The Breakfast of Cambrians

(Jazzercise)

Ok, I have ramped up my training regimen. I bought a fitness app: $6. Now, I am ready for the Olympics. I expect to take home the Gold Medal, though previous winners probably had apps that cost upwards of $20 or more. Whichever app is needed to win the Gold, that's the one I want. I'm starting a shitkicker.com crowdsourced investment project. Do not go to that site. I just did on my work computer. I'm not sure what those people do, but the domain name gives an indication. 

Something strange is happening. I have gained 5 pounds in two weeks. I've been training like a runaway madman, but have also been eating like one, or perhaps a homeless man suddenly presented with a buffet. I've been eating a lot, I mean. A sudden increase in exercise also produces an upswing in appetites. I'm hungry all of the time, and have not made wise choices. I know this, because they never felt like choices. 

Yesterday, I went to breakfast, after already having eaten breakfast. I was with a work buddy. We were both at the office very early and they were testing the alarms in the building. So, we went to Denny's where they have wifi and we chatted and worked while I ate a Moons Over My Hammy sandwich with hash browns. This was after a pot of coffee at home, a full bowl of cereal, a banana, a plum, and a breakfast bar. About an hour before I squeezed through the front door of Denny's.

Now, I know what you might be thinking... that Denny's sounds delicious. It was reliably Denny's food. No question about it, but the costs were staggering. Their menu is not uniform in pricing. I don't exaggerate when I tell you that this plate of food that costs no more than $1 to obtain in its pre-cooked version costs $20 once placed on a plate in front of you and uniformly heated, in SF. 

I'm not a fan of Denny's, as you may have guessed, but I ate the entire plate, ceramic and all. I was gnawing on my fork when my buddy checked to see if I was okay. He ate only half of his sandwich and then gave the other half to a hungry guy on the street as we were leaving. I felt bad, so I offered to show this guy my ripped calves. That was all I had to offer. Training requires sacrifice, and for whatever reason I felt that this guy needed a gentle reminder of that.

I kid, of course, out of my own dietary guilt. My buddy is a nicer guy than me. It's hard to figure out, because we share a similar sense of inappropriate humor, but somehow he doesn't use that sensibility as a template from which to live life. So, I see now that it can be done. Life, I must be doing it wrong again.

Back to the Olympics:

My appetite for everything has been greatly escalated and is now being documented by a series of movable weights on the gym scale. My fight and face-off is against two pieces of lead. They are not easily spooked. One has sat at the 200 mark since I've lived in Sonoma, never once dipping below it. The other has cycles like the moon, drifting back and forth between 37 and around 2, though most of its time has been spent around the 25 zone. Once even going as low as zero, never to return thus far. If I can focus on limiting my intake then the big chunk of lead will be moved down to the 150 notch and I'll get to watch the other smaller piece drift immediately up to the 49-50 area. My fight will start anew from there. I have an eating disorder, in the sense that it is chaotic.

I am currently enjoying the unofficial diet of the Denver Broncos defensive starting line. I eat as if I'm famous for it and enjoying the rewards of that fame. 

It's very difficult not to eat this way. An injury right now could possibly send my weight into the quadruple digits. I'd like to say that my body is making use of everything that I put in it, but that would only be true if you saw the pudginess on the front of my abdomen as being useful in a fitness sense. It is very true that training with extra weight will help increase endurance, though that becomes more true if you can safely drop that weight before competition.

My buddy that will also be entering the Olympics (in the sissies category) convinced me to buy the $6 fitness app. It is designed around a 16 week program to prepare a person for being in the Napa Olympics. It is programmatic with a linear increase in activity. It all makes perfect sense and should ensure victory for one special man. 

There was a time not long ago when women were not allowed to compete with men, particularly when voting. I don't wish to speak too soon, but it's lucky that these three women have chosen to participate in the Olympics now, because the curtain sure seems to be closing on that sort of thing. 

I want Eric and Donald Jr. on the Supreme Court's bench more than I have ever wanted anything before in my life. Those two thinkers will set this country's mind straight. You know Donald would never appoint Ivanka. He lacks the requisite sense of enlightenment that would permit such a thing. A woman on the S. Trump Court. How silly is that?

I've been making "white power" jokes with people lately. It's what you do when you have a freshly shorn, Irish head. So far nobody thinks that it's very funny, at all, but that's because I'm not in Florida anymore where those things are still quite comical, if only by proximity to Cubans and Puerto Ricans who uniformly find white power jokes to be laughable. There are simply too many examples of supremacy in Florida from which to choose. The finest minds of the last generation are to be found in those swamps.

I'm going to switch it up for the Olympic competition and go with "Male Power!" 

I suppose I could veil it a bit and go with "Masculine Capacity!" but I do not wish to obscure or dilute the message. White men have won. They chose their fav Twitter troll to lead them towards Again. 

Oh fuck. See? I need to focus. I can't be distracted by the sudden chatter concerning the return of white nationalism at the highest levels of our government.  I hope that no one takes this jocular denigration of Trump seriously? Trump has feelings, too! 

Can you believe  the way that people are responding to his appointment of rich racists? It's almost as if they don't care about his feelings.

Ugh, I should be eating right now.

I do have an anxiety issue with food, I think. It has appeared suddenly on November 9th and is growing exponentially. There is a specter haunting Hell.... 

I often sit and work at my kitchen table. I notice that when I am having a stressful day that I'll pick at food more often. I'll wander to the refrigerator to look and see if anything needs my devouring of it since the last time I looked. Some food just begs to be binged. 

It doesn't help the stress, very much. It just makes me feel so, so pretty when I see myself dancing in the reflection of the microwave. Sometimes it feels as if I'm really stuck inside of the thing. 

(Behind Every "Great" Man...)

Photo: Damon Winter, New York Times

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Napa Spring Olympics, April 2017

(Not Napa)

Here is my first Spotify link ever posted. Enjoy. it is meant to be paired with a bottle of Cabernet and the picture above. I have listened to the album three or four times since yesterday. The recording is almost as good as the music. The inclusion of ambient room noise and incidental noise from the instruments adds something very special to the recording, and the music is stellar.

I've been having to use Spotify to listen to new music. The greatest library of torrents ever assembled is no more. Somewhere, that library of torrent files sits on a drive, waiting for me to rediscover. It's a bummer, the site was so much more than just label releases. I had access for just over four years and would have been happy to maintain that access forever. Ethics be damned. Access to rare and unreleased music far outweighed whatever moral reservations I might have had. PM me if you'd like a lesson in greed. 

I wrecked my new bike yesterday, sort of. I wrecked my left knee much more. I came to a stop too quickly, after having dropped my water bottle crossing a street. I couldn't get my left foot out of the clip fast enough, and for whatever reason I didn't lean enough to the right where my foot was already free, leaving less resistance for the remaining foot to use to break free from the clip. Over I went, quickly and certainly, to the ground. 

It doesn't sound like much, but I went down hard. Stayed there for a while moaning, crawling away from the contraption, trying to escape its pain and shame. Runners, two of them, slowed to ask if I was okay. I was tempted to tell one of them that I had an erection that had lasted more than four hours. She was cute. Instead, I moaned and said that I would one day be okay. Because I honestly do believe that. 

I took a long, hot, mineral bath when I got home, two aspirin and an Aleve, but the knee is still very sore. Perhaps a presaging of things to come. Training for the Triathlon will not be easy. I received a text last night letting me know that two of my friends had already registered for it. So, my crew consists of me and three women, so far. Do not let this fool you into believing the Olympics will be a cakewalk for me. I'm going to insist that all three of them compete in the "sissies" category. 

Is the word "sissy" a dysphemism of sister? It must be. When a boy's not being a brother then quite correctly and technically he must be a sissy. So, Im competing against the three sissies. 

I really hope I win. Isn't aging already shameful enough? I should be expected to endure no further indignity. I will not only need to win, I must also crush my opponents. As long as my time is better than their's when totaled then I'll still consider myself victorious over the other gender. 

If I finish, I win. It's only fair. They have me outnumbered. That is how the Olympics work. It's like the electoral college, designed to suppress the tired voice of a nation. All you need to win are well-placed voters hiding in the desert. 

I do need a pace group. Because I have only ever exercised by myself the one main thing I lack is an effective tempo for these types of things. I burn myself out in the first hour or two and then only hope to hold on after that. It's not a strategy often employed by those who have ever tried this stuff before. The threefold purpose of me wanting to do this event are as follows: to put an exercise goal in front of me to work towards, to learn to pace myself better over time and to develop a different cardio workout, and to completely crush the fairer gender on the leveled playing field of physical competition. 

The first two are negotiable. If I fail at the last then I'll shave my head. I promise. 

I'm not sure, but I believe that I'm meant to receive an Apple watch from my company soon. There is a lunch next week with the CEO. This should pair well with my current needs, I hope. There are apps that are designed to improve every part of me. I've been trying to get people to pay attention to my workout regimen for years, this should cinch the deal. 

Strava has developed a sex app that can tell you what you're doing wrong, even when you're only practice-training. I'll need that. I hope it works on my left wrist. How am I supposed to improve, otherwise? There had better be tutorials. 

The iPhone needs an app-analysis feature. If you haven't used something in a year then it should just disappear from your phone and be replaced by a new U2 single that they are unable to unload elsewhere, or through traditional sales channels. 

U2 is working on a way to force everybody to listen to their new album on Christmas morning, from beginning to end, as soon as a child opens their first present. I'm sure of it. They are the best in their field at scripting the unified dissatisfaction of their listeners. Giving discontentedness both a voice and a soundtrack. They accomplished what they set out to do: they created a generation full of people that just could not take it any more.   

I've never been more certain of anything in my life. - Walter Sobchak

Well, that's my life update. Take it or leave it. There's a little bit of music in there, a bit of sexist trash talk, then back around to what used to be music. 

We'll see which lasts. 

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The Eye of the Spider (Gonna Fly Now)

The boy and I hung up Christmas lights yesterday. They seem incomplete without a tree. Though, it's fun to string up colored lights and close the blinds, to witness the enchantment. 

Now, I'll just need to swim 1 mile, ride 25, and jog 6... By April. 

Perhaps I should have weighed the factors more carefully before diving in to a public commitment to do this thing. CS reminded me that I don't know how to swim. So, there is that to learn first and foremost. He has been pushing me off docks since we met. In fact, I believe that's how we met. He was bullying minorities one summer at the local fishing dock, claiming to have recently pulled in a 700 pound swordfish from that same lake using only a glow-in-the-dark yo-yo and its string as bait and tackle. He used to abuse horse tranquilizers. They can make a person a little teste, and also imaginative. 

I'm certain that he's ruined my camera. He's been using the wrong cable to try to charge it. That, or the power in his 19th century plantation house utilizes no electrical standard currently still in use. I'm beginning to suspect that he never actually had that $15k worth of camera gear stolen, but he rather just tried to recharge a few batteries for the stuff and instead of conceding defeat he traded the whole bag for some equestrian questionables. 

Do you remember what he claimed on his site, that my camera was manufactured out of helium? All of the key signs of equis terribilis are there. It's a shame, as he is quite intervention-resistant. It's as if he's spent his whole life practicing for that one moment. Lord knows I've tried. As soon as I turn my back then he's off and galloping on Bronco Barbiturates once again, howling at traffic lights, confusing them to be the phases of the colored moon that only he can see. He's deeply involved with that entire subculture, Donkey Downers. 

I'll have to give him a good deal on the Fuji camera package, now - which includes a manual, one that also explains how to charge the batteries, and perhaps even more importantly it explains how not to destroy them. He's like having another child, maybe one that's away at boarding school, trapped between parents. The only time I hear from him is when he's broken something and needs more money. He's currently participating in a winter conversion therapy camp. He says the electricity starts to feel kind of good after a little while. Just like anything else, he claims, if you learn to just relax and take it. 

Moving on, minus one camera and one plushy in remission.

What else is going on around the homestead... I endured another weekend being "on call." I'm slowly getting better at it, which means that I'm losing my preparedness edge. An emergency will of course strike when I have forgotten that they can and will. I just hope that I'm naked when it happens, and sleeping. 

I'm considering doubling my coffee intake. I've been flirting with the idea for months now, but I think I'm ready to take the big plunge. I'll need to strengthen my core and cardio. I know that caffeine elevates the heart rate, so that should give me the extra capacity I'll need to run a 10k at the end of an already excruciating morning. 

I've been listening to motivational music on loop all weekend. 

I keep telling myself that if I can train to swim the mile then the 25 mile bike ride will seem like an hour of rest before I have to run the 10k, though I know that this is not how these things actually work. Muscular fatigue does not diminish upon exertion, but rather increases. I'll talk to CS about obtaining something designed to slow down a horse's heart, to see if I can utilize his vast and sad knowledge of such things to my advantage. 

Cheating, you say? 

I'll re-read the by-laws and find out. I saw nothing about performance enhancers on the website. You see, it is not good enough for me to simply compete in an Olympic Triathlon, I must also cheat while doing it. Otherwise I fear that I will not derive the satisfaction that I require from the experience. 

I've offered Caitlyn Jenner $40 to enroll in this Olympic thing also, because I need to prove to the world that I'm better than her. I must show everybody, once and for all, that it's probably better for you to to remain being a man if that's what you were lucky enough to have been born. If I lose to her, I will edit this page and modify that last claim, changing its gender claim. I promise. 

Also, I have not beaten an older woman in a foot race in years. I'd like to add that recent accomplishment to my LinkedIn profile. I've also reached out to Billie Jean King, though her office has not returned my calls. At least Jenner's people know where the money's at. 

Last night, the boy and I went to our friend's house and had a delicious dinner of beef stew and homemade chocolate mint ice cream. I was chatting with my lifelong buddy and she decided that she was going to do the Triathlon as well. I'm going to keep the horse enhancers secret from her, of course, because some people simply don't know how to be cool about such things, but already I am also plotting some legitimate ways to defeat her. 

Now my requirements are two-fold: I must cheat and I must win. This is my first time in the Olympics. I want to leave my mark on history. The Guinness people have been warned about me. 

Not a lot to ask, a world record on my first try, but that is where I will derive my future happiness - from the bitter and disappointed tears of my fellow competitors. I'm going to check with the organizers to see if they're okay with this race being "to the death." It's not only the best way to ensure victory it is the only way to guarantee it. Vanquishing an opponent is far too middle ages, and there is nowhere left to effectively vanquish to any longer. Simply winning the thing is only the new form of participation. They keep moving the finish line to the back of the pack. 

I'd like to strike a healthy balance between the far past and the present day and conduct a more 18th century style competition, one that finishes with a duel. The first two to cross the finish line must then load muskets and trade fire under the trees until there is a clear winner. 

If I can load mine in time then I just might get a clean shot at #2.

(Lola, the lovable donkey)

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Four months of endurance training

I'm signing up for my first Olympic Triathlon, in April - 1.5k swimming, 40k cycling, 10k running. I've wanted to do one for years but have never bothered. As my 50th birthday approaches in the nearing distance I've started to look at things that I can still do. Or things that I can still strive for, at least. 

I'll need to train, of course, mostly the swimming and jogging. I'm reasonably confident I have the biking portion down. The 1500 meters of swimming and the 10k of running, I'm not so sure. Particularly when all three activities are done in sequence, and timed to measure performance.

None of the other things I've done - the buying of the cameras and lenses, or the sudden purchasing of two new bikes - has screamed quite as loudly that I need a girlfriend more than does this recent decision. Sure, I could claim that it's just a fitness goal, but I know in my heart I wouldn't be doing any of this if I had some squeeze. 

It's pretty basic, really, how these types of things work.

It's like this:

If 🏊🏼 + 🚴🏼 + 🏃🏼 = 🏅

And🏅 = 💃

Then 🏊🏼 + 🚴🏼 + 🏃🏼 = 💃

The logic seems clear enough: after I win a triathlon I'll become a woman, dancing in a red dress.  

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It's not my fear

It was transition time for the boy last night - time to make the shift from mom's house to dad's. That's right, the word can mean something other than changing secondary sexual characteristics, or assuming the presidency with a hodgepodge team of twice-failed goons. The cabinet of deplorables. 

So, we all went to our mutual friends' house. We chatted and had dinner and let the kid's play while they were watching The Jungle Book. My buddy and I drove to get food, first to a Chinese restaurant that was closed, then to a Thai place that was thankfully open. On the drive there and back he and I talked about Trump's victory and what it means.

My buddy is of Mexican-American heritage, as is his wife, of course it follows that so are his two children. He spoke of a growing sense of fear for them, his thankfulness that they are both light skinned, hoping that might help shield them from some of the things that we're starting to see emerge in our sweet little hamlet of Sonoma. He and his wife both work in education. The stories are beginning to pour in about racially motivated incidents at school. It's becoming clearer that the dangerous rhetoric seems to have found its new voice, has bubbled up again from the muddy mumbles of a few to the renewed utterances of misguided nationalism and misplaced nativism. 

The symbols are re-appearing, the bristling assertions of whiteness and their renewed claims of cultural victimhood. The racists are tired of being told that they are racist. So, they're doing the only sensible thing they can, they're putting their whiteness back on the map, some with boots.

It's difficult not to feel rage, though that feeling is meaningless or worse, useless. This has brought back to the forefront at least one part of my youth - anger at injustice, ignorance, intolerance. I haven't been this disappointed in America in a long while. I didn't like Hillary, but she has never been charged with a crime, as far as I know. Think about the tremendous lie that was hoisted on America in that. Not that she should have been charged, as some people may read that last sentence quite differently than what I intended. We accepted a New York real estate developer with ties to both the mob and foreign investors, as well as foreign rulers, as the head of our executive branch of government. That was the nation's answer to the Hillary problem. 

Staggering solution, that.

I suppose it's a good thing to periodically be reminded that racism doesn't just disappear when ignored. That is, at least if you enjoy the luxury of white privilege, which I must. 

When I was in the car with my buddy I realized that my fear in all of this is that my son will be exposed to racism. My buddy's fear, as is his wife's, is that their children may become the victims of it. You can say all you want about exposure to racism making you also a victim of it, but it's just not the same. He spoke of a time in the future where he might need to go places without his children, for fear of what they might be unknowingly subjected to.  I can't pretend not to acknowledge a Thanksgiving ladleful of white privilege when hearing that. I can't pretend to have felt that way before, at least until he said it in the car. Then, I could feel it only for him and his family. It's not my fear. It's not a feeling that I have to either contend with or endure. Most of America gets to walk away from this, and about half of them seem to have chosen to do so. 

Then, of course, there are my gay friends, black friends, and on and on and on. I'm sure I must know some Muslims. Do I? I know far more Hindus than I do Muslims. I generally avoid anybody that openly worships anything, particularly those that either talk about it or expect my reverence and deference to their deities. I just scribbled a little doodle of Muhammad Ali as Ganesha, to re-assert my lifelong commitment to irreverence towards all things reverent. 

All of my friends of color, or non-heterosexual orientation, or of shared heritage, or those that are female are all worried, many of them in a way that they have never felt before. 

My buddy's wife spoke of a mutual friend, she saw him wearing the safety pin at work and he explained to her what it was for. She hadn't heard of it yet. She was enthused at the idea. Like a fucking dumbass I shot it down as potentially patronizing, which it very well might be, though it need not be disassembled as an act of solidarity. Sometimes the intention of a thing is as important as its possible outcomes. 

At least for the moment, and upon rethinking the safety pin's intention, I hate the conservatives on the right and the fundamentalist on the left who are disparaging it much more than anybody I know that might wish to wear the pin as an expression of shared sensibilities and beliefs. I mean, I get it, the criticisms of the movement are valid, but sometimes the moment calls for gestures and symbols of resistance. It brought some solace to my friend. There is that, I suppose, and that is always welcome and needed. There must be more, though. One must be on guard a bit against everything. It tires the mind, and a tired mind is dangerous. Too willing to ignore and too able to dismiss. 

Those that seem least surprised by any of this are my black friends. They don't like it, but they've seen all of it before many times and were not nearly as surprised as were the choir of white liberals. Also, Trump didn't vilify the black community. I believe that they see him for what he is, and he need not say anything for them to know exactly what he's all about. If somebody would just whisper in Trump's ear that immigrants might make for good slaves then the talk of a wall might be ended for good. Or, at least the wall would lose its present form as a symbol.

I found out something that I did not know about my ex-wife last night: she thinks Dane Cook is good looking. This perhaps gives some insight into why things failed. I lack frat-boy credentials. I knew that I fucked up somewhere along the way, it's just so hard to pinpoint these things. 

She helped counter-balance this newly discovered and unexpected disposition a bit by giving a monologue about the successes and failures of public school integration. She said that The South has been far more effective in this regard than have other parts of the nation. There are liberal enclaves everywhere that have successfully resisted public educational integration. I was astonished, though it all made perfect sense, and in retrospect should not have surprised me at all. I've seen it but ignored it. 

It turns out that guilting an entire region long enough for bigotry and ignorance just might have an upside. It just might work. Perhaps instead of trying to understand the needs of the working class in the red states maybe we need to return to the systematic shaming of them as being filled with deep pockets of ignorant bigotry. Just look at what good it's done for the South. 

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Moments to which the eye can not return

The second chapter of the holidays has passed. There still remains the surviving of Christmas, then enduring inanities celebrating the of end of calendar year with imbeciles. Afterwards, I'll be free to enjoy my misery in seclusion for the remainder of January, February, and whatever comes after that. Or, until Spring, whichever announces itself first in the morning's dawn.

No, it is not all that bad. Thanksgiving went well. The boy seemed happy enough. Thanksgiving doesn't do very much for kids. They get fed. You can try to dress it up, but they know it's a cheat. They are all born as ungrateful shoplifters, then spend a lifetime trying to find ways to be otherwise. Some succeed. 

I found another roll of film that looked as if it has been "shot," though I suspect that I had accomplished with it precisely what I had with the others. All that I did was put the film in the camera for a bit, pretend to take pictures with it, having happily operated all of the manual controls, then rolled the leader back into the roll so as to render the roll unusable without having captured a single image. 

It'll cost me about $20 more to find out if my failure is complete. I spent about $120 to create two images that I like. This helps me appreciate the approximately $15k that I have wrapped up in my digital kits.

It's sometimes good to lose time and money learning things. It might prevent me from doing it again. Though, losing images that I had hoped to have represents a little breaking along the surface of the heart. 

Floating down, through the clouds, memories come rushing up to meet me now

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Existence precedes essence

I've been writing here for seven years now, almost. I've never had so much clear insight into my own past, into myself. I hadn't realized the effect that it might have on me, to document my life's passage into time. I thought it would be fun, but clarity can be a curse. It is best to safely harbor one's own illusions. They matter. Without them, life lacks essence, little more than a series of disconnected events happening to one person. Illusions help string pain along with joy, like unstrung Christmas lights awaiting their moment. 

I've been struggling lately, trying to align my idea of myself with the reality. It is best not to do this. It's difficult and offers as much danger as it does reward, maybe more. It requires ignoring the opinions of others, which seems a sensible enough policy. Everywhere I look I see that success depends somewhat on the advancement of your ideas over the ideas of others. It is not enough to simply have ideas, that alone only makes you interesting, and only if your ideas appeal to others. You must pick one of them, or a small handful, and then bludgeon the world into a kind of submission with them. When they say, Leave your mark! they don't mean in your underwear. They expect it to be a wound, or measured in the accumulation of wealth. The world is full of personal trainers who will surprise nobody and change nothing. Yet, perhaps that is what I need.

I'll see people in the gym being trained. I'm always curious to overhear the conversation. Many of them are, quite literally, paying to have somebody notice their effort, nothing more. I'm going to start giving everybody a quarter to read my posts, just to see how it feels. Or, maybe a dime. 

I have grown tired and weary of America, again. I have flip-flopped my whole life between trying to find the things here that are worth defending and also being careful to not fall into the trap of seeing the entire experiment as a doomed failure, preferring the imaginary piecemeal aggregation of some better society elsewhere. 

Then, someone like Trump wins the presidency. It's as if the lights have been dimmed on whatever vision I had of America and what it was meant to become. Emotional? Sure. I'm sick of being told that we shouldn't be having emotional reactions to what is happening. Feeling is another way of knowing. Feelings require imagination, yet also curses it. 

At middle life I have come to accept that there are two primary visions of America and that half of the people of the nation were writhing in agony the entire time Obama was in office, honestly believing that he was destroying what was once great about living here. Many of them, much like many of my friends now, must have thrown their hands up in dispirited hopelessness the last eight years. Seeing within everything that Obama did a malevolent evil, an evil that liberals were simply too blind or unwilling to see. Or, stupid. Stupidity is the commonest argument and explanation, one that requires only the proof of disagreement. I don't need to buy into this assessment to sense that it is very real for many.

I hated George W. Bush, but I didn't demonize everything that he did. When he made choices that I agreed with I would say so, much to the chagrin of my liberal friends. They could see no good to come out of him at all. Then, I watched others react the same way to Obama. 

I pointed out to my liberal friends at the time that Bush's cabinet was more diverse in ethnicity and race than any Democrat president. They would immediately launch into attacks on Rice, Powell, Gonzalez, Martinez, or Chao. I'm sure I've forgotten a few, but it brought me great pleasure to point out that a Republican was beating "us" at the cultural diversity game. The game that we were supposed to be winning. It's true, and he did. Just because Bush did something doesn't make it evil or wrong. He did a good job at sending a message to America that everyone can have a stake in what we're doing. 

I had hoped that Trump was only engaging in a bit of very ugly campaign obfuscation, and was only using rhetoric to advance his candidacy with those too stupid to see through it, but appointing someone like Bannon as your Chief Strategist tells a vastly different story and one more in line with a presaging of things to come. You may not have liked Bush's appointments, and you may have even denigrated them as being "tokens", but the racism's on you for having said so, dear liberals. 

What I wouldn't give for a George W. Bush right now, and I'm no fan of him or his policies. I would have celebrated a Pat Buchanan presidency over a Trump. The nativists and nationalists are now free to believe that the country is in locked goose step with them.

I wasn't going to write about this next bit. I felt like it was anecdotal, as such an attempt at persuading, and maybe unfairly expanding a point of failure into a larger context where it takes on unearned meaning. But... with that qualification in mind, I had an unusual experience a few days ago, almost a week now.

I was finishing a ride up the valley after a day or two of rain. On my return I was back near Sonoma heading through Boyes Springs, a small hamlet-city that sits just outside of Sonoma and one that many consider a part of the city of Sonoma. It has a very high population of Mexican-American families, or just the first part, living side by side with families whose lineage is more European. You know, white people. 

I was coasting along when I heard someone yelling from a pickup truck as it turned onto a small street that leads up into a small neighborhood. The yelling grabbed my attention. The words were clear: Get the fuck out of the street, beaners! Then, the driver of the truck from which the yelling emerged stomped on the gas and spun their tires in the remaining rain all the way up the street. It was a show of controlled rage, a genuine racist event. 

I tried to gauge the reaction of the two men that had been crossing the street but didn't wish to either stare or to make them any more self-conscious than what had just happened may have, and I couldn't see the driver of the truck. In an instant, the whole thing was over, at least from my visibility. The enraged driver had apparently grown tired of Mexican Privilege. You know, crossing streets on foot and all of that. 

It was upsetting, I'll admit it. One need not succumb to the perils of emotion to have a reaction to such a thing. I thought about my boy, and what it was like growing up in Florida in the 70s when some parents would think little of using the words nigger or spic around a child. By the 80s most of those same parents were using more veiled terms. My father, Irish and from South Boston, would caution me about interacting with black guys, darkies. I never heard him use the word nigger, my mother from Virginia would never allow that nor do I believe it was some secret impulse of my father's to do so, but its use as a term became unnecessary. I knew what he meant, and he knew that I knew. 

He was from a different time and place. He changed, throughout the course of his life and until his death he modified the way that he would discuss things with me and perhaps the way he felt about them himself, sensitive to the fact that I didn't feel the same as him, and that the world had also changed a bit. His second wife was of direct Mexican heritage and that was part of what he loved about her. He perhaps had the large Catholic family he always wanted, and he was quite loved there, with a type of love that I never had for him. Though I did finally arrive at a place in our relationship loving him much, and missing him now.

I'd like to believe that whatever racist dispositions exist here in Sonoma have been adequately suppressed by the changing times. I may have been wrong. 

I workout at an almost all Mexican gym, so I do not idealize Mexican sensibilities as being pure and free from racism. I am treated as an unwelcome aberration by some there, and as an friendly anomaly by others. I'm Irish, have a shaved head, and think nothing of wearing white shirts to the gym and listening to Hüsker Dü's masterpiece loudly on the stereo while working out. I can only guess what they guess of me. I must seem absolutely Hitleriffic. 

Racism is real, I get it. I can feel it, also. It is not necessary to pretend that it doesn't exist, or to overreact to it when signs of it become evident. But this wasn't on Facebook, where everybody's a valiant hero, filled with lionhearted bravery. This was just a few hundred yards from my apartment where I live with my son. Things adjust based on proximity. That's not an admission of anything other than being a human, so please don't tell me what I should have done in this scenario, or what you would have done. 

Once I started traveling I sometimes found myself in pubs in other countries, unsurprisingly. I was amazed, and still have an admiration for pub culture. That microcosms of a nation can come together and talk publicly about the issues that face them without a focused sense of fear that at any moment a fight will break out was very refreshing to me. 

If you start up a conversation with a stranger in a bar in America there is a reasonable chance that an argument will eventually ensue. Perhaps that only happens to me, and at a disproportionate rate, but I also sit and watch the interactions of others. America can be a pleasant place for those that choose to get along and be reasonable. I'm not always one of those people. There's very little conversation that occurs here that doesn't feel as if it just might be to the death. America still believes in bullfighting, as long as the bull remains an enemy to the sword. It's a game show without prizes, and millions of screaming contestants prepared to prove their worth as such. 

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The Stretching of the Nape

(Jack Montgomery)

Is it only Tuesday. What was I thinking.

I pulled a muscle in the left side of my neck, one that stretches from my shoulder blades to the backside of my ear, along part of the upper line of the jaw, then to the back of the head it seems. I had no idea that even such a muscle existed. It's igniting all of my nerve clusters on that side also. The whole region is in turmoil. Maybe it's just gas. It's not a very good idea to suddenly start eating a lot of fiber. In fact, it's a very bad idea. You can not "catch up" on fiber intake. 

CS berated me for stealing a line of his yesterday: Everybody loves a puppy. It's true that I did hear it from him, though I suspected that he stole it so I was reluctant to misapply credit. He now claims the line as his own exclusive intellectual property, so this is a rare editorial correction for this site. We live in topsy-turvey times. When the hammer finally comes down I want to make sure that the blame is applied where it belongs, with CS.

Nationalism is going to be fun. I saw a Jon Stewart clip that I liked. He points out that nothing has changed. We're still the same country made up of the same people. There are just a different set of voices talking more loudly now. He also posits that you can not take the worst thing that Donald Trump said or did and apply the shame of that behavior or those sensibilities to anybody that voted for him, or anyone that wishes his presidency or this nation to be successful. That's not how these things work. Or rather, that's not how adults should insist that things work. 

It is not quite as simple as being okay with racism is also racism, even though the statement is fundamentally true. That alone should cause some questions around it being embraced as an axiom. Because, you know, fundamentalism. 

No, let's talk about photography. I have been struggling to find the time to take any pictures, can not even go through the ones that I have taken to throw out the bad ones and somehow preserve the good ones, somewhere. My life is stored on aging computers spread throughout my life, old hard drives packed in boxes, buried in the closet. Once you have children then parts of your life freeze in time like a snapshot. Things change around you and even within you but there's no getting back to what was before. It gathers dust, and will be cracked open one day by the boy, like a time capsule of his dad's life. I only hope that I have time to edit the story that has now flooded my life and left me without an ark.

I like the image above. It is pleasant to look at things in a way that we are expected and told not to. To have them put on display for us. It causes a stirring, the taboo of tender things. I do not mean sexual, though it is of course an image meant to provoke responses along those lines. Even if only intellectualized responses are permitted, those are to be abbreviated along the strict lines of unstated moral expectation. The image is not only sexual in nature. There is something more there, also.

At what point does a girl become a woman, and as such, when does she become beautiful? We are encouraged to ignore the question in a number of ways. That is for her to decide... seems the thundering vacuum of an answer from her mom, though she doesn't mean it at all. 

Then what of the picture above? It is there for the purpose of examination. 

The image is a challenge and a question, as well as an implicit statement about the nature of self, persona, and presentation. There is an hysteria involving all discussion of children as sexual creatures. To acknowledge is to violate, to ignore is the perpetual demand. 

If you look closely, you'll notice a darkened dent between the girl's legs. You notice it because she was posed more as a woman than as a girl and no viewer should miss that fact. We are supposed to look the other way, but we don't. Why, to both of those facts? And more, why is there so little legitimate conversation concerning what that means. There is a mound of iniquity to be found there, for those who believe in such things.

I do not mean the girl, of course. 

I wish to return to a world where everything did not require eternal qualification. Not this new world of narcissistic innuendo, but one where metaphor flourishes without fear of being fact-hunted into becoming facts, where image and idea are persecuted for violation of unwritten law, the unstated yet ubiquitous mores. American custom has lingered too long on only that which is essential, and still there is no consensus. 

About a week ago somebody posted a quadtych image on FB, an historical series of First Ladies. There were four of them. I forget who the first was, maybe Eleanor Roosevelt, but then there was Jackie Kennedy, a bare-armed Michelle Obama, and a naked Melania, highlighting her fake breasts and hand barely concealing her shaved pussy. The purpose of the image, it seemed to me, was to showcase the hypocrisy of those who criticized Michelle for having bare arms as a First Lady and that she was more in league with her antecedents rather than her freshly shorn successor. 

It didn't take very long for someone I didn't know to shame the person who posted it, a gay buddy of mine, with something like this: Body-shaming, really? I looked at the post for a while, noted my friend's nearly apologetic yet adamant response that he would never... clarifying quickly that he does not engage in body shaming, and so on. An expected reaction from a conscientious person. 

I was tempted to post something along the lines of: For me, shame is not something that an image can experience. But that temptation was not enough. Arguing tires me and seems to confuse others. Why argue about how to properly bolster the esteem of a disconnected image.

The censorial subtext being that we need to defend images form being looked at and assessed, because the mind making distinctions is the purest source of societal evils. There is, of course, more to the subject than what I have presented here. No point is either made in full nor exhausted by same in a single telling 

Because I use the adult versions of words I know that shame is an internal emotion associated with feelings of inadequacy. Melania's work as a nude model would indicate that she seeks, or at least at one time did, the attention and assessment of viewers as a piece of capital expression, and that she can't hear or sense us shaming her nude likeness on Facebook. 

That would be witchcraft. 

But why bother? I should just post the image above in the conversation thread and say, I think this girl is fucking fat, and she wears too much makeup. Though I do worry at times that my point might somehow be lost in that. 

Where is the national conversation that has grown tired of both sides? One need not be a Trumcist to  recognize that the stultifying atmosphere that many of us bought into in the name of improved racial tensions has somewhat failed. Both sides have dug in deep for a tugging off of the war. We've unleashed the legion of little emboldened voices, the choir that always rises, seeking to match or best all counter expectations of conformity, in perfectly strict harmony. 

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The hideousness of time now lost

Trump's victory seems to have emboldened liberals now, also. They are correcting people on Facebook for cultural infractions at a record pace. The right complains about the liberal bias in media, but the alt-right has near complete control over the flooding basement at Facebook.

Isn't that enough?

Aha, caught myself... I must find a way of escaping this. It really is like giving into the recurring impulse of addiction, or at least what I've read about such things. I have such a hard-on for political headlines right now. My eyes can't collect them quickly enough.

True liberalism should be founded first in the unhindered use of the mind. There are too many petty snitches roaming the coasts, it seems. This is not to say that ugliness does not exist, but it seems clear enough that tattle-tale-ism won't fix what ails America most.

Yesterday was again a rainy day. Too rainy to enjoy anything outside for very long, though I did drive around and try to take some pictures, only one or two of which pleased me, and those are both somber. I did fulfill my promise and grilled a ribeye steak with two over easy eggs for breakfast. So, there is that.

The ex and I took the boy roller skating, his first visit ever to a roller rink. It was a disaster. I think that he doesn't like being four years old with two adult parents that already know how to do things, things like roller skating. He shows frustrations at not being at our level of interaction. I suppose that's normal, right?

Well, I went airborne at one point and landed on my lower back, as well as hitting my head pretty hard on the rink floor. So, I'm not confident that I can still claim to know how to do things. With some more time on the disco-oval I think that I would have improved, but once I started vomiting and had to be rushed to the hospital with a concussion then our Sunday took an unexpected turn.

No, it wasn't that bad, there was no joy ride to the emergency room. But... I can see why middle-aged people like myself become more cautious of life, and whose adventures become more reasonable, less inclined to involve physical risk. The biggest peril that many people face at this age is fucking one of their friends' partners. It's actually quite good that some of my friends chose never to have children. Comparatively speaking, they're a bunch of train wrecks. It's sort of fun to watch, after the fact, but I can only sit back and wonder what next.

What next.

People are selfish, or to state it with an eye lent more to pragmatism: they advance their own wants well before the needs of others, even those to which they claim the greatest of love. I can't say that I completely blame them. I find myself withdrawing more and more from the possibility of dating, if only because it seems to be increasingly a losing prospect, or a lost game. I know that those feelings change when someone suddenly appears in front of you in life, wanting and also offering love. Everybody loves a puppy. 


Though, from my perspective, this would destroy what little time that I do have for myself. You know, the very thing that allows me to be lovable. I look through my text and email history and it has occurred to me that I don't have time for anything anymore - my list of friends that I correspond with has diminished to a single handful, texts and emails have gone months without a response from me, a good friend's mother passed way here in the Bay Area and I wasn't able to attend the memorial service. If something is not an abject emergency then I can hardly schedule time for it. I'll need to get pancreatic cancer like Steve Jobs before I learn to deeply regret living this way.

Where does a woman fit in to a life like this? I have loved mostly crazy women, and you might flinch at that assessment, but I'd be happy to send you a list and chronology so that you can gauge for yourself. You'd have to go all the way back to my first real love to find a sensible, nurturing woman. Some of them might have pulled out of their decade of craziness, but that's also when things stopped working between us. Could it be me?

I'm at the point in life that - if I were a woman - I'd be getting my hair and nails done with suspicious frequency.

It's been over a year since I've been on a date, I think. If I have, then I've forgotten it. I might have gone to lunch with a woman in there somewhere. I've flirted, but without the consequence of sincerity or the mutually pleasurable escalation that would lead to a date. I practice flirting, but am trying to be cautious not to send the wrong signals, either. I live in a dangerous state of probable overreaction to everything. The slightest interest from a woman triggers every follicle in my brain, within seconds my nervous system is flooding with the cocktail drugs of primal lust and a sense of overstated charm.

I try to be sensible about these things. We know that the nervous system is built around clusters of nerve endings, many of which are designed to have us act against our own needs, particularly when the wants raise and wave their flags of orchestrated interest. Within seconds, I am willing to forgo almost everything in my own life to attend to the vague interest of another. Yet still, no serious takers. It's dispiriting. The qualities that I possess seem more suited to attracting younger women, though lose their effectiveness rather markedly when contained in the body of a middle-aged man. Perhaps that is also just another misconception of age, one embedded into our genetic structure.


The last time a woman expressed interest in me it was through LinkedIn.

Things didn't quite work out.

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I'm So Vain

(Patriotic Jailbait)

I have been waking up all night, again. I did not make my normal medical-marijuana tea last night before bed. So, either that crazy, dangerous pot stuff really works or I have become habituated to it and now can't sleep very well without it. Perhaps both. Why can't it be both? 

I live in mild anxiety about developing chemical habits now. I recognize that they'll likely be for life, like any sports injury I incur at this age.  I wake up and I suddenly have a new lifelong addiction, or a pulled muscle that never heals. It's no good. I permitted myself a daily coffee allowance - two cups, sometimes four - but that's it. Nothing else daily. I've even cut out wine and beer from being quotidian, which has worked out swimmingly, though I have found other things to waste my money on of course. I was quite smart to divest of my holdings during the Obama years. I'd hate to have all of that cash now. 

I don't really waste my money as terribly as I suggest. I love the things that I buy, and have no regrets, particularly with the cameras, lenses, and bikes, all of which have reached their sensible saturation point. Whatever lenses and cameras I buy now will be purely ancillary, or is it secondary? I have two "pro" camera systems, and now only require more time to wander. That is the one thing that my spending habits do not provide me, time.

I do not share the same trepidation towards approaching unknown people to take their picture as CS does. He has real problems. People love me, always have. Once they get past their initial mistrust of everything I do or say then things are fine and we are all good and close friends. When the time is right I bring the camera to my eye, obscuring my face, then pilfer a portion of their pneuma. The shutter opens and reveals the empty plane of Nietzschian darkness. 

Once at home, I transfer the image to my computer where it can glow alone in the light of mauvaise foi, or is it merely a touch of jolie laide?

Well, today looks to be another without riding. My happiness has come to depend on it, like Dolly's Jolene. I have entered the middling years of messy life-guilt, wondering where two decades went, soon three. While others may retreat into yoga to manage their choir of screaming voices, I find solace in daily risking my life and the lives of those around me. At 200 pounds and ~15 miles an hour I can kill almost anything except maybe a car, or a medium-sized bear.

Wait, I am a bear - gay men simply love me. Some of them. It must be my NY snark, which I am losing in the sunshine of California. Gay women treat me with conversational caution, mostly. They always seem to be waiting to hear me say something that I probably shouldn't be saying, and I so do not care to disappoint. 

There must be some that suspect my dissatisfaction with liberals indicates a private impulse to announce support for the right. Few things could be further from the truth. While I would concede that not everything the right advances is necessarily wrong, I have not made the mid-life "conservative shuffle" to the right that some might be waiting for, and some even consider as normal.

Just because I'm a disappointed white man in middle life doesn't mean that I'm going to vote for Romney in four years, which is what we're now being set up for. Either that, or the family dynasty that Trump is trying to prematurely install at 1600 PencilVanya, with that inbred elf of a son of his. He has that mean, stern look of natural cruelty that wealthy kids can sometimes possess. He can only achieve climax while watching kittens drown in a champagne fountain he has in his private chambers. His Secret Service code name: Badfinger. 

One almost gets the feeling that Trump could launch a new product line in his first 100 days, if only to justify using diverted national resources to advance his interests, which are now married to the interests of a nation. He has a son named Barron.... Barron von Trump, I think. I wonder if that kid has ever sniffed Tiffany's underwear, or maybe her discarded jean shorts around the sweet spot. She looks like a real pool party. If she had not been born wealthy then she would have been born in Florida, instead. 

Am I going to die because of this post?

More like "Patriotic Clickbait."

The Secret Service will absolutely love this family - hookers and blow, then more hookers, and then more blow. I mean, can you even imagine how much fun they're going to have now. Only a triumphant return of Bill Clinton would have competed with the air of jubilance they must be experiencing at the Confidential Cubicles - nights in NYC, luxury travel, fine dining, hookers, blow. Only a small handful of them will ever see Washington again.  

Fuck. Did you see that? Politics crept back in here while I was dreaming of coffee, like my girl, Carly Simon. I bet you think this post is about me? It is, but I'd like to kiss Carly Simon's lips, in 1973. You gave away the things you loved, and one of them was me. 

And when you're not, you're with.. Some underworld spy or the wife of a close friend, wife of a close friend.

Not me, Carly, not me. You and I would've made such a pretty pair. 

Isn't it pretty to think so?

I took a ribeye steak out to lightly season. Before the sun comes up this morning, standing outside near the rain, I am going to sear it on the grill, then have it medianamente-rojo for breakfast with over-easy eggs, perhaps also the bottle of Dassai sake that my buddy sent me. 

It is that type of a dark, wet morning. The future feels bleak in the pre-dawn of this four year era. It is best to laugh a little at the quietude, at the stillness that drowns everything except wakefulness. 

.

"When you're young you get sad"

Ugh, I've been working since 3am. I put in a full day by 11... A model made of employee. 

Now, it's raining and I don't know what to do. I suppose I could ride in the rain, or go to the gym. ... the rain has cleansed me of silly ambition. 

The other day I was riding along a path, navigating a blind S curve, drinking from my water bottle. It was a bad idea, but that did not become clear enough until the couple walking the other way panicked when they realized that there was no way that I could either stop or avoid them in time. I hit my brakes and tried to swerve, but the back tire slid out a bit just as the girl jumped up enough for me to slide partly near her and partly across the spot where she had just been. I was able to get out a "So sorry!" before I regained control and navigated the final curve, then slipping beyond their site.

I could hear their relieved laughter as I continued pedaling away, so I didn't feel too terrible about it, but it did come to me as a surprise. The new bike goes faster, leaving less time to respond. It has forced me to think about riding differently, and all that entails for someone like me. Since, there has been a near crisis in consideration. I am second guessing everything. 

Since Trump's victory I have enjoyed being alone in my own head much less.  I don't like the shape of things any more, and don't enjoy thinking about the future as much. I do not wish to become an embittered man. I know that seems an exaggerated telling, but it's true. Too much time is spent practicing narratives in my head. I see the temptation, the surrendering to the impulse and its results, as clearly as I believe I am able to. It's no good. It's very bad. It's the bad thing that your young self swore would never be. I feel as if I'm trapped at a dinner table and I'm the dad talking.

I might have to cut myself off from all political talk; both sides do little for me any more. When I was younger I believed the democrats held the moral high ground. I started to move left of that party, as did many others, and I started to feel that we were then holding an even higher moral position. Then, in the last few years I've realized that an entire portion of the liberal population are really just a bunch of lazy self-interested dumb-fucks. The worst part of the realization was that I wasn't self-interested in the right way. I had just crowded my life too much with half wits, and then became one. 

Discussing anything on Facebook with almost anybody has had a crippling effect on my ability to interact with others, but there's been some negative impact also. It's made me realize that I just stopped giving a fuck sometime in the last ten years or so. I chose a side and I've basically stuck to it, but I've ceased liking many of the people on this side, or agreeing with their narrowing prescriptions of what will best benefit mankind now. The other side has never been an option. 

Politics has made me realize how not to be in life, but talk of politics has prevented me from using that knowledge at all. I'm no better than a sport's fan at this point, and I chose my team many seasons ago. 

I have a difficult time talking to some of my friends. It's all we talk about; we never agree. I just don't want to be an argumentative middle-aged man any more. I wonder if Christ will have me back. Many say that he offers a permanent co-dependency of sorts. 

Ah well, it is a rainy day and I have no music playing. 

Could not see that a time as this in life would ever arrive. No glimpse had then yet appeared as to how time becomes another thing, also.

- Sean's Diary, November 19th in the Year of Our Lord, 2016

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Time To Pet

The luxury of a weekend's worth of time squats in front of me. The wind pushing its way through the palms outside, inviting a ride up the valley. Shadows of the trees sing back and forth against the wall outside the kitchen window, allowing then denying the sun's easy passage. Silhouettes against the wall elongating, swaying, gathering together again in bursts, as a murmur of darkened birds, imaginary in flight.

When I return, the flock will be stretched apart and away, all having migrated slowly to the east, the sun falling away from the sky, then cooling in the faraway waters of the Pacific. Offering night as its compensatory deal. From what a great height to view the only world, from what a great height to daily fall. 

There are a number of things that I told part of myself that I might do this weekend, all boring domestic stuff but little victories nonetheless. Now, I have agreed to work extra hours. I have done such terrible, terrible things to my credit cards. We are hardly on speaking terms.  I get monthly letters, all written in an indecipherable code. 

The cat above is my buddy, Jerry. He shows great love for me, and I for him. I go feed him, he and I will discuss the ongoing issues of canine tedium in purrs and coos and soft talk on the couch. Over a tin of fresh cat food and some light petting, we bond. 

I'm not sure what happened, but somewhere along the way I ceased being a person that wanted a pet, even an easy one. I only wanted petting, an easy one.

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The most expensive selfie I've ever taken

(... and all I got was a record of my hairline)

No more politics and less politically motivated social commentary, for now. I have grown tired of it, also. Though I know myself - I will be back. 

Yesterday, when riding my bike, I realized that I was not getting out of it what I most wanted. I was too worried about things that are far beyond my control, conversing with others in my head, advancing imaginary opinions against imaginary responses, precluding myself from the moment that I was living in, preparing for as much future unhappiness as I was able to imagine. I've been trying to focus on things that bring me delight but have been failing pretty terribly there as well. 

As readers here already know, I have been taking pictures with my new camera, a manual 35mm film camera. It turns out that I was not loading the film correctly. I shot about seven rolls and then had them all processed. Some of the rolls were older. Three of them came back completely blank. The camera and lens I bought were about $550 combined and the film, processing, and scanning was about $150. 

I have spent about $700 on the image you see above. 

It is a reasonably rare picture of me, so there is that. I hope that you enjoy it. It cost me an education in process and patience, and then there is the cash. I have had far more expensive life lessons, so I am trying to keep things in perspective. 

I have yet to confirm that I am now doing things correctly, though I believe that I am getting closer. I opened up the back of the camera at what I thought was the midway point of another roll and discovered that it has not moved at all from when I "loaded" it. I reloaded it and now can verify that there is more resistance when I am manually advance the film with the lever. It feels less right than before, but I suspect I am getting closer. I'll probably have a roll that is all half images like the one below. 

I should resort to using oversized Emojis to express myself. They are much cheaper. 

The boy and his mother bought me a gift certificate to Photoworks for my birthday, which was very sweet of them, and thoughtful. That money was also tossed upon the pyre of my hobby. I could have become one year older without this added disappointment, of course. I'm going to have to apply for credit soon if I wish to keep trying things. Or, wait for another birthday's orbiting. 

Here is half of the story:

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Mission Accompliced

(well-regulated politician)

I want to keep writing about politics. I want that so very badly, at least as desperately as I have been the last week. It is best to let it go though, I know. Just because there is an all-you-can-eat buffet available that doesn't mean that you should eat all that you possibly can. I have gorged myself on politics for a few months now and I still have found that I am the only person I agree with, yet I am still hungry for more self-agreement. 

While I don't much care for everything about him, I would have appointed Jon Stewart to the presidency if that were within my power. He is an informed and concerned citizen whose heart appears to very much be in the right place. 

If we have entered the post-postmodern era of celebrity presidents, one advanced by the actor Ronald Reagan, then why not Jon Stewart for eight years? Then, Bill O'Reilly could take over for a term or two with Dennis Miller as his VP, then Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks. It all makes good sense and there is money to be made, a series of films out of Washington that explore the many complexities of celebrity presidencies. Kevin Spacey can run this country. I am as sure of it as any voter. These are America's real heroes. Fuck, we could even have flashbacks to Trump's dual tours of Vietnam, when he fought side by side with Rambo. All of it. 

Do you see how I can't stop? It's considered a disease. There are 12 steps that will help me better argue with those that don't have it. 

I have a racialist friend that posted an article that claimed that calling people racists doesn't help anything. It came as news to America, as you can imagine. As part of that post he relayed a story about a racist friend of his. I swear to Beelzebub, this actually happened. Another friend of his then pointed out his fallacious revelation in a followup post and he did not bother responding. It seems that getting mired in the facts of racism does not advance his message very much. It's unfortunate for him that self-rigteousness and self-education are separated by necessity and purpose.

Read one way, he seems to say that being born white affords you privilege, which then qualifies you as a racist. Read the other way, he's simply calling his friend a racist. You tell me: "Putting aside for the moment that this person was white and, as a beneficiary of white privilege, also a racist, I temporarily accepted their use of 'racist' as meaning racially prejudiced".

He gives no indication as to how long his temporary pardon on the meaning of terms would be in effect, but we must assume that his largesse extends past the point where his thoughts will be forgotten or dismissed. 

I suppose it really depends which portion of the sentence he's qualifying after the comma that follows the word "privilege." Seems like the word "and" should have also followed the comma. He is of Mexican heritage though, so perhaps English is not his first language. 

I half kid here. He lambasts me for not making enough sense, so he deserves a bit of noise in return. Also, he's a racialist, so it makes good sense for him that he is obsessed with the issue. 

I finally watched the Chapelle episode of SNL last night. I can see now why so many Facebook liberals weren't able to tickle their own anuses with pixie dust for a day or two afterwards. Dave contends that we should put the partisanship behind us and give the new president a chance, that there's been far too much division and nothing good will come out of any of it. Few messages anger the losing side more than this one. Where will they derive online identity without an oversized bogeyman to fight. 

Don't get me wrong, I have been in bitter knots for a week and can not imagine a worse possible outcome than the one we have, but I accept that outcome. America has spoken, and what they want most is Trump, even if most of us don't want him, numerically. Some wanted Trump, so now they have him. 

He will likely not be quite as bad as liberals believe, nor nearly as effective as conservatives hope. So far, so bad. He'll please white people, and haven't they been through enough already. He should have accepted the presidential salary and donated it to a charity. The Clinton Foundation would have made good sense. It would have shown what a theatrical farce campaigning actually is. I mean, I'm sure they may have hated one another but money so helps ease to the acrid pain of hatred. 

Also, I'm not against the electoral college. I hope I made that clear in my qualification paragraph, but perhaps it wasn't clear enough. I don't actually know enough to have an opinion on the process. I can read Wikipedia, that's about where I am on the issue, filled with ignorant opinion.

That is where I hope to cease the political portion of today's post. 

Regan was a little disappointed that my post yesterday didn't trend better. I explained that this was my fault, the result of me not using a picture of her and then spending the entire rest of the post to discuss politics. Who would like such a thing? I blame myself, of course, she is rightfully an internet sensation and I failed her in my dedication. The Mighty DJ Hathor. 

Well, I have work to do. Did I really just write another political post? 

FUCK. Fuck. fuck. fuck. fuck... 

I had hoped to charm my readers with irrelevant details concerning my recent local bike rides. The pounding of my heart, it beats so strong... what can I say? Just quasi-poetic meditations on the nature of the middle ages of one man. I have gracefully swanned through my Medieval years. Now arrives an era of Discovery. Then comes Enlightenment. I hope.  

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