I, Nate Tucker

i just paid my ticket. i hate those guys. hate the system.

Just past 7 am.

I walked out to my car and saw a streak of red in an arch across the driver door.

I used the squeegee from the gas station, and scrubbed. I dipped in the orange bucket, the water was black. And I scrubbed.

I saw the lady at the next pump. She looked at me. And for a second, I thought she knew. She knew I had murdered the old woman myself. Murdered her with the back of an ax.

The red disappeared from my car, but it dripped onto the pavement, not dissappearing at all. And when I touched the handle, it got on my hands, and I knew. I knew I could never escape. I had to turn myself in.

Okay. It was really just ketchup.

I picked six items I would regularly buy at Walmart, and I compared their prices with Alice.com:

Granted, Alice gave me 4 coupons, which saved me $3.35 (which means I can’t get this same deal every day). But Walmart also had several sales–so their prices will fluctuate too.

CONCLUSION: In this study, Alice.com was cheaper. And you can’t argue with cheaper. Alice.com also saves you time (you set its schedule, and the items show up on your doorstep). And did I mention that there’s no shipping costs, ever? So, yes, Alice.com is a good deal.

If you want to streamline your life and save money and time, you should give Alice.com a try.

I just saw one of my coworkers sitting on a bench in the lobby, staring toward the ground, but starting at nothing. I don’t know him well, but he seems to be a smart man. As I walked by, this thought came to me: Depression is a function of the ratio of intellect to vision.

I’ve always liked the lyric, “I think I’m just scared. I think too much.” When I have been depressed, I sometimes wished I could just stop thinking, because it was the thinking that was causing the depression.

An intellectual recognizes the dreariness and hopelessness in life. Some people do not have that sort of intellect. For example, there’s a bum who commutes the opposite direction of me every morning. I see him in his blue hoodie and carhart coveralls. He holds both hands on the shopping cart, and limps along, one foot raised up behind him, his crutches tucked beneath the cart. Of course, I’m making some large assumptions, but I understand that there are lots of resources for a man like that to get back on his feet. Meagan tells me that if a person like that wants help, he can get it (especially in Salt Lake, so near the Church). But it’s this lack of intellect (as I’m calling it) that keeps him from recognizing his situation as a problem. And, not seeing a problem, he has nothing to solve, and not much to get depressed about. (He always strikes me as being surprisingly content in his big fluffy beard.)

My other coworker makes another nice case study: He just turned 40. He recognizes that he’s getting old–that his life is winding down–and this gets him down. Another man might approach that marker obliviously, proving the old adage that ignorance is bliss. Recognizing the problem puts my coworker at a disadvantage to the man who is oblivious. Unless–UNLESS–he lets this recognition move him to the next step…

Vision is the counterbalance to intellect. Intellect lets a man see his problems. Vision lets him react and overcome them. If the bum could see his situation as a problem, vision could then drive him to get help, and then a job and a roof. Intellect reminds the 40-year-old that life is short, but vision could drive him to spend his short lifetime changing the world, instead of playing World of Warcraft.

Again, depression is having an improper balance of intellect and vision.

The solution, then, is either to think less or see more.

(Better to be a happy lunatic than a sad genius. Better still to be a happy genius.)

We’re standing at one of life’s crossroads with two paths before us. They both lead in good directions, but in different directions. Which job offer should I accept? Should I go back to school or keep working up through the company?

What is the right path?

This is often something we take to God with the hope that he will tell us which is right. And sometimes we don’t seem to get an answer. I propose that this is because the path is not the preeminent element of the scene.

We often think of choices like tokens on a game board–move twelve spaces on this path and you’ll end up here. This model causes us to think in terms of one choice being better than another because it gets us closer to some unknown goal.

Let’s change the analogy a bit: Pretend we are sculptors. Our life choices are the choice between which type of clay to use for our sculpture–perhaps it’s between stoneware and terra-cotta clays. Yes, they have different qualities–pros and cons–but both can be shaped into something good. Although the type of clay will effect the outcome, the type of sculptor will have a far greater effect on the result.

Now back to the topic at hand. If the Lord just gives you an easy answer, your choosing is removed and you’re a passive sculptor–a lesser sculptor. But the Lords wants to make you into an active sculptor–a greater sculptor. Thus he lets you choose, and by choosing you become empowered. By choosing, you become a better, stronger person. You become a chooser who has more significance in the scene than the choices themselves.

So what is the right path?

You choosing is the right path.

I chipped a tooth in my sleep last night. Bottom, back-left. You know how some of your molars have rising and falling ridges–like a miniature Wasatch front around the rim? One of the highest peaks is gone, which left a big hole–vacuity, the thesaurus says–and a rough edge, and my tongue keeps poking at it, almost like it’s hoping it can wear it smooth. I hope so too.

This is a striking reminder of my mortality. That part of my tooth will never be there again.

This confirms that I’m grinding. My jaw has been very sore for the last three days. I’ve got to de-stress. I probably swallowed it.

(I thought of this when I was trying to wrap my head around the term Transgression, as mentioned in the Bible.)

(I’m always making abstract concepts into images–in my head at least. Does anyone else do this? Is it helpful? To me it’s essential.)

Something weird happened at work today.

I’ve been a little worried about my inability to stay focused. The problem is that I have the whole internet just sitting right in front of me, taunting me.

I’ll be going along, and then: Oh, I gotta email L. And then after a couple of minutes, T sends me a link to a Scooby Doo redo, and I follow the link. And one distraction always leads to another. It’s terrible.

So one of these many distractions was an RSS feed that said Google was doing a conference on Chrome OS. I couldn’t resist (you know me). So I put it up on my right monitor, and kept working on my spec on the left. Turns out that I didn’t need to watch it, mostly just listen. So I’m listening, and working away. And before I knew it, two hours had gone by, and I hadn’t left my InDesign screen once. Two hours of me staying on task. It was incredible.

The video conference was enough to keep my mind from wandering to other things. But it was undemanding enough that I was able to keep designing away. Hmm.

(Of course, this wouldn’t work if I were writing–too much mental conflict. But designing is a different story.)

There was this new guy at church. I sat next to him, and struck up a conversation with him. That was way out of my comfort zone. (This was in my old ward.) I went to Salt Lake with him and a group for an event at the tabernacle, and chatted with him in the car. I was patting myself on the back for trying to befriend him.

My girlfriend invited him over for dinner. (She was the one who first invited him to church.) She told him I was coming, and he was like, “Who’s that?”

I’m sure he’ll recognize me. But the point is: I obviously wasn’t as friendly as I thought.

* * *

Last night I had dinner at MacCool’s with T. We ordered five half-price appetizers. Sometime in the conversation he mentioned his credit-card debt and his problem with overspending. When the waiter was getting the bill, I said, “Give me the three more-expensive ones.” And T was like, “Let’s just split it half way. It’s not really worth bothering over a couple bucks.”

I’m not as generous as I thought was either.

* * *

And another thing. I write on here with the whole world as my audience, and I act like I know something. But, jeez, what do I know? I’m just a punk kid.