Aaron's Random Thoughts

Grandfather Stanton

2020-07-02T13:52:00.003-04:00

My grandfather passed away in 2009, as you can see from the picture. I was told that he would be buried somewhere in Michigan, but nothing more. That was the last I heard.

Every so often, when I get some time off, and if I have some spare money, I like to spend a couple days out of town by myself to decompress. For some reason, I realized that I could find where he was buried. A bit of work found his obituary, and I decided I should find where he's buried.

A six hour drive, and I found him.

My feelings for my grandfather are deep and somewhat complex. I wish I had known him better, but what I remember of him is very good. A smart man, happy, loved to read, loved chess. He lived in Florida with his wife, Marian, the entire time I knew him. She was pretty, small, and happy. They both clearly loved each other very much.

A bit of time on Google showed that he'd lived in Florida beginning in 1968, and was there until he died. It's interesting to me that he moved there in 1968 - that's when my parents got married. Was that part of why he moved? When did he retire from the military? What did he do after that, before he moved to Florida?

Marian was his second wife. He and my grandmother divorced when my father was very young. I don't know why, and probably never will. I don't yet know how much time my father spent around him while growing up, but I could (and probably will at some point) ask him, and learn.

I see certain patterns between the lives of my grandfather, my father, and myself. I don't know how much further back these patterns extend, nor if they will continue further into the future. I don't know if these are good, or bad, or neither - they simply are. We're human.

So where am I going with this, and why now? I do think that it's amusing that I'm now at the same age as my grandfather was when he moved to Florida. I can't exactly do that, but in a few years I do plan on leaving the area. Florida? Europe? I don't know. I kind of think I want to put everything in storage and be a nomad for a couple years when the time comes. I can do what I do for a living anywhere the internet exists, so why not? Travel around, work, move on. I haven't seen enough of the world yet. (Of course, whether or not anyone from the US will be able to leave the country in a few years remains to be seen, but I'll deal with that when I get there.)

As far as why now? I've been watching Sons of Anarchy lately, and it deals a lot with how a son deals with the ghosts of his father and the past. Now, I'm not going to up and join a motorcycle gang (though my grandfather did buy a motorcycle when he was 65), but it's just a thing that makes me think.

I'm in Bad Axe, Michigan right now (great name), about half an hour from Gagetown. The only hotel in Gagetown had no rooms, so here I am. I'll be heading back tomorrow. I'll probably swing by the cemetery one last time on my way home.

Seven-squared years

2018-01-31T20:43:00.002-05:00

A reference to this post...

Today I'm 49. I look back a bit at the last thirteen years, and it's somewhat fascinating. Many, many things have changed completely, in ways I could not have anticipated in the slightest, and yet many things remain the same.

I certainly don't "feel" 49 - whatever that is supposed to mean. I don't know how 49 is supposed to feel. How could I? I've never been this age before. I guess I should look at it more like "Oh, so this is how 49 feels. Interesting."

And I still need to build something that people will want to buy.

Ten years

2016-10-11T06:31:00.001-04:00

Just a brief note, marking ten years since my divorce was final.

Skimming back over these posts, I'm still who I was. Internally, less seems to have changed than I thought, and certainly less than I hoped.

Horror story, draft 1

2015-08-20T14:59:00.001-04:00

I am walking down the sidewalk, as I do pretty much five days a week, every week. It’s late afternoon, and the sun is low as I look down at the broken concrete and the grass growing in the cracks. I glance up and see the abandoned lot between two houses. It’s mostly gravel now and some yellowed, dead growth. I shudder and keep on walking as my mind drifts back to what happened there last year.

Nobody talks about what happened there. I think I’m the only one who really remembers it, because I’m the only one who was there when it happened. The house that’s no longer there, the fading screams of the people who were trapped inside. The flickering light coming from the house in the night as I ran out the door. Turning and seeing it happen, unable to help, feeling the despair, and those people...gone.

I count the cracks in the sidewalk as I walk past the empty lot. One less than last week, but I cannot for the life of me pick out which one. I know it sounds strange, but it’s happened before. I think it happens every couple months, but I’m not sure.

Last year some friends of mine and I were checking out the house. It had been abandoned as long as we could remember, and we decided to go inside. I think it was on a dare, but I can’t remember whose idea it was. It wasn’t hard, the back door was half off its hinges as it was. The seven of us went in and hung out for a while. I think probably a couple were getting drunk, I know some were high, but mostly we were kicking around the ruined place. Water stains on the walls, doors missing. Old clothes hanging in the closets, piles of books falling apart. Boards warped by time, rusty nails sticking out of the floor where time had shifted things too far. It was a pretty good sized house for our poor old neighborhood, maybe five feet of yard on each side to the next house over.

I keep walking past the empty lot, being sure not to touch the long fronds that extend onto the sidewalk. They don’t move any more, but I still don’t like them. They’re shorter than they were last month, if just barely. I measured them once. I think some of the shortest ones are gone completely, maybe.

A few weeks after it happened, I went to one of my friends’ parent’s houses to talk to them. They let me in, and I walked in, and we talked. His parents, his little sister, and I had dinner, and it was a lot of fun, but we didn’t talk about him. I figured it was too soon. I left their small, two bedroom house, and went home. That was the first time after the event that I realized it was even worse than what I had seen, because his sister had a room to herself - it used to be a three bedroom house.

I’m almost past the lot. It’s not a long walk, only about twenty feet, but I’m not going quickly. I’m too wrapped in thought, thinking about what happened that night. I had gone into the basement alone, the rest lost upstairs, and I found some more books. One was in good condition, somehow, and I sat down and started reading it. Thick, heavy, musty, wrapped in leather, the pages were supple and smooth. The lettering was old, hand written, and I wasn’t sure how to pronounce a lot of the words in it, but I did what I could. Some of the rest came looking for me. I guess I lost track of time, because I was about halfway through the book when I looked up and they were sitting around me. They were laughing, and joking about starting a seance or something, I think. That’s when I noticed that the edges of the room looked wrong, bent. The corners looked too wide when I looked one way, or too small another way. I felt a little nauseous, like when you get off a spinning ride at the fair. I needed some air, so I put down the book for a minute and stumbled upstairs.

I’ve measured the lot a few times since then. It’s definitely smaller.

I heard someone downstairs reading from the book aloud. I could tell they had picked up where I left off. I looked down the stairs, wanting to tell them to stop, but the stairs were too crooked to walk down, especially as dizzy as I was. The stairway was twisting. I started to see things at the edge of my vision, coming out of the corners of the room. The corners were even wider now, far wider than they could be, and there were colors I cannot describe, like under a blacklight, but without glowing. The things that came out of the corners that were now holes were nothing but tentacles. I screamed in terror and half ran, half fell out the front door of the house.

I’ve gone to all my friends’ houses, and it’s the same. Their families don’t talk about them. In one’s house, the one who lived furthest from here, her bedroom was still there, but it was empty, unused. The next time I visited, it was gone, and I could not find where it would have been.

I turned and looked behind me, and the front door of the house was shut, though I had not shut it. I heard my friends screaming, and I could not bring myself to save them. It was night, but the house was lit from within by those awful colors. The tentacles erupted from the edge of the house and the ground and began reaching for me, wrapping around the house. One touched my arm, but I pulled back, and it retreated as I made it onto the sidewalk, like an invisible wall. The house started folding in on itself without moving, like a piece of paper. The screams of my friends started to fade into the distance, in a direction I cannot point to. The house and tentacles began to shrink and fade from view, and when the house was gone, only the tentacles were left. Smaller, no longer colors I cannot see, and still. They look like dead grass now, and they shrink over time.

I keep walking, and I finish crossing the empty lot that nobody talks about. It is late afternoon, and I have had a long day.

Now, where was I going?

My grandpa

2012-07-04T19:10:00.002-04:00

My mom's dad passed away June 19. It was about 5 weeks before that I first heard from her about his cancer. I was upset that I hadn't been told earlier, but she told me that she had only just found out herself. I saw him that Saturday, May 19, and then three more times, the last being the day before he died. I was the last of my generation to see him alive. As I'm the oldest of my generation, I was also the first to see him, so it's sort of appropriate.

He was a good man. I cannot say he was a "great" man, as he was humble in the scope of his life, but he set a benchmark all of our family can judge ourselves by. To think "Would this make him proud?" if we wonder if something is right, or to picture that look of disappointment to know something's wrong. He was a US Marine in WWII, and I believe he'll be getting a 21 gun salute at his funeral. (Cremated, understand.)

I regret not having gotten to know him better. I think he understood, though, that a lot of my time was spent working and taking care of my kids, and that he felt that was as it should be. I'm very glad that I took my kids to see him before he deteriorated completely. It made him very happy to see them, and I know that they will keep that memory their whole lives.

So, Grandpa, rest well. You've earned it.

Phone

2012-02-17T17:19:00.001-05:00

Testing the Blogger app on my phone.

2011-11-09T14:37:00.002-05:00

Just spent some time re-reading old posts here. So strange that my life has changed wildly over the last few years, but internally I'm really not all that different. You'd think I would learn something, or not have the same recurring problems year after year, but apparently you'd be wrong about that.

Hi

2011-10-13T09:32:00.000-04:00

So this "Occupy Wall Street" thing has been going on for close to a month now, and has spread to other cities, including my own. It's a curious thing, and I am watching it with interest.

I'm feeling rather lethargic lately, but that seems to be a long term problem of mine. A theme running through my life. Undirected, unfocused. Disappointed, even.

Yeah, that's a good word for what I feel a lot - disappointment. In myself, a lot of the time, but also in other people. We should all be better than we are. I believe we can be, but for whatever reason, we fall short.

What is this place

2011-03-11T11:54:00.000-05:00

What has this place become? The naked, unabashed, unapologetic power grab going on at the state level in the US is terrifying. The open torture of one of our own soldiers, with no end in sight. The absolute acceptance that corporations can do no wrong, and that workers are the enemy.

How is this America?

There's no "hope" here. There's no striving for a better tomorrow. There is no equality, or fairness, or even virtue in this. This is the strong crushing the weak, the rich dominating the poor, the few enslaving the many.

Why is the government not putting work programs into place? Why do banks get giant bailouts, only to see executives get massive bonuses? Why are chain of ownership laws in real estate being blatantly ignored? Why do giant companies pay less in taxes than I do?

There's no attempt to build a brighter future going on. Only "shared sacrifice" - where "shared" means "not the rich". It's a bleak, depressing future we're being presented with, one where a life in chains of debt is somehow better than any other possible alternative.

I don't like this empty future. I don't want my kids to have a future this dark. I need to figure out what to do to make the world a better place for them.

No real reason

2011-01-22T21:59:00.000-05:00

I don't really have much to say at the moment, save that I notice I have been neglecting this, and perhaps should consider writing here again. It might do me some good to express myself every now and then. Feeling very tired lately, and unmotivated - but that does seem to be a recurring theme in my life.

Startup Weekend

2010-11-15T11:40:00.000-05:00

It's been a long time since I've posted anything here, almost a year and a half. I'm not going to go into why right now, but instead I want to talk about this past weekend, which was really cool. I participated in a "Startup Weekend" event. The basic idea was to pitch ideas, form teams, and create a functional business - all in one weekend. Sounds insane? It is.

And a hell of a lot of fun.

So here are some of my thoughts on the experience.

Day 1:

Arrived at about 5:30 with a friend in tow. Lots of pizza there, and lots of pizza. Saw a couple familiar faces. Mixed and mingled, heard a good speaker, and about 20 people pitched ideas, including me. (An idea I had over a year ago.) My idea was similar enough to 2 other ideas that we merged teams. Then people voted for ideas, with the idea that the team with the most votes would stand up and pitch again, and people would join that team. Ours went first and wound up with about 14 people, a lot for an event like this. A couple other ideas I really liked, but I stayed with mine.

We all then split into our groups and began working on the projects, staying until midnight.

Day 2:

Arrive at 8:30, the doors open at 9. Go in, have breakfast, get to work. There are updates given, but each team is working like crazy. A few people vanish from our team. I am the only back end dev, and I am scrambling with server problems, and DNS isn't helping. Finally I give up on Rails 3 ever working on my server and restart with Rails 2. Shortly before midnight I get FB Login working, returning some values.

Early in the day we settled on a name - Likedity - and got the domain name.

Day 3:

Arrive at 10 and work. The team is down to 6. A speaker at one point, an update somewhere in the day, final pitches at 5:30. I'm working to get the front end design pulled in. It takes a while, but I finally realize that FB isn't sending me location information in any way. I give up and quickly set up GeoIP with Maxmind, which is a snap. A very short while later I get event information from Eventful working, using the GeoIP. This is at about 4. The business people in the team are working to get a presentation put together. We wrap up at 5:30, and pitches are actually at 6. We go second.

We didn't win the overall contest to go on to the next round, but there's quite a bit of interest in the app, and encouragement to keep moving. The top 2 apps - eatdrink.it and statssquared - really, honestly, kick ass. Statssquared wins, and deservedly so. They have something really cool.

Below is a list of the final companies that came out of this, roughly in the same order as the final pitches, although I am a bit fuzzy on the middle ones.

Go check them all out.

Day 9

2009-06-26T07:48:00.001-04:00

Just finished working out again. Day 3 for each of the appropriate workout weeks. Man, this kicks my ass, but I guess I need it.

Day 8 (A day late)

2009-06-26T07:46:00.001-04:00

Nothing really to report except, once again, headaches and sleepiness are subsiding. Very sure it's the result of adapting to the vitamins. Still the occasional fishy burp from the fish oil, though.

Day 7

2009-06-24T22:59:00.002-04:00

Today was the second day of the exercises, and I got through them as listed. Man, those are hard. I know they are supposed to be, otherwise no progress is made, but damn.

Headaches and sleepiness are definitely diminishing, but still not completely gone.

I'm trying to think of some topics to write some articles on that people would be interested in reading. I suppose I just need to pick a few, and then check on some keyword combinations and see how they stack up in various tools designed for that. Nothing like actual data.

Day 6

2009-06-23T08:59:00.002-04:00

No exercise today. The weird headaches and bouts of sleepiness seem to be fading somewhat. Perhaps my body is adjusting to the vitamins I am pushing through it, figuring out what to do with all this stuff it's not used to getting.

I've been doing some thinking about life, and the world, and I'm not happy with a lot of it. Maybe I'll post here about it later, but right now I just need to deal with it myself.

Day 5 (A day late)

2009-06-23T08:55:00.002-04:00

Forgot to post this yesterday, but in the morning I started day one of exercise. Pushups I did Week 1, Day 1 at the highest of the 3 intensities, situps I did Week 3, Day 1 and the second level of intensity, and squats I did Week 3, Day 1 at the highest level. Pushups, then squats, then situps. Repeat, over and over.

It was hard, but I got through it, and was surprisingly not very sore for long afterward.

Other than that, it was a pretty crappy day for a variety of reasons that I won't go into here, but at least I had my mom over and she and I and the kids had pizza together, and that was good.

Day 4

2009-06-21T12:33:00.002-04:00

It's Father's Day.

Ben just lost another tooth. The third one on top, fifth overall. It came out really easily, apparently he was just poking at it with his tongue and out it came.

Napping a lot today, but I usually sleep a lot on Sundays. A little bit of the achy sinuses thing, but not as much. Maybe it'll clear up soon.

Not much else to say.

Day 3

2009-06-20T17:39:00.003-04:00

Partially because I stayed up too late last night, my body/brain *demanded* a lot of sleep this morning. Curiously, it's been very quiet inside my head for most of the day today. For me, this is a big deal, because usually my mind is going at a million miles an hour, and often I can't get things done. Also, interestingly, I was able to make myself *not* think about things. Often I get stuck in a loop over something, and today I could break out of it, change the subject.

Sinus headaches today, too. It's really pretty out, after yesterday's storms. Not sure if it's pressure changes or the vitamins.

I plan on beginning the exercise routines on Monday.

Day 2

2009-06-20T00:09:00.002-04:00

My legs are really sore today. I was extremely tired around noon, and have had some headaches across the middle of my head, side to side over the top. It's possible that the weather changes have been playing havoc with my sinuses, so I can't really attribute that to the vitamins. My stomach has been a bit queasy, which is likely the fish oil, I think.

Obviously it's too early to see any real effects from any of this.

Day 1

2009-06-18T16:08:00.001-04:00

So I got tired of it and decided to do something. I went and found a few web pages for some simple exercise programs: two hundred squats, one hundred push ups, and two hundred sit-ups. I also signed up at push ups logger to track my progress. This is me. It's sort of weird how that site uses the same pages for push ups as well as sit-ups.

I also just bought some vitamins today:

Fish Oil 1760 mg
Lecithin 400 mg
DHEA 25 mg
Acetyl L-Carnitine 400 mg with Alpha Lipoic Acid 200 mg

The fish oil I took 2 of (already having fishy burps, oh well), the others I am taking 1 of. The fish oil is for the Omega 3 fatty acids, and the others are either acetylcholine precursors or aid in its production. Acetylcholine is the neurotransmitter that tells your muscles what to do, and is a primary factor in the executive function of the brain.

I have no idea what the effect of this will be. I intend on sticking with this, modifying it as needed to get better effects.

Lost

2009-06-14T22:59:00.002-04:00

It's been a while since I posted last. I don't even remember what it was about, and I'm not inclined to go and check right now.

I'm in a serious funk right now, and extremely stressed. I have a few bright spots, some hope, but what I need are a serious large scale goal to work toward, a hobby or two, and a girlfriend. It's been long enough since I've had any of those that I am past not even remembering what it was like, and starting to want them again.

I need to move forward with my life. This stagnation is killing my soul.

What I am learning

2009-05-09T14:27:00.002-04:00

I've been wondering a few things about my life, why things don't work the way I want, and I'm coming to a few fairly unpleasant conclusions:

It's ok to torture people. Don't worry, you won't get in trouble for it. Why?

If you're just a grunt, you were just following orders, so it's ok.
If you were in charge, you can keep it under wraps until the next administration comes along, and they'll sweep it under the rug for you.

It's ok to ruin people's lives financially by taking inherently stupid risks. Why?
- The government will just give you more money to play with, and make future generations pay the bill.

It seems to me that people actively try to not think for themselves, and they like getting screwed. I was raised to think that being aggressive was wrong, that I should play nice, but it seems to be that's wrong. That being aggressive is how to get what you want, and the bigger the dick you are, the more you get away with it.

I was raised to think for myself, which means I don't tend to like being told what to do, and I was raised to be nice, which means I tend to think that telling other people what to do isn't right. This combination leads to one very, very frustrated man.

Johnny

2009-04-18T08:28:00.002-04:00

This past Sunday a friend of mine passed away. I hadn't seen him in several years, but in my circle of friends he was very well liked. The viewing was yesterday, and I saw several people I hadn't seen, well, since the last time I saw Johnny.

The funeral itself is today, and I will almost certainly go to it.

Johnny was a good guy, very funny. It's unfortunate to say that my life really won't be all that different with him gone, because I hadn't seen him in so long, but he was the first person in that circle of friends to go that I am aware of. He was only 49 or 50, and this really brings to mind my own mortality.

Very soon

2009-04-16T08:47:00.002-04:00

About a week ago I was chatting with a friend of mine online, and he gave me an idea for a project for a new website. I've been working on it quite a bit since then, with much feedback from him on it, and I'm hoping to get it live today, tomorrow at the latest. It's pretty cool.

I'll post a link to it once it's live.

I'm tired

2009-03-19T11:19:00.001-04:00

Stayed up late watching "The Terminator", and my stupid brain wouldn't let me sleep.