So when my brother sent me a certain link, I decided, hell, I’ll just go with that.  The particular link he sent me is this one.  It’s a Japanese blog the content of which I can understand not one word.  But that’s not the point.  I don’t need to be able to read Japanese to see why my brother sent it to me.  If you open the link, you’ll notice the following picture:

Cute, right?  An interesting picture, certainly nothing to write home to mom about.  But that’s not why my brother sent it to me.  He sent it to me because I took the picture.  As a matter of fact, I took it on my way home from school for the last time after graduating in 2009.  And it’s no mystery as to how it got on the internet; I put it there.  I posted it to Reddit shortly after I got home and enjoyed myself perhaps to an inappropriate degree as the image gained popularity and eventually made it to the front page (if you don’t believe me, click the link).

That’s pretty minor in the grand scheme of accomplishments, probably just under learning to walk.  But at the time it felt like my fifteen minutes of fame.  What it turned out to be was a nice little lesson in the realities of the internet.  Almost as soon as I had posted it on reddit, my image appeared on then-rival social news site Digg, which had been accused on a minute-by-minute basis of sniping content from Reddit until its fall from popularity last year.

I was livid, of course.  The idea that some other user was reaping imaginary and worthless points on some other site, of which I wasn’t even a member, was inexcusable.  Forget the irony of wanting credit for taking a picture of what is essentially someone else’s cleverness.   So what do you do when someone steals the stuff you put out there on the internet?  If you answered, “Complain about it on the internet,” you’d be right on the money.  The chief response to my complaints was, “welcome to the internet,” and that, too, was right on the money.  It was ludicrous of me to expect anything else.  Thinking about it now, I’m reminded of a line from Futurama: “the internet is about the free exchange and sale of other people’s ideas.”

So when my brother sent the link to the Japanese blog, I decided to Tineye my picture and see to what other exotic shores the digital tide had carried it.  Tineye found 35 results, which is modest, unless you consider the billions of images that must be out there on the interwebs, in which case 35 becomes insignificant as 1.  And my anonymous mediocre fame isn’t limited only to Japanese blogs.  My picture seems to have found its way onto such far-flung sites as this collection of unbelievably un-Photoshopped images on a German-hosted Russian blog and such prestigious pages as The Chive’s all-cleavage-shot gallery, “Ball Girls are the Poor Man’s Sexy Tennis Star”.  That last one baffles me some.

This little picture is even one of the flagship images at the head of another you-won’t-believe-this-isn’t-photoshopped gallery on Tech Blog, a site I’ve actually heard of previous to this.

And it feels kind of weird to have contributed to the innumerable images floating around in the swirling eddy of the internet. On the one hand, my image’s presence on the web is insignificant, a somewhat interesting picture drowning in a sea of somewhat interesting pictures, a tiny pin in the momentary boredom-postponement machinery I and so many of my coevals (read: you, valiant blog reader) have come to rely on. But on the other hand, there’s a tantalizing taste of immortality in it, the comfort of perpetuity, the image having taken on a life of its own.  I have contributed to the fabric of the internet in a small way, and that, shallow though it may be, elevates me, validates me in some strange way.  It’s as if the internet is telling me: yes, you were right to find this interesting.  There are other people out there like you, who find these same little things interesting or poignant, just like you.  You are not alone.  And isn’t that the point of the internet?  To be together in our loneliness?

If you move in bicycling circles, or know someone who does, there’s probably about a 50% chance that you’ve heard of Million Mile Freddie.  Since he was a young boy in the 1960’s, Freddie Hoffman has ridden more than 1.5 million miles, the first of which he rode on a tricycle his mother bought him.  He has, since the tricycle days, kept meticulous track of each and every mile he’s put to his back in a series of detailed diaries, from which he can recite on demand a host of figures, averages, extrapolations, and comparisons.  In fact, according to Freddie, he’s ridden an average of about 80 miles a day his entire life.  In the past 20 years, he says, on only one day has he not ridden his bike somewhere, be it to the store, to another state, or to the other side of the country.

To put this in perspective, I’ll go to the oft-quoted comparison, and Freddie’s personal favorite: riding 1.5 million miles means that he has ridden to the moon and back (some 239,592 miles each way) more than 3 times.

About a week ago, Freddie stopped by our house on his way home to River Edge in east Jersey from Florida, where he had ridden to visit relatives.  This was my first opportunity to meet Freddie after hearing so much about him growing up, and an opportunity to hear his story first-hand.

Freddie is not what you imagine when you think of a cyclist of his accolades and accomplishments.  Lean and lithe Lance Armstrong he is not.  His image is a little more at home with the job he works when he’s not touring the country saddle-back: school janitor.  But don’t let this fool you.  Freddie has a capacity for perseverance and a tenacity to defy his initial physical appearance and probably any other human limitation you could think of.  He is big, friendly, verbose, and has a way of making you feel like you’re his best friend, even if you’re just meeting for the first time, as I was.

The first thing he does when he meets me is slap my thigh and comment on my cycling physique.  I enjoy a brief moment of cognitive dissonance as I am simultaneously uncomfortable at the physical contact and flattered at the comment.  But you have to be ready for some surprises with Freddie, so I move past it.  We sit down to pizza (a half a pie and large chicken Caesar salad for Freddie, who says he is cutting back because he didn’t ride that much today), and Freddie proceeds to ignore his food as he seems incapable of pausing in his endless enthusiastic narrative long enough to take a bite.  Over the course of four hours, we occasionally watch with excitement as he picks up his fork and loads it with salad, only to forget about it and leave it resting on his plate.  My mom tries a few times to get a word in edge-wise, just so Freddie can take a few bites, but is largely unsuccessful.  She finally succeeds, and Freddie begins eating his salad around 10 PM, long after the rest of us have finished our meals.

It is clear that Freddie talks like he rides: with a single-minded devotion and indefatigable energy that even he seems unable to rein in, even if he wanted to.  For the first hour or so, we listen as he explains passionately and in great detail some of the finer nuances of bike riding and the difference between touring and racing.  But eventually he comes around to telling his own story, though he tells it like a Tarantino film, not always in chronological order and sometimes interrupting a story to tell another before coming back to the first.

I’ll do my best to sort it out and tell a linear version of his story.

During his birth, Freddie was somehow deprived of oxygen, which resulted in damage to the brain and a consequent learning disability.  As a result, he has no education beyond the fifth grade.  And yet, he can (and will) tell you exactly what part of his brain was affected and how that produced his unique situation biologically and neurologically.

His condition made him a social outcast as boy, and the neighborhood kids used to tease him pretty relentlessly.  Freddie used the tricycle his mother bought him, and later a bicycle, as a means for escape.  He kept track of his mileage, first by counting laps of his neighborhood, later with a mechanical speedometer, as a way of focusing his attention elsewhere and ignoring the abuse he received.

Near his house was a hill of a legendarily steep grade and on which all kids were forced to dismount their bikes and walk.  At some point Freddie got the notion that if he could just train himself to ride to the top of that hill, maybe the other kids would see that he was strong and stop teasing him.  So he applied himself to this task as he would apply himself to almost everything else he would attempt in life.  It took him a year, but he was finally able to ride to the top of that Jersey hill without getting off his bike.  The next day after school, he got the neighborhood kids to come to the foot of the hill with him and he made them a bet.  Five minutes later, he had disappeared over the crest of the hill (with the help of a strong tail wind, he admits) only to reemerge, glide back down, and take their money.  The bullying, he says, slowed noticeably after that.

In 1969, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, and Freddie discovered his next goal.  Though by age ten he was already regularly riding centuries (100-mile rides), Freddie devoted himself to racking up on his bike the mileage the Apollo 11 crew had traversed in their Saturn V.  What took the astronauts four days took Freddie several years.

Talking to Freddie, you can see that he deals in a lot of metaphors, most of them not what you would expect, though they’re often uncommonly apt.  Freddie talked to us for a long time about the space program, and it was clear that he saw his own journey in terms of small steps that can add up to giant leaps.  Something about the unfathomable odds the astronauts had to overcome seems to speak to Freddie on a personal level and inspire his emphatic devotion.  To boot, I’ve met few people with as complete a knowledge of the space program as he is able to call upon at any given moment.

Of course, Freddie didn’t stop when he reached the moon.  Stopping is not a concept he’s had much experience with.  He kept riding, and in 1980 he hit his stride.  Freddie calls it the Roaring Eighties, a decade (down to the day, according to him) of an average of over 100 miles a day, a decade in which he rode more than half of his total lifetime miles.  He experimented with racing, but mostly he continued to ride the way he does best: long, hard, and usually alone.  When my dad met him, the bike Freddie was riding was appropriately named “John Bull,” after the longest-running steam locomotive in the world (also from Jersey).

It was during the Roaring Eighties that an event transpired that would transform Freddie’s riding forever.  In 1986 his mother passed away from leukemia.  Until this point, Freddie had ridden for himself, as a way of standing up to the mountain of challenges that was his birthright.  After the passing of his mother, he began to ride for her, naming his new bike “Ruth E.” after the woman whom he credits with giving him the loving support to surmount his personal adversities.  He began going door-to-door to collect pledges (on his bike, of course) for sponsorship of his rides.  He has since raised more than a million dollars for leukemia research.

It would seem he’s become intimately familiar with that figure, because ten years after the death of his mother, Freddie hit another landmark event: his millionth mile.   Freddie hit this milestone of milestones on his way west across the country on a lonely stretch of desert road in Colorado (he, of course, has the date logged and committed to memory: August 8, 1996).  Freddie describes the experience as lunar.  He stopped his bike and in the driving sun looked around at the landscape that surrounded him.  He could see for miles in every direction.  No humans, no buildings, no animals, just rocky, otherworldly terrain as far as the eye could see.  The passion with which Freddie calls forth this image is intense, and he tells us that he felt like he had done it.  He had made his moon landing.

Obviously, Freddie’s appetite for miles wasn’t sated by his millionth.  He continues to ride and has tacked another 500,000 onto his tally.  He has done this despite having to take care of his ailing father, who died in 2007 from Alzheimer’s.

The story Freddie tells of a role reversal between father and son is touching and even more amazing than his cycling history, if that is possible.  Freddie, who didn’t trust the the task of caring for his father to a nurse, continued to work as a night shift janitor while he tended to his father.   He was also the only family member strong enough to lift his bedridden father in order to bathe him and keep him from getting bedsores.  After his father’s death, Freddie began stumping for Alzheimer’s research in addition to leukemia and continues to ride for both causes.

And Freddie isn’t content with just raising money.  In his efforts to win over potential donors, he has striven to learn as much about his causes as possible.  He explained to us at great length the exciting new research being done into combating cancer, explaining complex scientific ideas with a mixture of impressive vocabulary and a knack for putting it in layman’s terms.

He’s the same way about his own condition.  He’s done a great deal of research into the disorders that have come to describe what used to baffle his doctors and understands them on a very deep level.  And he acquires all this knowledge by cold repetition, doggedly subduing his learning disability seemingly by brute force of will.  Freddie believes he is in a unique “twilight zone” between the mentally handicapped and those who try to help them; he feels he is able to act as an interpreter in this regard and has worked with researchers to try and help them get inside the experience of mental disability.

And yet, despite all the barriers Freddie has toppled on and off the road, he remains challenged.  He’s been recognized by two presidents, 50 governors, and even members of British Parliament, and yet he has few close friends and has never had a wife or even dated.  He believes that it is essentially impossible for him to be in a relationship with a woman and openly recognizes how challenging it is for others to interact with him.  But he seems to accept this as fact; he is incapable of being any other way.  He speaks of it almost like a scientist observing himself from behind a two-way mirror.  It’s a sobering and strangely inspirational thing to experience.

After meeting Freddie and listening to him, I can only say that he is probably the most rawly genuine person I have ever met.  Once you get over your initial shock at the volume of his voice and quantity of his words, you come to see that he embodies an almost superhuman devotion to the things and people he loves and is so brimming with pure, hard-wired zeal that he can’t get the thoughts out fast enough to fully share with you the scope of his world, though he would love nothing more.  It is certainly impossible to capture the whole experience of Freddie in a humble blog post.

So on Friday after I got off work and forced myself to go to the gym despite my mounting and increasingly intolerable anticipation, I hopped into the car with a weekend’s worth of clothes, a homemade reddit t-shirt, and only 5 hours of sleep under my belt.  Appropriately, I happened to have a podcast of NPR’s Selected Shorts queued up to a reading of a T. C. Boyle short story read by Stephen Colbert (what a holy alliance!).   I felt a little like the fanatic fan Jon Stewart jokingly described when he first announced the Rally to Restore Sanity: just strapping on a diaper and aiming my car in the general direction of Washington D.C.  In truth when I finally made it to the District and had to make my way though a wall of rally-related traffic in order to get to my brother’s apartment in Alexandria, I may have been wishing for that diaper.

In case you’ve been under a rock for the last month-and-a-half, the Rally to Restore Sanity (and/or Fear, as it came to be called) was a call to arms aimed at people who normally aren’t inclined to take up arms.  Stewart announced it as an opportunity for the voices of the silent, moderate, reasonable 80% to be heard.   He said he wanted the gathering to be for those who felt they had no representatives in this age of highly polarized 24-hour news channels like Fox News and MSNBC, or highly inept ones like CNN.  It would be an opportunity to show that there are Americans out there who want a reasonable, rational discussion, and who are willing to consider alternate viewpoints.  As one commercial put it: make your voice heard, but use your inside voice.

The running gag was that, not to be out-done, Stephen Colbert, perpetual one-ups-man, would hold a “March to Keep Fear Alive” elsewhere in DC.  From the get-go, Stewart’s rally had more prospective attendees on Facebook than did Colbert’s.  Whether this was the reason the two combined into one rally or, more likely, that they had planned a combined march from the beginning, you couldn’t be sure.  What you could be sure of was that Colbert’s more subtler satire would create the perfect mock-tension to drive the narrative of rival rallies.

Beyond the fact that the ideals of rational discourse and cooperation were political music to my ears, I was particularly invested in attending this rally because I believed its impetus to be in the social news site, reddit, to which I am blissfully addicted.  Before there were even whisperings of a rally from Jon and Stephen, someone on reddit proposed that Colbert specifically should do a satirical counter-rally to Beck’s.  It was then suggested that the best way to bring this idea to Colbert’s attention would be for members of reddit to donate to his favorite charity, Donors Choose.  We raised more that $100,000 in that effort, breaking that charity’s record for donations (we got it to half a million two days before the rally proper).

So when a week or two later Stewart and Colbert announced their respective rallies, the reddit community naturally assumed that the faux-pundits had heard its call and answered.  Colbert even mentioned reddit and its philanthropy once or twice on his show.  This theory was later disproven, when, at a post-rally press conference, Stewart and Colbert revealed that they had been planning the rally long before reddit’s call to action, but that reddit’s enthusiasm was their green light.

The reddit community is divided on the truth of this statement, but that doesn’t change the fact that redditors turned out in droves for the rally.  In some of the pictures of the rally, you can see signs sticking up out of the crowd bearing some of reddit’s insignia, including one giant reddit alien.  And because reddit is very big on numbers and scores, the admins set up a system for trading a specially created personal code with other redditors that you could submit online to prove that you were there and met some of your fellows.

When the day of the big event finally dawned, my brother, his girlfriend, and I roused ourselves at the ungodly hour of 6:00 in order to try and secure a good vantage point.  Colbert, recognizing the rally’s proximity to Halloween, had suggested that rally-goers wear a costume that characterizes one of their fears.  My brother, who is tall and lengthy of limb, straightened his long blond hair and dawned a black hat to become Jay and his girlfriend sported Silent Bob’s overcoat and beard.  I don’t know how frightening Jay and Silent Bob are, but they sure did get a lot of comments and some attention from press photographers.  It was fun to watch people’s faces on the metro as they recognized the costumes.

Getting up early turned out to be a wise move, and we ended up being in the second section, able to see people on stage, if only as little action figures, though we tended to watch the nearby jumbo-tron.  At some point I remarked that if I had been watching from home I would have had a couch to sit on (as well as a bathroom, a woman nearby pointed out).  Yes, there were port-a-johns, but it wasn’t worth fighting the crowd to get to them.

And yet, as we stood for hours waiting for the event to get under way, there was a sort of palpable sense of anticipation and camaraderie.  It seemed that, like me, a lot of people had made the journey to come to the rally because, watch from the comfort of their own homes though they could have, they wanted to be there, to experience it, and to show their support for the cause of rationality.  It felt good to be more than just a passive observer for once and to see such dramatic and tangible proof that you are not the only one out there who is frustrated and who wants to improve the situation.

In the end the estimated number of attendees was 215,000, covering the mall pretty much entirely from the Washington Monument to the Capitol.  When you compare that to Beck’s rally, which got around 87,000, it makes you feel like your presence there really helped to make the event significant.  Historically speaking, it’s anyone’s guess how this little shindig will shake out.  Will I be telling my grandkids I was there?  Probably, but I don’t know if they will have heard of it or care.  For the moment, I’m just pleased at the prospect of some momentum towards a saner national discourse.

The rally itself was supposed to start at noon, but it really didn’t get underway until 1:00.  Michael and I were a little miffed when The Roots came on at noon and played a 45-minute set.  We bemoaned the deception, worried that it would turn out to be the Rally to Restore Entertainment, or the March to Keep Distraction Alive, but we were momentarily placated when the Mythbusters showed up and got the whole crowd to jump simultaneously so they could record its seismic effect.

Then the rally properly started.  Jon Stewart came on stage and was joined by Stephen Colbert, who entered like a Chilean miner from a capsule embedded in the stage.  The next hour and a half was a non-stop stream of entertainment with the usual clever satire underlining it all.  Sanity and Fear awards were given out to various media luminaries, Stephen Slater promised to be less impulsive in the future, Yusuf Islam’s “Peace Train” battled Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train,” and there was a giant Stephen Colbert Puppet.

But at the end of the rally, as you doubtless have heard, Jon Stewart took about 15 minutes to do something that Stephen Colbert’s persona rarely allows him to do: be serious.  Stewart spoke fervently, eloquently, and passionately about the return to sanity he envisioned for America.  The gist was that we have allowed a proportionally insignificant, albeit loud, fringe to hijack the national discourse.  He pointed to the 24-hour news networks that make everything black and white and thus make it difficult to compromise or admit that one’s opponent might be right.  He made an excellent point, that the media is meant to be a magnifying glass that helps to illuminate issues, but that in recent years the media has been turning that magnifying glass onto too many things that don’t matter and onto too few that do.  Poignantly he said, “If we amplify everything, we hear nothing.”

Anyone who watches Stewart’s show with any regularity should be no stranger to this theme, but it was such a powerful thing to hear someone go against the popular narrative and speak up for respect and rationality.  I’m generally a pretty sentimental guy, and I definitely got a little misty at certain points.  The truth of Stewart’s words was sharpened by its  contrast to the bombastic, inflammatory, sometimes oblique rhetoric of so many pundits.  For someone like me who is, as an American, so accustomed to being embarrassed that these people purport to represent us, Stewart’s speech awakened the coals of a patriotic fire that I thought had long since been extinguished.  I walked away from that rally and that speech unspeakably happy to be an American and with a realization that we should not be ashamed of our problems, but rather that we should be tackling them every day and taking pride in the progress we make.  Jon Stewart is the kind of person whom we should be electing and sending to Washington, and I hope such an unfortunate fate never befalls him.

I started Rob64.com ten or eleven years ago (in middle school, if memory serves), not content to wait around for Facebook to be invented in order to have a presence on the tubes.  The site has enjoyed various states of neglect over the past decade.  I’ve decided to overhaul/update the site and combine my blog with the sort of online portfolio my site has traditionally been.  I spent some time trying to create a site completely from scratch within the Wordpress system, but I just don’t know enough about CSS and PHP, so I modified a theme, which is what you see here.

Beyond the cosmetic and the tubular, my life has undergone a bit of a tumult since last we spoke.  Namely, I broke up with my girlfriend and moved back home to Jersey.  This tectonic shift in young adulthood was the impetus for my absence and also part of why it’s lasted so long.  By that I mean, my reason for starting the blog in the first place was to share the experiences and epiphanies of living on my own for the first time.  Since moving back under my parents’ roof, it just hasn’t seemed as though I had much worth sharing.

Plus, though I prefer to be open and sharing on my blog, for a while the dominant theme in my life was the fallout from the breakup, and who wants to hear about that?  I don’t even want to hear about it.

But enough excuses and preamble.  My life has actually changed in many ways since we last spoke.   For starters, I was hired to fill a graphic design position through the good graces and connections of my best good buddy, AJ.  As I’ve observed before on this blog, the loss and gain of employment has a far more profound effect on one’s mental health than I had considered.  In unemployment, every shadow seems like the onset of a long night; employed, they seem more like shade.  (I’ll leave you to evaluate the success of that analogy on your own.)  So in the last few months I’ve enjoyed the contrast of crippling depression and fanatic optimism, and I’m pretty glad the pendulum is swinging the other way at the moment.

In other news, the family and I took advantage of this summer possibly being the last to see all four of us under the same roof by taking a trip to Disney World.  This was more or less hilarious given how bad my family is at vacationing, at least in the conventional sense.  To wit: my mom couldn’t sleep in, even if she tried; my dad packs a day pack for a day at Animal Kingdom as if we were actually on safari in the Serengeti; my brother avoids sunlight almost to the point of vampirism; and as if overcoming my tourist’s guilt isn’t normally enough, I had a cold for the first half of the trip.

To be fair, none of this really got in the way of our enjoyment, but it did make for an interesting vacationing experience (see: drunk guys coming back from the bar and hitting on mom as she’s out searching for some pre-dawn coffee).  Otherwise, Disney was pretty much as awesome as I remember it.  I rode the Tower of Terror for the first time and loved the atmosphere and the silly Rod Serling intro, even if I was underwhelmed by the ride itself after all those years of being afraid to get on it.  And of course, all that time spent looking at an endless succession of Mickey Mouse images resulted in the designing a Disney World flag (which is what that is).

Shortly after we got back, it became pretty clear to all of us that our dog, Missy, a fourteen-year-old golden retriever, had reached a quality-of-life threshold and we made the hardest decision a pet owner has to make.  It’s hard to say more than that without being trite, so I’ll keep it to this: we got Missy shortly after we moved to NJ, and I’ve been saying for a long time that when she died, so too would my childhood.  That’s a little melodramatic, but the truth is our house doesn’t feel the same without her.

In a related story, I saw Toy Story 3 twice, once before we put Missy down, and once afterward with my young cousins.  I got a little misty at both viewings, I must admit, but for completely different reasons.  Emotions can be so odd.

The occasion for my cousins’ visit (along with my aunt and uncle) was to spend a little quality time together before we all hit the road for the great state of Iowa, my grandpa’s birthplace and the location of a massive family reunion.  The trip was replete with water slides, go-carts, barbeques, familial bonding, and genealogical discovery.  It’s going to merit a post of its own, so I won’t preempt myself any further.

I’ve been occupying the rest of my time with a burgeoning (and briefly neglected) business venture on the handmade craft site Etsy.com, selling LEGO jewelry I was inspired to make while in the LEGO Store at Disney.  I’m just starting the process of actively promoting it, so we’ll see where it goes.

That’s the last four months in a nutshell.  If you’ve read this far, thank you for your patience.  On the immediate horizon lies a cross-country road trip with Mr. AJ, who is pulling up stakes and striking out for LA.  I’ll be working from the road, so I’ll try to blog from it, too, so I don’t lose bloggardly momentum.  Stay tuned!

So about two weeks ago, Rachel and I were downtown for a little Sunday brunch at a local cafe where one of our friends happens to work, a place called Cafe Phoenix.  The appeal of this place is that it reminds the two of us of Vienna (where we got together).  That, and, of course, the omelets.  But that’s not the important part.

The important part is that after our brunch we decided that since it was such a relatively nice day out, we would go for a walk down by the river.  And we found ourselves in a little park area that was pretty much covered with dogs, two of which were these little puppies.  One had dark, long, wild hair and looked like someone had given it a good once-over with a party balloon.  On the other hand, his compatriot had short yellow-caramel colored hair and looked kind of like a yellow lab.  After about a good five minutes of lurking and general creepy cute-mongering on our part, a woman approached us with the short hair pup.  “I saw you guys watching,” she said, smiling and handing us the tiny bundle of fluff.  We had a few good “awes,” while the lady explained to us that she was fostering the dogs for a rescue organization and that these pups (chow-whatever mixes) had been abandoned by their mother.  We said that was horrible, thanked the lady, and headed home, our cute quotas more than filled for the day.  Apparently.

But Rachel, who has been dying to get a dog for, well, ever, couldn’t get those dogs, the short-hair in particular, off her mind, and by Monday, she had posted on Craigslist explaining that she was the girl they met by the river and that she might be interested in the in the short-hair.  Well, the lady responded in short order, said the dogs were up for adoption on Thursday, and, well, that was that.  On Thursday there was a puppy in our apartment.  That was a week ago.

Before we even had the dog in our apartment, before we even knew we were getting it for sure, Rachel had already decided on a name for him: Pinto, because, as she says, “He’s a little bean!”  And that’s a very accurate description.  For the moment.  But he’s got some giant paws on him, and it seems more likely he will resemble his eponymous horse or car when he’s fully grown (hopefully he’ll be less explosive than the later).

Going into this, the thinking was that a dog would be relaxing, a welcome presence in the apartment, something to brighten our lives that have been recently such a checkerboard of fortune and misfortune.  And all that he has been, for the most part.  What we didn’t factor into our calculations, or at least what we underestimated, was the training and patience that would be required of us in order to rear, essentially, a baby animal.

Pinto is first and foremost, cute (as you can see).  His blunt little snout, bite-sized floppy ears, corkscrew tail, and giant, lumbering paws are pretty much irresistible.  He also has a comically serious face, which is especially hilarious when he is all excited and running flat out across the grass to land in your open arms.  Cripplingly cute.  Devastatingly cute.  Apocalyptically cute.

But every coin has two sides.  On the obverse is the adorable, spastic, clumsy puppy; the reverse is a stubborn little demon full of an explosive energy rarely seen outside Cape Canaveral or Chernobyl.  Mostly, he’s obstinate and difficult to keep focused when you want to do something like take him for a walk to burn off all his energy.  Recently, my strategy has become to begin jogging the second we get out the door, so that he has to run to keep pace with me, and thus can’t get distracted too easily.  This will get him in walking mode, and then we can have a nice, structured, leisurely walk back home.  This also tuckers him out pretty well, which is my ulterior motive.

And yet, Pinto is a puppy, and being a puppy, he has access to inexplicable energy reserves, and sometimes even three jogs/walks a day doesn’t seem to be enough.  The real issue is that when he gets good and hyper he gets in the mood to gnaw on and attack things.  Usually the objects of his pint-sized aggression are chew toys, tiny tennis balls, or his leash.  But occasionally he zeros in on Rachel’s or my pant legs, shoes, or if he’s in one of our laps, on our lapels, sleeves, or hoodie draw-strings.  He most often will take it out on his doggie bed, which he swiftly vanquishes at least ten times a day.  It can be a little scary when he gets fixated on one of these things because it often includes some growling and thrashing about, inspiring Rachel and I to joke about what the other mystery half of his genes are.  Rottweiler?  Doberman pincer?

Now, in my collected unemployment hours, I’ve seen just about every single episode of The Dog Whisperer, and we bought Cesar Millan’s book on raising puppies.  We’ve been doing our best to be “calm-assertive” in all situations and follow Cesar’s advice pretty much to the letter.  This has worked out very well for housebreaking, separation anxiety, crate training, walks, and much more.  But at the moment, Pinto’s feisty fits seem beyond Cesar’s advice, or, at least, our ability to apply it.

So it’s been a mixed bag, as everything is.  Much of the time, Rachel and I feel as young parents must feel at this stage of the game.  We love the little guy to death, but he can really do a number on the nerves and the blood pressure level.  We worry about giving him too much or not enough of everything: food, attention, praise, exercise.  When we’re out and about, we wonder if he’s doing alright alone.  We agonize over his chances of getting parvo before his third round of shots.  We hope we’re not too strict or too lenient with him.  And it’s only been a week.

It’s been a tiring week, but a rewarding one as well.  Pinto already knows “sit” and will fetch (sort of), and housebreaking really has been a cinch.  And I’ll be out and about, at a bar perhaps or a friend’s house, and realize that I’ve got a poop bag in the inside pocket of my jacket or I’ll reach into the pocket of my jeans for some change and I’ll find only a bunch of dog biscuits.  Plus, this puppy training thing is such an engrossing and draining project that it has pretty much entirely subsumed my Red Alert 2 Addiction, which is something of a fringe benefit.

So we’ll see how it goes.  I’ll keep everyone posted, but I’ll try not to be that parent that just talks about their kid non-stop.  In the meantime, if you see us in the street, you’ll know us by the crosshatching of little red scars on our hands and the tattered hems of our pant legs.

So I’ve got some time on my hands.  What have I been doing with all this time?  Being productive?  I suppose that depends on your perspective, but the answer to that question is probably no.  No, I’ve been immersing myself in the nostalgia and retrograde maturity of an old video game from my middle school years: Red Alert 2.

Here’s the gist: the game came out in the year 2000, right at the end of that ten-year gulf of time in which the US didn’t have a definable, polarizing enemy to unite against.  Too early for the Al-Qaeda party, RA2 is a real time strategy game in which the dubious enemy is the Soviet Union of alternate history.  And by alternate history, I mean that in the universe of RA2, Albert Einstein built a time machine and stopped Hitler from rising to power, leaving a gap for the Soviets to fill, becoming, effectively, the new Nazis.  Thanks to Einstein, Allied troops have time-jumping weapons and “prism cannons” (read: lasers) in addition to their standard incendiary weapons.  The Soviets utilize a psychic mastermind named Yuri to create psychic weapons, as well as deploying high-powered electric weapons à la Tesla.  Narrative gold, basically.

I loved this game in 8th and 9th grade, and Adnan, Ben, and I used to play it all the time.  Basically, you command facilities and manage resources to build up an army and destroy your enemy.  There’s a pretty wide array of units, and if you capture an enemy base, you can build those of both Allied and Soviet varieties, giving you command of some kind of super-army, which I have to say, is my favorite part.

I rediscovered this game in NJ when I got my new MacBook and started emulating Windows.  I promised myself I wouldn’t play it in Wilmington, because it’s so all-consuming.  That worked.  For a while.  But as the weeks wore on, I felt the itch, and I started to play.  At first, I just played occasionally, when I was bored or whatever.  Then it became an everyday thing.  Soon enough, it was eating up whole hours of my afternoons.  I started daydreaming about it while I was at work or at night class.  A new strategy or combination of units would flit through my head while I was reading or buying groceries.  One night, I couldn’t get to sleep for the visions of strategies dancing in my head.  I even downloaded an ancient user-made program that allowed me to design maps to play on in the game.  Then, I got fired and the last barriers were broken down.  It was hopeless.

The appeal of the game, both to 13-year-old me and recently-fired me, seems pretty obvious.  First of all, the game serves as a very convenient illusion of control.  You command a whole army who march at your beck and call, serve your every whim, make a suicidal charge with smiles on their faces when you give the word.  You get to dominate and utterly negate the existence of your enemies, the ultimate catharsis.  And since the computer-player enemies are pretty limited in strategic imagination, you can play with your food before you eat it.  For the disenfranchised and the persecuted, this game is great therapy.

The more I play, the more philosophical I get about it.  I’ve started seeing parallels and metaphors to daily life at each salvo, every volley of cannonade, each perfectly synchronized air strike.  For instance, I’ve realized how much a slow-and-steady-wins-the-race kind of guy I am.  I much prefer taking my time to amass forces, strategically place them, and launch a coordinated attack over the throw-everything-you-got-at-’em approach that seems to be standard.  Likewise, I don’t like to rush into things in real life unless I feel completely prepared.  For things I care about, I’m methodical in preparation, so that when all the dominoes are in position, I just have to flick the first one, sit back, and watch my Rube Goldberg machine carry out the task.

But the primary and most poignant of the analogues to real life comes at the very beginning of every game, when you start out with only a construction yard, a small amount of money, five tanks, and seven GIs.  If you don’t work quickly at this stage to establish your base and build up your defenses, the synaptic speed of the computer-controlled enemies will quickly overwhelm you.  And as I play harder and harder levels and enemies, this becomes a more and more difficult task, sometimes requiring me to restart a level a dozen times before I can get a foothold.

And that’s just what it feels like at this point in my life as I try to establish myself as an adult.  Getting fired was like a surprise attack at a vulnerable spot I didn’t know I had, defeated before I had a fighting chance, a sort of crib-death.  It seems as if I had all my resources laid out in front of me, I knew my plan, I’d started to build some structures and amass some troops, and just as I was beginning to establish a home base, the Soviets rolled in with a couple Apoc tanks and Kirov airships and reduced my nascent fighting force to just a few retreating men.  Bam, just like that; back to square one.   Except that I can’t just abort the mission and try again.  Somehow I have to take the scattered remnants of my forces and find a new place to put down, begin building up a new base of command, and start preparing for the next wave of attacks.

Anyway, they say the first step is admitting you have a problem.  I have since begun to scale back my game-play, apportioning my time, using it as an incentive for completing other tasks.  Someday, with luck, I’ll be sober for good.

On the heels of betrayal comes denial.  Your life assumes a sort of numbed facsimile of its normal self in which you go about your day as if nothing has changed, as if you’ll see her again at 8 am on Monday.  But underneath this self-delusion runs a current of terrible knowledge, so that somehow you go through the motions, acting like everything’s fine, but deep inside someone with a nasal voice and a megaphone is shouting from a great distance, IT’S OVER; SHE’S GONE.

Then you get angry, suddenly embarassed that you ever let your guard down long enough to give this chick the chance to hurt you.  Good riddance.  The thrill was gone anyway.  You realize: why did I wait for her to do it?  Why didn’t I break it off on my own terms?  You rediscover the heavy metal of your high school days and spend a lot time driving around and glaring at people.  You still go about your normal routine like a functioning adult, but instead of a continuous voice in your mind, you think constantly of the moment when she broke the news to you and an ineffable, unbridled rage such as you’ve rarely experienced before lets loose in you.

Or maybe I just took my job too seriously.

But the truth of the matter is, I’ve been surprised at how hard it hit me, getting fired.  Even now, days later, hardly an hour goes by that I don’t think of it and the full gamut of emotions runs through me in the space of a few seconds.  But, mostly, it makes me feel vulnerable and impotent.

I actually had most of a post typed up with most of the details surrounding my termination, but it’s all really boring once you read it on the screen.  Here’s the simple version: I was working at a call center and they listened in on one of my calls, after which my boss told me that because I said “um” too often and lost my place but one time, there was a “professionalism gap” between me and the rest of the company.  My boss’ words were exactly, I shit you not, “You and the company are no longer a match.”  I could go into a lot more detail about the fact that I wasn’t given the opportunity to fix my mistakes or about some of the insulting insinuations made about the integrity of my character, but I can’t afford to replace this computer.

I’ll say one last thing about getting fired and then, I swear, I’ll be done.  The next post will be about getting laid in a race car.

One of the strangely nice aspects of the disconnected social interactions of the internet is that they offer a relatively painless medium for the breaking of bad news.  One of the first things I thought about after I was fired, other than “What just happened?” and a mental image of that Asian guy from The 5th Element saying “You are fah-yerd,” was “What am I going to tell everyone?”  I played halfheartedly with the idea of telling people I had quit, or that the company was downsizing, but I didn’t want to have to lie about it.  More difficult than admitting what had happened was simply the prospect of telling everyone I knew, again and again.  The thought made me physically ill.

In the end, I broke the news on facebook (are you supposed to capitalize that?) and here on my blog, and it was much easier just to put the information out there in the cosmic reaches of cyberspace and the “blogosphere” and let people discover it for themselves.  It’s almost like having your own publicist who can just leak the information to the press.  So now at least when I talk to people about it, they already know and I don’t have to worry about how to break it to them.  Plus, I received a lot of supportive messages and condolences from friends and readers, and though I wasn’t really looking for sympathy, it made things a lot easier to handle knowing I had people in my corner.

So to all of you who were there for me, thanks.

+ 1 minute: You are escorted from the premises, dumbfounded and stuttering, and your key-card is re-possessed while a manager collects your personal effects from your cubicle and brings them to you (exception, your wallet and keys, which you must collect yourself because the manager cannot be responsible).

+ 5 minutes: You wander aimlessly around the adjoining supermarket looking for your consciousness.

+ 10 minutes: You get in your car and exercise your tear ducts.

+ 15-30 minutes: You drive your car to the southernmost point of the local peninsula were you shout at the ocean amid a pall of shame and mucus.

+ 1 hour: You call your mother for a rant and a little catharsis while driving aimlessly around town.

+ 2 hours: You listen to some Metallica at an unhealthy decibel level, for catharsis, sometimes screaming along and scaring passing motorists.

+ 2.5 hours: You begin to scheme and daydream of ways of starting your own rival business and forcing your former employer into bankruptcy.

+ 3 hours: You return home and rant to your girlfriend and the two of you, now partners in joblessness, discuss immolating something, anything.

+ 3.5 hours: You settle in on the couch to play a violent war video game, for catharsis, and annihilate enemy forces ruthlessly.

+ 4.5 hours: In a fit of passive-aggressiveness, you blog about it, for catharsis.

+ 6 or 7 hours (projected): You finance the college funds for the children of a local bartender.

And Aunt Karen turned out to be right on the money.  The book addresses exactly my problem: a crisis of self-confidence manifested in the form of shooting down my own ideas before they even make it to paper.  The antidote to my creative constipation, in a nutshell: “shitty first drafts.” The book is brilliant and inspiring, true and realistic, and above all, comforting in the way it allows you to see that even the greatest writers are fording the same quagmire, hacking the same brush as schmos like me.

The birthday itself was great.  Rachel baked me the most psychedelic cake I’ve ever seen and we ultimately had to enlist the help of many friends to finish it off.  She was very secretive about the whole production of the cake and banished me from the kitchen while she was making it.  Actually, it was an all around sneaky birthday as Rachel succeeded in throwing me the closest thing to a surprise party I’ve ever had.  In fact, she conspired to have all of our Wilmington friends show up at the Blue Post, the watering-hole of choice for MFA students at UNCW.  Rachel would have gotten away with the surprise, too, if it weren’t for Jeff, who texted me just as we were pulling up to the bar to say he was sorry to miss the party.  But my drinking was generously financed by just about everyone and, at midnight, my personal new year was duly rejoiced with many libations.

This of course got me thinking about everything that happened during my twenty-second year on plant earth, so I made a list of all the important stuff that happened since last January the 16th:

• Barack Obama was the first black man to be sworn in as a US president (even if Blogger’s spell check recognizes neither his first nor last name).
• Rachel, Sara, Christina, and I drove from the frozen tundra of Geneseo, NY to the windy shores of Lake Michigan for AWP in Chicago.  Rachel and I played hooky on Valentines day and scaled the Sears Tower.
• I returned to New Orleans for a third time as a part of the SU Hurricane Relief Team spring break trip, which seems to have a diminishing rate of return.  But at least we got to build things instead of tear them down this time.
• I acquired three half-cousins in one short, non-traditional, outdoor Southern California wedding.
• North Korea tried to launch a satellite, which they insisted was a success but which no one could find in space.
• The world bears witness to the rise of Swine Flu and the Age of Anti-Bacterial Soap, despite the fact that the flu is a virus, not a bacterium.
• I graduate, and, more importantly, survive Senior Week.
• After a second Senior Week with Rachel at Hamilton, she and I set out for an epic journey through the heartland of the US with stops along the way to get covered in mosquito bites, sign a lease on an apartment, and eat the best catfish ever.
• The civil war in Sri Lanka ended after 26 years.
• Major protests in Iran belied Ahmadinejad’s claims of re-election.  Twitter was useful for the first and only time.
• Michael Jackson, Billy Mays, Walter Cronkite, Ted Kennedy, John Hughes, and Patrick Swayze all died.
• Bill Clinton stole the spotlight from Hillary in North Korea.
• Rachel and I moved to Wilmington and set about learning how to be adults.
• I rode the single longest bike ride I’ve ridden to date, an embarrassing 22 miles, and was totally wiped out by it.
• The Irish finally approved the Lisbon Treaty.
• Rachel’s mother came to visit us and made the tastiest damn stuffing I’ve ever had.
• I finally got a job!
• Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize for not being George W. Bush.
• A guy tried to blow his own nuts off on a crowded airplane and failed.
• Hundreds of thousands of people died in an earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Certainly an eventful and formative year for me, if not for the world.  As for my 23rd year, I have no real predictions as to how it will turn out.  I know only that I truly feel a member of the “twenty-somethings” category now.  Time for a quarter-life crisis, perhaps.