We could hear them moving

Earlier, the sun had dipped just beyond the river, we stood together listening to the sound of the many swallows that were chittering along the newly formed twilight.

Later, the moving candles could be seen across the banks and then below us towards our side of the river. The voices of the bazaar faded, became the voices of the desert moving near waters. Nothing in the dark was mysterious, save what already was. There is comfort in mystery, in that it always would be. It was unlike mystery at home, and always would be.

Along the far edge of the patio there were the sounds of the villagers, heading home. They were silent as kindling, falling along a path; their voices were ashes gently crackling, scuffling, then fading forth.

We could hear them moving, if we strained and drifted from within the curtains, just below us, just beyond us.

.

Plus Size Jumbotron

Bacon Cheeseburger, French Fries, and a Chocolate Milkshake. 

I am still thinking about my lunch yesterday. It was that good.

I don't eat like that very often. I was in a pinch, had only a few minutes to grab something before a team meeting. Oh, but I ate all of that during the meeting... while everyone else from the team looked on, trying to avert their eyes from the oral mayhem, the symphony of ingestion, the cholesterol carnage...

There are only two ways to feel in life: that you have done too much, or not enough. It is what separates us as humans. Very few people feel complete, just ask them, they will almost always qualify one way or the other: could have done more, should have done less.

I perhaps should not have announced my desire to wear women's underwear to work yesterday. Now, I will feel self-conscious about it, particularly after that lunch. 

Size Matters, say the ladies...

Too right... too fucking right it does.

It's my favorite thing to say when women start loudly discussing the importance of size after too many lunchtime chardonnays. 

Inevitably somebody will announce: - Size Does Matter! 

- What, you mean like fat?

I know, I know, it's not fair... and I shouldn't do it. But it's not as if a guy can diet and make his cock bigger. It does seem bigger if you're thinner, but that's only because there actually does exist an invisible inverse ratio between the two conditions. 

It is a thing called pride and it makes all things seem larger in the one who possesses it.

Cock size does matter though. Cosmopolitan magazine has done the necessary decades-long research. 

One thing that I never hear said when the subject is discussed: that it's only too small if it is an impediment to love. You never hear that, or you only hear it in its inverse.

To wit, there was a story recently about a guy who asked a woman to marry him, publicly - at a football game or something stupid, on the big screen, etc. - and she turned him down. Later, she went on to reveal that it was because he had a small cock. Well, that is just horrible, but perhaps he had his reasons. 

Or, she did. 

Clearly, the marriage was not meant to be.

So, he went on and made a documentary about it, about having a small cock. There was much to be discussed concerning this and apparently there still is. Everybody seemed to agree: that if a couple are not physically compatible then love has a tougher time surviving. Impossible, say some.

It's all true. 

I am not attracted to fat girls. I struggle becoming aroused for them and always have. I have to pretend that I am having a threesome with a set of siamese twins and treat each side of her as a different person altogether. I intentionally try to make them jealous of one another. I can not help this, though I have the decency to not get drunk and scream about it gigglingly at restaurants and call it liberation. Something like that could be unnecessarily hurtful to one of the fat girls sitting there getting fatter.

These same women, later that same lunch, would denounce all forms intolerance. You can hear them, seriously nodding towards one another in solemnity of purpose... "Anybody that would discriminate towards another person, based on a trait that they were born with and can not change.... well, that is just despicable, DESPICABLE! I teach my nieces to avoid anybody like that. It's just the way I was raised."

Nobody ever seems to notice the alternate: If you don't have a problem having one of these women fall in love with you then your cock is probably fine, in terms of size. I mean, it must magically be above the minimum threshold required for love. It is still very likely to be shaped in an odd manner, bent perhaps, and certainly she wishes that it was larger, just a little bit, after lunch... but it is functional in other regards and is not preventing you from enjoying different things in life. 

So, go out and get your kicks.

It is still very probable that your tender beloved will lie there and fantasize about firemen and basketball players, but it doesn't mean that she doesn't love you. She thinks of you as one of their fingers, that's all. She is probably not in fear of anal sex, and might even invite it occasionally. That's how you know. 

So, relax, be yourself. 

There's nothing you can do about it, and she can always lose some weight.

Never forget that, Champ!

.

I would, but my berries fall out

I have returned to my writer's loft. As always, I am up before dawn, startling the local vampires and chupacabras with lights turned on far too early, pacing the floors, no longer even capable of moving quietly, only more slowly.

It's actually a basement room, not a loft. But I can still see the moon from here, on my phone. It is like a NYC basement apartment, the window in the room that faces the street allows you to see the legs of the people walking by. But it is much nicer than my previous residence, the one in which I was recently evicted for payment problems. 

Ah well, it is the way of things. It was a little too air b'n'b for me. The bed was, quite literally, made of air and the breakfast was non-existent, barely a breeze…. which was apparently the same problem that I encountered with payment. There was too much venture and not enough capital.

Even when I sleep very well it's no use, I awake to a lonely world that I have somehow grown accustomed to. I check my email and then other online vacuums. Always, there are friends awake in Europe, also filling their day with meaninglessness. That is, at least, something. It is comforting to know that people in London and Prague are similarly tussling with tedium. 

They say that healthy people tend have sex in the mornings, though they never mention if a healthy person can accomplish the same. I wonder where these people are, the morning-sun-sexers. I could walk the neighborhood looking in windows to check, but I suspect the police might not similarly believe in the high purpose and calling of science. 

I believe that I might have lost some interest in seeing other people have sex anyway, though I have not tested this assumption with reality. Watching other people have sex, when done live and not a pre-recorded act for modest profit, is a pastime for the young. After a certain age, one which I somehow passed without knowing, then it becomes increasingly difficult to participate, even as a witness. There's this growing sense of, Ugh, why is that old guy here?

Even lone masturbation can provoke this sense within me at times.

CS advised me to wear women's underwear to work. He prescribed this as a manner of acting to assist in the staving off of boredom. It's quite true, of course. Life is better when you have a secret. That's what falling in love does for you, the whole world becomes your shared secret, and the foreseeable future, also. 

Breaking up has the opposite effect. Nothing is secret any longer. To make matters worse, nobody is interested in your mysteries once the juiciest portions have been told and retold a handful of times.

Move on and make new secrets, that is the sensible thing to do. 

But  one must have somebody's panties to wear to work. It would seem quite suspect to go shopping for a new pair, for yourself. Do they even make women's panties with a 34" waistline? They must, but that is a thought too hideous to entertain. It burdens the fantasy with fact. 

I don't want to wear a fat girl's underwear. I want to wear a skinny girl's knickers, one in particular.

One girl, I mean. I didn't have one specific pair of blue cotton panties in mind, there are several that would do. She could even pick them, and would probably prefer it that way, for the purpose of panty preservation.

Those type secrets are what I want, just silly things that make no sense but last forever.

.

... love in such a way

It must have been a heart attack, yesterday, a mild one. No other explanation satisfies my desire to speculate towards myself as thoroughly. 

Carnivale Selah' tells me that he agrees, and he has a background in such things. He is, at least, as intelligent enough to almost stay off of Facebook, which makes him pretty smart.

No, I kid like him: only in part. He warns deeply of the heart, but his severest caution is for the mind. He tells me to go to a doctor right away and make sure that I have not had a stroke. He believes me to have been having one for many years now. 

Yes, it all seems vaguely funny until my tongue becomes a sliding board for saliva, to turn my cheek into Wet and Wild at Spring Break every time I try to speak. 

There is that.

It is the stress of all things that I am experiencing, pretending not to be. Something feels wrong to me. Something feels off.

CS tells me that I will put Rhys under too much pressure to be the something in my life which will somehow make it all make sense. He might be right. I do find myself saying things internally like, Well, if I can just be a good father to Rhys, then there will be that, and that is something.

If all else falls apart I can just focus on having the best relationship that I can possibly have with the boy. That is something that I needn't be disappointed with.

But, in doing so, there is the pressure placed unwittingly on the child. Enormous weight for such small shoulders to bear. Love seems unfair, even devious, when it is all that you have to offer. Rhys will become the channel through which all of the stresses and strains that Rachel and I experience collect and then travel. Whether we wish him to be or not. 

The more we hide our troubles the more he will become the receptacle for those hidden fears. His desire being only to love us and to make things better, just as ours is for him.

I must find some way of re-collecting myself, even if it costs me in the immediate sense.

CS recommends some serious healing hoodoo: chanting, yoga, and some Baba Ramadan noodles.

All of it.

Now, I have all of that also to think about, to not try to love my son too much, to place too much importance or insistence upon his happiness, that in doing so he might become a reflection of my fears and disappointments. Then somehow, perhaps even most of all, to make sure that I am not trying to prevent Rachel from doing the same.

Facebook is useless, of course, but a friend did post a quote yesterday that I bothered to memorize. I do not remember the source, though it was a yogi. I could not find it this morning when I quickly looked before rushing off to work, but the quote was quite memorable and rang clear and true:

"You must love in such a way that the person you love feels free."

There is that also to consider, this morning, as the heart ticks forward into the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.... borne back ceaselessly into the past.

.

The inward fall of a body, gravitational collapse

Exhaustion.

Can't move, can't breathe deeply; tried to go to the gym and had to give up, the weights were made of neutron stars, kryptonite. They all tried to bid me their leaden harm. 

No idea what could be wrong with me; a mild heart attack, maybe.

The earth always has much more gravity on Monday mornings, that is pure science... but this is just silly. 

I can hardly walk, my knees are trembling. 

Sometimes, early on a Monday, before daybreak, I am afraid to peek outside to see the moon. It will be dangerously close, and dark as night swooping by, nothing grey about it, at all. It's just dark once it gets too close. It must wreak havoc on the tides, especially here in Cali.  I am certain of it. I can hear some people in the distance firing shotguns up at it, can see little tufts of moon dust lift where the scatter hits. 

I can get it with a flashlight some mornings, it's that close.

Two cups of coffee usually puts it right, or near right anyway. It finds its orbit again by Tuesday afternoon, or Wednesday morning, rarely later.

I don't know what is wrong with today. The sun clocked in five minutes early, heading towards overtime in the coming summer.

I'll give it all one more chance before I call the cops.

.

Somniloquy

Wind never waits. 

Last night it must have slept, though. Rachel, Rhys and myself all dozed in bed together. Say what you will about the future, or the past - it felt complete. To wake up with little Rhys "sawing toothpicks" next to me. It was really something. He ended up crawling up onto my face in his slumber. So, what does a father do? Nothing at all - just wait it out, try slowly to get him to sleep flat on the bed next to me, rather than on me. 

The little guy has started to talk in his sleep, cataloguing his inner world in murmurs, miniature declarations, chatting towards it as he goes.

It is easy to listen to, simple; so untroubled by time, uncrowded by anxiety; those sleeping fears that too easily occupy a more developed mind at rest.

I could sit and listen to it all morning, or so it seemed. Rhys sleeping on my face, chatting away at his world, as free to imagine as he is free from imaginings. Just as light as you would wish anybody's concerns to be.

Just that, light.

.

You can always come back

Less than nothing to report today.

My life is about to change again. I can feel it coming, from just over the hill. 

Wind never waits.

I wish that I would have listened to Dylan:

"You can always come back, but you can't come back all the way...."

Mississippi

Every step of the way, we walk the line
Your days are numbered, so are mine
Time is piling up, we struggle and we stray
We're all boxed in, nowhere to escape

City's just a jungle, more games to play
Trapped in the heart of it, tryin' to get away
I was raised in the country, I been working in the town
I been in trouble ever since I set my suitcase down

Got nothing for you, I had nothing before
Don't even have anything for myself anymore
Sky full of fire came pouring down
Nothing you can sell me, I'll see you around

All my powers of expression and thoughts so sublime
Could never do you justice in reason or rhyme
Only one thing I did wrong
Stayed in Mississippi a day too long

Well, the devil's in the alley, mule's in the stall
Say anything you wanna, I have heard it all
I was thinking about the things that Rosie said
I was dreaming I was sleeping in Rosie's bed

Walking through the leaves, falling from the trees
Feeling like a stranger nobody sees
So many things that we never will undo
I know you're sorry, I'm sorry too

Some people will offer you their hand and some won't
Last night I knew you, tonight I don't
I need something strong to distract my mind
I'm gonna look at you 'til my eyes go blind

Well I got here following the southern star
I crossed that river just to be where you are
Only one thing I did wrong
Stayed in Mississippi a day too long

Well my ship's been split to splinters and it's sinking fast
I'm drowning in the poison, got no future, got no past
But my heart is not weary, it's light and it's free
I've got nothing but affection for all those who sailed with me

Everybody's moving, if they ain't already there
Everybody's got to move somewhere
Stick with me baby, stick with me anyhow
Things should start to get interesting right about now

My clothes are wet, tight on my skin
Not as tight as the corner that I painted myself in
I know that fortune is waiting to be kind
So give me your hand and say you'll be mine

Well, the emptiness is endless, cold as the clay
You can always come back, but you can't come back all the way
Only one thing I did wrong
Stayed in Mississippi a day too long

.

Till human voices wake us

("You can run, you can run...")

Ah, sweet Friday. The weekend has nearly begun. The only thing that feels better than a Friday after work is a Saturday morning after a good night's sleep.

Well, I guess ecstasy feels much better, and being young.

But other than those two things, which coincide best for maximum effect, a Friday after work feels pretty good.

This is not science, folks, it's a bank heist.

Ah, sweet payday. The weekend has nearly begun. The only thing that feels better than a payday is a Saturday morning waking up with the sweet nectar of money.

Okay, I'll stop….

It is early Friday morning and the effects of the week are already beginning to wear off. The unforgiving spell of labor will be loosening its grip upon us all, just ever so slightly.

Soon, I will go to the gym and workout under strict halogens while the rest of the immediate world is still lumbering along the enigma. There is a large window in the front that faces the road, the western half of the valley. I do cardio facing out towards the rising dark as if I am on some theme park ride, like a submarine in the depths, powered only by me, watching strange creatures move past on their way elsewhere, apparitions drifting. They are just glimpses, mysteries of the morning, moments along the wire; each with their own concerns, each needing to be saved from something in their own way. 

… singing, each to each, 

do I dare to eat a peach?

.

"I'm trying to be honest"

(Daddy and the Boy)

Damn it.... I just wrote an entire post and then scrapped it. It wasn't even a first draft. I had been too candid in it, I guess; a thing that writing sometimes helps me avoid. Nobody desires the associated unpleasantness. It is burdensome, unwieldy. 

Honesty is an attempt at honesty, inelegant and immodest.

Also, I would have had people calling me all day long.

There are some subjects which scare the hell out of people. A talk-show-impulse inside of them snaps and they go into... Something must be done!

Be wary of anyone that demands honesty, and religiously avoid those who claim it. 

Gravitate towards people that don't try.

(The Boy, and Daddy's reflection)

.

Commute Chronicles, wildcard volume

(21st century)

There was another fantastical sunset last night, on the drive home. It slipped from heaven's fancy. A consolation for the commute, I suppose. It started as a hint, barely breaking over the mountains. Then it must have dipped under a cloud line; without warning it stretched to the clouds above me in a layer of rippling red. I thought to take a picture but then thought again, and again. 

Things come and go, let it be. Enjoy is my new mantra.

I got two more new books yesterday. Used books, new to me, that is. Now a stack sits on the dresser, awaiting my time, my life. I won't have to feel alone. Don DeLillo will be my new imaginary friend. 

Soon. 

He and I will poke fun at Jerry Stahl together. I, Fatty also awaits.

I will be clamoring for DeLillo to be a Nobel Prize winner also, sometime next year. With my recent history in picking conquerors, like Alice Munro, who knows…. If D.D. weren't American then he just might have a chance. I have tried to read David Foster Wallace, and will try again one day when I have run out of things to do and have resorted to drug addiction to pass the time, and... I don't understand why anybody would claim genius for him and ignore DeLillo. People must truly love a suicide. It is the final mark of a contemporary great. We are encouraged to secretly admire their commitment. What surer sign of lone intensity, Kurt C. taught us.

Too dark. The sun hasn't even arisen since yesterday's performance. Perhaps it will be in a very different mood today. It will be angry to find me here, writing like this in the dark, keeping secrets from the sunrise.

I turn directly around and drive back into the city today. I will reward my efforts with several coffees, all bunched up here towards the morning, and then a few spread out evenly across the remainder of what will be left of the day. My caffeine habits must be fascinating. Hundreds line up each day to hear my wisdom percolating. 

I am in the mood to succumb to something this morning. Temptations dance. I wish to remind my weaknesses that they are still loved, also.

We are told the most absurd things about what it means to live, and then we are expected to believe.

I will ponder that at high speeds this morning, bursting past other cars as I race towards the city like a rocket with an aging payload. 

.

An undergarment aficionado, and a true patriot

(maxin' at the bank)

At least that felt like a weekend. It required adding an extra day to it , but it worked. It is strange. We were given President's Day off from work, but my bank was open (Yes, I think we should celebrate it in the singular possessive. It seems more fitting.). I stopped by the bank around 5:45 pm to make an ATM deposit and I saw people milling around inside. I hadn't even realized that the bank was open until 6 on a normal day, much less the highly venerated President's Day. 

What the fuck is going on in there? I thought. Banks are alien places when they are not open. They all seem so weird. There is a psychological bubble to them. I can understand why some wish to breach it. It is not only for the money.  Their presence is an aggressive societal affront. There is a faux sanctity and openness to banks that mimics a church. 

They are not as relaxed as a supermarket. They project something that is distasteful. 

I want to violate banks when I see them at night. Well lit and hostile to all whose eyes happen to notice. I want to stand where I'm not supposed to, and set off alarms without worry.

Maybe my plans for a bank heist will have to wait for another day, also.

I have to be careful when discussing America here. There are a few people who read this blog who take all things American religiously. They are like snake charmers. They are willing to die for their faith in it. If it is written in the constitution then it is sacrosanct, because never before has the wisdom of the ages, with a deep understandment of human failings, combined with divine wisdom, people who knew a hell of a lot more than me or you... and voila! : The Constitution

The document has not failed, we must have read it wrongly, or we simply lacked the requisite faith. 

It is nearly impossible to even discuss politics with some people unless you make it very clear that you are a.) pro-gun and b.) dangerously pro-constitution. Not even just run-of-the-mill pro-constitution, but strictly cocoa puffs for it. The conversation will get so lopsided otherwise that there is no point. It requires some reasonably serious lying to even engage in honest debate.

Every now and then I like to state the obvious: Patrick Henry was a degenerate panty-sniffer, a real huffer of the bloomers.

Ah, but that is perhaps a conversation for another time.

Shit, shit, shit. I can already tell that I will have to finish this post later. My clothes are in the dryer and I must prepare to stay in the city tonight. My things are everywhere. I don't even know where I will sleep. My welcome is wearing thin at Chateau Cato, and my Castro writer's suite is not quite ready as a permanent residence. 

Ah, but those are worries for another time, approx. 12 hours from now.

Well, fuck it, I will publish this as is. There is more to discuss, of course, but that will have to be a morning cocktail party at a later date.

Yes, understandment.

.

The easy answer

The time has come. The time that I mistakenly thought all of Rhys' childhood would resemble, from birth to college. He is reaching a sort of discovery stride. It's impossible to keep up with. Each day he has some new revelation, some fresh charm at his command. He hardly even seems to recognize it for what it is. He's just rolling along, making all the magic happen.

Rachel and I are daily stunned and amazed.

To wit, the night before last Rhys asked me a question: "Are you happy, Sean?"

"Yes Rhys, I am."

The next morning, he was coming down the stairs with Mommy, barely awake, and again, "Are you happy, Sean?"

"Yes, I am."

We regularly ask him if he is "having feelings." Like, when he's hitting the dog, or throwing things at mirrors, or inconsolable because a pillow on the couch moved. So, his emotional lexicon is ever growing. 

He was just casually checking in on me, to make sure, you know, that I was happy.

Last night as I was putting him to bed I explained that we all have names, and that while my name is Sean, like his is Rhys, I am also his Daddy.

Silly, but I didn't want to be too soon deprived of the one person in the world who can call me that without some awkwardness. Bourgeois standards can be resisted to a degree, I guess. 

Then, last night, as I was putting him to sleep, he was calling me Sean again. I told him that it was fine, he could call me whatever he wanted to, either Daddy or Sean would be fine.

I explained that Mommy's name is Rachel. He said her name over and over and over. You could see him latching onto this new word as being an important component of Mommy.

"Rachel, Rachel, Rachel, Rachel" in his rough beginner's way.  Mommy has a name! 

She came in and reminded him gently that he could call her Mommy.

They might be bourgeois, but they are still standards.

These things are, of course, nearly meaningless outside of our little inner world. Just daily occurrences that others might show no surprise at all towards. 

But it had been some time since anybody other than myself had asked. 

It's a good question.

The easy answer is yes, yes I am.

.

Partied

"Partied" was first used as a verb by e.e. cummings in 1922.

That's what I've learned already this morning. I want to read that book, the one linked in the previous sentence. I wish there was a way to buy a used paperback when a book has just been released in hardback. or, to put it on your amazon list so that when it appears you would be notified, charged, sent the thing, whatever.

There probably is.

Holy Fucking Mothra!!!

I was just sitting here and the boeing-fly seen above landed on my computer screen. Well, that's a lie. I heard it approaching first.  When a fly is large enough that you can hear each individual swoop of its four separate wings, well, it's time to run for cover, brothers and sisters. I swiped at it with a magazine. It turned and taunted me like a blue jay. It perched on my bookshelf and cackled out to me. I swear this thing was pecking as it did passes of my head, tormenting me. 

That, friends, is what living in an agricultural valley is like.

I have to take a shower soon. I'm certain that fucker was planting maggots in my scalp. This thing was an Egyptian-plague level diptera, fourth level desert biblical powers, all of it. It's probably trying to find a locust to fuck.

Fukushima Fly, come over from across the Pacific. NORAD has been tracking it.

Emily Dickinson wrote about this exact same evil fucker, I believe. The lifespan on it must be tremendous.

Judge for yourselves. I would shit my pants in fear, but then I would have no chance against it.

He seems to have given up, now that it's planted its larvae offspring on my anatomy. I felt the thing land. It was a bodily burden.

It's a larva party. 

.

Not just lost

I slept for over 10 hours last night. So, you know what that means… no time to write today. I start working from home again this week, at least partially. I will still be going into the city on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, so you will get the best of both worlds, dear readers.

But I feel like a prince this morning. I awoke on rose petals made of pixie dust. My mind is at peace, the world is good.

Now I must go to the gym. I must reclaim some sense of self and that's the easiest place to do it, sort of. I am at the age where I can no longer lie to myself about such things. I must fight to retain a sense of vitality. Without it, all is lost. 

Not just lost, destroyed.

Since I have no time to write today I will leave you with this. 

.

You, Velvet

(A Southern Tale)

Wow, did the stories ever spring up from the woodwork for Velvet Ray. She is/was quite the local legend.

One friend wrote that he distinctly remembered the t-shirt: "Eat Skeeter's Big Biscuits" It was an ad for a notorious Gainesville eatery. He described it as being soft yellow and having holes in it. He wrote longingly that he was able to see her tan skin through the various peep holes, the blonde-ish peach fuzz covering her body that resembled, well, velvet.

Velvet got sent home because teachers finally recognized what we had known all along, that Velvet was no secret. 

My friend's description continued with her being the "most gorgeous creature he had seen in life up until that point", which was the 7th grade. He sat right behind her. He went on to detail the physiological effects of proximity to gorgeousness on a 7th grader. 

The outcome was both general and specific, ubiquitous and quotidian. 

Another friend relayed how Velvet went on after high school to be in Playboy magazine, a claim I was eagerly able to verify. 

He also confirmed and relayed the strange power of her pubescent magic.

Yet even another friend described Velvet as being his first crush. "Smoking hot" was the descriptive phrase. He was in love with her. He is also gay. Such was her persuasion, able to easily leap the orientation spectrum. Her attraction was circular and complete, enveloping.

Even a friend who has never met her described her as being a good contender for Miss Florida, if there ever was one....

All of these stories are true, and mine too. She was never even a nymphet, to my memory. She seemed to appear magically and fully formed as a sexually active child, sent here as a gift from sex heaven to inform us with sensuous erotic imaginings of a puberty afterlife. She walked among us as a 7th grade succubi. 

So, I took the mugshot from yesterday's post down when I found out it was her, as promised. I felt bad, very bad. It was wrong. 

I looked at it for a few minutes and decided that it wasn't Velvet. I couldn't align my memories of her with the first image posted yesterday, but mugshots are rarely flattering and much time has passed, three decades, more. 

Ugh, more.

I was wrong. Not everyone finds as much humor in dumb luck as I do. I must have a special taste for it.

So, here, Velvet.. :

(framed by mugshots.com)

In the future everybody will have 15 miniature mugshots. I'll see to it. 

I felt momentarily less guilty after being told of Velvet's participation in Playboy magazine. This doesn't make any sense at all, I know. It is far less mystery than it is shameful admission. It is objectification for the purpose of further objectification. It is a nasty, shameful attempt at justification. To feel that I wasn't hurting somebody, and perhaps couldn't hurt someone, that had posed for Playboy… well, that is a dangerous and stupid lie. 

I caught the feeling, and held it under scrutiny, but I still felt it. That little negotiation we do with ourselves. The little telling of inner stories, to absolve oneself.

As CS has said, the internet has revealed just how evil and shitty and wrong people are. I hadn't meant to jump in and participate with such blind lewd glee, but when making mistakes we don't always consider the consequences. 

Somewhere between the act and the thought lies the mugshot.

Thanks internet!

.

Velvet Ray, v.2

(original picture removed)

What a name, Velvet Ray.

An anonymous commenter from my childhood has been reading these posts, and offered Velvet as a possible match for the mystery girl from Tuesday's post.

The post was not about V. Ray, though I wish it had been. I fondly remember her being pleasantly advanced beyond her years.

Velvet got sent home from school one day - elementary school, that is - because she was wearing a t-shirt that said something along the lines of: "If you 'aint Harley then you 'aint shit!"

I wonder what happened to her, Velvet, though I suspect I know. A less than careful reading of the story "Greasy Lake" will inform the mystery and complete the gap.

Also, I found the mugshot above. Though that is not her, I do not believe. She had a better childhood tan, and those things are not destroyed entirely by county jail photos, I do not believe.

I am certain that my anonymous friend from childhood will confirm or deny.

If it is her... then I will take the picture down. It could be... The mugshot was from Florida. Though it would be silly to assume there was only ever one woman, also near my age, with the name Velvet Ray, from Florida.

Seems unlikely.

There must be dozens.

She seems a sort of a hybrid of Isabella Rossellini and Sister Ray. The original rocky picture show...

If you are just like me, well then, here is a free haunted house, just for you:

(Who're staring at Miss Rayon....)

Now, if you are a true, good friend and a fan of that sort of thing... then you should hear this. It's as if The Electrical Light Parade at Disney was tasked with covering the VU. Each performer seems to have been given a pocketful of soggy, crushed quaaludes and let loose on a keyboard and vocoder. The last five minutes of useless noodling is where I would draw your attention. Whoever does not know how to waste an afternoon like that does not know how to live.

Oh, the devilish mischief that the nervous system will get up to. 

Oh.

Well, I had meant to write another thoughtful meditation on feminism, a poem to the power of it.

Nobody wants to talk about Philip Seymour Hoffman's pain free last few hours. 

I just listened to Sister Ray twice in its entirety. What a miracle they were. That is one way to wake up: The Velvet Fucking Underground.

Now, my frivolous years were debauched within senses and well beyond reason, but there is still this tickling sense that I somehow could have done more.... That is, I suppose, what sets some people apart, for trouble. They are destined for it. They embrace that fate and then call it their own doing. It is dangerous to not live like a hero. 

It is dangerous to have a job.

How I ended up on this side, sane and nearly sober, job-heavy and a happy family man, no one will ever know. But, Oh, if you only could have seen me then..... I suppose that is the eternal magic and mystery of pussy, dear feminists. It has the power to heal, even pyramids get nervous.

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… a restless wanderer

Bad dreams last night, after hours of not being able to fall asleep, worrying about things that I can not control. 

Fear.

Now, I awake tired. My body did not rest, nor my mind, nor any other part. My cock has never had bad dreams, and doesn't care much if I do. Why can't it respect my anxieties and leave me alone? It thinks pornography and hand dancing are the answers to everything, almost. 

All male addiction begins with the penis. That's science. It is not a disease of the mind at all. Its entire essence is built upon the conditions of dependency and habit. It is a born abuser, but then descends into complete dependency around the age of 12, resurfacing to feed its voracious lust persistently through adulthood. Its eternal appetite knows no point of satiation. It is the hideous serpent.

Men are destructive because they are in tune with the temporary nature of nature. They have a deeper appreciation of the natural world, wildlife, etc. 

That's just science, ladies. 

I should take the day off but I have fallen partly into the trap of equating my sense of self worth with the money I earn. Time spent working will result in increased revenues and rewards. It has become my new sense of partial self. It is neither pride nor vanity but rather only an imagined security against fear.

What will happen? Oh, what will happen when I die?


Will I still then be incomplete?

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

I was talking with Cato this morning, relaying the dynamic of my childhood, part of it.

My brother regularly beating my ass was called "fighting" by our parents. They would tell us that we "had better stop fighting…" I hated them for it. I hated them for thinking that I could just choose to stop getting my ass beat, and it was somehow an affront to them that I was not - a challenge to their abilities at parenting.

"We just don't know what's gotten into those two…"

I didn't grow up thinking that it was my fault. I grew up hating them.

That all passed though. My brother has apologized and my father has told me to stop living in the past. That's Catholic resolution for you… swift and thorough. It was their fault then, my fault now. It is the natural way of things.

Cato was telling me that it's all quite normal; brothers fight. 

I suppose it is, how lucky for them. 

Now Abel kept flocks, and Cain worked the soil….

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What are you going to be?

(March '79)

So, are we going to talk about the elephant in the room: rape?

Jeezus... not sure where that came from, just trying to think of a subject before I start writing. I find it to be useful, though some have told me that they do not arrive here for coherence, but instead for the accidental nature of the place. They meander through every few days as if this is some warehouse after-party, and they are "looking for the guy..." It's an unlucky junkyard.

Today is just like yesterday, only longer. In truth it is actually shorter, heading into summer, but for the purpose of this post, and my concerns, it will be longer. I will leave work later today and then possibly stay in the city. 

I will need to verify that my room is ready at Chateau Cato. He is a true friend and has suffered much. He was there at the birthing of my last bad idea, serving as a sort of midwife, patting my head and cleaning the sweat away as the convulsions increased in duration and rapidity. I was fully dilated, crowning, screaming, making deals with the brutes and the beasts. 

Who even knows where the father was...

That's going to be my new line when discussing births, "And who even knows where the mother was during all of this... Nobody in the family even recognized that she had a drug problem until the contractions started. Screaming for morphine wasn't even second nature to her, it was first! She just checked out after that. I coulda' done it myself, and practically did."

Well, maybe. I am trying not to anger others, or to do so less, anyway.

Yesterday on the drive home from work I was thinking about the neighborhood in which I was intended to grow up. Thoughts started flooding back to me. People emerged from the morass of memory, came animated back to life. 

I remember this one kid that always smelled of piss when on the bus, and presumably elsewhere. Sitting next to him - because there were no more seats - was the greatest dishonor at the time. It evoked the full arsenal of insult.

His name was Alan. Alan Prater.

The other kids had almost ceased making fun of him. It had lost its sporting edge. He had resigned himself to perpetual belittlement. The next logical target was anybody unlucky enough to have to sit next to him. Kids would cram three across into a seat, with their book bags and backpacks, just to avoid the eternal disgrace of it. Afterwards you were tainted with urine. It was science.

I remember the house that he lived in. The city must have burned that place to the ground by now, or it was purchased by Mormons. Nobody knows. 

Near there lived a girl who was the favored recipient of some of my first erotic ticklings. 

I've forgotten her name now. I refuse to smear her memory further with a fictive.

Once, I was at her house and she was walking around in a t-shirt, one which I presumed covered a pair of late 70's / early 80's short-shorts, an erotic charge entirely sufficient in itself. Later, I found, that this t-shirt was covering nothing at all. Well, nothing but her pubescent nakedness, and that only just barely. She showed me what was under there and let me look, for the rest of my life. She immediately earned an honored location atop the ever-growing and permanent spank bank.

Years later she she became one of the first girls that we all knew to be sexually active. All of the guys in the neighborhood shared details of her - real or imagined. Oh, the things that she would do, could do. Will do. She was a real go-getter. 

The magic. 

Older boys used to use that girl like a trampoline in suburbia, fun as hell and usually in the backyard. Cars started pulling up after school. Revving. Her mom worked until the evenings. Older boys became interested in her, then she lost her tan. 

Though my experiences with her were long before that, and much more innocent. Once she started smoking cigarettes she was entirely lost to me, unreachable by boyhood, though she was never really mine anyway. She became part of a world that I had no access to, and at the time, no desire to, except maybe to see her.

F. Gump was I.

I once heard a rumor that she performed the same miracle of walking around naked in her house, covered only by a shirt, and inadvertently dropped a dingleberry onto the kitchen linoleum. Just a little hershey squirt of it, brown and shameful.

It seemed implausible. But the apocryphal tale was told with such conviction that it entered the local canon, became fact. It was the way that young boys talked about things that they could not understand and could neither control. Her sexual energy had become a shame to us. So, in immediate turn she also had to be shamed, somehow, and it had to be by us. Myth rises and becomes.

Even then I suspected that my sense of humor was beyond my years. I remember starting the school year out once by asking everybody what they were going to be for Halloween. Nobody seemed to get it, they just thought I was being weird again, as usual. Halloween was still months distant. 

Everybody would come back to school with new clothes, dressed up by expense or down by poverty. They were all "of" an idea that their parents had of them, of themselves. The question seemed obvious to me.

So, what are you going to be for Halloween? When it comes?

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I wrote the above before driving in to work. I park my car just off of Market and 6th, across from the portion of the tenderloin that is cracked most deeply. It is a difficult place for anybody to pass through, and many don't. The streets are stained nightly with evidence of the disarray of the human heart. It is a confined chaos; people trapped by visible and invisible impulses, injuries. It is not entirely uncommon to see drug and money exchanges, illicit sex, evidence of disease or death, just after.

As I was walking by what appeared to be a common working man getting into a construction truck after a night in the neighborhood I easily overheard him "talking to himself." He was half-mumbling/half-screaming, I played voodoo congas for the cosmic trombones, mother-fuckers….!!! Looking around wildly as he departed into whatever the day held for him.


What is he going to be for Halloween? I wonder.

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The Love Song

Commuting is worse than working. I have done an informal study of the two and this is my conclusion. The reasons should be obvious. My report has been submitted for publication and review. 

- Will advise.

If I sleep well then I have less time to myself. I feel rested but somehow less complete. I could give up showering to try to recover some of the time, but everywhere there is a cost involved and relationships to consider.

I know people who commute almost as much as I, and do so daily. They don't complain much about it, so why me?

Why was I born with such a gift?

-----------


And that's the misery of it. I just drove in to work, and now I must work. My life is not mine. It is given over to a morning and evening highway. Time that would otherwise be with me: gone forever.

I buy myself things that I tell myself that I want, but then lack the time to use them. It is only a semblance of self-possession, a mirage at best.

I pay my bills and tell myself things about that, too.


It is The Love Song of Alfred E Neuman…

Nikon 135mm f2.0 DC

It already feels over. I'm not sure of the cause but the weekends have shortened by as much as perhaps an entire day. I'm certain of it. I'm going to set a stopwatch next time, to verify.

Won't all of you feel stupid when I have proven myself right, yet again? I am getting quite good at it, like Edward Snowden.

It is the effect of social media on the defensive mind. I have seen it myself.

If you can handle a disturbing glance into the effects addiction then this is an article for you. Brace yourself for that, dear tender hearts.

So, I got my new lens yesterday. It is used, but it's a beaut. It is not a lens for everyday use, perhaps, but its specific application is what I desired. It is a fantastic portrait lens.

The pictures above and below were just quick snapshots. Rachel will admonish me for publishing them. In one she looks strung-out in a fun 70's rock-and-roll way, the other she has curlers in her hair... But the point was to show the wonderful bokeh patterning (below) and shallow depth of field (above, only the hair on the left side of her face is in focus). 

Notice the reflection in the mirror. That looks so good it's practically Catholic!

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… and in the Evening upon three?

The rain falls and I sit in darkness, a new morning at home - a new morning at what I must now call home, that is. 

It is a home, somebody's. There are four walls and a door. 

But I have that at work also.

I should probably stop buying camera gear. I am not even using it to document my gradual slide into late middle-age. 

It's simple math. In the US a male is expected to live to be 77.4 years of age. This puts 25.8 years as the marker delineating each third of his life. Three of them, representing early, middle, and late life. 

At 51.6 you are in your final years. April of 2020, I will arrive.

If you divide life into 1/4ths, which makes no sense, then still you are almost 60 before you hit your late stage. But doing this forces an unnatural fraction onto the art of living. It is best to stick with 1/3rds, like the riddle of the sphinx.

I have often arrived early. It is paradoxical. I am a tremendously lazy man but am also very prompt, usually. 

I expect to arrive at 51.6 years of age sometime later this year, at 45, perhaps right on the border between here and 46. I like to be five minutes, or five years, early for everything. Then, I will document my slow slide towards the final observation, the statement which will be noted on the records as my last.

Mine will be, "I think I smell shit! Nurse, is that shit I smell? I can't see it, but I know it's under there."

They say that your hearing is the last thing to go in death, partially because it requires the least muscular involvement. So, I am going to pay somebody to sit next to my bed and describe the fires of hell to me, eternal torment in the hands of beelzebub. 

Revisiting old memories, etc.

I am already half shitting myself just by still being here. It is remarkable, what happens to a man in gradual decline. Everybody wants to save him. He has outlived his usefulness in all but one way: his earning potential. 

Old men are no longer as capable of processing things for the joy of others. This results in all sorts of changes that one must endure. Nobody wants to die alone, but nobody wants to die with others changing their diapers either, especially people they don't know. 

I'd like to do both, but to reverse the process. I'd like my closest friends to start changing my diapers right away, and then leave me alone with my christian-for-hire, chanting brimstone lullabies to me in the gregorian fashion.

You are only as old as you feel, they say. Well, fuck them, I feel old. I am tired and my body doesn't heal as quickly any longer. Isn't that a form of dying? A sign of its onset?

I sprained my ankle in SF in October and it still hasn't healed completely. It was a reasonably mild sprain, all things considered. I could walk on it right away, though it was sore. Still now, if I sit with my legs crossed, as if to meditate, then it quickly becomes aggravated. It is not the inner space you wish to inhabit when meditating, the reminder of your own mortality through pain and agitation.

Well, perhaps this morning is not the time to contemplate my eventual demise; here in the early morning tertiary stage, I hope.

Die young, say many. And for some this strategy worked nearly without a hitch. It's a shrewd but sensible business model. It makes me wish I hadn't paid off my student loans.

Oh yeah... have I mentioned that here? I'm debt free! For the first time in my adult life I have no debts whatsoever. I have things that I have to pay, but no debt hanging over me. 

I must seem very attractive to a potential female wooer, all that I lack now is a dowery and a few loose goats to be slaughtered for the wedding.

 

Whenever I hear about somebody coming into a large sum of money, if they're not young, I think to myself: What a shame, they'll probably just save most of it. It will all be lost to an investment bank somewhere.

You should only be allowed to win the lottery if you're under 25. Everybody can play, but only young people can win. That's how I would set it up. 

My wishes would become law, my whims an edict to my people.

Then, I would charge the elderly to watch kids ruin their lives with all of that money. It would be on pay-per-view, which would be a requirement to purchase, part of the early-bird package, which also includes a cafeteria-style dinner.

I can just see all these terrible, aging lizards sitting at home watching tv, saying to themselves: I knew it, I just knew it. That little girl bought that red sports car. Yep, another one. Oh no, this was different from the other one. Oh, you know, she'll be outta' money in no time... I told you! Didn't I tell you? I can't wait to tell my grandkids. What she needs is a good investor, a financial advisor, not another foreign boyfriend. None of these damned kids know what to do with their money.

If my doctor says that it's okay then I might buy a new bike. I've just got to check with him first, make sure that my failing ass-ring can handle the pressure. 

After that, I'll have to check my finances... I've been eyeing this metal detector that would be quite useful for my morning walks along the beach. 

.

So that's what the "Publish" button does...

I get it now! Well, here is another half complete post. I am out of ideas. Read this at the risk of your own boredom, the peril of an active mind. I had intended to go back end remove everything that didn't matter, but couldn't, that would be the subset of everything below:

My mind is blank. I am looking at a 12 hour day today at work. I can think of nothing else. At the end of it I will know more than I previously did. That's all.  It is small, but it is something.

I want to lie around all day and eat pre-peeled fruit while I casually browse magazines.

That, and play with the new camera. I have already discovered significant vignetting in one of my lenses when shooting wide open, at f1.4. It is the cheapest lens that I have, so... I hope things get better from here. I will have to start shooting in daylight more. 

I have tired of being in the city, living like a half-witted Romany. I look forward to working from home again soon. It allows me to have and keep so much more of my life. How much can any of us handle?

I have run out of things that I want, at least temporarily. My mid-life crisis is rolling along right on schedule. I own 6 cameras and 9 lenses, and I'm still looking. Ever since Rachel bought a new car I want one also. Suddenly it seems to be the most sensible thing that I could possibly do, yet I hadn't really thought about it or considered it a few weeks ago.

Drinking one night did not send me spiraling into an unrecoverable alcoholic frenzy. So many people had told me how a return to it would result in previously unknown levels of abuse, no matter how long I've abstained. It was a guarantee.

Again, they were wrong.

I've been relatively patient and have listened carefully to what people have to say about drinking for four months. Now I am tired of hearing most of it. So much of it seems to be only temporarily true, or situationally so. People pass through different stages of their lives where they are vulnerable to overuse. Those stages seem to come and go for many, gradually decreasing over time for some, even as the effects of alcohol become more pronounced as people age. Myself included. 

So many do not believe this, or can not. They must believe that any drinking results exclusively in self destruction through immediate escalation of intake, nothing else.

I don't know why it should surprise me to discover that people don't know what they're talking about. Or, can only believe one thing and insist that all experience reduce itself to that belief, their belief.

I will say this though, and I believe it to be true: abstaining is easier that moderating. I have tried moderating and was pretty good at it for periods of time. But then I would forget that was the goal. 

It's too easy to not care, to negotiate with yourself. It feels good when drinking: the not caring, or caring less. 

But the feeling does not seem to be what is actually always happening. There is a substantial difference between not caring and hating the sensation of caring, the weight of its responsibility; proving to some inner voice that you can do as you please. That is neither the same as caring or not caring. It is something different. 

Managing grievances - real or perceived - seems easier when out from under the influences of alcohol. 

So, there is that to consider.

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

"To live outside the law you must be honest." - Dylan

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