Rocking the Boat

Well, we did it. Rachel and I went out to a nightclub with a friend, stayed until closing, had fun, chatted amicably, even danced a bit. Yet we didn't turn into morning hobgoblins. So, now I know that it is possible, just unlikely. The transformation into a monster of morning need not happen every single time. It is written anew.

So, we had our New Years celebration on the Friday before. Now, we will kitten up and lick our wounds, though they are mild. We were mild, adultish even. 

Wait, adultish sounds like the delicious sin of old commandment cross-hovel passion much more than how I intended. 

Anyway, we went out and had fun and did not get too terribly harmed by it. It is possible.

Now, we sit around the house waiting for the inevitable imaginary time to arrive. 

The boy seemed to be tiring of only adult interactions. So, I dressed up as a pirate with him, made a ship on the couch, then began a mini adventure that ended with him storming another ship unexpectedly from the one that had sailed up next to it in the darkness.

That's it, really. The last day of the most recent year. 

The hour spent as pirates, bouncing ship. 

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Personhood, Thoughts and Prayers

I've run out of pictures for this site. I've been shooting 35mm film almost exclusively, so I have few digital images to work with here quickly and easily. So, older negative scans it is. I like today's image, overexposed nearly to a fault. It's the type image that you almost have to try to take on a digital camera but happens quite naturally on a manual film camera, where you are trying to set the shutter speed, aperture, and then nailing focus all in a combined instant. It can not always be done perfectly, and exposure issues are common. I like the look of them on black and white film, at least.

On digital cameras I tend to rely very heavily on aperture-prioirty mode and will only switch to fully manual if I wish to create a blurred image to represent motion in the frame, or for some other specialized purpose. I suppose that all purposes, or functions, on a camera are specialized. I rescind the fallacious sentence.

I bought yet another cheap little camera body for $43. One "designed for women," or so said Nikon when they were marketing it. Women would not need to fuss with all of the complicated mathematics that go into taking pictures. Check out the instruction manual. The 80s were my Mad Men decade. We believed that women were being treated nearly as equals and that the struggle was almost over. Looking back now it is easy to see that wasn't quite the case. Men seemed interested in women's liberation as a potential sexual coup on a massive scale, while only marginal advances in actual equality were being made. I see that now.


I should be careful writing that way. Some do not like it when I agree with liberal premises any longer. I suppose I can understand why. The liberals, or rather the Dems, have fucked everything up for the rest of us. They failed at so many things and now they're all doubling down on more of their election losing attitudes. I'm hoping for the best, but I think the Dems will do well in 2018 and then get their asses handed to them again in 2020. Their organized outrage only lasts about 24-30 months from any major defeat, and then even less for their victories. Too soon they devolve back into infighting and bickering about the appropriate terms to discuss gender issues and the extent of evil that Trump represents rather than agreeing on any solid liberal basis with which to appeal broadly to voters.

I would run on the platform of promising to remove all gender or sex designations from all law at the state and federal level. That would be it. You want equality, let's create it by removing any and all references to male/female, man/woman, husband/wife. All of them, from every single law. Then let equality rise up through the courts in the most dynamically conceivable way, erasing the bullshit that politicians are now using to make claims for their perpetual usefulness and value in the regard of fighting for those rights.

Let politicians find some other criteria to tighten their grip on the imaginative mind of the populace, and vote every last one of them out of office that resists those changes. There is no compelling counter-argument that I know of. Please let me know if I'm wrong, dear anonymous?

You would no longer need a candidate that was strong on women's rights or any other category of identity, those distinctions should dissolve. What you would find if that did become the next major liberal impetus is that many would suddenly reveal themselves not to be for equality at all, but rather that they wanted their identifiable group to have advantage under the law. If you want equality then all special categories of personhood must be obliterated. Except maybe childhood/adulthood. I haven't thought that one through enough yet, because you can guarantee that someone would fight to bring back child labor if we did away with those protections.

Not all of it, but many claims of injustice would become something else, something more telling. Others would simply act as if "that's not true equality." Suddenly, we'd have to listen to the arguments as to why men and women should not be treated the same under the law. Because there are always sensible seeming reasons to favor one and limit, or even punish, the other. Always.

Most groups don't want equality, they want increased power. They use the claim of inequality to fight for power. Most claims would dissolve naturally if the expectation of equal treatment were met. They know this, so they struggle to keep the struggle alive rather than by undermining the presumed basis of inequality: law. It is the fight to hold the claim of grievance which fuels them. Victory is best avoided, as nothing will ensure one's demise faster than the claims being satisfied.

The assertion of inequality allows people to avoid complete scrutiny towards their own actions. The sufferer is somewhat pre-forgiven for whatever response they choose, because, you know... they had to do this or that.

It was justified is the often made claim.


So, while we're keeping ourselves busy by applauding everyone's ever increasing level of courage and resistance, why don't we do away with the legal mechanisms which make that resistance and courage necessary.

Why?

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My Scratched Data

I have slacked on scanning old negatives lately, though I do enjoy it. It provides me a more intimate relationship to my photography, with my visual information. To handle film negatives and to work slowly with them, well, it adds something different to the experience. There is the love of analog, but there is also something else. It's the mistakes - flashed frames, half frames at the end of the roll, scratched negatives - that I sometimes love the most. Though it is also nice to scan a rich, clean black and white image from time to time. A keeper, as they're known in the lonely biz.

The mistakes have a charm of their own, though.
I've so often believed in them. 

When I worked at Apple I began to recognize different character types and what type relationships they had with their own information, as embodied in their storage habits on their computers. Computers are, in some ways, a reflection of their owner's psyches - the map of the terrain of their mental habits, the topography of their problems. Having things spread everywhere is not the same thing as being disorganized, and carelessness is not insouciance. I have struggled to keep the digital archive of my life reasonably organized - mostly music and images, but also much writing. This site has helped me organize quite a bit, though its only direct organizing principle is inherent in time's slow passing and that being available for my own use as a by-product of daily writing. If these were printed on paper then you can be sure that I would have somehow already lost them all to the fates.

One part of me hordes while another disperses. 

The boy still sleeps in my bed pretty regularly, about half of the time that he's here. I've been warned to try and dissuade him from it by other amateur parents, but what the fuck... I like the kid and want him to feel safe and good and to be happy. So, I don't mind. I'm sure there's some study out there that will show how I'm slowly turning him into a republican or a shoplifter because I let him sleep in my bed. Who knows. Last night I woke up and I must have been a bit cramped from him. I had a knot in a muscle towards the center of my back, was pushed over to one side and he was arranged somewhat along the center of the bed, arms and legs splayed so as to require as much space as his fifty-five pounds permitted. I tried lying flat on my back to let it untangle itself from my spine, but no luck. 

Now I sit here in the pre-dawn, pondering the efficacy of my parenting choices. 

It looks as if I might be going out to a nightclub tomorrow. I know that I have stated here before how that is not the life for me any longer but a couple old friends are in town, one of whom I haven't seen in a few years. So I'll go skip the light fandango, trip the shiny fantastic, or grow a pair of disco balls... whatever the fuck kids do now. Well, not whatever. I hope nobody expects me to smoke anything that is claimed to have magic crystal power. I've never found most the crystals that dissolve upon the direct application of heat from a lighter to be very healing or enlightening, but perhaps I am introducing them incorrectly to my circulatory chakras. Who knows, but that shit lights me up like a pinball machine. 

My latest life goal is to be asleep at night whenever possible. So, I'm not sure how any of this fits into that rather ambitious objective.

We'll see. If there is one phrase that I can never hear enough of it has to be: your healing energy. I like to try and match those with my aggravated energy and see if any sparks occur, the old enchantments of the yin and yang.

A different old friend played in the city last night, but that was a night that I had Rhys, so there was little chance of any unexpected magic healing energy happening.

I will ride my bike up into the hills again today, seeking some supernatural spell that happens only when I keep my heart rate above 150 bpm for quite a while. It tickles my heart chakras. 

There is nothing to report today. There is only that odd hammock of a week that hangs between the Christmas tree and the firm solar post of the New Year. 

Slumbering within it, dreaming I, swinging in the breezes of time.

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No Ratchet in the Rye

The holidays were a smash success. Mom and I agreed on it exhaustedly yesterday while the boys - Rhys and Jordan - were ice skating. There were no meltdowns, no shameful family episodes, no tears, nor screams, nor slammed doors, no ultimatums - a blessed Christmas miracle. We were tired, mom and I, but we emerged victorious. Mom deserves the claim of victory more than I. She is nothing if not Santa's indefatigable helper. A Christmas machine, made of woman. 

I forgot most of the things that I was supposed to do. It just occurred to me yesterday that I instructed Rachel to send Rhys's cousins Christmas presents, but then we forgot his Uncle Pat, my brother. We, that's one way of describing who forgot. There is never a total victory on Christmas. I believe that is instead the more Easterly message. 

Even my fragile old bones did a little bit of ice skating yesterday. Rhys wanted me to come out on the ice with him, so that's what I did. The skates were horrible and the ice was made out of frozen gravel, but we did it. His buddy Jordan finally let go of his training buckets and by halfway through the day was out there doing orchestrated ovals with all the old pros. Rhys holds to the side of the rink or to my hand, but he's getting there, slip by little slip. He has requested a skate board for his birthday, so better balance and more confidence will be the next to arrive. I hope. 

Then, there was a late lunch and heading home with walkie-talkies in the two separate cars for the boys to marvel at the wonders of short-range radio. On scanner mode they were able to find other local kids that were playing with their new Christmas radios, then have excited little giggling conversations with these other mystery broadcasters. 

Who knows, maybe they'll drive big 18-wheeler rigs one day and know all of the CB radio jargon. If Google does not automate the future before we get there. I always dreamed of having a trucker son. 

I was going to make a Catcher in the Rye reference but I couldn't remember it, then I couldn't find it online. Something about how it is difficult to appear depressed when ice skating. Maybe I've imagined that memory from that book. I tried to find it once before but no luck. I would have thought that every possible observation from that text would have now been well documented and discussed online, but maybe they've given up on 20th century writing already. The new attitude seems to be centered on dismissing all past pleasures, art, and assumptions. To do away with the past is the first and last of the true rebel's creed. There remains only the unquestioned virtue of the present - sins were of the past, so the past must go. 

(Auntie Victoria)

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Captain's Log, Stardate December 26, 2017

Christmas with kids is a lot of fun. I'll admit it, I'm a sucker for simple happiness. Yesterday, the boy was in kid paradise. He was tearing through his new toys, trying them out for feel and function. One of the gifts he received was a science kit and a laboratory coat, so he was making all manner of bubbling concoctions, colored water overflowing everywhere. Just the way a five year old should be. 

I had opted to work from home, which I often do on holidays, a small gesture of helpful commitment. There is usually very little to do. Not yesterday. From the precise moment that we were done unwrapping presents there was an alert that I checked into. Then the rest of the day was spent trying to communicate to one party while trying to gather information from another. Ah well. What should have been a relaxing day of quietude was spent somewhat frantic and stressed. What can be done. Not every customer is American, and issues don't disappear because we collectively believe in the supernatural powers of Santa Claus.

Kids believe, though. It is of course stupid and cruel to misguide children in matters of faith this way, but it's so much fun to see the look of wonder and near solemnity they have towards the plump yearly deity. 

On Christmas Eve we tracked his global progress with the perjurious help of Google and NORAD. 

Now, the boy has a birthday coming up in less than two weeks. He will be six in January. 

I'll be 50 in October.

The pics from above are the Christmas dinner party we went to on the Eve. 

These below are from Christmas morning. 

What would I be if not also a dedicated chronicler of holidays....

Oh yea, the boy had a mishap at school last week. I had to race there to pick him up. The cement faceplant he successfully maneuvered was quite traumatic according to all eyewitness accounts. There was a lot of blood flowing from both nostrils, many wails and endless tears. 

The doctor told us what I already knew. There's not very much you can do for a broken nose in a child (it wasn't in fact broken). You just let it heal, it will turn out as it is going to.  

That must have been what happened to me (see above). Something in my face became broken along the way and it was never quite set correctly.

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Happy Jesus! (pronounced Hay-Soos)

(Chris "Simpsons Artist")

I sit here in the pre-dawn, waiting the awakening of a five year old boy who is in love with Santa Claus and on fire for Jesus. He has lately become quite the expert on the old fellow from the North Pole, correcting me on all manner of Saint Nick's Christmas behavior. He has gathered information from who knows where, but he is armed with it and prepared to utilize it against any of our claims to the contrary. Details concerning elves, how they are not really watching anybody leading up to Christmas, that they're busy making toys all the way until the last moment before the big night. Also that Santa can't possibly be everywhere to put kids on the "naughty or nice" list. He just does an overview report for the year. I affirmed that I checked Santa's website and verified that our boy is in the "nice" column. He has lots of details that I can only imagine are shared and agreed upon at school. They somehow all seem favorable to kids and can be used to bring into question any parental assertion regarding the more technical aspects of the yearly religious mystery. Christmas is really becoming his area of expertise. He is no longer in much need of parental input. He has formed his own relationship with the event.

He will be awake any moment now, I hope. We were up late - at least for him and myself - leaving a Christmas dinner sometime around 9:30. I went home and went straight to sleep, knowing that I would have to wake up early and wrap gifts, something that I am shamefully bad at. It seems so easy, but my success at it is patchy at best. I would take a picture of a bad example and post it here, but I have already hidden them under other presents underneath the tree. 

Ok, I should wrap this post up. He will be walking into the living room any second now, astonished and amazed at the miracle of the morning.

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Proust's Questionnaire

__1.__What is your idea of perfect happiness?

Leisure time, and the resources needed, to pursue interests without impediment.

__2.__What is your greatest fear?

Not having any of the above, or rather more so: the death of those I love.

__3.__What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?

My many sinful abominations.

__4.__What is the trait you most deplore in others?

Theirs.

__5.__Which living person do you most admire?

Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski.

__6.__What is your greatest extravagance?

Being an amateur, probably my professional cameras and lenses.

__7.__What is your current state of mind?

Apprehension concerning the political future of the country.

__8.__What do you consider the most overrated virtue?

Self-discipline, especially when embodied in patience.

__9.__On what occasion do you lie?

Only during questionnaires, or police questioning.

__10.__What do you most dislike about your appearance?

That waistline of eternal improvement.

__11.__Which living person do you most despise?

Donald Milhous Trump.

__12.__What is the quality you most like in a man?

Ease of humor.

__13.__What is the quality you most like in a woman?

If she likes me.

__14.__Which words or phrases do you most overuse?

"That being said..." or "To be honest..."

__15.__What or who is the greatest love of your life?

My best friend, Jesus H. Christ.

__16.__When and where were you happiest?

Recently, since reconciling my family. Historically, the early days of the electronic house music explosion ~ 89-92. The three year summer of love.

__17.__Which talent would you most like to have?

The ability to sketch creatively with an eye for composition, character, and abbreviation of line without sensual loss.

__18.__If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

That I would feel less lonely.

__19.__What do you consider your greatest achievement?

I have written some prose passages and poems that I'm proud of.

__20.__If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?

Woody Allen's finger.

__21.__Where would you most like to live?

Far into the distant future.

__22.__What is your most treasured possession?

My Martin 16GT dreadnought acoustic guitar.

__23.__What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

I have had several periods in my life in which I was near suicidal - those.

__24.__What is your favorite occupation?

Musical performer.

__25.__What is your most marked characteristic?

Irony, satirical distance.

__26.__What do you most value in your friends?

Warmth.

__27.__Who are your favorite writers?

Salter, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Hamsun, Thompson, Bukowski, Dostoyevski, Genet. I am neglecting too many here.

__28.__Who is your hero of fiction?

Darling, Raskolnikov, or maybe the unnamed narrator of Hunger.

__29.__Which historical figure do you most identify with?

Joe Gould or the Marquis de Sade.

__30.__Who are your heroes in real life?

Christopher Hitchens.

__31.__What are your favorite names?

Gaylord and Cornelius for men. Tatiana and Periwinkle for women. They're family names.

__32.__What is it that you most dislike?

Washing clothes in a machine that doesn't work.

__33.__What is your greatest regret?

Allowing my love to devolve into acrimony.

__34.__How would you like to die?

Painlessly and unexpectedly, just after asking someone to "Please stop that!"

__35.__What is your motto?

Have others laugh, cruelty is inexcusable; bring a nice bottle of wine.

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Thanks for your corporation

(La Cena - Belkis Ayón)

Awake at one am, knowing that sleep will not return, not for a long while. The boy will first wake up. I will sit on the couch with him, watching some cartoon hero conduct cartoon heroics. My back will start to slide down the back of the couch, I will try to curl up on one end, a pillow stuffed under my head, my legs will then stretch out, cramping the boy. I will wish in pre-slumber that I would have just gotten up and gone to bed, but sleep will come. Fifteen minutes of it, maybe thirty. That will be it for the day.

No wonder I am in a clipped mood most evenings after riding and working out. I am hungry and tired. Last night I waited too long to eat, my blood sugar dropped and I entered a foul mood gracelessly, one resolved only by food close to my face. We wanted to get Thai but there was a wait at the restaurant, so the Whole Foods hot bar it was. Who lives life this way? I'm like a bachelor with a family.

Yesterday's title mentioned Amazon Prime, today's post cites Whole Foods. We are surrounded, and they are coming to get us. Death by a thousand clicks. 

Buddhists must recoil at the open pursuit of such suffering. 

Speaking of:

The boy will get a skateboard for his birthday in January. I am tempted to buy one also. I've never wanted to be this horrible middle age. It's not as if I once grew up and now shamefully wish to return to the Eden of youth. Anybody will tell you that's just not true. I am nothing if not a child of principle. The primary truth being to never live as an adult. It's why Amazon is so dangerous to someone like me. I am the proverbial kid in the candy factory. I buy little sweet, useless things until I have made myself sick and can no longer look at myself. It is the enlightenment of convenience. 

Most everybody now seems able to make a career out of their eccentricities. That is but one of the perverse lies of social media: that you'll also one day get your turn at being publicly stupid. Bad examples always arrive towards the top of the news stream. It has a similar effect to that of a gambling addict watching a national poker tournament, or a writer reading Hemingway. I can do that! Why not I? The mortal me must wonder and ponder. People believe their chance is out there waiting for them, and for some it may be, if they could just fall into the other side of the news cycle and then rocket away, upstream into infamy. And some Honey Boo Boos do.

There never seems to be enough room for everybody to be complete, though. I do not wish to sound like Paul Ryan here, but as you grow older a few things happen and one is the grim recognition that most things are probably not going to change for the better. One side will always up the ante and fight for what they believe to be the justice of progress, while the other will always up their efforts for the reversal of all the upped antes. If justice is the goal then most people would live and die in silent democratic obscurity, and most do. 

Justice is an approximation and no two people have ever agreed on its correct presence and purpose if the issue is pursued to its conversational completion. Everywhere there lies enormous disagreement about what should be, and how. There lies the respectful rub: Why are there others, and what do they want?

Some wish to return to a time in which there was a brighter future, though they are hesitant to define when that ever was. Others have no interest in doing anything beyond making the future as unlike the past as is possible, tossing out any progress they deem objectionable along the way. It is the cost of the now: to live either with memories or dreams of presumably better times. Some see the past as misguided arrogance, others view the present as the same, with an activist eye towards the future. To watch society crack at this temporal tug becomes less easy to accept as the years pile on. The mind wearies at the causes and effects. 

The idea of social progress is a recent one. Its time had finally arrived. Only after the western world discovered and pursued historical inquiry did the concept that the future could be systematically improved finally emerge. The postmodernists taught us to dismantle the past to get to the future. But they're all gone now and have yet to have their batteries removed by more popular ideas. Everybody grabbed a cloth shred of postmodern thought and ran it up the flagpole of their enemies, proving its point of ironic artifice. By learning how to reject the grand narratives they backed themselves into competing ideologies, bolstered by categorical assumptions and vague notions of ill-defined moralities. 

It is insufficient to recognize that history is a social construct, then attempt to create one that others must accept as true. Not if you wish to be in a society of others. Now we enjoy the many fruits of vagueness and the deliberate rejection of systemic knowledge. And these thinkers are the very same people who blame Trump for being Trump. You can not spend decades claiming that all we know is false and then not expect to see that platform eventually succeed. Trump is a logical political extension of postmodern discourse. The News Descending a Stairway.

Of course that stripe of false objectivity is just me trying to continue the consolidation of empirical power. I must be so blind and bigoted towards my own observations. 

So unwoke, that crazy q6.

We need not have a collective disposition to share an understanding that we have differing dispositions. There is the expectation of equality, then there is political retaliation for the advancement of that expectation. Every political person that I know seems unhappy, nervous, unerring, and occasionally very, very angry. The few thinkers and writers that could make me laugh have all but disappeared from the conversation. That is not me aggrandizing the past, only a recognition that there is more rage and less humor now. There remains only the power to laugh at the losers when losing.

Factions mobilize to demand what is rightly theirs. It is theirs because it has been previously deprived them. What could be more definitive proof of rightful ownership than lack? 

I've spent my life arguing that argument. That there has been collusion by the few to dispossess the many, to aggregate life's enjoyments beyond how they might reasonably be enjoyed. There is so much suffering that goes into affluence. No matter where you look, everybody wants more, and few ever have enough. 

Pleasures are fleeting, yet leisure seems so sensible. 

The Buddha said more than any man could have possibly spoke in a single lifetime. The paradox of excess exists even in spiritual wisdom. 

Why would someone with so little say so much?

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Help me Amazon Prime....

(Helmet Laws Suck)

I forgot to buy Christmas gifts this year. I relied on mom to heed Santa's secret summons. I bought mom something and I've been stockpiling little gifts for the boy throughout the last month. I am not a great shopper for the wants of others, unless they happen to like cameras, books, or music that I also happen to love. Under those circumstances I am the best. I've been told that I'm a bad shopper because I am a self-centered narcissist. That seems plausible enough. I do think about myself more than others, and more often. That's partially because I live and work mostly alone. When I go out places I'll find myself thinking about how stupid other people are. So, it all balances out. Everybody seems like a Star Wars fan to me - harboring some diehard belief in a universal force that also seems to oppose their basic principles and requires their heroism for the galaxy to be safe.

Sure.  Go beat up the devils, silly.

I don't get it, but maybe that's because I'm not a Jedi. None of them ever get laid. What are we, twenty boring episodic disasters in and nobody has even gotten or given a hand job yet? Lots of saber fondling, lots of homo-eroticism, the occasional disturbance in the force, but no old-fashioned penetration. It must drive the all fans crazy that Jabba the Hutt was the only one to ever get any nice, sweet tail, and that was only implicit. We never get to actually see Leia be the sex slave that they chained her up to be. Deep in our pants, we knew. 

Is there such a thing as a Jedi feminist? If so, why no uproar at the misogyny? There is so much power of male pubescent sexual angst held harnessed in those light sabers. You press the button and it comes gleaming out like an orchestrated glowing of glandular discharge. Always at erection angle. 

Oh, I'll leave Star Wars alone. It probably needs some private time anyway. I don't blame anybody for wanting to escape, even when the want is a need. We all deserve some harmless escapes. 

As always: Fuck The Pope!

I was scanning old negatives again last night. Images you have perhaps seen here before. I wanted to improve on the low res scans that had been done at the time of processing. I'm not sure that I've done that, but they take up more space on my hard drive now, so that must be a good thing. I kept the one far below tilting, as if the ocean and everything with it were heading off screen. It's just slightly troubling, as if they're about to vanish from the edge.

The one above was about a week before his first haircut. I gently cautioned against it. Once clipped, we can never return. I argued that he wasn't going on any job interviews, let it grow. That picture and a few others were taken one prelapsarian afternoon downstairs at our house. I remember it so well. Barkley on the bed next to him. He and I in that happy little world of our own. 

I am sitting here now in the pre-dawn, listening to Holst, distracted by it. Not a Jedi, not a Stormtrooper, neither a Vader, droid, nor a Princess. Only this surly smuggler Solo. Witness to the force of Alderaan still turning onwards, ever spinning east; never arriving, never leaving. 

I also like these:

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Classless Warfarer

(Available at Mercana)

Oh, don't worry too much about yesterday. I'm probably just being binary. It's a condition, riddled with unintended consequences. 

I have spent the morning reading and chatting with online friends spread afar. Isn't the internet really just something else? One friend in Nepal, another in London, another New York. They all still hate each other. I confirmed that fact anew.

I like to keep the fires burning, afresh and anew.

I've been listening to Daniel Lanois this morning, also. I have moved on from YouTube and am now listening to Peter Gabriel's Birdy album, the soundtrack to the film. It was produced by Lanois. I don't often go back and listen to Peter Gabriel, for all the standard objectionable reasons, but it's a soundtrack album so it's easier to digest. He never drops into some piano break and starts singing about being from some proud land we grew up in.... Hideous. Didn't he do the soundtrack to "The Real World"?

I'm getting into the Christmas spirit by making fun of Canadians and arguing about whether or not Trump's tax victory will hurt or help those trapped forever in what used to be called the middle-class. I argue either side, depending on who's listening. But don't worry too much about all of that.

Remember when Apple was fighting for your privacy? Be very wary of anyone who wishes to protect your secrets.

I saw a fun meme yesterday, Have you ever heard of a country trying to repeal universal health care?

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Where the self ceases

I've sat here whiling the morning away, chatting with CS about the changing shape of the American landscape, patching together the remaining pieces. We share similar temperaments, attempting to make some sense of the world through words, those often derived from feelings. This can be a dangerous drama, one that many are not willing to attempt. A repeating of the programs of others at ever greater volume is what these times demand. Everyone is set to out self-right one another. 

This site is confessional, therapeutic - hopefully a safeguard against too much of that. Read here enough and the cracks will become chasms.

As C.C. pointed out recently, people don't want you to agree, they want you to surrender. If you're not adequately agreeing then you must be suffering a crisis of emphasis. Everywhere there is a paucity of severity that must be filled with ever virtuous voices. If you're not hysterical then you're not paying attention, to me. If you do agree with the principle of a thing but express any reservation in process then you are a competitor to truth and need be demolished. Everybody hates the destruction of temples, except of course those of the enemy. So many are revealing themselves to be just like the people they hate. The descriptions of the foe being nearly autobiographical, the definition of dislike, unworthiness. 

That has perhaps been one of my problems: my agreements are qualified, my capitulations insincere. I seek to converse only when I'm allowed to sit at the table of conversation. I don't need to be a revolutionary, I only need to believe that people deserve equality of treatment and opportunity. For me, that is a sufficient guiding principle. The unending public appeals to principle seem insincere to me, even dangerous, a categorical effort to subvert and denounce without careful examination. Hate speech being any contrary inquiry into premise. 

My type will be rooted out and ostracized, an impediment to the uprising. I can feel it, and feeling is the way of knowing. Words can be used to express something we do not feel, so they are always suspect. We feel our feelings as a type of truth, not so with words. 

My words will haunt me. The ones that might defend me will be just as inadmissible then as they are now. Of what use, and possible danger, is someone who neglects to embrace a side in full.

Nothing is easy to share, it is something that is difficult to split. Some don't want to give up what they have. I'm not entirely sure if we should blame and hate them for feeling the way they do, or should we simply show and express support for equality, or both. None of it satisfies the demand, though. I'm not sure what it is that anyone can do, but do we must. Should I renounce my inherited privilege? Acknowledge it with an eye to self-flagellation, or reparations? Hate my kind? Hate history? Hate the inadequacies of the present? Will those hatreds suffice and sustain, or satisfy?

I'm tired of trying to talk to people who dismiss me for being. 

I think back to the many conversations I had with young, smart people when I was also like them. In the 80s it seemed as if there was still a conversation to be had. Not so much any more. There is the sole advancing of the changing credo. Everyone is filled with unshared ethical principles. Just leave any two comrades together in a chat room and only one will emerge. The loss will be tallied up to the high costs of righteousness. It's impossible to agree enough with those you agree with. There is only the simpering clicks of so many Likes. Never try to discuss or to offer a counter-point in conversation. To hold an opposing view is to enemize yourself.

It's probably only me. Out there in the new world, in the boundless land of youth, I'm confident there are still young people finding new ways to agree with one another. Afresh and anew, as perennial as spring, tackling the tough topic of being the self and not the other.

I've learned to slowly recede, to be more quiet and to listen. 

So much bad ideology lingering on the lips of once lovers. 

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a poem dancing for its life

The vines are nearly leafless now.  The rows of gnarled creepers appear ominous and deadly, strangely poisonous. The twisted skeletons hint of lost allure, the remainder of remains, in leisure.

Mechanical rows clutching the hills, like graves; a warless Arlington. The arthritic fishing net stretched across the land in trusted farm fashion; stapled to the earth, fishless, awaiting wine.

Two empty miracles collide in silence.

Some mornings I take the backroads to the highway; the long way across, to the state road, number 37.  It is a better drive, lovely in its hills and then across its valley plains.  It covers more earth and sometimes gives one earth to look at.

Each morning I cross a different land.

A day before there was a stretch coming down out of the hills and starting across the fields where all things were obscured by fog; the famous bay-area murk moving.  It drained much of the color from the land.  At a distance it ended all sight though not all glow. Vision falling off in directions to grayness, or worse;  eyes still yearning to be young.  The fields of cows and sheep move past closely and quickly as a soft haze of blurred ghost.

Nothing at last is real, or again it is, and one could disappear into it.

On other mornings, with no tellable difference in weather, the fields are perfectly clear, crystal as suggested.  Flocks of birds moving in their unusual unison, ripples of a single wing, pirouetting into and then across the light.

On yet another morning, further back, I saw three large birds hunting a flock of much smaller ones, all flying tightly, together just for now, enacting the odd dance of living;  giving and taking, striking and receding - all a single poem, dancing for its life.

Mornings, then again at night, backwards always racing, I cross this valley in fog; darkness falling, rising... its grayness just the same.


The two lanes stretched out unseen ahead,
twisting all points into approaching mayhem,
miracles never colliding,
but instead only the enduring yellow,
yet ever herding us away

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Nearly Missed a Bullet

Yes, I love the new negative scanner. I also love the phrase: Negative Scanner. It sounds like some dark guardian tasked with very tough business, a shock trooper along the outer borders of the apocalypse. If I were more into science fiction or fantasy then I would pursue that sentence further, but no, that was never my calling. I always preferred girls to interstellar dragon handlers. I wish it could have just been Dungeons and Dungeons. 

I will start to slowly go back and re-scan the negatives that I've paid for along the way. I only received files that were barely postable on social media (How is postable not a recognized word yet?). All that money spent having somebody else scan my film, and at the lowest resolution possible that can still be considered part of what might be called and billed as a "service." 

Shameful. 

I feel like I'm complaining about how little meat they use on the subs at Subway, or where did all the plastic bags go at the grocery store? Ah well, I am getting older... it's my birthright, privilege, and pleasure to complain about things, particularly the behavior of other races at the holiday dinner table.  

Wait, I'm not sure if I can make both jokes in one post - shock troopers were a Nazi thing, and then making a joke about getting older and being skeptical of racial integration.... Seems quite suspicious when united in what should be one continuous piece of thought. It could be an example of micro-intolerance, because humor is nothing if not tacit permissiveness of otherwise unacceptable thought.

I can't wait to discuss #MeToo this Christmas. I'll recite the date rape lyrics of Baby, It's Cold Outside and then open the table for discussion. I'll start by locking eyes with each person, one at a time, and asking if they really know how a female Rudolph might feel. 

Now, have you ever been Rudolphed?

Ah well, every home needs an HR department. I'm pretty sure that's where the idea started, in the kitchen, or rather, at the table. 

In black and white my son will begin to look more and more like a cross between Albert Camus and Joe Strummer. I'm teaching him how to smoke without inhaling. I'll still always look like the eyes of Sartre, but what can one do in these divided times? 

Soon enough we'll have no past heroes left to emulate. It is always the past most of all which must go before the present and future can improve. That is the demand of efforts towards the truest amelioration: everything must go.

When I was younger, Mickey Rourke was the guy that all the smart guys wanted to be. You see where that led us, now don't you? He turned out to be a talented spud with poor politics and two handfuls of horrid habits. 

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Scanner Darkly

I forgot to write a post this morning, now I'm going for a long bike ride. I've spent all morning scanning negatives - Fuji color and Kodak black and white. I'll get to the Ilford b-n-w later today.  CS encouraged me to buy a negative scanner, so late last night (for me) and then again early this morning (for anybody) I've been scanning my most recently developed rolls of film. I was doing so without clean cotton gloves like I was taught in film school all those years ago. 

It's really starting to feel like the season... I'm turning into a ghost of Christmas presents. 

I love the boy, of course, but I think it's a beautiful image, and like to believe that no matter what. 

Kodak Tri-X, iso 400. 

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What am I doing in here?

Sitting here in the dark doing laundry. What a life. The sun will be up soon. As I am finishing up folding, the day begins. I sit here each week working, somehow can't bring myself to also do modest domestic tasks. Half the time when I turn around to see the kitchen behind me the dishes are piled up. Not always piled up, though the kitchen is rarely free from them entirely. I try to cook, but can hardly clean while doing so. There always remains disorder. It functions preventatively towards the future. 

It would take but a minor change in habit; somehow it all escapes me. If there is this realization, there are others I must be providing hidden berth. Invisible tankers, docked along the lining of the mind in darkness, rising and falling with the seasonal tides. Habit's existential whispers.

Soon, I'll go for a ride. This week I have made some odd internal promise, one without terms, agreed upon vaguely one day while I was out riding, reminding myself that it felt better to be lighter. Do that, then, Sean, Right? The voice said. My voice, one of. 

I won't talk about my weight and the internal conversations I have about it. They are like most others, I suppose. They are like all other parts of me given to extremes. 

Being svelte is not intoxicating enough, one must also be urbane. Few things seem more courteous to others as being thin.

Did I just write that? 

Jesus, what is wrong with me? Jesus?

Of uttering habits, existence; there is still pain. Uncouth to discuss, but old people do. Inextricably tied up with something much less inviting to consider, always. Last year I focused on physicality, this year it noticed my efforts, and me. Must have looked good. In spring it reminded me to limp, some stretched ligament on the bottom where all the weight goes, then there was tennis elbow without having played much tennis, a malady that has grown with and without effort, now the other foot is threatening similar riot and the knees are grumbling that they have long been in for it. 

I see my boy jump off the last few steps of any set of stairs and I envy him, his bouncing exuberance made of human rubber, the mind fueled by simple sugars.

That's the morning howl.

That's the morning howl.

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Sometimes I forget what is lost in print

(image found online)

Are you fucking kidding me? I love Christmas, live for it. The rest of the year is nothing but unending misery in comparison. Yesterday's post was a joke, a very bad joke, written by a depressive mind. It was a result of the deal I made with the many devils of my central nervous system. They promised me talent for an old soul.

My battery is about to die on my computer. Its silent resistance to the loss of net neutrality. It has been fun, watching all of the coincidental righteousness and indignant drama on the issue, online. So much gets said, so much of it gets repeated. It's comical, though it's important to remember that those are the people that vote - a target rich environment for the lazy satirist. These times call for violent vacillation between utter candor and arch sarcasm.

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Jingled Bells

(shopping for a dead tree)

Ten days until Christmas Eve. I'll need to start doing something. Though what that should be I do not yet know. Amazon, I guess. I've resorted to telling the boy that all of the elves have moved to this vast South American rain forest, because of, you know, climate change. I explain that they had to diversify their operations with the harvesting of the coca leaf. I want to prepare my son to battle conservatives on their home front: the sanctity of Christmas.

I don't mind seeing the boy get so excited at the impending arrival of Santa Claus, but I do tire of the expectations of glee from others. I want to be left alone, mostly, until the season passes. I'm not being a Grinch, truly, I just don't have very much to pretend about in that regard. I'm happy, though detest the collective need to display one's feelings in concert with all of humanity. All of Christian humanity, that is. My feelings don't work that way. And yes, of course I have deeply conflicted feelings about family. 

For some, anything less than a Showtime-esque Happiness-On-Demand demonstration is a clear indication that there's something wrong with you. Of course there's something wrong with me, the first thing I noticed about the word demonstration is that it starts with demon. Has nobody been paying attention? What the fuck? I have issues. People expect you to shelf most of your neuroses and half of all of your emotions simply because it's the season for it, as if these things check the calendar before happening. Why can't you just be pleasant?

I thought that I was.

Emotionally stable people annoy the shit out of me, most of them are unforgivably smug during the holidays. I feel as if I'm always surrounded by carolers. The sounds of bells jingling in the distance an approaching malediction, a battalion of orchestrated gaiety on its way up your street, to your house. Chanting in unison like happy white nationalists: We wish you a merry Christmas, We Wish you a Merry Christmas, WE WISH YOU A MERRY CHRISTMAS...!!!

Well, I want that for them also.

I try, I really do try, but it wears on me. There's a reason that many people joke about needing whiskey to get through the holidays. I have gained a stone in weight since last year at this time, so I cut out wine and beer from my diet a couple days ago, in the hopes of getting a cycling start into the new year. It's not a resolution, don't worry, I'm not like those people. I was just happier when my pants didn't press against me at every bite, the belt line reminder of my indulgences. I started noticing that I felt thinner after two glasses of wine. 

That can't be right, I thought, that goes against what I know to be true.

Ah well, I won't write about my weight today. As much as this site serves as a repository for the self-helpings of others, I have perhaps belabored a few points. 

The end of that sentence made me giggle. There is a perversity to so many things that make me happy. Truly, a deliberate deviation from the accepted norms, personal joy found in that sweet balance between secret contrariness and open obduracy. 

Maybe that's also part of what I hate so much about Christmas: I do not find the ritual of it very comforting. Instead, I'm unnerved by it a bit. Not so much that I would take an imaginary or actual stand against it, but I try to lodge my complaints here and there like little stocking stuffers. 

I can't be the only person that wants to grab an Elf on the Shelf by his neck and force his face deep into my open ass crack in front of crying children and screaming relatives. Right? 

No, I don't have public sexual non-consensual interactions with Christmas dolls. 

Everybody here suspects that I wouldn't really do such a thing. 

I don't protest too much about it, either.

Be cool, Sean, just be cool.

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It was never my Sweet Home

You can sure bet that God's wrath is going to fuck up some mobile home parks in Alabama sometime soon. From what I have been told he does not at all like to be mocked. 

It begs the question: exactly how much pull does Putin have around here anyway? Maybe he didn't even bother. He checked with his cronies and he had no footage of a 12 year old pissing on Moore's face at the food court, so maybe he thought better about getting involved any further in Alabama politics.  

Who knows. The world is so crazy right now, I would not be surprised if Styx reunited. 

If it is God's will, then so be it.

I was so excited this morning when I woke up and read the news out of Alabama that I almost bought an album on iTunes. That's how eager I was to participate in democracy and to begin the long process of redistributing my vast wealth.

I'm happy for my democrat friends, though I know deep in my heart of hearts that they are doomed. Have you seen the hurricanes that God has been throwing at us lately, all because of gay marriage? Let's not all celebrate victory just yet. God could still send in the locust vote. People simply love some biblical pestilence. 

Shit's about to get real - Big wheels keep on turnin'....

I don't really want to write about Alabama right now, my heart's not in it. 

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I Accidentally Cried for a Racist : The True Sean Q6 Story

(Better days; Simpler times)

Turns out that little Himmler in the video yesterday - 'ol Knoxville kid cracker - might just be the progeny of a bigot. There are some racist lineage issues now that bring the authenticity of his pain into question. Well that, and maybe he brought some of that bullying onto himself by spouting some racist nonsense. 

I don't know, I haven't done any of the research, but my online team of Twitter research detectives have filled in all of the historical gaps in my responses. 

Just goes to show: if you're going to have an unexpected emotional response to a newsfeed situation then you should always check the family's history for antagonized racism first.

Though, it looks as if I may have not been very far off with this sentence from yesterday's post: If you need some sort of other assurance then look at the Knoxville bullies' parents and note how time and fear have worked together to craft them into being perfect people. 

Jesus.... I'll never get those tears back.  It turns out that Life is Not Fair.

I mean, I should have known, those fuckers were from Tennessee, and they were white, of course they're racists. The next thing to hit the news cycle will be that this family crept over the southern border into Alabama to vote for Roy Moore. I'm sure of it. 

They're basking in their newfound celebrity a bit before their first major arrest as a family. They'll want to make sure that next news splash really counts.

People ruin everything. 

Why can't I just enjoy the simple uncluttered truth of my initial reactions to things? It's because I'm unstable, I'm certain of it. I have unexpected emotional swings. I get them like I used to get erections in middle school. I'm convinced that the two phenomena are somehow connected, because boners have feelings too.

Ah well, moving on. I received a letter explaining that I must log on to a website and create an account and start paying my car bill. Soon. The paper has dates on it and explanations of what will happen to me if I forget, which can happen to anybody. 

It seems like more additional work than I should be expected to endure. I guess the days of getting a payment book and mailing each slip off with a check every month are long over. This slip in process will come in handy in the first few months of the apocalypse, where everybody else will still be trying to maintain some sense of normalcy, but I'll recognize when the scales have tipped too far to one side, like when we repeal net neutrality. 

It is the moment when the Kraken of capitalism will be unleashed. 

I know there are two sides to every story, but I can't seem to get a straight answer from one side as to why the ISPs are unable to adequately build a business model from billing for bandwidth. They are charging people for volume of information usage, and the content providers are billing for their product, but for some reason we must now concede that the bandwidth provider should be able to determine not only the quantity of information that you use, but also the quality. 

I know that's an over-simplification, but this post is not meant to be exhaustive. If you'd like to know my true feelings on any given subject then you must start reading from page one.

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