Yearly Archives: 2012

I’m not scared of heights, I swear

The other day I was f’n around online and I came across this video of these guys that climb all the way up to the top of really high structures, like antennas out in the middle of nowhere. The head climber attached a camera to his head, so you got a pretty realistic point-of-view type film, of this guy just climbing higher and higher up to the top.

Let me tell you, just by watching this video I experienced a strong physical reaction. My stomach got shaky, queasy. It’s the same feeling you get if your car goes over a hill really fast, or if you’re on a ferris wheel that takes a dip at the same time as the carriage starts rocking. I was terrified for this guy. This particular antenna that he was climbing was about as high as the Sears Tower in Chicago. Once he got as high as an elevator would take him, he basically had to climb an open ladder. And it just kept going up and up and up. And then finally he gets to a platform, but that wasn’t even close to being the end. Then he had to climb an even smaller ladder, this one was basically just a pole with pieces of metal coming off the sides. It was like a half-ladder, like a ladder’s inverse.

And this guy wasn’t even using any harness or anything. The video said that constantly attaching and detaching and reattaching a harness would slow him down. He had a little clip that he would stick to a rung every now and then so he could lean back and rest. Like he would actually just lean back, his feet on the ladder, but then just releasing the weight of his body against this chord that he affixed his life to, just taking a rest from climbing up this never ending pole, leaning back against the void.

Oh yeah, and he’s carrying his tools up behind him, also attached to some other rope, and the whole pack weighs maybe thirty pounds. And he finally gets to the top, this tiny piece of platform maybe three feet squared, and he pulls up his pack of tools and starts changing some light bulb at the top.

First of all, what kind of a sociopath designed this antenna? Aren’t we at a point in technology or society or civilization or whatever where we can build an antenna with maybe a ladder that’s surrounded by a scaffolding so that this guy could climb without a legitimate risk of falling to his death? And to do what, change a light bulb? I’m no genius inventor, but maybe they could install a light bulb at the top that would attach to some type of mechanical elevator, so when it dies, you can just press a button and it would come down for a change instead of a human being going up.

But whatever, I guess eventually whenever you have tall structures somebody’s going to have to go up and at least make sure everything’s OK. And this is what kills me. That’s an actual profession out there of people who climb up buildings and bridges and antennas. It makes me sick to my stomach. I wouldn’t say I have a fear of heights, but thinking about these people doing this sends my body into a panic.

Every time I think about it, my palms start sweating. What kind of a physical reaction to heights are sweaty palms? How does it make any sense at all? If I’m up somewhere really high, chances are, if I want to survive, I’m going to have to grab onto stuff and hopefully climb down in one piece. How is this easier with slippery hands? What the hell evolution? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to have a magnet grip, or maybe Spider-Man’s wall crawling powers?

But what really bothers me is that this is part of the human experience. Every once in a while I’ll get stuck in my head and I’ll think about my life and how comfortable it is, but how outside of my own tiny existence there are people going through all sorts of crazy shit, like free climbing up a giant antenna. And I think to myself, well, I’m a human being, and they are human beings too, so the only difference between myself and person changing a light bulb at the top of the world is, well, there is no difference. It’s really just a matter of elevation. I can very easily picture myself up there, and my imagination is obviously a very good one, because I’m able to trigger these stupid panic responses, like nausea and sweaty palms.

And what if one day I find myself living under a totalitarian regime, and I get drafted as a laborer by the state, and they put me in some worker camp, and they look at me and say, “You. The tall guy. Come on, we’ve got a new job for you.” And the guy pulls out a light bulb and smiles. And as I lose control of my bladder and beg to be spared from this human experience that I desperately do not want to experience, this psychopath smiles even harder, knowing that he picked just the right guy for the job, and he takes out a gun a cocks the barrel back and he says, “Climb.” And I don’t have a choice.

Honestly, shit like this keeps me up at night. I just, I just really hope that I never, ever have to do something like that. Or even watch another video like that again. I should just stop using the Internet. Or leaving the house. Or writing out these crazy imaginary scenarios that only get more vivid and descriptive as I write them out. Jesus Christ my palms are really sweating now. Like my keyboard is soaked. I can’t believe it’s still functioning, because it’s so wet.

Wow, I’m feeling really tired today

I’m so tired. Like I couldn’t even get out of bed today. Like I’m still in bed. I slept for maybe twelve hours. I don’t know why I’m still so beat. I’m seriously still under the covers. I keep trying to get up but my eyes, even if I can force them open for more than two seconds, it’s like my eyelids are just weighed down with extra gravity, and then when I eventually give up and they slam shut I keep telling myself, just fight it Rob, just stay awake, even if your eyes are closed, just don’t fall asleep, just concentrate on mustering the energy to pry your eyes open again. And then by the time I actually open them up and I look at the clock I realize that I in fact did fall asleep, that my willpower was nothing compared to how tired I am, that an hour has passed and this day keeps slipping further and further out of my hands.

And so I’m resigned to the fact that I can’t get out of bed. It’s just too much today. I feel like a parasite must be attached to my body somewhere, sucking me dry, leaving me this empty husk of a person, unable to stay awake. You might be asking yourself, how are you writing this Rob? If you’re so exhausted, stuck in bed, how are you at your computer writing? I’m not. I gave up on trying to get out of bed. I’m on my phone, typing it out on the touch screen. It’s taking forever. I’ll get stuck on a word for like two whole minutes, back and forth, me trying really carefully to hit the right letter, but because my fingers are so big, and the screen so tiny, and I’m so tired, I just don’t have the energy necessary to really aim my fingers, and I keep messing up. And then when I finally get a word right, the phone thinks I’m trying to spell a different word, and it does me the favor of changing the word automatically, without even asking, and I’m back to square one. It sounds like a long and tedious process. It is. I’ve been working on this blog post for the past eight hours. I’ve already taken like twelve naps.

I feel like my body has started hibernation, like a bear. If I’m really quiet I can’t even hear my heart beating, because even though I’m still alive, (I have to be alive, right?) my heart is still beating, but the beats have slowed down so much, to such a crawl that if I try to listen for an individual beat, it sounds like I’m dead, because the spaces in between each beat are just too long, way too long to maintain concentration on listening, I can’t keep the focus for that long, and so maybe there was a beat, but I missed it, I fell asleep or something.

Hibernation isn’t just about sleeping and a slower heart rate. Everything’s slower. My metabolism is just barely on at all. And that’s too bad, because right before I went to sleep last night I made myself a huge plate of fettuccine alfredo. I figured I’d carboload, give myself the fuel for a productive tomorrow. But I can just feel every strand of fettuccine just hanging out in my stomach. And I’m trying to will my digestive system into action. I’m like, “Come on stomach! Metabolize!” But nobody can control their organs, not consciously, and I’ve wasted so much of my non-energy on just visualizing my intestines, trying to kick-start the whole Krebs Cycle (Krebs Cycle? I don’t think I used that right) into action.

When did I miss twelve phone calls? Who even calls any more? Inbox full? How long have I been asleep? I don’t remember having this full beard. Who installed this catheter? Why would whatever hospital I’ve woken up in spend so much time making sure the catheter is installed correctly but not bother to give me a shave every now and then? Can I take out this IV? Is this feeding tube really necessary? Hello?

When Rip Van Winkle woke up the colonists won the American Revolution. Maybe I’ve woken up and the conservatives have finally won the Romney Revolution. That was a funny joke. Maybe a little too funny. I actually laughed a little too hard and I think I’ve in the process wasted all of the energy that my body was slowly starting to build back up, and now the laughing is over and I’m just so sleepy, maybe I’ll just take little a nappy-nap, just for a minute, because my eyes are so heavy.

Wow, I’m feeling really great today

I’m feeling great today. I’m feeling super energetic. Everything’s just on. Does that make any sense? Like a switch. Like there are a bunch of switches and all of them are in the on position. I’m just going with it. I’m just going in general. I’ve never felt better. I’ve never felt more capable of doing anything. Seriously.

I feel like I could climb a mountain. I’d just get to the base and start climbing. And I’d keep going and I’d get to the top and I’d look around at everything and say to myself, “That was it?” because I’ll still be so pumped, that climbing a mountain wouldn’t have even made a dent in my energy reserves. You might be saying to yourself, well, maybe it wasn’t that big of a mountain. Rob, don’t you live in New York? Even if you go upstate, it’s not like the mountains are that big. And so I would say to that, touché, bring me a bigger mountain. Let’s go to the Rockies. Let’s go to Katmandu. Is that a mountain? I don’t think so but, whatever, I didn’t want to say Kilimanjaro or Everest, because they both sound too cliché. But I’ll climb all of them, one stacked on top of the next. Make a ladder out of mountains so I can climb all the way to those super mountains on Mars. I can’t be stopped. Not today.

I feel like I’ve been struck by lightning. But instead of simply coursing through my body for merely a fraction of a second, this lighting bolt is constant, like it’s just going up and down my spine, trillions upon gajillions of gigawatts of energy. Yeah, I know, lightning bolts are really hot, like surface of the sun hot. But for some reason the energy isn’t melting the flesh off of my bones. It’s like I’ve harnessed it, I’m somehow in control of it. And my hair isn’t singeing either. And my clothes are fine too. It’s not real fire is what I’m trying to say. But that’s what it feels like.

It feels like I can run an ultra-marathon. It feels like I could swim down the eastern seaboard to Florida. It feels like I could write a whole novel in a day. But it wouldn’t just be words, not merely length. It would be quality work. Like masterpiece caliber material. And it would make all other writing seem terrible by comparison. Which maybe I don’t actually want to do because, should the bar really be set that high? Isn’t that kind of too high?

But then again I’m feeling so energetic, so full of just, everything, that I’m seeing that bar, like I’m visualizing an actual bar that I’ve actually set so high, like I reached as deep as could to set it that high, and then I come back down and I look at that bar and I’m like, wait a second, that doesn’t seem too high. I don’t feel like I even used any energy at all. I’m still so jazzed up and jacked up and I dig even deeper and I reset the bar, even higher than before, and it makes the first setting seem like I didn’t even bother to pick the bar up off the ground, and then I come back down and repeat the same process over and over again, so the bar just keeps getting set exponentially higher and higher each time, and then I say to myself, wow Rob, it must be getting pretty late, all of this bar setting must have taken a while, but I look at my watch and I’m shocked, just floored, because all of this will have been done in like ten seconds, I’m moving so fast, over the top energy just pouring out of the core of my very being, and it’s all working up an incredibly oversized appetite.

Yeah, I didn’t even realize it, but I’m starving. I’m hungrier than I’ve ever been in my life. I feel like I could eat a whole steak, a giant porterhouse, two perfectly cooked roast prime ribs, a whole cow, really every single fiber of meat, I could lick it clean off the bone, washing it all down with gallons and gallons of water, so refreshing, I could drink an entire ocean, obviously it would have to be desalinated, I didn’t mean actual ocean water, I was talking about volume, just trying to give you an idea of what it would take to quench my thirst, and now that I’m thinking about it, one cow wouldn’t be enough, especially compared with a whole ocean of water, and while I’m waxing aquatic, I think I could eat a whole whale, a whole family of whales, a giant plate of whale T-bone steaks, and I wouldn’t even need a fork or a knife, I’m just that hungry.

I could do anything right now. I think I could run a two minute mile. I feel like I could uproot a tree right out of the ground with my bare hands. My fists are telling me that I’d have no problem punching multiple holes right through the walls. Right through the sidewalk. That barbwire fence doesn’t look so dangerous. Why shouldn’t I be able to touch those livewires? How much you want to bet I could throw this football over them mountains?

Seriously, you can’t stop me. I can do anything. I could solve the world’s energy problem, just hook me into the system, jack me in, put me on a treadmill, attach the treadmill to some generators, call up the President, tell him the energy crisis is over, tell him not to thank me, there’s no time for me to say you’re welcome, I’m too busy, I’m too going, I’m too on, I’m just, way too on.

Can I have your shirt?

No, I’m not being sarcastic. I really like that shirt. Can I borrow it? Can I keep it? Can you give it to me right now? I love it. I wish that you had bought two when you bought it for yourself. I wish that you bought eight, and that way you could give me seven of them, one for every day of the week. If only I could open my closet and see a whole wardrobe, just of that shirt, over and over and over again, man, my life would be set. Because I really love that shirt. And I’m not being sarcastic. Seriously, can I have it? I want to take it to a tailor. I want to take it to China and have them set up a whole factory dedicated to mass producing that shirt, thousands of copies, but only for me, just in my size. That way I’ll get to wear a brand new shirt every single day, and then I can just throw it out. Maybe I’ll wear two every day, like if I go running midday, I’ll take a shower after I get back from my run, and I’ll wear a brand new one for the afternoon. Scratch that, that’ll be three a day, because if I have that many shirts, of course I’m going to wear one while I’m working out. I told you how much I love the shirt, right? And now that I’m thinking about it, it’s actually four shirts a day, because I’ll want to wear one in the shower. And you know what? Make it a lot more shirts, because instead of pants, I’m thinking that I’m just going to wrap one shirt around each leg, and then another shirt around my waist. Well, maybe I can just have my Chinese garment factory use the same shirt material to make pants … no. No, then it wouldn’t be that shirt. It would be something else. It would be pants.

Of course I’m not being sarcastic. Haven’t I made it clear enough already how much I absolutely love that shirt? I’m obsessed with it. In fact, I don’t think it would be fair to mass-market that shirt, even if it were only for me. Because all of those shirts wouldn’t be that shirt, that very shirt that you’re wearing right now. I think that it’s something not about the style, not about the make or material, but there’s something special about that specific shirt. Like even if you bought two like I had mentioned earlier, or eight, the other ones wouldn’t do it for me in the same way that that shirt is doing it for me. Can you please take it off right now and hand it over to me? I’m begging you, sincerely. Although, if I were in your position, I would understand exactly what you’re going through. People must come up to you all the time, pleading with you, demanding to have the shirt. I wouldn’t give it up. But I can’t stop asking. Just please give it to me.

I’ll never take it off. I’m really serious here. I’d just leave it on for the rest of my life. Sure, it would get dirty, and start to fall apart, holes and stains and everything. But that would just add extra layers to its uniqueness. It would grow old with me. And finally, someday, I’d be laid down to rest with the shirt still on, threadbare by that point, maybe it would be so faded and torn that I’d have to tie it together at certain spots to keep it from sliding off of my body. Spending my whole life in that shirt would have had obvious consequences on my professional and social life. Nobody would want to live with me, because they’d be too jealous of the shirt, and I wouldn’t be able to live with anybody either, because I’d be too worried that they’d wait until I fall asleep to steal the shirt and take off in the middle of the night. And holding down a job would be impossible, because you’re supposed to wear nice clothes to work, like a suit and tie. And then obviously everybody at work would be jealous of the shirt also.

And so, please, don’t make me beg any more, just give me the shirt. Let me live my life in your shirt. Let me be buried with that shirt. I’ll need to be buried in concrete, obviously, deep down in a really state of the art high-security mausoleum, because as soon as I die everybody’s going to be thinking that they can just grave rob me. I won’t let it happen. I want to be in that shirt for all of eternity.

What? I’m serious! No I’m not being sarcastic. You pick out the best shirts, what can I say? And look at those sneakers. Wow! What a great pair of kicks. Can I have them? Those are the coolest sneakers I’ve ever seen in my life. I’ll trade you my car for just one of them, just the left one. Come on, I’m totally serious. I’m not being sarcastic at all. I just … I just love your sense of style.

I’m running a little late here

As I’m writing this, it’s raining so hard outside. I woke up this morning and I couldn’t even tell it was morning, because the sky was so black. And it was just coming down in sheets. It had the effect of keeping me glued to my bed, the no sunlight, the soothing sounds of rain. I feel like I’m falling asleep as I write this, trying to pound a few cups of coffee and write a whole blog post before I have to get to work.

I always commute by bike, seeing as how I live three miles away from the restaurant where I work. And so I have my morning planned out down to the minute. I know exactly when I have to leave the house. And I’m still hoping that the rain is going to clear up. I have like half an hour, so, you know, it can’t rain forever. All I do is wrap a few garbage bags around my waist and I won’t get any of that splashback, as the back tire sprays water up my back.

But I don’t know, this is getting heavier and heavier. The problem lies in the fact that it only takes me about fifteen minutes to get to work by bike. If I don’t ride my bike though, I have to walk seven blocks to the subway, wait for a train, and then walk another seven blocks from the subway to the restaurant. Who knows how long that takes? Half an hour? And it’s never consistent, because the trains are never really consistent.

So I could sit here and wait for the rain to clear up which, as I’m writing this sentence, I think it actually is clearing up, not all the way, but the sun looks like it’s trying to break through the thick clouds above. So maybe I can wait here, follow my regular schedule. The problem is, if I take the subway, I have to leave earlier than usual, to allow myself all of that extra time for walking and waiting. Right now it looks like I’m going to bike. But what happens if, right as I’m out the door with my bike, it starts coming down hard again? I’ll be so screwed, because there’s no way I can make it to work in fifteen minutes via public transportation.

And I just started at this restaurant like two months ago. So far, I haven’t had to take the subway, not even once. I’m just picturing everybody standing around, getting ready to get to work, and my boss is like, “Where’s that new guy?” and then ten or fifteen minutes later I run in and I’m all soaked and out of breath, “Listen! I can explain!” but all I can see is my boss just arms folded across his chest, shaking his head back and forth in disappointment.

So I guess, what, if it really got that bad, if it really started to rain right as I left, I’d just have to go for it. If I show up to work drenched, but on time, isn’t that a lot better than showing up ten minutes late, but significantly less soaked? If I were the boss, personally, I would prefer that my employees take their time, especially on days with inclement weather. I’m putting myself at significant jeopardy, riding my bike as fast as I can, in the pouring rain. Is it really that important to be exactly on time?

I never really understood punctuality. Like, I get it in terms of if you’re meeting up with somebody outside of work. Nobody likes to stand around waiting. But at a job? At a restaurant? Lunch doesn’t start until noon. I have to be at work at eleven-fifteen. Why forty-five minutes? Shouldn’t there be, built into those forty-five minutes, ten or fifteen minutes to be late? Do you know how stressful it is to try and get up at the same exact minute every morning, to leave the house at the very same second, regardless of how much you’d just like another five minutes with your cup of coffee, or another ten minutes just laying in bed listening to the rain outside?

Of course you do. Everybody has to get up for work. Everybody has to make it into the office by eleven-fifteen. It’s called being an adult. And I get it. Responsibility. Money. Time. I just think that we all should chill out a little bit. Everything’s by the minute, by the very second. Don’t we all just want to relax a little bit more? Do we really have to be racing to work everyday?