Trampoline is a funny word

Dinner at a friend's place, to meet the boyfriend. He has recently moved to town, had been just visiting. They live around the corner, across the street from the creek that runs along the west side of the little town. The same creek that runs along the backside of our old place. Now, her old place. My ex-best-half. 

There was a trampoline, which the kids greatly enjoyed. We made lovely little pizzas.

I recently dipped near an immediate goal, which was to return to the weight that I was when I felt only mildly overweight. That was ten pounds ago, sometime around Burning Man, likely just after. At the very least I'd like to get below that weight. 

Ideally, I'd like to get below 200 pounds again. That does not seem unreasonable, merely ungraspable. I am not one of those jolly fat fellows, like Santa. I am quite pissed off about it, sweaty and fat with bulging eyes, bursting blood vessels, all of it, etc. I tend to take all of that misdirected anger out on trampolines. I nearly broke the contraption with my unrestrained joy at it. 

While jumping, I thought several disconnected thoughts: 

- Can this thing bear my weight?

- Yes, I guess it can.

- How high do you think I can jump?

- I feel so free when I am floating.

- I wonder if they sell these at Walmart.

And on and on until I tired of what was starting to quickly seem like exercise. It must have lasted almost seven minutes.

For some buried reason, the images of the boys jumping around inside the device reminded me of the Talking Heads, mostly the one at the top. I was going to write a piece based around the existential ideas of suspension and paralysis. Not the physical form of it, which I have been warned about by my radiologist friend, a man that would know. 

But instead, the more insidious forms of it. The state we find ourselves in: unable to fly, afraid to fall, laughing nervously along. Performing tasks as rote, just to get by, to call life "life."  We see it in the broken and disconnected frames, snatched perhaps from time, yet added to the budding self-consciousness, where the weight of experience settles into its future form, for good or ill. 

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Prairie Picnic

It is settling in: my glasses are gone. If the blind lead the squinting…

I double-checked the gym, re-searched the apartment, howled to the clouds, then swayed begging towards the waning moon. It makes no sense. I rarely ever lose things. Like with most stuff - not things in which one can reasonably presume that they were left in a specific spot and now the thing has been unsurprisingly taken from there - there is only a haze of mystery surrounding a brief window of time, a reminder that there is a final end to all certainty. There still exists a vague sense that I had them then, I think, but then I noticed here that they were gone, with nothing substantial in the interim to give me hope.

While they are only glasses, they are personal. They are connected to me. They were. There is a mild horror associated with loss of that kind. Impermanence seems permanent enough, as is. I could take the Zen path and express my non-attachment to them, but they still need to be replaced, so that is less of an option that is available to me. Non-attachment is not the opposite of gravity. 

Ah well, I still have cameras to buy, expensive ones. I've not only lost my mind, I've doubled down on an all-or-nothing bet. I'm going to buy the newest, most expensive model. It is more than three times the cost of the one I purchased that I should not have. With some basic multiplication it all comes out even and the world is good. It'll end in zeroes. I'm certain of it. 

I'm a single guy. I get to spend money on whatever I want, though I know I shouldn't. Not like this, anyway.

I did something uncharacteristic of me, yesterday: walked around Sonoma with the intention of taking portraits of people. I failed at gathering any portraits, but it was nice just to walk around my realm with the intention of taking pictures. Framing the world does something for it. It changes it in such a way that one starts to see the genesis of composition in all shapes, the shape that precedes.

I read a book a decade or so ago, The Sacred And The Profane. It argued for an outline of differences between sacred space and time and secular space and time. It explained how, and why, a religious person walks through life in a very different continuum than does a secular-minded person. The author dispassionately explored the meaning of the religious and irreligiousness experience in such a way that it rendered refutation less necessary, useless even. 

Wandering, looking at the world with an eye to capture or convert, does a similar thing. I think. To create art is to echo the trinity, in a sense. The initial impulse, the idea, has its corollary in God, the idea behind the machine. Then, there is the act of creation, where the artist becomes physically involved for a brief time with their creation, to mold it into its essential form. This has its reflection in Jesus, where the idea transitioned to become a physical part of mankind, the realm of the touched. 

Then, once the physical work is complete it becomes a thing all of its own, a creation of spirit, not at all dissimilar from the Holy Spirit, the knowing wind. More aura than is ratio cogitari or hominis, genus. 

More aura, more aura, I cried.

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Portrait of a Tree

Walked around the little town square after work, hoping to take pictures of people, portraits of. There were few people, none to represent posterity, portraiture, or else. It is a community with some well manicured edges. 

I put the camera into manual focus and crouched to better align myself with the horizon's watercolors. I took only two shots, though I knew that I would like them; light as pastel, almost powder. 

It is the wondertime here. 

Good Hustle

This fellow was here this morning as I went to make coffee at work. I thought it was funny, because it looked photo-shopped into reality. That picture is right out of the camera-phone. This is where I drink coffee and peer into the refrigerator, wondering what will satisfy me.

My glasses are gone. I am not the type to lose things by chance. I destroy things, which is one way of losing them, but I know where they were.

I know why I lost them. I have been sleeping better, but it has made me slightly more distracted. I suppose that there is almost always a trade-off in life. It's rare that you get something without giving something else up.

I tried to buy a camera that I thought would make me happy, but my happiness exists in an ever decreasing space. Now, I must either back out of the purchase or buy the nicer model. Adequacy no longer has meaning for me. I have nearly ruined another love in my life simply by not allowing myself to afford it. I won't be happy until I am destitute. 

A reader here complimented me on my blog yesterday. With my characteristic bashfulness I tried to accept the compliment as graciously as possible, pointing out that it's a lot of silliness also, among other things. 

The response was perfect: Good Hustle (smily emoticon). 

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Paul Frank, Missing

My glasses. My newest pair, with the frames and the special coating. Vanished. I only remember not having them. It happened suddenly. I was leaving the gym and felt their absence. Back at the gym, hours later, nothing. Who knows.

Like all others, gone. 

Once, I helped an older woman. She was the wife of a man who was in prison and would be until his death, which wasn't far off, nor was hers. She had a medical condition. They tried to sue, they lost. He shot the lawyer dead.

I was helping the wife clean out her house of much of his stuff. Our activity had a strong sense of permanence about it, as expected. She didn't seem at all surprised by her predicament, though. She spoke about the acts and present condition of her husband with a characteristic disinterestedness. It was privately fascinating.

He had been a WWII veteran and had a cache of uniforms and memorabilia, much of which was inherited by me because I showed a mild interest. The young girl that brought me there was my second or third girlfriend. It was her aunt somebody. She made me a sandwich and a glass of lemonade.

I hauled most of his stuff to the dump. 

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The Essential Form

The truth of impression, the distance that charms. The space between what was wanted and what resulted.

One measure of tragedy is that same space: the distance between what we may have hoped for and what resulted.

Funny, that - the echo turns out to be the lining.

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… the arc of life

I bummed around all weekend, doing lots of nothing. Had Easter dinner with the ex-family, went for a long bike ride, did extra sets at the gym to no use. I walked around the back yard with the boy and my new camera, hoping to capture some of his youthfulness.

We went still bird watching, he and I. We hung the gift of a hummingbird feeder at Mom's house. My apartment parking lot lured no hummers. 

The years pass as months, the blur of a time fastly fading. There exists a growing disparity between all of the things ever experienced and the rest of my life, the remainder. As if the elastic of a future that once seemed to stretch before me has now begun its sudden snap back, returning wildly towards the place from which it came. 

I sit now and look out my kitchen window, pretending to ponder the used metaphor of life being the trajectory of an arrow shot either randomly towards the sky, to the horizon, or into the ground. It seems that it was, or that it must be, or that it will be. One does not hardly even feel the arc of life until after its apex.

I took the below picture of mi ex-esposa. It's right out of the camera, only with the colors removed from the jpeg. I like the picture quite a bit, but she did not, so I'll post it here at the bottom of this post, where she might not ever find it.

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He Is Risen!

Easter morning. The boy searched for eggs at Mom's, in accordance with His wishes.

He found basket upon basket of chocolate shaped as bunnies, as sweet as sugar is to the tongue. 

The eggs were painted each in powdered reds, oranges, yellows, blues, and purples. The oils we mixed into the dyes created unexpected patterns along the oblong surface of the shell. They broke apart easily. Mom deviled, after having split them, after having applied the whisk.

The eggs were hidden everywhere in the house. Everywhere that could be easily reached; miraculous and nearly inexplicable. 

That is one busy bunny, I offered.

The wind came and went along the grass of the back yard, twisting the wind spinner as it arrived, departing along the upper crevice of the river, beyond the trees, which were likewise drifting in those selfsame winds.

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Tinder is the Night

(Unused Tinder profile pic)

Well, my RAID I system doesn't work as well as I had hoped that it would. It's an indexing problem. The library is too large and I'm not able to effectively use iTunes' indexing system remotely. I can share the library to my computer but I don't really need that. The server is already redundant. Oh well, I can still access my files anywhere that I am, I just need to know how to navigate to the files in question as the search function is nearly useless. I should have known, really. The tech-support guy at Synology discouraged me from indexing, telling me that it occupies too many resources for the result that you get, and that it must be running in the background all of the time. 

Those tech guys usually know what they're talking about.

I own my first ever Android product now, a Samsung Galaxy 4 tablet. It seems clunky when compared to the Apple OS. I had always heard how superior it was in that regard. Ah well, there's at least one argument for confirmation bias, or against. Perhaps it only needs more of my attention to become less awkward. That's it, I'm sure. It is nice having some new gadget that cost me nothing. 

Well, I chose to stay with AT&T as a mobile carrier, so they gave it to me as a reward. No new contract, just love from a company that clearly enjoys taking monthly money off me. It'll help with the boy on long car trips. I jacked it up with a 64GB mini-SD card so we can go crazy downloading content onto it. I get to re-buy all the things I've already bought twice and lost half once.

I do not believe that I will ever get married again. I have learned to better trust my own initial judgement as a sort of pre-defense, divorce-prevention mechanism. I am listening to that little voice that says "Oh, don't do that. Just, no." So far it has only kept me from meeting a woman for coffee. I'm sure there are greater mistakes that this method is waiting to save me from, out there somewhere watching me, a fumbling single parent of one.

Women find divorcée fathers in particular need of their saving. The more together they seem then the more attractive they become and in need of a very specific saving: theirs. 

I have a new policy: 90 days. 

No matter how well things are going with a woman, any woman, I'm going to set an iCal event to remind me to break up with her after 90 days. No questions asked, no answers given. Everything starts to fall apart entering the fourth month. Any signs of failure before that only light the threads of arriving future doom, giving ghostly pattern to the returning of a spidery apparition. 

Thus singeth the harpsichord. 

(Current Grindr profile pic)

Does this shirt make David Bowie look fat?

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Pasch

(The corner of Haight and Ash-Wednesday)

And so this is Easter, and what have you done, another egg painted, and a new one just begun….

I love Easter. It's the one day of the year in which I can easily cast off my hatred of all things, adorning the purple velvet cloak of Irish-Catholicism, to celebrate the day that signifies the culmination of the Passion of Christ. Also, I get to eat as much fish as I would like. 

In truth, I just like to see all the girls dressed up in their very best. Few things are as erotic as a church on Easter Sunday. I am going to come out in full support of traditional gender roles on this one day of the year. I'm not talking about really young girls. I mean mostly late teenagers, and their hot, milfy, cougar mommies, instead.

How funny and lucky it is for some that "teen" can still refer to a consensual adult. There is a two year window, by law, where teenagers are not considered jail-bait, but are able, capable, and eager to exercise their own choices, while still under the watchful and mostly disinterested eye of the law. 

If there are any 18-19 yr old readers of this site and you want to really piss your parents off then please reach out to me privately. We'll have a great afternoon, send recent pics.

Okay, there is that. I partially kid. 

I do invite anyone to argue patriarchy or feminism with me today. Good Friday. I have the power of the Holy Spirit behind me. I wield its enigma like a sword made from the winds. I slept for eight hours, a tremendous victory against the moon. The Gods of Olympus smiled down upon my suspended consciousness, my body in repose.

The boy and I made dyed eggs last night, in anticipation of the arrival of the mystery bunny. We of course made a mess, but it was fun and we only broke one egg. The dye came off of plates very easily, and out of plastic containers the same, even off of fabric and dinner placemats and clothes. The one place that it refused to budge was skin. Dish soap was helpless against it. We both went to bed with gunked-up kid fingers.

Perhaps that is the trick, eat fish for dinner and let the mighty Isis know of our adoration for her each night with decorated eggs and dirty, dyed fingers.

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Chamomile 0, Sean 1

I returned from the gym sweaty, only to find that the water at my apartment had been turned off. I sit here now with the mineral rich sweat feeding whatever lingers along the cutaneous. I await the return of indoor plumbing to conduct my microbiotacide, to vanquish the dreaded malassezia globosa. Tinea Versicolor.

Similar to CS's slippage of late, I have also lost my mind and am buying things that I can't afford. I purchased yet another new camera and lens this morning. It was expensive. I will need to sell something now, but I probably won't. I won't tell you what I bought. I'll just wait to see if anybody can tell the difference in the pictures I post here. It was not the latest model, and I opted out of a lens that might have had better bokeh, but struggled focusing in low light situations. But, what the fuck, money never lasts.

Time passes; love fades.


The other night I was preparing for sleep, reflecting upon my struggles obtaining and possessing the state of it. I put some water in the kettle and started preparing the tea, chamomile. I tried to open the packaging that kept the fresh tea bag from me, After one or two small parts torn away I still couldn't get enough of my thumb or forefinger into the slit to separate the two halves. I started biting at the thing. Within seconds I ended up savagely tearing the entire thing into pieces with the ferocity of my jaw and the strength of my teeth. Bits of chamomile drifting to the kitchen floor as snow made of tea leaves. They were sprinkled along my chin when I wiped, proving that I had won.

I cursed, spat, and kicked at nature as it fell, spreading it throughout the kitchen, underneath the refrigerator. It was all bath salts in catnip. The buzzer alarm of the microwave was going off - I use that to time the heating of the water, rather than letting it get too hot so that I have to wait for it to cool down before I drink it. I grabbed another tea bag in such a way as to let it know that I was in no mood for resistance. I felt like one of the bad cops at a rally. I was in charge, and not about to allow any fucking nonsense in the opening of this next bag. My message must have made it through. This one tore in a single line exactly as I intended, offering up its innards as alms to a weary man, one near the edge.


After that, all was gravy. I looked at the floor and acknowledged my victory over one chamomile tea wrapper. The phrase "beautiful loser" whispered by. You just can't have it all... 

I wondered: if I could so easily defeat one of them then how many would it take for them to overtake me completely. Certainly not the modest numbers that were represented by the sole box I had in my cabinet. I pictured being strapped to the beach by chamomilliputians, thousands of them; then, me breaking free of their miniature harnesses, making water on all of them, laughing wildly into the nighttime sky. Howling, even. Howling myself to sleep.

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Fiending for Sleep

I was in bed with the lights off by 9pm last night. I awoke at the sun's bright tolling of 7am. There is a super-boring story as to what happened between those hours, and yet it is all that I have to tell.

Most nights - not all - I need some sort of relaxant to prepare myself for sleep. Otherwise, I very quickly develop sleep anxiety and will toss and turn for hours, so wound up with mind racing that I feel as a jack-in-the-box that never quite pops. There is the strangest Dutch carnival music that plays though my mind, at all hours, like the breaking of musical springs. The shattering of musical, metal bells.

I close my eyes and see myself down the avenues, running with the midgets in Pamplona, all of it. 

It is the curse of diminishment - the less time left in the night the faster the upwards spiral of anxiety, as if the inward voice is organizing to protest against the non-arrival of something. 

There is Xanax, NyQuil, Ambien, melatonin, wine, chamomile tea, pot butter, and of course whiskey to help calm me down, but they each exact their toll. To sleep I narcoticize myself, but I wish to avoid habituation, so I wander from one method to another. I fear that I may have become acclimated to a sleeping process, instead of a substance, though in that I am not alone. 

I am most content when I fall asleep without the drowning assistance of the pharmacist, but writing that lends a tremor move through me. In fear of the ghosts of restlessness. A lifetime supply of opium would solve my modest problems, yet no game shows offer this simple prize as a prize. 

When friends learn of my condition they try to convince me that natural sleep aids are much better. They don't work, I've tried them - valerian root, magnesium, kava, all of that stuff. What few of those closest to the center of my sleeplessness seem to believe is that deprivation is far more unsettling to me, and far more likely to break loose some of the stalactites of my neuroses, than would be the recurring and moderated intake of the other stuff.  

After dosing through all of that, I awoke rested and fat.

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Point of View

My Coq au Vin was a hit. My days as a celebrity chef are off and flying, like a kite.

I never use a hood, which is why there is lens flare in the image above, though I kind of like it. Reminds me of bad pictures from my own childhood, though they were always in faded colors. I could have used the flare more creatively, but I thought I was actually getting away with it. Turns out I was just botching the shots, trying to get the shadow in the shot and ignoring the elephant in the sun.

I have no time to write today, too many things going on. One less thing botched, I suppose.

I like what CS has done by shifting the personal pronouns from "I" to "you" in mid-post. I can't figure out why I like it so much. Change is nice, you see.

It's second person, I think, but what has thinking ever done for any of us.

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Shinzo No Tobira

(Future Consumer of Coq au Vin)

The weekend came and went, as they do, all that they do. Weekends are lazy, stupid, and unemployed.

I did read portions of several books on Sunday afternoon. I could not settle in to one. They were either too dark, too much of an academic study, or the fictive writing was simply bad. I have been trying to read through a few recommendations and they are mostly terrible. I have to stop letting Amazon suggest reading material for me. I get sucked in, thinking that I'll find out about some cool new writers to which I am currently oblivious, but then I get this book that 487 people rated as a 5 star masterpiece and it turns out to be limping twaddle, the pages sag in my hand as I turn them ever more slowly.

I have a stack of partially read books right now that all qualify; pure bunkum.

I received Lawrence Osborne's Hunters In The Dark but have not started reading it yet, which is lucky for me as it will likely save me from the seemingly endless supply of bound drivel piling up around me. The debut book by Callan Wink is promising, semi-recommended by CS. 


As for auto-recommendations…. When will I learn that Amazon is not my friend. When it comes to books and music they are that annoying acquaintance that you are expected to nod politely at while they drone on about their last triumph of mediocrity, having already forgotten the artist/writer/title/etc of the work that they just impressed upon you as being "life changing." Some of it does represent a life change, to be sure, though rarely in the way that one might hope. When you are done reading some books you have less life left, fewer hours remain.

Recommendations are best made from those whose tastes in the given form you esteem, all else is rarity and coincidence, if not miracle or mystery. Amazon's friend-algorithm is about as good a companion as is Siri. It is a form of ambient knowledge, one which is useless because anybody can find it. Even worse: they are encouraged to contribute.

If you want to participate in democracy than attach a book that you've always wanted to read to each of the candidates and force yourself to read it, depending on who wins. It'll help take your mind off which version of the end-times we are left with... Choose carefully. If Mein Trumpf wins you read Graves' I, Claudius, etc.


I go into the city tonight to serve my friends warm plates of Coq au Vin tonight. I've substituted a certain style of living for a specific style of eating. I will fall asleep at their house at a sensible time, curled up like a kitten, then awaking slowly from a deep sleep, stretching my limbs into the air around me, reaching for the invisible stars still twirling across my eyes as they fade. As if I was free to read as I please and that it was a weekend morning once again.

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Adult Material

Okay, I get it, my cooking show might not launch. I received almost as little interest in my roast chicken yesterday as my mention of gay sex seemed to generate… my readers stayed away in droves. To regain my audience I might have to cook my way out of the closet. Maybe I should toggle the switch on this site to "contains adult material," a phrase which sounds like a politically corrected term for the output of a urinary tract episode. 

With the help of CS I am slowly learning how to navigate the world of millennials, and social media. He sends me articles that I find quite humorous, mostly written by people my age. They outline the problem with millennials, sort of. There is a sense of bemused exasperation in most of what I read. They just doesn't understand. 

Middle age is an odd place to be, like Middle Earth but with far too many hobbits. Looking at things from this vantage point, everything becomes eldritch, like coming down from a lifelong psychedelic, sort of. Issues of time and space, and ultimately the echoes of mortality, return with increasing severity. I question whether I took life "seriously" enough, though I know better than to answer that question, or to try.

I now remember what my father was like when I was a kid, and why I didn't like him. His life fears and observations were informing everything he had to say to me. I was a whimsical kid, some say too much, but I had an idea of what I didn't want out of life. He would try to impress upon me through iteration and reiteration that I would "spend life digging ditches" if I didn't get an education or find a vocation. His singularly dystopian vision of my future was not filled with baboons and periwinkles, but was instead inhabited with foremen and shovels, long days of bologna sandwiches with no mayonnaise. 

Now, here I am at mid life, looking at a four year old boy and finding myself wanting to fill his head with future financial fears. Well, sort of. I wish to impress concepts like compound interest upon him. 

To wit, he really loves Buzz Lightyear. They are great buddies who have traveled the galaxy together and I derive a fair amount of pleasure from repeating the character's catch-phrases with him.

Not today, Zurg! To infinity, and beyond! Etc., etc.

He has had a Buzz action figure for some time now, and it looks as if a four year old has cared for it. One arm fell off, he lost a foot some time back, drowned in a vat of unrelated toys and toy parts. His semi-retractable half-dome helmet is clear plastic, or was. It is now covered in the telling scratches that confirm his many adventures. 

So, we went into the little city up the valley and to the mall. Yes, The Mall. The boy has no acquired disdain for such places and I can stomach them as long as I'm able to buy him things to make him happy. Easy enough. A few minutes later, we were walking out of the Disney store (see, I told you that I was gay and nobody listened) where we had purchased some Darth Vader pajamas and a new Buzz Lightyear. 

No sooner had we freed him from his interplanetary cardboard spaceship did the boy grab both of them and fly them into one another, head-first, creating the plastic-on-plastic sound of collision pre-associated with normal play. Without being able to stop myself I launched into an abbreviated version of how to care for things so that they might last.

I wasn't even able to finish the speech, nor would it have mattered. I realized I was trying to convince a four year old boy that Buzz Lightyear is temporal and fallible. Like all other things in life, one day he too, the mighty Buzz Lightyear, will fail. If there had been a mirror in the living room then I'm convinced that I would have looked into it and seen the eyes of my father, as played by the portrait of Dorian Gray. Few things are as soul corrupting as the recognition of caution and fear in your behavior towards a child playing as children do, innocently and exactly as we would want them to be. 

I'll spend my later years reminding him to hold on to his youthful vigor and I hope he reminds me about my Buzz Lightyear safety tips. I was tempted to smash both Buzz's together in mock triumph and celebration, to regain the boy's trust, though this action somehow did not adequately convey my message either. There are some truths that are simply not transferable. They are discoverable, appearing only in time, for some. My truth was that I am becoming a dad: protective and loving, concerned though unprepared, correcting yet unsure of my own definitions of the concept, trapped somewhere between being a child myself and actively trying to teach one how to no longer be one.

(Deleted passage)

Jesus Christ. What the fuck is wrong with me? The boy just woke up. I took a few minutes out of my morning and tried to explain all of this to him, it being so fresh and clear in my mind.

He looked at me in a child's exasperation and asked if he can watch "Lego Ninjas" now.

Sure. Lego Ninjas it is. Just let me make some more coffee.

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The Qulinary 6

(Roasted Chicken)

I put it in for a bit more after this, 6 or 7 minutes, at 500 degrees. It came out a more golden brown than is shown here, but I neglected to take another picture. 

The next time I go to Washington I'm going to go see Julia Child's Kitchen at The Smithsonian.

A friend recommended a cook book, Food52, which has been great for me. Since I don't know how to cook I'm less reluctant to follow some of the unorthodox recipes found therein. Another friend bought one for me as a gift, which has been super useful, and yet another was a recommendation. Between all three I'll be a master chef by the time that I retire.

This morning I prepared Coq au Vin for eight. It's slow cooking now. I will bring it to my friends' house on Monday night and we will all feast on my specialized labor. 

I'm going to start my own cooking show soon.

Cooking is about passion, so it may look slightly temperamental in a way that it's too assertive to the naked eye. - Gordan Ramsay (my spirit animal)

To the naked eye, my cooking looks more like a one-man UFC match.

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"The life I love is playing music with my friends"

The days arrive, giving reason to why many purr and coo when I tell them that I live in Sonoma. It is the most beautiful place that I have lived. These days are as drops of honey on the tongue, passing like silk across the eyes, a blue bath for the mind.

The other day I opened my travel bag, the one that is almost always there in the bathroom, and I found the boy's toothbrush and toothpaste packed in it, zippered up. He has long asked to come with me wherever I go, now he is making sure that I know what he needs when we depart.

The world revolves on the tiniest of miracles. So much delicacy pivots and pirouettes on the kindness of simple gestures, the silentest of messages ever sent: a four year old boy putting his toothbrush and toothpaste in with Daddy's, only because he wants me to know that he also wants to go.

Like a band of gypsies we go down the highway, we're the best of friends:

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The wonders of Wonder

I did something that I rarely do, for reasons. I went through my blog posts, reading backwards in time. Several things jumped out at me, monsters being among them, but most of all the near complete incomprehensibility of my writing was what was noticeable. I suspect that I have successfully merged a nervous-breakdown with a mid-life crisis. Somehow, the two competing internal doomsdays are both sliding into home plate. My breakdown hit a ground single just past the infield, one that might have pushed the mid-life runner at second-base into home, but then inexplicably the breakdown turned around when it was almost at the first-base bag and darted back towards home. Separation anxiety, perhaps. My high strings must have pre-felt too alone way out there on first base, away from home.

Do you see what I mean? That paragraph has very little to do with itself. It starts one way and ends on a baseball metaphor that has no precedent. There are pages and pages of gibberish almost just like that.

What happened? I used to be able to write, I think. I feel as if I did. 

There is a sexual neuroses in too much of what I have written in the past few weeks. It might be troubling if I didn't find it vaguely amusing. 

I asked a friend yesterday if she believes that she has ever formed a healthy sexual relationship and her response was immediate: Yes, with myself. 

She went on to describe that she has no qualms whatsoever with what goes on in her own mind. It is only when she shares them that the trouble starts. 

I could hardly believe what I was hearing, what seemed like the truth. It was an unexpected, though not entirely unsurprising, revelation. 

I confided to her that I have often wondered what Wonder Woman's panties smell like.

She was less than awed by my wonder.

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Another night, another night

Another day lifted into the winds. Soon enough, the evidence of it will be lost.

The weather is lifting, though only during the week. It rained last weekend and will do the same this next, I'm told. I'm told lots of things, it is too bad that I so rarely listen.


Tonight I go to see a friend. It is the opening of an exhibit: Bill Graham and the Rock and Roll Revolution. My legs don't want to push the gas pedal, or the brake. I did not make it to the gym today. I wish to lie around and read, maybe watch a movie, a documentary.


Another night descending from well above the winds. The evidence is arriving.

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Birds in the sky, you know

… nothing to say, the dovetail of the day dedicated to sunshine and the winds.

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I Am the Morning

(Brando's Debut)

A businessman with no political career to fall back on, or to protect, takes the Republican party by land, by sea, and by air. Trump will choose someone far less preferable than him for VP, though that fact won't be so clear until it is all over, locking himself in as an implacable Executive.

Execute he just might. 

I'm more worried about Apple, though, for now. Ever since I "fixed" my unbroken iPhone and got rid of all of the unwanted iTunes download history from my Music index it keeps requesting that I re-attach my iTunes account by logging in. As far as I can tell there is no way to disable this. So, much like the forced OS updates, now I have this to contend with also. Apparently, I am not allowed to use the device as it is advertised, as a means to play the music that I want to listen to. For that, I must scroll through my purchase history. Things that include the theme songs to Welcome Back, Kotter, Hawaii Five-O, and Rocky. Then some that are much less funny: Anne Murray's "You Needed Me."

The nightmares never cease, they only become more brief and frequent. 

To wit, I went to purchase some food stuff at the locally owned, recently sold to a larger corporation, food store here in town, Sonoma Market. I wanted to buy some nicer cuts of meat for a chicken roast, a beef stew, a spaghetti bolognese, and pork breakfast accoutrements. While there, I browsed the aisles and saw what looked like some high end pasta. I bought two boxes at $8 each. For pasta. When I went to use one of them last night I realized that it was gluten-free. It tasted okay, but it left some residue in my pot, some gluten replacement gunk. I don't mind people making their own dietary choices, but now they've come after me….

Lastly on the agenda, I forgot about DST last night and was timing my evening with the boy around the clocks in the kitchen. Big mistake. It felt later, but something was off. I kept the boy busy with coloring in his new Batman book and putting together a bookshelf for his room. When I finally realized what I had been doing it was already 8:15pm, well past the time that he should already be in bed and trying to sleep. So, we did a quick rush job on brushing our teeth and then read one book of poems before bed. 

This morning, he awoke an hour and fifteen minutes late. I rushed to get everything prepared for his day, with little success. He was late to school and slightly underfed. He had no jacket here, so there was a stop by Mom's house also. I arrived at his daycare about 40 minutes late, to the disappointment of the henchpersons that run the place. They rule with an Iron Elmo.

Okay, I guess there is one last life-update from the files of the Q6 weekend. I did take my bigger camera to the performance on Sunday, having already experienced the production in its raw, most essential form, I questioned whether or not I would get much out of it on a second viewing, so I was the annoying dad with a huge camera and lens at a child's musical play, an offspring-opera, if you will. 

He is so fascinated with the performance that he stands there the entire time with his back to the audience, watching the spectacle behind him. He was, perhaps too young to be involved in this, though I suspect no harm was done by it. The opposite, in fact. He did have the classic actor's meltdown in the car with Mommy after it was over, but that is all part of the stresses and many strains of performance art.

He wanted to know where his flowers were.

(A Family, as scene from a distance)

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The Little Merman (Generation-Meta)

(Chefs)

Okay, so I wasn't that dad that brought a dslr and a telephoto lens to the performance. Nor did I set up a tripod and stereo mics, but I did bring a little Fuji X100S that has a video feature, which was cute. I took a couple still-shots that came out, where I could at least crop them as proof that the event had happened.

I'm going to another performance this afternoon, so perhaps I will bring the bigger camera, give myself something to do, etc. Not that the principal characters didn't do a good job with their performances. They did. The thing was a lot of fun to watch, though I do not know if repeated viewings will improve the experience much. I guess that's not why I'm there, it is to be entertained and I was.  

I have recently discovered that a lifelong friend of mine and I share the same mantra: Shut-up, Sean… Shut up, Sean...

The organization that puts these plays on must make a goldmine in cash, yet there is still a massive opportunity that they have missed. They could be recording these performances and selling them. They're already overcharging for everything else, so why not?

I mean, $25 for the entire recording of a once in a lifetime performance. I mean, even psychics charge that much. Why not? 

I wasn't going to bring a camera at all, but then Cato told me a story about a recent trip that he made, back home to NYC. His father had compiled a collection of images and video from when he was growing up, and how touched he was by the content and effort. So, then I felt like a bit of an idiot for even considering not shooting some sort of image. 

Think of it, in this new world the question might be, Why didn't my parents take or post enough pictures of me? I never questioned how much film wasn't spent on me when I was growing up. I only took note of the images that were there, piecing together in my mind a sort of patchwork fantasy history of what really happened. That, mixed with my mother's recollections and persuasions and I had constructed a fairly dismal view of my father, one that remained almost until his death. Such is Mommy-Power. Divorce is tough on families, particularly if you're raised Catholic. You never get one. 

I forgot that it was Daylight Saving Time so I called to video-chat with the boy about 30 minutes before they were ready to wake up, having forgotten about the change and only thinking that perhaps I slept in. But no, instead I called the ex and the boy long before they had woken up. Ooops. Ah well, I'm okay with them each losing a little sleep for science. 

Facts are fun, and the posting of results from fact-checking sites has become the new contrarian discourse to emerge from the meta-generation. The people have spoken, and they all disagree, most of all on the facts. Envisage my stupefaction when I discovered that Donald Trump has said a thing or two that actually correlates with reality, though admittedly it was only when he wanted to take down another candidate. Ted Cruz is not liked by anybody. He doesn't have the support of a single US senator. People talk about how politically ineffectual Bernie Sanders would be… Well, I think that I may have already said that, anyway, or written it, or implied it, or I should have.

Well, a new day emerged before those that survived the night, the day ahead emerging faster than usual; there are eggs to be made, toast, a fruit juice or smoothy, maybe even some sausage; the rain arrives, moving from the heavens above, proof that even there nothing remains still for very long.

(Rockettes-style precision)

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Pray For Me

A clean weekend ahead of me, or rather, a weekend cleaning. I had hoped that the weather would turn towards something better, but no, it is gray and overcast, colder than what I care for. A perfect day for the gym, though the gym does not take all day. Tonight, the boy is part of a theatrical production, his first. The Little Mermaid. So, there will be that to attend. Everyone has asked me if I'm going to take pictures or video when I mention it. Probably not. I just hope I remember to bring my glasses. Today is a good day for cooking, though there are no guests. 

I would ride my bike, but a part of me still wishes to live.

I have started re-reading Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, so I am trying to give my life meaning in the hopes that happiness might be the occasional result, even though he warns against seeking happiness, that it must be the occasional result of meaning, nothing more, sort of. Not that I am unhappy, I only lack meaningfulness, a sustained sense of purpose.

It can be a problem, which often results in other problems. The efforts spent trying to "get to know oneself" can be problematic for the deeply religious and irreligious. There is a yoga class at 11:45 this morning. There really should be yoga for agnostics, where the focus is only on the quieting meditative and self-reflexive aspects of the exercises. The two systems of belief do not seem as if they require an announced incompatibility, though I'll admit that something about the idea feels wrong. It was my experience with the nature of faith that led me to atheism, so why not? Perhaps I had a poor instructor, my own inner voice. Or, perhaps that voice suspended in the unlit sphere is the only voice in the universe.

It would be nice to still believe that there are invisible forces fighting for my attention. I mean, ones with cool names. It's like super-heroes and super-villains, but for adults. If I could close my eyes and fend off Satan with an assured invocation then you can believe that I would. 

This is not what I want to write about. Perhaps I will feel differently after the gym.

Be back in an hour, Mom.

Nope, I fiddled around and I'm back. It's only been 10 minutes.

I've been looking at new computers. I want one. I don't need one, at all, but that doesn't suppress the urges. I have been conducting an internal war with Apple for the last few months. I have come to hate them as a company. They completely abandoned the user experience in their products. The user has become the product that they are consuming. You can hardly touch the fucking phone any longer without them changing one of your settings to use their service or to buy something. It's like a commercial that can make phone calls. 

I spent nearly an hour last night just trying to get the Music app on my phone to not show me my entire iTunes download history. It wasn't actually in the phone, it was only there to clog up my ability to scroll through the music that I actually did want on the thing. All of the recommendations online did not work, and once I started trying to create a community-question on their forums about it they planted a cookie in my browser so that I could not get back to just browsing their forums. They had me in their grips and they were chewing away. I thought that they had re-written my host file, but it was just a cookie. I found it and vanquished it. I can still do that.

It makes me laugh now when people refer to Microsoft as a monopoly that the government had to break apart. Apple will be next. Governments do not like to compete with their subjects.

Well, it is time for me to sweat. I'm going to find my C & C Music Factory cassette and put some batteries in the Walkman and go do some Jazzercise. The impending change of Daylight Saving Time has me living anachronistically, while it lasts. 

It sounds, when read properly, as if Daylight is saving Time tomorrow. I picture Time in some sort of trouble, floating in the nothingness of space, being dragged by the demons of darkness in helpless and lost circles, until Daylight comes to the rescue… bringing Light to Time and trouncing Darkness by surprise. The arrows of Light puncturing the endless veil of the Abysm.

See. Pray quietly for me. 

Even a nullifidian needs some Love.

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Horrors and Pete

Louis CK has confused himself with Eugene O'Neill. 

I saw CK in the film Trumbo and he was abysmalo. Dumbo. He nearly ruined the film, not just for me but for our entire group. He can and does have dramatic moments in his comedy routines, particularly his show Louie, but he seems to have convinced himself that he's a serious actor now, that he has something to vital and deep to convey. He doesn't, as an actor. Not to say that the new show, Horace and Pete, isn't any good, just that Louis CK needs to stop being in it. The writing was good enough, but he can't carry a moment, while the other actors can, and did; Alan Alda, Steve Buscemi, Jessica Lange (as Faye Dunaway), Steven Wright (as Hank Chinaski), Edie Falco, and more!

CK is smart enough to have Steven Wright play a role that suits him, but he fails to do so with himself, unless the premise of the series is those that are out of place when being watched being out of place. You can feel his "pause-headturn-pause-look-back-at-other-actor-look-away-again" moments arriving minutes before they happen. It's an actor's showcase: paucity of surprise, loss of believability, reliance on vulnerability as a characteristic, listening to the other actors too intently. The last of these is usually a good thing in an actor, when done well, but you can tell that Louis is thinking about it too much. He never presented himself as being natural, but his awkwardness needs less work. He does with his intense glumness what Jim Carrey does with his face, or tries to.

Of, course, acting, like, all, else, is, subjective.

You tell me.

I stayed up late (for me, midnight) and binge-watched two episodes of the new show. I slept in until 5am or so. In fairness, I only really watched the first episode. I was starting to drift off in the second. Louis might improve a bit as the series progresses. First episodes are what they are. It was nice to see Alan Alda scream at Louis. That's almost how I felt.

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