Brain Enema of a Savage Mind

Introductions

A persons life is hard to put in to words. The challenge is greater still when that person is yourself. I face that challenge now - to find select words that will convey, as best is possible, my existence. Knowing a person is an experience. Without knowing them, without having experienced their physical being, it can be difficult to grasp the essence of that person. We are forced to resort to the factory of our mind to produce a theory. The theory of a man. So now I must supply your mind with the raw materials that it needs to begin the process. You will absorb these words. They will seep in to your mind and then it’s up to you. I hope to dispel misconceptions. Perception. It’s all we have. Of course you can look at a picture. This is really where the process of perception begins. With visual stimulation we can come up with certain judgments. It’s human nature to judge on sight. This isn’t wrong - it simply is. The hard part is to understand that these visual cues don’t necessarily have much to do with fact. We can make all the judgments we want based upon a persons image, but seldom does this allow us to delve in to actualities. However, as we are human, it is on image we must begin. Accept the conclusions you came to when first looking at the picture. These are perceptions. Perceive as you will. Now let us introduce the facts.

The Mundane Facts

My name is Alexander Schwartz. No middle initial. It isn’t needed because there is no middle name. Some find this odd. Despite whether it is odd or not, it is fact.I was born in Meadville, PA on March 30th, 1975. I do not, however, consider this my birthplace. While it may be where I actually left the womb, I have no memories of it. I was too young, my brain still too tentative, to form actual memories from that place. My memory, therefor what I consider my existence, began in Raleigh, NC.I am a little below the average height for a male in the United States. While I have been measured several times there is still debate on my actual height. The truth is somewhere around 5 feet, 8 inches. My weight is more or less average for my height. It can be quite variable based upon current eating habits, and levels of beer consumption. I am a white male. That is quite apparent. My ancestry traces back to Poland, Ireland, and Italy. Simply put I am a typical American mutt. I am from nowhere in particular. I am just from here. I am proud of that. I do not tie myself to some culture I have never actually been a part of. The various places I have lived in the US is my culture. Bits and pieces of it make up the whole. I am proud of this as well.

Places I’ve been and things I’ve seen

I lived in North Carolina until after my 7th birthday. I remember the Catholic school I attended for first grade. I have memories of the apartment complex I spent those years in, and of the people I called friends. I remember specific incidents, some of which are mundane, some of which have a sharp clarity in my mind to this very day.In 1982 I moved to Ithaca, NY. I remember arriving there, and meeting my first friend within minutes of getting out of the car. It’s amazing what running wild with a toy gun can do. I lived in the same apartment for the next 11 years of my life. I remember growing up there, forming the basis of what I believe there. People came and went, a few close ones remained. Some friendships don’t go away even with time and distance to contend with. The good memories outweigh the bad, even if my 4 years at Ithaca High School were not 4 years that I cherished. In fact most of those memories I think about only out of necessity, and not out of fondness. In 1993 I attended Niagara University. I had never heard of it before applying there. I was only accepted to a few colleges, and I can’t remember my reason for choosing Niagara. Whatever the reason may have been I certainly do not regret it. The start was rocky, at that point in my life my ability to make new friends had diminished. Fortunately friends made me and life there become a new experience with every breath. After many classes I finally declared English as my major in the spring semester of 1994. My years at Niagara are currently the best of my life. In 1997 I graduated college and moved back to Ithaca, NY. I had nowhere else to go. Shortly after returning I got my first full time job with Cornell University. I moved in to my first apartment by myself. It would be the first of three apartments I would inhabit in Ithaca. The job there was also the first of three full time jobs I would have there. My second apartment I shared with two people. Overall things ran well, there were some minor incidents, and occasionally beer exploded. My third apartment I shared with just one person. It was a better class of apartment, but after a year there it became apparent things were going to change. In 2003, due to unemployment, I was forced to move to Auburn, AL to subside on charity from my parents. The changes was a dramatic one. It was a different culture, certainly a different climate. I had been removed from all my friends, all the social circles, some of which has spanned the course of nearly twenty years. Despite my difficulties, some friendships were cultivated. In the summer of 2004, after a year of life in Alabama, I was given the opportunity to move back north, this time to Newport RI where I lived with my cousin Jay. Alabama wasn’t bad to me, I just didn’t feel it was a place where I wanted to live. I missed winter. As crazy as that sounds it is indeed the truth. When I had the opportunity to move in with Jay in Newport I jumped at the chance. I soon ended up working The Music Box Annex. It’s a store that sells novelty T-shirt and a popular brand of T-Shirts known as Life is Good. I loved many things about Newport but I was never able to cultivate any significant friendships there. After almost a year of living in Newport I moved back, once more, to Ithaca, NY.

Today, looking to tomorrow

Once again I find myself in Ithaca. Despite my protests I find myself inexplicably drawn here. The years away have done me much good. They have taught me a lot about myself, and allowed me to reflect on my life in many ways in which I would never have imagined had I stayed in Ithaca. I have come to realize that while I shall always be a geek at heart I’m not sure that’s where I want my career to take me. To say that I was often unhappy while working in the IT industry would be a vast understatement. There are several things about the field I miss, but as a whole I feel better off without it being a full time part of my life.After a few months here of having problems finding work I pretty much stumbled in to the job I have now. Through second hand sources I knew someone at the Ithaca Beer Company who was leaving. She encouraged me to apply for her job and by the end of June I was the newest employee there. Not only had I stumbled in to a job, but I had ended up finding myself, for the first time in my life, in a job that I loved. Working at the brewery has given me time to think about things and what I want out of life. I’ve always had an interest in beer (not just drinking it, but the science behind it as well), so this job has been something I’ve been able to be very passionate about. I don’t end my work days hating life. For the first time in a very long time I am happy with where I am at.I still have a long way to go. There are more things I want out of life, and the place I’m in won’t be properly suited for that forever. I hope to continue learning about beer and introducing many people to the world of craft beers. I like teaching people about what goes in to the production of beer and various types and styles of beer throughout the world. I also enjoy learning more about it myself as well as discovering more of the science behind designing a truly well crafted brew. After a road trip in the summer of 2005 I fell in love with the state of New Mexico. Ever since then I’ve been toying with the idea of moving out there within the next few years. Currently the idea is to learn more about the brewing world before moving out there so I could continue with a career in the craft brew industry. I think I’ve finally found a career that not only challenges me in many aspects of my life, but that I also have an honest passion for. It just feels right.

Filling the space in between

Most of my creative energies are expended on writing. I write works of fiction, limited amounts of fantasy, poetry when my emotions over take me, and random reflections on life. I’m constantly working on improving my visual creative to the extent that I can - this ever evolving web site is one of the palettes upon which I work. Minimalism in web design has been something I have been very keen on.A vast majority of my life has been spent around computers, so it is no surprise that they are something that take up a great deal of my time. I maintain the server on which this site is run, along with a mail server, and several other server functions. Networking technology fascinates me, and I am always working on expanding my abilities in this area. Network security is also something I have come to enjoy. While I am still limited in this capacity I am hungry with paranoia for it.Movies and music are loves of mine. I watch a great deal of TV and movies. My Tivo is one of my most precious possessions. After the computer, it is the first thing to be set up when I move in to a new place. My tastes in music and movies run the gamut. There is very little country music I will have anything to do with however. And unlike many music lovers, I despise the music video. Sitting on my ass isn’t the only thing I do well. The one thing that challenges my love of computers is hockey. To say I am in love with the sport would be to down play how I feel about it. I’ve played hockey for nearly five years now. I’ve been watching pro hockey for longer than that. Despite their inability to put together a winning season, I am a rabid fan of the Buffalo Sabres. I’m backing to playing in the Ithaca Adult Hockey league (where it all began for me) and hope that I don’t have to take another year off from hockey like I did when I lived in Rhode Island. It’s another passion for me. It’s another facet of the whole.

A Final Analysis

There they are: facts. You can do with them as you choose. You can piece them together, discard them, put each through the microscope and draw whatever conclusions you will from them. They are little pieces of a much larger puzzle - it is a puzzle without end. There are always new pieces to discover, new images to be seen. The image from far away is different from the image up close, but both images are part of the same intricate design. To discard one in favor of the other is to ignore the whole and only focus on a small segment. Life is a sum of its parts, but even the whole is only a piece of something much larger. Things link together. Life flows. All around us change. We have our perceptions and we must use those, along with an understanding that there are no constants, to come to a conclusion about a person. There is only one truth in all of this, that no matter what we divine from the facts given to us, there is always a degree of error, a statistical skew from the norm. Take from this what you will. Filter it through yourself. Learn. Understand. I am.