Night: The perfect time for dark thoughts

The dead are those with great wisdom,

we can put words in their mouths, and the living cannot argue with them

The dead are those who've done great deeds,

and no one is left to remember their humanity

The dead are those who were greatly wronged,

they cannot forgive, and no penance paid will ever be enough

The dead are those who we cannot bear

to accept that we will never see again

So we give them a home among the gods

and pray so that we may join them soon.

No more road trips

Today I made my first flight as a private pilot, taking Debby up to Show Low to visit our cousin Shannon. After lunch we only had about an hour before heading back to return the plane, so she gave us a quick tour of some houses in the area, including a few in the 7-figure range. It's amazing how much people will pay to have a house that they will live in for no more than two weeks a year. I wouldn't mind having a vacation home up there, of course, but even the small ones would run about $300k.

The trip up there was uneventful, but the trip down started around 3:30, just in time to catch the hottest part of the day, so (jargon alert) not only did we have plenty of turbulence and wind shear, but it turns out that the density altitude was about 1700 ft above actual, and since this plane has a service ceiling of 11,000 ft, I was fighting to keep this plane at 8500 ft. Of course, every once in a while I'd catch an updraft, and within a few seconds I'd be about 300 ft higher than I wanted to be. Next time I head up that way on a warm day, I think I'd prefer a plane with more than 160 hp available.

So, who's up for lunch in Sedona in a couple weeks?

I also have a Public Service Announcement:
April is Alcohol Awareness Month. For those of you who are not aware of alcohol, it is a marvelous liquid that can make you happy and self-confident, promotes morality by acting as a truth serum, and allows you to see the inner beauty of others and become much, much less concerned with superficial physical beauty. I know that I myself will become very aware of alcohol about 10 minutes after I've paid by taxes.

Guess what I did today?

If you said "woke up, went to work, had dinner, went to gym, had some drinks, went to bed", you'd be absolutely right (except you'd need to add "wrote a completely inane blog" between "drinks" and "went to bed").

Maybe you're curious what I do while having drinks. Then again, maybe you're a stroke victim. Tonight I had some drinks @ TGI Friday's with my friend Jay. We mostly talked about upcoming movies, music, and vacation plans that will probably never happen.

Movies: "300" will kick ass. It's also coming out in IMAX, which just sounds ridiculous. Also, I almost cried when I heard about the new Fantastic 4 movie, "The Rise of the Silver Surfer", because the Silver Surfer rules, and the Fantastic 4 was one of the worst movies I've ever seen.

Music: Drummers suck. The only reason to deal with them is because you need one to stop playing acoustic. For the moment, I really want to get back on stage, so I'm going to get together with Mike, who has completed his Bar exams, and try to get a few acoustic gigs underway.

Vacation plans: I really want to go to Japan. My main reasons: sake, sushi, and the culture. By "the culture", I of course mean that I'm very attracted to Japanese ladies.

To reward anyone who may have made it this far, I want to leave you with the following thought:

The more confident a person is in their knowledge of a subject, the less they actually know. This is largely because a more knowledgeable person has a much better concept of just how much they don't know. In fact, a good rule to live by is that the only people who are completely confident are the completely ignorant. This is not the actual thought, and hopefully isn't something that you are unaware of, it simply a lead-in to the important thought: The human masses are attracted to, and will always follow, the most confident available leader.

A scary realization

The past 6 months are a complete blur for me. I really don't remember most of what I did in that time. I know that significant things did occur. For example, I achieved a Private Pilot's license. I saw a few movies, went to see a few shows. But the months of September and October are a complete loss to me. The only thing that I remember in October was staying home on Halloween.

November isn't much clearer. I remember going to my friend's birthday party and having a lot to drink, and that's about it for the month. Now that I think about it, I remember the times that I've had a lot to drink more than I remember the sober times.

I definitely remember things that have happened, but I'm having a hell of a time remembering when they happened, or what order they happened in.

The past month has been a little better. At least I remember spending a lot of time at work. I even remember coming across some code that someone had written, and trying to figure out who wrote it, only to find, based on the change logs, that I had written it a couple days beforehand.

So I'm still trying to figure out what's going on. One possibility is that I've lost my mind (not such a stretch, really). Another possibility is that my life, with a few exceptional circumstances, was so incredibly mundane that there's nothing to remember. The explanation I'm leaning towards, though, involves a combination of those two factors, with the fact that learning to fly a plane takes a lot of waking up at 6 in the morning (and consequently a lot of lost sleep for a night owl like me).

So what can I do? I've noticed that my blogging, which has never really been very prolific to start with, was nearly nonexistent in that time period. The couple of entries that I had in that time have helped a little bit in reconstructing the events of the past half-year, as have a few entries in my friend's blog that involve me. We'll see if committing myself to more posts will help me reconstruct the soon-to-be past. Now I just need to find something better that "woke up, went to work, had dinner, went to gym, had some drinks, went to bed" ad nauseam.

I really need to get out of town. At this point, all I need is a destination and a couple days free.