Month: November 2015

How to Win the Love of Your Barista, Part 4

My favorite coffeeshop is open from too early until quite late, and in order to cover all the shifts, eight different girls work there. Those eight comprise about twelve total girls worth of cuteness. (The hiring manager clearly knows what he--I'm gonna assert that it's a he--likes.)

It's November now, a time of tights and long-sleeved shirts, and so it's not clear just how many of them are actually baristas and how many are merely working as baristas. Cuteness alone is no indication.

The cute girl working as a barista is more likely to be receptive to your advances, and so there is temptation. Some might ask: Is it not enough to go on a date with a cute girl who works as a barista? No, it is not. What has that accomplished? There are many cute girls in the world who are not baristas. We have higher goals in mind.

Speak of Raven and Raven Appears

Special Saturday Bonus Piece (You Lucky Bastards)

I was about to publish Thursday's Daily Refill. All that was left for me to do was assign it a category. I went to click on "Occult Mysteries," but it wasn't there in the list. "How odd," I thought. "I remember creating that one for Tuesday's piece, just two nights ago."

So I went to the list of all my posts to see if I had somehow posted Tuesday's piece in a different category completely--and it wasn't there at all. Neither was Wednesday's piece. I certainly remembered publishing both pieces, but neither seemed to exist.

Now, here's something you probably don't realize: right now, I publish every Refill twice: once on Daily Refills and once on the Free Refills homepage. My intention is to figure out how to make everything that gets published on Daily Refills show up automatically on the homepage as well, which I'm sure isn't hard to do, but so far I haven't taken the time to find the plug-in that will do it. So for now I'm still publishing in both places every day.

I went to the list of pieces on the homepage, and neither Tuesday's nor Wednesday's piece was there, either.

At which point I fell into a state in which I questioned my very grip on reality. I was sure that I had published the pieces. I remembered doing so. I keep the same pattern every day: I publish first on Daily Refills and then immediately on the homepage.

"Maybe," I thought, almost literally dizzy with confusion, "I only think I even wrote those pieces. Maybe it all was a dream." But no. I took a quick glance at Emacs, and there were the files for each, in exactly the state I remembered them.

I was pretty distressed. I don't miss publishing days. It just doesn't happen. Since I started daily publishing back in the spring, I haven't missed a day.

In a daze, I reposted Tuesday's and Wednesday's pieces. I checked later and they were still there. Last time I checked, they still are.

So what happened? Well, one thing I am sure of is that I didn't somehow fail to publish the pieces. I could imagine forgetting to click the "Publish" button--but not four times in a row. We can safely disregard that possibility.

So what does that leave? Some kind of server-side glitch? A hack into the website? Both are possible (and you can rest assured that I changed my passwords).

But I doubt that's what happened. For two weeks, I've written about the mysterious disappearances of possessions of mine. I've written about trickster gods and house spirits and their rambunctious play in the fields of our lives. So maybe, just maybe, they're just trying to confirm my initial hypotheses. "Those missing shirts?" they're saying. "Oh yeah, we have those. In the meantime, count your possessions closely, and make sure you keep backups of all your files."

Friday the 13th

Our culture traditionally views Friday the 13th an unlucky day. I am watching my possessions, especially my shirts, very carefully today.

But, really, which do you think would be unluckier? That something I own disappears today, or that something that disappeared returns? At this point, which is likely to have the greater impact on my increasingly tenuous grip on sanity?

Hello, Worms

When I began this discussion of the missing shirts, I didn't realize that the exploration would take two whole weeks. But once I started in on the topic, it became clear that, really, I'd been avoiding the full implications of the shirts' (and other items') disappearances. It's far easier to just believe that they're missing, that somehow I just lost them, even though that flies in the face of everything I know about my own behavior, all the ways that I am careful not to lose things, which honestly gets borderline obsessive.

I don't know why I'm surprised. If you open a big can of worms, it's kind of silly to exclaim, "Goodness! Look at all the worms!"

When I started, I guess I thought I was just writing about some missing shirts. Now I see that, really, I'm discussing mysteries of great metaphysical importance.

In the meantime, I can't find my riding tights. I brought them to Alaska to wear as an underlayer, and I remember unpacking them when I got home.

Hello, worms.

The Plot Thickens. It Also Emulsifies.

In my focus on the missing shirts, I have drawn too narrow a focus. The mystery runs deeper.

For example, I never mentioned the red stuff sack that I kept in my soccer bag. I used to put my jerseys in it so that I wouldn't have to root around in my bag to find them. I know I had that stuff sack back at the end of the spring season. When the fall season rolled around, I couldn't find it.

I also had a pair-of-shoe-sized vinyl carrying bag that came with a pair of cleats I bought a few years back. I used to put my shin guards and sleeves and socks in it. It, too, disappeared between the spring and fall seasons.

As with the shirts, the obvious, materialist answer is that I simply lost these items--I left them on the field or something. And I would accede to that possibility, were I not so completely OCD about never leaving anything behind. I always check again and again and again before I walk away.

At a certain point, the question becomes not just, "What forces are acting so sneakily to steal my things?" but also, "What are they hoping to accomplish?" Could it be that occult forces are trying to disconnect me from my very sense of the solidity of reality?

Consider: a couple of nights ago, Debby went into the downstairs bathroom to get a little lotion from the huge bottle she keeps in there. She was in there for a long time, then came out, lotionless and puzzled.

"I couldn't find it," she said.

There are no hidden places in that bathroom. If you can't find something, it's not there.

"You see?" I said. "And you thought those pieces about house spirits and trickster gods was just me messing around."

Breezes, Waves, Winds

I am coming to suspect that the boundaries between the planes is becoming more porous. Was my stalker impelled to take the grey Montbell t-shirt by the breezes stirred up by Raven's wings or the echoes of Coyote's howls? Do I dare ignore the possibility?

One day, will I open up the drawer in which I keep my workout clothes, the one I've searched over and over again for the missing shirts, and find, balled and wrinkled in a back corner that I am certain I've checked fifty times before, that orange wool Ibex shirt or the long-lost Salsa jersey, the disappearance of which set into motion this whole madness?

A strong wind blows when two locations' air pressures differ. Think, then, of the strange currents of energy that must exist between two distinct realities, that of the physical plane that we (think we) know, and of another plane, more occult and wondrous and standing beyond our meager attempts to explain. What might those winds look like? As the boundary grows more permeable, mustn't the strength of the currents grow? From that perspective, I will view the unexpected return of my Ibex shirt as essentially the appearance of a wind sock between the dimensions. Here in this physical space I may see a crumpled ball of fabric, but with my eyes attuned to greater forces, I will see it inflated, as with portent, indicating the strongest of winds.

The Mysteries of Divine Agency

From the discussion over the last few days, it may seem that despite my initial mention of it, I have chosen to disregard the possibility that some sort of trickster deity had something to do with my shirts' disappearance. This isn't exactly so.

It is very hard to speak comfortably of an immortal's activities on our plane of existence, since in all but the rarest, most extraordinary cases, deities assert their agency via subtle influence rather than direct action. It wouldn't be inaccurate to say that a person (or other physical force) becomes the agent for the deity's whims. But how, then, do you differentiate divine influence from that agent's more prosaic activities? Given our rather impoverished perceptual abilities (by the standards of the vast panoply of beings whose planes ever intersect our own, anyway), it's rarely cut-and-dried.

Imagine, for example, that you are reading a book that you are really enjoying. You're moving towards the climax, and the book's momentum is really picking up. You realize you're thirsty, so you decide to take a little break to go get a beverage before moving boldly toward the book's exciting finish. You set the book on the side table next to the lamp, and go get your beverage. When you bring the glass back, you realize you need to use the restroom, so you put the glass down next to the book. When you return, you discover that the cat has jumped onto the side table and knocked your glass over. Now the book is soaked. "Damn it!" you cry. "Stupid cat!" To our haughtily incredulous, post-modern world-view, that's the end of the story: the cat was naughty. But can you really comfortably say that the cat wasn't in some way compelled into that action?

Indeed, it is perhaps worth asking: Don't the cat's weird, almost alien whims ever make you wonder just what the hell is going on in its furry, befanged little head? Can you really be sure it isn't some kind of antenna for the eldritch impulses of supernatural entities? And thus the follow up question: Why do you even have a cat in the first place? Why didn't you just get another dog?

On the Characteristics of House Spirits

House spirits, as you probably know, have a very different relationship with time from ours, and usually exist in a kind of floating dream-like observation. "Sleepy" might not be a bad word to describe it, though it does anthropomorphize something that is very much not anthro-. You almost don't want to say that the house spirit "saw" my stalker take the t-shirt, "saw" my subsequent befuddlement. It would almost be more accurate to say that because those events happened in the house, the house spirit couldn't not be aware of them: in a sense the resting house spirit is the observation ability of the house itself.

When did it fully "wake up?" Probably during the Boulder floods of 2013, in response to the insult the house experienced when the sewers backed up. That we took a long time to rebuild might explain its continued restlessness.

It remains active. I got home after midnight Monday night/Tuesday morning, and my wife sleepily told me that she'd awakened at some point to find all the covers thrown totally off the bed. Now, she's got a weird thermostat and sometimes gets hot for no reason at all and then kicks the covers off, but when that happens she always remembers doing so. Not this time. She was pretty puzzled.

But I know what's up. Definitely the house spirit. Hey, house spirit: I want my Ibex shirt back. I barely even got to wear it.

It Was Grey, Grey Like the Purgatory of Your Own Conflicted Emotions

To my stalker, taking the grey t-shirt had seemed like such a good--or at least, impossible-to-ignore--idea at the time. But every time she walked into her bedroom and saw my shirt on the pillow she'd dressed with it--a pillow to which she'd added a purple smiley-face-emblazoned balloon for a head, reasoning, "He's bald, after all"-- she felt a deep shame. Eventually it got to be too much. She moved to Peru, trying to escape her compulsions.

(How clean a break did she make? She took the t-shirt with her. She did, however, pop the balloon.)

But try as she might, she couldn't escape the feeling of something important missing from her life. After eight months, she had to move back.

Welcome back, my dear. I still want my t-shirt.