Ahola from sunny Arizona. Recently added a few photo albums, including pics of the new house, you can see I’m well moved-in after two months! Hotdog crazy how time is flying. Going back to school is a ridiculous nightmare, work is fairly enjoyable since the schedule has calmed down but still long hours and tedious, my various side projects are banging me, and the new pups are crazy wonderful bundles of responsibility, but unfortunately not old enough to hold it more than about four hours.

But somehow this wild stucture works out, because the only way I can handle it all is to allocate my time in strict four-hour shifts. My watch timer beeps every four hours, and I switch it up. I’ve got another two hours left on my wakeup / workout / dog training / breakfast / housework / housework / personal organization / chill / drive-to-Tempe shift, and then it goes into schoolwork for four hours. I’m in the chill part of the dealio right now, or I suppose I should say super chill.

School sucks, but it’s over next May, always on the verge today, and this bum is a college grad. I think it’s all a bunch of bulljive and some Orwell-ian cashcow-tainted abuse of the power-knowledge nexus, but that’s a little deep for mispacio and my time is limited.

My motivating focus is a bus road trip next summer to celebrate the end of this drawn-out affair in academia, which has mostly been a serious waste of time and money. If my mother didn’t blindly believe that a college degree was more impo’tant than water, I would have skipped the whole headache entirely, and it pains me like a gutshot every day. But like I said, it’s almost over.

Which basically brings me to the whole point, that it all’s almost over. If you are going to “waste” time, do it grandly. Life is short, have lots of fun, do things you want to do, do them with a passion. In truth, love and peace are the answer.

“So which is easier,” he asked, “giving up or giving in?”

“Well, I’m not sure what you mean,” I said and took another drink. Of course I did know because I knew him and this was his favorite conversation, but I felt more like hearing him talk.

Randy had a way with words, not so much in the traditional sense, but rather in the way of a mosquito buzzing around your ear. I liked the buzzing, softer but growing closer and louder, until finally going silent when feeling replaces sound. I like focusing on one sense at a time.

I hate when you find a mosquito, one you didn’t even feel, now sucking your blood. Watching the slim sticker pump from my body’s bloody well gave me an ethereal delight in that I could now revel in the singular experience of sight, somehow not feeling or at least not noticing the contact.

Once the little rapscallion had fully gorged itself on my life juice, plump and intoxicated, I swatted, crushing the soft skeleton and splattering the bellyful of blood onto my skin. I always looked forward to seeing the bite later develop into the characteristic itchy red bump, but for whatever reason, I was always robbed of that curiosity. The skeeters that get away, for whatever reason, were the only ones that left their mark. I was no bug scientist though, and so, was content with wondering how the whole process worked, questioning and hypothesizing, like it used to be, before everything was all figured out.

“What do you mean by giving up?” I asked Randy. I took a sip of my beer. “Killing yourself?” He wasn’t suicidal, maybe homicidal when people couldn’t understand what he was talking about. He was s smart guy, so most people had no idea. I liked flustering him though acting that I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. Some reason he kept falling for my joke.

“Well, think of it this way,” he’d always start out. “Say you had two paths you could follow in life. One was to go live in the woods, build a cabin, and live off the land. The other was to get a nine-to-five job where you had to wear a suit everyday and do some menial work that in the big scheme of things didn’t really matter all that much. Just so you can buy stuff so other people can buy stuff. It’s stupid.”

“So which is giving up?” I asked, offering a half-smirk, just to let him know I’ve got him figured out.

“Well, I mean giving it up, the insanity of the nine-to-five life.”

“Well Randy, I suppose it depends on what you want to do, but I don’t think one is necessarily any easier than the other. Also, how you want to live your life? Usually, the way you want to live probably won’t be the way you find yourself living, and so then, living the way you want to, whether it’s giving up or in, as you put it, will be harder.”

I let him talk on for a while, because he wanted to and I wanted to drink, and I liked listening to him. I was only seventeen, in my first year of college, yet still sitting at the bar. Drinking seemed like the most important thing to be doing after all; doing this stupid homework just repeating some crap I already knew wasn’t all that important, to me that was giving up.

Randy ventured out a year after I did.