POET’S WORK

Grandfather
    advised me:
        Learn a trade

I learned
    to sit at desk
        and condense

No layoffs
    from this
        condensery

  — Lorine Niedecker (1903 - 1970), American Poet

One of these days I’ll figure out what it’s going to take to get me to go to bed at a reasonable hour, so I’m not struggling through the next day at work on only 3-4 hours of sleep.

But not tonight.

YOU

You create poetry
by simply standing
in the
afternoon rain,
cigarette dangling
from a crooked
smile.

Some of us
have to work
harder
at this kind of thing.

  — William Taylor Jr., American poet based in San Francisco

I’m taking a few days off from work because, well, I just needed to take a few days off.

I was originally planning to go down to Fountain Hills, AZ (where my mom and stepdad live), to cheer on Kathy Sherwin, et al, at the NMBS race down there, but due to finances (and lack of planning, other than requesting the time off), this didn’t happen.

Now I’m just trying to relax and decompress. Unfortunately, like my normal work week, I’m still only getting 4-5 hours of sleep per night. I need to get out on the bike, and yet, I wasted a perfectly good riding day yesterday.

What’s worse than knowing what the solution to a problem is, and not being able to motivate yourself to do it? My life is so decidedly un-Big Ring these days, it’s unreal. Dysthymia in action (or is that dysthymia inaction?).

I did go to the Bike Porn showing at the warehouse last night; which was really quite interesting in the various ways that bicycle pornography can be interpreted; from the slightly erotic panning of sculpted lugs on a handcrafted steel frame, to the comedic idea of two bikes making love to each other, to a freak-bike builder lusting after high-end boutique racing bikes, to actual hardcore porn involving a bicycle … certain aspects of the latter were erotic and well-done; other aspects were just disturbing, at least to me.

You can view the trailer on Blip.TV … be forewarned, it is definitely not safe for work, or for people who don’t want to see nudity or anything remotely explicit.

Ran into the Wolfe, just after the screening and chatted far too briefly. Sometimes it’s interesting how easy it is to “talk” to people online, yet how difficult it can be face-to-face, when you’re not really sure what to say.

Shortly thereafter was an impromptu running of the Salt City Sprints with a number of exciting match-ups; in a few of the races, in keeping with the theme of the evening, a number of people (men and women alike) stripped down to skivvies, or less in a few cases, to try and gain a competitive advantage over their rivals (or maybe just to give the audience a thrill) …

The most exciting match of the evening was the fully-clothed face-off between Legal Messenger, Inc. (LMI) owner/dispatcher Jason Copier, and LMI messenger Patrick Beecroft which finished in a dead heat at 13.74 seconds. The battle for sprint supremacy between messenger and dispatcher was not settled last night.

The evening broke up about midnight, with many heading off to the Gallivan Center for a Midnight Mass, while I drove home (because, as you know, I drive to bike events rather than actually riding), and sat on the couch for another 3 hours watching stupid late-night television (I don’t even remember what was on) before finally wandering off to bed for a fitful 5-hours of sleep, waking up this morning at 8:30 to face another bleak, boring day … I’ve got to get out on the bike today, even if for only a short 10-miler, before the weather gets shitty.

XTC - SENSES WORKING OVERTIME

Hey, hey
The clouds are whey
There’s straw for the donkeys
And the innocents can all sleep safely
All sleep safely

My, my
Sun is pie
There’s fodder for the cannons
And the guilty ones can all sleep safely
All sleep safely

And all the world is football-shaped
It’s just for me to kick in space
And I can see, hear, smell, touch, taste
And I’ve got one, two, three, four, five
Senses working overtime
Trying to take this all in
I’ve got one, two, three, four, five
Senses working overtime
Trying to taste the difference ‘tween a lemon and a lime
Pain and pleasure and the church bells softly chime

Hey hey
Night fights day
There’s food for the thinkers
And the innocents can all live slowly
All live slowly

My, my
The sky will cry
Jewels for the thirsty
And the guilty ones can all die slowly
All die slowly

And all the world is biscuit-shaped
It’s just for me to feed my face
And I can see, hear, smell, touch, taste
And I’ve got one, two, three, four, five
Senses working overtime
Trying to take this all in
I’ve got one, two, three, four, five
Senses working overtime
Trying to taste the difference ‘tween a lemon and a lime
Pain and pleasure and the church bells softly chime

And birds might fall from black skies (woo-woo)
And bullies might give you black eyes (woo-woo)
But to me they’re very, very beautiful (England’s glory)
Beautiful (a striking beauty)

And all the world is football-shaped
It’s just for me to kick in space
And I can see, hear, smell, touch, taste
And I’ve got one, two, three, four, five
Senses working overtime
Trying to take this all in
I’ve got one, two, three, four, five
Senses working overtime
Trying to tell the difference ‘tween the goods and grime
Turds and treasure
And there’s one, two, three, four, five
Senses working overtime
Trying to take this all in
I’ve got one, two, three, four, five
Senses working overtime
Trying to taste the difference ‘tween a lemon and a lime
Pain and pleasure and the church bells softly chime

I don’t know if it’s the changing weather (like it is for the Mistress), or if there is something else going on, but I just cannot get my head into the game.

My motivation levels are near-nil, and I find that right now I’m basically just on cruise control. I wake up, I go to work, I come home, I eat too much, watch some TV, and go to bed. On weekends, I may give myself a respite by heading up one of the canyons, but the past couple of weeks, even that hasn’t really helped a whole lot.

I’m looking for inspiration from without, because I’m certainly not finding any from within.

I can’t write, at least not expressively … my pens and journals are just sitting there. I’m not feeling artistically inclined towards my cameras … I’m just carrying them around, but not pulling them out and using them.

My bikes are in the closet, or leaning against the counter in the dining room, tires flattening, chains drying, and even the last couple of days I’ve been skiing have been less than exceptional.

I’m deep in a funk, and I don’t know how to pull myself out right now; and I’m not sure how everyone else can put on such a happy face all the time. I listen to what other people tell me about what’s going on in their lives, much of which is often more difficult than what I’m having to deal with, and yet, they seem like they’re able to just deal with it and move on, while I find myself wallowing in in the muck that is my mind.

Definitely not doing the Big Ring thing these days. I dunno, Train, maybe I should give up the “Flahute” monicker and put away the Ferlinghetti and Kerouac, and start pulling out the Maya Angelou and Sylvia Plath.

Very doubtful I’ll be able to make it out to see Eddie Spaghetti and Jordan Shapiro at the Bar Deluxe tonight … and I’m extremely pissed off about it.

Eddie and Jordan don’t go on until 11:00 (which is another rant … why do bands always start so late?) … but I have to be at work tomorrow at 7:00 for tax training on mandatory overtime … this is a training I’ve taken every year since 1999 when I first started working for my company.

I know what an ordinary dividend is. I know when the deadlines for delivering 1099s are (January 31, unless you’re granted an extension, which we have been the past couple of years). I know that 1099-OID (original issue discount) forms will be updated multiple times before they must be finalized in mid-March. I know that you have until April 15 to make an IRA contribution for the previous year. I know that you have to start taking your required minimum distributions from IRAs in the year in which you turn 70 1/2, and if it’s your first year, you have until April of the following year to do it (i.e., if you turned 70 in October 2007, you don’t have to take your first RMD until April 2009, BUT it’s still a good idea to take it in 2008, because you still have to take an RMD for 2009 as well, and you really don’t want to take distributions for two years in the same year if you can help it).

I know all of this shit, and still my boss is insisting I show up … to pay me time and a half to sit around for 6 hours and listen to some schmuck trainer dumb down all the information enough so that the new hires can understand it … when we could really go over any changes there might have been since last year in about an hour.

I’ve already taken the friggin’ quizzes they want us to take at the end of the training, and scored better than 95% on all of them. What’s the point of wasting the money … why spend the $300?

Oh … it’s because we’re about efficiency and “World Class Service” … but we don’t give our customer service representatives enough time to follow-up on issues because answering the damned phone to reset some dimwad’s password is more important than following through with the varous Ops groups in New York to find out why this $100,000 trade in a client’s $15-million dollar account didn’t get processed properly … so the branch service teams have to back-up the customer-service teams, and the premier/elite teams have to back-up the branch-service teams, and Operations specialists like me end up doing everything in addition to cleaning up the messes left behind by the frontline instead of focusing on our projects because everybody else is busy telling clients they only have $1,500 available on their debit cards because we’re fee-ing them to death to try to get rid of them, because they should really be at a discount firm rather than a full-service firm when they only have $10K to their names.

I’m still trying to figure out how that is “World Class” service … when we leave our big-dollar financial advisors and clients hanging for a couple of days because it’s more important to answer the phone to reset a password. God forbid the little guys we really don’t even want as clients because we actually LOSE money on them have to wait for 2-minutes (instead of 15-seconds) to get their question answered.

Since when did efficiency become more important than effectiveness? What good is it to be able to answer X number of phone calls in a day if you can’t actually accomplish something because you’ve got to get the current caller off the line to answer the next phone call? You’d think a white-shoe firm would know better.

Life in the cube-farm fucking sucks.

Train knows what I’m talking about.