Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Fata Morgana




(unknown)


For those readers that take joy in telling me, just act younger, and you'll feel younger... : I pinched a nerve in my back lifting one side of a piano, lifting it as any young man might. I was finally getting rid of the carpet that has been here since I dumbly bought it online and then had it delivered from Home Depot. 

For those readers that believe me to be almost gay, read that last sentence again. 


I rode my bike today in the heat, intentionally going more slowly than I would normally, trying to enjoy it. It was simply different, not decidedly preferable. Portions of the ride felt more endured than enjoyed. There is something about my heart beating wildly that still tickles something that I am in love with.

For those readers who like thumping things. 


I spend a fair amount of my time while riding also reminiscing. I have been doing a lot of it lately, too much perhaps. I enter a meditative zone easily when following fast a familiar route. The repetition buried in the act allows calming clarity in which voice gets to hear voice anew. When it is tranquil, when I can hold on to it, it leads to something that resembles wistfulness, a breath of suadade. 


I catch myself shaping again some smooth recollection in the dark, glossed by time, in defiance of fact. Lost and in lost love with some vanished thing that struck a glimmer within the inner-amber, preserved as outline of artifact. 


As the hill up to the vineyard approaches, the voice of skepticism gives rise, mounts yet again a sound argument, one not against validity, but of the privileging, the allowing. To resuscitate shadows long gone, worn as utensils. 


Some lack the capacity for self-honesty, others thirst the open opportunity of it. I am happy enough to have moments in which I permit them to be. When I am not abusing memory I can sometimes see the shape of self inside of it, recognizing the voice that speaks to be a mirage that tattles its tales of miraging.



I asked myself a question at the end of today's ride: Was it fun, or did you spend the whole time concentrating?

For those readers who like episodic adventure, we'll discuss q6-concentrate tomorrow.






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Monday, May 30, 2016

As you would like to be...






Just like that, Memorial Day Weekend is over. Well, there is still today, the actual day. We are meant to reflect upon those that have given their lives for this country, theirs, in military service. Our country seems good at making new examples for us to reflect upon. I question whether or not there have been any justified wars in my lifetime, a lifetime that includes Vietnam. I have argued that Saddam needed to be taken out of power, though it seems that we perhaps should have waited and conducted an all-drone surgical operation on Iraq, even though I have been very skeptical at my country's use of drones for the purpose of political assassination. 

Let's not get into all of that right now. I have become a far less political person since losing my Twitter war with Donald Trump.

Remember when Saddam was hung to his death by a rope? When Gaddafi was beaten to death in the street? How is it even possible that Arafat died comfortably of a stroke?


Well, if I am not going to discuss the death of American soldiers then it seems rather expedient for the purpose of writing a post to move right past them and on to world leaders who have lost their lives while also presumably being removed from the service of their own countries, excluding Palestine, of course, as they are more of an internment camp that seeks political asylum than what has been allowed to be thought of as a country.

Dying for their country takes on a different meaning when the person in question actually believes that the country is their possession.  To die for the country of your birth is not quite the same, is it. 


Speaking of Palestine, I like Jews, especially the smart Ashkenazi ones, and also the ones we have here in the US. My Jewish friends are the most warm and loving of the friends that I have. When they invite me to dinner I feel at peace and comfortable in their homes. Safe, even. I sometimes wish that I would have been born into a Jewish family. I must be the only Irish-Catholic that ended up without relatives.

Well, I have a brother, but he does not seem Jewish to me at all. His mysticism is not like mine. I doubt that he even knows the choreography to a single Madonna video.

Have I escaped the political conversation yet?

Soon. Work with me.

I also like Latino families, except for the strong sense that one gets not to disagree with mom or dad at the dinner table. Padron y Madron. At least within my Jewish friends' homes you are expected to speak your mind and even respectfully disagree with mom or dad. You are given the free space to express an idea, if done so with wit and charm. The only faux pas is that of being tedious. You'll know because the conversation will abandon you. The surest way to alienate yourself in a Jewish home is to have nothing of interest to say.

It should be the rule everywhere: Speak unto others...





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Sunday, May 29, 2016

"Underneath the sycamore tree…"






Little by little, I am slowly learning to cook. Until yesterday I had avoided using pre-prepared dishes, except for the occasional box of mac-n-cheese, made quickly, ostensibly for the boy though it ends up being  part of my meal also. Once completed, I am drawn to its buttery orange-ness. I need a recipe that is easy to make and a better vessel for nutrients than is the Kraft version. It should not be that difficult. 

As with most things I was learning to cook in an unnecessarily difficult way, from scratch. I wanted to experience the unadulterated sensation of culinary failure rather than the secret victory of using a Zatarain's box of black beans and rice, but I was very wrong-headed. There is still plenty of failure to be enjoyed out of a box. I slightly undercooked the rice and beans, and then I didn't let it sit long enough after taking it off the heat, but I have another dish under my belt: blackened chicken and New Orlean's style rice.

I'm nearly creole, now.

Blackening the chicken was fun and works well with what I am already accomplished at, baking chicken. 



Speaking of secrets…. I have a new reader here. They have been reading anywhere from 100-200 pages a day. It won't last long. I know. But it is odd and exciting to see someone devouring my past in this way. Binging - it is what draws people to the game of bingo. The thrill of it all. The poor man's Eureka!

I suspect it's a woman, my new reader. They can be so lovely. I am always disappointed to find out that some old friend of mine from my middle school bus stop has discovered my blog. They'll finally reach out one day and write in their understated tones: Man, you were always fucking weird. I new it. I new it, bro.

I want instead for their ex-wife and daughter to be reading. It's called vanity, and it can strike anyone, though it has its favorite targets. When men like my writing I think right away that there's something wrong with them. Why can't they see the glaring errors and inconsistencies? The laziness? But when a woman likes something about me then the clouds part, it becomes clear that we share a private understanding about things, a sacred trust that should be nurtured, a seed planted in the dark.

When men compliment me I can not help but think that they should go back to school, maybe a remedial course at a local college. Something, anything. Pull yourself together.


To whomever my new reader is: keep your little secret well hidden from your husband. I've tried to make this site one that leaves no trace in your browser history, but Google is and has been against my plan. For years I tried to make this site one that self-destructs shortly after publishing. Some might say that I've succeeded.

That is just one method of converting an innocent secret into a dirty one: hiding the things that you read. Don't worry, my little reader, I'll be your private confidant. We'll play a little game I learned in high school called hush-hushkeep it down now, voices carry.

No, I jest. I would never enact such a scenario with a married woman, though I suspect that my reader is not yet married. Your secret is safe with me, sweetness. I'll only write and talk about it, nothing more, I promise. In fact, I'm not even sure what our secret is yet, other than I can see you reading pages here and that your reading habits reveal you to be a human. You let me know when you want me to know. All I know is that you're reading about a hundred to two hundred pages a day and have been for a few days in a row now, even over the weekend, and also that this thing is meant to be.

Is it even possible to stalk someone unknown that is on the verge or already is stalking you? If so, I think I just succeeded on some level. I don't use Google Analytics, which would give me much more granular insight into my new little mystery, like relative location, which crosses slightly over into creepiness.

I'm going to turn this into a dating site, one way or another.



That link above is worth clicking on and watching that video, or this one. While unrelated to what I was writing beyond the phrase quoted, hush-hush, the video brought back some pleasant 80's memories coming up close, while the questions in thousands take flight.


If my new reader does not quite remember the 80's then don't feel bad at all, and do not about such things worry my obscured delight. I wouldn't have wanted you to have endured the 80s, or even most of the 90s. That's all fine and well with me. Age needn't be an issue with us, but you have already felt that. If not, then take some time to feel it now.

I'll leave this here for you so that you won't think me just some strange man popping off about the glory days of pop music. I can pop off about any number of other things, you must know.









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Saturday, May 28, 2016

Speak, Memory





I went to the local sushi restaurant, to prove something to myself. As part of an unrelated challenge I ordered a rainbow roll off the menu, an atypical selection to my normal sashimi. It occurred to me that perhaps the boy claims to like the plain raw fish so much only because I have announced my great love for it. Pretty simple mistake, anybody could have made it. I've been watching his sushi selections when we share elsewhere. I think he might have initially overstated his lifelong love for sashimi.

The kid is nothing if not heroic.

As I was sitting in the sushi place I began to chat with another lone man at the bar. Our talk required that I establish unnecessarily that I have a four year old son, which somehow directed the conversation towards drinking sodas and eating junk food. There was talk of game rooms and ice cream parlors, the burger joints of the past. I was reminded of the charge and sliding rush of freedom that accompanied adolescence. 

I went quiet and stared at the counter for a lost lifetime, reminiscing.

I remember politely saying goodbye.


—————————


I had a dark spot in the corner of my eye. It was growing. When inspected closely, touched by the precise nail of a mother's hand trying to clear it from the eye, then it appeared to be just under the pink flesh. And it was. 

It was a small cluster of cells that grew together unexpectedly, a mole. The pigment had darkened through exposure to the sun. It had been growing. A trip to the hospital, the navy base. Orlando. This was before we started going to the VA that was just outside the gates and before the cemetery when leaving. The base experience was routinized - past the guards, slowly by the torpedoes and the statued shells of the too-small-to-be-real fighter planes, the decorations of a military.

We would buy groceries at the commissary with mom, with dad when the weekends went weird. 

This would be presented as an adventure. I see all of that now. There were some actual adventures, which were formally called vacations; weekends at the local lake, with the city park populated by many other navy families, fishing from the dock using small pieces of hot dog on a hook, catching nothing, short drives to rv camps on the coast, small cement game rooms that we were encouraged not to be in after sundown, its poverty of boredom. The accumulation of passing days happening so slowly as to hardly matter.

Those trips to the commissary with mom, the stated intention of the times. 

The summers then must have been paradise to those who were used to anything worse. I was born into them. There is a brightness that gets into everything that can not be washed out. It is torturous and unforgiving, growing subtropical roaches from the accretion of excess humidity. It's a process called Spontaneous Gas Stations. Giant glowing frogs have taken off like swamp fires all across the south. They're what people used to call lightning bugs.


The visits to the eye doctor and the subsequent surgery were more pointed as recollections than the others. The operation had been talked about by the family in calming tones, consolations that preceded my quietly growing inner child hysteria. It was my brother's imagination that functioned in place of my own with runaway visions. He whispered the hints of blindness and questioned what getting a needle stuck in your eye would feel like and wouldn't all of the eye just run out onto the floor. And it would. Of course it would.

The moment arrived. Florida, 1973 or '76

My mother wore a dress as it mattered, when asserting motherhood is what the moment called for. I remember hers that day, the cascading pastel green look of it in front of me, and that it partially concealed each oncoming set of swinging doorways, leading to each following hallway, administration offices, nurse stations, gurneys, the inner chambers of adulthood. The complex was just that, a maze made of questions. I, a lost apparition in the apparatus, following the waves of the dress closely and without option. 

Base hospitals glow with institution. If the color changes it changes nothing concerning the sense of being there. Its essence is essence-less, as if they've determined how to extract from a color that thing that makes it colorful. It reminds one always of something else, a disaffecting familiarity.

At the gym, sometimes when I am being self-cruel, I tell myself that the military might have worked for me. You just never know. Those weird things you allow when discipline becomes a private conversation or convention, and it can.


My brother was there. The procedure was not severe, otherwise I would have been blind to the presence of others waiting outside the operating room. Instead, my brother's screams for doctorly mercy from the hallway and my mother's attempts to manage him while still being there for me had been the whole point of me telling this story. Our family had divisions, and we three were one of them.


The first needle is to administer local anesthesia. No delivery of that kind had any meaning to me. Its effects were as irrelevant as compound interest. There was a piece of fabric placed over everything except the eye, my portal to Egypt. I was surrounded by lights, a small gaggle of adults hovered near my head, then there was the doctor. It of course began.

Screams and begging, the doctor's hands pushing me down, the nurses holding my arms and shoulders, my legs kicking wildly and freely, twisting as the front half of the abdomen and spine would allow, my head in a lock brace designed for children, the eye with a contraption on it that prevented me from blinking, from being anywhere else, from seeing anything except needle and the oncoming fist that held it to its target destination.

It all approached, along with the chaos. The pain was tremendous. This child's imagination dedicated itself to fear and fight. What could Jesus ever do for me after something like that, after the needle. The plungers of the dreaded device echoed the shape of crucifix. 

I would never quite recover. The next needle was much larger, by necessity, and much too soon at the time, by process. It was designed to remove the cluster of cells, and allowed reverse traffic upwards along the metal of its cylindrical shape for this very purpose: extraction. I could see that, though I did not quite know it. At its moment, terror only tells one thing. It did.



Few children have practical experience with local anesthesia. I was among the lucky ones that had no need for training and repeated explanation, parental consolations. I would have made an awful diabetic, just terrible at it. Sickness requires something that I lack. I never quite know what sickness wants. It robs me, but of what I can not always tell.

There arrives a point where terror causes the release of endorphins, though it need not always be that. Life becomes otherly; I went within. The sensation is to suffer in slow motion, and from a distance, to feel somehow objectively about it all, to see your panic rather than feel it. In fear, there can emerge a magicality of getaway, the essence of escape - silent voices of seclusion, whispering their odd and alluring message.

Its only demand to keep close its memory.












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Wednesday, May 25, 2016

The Gears of Indulgence






Not drinking doesn't actually help me much, if at all. I have purchased a few new things recently, and then lost some important pieces - a flash umbrella sheath and a usb drive. The umbrella sheath can be somewhat easily replaced. The thousands of images on the drive can not. Or, it would take me a very long time to recreate them, and none would be the exact same. The boy might find it fun at first, but that feeling would give way quickly to tedium.

The end result being that I lost thousands of pictures. There were some good ones in there, I had thought, and I had hoped to go through them to preserve the best among them. Why I put the usb drive in my pocket to go to work is beyond me. I suspect that I lost it at the parking lot on Mission St. when I was paying the attendant and getting my car. The new drives are impossibly small. They resist ongoing personal possession.

All of this loss seems to be the result of near total sobriety, which has become my new sworn enemy. If I am going to lose things I want it to be the result of intoxication, not clarity.

The loss hurts, a bit. The heart attaches to images, essences captured, hopefully preserved. The heart is like a child, it has little use in understanding things, it just wants. What mine wanted was to keep the pictures I had taken.  

Ah well, I will learn to live differently. That is easy enough to do. My life is so self-indulgent and intemperate at times that almost any change ends up being for the better. To live life I must place a little regular confidence in my craziness and luck. The two forces fight for attention in the vanity fun mirrors of my mind. I must be more willing to lean on the erraticism a bit, not back down from the expectations of my own organized lunacy. 

Loss wrenches the gears of indulgence. 



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Tuesday, May 24, 2016

"The road to hell is paved with unbought stuffed animals."




(Photo by Pat O'Toole)


It is too late for a post today. My day is already trotting towards a gallop, whether I tighten the reins or not.

Today would have been my father's birthday. I believe that he would have been 84. I still have his phone number in my phone. It feels odd to delete it, or to even ask why it feels odd. CS said that having your father die changes a man

He was right.


I have been good at a number of things I've tried in life, but I was never very good at maturing. When I look at people who excelled at it there are only a handful of results that I find desirable, and a tremendous number of qualities that I do not. So, I suppose I made a mature decision to avoid it, or that's what I'd like to tell myself anyway. If I tell myself that often enough I can get others to be skeptical of it.

I gravitate towards those who are likewise whimsical, even defective. I don't mean that they have left their own country and sought political asylum in others, though that form of defection is not far off either. Some of them did. Some of them made it. They are still being carefree in other places, though the strain of years shows. They possess a mitigated whimsy. It can be both adorable and tedious, depending on whether or not they need a ride home, like a complete unknown. 

Like a stone Al Capone.






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Monday, May 23, 2016

Hydrophobia





I felt much better when I wasn't drinking. Over the weekend I drank as I normally would, so now I contend with the enervating aftermath, the life drain. I am tempted to go have a beer, but I know how short-lived the hair of the dog is for this feeling. It is a one hour cure. I don't feel that bad, just tired. One good night's sleep and I'll be back in form. 

At least I had fun. I went to an outdoor music festival in Golden Gate Park yesterday - All Day I Dream. It was fun and I ran into a bunch of friends. Like led to like... I would post a picture here of the ones that I took but they are in the camera, and the camera is impossibly positioned in the other room.

I had not realized that this upcoming weekend was Memorial Day Weekend, so I'll have Monday off as well as it being my weekend with the boy. I might plan a little adventure. I have no ideas. 

Message me, universe.


I have nothing to say. I just closed my eyes and hit a few keys on the keyboard, then looked to see if it would give me any ideas. I swear this is the truth, it spelled: etc








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Sunday, May 22, 2016

The open wound of kissing





I went to the Ex's graduation ceremony yesterday. She received her Master's from USF, with honors. I was happy to have been there, and am very proud of her, but have also told her that we must stop pretending to be a family, that she should stop expecting me to be the man in her life as she is not the woman in mine. 

We do many things together, as if we were functioning as a family, but we're not. The option has been left open for either of us to owe nothing to one another at any time the whim takes either of us. It only invites future pain for one or both. The prolonging of whatever little pain we can still extract from one another, to remind ourselves that we still can cause feelings.

Having an ex-wife around has the effect of scaring away any potential love interests, at least the ones that don't thrive on romantic challenge. Everybody is universally impressed at how well she and I have conducted our post marriage life. I almost finished that last sentence with the word "together," but that is the problem, or dilemma: we're not together. We have no plans to change any of that. It has the effect of being in a loveless marriage, which in a sense it is. We do everything together except love one another. Our son's conception of adult love will be one nearly without affection. 

Having an ex-wife around in which there is still intimacy and proximity but no physical affection is not entirely dissimilar from having a deeply involved relationship with your mom. It leaves less, or very little, space for another woman to enter your life. Who would want to compete with an ex-wife for space in a man's life. There are those women I suppose. The ones that thrive on… romantic challenge.

Another woman. That's an odd and funny phrase to describe a woman, even with the above circumstances considered. She wouldn't be another woman, she would just be a woman. 

I'll make sure to tell her that when the time comes.




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Saturday, May 21, 2016

"Warmth, more warmth, I cry"






I'll only be able to swing the boy around by his feet for another month or so. He is growing faster than the camera can document, at 8 frames per second. 

We took the boy to the eye doctor and he said that there is nothing to worry about. Children his age commonly have far-sightedness. It is nothing to worry about. I've already said that. 

It is that the muscles in his eyes must react to focus on objects at close distances, where others do not. He will not need glasses as a result of it, yet, though we will keep an eye on it. It was a relief, to find that the type vision issues he has often become meaningless as he ages.

Also, he does not appear to be color blind, another fear that we had that was based on observation. He regularly calls my car "blue" when it is yellow. Though this form of color blindness is very rare. So rare, in fact, that the doctor did not have the correct cards to test for it, but he did well with all of the others and the boy seemed to have fun playing the games of finding the numbers within the colors. 


The pictures above and below were just test results from me having set up a tripod in the back yard. Since purchasing a few pieces of lighting gear I have started to look at using the camera on the timed shooting setting. It is the best way to preserve images of the boy and I in the frame together, of which there are so few.


Here is me offering my first born son up to the god of the skies, begging for for an anointing to fall down from the heavens, trickling through the tree branches above, showering the land below with the warmth of love's quite bearable lightness.






(Now self is the first sacrament
who loves not the misery and taint
of the present tense is lost
I strain for a lunar arrogance
                     light macerates
                     the lamp infects
warmth, more warmth, I cry.)


- Jim Harrison

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Friday, May 20, 2016

"… no need to inspect or act upon"






This site, quite inexplicably, seems to magically have the power to draw women closer to me. I know, it seems implausible that such horrific internal thought, typed out in arduous daily effort, could have the effect of some small feminist appeal, but it does seem so. 

It is magic. It is a new truth, birthed from little smiles around the eyes.

Now I'm trying to figure out how to transmute vague interest into real and actual sex with another person. I mean complicit penis-pussy penetration. 

Life used to be so much easier, in Florida. Women, some of them, will have sex with somebody if you unexpectedly make them giggle. It's known as hospitality

Out here, in the west, you have to also solemnly affirm their liberal inner spirit, for many years. They have a rather rigid verification process in place that prevents some quackery, tomfoolery, misery, and also happiness.


I think selfies are funny; harmless, for the most part. I rarely find pictures of myself that I am happy with, so to strike a familiar bathroom pose and take one was a very minor novelty for me. I've only done it fifty or more times before.

A friend texted that I look "ten years younger" in response to yesterday's picture… now that I have shaved. It is not the loss of facial hair alone that creates this visual affect, it was also 25 pounds of effective blubber. I am Oprah-esque in this regard. I have a transparent trash bag sitting here next to my dining room table filled with the amorphous marbling that used to clog my arteries, sending highlights of off-white lipids along the fibers of muscle.

 I bet my stomach region tastes like bacon.

My friend admonished me, claiming that wine does not make a person fat, that excess does. There are lots of things I do in excess that have no calories, some relentlessly vigorous activities that burn calories in only one hand. 

I have retained my mannish fingers through all of this.

Wine has calories, in direct relation to the volume consumed.


Some are born to sweet delight. 
Some are born to endless night.



What is so easy for many is so elusive for others.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------


Ugh, honestly. Fuck this. I have spent most all day reading, hoping to understand the wide-sweeping implications of RFC 2821. That's right, my little-love-drugly-fuck-addicts, there are no big friendly ecstasy smiles at Chateau Q6 this afternoon. 

No laughs, no replacements, nor updates to this pivotal protocol.




Just this:

As discussed in section 2.4.1, a relay SMTP has no need to inspect oract upon the headers or body of the message data and MUST NOT do so except to add its own "Received:" header (section 4.4) and, optionally, to attempt to detect looping in the mail system (see section 6.2).


The flat recommendation "… has no need to inspect or act upon" does not preclude doing so, particularly as reflective response in smtp communication might otherwise imply. 

It is far more complicated than I have led on here. Yet, as with all RFCs: FUCK 'DIS


Dat's how I'm livin'






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Thursday, May 19, 2016

Arnold Juggernuts





I have nothing. 

I make my life more lumpy than it needs to be. It loses momentum easily. 

As soon as I begin to execute an impulse, another one juts out the opposite side of the sack that pretends to hold the whole disaster together, adding ugly danger to the once delicate balance that allowed such an irregular downhill juggernaut. 


The selfies are still for free. 











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Wednesday, May 18, 2016

Enough






I'm pretty sure there is a professional service operating out of my apartment laundry room. There are three women that are always in there, always doing laundry, never willing to offer to let anyone use any of the washers or dryers in the room, and suspiciously incapable of eye contact. I am tempted to just drop my laundry off and check back in a few hours. My Spanish is non-existent enough such that I could try to use the speaking person's international sign language to show with my arms, hands, and eyes that if they do my laundry I will reward them by letting let them touch my lap area while also making eye contact. 

Or, maybe money, sin ojos.


I just need my laundry done. No matter how much I tell myself that I am going to become a better housekeeper it never happens. Every time I do laundry I need the resources of the entire laundry room. It takes about one day to get the project started. I just keep buying new clothes. I must be the most hated stinkin' gringo tenant in the barrio.


I can never understand those people who always do laundry on Tuesday. They set the day aside for that sort of thing, like cleaning their bathroom and doing dishes. I mean, I wish that one of them was in love with me, but I don't wish to understand them, much, just enough.








Tuesday, May 17, 2016

"Machines don't fix themselves"




(Avid Reader: Meghan)


As promised, here is the portrait of the regular reader of this site. The Google-Borg seems to have fixed itself, for now. 

I should create a stock list of questions, something like the Proust Questionnaire, that I can use on this site, combined with portraits of the interviewees. My writing - at least the hard parts of it - would be done for me. I could sit back and watch the money roll in. 

Just press a button, somewhere rats would get free cocaine

Speaking of wine, I love the stuff. I had a few glasses the other day and the pleasant memory of it lingers even beyond the recollection of the shapeshifting pains incurred the following morning. Wine is very seductive, gracefully taking the place of love in the imbiber's heart. 

Well, if you let it in. Wine is the alcohol that most resembles a vampire in temperament and tone.


I lost some readership population when I stopped flirting with the idea of me writing from the perspective of an aging drag queen, desperate to be seen. The idea was fembidexterous, and I had begun to warm up to it greatly, in private. What I needed most were some panties and lipstick, and a mirror. 

A thought occurred to me though, as they often do, that I would make a hideous drag queen. 

Searching inside myself for what type of queen I might be, I went on a spirit journey to discover my Divine Anima, my Femme Fetard. When I found it lodged in a moist crevice of my innermost mind the first thing that became clear was that my inner woman disturbingly resembles Ayn Rand.

What does Ayn Rand think like in drag? Me.


It is an ideous vision, truly, beyond what should be expected to be endured by reasonable people. Somewhere deep inside my psyche is a confused and wandering Ayn; naked, save for hefty tufts of chihuahua fur; unexpected lipstick traces outlining the horror that is the history of her true inner woman. The victim of too many ambivalences. A body pumped full of sheroids. Sort of a fascist greed-whore that seems to speak sensibly to a certain segment of the population, a Pied Piper for libertarians. 

Still, it would be nice to finally be celebrated... if I chose to be so courageous and launch an unexpected debut of this lost and tender spirit, somehow also deserving of love:


(Ms. Evilyn Rand)


If one examines the above picture of Ms. Rand carefully then her reptilian ancestry becomes more clear. If she does not molt her back-plumage every few months then the soft exoskeleton takes over. You can see that her head hair is trying to escape along what would be known as the jaw line in other mammals. I had a picture of her pterodactyl teats around here somewhere, though I can not find it now. I might have hidden it under a rock, in greed and shame, then shame of greed. 

It is such a vicious cycle, loving the Rand.

Why can't I just settle on something more pleasant to be perverse about?


Why Ayn, why? 

You tell me, sexy.





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Monday, May 16, 2016

Necessities






I felt cheated by the post earlier, and you should also; not being able to upload an image with it. So, now you get this, and more. I took my flash and an umbrella over to see the boy. I have become the biggest amateur photo-geek in Sonoma. I tried a few shots with the flash coming through the umbrella. I liked the one above, most of all because the boy's expression, not so much what I over-added to it.

I was lured over because mom said they were dressing up in costumes. That type thing is exactly what I have been hoping to do more of lately - capturing staging and stages, the artifice of moment, hopefully as the moment takes flight and becomes something other than itself.

Little sequences, stories that can't quite be told.











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A thousand pardons, Sultan Pepper




Google is useless today. It will not let me upload an image for today's post, nor use any image saved from previous posts or uploads. The modal popup does not populate. Free services are tiresome.

Failed to load resource: A server with the specified hostname could not be found.

https://e.picker?protocol=gadgets...

I need my buddy Noel to file a public bug report for Google on Facebook.

I was going to use a picture I took over the weekend of a regular reader here, a portrait of sorts. I liked the image of her and had hoped to exploit the new, free face for traffic to my site. I had thought to maybe do a new series of portraits of readers, starting with a local one. 

I'll be interviewing the Time-Warner tech guy by the end of the month.


I drank yesterday - wine. It felt wonderful as it was happening, but I awoke today and remembered its lingering nature. I went for a bike ride at lunch to expel its wicked wretchedness from my soul and many temples in the form of bodily sweat.  It seemed to work, though I want to go to the pub soon, so perhaps it has its mysterious claws sunk deep into me. 

Sometimes I wish I could masturbate while I was riding my bike, mostly just to increase my heart rate, and because it is what I like to do, but there are a few problems with trying to implement this exercise regimen publicly. When are the liberals going to take up my causes? Masturbation is just as natural and beautiful as breast feeding. While it lacks as far as nurturing is concerned, it still has its physiological merits. Studies suggest that people should probably do more of it.

That's just science, though.

Okay, I was going to write an observation that I made about emotions while riding today, but now it seems ill-suited for the rest of this piece, and I do not wish to further jumble my juxtapositions.



The administrative faculty of this site would like to deeply apologize for the lack of image in today's post. We offer this post as recompense and wish to express our deepest apologies for any inconvenience and feelings of unpleasantness that reading these words today may have caused you.














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Sunday, May 15, 2016

"An ocean of violets in bloom"




("Dream if you can a courtyard")


I taught myself to play it on piano last night: "When Doves Cry." 

Well, I taught myself how to ape the chords adequately - Am, Dm, G, pretty much. There are other chords in there, but not enough to prevent a piano telling of the famous song. I replace a few of the lyrics to make it apply more to my life, and shift the chord arrangement a bit to prevent there from being no playing over the parts that I couldn't quite figure out, but it remains just barely recognizable as the Prince hit. 

Now, I only need someone to play it for.

I considered recording it, live from the living room, just myself on piano and vocals, but I'm an enormous pussy when it comes to singing, and have little confidence in my own. I know that I could have chosen a more obscure Prince song, but I heard this one live from Massey Hall and it caused me to sit down and learn the thing.

I have a great live acoustic album from Neil Young, also recorded at Massey Hall. I used to listen to it all of the time when it was first released about 10 years ago. His producer tried to get him to release it as an album instead of the album Harvest. Good thing for him, one might think, that he didn't listen. Harvest became for him the very successful thing that he wished to escape. Or, so he made it seem with his follow up albums, Time Fades Away and On the Beach, the latter of which is one of my favorites, which they finally just re-released. It had been deleted, such was Reprise's reaction to him not sustaining his reputation as the one-man Eagles.  

I write about music when I don't know what else to write about, mostly. I'll also sit down at the piano or the guitar when all else has evaporated. I used to rely on music so much more heavily, and much more often, than I do now. I have no idea what happened, but it just does not move me the way that it once did. It can, I'm just not as available for it to take me on its midnight journey to Jupiter. 

The truths and beauty there seem fewer and farther between than they once did. The albums I like to listen to irritate my friends, in large part. People think I kid about country and alternative bluegrass, until they come over and that's all that I'll play for hours on end, happy as a detuned banjo.







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Saturday, May 14, 2016

… wine before






A day with the boy. We went to a professional playground with our buddies and rode go-karts and played video games and ate nonsense. It was great fun until the boy vomited up in the car on the way home. Don't worry, it wasn't my fault, not quite anyway. He had eaten much mango earlier and it turns out he was struggling to digest it. It arrived unexpectedly in full pieces. The car seat and all of his clothes smell of the unstomached wretchedness now. Today should be laundry day, if for no other reason, but I'll put it off.  I should wash my hands, they smell of sick. 

I'm tired of too many things to list here. I've put myself in a situation that I had known that I shouldn't, but I did anyway. It will take time to transition away from it. There are no easy answers. I should not write cryptically, it serves no purpose.

I never wanted to be your weekend lover 
I only wanted to be some kind of friend 
Baby, I could never steal you from another 
It's such a shame this friendship had to end

Now, I will try to convince the boy to take a nap. Naps used to be just for him, though I have now acclimated to our little afternoon siestas. Few things make me quite as content.


I had taken a hiatus from drinking, trying to lose weight, and I have… but, I have grown bored of it. When we wake up we'll go to the store and buy something to cook for dinner. Even though I spent almost $400 at the grocery store the other day I somehow neglected to buy anything that I can turn into a meal, so we'll go back and figure something out. I might buy myself a nice bottle of red wine and drink it slowly while cooking, relishing its effects. 

Few things make me happier than wine after a nap. Falling asleep slightly thinner might do it. We'll probably never know.










(Boy, #1-#9)




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Friday, May 13, 2016

The ex-best half






I don't give a shit if people are bored of pictures of the boy. I think he is a marvel.


I have even less to say today than I did yesterday, though yesterday's post seemed to have pleased a handful of people. 

Interacting with the boy results in lots of funny anecdotes. 

I'll leave you with another:

His mother and I were helping her mother unload some stuff at a storage unit. There were boxes and boxes of clothes, some of which Rachel was trying on. There were dresses, white leather cowboy boots with a star on each them, gowns, fur coats.

At one point my ex-best half tried on a fur coat. 

The boy was quite impressed...

You look so beautiful. A little furry.







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Thursday, May 12, 2016

My son







No time today, am busy with work.

I had an idea for a post early this morning while I was riding, maybe for later or tomorrow.


Yesterday, the boy and I went to the grocery store and he desperately wanted some sort of candy or chocolate at the checkout stand - an idea which I shot down.

He pleaded and begged. His happiness sometimes hinges on my verbal edicts, you see.

I found a small bar of chocolate-coconut that I told him we could share once we made it into the car - thinking that having an ally in the loading process would serve me well.

We bought the groceries, hundreds of dollars worth, he then studiously marched out to the car and put himself in his booster seat.

After I started the car and was heading out of the parking lot, he gently reminded me of our pact, our shared chocolate secret.

I unwrapped it and broke it in two, offering him the slightly larger piece. We enjoyed it in relative silence.

Some time after the licking of the lips, he offered his assessment:


Coconut's hard to get in your tummy., It stays in your mouth too long.






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Wednesday, May 11, 2016

Other things







Okay, I need a felt-tipped pen, I think. I am to sign a photograph and send it off. A reader here will hang it on her kitchen wall. I will be closer to immortality, nearly Greek, almost etc.

I do worry about my handwriting, but I'll always have you, dear journal.



I was told yesterday that the boy will have to go see an optometrist. He did not pass a preliminary testing. It confirmed something that I had yet to admit to myself, but that I had already noted, he struggles following a baseball in flight as we play catch. With the larger, more colorful balls, he struggles much less. He has asked me to use the white and orange ones repeatedly when we're playing, with no other obvious difference, to me. 

My mind races to the worst of possible outcomes: blindness. With nothing at all to back my fears up, nor even adequately feed them, they quadruple in seconds and make home on top of me. During my bike ride yesterday I was struck with horizon anxieties. I was able to ride through them, but fuck... does the weight of life try to make itself comfortable on top of one at times. Every person has a few squatters inside of them, jockeying for position. 

The ride itself was fantastic. I nearly accomplished something I've never done before - the entire circuit in the highest gear. So, there is that: physical near victory.


It is not easy to accept an imperfection, nor the idea of an imperfection, in an otherwise perfect child. I know I'm being a little prematurely silly, but I do like to keep a healthy jump on myself. All attributes in the boy have significant meaning to me, and for me. Sight ranks very highly in what I want for the boy, and visions. Etc.







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Biologicals





Hilarious. The damsel escapes, on fleet sneaker. 

Well, I've been thinking more about my recently adopted trans-ness. I looked through hideous images from Vollmann yesterday, trying to find a grasp on these complicated matters of physique.

Every so often I'll come across an image that nearly inspires me, as if I am suddenly floating above myself, above my gender even. It is an experience in which I begin to think aloud… I can be a fat girl, too…. Then, just like that, I feel differently. It's magical. I'm starting to believe that with a summer dress or two and some red lipstick that this project might actually have gotten legs.

Gotten 'em - hot ones. 

My fear, however, is that I will not be celebrated as a true American hero the way that others before me have. It's because my cock still gets hard, I'm certain of it. That vile thing stands in the way of my emerging delta. If I'm not very careful then I might just be ridiculed as a fat drag queen with bad makeup, like an aging raver in a madhouse.

There is always that danger, of course. It is easy to throw on a colorful blouse at some desert festival and borrow some sensuous felinity through artifice alone. But to assume another identity, one that does not correlate with your biological sexiness…. well, now, that is saucy.

Saucer of milk, table for two….


I jest.

I probably should stop. I take enough pictures of kids that any weirdness or perceived sexual ambiguity might be detected and then misread as a genuine danger, as if I'm merely trying to use a bathroom of my choosing with children present.

I'm not sure what my birth certificate says; hopefully, "unregistered."

Or, this issue is over already. Isn't it?

We should all stop beating the dead and dying horses. Though, I did hear that the DOJ filed suit against North Carolina. Or, was it the other way around? Everybody is suing everybody, it seems, and all so that I can enjoy the luxurious softness of wearing women's panties in public. It seems a lot of ruckus for something so simple, and sweet.


Oh... but as you pull them on, when the soft cotton forces the hairs of the legs up and in the wrong direction, such a gentle caress, the hand of an imagining.

One could easily confuse it for love, or for being loved.

Just close tight the eyes of the persons in question.



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Tuesday, May 10, 2016

Piercings, et al.






I had a strange, though not entirely unfamiliar, feeling yesterday. I have lost 25 pounds in about two months, but as I was getting dressed I felt as if I had gained back some of the weight. I suddenly felt as if I was slipping backwards. I studied the mirror carefully, in desperate pirouettes. I knew this feeling to be inconsistent with reality, so I found it an odd one. It was mixed with a variety of other feelings, but the sense of it moving through me was familiar enough. For a brief moment I believe I knew what it must feel like to be a fat girl. 

I was reminded of William T. Vollmann and his Book of Dolores. I shuddered at the connection there. 

My immediate reaction was to move past the sensation. But, I stopped myself, and thought about that more, that feeling of wanting to escape. I wondered why there was the immediate impulse to abandon the line of thinking, or the ribbon of feeling, the bow of emotions. 

What if I pursued the sensation to find out more about it. A healthy curiosity. It is, of course, my right, but there were immediate internal pressures, ones not entirely unrelated to the initial feeling of being a fat girl, that seemed to act in a prohibitive fashion. Shame. I wanted to eat chocolate and be alone. 

I was left with the feeling that I wasn't being quite honest with myself, only because I wished to avoid an unpleasant sensation. I wondered where the tipping point in such a feeling might be, how close is it, and can one feel it arriving, and is it invited. I suppose that point must be at a different internal marker for each person, if at all. Perhaps it's true, some people must have no curiosity about such things, or very little. 

Then, there emerged a perversity that uses its own language to announce its wants and needs. I succumbed to this during the drive to pick up the boy, for fun. I suddenly had an intense desire to know what it feels like to be a fat girl. To flaunt it, even.

Yes, fat girl. You read that phrase right. I'm not sure why the feeling arrived with a gender other than my own attached to it, but it did. My feelings have rights, also. Who am I to argue with any of them. If there's one thing that we have learned it's that white men should shut the fuck up and let their unorthodox feelings do more of the talking, if not all of their talking. We've heard just about enough from my previous kind. 

Equality, etc.



Well, I would write more about this but I have bankrupted my time again this morning, and have only begun to explore my less traditional identities. Its what trans-ams do at first, I think, notice that the mirror has shifted a bit.

Perhaps tomorrow I'll feel a little butch, and we'll get back in here and knock a few things around just for fun. I'll start wearing flannel underpants and challenging chicks or small dudes to arm wrestling matches. I'll smoke cigarettes and proudly display my latest body art. 

Silver rings, arriving from the flesh nearly as they enter; inexplicably, but by plan; completing the circle of circles; penetration, implied permanence. 






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Monday, May 9, 2016

Stella






Back to work. Few adventures this weekend, but good ones with the boy and his mom - discovering secret hidden passages at the storage unit space, exploring the back yard more fully, expelling the villains from the area before dinner, pondering the river, reminding mom that she's great, tulips, etc. 

Now, thrust headlong into the work week. 

Suddenly, I feel as if I want tomorrow morning's coffee.




My brother posted a scan of an old color pic from the family photo albums. It caused me to consider my mother gently yesterday. As I age, I become more sensitive and forgiving of the fallible, even myself, every now and again.

The young girl in the background of the image above shares a name with my mother. 

Stella.






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