For the quarterly bout of whinging, this one's remarkably less emo than previous ejaculations. It would appear that the near-elimination of sucralose from my diet is beginning to pay dividends.
(transcribed from notebook, 20090211, ~2115)
There was a period of about six months at the end of my senior year of high school in which all roads were open, anything possible. At some point during my trajectory through the Art Institute, that feeling resurfaced. The surity of direction, the CONFIDENCE that things were going to be Awesome, had gone. Gone, or never had the time to develop. A battery of well-timed pinball careening off of bumpers I'd unwittingly set up, flippers whacking into the finality of a job. Coasting on inertia with no structured plan or lattice of concrete achievable goals in sight.
In a structured environment with defined goals it's easy to meet, exceed, or manipulate. The entire education system seems designed to fling you into more of the same, changing out the report card for a credit rating and an annual performance evaluation. A bonus, if you're in one of those jobs - carrot on the end of the stick.
The ballistic trajectory - public school, college, the kind of work most college work prepares you for (or seems geared to) is a linear, learnable, gameable system. It does not, at heart, teach or encourage mid-course correction. It assumes you know what you want and where you're going, trains and equips you accordingly. If what you want and where you're at are at odds, the machinery is there to change cabins, assignments, even move from passenger to crew to pilot. Try to get off the boat or change course and you'll find the wheel chained, the deck off limits. No lifeboats. Welcome to the hotel California.
At an age in which most people are on course, digging in, still deeply concerned with report cards - now called "credit rating," "1040EZ" and the like, I find myself in need of a course correction. I'd prefer grounding on Fiji to endlessly circling the Antarctic. The rudder is locked, the wheel doesn't respond, and the perpetual overcast prevents a star fix.
The masters-at-arms all wear the same name tag : Never get off of the boat, man. Never get off the boat.
In the context of the nautical analogy, piracy is the logical option. Jump the next ship to pass in the endless night and hope to hell the rudder works. When I know what the rules are I can figure a way to game the system, get a leg up, move forward. But this boat, it's locked on course. It has no radio, no signals, no lifeboats. Desperate as I've become for a change of venue, as incompetent as I am in my ability to Scotty this Enterprise into operation... the scuttle plug - the giant neon-pink badly secured urine-soluble kill-switch with giant neon "PULL ME!" signs all over it - remains untenable. Lepers live down there. Lepers with advanced line-of-sight-transmissible neurosyphilis.
Straight physics - alteration of a ballistic trajectory requires collision with another object. A glancing blow, in this context, could divert the ship to warmer waters. Ocean currents, gulf stream and all that. Far be it for me to expect my intended target to step in front of an otherwise clean miss, by a mile - she'd need seven league boots to do so.
Drowning in mixed analogies, I'm certain of two things - I can sandbag the bullets of a system I know how to game, and the system blinks ignorantly at the concept of a "branch transfer." I'm running out of sandbags - and if I've learned one thing about the security on this boat, it's that they have more bullets than I have sandbags. Eventually, one of those rounds is going to hit that hot pink scuttle plug.
Eventually is a matter of rounds. Not clips, not belts. These are bolt-action, high-precision motherfuckers, and they deeply resent my encroachment upon the sacred wheelhouse.
They're bastards. Bastards with Remington 700 floating barrel rifles, Redfield scopes and match ammunition. They near-miss to intimidate, to imply that the line is a good thing to toe. A bullet under the earlobe, compressed air pressing the bridge of the nose. Go back to your cabin and all is forgiven - ignore that ship on the horizon, there's no way they're swinging by. The running lights, they're off. Go back to your cabin.
Go back to your cabin.
Nothing to see here, move along.
The deck is flammable. Flammable enough to see. Dry enough that my lighter will get the job done. I can swim. But will I MAKE IT? Maybe. There are, in fact, {at least} THREE ways to alter a ballistic trajectory - something occludes; impact; or something ON the projectile goes off with enough force to alter the trajectory. Above the scuttle plug, with its neon pink?
The fuel tanks.
They'll burn pretty.
Eventually they'll burn neon pink.
Arr, matey! |
