TimWoolery.net Documenting the Journey and the Learning Curve

#76 – The Lottery

#76 - The Lottery

Here we sit, all broken-hearted,

Sometimes you’re screwed before you get started.

That’s the iambic pentameter that would apply most accurately to me with two fingers of Jim Beam and a water-back at my side. The sunlight fades to a long, leisurely sunset that goes from yellow to green to aqua to blue to black in one long motion. Oh, yeah – I guess it goes without saying that I’m feeling sorry for myself just a little more than usual. The drawing was just the cherry on top – my local gym is doing a drawing, the winner gets flied down to LA for a grand prize drawing that’ll total half a mil American. With all the mounting debts, or should I say paid off debts that leave me in the black but very, very cash-poor, I’ve been dreaming more than I should about what I would do with half a mil to my name. Now that I don’t have it, I’m still the same poor slob that I was before but something really nasty, cold and wet has its hands around my midsection.

There are reasons that I need this money. There are things that I would do (positive things) that would change Nicole’s and my respective lives if given the opportunity. Everyone dreams of it. Dear old Uncle Henry kicks off and leaves you enough money to become filthy rich. You’re not going to be like the other ones; you’re going to be different. You’re going to be smart and generous. You’re going to do good things for yourself and other people – this is just the beginning of a lifelong rocket ride that goes from one party to the next.

Stuff has been going wrong in my life in the past month or so – you know about some of it. The car, the taxes, the family. The grandfather that could have died but didn’t and now for some reason, you haven’t found your way over there yet. The job that’s become something taxing and stressful and the light at the end of the tunnel is so dim that it might as well be non-existent. You toss and turn all night, go to sleep exhausted and wake up tired. You jump awake at the cats taking a swing at each other and the modified exhaust of the kid who delivers your newspaper (and the rest of the neighborhood) in a rice rocket.

Malaise, baby. It’s not a word – it’s a state of mind.

But there’s a possibility, a hope. A fools hope, but that’s more than you’ve had in a while. Buy some vitamins and supplements (You’ve been meaning to, anyway) and get entered in a drawing. Odds are 1 in 10,000 and that beats the usual 1 in 336,000,000 that you usually hear about. Show up…see if you win, why not? The only problem is that it never stays that way.

You picture your once trusty-steed in the dirt next to the driveway of your brother-in-law’s house. Minus the contents of the engine bay, it sits there as just another piece of junk that you’d look at and then ignore at the pick-and-pull. Cars that people don’t want, whole cultures and individuals that spark for a very brief second and then are damned to a lifetime of neglect. How does that happen? How do you live your entire life in a corner of time or life that is just about what is ending and not about what is beginning?

To illustrate my point – let me tell you a little story. When I was four or five, the kids in the neighborhood more or less hung together. We had our fights and whatnot, but it was pretty cool. Victor, Roy, that other kid. No names that I remember, but we didn’t need any. It was just about screwing around the playground that bookended the pool and was surrounded by what seemed to be an endless grassy field.

There was always that weird kid in our bunch and no, it was not me. Surprised? Moving on…I remember nothing about him, vaguely that he was shorter and maybe younger than me. Brown curly hair, I think. If I thought really hard, he might look like Michael Aquino in “Orange County”. We had those bushes in the complex, those plants that you never really notice but exist to keep the place from looking like a backyard in Tracy. The bushes had those little inedible berries that might look like blueberries if you were stupid or high. So, we’re standing around, four or five years old and this kid gets it into his head to start sticking the little berries into his nose.

You’ve all heard this story before, I’m sure. Naturally, he stuck enough in there so that when he tried to pull them out, he couldn’t. Screaming, he ran off to tell his mom and maybe become fodder for a stand-up comic years from now. I heard a similar joke from Sinbad. We’re all freaked out, knowing that we are, in fact in BAD TROUBLE…or maybe he just is. Everyone starts running away for home for some reason, abandoning the terrible place where we crossed the line from “fun” to “trouble”. In seconds, it was just me and some other kid. Maybe it was Roy; man, whatever happened to that guy? He looked at me and said in a scared-kid voice “Bye!” and took off running. I was left in that place all alone.

And standing there, for a few seconds, I was overwhelmed with this feeling – something that kind of sat on your chest like an uncomfortable, hot and itchy sweater – that I was standing in a place where something had happened but now had passed by. It was over, the world had moved on and I was still standing there. The feeling was itchyhot and I needed to get out of there. I yelled, “Bye!” like the last kid, even though there wasn’t anyone left to yell it too. I ran home and told mom the story, she was even less impressed than I was.

I’ve been trying to understand that feeling for years. It’s come over me in different places and times. I feel it most often visiting places like the DMV and K-Mart, old buildings still in use as government offices. Places that go from new to old but don’t become comfortable in their age. They don’t become that funky room in the house where the kids eat junk food and watch TV. They just become old and uncomfortable, like going to that one guy’s house, that friend of your grandparents. You stand there, taking in the faux wood paneling and the spotlessly clean lacquered living room furniture. Sit in a char that predates retro and is more like retro’s angry ghost. Something that would rise up and punch Urban Outfitters right in the stomach. The cheesy/fake Oriental fixtures and the gold Lame' wallpaper. It’s old, it’s over, but it’s still being dusted and vacuumed. Like that video of that mouse being eaten alive by a piranha that made you angry in a way you weren’t aware you could become…it’s already dead but doesn’t know it or refuses to accept it and just keeps struggled for the surface, looking for the way out.

Ugly feelings – feelings that remind you of those days when you were a kid and your mom made you wear the hand-knitted sweater made of heavy yarn that had dark red reindeer AND the crappy rubber galoshes all…day…long. And somehow you ended up getting wet anyway and you had to wear your reversible raincoat that you never reversed that was made of some really strong-smelling polyvinyl that just baked the wet heat against your skin until you had something approaching the first portable sauna. The kinds of feelings that are only evoked from being stuck in the “Multi-purpose Room” at school that smelled of rubber basketballs and rancid potato nuggets for 45 minutes out of every day.

Malaise, baby. Apathy, blahs, blue funk, blues, boredom, bummer, dejection, disinterest, dismals, downers, dullness, the dumps, ennui, funk, gloom, inertia, lassitude, letdown, listlessness, mopes, slump, stagnation, stupor, tedium, torpor. There are many words to describe it, it’s still not anywhere close.

Planetary physics teach us a lot about life it turns out. Some interesting facts to consider:

• The speed required for a spacecraft or other object to completely escape the gravitational pull of the Earth (escape velocity) is approximately 11 km/s (7 mi/s), or about 40,000 km/hr (25,000 mi/hr).

• The first experimental confirmation of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity was made during the total solar eclipse of May 29, 1919. During an eclipse, bright stars become visible. Einstein had predicted that gravity from the Sun would slightly bend the path of starlight passing close to the Sun. Astronomers tested this assertion by measuring the positions of several stars that appeared close to the Sun during the 1919 eclipse. The deviations in the observed positions of these stars due to the Sun's gravity matched Einstein's predictions.

• The measurement of gravity is 32 feet per second (9.8 meters per second) for every second of falling time toward the center of the earth.

- From various Internet sources

Note that all of these facts are about gravity, about large bodies in space and the science involved in keeping things attached to them. It may be a little obscure, but relationships with people are a lot like that. What do I mean? Let me explain:

I never meant to stay in Fremont. In fact, from ages 12 to, oh say, 21 I planned on making my exit to some far-off destination and let the town remain the flyspeck on the map I always suspected it to be. Cut loose from the moorings and steer my ship to some faraway land. It didn't work out that way and the way my life is organized, I don't see it becoming different without some drastic and (very likely) painful changes in my life. I'm married to this place now…I'm not stuck. I’m here because I made choices and decisions in my life that led to me staying here. I can see the 12-year-old me in the corner glaring at me in the fury and purity of heart that you can only have when you're young and you've never made a bad decision in your life. He's idealistic and occasionally, he causes problems for me.

Enough with him for now, I can't deal with him – only God knows how my parents didn't end up smothering me in my sleep at that age. Escape velocity is a concept I've understood for a long time. I tried to arm myself with fuel to explode, to propel me away from the large bodies that hold me through the immutable laws of family politics, the realities of people's feelings and how they always manifest themselves in some obscure way to wreck entire weeks of your time.

So, back to the theory. Launching a vehicle into orbit or, even better, away from a large body is a complex equation. You need to provide your vehicle with enough thrust and enough fuel to get there. If you weigh the vehicle down with too much fuel, it'll never get off the ground or (worse yet) become the largest Roman candle you have ever seen. LOX doesn't burn, it explodes.

I think I became one of those rockets you say in The Right Stuff that started up just fine but then, through some miscalculation in the stabilizers, pointed straight at the ground and became the most expensive smoking crater in the ground in the history of mankind. I feel like that a lot of the time, been feeling like that more often than not lately. I could give you a laundry list of the issues – all my training in project management has lead me to the ability to clearly articulate the problem while still having NO clue how to solve the problem.

So, no; no escape velocity. Every time I get to the upper edge of the atmosphere, within smelling distance of the far shore, gravity leans in and yanks me back. He's making a run for the fence, shoot him in the leg! I feel like Steve McQueen at the end of The Great Escape. Tangled up in a mass of barbed wire, I can see Switzerland six feet away. Only problem is, there's a blank-faced Aryan youth pointing an MP40 at me. Six feet away, figuratively, I've got freedom. I've got family that I genuinely, repeat genuinely get along with. We get along because we want to, we talk out our differences and we have the happy memories that come from good relationships and honest communication. I've got my financial resources in order, I've got the simple things like checks out on time and no massive bills (Hint: Income tax) that come out of nowhere to kick me in the nuts. I can see the goals, I can see the benefits but for the life of me, I can't get there. I can't get there because before I can get there I've got to somehow disentangle myself from some razor wire and hope the kid with the submachine pistol can't hit a stationary target with any one of his 32 9mm bullets. The odds aren't good and so like Steve, it's easier to contemplate smiling ruefully and retreating to the cooler for 9 million weeks.

It's infuriating – it makes you crazed. Wouldn't it be great if everyone was FOR the right thing and we all agreed on just what that constituted? It isn't…it never is and I'm not even sure why I hold onto the hope that it could be after all this time. People are different, nobody's perfect. Misunderstandings are possible and when they concern me, are more than likely.

So what are you saying, Tim? I'm saying that I've reached a point in my life where I'd rather be alone than endure the kindergarten- or maybe if I'm feeling in the slightest bit generous, junior-high-school-type circus that some of my relationships have become. I can hear Spock from Star Trek: The Motion Picture going "VeeGer must evolve." I don't need to evolve…I certainly don't need Steven Collins running around trying to put his hands on me. Life would be really disappointing if you could honestly have the whole thing pegged and clocked by the time you got to my age. I'm not so arrogant or stupid to think that I have – I just think I've outgrown this little box I've been running around in.

Scary prospect…I've been here before. Usually, it turns out that like a sheep leaving the fold, the world outside is too dark and scary to contemplate facing it alone. Like the lava in the lamp, I collect enough heat and rise to the top only to cool and slowly sink back toward the light. The small satellite that doesn't collect enough thrust to break orbit and go sailing out into the dark night. This time I have to break loose and go for it for the simple reason that I just can't stay any more. I'm not a kid, I've done some good things with my life and now it's time to do more.

I've never thought that the life I've got so far was the goal – it was more like an extended pit stop. Stuff like buying a house and getting married, those are big milestones but I've never though for a second that they were my destination. Nicole and I will get into these big fights about the bills, or cleaning the house or whose turn it is to clean up after what cat after it hocks up a hairball. They're big fights, or at least I give them a lot of energy because I don't just want to solve it for that moment. I want it solved as in, "We've got this problem so knocked out that we will never have to worry about it again". And then what? I don't know…we move on, I guess but to what point in purpose I have still yet to understand.

I was contemplating all of this as I waited for my name to be called, or at least to hear someone else be called and know that I would not. When it happened, a few people must have seen something in my face. They were sympathetic but I just shrugged. Recited Rudyard Kipling to myself “If you can take it all and risk it on just one game of pitch and toss…” Other people, other men have been where I am. Just the little satellite that lets go of his tiny little orbit to catch hold of the launching power of some larger space body.

- Tim Woolery, 4/18/2005