Systems Theory

My head is full and my heart is empty. Another day another day another day, marching towards graduation. Like so many other mornings I sit in a lecture picking up what the professor puts down on the board. Outside snow dances in the twilight, pirouetting in the icy winds. Its odd, I’ve been going here for years but it still feels like a foreign place. I know the best sitting places for charging my laptop, the best bathrooms with the fewest people, the fastest routes above and below ground to each building, but it still feels all wrong. And the snow falls falls falls painting an unfamiliar world in a cold wet layer.

The function of a silicon diode is relatively simple. A voltage is applied and as it approaches a certain limit the current it allows through increases in an exponential relationship. So simple so simple so simple yet it is the ground on which the entirety of modern computing technology is built. From it came the transistor, and from the transistor came the logic gate. AND OR NOT NOR NAND XOR INV the names of the roots from which springs adders and subtractors, multiplexers and demultiplexers, ROM and RAM. Even further still ALUs, registers, I/O interfaces, and on into CPUS and GPUS. How brilliant to learn the foundations of a world most take for granted?

Yet still still still I sit here waiting for something to happen. I know it all, I test well, I see the pattern language of which the entire world is composed yet nothing nothing nothing feels like it should.

When I was a kid I had visions of university life. Fiery social situations, art and soul everywhere, adventure and new experiences. Yet, the experience I came to learn was one of quiet and solitude. New experiences, sure, but rare. In general, more of the same with a slightly different coat of paint. Maybe I was desensitized to new things in the same way our eyes perceive color less vibrantly as we age. How horrible? Irreversible magic death. Nothing new under the sun sun sun so they say.

Have you ever seen a picture of a city in Russia during the blue hour? Let me paint it for you. A single light on in an endless Soviet apartment block. Gray skies and yellow street lights. The dull dull dull grays of a life among the ruins. Its cozy isn’t it? To imagine a sparse apartment, a jar of pickles in a cupboard, and a loaf of bread on the counter. A couch with holes in the fabric. A television older than the students who live there. Strangers strangers strangers in a homely homely homely land.

Alienation. Not a nation of aliens or a strange EDM artist from 2004. Alienation. Having no place. I know so much about how the parts fit together. I know about how the wholes interact into even larger wholes. Systems within systems systems systems ever and ever increasing in complexity. I know how it all works. I could build the infrastructure. Yet it doesn’t work for me. And I feel the same same same.

The Talking Heads, surely you’ve heard of them? “Same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was” David Byrne would echo with increasing hysteria into the microphone on Once In a Lifetime. “Well, how did I get here?” he would ask before launching into the chorus. A question I ask myself frequently. Where is that social ecstasy, the fire of life, community and camaraderie? I see how all these silicon parts fit together, a world designed with interlocking systems, yet outside the people seem ever more disconnected. I can piece all the systems in the world together, but the human factor remains out of reach. So I sit here, my head full and my heart empty. Waiting waiting waiting.

Guest Book

I was browsing old websites from the early 2000's and was fascinated by looking through the guest book pages. People left messages that have survived decades untouched like hieroglyphs on the walls of digital pyramids. So let's add one to The Silent Page! If you visit this site, leave a comment on this page with your name, a note, or anything else you want to save for the future! Cheers to us a few decades from now!

The Apartment (From the Cutting Room Floor)

Hello dear readers, welcome to a new format for posts here on the Silent Page! The Cutting Room Floor series will be pieces that are unfinished and probably won't ever be finished but I think are worth sharing. This first one is saved under the name "The Apartment" and tells the story of a young man cleaning out his grandfather's apartment after he passed away. 

As part of this series I will also analyze the piece to explain what I was going for, elucidate the writing process, and hopefully make it make sense.

This was my grandfather’s apartment. He lived here in the city for almost his entire retirement. In the past he had worked as a technician, repairing high tech simulators for pilots. His knowledge of applied electronics was beyond that of even the best grad students at the local university. The apartment reflected this. Technical books and drawings on tables, scopes and meters on the walls, a workbench messy with projects only he understood. The faint smell of warm solder still hung in the air.

As you can tell these sentences are pretty rough, but I was trying to setup the grandfather to be similar to my own who was a big inspiration to me. I was sort of shooting for the old "skilled technician who shows that experience outweighs knowledge" stereotype.

I stand at the threshold to his world, a manila envelope of paperwork in hand.

I personally really really like the imagery of this line. Our narrator is both literally at the threshold to the apartment but is also figuratively at the threshold to his grandfather's life as he steps into the task of organizing his things. The idea was for this story to revolve around the process of packing and labelling someone's life after they passed away - a task I was privy to with my late grandfather and one I found both disturbing and strangely beautiful. 

It was a cold day in October when I got the call. My grandfather was in the hospital, cancer, aggressive, nothing they could do. I sat down on a bench outside the building with my head in my hands. People passed by, no one said anything. Here was my inspiration in life, dying on the other side of town. I had always wanted to be like him, he had inspired me to pursue these studies and now he wouldn’t see their completion. I don’t know how long I was like that for, but I was snapped out of my rumination by the old math professor leaving to his next class. “Are you ok?” he had asked but I didn’t respond. He sat next to me in the silence. Eventually he left me to my own melancholy.

I started this project on a cold day in early October. Decided it was thematic enough of a season to base the story's exposition in. The character's sadness over his grandfather not getting to see where he ends up after being inspired by him is a personal experience I had and one I wanted to capture in the story. I think the professor's actions are a little strange and I needed to do a rewrite of the ending of the paragraph to make it less disjoint.

A few days later an envelope arrived in my mailbox. Apparently, I had been put down in the will as the one responsible for cleaning out my grandfather’s apartment. Evidently, my extended family had more important matters to attend to.

Here is where I started tying the exposition back to the story. From here it was going to be established that the narrator was the only one in the family who would handle the task of cleaning the apartment and we would follow him as he reflects on what he knew of his grandfather's life. I had little vignettes for a few different mementos he finds that were going to explore the story of his late grandfather and their relationship. I may still explore these concepts in future work but for now this is the station where the train of thought stops.

Overall, its definitely a rough, unfinished draft but I see potential in the ideas and general story outline. What do you, dear readers, think of this style of post? Yay or nay? I kind of like the idea of taking things I'll never finish and exploring them in this manner. I, personally, like seeing how authors/song writers/poets break down their works and expose their inner thought process but that may just be me. Proper pieces soon to come, stay tuned!

(Also, as an aside, if anyone has a knack for being artsy I would love to collaborate on images for these posts. I want to move away from stock images and towards lovely, original work. Reach out at the contact email if interested! - Silent Partner)

You Don't Wanna

This is an excerpt from a larger piece I'm working on. Some of you may know where it came from. Obviously, memory and imagination have filtered the experience. Thanks for reading!

“No limit to the limit – I thought I told ya. You don’t wanna go to war with a soldier” the drill sergeant calls out into the morning air, cutting like a bayonet through the marching boots. Soldiers go to war. That’s nothing new. Its another day of training for Alpha Company – a company of engineers in training. Not the six-figure salary kind. The kind who clear minefields and demolish bunkers. The kind with an eighty percent casualty rate. The kind who die.

The faces of the marching troops are as diverse as the reasons they signed up. Immigrants looking for citizenship. White kids from the midwest with nothing left. College students earning their tuition – swapping books for boots. A grown man hoping to provide both an example and some money for his kids. Ideological zealots with a desire to become dangerous. The list goes on. Today they all march to the same cadence. “Hooh – Haah – I wanna slap somebody! Hooh – Haah – I wanna leave them bloody!”

It’s a violent place by nature. Every day and every action is accompanied by violent imagery. These trainees will be the next set of bodies on the tip of the spear. “Engineers – lead the way!” they’d shout while spacing themselves to march. For all their pride, the bleeding edge is what makes their task so fatal.

I’m stuck in a small formation behind them. They call us “holdovers” – a group just as varied as the company we fell out from. Some of us had discipline problems. A few couldn’t take the stress. Others realized they made the wrong choice. One of us, a grown woman, is losing her mother. An unlucky few of us are injured to the point of becoming non-trainers. All of us walk – out of step – together. Following the main company to wherever it travels. Right now that happens to be towards breakfast.

I fall into the realization category. I had joined as a Guardsman – with a desire to be a first responder during disasters in my community. I chose to be an engineer because they told me that I would be first into the disaster zone. I wanted to pull people from rubble – not make it. I wanted the adventure. I wanted to be a hero when heroes were needed. I wanted to save people.

But, the reality of training is death – not saving lives but taking them. Potentially, losing yours in the process. A heroic sacrifice? Sure, in the right circumstances. But I see nothing heroic in dying in the desert far away from the community I took an oath to protect.

“Motivated – Dedicated – I thought I told ya. You don’t wanna go to war with a soldier.”

My only motivation is to go home. My only dedication is getting out. And I sure don’t want to go to war as a soldier.

“Company – Halt!” and the boots fall for the last time in front of the dining facility. “The order of chow is – One – Three – Two – What's the order of chow?” each platoon in the company calls back in order. It’s like something out of an educational cartoon. “Ready – Shift!” and the neatly formed platoons shift themselves into two ordered columns. Us holdovers loosely form up behind them. We barely dress right dress or cover down – and it shows. What use do we have for the almost theatrical discipline of the main company? We're quitters. Our only focus is home.