Running Up That Hill

I took a morning walk down from Nob Hill to Geary, Starbucks. On the way I took a wrong turn and ended up in a neighborhood that I used to often visit. My friend, Jennifer, lived there for several years and I would stay at her house while here. One day there I watched Vertigo five times, accomplishing the intended effect. I could not walk without dizziness for days. It was the only dvd I had, television was and is abysmal. I was in the mood for it, I guess. I did not learn the lessons of the film, though. We never do. Maybe they are too vague. It is the fault of the lesson. 

No, that can't be right. 

We just rush in, assuming something close to love will somehow fix it. Dreamers all, blinded by emotion, reminded by reason.

As I walked along Geary I was also reminded of an old friend, departed, the rambunctious and directionless fun that we used to have. The vestiges of a time. I would write about it, but it would only be to distract myself, which would be unfair to the subject.

On the walk back it is all uphill, a steep one. The Nob, it is a nice neighborhood, where I would wish to live if I move into the city. Though it is well out of my price range. Everything is. I can not even afford staying here for free, there is parking and the cost of coffee to consider. Already well past my budget, which is currently nil. 

As I walked I started shedding shirts and the little Winnie-the-Pooh hat that another friend let me borrow, to keep me from the cold. I arrived back at the apartment I'm watching (again) sweating through the one remaining shirt I had left on. 

Now, I sit here and face the change in temperature, both earthly and bodily. It is good practice, change.

I wait for the rest of the world to start up, to hear the machination of a city come to life. Today, I will go with my friend and we will visit the free art galleries. I gazed through the front glass of a photography store on my walk where there were pictures taken of rock stars selling for hundreds, even thousands, of dollars. 

Impossible. I'll probably return there later to verify, and chuckle to myself.

To post this piece to my site I will lie down on my stomach in the carpet hallway, to get a wi-fi signal from his apartment. It feels silly, posting these ramblings, but it is still somehow better than keeping quiet about it all.

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Me too

(Rhys, playing the piano)

Another day, I wake up with a single word floating through my mind, wondering how it got there. 

Each morning I write a few paragraphs, delete them, write a few more, delete them. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be writing any more.

Barely a breeze. There is a stillness but also a distant sound. I sensed it was coming but I hadn't believed it, now it has passed. This life requires a little faith, whether you believe it or not. Perhaps I will seek stillness. It is a state that I can move through where others choose to sit; an untroubled calmness. It is easy, as the buddhists teach us. You just perplex your mind and reflect, and there it is.

There is one less thing that I am now uncertain of, one thing added to a different pile of questions. I believe that. I have faith in it. It is simple inventory, an accounting of the accumulations of life. This might be very premature, but I have accepted it. It took a few days, even less than I thought, but silly faith in a thing wears off when it finds no corollary in another. By itself faith is madness, just look at anybody who believes in their own gods, or goddesses. It takes another silly fool to nod their head up and down in reverence for the thing to work at all. If two people agree on a thing then it is not madness. 

There must be a "me too" involved.

The nature of faith takes odd shapes. It changes your life but not always for the better. Putting your faith in the wrong things can leave you worse off than when you were just waiting, watching the world. I knew someone who put too much faith in fiction. It was me, or the character of me.

I was talking to a friend and he told me that if he were to ever get into a relationship again he would require that they had their own life, their own place to live, and he would see them whenever he could. He would also enjoy quiet evenings at home, alone. That sounded perfect to me. Where does one find such a thing, I wondered. 

Never forget that you are just a guest in another's life. You are also a guest in your own life. This is not to say that it's not "yours" to do with as you wish, but it's healthy to remember that we are all just passing through. All things are temporary but one. 

Do you see my new buddhist nature...

Then later, I was chatting with a few people and relaying the recent circumstances of my life. Comical and erudite as I was there was still something missing in what I was saying. It was as if I was in the gravity of a thing but could not name it. But it held me there, spinning in comical orbits, talking out loud. Then it occurred to me, luckily before I had finished my paragraph. So, I began another.

It wouldn't make sense to try to relay it here, it was a glimpse of revealed wisdom, and we know the dangers therein. 

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"... a whirling or spinning movement"

Well, here I am, still. No matter how late I go to sleep (11pm) I awake at 4am. Today is the second and the last day of the apartment-watching. I still have no wi-fi here. I will have to post this later, if I can.

Nob Hill is a great area of SF. My friend and I watched Vertigo last night and he name-checked all of the streets and corners and buildings, the ones that were still standing anyway, citing many of the new buildings that have since replaced them. 1958. Hard to believe how quickly time passes. Not that I would know the distance from 1958. But I know other times, other distances.

Vertigo's theme is identity, of course, and what happens sometimes when it is forced, false. Unhappiness is the common result, or worse.

Well, I can't write this morning. I am sitting here, staring at the screen, wondering… what next?

A song by The Pretenders keeps drifting through my head. 

I saw a picture of you…. oh, oh, oh, oh, oh oh, oh…. Those were the happiest days of my life….

If nothing else, I went to a different gym yesterday, a nice one. It is in a hotel. That nice. But the scale in the locker rooms confirmed what I have suspected with other scales. I have lost weight, 20 pounds of it. It took about 6 months. At that rate I'll disappear in about 5.5 years.

I would still like to lose a little bit more though, being under 200 pounds is my ideal weight zone. I know that getting older makes it more difficult, but I'm still not sure how I blubber-ballooned up to 236.5 pounds.

I am sitting here, thinking back upon experience after experience from the last several years. It is difficult, looking back in this way. Being honest with yourself at least has some benefit built into it, but being honest about one whom you love does not always carry the same value. So, you keep those truths to yourself, or you try to. But that's not the way that these things unfold. I know that now.

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SF in the dark

(found image)

I sit here in the cold of SF. A last minute opportunity came up in which an apartment-sitter was needed for a woman whose father had passed away, a favor for the friend of a friend. She had to rush elsewhere. She will be in New York for another day, probably no more. I can't seem to get any warmer here. I'm afraid to touch things in her apartment and don't see a thermostat. I don't know how people in SF do it. California is beautiful, SF is wet and cold.

Man, I had a bad day yesterday. Nearly impossible to put into words, maybe one day I'll try. I took most of the day off from work and tried to understand it, tried to take as much of it in as I could, the rest I had to shelve, where - I do not know. It is all mysterious, each new day brings more. 

This place doesn't even have wi-fi, I do not think. I'm sitting here writing directly into MS Word. Feels strange, somehow more serious. There are more options to stylize in Word. None of which, I do not believe, will translate to this site. I have become used to having coffee in the mornings. It is a habit of middle age that I have adopted just in time to qualify. 

Though, it may also be a time for the shedding of habits, whether wished for or not. I never wanted to be a coffee drinker, the stuff didn't at first appeal to me. Funny, how the things that do not appeal to you become another thing altogether once the habit is formed. The things that might make you uneasy at first find their way into your system and make themselves comfortable, putting up shelves and shopping for couches, hanging paintings on the wall. They become the things that you love, and wish to hold on to.

Ah, such is life.

A novelty: I will walk to work today. I had to put my car in a rather expensive garage, being in Nob Hill there was no parking, and a "special event" of some sort was happening so they sensibly applied their special rates. We drove in repeated rectangles looking for a free spot, but there was nothing. It is best to leave it there for the duration. I am a city dweller again, for a little while. I will try to enjoy the feeling, see what it evokes. I must traverse the treachery of the tenderloin to get where I need to go.

The word rectangle sounds like my life feels right now.

A friend lives across the hall from where I am apartment-watching. He pays as much in rent as our mortgage, just to live in the city. Seems strange to me now, that. Impossible. Though when he moved here from Chicago he had planned on living with his girlfriend. He came out and got the place for both of them. Coincidentally, her name is Rachel. We went to dinner last night and mused at the accidental fluke of it over Thai cuisine. Well, I did anyway. They broke up before they got serious. It was not meant to be, I guess - and getting serious is a big step, one not to be taken lightly. All big steps are heavy, that's the very thing that makes them big.

Well, I'm going to go back to bed and see if I can conjure up a few old dreams, sleep is sometimes the best place for them.

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And though the news was rather sad

("I'll Follow The Sun")

I've tried writing but then erased what I had written and started over a few times now.

It is astonishing how differently you sense experience once it has passed. Reflections about the nature of things, or people, or yourself. These musings take on such different qualities as time counts on, day after day. Little attributes that you recognized or dismissed suddenly grow into invincible characteristics. All of life is held by single moments, all strung together like popcorn along a thread, spiraled upwards on a yearly tree. 

People are selfish and will act selfishly when given the opportunity to do so, count on it. Even the thought of the possible cost to others is a burden. Little things, daily activities that bother or unnerve another near you, they add up and then become insuperable. You just do them, perhaps recognizing the annoyance but not giving it too much concern.  It is just the way life is. We are reminded at times by the messages around us that selfishness is an occasional necessity. Though sometimes selfishness comes in single, lasting packages. We are left to live with it, or the thoughts of what is now missing, lost or taken. That's where reflections step in and take over. 

Memory exists with the luxury of being whatever it wants to be: giving, loving, caring... or ruthless, imaginary and cruel. Or, sometimes simply necessary, repeated in the mind out of a need to approach the truth. Memory gets to be whatever it wants to be, even if it is an addict. Life is a recurring dream in that way. We don't relive the thing, we relive our thoughts. We become lost in our inner addictions.

Then one day you wake up, fall out of bed, and read the news. Oh boy.

Somebody spoke and I went into a dream....

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Because I'm tired

Oh humanity, I have been doing some soul searching. There is no end to it, the search. It is like having insomnia in an endless daytime; thoughts in waning light, ever recurring. It is a day that never quite gets dark, or becomes night, but just keeps rewinding. The mind chasing itself, its choices that were still chances. 

What have I been doing, I wonder. Why are my epiphanies too often after the fact. They don't prepare me as much as they remind me, taunt me.

I know why, exactly. I am just thinking out loud here. I have isolated where most of my problems come from, where they go. As I look back over my life I can pinpoint the two common denominators: Me and what I do. 

One of them must go.

When I hit 40 I decided I wanted the second half of my life to be different from the first. Presumptuous that I might live until 80, I thought it was a sensible time to make the switch, but I ended up only lightly shedding a habit or two. Other habits hardened around me, closed in. The facts have spoken there. Denial has ceased to be an available option.

I had become resentful along the way. It is a dangerous feeling, the sensation of having been treated unfairly comes into it. Little surprise in that. Resentment is the soul killer.

Resentments take no time to easily find a thing that I have long looked for, the soul. It does seem unfair, but that's also part of what it leaves in you, the residue of imagined unfairness, then the remorse for ever having believed yourself. 

I was asked a simple question last night and my answer surprised me: "Because I'm tired of being an asshole."

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That old chestnut

(Insert platitude in open space at upper-right)

Recently, my father told me that I spend too much time living in the past. I reminded him that it is the place where all my memories currently reside - and who else am I going to have Thanksgiving dinner with other than my memories? He did not find this funny. But, he's right, in a way. There are many internal holdings that I've never bothered letting go of; childhood memories or difficulties, the adult re-writings of same. I've held them all for so long that they've become something else altogether. Memories too often repeated become shape shifters, werewolves in the moonlight.

Some people are better at getting over things, other people seem better at getting into things. Trouble, for example.

"... never bothered letting go of..." 

Perhaps that's not the right way to describe it. The description makes it sound very easy, as if it is simply a matter of releasing your hand when it is filled with beach sand, the wind and the sun will take care of the rest. Just like giving your life over to the Jesus. I've never bothered coming to terms with incidents and episodes from my past. This site is an occasional attempt at doing so, but can only ever be partial in that regard. The mind holds things in different ways, memories slip in fantasies.

For some, maybe it is more like sand. I feel as if I've been reminded of this occasionally with inspiring framed pictures in people's bathrooms. A beach scene where we are told of the transience of life. This thought, somehow, never strikes the proud owners of the mini-poster as a horror, but rather as something to be briefly sermonized with a cursive quotation and an image of seagulls along the shore. The word cherish is often floating there.

I've always operated on the principle that - in any type of relationship - the other person's fears mainly reveal their own weaknesses. A person that insists all the time on the importance of "honesty" is often dishonest, either with themselves or others. A person who lives in fear of being cheated on is often unfaithful. One who demands partnership above else can hardly provide it. If you perpetually claim that somebody is in denial then there's a pretty good likelihood that you might be experiencing denial also, etc.

The list goes on and on and is never complete. That's what I've found: that life is incomplete. So, be wary of those who insist upon living life "completely." 

Absolutes barely serve as reminders when repeated so often. Until they one day hit you and you find yourself alone, staring at a framed postcard in bathroom, having an epiphany about time and how little of it there really is. So, you live life as completely as you can. There will always be others to let you know the parts you need to continue to work on.

Somehow, in all of this, you have to find a way of coming to terms with yourself, as incomplete and ill-equipped as you may be. The more you can accomplish that, by whatever route, the easier it is to not fret over others. They're going to do whatever they're going to do. They are also on a limited run, we all are.

If you find yourself, one day, insisting on apologies from somebody that is reluctant to provide them, then you might just apologize to them and let it go. It's very likely that they don't feel as if they've done anything wrong. Badgering them into an admission of guilt is a terrible waste of time. You're wasting time at twice the normal rate, yours and theirs combined, maybe more.

Knowing this won't always help you though. Practicing it brings you a little bit closer. 

Never claim that you've perfected anything. But also never claim that you are its imperfection either.

That is my wisdom. I want it written in a framed sky.

I listened to a conversation about modesty the other night. I knew what the word meant, but hadn't had much experience with it. 

It is an important virtue, deserving of its own poster. Though it's far too humble to ever ask.

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216.5

I did it.

I'm finally below the weight that I was when we left NYC (pictured above, 219 lbs).

Self-doubt, it is a true monster - never so large that it can't fit into every crevice in your mind, if encouraged. If you feed it, then it will build up in accretions of flesh that surround you. Mine favors the flavor of bacon. 

That's part of it, anyway.

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Another way to ease

I doubt sometimes whether 

a quiet & unagitated life 

would have suited me - yet I 

sometimes long for it.

- Byron

"... manic sex isn't really intercourse. It's just another way to ease the insatiable need for contact and communication. In place of words, I simply spoke with my skin." - Terri Cheney, Manic: A Memoir

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"Think of me and try not to laugh..."

(... and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden...)

Fall is here. There is a chill in the morning air, lingering into the day.

Yesterday was brutal. 13 hours of working, 3 hours of driving, and a brief handful spent sleeping last night.

No time to write today.


Anyway, my coffee's cold and I'm gettin' told.....

El Expreso de Medianoche

Up at 4am. Going into the city today. It will be a 17 hour day for me. Somebody should call the police. It seems illegal.

Never call the cops. That's what I've learned. The situation always gets worse when they arrive. 

In Mexico, I have been told many times, and found it to be true, that if the cops arrive, you just hand them $50, point at a Mexican and say, "He tried to rob me." Your troubles are over, and the troubles for the other fellow have seemingly just begun. They'll put him in the car and drive him away. I'm assured that they just drive him around the corner and drop him off. It is all for show, a mere pretense. It is not uncommon for them to buy the victim a beer when they drop him off, to show that there are no hard feelings, amigo.

Once, to test this theory, I was in Mexico with several friends. Some cops stopped the car and realized that there was a stinkin' gringo on board. They made us all get out and started asking us questions, separately. It didn't take long before this goggle-eyed group of dancing wayfarers started coming unravelled, babbling nonsense in a nonsensical tongue. They realized that there was potentially much more then $50 to be earned here. Justice must be served. So, they arrested me. They put me in the car and told my friends they wanted $500.

Now, I had a rather large bag of powdered ecstasy in my pocket. A thing that was then practically legal. Though it was not, in fact, actually legal at all. But it was neither denounced nor misunderstood in the way that "Molly" now is. I knew that I was potentially looking at a much larger problem, the complexities of which came at me in soft waves of fluctuating intensity. The situation, as it stretched on, started settling in and speaking to me through the little explosions of pixie dust that were occurring in my mind. 

I continued to sweat it out. All will be well, the drug told me.

My friends, luckily, had access to precisely this kind of money, but knew better than to just go get it, as the price would most assuredly go up based on some event in my behavior and the bloodhound-like sense that all cops have when they are in close proximity to cash. So, my friends were forced to beg and plead and make phone calls and put on an elaborate show, and then all go off in different directions, coming back at first with only half the money, bargaining more with the cops, etc.

My reasoning went a different direction. I began to see the entire thing for the farce that it was and suspected that soon I would be released. Perhaps not before the good guys got their full $500, but soon. At the time, they accepted both dollars and pesos, as was the custom. Now, only pesos.

They had not bothered handcuffing me before putting me in the car, the way that American cops must. So, while they were busy negotiating the terms of my release I reasoned that less evidence was preferable to more evidence and that my very pleasant, warm high was beginning to wear off. I had reached the drug's half-life. I did what any reasonable, thinking person in that situation would do. I ingested more. Not so much as to be dangerous, but enough to recharge my waning befuddlement.

Shortly after that the cops got in the car and we drove off, much to my surprise and increased concern. 

I know my way around Mexico City pretty well but not quite as well as the cops did. I couldn't tell exactly where we were going. I was made to understand that jail was our next stop. The cops knew just that much English. I started to worry through the drug's effect. I pictured myself getting raped by strangers while other strangers watched and cheered, while on ecstasy. Not them, but me. Somehow the vision did not satisfy the sensation. I'm not a racist, but being raped by Mexicans somehow seemed less preferable than what we are told to imagine will happen to you in an American prison. I would be an albino in that place and as such would possess special magical powers, I thought. 

Maybe I am a racist, it only took an imagined Mexican prison gang-raping to finally get it out of me. Perhaps it was the idea that being raped by those who understand my pleas for mercy would be somehow be better than being ridiculed to beg in a foreign tongue. Why would being mocked in a foreign tongue during this brutal act somehow be worse than understanding what was being said. I don't think compliance plays much of a part in it. Though understanding the specific nature of the command must come in handy at times. Otherwise you must be shown, taught how to be raped.

But there I was, on my way to years behind foreign bars, decades maybe. Why did I also suspect that a Mexican prison would not meet the standards of an American prison. Do we really think that we were so much better at everything? We really are despicable, I thought to myself. We can't even go to prison in Mexico without looking down our noses at it. We didn't even invent the prison system. I think it was the French, or the British. I believe they used America as a prison, the penal colony concept. Australia, Haiti, Louisiana, etc. Of what did I have to feel so superior about.

Well, at least I will have an opportunity to learn some Spanish, I thought. I will be quite the novelty there. They will all participate in my advancement, taking turns teaching me various phrases that denote submission and subservience to a set of unspoken rules that one day soon I will master and know implicitly. When I am finally released and return to America I will be able to get a job working in a kitchen, or gardening. Fuck, I don't even have my passport on me. I might have to sneak back over the border.

All of this bouncing around the inside of my skull cavity while the cops are driving me towards my doom. After about half an hour I realized that we were in the same section of Distrito Federales that we had just left. Sure enough, we were pulling back up on the very spot that we had just departed from, where my friends were waiting. There was some more negotiation, the handing over of cash, and then the official ceremony of my release. They opened the door and pointed for me to get out. I was not worthy to be in their car any longer.

I complied. 

I may have even thanked them, stopping just short of a nice warm hug.

(This story was told in the first person for the purpose of comedy and to maintain the sacrosanct verisimilitude of this site. The experience relayed here was actually that of a close fiend, fictionalized by myself.)

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Saudade

Shit. 30 minutes until the gym opens. Who knows what will drop out of me here. I haven't even had a cup of coffee yet. It's brewing. 

I posted last night anyway, was feeling some saudade. 

I had planned on going into the city to work today, but Rhys was a ball of energy last night and I didn't get to spend any time with him. SF will be there tomorrow, when I must go in.  

I got an email ad for a company today that, if I join, promises to bring me new readers. They claim to be the cause of my increase in readers the other day.  It is odd. I check how many readers I have most days but somehow feel that it's "cheating" to enlist a company to deliver more readers. I've had basically the same number with occasional jumps and drops in numbers for about 2 years now, maybe more. 

I never intended on structuring this site to be anything more than what it is: a place where I can openly discuss self-mutilation with my friends, etc.

Holy shit... If you ever tell yourself that you're experiencing a particular emotion, as I just did above, then just do a Google image search for the word of that emotion. Right away it will cure you of it. There are a handful of complex emotions that can be captured or conveyed through images, by some. Saudade does not appear to be one of them.

People are just terrible. 

Once I was at The Boathouse in Central Park with Rachel. We were trying to find a place to sit and have a glass of wine. There was a young-ish, dark-haired woman sitting at a rather large table by herself, looking out across the water reflectively. She was writing in a notebook. 

I will try to approximate it here:

You have left me once again in my lone coffin castle of solitude. You have hurt me, dear. You will never know what love treasures I had in store for you in my attic or basement. I am a woman of deep and drowning mysteries. The pain that you have caused me is like a knife through my plexus. I sit here among these artless Americans writing the words of my love where they are not deserved, will go unnoticed. Like our love that we shared so many times, over and over. You have hurt me so, dear. You stole my heart from between my legs.

And on and on, page after painful page of it... I wish I would have taken a picture of her staring out across that man-made lake in Central Park, filled with Google images. I should have offered to buy it off of her on the spot, then publish it under its appropriate title, license the movie rights. All of it.

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Toughskins

My head is pulled under the cover of childhood, reading forgotten comic books in the dark, a flashlight, a fortress of fabric in my pajamas, cotton heroes, sheets strung from wall to wall, wanting to make the smallest world more private, for reasons still not understood, giggling just in and out of innocence. 

Wanting somebody to notice my fort. The imaginary fortress of this bunkered bedroom. 

"No!"

I must have been 11, 12, 13.

I remember the first $5 bill I ever had, creeping out of my Toughskins denim pocket. I tried to get people to notice it there. I did. If they would not, then showing them was my schtick. It was mine, though possessing little idea of what it meant, what it would.

It was a tender, of sorts. Currency, a wanted thing.

I show Rhys the falling leaves every chance we get, point to the trees bending in the wind; gazing upwards for seconds. Firsts.

The first outside sensation that he noticeably noticed was the marvel of the wind moving through the trees above. We held him, stomach upwards, cradled in our arms, on the back patio, dizzy with newness, dazed with wind. It is the reason that we moved here. Trees, without having to make a special trip to visit.

Now vainly, desperately, perhaps too early, I try to make the connections with him. I pick up a yellow leaf and draw his interest to it if I can, then up to the trees. A hopeful fool, pointing at the sky, murmuring of nature, seasons, temporary gods. Happy, for a time, with this absurdity of failure. 

Wind moves above me now as I write this in bed. I can hear some of it, shifting - sounding like a beach town, a shore in the darkness, like a place that can not stop itself from giving up. 

It reminds of a time, not so long ago.

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

In the 1960s, Sears' children's jeans were made of the same material as that of its competitors.  When market research showed that durability was the most important feature for parents buying children's jeans, then Sears' engineers headed into the laboratory to develop a stronger material than either the 50-50 blend of cotton and polyester or 100-percent composition of jeans most commonly found in stores at the time.

To demonstrate just how tough the new jeans were, Sears launched a famous "Tough Jeans Territory" ad campaign in 1974, in which Sears constructed a trampoline out of the Toughskin material.  Sears was so sure of the new line of pants that they were sold with a guarantee that children would grow out of their Toughskin jeans before the jeans wore out.

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Oh... just some mutilation

(unknown)

Somebody's been on this site again, reading all day yesterday without asking, or thanking. My pageviews jumped by about 150. They appeared to be all in single pages. Well, it was a rainy day here in Sonoma, so that explains it. When it rains here, it rains everywhere. That's easier for me to understand. With weather, I am like a dog looking out a window with an erection, scratching a flea.  

Fuck, I jogged to the gym yesterday, and then the only way I had home was the same. Never again.... My whole body is bruised from it. No wonder they don't want 45 yr. olds going off to war. I used to think that I would sign up for the military just to go through basic training, but then craft an incident that would get me roundly kicked out when it was done; just to get in shape, to see if I could do it, and for the raw experience of it all. 

Of course, I never did. I would have already mentioned here that I had been in the military, etc.

I saw Top Gun and it scared me witless. The volleyball scene where they all make sweet, gay, beach love together.

I went in and took the ASVAB when I was about 19. The recruiter told me that I could be an officer, that the Navy would pay for my college, a free ride. I don't know why I didn't do it. Everyone else in my family had been in the military, or was at the time. He said I could choose any field. I had Aced the test, he reported, champ... I admitted to having done all sorts of drugs to him, a perverse confession that pleased only me. He lowered his voice and told me hush-hush, nobody has to know about that. They don't even drug test unless they suspect, and that's not until much later, during basic training. It'll be our little secret. What a creep. They bugged me for years about joining but then finally gave up. 

I kept telling them that the Air Force was making better offers, and had they ever even seen Top Gun?

I liked knowing that it was there, if I needed it. The Service. I wonder if it's too late to reach back out... I have the requisite discipline now. I swear.

My life is quite regimented but nobody seems to notice, or perhaps believe, or care. My life, in its humble beginnings, had been chaotic on so many levels, for so long, that nobody noticed the slow transition that occurred. I gainfully entered the work-force, I got married, I had a child, I bought a house, I write daily, I exercise almost daily, I drink very daily...  All things that seem nearly unbelievable when considered together.

Nope, some still think of me as a too-loose canon. It is the most convenient assessment for them, the easiest to make. It perplexes me, particularly when I look at other people's lives, and how fragmented those lives can seem - held closely together by ever-tightening and knotted neuroses, an inner-emotional core of chaos, a denial of the full range of life rather than a surrendering to it. A lifelong resistance to a deeply known thing: the dark entity of self. 

The nucleus that can not be named.

I suppose it is the wide emotional arc I represent, the fluctuations. The unpredictable energy and then the gloom. They're not for everybody. People seem to prefer deeply ingrained problems that they can resist over time and maintain in perpetuity, rather than the radial frequency of my emotional energy. Some people gladly choose denial over disaster. It's why counseling feels as if it's working for them, the abiding sense of gentle unraveling, the slow assuaging of self. The coddling warmth of another's concern. 

Not me. I am a dozing Fukushima. Even therapists implore me to "please, get some help...." 

When I start to feel out of control I burn myself. It reduces everything down to that single moment of pain. Where things disappear and all that I can see or feel is that white hot flashing spot of simplicity. It immediately transports what's left of me elsewhere. The mind constricts and then opens to a brand new familiar place, the boundaries between pain and pleasure drift as tattered fabric in the winds. Everything goes away. And I'm the only one who gets to decide whether I'm going to do it again or not.

"All the knives seem to lacerate your brain, I've had my share, I'll help you with the pain..."

Moving on.

Well, I just spent an hour writing a portion that I've removed. Too much faux-confession for a Monday morning.

Then, I shifted over to Facebook where I wasted another 20 minutes. 

Now, the morning is escaping me. 

It is slipping away as the pain from the scar.

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My Laureates

(The original Joe Strummer)

This still gets me every time. There are so many good cover versions of that song, but that one really makes me feel okay. The sadness of it somehow becomes something else. Whimsy in a middle-aged man is often just foolishness. Here, it is what it is meant to be, a skylarking.

I was looking through old posts and emails, trying to place something in time. 

Time, I have a terrible sense if its passing, always have. I found my version of 50 shades. I had linked together a few vignettes the handful of posts before that, hoping to teach myself how to tell a story. It is more difficult than it seems, the telling of stories. We can tell ourselves all manner of things within our minds, but they are mostly fragments, sentences if lucky. In the darkness, the mind has only itself as a companion. 

You had better hope that you're saying nice things to yourself in there. 

A story is more than just a detached thought floating in the mist, though once ingested stories can sometimes become just that. A phrase or a fragment can evoke whole places, complete memories of emotions.

I should know: I am reading Alice Munro right now. She is an enviable raconteuse. There is a richness and complexity to her writing that is maddening. It is magic on the page. 

Saul Bellow is the closest that Canada has come to claiming the Nobel Prize for Literature. Though he was only Canadian by birth, he was educated and lived in America, and became an American. 

The Nobel Committee no longer seriously considers American writers for the award. They are considered too insular and self-involved. They do not speak to the world, we're told. Toni Morrison was the last to win, in 1993. The last before her, born in America, was John Steinbeck in 1962.

They loved us for a little while.

Proust, Joyce and Nabokov never won, either. Down go France, Ireland and Russia.... Never quite famous for literature anyway.

Alice Munro seems at least as deserving as Mario Vargas Llosa, José Saramago, Doris Lessing or Harold Pinter (The only ones that I have read from the last decade or so).  But, alas, there are many writers with talent, and I read only in English, or translation. English is insular and self-involved. Hungarian is the new global voice.

I have been meaning to read J.M. Coetzee and V.S. Naipaul but there is only so much time to waste in a life. 

I have a Philip Roth book on the shelf, The Counterlife. Don DeLillo and Salman Rushdie are considered notable by many. With Rushdie, I've skipped his "important" works, for now. DeLillo: I've only read White Noise.

Joyce Carol Oates!, claim some. I've only ever read one novel by her that I cared for, You Must Remember This, and then a collection of stores, I forget the name. 

The key to winning is living long. Camus tricked them, snuck in under the wire (pictured above). Rudyard Kipling had many, many years left. He needn't have won it so soon.

Some claim that the writer must do more than just live long, they must also write much, and well. There seem to be a handful of tricksters in the bunch, but that should be no surprise, just look at the Peace Prize.

They've announced a new category: Nobel Prize for emails.

"It is necessary to fall in love... If only to provide an alibi for the random despair you're going to feel anyway." - Camus

I've named 19 writers now in my Sunday report, more than any other student in the class!

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Type E

(Susan Burnstine)

A good friend, and dedicated reader of emails, told me that I had never once told her about the strange encounter on I-10 that I relayed here yesterday. It seems impossible. She lives for stories of that kind. Certainly I have relayed all of my paranormal stories to her already, many times. I even remember she and I once discussing my cynicism, doubt, and lack of faith in the supernatural, and the unlikelihood of visiting extraterrestrials. She then asked, as always, if I did not think there were some things that were unexplainable. How could I disagree. I tell that story often when people suggest that I don't know everything.

It is always possible to assert man's ignorance. Or, even more specifically, mine. It is easily proven.

But, I had a very strange and emotionally charged encounter with a human-shaped creature in the middle of nowhere, without an entirely adequate explanation. At least no explanation that leaves no lingering questions at all in my mind. It doesn't really change anything, though. Occam's Razor tells us that it was most likely a human. That simple explanation satisfies all of the perceived criteria. Inductive indifference is a powerful tool of reasoning, specifically in approaching seemingly unexplainable experiences. All logical observations conclude that the creature was human. It is only when emotion enters the assessment do we begin to suppose and speculate, and even wish for something else. All activities that I spent the next several months engaged in.

It is important to remember a few things: there have been many, many UFO sightings, encounters, and presumed "abductions"... There is not one agreed-upon piece of empirical evidence of visitors from another planet. Does that not strike some as strange? For some, it only proves their higher intelligence, their ability to make contact but leave no trace. For others, it only reflects a lack of evidence. I am one of those. 

How many encounters have been disproven or otherwise explained? Many of them. This does not mean that it is not possible, only that there is no evidence. Eyewitness accounts are often quite lacking in unexplainable physical evidence. Science does not treat these as worthy of inquiry for a reason.

Have humans been shown to be highly imaginative, and to allow that capacity to form entire structures of agree-upon fantasy? Yes, there is much global evidence of that.

Again, inductive indifference teaches us that among like things certain predictions can be made based upon logical observations of a given series of symbols.

- It was shaped like a human

- It walked (though somewhat oddly to appearance) as a human

- It was covered in a fabric, a human invention

- It had a glow to it when not in the direct light, possibly phosphor

- It occurred near a university town where there is a greater likelihood of hijinks

- I was alone, emotions can tend to be runaway

- The experience was very, very brief

- I did nothing to verify, but rather let the experience inform my imagination and emotions

- Most telling of all, it expressed no interest in probing my anus

See? It did absolutely nothing that was unaccountable, to the senses or otherwise. That's not always the case for some in these type celestial engagements. That is, until you get dispassionate observers involved; chicanery is most often discovered at the root of these adventures. 

My incident does not even qualify as a "Close Encounter" as there was no UFO visible. Under Bloecher's subtypes it does qualify as a category E in which an entity is observed but there is no evidence or sighting of a UFO. That is as far as the hypothetical nature of the experience can stretch. I had a "Type E" encounter. 

Not my first, I assure you. 

I have, and do, find it strange and interesting that seemingly normal people during the course of their daily lives are occasionally transformed by the experience of witnessing something unexplainable. I have read about the lives of reasonable people being completely upended by a single unexplainable experience. I usually assume boredom, some urge for their lives to be something other than mundane. I can understand and sympathize with that impulse. 

But I am not one of those people. I have invited weirdness into my life from the beginning. Believing in love is as improbable as anything else, and filled with much wonder, magic, and all the speculation that any human can be expected to endure. 

When you enter a movie theater and have your sense of reality transformed for a period: Is that real? Of course it is. Almost all of your senses tell you so. Is there an explanation for the experience: Sure. Does it change the experience of the experience: Some, but not entirely.

The same friend that denies all previous knowledge of my many alien-friends and confrontations used to be quite disturbed and excited by the idea of suspenseful films, and probably still is. She has an abiding fear of sharks, often when on land, miles from the nearest lake. Her fear is of the predatory and movable kind.

Now once, long ago... I wasn't sure if she had seen a certain film yet or not, or if she was merely frightened by the effectiveness of the advertising campaign, its presentation of itself as a documented fact that was only hereto coming to public light. 

We were driving south through a darkly wooded part of Florida when she announced that she had to piss. She may have said "pee." We pulled off of the interstate but the only gas station there was abandoned, in unlit disrepair. La Commandanta' that she is, she just instructed me to stop the car. She exited on her passenger side, stepped backwards into darkness, dropped her pants and then herself. I could hear the tinkling sound of her squatted water-making. Looking off into the wooded darkness around us I decided to ask her, by chance, if she had seen the Blair Witch project yet. No sooner had I completed the sentence was she was back in the car demanding that I flee, immediately. It was not possible to escape the evil wood witch's clutches fast enough. Urine was apparently no match for the pitch-black pythoness.

We laughed about it, eventually. But there were many miles that we had to put between us and the sorceress that almost claimed her.

Boo!

.

... our little life, is rounded with a sleep

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vex'd;

Bear with my weakness; my, brain is troubled:

Be not disturb'd with my infirmity:

If you be pleased, retire into my cell

And there repose: a turn or two I'll walk,

To still my beating mind.

-Shakespeare, The Tempest

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An emotional encounter

I was going to tell the story of getting shot at in Florida, but I thought of another Florida story instead. We'll save the shooting for another time. Instead, I'll relay one of the life experiences I've had that confirms, to me, how powerful the imagination can be. A thing for which I have no adequate explanation.

When I was about 18-19 years old many of my friends were going away to college, mostly University of Florida and Florida State. I had dropped out of high school on my own accord so those options were not yet open to me.  Finances kept them from ever becoming a reality. 

I was working my way through an 8.5 year A.A. program at a community college in Seminole County. The same one, incidentally, that George Zimmerman attends, or attended.  I have not had much time to keep up with his life. This is one of the reasons I felt as if I had so much to say about the incident. I know the area pretty well, and am aware of both the overt and submerged racism that extends both ways. There is plenty of hatred amongst blacks for whites and Hispanics there. 

Spell check had me capitalize Hispanics. I do not believe I have ever seen "whites" or "blacks" similarly capitalized. 

In any event, that is not the point of my story.

I was dating a girl. Beth was her name. She was among several different girls I dated with the same name that used Beth, or Elizabeth, or Liz. The last mentioned, Liz, ending in suicide. Beth went away to school, Florida State. Being ~19 I would do just about anything for pussy, including driving the four hours from Orlando for it. 

I didn't drive there very often before things inevitably ended between she and I. The weekends in a college town were much fun but she became very serious about studying, to what end I do not know. I saw her at a Bauhaus show many years later. Though she was lonely that first semester and I was young and energetic, willing to love, still trembling with glandular discharges. Young enough to have a long distance relationship, that is. Twitchingly motivated. So, on Friday nights I would make the four hour journey by myself, usually coming home on Sunday towards the afternoon/evening. 

From Orlando, once you get off of I-75 heading north (75 could take you all the way through Detroit and into the lower and upper peninsulas of Michigan, and then to the Canadian border, surrounded by Lakes Michigan, Huron and Erie) and turn West onto I-10 near Lake City where Ted Bundy took his last known victim, a 12 year old girl (10 will take you west all the way through New Orleans, San Antonio, and then on to Los Angeles, if you cared to), then you head the last hour and a half to Tallahassee. Through nothing but woods, along the panhandle. 

Look at a map, there are no cities there, barely even gas stations. Just a highway built of necessity. An artery of commerce.

I believe this to be the greatest of southern crossroads, perhaps the most significant in all of America in terms of the length of roads crossed. Perhaps there is some crossing in the midwest that might beat it. I don't know. I've never cared. The roads lead north and west for as long as they possibly can.

Once you are on I-10 there are no lights, just highway and darkness, lots of it.

This particular night I was tired but not that tired. I wasn't suffering from highway hypnosis or anything along those lines. I didn't need to pull over. I was singing along with the tape player in a full-throated way, rocking along to R.E.M. or something similar. I was eager to make the last hour and a half towards my girlfriend.  

There was the occasional headlight of a car going the opposite direction. The highway was separated by a significantly concave grass median, the outside shoulders tapering down into woods that were worse than nothingness. Darkness, and shadows that barely required light.

I had my high-beams on and there really was no reason to dim them for cars coming the other direction. The night and distance absorbed any oncoming insult.

About halfway between the turn west and my destination, maybe 45 minutes that direction, I saw somebody by the side of the road. I could see them from quite a ways off because they were wearing something very light, almost reflective. A sort of silverish figure standing on the side of the road, but on the road, at the edge.

I started to slow down as I approached, looking around for a wreck off to the side, assuming there must have been an accident. I probably slowed to around 30 or 40 while I was still a hundred yards off or more. With there being nothing else to see I started to focus on the person on the side of the road, who then started to walk into the road. I slowed down even more, not knowing what was going on and not wanting to hit them. I pulled to the inside of the far side, to the opposite edge. 

It was then that I noticed the way they were moving, as if their elbows and knees moved in both directions. The fabric, or what seemed to be fabric, was of one piece and was worn from head to toe without a visible seam. There was a sort of S-shape to the extremities and this seemed to be how it would move, a sinuous sort of dance, though the feet were noticeably shifting also. It seemed almost unable to hold up its own weight in this way, but showed no sign of effort, or strain. 

By this time it was in the middle of the right lane. I had slowed to about 15 or 20 miles per hour. As I passed I noticed that there wasn't much of a face on it. It was taller than the side of my truck but still a couple feet away, so that I could see to the top of its head. There were indentations where there would be eyes and they were of a slightly different color, almost a grey and without as much reflection, maybe none. There seemed to be a place where a mouth would be, but it didn't seem possible for it to ingest anything that way. Sound may have been a possibility. I heard nothing. It spoke nothing that I could hear. But it was interested in my passing. 

Its attention followed me as I went by. Its head turning slowly with me, slow enough for me to get a really good look. Its arms were moving and even seemed to lengthen a little as I passed. I could see the fingerless hands and a dark line that hinted at a thumb. Through my right window I looked directly at it. As the lights from my headlights were no longer hitting it there seemed to be a glow from whatever light had been previously on it, as if it had absorbed all that it needed. Phosphor, or a bioluminescence. I could see it even more clearly once it was out of the direct light.

This mild glow seemed to come from just under the surface of the material. There may have been more than one layer. The glow was concentrated in the abdomen, though only slightly more so. As you can probably guess, its head was large and its neck was thin and seemingly elongated.

It all happened in a matter of seconds, no more than three or four at the very most. 

Then, it was in my rearview mirror, it had turned to watch me drive away. I could see it still face-on watching me depart. This is when I could really see how it moved, its sort of liquid locomotion, with each leg almost acting independently, like a four-tentacled octopus on its hind legs. It didn't seem to be pursuing me or indicate anything to me other than mild curiosity. It just turned and watched, standing near the center of the highway. 

That didn't matter to me.

I was only about 20 or 30 feet past it when I also turned backwards to look off into the woods from where it seemed to have come, wanting to see a few cars, probably pickup trucks, and kids laughing, getting their kicks, drinking beer and cheering.

There was nothing, but it was dark.

I got my truck back up to 70 mph as fast as I could, as fast as it would, watching this lone apparition recede in my rearview mirror, deep in the middle of nowhere. By this time I was shaking, and scared. I kept looking in my mirror and through the back window of my truck, half expecting to see a launch and a light darting through the sky. I kept telling myself to stop or turn around, but wasn't able to.

Fuck, fuck, fuck was all I could think clearly.

I told myself over and over that it had to have been kids, college kids, an elaborate prank. A student of avant-garde dance. Michael Jackson had also pulled off miracles of movement. 

But then I couldn't understand why they would risk their life stepping out onto a highway for a joke or a student project - so far away from anything, willing to get shot, almost asking for it.

Kids, I thought, kids it must be. Not kids like me.

And that's what I've told myself ever since. 

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Meatball

(The redneck 'Princess Leia' and El Bandito)

Well, baby Tylenol - as evil as we are to understand that it is - works. The child sleeps. Acetaminophen kills more people than any other over the counter drug, we're told. 150 people a year. I suppose they do not include nicotine in their assessment of such things. It is not a "drug." It is a product. 

150... barely a weekend in Daytona. 

I don't know... it seems worth it, to me. I do not believe that I have ever come close to overdosing on Tylenol, nor have I been at a party where anybody lapsed into sudden-headache-catastrophe. Nobody flinches at a number so low any more. The internet has made 100 the new 1. 

Accidental overdoses, we're told. This is the age of Social Media. If it were 150,000 since 9/11, well, that would be different. That is a post-worthy number. In a number like that there lurks a youtube conspiracy.

Won't it be nice when the NSA can step in and prevent a few of those?

"You tube!" sounds like a 70's insult.

What am I doing? Rachel might still read this site. 

'This American Life'  - everybody tells me to check it out. It's where clever people derive their chat. A guy I work with - I almost called him "my boss" - recommends it. 

El Jefe.

Bruce Springsteen is The Boss.  Everybody else is just tired, and fired.

"The devil appeared like Jesus through the steam in the street."

I don't know what to write about any more. I've told all of my stories. I've devolved into shock radio tactics. Pussy, etc.

Wait. I was shot at once, with a handgun, in Florida. I'm surprised I never mentioned that when I was espousing my wisdom on gun violence and George Zimmerman. Maybe I did. 

I don't have time to tell that story today but maybe tomorrow morning, though Friday mornings are often hectic for me. I am eager to get the day moving to build up speed into a weekend in which I insist on relaxing. We are subtlety reminded that we are both replaceable and yet also a valued member of the team. It is odd, and yet demonstrably true.

I don't know why I keep mentioning Erich Fromm here, but... he discusses a mother's love in comparison to a father's; conditional and unconditional. It's what prepares us for the workplace. We are coddled yet reminded to perform, accepted into something much larger than just us, but shown that others can be preferred over us if we do not produce the kind of results that make dad happy.

It is strange. I'm not sure what an acceptable alternative might be. It seems a human reaction to human conditions.

People who rebel, often, are not rewarded. Your rebellion must always be for the purpose of improvement. It must never be too specific, and most importantly, not very often. Never rebel against the stated rebels. 

That's what happened in Beirut. A civil war does not need another civil war.

What the fuck am I talking about...?

Well, I could explain, but I'll be out of time soon. The gym calls, again. 

All I ate for dinner last night was meatballs, about 25 of them. Not even on a plate. Just right off of the oven tray, standing in the kitchen in my underwear. I would be rather embarrassed if a video emerged from the experience. A hidden camera on the stove and me just asserting my dominance over the hot, helpless spheres. Particularly in the timing, the way that I would retreat and return, just a hand sneaking back into frame and abducting them one at a time, as if I was somehow doing myself a favor by spacing out my gluttony into discrete ingestion periods.

---------

Just got back from the gym. Meatballs or not I've lost 15 pounds. A few of them might have made their way out to my extremities where there is less gravity. But I'll find them, and then consume them in a different way.

The second highest grossing movie of 1977 was Smokey and the Bandit.

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