Lone Wolf

I know myself, I know what's going on. But it doesn't make it any less uncomfortable: I've got a case of the "lonlies" again.

This weekend was great--drove down to Blacksburg, rode around the town on my bike, hung out with my friends, watched the Hokies beat the Hokies through sleepy eyes, ate too much...the works.

And now it's over. And I picked up on several subtle things this weekend--new developments in relationships, [good] sides of people I've never really seen before, and...how much I haven't changed. I'm still as immature as ever, incapable of really showing any emotion or empathy, incapable of really letting loose and having a good time. Why is that?

Fear. I fear the let-down afterward--I know that, in the morning, it's all over and I go back to being alone.

It doesn't help, either, that everything I watch, everything I listen to seems to emphasize the benefits of being with someone. Every love song, every break-up song, every movie and TV-show and book that I read--everything reminds me how alone I am. Dan's "good morning" kiss on Lindsey's sleepy lips, Utena's night with Akio, Bruce's wife's insistence on not tracking mud in the house...

And nothing left for Kent. No one to spend the night with, no one to kiss in the morning, no one to nag about tracking mud. Nothing but my guns and my bikes and my work.

I know that in a week I'll get over this, that something will happen soon that will snap me back to my happy-go-lucky self, but for now things are going to be depressing...

The Run-Around

Thursday: get to work early; get to the range early; didn't clean my guns, because I had to prep for an interview

Friday: get up early; get dressed nicely for the interview; go to work early and play off my dress-up as "I haven't done it in a while" and "I have a date with a gun show"; leave work early and make it to the interview just-in-time; do the interview (which I thought was OK, but I was unintelligible as always); go to the gun show for an hour; drive my brother back to his car; go to dinner; get home with the intention of prepping my bike (but watched Good Morning, Vietnam instead); prep my bike until 2AM

Saturday: get up at 6:30; get showered, dressed, fed, and out the door in record time; drive up to Poolesville (1-hour drive, any way you cut it); do the ride; drive home (and get stuck in accident-traffic); get out to the gun show to make my 3-day pass worth the discounted $13 I paid for it; get home with a new hard-sided equipment case and some tools; get to the soccer game two minutes before start with no time to prep or even stretch; done with the soccer game and head over to one of the players' house because it's right by my own house; get home and shower and get to sleep.

Sunday: get up early; get out to the trail to ride; get home and get dressed; get up to Potomac Falls for a friend's wedding; head back to the gun show 4 hours later and discover that the 'ears' and the gun safe I wanted are gone; go back home with more tools and another equipment hard-case; go to dinner at my parents' house; go back home to record a thing for my sister; take her back home; head home to sleep, finally.

Monday: get up early; get to work early, only to discover that I'd forgotten my key/card and have to drive all the way back to get it and be 1.5 hours later than I intended at work; stay at work while everyone else goes out to celebrate a new director's hiring (yay...pep-talk and food...and almost 1.5 hours of lost productivity and getting fat on restaurant food--no thanks); get off work nearly an hour later than I planned; get to the range with only 15 minutes to cram as much 'practice' in to make up for not getting any quality practice in over the weekend; shoot my worst score in a month (didn't even break 500); get home for dinner; clean the gun; clean the bikes for tomorrow's ride.

An active lifestyle is good and all, but sometimes there's too active, when there's hardly time for anything else (and hardly time to post this, even). I need to clean my car and change the oil (I prefer to do both by myself), but this weekend I'm going down to BBurg--there goes my bullseye and cycling training. Maybe I can find a range down there and bring my guns...and I'm definitely bringing my bike, though since it'll be more like buddy-riding than training riding, it won't really help me all that much in training for Tahoe...

If driving to and from work didn't take up so much damned time--nearly a whole hour on the drive in, and almost that on the drive out...I could have a bit more time to space things out. Right now everything's running on very tight tolerances--not much wiggle room in timing. And just one little thing (like forgetting my key/card) will blow the rest of the things out of the water...

"It's no problem, man. No problem at all." (A dream)

Those last words I said to him were out loud, in the real world, as I slipped back into consciousness.

He had collapsed and was laid up in the hospital and all of us, every one he'd met, had gathered to dance in his honor in a large, open area on campus. We had all done this once, and no one was afraid this time. We were happy, jovial. It's going to be okay. Then we got the word that he was home, and we all gathered up into an Army Deuce And A Half to make the trip out to his country home, navigating the fields and gardens.

We pulled up and we all jumped out and walked through his palatial country house, with flowers hanging in the veranda and old-style wooden doors. I pulled my shirt down over my sidearm, but we were greeted by his aunt and uncle, his uncle wearing his old flap-holster (oddly, on the same side that his arm was missing just above the elbow) from The War. We rounded a corner, and there he was, sitting near a corner of a rather large, open living room. I walked straight to him.

"How're you doing?" I asked as I hugged him. His hug in return felt practiced, but weak; he'd done this before.

"Ten years," he smiled as we broke apart.

"Plenty of time! Get everything done!" I exclaimed, more for myself than for him, gesturing and looking around at his house. I was trying to get used to the fact that the doctors said he only had ten years to live in a hurry. It's one thing to know you're going to die sometime; it's quite another to know how much time you've got left.

"I dunno," he said, starting to break down. "I still gotta pay this off," he indicated around to his country home, "I'm in negative money here, my brother is sick..." He was beginning to lose it, the tears plainly evident in his eyes. I looked back at him, making my decision on the spot.

"It's no problem, man. No problem at all." I meant those words, every last syllable. Even as I woke up from the dream, I realized that I was saying the words aloud to the cacophony of my two angrily-beeping alarm clocks. The words were true, and I understood them.

The "Me" in T-E-A-M

I think I've figured it out: all of my passions so far, all of my hobbies, have been solitary activities, ones where I set and meet the expectations, ones where I impress no one but myself, where failures only matter to me. I suppose that's the definition of a hobby, I guess, but they really haven't brought me happiness. Temporary, yes, until I get bored with it and move onto the next thing.

What I really seem to revel in is a team mentality, being a part of something. I feel this when I ride my bike with someone (like Team In Training or random people I meet on the trail), when I play soccer (by definition, a team sport), when I played in a band and when I auditioned for The Motive, or when I do any activity with someone else. Even if the actions and motions are inherently individual--I don't really need someone else there to 'help' me ride a bike, for instance--as long as there's someone else there doing it with me, then I'm happy.

This is perhaps the reason I don't play video games as much as I used to, the reason I haven't really gotten back into art or airplanes, the reason I was (am?) depressed after reading the "Thanks, but..." email from The Motive, the reason I scour the "Musicians Wanted" section of Craigslist: I am lacking in human company. Even if it's just to show off, I want someone there to show off to. The Internet doesn't count--put a couple of computers and The Cloud between me and my 'audience' and it takes all the fun out of it.

Now that I've identified it, what should I do about it? TNT happens every weekend, sure, and every now and then I do things with other people (i.e. going to the range, snowboarding, a buddy ride), but "every now and then" isn't often enough. I'd like for things to happen at least more than half the week, so that I can start to appreciate my "alone time" again.

Hmm, that's interesting--if I want to appreciate my individual hobbies, I need to increase my social contacts and situations. Curious.

It seems to go back to taking things for granted: back in school I was always surrounded by friends and activities, so I never really participated in any of them, and focused more on "being myself", since it felt like my social circle would be there forever, thus there'd be time enough to do things with them. Now that they're no longer there, I have plenty of time to be "me", and now I long for human contact again.

Having tasted both, it's time to strike a balance...

Leading A Life of Quiet Desperation

So. Here I am, living on my own, looking out for Numero Uno. I've taken steps to ensure that I'll be OK when I retire...but what about until then? What do I want to do with the next 40 years of my life?

I told my mom years ago that I wanted to do everything, and so far I've lived up to that. Back in elementary school I was voted "most artistic" of my class, and through high school and college I pursued my art skills to where I was actually "publishing" a web-comic once every week (for a short-lived six weeks). At the same time, I took music lessons, first learning piano and then moving on to the guitar, eventually forming an actual rock band and performing in college. At one point, I was a paper aerospace engineer. As to my active side, I started in baseball, moved onto soccer, learned how to ski and snowboard, took up ultimate frisbee, got into tennis, and finally jumping whole-heartedly into cycling. Lately I have picked up target practice. I am a computer programmer by day.

So who am I really? What is it that I really want to do? What is it that I really like? I watch TV, read the internet, and see all of these people who have specialized in one thing and been successful at it. I find myself thinking "I could do that", then I jump in and for a while (a few months, perhaps a year) I actually do that, but then something new catches my fancy and I'm off to another thing.

Maybe that's my real hobby, my real pastime--a meta-pastime, as it were: to jump into as many pastimes as possible, to take them as far as I can, plateau, and then jump into something else. Lately, it's been the stock market; I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad and suddenly, in the span of about a week, I've become a gazillion times more financially literate than I was just a week ago, and odd phrases like "refinancing" and "what has your money done for you today?" take on new meaning.

But I know myself well enough now: in a year, maybe even a few months, I'll be back to searching for a new hobby, a new craving of knowledge to fill. Maybe it'll be skydiving or scuba diving or...I dunno. Who knows.

And I'm worried: will it be this way forever? Will I never find something, settle on it and say "this is it--I can do this for the rest of my days"?

I'm flailing about right now, casting around for things to do, while trying to reorganize a little bit. I've sold off a guitar and an amp and some other gear to simplify a bit, but then I've started pursuing music again. I fired up a childhood computer game (Tanarus) that used to consume, literally, half my waking hours to play (sorta like the MMORPGs, but this one is more action-oriented, driving tanks around). I've contemplated getting back into airplanes and art.

But what am I really looking for? What do I want to accomplish in the next 40 years? In the next 20? 10? 5? In the next year, where do I want to be?

Kent And Guns: The Early History

I've always been interested in target practice.

I grew up in the 90's, where toy laser guns and Nerf guns ruled the day, although I did have a cap gun and one of those "tracer guns" that shoot the penny-sized plastic discs. I remember setting up paper cups and trying to knock them down with nerf guns that shot ping-pong balls. I even got in big trouble once when I found a perfect Y-shaped piece of wood, stretched a rubber-band across it, set up a crate as a target, and missed the crate and put a rock through the glass sliding door behind the crate.

Then, when I was 17 or 18, my dad handed me down his air gun, a Crossman 1377--one of the older, unrifled ones that could shoot BBs both and pellets. It had faulty O-ring, so the compressed air would leak. Then I repaired it and took to shooting all sorts of stuff--filling the barrel with water and shooting off a nice mist, blowing the dust out of my computers with it, etc. Unfortunately, my dad wasn't into guns (even though he owned--and still owns--a single-shot 12-gauge), and he placed little emphasis on safety, trusting that I was mature and would use my common sense to stay safe. I didn't know anything about safety. I was a dumb, naive kid with an air pistol, and no respect for weapons or their deadly power.

I'm still ashamed to tell this next part, but I'll tell it anyways because it needs to be told. I found that I could stick a Golf tee in the muzzle of the barrel, kinda like one of those rifle-fired grenades, where they stick a grenade on the end of a rifle, firing blanks to launch the grenade. This made for cheap ammo, since my dad was into Golf at the time and I could find a tee anywhere in the house. Plus, they were recoverable, so I could use them over and over again. One day I loaded one up and, with just one pump, I was able to arc the tee from the foyer in my parents house to my brother's room upstairs, where it struck my brother on the side of his head (evidently, not with the pointy part). It wasn't an aimed shot--I didn't intend to hit him, I just wanted to lob the tee into his room. Just to see if I could. Then, not having learned any sort of lesson from his anger, I shot my cousin's dog with another tee and a similar power level. This was the last straw. My dad took back his heirloom and threw it away. The dog, well, we've made amends--she still comes up to me (but not for the week after the shooting--she would hide in her transportation cage if I was around).

Finally I learned my lesson, or at least I didn't have the air pistol with which to make that mistake again. I went off to college and, in my junior year, one of my roommates brought back a PVC-pipe marshmallow blow-gun. Finally, here was a gun and ammo I could actually shoot people with and not have to worry about deadly consequences. I jumped right in, improving on the design to use a piston and a cylinder to deliver more power do it more consistently than lung power. I also changed the format of the gun, from a glorified blow gun (with a pair of handles for the hands and a barely aim-able shape) to a simple long-gun, with a butt-stock and a forearm. It was much more accurate and powerful and easier to operate (it depended on arm-strength rather than lung-strength) and could be fired in a wider variety of positions. I even figured out how to add a sleeve inside the barrel that had rifling, which might improve the accuracy of the marshmallows.

But it still wasn't the real thing.

Fast forward a few years: I've graduated and started a full-time job. At this job, one of the guys I worked with invited me to go shooting with him. With real guns. With real bullets. At a real range. I went to his house and, after running through a bunch of safety rules, he showed me what we would be shooting: another coworker's guns, a Heckler & Koch P7M10 and a Glock 21. We went over the manual of arms for a bit and practiced dryfiring. This time there was no immaturity. Here were real weapons that could be used to actually kill something with. Not just the varying degrees of lethality of the Crossman 1377, no; if you pull the trigger on one of these while it's pointing at a person, there would be no question that that person would die. Finally, I was experiencing the maturity and respect for the weapons I should have had, all those years ago. I was conscious of where the muzzle was pointing, ensuring that I would not "sweep" anyone while dryfiring, keeping my finger off the trigger and planted firmly on the frame until the sights were lined up.

Then we got to the range and I read each and every rule I had to sign off on twice to make sure I knew them before handling live ammunition. While we were doing this, I was buzzing with excitement and nervousness. I could hear the gunfire from the range, I could smell the burnt powder.

We paid for an hour of range-time, a few targets, 100 rounds of ammunition for each of us, donned our Eyes and Ears, and went out onto the range. My coworker clipped up his target, sent it out, and loaded one of the P7's magazines with 10 rounds and put them all downrange. Then, slide locked back and the gun on the table, he turned to me and gestured: "your turn". I stepped up to the table, loaded the magazine as he had--wow, was that painful--picked up the gun (finger off the trigger), slapped in the magazine, squeezed the grip and savored the feeling. I saw it in my mind's eye: the slide moved forward, stripped a round off the top of the magazine and pushed it into the chamber, while a split second later, the next round was pushed to the top of the magazine. In that split second, I felt all of this and heard it and knew, for the first time in my life:

I was ready to fire.

I lined up the sights, right on the X, right in the middle of the silhouette, and squeezed the trigger. In that instant, between the time the slide started to cycle back to the time the slide stopped moving forward, I knew this is for me. With a grin, I enjoyed the rest of the hour, even besting my coworker in an impromptu accuracy match. First time out shooting. And no, this wasn't with cheap, light .22LR--this was with full-recoil, service-grade .40S&W.

That first time was almost two years ago. Now, target practice has become one of my favorite (if most expensive) past-times, and I embrace everything to do with it, from the tools and technology to the ammunition to the culture, and even the political aspects.

I have found something truly unique in my little world, and I have no intention of ever letting it go.

Song for a New Year

"Song for a New Year"
Song by Dispossessed

it's a new year
time for us to start again
it's a new year
time we all remembered where we've been
it's a new year
time for us to set things right
it's a new year
even if they won't change overnight

and I can't help but have the feeling that someday we'll all be good
and I can't help but have the feeling that it will all be as it should
and I can't help but have the feeling that it is time to start again
and I can't help but have that feeling now that I'm here with all my friends

it's a new day
forget all your ugly pain
it's a new day
look ahead; wash away the rain
it's a new day
things are sure to change, you'll see
it's a new day
and we don't know what it will be

and I can't help but have the feeling that someday we'll all be good
and I can't help but have the feeling that it will all be as it should
and I can't help but have the feeling that it is time to start again
and I can't help but have that feeling now that I'm here with all my friends

'cause things will change
we will grow
we're okay
and time will flow

we're all here
when I leave now
we're doin' great
we've made it through somehow

and it's a new year
time for all to make amends
it's a new year
never too late to start again
it's a new year
even if we won't change overnight
it's a new year
time for us to set things right

it's a new year...