We are all on our last cruise

Judging by the online community's reaction I'm surprised that Michael Brown didn't get killed much sooner. There are many who feel that he got precisely what he deserved and it was only the heroics of our boys in blue, with their herculean restraint, that kept him alive as long as he was.

We're reminded that the "grand jury" saw all the evidence and has made their decision. There simply wasn't enough evidence to indicate that a crime might have been committed. 

If I was a black guy in the US, with access to the internet, I think that I would be fucking terrified. There seems to be no shortage of people online that would love nothing more to one day be in that cop's shoes and pulling the trigger in just the same way. 

Death to the thugs! 

Not coincidentally, they are the same group that claims that racism is now a thing of the past. You know, we have a black President.

I'm not sure what it is about justice that angers the darkies so much.

For once, the far-right white men all seem angry at the "24 hour news cycle" that has "caused" all of this. It is strange... to have them so close to questioning Fox News for the first time in their lives, but still somehow missing the point.

Well, enough on all of that. The riots should keep everybody happy for another few days. Few things confirm the need to shoot blacks as much as looting. 

If corporations are people then they have 2nd Amendment rights, too. It's only a matter of time that Fox News will be reporting on Fox News shooting looters, as they're reporting on them. That should boost their ratings and forever erase the murky question of "journalistic ethics." 

Finally, the media is taking its responsibility to this nation seriously.

I woke up at the pre-zero hour again. We will be leaving for Colorado soon and I need to prepare. I have only packed my bags insomuch as I charged the batteries for my cameras yesterday. There are two packs of unopened Calvin Klein t-shirts stuffed in with a bunch of dirty blue jeans, a few socks, and a pair of underwear.

Rockies, here we come. 

Last night I was explaining to the boy that we'll be going on an airplane tomorrow. It's old news to him now. He was mainly uninterested, though he did ask me if I paid for him to be upgraded to first class.

We'll be leaving the little pup behind. Grandma shows up here in Sonoma later today to care for him. They're old buddies.

I can feel it already, a very long ways off, this will be one of the strangest Thanksgivings ever.

My father is rather old, his health is beginning the inevitable descent of aging, at that age. Each time I see him I can not help but wonder if it will be the last. It is a grim thought, and one that I can not easily drive from my mind.

There is no escaping it, the unavoidability of mortality.

.

Poppy Tears

(Afghani Dreams)

I don't want to leave the bed in winter. When I do, I only wish to return. If I had a fireplace then I would sit next to it nightly in a big chair, wearing slippers and a robe, smoking opium, if I can get it.

I know now why my friend told me not to look at the tv or internet last night. Ferguson. There are a variety of ways to feel about what is happening there, then there are two types of people that insist that you feel just as they do, without variation. It depends on where you see injustice. Some people are all for law and order, and some are a little too much for it.

One thing that I did find humorous about all of it was an online post I saw: If you were killed by a cop, which store would you want looted in your memory.

It all seems senseless, particularly the part about the grand jury never indicting a cop. I wonder if there has ever been a grand jury that didn't indict a cop killer. That should help serve as a comparative basis when considering what justice is, or should be.

I might write about it more. I just don't feel up to it now. 

Today is my last day of work for a little while. Tomorrow we leave to visit my father's family for Thanksgiving. Cusicks meet Cusicks, familia y familia. We will drive west from Denver through the Rockies tomorrow when we arrive. It is a beautiful drive. I look forward to it each and every time that I've done it. It offers a true sense of passage.

That's all there is to report from the personal essay desk this morning. If anything changes then you will be the first to know.

Keep your eyes on this blank space:

.

Where the sky meets the air in my chest

Towards the last few years of my life as a touring artist I developed an intense fear of flying. The day or two leading up to a departure were often filled with dread. I became cross with those near me, reminding them of my love, of myself as a mortal. I would sleep as the plane pulled back from the gate and taxied. Though this was not sleep as you might know it, but the troubled sleep of reason. I would awake with a start, jumping up suddenly from a pool of monsters. 

A doctor described it to me as one possible response to anxiety, the fear of death, a perversion of the fight-or-flight instinct and a form of narcolepsy, brought on by decades of drug use and a willing disruption of the sleep-wake cycles.

That same doctor prescribed to me many anti-depressants and anti-convolusants, to disastrous effect. I was rendered unbearably erratic by the very cocktails that were designed to bring me solace. Escaping them was a more profound struggle than the affliction itself. 

My life had become like progressive rock; insistent, technical, convinced of its own worth. 

Smug. I forgot smug. My life had become unpleasant, endured mostly by enthusiasts. 

A pilot who once sat next to me described my condition otherwise. He claimed that it's a natural reaction to the feeling of suddenly having fulfilled all of your responsibilities. He likened it to coming home at the end of a very long day and dropping all of your bags and sinking into the couch. He mentioned the myths of pressurization and commented freely on the medicinal effects of red wine, insisting to use the phrase "spirits" in discussion.

When I awoke again we discussed the variant speed of sound at different altitudes, as well as strategies to understand its meaning. The speed of sound gives us some understanding of the very meaning of time.

There are a number of accepted standards. I started to look them up just now but a close friend asked that I not look at the internet or tv before writing. I suspect it is because of the curse of unneeded factuality.

He is likely right.

Few things make me feel as free as the momentary wish for abyss.

When I would awake during takeoff I would keep my eyes closed and grip the seat, feel the intense weight of falling upwards as if there were no end to the gravity of flight, no end to being pulled elsewhere, as if the sun and moon and earth were conquered all, and at once. 

.

With No Direction Home, Like an Incomplete Unknown

(Egon Schiele)

I used to read much more than I do now. I miss it, time for self. There was a sense of calm that it afforded, a sense to which I can not seem to return. I rarely watch movies any more, also. I had told myself that there were lessons there to be learned, embedded somewhere in the tales of remorseless excess. 

Now, I am not so sure. These stories seem to have no better prepared me for life than anything else might have. Addiction might have conferred greater lessons than fiction. I tried to extract partial lessons from both, in the hope of combining them. Somewhere along the way I was supposed to decide on a way of living and then live by that self-defined etiquette. I adopted a few different approaches to life and must have decided at some point that they all seemed nearly interchangeable. I'm not so sure now. Nothing seems compatible any longer. Though also, nothing seems substantial enough on its own to feel complete. My memories are tattered scripts, unfinished scraps of dream long forgotten.

There are occasional periods that I pass through that take me by surprise. Emotional turbulence bubbles to the surface and I am causing some new personal havoc of sorts. It is exhausting, to live a life of unstudied emotion, to give in to unconsidered impulse. Sartre called it "magical," though it is left to the reader to decide whether it is of a black sort or not.

One partial solution is easy, of course: stop adding kerosene to a fire that I wish to subside. 

But the devil's voice glows and invites, doubles as embers in the darkness. 

The temptress kisses in the crucible.

.

Tijuana Cock Fight

Friday, with a team of three other untrained experimental research scientists, I assisted in the design and construction of an appropriately-named killer attack robot. I tried to upload a video of its final victory but Google is being weird. It nearly swept the competition in a brutal to-the-death match series involving thousands of other applicants.

I had been quiet about this up until now because I hadn't realized that it would make international news, which it still hasn't, but I'd like to get out in front of this scandal before it happens. It's no surprise to many that read here that I very well might be announcing my candidacy for office sometime this weekend.

Here is the short list of my qualifications:

- Can do pushup

- Wear underwear, often designer

- Eat red meat for every meal

- Haven't had red wine in hours

What has my opponent done? Silence.

These times call for more than just silence, they also demand reverence towards sanctity. In the face of yet another Benghazi report  that clears the White House of any and all wrongdoing this nation needs someone willing to ask the difficult questions like, What the fuck is a Libertarian anyway?

- Why don't they seem to want Libertarianism for others?

- Why do the best works of 20th century literature lack protagonists that qualify as heroes?

- What do they keep spraying out of commercial jet airliners?

- Why do vaccines that contain mercury cause Epolio?

- Why doesn't The Constitution include a Right to Privacy?

- Do albinos have past lives?

- Why is there no agreed upon measurement of time?

- Is there a possibility of intelligent life elsewhere on this planet?

My opponent has voted against all of the measures designed to prevent unregistered harlequins from enrolling in our grade schools. I have supported measures that increase the chances of pregnancy. 

My opponent has angrily voted against proposals that would have provided education for all politicians.

Is that really who you want sleeping on the big red button in the middle of the night when Russia finally comes knocking on Sarah Palin's front door?

Vote No on Missionary Proposition #9. 

.

The Tauntaun Toddler

Note the Star Wars pajammies.... in pumpkin collars and cuffs.

I want a matching pair. I'll find them, too. I mean, I am your father, and all of that, etc.


The time is arriving on padded Ewok paws when the boy and I will sit down together and watch Star Wars for the first time. It might still be a few years off but I can feel it approaching. Call it the Force, if you must, but I do feel it. Chalk it up to the many midi-chloridians.

I don't have the energy to make a bunch of nerd jokes here. Do Jedis ever really apologize? We'll keep our eyes wide for Order 65.


Don't worry, though... I'll also take the warrior to his first Peter Framptoon concert. What could possibly be more important to a young boy than the bookend summers of '76, and '77, when Corvettes and Trans-Ams ruled the roads and even serious artists were taking stabs at a quick disco hit....

The night is dark but the sidewalk's bright, and lined with the light of the living...

Yes, young Jedi; bright, it is.


Some Boston, barely an infection from Aerosmith (not too much). Then, as a matter of pure course, the eternal fight against the evil of the many Empires.

.

When the Levy Breaks

I hate taxes. 

I no longer require the services of the government. I was forced to "let them go," to relieve them of their duties. 

A few days ago I thought I was wealthy, but then I checked into this unexpected and astonishing fact a bit further. It turns out that the government is just waiting for me to try and access any of my wealth and then they will swoop in and take an insulting portion of it away from me. Little matter to them that I already paid them once as I made this money. They want to take some more every time I look at it, or wish to use it, or talk about it here.

I fail to understand how this does not qualify as double taxation, income and then sales combined. Shouldn't they just be excising funds from the person that I give my money over to, once I have finally decided precisely what mechanical marvel it is that I want?

What an enormously lucrative scam, this tariffing of people in this way. 

They've built super-computers to scan the information posted here to determine if it represents a threat. They took some of my money to accomplish this herculean data task. They've hired analysts that are presumably more adept at perceiving perilous remarks than the computer alone could ever be. I can count the bots that scan and index the pages here. Their behavior is markedly different than that of a human's. 

With a little research this morning I discovered that I am far less wealthy than I had thought. The government is just sitting and waiting to take my cash away as soon as it twitches. They are the massive spider sitting at the center of the lattice, wishing to wrap its convulsing dinner in bureaucratic silk. What venomous fuckers lurk deep in the cobwebs of the device. 

.

"Some day you'll know...."

I awoke to the sound of rain falling in the darkness. I'll sit at my desk and listen to the drops making their way through the trees and to the earth. I want a day off so... a time to do nothing at all. 

Soon.

While on the verge of one vacation, last night I planned my next, a return to Florida. I will see if I can make it happen. It will be towards the end of January while it is still quite nice in Florida, where the skies are pleasant and clear, stretching to cover almost all that can be seen and felt within a day.

The uncomplicated skies of Florida make it a minor challenge to feel sad. The open azure are is as ice-skating for the eyes. The mind floats and glides in wide circles, and great figure-eights.

.

That's not how you spell "Gandhi"

(Literacy without Laughter)

My whole body is tired and sore. It feels as if I slept on boulders last night, irregular ones with rough edges. I knew it was going to happen. As I was trying to fall asleep I was uncomfortable, restless. My neck and shoulders and back were fighting between themselves. I couldn't arrange the pillows in any way that seemed to benefit me. The muscles in my neck seemed to be playing tug-of-war with the ligaments and tendons in my shoulders and back. I have an unusually large and heavy head. It was built by the Irish, with all the buoyancy of the flagship from the White Star Line.

I am supposed to present new material at work today. Luckily, I am not doing this alone. Coffee only excites the pain points, accelerates my thoughts concerning my twitching discomfort. I did not even drink last night. It's just age and cruel time working together, and against me.

But, I am a rich man now. It happened all of a sudden. I just found out. I rarely ever monitor my accounts and investments. I prefer to just ignore them and treat them like an unchecked lottery ticket. They could be either useless or priceless. I am confident that the American economy will confirm this one day for me.

I prefer mysteries to modest fact.

I checked this morning and was shocked to discover that I am what John Lennon always hoped that I would never become: a Working Class Hero on the way to Baby, You're a Rich Man.

I should get a safety deposit box. I'd like to have a place where I can go and open a weighty steal box in private, a place in which nobody questions the odd, expensive things I choose to horde. I could pretend to be a villain in a place like that. If the lights were right.

It's where I would store all of my Gold Bonds.

.

It is the point

Another great sunrise. I'm getting really good at those. Just in time, too.

Why do vacations always fall a few weeks distant from when you really, truly, desperately need them. It's like having to piss while you're in the car, in traffic. You can hold it as long as is needed, most of the time, but not a single millisecond longer. True pissing happiness is always somewhere in the past. The present piss is often a nearly averted tragedy of uric proportions. 

I bet death is like that also, just more painful.

I knew it had to happen soon. I could feel it coming like a siren, but holy fuck I didn't think I could wait another moment.

I have a vacation coming soon. Next week. I need it 

Tonight, I go swimming with the boy. We go to classes together where he learns to hold his breath and trust me. He is loving it all more and more: life. I am loving it right along with him, with a swimming limp, yet still able to keep up. 

The experience of being a parent really does take one, at times.

It might not make any of this more meaningful... for some, somehow. It certainly makes life more wide and deep, for me. I suppose it might require a cursory understanding of how meaning is derived; for and of the subject. Meaning gasps and struggles, sometimes. No true teller would tell otherwise. Though every now and then, with a nice clean underwater streamline stroke, there is that sense of weightless gliding that is like no other. It feels earned and deserved, somehow more valuable as such. The pushing off, or diving in; the depth, the suspension; the weight of the water around you, reminding. Freedom as a result of it, rather than freedom from it. 

The dry analysts of immersion are many.

If meaning can be measured in richness of experience then I suppose that is how some might somehow miss the thing itself, life. A child can occasionally validate intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, with seeming effortlessness.  The results can be intense.

No true Romantic would fail to sense that.

That's no cruel criticism, either, brother.  

.

The wave model

(The filthy skies of Santa Fe)

Red skies this morning.

The eastern shore didn't stay red for very long; transitioned to orange by the time I could walk past the trees. Then it was just me, a slight chill in the air, and the disappearing evidence of atmosphere.

Night, you were never dark enough for me.

This morning, I passed through the visible spectrum. The blues and purples scattering out long before they reached me, or all trying to escape from the west, sneaking out the back door of morning.

It's a myth that pollution causes the best sunrises and sunsets. The molecules that are most commonly produced by pollution are far too large and would scatter light unequally, or absorb much of the visible energy from light that we regard as beautiful. Comparing the size of a photon to the nitrogen oxide particle (for example) that constitutes part of photochemical smog is nearly pointless for all but those who study such things. A photon has zero rest mass, so it allows for light's frequency dependence where mass and radiation achieve thermal equilibrium. That's your science lesson for the morning, dear readers. Photons for breakfast!

If this common myth of sunset-pollution were true then smog would create beauty and Beijing would best the Bahamas for most photographed sunsets. This claim is silly, and observation easily defeats its basic premise.

So, go back to uncritically enjoying a sunrise and sunset every now and then. 

It won't kill you.

.

A surge in new membership

The KKK has involved themselves in Ferguson. That should help clear matters up. They have announced their intention to defend themselves, with the use of lethal force, against the peaceful terrorists. 

Terror, what a flexible concept. The group to claim offense becomes by default the group to accuse the other of terror. The tactic is as much involved with victimhood as it is with anything else. 

So, now the KKK are the victims, preparing to defend themselves against this latest uprising. Their message echoes that of the police force, somewhat. There are things that they simply will not stand for, or against, or anywhere between. Once you start threatening to rape white women then you have crossed a line.

"You have awakened a sleeping giant" reads the flyer the Klan has been distributing. A true sleeper cell, that one. Decades passed with the KKK getting such a bad name that many of their chapters have moved north, to Idaho and Pennsylvania among other states. Ferguson is much closer to Chicago than it is to Atlanta, maps remind us.

Now, don't all those silly southerners feel... well, silly, having long ago mostly eschewed this neighborhood club of friendly do-gooders.

If the first sentence of their missive announces that a sleeping giant has been awoken then what are we to think of all of those decades when they were being less than vigilant, napping on the job of maintaining racial purity and all that. What does a sleeping giant eat when it wakes from a long, deep sleep? I bet it must be hungry.

They make it too difficult to understand their message sometimes, The Klan. It's so hard to have any pride in what they do, protecting us from the threat of others. 

Where are the ol' Bald Knobs when Missouri really needs them. 

And why hasn't Charlie Manson weighed in on these radical racial tensions. He was always good for fresh insight into what ails society most. I suppose his marriage is working out well, has calmed a few of his raging demons. She's weaned him off coffee so he's feeling a bit edgy of late.

Gun sales in the region have risen, of course. Everybody has the right to protect themselves, sort of. 

The law is pretty clear about a person's right to use lethal force to defend themselves against an unlawful attack, or the reasonable expectation of an imminent attack. So, as long as it's not a cop shooting at you, emboldened by the law, then you are as golden as the day is long. Shoot straight, answer first.

I swear, I thought the cop was going to shoot me. He was drawing his weapon, and I know what that means.

Things tend to spiral out of control pretty quickly as soon as people start defending themselves from the police. That is something that no stable society will stand for. The KKK has jumped barrels first into the fracas to stop innocent cops from being harassed in their homes.

Who might have ever guessed that? 

.

Poems that Demand Bad Breath

The greatest thing about middle-aged women, their finest moments, will likely occur to me in slow-motion when I arrive comfortably in the diaper of my late sixties. 

I will look about and think out loud, Yes, yes, yes... she moves like a lovely viagra inhalator. 

Contemplate the oval mystery that is woman, the imperfect elliptic of life.

Oh, sweet mother galaxy... provide thine oysters. 

.

Sleep Tigers

The boy slept at my place last night. It was the first time he spent the entire night in his own bed here, coughing and wheezing through the night. I will be sick in a day or two, hacking and trembling in cascading echoes of his ailment. It is surprising how children can sleep through a coughing fit. I whisper his name but he is riding sleep tigers, capturing the pirates of the parasomnia. 

There is the familiar and welcome sound of rain hitting the leaves outside, it percolates through the trees and bushes, then to earth. I would like to take the day off from work and lie in bed and listen, reading and napping, letting time pass through me without need for measuring task or accomplishment.

A friend is in town, so I will go and meet her for dinner tonight. We will have much to catch up with in conversation. So much has changed since the last time she was here. Though I complain of lethargy and diminished inspiration to write here, in truth I am happier now than I was then. Perhaps that is all that has changed. Happiness does not translate well or for very long into interesting writing, and do not believe anyone who would tell you otherwise.

Don't take my word for it. Read a novel about the life of a happy human. There are not that many out there. The imaginary Amazon shelves are endless with self-help tomes but not so many novels. Some of them might be written well, a pleasant way to pass the time, but none will be considered great by the the consensus of time. Literature investigates struggle, and does not always need to concern itself with supposed solutions. The tragedy of life is sometimes simply laid bare, nothing more.

Comedy is a device used in defense of the void, and it should not be confused with happiness, nor its occasional result, laughter. 

This is not at all to say that a writer can not express a range of pleasant cheerfulness, only that books that attempt to project happiness as their central theme are generally dismal reads, insufferable in their prescriptions for living.

Ah well, that is not what I wished to write about. There will be some who disagree, recommending the latest Eckhart Tolle book, The New Joys of Nowness, or some such rubbish.

Ok, I should stop.


Just found out that Rhys is too sick to be at school and will have to come home for the day. Just might get my wish for a day listening to the sniffling rain.

.

My Rhythm, My Rhythm, why have you foreskinned me?

(You have much candy for me?)

I have ceased living an interesting life, for the time. I'm in a museless lull; an auto-tatertot. 

If I had any moral courage I would stop writing here, though that represents a cessation of self-pleasure. We then risk me writing in my sleep. Nocturnal Onanisms. 

It is safest and bestest to continuest for the futurest.  

Boredom:

There was having a child. That was a content-creator for some time. 

Then, there was splitting up with a wife. Even I have bored of that, though I must have been among the very last.

Now, I go to work and the gym. There are not enough stories to tell concerning those things.

I don't give a shit about politics, or music, or people right now. I haven't taken a picture since Halloween night and didn't try much that night at all. 

I've only been reading lacklusterly.  Google is trying to tell me that's not a word, lacklusterly.

I say it is. It very is.

Arguing with an online algorithm is a close proximity to prayer for the hairy of this damned age.

Why Algo, why? 

(Gimme some chocolate, now...)

(I become a trick dinosaur ghost. Boo!)

.

Unfinished Simpering

Note: I give up. I wrote this at 6am, when I arrived at work, never finished it, didn't bother deleting it, now it's yours:

It seems that some days, no matter how early I wake up, I am still not rested enough to write a post here. Somehow I don't have enough time.

I had thought that maybe it was just sinful lethargy, from a return to reasonably light drinking. Though that doesn't make any sense. It's not as if it was any different when I was an abstaining Christian.

I left the house at 5am this morning, for reasons that I can not explain to myself. I arrived at the SF office in the dark. 

This version of life can not be right. I think that I have fucked up my body's natural melatonin levels by falling asleep before the sunset too often.

I'll be an albino vampire soon, living on the blood of lambs.

If I could just reach the bat belt...

.

Does this kid make me look fat?

Oh man... that little boy is becoming a lot of fun.

Yesterday, after the 49ers game I brought Cato over to cook miniature hamburgers and grilled chicken. The boy ran around, excited for there to be a guest in the house, and excited for dad to be there as well.

Me holding him upside down is one of his favorite pastimes. It's becoming increasingly difficult, at 40 squirming pounds it requires a firm grip on both ankles, then a rollover set-down from the waist.

He can't get enough of it.

I've been trying to lose some weight again but it is a depressing endeavor. In the past it seems that the weight would melt off as if by mental will, barely any effort required. Now, no amount of physical will seems to loosen its flabby grip on my belly and bones. I stopped drinking for about two and half weeks and tried to watch my diet carefully, exercising about five hours a week, cardio and weights. 

I didn't lose a single pound.

So, I spent the weekend restoring beer-time and football to its proper place in my life. I didn't gain any weight but neither do I feel exactly rested.

Ah well, as CS has reminded me several times... I am just at that age, and to just accept it. I'll probably never be thin again. I might accomplish it with sustained effort but the weight will come right back once I return to my normal habits. It is depressing but I try not to let it get to me.

There are lots and lots of women who are still willing to have sex with me, so there is that to console me on those cold and lonely nights. Pictures of strangers, offering themselves up to the void.

.

Don't tell...

(Oleg Oprisco)

I slept a fair portion of my Saturday away, falling asleep some time in the late afternoon and awaking in the evening and then struggling through the night, lethargic and barely rested. It is only what I want sometimes, that secret life passing in darkness. Having more control over my sleeping patterns would be preferable.

My back hurts from the choices I have made, and endured.

Rhys has started talking back to his little kid's videos. The Little Mermaid will sing something and he'll implore, "Don't say that, don't say that..."

I know that I am becoming one of those lost souls that believes everything their child does to be of an exceedingly adorable nature, but I suppose that is better than being the other kind of parent. 

I was at a park recently and a father was trying to explain condensation to an uninterested four year old boy that was playing on the climbing ropes. On one level it was understandable, even touching, that he wanted to describe the world to the boy. Then, on the other hand...

I should be cautious in my assessments. I might become the worst kind of father, trying too hard to be a mentor, a god. There is always that danger, the likeliness that lurks in the absence of honest self-knowledge. Everybody embraces their justifications for being a certain way, and renounces most outside input. So far, fathering has been a mixture of instinct and learning along the way. I'm hoping to hold that balance. We'll see. 

I tire easily of super-parents, armed with clinically tested theories and nonsense ideologies. 

I have noticed that fewer strangers are attempting to interject their opinions on me now in public. With a newborn you will have complete strangers approach you in public and tell you how to do something, or what not to do, etc., etc. It is them trying to be nice, I guess, but it ends up being mostly presumptuously annoying. 

I arrived at a point where I was tempted to just respond with, "All of the important studies disagree with you." 

I try not to be so hostile to the opinions of the super-market experts, but they do not often make it easy.

Now, I'm instinctually tempted to just lean down and whisper to Rhys, "Tell them to Fuck off!..."

He'd do it, too. 

.

.... where credit's due

Haircut at Auntie Lisa's house. She had said she would cut my hair also, though the requirements of dual parenting did not quite allow for it.

He is becoming a darling little boy, day by day. 40 pounds and 40 inches, approx.

A genuine wonder and a true pal.

Well, if you're enjoying a lazy Sunday and happen to be a Beatles fan, then here is an old collection that I put together for a friend. For years I had thought that he did not give me any credit for having made it because I only looked at the page that you are about to see if you click that link....

Then, sharing it with a friend this morning, she pointed out that he does in fact give me credit in the introduction, a warm and pleasant bit of credit was lurking there all along, waiting for me when I need it most, I guess.

I'm a twat, but the boy seems to think highly of me.

(Addendum: A friend reached out and immediately corrected me on this story, explaining that he had already explained that I was credited in the audio of the mix, and that I seemed to understand this at the time that he told me. I suppose that I am succumbing to the ol' Irish Alzheimer's, I've forgotten everything except the petty grudges...)

.

Beaver Moon Rising

I had always thought that the lyrics were:

No sweet thing exists, oh off the stage lines
Could make me feel bitter, or treat you unkind. 

Nope, it's:

No sweeping exits or offstage lines... 

I drove up into the hills to watch the moon move. I wanted to keep driving upwards though the roads ceased to be, ending in lone driveways, perched houses. I turned to look and the valley slumped before me, a gaping inward arch. I sat and howled and howled, an un-packed canid.

I spooked the horses.


Sonoma would be a good place to go to high school. It's visually memorable, contained, and sensible. Anybody growing up here would develop a strong sense of elsewhere, also. A local place for local people. It is a good place from which to escape, with an easy return policy. No receipts required.

I hear it all of the time, people discussing with pride their years elsewhere. The dream that didn't work out. The return to where they seem to belong. Home, here. People try to avoid themselves, often by leaving. But then home again, here again, jiggity. 

I try to imagine Rhys becoming a high schooler, and can't yet see it. It is too far off and too much personality still needs to form within him.

Childhood living is easy to do.

It's starting to look as if he and I will leave this valley right about the same time, fifteen years from now, approx.


I spoke with my own father last night. There were things I wanted to talk to him about but didn't bother him with it. It was after coming down from the hills. I didn't have it in me to force a conversation on him.


I awoke in the middle of the night to piss, one of the two new feral felines that my roommate recently got went scurrying into the darkness, back to hiding under the bed, whence it came. Terrorized by monster I in the dark.


It is still a week until payday. I will feel more free for reasons that make no sense, mathematical or otherwise. I sometimes wonder how some people can afford lottery tickets. It is the closest thing they have to a dream, I guess, to be the recipient of a fantasy by pure inexplicable chance. I see them in the stores, having filled out their many multiple choice bubble sheets. Always getting an F- when the universe gives back the grades.

People don't win the lottery, numbers do.


The things you wanted...

.

Adult male rabbit seeking casual relationship with anybunny

It's impossible to do everything.

Each day I set a few modest goals: workout for one hour, write here for one hour, read for one hour, work ten hours at my job, father a two and a half year old boy, sleep for 6 hours, spend one devout hour in bed before sleep practicing preemptive atheism.

Then, there is of course time spent eating, showering, getting dressed, brushing my teeth, hugging people when I see them, hugging them when I say goodbye, chatting about my day, listening about theirs, driving places, fixing things, taking pictures, reading emails, preparing food, taking note of the hills and the sky, drinking coconut water, considering what qualities to esteem and adore in middle-aged women, wrestling with the flesh in my pants when it gets feisty.

A flattering number of people arrive here most days, to see for a moment through my eyes, yet not one of them has ever offered to go to the dentist for me.

.

¡Ay, caramba!

The good guys won! We'll finally get this country back in shape.

I can not wait, personally. We've had to suffer these potheads for far too long now. 

We finally beat the dems like the silly mutts they are. I'm looking forward to enjoying the economic prosperity that will surely arise from all of this. Fuck, I tried to cancel my health insurance this morning but HR said that I can't do it. I reminded them that there's a few new sheriffs in town, they had better buck up, I'll be back.

I'm just glad that I'm white and middle-aged, not a terrorist, etc. Jesus, the little people have got some kickings coming to them, and it's about time. Those fuckers have enjoyed a free ride for far too long, leaching off this great nation of ours. 

Pay up, Sanchez! 

You wouldn't believe how easy the migrant workers have it around here. You see them slinking around everywhere with all that filthy cash stuffed away, cash that should have been going to pay the taxes of the many suffering vintners in the region. 

That famed Mexican haughtiness is in for a few kicks to the balls, wipe those smirks right off of their faces. 

That'll teach 'em. 

Well, I haven't even looked at California's election results. Maybe I should have before writing all that now sits above this paragraph. Maybe the Mexicans finally won. Who knows, they might have already seceded and I might be a Mexican right now as I type this. 

Who needs facts. I can adapt.

Es fácil, todo lo que necesitas es amor.

Jesus Marimbaburritos, did you see that? My blog is succumbing to harvest-time gibberish.

Well, I should stop, preferably before somebody starts to take me seriously. I often wonder the possibilities of such a thing, being taken seriously. 

I am no big believer in democracy, but neither is anybody else. Just listen to what they all say today. You'll hear the word "cheated" thrown around a lot. 

Ask the people what they want and then just give it to them. Easy.

I see very little difference between the Reds and the Blues. 

The Blues lean further left on social issues and were about 3 and a half million times more likely to engage in voter fraud, but that's about it. 

I can understand why it's so important to many, and can understand the horror among some that recent advances in social liberties might be rolled back, or impeded from advancing any further. It's not as if many Presidents have been appointing liberal judges, ones that will challenge the authority of the executive arm of government, much less act in the interest of individual freedom. It's not easy, but the several POTUS' have found a way to create cascading layers of complicity in the judicial branch.

So few challenges to executive privilege ever make it to the final court, to test the "constitutionality" of their actions. They are smacked down and reduced in purpose along the way, to such degree that any seeming victory in checks-and-balances is mostly a meaningless victory, if not a pyrrhic one to the democratic and judicial process on its way up, or as a result.

Meanwhile, we live in a time in which the final court will claim that a corporation is a person and should enjoy the same rights and liberties afforded individuals in the Bill of Rights.

American terrorists aren't people, though. Let's not muddy the message. They are treasonous traitors. 

It's going to be nice to put prayer back in schools, and not that muslim wailing bullshit. Some nice sober recitations, in lockstep chorus. 

That should help separate the good ones from the bad.

Oh, majestas.

.

Birdman

(Photo: John Dill)

The picture above appears tinted the way the world becomes if you drink too much NyQuil. Or, that's the effect it has on me, anyway. It is a picture of my friend playing the Robot Heart sunrise set at Burning Man this last year. One sunrise that I missed. I left only minutes before my friends arrived, confusing the time that my friend was starting, arriving too early and then leaving likewise.

He was in town yesterday, so we decided to have a movie adventure.

Why is it so difficult to see good films?

We attempted to go to a showing of Birdman. It was only playing in one theater in the entire SF Bay area. The theater was immune to all the iPhone maps we used to try and find it on foot. We ended up stopping cars in a mall parking lot and repeatedly asking directions, little updates along the way. The theater was hidden behind a rundown row of apartments that bordered the mall parking lot. It was being eaten by the nearly impoverished.

What am I talking about? In SF, those apartments probably housed millionaires.

It makes no sense that a film starring Michael Keaton, Edward Norton, Emma Stone, and Zach Galifianakis should be relegated to one old crumbling ruin of a theater hidden on the dark sloping backside of a mall parking lot. Though perhaps those are my age and cultural preferences acting slighted rather than the facts of their diminishing star qualities. Also, this added to the dramatic theme of the film. Maybe it was intentional. Or, I waited too long to see it and it was only playing in one theater.

I don't know.

Nope, I just looked. It's playing in three theaters and one that was much closer to where we were. Fandango is useless and dangerous.


The film was great. It was intended to unfold as a single take though it also self-consciously revealed that this could not possibly be so, with actors appearing instantaneously in new positions and wardrobe as the camera panned. Some of the cuts were detectable if you paid careful attention, while most others were seamless.

Still, it makes little sense to me. It had a limited released on Oct. 17th, that's it. I would guess that with the star power that it has and the director being the maker of 21 Grams... ah well, what do I know of such things. The closest of the theaters to me, in Sonoma, only occasionally plays a film that I care for, Moonrise Kingdom and St. Vincent (with Bill Murray) being the two that come to mind, separated by two years.

You get the idea. I'll let this point of fact go. Give me time.


Birdman appealed in odd ways. The director, Iñarritu (forgive the missing accent over the a), does an excellent job at both anticipating and toying with expectations. The dialogue is quick and powerful, the pacing is purposeful and dynamic, and the theme of escape-through-flight is eternal. Though there are elements to deride within each of the characters, the director does not instruct us much as to which we should prefer, which is a refreshing lack of directorial condescension.

Usually, for me, there is something so nervous about Michael Keaton's performances that it can make me almost uncomfortable, but in this he does a good job at making me nearly uncomfortable in different ways. His character is a sagging collapse that somehow retains some of the charm and mystery of his former self, as well as some of the power, though also a hefty dose of petulance.

The director never lets on whether his supernatural powers are real or entirely imaginary. His dressing room gets trashed and other characters acknowledge it, but none witness the trashing. Often used through desperation, his powers over the physical world augment the unfolding of the character in both touching and satyrical ways. During a helicopter battle a griffin screeches down from a rooftop during his tremendous hangover on the opening day of the play, etc.

Haven't we all felt that way.

There were montages at the beginning and end that I would have liked to have seen incorporated more into the story line. My friend and I readily agreed on this point. They were visually powerful and suggestive but somehow the director seems to have missed the connection, or not made it as fully as he could have. Instead, he suggests the flight of suicide as the visual denouement though never really tells us one way or the other. The implication is clear but never achieves anything more than just that, implication. One might suppose that would be enough, though it somehow felt lacking, even given the intentional blurring of the lines between the real and the imaginary.

Perhaps it is only meant to impute the inner desire to fly, to escape, to die. In that, perhaps Iñarritu succeeded. Though we both wanted closure, not hints.

Still, we gave enthusiastic thumbs up to the film. It is truly unfortunate that it does not have more of a wide release in theaters because many of the effects are exclusively cinematic.

4 our of 4 stars, and two thumbs.

My buddy and I are old battling critics, separated by opinion and at occasional eternal war with one another, though on this we were united. The front lines have been blurred and now we share old war stories as if we had always been fighting for the same side. It is a by-product of age, I suppose. We have grown up a bit together and recognize that there are better enemies out there than each other.

Like time.




Well, let me wrap this up with one of my coincidental interests. I've been reading again lately, so beware.... references and quotes are now upon you.

Mephistopheles.   No joy could sate him, no delight but cloyed,

     For changing shapes he lusted to the last;

     The final moment, worthless, stale, and void,

     The luckless creature, he would hold it fast.

     Here he who fought me off so well-

     Time triumphs - stranded lies, a whitened shell.

     The clock is muted-

Chorus.                          Mute! Like midnight it is stilled.

     The hand is falling.

Mephistopheles.            Fell - it is fulfilled.

Chorus.    It is all over.

Mephistopheles.            Over! Stupid name.

     Why over?

     All over and pure nothing - just the same!

     What has this constant doing ever brought

     But what is done to rake away the naught?

     So it is over! How to read this clause?

     All over is as good as never was,

     And yet it whirls about as if it were.

     The Eternal-Empty is what I prefer.

- Goethe, Faust

.

La Collectionneuse

My secret life has a new dimension.

Last night, after seeing Rhys, I went to sleep around 7:30. Last evening really, not yet night. I awoke around 2:30 and my secrecy began. As a film projector unexpectedly begins in the silent darkness, there is an orchestra of dancing lights upon waking. A dream of having just been in an unlit room; untold stories unfolding in the eyes.

An accomplice recently asked why I don't just stay up later, the way that I used to, and then sleep in. She surmised that I can still have all the secrecy I might ever want in the late evenings. Her assumption being that I wished to somehow economize and align my time with others. 

It's not true, though. In the evenings there still exist options, distractions, the noise of others moving, the temptation to move in unison with the turning world, to rise. Through the middle of the night's passing there is a calming nothingness. Things appear in the darkness as aquatic apparitions in the depths, the emptiness of secrets being their disguise.  A world without shadows, only darkness and unharnessed thoughts floating. My midnight life is as a submarine sliding past, surrounded in silence.

Close your eyes with all lights off, then press on your eyelids with your closed hands, not too hard, not so that you see red but just before. There are unexpected shapes floating across. Hear your breathing, carefully. 

It is like that, this strange phantasma. Hours upon hours, all dispersing in morning light.

Several emails back and forth with an old friend yesterday, I decided that I would start spending some of my alone time in films. We exchanged compact opinions on a handful of directors. I asked him about a book I had encouraged him to read, A Sport and a Pastime, by Salter. He gave me his enthusiastic approval and then compared it to a film, La Collectionneuse, by Rohmer. 

Now, Janus films also await me in the cold, cold night. Criterion. Last night was the first in an unplanned festival. 

I awake and take off all of my clothes underneath the covers. I don't quite know why. One must re-remember how to be nude when it has been too long. One must feel why to be nude. It is odd, the sensation that you have put something on by being naked, to assume senses lost by clothing.

It is a practice in resisting age, an invisible cloak that attends disrobing, like the warmth of a second glass of nice red wine.

The film's main theme is a pouty young woman who owns several bikinis. Two men compete over her but there are also more, some who have and enjoyed her. Passers by.

Each of the three main characters - a struggling lust triangle - espouses their version of sexual politics, complicity. 

Each incomplete, each insistent, each doomed. 

The intended theme concerns itself with how much vanity and guile exists in even the simplest and most casual romantic arrangements, seeking to prove something we only find to eventually blame in the actions and assertions of others. One must conceal their impulses and detestations, carefully arranging how we advertise our interests.

The film ends in the unquieted restlessness of finally being alone, of returning to the imaginary desired state of peace. 

Fin.

It is freeing, this noiseless feeling. To possess nonexistent silence; where the whole world is hushed, and I miss no one.

.

Behold, a thief in the alembic

I didn't take many Halloween pictures. I was out of my zone. I brought the wrong camera. I'm losing my edge.

Also, I didn't want to be annoying at every possible turn.  

The one above is of a buddy of mine. He and Rhys had a grand time roaming the streets with the many witches and goblins and princesses, collecting their sugar loot, the sucrose pillage, their wild cellophane plunder.

I lectured them on gender stereotypes, of course, because that is my ideological nature. I was dressed as an adult pink bunny, though I do not believe any pictures exist. I frightened parents, truly. When my gender lectures gained no audience I warned them of demonic possession and offered to introduce them to Christ, to shepherd them in to the fold.

Ah well, there is still time before the arrival of the floods. We live in biblical times; locusts, plagues, bats, the flood of rising waters, etc. Fast times for the righteous. 

It is odd that embedded in the Christian myth there is the warning that a loving Christ will return as a dark surprise, a thief, to toss the non-compliant into eternal misery and torment. Surprise! 

Does that sound right to anybody? Why is there even a battle going on between a true almighty and one of his perverse angelic traitors? 

None of it makes any sense at all. Wouldn't the god described in the biblos, the creator, just win that battle and be done with it. Seems odd, that. The myth seems quite human in both its telling and purpose. Nothing about it seems particularly inspired, or even mysterious. If it was written by God then one might have guessed that he would have edited out all of Numbers as being inconsequential. He might have had the Ten Commandments be the same from the first and second recital of them, also. It sounds as if it was written by cuckolded farmers, ones who are accustomed to having their crops raided by insects, suffering the occasional oxen theft. 

Ah well, happy Sunday!

I read several pages from Goethe's Faust last night, so I'm feeling quite homunculi this morning. 

You could say I had a fairly radical Saturday night, wrestling with 'ol Mephistopheles.

What I possess as from afar I see
Those I have lost become realities to me

.

"Come on now try and understand"

Even a doctor friend reached out to congratulate me on my luck yesterday. Such is the underlying power of chemistry. The central science bonds us all.

I half-joke when I discuss pharmaceutical drugs. I am as harmless as a box of kittens, a busload full of nuns, etc. I only ingest the medicine that my doctor demands of me, and always under the strict supervision of the printed advisory on the bottle. I have installed a special camera in my room to carefully monitor intake. Each morning I review the previous night, frame by frame, to ensure that there are no discrepancies. 

If any of you knew the daily and nightly horrors that I endure just to make this site possible then you would not question the wisdom of my doctor and pharmacist, who appear to finally be working in concert to address my condition. I suffer from mild acuteness.

It can strike at any time. One must always be prepared. From this rises the paradox of poetic nerves, or so I would like to believe anyway.

It is the closest thing I have to occasional faith.

Ah well, it is all just a joke. It is part of my irreverence series. I am trying to touch on any and all subjects that deserve it, in which people might have wished that I didn't.

I want that to be the way that people remember me, in precious wishes.

I was going to link "Careless Whispers" to the phrase "precious wishes" but I couldn't do it.

I'll leave you this instead:

.