Super Lunar Blueclipse Moon

My only intention today is to document the facts. 

These two pictures, when viewed together, demonstrate the scientific impossibility of either the earth or moon being spherical. 

My very super scientific camera has recorded the data that "big NASA" doesn't want you to see. 

Clearly tonight's Monsanto Moon is both circular and flat. 

Touch the screen in front of you and rub it, you'll see. 

Facts are facts. 

Suck it, Buzz Lightyear.

This site runs on donations. If you want to see more articles and images like these then please safely donate your money from a work computer right at this totally safe for work link: here.

It's a porn site, dedicated to women everywhere with supertangas. 

.

From a conversation in the car:

Butt, penis, fart face - I know all the potty words, even vagina.

.

Lomo LC-A

I am aware that the Lomo craze is nearly over, at least for the coolest of kids, but I'm still a sucker for the international anachronism of it all. Mine arrived yesterday from the Ukraine - an original Lomo with Russian glass. So, I'm hipper than I might be otherwise. At least more than I would be with the newer, Chinese model (LC-A+), one that likely functions better. Though this was advertised as an LC-A+, it is most definitively not. I suppose I could leave negative feedback on Amazon for this poor ex-communist ingrate, but he was very nice through the entire buying and shipping process, assuring me without prompting to not worry, that the mail from the Ukraine is very poor but that it would arrive as promised, and not to worry, not to worry, not to worry, that I should check his seller rating and feedback on eBay to confirm what an upright guy he is in this and all other regards. 

Soon, everyone will have public buyer and seller feedback, that's how we'll know whom to love or merely date.

From my limited understanding... it is the original Russian glass that added so much quirky value to the camera to begin with. So, I can tout that one quality, at least until I get my film back to scan. So far I think I have been choosing the zone-focusing distance poorly. I read the English version of the Lomo manual only this morning and the very simple system makes a bit more sense to me now. The paper manual pictured above is cool because of the Russian text, but is useless to me as a technical document meant to foster understanding between nations.

Sorry, I grew up as a child refugee of the cold war. I spent my puberty envisioning various nuclear fallout scenarios, always imagining that I was somehow able to make it home just to let mom know that I loved her, to squelch any lingering doubts she may have had. 

I am often very sweet in my heroic childhood fantasies. Though, I saw an article recently warning women about dating men like me. Few things are as sure a sign of danger as is occasional boyish sweetness. What could be more suspicious. It seems that complicated men - those who experience a full range of human emotions - are virtually ticking time bombs, I read with surprise and delight. The article seemed to be both cautionary and instructional. Its intention being a tutorial on how to know whether a given man might be enlisted to the service of your pleasures and needs. I searched the internet globally for similar information on women but my research drew me to overly demonstrative examples, where perhaps the request for detail was being taken too literally. 

There is no winning for either men or the women now. I miss the time when we were allowed to like each other, without all the ancillary assistance from the romantic correctionists, the ideologues of love. It looks as if all of American society is finally going to have that conversation we've always needed. Thank the lucky stars for that! I thought we were on the verge of a breakup. It turns out that women don't want to split up, they just want men to finally get the help that they so desperately need. It's time that men address their maleness issues, as females. Details forthcoming.  

If things do not work out between Rachel and I, again, then consider this site a comprehensive list of my romantic expectations, ladies. I have needs, too. 

Rachel and I have done pretty well recently at treating each other as partners, as equals, though I'm sure that a careful feminist inspection of our understanding would reveal that neither of us is happy by getting only half. Certainly there is a gender gap in there somewhere. There must be, the dynamic includes one evenly paired oppressed and oppressor. 

I'm still the arch patriarch around here, aren't I? 

Speaking of, I went out last night with Rachel and Rhys. It was Cato's going away party. He's off to Berlin for a new job. So, you'll never hear about him again on this site. He is dead to our editorial staff. His new name, if mentioned here at all, will be Can'to. Pronounced like one of the Ezra Pound poems. Or you can also use Cannoto from its original Italian, if you shan't possibly bear another contraction. 

Rhys drew him a very sweet (and I guess as such, possibly dangerous) going away portrait, one of mom as well, in a book that was passed around that we were meant to each sign. I think I wrote Muchos Besos or something equally inane. Because what says Berlin quite as well as does Many Kisses written in Spanish? Beaucoup de Bisous.

Another of my close friends was there last night. He is also leaving SF soon, after 25 years or so, to travel through India for however long it pleases him. That represents the last of my three close friends that were living here when we moved from NYC over six years ago. Ah well, I have friends in other places if the urge to travel strikes me - three continents worth. Perhaps if I can stop buying useless and discontinued Russian junk cameras then I could set aside some money to travel. I have been eyeballing an Olympus XA-2, also. 

After my sabbatical things will be different.

That's just what my other friend emphasized: without a plan in place then that time will disappear very quickly. Time evaporates when it is left to roam in the moonlight. He urged me not to just wing it and hope for the best. He is of course right but I can still resent his lack of faith in how I mismanage my time. One must be willing do a tremendous amount of nothing if there is ever hope of doing anything that glimmers. That is what I've learned. It is my modest life lesson to you: do nothing and wait, something will arrive, you want to be relaxed enough to hear it calling when it does. Working produces the types of thoughts that mostly only workers have - ponderous, either productivity or escape driven. The best things arrive unexpectedly, often from the deepest state of repose, from a leisureliness of spirit and time. Not necessarily tranquility, but when released from the harassments of responsibility.  

Who knows. Perceived laziness might be the next social target. People will openly denigrate it, though on new grounds. A class of people will emerge associated with the trait, and they will be mocked as somehow being less than expected, less than what the future of this country needs. If rednecks and the elderly are safe marks now then it does not take much to expand that program to include any who willingly choose to produce or purchase less. What could be more like the elderly and the southern unmotivated than to willingly work less out of a conscious choice. 

The days of autonomous leisure - at least that not caused by independent wealth - are approaching their close. Liberals will come to the immediate defense of those accused of being lazy but they will, as always, greatly miss the point and only make the issue worse by insisting that the intention of the accusation is exclusively racially motivated. They won't be entirely wrong, they'll just continue to be entirely insufferable.  

I want to live "off the grid" like anybody else, but still require a robust broadband internet connection. I have needs, America.

My only concrete goal for my time off, so far, is to check and see if any of my past lottery tickets were winners. Once I've confirmed a single winning ticket then I can finally get down to the sticky and unpleasant job of organizing my life. That's what it would take for me to organize my life, I think: an unexpected bonanza of recreational wealth. 

I initially wrote to reorganize my life, but felt the bolt of guilt at the lie of it. I have never been organized. I can organize a book shelf to my satisfaction, or in accordance with the alphabet, or to generally accepted categories in style, purpose, region, or chronology. I can do the same with crates and crates of records, but not to my daily routine.

If only my dreams were alphabetical. 

One of the reasons that I love my current job is that there is an inherent organizing principle to it. I seem to function well enough when order is instituted by an external demand. What I seem to lack is an internal version of that same principle. My life is that kitchen drawer that exists in every home, filled with objects whose meaning and usefulness are blurred by their proximity to other oddities of likewise indeterminate use. So many things that I love are not connected by their uniformity, but rather by their oblique disorder, how they seem to fuse their disparate shapes into an inseparable and useless whole. It is the place where form destroys function. 

Always there are the important life questions, Why are there balloons in the drawer with scissors? 

I'm happy just reading for days on end, and can even commit to near daily exercise, but when it comes to seeing a self-generated project through to completion I become overwhelmed and no longer cherish my independence. I am cursed by a mind that roams, and I'm not even sure if it's mine. 

If I don't have somebody to either compete with, impress, or shame through comparison with my imaginary talents then I quickly lose interest. This might be a character flaw. I haven't been able to set aside the time to look into it any further.

.

Potentially Torrential

Yesterday, late in the day, I received some great news, like seeing a gift bicycle for the first time. It arrived wrapped as a birthday present, a bright red bow on the handlebars, leaned next to the table on which there was also a big ice-cream cake with so many burning candles and all of my friends excitedly standing around, cheering, singing celebratory songs, wishing they were me. 

Sort of. 

I'll be taking a six week sabbatical from work starting in mid-February, which will stretch all the way into a one week vacation in Costa Rica. Seven weeks of freedom, six of which will be the type freedom that I enjoyed while living in New York, mostly - the days will be mine to do with as I wish. Then, a weeklong vacation in CR with friends. Two days of which we'll be deep in the jungle of the Oso Peninsula, at the southern tip. Well, in a tree house near the jungle.

I left the house shortly after getting the news yesterday and went for a long and slow bike ride, to try to process all of it. Immediately, my mind began putting pressures on, berating myself in advance for not using the time more wisely, a thing that seems as inevitable as breathing. Then my other inner voice argued back. I returned to a relative state of normalcy where I could just enjoy the idea of doing nothing, or maybe spending a few days dropping liquid acid and listening to old rare-groove rock albums, naked.

It is for this precise reason that so many people I know have had to stop the use of recreational marijuana. The constant second-guessing gets to be a bit much at times. Lucky for me, I've always been a third guesser - perpetually confused to the point of indecision. So, in a sense I have out-tricked the drug with my own systematic neuroses. Second guessing is my third nature. 

Now, of course, I am beginning to inspect how badly I've been mismanaging my money, the trail of self-inflicted financial indignities. Banks keep painfully accurate records of my behavior. There is a little hourglass filled to the top with grains of remorse, when turned up one way. I could have prepared myself for this time off a bit better and possibly made finer use of it, though the idea of staying around the house and settling into a relaxed daily habit also greatly appeals. A lack of resources has not been the source of my unhappiness, though their misuse has crept into my conscience here and there. 

I've always bitten the hand that feeds me - my own. I'll sometimes awake to find myself gnawing on it in my sleep. I swear to it. Last week I awoke to find an advertisement on Amazon that I had only dreamed about. I used to wake up and check Facebook, but that's a graveyard for chumps and stalkers. What used to be the online cocktail party devolved into little more than a high-dive bar. I helped, of course, but I grow tired of the places that will endure me. Now, I go straight to Amazon and see if they have any new suggestions. I prefer those to friends. Friends are a nuisance, especially when they make themselves a burden. 

Once I accepted Tony Robbins into my heart my financial woes were lifted. Now, my life appears in the mirror as a beautiful late night video infomercial, one where nobody ever interrupts. The desperation of many people can be satisfied with something like a new diet book, yet we're expected to listen. 

I'm so excited about my time off that I'm going to rearrange my camera closet today. I'm going to begin preparing the cameras, lenses, filters, and other stuff to bring with me. Somewhere deep in my heart I know that I'll need all of them, because nothing quite outlines the contours of my unrequited happiness as does expensive camera gear in potentially torrential rains. 

Since yesterday two sparklers seem to be burning in my ball sack; a Fourth of July for atheists; millions of glowing spiders fleeing winter ice, cheering as they scuttle; an ice cream cake with forty-nine candles burning in the night; the flotilla aflame, drifting outwards past the sea; precious time snatched back from the daily blaze of obligation; an unopened box filled with snapshots from the future; or, six weeks of rain and a stack of twenty unread books. 

What can be done in a heaven temporary.

.

"I've got to leave before I start to scream"

(CS, in NYC)

Like CS, there's not much to write about lately. No new stories to tell. This is why I've been scratching at the past, which might be fun for a little while. I can only relay the details of losing my virginity so many times, though. Best not to exhaust that as a resource, else I may never get it back.

I don't remember many details from the first time that I had sex, but I remember the second time very well, which was the following night. I do remember coming home after the first night and walking into the garage entranced, as if drugged, thinking that somehow my father who was there piddling in the garage might know, might be able to sense its narcotic effect on me, as if the hormones that helped me arrive there would then turn on me and betray my carnality to an otherwise occupied parent. I must have wanted him to know. 

I knew that things had changed; not entirely sure what that would mean. I only knew with certainty that my love for her would last forever. That part was tattooed to the post-coital mist. This love was why I was here. It explained everything. 

I suddenly had a partner in secrecy, one from the other team, the strange and magical tribe from across the summer lake. She was immediately superior to all of my previous boy-child friendships. She could conduct wonders, as if her breath was comprised of helium. Her flesh the only warmth that mattered. My young mind learned quickly to understand and believe in the spiritual power of women. That one such as her, so young and mine, could pluck me without struggle from my mother's nest, surprised me in the way that I had been anticipating. In so doing she of course changed the universe forever, merely by wordlessly indicating that she might just prefer it a different way.

Voilà - the potion worked its wonders. Transfixed by the erotic aroma, I morphed into a young man.

I had not chosen as carefully as I could have perhaps, though every option was being pursued simultaneously. It was a matter of social dynamics colliding with the mathematics of opportunity. We seemed in the right time and place. Twitching with glandular impulses, mostly directed towards one another, our destinies combined for a handful of minutes at a time - two silly creatures grasping at passions. She, the little lovely, self-splayed for me. I, the eager convert to her world religions. I could feel myself disappear inside of it, returning to life as if reappearing from within a dream.

I would do anything to partner further with the object of my destiny, and was eager to demonstrate this. My decade and a half of years accumulated became hers. I handed over every part, believing each piece to be of value to her. She disabused me of that notion quickly enough. So, there were other young women, girls really, after her. They arrived in a sequence, mostly a serial fashion with an occasional paralleled transition period, where my undying love for two of them overlapped briefly.

I barely remember her best friend at the time, whom I also got pregnant. Two in my first active year, which is somewhere above the speculative average. The only thing I seemed to understand was the most basic portion of it, the fundamental mechanics of where things were meant to repeatedly go. Two abortions worked in tandem to help flesh out my understanding of sexual consequences. I learned, though only reluctantly.

Women don't talk about abortions much and as a general rule neither do I. It's not something I bring up during picnics. Herpes, also, is a subject better left for the talk shows. Why ruin an otherwise pleasant afternoon? That's my attitude. Best not to share your diseasedness. But this site isn't meant to be a picnic. Eating lobster with your teeth is a messy business.


I wrote a piece one morning a week or so ago that went unpublished. It recounted some memories of that time, which is why they're still bumping around in here I suppose. I took too much of a posture in it. I wondered openly what my two children might be like. They would both be in their early to mid 30s by now. That fact alone is inconceivable to me. Not painful, but empty, distant of necessity.

I have friends that would be younger than my own children now, and then again it is just as likely that I wouldn't. In fact, it is most definite. The What ifs... of speculation become less buoyant when nearly fifty years of experience are roped onto them during some misguided lifelong getaway attempt.

Also, few people encourage men to explore their feelings concerning the decision of a woman in this regard. It is, of course, her decision. So the man is expected to be silent about it from there on out, out of respect for her privacy. Such is the far reaching power of another's privacy. Women are Earth Goddesses, all the way up until the time they decide to excavate. It takes some of the shine off the myth of nurture, so it is best to maintain lifelong discretion concerning the facts. You don't often hear men speculate about what might have been, if only... etc. It does something odd to the ideals we tell ourselves, makes them less enforceable.

But I do wonder sometimes, even if I am incapable of holding that wonder with any seriousness, or for any period of time. Or, maybe I am doing it right by only pretending that I am. It's an uncomfortable thought. I bet I could even get misty eyed about it if the conditions were right.

Who knows. I could have had two daughters somewhere out there in the universe, both by different teen mothers. One like Tiffany Trump, only older. The other, a genetic hybrid between a young Ann Coulter and a current day Casey Anthony.

If only.

.

Winged Chariots

Again, nothing to report; the skies continue to fall. 

The boy and I were doing Ninjago Legos and playing with a new radio flash sync that I bought last night. It allows me to hand-hold a flash with my left hand while I shoot with my right. Pretty much exactly what you'd expect from such a setup: overuse and extreme-ish shots, all of a kind - anywhere from the trapped in headlights to ghostly time-traveling stuff, cropped to make some hopeful sense. It was fun. These represent the best few of the few I took. I want to try again in daylight, outside, and learn to feel the relationship out a bit more between what I'm doing and what I like. Hear me, dear. Oh Gods of Time.

The kid is animated in that early self conscious way, just the beginning of self-reflexiveness. He makes a drawing, he shows it to me, there are objects of his world placed in the manner that he would have them. We take pictures, I show him, he directs me to do another while he falls into the couch. I show him again, and on and on like that. Fun stuff. He has the best spirit about being. If he told me that he could fly I'd want to believe him.

.

Equus

For those who read here in a serial fashion: I did go for a bike ride yesterday, my first in about a week. I did my usual ride up into the hills on the other side of the valley. 

A few weeks back I was going to relay a story about another rider and myself riding up this same incline. It takes me about fifteen minutes to get to the base of it and then another fifteen minutes to get to the top. My guess is that I hit my peak heart rate at that point in the ride, though who knows. I don't track things that carefully and I broke my Apple watch about a month ago or more. 

I passed an older guy on my mountain bike just before the beginning of the hill and then he passed me on his road bike, but that didn't last very long. Because I do this ride regularly I have pretty good conditioning for it. I was going to gloat a bit about that a bit here, but forgot to. 

Then there was yesterday. 

It was the same scenario except it was a group of riders, about ten or twelve, that I passed just before the base (they were taking a rest break), but then they passed me shortly thereafter and the only time I saw them again was as they were going back down the hill, after having ridden the entire loop, as I was just summiting the miserable thing. We were in close physical approximation to my previous victory over the older guy, but this time there was no older guy. Or rather, I was. It was humbling, as most physical shame can be. 

I told myself that I had been sick, and that I had not been sleeping well, and that a mountain bike is a bit more challenging on that hill than are road bikes, and I tossed in a few other irrelevant details, but none of the usual magic of self-deception worked. 

I tried to enjoy the sunshine.

Later that same day, I arrived at the gym and a regular there told me, unprovoked, that I should slow down, that I'm only going to hurt myself if I keep trying to work out the way that I do. He pointed out that I am always either wearing an elbow brace or limping with some foot malady or crying out in pain, something that is always the result of a self-inflicted injury, and that it's because I'm trying to exercise as if I'm still in my 30s - weight sets that are too heavy for me now and doing too many "circuit" reps in such a short period of time. He explained that I would be much better off reducing the impact to my muscles, ligaments, and tendons. Just being there and doing the sets are what matters, he said, not competing with my own body to see how much torture it can take, and whether it will lose its will before I do.

As I stood there listening to him I told myself that I could beat him arm wrestling and that's probably why he was telling me all of this, but something still ate away at me and it didn't seem to be his weakness, nor was it exactly my superior strength. I got an emergency text which forced me to leave the gym before I could work out, but I made a mental note to stop talking to him, maybe file a complaint with Juan, the owner. But by the time I rode home I had made a reversal on that and decided to commit myself to a new diet instead. I have tried to manage my weight purely by burning calories and that doesn't quite seem to be working any more. So, now I will focus all of my energies on evil, evil food.

Perhaps it was wrong of me to demonize laziness when I could have been condemning diet instead. One must try to balance their sins in the same way they must attempt to keep stable their pleasures, otherwise people may think you gluttonous. Sting told me that. I'll need to re-learn how to lord my self-control over others weaker than me, and how to condescend to the dietary choices of those others by ordering food in more specific ways than them. I suspect this transition will take up to a week or more. It's tough to say, I'm a little bit out of practice and it might not be like riding a horse. It might be like eating one.

.

Help me Chaka Khan Jubilee, you're my only hope...

I'm not sure what went wrong. I wrote about diarrhea yesterday and my readership dwindled by double of half. I thought that maybe I could lure some new fringe patrons to the site. People may have been afraid of becoming inculcated to the particulars of my ailment. Fear is perhaps the correct response. 

I don't have much of use to report today. I am feeling a little bit better, so much so that I almost went for a bike ride after work yesterday. I'll try to guilt myself into it today. The sun is out and my blinds do not block all of its demands, which helps alleviate some daytime guilt and partially blocks the occasional nighttime shame. 

I was relaying a story yesterday of sleeping on the beach under the far south Florida stars when I was young, between two palm trees on only a beach towel, wearing what I could also swim in, and did. Such is the climate near the summer Caribbean, such is the free willingness of youth. 

I used to drive to the Florida Keys on a whim. I remember one trip in particular, I quit my little teen job flipping burgers at a place called G.D. Ritzy's. I went in to pick up my check about 30 minutes before I was supposed to be working. My barely-an-adult boss was hesitant to give the paper envelope to me, but I implored him that I had to cash it before the weekend. He said I didn't seem dressed for work and he was right. Who knows where he could be now with insight like that.  

He only saw me again when I came in to pick up my partial check the following pay period. He tried to deny that to me until I walked to the lobby and looked up the Florida Department of Labor from the phone book blue pages and called their 1-800 number from the pay phone. I was still on the phone with them when he walked out of the office to meet me with my paycheck. They had asked for his number and told me to hold the line. That was back when the government still limped along a bit. Must have been around '85 - '86 - the Reagan years. My economics trickled down the state on I-75.

My buddy and I jumped in his truck and drove straight there, returning only two days later. I drank a bottle of Southern Comfort on the drive home and then never touched the stuff again. The smell of it still reminds me of my young stomach turning and turning and convulsing. My hangover lasted into Wednesday of that next week. I slept in the bathtub on Tuesday. 

I say none of this with pride, only with the memory of the pain.

We stayed at the Blue Lagoon motel in Key West and we were lucky to get that room. It was the last available on the island, and perhaps the last on the entire string of islands, maybe in all of America. My buddy had an Alpine stereo system and I had a tape of The Cult's Love. We drove and we swam and we drank. I remember that much. 

His sister was the girl, or young woman, that I lost my virginity to a few years before that. She was crass, irreverent, and uncultured, but she also had moments of sweetness, or so I thought through the translucent fog of infatuation that passed for young love. What I couldn't possibly know or understand was that it was just an acute case of the puppy kind, how so many must feel. I dated her for a year or so before our age difference swept her away from me. She was a few years older and I was passionately naive, filled with what would become the basis of what other women - lovers and girlfriends and friends - have regarded as my problem. Where I amplified those parts of me that I believed made me more interesting, and dismissed those parts where perhaps caution flags were being raised. I learned to stop listening and act reasonably cool under all sorts of weird, self-inflicted pressures. That worked for about a decade and a half.

Some people pay thousands of dollars - month by month and year by year to find the lost minute by minutes - to go sit in someone's office and unravel those moments of their lives, to learn how they can better accept their past decisions and maybe finally do things better next time. To dust themselves off and try again. 

I write here almost every day, and get to see the words that become sentences, the sentences ganging up into paragraphs against me, backlit and glowing so near to my face, radiant in the reflection of my eyes.

I've just put Love on my iPod, must soon head up and into the hills, to feel my heart beat one more time anew, and tell myself that this time it really is. 

.

Orange Work Clock Marmalade

Today's post title is unrelated to today's post. I only liked the picture, and the boy enthusiastically told me that he tried marmalade for the first time while in Tahoe with his mother recently. I explained to him that is only what Americans eat when they wish to feel fancy, like the Brits, or young fans of Paddington Bear. He treats every sentence out of my mouth as the Facts Of God, so this sort of subject can be quite fun for me.

Nothing to tell here on this sunny Monday morning.

There was a three day weekend of illness - 72 hour virus of some sort. It seems to finally be leaving for good. I was able to go to the Pine Derby race this Saturday, but that's about it. The rest was spent in diarrheatic misery. My anus should have developed its own callouses by now, but no, it didn't. It went the opposite direction and now screams at every perceived or imagined slight of friction.

Let's not talk about the current end-state of my alimentary canal. The sun is out and the day seems pleasant enough. 

We can do better than this.

Maybe we can't. I just spent a full minute in contemplation and no other subject seemed as potentially interesting as that of my ring stinger. 

That can't be right. Let me try again.

Nope, apparently I am one of those poor souls that - once the anus has been mentioned in conversation - struggles to movement on.

.

Pine Derby Race Results

Our Pinewood Derby car came in 1st in three of its heats, 2nd in one, but then we got smoked in the finals by not winning a single heat, coming in at a modest 10th place overall out of about 40 cars. There were a few ringers in this thing. I intend on filing a complaint after I confer with my legal team. The buddy who helped us build our car in his garage workshop did similarly - the blue car with the flames on the hood, closest to the camera above. Ours is the red car below with the weights taped on the back in the hope of it looking like an transparent-engine-cover on a Lamborghini.

Next year, if Rhys is still interested in the Scouts, we'll know some strategies to help our design and assembly. This will allow us to get some early bets in while our odds are still good.

The cars were built by the other boy's father and myself. If anybody should have felt any joy, pride, or disappointment it should have been us, but we had some small distraught tears and pouting on the sidelines anyway. Fledgling emotions associated with that painful realization that life might not turn out for you the way that you had hoped. Sometimes I wish there was a sideline that I could go to and petition my parents with tears, for them to somehow make things better.

Oreo cookies were used to assuage the agony of defeat.

Ice cream also helps, then the ice cream becomes wine, the wine becomes water, the decades drift past you and you become content with just trying to be a good dad, but it takes up most of your time and you arrive at middle life realizing that you've spent your prime years not even thinking about how to make a faster downhill derby racer.

Life is a string of little victories and defeats, so I've been looking online at discount trophy retailers, seeing if I can get a cheap molded plastic monument with my son's name on it, to help ease the pain and confusion of being.

(The last paragraphs were written for a friend who once went to regionals for scout derby racing, but then in a later response about going to the opening night of a planetarium said that he's "pretty much over life" but loves to see wonder in his boy's eyes. Insert: Uranus joke.)

Who might have guessed that being such a tremendous dork would be so much fun. It was fun.

Below are a smattering of loose shots. Please forgive the terrible white balance in these. I tried to adjust but used only my eye. I should focus more on shooting conditions, but I don't. See paragraph above concerning the occasional serial nature of life defeats, and then the inevitable capitulation to the abyss.

.

The Color Pinkle

Do not read this post if you wish for your own happiness to be the result.

Yes, it's true, sickness is boring, though it was all I had to mention yesterday. There is little to tell, and what there is does not qualify as being worth telling. Only the worst people wish to listen with interest to the ailments of others, or advance their own onto others. I've known them. They are awful, boring people, incapable of passion or romantic love.

That made me laugh for reasons I should not admit to. Or rather, I should only remove the proper noun from its telling. 

Here you go:

I used to know a woman who would endlessly prattle on about her various headaches and body aches and other personal misfortunes. She would sometimes try to universalize these afflictions by waiting until someone around her made the mistake of mentioning one of theirs first before launching into her own history of mysterious pains, both acute and very dull. A Debbie Downer if ever there was. 

She was desperately seeking attention of a type that she could obtain neither naturally nor otherwise, so she would settle on whatever she could extract from others without verbal or physical consent. We were all forced to suffer her advances, both men and women. If she were a man, in this current climate, then I'm certain that she would be the object of collective scrutiny by now. Perhaps me being brave enough to come out here now and tell my story will help others to also be brave and tell theirs. She would trap us in places where it was difficult to escape then project a discussion of her maladies with the seeming intention of deriving pleasure from our discomfort. A real serial dinner deflatist. There were times where I felt as if I had been drugged and I would come to and she was just finishing up her awful litany of physical displeasure. 

You may think that I am kidding, and in one way I am, but trying to seek affection in unpleasant and even non-consensual ways is not a behavior that is exclusive to men, nor are they the sole cause of bad sex, as some women seem to be suggesting from the recent embracing of the Grace testimonial, which should be treated as a diversion rather then the thing that also really needs to be talked about now. Yes, I understand that men can be awful, but the attributes of being disingenuous or dishonest are not qualities that men exactly control the market on. 

That's right, I'm telling you that women really do lie, and they can also be pushy and demanding. When you encourage all women to believe they are victims then it should surprise no one that they will start to see and frame themselves exclusively as such, which will in turn affect how they understand their own predicament as well as their responsibilities to others. Self-defined victims are far less burdened with their own moral accountability. It's a form of feminism without courage. Like when a woman will auto-cry to "win" a potentially difficult conversation that in no way requires the use of tears. It is a fallback mechanism of feigned weakness to take conversational power over another person. The scripted arrival of temporary emotion when the only other option is to admit wrongness is not honesty and is not victimhood, it's bullshit, and every straight man I know has suffered plenty of it. Fuck all of that, I say. It's emotional bullying.

Oh no - Oops. I should stop. I just realized today is the Women's March, a political rally that I very much do support. Women should organize and vote with their interests in mind and they should seek to elect representatives who will protect their interests and advance equality for all. I don't have to agree with all of their individual demands to believe that democracy should be the solution to their problems, and the effective satisfying of their social and political claims. I would hope that they would include demands that are for the collective good of all, as embodied in the ideals of equality and justice. But that is my wish for any movement, it does not also need to be theirs.

I feel the same about Christians. If they want laws to reflect their values then they should vote, and they should accept the results when and if they lose. We should all feel some version of that. If our needs are out-voted by the needs of others then so be it. No laws should be put in place that are unjust, but we should all learn to accept that not everyone shares our values, and if you're going to self-identify as part of a group smaller than "citizen" then accept that you have already agreed to your own self-limiting definition and any political restrictions that doing so might engender.

Are people too dumb to know what the word engender means? Probably. I could use another word, but that one makes me happy because it seems to suggest something other than its meaning. 

There is only one group that I truly hate and would vote to subjugate to cruel work camps: the willfully stupid - those predisposed to intellectual laziness or denial. 

Well, I should be more careful, I could end up in America's financial Siberia with such admissions.

Ok, done with that portion for now. My favorite writer on the subjects of feminism and the difficulties of sexual politics is Laurie Penny (<<< her latest post linked there). I don't agree with everything she writes, of course, but I feel as if she approaches things with a very passionate honesty. Much more so than so many of her contemporaries. She is almost as much fun to read as she is to disagree with, though in large part I do agree with her, even when she is at her most revolutionary. She comes very close at times to being "anti-man," but she seems to be aware of framing her arguments in an anti-male behavior kind of way, which speaks an important kind of truth to me, one that I can hear and embrace for anybody. If a man reads her writing and comes away feeling as if her brand of Resistance is about you, or an attack on you, then maybe you're a complete shit-head and you deserve to be set upon with ideals that counter your assumptions. It is very tone-smart writing, yet is also deeply irreverent to the status quo, so I love her. She is smart, impassioned, and not wrong, which hits on two of the three attributes I look for most in any writer. 

I can suffer a writer being wrong - especially when that fault seems to only be the occasional too-careful selection of supporting facts - as long as they're smart and also impassioned by what they believe then I can overlook a lot. Being right has never been a requirement for me, but if you're reading here then you already know that quite well. I could easily spend the next ten years going over these posts and disagreeing with them, but why, when I could also spend the next ten years being wrong about other new and exciting things.

Well, if I can recover my sickness enough then today is also the day of the Pine Derby Race. 

There is nothing very fascinating about diarrhea, but let's talk about it for a while and see how we all feel. 

By the way, a quick little aside: nauseous means to cause the feeling of nausea. So, if you tell people you are nauseous then accept it when they may just nod and agree with you, like my dour acquaintance described above. Contemporary definitions have adjusted because people have misused the word so often and to such degree, but nauseated is the word you're likely looking for when you are experiencing rather than causing the sensation. 

Be careful when describing your maladies to me. My favorite type of sarcasm is usually only for one listener in a given group, which is why people sometimes struggle talking to me: they think I'm not making any sense, which is is of course also sometimes quite true.

After those pedantic semantics I will spare you my thoughts on liquid excrement. I'm certain there are some who will be disappointed, but what can one do, really? There is only so much time in each morning and I can not possibly satisfy the digestive curiosities of all. I must focus on my general readership. 

Now, what is the Pink-Bismol and how does it relate to today's March?

Well, I'll tell you: there is no relationship beyond the use of the color pink. 

- One is meant to suggest the pussy-power of femininity and that those thusly adorned with knitted battle gear would not have their pussies grabbed by celebrities - the wearing of which virtually guarantees this. It is a vague type of protective witchcraft. Its power emanating from its sympathetic magical connection to the thing it is meant to represent. This is of course a definition which derives from cultural anthropology, and not a slur. They wear the magic pussies on their head in an enveloping, declarative, and protective manner - it is a sign of unification for all those who have pussies, while sending a potentially conflicting message to those who only identify as women and wish to one day wear one on their heads, or possess one elsewhere. Its imitative apparel power proceeds from the sexual organ to which it corresponds. 

I derive what might be considered a perverse pleasure by wandering around these rallies complimenting women on their chapeaus. This works pretty well until I ask if I can touch, wear, or sniff them. Its power is not intended to be misused or shared in this way, even if I do get the occasional laugh, smile, or smirk. Those are the very rare exceptions. So few seem to have a sense of humor about wearing symbolic genitals on their heads, where the symbolism would become quite metaphorical if they would just lower theirs onto mine. Perhaps I'll stop by the March today ambivalently wearing a silk purse, in solipsistic solidarity. 

- The Pepto product uses pink only for brand recognition. 

I may walk around at the Pine Derby Race today guzzling from a nice fresh bottle of Pink-Pepto, to show my allegiance with the cause of reclaiming the word pussy, snatching it away from the lips of famous men everywhere. I suppose I could call it "Pussy-Juice," but contextually I understand how some might find that usage problematic. Perhaps the meaning and intent of the color pink can not be appropriated by a man merely hoping to treat his own diarrhea. 

You gentle readers, must always decide for yourselves. You would not want me suggesting how to think or feel. 

You can glimpse how I might get it all irretrievably wrong, every single time.

.

The afflicted area

I started to feel bad yesterday afternoon, at work, in SF. I took two more aspirin and hoped for the best. By the time I was at home it was a full blown something - chills, restlessness, sweats, nausea, and worse. I took some Alka Seltzer Cold and went to bed, but it didn't seem to have any effect. It didn't put me to sleep as I thought it might, like wonderful NyQuil nighttime. I just watched shows off of a tablet and then my phone when the first battery went dead. I fell asleep much later than I normally would have, which made no sense. I awoke two hours later, then again another two hours after that. Four hours a night has become the new normal for me. I still felt terrible but the effervescent tablets seemed to have done something. 

I read recently that we're supposed to get eight hours of sleep a night, and many people do, which seems impossible. How can it be that I regularly sleep only half of the norm? 

Why me?... as the most basic of the old existential questions goes. I did lie around long enough that I drifted off for part of another hour. So, there was something in the Seltzer stuff that must have helped. My sinuses were clear and dry when I woke up, though they were not a problem beforehand, I just noticed that they seemed drier than usual.

How fascinating this information must be to my doctor. For the layman reading here, it was three paragraphs snatched from your life without a single redeeming sentence to satisfy your interests. I should delete it all and start over. But where? The sickness comprises the details of my life. 

Well, there is more. I'm writing about this recent unexpected sickness, perhaps, to avoid writing about the other. The boy went to the doctor yesterday and we were given confirmation that he has a truly disgusting condition, one that we must deal with immediately as well as undergo treatment ourselves. It is common and nothing to worry about, but unsettling and repulsive. 

The entire drive home from the city yesterday Rachel and I (yes, were were cutely carpooling) were revolted by the news. We must take immediate action and sustain a change in hygienic regimen for six weeks. It is all very simple and can be dealt with, nothing to worry about, a common children's affliction, though one that I do not ever remember having as a child. 

Who knows, perhaps my mother kept such information hidden from me. Mothers do tend to shield children from certain things. I'll say this much: we suspect it has been giving the boy bad dreams, the night terrors, as that is one of its symptoms.

We are already back on the path to healthy living. 

Team Cusick! Etc.

Nature boy:

Nature:

.

Just be old?

(concave reflection)

Reading too much online reporting leaves me with few conclusions to draw. It seems that people do not like each other very much. If you question any of their feelings, actions, or motivations then you might very likely become the target of their misguided embitterment. Not even by them, but by somebody who has read what they have written and wishes to advance or enforce it. Everybody wants to be heard, but it seems that too many only wish to scream. 

I just don't believe the internet quite benefits people in the way they believe it does. I've returned to reading books more and I'm almost shocked at the disparities between the two experiences. I know that sounds obvious to many, but I've been focusing on how different writers will attempt to employ rhetoric to persuade, or its near complete absence while still making a very persuasive point.  

Then I look at my posts here, how some will resemble essay writing and others will more closely resemble what passes for online journalism, while only being an opinion piece. I try to write in a variety of styles, but I'm least happy when what appears here falls into that last category, but that's where so much of the fuel for writing seems to come from, at least here. I've written several unpublished pages recently that were just that: opinion pieces. There were some good passages, but mostly their presence made me feel a little queasy if I just sat on them for a while, similar to how reading too much of the online stuff makes me feel.

Ah well, I was happier when my interactions with certain types of people were more limited - when they only happened by chance encounter, occurred face to face, and were limited in scope by those circumstances. Now, it seems that everyone is having the conversations that only the more extreme participants were engaged in during the 80s and 90s. The conversation seems to find its richest resources when it taps into the need and ability to vastly overstate its purpose. I mean, I get it, things have changed, but it seems that many are convinced that they have only changed for the better. The term "tone-deaf" seems to have come to exclusively mean "old."  Because youthful zealots are the only ones privy to nuance. 

Places like Facebook seem to self-explanatorily prove such a notion, but then people will tell me that I am to blame for looking in the wrong place. But it seems to be a very large microcosm of what is happening everywhere. The comments section of almost any major publication, for example.

To discuss a moderate position with an extremist makes you their enemy. I'm not even usually a fan of moderate positions. I always try to imagine a position more extreme than the person I'm talking to, but being only an extension of their own position, to see how much weight the extremity can possibly bear before we're forced to admit to at least some absurdity. I'm often curious in that way. 

This is why I have no problem telling people that I'm transgender, even though it is only true inasmuch as it is true for anybody blessed with the imaginative capacity. Do not misunderstand me, I'm not suggesting that being transgender is only of the imagination, but that is the only way it is possible for me to feel or understand, purely through my willful imagining. Anybody can do it, you just close your eyes and wonder what something might be like, which will result in any number of feelings that you're not used to, some of which may make you uncomfortable, others otherwise. Those are specific to the person, and almost always in flux.

Being transgender has been very easy for me and has resulted in no negative social encounters, yet. Stating that might anger some people, which makes me wish to state it all the more often. I've always believed that there must be something important embedded in that ire, but now I'm not so sure. It just seems bland to me, flat vexation for all. 

People do not wish to share the claims which seem to provide them with the identities they are making the claims for, which strikes me as odd. I can choose to be ambivalent about anything, at will, but ambivalence is not what people wish to hear concerning your understanding of them.  People have suggested that my exercise in transgender feelings is even dangerous. Yet how is anybody expected to have empathy for another's circumstances without conducting some sort of similar exercise within themselves? I wonder. Are they fooling themselves, or do they genuinely believe that only a certain category of person gets to experience and express thoughts and feelings about a given matter. I can never tell and there is so much disagreement and anger concerning anyone's authenticity and motives.

People seem to wish to express rage towards straight white males most of all, and perhaps that explains it: nobody wants to give them an escape hatch. They have them cornered, and now they wish to unleash the full brunt of their fury. That was the subject of a lengthy piece I wrote yesterday morning but then didn't publish. Instead, I went with an incoherent piece of garbage later in the day that I have since removed.

For me to have developed understanding and empathy towards the gay experience I listened to a number of gay friends recount what their lives were like, what wishes they had for their relationships with their family, what corollary or unrelated wishes they had for their romantic relationships, how they wished to live their lives, and what regrets they had, if any. The last category was often the most veiled and protected, understandably. In time, I became more and more comfortable with hearing about the private circumstances of their lives and I found that this exercise greatly increased my capacity to love and feel for them, which also allowed me to develop a shared sense of humor with them, something that seems to be lacking in this brave new world's understanding of one another. It is no longer allowed to find anything funny if you are not suffering as greatly as another within a given context. People seem to have lost the ability to detect when they are being laughed with or laughed at. I blame the internet for this. It is a horrible place to make new friends, and none of my old friends use it in the way that I seem to, or try to.

This understanding has resulted in more than one friend believing, and even trying to convince me, of my own homosexuality, just by being sensitive to their life, and pains, and joys. It reveals to me how incapable people are of understanding one another. We only seem to attribute to others values that we ourselves are capable of possessing. 

In a similar way, I have female friends, and many of my male friends will try to get me to admit that my only real intention in being their friend is to have sex with them. The only conclusion that I have been able to draw from this is that they are incapable of being friends with women without the desire to have sex being the primary motivation for forming the friendship. Now, I do only befriend attractive women, but that's because they seem more charming and clever to me. Again, this is a sensual observation and not necessarily a sexual one. 

You must remember that I did not grow up in what could be considered a southern liberal stronghold. I grew up in Florida in the 70s and 80s, where this type of understanding must be learned and developed, and where other attitudes, like casual racism, had to be daily resisted. Complex understanding of others did not appear fully formed in the hearts and minds of adolescents in that locale and time period, etc. It is practiced until it becomes natural. My experiences in nightclubbing helped greatly. There was a period in which, as a group, we all seemed to come to a fresh collective understanding and acceptance of one another, fueled in part by the use of what used to be called a designer drug - Ecstasy. The most appropriately named drug ever made, most of all when created and ingested correctly. There are many variants of it now, not all leaning with equal effect towards benevolence. 

At almost 50 years of age, it seems that the development of understanding for others must only come in the form of reverence to their circumstance and of them as individual people, no matter how much pushiness and bullshit arrives with it. I feel similarly about so much feminism, or rather collections of feminists. They are, or too often can be, bullies. We are reminded to stand up to bullies, for the sake of the weak, but they pretend to also be the sole persons in possession of any supply of weakness, even as they are attacking with startling vitriol and malice. It is the advantageous claim of victimhood when used as a social cudgel. 

It makes no sense to me, that they can not see they have become the very thing they claim to hate. They resemble men in their casual assumptions and in their demonstrations of the use of the power of condemnation. Nobody wishes to be called a bigot or a chauvinist or a sexist, but it has become almost comically scripted when interacting with any number of online factions. The first thing they notice about you - maleness, whiteness, or those two qualities combined - generates an automatic dismissal of you as a person and anything you might have to say.

I know, I know... these are white, first world problems. I just fail to see how they don't see what they are doing. There must be a complete vacuum of imagination or the ability to self-register the marked similarities in tone, content, and delivery of the thing they have defined as that which they most wish to topple. 

It was Kafka that I recently quoted here: Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy. 

The same is true with too many liberals who wish to discuss and advance transgender rights. Only they or the people they believe themselves to be defending are ever qualified to speak, and then it must only be from the agreed upon cue cards. Easy fix: be a member of the aggrieved group and think and speak as an individual. Few things will reward you with hatred as quickly and definitively, even when you find examples of an accepted transgender saying the exact same thing. 

I have, quite literally, copied and pasted sentences from transgender testimony into online conversations and been met only with severe hostility, and was then provided with any number of reasons as to why I do not get to speak that way. It makes no sense, and yet I see it everywhere. It is almost all that I see. 

So, what does a thinking person do? Give up? Walk away from the conversation and accept the fate of my own tone-deafness?

Just be old? 

A hermit or a troll?

Would it matter for there to be one less person to hate?

(mostly plane)

.

Why Everyone Should Own and Use a Gun

One of the things that I used to love about the internet, perhaps ten years ago or more now, was its irreverence. People seem so very unhappy about it all now. Empowerment seems to be making people angry. Perhaps something other than empowerment is resulting. Who knows. I enjoyed the thing much more when it was mostly a global repository for bad manners, even worse grammar and spelling, and the many joys of endless insouciance. People seem to have embraced the notion that what happens there somehow deeply matters. I mean, it does for them in their living room, but not in the way they seem to believe. I've never seen so much bad opinion flourish. The internet is where nonsense goes to find its center and then excel. Accusations, rather than ideas, have taken flight. Luckily there are plenty of volunteer cops out there now, to talk the stunt thinkers down from the ledge and corral them back into the safety of the fold. 

I'm on the side of the nonsensical from here on out. I don't want to win arguments, I don't even want to have them, I only want to disrupt them. I want to make sure that people feel stupid for discussing politics, some flimsy redefining of justice, or to set social mores. Absurdity must be cherished if it is to be preserved. Nobody should be immune from confusion. The angry most of all. They need it as respite from enmity.

People are becoming afraid to undermine narratives. They seem to be buying into the false notion that only the most recent narrative is the one to be revered, or perhaps the next. Endless progress without evaluation. 

I don't mean trolling. 

Inappropriate incongruities need not be provocative or inciting, only derailing. Okay, it is trolling a bit, I guess, but without the intention of encouraging quarrels. Just some healthy sowing of confusion, planting the seeds of risibility. 

I only ever wanted to be a smart-assed skateboarder that flaunts parental instruction for the pleasure of their friends, but still has good table manners when none of them are watching. 

Everybody has their dream, I guess. 

Mine is to buy a skateboard. 

My son seems to have it all figured out. He has a semi-directional fart gun. Whenever I start to lose myself a bit in parenting he'll sneak up on me and blast me with a little pre-recorded bit of unexpected brilliance. We were driving around Sonoma yesterday with Mom, his walkie-talkie set on scan, finding other kids that were out there communicating in the best way kids around his age can (secretly, they presume), luring them into brief conversation, then blasting them with some audible genius. 

It was the most fun I've had in weeks. We giggled ourselves to sleep last night with it. 

He exercises both his first and second amendment rights at once, without even knowing what they are. 

Texted audio clips from this device are, by far, the best thing in my life for the last 24 hours.

I want my life to be more like his. 

.

Pine Derby Downhill Racer

Nothing to report. I have written a handful of posts in the last few days and again have decided not to post them. 

Yesterday, Rhys and I went over to his buddy's house and made our pine derby racers. There is a race next weekend and we were preparing for it. I had not thought that the Scouts would be as much fun as it is, but it is, truly.

People with hobbies seem happier. I know this through photography. It is fun, of course, but there is more than that. It helps me frame my life a bit, to see it as a spectator as well as a participant. To experiment with the telling of my life.

Writing does this also, of course, though that leans more towards observation, even as I am relaying actual events that involve me. At those moments most of all. It is therapeutic, in a sense. Anyone is free to observe or psychoanalyze at will and draw their own conclusions, and yet I rarely agree with them.

So be it.

I'll try to keep our sessions short, interesting, and at in-network fees.

Forgive me those moments when I dawdle.

"In the end, writing is like a prison, an island from which you will never be released but which is a kind of paradise: the solitude, the thoughts, the incredible joy of putting into words the essence of what you for the moment understand and with your whole heart want to believe." - James Salter

.