"Soft, like silly putty..."

(The Past, Present, and Future Mrs. Cusick)

Dear Jesus, I am going to get high tonight. I rarely go out on NYE. It is likely a by-product of having worked in nightclubs on that night for many years, I guess. I can't stand all of the amateur drunks, trying to prove joy with intoxication. It's hideous, but I'm going to be one of them tonight, among the throng, as they say. I doubt I'll get drunk, so I will get pleasantly high instead. Yes pot, it's legal now.

I do wish that Jesus' first miracle would have been turning his first emptied wine goblet into a primitive water bong. The bible is so patchy at providing religious instructions on such things. Imagine how differently the world would have been shaped if alcohol would not have been forbidden to the short-haired Nazirites, but instead had they been instructed on how to make bongs that were pleasing to the eyes of the Lord - God's chosen binger builders.

In these trying times it would be great to discover a new book of the bible, somewhere buried in the dirt of the desert, one that outlines how to make ceremonial water pipes, explaining why it pleases God to smoke pot, and how best to lay with your neighbor's daughter. How to adequately covet a woman's behind hole, to preserve her innocence, all of that.

Okay, where am I going with this. The bible never gives great instruction on such things, and the world desperately needs it.


I'm going to a De La Soul show with some old friends from NYC. A group of peeps that is now partially dispersed across the western states. We will all come together tonight to re-live the early days of jazz-influenced hip-hop. I am hoping to shoot somebody because that is what people do at hip-hop shows, I've heard. I'll do it right after screaming, Aloha Akbar! 

Goodbye Greatness! Or it could be, Hello Greatness! 

Let's Make America Aloha Akbar Again.

Ok, how can I insult the Jews now? Have I left out the Hindus again? They're difficult to insult, they smile so much. It must be that lack of a central religious doctrine. They are not fundamentals, but my goodness are they fun. Hindus are my favorite, if I had to choose. I would retire to their kingdom of the great beyond before all of the others. Just Rati and I, enjoying the paradise of pleasure when nobody's looking. I would require Jesus' chalice-chamber-bong and maybe some occasional morphine.

I think I need a nice Hindu girlfriend, a real Bomb Bae. I would marry her just for the wedding. Aren't they simply delicious women. I can see it now, me in my all-white sherwani, with round Irish turbaned head atop emerging from the streamlined tailored fabric. She, a vision of earthly pleasures, dressed in a semi-pellucid sari and the finest scarves and jewelry that I have ever touched or unravelled. I would give all the horses of my Kingdom for a sweet Hindu bride tonight. She, underneath all of it, my woman dressed only in the aura of her own loveliness, surrounded in flowers of the thousands. Her carnality another attribute of her innocence, nothing more.

I have an abiding affinity for Hindu women, and maybe the occasional Persian. My only requirement for my next love is that, like me, she has no tan lines whatsoever. Our bodies together making a dichotomy from the merged colors of love. Our little two-tone portrait of affection, spinning in the orbits of eternal space, free from worldly concerns.

Of the many things that I have admitted here I do not believe that secret infatuation with a regional type has ever been openly confessed. I suppose after 7 lucky years I am starting to hit a comfort zone in what I am willing to reveal here. Well, I hope my Hindu Buddy Bride likes De La Soul, because that's what we're doing tonight. Also, she should not be squeamish about smoking hash or opium. In fact, I would prefer if her father was in that business. It's sort of a deal breaker, otherwise. We can share hookahs, her and I.


Okay, I'm meandering and some will hopefully take offense at my admission. It is how I am helping to keep liberalism strong, by using it as something other than a purely corrective mechanism.

Suck it, honkeys.



Dancin' on the dance floor, girl it's you that I adore
Step off stage, ya' scream for more
Native tongue, got rhymes galore
Snap my fingers, make you mine
If not, I'll snap a second time
After that I guarantee, you will be standing next to me....

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Diu Caesar Vivat

(Joys of Youth)

I did as promised, I rode my bike yesterday and tried to clear my head of all the noise. It worked for a bit. I am tired of politics, truly tired, particularly as most people are not even discussing anything political, they are thrusting social wishes and disappointments at one another without admitting it. To add to that problem, these issues are somehow embodied in poorly and half elected representatives, and doing half-battle there. There is no national discussion. Dialogue has gone the way of education. Phrenology will soon be on the rise again. Because the shape of a person's skull is an indication of their ability to post effective online opinions. 

Personally, I have been enjoying reading the pamphlet literature of the "Flat Skull Society." Everything is a fucking religion now, and opinion a protected conversational category, freed from liberal mocking. Conservatives require a safe space, also, and they seem to want most the space that liberals were just in. They became tired of being bullied with correctness, so incorrectness will be their newly reasserted mantra. So many of them are claiming that America has spoken, yet neither side quite seems to have heard or understood what was said. The majority said No. Yet we still can't quite agree on what we all disagreed on. Trump won, but we're still not sure what it was that he won. 

Ok, I must stop. My heart is becoming filled with the mud of hatred and I am the one allowing it. I must stop it. Who else can I trust with such a task. I wish to be left alone, but you'd never know that, the way I post and respond to posts. I think I'll schedule some time off from Facebook. I believe I have some vacation time saved up.

Maybe I really do hate people. 

I did go on a great ride yesterday, down to the bay of San Pablo, to the speedway that sits on the entrance hill to Sonoma valley. The rains have produced the sound of water percolating across the rocks that line the drainage ditches along the small two-lane highway. When ignored functionally they sound like a creek's babbling, like nature. They line much of the route, so there is that pleasant diversion. Yesterday, once past the four way stop sign that marks Sonoma's perimeter, at least for me, there was the smell of freshly cut lumber, lots of it. I rode through the cloud of wood's odor and wished to see something built anew, something to rise from fresh wood.

That made me giggle. I have the mind of a pubescent. 

There and back the wind was cool and the sky open, as if I was inside of a vast blue jewel. Few things do for me what cycling has. Every now and then I get a brief glimpse into what it is like to stop talking, to enjoy silence. I'll come out of a sort of hypnotic state and not quite remember where I was, or where I am, or where I am going. I'll have to look around to place myself along the route, to know what to expect, to remember what comes next. It feels great, truly, to have been free from noise for that little glimpse of a moment, that minor respite from the sound of talking. It is the result of riding a route multiple times. The mind is allowed to turn off for a bit, even though it is awareness that is sought, it arrives sometimes through a returning to it. 

There are two rides now that I regularly do, both in opposite directions, each the Olympic Triathlon distance of approx. 40km/25 miles. One is to Saint Francis winery to the north, the other to Infineon Speedway to the south. There is a dichotomy there, I'm certain of it. It has to do with the competitive use of fossil fuels and the patron saint of love for animals, though I do not feel like belaboring the point here. Both rides are beautiful; anybody would be lucky to live where I do. It is the most alluring place that I have ever lived, and among the most prepossessing places that I've ever seen. So much so that the eye sometimes forgets, and must be taken again by surprise. A jump start back into the graceful curving aesthetics of a place, of nature. There is something so lovely about the principled agriculture of the land that appeals to the eye and mind. Perhaps it is only my love for wine that informs and fuels this inner value. I'm sure there are others that would see it otherwise.

Maybe I do hate people. There are too many of them - they ruin everything. 

Death to silence, pirates, and tyrants. 

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2016 was a murderer and a racist... (Anybody want to argue?)

(Insta-portrait of a Liberal, taken by The Boy)

Being around other people's families for the holidays has, I believe, taken its toll on me. I can't tell if it is the absence of my own interacting with what I am seeing in theirs, or if it is only what I feel about "family" entirely in and of itself, but it has all left me rather unsettled and a bit exhausted. I am cornered out in the open, somehow, and I just wish it to be over. Everybody seems to be enjoying the glow of these times, but I can't seem to find the right distance in proximity between things, or from things. The more I listen, the more I talk, when I desperately need some silence. I need some time away. I need a vacation. I want to meditate right now. I should have started an hour ago. 

I made the mistake of writing some mild politics here yesterday. I don't want to hear any of it it any more. That posting then triggered the obligatory constitutional conversation from a friend that knows no others words than articles, sections, and amendments of same. I am tried of it, really tired of it. The constitution should be re-written, then preserved in glass and sent into space for other civilizations to make use of. Ours has been improved upon by others that came after it and we should admit that and utilize those strengths. The people who wrote it certainly would. They would not have written it the way that they did if slavery had not been a "problem." Some say that "problem" has been fixed. 

Wait, I should stop. This will trigger another constitutional conversation, and I will be forced to delete my friend from social media. Well, I guess he is my family and it is the holidays, so he can't be deleted and we're supposed to be arguing as a sign of corrective love for one another, but Jesus Fucking Christ.... I wish he could shut the fuck up about the constitution. 

He has tried to tell me that he and his people felt the exact same way about Obama taking office that we now do about Trump. This is not possible, any amount of honesty would prevent it from being stated. His attempt to advance this claim is about to make me vicious, mostly because I want to be left alone, but also simply because Trump ≠ Obama. It is silly, if not stupid, to try to replace the qualifying symbol in that solution. Idiotic and dangerous, in fact. Trump represents something very different than did a senator, constitutional scholar, and president of the Harvard Law Review becoming president. But people see what they wish to see and talking about politics is not the way to be left alone. It doesn't work. It never works. I feel like an atheist trapped at midnight mass, on really strong acid. 

I wish mostly to have fun with my son and to find a way to feel complete. That should be easy enough: care for my son, care for myself, remain open to love, and hate all tyrants. I can't figure out which of these is causing the problems. I suspect it is the fatigue felt at remaining open to love for so long. Why does having a woman in my life make me feel so much better about things that haven't changed at all. 

Love is replaced slowly and noiselessly by useless diversions, once it evaporates and the well has run dry. Hating tyrants is innate, that can not possibly be the problem. Some would say: hate the tyranny, not the tyrant because players be playin', but that's nonsense. Hate the player sometimes, also. 

If there are supreme court appointments to be made... Maybe one of the second-amendment people can do something about it. 

I think I just need a break from arguing with far-right conservatives. You know, libertarians. There are arguments that can be had with self-described liberals, because many of them never bothered thinking about what they claim to believe, so it is easy enough to wedge a pivot point in. When crossing party lines the troops are too entrenched, the pivots that should hold are just ignored. The agenda is then imaginarily advanced without concern for the inconvenience of fact. 

Bobby, if you read this and post anything at all as a response then I will delete you as a friend from Facebook. This is my promise to you, my Christmas covenant, designed to combat our mutual middle-aged daddy-dogma. Also, stop complaining about the hardships that the government has placed on your small business. When I describe unjust laws in states you always fall back to saying, Then those people should move to a state that better supports their cause. If your business is struggling then get out of that business. That's your version of freedom, so make your own wisdom work for you before you insist that it works for others, my dear Libertarian. 

Also, Bobby... My friends all tell me that we should start arguing with other people. All of them say this. All of them, Bobby.  

I'll try to write another post today, one that just describes the land around Sonoma that I see when I go on a bike ride. I will do my best to only relay my visceral experience as filtered through my senses. I will try to avoid describing the biological functions of the plants that I see, or the agricultural purpose of the beautifully beveled terroir. Those are well understood facts, and facts are what seems to be causing all of the problems in online politics. It is something that I would like to prevent from also infecting the nature around me that I so love. Should be easy enough, now that climate change is no more, and god's white hand is finally back to guiding the president's pen. 

Praise the version of Jesus that won.

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"You're my only hope."

(photo by Batman)

I get it. Liberals are tired and wish to retreat into the holidays to ignore their recently licked wounds. Nobody wants to talk about the liberal sacred cows, like the gender wage gap. They're so focused on the republicans that they need to vote out of office next election that they've again ignored the democrats that'll need to go first, a lesson they often forget. If you wish to strengthen a party then don't try it with lame politicians.

A vital part of me is making some noise lately, reminding me not to be lulled into passivity. The Obama years tricked me a bit, into believing that America had really changed for the better. Though I feel as if I am losing my grasp on the ability to adequately gauge the severity of things. Either that, or Trump has offered so much speculation as to how his horror will unfold that no one can really know which of the many bad ideas he'll actually try to advance. 

But, I get it. It is the fuzzy week between Christmas and New Year. Nobody wants to poke at anything with sticks. Everyone needs a break. I do also, but I start to feel uneasy when I take one that lingers too long. I don't want to stick my head in the sand for four years and just pretend that this isn't happening. Donald Trump will not represent the best parts of America, he will represent the worst parts of himself, of his own brand, and nothing more.  I suspect that he'll cross too many economic lines and even the republicans will need to take him out. It will reveal too fully how greatly American politics has been a mutual money grab. Trump will predictably try to grab too much.

We elected a sleazy NYC real estate developer because half the nation was convinced that Donald Trump represented the racial purity of the capitalist message. In one way he very much does. So, no more poking at the liberal myths for now. It's time to start enjoying the holidays.

I'm going to see De La Soul for NYE in SF. What are you guys doing, watching New York's balls drop?


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


America's favorite pornographer, Cafe Selavy, sent me a few large prints that I had been requesting for a half a decade or more, the first in my collection. He felt bad about destroying my camera charger, we must presume. I bought a cheap 3rd party one and the charging issue appears to have resolved itself, So, now I have three prints to consider framing and hanging. One of which is the one you see above. It is among my favorites of his. It is to the eye what sculpted marble is to the touch, a scallop on the tongue, as scarce and protected as an ivory tusk made of woman.

I would make a great Pygmalion. If I look at the image, close my eyes and exhale, my mind places quicksilver kisses onto the lips of the vision, giving voice to the stillness lying there. The eye can not reach out and touch life into a thing the way that the mind or hand can. Flesh composed of an ocean's ebbing, and flows. The image of her body recalls the earth. One needs to do so little to give the stillest of things movement. Hope is motion's first requirement.

I'll help you Princess Galatea. I will.

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Vacating One's Premises (taking some VOP)

Well, they're over, sort of. The holidays in which I did not take a holiday. I worked an extra day, yesterday, when most everybody else enjoyed their day of observance. 

I like that the Brits use the word holiday instead of vacation. It seems more apropos. To vacate sounds like an enforced police action. To vacation from one's premises. I suppose in these topsy-turvy times I can select whichever words I want, and those words can mean whatever I wish them to mean. The age of Enlightenment ended long ago, as did culture's subsequent dalliance with Romanticism. We have lately received democratic confirmation of the death of both eras. 

The American experiment in civilization seems doomed, each side convinced their version will somehow last, and thrive best without the other. We all watched education's downward spiral, now we get to angrily disagree on what caused it, as we always have. 

That argument won't last very long. It won't need to.  

I have a friend who advances the idea that liberal media caused all of this. If they had only presented conservative facts as equal to liberal facts then conservatives would not have had to fight back with their own preferable versions. Fair and balanced; facts worth believing. A majority of republicans believe that Trump won the popular vote. That is the prevailing ignorance, anyway. They also believe that unemployment rose under Obama's administration and that the nation is far worse off now economically than we were when he took office. So, we'll let them have their run at the facts and we'll see how things unfold. Soon, those very same people who questioned the authority of the federal government will be advancing the state-approved facts of Trump. 

Watch for this transition in national dialogue, it should be impossible to miss. If you would like to participate in the amorphous quality of fact, then just read up on the gender wage gap. I have only read a handful of articles and it is a fascinating subject, most of all because one can never quite grasp any portion of it fully. It requires faith most of all, and one must enter the conversation from the point that reveals their prejudices best. If you believe that women are discriminated against in the paycheck then you can easily find facts that reflect this. If you deny that such discrimination exists then you might casually point to there being no facts whatsoever to support the claim of discrimination. The percentile difference shrinks or expands based entirely on opinion, and one must be very careful when positing anything that resembles a fact on this subject. The needle of fact can not pop the balloon of opinion, it only hardens the rubber that holds the hot air.

Ask your co-workers. If they feel they deserve more money, that greater income has been denied them because of their gender, then take the issue directly to HR. It is a legal matter at that point and should be addressed. 

When studies are conducted by the Dept. of Labor they find there is no discrimination. They are required to investigate and pursue these matters. When some look at that same study they find that there was nothing but discrimination, both in the original subject and then in the study of that subject. The problem then doubles. We have laws which protect women from discrimination, but they do not get used it seems. We are left to presume that men silently prevent the proper usage of law. These laws for equality must be iniquitous, it seems, because they do not take into consideration Hillary's version of the truth, the one in which women make 78% of what men make, which in and of itself seems true when you look at the facts. Few people argue that well established math. It is the fact around which opinion can easily attach itself. 

That most of the differences in pay are quantifiable and already accounted for (and have nothing to do with direct discrimination) do not enter the conversation, because the blame must be shifted elsewhere, further into the unequal past where there was nobody left to blame except that generic maleness that created all gender inequalities. You see? Men and women were both equal at the inception of our species, then men stole that sacred ideal from women in the form of opportunities. Nobody quite knows when and where, but we all agree that it did happen. 

The perfect state that never was is a very attractive ideal for many. The noble savage and savage-esse, granted at birth equal talents and abilities. 

I do not make light of this, at all. I take it seriously, that's why I read as many articles as I did. My own assumptions were recently challenged by somebody. I was surprised to find such a wide range of consensus: everybody agrees that nobody agrees. Discrimination is very real, yet it can't be found. The idea of it has invaded all areas of life, even when independent of evidence of its existence. Women are financially mistreated by men, we just can't quite agree on the percent of it. There is about a 5% difference that could be discrimination, but it could also be attributed to differing strategies of negotiation. Nobody knows, yet almost everybody believes something. Just ask them.

I don't have an internalized opinion on this matter. I tried to form one, but I couldn't. I read a few articles, then I read a few more. Do it for yourself and try to be unbiased. It is not an entirely easy task. Do a Google search for: gender wage gap. Don't stop after you find an opinion that echoes your own, but rather keep reading and search for articles that criticize your opinions or ones that debunk the existing studies, or articles that merely duplicate the prevailing opinion without an attempt to offer fact at all. You'll find a lot of available information, and much abstruse speculation. You'll also see the same statistics presented in very different ways - some damning, some absolving. 

I was going to make a joke about Congress' recent initiative to raise the minimum wage for pregnant women, but I'll stop there. Men don't have to worry about such things, since such fewer of them make minimum wage anyway and male pregnancy is a thing of the past. Nobody knows why. Ask that question and you'll hear another tale of unending prejudicial circumstance. When it comes to the lowest paying jobs it seems that men need not apply, or if they do then the glass floor prevents them from ever arriving at bottom. I will not rest until there are laws which guarantee female promotion at the moment of conception, and a bonus if the baby develops without penis. It is the only way forward. Nobody knows why.

Oh shit, I forgot to write a post in a single paragraph. Let me start this thing all over:

 

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Boxing the Days

Christmas Maximus; the Circus of Nero; all of it, Romanesque. Morning mayhem, with toys as victories, triumphs won from a whirlwind, the perennial ripping at wrappings. The boy has developed an expensive interest in instant photography, but I love many of the pictures that he takes and find it pleasant and satisfying to suddenly be a subject of photographic interest for him. I have fallen greatly for the lucky and unlucky accidents that emerge from the blank void before us, of course. Each image arriving within moments of itself. We laugh along at the stilling of our silliness, single frames of laughter snatched from life. The boy asked to keep a number of them for himself. He wanted to have some stored in his room at Mommy's house, in a special drawer he cleaned out for them. I stood back and watched him choose, measuring his love and allegiances, though I tried not to. Turns out that I have nothing at all to worry about in that regard. The boy loves us each in a way that few can love themselves - without question, without end. Those life lessons that I learn anew. In this we make a pretty great team. Here are the pictures that prove it.

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Merry Christmas to all!

Santa brought me two new cameras, a couple books, a rasher of bacon, and five cups of coffee, so far.  I feel like a four year old on the cusp of being five, though the picture above does not reveal my true inner excitement at the moment, it is still there, perhaps its countenance a bit dormant or out of practice, just beyond the reach of even the best of coffees, but it is there. 

Elves can see it.

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Rock and Roll Never Forgives

A night in the city, half spent at dinner, half at a nightclub, an increasingly odd experience for me. A person that I had once met many years ago in Tampa was there. Well, he reminded me about the time that I had met him, it sounded familiar enough. Then he asked me about my relationship to a project I worked on with a friend about fifteen years ago. I didn't quite know how to respond. I trotted out the banal observations about a work having a life of its own and it always having different meanings for different people. That, but there was more. I wanted to say things change and that I find myself caring less as time passes, that it's a dj record and I don't dj anymore, that I listen to a lot of country and bluegrass now, but I didn't. In part because I'm not sure how true such a thing is. Not that I don't listen to bluegrass, but the other. Most of all I guess I find it odd and silly that a nearly fifty year old man is not only at a nightclub but is talking at all about some former glory, as if I had been lured into it... Approaching fifty, I have learned in part how to be polite. Best to nod and smile, remember to say thank-you when complimented. The basics. It is Christmas, after all. The wild young man from back then and there has become some other thing, some newly aged monster, having arrived here suddenly as if birthed in middle-age from a stanza by Eliot:

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.            
             So how should I presume? 

.

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Christmas (Observed)

It is raining, such that all things seem far away, beyond the clouds. The dryness here near enough to keep me inside. Something seems a cheat about Christmas falling on a Sunday. It disrupts the spirit of the thing to not have it fall on a weekday where it belongs, where it is safe from work and warms us with the same. Holidays should never coincide with a weekend. The fact of a specific date should bend under the pressure and be squeezed out and away from the regularly expected days off. Monday will feel too much like a raincheck for a holiday, too unremarkable to celebrate, and like a fool I have ruined it all before its arrival by offering to work anyway.

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Safety Mesh

(Drugs look like this)

Leave it to me to go to a child's birthday party and find a way of taking psychedelic images right out of the camera. No processing, or rather, only in-camera processing (jpeg conversion). It is just an out of focus image shot through the safety mesh of the kid's bouncy castle. What else am I going to do, interact with adults? This party was about two months ago and I had meant to give some of the pictures to the birthday parents, but I haven't. Taking pictures is easy, going through them takes time. Who has time. I went to the boy's Christmas play last night. The story of Jesus' birth in Bethlehem, even though other biblical facts claim that he was from Nazareth, which fulfills a different prophecy, of course. The story had to be fudged a bit in order to better make him fit the part of the mythical messiah. So, there is this absurd tale of a pregnant women wandering 69 miles in the desert to satisfy both prophecies. Ah well... my criticisms of the historical veracity of the play were not what the night was all about. I shot RAW images on my Fuji X-Pro2, forgetting that Apple hasn't provided native RAW support for my camera yet. Because they are uselessly pro-lapsed assholes. So, I have conducted an in-camera conversion to jpeg to provide you with the guiding light that is the star of Bethlehem, below. I think the world could use a few new prophecies right about now. Why not? I prophesy that Christmas will be over by Tuesday. Thursday at the latest, if the weather holds in the desert.

(The Star of Nazareth)

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The nocturnal effect of effervescence

(Blaine Transue, Sonoma)

Late yesterday I could feel the soreness in my body creeping through me. The only relief was to recline in bed with the lights off and my eyes covered. Walking in my bare feet through my apartment to the kitchen and back made me shiver a bit and wish for sleep. I had skipped both the gym and cycling for two days. My body was exhausted, I think, or I was becoming sick, possibly both. Hard to say, though they must be related. I dropped the boy off at his mom's house after dinner and after him eating a strawberry cheesecake ice cream cone at La Michoacana, the Mexican place at the top of the hill that makes us both so happy with its delicious vanilla. I came home promptly and dissolved two Alka-Seltzer Night tablets into water and watched future vitality bubble to the surface with the sound of happy applause. I do remember things after that, though I am unsure if the visions and sounds were real or imaginary. Twelve hours later I awoke, lucky to be in my bed. The sun was up. I had neither tossed nor turned in my sleep, I do not believe. This store-bought elixir is the type concoction that is used to trick coroners into believing a patient has passed, so that they will be buried alive in the very next scene. My heart rate slowed to ~4 bpm and my body met the room's temperature, somewhere around 68 F and then stayed there for the duration. I couldn't tell where I stopped and the room began. My eyes opened in the morning, but just barely, and only after several attempts. It took a few tries before I could see any value in the effort. As the light made its way through my vitreous humor some portal to the universe then moved out and away from its watch post inside of me, where it had set up residence within me. I know now why people implore, Do not stumble towards the light. It just might be the bonfire of eternity. 

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Intercontinental Ballistic Tweets

Doesn't it feel like it's just about time for another war. People have become far too blasé about militarized conflict, war, particularly the nuclear option. Trump, I believe, knows that if those warheads are not used then they are wasted. In fact, they cost a lot of money to dismantle. Usage is nearly free, in a sense. A great business mind like his will figure that out soon enough. When viewed as inventory: everything must go. He'll sell the leftovers to raise money for the Contras. I'm certain of it. He is a man that will have plenty of Oliver Norths lying around. The Donald Milhous Trump that he is. I do not wish to waste my single paragraph here on the presidential clearing-house sale. But I must... One gets the feeling that America hasn't quite learned its lesson yet. Since the election I have grown far less tolerant, mostly of self-described liberals. I had been growing tired of them throughout much of Obama's tenure, while I grew to like him more and will now miss him. Once Obama started rolling back the drone assassination program, at least publicly, it allowed me some room to do something other than criticize him. I remember being at a friend's house in NYC the night he won. The New Yorkers in attendance were ecstatic. I said simply, He will do nothing to roll back the presidential abuses that Bush took. In fact, he will expand presidential powers and will abuse those same powers. This statement was met with outright scorn, mostly from the sneering woman across the room who would one day soon after become my wife. 

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Open Sesame!

I'd be a contented kid if I could choose to do it again. To watch is to remember, to recall the joys, the hiding, darting whispers, the giggling at being found. Experts of spaces, counting numbers in the distance and the hurrying to hide, footsteps as clues at a distance, a hushing silence as the finale of numbers approaches. Wandering out into the vacant world, two clocks ticking on excitement. Private keys, pacts and allegiances, each bursting with youth, the creation of codes yet unknown. Parents, outsiders to the secret, strangers to the thrills of adventure. All of life accessed with a single command, a magic worth remembering. The only password that matters. 

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"At least you haven't become a Christian"

(A heart-healthy post)

A buddy warned me yesterday against the dangers of treading in Triathletism. He cautioned that my talk here is becoming close to outright advocacy for wheat-grass endurance. I assured him that my diet is as horrific as it's ever been, and as long as I am not publicly discussing the desired consistency of feces then I still have a handle on how things are meant to be. I heard his warnings, though, and he is quite right. Few things are more tedious than a person publicly bettering themselves. It is the story that no one wishes to hear and only the water-brained wish to share. Private tragedies can be memorable, public self-improvement is always pathetic. I know this, of course. I was trying to be comedic about it, but it is a thing that is only funny when viewed, and rightfully ostracized, in others. Of the many things that I get wrong I had not thought that being healthy would somehow arrive on that list. But, there it is. If a thing can be done then it can be done incorrectly. You can count on me to find a path towards that. So much human error can be found amongst the strengths. I am overly playful at work sometimes, also.

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The Bellows

I have finally figured a part of life out, at least for now - I will only take pictures of other cameras and keep my posts to a single paragraph. Too much of my runaway self has made its way onto the pages here. The teenage runaway, the troublemaker. I have made my life explicitly comical, drifted too far into jocular criticisms of the murky political principles of others. I have probably scared away readers through inadvertent insult, perceived bigotries - as in my pronounced distaste for female chauvinism. That was the old me. This is the new me. I am so much more tolerant of casual and celebratory sexism now... I guess this should be a new paragraph: I will need to buy a Rollieflex. What self-respecting amateur medium-format photographer does not own one. I grew mildly bored of the soft-focus lens more quickly than I had thought that I might. It is good that I did not buy the 56mm Lensbaby Velvet, though I will not want to return the one that I have borrowed. Perhaps I can pull a CS and claim that it never worked when it arrived. The thing to do is to buy cameras faster than you can learn to use them. This is what keeps a hobby interesting. One must have dreams that are thwarted by the realities they provoke and demand. It is how one breaths life into the red flower of fire. There is the scuffle that accompanies notions as they emerge from the depths, moving towards a life of their own. Just as other types of love unfold, it should hurt a bit, confusing its subjects as it provides its quotient of pleasure. Never quite knowing which way we face when the spinning ceases. That is how some tales are gauged. There remains as evidence the staggering, blinding cost of it all, the memory of it seeming free. 

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Helpless

(My face has two navels)

Something has to give. It might need to be this site. Such intense navel gazing takes its toll. I feel happier some days in the afternoon, too often on days when I've skipped being here. I had a stressful night last night being a single parent. I fell asleep reading on my bed, woke an hour later, or rather, the boy woke me. I had nothing left to give. We went to sleep an hour early, at 7:30 and I slept until 4am this morning. When the boy woke well after 7am he asked me to play him some music that I've made. The first time he's ever asked such a thing, first question of the day, so I played him this. It's a song I do for him around the house on guitar and piano, though not terribly often. He was excited to hear my voice coming out of the computer. I was more ambivalent. I do not wish the boy to become solemn, but thoughtful. Can one become one, or either.

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"The blackbird whistling"

(Niki Boon)

I was happier when I was heartbroken, I think. Now, I am just bored. There are three recurring seasons of life: love, loss, ennui. None able to resolve the last, each returning by unseen timepiece, ticking off seconds days months from some calendar kept elsewhere. 

This is the third post that I have written this morning. There was one that was quite funny, though it was also vulgar and playfully sexist, a thing that we are told can not exist. I wrote frantically for about an hour before some other part of me stomped on it with editorial authority. Oh, the beauty of inflections or the beauty of innuendoes. I entertain myself with crudities because I am lonely and hostile to love. I feel as if love has picked a gripe with me and I have lost the capacity for magnanimity. I lack the refinement of feeling that affection can produce. I have so very little left to be careful with. 

I miss the craziness of love, the unexpected predicaments that accompany shared and private affections. 

Have you ever watched people that are falling in love? It's a silly creature with extra legs. Each duo teaching one another to dance using the signed language that they have only just invented. It is so sweet and wonderful and genuine, worth sometimes enduring all that follows. 

Loss is so easy, anybody can do it. All that is required is first being inauthentic to yourself. 

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her; If you can bounce high, bounce for her too, till she cry Lover!, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you! 

- Thomas Parke D'Invilliers

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Mighty Hoax, I bid you undo!

(Jesus' Lowrider)

I went to a local school's open house yesterday. It's a big decision, one that I intend to apply some thought and consideration towards. I want the boy to be happy, to enjoy learning, etc. The school is on the short-list of schools for the boy to attend soon. Likely a place where he will have some of his earliest memories.

Speaking of memory, I tried to explain to the boy that even though his is very good now he will likely not remember much of what he has known up to this point. It just confused him and made me question what exactly, the fuck, is wrong with me... I felt understandably stupid, immediately wishing that I could forget why I would ever tell a child such a terrible thing. Wise up, kid! Everything you know will disappear, and soon!

This is why women are needed for raising children. I don't mean that women should do it on their own, or even that they are "better" at it, but only that they are different and that difference is vital, crucial, valued, etc. Most women, I do not imagine, would try to explain to a child that their current frame of reference and the world they know is imaginary and transitory, that it will soon disappear from them, as a matter of dispassionate fact. It might terrify or perplex a child, unnecessarily. This thought had not occurred to me, as I was busy talking when it should have. So, out of my mouth it arrived. 

Men don't think ahead as much, or as far, it seems. Women think ahead a little too much, for me. I suppose my approach has been to give the boy whatever information that I have and to let him draw his own conclusions, offering guidance when needed. 

This is not good enough. I see that now. 

The age of four is maybe a bit young for those sorts of revelations. It is very odd though, to know that most all of the memories that he and I have shared up to this point will simply vanish and become an amorphous past that will be formed within him mostly through our careful retellings. So, I have time to tell him over and over again that I never told him he would forget everything, that will make it more true. 

At the school I listened attentively, made the occasional joke that nobody seemed to understand. As an example, the administrator that was giving the tour spoke of how the children, when studying Rome, might march in lockstep as if they were Roman soldiers. I asked how they were at making roads. Ten blank eyes looked at me as if I had just suggested child labor in earnestness. Less than three seconds before that an admin at the school was militarizing children, but the mere mentioning of the famous road building abilities of Romans was apparently beyond the accepted set of references permitted. I opted not to follow up with a mention of Justinian's Codex, Digest, or of the Institutes. 

The not understanding of jokes is becoming a real problem. I write too cryptically, or I make references that nobody seems to understand.  I'm not trying to be a snob, but I'm beginning to suspect that my online friends are a bunch of dumb-asses. I'm not sure where all of the clever people went, but they are all universally absent from my life now, when I need them the most. 

I blame my Facebook persona. It is insufferable. 

One parent whose child was already attending the school - and I could never quite figure out what she was actually doing at this open house - fell back as we walked, so we chatted. She asked what I thought a bit about the school a little too eagerly, as if I was on the verge of being inducted into some sort of sect. I explained that everything looked fantastic, that I loved the learning environment, and that all the children seemed very happy and pleasantly attentive to the activities in each classroom. The last of which was instruction on fractions. It caused me to look at the balck-board twice before internally confirming an answer to the teacher's question. I wanted to sit in on the class, take a bit of advantage from the remedial education. 

I expressed a little concern to this woman about the low immunization rates at the school. She explained that immunization is a personal decision and that each child's immune system develops differently. She stopped there. I nodded at her, because both of those things are true. All the while knowing that her response excludes a much larger truth.

Vaccinating doesn't put a child in a magic spacesuit, one that can alone protect them from disease. There is no way of knowing if a child is protected except by exposing them to the disease, something that must seem okay with a growing segment of the population. This fact is used as an argument against vaccinations - that they are not 100% effective in every child to which they are administered - which is true. They are 0% effective in children that have not had them if the child is exposed, which is best accomplished by achieving social immunity within the population. 

It was troubling, to recognize that the liberal enclave that is (presumably) educated Sonoma would act upon such faulty data, and under the culpability umbrella of it being a personal decision. The assertion itself claims an impossible conjectural knowledge of the development of any given child's immune system and what might be best for that system, to which the parent has no visibility whatsoever. More so, this presumptive position is held even when it endangers the health of others. 

I'm all for parents being able to cripple their children as part of the personal freedom that all Americans should wield over the innocent. The ability to experiment freely with the spread of airborne infectious disease is enshrined in who we are as a people. Because what is liberty if not that? 

But still, something was eating at me. 

The full vaccine conversation was perhaps too much for the parent of a child to undertake, and understandably. People have such divergent views, prepared to defend their stance with all sorts of available online information. The current state of politics is best understood as a precursor to the return of polio as a national epidemic, a sort of canary in our abandoned coal mines. Because, you know... there is information out there that says things, and I agree with those things. Between the libertarians on one side and the liberals on the other, we're all fucking doomed. The root word that functions more as a prefix that I have become most suspicious of: liber. 

One side insists that we should die from preventable disease, the other prefers gunshot wounds from bad guys being stopped by good guys. America has a liberty problem. Everyone agrees that it's either a surplus or a deficit, but it's a real problem, and one party has one answer. 

California has recently done away with the "personal belief exemption" to immunization. If you wish to have your child attend a public school you will now, at the very least, have to explain to a doctor why vaccines scare you so much. It's important to look your doctor in the eye and ask if he has ever read Jenny McCarthy's peer-reviewed studies on the subject? Clinical trials and real world benefit can be damned in the face of that blue-eyed tele-genius. 

If you wish to inform yourself on vaccines then do a Google search for: "Which blonde celebrities best understand the causes of autism in children"

Part of the discussion is very straightforward: Some children will be rendered safe from certain communicable diseases, others will not.

The Wikipedia article on immunization is one place that you might expect would include both sides of this complicated science-story. You would be wrong. The article on immunization makes no mention of its detractors or critics. To encourage them would be dangerous, by providing them the type credibility that Jenny McCarthy's clinical studies can not. Rather, Wikipedia compiles these concerns into their own article, where they can not infect the actual article on immunization. 

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To cry yourself thin once again

(unrelated photo)

I think that I've derived the source of my sudden weight gain. I've been using heavy whipping cream in my cereal. I had thought that the extra animal fats would help my training, but it turns out that all of those delicious animal fats must be balanced out with lots of breads and pastas. Ah well, I have at least determined the source of this mysterious weight gain. As soon as I've worked my way through my 50 gallon barrel of heavy cream then I'll adjust back to using half and half for my morning, midday, and evening bowl of cereal. I had believed that the extra fiber would push things through before any of those calories could take up residence on my belly.

Turns out that fiber does not contain the "negative calories" that I had ascribed to it. This was just dietary nonsense, which seems impossible, because my site advancing this method of weight loss has received millions of hits: tears-have-calories-too.gov

Ugh, I wandered off and came back and found this page still open. I had forgotten to keep writing. 

Well, I'll curb my eating, I hope. I step on the scale at the gym as often as 3-5 times a week, so there is a visceral reaction to the gain that is exterior to how my jeans feel when I put them on. Hopefully, that will be enough, watching lead slide up the scale and away from the earth's center. It is odd, how my sense of self becomes tied to my weight. I know that it's not "right" but the sensation of it is very engaging. I tell myself different things when the mirror is pleasantly listening. Charm arrives with less struggle. I am easiest on myself when I've put in all the time at the gym practicing an active self-hatred of sorts. 

Odd, that. 

I kid, but only a little bit, no more than a thousand calories worth. If you fall out of practice having those stern conversations with your wardrobe then you have to offer a few ultimatums to arrive back at a place that feels healthy. It is awful, sometimes, what the mind does to the poor body... Even when I was meditating, I had to resist the temptation to perpetually repeat the phrase, Calm down you fat fuck, pay attention, stop masturbating all the time. 

Every now and then I'll swap that out with: Your pretty face is going to hell. 

It is my ad hoc bliss slogan, my maxim mantra.

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Mother Effer!

(There is no tomorrow!)

I went to the gym after work and confirmed it: I've gained ten pounds since accepting the Olympic invite less than two months ago. I've known for a while that I am an anxiety-driven consumer of great foods, but fuck.... since deciding to summit Olympus Mons I have been eating more vigorously, with a champion's appetite. 

I keep looking at spoonfuls of pasta and thinking, Yep, I'm going to need that. Doesn't matter, it could be dripping with hot cheese and oil and all that goes though my mind is, There's delicious fuel for a few extra important training steps on my path to eternal victory.

Back to the all-you-can-eat drawing board, I guess. I put on a shirt over the weekend and I thought that I didn't look quite as svelte as I had before. I immediately blamed the shirt, then the mirror, thinking that they had betrayed me, that they were back to their old tricks. Now I see that there was a waistline coup d'etat already well underfoot. 

I left the gym after only a few sets, feeling deeply dispirited. It was my weight creeping back up where I am now that prompted me to stop drinking about a month and a half ago. Now I am forced to question that wisdom with renewed doubt. What's the point of being clear-headed if I'm not going to have a slender physique to match my wit and charm. 

The universe refuses to be happy for me. There is no pleasing the great weightless beyond.

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Few honors await the irreverent

There's no way the weekend's already over. The last two days were a near total cheat. Election night all over again. November 9th, 2016 would make a great Groundhog Day. 

I watched Patti Smith slaughter Dylan as part of the Nobel committee's presumed honoring of him. Do yourself a favor and read his acceptance speech included in that link. It rolls off of the tongue like what might soon be a first draft. He just needs to add that initial touch to it. Jesus, it's like listening to the semi-lucid ramblings of a stinkin' hobo. They found this speech in his pocket, with what might have been a raisin stuck to it. I hope somebody immortalizes the napkin he scratched it on. 

I suppose that's part of the greatness and charm of Dylan, though. It must be difficult to be so honored for having been so irreverent for so long. 

One great thing that mechanized recording and reproduction did for us is that it greatly reduced the weight of the opinions of artists concerning their own careers. We have the documents now to draw our own conclusions. Everybody's a music scholar, by virtue of the expansion of the available library. Your insight awaits only your click. They can't take their albums away from us. 

Madonna's calculated misstep "MDNA" is not going away, ever. Its release was reportedly the only time the grand-diva ever blushed. Could have been smeared rouge, I suppose. Did she really think that she could just slip an album like that in and nobody would notice? It's like watching Madonna drop a dookie-pie in your favorite record store. She's over in the jazz section with her pants down, ankles cleared from the drop zone, holding herself up by the bin that houses Coltrane. She just keeps looking at you and giving you the index finger to the lips to be quiet and the eyes that say just be cool about this. But she's pooping on the floor just because she's Madonna, because she can. Somebody's going to find it and then they're going to have to clean it up. It doesn't seem right, even if they do sell it on eBay. The poop shouldn't become the record store's property just because she left it there. Spiritually, it's still connected to her. 

Writing about Madonna pooping makes me feel queasy. It's because she's old. There's something about the thought of the skin on the surface of her ass cheeks that bothers me now. It didn't used to. It's not my fault. I'm sure with the young Madonna it might have seemed reasonable, but not now.

Age and weight discrimination are still sort of okay, though it really should happen only towards men, where it's even welcomed from time to time. It's the discrimination that nobody questions or takes seriously. Just read what everybody had to say recently about Bertolucci and Brando, those two fat old sweaty rapists. 

We could perhaps use another world war, if for nothing else then it is useful to re-establish clearer classes of denigration. Does anything define arbitrary hostility better than does a little world warring. It's as if every nation is suddenly caught in commuter traffic, screaming out their window at the stupidity of all other commuters. Everybody's a bigot when stuck in traffic.  I'm convinced there are groups of people that should be taxed based on choice of car color alone. It's one of the many platforms that I have tried to advance that has also effectively kept me from amassing political power. 

Fuck Prius drivers, though. Right?

It seems that the world is right on the verge of figuring things out again. 

I look forward to Kanye's Nobel acceptance speech much more than I did Dylan's. He's going to do an interpretive rant. It will at least show some spark of deeply misguided and half-thought comedic effort. He is emphatic when not vehement. He should have his own blog, too. 

Once Trump starts hosting America's Nobel Prizes on NBC we'll get a glimpse into lots of varied acceptance speeches, as well as blunt public rejections as a proxy for beheadings. The sub-theme of the program will be "controversies." That Simon Cowell doesn't get to weigh in on the Nobel winners tells me everything that I need to know about that sham of civility and self-celebration. Simon is the only judge on the Supreme Meat Lovers Court that even matters. 

Of all of the criticisms that I've ever heard of Bowie the one that lacerated my poor glittered fading heart the most was an attempt at praise: Bowie invented Madonna! It's not true, of course, but it does contain a kernel of pre-insight. One has to heat it in oil to get any life out of it, but it pops just like corn does after a little bit if you stare at it. I'm nearly surprised Dylan didn't use this little Bowie/Madonna gem for his Nobel speech.

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"...an official Red Ryder, carbine action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle!"

(Christmas-clickbait)

I'm drinking my coffee black, again. It is a sure sign of being old. I either can't remember to buy milk or I have given up caring that the coffee is softened at all by it. I'm sure it is the morning gateway drug. Speaking of, the last two nights I've slept a total of 18 hours. This may not sound like much to you. For me, it is a crushing victory against the cousin of death. 

Ouch. Fuck. Black coffee is hot. I tried to take what would be a normal swig of morning coffee, but hadn't remembered the full role that milk plays in that relationship. I guess I could just be drinking a glass of milk right now, if I had any, but I would have to suffer the opinions of others to do so and to admit to it. Something about cruelty, or man's inability to digest cow's milk, or something. True liberals always have the strictest of diets. It's how you can gauge liberalism without being rude.

I suppose that some of all that health-yammering might be true. My diet is poor. It must be from ingesting all of the fake nutrient news sites online. Those sites should all put a little banner on the McDonalds ads in my news feeds letting me know that's not real food. How else am I to know? 

There is nobody left to argue with. The election has emptied the country of what little sense of humor it had left. People were afraid that Hillary was too corrupt. Some of them voted to show how sick and tired they had become of that. They voted in a guaranteed outsider: a celebrity that no one likes. Our first verified multi-megalomaniac in the oval office. Only a celebrity outsider can get rid of the corruption in Washington. Any fool can tell you that. He's like a Rambo that never sullied himself in battle. The requirements for beating the democrats were basic: He must be hated by liberals, he must speak the racism in his mind without fear of censure or recriminations, and he must wear a baseball hat leading up to the election. 

What's a little racism once those criteria have been satisfied. Turns out that the word "He" was the most important one in the sentence. 

America has created another division for itself, between the angry and the exhausted. There are people who want the battling to continue and then there are those who are too tired to beg for it to stop. 

One component of the multi-faceted civil war in Beirut was between those who wished for the war to continue, believing still that victory was possible, and those who only wished for the fighting to stop, at any cost. Each side in that struggle became likewise divided along those lines, as well as all of the others there - political, regional, and religious. 

So, there is that to think about here on Sunday morning. When you think the country is "too divided" it's fun to think up ways that might even make matters worse. It's easy. 

I don't mind that the democrats had their asses kicked. It's more fun for me when the republichens lose, but it's nice to see everybody get a turn up at bat. Looks like some family values will finally return to the public conversation. At the end of it all the people who study these things will tell you that everybody showed up to be a single-issue voter, and there are about 150 million issues in the US. 

There is the now famous video of the shirtless tatted meathead screaming "make my burrito" at what appears to be a Mexican-American protesting the Trump rally. This ink-bedazzled athlete had only one issue - he wanted someone to make him a burrito. You can sense his exhaustion at hammering this point home for so long now. His weariness at wanting a burrito has now become anger. I know plenty of Mexicans that would be happy to make him one.

I would have paid money to have had an election night webcam on that guy. His excitement must have been simply Hitleriffic. 

Ok, that was just my practice intro. I had not wished to write about politics today. I am a rebel for both sides, one wanting to stay and argue the other wishing to retreat, to regroup, to re-brand for next election.

Ok, well, that was my intro. as well as my post, it seems. 

It helps to warm up with politics, creates an enemy, something to write against. I had intended instead today to tempt the nebulous. Maybe tell a Christmas story, one that everybody except the godless can agree on. 

The boy is up now and will want some breakfast, some fruit and then something I will prepare but will not eat. An Eggo waffle with butter and syrup. Maybe I'll try just one bite, to help offset the coffee. To oppose the bitterness, in its own way, with nature's maple sweetness. Some xylem to offset the phloem. 

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