"... with love in her eyes and flowers in her hair"

You would think with my wife being temporarily gone that I would have even more time, not less. But the opposite is true. I am about to rush out the door to go to work, pressed for time, rushing from one place to another, half crazed with all that is soon impending.

Rachel keeps me from a complete loss of civility.  I see that now.  I walk around the apartment and I notice that things are different when she is not here.  It is not that things are out of order, yet.  But it is just that it takes no time at all before it is entirely my things that have occupied the little space we share.  Everything is less dainty, though it is the exact same set of stuff that is always here.

The dog's bowl is somehow more male now than it was just a few days ago.  Not messy, as such, but visibly the product of maleness.  Even the dog itself seems a little bit tougher, ready for action, surly.  It is nothing that I've consciously done, it just changed, almost imperceptibly.  He seems to have a five-o'clock shadow.

As I write this, looking at him he seems to be saying, what? WHAT?


I ran into somebody last night that reads these postings and they said that it is interesting to get a glimpse into what it is like to be aging in New York.  When I woke up this morning it occurred to me that I make it seem much more fun than it actually is.  I hope that I do.

Ok, I must run, the coffee has been made, it is finished, the shower complete, the clothes are where I left them on the couch, soon I will be rushing down the steps to get out, feeling the earth rushing up to meet my feet.


"Someone told me there's a girl out there...."

Ichiban

Nothing to tell yet today.  My friend and I are taking his boy to Central Park and lunch at A Salt and Battery, New York's English style chippy.  I will get the low-calorie deep-fried fish and chips.....

Today is Muhammad's birthday, though I don't know how they determine such a thing, not knowing what year he was born in, either 570 or 571.  I'm not even sure if it is the same day each year, or if it moves around as some other holidays do, based on its relationship to another day.

I do know that beer is delicious, when served so nice and so cold.  I do know that ichiban means the shiznit.....

Sprung

Spring is here, though it is not yet clear if it is here to stay.  It could just be a mirage of budding warmth ahead.  It is perhaps just thermal radiation, drifting across.  They say it should last through the weekend.

My wife went to sunny California this weekend where it is expected to rain for three days. She will get back and say that it is now summer here in the city and we were robbed out of spring once again.  There are a few meteorological certainties that reoccur yearly for her.

One is that March 17th is always the coldest day of the year.  This is her birthday. At a dinner party years ago she was forced to put on a scarf when leaving for home and that has turned into an imaginary yearly blizzard that occurs only on this day, quite out of the blue, as it were.  She refuses to leave the apartment on this date without alerting the National Park Service as to our intended course and hike duration.

It is inexplicable. The local weathermen are dizzy with it.

The other climate certainty that she clings to is that spring and autumn only last a single weekend, plainly. Sometimes they pass in a single day, sometimes at night. This phenomenon occurs most often when it is raining. Sometimes the seasonal change occurs midweek, in which we might miss it altogether, or not even notice its passing, so busied are we with occupational concerns.  There exists for her only extreme fluctuations between the dehumanizing heat of summer and the deadly arctic winters in which nighttime lasts no less than 6 months out of the year.

She will be enforcing these weather predictions, advice, and knowledge for the rest of her life. I can tell.  Years from now I can hear her talking on the phone to someone unsuspecting, traveling to New York for a weekend, and she will be warning them to pack the heaviest clothes they have, especially if they're going to be there in mid-March.  It might be necessary to pack an extra suitcase for snow boots, wheel chains, and perhaps a snow plow, a team of sled dogs of course.  She will be arguing with the television that whatever footage they show of spring in the city must be "stock footage" and she's quite certain that a blizzard is attacking the city with unrelenting ferocious forces frozen....

No, I kid.  But she is quite crackers as it pertains to this yearly day-specific weather prediction....

She is my favorite crazed.

........


I am listening to Roxy Music this morning and eating ice cream.  The wife is gone, to the other side of the country. Do not worry, I am doing occasional pushups to offset the negative effects of the Ben & Jerry's Dublin Mudslide ice-cream....  It was St. Patrick's Day yesterday...

There is no needed, and no known, antidote to Roxy Music.

I have blossomed back up above 200 pounds.  Here is a picture of me watching my calories:

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St. Patrick's Day

Today is St. Patrick's day, unsurprisingly.  I will get to listen to people at work trot out their vaguely racist jokes about the drunk Irish without pause or reflection.  It is all true, of course, the stereotypes of roaming drunken Americans of partial (or less) Irish descent.  Heritage from any other northern-ish European country will also suffice, as long as they know someone who was once Catholic along the way.  I know, I am one of them, though I will not be roaming or drinking today.  It is also my wife's birthday, and I must work. So we will go to dinner after work, hopefully.  It will save me from a day of roaming, of offering up my wit and wisdom loudly across many crowded bars, of staggering in open daylight from doorway to doorway, of giving myself over to drink and song, my mouth watering for a fresh pint of lager once more.....

These pictures have nothing to do with St. Patrick, that I know of. They were taken at Notre Dame when my wife and I were there last year. I was looking through old pictures last night, reminiscing, a dangerous pastime I know, though more-so today than last night.  

Oh, alcohol and memory are working part-time to condemn me.

Raise high the gates of restriction.....

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Photo-Booth Sequence in Black and White

free and easily

Memory is working on me lately, rebuilding.  It keeps coming back to renovate, to restore.  I never know when to trust it, or when to demolish.  Memory has too often been my favorite liar.

The rickety scaffolding never seems to be enough. It somehow becomes part of the structure, absurd without it, impossible. The job is never complete.

Contractors, you see. Codes. Payouts and bribes.

Memory collects decades, year by year, drifting upwards towards pinnacles unbuilt; spires refurbished, halos rehabilitated, halos overhauled.

Perhaps one day we'll all fly skyscraping.


I have a recurring dream in which I am back in college. I suddenly realize that there is a very difficult class, usually math or chemistry, that I haven't been going to in weeks, maybe months, even when I'm naked.  I am afraid to ask the teacher to drop me from the class, to withdraw. The deadline has passed.  There is no way to catch up, the books have not been opened in months. There is no way out.  I awake in tired terror.  Some mornings I am in a panic of sleepy shame.  Dazed by my self.

I never learned enough, never studied as much as I could have.  Most things came to me far too easily, so I did them with only half-hearted effort, showing most how much better I could do than most, but without really trying.  But it was not "most" that I wanted to impress.  I wanted to impress the other ones, but I never truly tried. I was afraid of trying, of competing. I was afraid of not being the best, ever.  So, I lounged in snobbish ease. I took comfort in being accepted by those whose acceptance I hardly sought.  I used approval as a drug, eschewing it from the outside, demanding it from those within.

At least in this I wasn't alone, ever.


I still operate under this principle, and far too often. I barely try, but do better than the average, sometimes with amazing ease, sometimes with abysmal failure. But my average is more easily attained than those around me.  I'm an annoying reminder that I'll probably never have to try as hard as others.  So, I'm not usually detested by those who try harder than me, and only occasionally a threat to those actually performing better.

How did I fuck up that math class even in my sleep?
Or was it chemistry?

I forget.


A friend who has devoted his life to making and performing music once asked me why I didn't try harder.  I told him that I wasn't sure, but that maybe I wanted to get the most out of it for the least effort put in. Some would say I achieved grandly in that regard.

He always seemed at ease, and hardly ever trying. But he told me once that he has tried very hard, and worked very hard.  I was shocked and somehow disappointed.

I had wanted to believe that all of life could be one big easily received perpetual gift.  There for the taking, the asking.

Free was the word I always dreamt of:  Free....

Funny, that word now.

The scaffolding needed to prop it up.

The scaffolds from which it hangs, along with ease.

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Victory

Third day in a row, nothing to say.  I wonder how long this can go on...

I wrote a semi-coherent drunk screed about Jon Bon Jovi last night but stopped myself before posting it, for reasons that might make themselves clearer in time.  Perhaps not.


I am rushed to get out the door now, appointments and trains to catch, then work until late tonight.  It is all just work and then more work and then again work, without any end in sight.

I used to console myself with the idea that it kept me out of jail.  Now I wonder.

I must run.

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love etah

Again today I have nothing to say...

I am just killing time here because apparently I prefer it dead and behind me.

Fictional universe

I have nothing much to say today.  I went to a place for lunch with several friends. We bought $200 worth of slow-cooked pork and it has knocked me out for the day.  I tried to nap but the little piggy spirits chased me from slumber.


I had a dream last night. It might have been about Star Wars. The good guys did not win.

Don't let these pictures fool you.

I still think Star Wars was one of the best children's films ever made.


The conspiracy theorist at work clarified that he does not believe all conspiracy theories, he simply feels that the stated facts in the 9/11 case don't all add up, and it seems plausible that the government used these events, whether they aided in them or not, to advance the cause of middle-eastern aggression.

He actually didn't state any of it that coherently, but you get the idea.

This much is obvious though, isn't it?  There's no conspiracy there. There is just the old-fashioned diabolical misuse of power.


I wish that Princess Leia had been in the dream.  I could tell all the guys at work about my new love for all things fictional and galactic....

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Marriage...

Marriage has nearly destroyed my reputation.

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The joys of doubt

I got into a conversation tonight at work with a fellow who enjoys believing in conspiracy theories.  If you question him at all about said theories he starts to rant about how I, just want to believe everything the government tells me, and shortly after that devolves into saying that everybody else are, just sheep. Though I believe he might mean lemmings. But I'm not entirely sure.

I try to explain that there is good reason to believe that your government does not have your best interests in mind when they are legislating and executing law, but I simply don't believe they could possibly be simultaneously so incompetent and so precisely devious.

They are incapable of planting evidence of WMD's in Iraq after invading, but they are able to mastermind the taking down of The World Trade Center complex, involving timed detonations of buildings and concerted effort with Al Qaeda from top to bottom without a single whistle blower.

This is the same organization that has botched virtually ever operation they have undertaken in my lifetime.

I was alive when our helicopters crashed in the desert trying to rescue the Iranian hostages, I was alive for the Iran-Contra affair, and Somalia, the killing of Karzai's cousin, the "invasion" of Grenada, our failed military involvement in Lebanon, Three-Mile Island, our airlift retreat from Vietnam, etc., etc. etc.  Those are just off of the top of my head.  But I refuse to accept that the same people responsible for some of the most comically poor operations ever attempted, by one of the most powerful militaries in the world, could pull off such precisely controlled actions without a hitch.

Everybody has watched too many movies.  They buy into this super-efficient secret organization that controls the world, executing precise military operations globally, to the complete ignorance of most. But only they and a few others in the bong-water coalition are somehow privy to these secret goings-on, as evidenced by their advanced scholarship in youtube conspiracy theory clips.

If the world is getting screwed by an elite few then those guys are bankers, not politicians or generals.  Though the latter are doing their fair share of screwing-over, to be sure.

I've just watched my government fail at far too many simple things to believe they are capable of anything both sophisticated and successful.

One would have to be willing to believe that there were many, many American military officials who would be agreeable to attacking their own country, to kill thousands of civilians, to betray the oaths they took to themselves and their country, to watch the destruction that they themselves enacted, to watch the suffering of a nation, and not one of them would show enough remorse to turn against the horrific operation and blow the whistle.

Doubtful, especially in a society that so rewards a penitent confessor.  Perhaps Oprah should post an elaborate open reward for a governmental conspirator with strong evidence.

How much lack of evidence will it take for the conspiracy crew to let go of their dreams of disappointment?

How would it even be possible that the wiki-leaks incident wouldn't have also suggested or confirmed a WTC conspiracy?

When has anything like that ever happened before?  The whistle eventually gets blown...!!!!!

But, whatever makes you unhappy....

The fellow at work began screaming that there, is no evidence whatsoever that a plane ever hit The Pentagon..., even though there is an enormous amount of evidence that that is exactly what did happen.  He refused to listen to facts, because to his mind the only facts there can be are the ones that linger in the shadows unconfirmed.  These shadows are complicated and require a great leap of faith, or should I say a leap-of-loss-of-faith, to buy them.  These theories are intricate and require several steps of disbelief, then a skipping-along through the garden of logical fallacies to get to the payoff. Making the initiates of these theories feel mentally engaged and privy to a secret world.  Far beyond what a mere traditionally minded sheep might feel in the face of such evidence....

Conspiracy theories just seem like such a ready-made way to say that, you think it's all bullshit.  They appeal primarily to the dissatisfied but lazy mind.  They don't require that you test them the same way that they appear to have tested "the facts."  They don't hold themselves to the same standards of truth value that they accuse the official version of lacking.

It's not as if there are only two choices: either you buy into these conspiracy theories fully OR you are a lost sheep willing to believe everything you're told.  It is also possible for there to be many other strategies of belief, and more importantly: doubt.  Disbelief is a powerful tool in this brave new world, but the simple use of it does not confirm an assertion's validity, or its opposite.

To doubt their embraced conspiracy theory is profane to these people, their version of doubt is sacrosanct.  Doubt is a one-way street for them that ends in a cul-de-sac of supporting facts, impenetrable by non-believers.  They demand that everybody doubt the official telling of the story, sensibly. But they are enraged at the notion that doubt should be applied to their alternate and unnecessarily elaborate explanations of said events.

It would be like questioning The Da'Vinci Code.... Unheard of in civilized conversation....

It tires the mind to try to explain that you feel disappointed by the government also.  But that you are disappointed at their incompetence and deviousness for very different reasons, and with a different set of examples from which you draw, ones that are confirmed and agreed upon by all as documented accounts of failed policy and law, misuse of tax revenue, misguided foreign policy, coca-colonialism, etc., etc., etc.

Conspiracies are attractive, even seductive to some, and they certainly do exist.  But the proliferation of conspiracy theories coincides with a larger failing. One can't help but feel that subscribing to conspiracy theories is a retreat from action rather than a genuine attack, with the intent of positive change. Even their phony demands are primarily symbolic and self-aggrandizing. They call for information but will not accept it. They expect change but only through negation and suspicion.

Where?  What?  How?

How, indeed, can the doubt filled mind ever be satisfied?


It all just seems so patently absurd.  The contemporary and historical American misuse of the ideas of freedom and democracy seem like such a larger and more verifiable conspiracy. But defending such archaic ideas would suggest complicity to the minds of the nouveau-paranoia-cartel.  That the government has made them so suspect of the very principles that their culture will be remembered by, and ultimately criticized for, seems such a larger conspiracy as to be too diabolical to approach, and so, so uncool.

If they really wanted to show their government how mistrustful they are of them then they'd read the current tax code...

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Points on the Board

(pic taken in Soho shop window)

"Sleep comes like a drug in God's country" - U2

Finally.  I slept last night, cradled in the arms of the gods.  It was a Nyquil induced sleep, but it worked.  I feel dopey this morning, so much so in fact that I'm listening to Joni Mitchell. A far cry from the old Captain and Tennille that I was listening to yesterday.... Love will sleep us together...

So, on we march until we have taken the capital.  Next stop: Moscow

Yesterday an older post overtook a newer one as the most viewed post on this site.  I have told all of you that I shouldn't look at these things, but I secretly do.  It will bring me no good, I know this.  But it makes me wonder.  How does the internet work, and when will I get sued.


I was in Manchester on 9/11. One day I will tell the story in full and set the record straight, for posterity and to dispel any lingering conspiracy rumors.  I was speaking with my wife about it this morning. We were there together in Manchester at the time.  I was stranded there for about 10 days afterwards, thankfully.  Brutish Airways lost my passport when I did finally try to travel home.  They are perhaps in league with the DMV in NYC....

Look at that, I found a way to mention the top 3 most visited posts all in today's post.

I really should stop looking at the Stats page.

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Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band

Shortly after writing my last post I decided to take action. To stand and fight.  I walked the dog, got some cash, bought beer and Nyquil....

I find that just giving in to sickness sends the wrong message to the viral invaders.  You must confuse them; the element of surprise, the best defense is a god offense, war is hell, etc.  Once they detect both Coors and Cherry-Nyquil-vitae entering the system, charging in all at once, finding the path of least digestive resistance... Well, most of them just give up from stunted fear and confusion. They lay down their little poison arms in microscopic surrender.

I imagine it must be what it was like to face Napoleon's army on the battlegrounds of Europe.  Once I have shocked them with actions unknown then I let the body's natural immune system sweep back and clean up the rest.  Attacking the home capital with the rearguard in retreat, as it were. They never even see it coming.... Who would ever suspect such a potentially disastrous scheme?

Germs are, of course, beneath me, and hardly even deserve to be conquered. But what is one to do, really?  The troops must be marshaled into action now and again, to keep them at the quick and ready.


I find that generous intake of cold beer mixed with moderate ingestion of chilled Cherry-Nyquil doses gives the mind a clarity and sense of purpose that little else does.  When watching films I detect hidden themes, previously unknown and unseen by all viewers.  Creative interpretations float out to me as if from the aether, dancing from the lights, shimmering pirouettes, the epiphany disco....

Sometimes I can see the ghostly televisional theses float above me, reflecting off of the ceiling... then I glide up and slip past them, far beyond, and then on and on, to further celestial messages unmapped.

Do not be alarmed.  It is only movies that are speaking their private ciphers to me, not Beatles albums. The dog has not yet begun transmitting his cosmic instructions, the canine codes of universal purpose.


Fittingly, I am listening to Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band while I write this, as the competing palliatives take over and undertake my internal bidding.

Ascetics beware....

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Emerdementia

I am distraught.  I've been sick off and on for a week or more and have had insomnia on top of it.  It fatigues the mind in elastically painful ways. The desperate visions stretch out and away from me in the dark, returning with hideous throbbing intent, galloping at me with cackled hysterics.  I have called out sick from work too much and have no choices left to me in that regard.  I am forced to go in and make the best of it.  I do myself no favors.  My body refuses to heal, refuses to rest, refuses to quiet.  It reminds me of the many years I spent partying for days on end, but without the fun.  It just depletes the mind and destroys what's left of the body.

I feel as if I am connected to a low-level output electrical jack.  My body is trembling inside. It is as if I am having an epileptic seizure in slow motion. My eyes are twitching even when they are closed.  I am aware of everything that is going on around me but it is all vibrating and awkward and charged.  I feel as if everybody can hear that my mind is shaking, but they seem to not notice, their voices sound distorted and broken apart into smaller and smaller pieces.  

I lie down in bed and try to gauge the effects of it.  A nearly constant current disrupts every moment.  It feels like ephedrine, but not the upswing onset, but rather the afterwards, when you just want it all to stop.

That's where I am trapped, coming down from an unpleasant electric dementia.  

My throat is too dry to scream.

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but with a whimper.

-T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

Vertigo

(Trey Speegle, Benrimon Contemporary)

I can't sleep. The canine started barking at some thing perceived in the hallway and that was the end of it. The end of the night.  I tried to go back to sleep but without much sincerity or success.  I will wait until Rachel has left for work and will try again, but that will be in 5 hours.  Being a light sleeper seems to have mostly disadvantages.  I fail to recognize any advantages to it in this brave modern age.  My wife wants to have a baby soon, and she sleeps in a near catatonic state. So I know how things will go.  She denies this, and probably will continue to deny it.  But I know.

I am bored and dulled by trying to go back to sleep.  My body is fatigued and not quite recovered from whatever sickness I've had.  I had thought that it was something that I ate but now people are telling me everywhere I go that there is a stomach virus going around.  I was its next victim, apparently.  People tell me to go to the doctor and get something to help resist it, but going to the doctor almost seems worse than enduring it. The doctor and dentist have not been much fun for me recently.  My dentist uses scare tactics on me.  I caught him doing it the last time and I cornered him with some questions, he will be fired soon. I suppose it could be easier to just stop going, or challenge him to a game of Monopoly, but what's the fun of just not going any more? I will call him and tell him that he can't scare me into dental hygiene any longer.

That doesn't make any sense. Maybe it's easier to keep the dentist and avoid the doctor. That seems more reasonable, and I... a reasonable man.

I wish there was a single beer here. It helps me go to sleep sometimes.  But there is none and it is too cold to try to go out and get one.  So I suffer on, nearly silent.


Recently I re-watched the film "Vertigo."  It is among my favorite films, and most likely the one I would name as my favorite, if asked. It is powerful and mystifying in continually unexpected ways. Even after seeing it several times it still maintains an odd effect, suggestive and counter-instructive.  The idea of obsessions, contrary urges, and forced shifts in identity, and how "love" plays a part in those things.  The dual nature of us all, the pleasure one extracts from what is frightening, and the strangeness of recognition. It is a fear of heights and a fear of falling all at once. The desire to jump exciting the mind, drawing it near the edge; the erotic fixation of abandon.  It is a film about the roles we accept and the effect those roles have on us.

The film seems to barely say or do anything.  There is a sequence of events but they don't make sense in the traditional narrative sense, not on the first viewing anyway. The events seem to follow an impulse that is vague, even doubtful at first, but the tension builds and builds. There is a climax and a resolution at the end, though even that seems inessential to something larger that is happening.  As if the ending of the film, and what it suggests, is incidental to inducing this feeling of spinning, falling forward into something unseen, the spiraling blind vortex of the dark heart.

There is an ambiguity to it as it develops.  I am never sure how to feel, but the feeling begins.  The options we are given at the close seem to be either moral or emotional, yet neither of those somehow seem right, neither of them stop the film from turning. The viewer is left with the same sinking sense of descent that the film suggests to avoid, and that it itself has perhaps transcended.

With no way to stop it, no way to yield, and no way out but down...

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Peacorking

I shaved my head last night.  I got tired of having hair. Or, I should say that I got tired of having some hair.  It had grown long in spots and was beginning to bother me.  My wife encouraged me to get a haircut, so that was happening a few seconds later, to her mild surprise.  She says I look too mean when my head is shaved, like a convict.  The women elsewhere have universally loved it, saying I look 10 years younger and dangerous, though I don't see how that's quite possible, looking any younger, that is.  They flatter me, and I allow it.

I don't want to be 10 years younger.  I want 25 back, maybe even 30.  Just drop me off right after puberty around 1985 with a flash car and 20 thousand in cash...  Then come bring me back just as the summer ends.

No, that is not really what I want at all.  Though it would be nice to return and re-experience some things, but only knowing what I knew then, which wasn't much. I wouldn't change much about my life, though I would spend less time repeating myself, both in action and word.  It is the recurring theme in my life, etc.

Here is a picture of my face before I shaved it all off last night:

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Tar Beach

I was walking the dog yesterday as the sun was going down and I quickly snapped the picture above.  People tell me all the time that it is great to take pictures at sunset and sunrise, but I don't listen.  I don't know what's wrong with me.  It's as if through my entire life I've taken in information, repeated it, but rarely benefitted from it. I seem like a sensible guy, reasonable and partially knowing.  But at my core I'm an ignorant hillbilly that just keeps trying, sometimes getting lucky.

To wit, I took the dog up on the roof with me to get the picture below, shortly after our walk.  I brought a tripod and tried to capture the moon before it went below the false horizon of buildings, but I was too slow and inexperienced.  The dog was in complete cautious wonder at this strange place that exists above our cave.  He is conditioned to think that down the stairs is the only way out of the building, but then this...  He stayed close to me as I was trying to shoot, though I walked him around a bit to put him at ease. He seemed deeply unsettled by this new land, which might as well have been the surface of the moon.  I told him that it was. I showed him the 'pee of tranquility', where we landed in '69.

I used to go up there and sit in a chair in the summertime to try and get some sun.

Tar Beach, I called it. The place smells like urine now, but it used to be nice.


My friend at cafeselavy sent me this link earlier today.  It has depressed me because it made me realize that I'm not taking the pictures that I really want to take.  I am taking pictures that require no courage.  I have not learned how to ask people if I can take their picture, or do not have the nerve to just take the pictures and act as if it what I am supposed to be doing. The pictures in that link make me feel stupid, lazy and craven.  But they inspire me also, there is that.  My consolation for feeling cowardly, artistic inspiration.  Jesus that sounds pathetic.  I take it all back.  I am brave to have even looked at those pictures, you are the cowards for reading my inner ramblings.  What a bunch of creeps my readers can be.

Ok perverts, if you look carefully you can see somebody furiously typing out the manuscript to their first screenplay in the windows below.... have a quick peek...  It is a story about the government fabricating our moon landings, as told through the eyes of a dog.

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Da' Lub Ma'Sheen

I have spent many precious hours defending the good name of the Sheen family. This much is a known and well established fact.  But people are starting to really turn on me this time.  They say I'm going too far.

As if....


Charlie is an air to the thrown.

Apoxycontin Now!




"He broke from them, and then he broke from himself.  I'd never seen a man so broken up and ripped apart..." - M. Sheen, Apocalypse Now

(portrait of petrified djna, encased in amber)

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Zero O'Clock

After many months of going into work in the afternoons I have been scheduled to go to work at 7am today, then back to the afternoons tomorrow.  It is a shock to the system, to every system.  Coffee has abandoned me, the dog refused to wake up with me, it is still dark outside, I think I fell back asleep while typing the word dark, I wonder if there are cabs at this hour.  I wonder what hour this is.

This must be what it feels like to fly.

Liaisons

(photo taken from a Soho shop window, artist unknown)

Last night my wife and I lied in bed, discussing infidelity. We had been watching a film with Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier, "That Hamilton Woman," detailing the scandalous lives of Admiral Horatio Nelson and Emma Hamilton during The Napoleonic Wars.  We discussed the unfaithful lives of the actors in the early years of their relationship. The conversation turned to infidelities that we had experienced, those actively participated in, or disloyalties we had either been the knowing or the unwitting victims of.  

The conversation did not last long. We took renewed interest in the film at one point, you see. But just as The Hollywood Code does we took the time out at the end of the dialogue to denounce infidelity as unattractive and made sure that the perpetrators had suffered rather than been rewarded for it. We both agreed that, "It is never worth it" and we can't understand how other people say that it is among the most exciting sexual experiences they've ever had.  The movie continued.

I admitted that the most affecting experiences I had had in this regard were when I had fallen in love with a friend's girlfriend and I had to have her.  I arranged some truths in such a way to ensure that this would happen.  Though there was never any actual infidelity involved, it only lacked infidelity in the physical sense, every other aspect was there.  We waited until she had broken up with him.  She came to my apartment only minutes later and we had sex for the first time, including our first kiss, with her crying through some of it, towards the completion of the act.  It all improved later, but we needed to get it out of our systems, or into them.  I'm not sure if that phrase quite suits the subject.

Once when speaking to a friend who had begun dating my girlfriend sometime before the actual end of my relationship with her, he assured me that she: had never cheated on me.... I responded: When you form an intimate and affectionate relationship with a man that you plan on being with, that is cheating.  He agreed. Towards the end of the relationship her sex life had became more active than mine, that's all.  It is simple when looked at this way, from a great distance.  The same girl had cheated on her previous boyfriend with me, in a similar way, and we had devised agreed-upon assertions that were not to be deviated from in the event of independent questioning.  This is how the world works for some.  

I began a new paragraph where I lapsed into pontification, then started another, then deleted it all.  I have nothing noble to say about infidelity, nothing new.  

I think back to a post from a month ago or more when I was discussing with myself the desire to live a certain type of life. If you want to live an expansive life of great experience then read books that explore lives created from the same and that in turn might help inspire you towards greater experiences. But so many of the great books that I've read explore infidelities, and not always using The Hollywood Code as a guide through the experience...  

It is a perennially fascinating subject, especially when it unexpectedly emerges in the lives of others, at a safe or fictive distance.  Up close it is much less fun, though some seem to relish the very idea of it, along with the act, or the acts. 

I wonder about the souls of others, the shape and size of them, the capacities for inflicting or enduring pain, the selfishness of the human heart, the absorbed grasping for either substitute or genuine pleasures, and the many justifications for actions unseen.

"People who are brutally honest get more satisfaction out of the brutality than out of the honesty." - Richard Needham

"But Napoleon doesn't want peace!" - Admiral Horatio Neslon

(Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier)

Rabid

I have been terribly sick since yesterday morning.  I ate something, something bad.  It took me half the day to figure out what had happened, which changed nothing, but removed the mystery of the thing.

I told a friend that I was, "Sick as a dog."
He said, "I hope not. I saw how Old Yeller ended..."

the sun sets on the east rivers

I met an awful, awful
man tonight

he's probably my
land lord


the pockets of his heart
are filled w/ weeds

upon his soul
earthward, thrown. tossed.
lost seeds

I met an awful, awful

man tonight

he's probably my

landlord

Anasyrma

I went on a photo-expedition yesterday, to the west side of the island.  Nothing much came from it but I did develop an idea for a short video project.  I will have to check into New York law and see what the requirements of shooting video in the city are.  My friend said that as long as I'm not using a tripod then it's permissible.  Once I verify then I will proceed from there.  The project will work better once it warms up a little bit, I think. So I still have some time.

The Hotel seen in the background of the mirror is the one that is famous in NYC for having people appear naked in the windows.  Exhibitionism is the term for it.  We saw no nudity yesterday but it is very easy to understand how the fascination developed, the situation virtually begs for it. The Hotel was constructed straddling the High Line on the west side where public nudity is perhaps more popular, encouraged by the tourists, and conceivably conducted by them as well.  

Interestingly, the name of the hotel is The Standard.  Here we were looking up the hotel's skirt.  All pretty standard stuff, really.

These were just silly pictures in a fun-house mirror.  I spoke with a friend about getting a lensbaby lens.  We decided that we would split the cost of the lens and share it, as neither of us really needs it in a full-time way.  I suppose I should check with him and see which one he wants to get.  He had one before and it got stolen.  I hear story after story about stolen camera gear in New York.  I know that the phenomenon is not exclusive to this city, but it strikes fear into the heart of the marginally impoverished nonetheless.  

The picture below reflects my fear of theft as I am keeping the camera in the most direct possible line of sight imaginable, for the purpose of insurance policy and procedure.

First Lady

The security camera was perhaps installed to protect the plaque.

I've seen this plaque before but never paid much attention to it.  Yesterday as I was walking around the "villages", both East and Greenwich, I noticed the dates on the plaque and it occurred to me that those dates coincided almost entirely with E. Roosevelt being the first lady of the nation, when she would have resided elsewhere, presumably.  Strange, I thought.   I wish that I had taken a better establishing shot of this apartment building.  It is overgrown with vines, in need of a paint job, and high on the list of places to go to buy cocaine when the guy has turned of his phone.

No, I'm kidding again.

I sat with a friend yesterday and we discussed drug use, mine.  He has been a confidant for several years and for some reason I get confessional with him after a beer or two.  Each relationship has its variety of functions and for whatever reason ours functions in that way, at times.

After many years I finally discovered why I should not do cocaine, beyond the obvious health considerations. It is because I do cocaine as if it were crack.  A normal cocaine user, of which I am at all times surrounded, can moderate their intake of cocaine so that it augments their intake of other intoxicants.  I am not of this sort.  I do cocaine as if there is a moment of epiphany awaiting me, as my heart surges upwards into rhythms unknown.  Others are able to ingest cocaine as if it were something barely made of drugs, mere children's aspirin, made for ease of use, for the relief of imaginary pain. They squirrel away little bags of it all over their person and are capable of stretching out the experience for hours, even days, on end.  I treat it as if it were the DMT experience and should be done to the full, as if some psychotropic enlightenment awaited me just on the far side of those fueled intake obsessions.

The approach itself is wildly unattainable. I know this.

I resist the word "addiction" as well as its attending concepts, but I often wonder whether my unique attractions qualify, or if the behavior of those around me suits the spirit of the term more fully.  I am able to stop most habits with relative ease.  Whether it is eating a certain way, drinking, ingesting drugs, masturbation, whatever.  I tend to do things to an alarming extreme, but also tire of said extremes much more quickly than others.

Often I will hear my friends confuse the shrewdness of drug use with actual cunning, or wit. Unable to un-blur distinctions in that glowing frenetic state, unwilling to engage in any meaningful way, they suspend one set of faculties for the acceleration of others.

I can hardly tell what is being abbreviated and what is being stressed, but that is because in that advancing state I can hardly even see sentence fragments through to completion, much less sentences. Sustained dialogue is universally impossible with cocaine users, instead there exists only unique successions of rapidly repeating monologues, interspersed with interruptions, independent of grace, resistant to diversion.

I should make note here of the important detail that I really don't do any drugs on a regular basis any more.  This conversation was mostly reflection, etc.


Wait... I was talking about Eleanor Roosevelt, wasn't I?  I know very little of her life.  She is often accused of being a lesbian, though I'm unsure of the validity of the claim.  She was not a very attractive woman, as my senses report. She was strong and represented a new type of woman during a time that perhaps the country desperately needed such. She symbolized some changes towards the Democrat agenda that were resisted by the other side, and whose accomplishments are scoffed at by many die-hard GOP'ers now.

That's all I know, and little of that qualifies as actual knowledge.

I have been having some political squabbling with an old friend of mine, mostly surrounding partisan differences.  He seems to embrace the Republican myth and today I became an avowed anarchist, so there is tension bubbling on the haunted shores of facebook.... Tonight I awoke troubled to the memory of the last post I had made, in response to his. I responded again to him, then couldn't sleep, put on a shirt, poured myself a beer, wrote this post.


But now the beer is a fading memory and the bed songs me gently onwards.  The persuasion of sleep suspended in front of me, like the memory of pain under the effects of morphine....

 

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No Toxic, Just Waste

Last year when this site was in its early fledgling-reporter days this faithful community watchdog of yours published a potentially serious health risk expose concerning the neighborhood.

The full account can be read here....  Religious whistle-blower, I.


It was all speculative, of course, but jesus crispy, isn't that how one accumulates wealth presently?


Well, it turns out that the flea market is jumping again.  Now the crazed thing happens once more on the inside of the gates, and it is a genuine weekend extravaganza, a spectacle, a real freakin' bazaar.

Where else might you find such utter curiosities, such relics.... 

and these oddities were nearly abandoned as useless remains, deserted...

They spring back to life here as casual commerce.  

I found an old videotape in a disused cardboard box called, "One Man's Junk"  

Very telling, no?

I am cursed with this evil witchy world of ours, and of course amused.  

I walked into this open coven with some friends of mine just this last weekend. After what could not have been more than a few minutes I had to text them to find out where they had gone, why had they left me.... 

I imagine that heaven must be this way also. 

Time stands, 'till.  

I occasionally casually pray there will be free-texting and wi-fi up above on high. Though I've heard rumors Verizon got the deal.  Apparently The Holy Spirit liked the name of the company.  

In the Hereafter they'll be know as "Event Verizon        " 

It's a very composed branding decision, very sensible.

The unforgivable sin... blasphemy to the holy Sprint....

All non-venial sins aside, mounting a puppet harlequin inside a monkey's cookie-jar brain.... really?

I swear here and now to you, my unswerving and mostly Catholic readers, worldwide and beyond... I did not stage the picture above. That is exactly how nature intended monkeys and fools to coexist. 

Ok, I'll admit it... I'm not sure if that's a monkey or an Eddie Munster bear, but I am absolutely positive about that evil exaggerated carny possessing its poor primate skull. 

Unless its a bear, of course, then we'll go with "Ursidae Cranium" instead of primate skull.  

Hmmm, no real ring to it...... Ursidae's not a phrase that's exactly sweeping the nation.

Who is sweeping the nation any more? 

  

Fuck this!!!!  THAT ceramic is pure porcelain primate.  

Bears can suck banana as far as I'm concerned. 

But c'mon, let's not argue.... we're all carnivores here, right?

For purposes known mostly to me, I prefer to believe it's a monkey, and probably will.  

What self-respecting primate among us would not house a harlequin or two in their whore's attic?

I might even have room for a few old mix-tapes, just some monkey-businesses....

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Cookies, confessions

I don't know what has changed, but something has.  I tried to log in to this site today and it wouldn't let me. Then it gave me a warning about not having cookies enabled, which I did.  So I went into the preferences pane and enabled "Always accept cookies" rather than "Accept cookies only from sites I visit" and voilà....  But that can't be right.  I have had a lifelong policy of always accepting cookies. But we live in unhinged and menacing times.

Charlie Sheen is the only person who seems to have it all figured out.

Google wants me to accept all cookies just to use my own site...  Strange.  Well, they must know what they're doing.  Their track record has been nearly flawless when it comes to matters of privacy. So, why should I worry.  I have other things to worry about, like the "Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress"... I really should have bought the book. Since taking the picture above I've been curious what Dungeons & Dragons fans would be reading about, especially in that regard. I wonder what a few lucky polyhedral rolls of the dice will get her to admit to....  Truth spells, power pacts, princess-warrior panties, secret succubi, who knows...

Does the world change for the worse, or for the better?  I don't know.  I suppose most people have an endearment towards their own youth, those times, their coming of age.  I remember I used to ride my bike to The Interstate Mall on 436 with my brother. There was a record store there that sold ecstasy and there was a gaming store there in the mall also, with metal figures of dragons and sorcerers, elaborate chess boards.  I gravitated towards the record store.  Don't believe what anybody tells you, ecstasy was $40 each before it was legal.  I always hear about it being $5 in 1984.  Bullshit.  Well, maybe in other places, but in Orlando, at that record store, it was expensive. I wasn't about to spend $40 of my hard-earned lawn-mowing money on a little white pill.  That all changed, of course.

One of my deepest regrets is selling off my record collection when I was younger.  I thought that I would replace all of them with cd's.  I didn't.  My brother and I both bartered away most of our collections for a small fraction of what we had paid for them.  I believe my brother might have sold his entire collection in one go, at a record store near the Jai-Alai, across the street from Club Juana.  The name of the store escapes me now. All of the artwork, the liner notes, the tactile sense of holding the records, of sitting on the floor and reading the lyrics while listening to the albums.  All gone.  Well, sort of.  A few years later I started re-buying records, but ones of a different nature.  House music... house music, house music.  I suppose when it really comes down to it I don't care much about having Jethro Tull albums any more.

I think it's funny that the sorceress above is only "part-time"....  One must wonder what Dairy Queen she works at when she's not casting spells over pubescent fat kids dreaming of Princess Leia and Boba Fett with the Solo, Han.  I bet she makes an absolutely enchanting banana fudge sundae, a bewitching root-beer blizzard, and a charmed chicken strip basket....

Confessions of a Drive-Thru Demon...



(Disclaimer: I made the mistake of reading selavy before sitting down to write today, so C. Sheen's exploits were freshly imprinted in my mind.  I wish Charlie would name one of his children Afro. Nothing would make me happier: A. Sheen)

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