SFD

Yesterday, the birthday party was a great success. Everybody had fun and there was a pleasant air of celebration. At first Rhys didn't seem to understand what was happening. He was quiet and seemed to not quite know what to do. We kept reminding him that it was "his" birthday. But he settled into it all pretty quickly once things got going. 

We all visited the fire station together and the firemen let the kids sit up in the truck and pretend that they were driving. There is a museum in the front of the building where they have preserved some old firetrucks from Sonoma's heyday. One of the classic pump trucks was reported to have put out a fire using the wine from opened barrels. There was no accessible water anywhere. They did what they had to. 

The kids all had fun looking at the fire stuff and ringing the antique sirens.  

Afterwards, we went across the street to a back room in a pizza place designed for kids' birthday parties. There was pizza and salad and soda and cake. The little ones played a game in which they tried to connect taped spoons to a picture of the birthday boy on the wall. 

They all seemed to love being blindfolded and spun in circles by Rhys' mommy. 

Time crawls on, only those that are paying a certain type of attention seem to notice. Just look at Rhys, looking at Rhys.

Today, there is the sunrise. It is alone on my list of things. It seems an easy enough aim. 

As an old fisherman, I will wade and then paddle into pre-dawn, casting my line out into nothingness, to see what bites.

It will smell the bait somewhere far east of here, see the wiggling lure; unable to resist the urge, the need, it will move towards temptation. All things do.

Once the early ripple is detected then I will reel this sun slowly in, patiently, to pull it jumping enormous out of darkness with a billion mile thread connected. It will arc up over the boat in precise slow motion as if our very lives depended.

There is nobody that can stop. 

.

The Q6 Institute

(A Little Boy)

Today is the celebration of Rhys' second birthday. There will be a trip to the fire station. There will also be ice cream, cake, and presents. When it's all over he will announce his daily retirement by taking a nap. 

Two years…. I look at little baby boy Rhys and I still can't believe that he came out of my body.

A woman will never understand what it's like to have a child emerge from them in quite this way and then go on to become another living creature, in time. 

Shortly after the precious dna which contained more than 3/4ths of the vital information that made Rhys possible left my body it went through a sort of incubation period inside of another, emerging to finally re-unite with me after 9 long months. 10 months, maybe. Maybe longer. Nobody was counting, and nobody knows what truly goes on once it enters the host parent. It is entirely lost to science at that point. The curtain comes down and there is no peeking behind it. It's the way that nature, and all of the gods, intended... from the very beginning of time. 

It's all part of the tender miracle and mystery of fatherhood.

If only we had a way of examining the process more carefully, then we might be able to understand it just a little bit better. 

Well, we do now!

Voice-Over: Sometimes I look around at the world and I wonder, "How many children do I really have out there?"

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Please don't touch the display pieces. 

You break it, you bought it.

.

Trisha, for you

(N. Dynamite)

I am a wanderer again, sleeping on air. Any full-bodied x-ray of me would seem silly, improbable, supernatural even.  

I think of all those prior to me, the many luckless surfers of the past, sleeping on couches and pull-out beds. Those hideous sofa-beds, and futons, made of metal and lumps of hardened cotton. They are so awful as to be inhospitable, not fit for prisoners, barely better than a wood floor. Anybody that has one does not want visitors, truly, and ownership of any one of them is the surest way of communicating that simple fact.

Not my friend, Cato… oh no. He really knows how to treat a vagrant, roving itinerant. He would be willing to sleep on the air mattress himself, and has tried many times, but I've had to let him gently know, "No, Cato, no. It will only ever be 'latent', now go back to sleep. I'm sorry. It's not going to happen, ever."

Now, he has a fine, nice air-mattress, suitable for a monarch. It is appreciable, truly. I could sleep on it endlessly, and have often tried. I awake most mornings feeling altogether rested, from temple to temple, yoga-ized, undefeated and undefeatable. 

It helps that I ingest several drops of liquid morphine and smoke a snowdrift of opium just before dozing off. It helps me relax. A couple valium will prevent me from becoming too anxious. 

Ah, Bliss.

I awake feeling victory or nothing at all, as if I am in a floatation tank, detached from body, gently spinning, lost in the champion's vortex. It is movement which slowly breaks the spell. I become aware of the force of gravity, of being pulled in one direction, then the air beneath me, the room around me, the city outside. 

Then, the memory of work will ransack the morning, making the destruction of the dream complete. 

The pain, the horror returns. I am not in poverty, but neither am I free.

Wait! Today is Friday... The filthy grind comes to a slipshod halt. Temporary days stretch out before me like a little holiday, a mini 48-hour season. Sobriety will make those hours seem closer to 52. I swear, it adds at least two hours to every day, sometimes more. They are boring hours, but in the final tabulation those count too.

Tomorrow morning, we will have a little birthday party for Rhys, who becomes two later this week. He will run around and poop his pants in numeric victory, surrounded by other midgets.

Speaking of, I found the now aging picture below in my phone. I was loitering on the toilet, contemplating the emerging bitcoin phenomenon, and little Rhys wandered into the bathroom and wanted to participate. He sat down backwards on his training toilet and "went potty" with me, making sure I knew how it was done.

It was a first, for me. I'm not sure - with all of the pictures I've posted here - why I haven't posted it before. 

Has there even been a kid more adorable, and deserving of his father's love?

If so, I don't know who.

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The Lamb of Wolf Street

I've been spending more time at the cinema - "the movies." Two of the three films that I've seen have been disappointments. The Coen Brothers and Martin Scorsese should be flogged, given a sharp dose of the scourge. I genuinely tried to like both of their new films, but no luck. It was a going-through-the-motions for everybody involved.

Me, the poor viewer, most of all. 

I do everything that I am supposed to do: I buy my ticket, I buy popcorn, I turn off my phone, I find a seat, somebody sits down right next to me, practically in my lap, I stare forward into the darkness and up at the screen, waiting, but then... no magic happens. There is no story in which I wish to participate. 

It is all too bad, a minor misfortune. I want so much to be transported, to be elsewhere, to escape... all of that. But nothing. It is a drug that doesn't work, a cheat. I achieve nothing, no euphoria, no suspension of time or self. Nada.

I had only popcorn and root beer for dinner last night, to give you an idea of my condition. I awoke feeling vaguely queasy this morning. Coffee feels wrong, but it is what I must now do. I am a helpless addict, a piteous abuser of the the murky brew. Left to my own devices I would choose it, even over sex, though probably not over opium.

I don't see why I have to choose, really. Soon it will be surging through my veins, you will see. 

I have heard the term "sex addict" used to describe the behavior of politicians. What is the joy in sexuality if not compulsion? 

Sex is strange. It does strange things to people, whether they are having it or not. There is the obvious component of acceptance, of belonging. But the more fantastical attributes of it seem to remove this other purpose by a degree, or more.

Of what purpose, that, I wonder. 

To wit, during coitus I am sometimes able to take the form of a whimsical Dutch schoolgirl. 

Wait, no, no, that can't be right.... Put that away, for now.

There is an enormous element of fantasy involved, illusion urge. It ignites the imagination, and by so doing, can put a sense of belonging at a one step remove. It is almost as if we don't really want what we need, or claim to. We seem to need an escape from the gravity of the act, from part of its purpose.

Fear, I guess.

These are just assumptions. I'm not sure if we even understand yet why humans have sex. Procreation plays a secondary or tertiary role in it, at best.  But the fear of it, I guess, the desire of one, looms larger. I seem to remember reading about it when I was younger and then forming some opinions.

Where did I put those silly notions? They must be around here somewhere.

In the shared act of fantasy another layer of acceptance altogether is invoked. To admit and confess one's sexual reveries to another enables a different level of acceptance, and perhaps even love. Providing an opportunity to love and know both the hidden and revealed, all at once. In that it is sacred, and functions as magic, of the sympathetic kind. We become and hold power briefly over that which we imitate.

It does something else, also. Baudelaire proposed that we have sex so that we can participate in evil, so that we might know what it is like.

These are just assumptions based on illusions, shadows dancing along the wall, ghosts swimming in the pool at midnight.

This sex is not dissimilar from what we may hope to have happen during a film. We don't wish to have only the dry reality of an incident conveyed to us. We wish to enter the fantasy imagination of those involved, to float across time with them. We wish to be another, to participate in the lives and the dreams and the playacting of another self. To enter safely the sordid, the seamy, if only to make it seem secure by reducing its threat over us.

To control and relinquish, not always in that oder.

Substances seem to facilitate and accelerate this transportation of the inner world. When we consider what it might mean to need a catalyst to make the internal more mobile, and flexible, more willing… well, there is something strange there also. It goes against what we are told, though not much. It functions as an excuse as much as it does stimulus. It can.

Fear, I guess.

We accept less responsibility for our fantasies when they are dressed in the cloak and lingerie of intoxication. They seem to happen to us, rather than from us, or for us. To suggest, or accept, a similar fantasy when sensible implies a wholly different receipt of the illusion, somehow.  Some resist it blankly, denying all knowledge of previously admitted joys. Privacy, even in confession, then most of all.

Each type of seriousness or frivolity speaks to the individual fancy, so often unwittingly so.

Well…

The Wolf of Wall Street… it's the same story that we've heard a million times before: wife likes to snort cocaine, husband likes to smoke crack. Somehow they can't seem to align these impulses.

Is there just no love left in this world?

.

And so this is Christmas

Swift's Resolutions:

Not to marry a young Woman.
Not to keep young Company unless they reely desire it.
Not to be peevish or morose, or suspicious.
Not to scorn present Ways, or Wits, or Fashions, or Men, or War, &c.
Not to be fond of Children, or let them come near me hardly.
Not to tell the same story over and over to the same People.
Not to be covetous.
Not to neglect decency, or cleenlyness, for fear of falling into Nastyness.
Not to be over severe with young People, but give Allowances for their youthfull follyes and weaknesses.
Not to be influenced by, or give ear to knavish tatling servants, or others.
Not to be too free of advise, nor trouble any but those that desire it.
To desire some good Friends to inform me which of these Resolutions I break, or neglect, and wherein; and reform accordingly.
Not to talk much, nor of my self.
Not to boast of my former beauty, or strength, or favor with Ladyes, &c.
Not to hearken to Flatteryes, nor conceive I can be beloved by a young woman, et eos qui hereditatem captant, odisse ac vitare.
Not to be positive or opiniative.
Not to sett up for observing all these Rules; for fear I should observe none.

Those sound about ryght.

If I were going to do anything at all... then today would be a good day for it. This newest of days. Something, like listening to old Journey albums or cleaning out the garage.

The new year should fall in early spring. Whoever arranged the configuration of the Gregorian calendar to the earth's rotation around the sun was not so great a poet, nor gentle thinker. It is all wrong, and anybody that celebrates newness at the very beginning of the height of winter has a lonely and troubled soul. That is but one of the many things that is so detestable about the masses, they lack an open sense of natural truth. They are willing to wear hats and drink champagne to celebrate the demise and rebirth of their own maudlin ill-wittedness. At least in that they are marked and can more easily be noted.

I still celebrate Lady Day, and recognize it as the true beginning of the new year (see image above). 

I will finish East of Eden today. Yes, I know... I am reading it slowly, because it is dull. I don't regret having read it. I can say that. It does possess occasional merit, passages here and there that feel like a payoff of sorts. It is not great, in the sense that it neither provokes nor provides a sense of catharsis. No tragedy occurs because the characters are wooden, carved imprecisely from the wrong tree. Or, I should say, there is very little chance of tragedy happening in the next fifty pages. None, really, because I don't care. Steinbeck possesses a craft and uses it, that's all. The heavy scent of craft can be smelled throughout. It can not be concealed by the craftsman. He lacks the requisite artistry; too fond of biblical myth, and personal nostalgia. Six hundred pages of it wears me down, particularly as he seems incapable of managing those two ambitions and aligning their purpose. When I finish it later today I will be lying in my bed the entire time, not in Salinas, where I belong.

Additionally, he suffers great critical loss at being dead, male, and white. What combination could possibly render one more inconsequential in this  bright new day. Steinbeck himself claimed that if Eden were not good then he has been fooling himself. That is likely its truest critique. 

He is clumsy, a melodramatic moralist. Faults that could be overlooked, except for the gracelessness. That ignominy is one that no reader should be asked or expected to disregard. It is forgivable to be inelegant in a casual essay - a brutish assumption practiced here with monastic fervor - but to do so in such a grand, hopeful, and epic way… Well, a reader should find themselves chanting Yes when reading a work, not the other. 

Oh my. No, no. 

A great book should always seduce us, even if we are repulsed by what is being written, by what is being told. The truest fault is to be charmless in one's vices.

I know that now.



What else might I do today? I have a lunch date with the woman pictured above. She is struggling with a difficult relationship. I will attempt to charm her, let her forget her many woes. 

Perhaps it is best not to mention Steinbeck, present myself as being too indelicate in critical matters.

I know that now. I know that now.

.

MMXIII < MMXIV

Couple things. Heavy Whipping Cream is not the same as Half and Half and can not be used in the same way. I know that now. It is well to have learned that lesson on New Year's Eve. I would not wish to bring that heavy ignorance into the following year with me. Best to leave it in the past, where it belongs.

As for the picture above, sometimes it is easy to forget that not every person that knows me is a friend of mine on a social media site. Some people keep up with my topsy-turvy inner world here, instead. I had posted that picture on Facebook on Christmas Day (after somebody reminded me to do so) and it was a hit. The classic and timeless image of a boy on Christmas. What fun.

Well, I don't have much to say this morning. I slept in late, for me. I was up until around 10pm, practically an all-nighter, for me. Now, I will coffee myself up for the gym, prepare for the day ahead. It is the last of its kind, we're told.

Very few events on the calendar reveal how absolutely asinine people are, or can be. They will denounce the previous year as if the Gregorian calendar, of all things, is to blame for their current sorrows. We are meant to understand that the year brought them some known misery, but they are strong and will overcome it all, with the help of the rapidly advancing next year, a time that they are greatly looking forward to and will prove it so by achieving a mawkish level of revelry and intoxication sometime later today, building up to a crescendo at midnight.

The only shame on this day is, apparently, not having a lover to kiss when the clock strikes doom for the past and cheer for the future, a thing that it does each and every second if we are to understand and believe the message of this moment. This yearly Cinderella story in reverse grips the minds of most Americans, though oftenest in the form of the lottery. 

One of my most perverse joys is asking people to pray for me. Sometimes I'll reference some ill boding online, without specifics, and those who do not know me well enough will fall into my venus fly trap-like snare.

There was a study that once showed that having people pray for you, at least among believers, was bad for them. Once they found out that their loved ones were praying for them then they believed their condition to be worse than it was and sometimes resulted in their decline, or demise. More often than when people were not praying for them, or when strangers were, or when they did not know that anybody was praying for them.... So the science is in: prayer is dangerous.

I might be overstating its negative powers, but here is an article about the study.

Apparently, the best thing to do when a loved one is sick is to let them know, often, that nobody at all is praying for them.

This time you're going to need to save yourself.... Only you can worm your way into heaven this time. 

Bah! Volkswagen Humbug....

Current Unix Time: 1388497564 (UTC)

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Wild Planet

Well, the quiche lorraine was quite good, from yesterday.

I can't say the phrase "quiche lorraine" without thinking of the B-52's album, Wild Planet.  

Fuck!… Was that really only 34 years ago? If I had saved only $1 every month, instead of buying that album, then I would have $408 right now….. I am living in my own Private Idaho. 

Where do I go from here to a better state than this?

Watching that video now it is difficult to determine if they really loved surf rock or they were merely aping it in kitsch parody. They were from Athens, so both, probably.

Fred Schneider: I know very well that there's a New Wave going on, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to shave this mustache off. This was a gift from Mr. Freddie Mercury himself. Also, I should remind you that this mustache got us on MTV. 

The brunette in the band, I forget her name, looks like she wandered into this video-shoot from the last official press gathering of the Manson Family. They cleaned her up a little, taught her one line of the song and then told her to dance as if she was on bikini beach just after dosing her with the last drops of the liquid acid they had in the eye dropper that had been lost for a week and a half before they finally found it at the bottom of the cooler in the van that day.

But she makes the most of it, just watch.

Somebody has definitely flipped her kill-switch.

My kinda' girl. Towards the end, the redhead gets the signal also. You can easily spot the moment that the message is received and understood.

But if you can not, then it is precisely 2:48. 

The only choreography done for this video was at the very, very end of the song when they told ol' Bouffante Fromme to stop dancing. They had to get it right on the first take. The importance of this moment can not be over emphasized.

Okay, I did a search, to find the pic above. Her name is Cindy Wilson, which ties neatly into the Manson myth.

Geezus. I just got back from the gym. I had to listen to Sonic Youth's Dirty to get that Private Potato song out of my head.

Well, the quiche was good, anyway. Then, we went on a winery tour, Benziger. They told us about biodynamic farming techniques. I had promised myself that I was never going to go on that tour again - I've been about seven times now - but it was better than doing nothing, and my friends were going. I had brought a 35mm film camera with me. I figured that I would take some expensive pictures that I won't see for a month or more. I only realized after the fact that I had brought all black and white film.

Oh well… We'll see…..

At the end of the tour they led us all to the tasting room where everybody tried some of the wines. Benziger wines have never been my favorite. But I engaged in the obligatory conversation about my abstaining, which a friend callously referred to as "teetotaling." I am not now, nor have I ever been, such a thing and am more than happy to prove it the next time I get sick, or any given morning. I have no objections to NyQuil and Listerine. I sip three or four pint glasses of each whenever I feel a cold coming on, as a preventative measure, etc.

Only Costco knows my true secret burden.

Well, no. I am merely hoping to avoid abject bad-boyism, through the specific strategy of not drinking. I have no current plans to export my behavior, nor model for living, to others. 

My self-help book is only one word: Help! 

But at least I wrote it.

The longer I go without alcohol in its social form the more I begin to see how deeply it affects many people, whether they believe themselves to be drinkers, problematic or not. Once you are known as "the person who does not drink, who used to, a lot..." then people will often discuss their drinking, as well as their relationship with one of their parents, with you. This invariably includes how they feel about that parent's drinking, and the effect it has had on them. It is always just one parent. They will mention the other, to present a seemingly fair and balanced view, but their interest will focus on the troubled one. It is, predictably, the father with men and the mother with women, though not always.

There are some who, also understandably, will not discuss either parent's behavior or relationship to alcohol at all, but every so often you can detect an uneasiness about the fact that it is being discussed in any form. 

Not everyone. Not everyone.

They are difficult conversations to have, with occasionally difficult details to hear. I said a few weeks ago that I find myself to be more empathetic now that I am not drinking. It is all true. Some of these parental details are deeply disturbing, even when they are not horrific; little facts that have accumulated or become significant to the child, a child that is now an adult, confessing things to me. 

Many people have them. You can see how these memories shaped the early idea of the person, and how they now linger or even possess the adult. You note how carefully they hold and carry these memories, in what fashion they are presented, in what expectation of response. 

Nobody that was even adequately raised, with a bare modicum of love, wants their life to turn out badly. Nobody, I don't think, starts out hoping that things go wrong for them. But part of coming of age is a testing of your limits, and also the limits of others. Then, the test becomes your own personal definition of you, where it is finally insisted upon and then regularly proven. It hardens around the person, becomes constricting, restraining.

Phrases like "fierce independence" spring to mind, one borrowed from a close friend. The terms that one uses to accept, adopt, or embrace their various stances. The stances become the person, then the persons' congregate for the purpose of reaffirmation. A roomful of similar stances, all proving their utter uniqueness to one another. Sometime long after you've realized it, the stance may have replaced the authenticity of what you had hoped to embrace, to become; a rebel without a revolution.

Best to fall in love, hobble together some semblance of a good life of your own. That is best.

It is either that or living underground, like a wild potato.

Don't go on the patio!

.

Also, I dream

What next? Wait for another new moon... again, I guess.

Some friends are in town. I will go with them today and eat brunch at The Girl and The Fig, a popular local restaurant, country food with a French passion, says the slogan near the door. 

It's good. The quiche, they say, is great.

I went to see "Inside Llewyn Davis" yesterday, alone. It was a disappointment. A few people had told me that it wasn't very good and I wanted them to be wrong. But wishing was not enough this time.

I saw, again, the trailer for the new Spike Jonze film, Her. He seems to be growing up a little, sadly. Joaquin Phoenix is and always has been useless. Scarlett Johansson has a wonderful voice... but none, I think, do there embrace.

I'm not sure what it is with people here. They have a slightly different set of standards which they operate under. It's very strange. They seem to expect others to respect their individual space but they have no problem testing, or invading, the space of others. I don't know how to adequately communicate to them that my intimate space represents a much larger area than most.

Hugging strangers does not always result in the desired outcome. It is perhaps the likelihood of my paraphilic joy which alarms them.

The last time that I went to this same movie theater, to see Nebraska, I sat towards the front of a relatively empty theater, as close to the middle as I could get, in a completely empty row. A woman decided to sit down right next to me. I'm amazed that she didn't try to sit in my seat with me. 

Understandably, she also wanted to sit near the center. It was my mistake. I know this. I should have sat slightly off to one side if I wanted the convenience and luxury of having an open seat next to me in a nearly abandoned theater. 

This time, I sat off to one side and put my jacket on the seat next to me, which still wasn't in the center. A woman marched all the way over to where I was sitting, again in an empty row, and asked if the jacket was mine. I responded positively and she then asked if I could move it. I happily complied. I picked up my jacket, sat down in the seat in which it had been lying peacefully and then sat it on the seat next to me, safely on the other side, away from her. She didn't seem to like this but it still didn't send the appropriate message, or didn't send it strongly enough. She sat down next to me and then tried to raise the arm rest. I explained that my disability prevents me from being able to sit up straight without assistance, that I have periodic upper-head paralysis. I warned her that if I fell asleep on her shoulder not to disturb me, it is a rare form a narcolepsy that is like sleepwalking in a karate movie.

Well, I just deleted a long passage. Oh well, this site is perhaps not ready for it.

It wasn't nearly as bad as I have described - the woman in the theater - but it also wasn't far off, either. I asked her if the movie got really scary would it be okay if I held her hand.

I received two packages from the world wide web yesterday. Both were the wrong product. Books. That is the expected result from amazon.com around Christmastime, I guess. 

Just hurry up and send out packages to addresses that appear on this screen. Grab boxes, use the printers. Move, Move! Time is not the Easter Bunny, now get to work!

Lately, I am engaged in the nearly religious daily observance of chucking money at the internet demons, trying to appease them, to get them all back in their bottles.

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A new moon

My life is strange. I would growl at it if I found it outside.

I used to work the overnight shift in NYC. It was a lonely time to be awake. I would sleep anywhere from about 1 pm until 9 pm. When I awoke I would ride my bike up 2nd Ave. to the corner of 59th St. and 5th Ave., weather permitting. The wind would blow across from the East River in darkness. I was a true champion, crossing more than one hundred intersections a day, at the highest speeds attainable by bike. A death blur.

Sleeping in the day, I had unplugged the buzzer to the front door so that nobody could ever bother me, except by choice. Delivery persons would ring every apartment in the building expecting that somebody would just buzz them in without checking to see who it was. They were often right, or lucky. It is the New York way of things. Few spoke the same language well. The delivery people would act as if everybody in the building was lucky to be getting anything delivered. Small matter if it was meant for them or not. That they weren't just leaving it on the front doorstep to get stolen was considered an immense courtesy to all, for some reason. They did their jobs so begrudgingly even I would have to remind myself that they got paid for it at all. It seemed as torture.

People often talk of the coldness and desolation of that city. They really have very little idea. Films barely convey any of the truth of it. The streets at midtown were completely deserted after midnight. Encountering anybody in the night was almost always a deeply offsetting experience. Simple existence becomes suspicious, unexpected. The inevitable question was always first in both people's minds: what are you doing out here, why? 

Only drunks say, "Hello There!" at that hour. The occasional group of expensive prostitutes, escorts, usually in groups of two or more, just coming down from many flights up, whispering, heading to the corner for a taxi like a single six-legged sex monster. It was always an absorbing discovery of sorts. The loneliness would briefly disappear and then somehow double in just a matter of minutes. You would watch them even after they were gone, remembering the smooth bare legs, the high and tight colored skirts, heels clacking out an erotic dance rhythm, all getting into the car together. You would imagine giggles, and more. 

What fun, you might think. They must be so cold, you might think.

In the winter it was impossible. It would seem perfectly still until you had rounded a corner at the end of the block, a chill would move through you as if you were already a ghost, dressed in even less. The only warmth for some is money. 

My life is like that again, though not quite as cold. I am awake for long hours through the middle of the night. There are no escorts getting into cabs, only the occasional tweeker, barely a female, possibly eager to prostitute themselves in any number of ways imaginable, but alas, there are so few takers under the stars.

I just went to the 24 hour grocery store to buy a cold coffee, the only kind they had, and I realized that I continue to make choices which leave me increasingly alone, isolated from other people. I work long days by myself and am awake for strange, elastic hours through the night.

I need my own place. A place in which the minor bites of time might matter less, where I will only feel the seasons slip past, one by one.

As I returned from the store, I spied the balsamic crescent moon rising just before the sun. A lopsided smirk in the sky. It will darken even more in the next few days. On New Year's night it will become new, invisible to all but a few.

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"The world drags me down"

Oh, fuckness... At the end of the day on Friday I started browsing videos. I came across one that really brought back some jagged memories, as if glass was shattering around me, a real humdinger.

My god, I felt it, for a few slim minutes it made me ache and yearn to be again. I was ready to leap in the car and blast as fast as I possibly could, as much as I could, with whomever was willing.

Who would match that desperation.

Of course, there wasn't anywhere to go, nowhere that would take me, nor understand, nobody that would jump up and twist up and tear up with me and agree, and agree, and agree, until we were high, and high again, again and again.

I calmed down from there, and then even more from there.

Within a handful of lost minutes, on a sunsettting Friday, I was listening to the late 80's Neil Diamond alternative equivalent.

I was so ready to be stupid, with anybody, for three or four consecutive minutes. I held that much.

Oh fuckins, where did it all go, and so fast? Not the stupidity, that still lingers mightily, but the youth that allows it all to parade so eternally unquestioned.

At least for the length of part of that first video I was back there again, some suburb ring of the outer parts of Orlando, wishing and wanting to be anywhere else, as soon as possible.

It took another ten years or more before I did finally leave. I would call it an escape but it wasn't. The city was about as sick of me as I was of it.

Escape, that's a fun idea when you don't know where to go. The feeling of anywhere is powerfully seductive, in short bursts.

I know that now.


"Fate, up against your will…."

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Confessor Cusick, B.S.

No time to write today. It's too bad, I have much to express. The gym has a way of clarifying thoughts that might otherwise appear jumbled. 

They would appear that way because they are. My musings are always an untidy heap.

A friend once suggested dictation software. I might try it. How funny, or perhaps disastrous, would an "extreme cardio" post be? From sleepiness to breathless desperation in 20 short minutes. 

Caloric impact of each post : -450 calories.

My Oprah awaits….

Yesterday's post got a fair amount of response. I got quite a few emails.

People just love a confession, from a confessor. 

Discussing one's feelings about alcohol has a powerful effect on some. Rigidity of opinion seems to be the salient trait, and many are willing to present theirs. It is useful, and makes the subject seem less taboo. A differing of opinion is not necessarily indicative of difference in character, or a paucity, but it sure seems that way sometimes. There is an insistence with certain subjects.

People need to believe what they need to believe. There is little getting around it. Everybody learns to navigate a very familiar course, shocked at the suggestion or discovery of an alternate route.

Eureka, Archimedes!

Eureka, Jesus!

Eureka, Eureka!

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And so this is Christmas….

I've mentioned here before that I am not currently drinking. After several decades of imbibery I have undertaken an experiment of sorts: to gauge how well I handle emotions when not on fire with them. The holidays have been unique, so far, either because of this or in spite of it. "It" being abstemiousness and measured temperance, I guess. 

Drinks are counted in pints, glasses, or shots while self-control is counted in days. 

Doesn't seem quite fair. It's no wonder that the tally runs so high on the one side. If I wanted, I could calculate my sobriety in hours, or minutes. That would at least level the playing field a bit. If I calculate just the hours of 82 days it is currently 1,968. Irony, that. But they keep adding up, those hours. 

All of the words which indicate sobriety seem to indicate seriousness to a fault. It is perhaps this that gives abstaining such a stigma, one becomes a pariah of solemnity. That, and the fact that most abstainers actually are very serious about their abstinence, and are social pariahs. 

I am not - I do not believe - yet. 

I'm enjoying it, somberiety, but I do miss drinking a little here and there and do not consider it quite the evil that I have been told it is. There are those who refuse to see it any other way.

Alcohol is not evil, some people are fucked up, that's all.

The same people that have problems with alcohol also tend to have similar problems with drugs, food, sleep, sex, anything that can be abused, and interacting with all other humans. It requires very little background in science to find the constant among those variables.

But that's not what I wish to write about today, sort of.

Well, one last thing on that point: When you abstain from drinking it can be useful to spend social time with others who also are not drinking, because you are outcasts and belong together. But the problem is that these people are fucked up, truly. They spend much of their time talking about how hard it is not to drink. Like, on the holidays. Seconds later (or before) they will talk about how difficult their lives were on the holidays when they were drinking, and what complete asses they had regularly made of themselves.

If you ask them the simple question, "Which is worse on the holidays, drinking or abstaining?" they will answer immediately, almost angrily, that drinking is much, much worse. 

Most people can draw a very simple conclusion from that answer, others can not. 

It is bizarre, to say the least, and likely indicative of a very serious problem. Though the problem is not with alcohol, per se, but instead it is the inability to reason as an intrinsic function.

I have not yet evilized all of my drinking experiences the way that some might wish me to. I recognize that many of my problems do not disappear when I stop drinking, quite the opposite, a clarity forms about certain issues that is staggering, one at least as staggering as drunkenness itself. 

So, I have no need to then demonize alcohol. That does not seem to be the problem. I am.

This is not what I had hoped to write about today. Where did I go wrong? Ah, I see it above. I got sidetracked with the subject of drinking in the first sentence. I just wanted to make clear that I did not struggle much over the holidays while desisting demonic intoxication. 

But an entire day with nothing to do does make me wish to have a few glasses of wine, which I did.

I don't mean that I had them, but that I wished to, briefly and intermittently. 

I hear people talk about various strategies towards teetotalism, and most of these tactics involve not drinking. I am curious about alternative methods, ones which include occasional drinking.

I wish to experiment with spasmodic dipsomania. 

One thing that seems to be a recurring theme among the systematically clear-headed is that one must avoid "that first drink" if they wish to maintain anything that resembles dignity in the form of sobriety. I question this. Though not for them, but rather for me. I have no problem believing that they are possessed by a drinking malady. It can be detected in the stories they tell. It's in the details. 

Which is worse, drinking or abstaining? Here is one instance where use of the faculty of reason might be handy. 

In general, my life is better when I am not drinking. But we do not live for generals. We often live for moments, and are roundly encouraged to do so.

The irregular question is this: will drinking make this moment better? The answer is quite easy: sometimes, yes it will. But what of the moment that follows? This is where it becomes more difficult to evaluate, and reason begins to interact with something else; fantasies and fears, memories. 

Those that live in danger of predicting doom for themselves should avoid anything that encourages doom to unfold in fact. Some must fight the paths toward ruination the way that others fight off poverty, with constant effort. 

I am convinced that there are some among us who are entirely helpless in this regard. I have met them. Also, there are others that struggle and struggle, quietly or otherwise, to achieve something close to normalcy. Yet still there are others that enter and exit periods of doom in which they must be ever careful and aware to make it back out safely.

Then there are those that needn't worry about such things. Their sense of self is well established and is safe solely because it believes itself to be so. The belief in a thing creates the thing, doom or worth. It is true and continues to become truer.

I am tempted to use the word "begets" here, so I'll stop.

"Morality does not help me. I am a born antinomian. I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws. But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes." - Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

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I observe the holiday

We went to a church service last night. They walked a pregnant camel in who promptly shat on the carpeted stage that they call an altar, then sat down. 

I could not help but quietly and reverently agree.

I am up early on Christmas morning. The excitement is bearable. 

The house is still, the lights dimmed, the tree lit. It is pleasing, like a fire that has died down to a charmed glow. It looks as if the abominable snow saint has already made his magic visit. There are many offerings to the tree. It is nearly surrounded. It would be fun and exciting if King Kong reached in and grabbed everything right now, a'la Fay Wray. 

I await the boy's arrival and excitement. It is for that in which I am mainly looking forward. 

That, and the all-day feasting. Ham that was described with impressed hand gestures, holding an imaginary tree-size pig leg to elucidate. The eyes told the story of the licking of the lips. Then, later, prime rib that was ordered through the services of a special butcher, secret deals made, animals hired to transport the sacred slice, moonlit desert crossings, all-night belly dancing and untold wantonness... tents, drums, etc.

A carnivore's delight. Today, I will be bathing in animal fats. Tomorrow, you will no longer recognize me. I will have returned to my luckless pagan ways. 

But today... I will wander and wallow as an unjinxed gypsy. 

In addition to being a hungry wanderer I will also be a typical father, trying to take pictures of the boy, to capture his excitement upon the magical discovery. I will do my best to preserve that which I can.

I was going through my old photo library this morning, thinking back. I came across the very first pictures of Rachel when she was pregnant with our son. That it was a boy, well, we didn't know it at the time.

The image still excites me; the partial knowledge, the growing expectations. I look at it and I want and want and want, and I also wish.

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Devotees

(… to the world)

You don't have to be an atheist to be suspicious of Christmas, but it sure helps.

It's not so much that people trot out their mildly festive sanctimony and ritual, it's that the version that they choose to bring is so thin and seemingly unequal to the task. I'd almost enjoy the holiday more if everybody ramped it up a bit, really brought their God A-Game. Sort of a Crusade-style holiday: beatings, intolerance, blood thirst, bargains and savagery, impulse acquisitions, the bastinado, all of it. Like Walmart, only somehow grander in scale, broader in scope, more culturally penetrating. 

The parking lot of the local grocery store is the best place to gauge the soul of the holiday. I spent about an hour yesterday at lunch driving around and pulling into spots and then pulling back out again, waving at people out of my window, wishing them seasonal mirth. 

I'm in the spirit though, truly. I even sent out Christmas music, just to give you an idea. I bought presents. Well, in truth, I bought none, but I paid for presents to be bought by one who enjoys the process of shopping much more than I, and is far more accomplished at it. 

My benevolence knows when to take a back seat, enjoy the view, the ride, etc.

Okay, I wish all those happiness who also wish it for others.

In that we are not so dissimilar, the Christmasians and I.

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In the morning the trees are all disappeared

Yesterday, a Christmas party. I ended up on the floor, watching kids play.

Reflections upon childhood can be dangerous. Change is loss, gain is loss. It is too easy to regret, to wallow, to opine. You'll see.

Rhys will be two soon. The months are over, now start the years. There is already so much that will never return, so much gained, so much expectation. There is little tragedy more magical than youth, or as tender.

Selavy wrote about the mixture of pure and impure longings of all young boys, the terror of which I am still possessed, taken with the recurring idea.

We had a very small family. There was no Aunt Thelma in whom to desire, or wonder. Our family consisted of my mother, my father, my brother, no more. When my mother passed away the glue that held our family together had also given its grip. We were three men who seemed not to need one another. So it seemed. 

As I reached that "curious age" neighborhood women became the object of my mostly innocent attention, the spirit of my inquiry; the perennial fascination of femininity, a yearning to know things, to espy and to possess secrets, to make such secrets of scant knowledge and hopeful experience, to charm and be charmed, to approach the hidden, the sacred. To view and wonder - the enigma about enigmas.

Each subsequent want in life is somehow still attached to this. The aspiration to travel, to experience; intoxication and its hunger. Love. Through the glimpsing of this time I came to sense the impulse of music. I had waves of learner lust, unwanted innocence. I became eternally consensual, a beginner.

Not knowing what else to do I exuded a strong willingness to love, to prove. It became me.

It struck. I could not get shed my virginity fast enough or more thoroughly. It seemed a lingering malady, a thing in which to be deeply ashamed. It held something far worse than value, not in the way that any potential counterpart's may have, or may have had. Mine could not be lost, it had to be transferred into something else, given up in the most fantastic secret ever told, by one hardly capable of telling it. You should have seen me try and try.

Once, I found a place where the step-mother of one of my friends could be watched showering. It was a sacred, erotic place. I only saw her through frosted glass, but her nakedness was eternal. The obscured glass, which seemed a damnation at the time, only added to the mythic experience. I remained loyal to her image. I can recall it easily now, like a scene from the greatest film ever made. The less formed a thing the easier it is for the mind to hold unchanged, to cherish, to caress. Nothing, it seemed, could be more beautiful than the almost known. Nothing enchants quite like suggestion. To view and wonder upon my first true mystery.

I disabused myself partly of that notion once I caught sight of a magazine in which the riddle became touchable paper, flesh in the second dimension. Though I remain fascinated with a woman showering. It is not self-pleasuring, but it seems impossible, next to impossible, not to be.

Why not, I cried and cried. Why not?

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The largest impediment to love, it seems, for me, is when I lack the component for self-discovery, that moment of honest inwardness, the unexpected acceptance of what I would wish to deny.

Not the one in which I am standing in the grass peering in towards the liquid language, but the reflection upon it, its strength over me, its limitations. The wondering about the knowing … the knowing acceptance of what I would wish to deny.

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The hairy bikini bandits

(© all wrongs reserved)

A friend offered to write about my life right now, since I can't. I think I'm going to let him. That should be fun. Who does not take interest in their own life? Even suicides will often leave a note of explanation. 

When one does not know what else to do with something: fictionalize it. That will be fun. Or better, at least, for a little while.

The picture above is the proposed cover.

We have not yet settled on a title.

I tried discussing suicide with a friend recently. Bad idea. I spent the largest portion of the conversation explaining that they had "nothing to worry about," that I am going through a difficult time, and discussing suicide, as a phenomenon, shouldn't in any way….

Ok, I see now. It's probably a bad idea, discussing it.

All of my friends, except one, are reluctant to call for help when it pertains to me. That one friend is not only willing but seemingly eager to do so. I only hope that I finally get the help that I need. 

Perhaps "reluctant" is not the right word. Perhaps a "need for help" is not the right phrase. Perhaps.

Jesus. I should stop writing so cryptically. It is only a few days before Christmas. I am going to scare away the holiday revelers that come here to shop. 

I need to go get a coffee, and then go to the gym.

I will leave this much unpublished and come back to it later, see how I feel.

One last thought: I just want a nice blonde that I can administer spankings to, right now. Like the girl in the picture above, but blonde, or brunette, and giggling about it. 

Coquettish, kittenish, demure, etc.

Is it wrong to say "girl" in this context? Or "blonde"?

Seems strange to spank a grown woman… particularly a brunette. 

They have rights, you know, and they barely even did anything wrong.

Why does it seem that there should be a legal difference between blondes and brunettes? Blondes should enjoy a slight advantage. Why can't we institute that into law? 

The people who are against this would be the strongest argument for it.

Four words: First Amendment, Duck Dynasty...

Okay, I am back from my caffeine adventure. I should delete the suicide and spanking parts, and the parts about obvious inequality and legal advantage for blondes.

Just to let you know, it did occur to me.

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Think, differently

I had a strange dream that awoke me, left me wondering. I was suddenly somewhere with a few friends, and also the Dalai Lama. My friends had to do something and so I offered to help, an offer which involved giving the Dalai Lama a ride some place that he was meant to go next. My friends got very dream-serious and looked around at one another, then at me. They told me that once I take responsibility for His Holiness that I can not shirk that responsibility until it is complete. It is a great honor. I have to wait until somebody takes him from me, also accepting that same responsibility. This could be minutes, hours, or years. It could mean the rest of my life. I spent a few dream moments contemplating that.

It woke me up, dear Ebenezer. 

I've never been a fan of the Lama, nor of many supposed spiritual leaders, at least recently. He seems particularly insidious because he preys upon the innocent sensibilities of those who wish to mildly renounce western religions to embrace the otherness of eastern religions, but don't wish to be entirely irreligious altogether. He is a nearly perfect fit, and as such, a nearly perfect fraud. Most of these people fail to realize that their ability to freely choose among religions is mostly a western invention and not some alluring, time-tested gift from the east.  If "invention" is not quite the right word then at least it is mainly a by-product of western culture and the developments associated with it.

The Lama has always struck me as an enormous gonif. Though certainly he is occasionally capable of pumping out an internet-savvy quotation that appeals to the minds of people who require only conciseness and clarity in their spiritual pursuits. That is to assume that the quotations that I have read were even written by him, or even read by him at some point. He is a pure media machine and he very likely has ghost writers. 

If we are, in fact, to believe in his holiness then the belief that a ghost of some sort is speaking through him is to have made the very smallest of intellectual leaps. For what is the concept of a ghost but the spiritual manifestation of another, its continuance, or even rebirth in another. 

That is his claimed essence.

His Highly accepts financial donations from known murderers as well as having openly advocated for India's nuclear capabilities. Not their nuclear power program, but the other one, their increased nuclear armament ambitions. Such is the nature of his eternal saintliness. His persona is impure fabrication and there is absolutely nothing accidental about it, no more than his robe or the inheriting of the occasionally worn yellow hat.

But he seems like a nice enough fellow. I'm sure that he and I would make quite a lot of money together, given the chance.

All that aside, the dream gave me a sense of something that I haven't had in a very long time, the sense that to serve others is a task worth undertaking. To try and help, somehow. In the painful darkness and confusion of life perhaps I could somehow lessen the pain of others.

If there are greater rewards to be granted by helping than by taking then I would like to be the lucky beneficiary of those riches. I am greedy with the idea, possessed by unseen wealth.

For many years I have felt that my own survival was a form of charity. That by keeping myself from becoming a penniless compassion case that I was saving some people somewhere a reasonable amount of hard work, a benevolent act in and of itself. 

I am often found wobbling towards being a bindlestiff. 

But no, that all ceased being moderately true throughout the last 5-7 years. Now I am able to take care of myself under most circumstances. There are always a few instances that spring up in life unexpected which leave me surprised and ill-prepared, but for the most part I only eat cold soup when I choose to.

But it is not just about poverty. The dream left me feeling something else.

I am becoming more devout as I age. Not devoted to any religion or spirituality set but instead to my time, to the self which I know as mine. I awake alone each morning and I am free. Depending on how I spend that time it tends to determine how long throughout the day I can preserve that state of being. Some days I can make it past lunch. 

In the evenings there is the return to sleep, the lying down alone as even more freedom approaches. It is never enough, yet somehow too much.

I have learned that I should not fight for freedom, because I just might win and it will all be granted, and with far less struggle than I would have guessed.

I want a very different life. I just don't yet know what I'm willing to do to get it, or what effect getting it will have on me.

"I am tired, I am weary, I could sleep for a thousand years. A thousand dreams that would awake me…."

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The moon's residue

I awoke again in a different place. My life was upended in both the big and little ways. Pieces so small that they could not be seen falling, not found until they had landed, collected; gathering slowly, felt at first, suspected before seen. Dust from an old house, covering most the things that matter, settling evenly then gathering in corners. The smallest particles accumulate, descending unseen in sleep. The winds of a whisper. 

Impossible not to touch, impossible to prove, important to finally gather. Imagined ghosts made only of dust, dancing through shafts of light.

There had only ever been a semblance of normalcy, a simulacrum in false reflection, a story told to a story. One learns to suffer it all.

Emptiness is the most convincing of arguments. Impossible not to touch, impossible to prove, important to finally gather.

The moment came that my life shattered like a dish. Suddenly and with a ceramic crash that was thicker than glass. It was over as it happened, in the silence whistling just before. Nothing would now be placed upon it. Dangerous - though not much - shards too large to be ignored, some too small to be found. 

Then, it had become impossible to remember a time when a loving parent or grandparent would wish to hang it on a wall in pride, the way that they used to. There were these special mounts with clips and springs for just such a purpose. Then.

It was the nicest plate in the hallway.

"… I knew I would regret it, but sometimes regret can be as great a thrill as the actual act itself." -CS

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