Duck Soup!

I spent yesterday morning with the boy. We went over to Napa Walmart to buy some things for the new apartment. Yes, Walmart. I had been give a gift card and figured I might as well use it. I prefer Target, because I'm both a liberal and a snob, but what can one do... throw money away merely because you're an elitist with exaggerated respect for social classes? 

A broom is a broom, I self-surmised.

Also, I thought that it would be an adventure for the boy and I. It was. We found him a Spider-Man ball that he adores, and we each had one small piece of chocolate unwrapped at the checkout counter.

I did not buy all of the things that I need. I have tried to only purchase the things that will be of immediate use to me. 

I have tile floors, so a Swiffer was needed first, but then I quickly realized how inadequate it is with a child around. I needed a broom with a pan to feel complete.

On the way home I got a text from my buddy, Matt, the father of Rhys' buddy, Jordan. Matt and I agreed to meet at the town square where we would let the boys play for a bit.

When Rhys was getting out of the car he seemed unusually excited to go see the ducks. He practically ran towards their pond. I normally would have grabbed my play camera, but he left me too little time. I almost had to run after him. We hit the pond at the same time. 

He gravitates towards this one spot of the pond where there is no rock perimeter and he can stand closer to the water. As we walked around and hit that spot he turned to approach the water more closely. He stood on a rock that I immediately noticed was loose and I said, "I would prefer that you not stand on that..." as I reached out towards him. But it was all too late. A single second later and I could have stopped it, but no. He went face first into icy, nasty, dirty, shit-filled, disease-ridden duck water.

I dove to the ground to retrieve him, grabbing him up by the back of his pants, which were not even visible at the time as he had completely submerged into darkness.

A 225 pound man making sudden movements towards concrete is not advised. I bruised my left knee and sent that rock that he had been standing on into the water. I grabbed him by the back of his pants and had him out of the water almost as quickly as he went in, but it was too late, he was soaked from head to toe; freezing, crying, and stinky wet.

I carried him back to the car and tried to get all of his clothes off as quickly as I could. There was a dry shirt and pants there, luckily. His wails and tears were ceaseless. Just the small amount of water that ended up on me by holding him had soaked through my two shirts and even I was getting cold. He was shivering with anguish, remorse, and fear.

I rushed him home to mommy's house as that was the word he kept repeating through his tears. 

Mommy, mommy, mommy...

There, we put him in a nice, warm bath where he recovered quickly. I stunk of duck shit, washing my arms all the way up to the shoulders did not change that. It was on my pants also.

For me, it took more than just a bath to recover. I went with a friend to a steakhouse here in town that I just found out about yesterday and had martinis and a New York Strip.

Yes, that is the magic cure for duck waste-water: two martinis and a New York Strip.

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Song of Songs

(The fighter, Muhammad by Ali Keeyonardo)

Even my most enthusiastic supporters were reluctant to show advocacy for my exploration in Bat-Boner yesterday. I have accomplished something, though I'm not quite sure what. A puerile victory, or perhaps a personal tie, a record-breaker with something unnamed. A draw in the darkness.

I lost the coin toss, so I had to make it up in goals.

I have bored of writing daily, I think. Though I feel empty if I don't do it, incomplete. It is a form of compulsion. I am certain of it. It can be cathartic, but it often ends up being merely the result of unspoken urge, habit. It no longer gives me the sensation that it once did, unless I take some time away from it and then go back. I must seem paralyzed, to an onlooker, never able to surprise myself with my own movements.

I suppose that I am not meant to complain about those feelings, here. What if it makes somebody else feel bad for reading this. That is not my intention, at all.

Jesus. I need Jesus, or Moses, or maybe a floating Noah. Unnamed Lot's wife, before the mishap, just at the moment of her curiosity, then for a few brief moments before salt. Women should really never look back at the burning valley of Sodom. It is pillared.

Ezekiel was a colorful character. Why aren't we encouraged to worship the prophets, especially the mute ones. Wasn't Mohammad a prophet? I have a drawing I did of him lying around here somewhere. Just a little sketch, to capture all moments, forever.

Let's if you can find it there in my pockets, my Muslimah.


That's my problem with writing, I think. It's that I no longer believe very much of what I write. For a few months now, maybe years, I have fluctuated back and forth between things I care about and things I don't; things I believe and things that I forget.

Perhaps I should start writing children's poetry like old what's his name. I can't think of who I am trying to think of. James Baldwin? No, somebody else. CS, who did you say that I would soon become?


A piece of advice for my music loving friends: Do not awake in the middle of the night and begin to read about Nick Drake's final years. That's what I did, early this morning. I put on Bryter Later because it happened to be queued up in my iTunes library. The pleasure of listening gave way to the sinister itch of curiosity. Is anything more devious than wonder?

Now, I'm ponderous, melancholic. I wish to augment this feeling, or somehow remove myself from it. It has taken few of my years to realize that wish is (mostly) all that drugs and alcohol do. I read it long ago in my first pamphlet. It was how my parents spoke to me, though brochures for a hopeful, better life.

Add To or Remove From. That is my sole wisdom, my sinister logic. Anybody that wishes to be more present, and in the moment, is... well, doomed to the present tense.

No, I kid, drugs, and sometimes even alcohol, do allow you to live in the moment more fully, youngsters.

Carpe Dilaudid, when you can.



I don't remember all that much about Ezekiel. Well, just listen to me, now... I never even really met the guy! I only recall that he struck me as quite crazy, possessing a stern and inflexible disposition, like so many Old Desert Testamenters.

I had the oddest impulse to add the word "parfait" to that last paragraph and I have no idea why. Now that, true believers, is the source of all prophecy: received wisdom.

Don't question it if it's absurd, beneficial, or directly from God; only question it if may be messaging from the dark one, inviting you away from the path. You must ask your heart. That's what I do.

That is His wish and His command: Listen to the leaves, but don't fuck it up. When the spirit speaks, you had better listen, and then learn how to rake, bubba.

Many are culled, eschew the chosen.


And that, souls, is your Sunday School lesson. Take it home and ponder it, or read it at work on Monday, like a good, troubled Nick Drake verse.

Trifles are the new culinary joy.


I would not necessarily say that Nick Drake's music is suicidal, though it can be difficult to separate that desperate knowledge from the unique sadness and power of his singing. His gifts are of an otherworldly nature, and you all must certainly know how I detest such descriptions. Yet, here we are.

Bryter Later is one of his more hopeful albums; contained within it are the hopeful, romantic seeds of doom. An ecstatic Greek tragedy; the saddest chorus that never was. Waves of certainty and strength, nearly apologizing for ever telling you a story, vulnerable from absolute necessity.

Some claim that he died a virgin, old St. Nick. His sister has made the claim, in Rolling Stone, or somewhere.

Is there anything more disgraceful than that? To have your sister claiming you could never pull a bird, after your self-demise. She, with no discernible talents, save what the music media offers as recompense for the near obscurity of a life lived in accidental proximity to genius.

What a bitch, a model for Lot.



Song of Songs is the only book of the bible that I can stomach, anymore, which I don't bother with often. I promise.

It has Canticles.

If you've never read it then I suggest that you do, for the impulses briefly sketched out here, fighters of ink pen.

So much went wrong there, elsewhere.

SoS could be seen as a retelling of the myth of Eve, without all the denouncing of feminine mystique, mystery, and danger. I don't know, maybe things just end poorly. As with most biblical erotica, I only read the first few minutes and then turn it off, ready for sleep, or to focus on my wives.

I do not wish to appear gluttonous in the face of open sensuality.

Or, is that how we are truly meant to be. The prophets are very quiet when it comes to nothing.



Well, Bryter Later is complete. I am on to Pink Moon.

If my son were not sleeping here tonight then I would have my guitar out, pretending the unlit center of my living room was a mystery campfire. I would play along around it, just happy to be camping somewhere under the stars.


I'll be weeping before sunrise, Jeff Buckley by noon. Elliot Smith for dinner.


In the evening, as it arrives, we each canoe across the lake.

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StuporMan

It was a good thing that I was wearing my Batman pajamas.

Then again, at what possible moment would one not say such a thing? They really can be worn as everyday clothing. I know.

You think that I might be joking... but I do not joke about such things. Batman is very serious, some say too much so.

I purchased these as a piece of full body apparel at the suggestion of a chick. I believe that she believed that they contained some special magic. 

Though, now I mostly lurk and linger, too long in my lair.

I'm a Batman that consumes much coffee and needs a fresh back-shave. There must be many like me.

I would take a picture of myself, to post here, but I am too lazy to unpack a real camera and am rarely  happy with the images from an iPhone. I mean, they're fine, but they're just not up to snuff for Bruce Wayne. There are many photo opportunities here in the Wayne Manor. Or the Arkham Asylum... Downton Abbey at midnight.

I don't really give a shit about comic book lore. I just run out of things to catalog and confess to in my own life.

I've been into some pretty heavy role playing lately, though.  

I have been pretending to achieve the largest erection of which I am capable for a mid-1970's Lynda Carter. Then, presenting it to her in an honest, visual way. Hoping that from this offering she will intuit my intentions and respond in an appreciative and accommodating manner. Or, at least not scream, acting as if I have somehow done something wrong. 

I have carefully worked this all out in my mind.

It is a trick of Darwinian development that the sight of male genitalia does not more adequately arouse females in the local vicinity. Mating rituals are a practice designed to confuse, for all involved. What I have learned is that you still must give careful credence to them. A male's indication of willingness to mate is rarely perceived as such, or not just as such. How are we left to contend with the perennial mysteries of existence.

Have I explained what an erection is here yet?

Perhaps that is a post for another time.

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Boy Bullfrog!

Yesterday's post was part ruse, part farce, part hoax. I was trying to lure somebody deeper into argument, but they had lost interest about the same time that I had.

I should grow up. 

I'm trying, but it's not easy; far too little practice.

I would write more today, but I don't have much wind for it. I had to write a very difficult email this morning and it has stripped me of verve.

I am looking forward to a simple weekend with the boy.

We will have some adventures, perhaps address imaginary foes, ones that require an afternoon of imaginary vanquishing. 

He and I; just dashing, daring boys.

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... towards the necessary powers; oh, that speech

Not much time to write today, which may prove to be a disservice to my subject, but alas....

had we had world enough, and time...

The killing of several people at the offices of Charlie Hebdo and the "silent strike" of the NYPD share a corollary. I would like to take this opportunity, in an exercise of non-silence, to at least pretend to explore that analogue.

It is the least speech that I can do.

I only wish that I had the adequate personal resources to do so more fully, because.

Here we go:

I do not wish to belabor the obvious point that each collective act is an attempt to "correct" the actions of others. 

Each is a direct frontal attack on free speech, while also being tangential racism.

The murderers that walked into the offices of Charlie Hebdo and the police who are attempting to censure not just the mayor, but the entire city of New York, have their roots in the same censorious impulse: It is to demand respect and compliance both for (and to) an externally imposed ideology.

By comparing their impulses I am not equating them. I am only hoping to reflect that the impulses in each are similar, and have their roots in fear, ignorance, superstition, faith, or law; as well as the abiding concepts of justice.

(Not sure if I'll get to all of those).

To equate them would be categorical thinking, etc.

I'm not saying, for example, that the NYPD would knowingly and willfully kill innocent people. 

I'll let others say that.

I am not saying that an attempt to silence the free use of the mind, whether expressed through satirical expression or political assembly, is necessarily the same.

The silent resistance of an entire city's police force as a reaction to the mayor's position on the misuse of the concepts of "law and order" can not conceivably be seen as intolerance, nor the advocacy of violence. 

What I am definitely not saying is that the people who were killed in either of these horrible tellings of struggle were anything less than victims of ideological warfare, whether it be "for" or "against" free speech, in anybody's mind.

I am only saying that any attack on free thought and its open expression in speech or assembly should be acknowledged precisely for what it is: an abject attempt to assert one version of order over another.

Ideology must be understood for what it is, particularly when it manifests itself in murder or compliance from group fear.

Anybody that confuses who is the offended party here has missed not only the point but also the scale and scope of the crime.

Americans have been shelf-shocked with concepts of freedom for so long that they have forgotten how to use them, freedoms, so they likewise misunderstand how to defend them, which is only the task to use them well.

Each aggrieved party - the angry young Muslim men who screamed Allahu Akbar! on the one side, or the police who screamed nothing at all, but instead have sat silently with their backs turned not just to the mayor but also to the oath to uphold the law that they should also subject to - have painted themselves as the victims of somebody else, or something else. But they are the "offended" in this struggle.

Some "other" that has full and complete say in their sacred affairs.



NOBODY has the right to not be offended.



If the NYPD does not wish to be subject to a chain of command, then they should just say so.

If a small group of Muslim killers wishes to not have their prophet portrayed or mocked, then they have said so.


One group has spoken.

Only free minds need respond to that, though others will also.


For the other, only the mayor of that city needs to respond there.

Let's hope that his liberalism does not crumble in the face of need.


I was going to write, "... government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."



But, for a quick laugh:

Do a Google search for: Images of Mohammed

Trust me.

You will see how much serious work there is that is still to be feared.

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Just Boys in Blue

I'm no fan of most cops, an enemy to many. Watch them long enough and you will find that nearly all of them abuse their power, either systematically or impulsively, well past the point of violating the laws they are paid and sworn to uphold. They will intimidate anybody that questions them, even when the questioner is entirely within their rights and being respectful. They regularly stretch the truth on official reports when it suits them to do so, a form of perjury; crimes and misdemeanors, and on and on and on.

They function as a legitimized gang, though with the presumed purpose of sustaining order.

If you ever witness an interaction between a police officer and a citizen - one which results in the citizen being arrested - then do yourself a favor and request a copy of the police report. In California there is the CPRA, which acts much as the FOIA does nationally. Most states make these arrest records public and will only decline from doing so when the cop has made an egregious error, like having killed an unarmed anybody. Then, lawyers and judges must get involved to finally find that the report was made but lost, or that the report was never filed as this is a mere formality in cases like accidental death at the hands of a cop.

If you do take me up on the challenge of reading police reports then you just might be surprised at what you see. You will find a detailed analysis of events that in no way accurately reflects what you saw. You will see the persistent suggestion of resistance to authority as well as resistance to arrest, even when there was none. It is a commonplace practice for police to give themselves reason for misbehaving as well as the option to press for more charges later if you decide to complain.

Think I'm joking?

Try it. In fact, you can read any number of reports. They all sound eerily similar. There are meticulous details included which, when combined, are damning for one side, the perpetrator. A police report always seems to suggest that the cop had no choice but to do what they did, which will sometimes involve the necessary application of force. 

Every now and then this must even be true; some people do deserve to be arrested. But if there is any disagreement with the cops before the arrest occurs then you can guarantee that the report will be filled with hints of disorderly behavior and resistance to authority, which of themselves will only become crimes once the cop decides to arrest you. Before that moment they are known as freedoms.

Little matter the facts, there. Most people know this, and those who don't eventually learn it, unless they're lucky enough to be white, where they can live in blissful harmony with their local police force without much fear or wonder, but instead sustain a barely concealed admiration for order and for those who thankfully provide it.

Now, in NYC, we have an entire city's police force refusing to do their jobs. Arrests and citations have dwindled to near non-existence.

This is an act of mutiny and all involved might be put to death, if at sea.

These public servants are attempting to show elected officials who really runs the city and who holds the power. 

This is never something to ignore.

The as yet unknown component of the story: the mayor might actually buckle. Hopefully not. 

He should start firing, from the top down. Bratton, the police commissioner, should be the first to go. He has advocated for "broken window" policing, which is of dubious merit as a crime deterrent. That policy alone should be enough to get rid of him. 

Then, downward from there until the message becomes very clear: those that are elected to power will not be intimidated by those who are granted their power by law, and are there to serve society. As others rise and are appointed positions they should be given a probationary period to correct the police force. If not, then say goodbye to your already bloated pensions.

Anything less would be emboldening their already runaway abuses of power. 

If it's a test of wills they want then give it to them. 

If anybody thinks that an entire police force acting with such unanimity of purpose, against the needs of the society they are tasked with serving, is nothing much to worry about then look at other examples of same. History has many. Cops have been abusing their powers for so long, with near complete impunity, that they have forgotten from where their power derives.

Does a part of me like the potential for chaos here? Of course. But the cops are not acting chaotically, they are waiting for chaos, inviting it, and even possibly helping to create it by non-involvement, which makes them complicit in whatever outcome results, and no amount of plausible deniability will change that.

If you ever need to see just how corrupt and power-drunk cops are then look no further than New York's Finest. There, we have an entire police force blaming the mayor for two cops having been executed. They say that he encouraged this behavior and now they're going to give everybody a taste of what life might be like without them. 

I say give them a taste of it. What an enormously impotent being can adequately hide behind a badge that barely fills the palm of a hand.

Take that badge away. Let the lamp affix its beam.

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High Speed Interwebs

(the b-day boys)

The Comcast guy arrived yesterday, mid-day, somewhere within the agreed upon half-day time slot that I was granted. He was a nice enough fellow and we chatted about wireless router range, local node traffic, encryption, packets, etc.

When it was all done I checked the speeds that I was getting, wirelessly: 75 mbps down and 15 mbps up. I am happy. Those type speeds allow me to do most all of what I need. There is an ethernet connection, also. I haven't checked the speeds with that though they should not be much different, if at all. That was the only area where he and I disagreed, though I said nothing. It's Wireless N, so there shouldn't be any package disparity between using wifi and ethernet; perhaps only if transferring between devices within my LAN. 

Anyway, I'll check just to make sure. Wireless N taps out at 150 mbps, so it shouldn't show any difference.

I heaved many boxes of records off into the closets as I awaited for Comcast to arrive yesterday. There are still many books that must be unboxed and arranged.

My living room needs a rug. A large rectangular one. I ran the dishwasher yesterday to clean the dust off of some dishes that have been stored for some time now. I made coffee this morning with my Mr. Coffee in preparation to go to work in the city.

I sit here typing and I don't want to leave.

What I can't figure out about coffee makers is why they all lie by a factor of two. If you want two cups of coffee then you must make four. It says that it makes twelve cups, but the reality of it is always six. It is perplexing. I wonder if the same is true in Europe. I'm not drinking "American sized cups" of coffee, I do not believe, though neither am I drinking them in the expresso style. 

It's a domestic mystery.

If I could just keep working this way for the next six months then I should be ready to retire and buy my dream home. 

It will requite some sacrifices, of course. I am looking at all of the things that I'd like to do, just in the next few months; there is a trip to Florida for a birthday, a trip to NYC for Greek Easter and a baptism, a trip to Mexico for a wedding, hiking toward the hills of the Canadian border, a rock concert in the hills.... Who knows. 

I miss dj'ing, sometimes. Though never when I'm sleeping. 

In all of my dreams I am flying.

I happen to be flying through the fiery pits of hell, but still... the sensation of weightlessness is always nice.

.... I am at work now and must work, work, work if I am ever to retire by the end of the year. It is my dream and in it I am aloft.

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The Wolf Moon

Driving home from the city last night, my friends and I watched the full wolf moon rise from across the bay. It rose through murky clouds, only revealing itself as full once it had escaped the false horizon of the mountain line.

This morning, I watched it set from the front door of the gym, against the mountain line on the other side of the valley, again obscured by clouds. I howled and howled and howled.

Yesterday, we had been in the city celebrating the boy's third birthday, after having a birthday party at home. His friends came over and ate pancakes and donuts and other birthday sugars; everybody behaved, almost surprisingly. 

Later, we went to The California Academy of Sciences. We ascended the rain forest together and witnessed the many species of lepidoptera. We went by the albino alligator pool and briefly discussed being eaten by an albino alligator and how that might differ from a more traditional alligator attack. We went outside and saw two rather doleful looking reindeer, discussing Santa's exemplary flying fleet with the two boys. 

We decided that Santa has real reindeer, these were merely caribou. 

I pictured a midnight world of them, migrating across the tundra together under arctic stars, the aurora borealis curtains swaying above, north of the boreal forest and heading northerly still, trailed closely by a pack of hungry moons.

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Navin R Johnson

I have finally become a genuine citizen. I have a lease in my name, the power bill will be in my name, Comcast, all of it. If I get a phone line I could even get my name in the phone book. 

Things are going to start happening to me now...

Yesterday, Rachel and I went to Target to buy some things that I will need: a Mr. Coffee, a Sunbeam toaster, a Crock Pot slow cooker, a friendly "Welcome" doormat. 

Hundreds and hundreds of dollars converted into plastic objects and empty boxes.

My credit will start to improve any moment now. I'm certain of it. It probably spiked yesterday afternoon. My car was completely filled with stuff. George Bush would have been very proud of my patriotism. The terrorists have lost. Disney World still stands.

It was the first time that Rachel and I had been alone together in quite some time. Just us. It was nice, pushing an ever-expanding cart around the store, picking products out that either myself or Rhys will need. Caring for one another in tangential ways, showing consideration and even love for the life of the other. She looked very cute, Rachel. I had an intense desire to touch her, to paw on and pet her. Something about the domesticity of the day prompted me. We know what happens to people who engage in that sort of behavior in a public place, though. They end up on the internet.

Something dormant felt possible once again; memories acting as a powerful agent upon the heart. One must be careful of such feelings, though, they can lead back to love. 

I wouldn't expect you, dear readers, to endure such a thing.

We're celebrating Rhys' 3rd birthday today. He is already up and dressed and walking around the house, excitedly awaiting his friends' arrival. He is thrilled about the day. I am teaching him how to use noisemakers and the proper way to manage multiple balloons at one time, keeping them all afloat through a circus-like effort.

Daddy, I turn three today. 

Showing me on his little hand his number of years in miniature, extended digits. Announcing his new numerical self to the world, having successfully transitioned now from toddler to pre-schooler.

One, two, three.

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Pick a subject!

(The intense focus of boy Rizzo)

Ah, sweet weekend. Tomorrow we will have a birthday party for the boy. Three years old. Wherever the time goes it goes there exceedingly fast. Time is like bacon, always gone too soon.

I feel as if I've said that before. I love bacon. I know I've said that many times before. I have invited bacon into my heart, like a pork christ.

I think I've used the picture above before, as well. 

Today, I will go shopping. I need things for the new apartment. Lots of things. It'll be fun, the feeling of starting a fresh life. The quality of newness seems to cheer me a bit.

There is still much to do there. My life is in boxes, again. I only have enough shelf space for half of my books if I also unbox the few records that I kept. Or, I could buy more shelves. 

Everything costs more than I have, or more than I wish to spend, even at Ikea. 

I really should look elsewhere. My life has been too long decorated by the Swedes and their cursed particle board.

I do things now that I never did before, watching the price of stocks rise and fall. I have been warned not to do so, but I am a curious sort. The fluctuation from day to day fascinates me. I await the next economic bubble to burst. One day I will log on and see that my future has disappeared just as quickly as my past.

Nobody ever goes to jail.

Well, maybe a couple of the Enron guys did, one or two of them. 

Ah, sweet justice.

Rachel just asked me what I am writing about today. 

I have absolutely no idea.

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Prince of the Pussies, borrowed times

(the pain of being :: blind fishing in broad daylight)

I am a kid, just as when.... the recall of recalling.

How impossibly remote the year 2001 seemed at the time. It was, because it was. The future is ever distant, Jupiter or Saturn.

1974. Still is. Just more than four times the mathematical length... time, back then.


Everybody wants planets to notice, or to notice planets.


I feel as far from Pluto as Uranus. Though not as warm, nor as focused.

Aquarius, age of.


I remember, then, calculating the likely year that I would die. A batteried Texas Instrument device, based on known longevity at the time: 69 years.

Averages should, but don't count on them.

2037. 

I was a "dark" kid.

I survived.


... somehow Aquarius

Things have improved sur-moderately, since then. Now, I can be expected to live well up until 2045, perhaps longer. Promisingly, if I cease popcorn and renounce some of my more extreme masturbation practices. My insurance company expresses worry that I have claimed penile-racing stripes as a legitimate healthcare expense.

They question the legitimacy of such a thing.



As for longevity:

Certainly you don't just adopt the life expectancy of the newer years, right?

It must average out a bit.

Meaning: a child born today might have a life expectancy of 79 years, but a 78 year old American should have been dead years ago. 

Longevity is the ultimate selfishness.

Old people heave heavily.

Is it now safe to "come out" as being prothanasia-phylactic?

Why aren't there condoms that can prevent old people?


It is all part of the joyous time-cone, which has to do with gravity being always attractive rather than repulsive.

Old people are repulsive, as such they are the embodiment of the long-term effects of anti-gravity; an indication of what will one day happen to the universe.

It really anti-matters. 

We organize matter somewhat disgracefully, yet we force our children upon the idea of it. 

If the universe were arranged by my design then young people would populate the many young people places.

No, that is just horrible.

If you read here then you have a moral obligation not to vote for me.



Old people are killing our economy, especially those that are on the verge of retiring. Yet, somehow they are the ones most famous for complaining.

Decay should be stopped, in our lifetime!

Very few youths that I have met ever consider or fret working to pay for the diminishing revenues of Social Security. They don't even seem to care.

The same is not true for the new, recently longevedity. 

Maybe that's a workable solution to the Social Security crisis: increase the mandatory retirement age to 97+.

Tax the government back for errors, abuses, and miscalculations. We could sub-easily turn this thing around.

Crisis creates opportunity, when you legislate tax laws.

I don't know. I am as the Buddha, in that respect.

Today might not be the appropriate day for me to solve all of America's problems. 

Or, perhaps even one of them. I've had a very focused new year.

Some would say.

I have now forgotten what I meant to mean.




Very well, then I contracept myself, 
I am farce, I contain multiplicationables. 

- Walt Whitmans

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Santa Loves Me Too

This morning we had an unexpected veterinarian crisis with Barkley, the pup. Rachel had to run him to the emergency place; blood work, anti-nausea medicine, hydration treatments, all of it. Some sort of hemorrhaging, which is never a good sign. It is troubling, the near total helplessness with which we are forced to sometimes contend.

On the other hand, I moved in to my new apartment yesterday. It is an odd, fine feeling. I hung my shaving kit on the towel rack in the bathroom and thought nothing at all of it. When I awoke I recognized the silliness of such a thing. I have a place from which to live more permanently for the first time in over a year. Perhaps in time I will forget how to live entirely out of a backpack.

Last night, I slept for six hours or more in two intervals, separated by a long period lying in bed watching an animated series (I can make my way through an entire series in two or three nights, usually). When I first awoke in the center of the night I didn't know where I was, a feeling to which I have become far too accustomed. The sleepy transition to an understanding that I was in my own place was deeply gratifying.

Then, I was giving the boy a ride to school this morning. We were approaching the moment when we would pull into the parking lot. This is a moment when he often starts to express some mild tension at the knowledge of soon being separated from either mommy or daddy. 

I told him that I love him. 

"Santa loves me too."

I know he does, buddy. I know he does.

.

We become the things we've repeated

A windstorm upon wakening; unsettling, and apropos. Tree branches scraping the sides of the house. Boxes filling the hallways in the dark, unexpected shapes to navigate.

I will be moving into a new apartment today. I had considered putting it off and wandering the states like a dusty nomad, but other concerns guided my choices. 

Now, I will learn to make a nice roast beef and veggies on Sundays, probably become a born-again Christian for old time's sake.

I still have more packing to do, of course. I have put everything off until the very last minute. Once the stuff is loaded into the truck I will rush to the bank to get a cashier's check for the deposit. Enormous sums of money, to me, leaping from my account at irregular intervals. Soon enough the sums will become much more regular. I will complain about it all here, to remind you, dear readers.

Even though I lived in an apartment in the East Village it didn't feel like an apartment. There's something different about apartments there. They feel as if they were always something else previously. They only seem to be apartments as a slapdash afterthought. An apartment in Sonoma, alternately, feels that it is precisely what is was meant to be and will never be anything but that.

This apartment is quite a bit more expensive than the one I had in NYC. Hard to believe, I know.

At least I will have my own space again. At 46, my needs have changed. Rhys will share the space with me, of course. He will have his own room, something that I'm sure he will appreciate, though I'd like to believe that he'll also miss sleeping in my room. 

My advice: do not get divorced, if you have kids it is staggeringly difficult. It consumes your entire life. For the foreseeable future, at least one year, all I can envision is working to sustain this apartment. 

I'm happy about it. It was my choice. 

I'm happy about it. It was my choice. 

I'm happy about it. It was my choice. 

I'm happy about it. It was my choice. 

I'm happy about it. It was my choice. 

I'm happy about it. It was my choice. 

I'm happy about it. It was my choice. 

.

"You're Innocent When You Dream"

(Alain Laboile)

Tom Waits, Tom Waits and more Tom Waits. That is the essential concoction for the times, the elixir of the minute and moment.

It started at the gym with Rain Dogs, then moved into the car, and then at home. Now, it informs my sleeping thoughts. Frank's Wild Years, Swordfishtrombones, Closing Time... There is an acid cabaret dancing daily within my ears, a stumbling carnival of nearly mistaken insight.

Next up, Heartattack and Vine, then Mule Variations.

The songs feel like short films, floating with woozy misadventure, populated by circus oddities, a laugh in the face of regret, as if performers and stagehands alike are all marching around my mind to the sound of some lost, drugged, fugitive band. The music feels forbidden, illicit. 

It's the always out of orbit romanticism that informs and reminds, this crazed sense of irrational hope and desperate faith in so much of his work. It prevents the tunes from lapsing into pure self-pity and self-pathos, most of the time.

When I was young I wanted to be in The Clash. Then later, I thought that maybe The Stones would also be a fun band to have been in. Now, only Tom Waits' band will do. A tour of small, smoky bars. Everybody in the band would be a multi-instrumentalist, so we would swap parts and instruments depending on mood and inspiration; a shadow carnival come to life, dressed and dancing as puppets on string, spilling out into the streets and then the afterward.

A bracing exhaustion, exasperation, the near-perpetual crises of one's best years. 

That's my latest dream: to be in Tom Wait's band, at least through winter and well into spring. Beck would eventually recognize my talents and we would do a few albums together, etc. 

To clutch desperation and hope in a single hand strumming and picking, stomping on a bass drum pedal in time with a jangly tambourine hat designed by Dr. John. The loaded waltz of an accordion and banjo-eyed jig sending the revelers ever spinning in semi-circles.

Gun Street Girl

Falling James in the Tahoe mud

Stick around to tell us all the tail

Well he fell in love with a Gun Street Girl and

Now he's dancin' in the Birmingham jail,
Dancin' in the Birmingham jail.

Took a 100 dollars off a slaughterhouse Joe

Brought a bran' new Michigan 20 gauge

Got all liquored up on that road house corn,

Blew a hole in the hood of a yellow corvette

A hole in the hood of a yellow corvette.

He Bought a second hand Nova from a Cuban Chinese

And dyed his hair in the bathroom of Texaco

With a pawnshop radio, quarter past 4

He left Waukegan at the slammin' of the door

He left Waukegan at the slammin' of the door

[Chorus:]

I said John, John he's long gone

Gone to Indiana

'Ain't never coming home

I said John, John he's long gone

Gone to Indiana, he ain't never coming home.

He's sitting in a sycamore in St. John's Wood

Soaking' day old bread in kerosene

He was blue as a robin's egg and brown as a hog

He's stayin' out of circulation till the dogs get tired

Out of circulation till the dogs get tired

Shadow fixed the toilet with an old trombone

He never get up in the mornin' on a Saturday

Sittin' by the Erie with a bull whipped dog

Tellin' everyone he saw

They went thatta way, oh boys

Tellin' everyone he saw, they went thatta way

Now the rain's like gravel on old tin roof

And the Burlinton Northern' pullin' out of the world

With a head full of bourbon and a dream in the straw.

And a Gun Street Girl was the cause of it all.
Gun Street Girl was the cause of it all.

Riding in the shadow by the St. Joe Ridge

He heard the click clack tappin' of a blind man's cane

He was pullin' into Baker on New Year's Eve

With one eye on the pistol the other on the door,

One eye on the pistol the other on the door.

Miss Charlotte took her satchel down to Kingfish Row

And the smuggled in a bran' new pair of alligator shoes.

With her fireman's raincoat and her long yellow hair, well

They tied her to a tree with a skinny millionaire,

They tied her to a tree with a skinny millionaire.

[Chorus]

I said John, John he's long gone

Gone to Indiana

Ain't never coming home

I said John, John he's long gone

Gone to Indiana, ain't never coming home.

Bangin' on a table with an old tin cup

Sing I'll never kiss a Gun Street Girl again,

Never kiss a Gun Street Girl again.

I'll never kiss a Gun Street Girl again...

[Repeat chorus]

.

To Still a Hummingbird

Everybody sleeps. I came over to Rachel's to see the boy. The house is still dark and quiet. 

The nights are not as long as they had been, though not by much. They are as silent as death. I miss the sounds of the rain, a bit - not the diffuse grey tones that suffocate the days - but the sound of the rain upon awakening is a pleasant reminder.

Each day I creep closer to something. It has been some time since I have felt this way. That I can go anywhere. Just pick a direction and drive. Escape. It is something you can not claim to want if there is nothing preventing you from leaving.

Well, not nothing.

I went to brunch with some friends yesterday and we chatted about having kids, what it does to you, what it changes. It is a profound shifting of all of the large and minute components of life. Everything changes, and everybody sleeps.

One of the interactions I had that helped encourage me to want to have a child was a conversation I had with an art dealer when I worked the Genius Bar at Apple in Soho, NYC. He highly recommended having children, explaining that it does not take anything away from you but rather confirms the things you have known all along. He said that it makes one more critical of what matters and what doesn't, clarifies things, reduces your tolerance for certain people and situations because you no longer have space for them in your life.

He was right, but I do not believe the current result of my life is quite what he meant. There is only so much "you" that you can get rid of before you start to disappear completely. After having a baby I kept hearing people (men mostly) talk about how "you simply don't matter any more."

It is important and impossible not to believe this, at least a little bit. At the moment of birth you go from being the most significant person in a woman's life to being third or worse on the totem pole, usually just above the dog. 

Then, last night I went to meet some friends for dinner, about an hour drive from Sonoma. A practice run. We sat under the stars and chatted about the implications of artificial intelligence upon time, and the significance of gravity upon the universe, and what that might mean. We were all just reciting strung-together portions from various pieces we had read, but it was a fun talk.

One of the things discussed was the theoretical assertion that time might move backwards if the universe begins to be drawn back in upon itself exactly as it had expanded. The laws of thermodynamics, and specifically the process of entropy, would reverse itself. Gravity would become a repulsive rather than attractive force, order would be the result of chaos, and the universe would spin backwards towards the moment of singularity. 

Time itself would start to move backwards, precisely as it had moved forwards. We would each re-experience ourselves, though backwards through time, exactly as it happened once (or many times) before. We would be resurrected from death with the memories of a lifetime intact and then move towards birth where we would naturally esteem sensation over knowledge.

It is based loosely on the premise that no information is ever lost in the universe. Black holes would spew out the matter that they consumed. The event horizon would be one from which events occurred rather than the point at which their time cone is reduced to nil.

You would await the moments when those who have passed away would come back to life, with full and complete knowledge of when this would happen. All loss would undo itself. You would have knowledge of all events as they undid themselves. In this pre-determined universe all knowledge would revert to speculation and wonder.

Hummingbirds would still flap their wings at 50-200 times a second, but the result would be that they would draw air towards themselves, depositing nectar into plants where it would then be returned to the earth.

Campfires would ignite themselves spontaneously out of cold ash, and then reconstruct their matter into a blazing fire, then into a log and kindling, then back into trees. 

On and on like that until you shrank in size to re-enter your mother where you would eventually disappear.

It was that kind of a night.

.

Turn Me Loose

The holidays have worn me out, the emptiness that attends them and their passing. Not just the seasonal melancholia but the mild exhaustion of having endured the anxiety that seems to cover the month in its entirety.

It looks as if I may be on the road soon. I'll very likely put all of my stuff in storage, might head east by car. Perhaps all the way across, back to the east coast. I just don't know.

Or, I might buy a house and go nowhere.

There is an apartment that I might rent, also. Though it is as expensive as a house and will function in a similar way: prohibitory as an obligation though nearly complete as an immediate solution. If what I wish to have most is an obligation that prevents me from making other choices.

There is, of course, the boy to consider. I do not wish to be apart from him for very long. Then there is the job. Though I believe that is something I can continue to do in this capacity for a temporary time. I would need to check.

There is also the winter to consider, the Rocky Mountains to cross without snow tires in a 4-cylinder car. Who is to say what might happen... and that seems to be the most alluring sense that I get when considering it. The thought acts upon me like a warm dream.

The road calls me dear....

.




.

Ninety-Six Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences

The Norton Anthology that I have referenced here has already gripped me. These are not books to be taken lightly, though a sense of historical humor is useful even in the worst of times.

The study of religion produces within me the intense desire to have multiple wives, of all types. I do not believe that this simple arrangement should be denied to an atheist. In fact, it is a central point of my atheism, the instruction on how to morally provide for four or more wives at a time.

I've only skimmed through the pages on Hinduism. Who knows what I'll think by the time I get to Islam, which is naturally treated last, being the "new kid's belief system."

By the time I arrive in Mecca I might not want any wives at all. Or, I might only wish to have one that is half my age plus 7 years. That sounds nice, sanctioned by the cosmos. I could have my wives compete in belly-dancing competitions to create what is known as a pecking order.

My second-string harem will be comprised entirely of young women who are on the cusp of turning eighteen years old. I will call them, "The Barely Illegal Pleasure Squad Task Force, because it pleases Sean" and then shoot a documentary about the moment that the clock strikes midnight on the eve of each of their 18th birthdays. The very moment that they become free to pleasure me.

Well, in a perfect world...

For marketing purposes the title will be shortened to just, "Barely Illegal." I have argued and argued with the merchandising team and they insist that we would need to recoup on our investment.

I am only 25 pages into the introduction of the book. Perhaps a tiered polygamy scheme will not play as important a role in the telling of things as I would wish. Each volume is about 2000 pages, so there is plenty of time to explore the various sacred mechanisms of harem maintenance and coital codes of conduct.

I was quite pissed, flipping through the table of contents, to find that Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves is not considered a part of the official canon of Islamic religious literature. I question whether this investment might have been wasted on me.


Maybe such an undertaking in religions will leave me not so different than a week at Burning Man. I will be making sacrifices of flower petals and fruit to a goddess in close proximity, with a jewel in her navel and rings in her nose, smelling richly of incense and magic carpet desert tent love, describing our inner visions to one another amidst the open swirling skies, conduits for nonsense wandering freely amongst the dust and the wind, ascending and ascending for hours of a time.

.

"Spare me the din of your songs"

5am Chrimbo morning. I sit here with the lit tree awaiting the awakening of the boy. He contains solely whatever magic there is in any of this. 

Don't get me wrong, I do like the holidays. Parts of them, anyway. The spirit of giving can be undeniably nice. There is something charming about it, the momentary freedom from quotidian concerns.

I received an online gift, a couple books for download, yesterday. I started reading the essays from F. Scott Fitzgerald. I was compared favorably by the giver of the gift to the content of the gift, so my ego and arrogance were aloft with interest. Though I had to admit that I also did see the comparison. Now, if only I could create that same favorable comparison outside of non-fiction.

Fitzgerald is the writer that I would most like to be able to imitate. Him, or Salter. I should go back and read Tender is the Night again, and then again and again. 

This same giver of gifts has bought me something even far nicer, though it won't be here until the end of the month when I begin my tour. He had hoped to have it here by Christmas morning, but alas... the winds of gift were not yet ready.

Okay, I hear the boy stirring upstairs. The magic hour approaches quickly on padded pajama feet.

.

Tellin' Mother Nature 'bout you and me

(The road we choose is always right)

Finally, sleep, almost seven hours worth of it; nearly God's number.

Speaking of gods, my Norton Anthology of World Religions awaits for me, perhaps to flip through later today or tomorrow. Man's distraction, wonder, and worship. I will roam freely among the various beliefs concerning man's place in the cosmos, perhaps even the formation of that cosmos. 

Then, at the end of a long day, I will ask one or more of the gods to inhabit my ailing heart.

Who knows, we will see. I might be reading and translating Sanskrit by tomorrow at sundown. Perhaps I will emerge as an expert on the dangers of fundamentalism, embracing the pure understanding of poetry in a strictly literal sense. I could end up as an assassin belly-dancer, like Robert Plant, but a few years younger.

I have not felt very chatty lately, which affects my desire to write, if not my willingness also. It greatly adds to my spiritual dimension, though.

I went to lunch with my manager yesterday and could think of nothing at all interesting to say. Our going to lunch was for the purpose of me asking questions. I was empty of those, too. I had prepared nothing. Luckily, he is always good for some fresh insight, which he offered freely. Because of days of insomnia, I struggled to retain anything.

It exists now like the memory of having eaten soup once while ill. 

Empty as a koan, filled with the great doubt. 

The sound of a mysterious god, like a secret Santa.

The internet says that the rains will return today. My disposition has invited their return, like a mood ring drowning in a rain dance.

I am certain of it.

Need one more normal night's sleep and my sense of eternal irreverence will return, cursing all gods from a great and unfriendly distance. That is my gift from Ganesh.

Suspect that by tomorrow morning I will be levitating with cheerful spiritual wisdom, in harmony with Tao, each breath a whispered prayer for the next nest.

.

So let's take a ride and see what's mine....

My circadian rhythms are completely shot. I fear that I have developed a metabolic disorder of some sort. I have only slept a handful of hours in the last several days. It is a lonely life, this turning and racing in darkness.

All day today at work, my body has been in a painful daze. I am at all times on the verge of hysteria or tears or worse. It has caused me to eat irregularly, so that I feel doubly ill, of body and spirit. I strongly suspect that this is what menstruating must be like. I am as irrational as I have ever been, like being on a powerful drug that is no fun.

Yesterday, the sun came out in Sonoma, hopefully that will help. My body needs the sun's queues more than most. 

Today, it was out again.

On the unusually long drive back home from the city I had the windows down and chatted on the phone before finally running out of people that would answer.

Then, it was just Iggy Pop and I.

I am the passenger, I stay under glass

I look through my window so bright

I see the stars come out tonight

I see the bright and hollow sky

Over the city's ripped backsides

And everything looks good tonight

.