Oh, I know a dirty word

Well, CS was in SF. He brought a companion with him who had promised to be his lady chaperone for his first Pride celebration. I haven't heard from him since. He can be like that. I tried to tell him that most of the bathhouses are no more. Some people you just can't reach.

Maybe I'll hear from him when he comes up for air. 

We had a mostly uneventful weekend. Went to a local spring-fed pool here - Mortons - brought the dogs, lounged on the grass snacking, listening to the old "Social Living" album by Burning Spear at a respectful volume. That, and Black Uhuru's "Red" and The Abyssinians "Satta Massagana" and Glen Brown's "Termination Dub."

I had made myself a THC concoction before we left. I spent the day with mirrored shades on, smiling at everybody, walking into the pool at the shallow end, nodding, terrified of what was unfolding in my head, terrified of speaking. Or rather, terrified that I would not be able to stop talking once I did, which I spent the day being on the verge of. I misjudged my spoonful of the magical medicinal elixir. THC ceases being a soft drug at a certain level. I can't tell you what that level is for you, but I now know what it looks like when overfilling a 1/2 tbsp measuring spoon from our kitchen drawer, for me. 

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"Such substance makes"

I've had the strangest day. Fragments of weirdness connected to one another and stretching back until morning. I was lying here trying to go to sleep and something made me get up and look into my own eyes in the mirror. No idea why, just an impulse. Nocturnal concern. I went to the gym with Rachel this morning and then for a bike ride, something I haven't done in a while. I raced another rider up the hill that I ride almost daily and won. Maybe it rattled something loose. 

I am still out of new pictures. Have been shooting film and doing nothing else. Of what purpose I  could not say.

I follow a Sylvia Plath bot: "Such substance makes"

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Invocations

Another night, late. Fewer and fewer pictures of my own to post. I should go to bed, it is not far away.

The hills on the west side of the valley, towards the ocean, have turned golden. The fog sits on top of and behind them, moving along the soft summit ridge as living curses being whispered into coffee and cream.

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Coordinating Conjunctions

I don't have any new pics. That is a part of what has kept me from writing. And mortal despair.

I love starting sentences with And. 

Like dating a witch. Or her sister. 

But without the drama.

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Add To Cart

First choose an image, then write around it, or to it. Or, let it set the tone. I tried that, but had to skip past about a hundred pictures of the boy before I could find another image that I haven't already used. Such is the breadth of my laziness.

Well, the picture captures how I feel, in part. 

I've stopped buying myself things when I feel bored. It has only been about two weeks but that's long enough for me to notice a difference, or rather the lack of difference. Buying things doesn't make me any happier. I guess I needed to feel that for a few weeks.

Perhaps I have not deprived myself long enough. It's not as if I'm not online looking at ways to waste my money. I am, I am. I'm just not getting the satisfaction of clicking the Buy button. My money still disappears, somewhere, but I endure less guilt this way. 

I told you, the picture captures part of it.




I have nothing left for this day.

Take this, REO:

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Lucky Accidents

(CS)

Perhaps this image was a charmed failure, as CS says, but I like it more than just about any other image I've seen in a few months. If I could create images like this, in-camera, then it is all that you would see from me for a while. I have grown too comfortable with the family snapshot portraits, and I have made a few lucky mistakes, but I am unorganized and rarely learn from my mistakes, or remember how to repeat them. My life as a series of charmed accidents. I tried some street photography the other day but only by walking out to the street in front of our house and trying to find anything of interest. There was none, or very little, to my eye. For that, I miss living in a city. I want a road trip, just to take pictures. 

I awoke to songs and praise and love and kisses and gifts. Rachel and Rhys had worked together to create a nice little Father's Day surprise for me. There was a new toolbox waiting on the kitchen counter for me with handmade cards and funny store bought ones. I was asked a while back and it was the most functional thing I could think of that I needed - a new toolbox. They went into secret action, and found me a very nice one. It looks like it will last another 25 years, as my last one did. Rhys is eager to transfer everything out of the old broken one today and into the new one with all the clean compartments for screws and nails and whatnots. What could possibly be more wholesome and sweet, than is his simple and pure desire to just be my son and to participate in my life. 

I've spent so much of my life wondering why people aren't more resilient. They seem to be traumatized by everything. Perhaps they are. Life is tough and psyches are fragile, trauma gives people something private to hold and share about themselves, or to keep bundled up like a secret, still-born baby. Perhaps they wish to reveal the thing in parts or whole, to help explain the chaos that leaps around inside of them at times. 

People make mistakes, and then there are others that are always vindictive and cruel, as if that behavior forms a form of truth about existence that should be shared, to help toughen up those who might otherwise fall prey to those actions elsewhere. Kids and dogs don't have very many options for escape from such situations. I have seen it. I was relatively lucky. My life was free from what would be now considered abuse for the most part, though few believe that and there are some quizzical components to my past, to be sure. But I never felt abused, just misunderstood and mildly neglected. I'm fucked up mostly because I wanted to be. I allowed it, then encouraged it, and then couldn't stop it. So, here I am. 

But not this morning, not with a new toolbox - a fresh place to sort through the broken chaos, the runaway pieces of hardware, fasteners made of metal, sharp little objects capable of piercing the skin,  or affixing boards of wood, the unfinished or never started projects of my life, the chaos involved in a desire for an ability to fix things. Those things that become collected because few people discard what might one-day become useful again. 

Now, I have a new place to repeat the endless partialness of being. If I had ever learned to complete things then I might know how to end this post. Somewhere there must be a fortified plastic box of bright colors designed to hold all of the loose question marks, exclamation points, and of course the ever-needed period, used to pin down and hold an otherwise unwieldy and runaway stream of words in search of their meaning, adhering itself to what came before or arrives next while also magically separating itself from it. Bent nails in uneven timber, hobbled together with the intention of bearing weight. 

Measure twice, once cut.

It all seems so simple - I hug my son often and tell him that I love him and believe in him, and hope that he remembers that. I feel comfortable growing old in front of him, more than anyone else. It's likely because I can not possibly keep up with him. Trying to would prove the fact. 

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... then of course I would

I hate Apple's Photos app. Truly. It is an embarrassment for them and they don't seem to notice or care. I just spent about 20 minutes wrestling with it over a simple file management and editing issue. The best conclusion that I could come to after multiple efforts and some online research, and years spent troubleshooting technical problems, is that Apple is a company that deserves to suffer and die a shameful, expensive, public death. I hope that one day happens after my own, of course.

So, here is a 35mm pic from maybe two years ago. It is one of the boy's school buddies. They are all getting older around me at an noticeable rate. Why does every mention of the passing of time cause me to think of my own death, now? It didn't used to, and I'm still young, or so people say. Are others this morbid, though only privately? Or, perhaps other people healthy in their hearts and minds.

Answer me!

Tough call on the relative health of others, glad I don't have to be the one to make it, at least not this morning. It is the morning of Father's Eve.

As I age I value most people less, though I still see glimmers of beauty and hope and mystery in many, but few my own age. 

Age is among the great discriminatory categories. I see it everywhere, now. How it is allowed in almost all regards, short of cruelty or flagrant discrimination. But so much is subtle, particularly when it comes to how groups tend marginalize types, without ever needing to agree on it openly. It just happens, you start out as one thing and you gradually become another, without realizing how the gradual becomes the inevitable. Until. 

As you age you matter less. Of course this is not true for everybody, some accumulate useful resources. They somewhere keep pirate treasure maps in locked trunks. If you are a parent then you might matter more to your children, or so the hope goes. But this simple recognition doesn't prevent me from observing that the other thing is still happening, also, everywhere now and forever. If I was younger then of course I would fight up against it with the sudden fury of what was once me.  

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The mighty diamond of depression

Back in that other life I went to a getaway wedding at a getaway destination - Mykonos. In an attempt to appear normal, and to sustain a sense of normalcy for a week spent mostly without sleep, I stopped taking some medications that were ostensibly meant to treat manic-depression. Mine, they said. 

Now, whether you are afflicted with manic-depression, or only lightly touched with it, this has only marginal bearing on what the cessation of those types of medications - lithium bicarbonate and Lamictal - has on the psyche and well-being of the patient.

I was being the patient. A stumbling buddha - the sound of one hand laughing. 

I remember there being this immense clarity of just how full of shit everybody was, how false. I could be reached by neither love nor reason. It was overwhelming, to see my friends seemingly as they truly were. Similar to having recognitions concerning yourself and others while on very strong acid, and after. It burns a nearly intractable impression - even about those that you have known so long - on the fragile and perhaps weakened mind. Perhaps damaged. Don't be weak if you're also going to be vulnerable. 

The actuality of such de-acclimatizing from mood stabilizing cocktails works in a very stark and somehow unknown reverse order of operations. 

I learned and suffered a little taste of this with a friend of mine recently.

The details are irrelevant. But. I was given a glimpse into the odiousness in which I operated, and what that must have been like from the perspective of the other person or people around me. The one(s) hopefully operating at nominal levels of regular sleep, food, and meds. 

Nothing can be done. Or, nothing that I will ever do. I have few regrets, or a few, none other than how unlucky time and love can be when arriving and departing at such erratic and regular intervals. 

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A feeling of duty

(Carl De Keyzer)

I'm on my new computer but I have no new pictures on this technological terror, and I need one. 

Do I? Fuck it, take that pic ^^^. It is the only pic by this photographer that I have ever seen. I linked to his site out of a strong feeling of duty. 

Ha - duty. 

I can never seem to recover very well from childishness here. I think I know why that is but do not wish to fix it, and only part of the fix is with me, or cause. There are readers' expectations to which one should also offer their duty, the effects. 

Ok scatologists, I admit defeces. 

Damn it. I wanted to write something good today, something that made me feel good.

I wanted to expel the troublemaker.  

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The skin of the fruit

(Modigliani)

Turning in this sleep

One hand finds this other hand

Teeth breach the skin of the fruit

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Sailing Along The Southern Coasts

Went for a bike ride yesterday, my first in weeks. There were problems. Some time was needed off, but a bottle of wine or more every day started to make me feel more lethargic than enthusiastic. I enjoyed it much. Then its time had both arrived and departed and departed again. 

There is some building hope for another ride today. That is sometimes how exercise works. You get a little rush when you return to it, suddenly you have a challenging personal secret - how you feel when you try. Of course when returning to riding after an extended break of any kind I immediately start dreaming of buying myself an extravagant reward for having done so. Yesterday it was of taking today off from work and going to a few bikes shops, ending the day with a brand new gravel bike. It brought me much pleasure yesterday to imagine such a series of events happening today. But they did not happen, not yet. That's my nature, as an imaginative guy. My imaginings often involve the many things I would buy and enjoy if my life were little else but leisure. If freed from the shackles of employment. My wants seem modest but often involve the purchasing of things that are several thousand dollars - cameras, lenses, bikes. Everything else that I want I just buy without much hesitation. 

I rode my bike by an all wooden sailboat yesterday that had a For Sale sign on it - $3500. I wondered if that included the trailer and I told myself that it must. I came home and told Rachel and Rhys about it and for a short time we thought of what it would be like to have a small sail boat, what learning to sail together would be like, or what we believed it might be like. We all loved the idea of summer sailing, visiting lakes within a day's drive that we probably don't even know about yet. That is what we all talked of as we drove through the lights and towards town.

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The Beach

Family pics - they are what I'll do more of now. They are fine with me. They are mostly all I've done. I take lots of pictures, and tend to post images that matter more to me than perhaps the viewer. So be it. 

I only took one of these. 

And I still find it so hard To say what I need to say

But I'm quite sure that you'll tell me Just how I should feel today

I see a ship in the harbor I can and shall obey

 

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Beth-machista

I don't know what pushed CS over the edge but he has stopped talking to me, ever since he threatened to do so. Who knows - old people are unpredictable, except when they are angry. 

Mom also gets mad when I talk about how much hippie-pussy the boy is going to one day get (see picture above). Maybe CS suffers from a similarly arranged moral apoplexy. He's always aligning me with some other values dressed up as bohemienne. He will make a great housewife also, someday.

I can never remember if it's the Philistines defeating the Israelites or if the other team won and the good guys are still allowed to love art modestly. You tell me.  

The Old Testament is fading for me, like so much Faulkner that I never bothered reading, any more than about rather than the thing itself. 

It is all heard by this idiot, fluff of sound and furry, 

signifying bread crumbs. 

Out, out, Greek salad, 

this way to crouton crumbles.

all of our cucumbers have olived feta.

Horiatiki, Horiatiki, Horiatiki

Caper berries in this petty place, 

from day to day.

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Still Dead and Companied

A second night at Dead and Company. It's as if the music never stopped. I don't have any pictures from the second night, but they would have looked just like the pictures from yesterday. The show was good, again, though I'm not sure how much I need to go to multiple shows of the same band over the course of a weekend any more. This is the second time in about two or three years. Last time it was the Grateful Dead, also, with Trey Anastasio. The Fare Thee Well tour.

Well, once my buddy wakes up from his late night journey to Jupiter then we can start getting back on the road, maybe drive through SF and get some dim sum. That always makes things better. 

I bought the boy his first tie-dye t-shirt. He will be happy that I brought home something from the show. 

CS says that he can't know me any more, in yesterday's comments section. Who knows what combination of things said yesterday could have been his final undoing, that I went to a Dead show, openly admitted to eating acid or I found John Mayer's behavior to be sleazy. You know, it is possible to get very young girls high on drugs and still be a creep. 

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Dead and Company

(Shoreline Amphitheater)

Here is the setlist for last night's show, for people who love such things, of which I am an occasional one who does. We're returning tonight for another show. We still have some acid left, I think. That stuff is best eaten in the afternoon. Anything later in the evening becomes too insisting of its effects.  

John Mayer is a douchebag, but a very good guitar player. It is an odd combination for him to be playing with these old hippies, but I suppose that he and Bob Weir share the love of sex with young girls, so they have more than just the tenuous musical connection that I perceive for them. 

They are in a band together, so my opinions matter very little here. That I am at a weekend's worth of shows to watch them further dismantles the flat argument of my opinion. It must bother me that he was born in 1977, or something. It's okay for me to be an ageist, now, I hope. 

Mayer is douchey. I met him one night when I worked at Apple. He had a fourteen year old girl with him, high on drugs, at 4 in the morning. He was gloating a bit, that he gets to do such things, in a very sleazy way. Perhaps it was some moral sense that I'd like to pretend I don't have, but the fact of his creepiness was unavoidable. I was not alone in this feeling. Even by my liberal standards, it seemed wrong. 

She could have been a young looking 17, I suppose. I mean, she was very high. Cute, etc. 

Seemed for some wrongy. 

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