Married to the Widow

It's a euphemism for being executed by way of the guillotine - married to the widow. I finished the Sante book. It was, again, brilliant. Two history books in a row, both about cities, by the same author, though... It's time for a different type of book. The next, I believe, might be a memoir by a Nobel laureate. It's time for me to get my mind out of the Parisian gutters. Sante never glamorizes the underside of life or the dispossessed, but clearly that is where his interests and fascinations are. Oh, wait, the Nobel memoir is a French author. 

I've been telling Raquel lately that she looks like an expensive French whore. She seems to love this. She understands that I sometimes immerse myself in the book I'm reading. It is my custom and habit. 

I have deep been down inside a rabbit hole of classic rock today - Eric Clapton, The Allman Brothers - hours of both of them, mostly. Clapton can be a genuine bore, both as a musician and singer. He does have some stellar moments on the guitar, though. The Brothers South were great before they were widely recognized as such, and then again well after. Their album Idlewild South is pretty great, as is Brothers and Sisters. If you can stomach southern blues rock, which I can.

I've been putting together a small home studio again. Over the course of the pandemic I pulled gear out of the closets and plugged it all in to find out it was all mostly destroyed from the heat of twenty years of storage. I found a repair guy in Oakland and started getting some of the classic samplers fixed. In doing so I also started stacking my computer with some of the new computer-based stuff. I kept pulling all the hardware out of the closets and setting it up on the kitchen table. Sometime this last week I finally decided that I wanted more access to my gear. So, I've found a way to set everything up in the house. I hope. 

This might mean that I might start working towards completing some music again, not just endless noodling. I still have friends that own record labels. Though I think that if I were to have an ambition it would be working towards a collection of material that might function as an album, rather than singles. That's one of the many things I misjudged when I was known for making and playing music. I should have worked towards making an album. An album is (hopefully) a less ephemeral effort. 

Well, I'll believe it when I see it. Albums are so 1970s.

I'm still cool. That will be my new mantra: I'm still cool.

I'm still cool. 

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Fait Divers

The Sante book on Paris is coming to its conclusion. Luckily, CS has made some other recommendation that I'm certain will get me through the next couple weeks. One pleasant thing about aging is the time that I make for reading. It is something. 

I am trying to return to things that make me happy. I'm not sure if that's a sign of yet another chapter in my ongoing middle-years catastrophe or not. I'd like to believe that I never grew up. I should have pursued a carer in academia, or at all.  

I plugged in a series of guitar pedals and small outbound processors today to play my guitar through. It took me about an hour to get it all to sound right. I won't bore you with too many details, but I had a compressor, wah-wah, octave pedal, and then a noise gate with another effects loop running off of that (to a Microcosm), so that I could play clean-ish filtered or with this very atmospheric sweeping looping going on behind me, all gated by the pedal that feeds the amp. After getting it to sound a way that I was happy with - the compressor alone took me about 15-20 minutes to set just satisfactorily - I played spacey lonely arpeggios, harmonics, and muted minor riffs for about an hour. The rest of the world disappeared. 

I felt like a kid again. I used to have a studio in my bedroom closet at my parents house. I cleared everything out of there and set up a small mixer, effects loop, and a two track Teac reel-to-reel recorder that allowed me to do two tracks of independent recording, the left and the right individually, which I then mixed to cassette while adding effects to simulate a stereo two-track recording. I would record ambient tracks on cassette and mix those in lightly on top of each mono take, so that when I slightly panned each side it would create an impression of far more depth than was actually there.

One of the favorite things of mine that I ever did was a remake of an old Bauhaus track that had my vocals double-tracked with an acoustic and electric guitar playing different parts, with the electric in a sort of industrial wash when it wasn't hitting the bass notes. I was singing the lead on one track and had the faraway reverb vox on the other. I wish I had that cassette now. A girlfriend - Beth - threw it out the car window one time because it had another song on it I had recorded that she hated. She must have assumed every song I learned was somehow about her. 

The thing to which I can not return, no matter how many pieces of cool gear I buy, is a summer of hanging out, playing the guitar, learning new songs, having friends for only a couple years, or maybe only months - becoming myself. You can re-invent but you can hardly re-become. It's all a solitary pursuit once the crowd dissipates. 

That's my miscellaneous fact. 

 

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Nattering

It's Sunday, and why the fuck not? I know how much dog pictures are loved by the readers of this site. I know exactly how much. I'm a sucker for the beginning and end of the film roll shots. The Nikon FM3A let's you shoot the entire roll, which is another thing I love about that camera. Best manual film camera I've ever shot with. Just ask Barkley the wonder pup. Well, maybe don't ask him - he's been deaf for a couple years. He turned 16 years old this week. 

Today is an all-day lacrosse tournament. I'll have to decide if I want to stay for the entire thing. I'll bring a pseudo-sports camera and lens (Nikon D810 w/ 70-200mm f2.8), so I'll have a way to keep myself busy if I get bored. Oh, it's going to rain all day, so I'll have the added excitement of protecting the camera and lens. Maybe I should just sit in the car and read a book. 

Jesus, if I would have just "said" all of that "out loud" in my head I would have bored myself to sleep.

Rachel just came in and asked if I'm writing on my site again. I had thought she was already reading here because there was an odd shift in temperature and tone one day after I wrote of my disappointments. Once again I get to arrive at the conclusion that she really doesn't listen to me, or read what I write, or etc.

Sometimes I worry that one day soon I might look back at my life and think that I worked too hard, even though I've barely ever tried. 

I've bought enough studio gear that I'll be putting together a home studio soon. I am more excited than anybody else about this, of course. I am occasionally good at producing, believe it or not... I'm not only a chatty, absent-minded memoirist. I work best when I'm with making music other people. Some things are best done in solitude, but for me producing music isn't one of them. The costs of building the studio keep escalating, though, bit by bit. 

I worry that one day soon I might look back at my life and think that I've squandered too much, even though I've barely ever tried. 

Addendum: The lacrosse tournament was during one of the strangest days of weather I've ever seen, and I lived in Florida for 30 years. The first half was a deluge with dark, low-hanging clouds across the entire upper visible meridian. No light, but rather darkness visible. The entire fields were under an inch of water.  The games continued. The weather app said that there would be sunshine in one hour. A coach and I both agreed there was no chance of this. It looked like the rain would continue without cessation for months. As soon as the coach and I had agreed Rhys and I started walking to the car, to sit in the heat. We got the heat going right away, the boy and I saw a crack of light along the horizon. The sky was completely blue without a visible cloud within thirty minutes. I'd never seen the edge of a storm pushed so thoroughly out of view. It was a miracle from Mother Mary that I wanted to share here with you. 

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... heed to temptation

Oh yeah. I forgot to keep writing here. I'm still finishing up The Other Paris, an official CS recommendation. Sante can say so much in so few words, suggesting rather than insisting. Presenting the facts and then making what seems like an effortless observation. It's no wonder Sante translated Fénéon, a gift from CS.  Brevity is wit. I am taking my time reading now. For a couple weeks I went through a frenzy, but it has passed. I'm reading technical manuals now, also, which has slowed me down almost to a stop. Though, not just reading, I am applying what I've learned. Each page a repeated chore of sorts, but the skill learned becomes fun. Using machines to create music or rhythms requires practice and patience. 

Somehow - perhaps through some crisis of age - I have started building a new home studio. I have no idea how much money I've spent, but so far I have no regrets. Life is about getting your money's worth. I have a pretty good mixture of analog and digital gear - old and new, automated and manual. Enough to keep me having fun. A bit of knowledge has come back to me through the fog, memories of how to do things a certain way and why to do them that way. CS has asked me about home recording and I have offered some small bits of advice. What he is trying to do is very difficult to do well, because it captures and announces every inconsistency and error. I have learned to record in such a way that errors can be mitigated or corrected, but it leaves the result sometimes feeling stale. 

Well, I've been practicing playing the guitar, also. Though mostly scales - the minor pentatonic - up and down the neck in every key, over and over again and in different positions, when what I really need to practice is rhythm. Anybody can play the guitar, fewer can play along well with a song. It is a different kind of practice. The sound of a metronome starts to drive me crazy. I'm no Jerry Garcia. This also requires practice and patience. Where does time go. 

It goes in there. You put it in the hole, dummy!

Way down in the hole.

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The lover of imperfect heroes

"Monogamy is over, or ending..." say the magazines. Relationships don't survive, say the experts, but apparently monogamy doesn't seem to help very much. Those relationships fail at a similar rate. Living outside of monogamy doesn't help, either, but it does beg the question... if everything will fail anyway, why not live a life beyond imagination?

Well, that is just an observation/reaction to a headline sent to me by the lover of imperfect heroes this morning. I don't mean to suggest that he was Peter Beard's lover. I'm just saying that monogamy might not have saved Beard or anybody else. 

One of the more difficult things to make work after the volatility of intense passion is gone is love. It might take years before you realize how much the volatility carried the weight of the romance at times. Take Raquel and I, for example. We have broken up in a significant way at least four times. I don't mean just an angry "go home" argument when we were together but living apart. I mean the type of breakup where one of us moves out from where we were living together and we start seeing other people. We would be millionaires by now if our love had been more adequately anchored. 

When we went to Burning Man we were to meet a friend who was bringing his son that is close to Rhys's age. When we got there it was difficult to tell what wasn't quite right, but I could sense something. I have learned not to spend too much time trying to figure things out at an event like that. I'm sure there is some stated principle around "radical self-confusion" or something similar. 

By the next day my buddy was wanting to explain things. His wife had announced herself as polyamorous to him. She was camping elsewhere. He was left to try and understand what he had been told. To add to this, her situation had been further explained to him by one of her lovers and that, if he really loves her, he should accept her as she truly is and praise her inner beauty. One of her other lovers might have also encouraged him to likewise accept her true self. He was surrounded and in a safe space they implored him to understand. 

It was too much for him. He packed up and went home, leaving us to explore the playa as a three-headed reveler. He tried to shake it off, but Burning Man is not always the best place to ask or answer the more serious questions of life. 

That said, I left my wedding band in the temple, lodged between two slats of wood, where it burned to liquid and is gone forever. Though, I had made the decision to do that before we arrived. Melodramatic, you think? Not at all. This is the first time I've mentioned it to anybody, and will probably delete this paragraph before I click the publish button. It was a quiet decision. While you may not answer the toughest questions of your life in a place like that, it can be a useful place to exercise letting things go. 

The non-religious can lean into ritual as needed. Symbols can go up in flames, too, says the great golden Buddha in the sky.  

I have accepted that mine and Rachel's relationship is doomed and over twice out there in the desert now, and have been forced to accept the same in far worse environments. I couldn't have been wrong every time. 

Nothing is over when there is a child. Not even death can end those vast empty tensions. 

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Chipped Indignities

By the pricking of my thumbs

Women can be scary.  Any creature that has the capacity to be self-convincing can also be unnerving. Their expectations of you and their sense of themselves, specifically their self-worth, come to be somehow tangled and intertwined in their minds. If they pursued these feelings further they would become stalkers where the danger they represent would be more apparent.  

I have a small handful of women who I have blocked from every communication device or service I use and they still find a way to annoy me from afar. They have seemingly accumulated in numbers over the years. I'm an unwilling collector. 

One of them is sick with a serious disease. This saddens me, though I feel as if I have no way to tell her, or to communicate anything to her at all. It will be misinterpreted, as apparently all of my previous attempts with her have been. My past interactions with her seem to have assembled within her over the years into being something that only she believes or can see. It must be real for her. Whenever she reaches out it is for the very specific purpose of trying to guilt me into giving her money. I have ghosted her, as the kids say. The tone of her demands is startling. It assumes something almost fascinating, incredible in its basic assumptions. She mentions my son in unnerving ways, as if his life is something that involves her. 

Another I have blocked for many years now. As far back as at least 2007 she would text me several hundred times within a single night. It was so maddening that one night when I worked the overnight shift at Apple I gave my phone to a romantic prospect, so that she could see how truly unhinged this previous friend had become. The prospect encouraged me to file a police report and get a restraining order. There was never a romance, only some memorable and warm flirtation. She sent me nudes one night several years later. She was sweet and pretty. 

It is no exaggeration when I write that this week I was deleting all of the voice-mail messages in my phone - something I very rarely do; I usually just wait until I get a message that I have run out of space -  and I saw a very recent one from my stalker in a folder that I never bother looking: Blocked Messages. She was explaining that she had "done something" to her phone and now all of her emails seemed to be coming from me. Meaning, she is emailing people and the name associated with the email that people receive from her is mine. Or, I think that was what she was describing. I didn't listen to the end of the message. She was asking me to help her fix it. Deleted. 

I have not proactively communicated with this person in probably 5+ years. The last time I had it was a shared email thread in which I was asking one of her close friends to please get her some help, but that she must leave me alone. 

There is this seemingly inherent sense of personal debt embedded within their communications. That I owe them something to which I have never agreed. I've done something wrong by not responding to them correctly, by not caving to their erroneous romantic faith. 

I don't consider myself a magnet for this behavior at all. If I have done anything to elicit this from a person then I have no idea what that could have possibly been. I will admit that I spent much time in what can most easily be described as an underground drug culture, which may go some distance in explaining a portion of its disturbing nature. Though I swear with complete honesty that I have done nothing to knowingly provoke anything. The average young woman probably manages more frightful interactions on a monthly basis than what I have described happening across several years. In no way am I suggesting that I am to be pitied in any of this, only that I find some of it troubling. 

I was once told that I was "scaring" a woman to whom I was attracted. I was mortified, I deserved it. I left a series of long semi-coherent messages on her voice mail. I was compelled to explain things to her once and for all, you see. I've never been able to speak with her again quite as comfortably as I did that night. If I even tried it might seem creepy. My natural and unhindered internal discourse leaves people feeling unsettled. I enjoy awkward and ambiguous interactions, especially intense ones. I understand now that voice mails are not the best place for this, legally.   

One of the worst things that a woman can possibly say is that she doesn't feel safe around a particular man. It is damning in a way that few other things are, or can be. 

I wish that I could say that I had never had sex with either of the two women I've briefly described here, but the first one I did. It was several decades ago. It did not work. I mean that I could not become aroused for her. It turned out that I was not attracted to her. I had sex with her because I had been drinking and my inhibitions were lowered. I guess. I threw up on the side of her car that night while she was driving. I remember that part and the morning, wanting to escape, to go home, to be alone, to hide from myself and all others. 

There are a couple more women. I lack the energy to describe their behavior tonight. Let's see if the two I have described will permit me to live much longer after writing this. If I had a greater will to survive I would delete everything. 

Some people will drag you around like a prosthetic romance if you permit them. You can hear the arhythmic sound of the hardened acrylic and silicone scraping across old wooden barroom floors, so many thousands of miles distant. Long dead jukeboxes lurking in cold, unlit corners. 

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I'm so lonely I read

The house has been quiet all day while I worked. Now, it has come to life with the cadence of domesticity. The percussive routine of drawers and cabinets opened and closed, the water from the sink running, stopping, the doors to other rooms, and outside, the coffee grinder, glasses from the cabinets, plates, all sounds either a conclusion or preparation, all unfolding as a familiar nightly rhythm. 

I took the pic above at the Ritz-Carlton at Northstar. Raquel and I were walking through to meet some friends for dinner and it was just at "the moment." I stopped Rachel and pointed out that they were prepared to make the pronouncement and presumably to consummate the union with a kiss. We stopped only for a handful of seconds, but it was indeed the moment. Sure enough... I now pronounce you man and wife, you may kiss the bride. One day they will construct a kitchen rhythm of their own. 

Note how "meta" the above image is, a frame within the frame blocking the bride's thigh. I get less nervous at weddings when I picture the bride naked, especially during any uninvited speech I might be making.

Just picture the bride naked, picture her naked....

CS and I agreed on a subject for today's post while I was out walking the dog - I had video-called him - but now it escapes me. He is old so he sees an uninvited video call as an invasion on his way of living, which is of course why I do it. He said so. 

I pre-ordered a present for him for his birthday, a book of images. 

Here is an excerpt to close out tonight's diary entry:

Photographer Anders Petersen was hanging out at a dive bar on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg in 1968 when someone grabbed his camera from the table where he was sitting and started taking pictures. Petersen used the opportunity to photograph the culprit—and the rest of the bar’s motley crew of patrons. The resulting project is one of the most revered photobooks of all time, a celebration of a gritty city at the tail end of the 1960s, and the cornerstone of Petersen’s storied career. The images have become classics of their genre; Tom Waits used one for the cover of his legendary album Rain Dogs. Their candidness and authenticity remain as eloquent today as when they were first published in 1978. This sumptuously produced reissue features a new foreword by Waits, and is certain to find a new audience, who will appreciate the stunning analog photography and its elegiac collective portrait of the fringes of society.

 

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The Sea and the Old Man

Every subject, in part, concerns aging. 

I should have more to say when I come to write here. I tried writing in the morning but that did not seem to improve it. I am out of practice and have lost my focus. Maybe I've just fucked around too much. I've lost the ability to be serious in the right way. I read good writers; it leaves me troubled. 

Should I tell you about my day?

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Perhaps that is all I have today - a fragment of observation and a fragment of a memory. I should tell the exciting early days of my life in Orlando. The 90s. Before I was corrupted by NYC. I might not believe it myself any more. Or, I might not be able to tell the stories as they deserves to be told. I would lie here or there, or minimize, pretend it was not as it truly was. Yet, even with that, some of it would still seem unbelievable. I have often had more than I needed or deserved, yet somehow have run empty of everything. 

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Our Day of Saint Valentine, comrades

It's true, we often go on bourgeoisie vacations. Two of them in the last three weeks, another coming up in mid-March. The picture above was taken at the hotel we were at - the Ritz-Carlton at Northstar, near Truckee, CA. I blame the bourgeoise. I had long ago forgotten the difference between the words bourgeoisie and bourgeoise, though now when checking... all my love of Marxism came flurrying back to me at sunset. We take these vacations in service of the people.

Ok, enough stupid political talk. We came back from Tahoe last night. I promptly fell asleep for about an hour, woke up just in time to eat a little dinner, now I am headed back to work for the people.

I have nothing prepared for Valentine's Day. My fear is that this absence of preparation will haunt me. Who knows what Rachel has prepared. She is indefatigable in matters of formal celebration. Every year the holidays are decorated, celebrated, and then boxed up for the following year. She is a machine made from mirth. It has become a family tradition, this tireless and unending seasonal work.  I probably align more with Ebenezer Scrooge, though let's not forget who is dancing in the end, after facing the three knowing ghosts. 

It never occurred to me that this might be a reference to the three wise men who, according to the Christian myth, visit Jesus upon his birth. 

Well, maybe not. CS just pointed out that there are four ghosts. There was his dead business partner, also.

I have begun shopping for all of the things that the boy and I will need when we depart on our two week camping trip in June - air mattress pumps, fire extinguishers, maybe a new tent. We might even rent one of those leisure pimp vans, a Mercedes, though I will need to check into prices. We are bourgeoisie, but maybe not quite that much, as to be part of the ruling class. I am happy camping in tents as long as the air mattress works and holds air throughout the night. I enjoy waking up with the sounds of nature all around me - wolves, bears, snakes, the cries and screams of the lost and dispossessed, etc.

Wait, did I even mention that trip here yet? Perhaps I haven't. Well, without offering up too much boredom for one morning, the list of parks and places we hope to visit departing and returning, in order, from Sonoma are these:

- Sequoia and Kings Canyon

- Mojave Desert (just driving through)

- Las Vegas (visiting friends)

- Grand Canyon 

- Monument Valley (just driving through)

- Arches

- Canyonlands 

- Bryce Canyon 

- Zion 

- Las Vegas (if we still have friends)

- Yosemite Valley 

- Home

Yes, an ambitious two-week camping trip. Perhaps a luxury vehicle is what is needed here. I guess it just depends on what sound systems they have installed. 

 

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Out-of-Office Reply

We are departing for Tahoe tonight, after lacrosse practice. Yes, my son plays indigenous Canadian sports. What of it?  I will be away from my computer until Tuesday. 

I awoke at 2am last night and watched Salesman by Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zerwin. Direct Cinema is the genre. It is a film worth watching, though almost in the same way that alcoholism can be a fun affliction. This is the second time I've seen it. There was a forgotten viewing in film school, approximately 1996-'97. 

I could continue with my observations about the film, but of what use will another opinion possibly be. 

Don't worry about me, I fell back asleep around 5am and slept until 7, and I haven't yet run out of opinions. I feel perfectly refreshed today, sort of. CS turned 70, which has me wanting a second daily nap. He likes to mock me but he has turned his focus to recording himself playing music, where my specialized knowledge might prove to be useful. 

That is what (some) men do: develop niche interests and then wait and hope like hanging spiders. 

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Conspiracies of flight

I need a new hobby, and space to practice it in. The old hobbies and habits are wearing me down. Not drugs, though somehow I still do a form of those almost every day. People do a lot of things in life that they never thought they would. Getting older doesn't automatically stop you from being weird, or seeking a cessation from pain. You just end up being less public about it. Partially because nobody cares, except maybe your employer. Perhaps even those days are now lost. People become private, yet all is exposed, everyone an advertisement. Solitude is for when people stop caring about you. In another time and place I might have been lost to an exotic drug. Instead, this. 

Everything is destined to disappear. Nothing remains. 

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bound to be

I should stop eating pot edibles before I update here. It is not resulting in much that is coherent. I detest most potheads, for reasons I shouldn't have to explain. It's the way they talk and think that bothers me most, as if the values of life can and should be mutually agreed upon by dopey, knowing smiles. It's not just that. It's as if the issues have been settled long in advance and the vacant smile is designed to communicate and gently share that fact. Potheads, on some level, believe deeply in the likelihood of UFOs. Ask them, they'll explain it. 

Ok, I should not write about my dislike of most potheads, either. I did not intend to come in here and cause turmoil. I'm a very kind of soul.

This weekend is a possible ski/snowboarding trip. Everything is set to go, except I have been feeling lately like I might want more time to myself. It is not only that I want or need more time to myself. There is more. Relationship strains. 

Something happened last year. I grew older. I stopped drinking for six months and had the horrible realization that life doesn't necessarily get any better by the absence of alcohol. I mean, it does get better in some ways, but there are a number of things that you realize are not improved at all. I was forced to acknowledge that some problems are not even touched by alcohol. They are parallel issues more than serial. It was so disappointing I went back to drinking. 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sorry for the post in two parts - I became distracted. Another thing I dislike about potheads. 

I'm upstairs with the dog locked in a bedroom while a homeowner's association meeting goes on downstairs. Something is coming to order. I'm sure of it. 

I have just chosen the dates for a summer camping trip (mostly camping) that the boy and I will take in mid June to early July - King's Canyon (sites open sometime in May), through the Mojave Desert (just passing through), Vegas (Father's Day), Grand Canyon (Southern rim, site booked), Monument Valley (probably just driving through), Arches (no campsites available), Canyonlands ("first come; first served"), Bryce Canyon (site booked), Zion (working on it...), Vegas again (maybe staying with friends), Yosemite (more sites open on Feb 15th), and then home to Sonoma. It feels as if I have a tentative plan.

R came in while I was looking at the dates and asked mildly snidely if I was going to "make any reservations, or just wing it..." The idea of meandering aimlessly terrifies her. If she could fax me an itinerary in her sleep right now she would. We are very different people. Sometimes I don't see that until I do something the way that I prefer.  

I tried and failed to use the recreation.gov site. It was dispiriting to see the NPS site be so poorly maintained, to the point of inoperability. The site kept crashing, freezing, losing my auth, I kept having to delete the cookie the site planted because it couldn't seem to interact with it well or for very long, nearly perpetual 403s (which wasn't even the correct HTTP response, because I wasn't accessing a page that would have a permissions' set). 

The once great National Park Service, humbled by incompetent 3rd party tech contractors. 

I was only able to book two of the campsites. The rest either are not available yet or the site inexplicably stated that they would release open sites on Feb. 6th 2024 (exactly one year from tonight), or they were already completely booked all the way through the summer. 

I think CS has a friend that knows how best to do Yosemite without a camping reservation. Holy Shit... CS turns 100 yrs old in a couple days. I don't know Roman numerals but I think he's just C after that. 

I need to remind myself to say something nice to the fledgling centenarian. 

Well, that is my update for the day. You really shouldn't snoop through somebody's personal diary entries like this. You're bound to be either disarmed or disappointed.

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Le Cochon

Lucy Sante is destroying city after city. Girl Godzilla crushing my ideas of Tokyo. After I finished Low Life, CS sent me a text recommending that I also read her similarly told urban history: The Other Paris. Like a fool I ordered the book and it was here the following morning. Why can't Sante destroy Amazon next? 

When Raquel and I went to Paris I had a rather traditional list of places that I wanted to see, mostly due to our time restrictions. I wanted some time to wander through the streets that I had read about in 19th and 20th century literature, but assumed that might just happen naturally, that the Paris of my mind would be there for the taking. That (other) Paris never emerged. Everywhere we went was contemporary, aesthetically, in temperament and in tone. With just enough design flair, history, and the occasional building of antiquity to negate my fantasy ideas of the place, leaving me somewhat confused and disappointed. It wasn't quite what I was expecting, nor did I find much of what I was looking for. 

I had read The Paris Dreambook, but we hadn't exactly established an itinerary around it. I thought that somehow the 19th century version of Paris was still there, that it just maybe wasn't in the same neighborhood as the Pompidou. I dreamed that there would be wooden basement doors along the sidewalk that smelled of leprosy, madness, and which would suggest a dark entrance to the famous catacombs. 

I was wrong. Everything was. 

There are, of course, vestiges of the ancient Paris left, but not very many, says Sante. I believe her. I've felt it myself, without knowing exactly what it was I was feeling. Other than the city not being built around a grid it felt terribly contemporary to me - too clean. Too much of what I believed I loved had been left behind or replaced. I expected to see the worn down stone corners of time everywhere, an almost breathable sense of decay. Instead it felt as if I was in a very well kept park built to honor the memory of Paris. It is famously the city of love and/or lights, but is also the city of death, suffering, and six million underground skulls. The birthplace and spiritual center of urban ennui. 

In some small way it is like Sante's NYC. Paris has been rebuilt many times, a cascading palimpsest*. Keeping at times only the thinnest evidence of its own identity intact. Sometimes for the touristic purposes, often because the buildings that make up the area are far too valuable as they are, and other times because it is not yet worth a developer's money to completely obliterate the past. It is this last area that Sante focuses her attention and ire (at least in the first two chapters). 

Soon cities will be a place that you can only meet a certain type of person: one who can make enough money to live there. This cultural flattening might appeal to those that can afford to live in cities, and do, but what many of them have probably come to believe are the very reasons that they would ever wish to live in a city are now all but gone. Something vital about what makes a city desirable has already been lost. 

It is an interesting talent for an historical writer - to simultaneously destroy and rebuild within someone something that they already love, and to readjust the focus of my fascination beyond the years my own life.

Well, that's my book report on the first two chapters of the book I'm currently reading. I didn't take notes, nor do I ever underline books any more when I am reading them, making references and quotations possible. Something vital and desirable about doing so has already been lost. 

* - Her word, not mine. I aspire to one day be a more honest thief. 

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The Pink

Ah, the foot of a woman. Some festishize such things, or their shoes. I almost just looked up a few articles to understand why that is but then realized how susceptible I might be to developing one of my own. I have a friend that was quite well known in New York for getting high on ecstasy and sort of "losing himself" while massaging various women's feet. He would become unreachable in the presence of his fantastical objects. Some women would let him, others would scold, others acquired a fascination of their own concerning the behavior and those involved. 

Some mysteries are better left unsolved. 

These are Raquel's feet. I have no strong feelings about them one way or another, though at this time I have no need to develop any. I'm certainly not against them. They require no chivalry from me, not being in any danger.  My feelings grow stronger as my eyes climb upward. Perhaps that is why men develop fetishes for feet: they are the on-ramp to the legs, which leads to the freeway.  

Feeling is a tactile sense, yet feelings are not. 

Italians are a proud people, yet italics are not. 

I should leave the house today and go take pictures of something fucking stupid. Anything. I am using up any images I took in my yearlong+ hiatus from this site very quickly, and I have lived a mostly artless 2022. I have been buying audio gear - guitar pedals, cables, soft synths, an audio interface, mixing board, drum kit, drum machine, etc - for about two years now, but not really using them very much. Mostly I just play the acoustic guitar. Producing music is fun, but it also resembles work. You must think and make decisions, and strive to accomplish something. The final result can be artful, though the process can be laborious. Listen to the album in this article, it strikes a good balance between playing and production. 

I find it mildly interesting that the internet has developed in such a way that most all platforms allow you to upload images and videos but none that I know of allow you to upload a basic audio file, and subsequently none support basic playback, of course. There is standardized code (html: <audio>) and a wide variety of supported playback formats. As it is now you must first make a video out of the audio, even if the video presents no visual information. 

It reveals something, I think, about either the platform, the consumer, or both. Even audio streaming sites are somewhat visually decorated, as if not doing so would result in a loss of interest, or worse: reveal the platform's underlying psychological mechanisms and intention.

Well, that is a rabbit hole for another day. How many holes do rabbits have? I mean the females. And why is the rabbit foot a common totem for luck? 

My god, those little beasts make crazy cadence. 

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Ma Cabernet

If I could adjust to writing first thing in the morning, save a little more money from each paycheck, learn to clip my toenails more regularly, wipe well, flush better, etc.

Something important is different in the evening, perhaps several things. I'm not sure if it is a loss of lucidity or an increase of a desire to be less lucid, but that's a part of it. Each day is long, filled with thoughts. I can't remember where I left off writing here a year ago and I can't bring myself to go back and look. My reporting on the world had become unbearable and I don't know how I'll adjust to the forced recognition that it has only grown worse. I pine for a younger life, when I could write about music happily. Well, that is an adverbial stretch - youth sings a few of the miseries. 

I felt content a few years ago, riding my bike, listening to music, sunsets and country roads, rolling vineyards, having eaten an edible. It was pleasant, and I was content. Getting hit by a car will fuck you up but not all at once. Unpleasant waves of foresight, memory, and the naturally detestable caution that attends aging.

Fuck, am I becoming my other?

Oddly, I've always known the cure: stop feeling old. There is always somebody who is willing to tell you you're not. Old, I mean, or that you shouldn't feel that way. Try talking to somebody that you love romantically about the difference between feeling and being. It's a great way to disagree with each other about fundamental things, possibly forever. Until the end of feeling and being.  

I promise to continue bravely blogging here if I lose any battle with cancer, even a fist fight, a hot dog eating contest, etc. Any competitive scuffle, I'm here.

Just like my other.

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A Low Life

When I lived in New York, wandering without purpose in the daytime, drinking in pubs that were open before lunch, before breakfast, I would often go into bookstores and buy more books than I had the intention or time to read. I thought of myself as a New Yorker and had to have the many books that proved it. Well, some of them, anyway. Luc Sante's Low Life was one of these. She is now Lucy Sante, but the copy that I have was purchased with her birth name on the cover. Her deadname. I saw this book on front tables of bookstores everywhere in the city. It was highly recommended and regarded, yet for some reason I never read it while I lived there. It is probably for the best. I would have given manic sermons to my friends on its importance, and the necessity for everyone to likewise devour it in hysterical late night moments of their own, dark binges of literacy. 

I was unstable when I lived in New York. It's why I lived there. 

I finished reading it tonight in Sonoma, CA and I am still spinning with it, not knowing what to say, wanting to write something intelligent, knowing that I can not match what I've just read. The afterword of the book describes people like myself who move there to become a part of the city, to merge their story with it in some misguided hope to steal or share some of its sheen and glow, to tumble in its squalor. It is where people go who feel too big for where they're from, too much meant for more. Without ever saying any of this in the text of the book, without accusing me directly, I could feel it come over me as I read. People who lived there a hundred years before me, lives lost in time, whose heroes had names that were also unknown and unrecognized by me, came and did the same, with wildly different results. Death, being the unanimous uniter. 

P.T. Barnum. Etc.

It was at times a challenge to even believe what I was reading. It all felt nearly impossible. McGurk's Suicide Hall, as one example. More famously: the Draft Riots. 

There were a series of police departments who fought for supremacy and for territory. The Municipal becoming the Metropolitan, then the Metropolitan going to war with the as yet unnamed one that was sanctioned by the city, and who wore uniforms. The winners were what became the NYPD. The losers, the Metropolitan Police, who refused to concede loss or victory but were determined to stand their ground, were surrounded by the National Guard, who threatened to burn the building down with hundreds of them in it. They surrendered instead of committing a mass group suicide. It is unclear who gave the Metropolitan Police their authority. Much like the fire stations of that time, they were closer to gangs than actual social or municipal services. They operated within territories and brutalized any challengers or dissenters. Once the NYPD was formed their mandate became much more clear: beat the poor and guard the wealthy, but keep them apart at all times. Though gentlemen could of course visit any of the 3500 registered whorehouses as they chose. There were at least as many that were unregistered. 

The same was true for bars. The Bowery was a focal point to which the author kept returning. Its history is stranger and filled with more pathos, violence, and entertainment than can hardly now be believed. How could any city evade its own history as well as New York, I wondered. I kept revisiting the familiar streets that I knew from living there, populated with desperation and misery a century before I walked them. The whorehouses, many of them, became opium dens, the drug trade has nearly been a constant. 

Even the Christians who lived there seemed feverishly deranged with impulses and ideals. The movements to reform vacillating with debauched periods where vice reigned and crushed its opponents. It is a tale so nearly unbelievable that only the specificity of fact can provide the needed credence. 

 

Well, it is late and I am crazed with all that I never knew. 

It's time to succumb.

"Night is forgotten and endlessly repeated; it is glorious and it sits next door to death." - Sante

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Oh no!

I anthropomorphize everything. I'll admit it (there have been accusations...). I see human terror, error, wonder, and fear, in objects. But the people who tell me I do this will sometimes close their eyes and play with themselves with a vibrating toy shaped like a penis or a curved finger. Who knows what powers of imagination and anthropomorphizing can accomplish in that state. They are off somewhere building castles in Spain with imaginary lovers, moaning together as they move towards their fantasy union. You can detect these vague truths in the eyes once they are done, the demure looks of coy satisfaction and playful shame, when their mind has not yet released its temporary grip on pleasure. 

So, I am left with questions. 

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Memento Mori

Well, what do intelligent people write about? There is only death and bad news; the trifles of here, there, and then. Everything else is pudding. I could catalog the poor reports of my day, though I am tired and it is late. Being alone at night slows the world to stop. Everywhere there is misery. Why not.

A distraction, a void. 

Perhaps CS is right: sobriety is a boring horror of rationale and emptiness, a void of distraction. There is no vacationing - time passes slowly if at all. No way to balance the future and past in the present. Time seems personal, it's not you. Nothing left to rectify; everybody moved or is moving; bad news lasts; the rents rise.  

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