Writer Ferret at Large

I wrote this way back in 2003 and through the wonders of the interweb, I found an archived copy stashed away and thought I’d repost it here just for the heck of it.

Little Wolf Brother
– Gary D. Foster

Little wolf brother, I will run for you
and share the bite of the frost on our paws

Little wolf brother, I will hunt for you
and the blood of the kill will slake our thirst

Little wolf brother, I will howl for you
and hurl our challenge towards the winter moon

For you are trapped, and I am free
to run and mate and fight
and join my voice with the packsong
on a cold December night.

The wind will never touch your fur
but I am trapped as well,
my soul is caged as surely as yours
within this human shell.

So when the light of the hunter’s moon
shines down and touches me
I’ll raise my voice in challenge
while our spirits both run free.

Today is not a good day.

In fact, it hasn’t necessarily been a good week, or even a good month. Oh, I’ve had worse, and there’s the occasional day like Sunday when everything seems to go right but today… today is one of those funky days. The fees and interest that Sunday charges for being nice to you.

What’s bothering me? Many different things. My job, first and foremost. I’m not happy at all with my job and in fact, I pretty much dread going to work each day. Every morning it’s a battle to get myself motivated enough to climb into the car and head to work. It’s not that it’s a particularly horrible place to work, it’s just not the right place for me at all. I don’t fit in, they’ve reclassified my job and I’m doing help desk and customer support tasks now and of course there’s the continual issue of nobody every really talking to me.

Sometimes I want to just pound my head on my desk all day.

Home is aggravating me too. Rox and I seem to be at odds a lot lately. Nothing in particular or dangerous (I hope) but we just don’t seem to be clicking into the same groove like we usually do. I remember way back when I was going to a counselor and trying to stave off the death of my first marriage when the counselor told me that generally within the first couple of years there is always a sort of power struggle in the relationship. She warned me that things would be turned upside down during this power struggle and it was a normal part of wearing down the rough corners and settling into a married groove.

I think that might be what’s happening here. At least, I certainly hope that’s all that’s happening. I see a pretty big difference in the way we interact and it bothers me. I worry constantly that my wife is unhappy and this worry then just feeds into MAKING her unhappy, so it becomes this self-fulfilling self-destructive cycle. I know I worry too much and I know that I’m often a little too sensitive to the currents and moodswings that are in the air. I can’t help it, it’s just who I am. I work on it all the time, yes, but it’s still something that exists in me and needs to be acknowledged even if I don’t like being that way and am trying to change it.

I don’t think it’s wrong to want her to be happy. I have at least learned not to sacrifice my own mental sanity for this and I’m finally grown up enough to admit that I can’t make her happy, but I do believe I can make her unhappy. I’m also codependent enough that making her happy makes me happy. I don’t think that’s a bad thing either. I like it when she’s happy. She’s beautiful when she’s happy. Ok, she’s beautiful when she’s unhappy too, but that’s like saying a thunderstorm is beautiful. It is, but it’s a bit frightening too.

Anyway, I am constantly working on trying to balance my own wants and needs against hers; my own happiness against hers and my own dreams and ambitions against hers. I’ve made the mistake in the past of completely subsuming myself for the sake of another person and that was incredibly stupid of me. I’m not going to fall into that trap again. However, that doesn’t mean I can’t be cognizant of how we fit and mesh together as equals. In fact, I try very hard not to swing the pendulum the other way and only think about myself either. I’m looking for that mythical magical balance point.

I don’t think I’m going to find that balance point anytime soon but I sure hope I’m wrong.

Sometimes sundays fall together and just “work”, you know what I mean?

Up early this morning with my lovely wife and shared a pot of the last of my homeroasted Sweet Maria’s blend French Roast. She took off to spend the day in Sac-town with her sister and I puttered around. I made myself a great breakfast (bacon, eggs, hashbrowns) to start everything off right.

After that I put together a loaf of whole wheat bread using my house recipe (I bake all of our own bread… although I cheat and use a bread machine). Then I roasted a half pound of Ethiopan Yirga Cheffe in my new Behmor 1600. After that roast, I pulled out a half pound of Brazilian Daterra Santa Colomba and roasted it up too, so after 3 or 4 days rest we should have some really good coffee. Seems such a waste to put it through the drip machine and I’ll use the Bodum as much as I can.

The Yirga Cheffe was the last of my stash of that bean. The first half pound (of a 1 lb batch) was my first roast ever and, well, it sucked really bad. I was very paranoid and way underroasted it, stopping the roast just as the bean started to enter first crack. The resulting coffee is sour and honestly upsets my stomach. This time I roasted it to all the way to just into 2nd crack, probably somewhere around a FC+ level but definitely not to Vienna like I normally like (I’m not very good at determining final roast level numbers yet). Everyone says roast this bean to a regular city roast and it will bring out the lemon and citrus but I’m going to have a hard time breaking my dark roast habit I think.

The Daterra is another bean that’s getting a lot of press although the Santa Colomba is (I believe) a blend and not the top quality. I tried to just let it run through a normal P3 profile on the Behmor without me fiddling with it just to see what would happen. I maxed the half pound P3 profile to 15:30 and just let it rip, and it ended the roast just as the very first signs of 2nd crack were starting. This is a definite full city roast and we’ll see how it tastes after a few days.

After roasting coffee and cleaning up the garage I planted some cucumbers and Purple Queen bush beans. The snails and slugs ate all my red lettuce so I repurposed that part of the garden by building a couple of cucumber mounds. We have terribly thick clay soil so I’m not expecting much but we’ll see what happens.

After that I busted out some chores on the honeydo list, hanging robe hooks on the back of the door and installing a new light fixture. Then it was off to Sacra Tomato to pick up the wife (she drove a car up there to sell it, so she needed a ride back). Back home, then she jumped into bed (poor thing, she’s getting sick again and had the chills). I stayed up a bit longer, puttered around the house a little bit, played a couple of City of Heroes missions and then crawled into a nice warm bed chock full of dogs, cat and wife.

Yeah, it was a good Sunday.

I hate cell phones. No, let me rephrase that, it’s not quite correct. I loathe cell phones. There, much better. Cell phones are truly the work of the devil and I hate them with a passion. I have never had a cell phone that I liked, only ones that I tolerated.

Every single cell phone I had except for my very first one (a nokia candy-bar style phone) aggravated me for one reason or another. The nokia didn’t aggravate me, but then cell phones weren’t super fancy gadgets then and I had a lot more tolerance. My motorola slvr drove me up a tree until I dropped it into a bucket of sanitizer, quickly sanitizing it out of existance. The motorola razr I replaced it with (a free one from a friend) wasn’t nearly as bad, but it still was a chore to talk on with horrible sound quality unless I used the blue tooth headset. It was tolerable with the headset but only just barely.

Well, I went ahead and took the plunge and replaced my razr with… (drumroll please) an Apple iPhone. Now, this phone has been overhyped beyond belief. It’s been shoved in our faces and down our throats by all the hip coolhunter trendsetter types until you just want to scream IT IS JUST A PHONE FOR CRIPE’S SAKE before you take out an automatic weapon and start hosing down all the smarmy hipsters who are hawking it.

Boy… either I’m getting soft in my old age or I SERIOUSLY misjudged the hype on this thing because I’m here to tell you, it lives up to the hype. Yes, you heard me correctly, this thing is truly the Jesus phone. I absolutely love it and after only two full days of having it I can’t imagine giving it up. This thing successfully marries so many different technologies, so many communication mediums, and it’s got the typical Apple “it just works” gloss and sheen. There’s no fumbling, no swearing, no wondering “how the hell do I do insert random task here“. It … just … works.

Apple… when they nail something, by God they nail it. I never thought I’d ever hear these words come out of my mouth but I love my cellphone.

I have lost the ability to be alone. I used to be extremely comfortable being alone but somewhere along the way I’ve become accustomed to a (sometimes) chaotic household with two dogs, a cat and a noisy morning person wife who delights in tormenting me when I’m sleep-addled. My wife has been out of town for two weeks and I’m about to go stir crazy.

I went from a crazy chaotic job environment in the video game industry to a quiet, conservative telecom programming job where I spend most of the day buried in a code editor and not talking to a single soul. I come home after work to a house with two hungry dogs who, although I love them dearly, just can’t seem to carry on a conversation with me. I bump around the house making myself dinner, cleaning up, messing around on the computer a little bit and then going to bed. All without speaking more than 10 minutes of conversation to a person throughout the day.

I’m not good at this. In fact, it sucks. I miss my wife and I’ll be very glad when she comes home. I’m married for a reason… I’m married because I love my wife and more important than that, I like her too. I miss her and I’ll be glad when comes home, even if she does make up crazy lyrics and purposely mangle The Piano Man just to drive me crazy.