Musings

A slightly better afternoon

2009-10-27T19:54:00.001-05:00

Made it to the office to review audits, meet about the planning meeting; (for those of you following along at home that was the meeting to plan the upcoming planning meeting.

Trying to avoid thinking about the soft rain and the thoughts of being with her in the rain. Rushing Rushing to get home, to feed the cats to prepare a meal, to type this and to head to bed before the internal conversation kicks off.

Dragging into work

2009-10-27T11:26:00.002-05:00

It is past noon and I haven't made it to the office. Sent a bunch of emails and was on two conference calls, but I'm still feeling like a recluse. I just don't want to deal with people today.

Healthier living through... Chardonnay

2009-10-26T19:31:00.000-05:00

I stepped on the scale for the first time in a few weeks and received an unpleasant surprise. Time to get back on track. So tonight's supper was a hard fought flounder filet with blanched baby bok choi, and a glass of Chardonnay. And a sleeping pill, and listening to WWOZ.org on iTunes from the French Quarter. Listening to the blues right now, it's perfect. Funny how focusing your mind on happy times can break a foul mood.

I need to propose some kind of temporary or permanent settlement to her. I am trying to gather my thoughts. I am trying to 'divorce' my mind from the absolute joy it was to be with her sometimes versus the angry and upset person on the other end of these phone calls. I have to keep my emotions in some kind of check. The Chardonnay and the sleeping pill are helping. If I can just fall asleep without getting upset.

Back at it

2009-10-26T10:55:00.001-05:00

Finally made it to work today at noon. I had a call with the client from 9-10 and could have gotten here faster, but I was talking to myself about the separation too much. I am depressed.

Breached!

2009-10-23T22:03:00.003-05:00

Aerial photo of New Orleans at the peak of the Flood, only the Vieux Carre at the elbow of the river is dry
In the past 36 hours the black swan has landed. Just like the Category 5 Hurricane, you knew the consequences would be severe, you just never knew what series of events were going to come together. And, as I said at the time, the Hurricane didn't cause all of this, it brought to the front the weaknesses that were already there. The Levees were always weak, but untested. The "leadership" was weak, mostly a ceremonial parade of obstinate privilege. And the list goes on.

So it is with my marriage; at lucky year number 13, it all seems to have unraveled for good. It wasn't the immediate trigger (which was my fault, but appears to her as far worse than it was), it was the structural weaknesses that led a dumb move to crumble the structure from inside. And as each layer of edifice, of facade, of Potemkinville, came tumbling down, behind that was another flaw exposed in the systemic collapse.
So, I am just standing at the demolition site, in shock, hearing sirens converging.

There is a bottle of scotch nearby as a traitorous companion; but stalwartly there is also Meaux who, as he always does, when sensing my depression, won't leave me alone. He is here on the desk as I type this. He's been with us since a couple of weeks before the wedding. I wonder what he would write about how it was before it ended. Of the two of us, he's the one that touched her last and maybe forever.

This looks like it is going to be bad

2009-10-21T22:26:00.001-05:00

String of text messages and emails came in during a business dinner tonight, and it was quite disturbing. A closed wound is reopened and, apparently, hemmoraging.

A Monday that feels, well, like a Monday

2009-10-19T11:55:00.001-05:00

Went to bed late, got up late, got to work late, have a ton to do... what a life.

We talked!

2009-10-18T10:30:00.000-05:00

She called me a few minutes ago. It was awkward, but just hearing her voice gave me butterflies. I know I deserve a divorce, and I know there is enough anger in our marriage right now to rip it apart, but this is the woman I love. I can't walk away from that. I can't run away, either. I need to stay on track.

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Sunday

2009-10-18T08:40:00.001-05:00

It is a glorious day in Atlanta, weather is crisp, it was about 40 degrees this morning. Went to Publix and got provisions for Goulash tonight, it is simmering already. Texted her at 9 am that I was missing her (I am, greatly). And it is off to the computer to get ready for this upcoming week from hell.

Lost without my PC

2009-10-17T11:58:00.001-05:00

My company laptop died on Wednseday (thanks for the security update Microsoft!!) when Automatic Updates took over the machine. Now it is Saturday, I am at my Fedex Office location trying to rebuild my weekly reports. What a fiasco.

Another chance to even be civil

2009-10-15T20:16:00.000-05:00

...lasted about four minutes before I got the full blast. Somebody pass the fucking Merlot.

2009-10-10T05:03:00.002-05:00

“…And you may find yourself in a beautiful house,

with a beautiful Wife
And you may ask yourself

-well...how did I get here? “

-Talking Heads

“When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely,

it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.”

– Tennessee Williams

Curing the Problem = Finding the Solution

2009-10-10T04:24:00.000-05:00

I've taken to reading a particular strain of self help books lately; Unfortunately, there is a lot in there that I don't want to hear. Or hear and still don't want to act upon. It is like a yin and yang thing. On one hand there is my wife saying clear out these issues, save yourself -- save us and let's move on. On the other there is the knowledge that these issues are monsters I haven't been able to slay for many years. That they are all intersecting and that they form a net that is drawing me down. Under extreme stress, fatigued, suffering from insomnia, with violent internal dialogues waging, each of these little demons has been triggered. Each is doing its part to add to the chaos that muddles the solution. Each coping mechanism triggers another vortex, each causes a new problem needing a new coping mechanism. In the end, life is stripped to the barest of essentials, and joy is lost.

I need to confront myself; forgive myself, and move on.

Wake me up; is it October, yet?

2009-10-04T11:58:00.008-05:00

I am losing track of how long it has been that she's been gone. The house is so empty that I keep the iTunes playing constantly or the roaring silence leaves me talking to myself. I have basically re-arranged everything in the house to try to make it more tolerable. Like in the VABe apartment, (which looked like the CIA safe house in Bourne Identity, as it had more computers and flat panels than silverware or chairs), the digital is elevated. I have pushed the couch to the corner of the living room, and set up a desk and three computers in front of an office chair and my leather chair.
There is a room we didn't know what to do with, that now has a few boxes of her things that caused me to weep.
The guest bedroom, which was really just for me to sleep in when we fought, has been replaced with a sitting area that I use on Sunday mornings to read the NYT.

The bedroom is difficult. I have taken everything out of sight but the spot where she used to be. Even the alarm clock on her side of the bed is gone. I was hoping by removing the personality from the room, it would become antiseptic, like a hotel. No such luck. Going in there is an effort. I even sleep on the couch some nights.

Right now, the Wiener Philharmoniker is on the sound system. The back door is open (its 67 degrees in Atlanta and glorious), the cats are playing hide and seek in the back yard. There are five bottles of wine on the kitchen table along with a New Yorker and a couple of bills that need to be mailed on Tuesday, when the paycheck arrives.

It would be so much easier if she had just -- I don't know-- died of some crazy disease we couldn't cure. Instead, it is our marriage that is wounded, and I am the majority cause. It is bleak, I am weak, and there is so little to show for all of this. How do you start over again; once again. It is hard to get past the past.

Rebirth, New Birth, Trombone Shorty... wake me up when September ends.

Another Reason it is going to be a long 'road home'

2009-10-03T22:58:00.000-05:00

Battle Over Low-Income Housing Reveals Post-Katrina Anxiety - NYTimes.com

Just before we walked away from our home in Lakeview for the last time.

2009-10-03T21:39:00.004-05:00

I spraypainted this on the wall the day we sold our sodden home in New Orleans. The phrase is a less than sober misspelling of Mimi's final dying words in Act III of La Boheme. It was more apropos at the time than I realized. Although it is not probably apparent to anyone besides myself , this is a juxtaposition of such an extreme nature that I consider it art. Unfortunately, there are few people around that would ever grasp the full picture. Like Mona Lisa being a self portrait of the artist, this act captured and mirrored the story of our home and homelife.

70124ever!

How To Tame This Dragon

2009-10-03T20:15:00.005-05:00

This display was at the 2007 CTIA convention in Orlando. The company that pays my bills is engaged in taming this beast, but the problem is two fold. The more footprint you add, the more 3G capacity you mop up (think 3G iPhones in the former 2G footprint that suddenly wake up and act like 3G iPhones in Atlanta and triple the backhaul demands). Rule of users is also that the more you make the network accessible, the more it gets used.

For planning purposes, that means you take a boondocks town with 2G and add 3G, it doesn't start to ramp over a period of time as people are sold 3G. No sir, they already have it, two years of purchased smart phones on dumb networks. Now, these phones suddenly feel brilliant and the usage surges! People start using the tools at the same activity level as mature 3G markets.

That means spectrum constraints, upgraded facilities, more sensitive equipment, HSDPA +, LTE, Fiber to the Cell, etc. All of this takes time, capital and people. You never get ahead of the ball, unless you overshoot, or you have an easier technology migration path with a shorter upgrade cycle time. (like Verizon's CDMA 1xrt, EVDO migration).

We just failed to make a deadline, the fourth or fifth deadline for a project designed to catch this dragon in a few places. People act as if we dropped an Atom Bomb on a convent. Bottom line is this:

All this technology is in flux. When a project is 'greenlighted' the usage has already triggered a need. But procuring all the equipment and rights take time, actually building all of it takes time, and then the labrynthine steps to light it all up take an indeterminate amount of time. Most of the capital expenditure models are linear. The end user usage growth is exponential. (There is another factor, too. Revenue per minute of use is under competitive pressure).

A company that fails to manage this well has two options; One, underserve your customers (Can you hear me, now?) , or two, literally beat the living shit out of everyone that touches the project from start to finish to minimize time to market. The two are not mutually exclusive. But middle management that inherits bad planning only has option #2 at their disposal. As their exclusive vendor we get the pleasure of "Let the beatings begin." As my exclusive client, I have no option but to take it.

It is a rule of project management that if you start late, you finish late most of the time. This is pretty logical, but shocking to people that manage companies by powerpoint.

If you are about to faint when you call Domino's are you surprised that it will still be 30 minutes to get your Pizza? This is pretty intuitive. Unless there is a committee involved.

Solve the cause of the problem and the problem goes away

2009-10-03T19:39:00.006-05:00

This has been a rough couple of months for me. There are so many areas of my life that are careening off the tracks. It has been an unhealthy phase. The boundaries that had been in place somehow blurred.

Another Day of Pressure

2009-10-01T12:45:00.001-05:00

This week has been brutal. Now that we missed launch dates, the recriminations are starting. What are you going to do to prevent this from happening again. The basic answer is better planning, but the customer wants to outsource that, and doesn't want to commit to reasonable timeframes. So, if you do ten months of work in six and three days, that's a failure. What the hell.

17 hours and we're not even done.

2009-10-01T01:28:00.000-05:00

I have been working since 830 yesterday morning, it's 230 am. Just a day from hell. We missed our launch in five markets today. Problems were mostly out of our control, but we are in an abusive relationship with a Forbes Global 10 company.

Good news is our friends at E// are catching up (even though they never were behind, don't make mistakes, and if they did we made them do it). We should be up and running within about ten more days. 850 UMTS for 2 million people isn't a bad outcome.

It supports my blogging platform, for one.

prelaunch blues

2009-09-29T20:16:00.003-05:00

going to miss the launch, am i

Living upstairs from a voodoo shop

2009-09-29T00:33:00.004-05:00

Another bit of insomnia. I have the iPod playing Cowboy Mouth. The great John Boutte singing about living atop a voodoo shop.

But, in my morose frame of mind, I keep thinking of Addie Hall, who also lived on Rampart Street, above a Voodoo shop.

I am not fully well. It is not a good night to be free of the demons. It is just a long couple of hours until dawn.

We can only tamp down so much before it takes charge again. Mostly at night, mostly in the mind.

The intersection of ego, guilt and sin is a vertex of hell.

Insomniac

2009-09-27T01:37:00.000-05:00

I don't know what is wrong with me. I am like I was when waiting for Santa Claus. Only there is really no tree, and certainly no Atari under the tree.

Why am I up?

on the server PC, I have this view of the Unter der Linten from the DHM museum back towards the Brandenberg Gate and the Riechstag. It is 8:40 am there on a Sunday, traffic is light, and it is, like the French Quarter, one of those miraculous places were the alignment of sunlight and scale of the buildings is hard to describe or replicate in the average office park complex. (where I spend most of my life).

When cities are built and re-built over hundreds of years, they are different places than places that are only as historic as the last inflated credit cycle.

Blogging on a Saturday

2009-09-26T10:59:00.000-05:00

It was supposed to storm today in Atlanta. After a week in which rising water was the hysterical topic on the local news (but still has restrictions on lawn watering, strange); more weather was not welcome.

But, we don't have much but clouds today. My tabby cat and I did a little cleaning up this morning. The roomba came out and he supervised its fractal path around the furniture. It is a hoot.

I have a list of things to do today to catch up my personal life; and this is really not one of them. But, living alone, with little time outside of work for meeting people up here, this is my social outlet besides hanging out in the pub down the street.

Friday Call

2009-09-25T20:02:00.029-05:00

She texted me today and wanted to talk tonight. I was looking forward to it all day. By the time I left the office (7:00 pm), I was already tired, but called her on the way home.

The next 45 minutes (including two dropped calls -- thanks ATT), was just a powerful unloading of all that had been building in our marriage for 13 years. Her counselor had suggested that she give me a clear list of why she was gone, and what needed to change. It was a comprehensive list.

And I agreed with every point. And I cried, because in all the silence around me, I had been beating myself up on the same things. Nothing was surprising. And yet,

Earlier in the week, my supply chain manager was in my office detailing an initiative to simplify a particularly rubegoldbergian process in our company. He used the phase "Containerize the Chaos". Yes. Indeed.

What my wife was doing was ripping open all the containers at once. I felt like Indiana Jones looking at the giant pit of snakes. It was all the issues: booze, money, sex, stress, work, travel, not having kids, our co-dependent families, PTSD, and on and on. All the issues that had been carefully put into little containers of plutonium powered denial.

God, it hurt to hear. But I loved her more for having the courage to put it all out in the open. I don't know if our marriage will survive this; but this -- as painful as it is -- is the friction of progress.