the world has turned and left me here

diver

Here's the approach to Siemens. Even though I was quite a ways away when I took this, you still can't see the entire thing. To give you an idea of just how big this thing is (since for some reason I seem to be determined to impress upon you a sense of largeness, so start getting impressed already), I walked out on the wrong side one day and it took me 15 minutes of skirting the perimeter to get back to my bike. In the picture you can see poppies in the foreground. I was wowed by them the first couple times, but since then have seen open fields that are nothing but poppy-red dabs of paint, poppies, poppiesssssss, my pretty, cackle cackle.

Ahem. Discovered the forest nearby, and I mean forest in the strictest sense of the word. I was riding the infertilizer. My launchpad was this dome hill in the middle of a children's playground, about 10 feet high. The sign by the playground had a crossed-out picture of pretty much everything interesting you could imagine yourself doing in this little playground, and said something about only allowing children under 14, but in the moment I felt about 14, and this was a launch, okay? From on top of this thing I got some pretty good speed shooting into the forest. Once inside it was dark, with tall, branchless pine trunks all around but a thick canopy above. Pine needles on the ground, fern, moss. Root tangles made the ride jittery in places. Then there was this transition in which things suddenly went from somewhat dark to spooky-movie dark, and the trees seemed to close in, and I started having to duck branches. I thought, turn back you fool, can't you hear the ominous background music and see it all coming?

But I got out of there okay. There were lots of paths leading in all directions. Eventually I found myself on the edge of the forest again, with a green field on my left. It was getting towards dusk (ah late summer days). Then I noticed some deer in the field up ahead, perking up at the sound of my bike on gravel. Or were they big rabbits? I couldn't tell, my eyes were pretty blurry from the fast ride, so I decided to slowly get closer. It turned out they were deer, mutant dwarf deer, couldn't have been much more than half the size of whitetails. I threw caution by the wayside and raced past them while they just stared, motionless, about 20 feet away, their heads pivoting slowly. Failed to make an impression apparently.

It's like this: during the day, at work, I sink deeper and deeper into this (stupor?) (hypnotic state?) frame of mind in which only me and my code, only the internal monologue and the program I'm working on coexist. In the evening, after work, I try to swim back to the surface. To actually taste food again and not be thinking something like "did I remember to handle bottom-up bitmaps?" and chewing but not really tasting. To talk to people, look them in the eye, think about them as people and not just a bundle of electromagnetic and acoustic stimuli that I must respond to, but are distracting me from my work at the moment. To feel things. It is this swim-to-the-bottom, float-to-the-surface oscillation that has become the daily way for me. My brain has inertia and I can't just pop out of one world and into another, it takes time. (To quote Jonas, I can't simply "close the drawer.")

And right now, sitting around writing this, I'm sinking in again. Gasp...up!