On Webs, Internet and Otherwise

Under the sidewalks of WSU, there is a curious natural phenomenon. Down below where students mindlessly walk from class to class in an ipod induced stupor, there are a collection of underground tunnels that connect building to building. They feed heat, power and information to each building in a crude pattern. Here and there they intersect. Here and there they start and stop, pipes climbing and weaving around each other. These places are unseen by most, they go unnoticed.

However, there is a section that is a little different from the rest. For whatever reason (only an entomologist might know) there is the perfect balance of humidity, altitude and heat. In this section of tunnel, thousands and thousands of spiders gather and coat the walls of the tunnel with webs. An entire twenty foot section is a lattice-on-lattice interwoven symphony of silk. For whatever reason, insects gather here in the tunnel more so than any other section, and the spiders jostle each other to get at the endless source of food.

And of course, it's through this section that we were chosen to pull our fiber optic cable. If you are not comfortable with being in close proximity with spiders, manual labor mere inches from them being overhead is not pleasant. In fact, I'm fairly ok with spiders and yet I found myself moving a little faster with a little more panic in my voice while working there.

But here's my point.

It takes a special person to appreciate the beauty in the tunnel. It takes a special person to appreciate the beauty in just about anything related to the manual labor involved with the magic of the internet. It takes a special person to wander around on the job site marveling at the simplicity of this world, how all the parts fit together to make something and how that something is gradually eaten up by the world again, no matter how diligent the maintenance or design.

I am such a special person. I am a Type B personality. I love the obvious metaphor between spider webs and fiber optics. Just as my hands are shaking from fear, I appreciate that the venomous hobo spider looks like a harpist's fingers as she plucks away. I wonder how that spider came to be weaving a web here in this dank tunnel. I wonder what that spider thinks of me, a large, large insect clumsily weaving a thick black single strand web.

These days, it's hip to be Type A. Type A's are go-getters; they are people of action. They have action statements and life plans. They don't have jobs, they have career goals. They are stressed over their house, their car, their career, their spouses. These are the bread and butter of this nation and this is their time to shine. They take charge of situations and engineer and inspire solutions. These are great, great things. I am horribly envious of Type A's. Somehow I want a bit of their drive and ingenuity. I want to feel stressed over things. I want to have a calendar in my head down to the year, month and hour. I feel guilty for not feeling stressed. I feel wrong to not go-get goals. I feel silly not having any bullet points on my plans of action.

Unfortunately, I am a member and an advocate of the much less hip and trendy Type B's. We're sometimes erroneously referred to as hippies or slackers or other such disparaging terms. These days it's much less hip to be a dreamer or a visualizer. We don't make much money, we don't get too many spotlights. It's the aggressive Type A's that fight and compete as the thrill of competition is lost on us. The adrenaline rush of the fight, of the conquest means nothing. Sometimes Type A's are completely mystified by us. They do not see the point in our wandering musings and consequently, they are mostly amused by us, but nothing more.

And oh, what I would give to trade away my appreciation for metaphors, for common and uncommon beauty. I would trade it all in. If I could only anticipate the structure of the tunnel, how the cable must be pulled, the angles and trajectory and footage. The math and the sequence of steps that must be performed. Sadly, these things elude me. I have only so much brain space, and it is occupied mostly with memories I've had, both real and exaggerated, with useless trivia, with songs I've made up. With comparisons between spiders and glass. It's all used up, and has no room for potentially useful information. If I could reach inside my head and turn my right side down and my left side up I would, I swear it. I could be a useful member of society. I could be really, really important. If I could just set my mind to it, I could. But I'm quickly distracted again and all is lost. Just as the inkling forms in my mind it evaporates again and I'm left singing yet another ridiculous song in my head.

At the same time, I'm a bit proud of us Type B's. When athletes stare glassily into the camera and utter the time-tested phrase "I play for the love of the game." That's us! We really do play just for the love of the game, and not for money or competition. It really doesn't occur to us who wins or loses. It's not that we are morally superior, it just doesn't really occur to us as being that important. It's just that we have a bizarre listing of priorities and sometimes they don't jive with a normal, or say, rational person's. It's normal to be competitive, it's normal to want to win. It really, really is. It makes me feel horribly guilty to sometimes got to a baseball game and have no recollection as to who won or lost. These things make me sad.

So I work my job, same as everybody else. And sometimes I even pretend to be concerned about things I'm supposed to be concerned about. Sometimes I fake trying to be stressed about important things. But really I'm just faking it and you can tell if you look closely. Sometimes I stroke my beard and consider important thoughts, but it's only to keep up appearances. In reality I'm probably trying to think of what color green I like best, or if the car behind you had a name, what its name might be. I might be remembering what the name of the girl was in second grade I had a crush on, or what the lyrics to my favorite Ren & Stimpy song were. These are not good things to spend a long time thinking about, they are not terribly useful at all.

So I work my job. And I pretend to be diligently pulling cable. But really, I'm just staring at spiderwebs and getting paid. I do an ok job of it, that is, pulling the cable. But I do a fantastic job of appreciating the beauty and the ugliness of the universe on a daily basis. Everyday I'm awestruck by how the planet works, by how life is. Every single damned day. Maybe that seems charming to you, you Type A's, but really it's not. It's just distracting, and it becomes hard to explain to the bill collector that they need to start over, because you were just remembering a tree named Mr. Needles, and how much raking you had to do for him. It becomes difficult to explain to the mechanic that your car's name is Jenny, which is why you keep referring to her in that manner.

So until I figure out a way to fix my brain, or a pill I can take, I'll keep doing these silly things. I'll grow older and older, and still be not useful. The only thing that will change is that my musings will grow more and more wildly, and be less and less tied down to reality. I'll just get crazier and crazier and never any wiser at all. This also makes me sad. On the other hand, I hope and pray for vindication. In my fantasy I rise to heaven on the wings of an angel, and old Saint Pete will tilt his reading glasses to the edge of his nose and read off my sheet. "Says here you had the priorities right the whole time. I see that you caught that thing we did with the spiders, clever metaphor we thought, but maybe a little obvious. Oh, your sheet is missing the name of that girl from second grade, her name was Abigail."

The reality is that I might never receive any vindication or proof that this is the right way to go about things. And truth be told, I'm not sure I have a choice even if it isn't. But one day, maybe someone will look me in the eye and tell me I was right, that I wasn't crazy, that this is how life is supposed to be lived. But maybe I shouldn't be concerned at all.

I mean getting all stressed about right and wrong is a Type A thing anyway, right?

Why I Fight

I admit, the question has come up a few times.

Sometimes it's in public, among friends. Sometimes it creeps into my head when I'm trying desperately to fall asleep on the hotel's dreadful bed, or sitting alone staring blankly at my very beige apartment walls.

It's persistent. It's demanding. It's ever-present.

Why am I still in Spokane?

I'll readily admit I don't have any clear answers. Or any good answers, for that matter. What I do have is a series of bumbling explanations, clumsy, but rational in my head. They are clumps of reasonings, more feelings than anything, that coalesce and merge in my head into constructive and concrete arguments. Arguments that I can't quite shape well enough to compose on paper or in speech. But I'll try. I'll try because I guess I owe it to the proud few who read my sporadic blog. And I suppose I owe it to myself to try and catch some of these wispy thoughts and nail them down, so at the very least I have some sort of manifest I can refer to when that pesky question gets louder and louder.

Why am I still in Spokane?

Still is the operative word here, and we'll start with this one. Sure, it's in the middle of the sentence, but I'm not a stickler for order. Still implies that my timeline should have been completed, that I should have finished my work here. It implies that there was at least some sort of framework for me moving and living in Spokane, that there was some either hidden or apparent structure to my career and life change.

Well the truth is that the "still" doesn't really belong in the sentence. I never had a plan, or a scheme, or a drive or desire. I really only knew what I didn't want in Seattle, I was really only running away. Sure, when I left I made it out to be this grand adventure. (You only live once! See the world! You're young! Have adventures!) Spokane is hardly the adventure I envisioned. Spokane is hardly anything on its own.

I'm going to be frank. Spokane is pretty dull.

Spokane alone is not a life-changing city. It's not a grand-standing village, perched on the edge of greatness. There is no sense of great things on the horizon here, there is no common feeling of accomplishment that I can detect from my fellow Spokes. In reality, Spokane is the capital of the Inland Empire, which is hardly any empire at all. No emperor would bother conquering this area. It feels as though that we're in Washington purely because Oregon and Idaho had little to no interest in this awkward spot between the Palouse and the Silver Valley.

Ok, we've established I'm not in love with the city, the question still stands. Maybe the answer lies in my newfound job, my sense of purpose here in Spokane that I was lacking in my glorified telephone rep job in the hum-drum and anonymous chaos of Seattle.

The short answer to that is...no, not really.

My job in Seattle was just that, a job. The problem is that I dressed it up to be a potential career, and it simply wasn't. It wasn't a question of it being challenging or me having the drive or ambition to succeed. It was more of a question of whether the job was worth doing at all. And really, if pressed, I'm sure the world would function quite nicely without a Facilities Rep on the end of the phone. Lord knows I'm not ready for the responsibility of say, an air traffic controller or a surgeon, but maybe I was shooting to be a slightly more important cog in the Great Big Machine.

Have I found that in Spokane? Hardly. I'm competent at my new job, but not a standout. I'm ill-suited for most tasks. I can't pull as hard as most of the guys in the crew, and I certainly can't smoke or chew (blech) like they can. I don't make racist or sexist jokes out of habit, I don't brag about mudding or blast sentimental country music. Instead I correct their grammar. I make jokes about US foreign policy. I play goofy techno music.

Most of the jobsite thinks I'm either preposterously homosexual or touched in the head, or possibly both. At this point, I could care less. I've lost interest in gaining the respect or admiration of most of the idiots I find on a jobsite. To be honest, the jobsite mirrors the office more and more, in a depressing blur of cubicles and drywall. All my crummy past jobs are merging into one drab non-career, and Spokane certainly hasn't been the cure for that. So if I'm not in Spokane to re-start my career, then why?

Why am I still in Spokane?

The "still " doesn't' belong, we've established that. And really, we could probably do away with the clumsy "why." Why doesn't really answer anything, it simply provokes more questions, like in this case why I am in Spokane in the first place, why I chose Spokane, or why I hammer away at this blog every few months. Then again the question "Am I still in Spokane?" seems a little to easy. Geographically yes, I'm in Spokane. Am I in the Spokane frame of mind? Probably (and thankfully) not. Spokane prides itself in being a family oriented city, so much so that it's actually difficult to go anywhere without there being children or toddlers around. Families are ever present, and they delight in pointing out that they are families. People back in Seattle would often lament over the fact that gays would openly display affection in public, which was felt to be upsetting. Over here, I can't help but stick my tongue out at all the gross displays of blatant heterosexuality in Spokane. It's everywhere, none more obnoxious that the cute little stick figures of a perfect family (Dad, Mom, Sister, Brother and sometimes dog and cat) stuck to the back window of a minivan or SUV.

These are the things I hate about Spokane. These are the things I could write blog entry after blog entry about. Fortunately for you, dear reader, I'll leave you with the abridged version.

Why am I in Spokane?

Well, as we pare away why I dislike Spokane, I think we'll get closer to why I like it. Or why I like it enough to stay put. First of all, it's not like there aren't things about Seattle that drive me absolutely insane. Seattle has the advantage of being my hometown (and really, no matter bad hometowns are, we always have a soft spot for them) and also a pretty nice place overall. However, Seattle is a Big City now, whether it wants to be or not, and is saddled with all the baggage that a Big City carries. Seattle feels like its overgrown now. The neighborhoods seem bloated with condos these days, instead of quirky apartments. Also, most disturbingly, Seattle doesn't feel much like home anymore.

I spent the last Christmas break idly meandering around downtown Seattle. I claimed I was shopping, but what I was really doing was a most careful version of people watching. I was trying to find out if I still felt like a Seattlelite. And I waited, and walked, and walked and waited. What I found was that I could tour Seattle and find points of interest from my past, but I could find no indication of my future, I felt no desperate pull to the people walking alongside the streets with me. It was a profoundly sad moment, all the nostalgia I'd been hoping to have seemed to have dried up and I couldn't tell if it was me or the city itself getting older. Never have I felt more severed from something I felt certain I would have a connection too, never have I been more firmly separated from something I thought was still a part of me. I tried to shake it off, but the feeling stuck with me even as I returned to Spokane. While there weren't trumpets and cheers greeting my arrival back in Spokane, the feeling of severance was gone too. It was, I suppose, very comforting.

However, comfort alone doesn't dictate where we find ourselves. Or at least it shouldn't. What I really came to Spokane to find was the opposite of comfort, so to speak. I came here, out of blind stubbornness and fear, to start over. To really break free of my past, by force if necessary. And the sad truth is, is that while over two years have past, I'm really just barely getting started on that goal. I've gone 'round nearly a full circle here in Spokane. I've almost come back to where I've started and it's the most frustrating thing I've ever had to do in this life.

But you know, it was necessary.

It's hard to admit that. It's hard to look at the place I live in now, and the job I do now and say to myself that this is probably exactly where I should be right now. It's humbling, but not in a wholesome way. Not in the travel-up-the-difficult-mountain-path-to-discover-enlightenment sort of humble way, but more in the spit-in-your-eye-and-kick-you-down sort of way. But again, necessary.

I've done quite a bit of the ol' character building here in Spokane, and I can't fault the city for that. It's lent itself to a bit more tough love than even crusty old unforgiving Seattle. Seattle simply has too many safety nets, too many outs, too many havens and harbors. Spokane doesn't offer much, except for the relative refuge of my apartment. But I have to escape even that sometimes, whereas in Seattle I could stay submerged for months on end in my little Wallingford womb.

Spokane is a cruel and horrible teacher, and I love it for this.

But aside from all that, it really doesn't cover the real reason. Sure, I love Spokane for kicking in my teeth a little, and I despise Seattle for being the ridiculously big city it has become, but those are peripheral issues. They are little bonuses that tip the scales in Spokane's favor, but not the real engine that drives my stubborn desire to stay.

The real answer is this: there is a little spark of hope in Spokane.

I know, it sounds cheesy in my head, and it sure as hell looks cheesy staring back at me in print. But there it is, I can't say it any better or more clearly than that. Things could get better in Spokane, this could be where things turn around, this could be where a chemical catalyst in my life jumps in and mixes everything up. This could be where I finally wake up. If I leave now, I miss it. Worse than that. If I leave now I squander all the work I've inadvertently put in coming back around full circle to get my life back on track. I've wasted my efforts to escape the rat-race, to escape the same ol', to escape the boring treadmill of my previous possible lives. It'll all be for naught!

But then again, the spark in Spokane could just as easily fade away.

It's too early to tell. But here I stay. I'm not a gambler, I'm not a risk taker.....normally. But I think I'd like to see this one out. And trust me, if the flame goes out, if the spark is gone, if whatever magical nonsense I feel about this crummy burg fades away, then consider my bags packed. I'm not so young, thanks to this damned town, and I don't have much more time to waste.

That's why I'm still in Spokane.