A Truth About Existence

I did not write the stuff below, it was a post on slactivist by Scaramouche that I thought really captures the silliness & tragedy of the human condition. Anyway I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

One of my favorite blogs, the Waiter Rant, speaks eloquently to what you described here. He once had this to say:

When looking death in the face things get very real very quickly……..

I’m twenty one and doing a stint as a chaplain’s aide in a large gritty urban hospital.

Part of my job is to bring Communion to people dying in the AIDS ward. Most of the people wasting away in their beds are uninsured junkies or prostitutes. This is long before antiretroviral therapy. AIDS is poorly understood. Some people still wear masks out of fear of contagion.

Many of the people dying in this place are wracked with guilt. Remember how people used to say AIDS was God’s punishment for sinners? That’s not an abstract concept for many of these people. A lot of them made disastrous life choices - the consequences of which are now, remorselessly, killing them.

I’m too young and emotionally under equipped to be any real help to these people. I just try and listen. That’s hard. Some patients scream at me, driven insane by secondary infections that are rotting their brains. Others are stonily silent – not wanting help from anybody. Occasionally people find peace but that's rare. They cry, they bargain, they pray. All the things people do as they rage against the dying of the light.

Maria is a drug addict. She got AIDS from years of mainlining heroin. Her baby, the result of exchanging sex for drugs, died of AIDS. She has no family or friends. She lies dying alone in a small room overlooking the hospital’s air conditioning plant. She hasn’t had a bath in days. The sweet sour smell of the unwashed is over powering.

“Hi Maria. I brought you Communion,” I whisper.

She looks at me weakly.

“Can I have some water?” she asks. She’s near the end.

“Sure.”

I look for her water bottle. There is none.

“Where’s your water bottle?”

“The nurses won’t let me drink water,” she says.

Must be something going on with her kidneys. Stupid doctors. The woman's dying.

“Let me go ask the nurse what we can do,” I say.

“Thank you.”

I walk to the nurse’s station. A large woman sits behind the desk yakking on the phone with what seems to her girlfriend. She looks at me with complete disinterest.

I wait patiently for her to finish. She doesn’t.

I wait some more.

“Pardon me, Maria wants some water. Can I give her some?” I interrupt.

“Can’t you see I’m on the phone?” the nurse yells.

“Yes but….”

“I’ll be with you when I’m finished!”

So I wait. The nurse ends her call.

“Now, what do you want?” she says angrily.

“Can I give Maria some water?”

“She’s on restricted fluids you can’t.”

“How about some ice chips then? I think she has dry mouth.” I ask innocently.

The nurse throws her hands up in the air in frustration. “Yeah, go get the girl some ice chips for what good it'll do her. You can get them on the next unit.”

“Thank you,” I say.

I go over to the neighboring unit and fill a Styrofoam cup with ice. I walk back to Maria’s room.

“Maria I got you some ice chips.”

No response.

“Maria?”

I walk over to the bed. She’s dead.

A wave of incredible anger sweeps over me. All this poor girl wanted was a drink of water. It turned out to be her last request

Even this small thing was denied her.

I crush the cup in my hands. Ice scatters on the floor. Hot tears run down my face. This girl had nothing – less than nothing. She died thirsty and alone.

It was then my innocence was taken.

I march out to the nurse’s station. The nurse is on the phone again. When she sees me a look of annoyance crosses her face. “Now wha….”

I slam my hand down on the counter. “MARIA IS DEAD!”

The nurse jumps out of her chair.

“DON’T YOU GIVE A SHIT YOU LAZY BITCH? SHE’S DEAD!” I bellow.

All hell breaks loose. A code is called. Security is called.

The attending shows up. There’s a do not resuscitate order. He pronounces Maria dead.

Security guards escort me to the pastoral care office where the Chaplin waits for me.

Instead of yelling at me for losing my temper he sits me down on his couch. He hands me a cup of coffee.

“What happened?” he asks gently.

I tell him everything.

A small smile crosses his face. “That nurse is a lazy bitch,” he says.

I laugh harshly.

“This is hard work son,” he says.

“I had no idea how hard.”

We’re quiet. I listen to the wall clock tick.

“When you were looking at Maria in that bed were you thinking about yourself?” the priest says suddenly.

The tears come again.

“Yes.”

“What were you feeling?”

“That I never want to be alone like that.”

“Do you feel that alone?”

A truth I had been hiding from myself came bubbling up from the depths.

“Yes,” I start to sob.

The priest gets up and sits next to me. He gently and puts his arm around me. I cry till I feel like I’m going to shake apart.

When I finish the Chaplain says, “If you’re honest - trying to help people makes you confront the darkness in yourself.”

“Yeah,”

“Maybe you should work on feeling alone,” he adds.

“Kind of tough when you want to be a priest,” I reply.

“Maybe you should think about that.”

I’ve given my heart and soul to being a priest for four years. I’m supposed to go abroad to study theology next year. Now, for the first time, I realize it isn’t going to work out.

“God doesn’t want you to be unhappy,” the priest says.

“Then why drag me here and put me through all this for nothing?” I whisper.

“I don’t know.”

“God’s a real asshole sometimes isn’t he?” I say sadly.

The priest leans back and smiles. “A gigantic asshole.”

We both laugh.

A few months later I quit. ……

The Water Fall

In the summer I kept hearing the citizens of our lovely town talk about a waterfall, in a village far away. The journey to the waterfall was fairly arduous, Vince, one of our former finance people thought he was going to have a heart attack, so after he went there for the first time he started to work out a lot which made him a lot healthier and happier. Jordan, the Banner man, also said that it was a hard trek to the place.

Eventually, I decided to make time for a trip, the falls; from speaking to people I knew that we would need a four wheel drive vehicle, Mr Umar, the Transport Officer, said that I would assign me a driver who would take us there. I asked if I would have to speak to the driver but he said he would make those arrangements. To make it cheaper I invited about four people to come with me.



On the big day it turned when I called Umar about the truck and driver he told me to speak Mustapha. When I called Mustapha he told me it was his day off and he was going on a trip with his wife, and furthermore no one had told him about driving excursionists. When I heard this I complained to the TO about his broken promise which made him mad, since I did not want to get into a useless discussion of he said/he said I simply asked could me and Labaran pick up the truck? He agreed most readily to this so we picked up the truck and got the rest of our party. which consisted of;

• Your narrator
  
• Labaran the fixer
  
• Young Victor, the aspiring poet
  
• Charles "Indiana State of" Jones
  
• Jamal "X Shabazz"
  
• Melba the shrinker of heads.
  

After a long drive over dirt roads past villages, rice paddies, fields of 10 foot high millet, over streams we got to the village of the waterfall. The drive had reminded me of the time we drove my car through the Modoc National Forest so that we could get to the Rainbow Gathering. Just when I thought my lower back could not take it any more we arrived at Waterfall Village, this made me very happy since the truck was very crowded and uncomfortable in the back seat.


As usual whenever you go on excursions in Nigeria you will meet the villagers, spend some time with them, share kola, and give them a little something something. In return you will get a group of helpers who will carry your bag even if you don't want them to. going through all the protocols of Adamawa with the prominent elder we started the walk to our destination.



We walked past the flowering okra fields which Melba had never seen before and started to go up the highlands. The trip was okay for the first hour and then we came to the rough, steep part. Imagine if you will a path that is 1.5 metres from a sheer drop. At the end of this drop there is a rocky, rapid stream that has carved gullies in the valley. The path is overgrown with elephant grass, bushes, and other things, the path is also bisected by streams, in some sections its slippery because of the clays in the soil. and there can be a 40 degree incline in a few spots. While you are picturing all this imagine doing this on a humid day with temperature in the 40 centigrade range and you will have an idea of what the trip was like. Anyway, it was really hard for the 30 minutes it took to get over the hard part and my heart probably went up to 80 beats per minute during that half hour. But when I got done there was the waterfall in all its misty glory.

I took off my clothes stepped into the water and swam a little, let the water carry me down a couple of cataracts and had a great time. I even stepped under the waterfall and it was fucking cool. The force of the water wanted to push us away from the cataract, knock us down and carry us away. The only way me, Victor & Charles were able to stay under the fall was by holding on to each other..



After being there for an hour we all got dressed and went back. On the return I sat in the pickup's bed with Victor and it was a lot more comfortable though very un safe since there are no seatbelts there, though it was fun to watch the trees, roads and villages speeding away. It was also much cooler than the ride to the falls since the cool breeze made by the speeding vehicle was much more pleasant than the underpowered air-conditioner.

You've Got To Get Behind the Mule Every Morning and Plough

When this semester started there were a few things that I wanted to get done so that I will feel a sense of accomplishment. Those things were;

• Completing my rough draft of my Java textbook.
  
• Finishing my rough draft of my Operating Systems book.
  
• Writing an outline of our research project.
  
• Getting money for our project
  
• Training the swim team
  
• Improve my running and swimming performance
  
• Teaching my classes.
  
• Finding a good backup solution for our environment and circumstances.
  
• Getting automated installs working for our labs.
  
• Getting up a LDAP server for our school.
  
• Building a secondary Moodle server so that we can have failover.
  

All those things were very important, and I wanted to make some progress on every single one. Those that were work network related are very difficult since we have no budget, our equipment is failing and cobbled together. If I was not teaching instead of doing mainly teaching and some sysadmining I would have more time for that. Some of these tasks I am able to combine others have to be done in a certain order. I will be very happy when we get RT set up so that we can keep track of requests and IT projects that we are trying to finish we are also going to move a FC12 server to the data centre probably next week.

After thinking about it I found a backup solution that will work for our low tech network where I expect every device to fail and to not get replacements. It is related to the design I have come up with that will make our services more reliable. The main problem is the time to set it up now since we have been working on the issues that need to be fixed first such as automating deployments and figuring out what systems we have and what their states are. As to the swimming running & stretching that has been difficult but I have been running fairly regularly. I even did it in Washington.

On all the projects the has been some progress though it has been very slow, earlier I had even more stuff I wanted to get done but I thought it would be smart to scale back and wait till the summer to do stuff on data bases.

The one thing that I have tried to do is be pessimistic about what I can achieve so that I do not over schedule my self. The one thing that I have been doing is gettin behind the mule every morning and ploughing so that I make a little progress every day. As the song says I have been getting behind the mule everyday and ploughing.

The Mysterious Stranger

When I lived in Anchorage I relied on the kindness of strangers to get hundreds of public domain audiobooks. One of the first public domain audiobooks was Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories. As other people have said the title story is very existential, it looks at the flaws of humanity with a great deal of humour and clarity. In some ways its similar to Candide.

Anyhoo while paddling in the sea of interwebs I found a reference to angel called Satan which led me to a a clip in a TV show I had never heard of called The Adventures of Mark Twain. As you can see the we can enjoy the adventures of Satan. The readers for these istorirs are a credit to the whole Librivox community.

Nobody Expects Automated Expect!

While I was trying to fix some issues with an expect script that runs checks on a server I found out that instead of having to write the scripts or having workstudys learn about expect on top of everything else I want them to do we can use autoexpect to basically create a script for us. When autoexpect is run it enters all the commands that were typed into a script.

I am always glad to find software that works hard so I don't have to, maybe later I will play with Pyexpect

What is This Diversity of Which You Speak?

While I was at a house rave I ended up having a talk with an eager engineer about what is seen as good public policy, my conversationalist was not happy that the politicians were not able to sit down and do what is right for the country. I simply told the lady who was very proud of her engineering degree that there is disagreement about what people think is best for the nation so of course there will be debate, obstruction, gridlock and fighting because for one thing how do you define what is best for the country let alone on the means of achieving that end. This is a problem that I have noticed when folks about things like political parties in America, both the major parties talk about being democratic but they never have been. Foe example prior to the 1972 convention the democratic ticket was determined by machine politics that did not cater to the wishes of people who were racial minorities, women, nonchristian or nonheterosexual. By the 1972 convention people left out of the Democratic party's decision making process took over the organization and suppressed the ward heelers and machineites in the name of democracy. I guess that this problem occurred partly because both sides had different views of what a democratic process was. More recently when there was Michigan & Florida's democratic primaries were overturned there was a great deal of electrons loosed about how undemocratic that was. However having those primaries in the first place was undemocratic as well as the fact that most people never have a say in who their party's nominee is. But I only brought this up because the fact that so many people disagreed about what is a democratic process is similar to my question on what is diversity.

I first really thought about this when we went to a dinner in Homer, one of the things that makes Homer different from the rest of Alaska is that it is the only town in the state that the Republicans do not dominate in. Normally I would like such an accepting place except for the following problems. The first problem with Homer is that real estate is incredibly expensive a plot on a mountain 10 miles from town, with no amenities and a dirt track can sell for a million dollars, so a town that started out as a fishing village and a peninsula whrer hippies lived has now become a place where wealthy tourists come to live for three months. I met some of the wealthy Homerians, they are very nice, personable, and have good values and I really enjoyed their company. Despite how much I liked Homer's wealthy former hippies and salty fisherfolk Homer is one of the least ethnically diverse parts of Alaska, throughout the state there are lots of Alaskan Natives, Filipinos, Africans, African-Americans and others but I ran in to so few people of colour there. Though Homer is very welcoming to diverse lifestyles and different ways of thinking it is racially very homogeneous as well as being a place where most middle or working class folks will have to go outside of town to get work which is truly unfortunate.

In Anchorage there is a great deal of racial diversity but when it came to political diversity I did not run into that as much. I met a number of Alaskan Natives, Pacific Islanders, and Black folks who were all right wing. One example of a conservative person of colour was the President of Eklutna Inc, he had a plaque from a Republican party fund raiser. Even though I completely disagreed with these people about social policies, fiscal matters, and the role of government I was very happy to see that they were not of one mind as many left wing Caucasian people would assume about people of colour's political views. Most of the people that I met did not want restrictions put on fishing or hunting, were in favour of increasing the number of mining operations, and strongly against taxes and government oversight of industries. These views should not be surprising in a state that is as remote, rural, and conservative as Alaska, but one of the issues that it made me think about was what type of diversity do I value most? Would I prefer a place with more ethnic/racial diversity or somewhere that is racially/ethnically homogeneous but is culturally and politically heterogeneous.

After thinking about this for about a year I have come to the conclusion that neither situation is optimal for me, I wonder why can't we have both? I would prefer to live in a place that is diverse in diverse way, anything else will seem like a sham to me. Now that I am done with this post for now I will probably spend a year thinking about how Nigeria with its hundreds of languages and cultural norms which sometimes differ completely from each other there is no real diversity.

With Just The Right Bullets Tom Waits Will Drink Your Blood Like Milkshake!

For some strange reason I have started posting again, hopefully I can make an entry a day. As the blind man said to the deaf mute, "We shall see!" When I started this thing called blogging I would post a Tom Waits video every Thursday, I guess I was trying to be like Driftglass. If I can ever right as well as he does and as often I will be a happy man. I first hear this album in 2000, when I borrowed it from The Ames Public Library. At that time I did not really care for it. However, eight years later it became one of the albums that I listened to the most. I find that each time I listen to Tom Waits' work I find a new song to appreciate, even though I have heard most of his songs about a hundred times already.

I wish you all a wonderful Thursday and maybe next week I will be a Black rider again since that will make me happy, with fifteen silver wishes left.