Dating, Bison, Muskrats and Top Secrets

Dear Blog,

Dating is kind of awful. The field is clogged with uneducated, incurious flotsam, interesting people who are unfortunately ugly as sin, educated, interesting and attractive people who somehow end up being Trump supporters, women who like football and fishing, candidates of mind numbing perfection in Detroit or Nashville, one on the far side of Columbus. My super ego is rejecting all the pretty young things my id wants to message, and my id is rejecting all the mature, interesting people I should be talking to. Pretty young things are demonstrating interest in no strings attached sex, and sitting alone in my new house, alone, empty, self destructive, free agent, do what I want, what do I want? To be happy. That isn't happiness. She's really cute (I mean psyche rockingly cute). Just imagine how many quality offspring she could bear, go to bed, get out of bed, go to bed, read Neil Gaiman because 3/4 matching women list him - hey this is really good...

And rejecting people, my god. It's so much worse than flunking people. I mean, when the students kinda did half try and were so blindsided because society and K-12 failed them so hard, it was really tough to have to do. But it wasn't their capacity as romantic partner that I was flunking. Just the math ability, and that can be improved. Just yesterday, a sparky, interesting, many hobbied woman messaged me - said I'm neat and what am I doing tonight? Looking up how to craft a rejection message that hurts as little as possible, that's what. The rejectors in the cartoon diagrams are always women. Sexist pieces of shit. 

I added the following to the end of my self-description on Plenty of Fish: 

1) For the love of Pete don't post pictures of your kids! Predators exist, they're on this site, they can filter for single moms. 
2) Snapchat filters on main pic, or all pics? Do you have teddy bear ears and a cat nose in real life? Are you really trying to sell an algorithmically modified version of yourself? 
3) I'm pretty sure asshats don't read the 'first off, no asshats' part of your profile or otherwise don't believe themselves to be asshats. Second off, if 90% of your profile is dedicated to warding off asshats, maybe you aren't offering non-asshats enough substance to consider pursuing you? Just a thought. 
4) Down to earth has officially lost all meaning for me. As have fun loving and laid back. Check this out: https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/down-to-earth. Plainspoken. Fo' shizzle. I haven't seen that modifier on a single profile within 250 clicks of here. Stand out from the crowd! Otherwise, you're only going to get attention from asshats (note 3 supra). 

I am chatting with a viable candidate. There is hope. 

(Seh-goo)

I've been biking a lot. I biked around New Burlington yesterday. It was unreal how amazing it was. I stopped for pictures of river branches over cobbled stones between leaning oaks and grazing pastures for bison (did not know I lived anywhere near a bison farm). An hour ago I saw a muskrat clambour out of a drain and up along a soy field while I sat writing in my journal. It was one of the most beautiful spots. I did my best to draw the scene, clouds, far off highway, beans and corn, gravel and grass. I wrote a full page on the warm wind, the rattle of the corn stalks, the chirp of birds and insects on a patch of road I'd never conceived of, despite having passed within 200 meters at least a hundred times before, to and from Central State campus. I don't believe I've ever seen a muskrat before. 

My body is capable of simply drifting at paces I once found challenging, and many casual riders still do. It makes me happy to experience this drift between green walls of corn. I'm officially a serious cyclist, riding with a group of triathletes who compete in regional and national races. That came of a sub-plot to a ride I mentioned a while back, a ride to Urbana and back. It was a day so good that even as it was happening I knew I might be peaking for 2019 - and that that was ok. I've had years with lower high points. 

The Urbana ride, the weather was warm, breeze enough to keep you dry if you stopped, but not enough to really hinder you as long as you were generally pointed north or south (which I was). I left around 9 in the morning, after my ex went somewhere or other with our daughter. On the way up to Yellow Springs I caught a draft on an older fellow cruising at a pretty tough pace on the worst of the uphill in that direction. He told me his name, I think it was Dave, wished me well at a point where he turned around or left or something. Then I was alone again, heading north to Springfield. I had then just recently gone up to Springfield, so it was not so much familiar as not unfamiliar. I was solidly warmed up by this time, prepared to put in serious speed if that was needed, but planning a gentler pace for an all day ride. 

There's a quality of yellow that comes off of weeds on the side of a path when the sun is really high and bright in summer. I don't really understand it, but I love it. I was seeing this, and feeling powerful, and peaceful, as I got to Springfield. There are a few blocks there you have to ride the roads of downtown before the trail picks back up on the north end. I saw a group of young bloods coalescing in the downtown streets towards the trail northward. Carbon fiber, spandex, mid twenties. I figured they looked fast, would be good for a draft. Indeed once they got on the trail they were cruising about 28kph or so. At each stop, I stopped in among them. On the third stop, the leader asked, "are you trying to pass us?" 

My goodness no. I'm drafting. I'm not fast enough to pass you guys. She introduced herself as Lisa, and welcomed me to the clip. I got to chat with two or three of them over the next while. We followed an old man who confidently headed up a road, and ended up turning around when it seemed to become a highway. Lisa has been beating herself up for weeks for leading a stranger onto a highway. Whatever, it was an adventure. They broke the wind for me until about halfway between Springfield and Urbana, at a little jangle in the path where it crosses some railroad tracks. They invited me to join their weekly group ride Wednesday nights out of the Lebanon YMCA. 

On north I went alone, needing water shortly thereafter I saw the kind of roof that looks like it belongs to a public building. Just the kind of weird angle and height that is never on a private residence, you know. It was a bog nature preserve center, and indeed there was a water fountain, and a friendly ranger who doesn't really get enough people to talk to, what with being about equidistant to two fairly small cities. I filled up water and sat behind the building, on benches in the shade overlooking a cedar bog. The wind made the waxy leaves crackle while I ate my peanut butter filled pretzel bites that I've found to be a nearly perfect cycling fuel. A woman walked in from my left on a boardwalk that goes through the bog. She said, 'did you bike here too?' We chatted for a bit about the quality of the day, places we'd ridden. She talked about the GOBA, which sounds a treat. She went on, and I wrapped up my eating, topped off my canteens again and I rode off while she was lacing up her clip-in shoes. 

In Urbana, right away I saw a perfect spot, The Train Station Cafe, a former depot converted over to a coffee shop. I knew if there was any kind of food for lunch, I'd be set. And they have a full food menu of panini style sandwiches. I got a pretty good reuben and a latte, and drank a lot of water and sat still a lot in the cool. There were bikers (motor and leather) and people with amazing tattoos and kids and local art on the walls. I got in around noon, and started riding back home around 1. Landed a little after 4, a day well spent, another county down, a cool shower and my familiar bed to lounge in and watch youtube into the evening, and sing once my ex left (I was still living in the same house at the time). 

I did manage to join one Wednesday, and there were some older riders in the full group, but all of them climbed hills like they had places to be, and I was the last to the top of each big climb. I showed my strength as a distance rider on the flataways and actually pulled for a bit. Chatted with a half dozen cyclists and was welcomed and encouraged all around. I can't make the Wednesday rides, but they organize weekend rides often, and I've gotten in on one of those. Always not being the fastest, but neither the slowest, and certainly on the lowest tech, heaviest gear of all. I suppose they are becoming my friends. 

(Seh-gway)

I got a full time paid internship at a defense contracting company today. If they hire me, which the CEO said was the goal, I'd have to get the third tier government security clearance: top secret. The pay isn't amazing, but it will pay the bills, and I'll get a handful of certifications in industry along the way. Which beats the hell out of paying a couple grand on a bootcamp. At the interview, I was able to give a solution to a white board problem that was novel to them, as it comes from a set theory problem of infinities, but also gave the more typical programming approach. That is, I shined as what I am. 

I'm neither ecstatic, nor disappointed. It's not really the line of work I wanted, precisely. It's the right kind of work, for the wrong kind of customer (defense). It's not a full time job with benefits, but isn't unpaid, and has potential. I guess, just as I once wrote about a restaurant on Google Reviews: it wasn't the best of times, it wasn't the worst of times. 

(Segue)

Two new artists in my sphere of knowing, St. Vincent and Fink. Check them out. They're friggin' epic. Through my headphones Fink is dropping some raw emotion. Through the window nearby the sky dims behinds trees still waving gently in a late July breeze. 

I love summer. It's always been my favorite season. 

Your Obedient,
Ian Hogan, PhD

A Rough Summer Touching Mahoning County

Dear Blog,

Two posts ago I shared an info-graphic of the Ohio counties through which I have biked, color coded by somewhat arbitrary age divisions. There are two colors which correspond only to one county. Red is for Cuyahoga, the only county I biked in before I reached a working age and made it to an adjacent county. Blue is for Mahoning, the only county I added to the list in 2017. I was 31 that year, and had just the year before biked a few thousand kilometers and hit 11 new counties. It was 2016 that I first thought to map out all the counties through which I had biked and set the goal of getting all of Ohio. Looking forward to 2018, I again biked thousands of kilometers and hit over a dozen new counties. So what was 2017? As I reflect now on the year as a whole, it was almost comical in its arc from one of the most hopeful times of my life, to one of the most hopeless.

As of January 1, 2017, my dissertation was complete and I was on vacation, actually relaxing instead of studying even harder, for the first time in six years. My job applications were away and there was no point worrying until February at least. I was picking up old hobbies again, go and guitar, that I had dropped in the struggle to achieve academically while fighting cancer and raising an infant. I had no doubts about the quality of my work. It was my own, I knew that I would successfully defend, and did so as early as the committee was ready to go. I was fit, healthy, sleeping well. Our family was what we wanted it to be. The possibilities were as dazzling as my imagination would let them be.

By December 31, I had been rejected for all the most viable jobs in academia, changed track towards software development and was not making much progress when my undergraduate institution offered me a position very late in the season (well into June). The pay was good, but the institution was one that I had elected not to walk at graduation, for the quality of the school was so low that I had no pride in a degree attached to a 4.0 gpa. Succeeding in getting a job there was kind of like failing at everything that mattered but getting a ribbon because the market was so bad that two of the six graduates in my class got no jobs and were supported by their spouse and parents respectively.

We had a buyer of our house in Kent back out on the day we were loading the moving truck and ultimately lost money on it a month later. This meant that we ended up in tension with the sellers of the house we had contracted to buy near Central State, and spent six weeks paying them rent while also paying our old mortgage. I had already cashed out the small amount of retirement I had accrued as a graduate student just to float us through two more months without income over the summer. We were still the lucky ones in our generation, passing through having a young child, graduate school, and getting a real job with no debts and even some equity, but we had no cash and it was very stressful.

My wife got pregnant over the summer and then miscarried, also while loading the moving truck. Our relationship started to fragment as her mental health deteriorated and our family struggled in a new town with no social network. My mental health started to deteriorate as I attempted to work a terrible job well, teaching four courses for the first time in my life, and constantly unsure of what situation I would arrive to at home when I got there.

In the fall, my mother's parents both died. I had never been very close to them. They were kind of not good people, but it still hit me hard. They were my namesake. I wrote a long blog about their memorial a few posts ago, entitled Goodbye to Love.

It had become clear that my pay wasn't good enough to cover the aggressive mortgage we had elected. The resulting downward trend in the bank account only further drove a wedge between me and my wife, who had elected not to work against my wishes and against our original plans upon marriage.

With all that in mind, some might wonder how I managed to get on a bike and get to an adjacent county at all that summer. I remember trying hard to sneak in rides, just biking long routes home from school to get up to 20k in a day (usual school and back added up to 12). I had a chat with an old friend at some point that summer who biked distance. He asked me how much I was riding, and I said not much, only maybe 20k rides. He said "that's if I just went on a ride." Indeed, now when I just go on a ride at random with no plan and not much time, it'll be 15-25k. But biking is such a huge part of my life. I need to ride in order to motivate myself to keep putting up with all the other bullshit. So I rode as much as I could, and did get up over 40k, and then knowing I wouldn't have easy access to the North East again for at least a long time, I made a trip out to Mahoning county before we moved.

I remember it well. My target was Lake Milton, just inside the county line and a significant landmark. I rode on Tallmadge road almost all the way, straight east west. The weather was perfect for me. Mostly sunny, just a few fluffy clouds to make the sky pretty and give you a break from the heat every once in a while. Maybe 25 to 28 degrees. I remember passing these rural middle and high-schools well away from any major city and even any substantial town. There were football teams doing summer practice in fields next to both schools. Huge teams, what seemed to me must have been every youth of the correct age in the district in a football uniform. I remember my sense of bewilderment that they could fill out such large teams as I gently climbed one rolling hill and drifted down the other side, over and over.

Just when I got into the county, I stopped at one of those marts you get in rural places, a kind of not quite grocery store, definitely more than a convenient store sort of establishment that has bait, some hardware, ammo, and a run down deli counter, but still only three aisles of food and two of them are snacks. I just wanted salty snacks anyway. I grabbed those after going to the bathroom and the checkout lady called me 'Baby' several times and had this really elegant elephant head tattoo, like this one:

I told her I liked it, and that my wife loved elephants. (Yeah, I talk to crazy check-out ladies who call me 'Baby'. Why not?)

There's a bridge that crosses lake Milton, and just before that bridge, coming from the west as I was, there's a little pier with a gazebo at the end, maybe 30 meters out. It's just a wooden dock, no railings and about a meter wide. I risked it and rode out to the gazebo, knowing that if I fell it was just going to be a sopping ride home. I sat down on the picnic table and ate a medium sized bag of something salty in the shade while looking out over the lake. It was beautiful. Everything I wanted it to be.

I did the same thing the Saturday before last. I biked up to Urbana and hit a new county doing it. And it was everything I wanted it to be. Just the right thing to help me keep putting up with all the bullshit. I'll write about it sometime.

Your Obedient,
-Ian Hogan, PhD

(My Name Is) Human - Comparison

Dear Blog,

I've been thinking of writing up some formal thoughts on two music videos. With regards to my commentary on both of these, there is a good deal more going on in the songs and videos than I will mention. They are art, and I could never hope to fully detail their contents. I don't claim to have anything like a definitive understanding of the artists' intent with their work. I believe all listeners share enough experience to be worth some discussion. With regards to both artists, go check out all their stuff. To quote High Fidelity, "It's really fucking good."

Human, by Dodie:

My Name is Human, by Highly Suspect:

The lyrics to Human:

I wanna pick you up and scoop you out
I want the secrets your secrets haven't found

Paint me in trust
I'll be your best friend
Call me the one
This night just can't end
Oh

Will you share your soul with me?
Unzip your skin and let me have a see

Paint me in trust
I'll be your best friend
Call me the one
This night just can't end
Oh

Oh, I'm so human
We're just human
Lean for me, and I'll fall back
You'll fit so nicely, you'll keep me intact

Paint me in trust
I'll be your best friend
Call me the one
This night just can't end
Oh

I want to give you your grin
So tell me you can't bear a room that I'm not in

Paint me in trust
I'll be your best friend
Call me the one
This night just can't end
Oh

Oh, I'm so human
We're just human

The lyrics to My Name is Human:

Okay

I'm feeling the way that I'm feeling myself
Fuck everyone else
Gotta remember that nobody is better than anyone else, here
(Do you need some time to think it over?)
Look what they do to you
Look what they do to me
Must be joking if you think that either one is free, here

Get up off your knees, girl
Stand face to face with your God
And find out what you are
(Hello, my name is human)
Hello, my name is human
And I came down from the stars
(Hello, my name is human)

I'm ready for love and I'm ready for war
But I'm ready for more
I know that nobody's ever been this fucking ready before, hey
(Do you need some time to think it over?)
So figure it out or don't figure it out
I figured it out
The bigger the river (the bigger the river)
The bigger the drought (the bigger the drought)

Get up off your knees, boy
Stand face to face with your God
And find out what you are
(Hello, my name is human)
Hello, my name is human
And I came down from the stars
(Hello, my name is human)

Fire world, I love you
Fire world

I'm up off my knees, girl
I'm face to face with myself
And I know who I am
(Hello, my name is human)
I stole the power from the sun
I'm more than just a man
(No longer disillusioned)

(I'm not asking questions)
('Cause questions have answers)
(And I don't want answers)
I came down from the stars (so I'll take my chances)
(And what are the chances)
(That I could advance)
(On my own circumstances)
(Said "what are the chances?")
Hello, my name is human (and what are the chances?)
(I don't want your answers)
(I'm not asking questions)
(So you keep your answers)
And I know who I am (so you keep your answers)
(I'm not asking questions)
(I'm taking my chances)

I find some notable contrasts between the two songs and videos. Obviously the musical styles are drastically different with Highly Suspect's use of distorted, tube amplified guitars and pointed, aggressive lyrics against Dodie's gentle harmonies and indie acoustic, whispered verse, love song vibrations. Also it jumped out at me that Dodie uses very minimalist make-up, and in some of her other videos, I suspect none at all. Compare this to Johnny Stevens' body tattoos, gaudy apparel, piercings, time consuming hair and general air of 'LOOK AT ME'. I find this to be an interesting gender role reversal. The overall color tones of the sets, costuming, camera angles and panning, all play into these starkly different approaches of organic and neutral against highly artificial and visually aggressive. I find each complements the associated music extremely well.

Then there are some similarities in the way in which the songs change meaning in the context of the corresponding videos. To listen to Dodie's Human without the visual, or just to read the words, there is just a love song. Humans are feeling animals, it is human to fall in love and be super curious about another human. But then in the video, the object of Dodie's affection is a construction. It plays into the question of where human connection is real or manufactured. It reminds me of such explorations as the world of Data in Star Trek, The Next Generation, the question of the rights of people with sufficient brain damage to have capacity below lab rats, and the extent to which we can compare a text based friendship abroad with an in-person friendship (especially as automated bots are fooling more people for longer periods all the time).

I am no longer in regular contact with the person who shared that video with me, but I was able to take an old recording of their voice, sing a harmony over it and sync the tracks. Listening, I was reminded of this video. Manufactured human connection. We never harmonized that way. It wasn't real. But it sounded real. It would be hard to detect the forgery, you would have to know a thing or two about analyzing recorded sound. Just as automated conversation programs are getting harder to catch, as their caches of natural sounding responses grow and their algorithms dive deeper into what components of a passage of text make it 'flow' with another.

Similarly, My Name is Human, to just hear it or read the lyrics, is just a pointed rock song about the nature of human existence. 'Get up off your knees, stand face to face with your God, find out who you are...I came down from the stars.' Humans are natural things, derived of stardust. We grapple with our nature. In the face of something bigger, we fall to our knees. Here again, the video brings in robotics, sets a contrast of human from the stars and manufactured human. Can a robot stand face to face with its God? Again, Data did face his creator. Robots are being trained to identify those who made them. We're a few major breakthroughs away from anything worrisome, but the questions and potential are there.

I find it remarkable that two songs that deal so heavily in the concept of humanity, but such different aspects of it, both chose in their visual component to set a contrast with humanoid robots. Neither song on its face deals with the boundary cases of humanity in comparison with hyper-human approximations like Data or advanced AI conversation engines. Neither in their verses ask the question of how something made always seems to fail to measure up to something born.

I'm face to face with myself. I know what I am. I ate poison to destroy death running around my body. I have stripped away every part of myself that I did not want or found unwholesome and rebuilt myself to my imagination's specifications. I've stared into the abyss of myself. This aspect of me strides triumphantly while listening to Highly Suspect loudly in my headphones.

I want to give you your grin. I know of myself that I can't be whole without another. I don't currently have a life partner and I feel like a two-legged stool sort of tilted up against a wall of antidepressants and working towards a better future for myself...or something like that. I can never feel the presence of God except through the conduit of deep human connection. That part of myself listens to Dodie and lays quietly.

I am Human.

-Ian Hogan, PhD

Purification by Fire and Stories with No Point

Dear Blog,

Another sweeping set of life changes has intervened. There is no chance at an exhaustive reckoning, but some that come to mind quickly: I decided to separate from my wife last month. The short story is that she didn't make me happy. The long story isn't much longer. I also lost my job this month. I quit drinking in March. I'll be quitting my chorus in June. I've lost two good friends in the last year. I'm putting in time with those who are left. Most of my life is being stripped away right now. Nearly everything I have is potential. What I have that is manifest is a highly functioning body, an educated mind, a good set of coping strategies, and a growing relationship with my daughter.

I find there I have no one in particular to tell all my stories to. I have this tremendous urge to pour out the ideas in my head. How things work, what I saw here or there and then. The lack of an ear, an interested or at least fairly captive human to dump all these ideas upon, I find strikingly difficult to manage. There's also all the parts of being completely alone that normal humans have to deal with, but you all know about that quite well I'm sure.

So I'm going to put some stories on here. Apparently, no one will read them. Just as I logged in today I noticed there is a view counter on this blog and my last entry got 3 views. Several previous that I had sent links to friends and family only got 11 views. Quantities that show me I am somehow violently ignored. Regardless, I already feel some of the comfort I have always derived from talking on end, so I will persist.

Three years ago I set a goal in life to bike through every county in Ohio. Since then it became clear that it wouldn't take anything like my entire life (I will likely pass the half-way mark this summer), and so I've added that I would like to bike through every state in the US, and if that target is met, I'll set to biking on each continent. The rules aren't strict and no one is keeping score but myself. I don't count it if I merely bike extremely closely to a county (once a bike path ended, I later learned, precisely on the county line, and so I biked back and around a corner to catch the next county over). I also won't do anything silly like drive to each county with my bike and do a tight loop at a gas station. I have counted counties that I merely clipped a corner of on a long trip, but I generally try to find at least one town or other marker within the county to make a good deal of it. I like to have something that I remember of the county, of the ride.

As of now, the states I have biked in include (in order that I got to them) New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri.

The Ohio Counties I have biked through, in approximate order are Cuyahoga, Lorain, Erie, Athens, Greene, Clark, Warren, Butler, Hocking, Portage, Summit, Trumbull, Ashtabula, Stark, Geauga, Lake, Franklin, Pickaway, Fairfield, Licking, Knox, Richland, Morrow, Delaware, Mahoning, Fayette, Montgomery, Clinton, Madison, Miami, Ross, Pike, Scioto, Adams, Highland, Brown, Clermont, and Hamilton. Tomorrow I intend to bike to Champaign, and in a few weeks, another seven from central to western Ohio. I made this info-graphic earlier this year.

I learned to ride a bike in New Jersey. I remember that I only ever fell off my bike in the early days once, and that I didn't hit my head. I didn't get hurt at all. I fell into some leaves and grass, and I was only 6 or 7, so it wasn't very far to fall.

In fact, given that I have biked approximately 10,000 kilometers in adulthood and perhaps 1000 in youth, it's remarkable that I've only fallen about a dozen times, and among them my injuries included only two or three scraped knees, one scraped shoulder, and a strained neck. My last helmet was damaged enough to replace merely on the basis of how many times I had dropped it on the garage floor. I even crashed my last bike into a parked van and its handle-bar column snapped in half. The car had not a mark, and my neck was a little sore.

I love covering new ground. Seeing what a place has that I've never been to before. I love the sight of hot yellow sun on acres of trees. The smell of green, yellow, purple, and pink of the outside barely tamed by man. The rhythm of the peddling and typically quiet backdrop of insects and birds, some crunch of gravel and the punctuation of a passing car. It's a calming, familiar sound. I love the roads less traveled and the crumbling infrastructure of things you can't even tell what they were once. Knowing that some old local could say, 'that was a such and such, my friend's dad worked there. It got bought out and then closed...' The hot sun beats down, its rays breaking down the bonds, the rain breaking down the bonds, the roots breaking it down, and you can feel it slowly crumbling as you roll by and wonder. I love rolling through some minute town so far from anything and wondering, 'what in the world do you DO here?' I love stopping to rest and drink water under a gnarled old tree on the side of a farm that was planted to break the wind on that field a hundred and fifty years ago. The hard rides calm my body with that runner's high. I wrote a poem about it last year or the one before.

Thirsty by a cornfield on SR 42
between nothin' much and maybe some good ribs
yearning for what's lost, what cannot be gained?

(Was me supposed to fill in Simple Ranger)

The black eyed susans and asters
fields of sunflowers at the quarter acre
a creek yonder, once poisoned, now?

near, some city, some widgets are made.

(My shoulder all jangled there)

Fields of purple-pink flowers that grow like weeds,
forests and hills, potholes, penitentiaries,
blown out husks of human endeavor on backroads no longer frequently traveled.

(And who could play! Delirious dreams)

In future posts, I may share my memories from each county and state. Looking at the lists, I'm sure I remember something from every single one. Or I'll forget all about it and not post for another year. Feel free to ask, all three of you who'll read this. That's 39 or so stories right now. We'll need some coffee. 

Your Obedient, 

Ian Hogan, PhD