"I've got a bike. You can ride it if you like."

A blank weekend is closing down in front of me as I write this. 

I am on-call, having accepted a new position at work, so I have a limited range of activities that I can enjoy, or even attempt. I have to always be within a few minutes of my computer and a wifi signal. They gave me a personal mifi, so I really shouldn't be too concerned, but I've found myself sitting in front of my computer and working anyway. Hopefully that will pass, once the newness wears off. 

It is an odd situation to be in, to not really be able to ride my bike with any sense of freedom. Or, having to ride with a backpack with my work computer and the mifi in it, ready to pull over and get to work on the side of the road, hopefully in the shade, sweating all over everything, hoping that the salty fluid doesn't make its way onto the logic board of the unit through the keyboard. One drop being all it takes to render me meaningless in that capacity.  

Aren't the details of my new role simply fascinating to read about?

There is nothing new to report on. I will lounge around the house today, maybe pick a nice spot to get some lunch, go for a late ride once the final hour of my responsibility has passed. It has been days since I have done any riding, or exercise of any kind. I was stricken with some sort of pulled muscle or pinched nerve. It's difficult to say which. It happened deep inside the mystery of my shoulder. 

I have eaten all of the pain killers I had, which I'd been saving for the holidays. There were lots of different colors, like little Easter eggs that have a very chemical taste when chewed. Now, I will be forced to restock. How else is one expected to endure the upcoming annual season of gratitude and glee. The nights drifting away, one after the other. The morning should bring some choreographed expectation of me. 

Pain is intense at night, like love - when it is working, and when it is gone. 

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Sitings

(Boy)

My shoulder has kept me from the gym and from riding my bike. I feel like the Wicked Witch of the West after being doused. I'm melting. I'm melting. You cursed brat, look what you've done.... What a world, what a world....

Not going to the gym for a few days is manageable. It's only a bit uphill once I return. The not riding of the bike, however, that depletes me. The lyricism of the land can be felt by tracing its contour. To ride in a car is to abbreviate the shape of the earth. Once you become accustomed to the daily exuding of depravities then it begins to feel as if they are backing up inside of you where they linger and can do the bidding of wrongness. Stale sweat stews in the glands, making itself available to the great tempter, the wings of lethargy. 

It is a good and healthy thing to work issues out while riding, to have an hour or more of uninterrupted me time. It was the best of times, it was the me-est of times. Without it, I become dangerously less self-absorbed, which detracts greatly from my natural wit and charm. 

I need some woman-sugar, also. I've forgotten what a naked butt feels like in my hand, to squeeze it while kissing. The flesh cold, the curve promising. I remember it all being so very nice, a woman's welcoming. The combined warmth of one body along the length of another, flesh to flesh. The waking next to them to experience anew the trembling, the motion, the delight in movements, the temporariest of unions.

Well, this site is no longer dedicated to the subgenre of awkward erotica. There comes a time in every blogger's life that they must bind up their sexual preoccupations. 

You, dear readers, will be the last to know when I do.

"Blogger" sounds turd-ish, because it is. It seems to combine the British euphemism of "bog" with the American substitution of "log" and yet somehow has something to do with writing. It fits, but it feels vulgar. To call oneself a writer, though, is far worse. It is okay to write, but to consider yourself a writer then there must be something wrong with you. Something beyond simple self-absorption. If you wish to be any good, anyway, there must be something very faulty within you and you must find a way to present it as if it were a secret in the act of giving up its own privacy. A lifetime emptied of the sub rosa. 

That is an excerpt from my latest work, A Blogger Blogs on Blogging. 

I usually refer to this as a "site" but I can't rightly say that I'm siting, a term born wingless, forever damned to the parentless nest. 

Yuck, that is an absolutely horrific image: an orphaned bird born flightless, destined to die in confused and lonely misery. 

Okay, I'm leaving now. I've ruined the pre-party. 

God only knows what horror I'll conduct when the real guests arrive.

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Travis Belt Buckle

I definitely fucked up something in my shoulder. I have very limited mobility, though not enough to stop me from shaving my head last night. I started off just trimming my hair a bit, using a beard clipper, with guards. It seemed like it was working pretty well and I had it looking nearly normal, which caused me to be a little bit more emboldened than I might have been otherwise. I just kept cutting away and more kept coming off, but I couldn't seem to find a way to make it appear uniform, so there arrived a point at which shaving it off was the only option I had left myself.

Here is the result of my dalliance with uber white power fashion:

Fuck, speaking of... I engaged in an online conversation concerning race (sort of) with a friend of mine and it didn't take very long for the entire thing to slide off the side of the table. I blame him, of course, but looking back over the conversation I now realize where I fucked up. When you are a natural-born liaison for the white power structure it is best not to discuss the actions of a person of color in the U.S. My buddy - who we'll call Ché for the purpose of this post - wasted no time in pointing out that for me to have an opinion on the actions of a person of color is an indictment against all persons of color, and has foreboding racist implications. So, I shaved my head.

No, I kid of course, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to stomach the self-righteousness of some. The indignation is much easier to suffer, because it at least seems justified. I'm no stranger to the impulses of self-ness, but the partisan polemics of social media has created a nuance vacuum. There is only one way to feel: in support of good things. Or, you could choose to be against bad things. Those are your options. America, get used to it. 

So, I took the conversation offline and sent him what I believed to be a thoughtful private message discussing my ideas and pointing out his many logical fallacies, though only to the point that was necessary for me to continue the conversation. Nothing. No response. His much anticipated race war must already be underway. Ah well, I try to understand that some do not possess the requisite neurosis to discuss anything with me at length. My conversational style has been likened to that of following someone else on a never ending bender for reasons that never quite become clear. Ché has indicated in the past that he is only willing to discuss something with me if I am also willing to follow his ideological positions to their inevitable conclusions. Afterwards, I suppose that we might both be able to glow in the warmth of our newfound and allied righteousness. The effect of post-structuralist thought has been both pervasive and incomplete. When I did keep the conversation on topic he didn't seem to like that any more than the other. 

Who knows. The conversation did have me in the very unusual position of treating cops as humans and refusing to see them as a unified whole worthy of symbolic derision. It is a position that I don't agree with either. So, as you can imagine, I was outside of my comfort zone. 

I have another friend on the other end of the race issue spectrum with whom I am having an equally challenging conversation. Let's call him Adolph. I harmlessly meant Adolph Coors there, of course, you little fledgling fascists. 

There are actually two of them, and they are both slightly different versions of Archie Bunker. One is thinner. Both advance a sort of Reader's Digest Condensed version of the main bullet points that can be gleaned and enjoyed from Fox News. They are happy to offer their opinions on anything from enforcing current immigration laws to what exactly might be the problem within black communities. It is spellbinding to watch it all unfold. 

The biggest impediment to conversation, for me, is humorlessness. I can stand all of the logical leaps and fallacies, the accepted biases, the shortcuts through any data that doesn't support the preferred leanings. It's the abject seriousness which people regularly export, and also expect to be afforded in return, that I find so objectionable. Perhaps they believe their own opinions to carry the same gravity as the issues in which they are they are free-association opining. Everybody is correctly aligned with the aggrieved and the oppressed, no amount of caution allows approach to the sanctity of their well refined and deeply moral opinions upon the unjusticeness of everything. There is only damnation towards the listener for having listened wrong, again, or not adapting quickly enough with the subtly changing tides of the struggle.

If I were any less of an observer I might be tempted to believe that being white is fast becoming the toughest job there is. If. 

Well, here I am once again, writing about things in which I can not fairly provide context for, nor give specificity in the details that might matter. It is a poor habit of mine, though it would be unfair to give only the details that supported my side of the conversation. I mean, I did shave my head, I must be a racist by now, or soon, because it enters through the head and exits through the mouth, where it often multiplies through misuse. All race is a copy of a copy of a copy, so there will be some unfortunate blurring. They're not white or black, they're just a copy of other people who possessed those same qualities with greater clarity. 

That alone should help bring a calming sense of closure to my conversational counterparts, but no.  I would call them equals, but fuck... my assumptions have done nothing but damage in that regard. Some are still more equal than others. 

Don't worry, my timid readers, by tomorrow I will have wandered back to the safety of amber level white privilege. Until then, I'll wash my dishes like any other Mexican, one at a time.

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Petaluma, home of the fighting Lagunitas Brewers

I'm not sure how I did it, but I knew it would get worse. Yesterday, intermittently, I felt this very sharp pain beneath my shoulder on my abdomen almost on my back, along the right latissimus dorsi. It didn't stop me from riding my bike to Petaluma in the evening, nor from going to the gym afterwards. 

Then when I awoke this morning, something announced itself as being very wrong before I had even made my way out of bed. The arm had limited mobility and the shoulder ball and joint socket was very sore. My glenohumeral was failing me, as if the entire cavity had been agitated from within. I took aspirin, Alleve, probably a few Xanax, who knows. I have one prescription bottle that operates on the Secret Santa meets the potluck principle. I only put things in there that I know will help me, though the dosages can be wildly unpredictable. Pill size does not equate to the philter's effects. 

And the ones that mother gives you don't do anything at all.

Nothing has helped. I'm typing this out now with only my left hand, hunting and pecking as always, though with extended caesural pauses between each key strike. Each word a temporary victory, each sentence wrought from a paragraph's time. It's like a nightmare in which you are being chased by the future, and it's gaining on you, and growing.

I want to get away. Cato and I are considering doing some damage this weekend, though he is reluctant to tent camp, having just returned from Burning Man with all of the other filthy heathens. I don't mind sleeping in a tent, at all, though I understand how much one longs for their own bed, or the bed of another, after returning from the desert. Any bed, some space that is cool, dark, and soft. 

I could sleep for a thousand years...

I have been sneaking onto camera sites and looking at expensive lenses. It is the most perverse impulse that I can muster right now. I've been doing the same with bike sites. They seem to be corollary interests, but I want to keep them separate. I did buy a bike rack for my car, gets here on Friday. 

I would say that "I need a girlfriend," but that is silly. I am happy having time and space to myself. Oh no... as I was typing that last sentence the below song came on as YouTube was trying to sell my attention to somebody. 

When the truth is found to be lies

And all the joy within you dies

Don't you want somebody to love?

Don't you need somebody to love?

Wouldn't you love somebody to love?

You better find somebody to love...

Far out, man. The universe does not only speak to crusty burners stumbling back in from the desert like a plague, pockets filled with locusts, murmuring about the goodness of gratitude. The stars send the radical self-refrainers the occasional twinkle, too. 

Next up, Joplin's Piece of my Heart. What am I expected to do, just take another little piece of her heart? 

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"Everybody hates sugar. Because she's a prostitute."

(unknown)

Those two sentences represent the beginning a book review that a friend's son wrote. She had accidentally bought him the "wrong" book for a reading assignment. The kid is only ten years old, so it's tough to say if it will turn out to be the wrong book or not. The return data has not yet been tabulated. 

Reading those two sentences has made me happier than most things do, or can. Saying them out loud helps, particularly after the first 20 or 30 open office recitals. It is my new mantra. I always wanted a personal mantra with the word "prostitute" in it. No sacred utterance is complete without it.

I take the "Be" off of "Because" also, which helps, cuz. 

Sometimes I'll just repeat "Everybody hates sugar" over and over again. It transports me to my happy place.

Okay, I have nothing. My mind is now cleared of all distractions, including any future sentence that may have otherwise appeared here:

.

 

Objectifying

I've lived as if enduring a nearly perpetual breakdown since sometime in my early 30s. It seems that maybe there was a big breakup, or a series of upsets that seemed like a big breakup, or both, endured concurrently.

Lately, I'm giving myself a taste of banality, of losing one's mind in the standard way, slipping into the ravages of age, all for reasons that are also escaping me. I lost yet another pair of glasses, only two days after breaking another screen on my iPhone. The losing of the glasses is unsettling. Anybody can let a phone slip out of their hands. You still have the object to time travel with. It tells the tale of the action that was of recent disappointing significance, and shows you alternate universes from the past. Losing a pair of glasses that you remember having only minutes before makes no sense, it gives a glimpse into the inevitable, and an alarmingly clear one at that.

I'm terrified of this recurring loss. I can withstand the eccentricities of being unstable, but a life of losing intimate or personal objects without explanation, I had hoped to only enjoy that as part of my last few confusing moments on earth. Even if I were to find the glasses when finished writing this, that victory alone can not erase the feeling of being increasingly baffled concerning the nature of the life around me - not understanding my relationship to space, losing touch with objects which permit time to appear as an indiscreet whole, suspecting that there may be a stalking thief moving within the fog within me. 

To make matters worse, in the middle of typing the two above paragraphs, sitting on the couch watching the new Jungle / Kipling thing with the boy. It suddenly dawned on me that I forgot to pick up the boy's night-night from Mom, his personal blanket. I looked around the apartment. I looked in the car. Nothing. I had the boy prepare to walk to Mom's so that we could recover it, knowing that it had to be there. She and I had discussed it earlier, I thought. The boy and I had our shoes on. I had texted her. There was some back and forth text confusion before she finally made clear: the night-night wasn't there. 

We looked everywhere around the house, again - nothing. Looked in car, again - same. Loss is a form of panic with a limited set of symptoms. Something is slipping away from very near to me - physically, mentally, spiritually. The objects of my life are dispersing into fading pieces, disconnected from the thing that I believed had connected them: me.

Entering a mist made of lost scattered pixels, unable to tell if I am meant to be there. The internal becoming an unfamiliar realm. The loss of objects in the physical world a manifestation of that detachment, the ever ennui. Each missing thing echoing another missing connection. Each untethered piece taking its portion from the whole, drifting off into the dark, spaceless distance.

There, a thief disguised by thievery; brazen efforts, encouraged by success. Peer into fog, wishing to see something there moving, the rumor of a shadow, the murmuring of some evidence. Dreaming on patrol, of plotting, of placing hands around the neck of it, recovering so much loss in the snapping of that single next second.

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Camp Q6

Well, the boy and I successfully camped, finally, after several failed attempts. 

Midday Friday, we decided to lounge at the pool for a bit then head up into a nearby mountain for the night. The boy was ecstatic. We found our spot and set up our tent. Shortly after that - luckily not too much longer - another family arrived and informed us that we were in their spot. After some investigating and pointing it turns out that they were quite correct. One of the fathers helped me move our already setup tent over to the correct place and we all proceeded to become fast friends, sharing our firewood, camping gear, and the food that we were making. 

I had gone full-American and was making cheeseburgers and baked beans. The other family was Indian, so they opted not to eat any beef-thing that I had prepared. Ah well.... I kid, of course. I offered them none of what I had made. They offered plate after plate of delicious Indian food - goat meat with basmati rice, spicy chickpea patties, delicious sauces and fruits, etc. I offered to let them use a grille basket I had to heat the chapati and naan they had brought. These are just guesses on the bread. There are probably a thousand varieties or more that I am not familiar with. After this we were all quite pleased to eat the evenly heated bread together, which was a wonderful and unexpected camping surprise.  

They had three boys all about Rhys' age. He was off and running and having adventures with them, venturing into the nearby trees to enact some playful version of danger and heroics. I almost started to feel a little robbed, that the boy was ignoring me and our camping setup to play with the neighbors' kids, though I have learned slowly that it is best to just let things happen as they normally would for a four year old. Their lives, like most others, are happiest when they are being left alone to do as they wish. You can not correct a child into happiness, you can maybe guide them towards safety, then hope for the best. 

Being a parent has a corollary in vegan ethics, you simply wish to reduce suffering, though very specifically. 

Later, as he and I lay in bed awaiting sleep to arrive he asked me why other kids get to stay up later than he does. I tried to explain that different aged kids go to sleep at different times and that those kids were a little bit older than him, which was true, though the more telling truth is that dad was tired and ready for sleep. 

He loved falling asleep and waking up in the tent, under the trees, beneath the stars above that.

In the morning, we made eggs and had fresh fruit. Dad drank a Starbucks mocha thing in a bottle, which seemed to be some form of coffee but without any of the positive gain in energy. It did very little to raise my blood pressure, either, so I washed it down with a Red Bull whose effects were far more pronounced and perhaps cumulative with the other. I don't normally ingest such poison in the mornings, I promise.

Necessity is the mother of ingestion.

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Go Gators! (clickbait)

Nothing seems to make sense any more. I can't get away far enough, or for long enough, to gain fresh perspective. I should have gone to Burning Man, a fact that I am reminded of on a nearly daily basis now. Everyone has departed, or will soon. One video was sent of a friend dj'ing, who happened to be playing an old track of mine. Though, perhaps Burning Man is not the answer to my impulses. I should spend some time by myself. CS tells me to just go for a walk, and that is probably the best advice there is. Cycling is making my mind race. Only a few short weeks ago it was the magic action that was pacifying me, now I am more wound up after a ride than I was before. I must find new mountains to climb.

Buying stuff on Amazon hasn't made me any happier, either. I don't need anything. I merely want things, and usually only after chasing them across browser tabs for a few hours. Anyone with an interest in photography never runs out of desire for more lenses and camera bodies. It is the way of that art.

It is the way of much art. There are new mechanisms required for expression. Currently, I'd like to express the upper limitations of my credit limits...


Well, I have a weekend with the boy. There is a rooftop bbq in the city on Saturday. It is hosted by an alumni from U.F.  It's a Gators' party. Perhaps we will go see the city from there for a bit, eating cheeseburgers, and cheering for our team from the other side of the same nation that made cheeseburgers great.

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The Great Escape

The boy and I went to the Farmers Market last night, walked around and bought tri-tip sandwiches and corn dogs. Sat on the grass and listened to the band play some easy live music, played on the swings and in the bigger kid's playground. Mom met us for a bit and the boy's spirits were lifted by it.

I find myself asking, What next? more and more. There is the immediate plan to just have adventures, but I have never been very good at planning for the distant future. I'm lucky to be able to successfully pull off something over a weekend. I do better when I have more money, but that never lasts. For me to live a life reasonably free from financial concern I would need to make approximately four times as much as I do now. Ping me on LinkedIn if you have any secrets to such a thing.

Ping me. Jesus, what have I become...

Well, no time to solve the world's ailments today. I was going to spend a bunch of time on Facebook being white, you know, criticizing football players for not saluting off-duty stadium cops. 

The Libertarians have stepped out of their way to support Kaepernick's freedom to not stand for the national anthem, but they sure have spent a lot of time criticizing it. Not as much time spent understanding his reasons, only pointing out that he is wrong, wrong, wrong....

One time, many years ago, I was at a baseball game in Yankee stadium. It was the first July 4th after Sept. 11th, 2001. My friends and I got pretty liquored up on whiskey before the game, just as we sat in our hundred dollar seats waiting for the sports to happen. 

Now, there is still no consensus as to precisely what happened next, but the gist of it was that I nearly made my friend shit herself because I criticized her dramatic delaying of standing up for the national anthem. She claims that she was simply pulling herself together to do so, and she is a notorious procrastinator. She ended up not pooping her pants, but that didn't help anything.

In any event, a whiskey argument ensued, she left the game quite upset. 

Afterwards, for a few weeks, as I replayed the episode in my mind, I was repulsed by the unchecked nationalism that I exhibited. I buffered my behavior in all sorts of qualifiers - Yankee Stadium, July 4th, Sept. 11th - but nothing worked. I realized that I was a boorish twat, and didn't believe any of the dogma or protocol that I was advancing, for reasons that I could neither embrace nor internalize. 

None. It was the behavioral equivalent of doctrine, a retreat from thought rather than a willingness to engage. Oh well, I never apologized, or updated my official stance on this specific brand of stupidity. I will reconsider standing for the national anthem. though. When you think of groups of people standing together in the presumed sanctity of honoring their nation then some good questions do arise from it, though none that I wish to answer for anybody else. It is silly nationalism, that one should show standing reverence to a flag. I sit with Kaepernick on this one. 

Though...

Nothing matters. A friend's father passed away last night. After 60 years of marriage, his wife having passed away about a year ago, he retired his will to live - stopped eating, weakened himself in such a way that all knew what was coming next. 

I'd stand to that, and put my hand on my heart to honor that. Anywhere, anytime. It all ends. The most beautiful and complete versions of life and love vanish before us. It is a must, to become what love is then it must also pass. 

It is all absurd without end. Or rather, it is all absurd with end. 

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... see who sleeps

This day arrives, the crest of another week passes in foam. 

Some people are at Burning Man. I want to go, build an art-nest to traditional gender roles, with decorative chicks, to see what sort of weirdos I can drum up out of the dust, if just. I have yet to empty my actual car from the past weekend of camping. Am waiting for a next girlfriend to help me. It is but one of the many arts of manhood. 

Seem capable, needed.

Before it is over, some woman will wish to have my baby, again. 

I'd do it. I have achieved the wisdom of a pubescent. 

I sit now, looking at the imaginary section of days that sit between myself and my next weekend. I understand what it might take to move past this, if only by rote acceptance. Once those days are gone, then they are gone. The ones yet arrived have not yet; they are as gone in distance as all else, disappearing when you place much weight upon them. The future works inversely. The moment is the thing there is. No way to go back and enjoy time, much less the feeling of joy that left its shiny residue there upon the surface. If you think that you wish to enjoy the future then spend your present preparing to make good memories. 

Yet so few fall in love with a song upon its hearing. 

The importantest parts of life tickle the see-saw of time. We tell ourselves anythings, all times. Seconds becomes precious, they unfurl within us as minutes, or as ever, or less than else. 

I don't know. How would I?

Life was dense with opportunity and joy. That might well be how life tricks an object into noticing itself - dim the lights a bit, see who squints, see who cares... see who sleeps.

For those that had siblings, they will often do this infuriating thing to one another: mimic and repeat everything said by the other in mocking childhood tones. It becomes maddening, and yet true to itself. It is a truth which no one should be expected to suffer: the reminding of one's self in another. 

It's why love fails, unless you married the wrong person, then it's just their fault. 

Inevitably, one child will appeal to either or both parents to have the other stop. The imitator must also appeal to have it stopped, giggling as they go, imploring in exaggerated tones the request that would end the torture for one of them. What value would there be in such a thing, at all, if only to give up at such a moment that their echoing efforts are finally being recognized. The moment of triumph!

A real rebel will start to imitate Dad, as that statue lays down the new law. 

There is no better defense to dogma than its immediate proliferation. Only the severest of families can resist the temptation of laughter when dad seems like anybody else in the car. 

Hopefully, Dad feels the same. 

It is occurring to me slowly now, that parenting is little more than this game writ large, stretched out over a generational difference or two. The boy imitates everything that I do, everything that I say, sooner or later. It's maddening in its own way because I am imperfect, and no highest form of flattery will change that. I'll pretend to be hurt when he finds other heroes to imitate. Who knows, maybe I will be hurt by it, or maybe I'll remember this moment, and offer my vanity to the prevailing winds of his interests. 

Anybody with a liquid dose of self-honesty should find some relief in not having a template made from their own behavior, formed deep within the daily behavior of another, that of a child. 

I don't know. I don't know. 

I'm trying subtly to reverse the process, often look to the boy for behavioral clues, have had some success there. He seems happier than me, so why not. Why not? Why shouldn't I be more like him, than him like me. I could use a new hero, too.

I don't know how other people do it, or what they think and feel about such things. I'm tempted to start filling the boy's head with daydreams about Christ's eternal sacrifice, perhaps just to insulate him against any future nonsense in that regard. I promise here and now that I will never tell him about U2. What more is required of a good parent of my age? 

Things can go terribly wrong, as when a parent catches their kid smoking and makes them smoke several, or a whole pack. U2 can't help with that, because they are retarded, and their growth was stunted by success. They are midget Christians. It's awful, but they are doing what they can in their little midget hearts, in Africa, or somewhere else, wherever they are, or will be midgets next. 

To force poison upon a child was the mythical wisdom in the 70s and even the early 80s, at least among the families in suburban Orlando. Now, that would rightfully be called abuse, but you know... things change. It's why The Human League are no more. Kids don't have to listen to U2, now, unless they are victims of Apple stuffing. We were all victims when the field was wide open for making the heinous claims of the effect of others. Victims are the largest and fastest moving demographic, and they are making new ones every quarter.... Thanks, Jobs!

The person telling the apocryphal tale of having to smoke a carton would sometimes be doing so across the fumes of the cigarette that they were smoking,  

I try not to picture my boy with tattoos, body piercings, smoking cigarettes, herpes, simplexes, or worse. But, I look at the young kids in this area and I accept that he will likely appear as they do to me now, once they become his new reference point for coolness, the new standard by which he will gauge himself, if all of my reading recommendations have failed. I give it another handful of years before he'll be wearing rock t-shirts of some sort, locking his bedroom door and not wanting to sit down and talk with me, embarrassed when I discuss pop culture with his friends. 

The cliche exhale when I even ask him to come to dinner, his favorite food of the time, the one that I made him. 

Beleaguered Consumering. 

It seems inconceivable to me now, but so do many things. My 40s were a lifelong myth I gleefully trusted would never arrive, not realizing I had consumed them before they had their chance. 

Whatever time I am scraping off of the walls of the dungeon now are those of my 50s. 

Arthur Miller's Afetr-birth of a Solicitation. 

Such forward slippage of time - a sense of many motions falling, the woozy feeling that something implacable is shifting far underneath, some thing propelling things forward, predictable by pattern, increasing in scope, ushering time and self along with it. To see fractals unfurl within you renders all things part of something else, useless. 

Thoughtful people tried to tell me about it when I was younger. I listened, but didn't quite know what to do about it. Old people are disgustingly disappearing. Why would they vanish otherwise? Age is awful, but death is the reminder of how disgusting is the effort that keeps us all alive. Just watch an old person eat. I would turn against them if there were any left. 

Ah well, ah fuck, ah this, or that, next.

Every now and then I wish to sit quietly, to endure the moment of peace to be had from within, though not for long. I note the occasional breath amidst the mist, to avoid the seasickness of time. 

Mostly, though, I want life to move faster than it is, find myself bored with the collection of diversions that created me, that I will soon be stuck with, as objects of love to pass on; to this with, that with.

I've smoked the whole pack now, still stand, wisps of sinuous smoke rising around a group of dubious non-believers, generously exhaling the poison that I had also been warned of. As if time were frozen and wanted nothing more than me not melting.

These are just opinions - the elongated world of social media has encouraged me to detest the opinions of others - factless, baseless, ubiquitous, insisted upon, then against, full of self, or the emptying of nuanced charm of mind.

A favorite thing to claim, and oftenest will: you must have misunderstood...

It happens. 

If only fact. 

Deflating a well placed misunderstanding. 

Details diminish life, as scurry, 

with promises better

or, best unhurried.

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Del Valle

Camping for the weekend. There was a lake in the hills on the East Bay, Del Valle. It was all pleasant. I felt nearly normal. I was given a free glimpse of what normalcy must be like, for others. If it had been a three day weekend then I would have cracked, Im sure of it. Some stream of heinous images or thoughts would have found the route out of my mind, through my mouth, then to the ears of an unsuspecting innocent. 

We went with work-friends, though we were able to treat each as being somewhere beyond functional acquaintances. It was pleasant and warm. I mean, we got along well, were loosened up enough with each other to drink and make jokes and play Cards Against Humanity. 

We stayed up past midnight, laughing into the temporary darkness. I played John Scofield and Django Reinhardt albums. We built a campfire and maintained it. The cracking and popping of the wood punctuating the claims of victory and feigned disappointment that made the game what it was.

We hiked a portion of a lake, tested the water temperature here and there. There has been toxic algae in some of the lakes in the region. We swam in an area that had been roped off for swimming. The sailboats and others drifted or motored by. The far shore being only a few hundred yards across, where water met rolling hill upon rolling hill. 

After the sun had gone a generous population of stars appeared above us. We identified the constellations using an app, standing in awe of the heavens and our relationship to them.

The unleashed dogs enjoyed walking along the shoreline path as a group to be herded. 

They would run forward and inspect whatever there was, returning back with what they had found, which appeared only to be the happiness of being. 

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Some Velvet Morning

The world of sadomasochism became too weird for me. I had to ask to be unstrapped, then limped away with the only remaining pride I could muster after the many ordeals that I had been through. 

Speaking of, I had the strangest of experiences a few mornings ago. It was, as far as I know, unrelated to sadomasochism, unless that dark joy was occurring in some subconscious nocturnal capacity. 

Here is what happened: I woke up naked as is my custom and needing to use the bathroom where I found fresh blood on the front of my left leg. I looked, but I couldn't find the source. My hands were dry and there was no visible wound. I was the only creature in the bed at the time. I ruled out misadventure, for the moment. I used the bathroom then cleaned the blood off of my leg. That's when I saw the damage. There was a patch of skin seemingly missing from my scrotum and a reservoir of blood there on the surface. I gingerly treated it with the gentlest of nurse hands. It wasn't too severe, but it was a complete mystery, that somehow in my sleep I was able to damage myself in this way and not be aware of it. I looked at my fingernails to see if maybe I had scratched myself into injury. The nails were trimmed and showed no signs of having been used in this vicious attack. In addition to there being no weapon, neither was I able to establish motive.

I make a lot of jokes on this blog, but this is all true. I woke up with a bleeding ballsack and no idea how it possibly could have happened. Of the many odd experiences in my life this was a significant one. The mind needs to understand how a thing like this could happen. You know... an ounce of prevention and all of that, something about the cure. 

It turns out the scrotum bleeds quite a lot once the surface of the skin has been breached. I have long noticed and pondered the network of arteries and veins found there, believing them to be a map to some hidden pirate treasure, though I have been careless in preserving it until the time was right, and some distances might not remain to scale. 

I had to cut and shave away hair to try to get a bandage on it, which only exacerbated the bleeding, as the skin there stretches and necessarily must to be shaved properly, and also for the bandage to adhere to something other than hair. 

It didn't look right to just shave that one spot, so now the entire oblong spherical regions had to be sheared. That looked even more ridiculous, to have bald balls but also the tuft of reasonably normal kinked pubic hair above them surrounding the other part. The column, if you will. So, everything had to go. Before I knew it I was deeply committed to an entire pre-op process of cleaning and preparing the area for surgery. This mishap was becoming a kind of unexpected fun. In my very early morning pre-coffee haze I documented the entire process with the art of photography and through the use of bathroom mirrors. 

This is when things started to get weird. After I was done removing the hair that only seemed to confuse the purpose of the region, making it seem more chaotic and unpredictable than it actually is, the wound that had been bleeding was no longer there, or it had healed in a tremendous way. Like, Hollywood fast. I'm not kidding. There was a spot there, but it already seemed to have healed, when only fifteen minutes before it was bleeding enough to leave fresh bloody residue on my leg. There were emergency room considerations being made. Not having an explanation has kept me out of the emergency room in the past, but bleeding balls are something that need attending to, expository or not. 

The explanation that started to form was that the blood on my leg had come from elsewhere and had only left some residue on one of my balls, the left one. Having no pubic hair made that fact become more clear, but only added to the mystery.  I looked everywhere. I mean, everywhere, and could not find any spot on my body that might have left that much blood. I diagnosed varicoceles, though if you stare at those veins looking for that then they might appear as such to the layman. I knew the power of the mind when it comes to this sort of examination. There was still an area where blood might have emerged from on my nut, but it made no sense that it had bled so much and then healed so quickly. It was like the miraculous nut of Christ. I wanted to take it to the Vatican to have it confirmed as a miracle. 

I was going to put some sort of bandage on it, but it didn't require that any longer. Most people are like me I suppose and would like to believe that their testes have supernatural recuperative powers, so I started to pull at it, to verify. That was all that was needed to confirm I had definitely found the correct spot. The wound - tugging on it greatly angered my circulatory system. It was as if a cauterized artery had re-opened during a battlefield amputation. A fresh spring of blood red river emerged. I could have counted off my heart rate if I would have had a watch on me and been willing to let the pulses run for 60 seconds. 

If there is ever any question concerning the relationship between the heart and the testes then I encourage you to replicate this experiment. They are connected in the directest of ways, such that only an open wound can demonstrate. The nervous system was in there working also, because my mind was sending me a biblical flood of messages.

Those messages sounded like this: Oh Jesus, fuck, fuck!!!

I patted at it with a series of toilet paper and wet wipes, trying to cap the wellhead, slowing the flow to a near halt. Clearly, this temperamental Venus-like wound was in no mood to be tested. I surmised that the injury might be menstrual in nature. I kicked myself for not having a virgin to throw into a volcano, to appease the gods of bleeding balls. I wrapped the region in bandage and tape, briefly considered a tourniquet, but then put on a pair of shorts that I said one last goodbye to and went back to bed.

When I awoke a second time the only real issue was removing the post-op dressing. Well that, and the horror one feels at taking off the bandages after a self-performed operation of this kind. I was terrified that maybe none of my business would remain, that somehow in my efforts to fix the thing I had accidentally removed it, or replaced it with some cadaver's Frankencock. Who knows. My life has taken a turn for the weird.

Rest easy, ball fans, all was as it should be, or as close to "as things should be" that somehow still involve me. I would have posted a picture to accompany this post, but my better instincts told me that would be too demonstrative, also there is patient confidentiality to consider.

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FOMO

(You Know Who)

If you are anything like me, after six and half years of writing personal essays on a daily site then you might lose your mind a bit, also. I've reached that point in self-therapy where I'm not quite sure where to go next. There is no apparent cure for what afflicts me. Talking it out only seems to encourage it;  patient self-consciousness in no way resolves it; reckless submission feeds the thing that feeds the thing. 

I should have decided to go to Burning Man, if only to give myself a break from radical self-expression.

I received a series of rapid texts from a friend over the weekend. She had found a ticket and was making her plans, wanted to know what mine were. Mine, unfortunately, included not going. There comes a tipping point in the number of friends that do go in which you start to feel as if you're missing out, that you might regret not going, that you likely will. The ticket and car pass that I passed on are out there haunting me somewhere, in the wrong person's hands. 

In my lustier days I might have went on to discuss the chopping off of the hands of thieves and the difficulties that behavior represents for radical future self-pleasuring, but that angry desert sultan-prince is no more. I am Aladdin-esque now in my middling years, floating on magic carpets, though blonde with blue eyes, like Lawrence but with neither the masochism nor the sadism. 

Well, a little desert breath of each, nothing more. Hopefully just enough to be fun and consensual, not the type that results in the warranting of any formal charges, or inquests. 

I am trying to answer your questions... I never remember him actually touching me, skin on skin, but the leather that he was cloaked in did come in very harsh contact with the skin of my bottom repeatedly, as he was spanking me. The whole thing was glowing pink, the flesh had become very tender to the touch. I couldn't always see his eyes, but that was because of the full leather unicorn dildo mask and body suit he had on, as I mentioned. His speech was impeded, mostly because the red ball that was where his mouth would have been. It prohibited him from forming complete sentences, which was fine by me. He just kept huffing some canister of medicine that he said was for his asthmatic palpitations. He called it "Blue Velvet," though I do not believe that was the brand name. It looked as if it may have been one of those medicines that comes across the border from Canada or Mexico.  

Ok, stop. Enough. 

Mild, playful sexual torture is a lot of fun, as hopefully everybody knows by now, but I should let it go. I've lost some weight, so my old full-leather body suit sags around the midsection and makes me seem comical when viewed outside the strict context of sadomasochism. 

The image of me walking around at Burning Man in the heat of the day dressed in a poorly fitting full leather gimp outfit, handlebars where my ears would be, unicorn dildo hanging in the heat, draped over one zippered eyehole. It's just too much for this morning. I might have benefitted from a few decades less of hard psychedelic drugs. It leaves a series of crevices in the mind where none had been before. 

I can nearly see myself now, wandering in the noonday sun, offering peppermint Tic-Tacs to anyone that will approach, seeing if I can convince any "fellow burners" to drop one in my mouth. That is, if they can work it past the tightly strapped red plastic ball there. I would smile with my eyes, of course, and try to explain using only the motion of my tongue that the many mouthfuls of dust are simply torture on one's breath. 

I would be known by my playa-name: Gypsophila. 

Ah well, I suppose that I could just commit to not writing here for a while, though I don't believe that will help the problem. You see, my situation is desperate enough that when I ignore attending to its needs then it only grows in strength. It lurks in the shadows of crevices, waiting to pounce. Then, ashamed when it does, like a roid-rage without the roids or the rage, just a tremendous amount of sexual frenzy followed by waves of soul-smashing guilt.

Maybe I should get into steroids and growth hormones. At 47 that seems sensible and timely. What further evidence is required to complete my mid-life watershed years. I could make that quantum leap into fitness where my body begins to swell up around me like a balloon made of misshapen penises, veins bulging across the surface of the voluntary spasming of the muscle, twitching with glandular discharge. 

If I had not already named my post FOMO then "voluntary spasming" would have won. 

Ok, this exercise is pointless. Any one of my ex-friends has heard or said most all of this before, in a previously versioned telling.  

I will return tomorrow with an attempt at beauty as a compensatory act, perhaps the image of a singular flower as it bends towards what would otherwise be sky. A lily, an orchid, or an iris - an impossible series of delicate depictions meant maybe to suggest the fragility of impermanence and loss; substituting sensuality with what some might see as vulgarity; juxtaposed with a comically exhausted sense of fatalism.

Okay, I swear this: I was going to wrap this verbal train wreck up with that last paragraph, but then I received an email stating that someone recently mentioned me on the failed media platform Ello (I never bothered destroying all of the evidence that I even joined). When I clicked on the email to open it the below image is what I was presented with. I swear it as fact, a mere glimmer of truth mixed in with all that exists above.  

The world is just as weird as you invite it into being.

She seems like my kinda' girl, though she might have thought to make him take the pictures... I'll make sure to tell her when we chat. 

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Tense Shifts

I made it up the mountain. It was as I knew it would be: painful. I was quite wrong though in my assessment of the neighborhood and the quality of the houses in the neighborhood. When I had visited in the car with the boy I took a few mental snapshots of some houses that stood out as being uncared for, though they are very much in the minority there, that all became clearer once I was cycling freely through these Elysian fields.


As for the uncared for houses...

There was one in particular that seemed to serve as a gated junkyard for old hotrods. The estate looked as if it had been dropped in California from a southern plantation. Easter egg yellow and off white being the one-time color pattern, though the columns were all wrong and the untrimmed bushes did nothing to help. The entire structure was in need of pressure washing, coffee, and a good talking to.

What remained of the lawn had not been preserved in a way that could be considered "cared for" in some time, years perhaps. There were cars in various states of repair and otherwise across the front, also lined along the driveway, perhaps to indicate their present functionality as vehicles. They each looked like they were owned by some failed ex-rock drummer. There was a Bonham-esque sense of abandonment to the place, as if interests in life appeared fully formed though with a mitigated longevity. Some of the cars were orphaned in space and time. Grass growing up from the sides where mowing is just beyond an option. Their state was the result of dedicated inactivity rather than it opposite. The phrase "death by vomit" kept insisting upon itself as I rode by, the entire place a visual hangover.

There were other houses that were not far off, cables hanging across windows without blinds, where somebody successfully installed the internet by themselves, splicing the old coaxial wire and running a new shorter one to a different wall, leaving their victory hanging across the path between the two locations rather than bothering to correct for it, as if MacGyver had once tried to save it from collapse. The front yard, looking like a tool shed had been dragged around the house a few times by a team of local horses. All parts left out to be bleached by the sun, some of them now partly sunken into the earth. A garage sale abandoned by time. I had the impulse to check and make sure that the house was sleeping on its side. 

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Yesterday, the boy and I trekked into the city to meet an old friend, one who had the temerity to question my memory of our first meeting in 1975's Altamonte Springs, FLA. It was precisely as I remembered it, where facts fade within the amorphous mists of life remembered.

My telling of the story correctly presages his entering of medical school. He claims to have no prior knowledge of what his academic pursuits would become, or none at the age of seven. I insist that my version of the truth is the one to cling to and defend. I have a story of our first meeting. He has only skepticism of my story. Florida is a stand-your-ground state and I am the only witness. So, there is that to consider, my legal defense for telling it. We grew up not far from Zimmerman country. 

My binary family and his nuclear one went to lunch, then to the SF Moma. It was pleasant and uneventful, which is the best you can hope for with the involvement of a four year old. It is nice to have my son meet my friend's children. There is an odd circularity to the feeling. Part of it is perhaps caused by the underlying feeling that I never thought that I would arrive here, on the other side of the things I spent my life mocking. It is not nearly as bad as I believed it to be.

I suppose at some level it is probably just selfish, wanting your child to get a glimpse into your life when you were young. It all seems so unbelievable now - youth - particularly the ones that we enjoyed in the 70s. We spoke of the dangerous, stupid things that we did or were expected to do, all quite spontaneously, as if natural selection itself were not always peeking at us through the crack of adolescence. Somehow, most of us escaped. 

Everywhere we went at the museum the boy wanted to touch and rub all of the art that he could see with his unwashed booger spears. He tired quickly of my admonishments and reminders. When I tried to explain that the art is there for everybody to enjoy, but only by looking at it, and that they wish to preserve it for all time. 

Why? It's all fake.

What do you mean?

It's art, they make it all up. We do this at school.

Worth the whole day. I giggled with satisfaction when he said it, attributing all kinds of outsider status to the boy. I thought of adding Camus' The Rebel to the box of books that I will create for him to hopefully read before he enters college. His newly acquired DIY ethos sat well with me. I had to resist from relaying the anecdote yesterday, though I had hoped that I would somehow make more of it this morning. Some stories are just the dialogue, no need to provide context.

Oh well, mistakes were made in today's post. Good stories lost by their telling.


I tried to go back and read yesterday's post to make sure I didn't use similar descriptions of houses in today's post. I found a number of past-present tense shifts that made no sense and rendered the piece unpleasant to read, a sort of seasickness in time. I winced at the lack of care in what I was trying to convey.

Cato used to copy-edit for me, but he has abandoned that to pursue a life of genuine struggle.


Writing is difficult, was yesterday.

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Goodbye Cool Whirlpool

After picking the boy up yesterday, I decided to drive up the road that I've been trying to cycle for the last couple weeks, to see how much further the uphill portion is before I can find a spot where my heart and lungs can recuperate before advancing on the summit. Or rather, circling the summit via paved road, on a bicycle. I was pleased to find that the road only has another bend or two and about a quarter of a mile of heartbreaking hill before there is a short flat portion where I could rest and drink water without fear of tumbling backwards down the paved way that I came.

I kept driving up into the western neighborhood that is nestled there in the valley within the larger valley of Sonoma. Once we arrived, I could hardly believe what I was seeing. Gatsby-esque in reflection of the other valley hidden far away on the east side. Poorer, though not poor at all, only seemingly so when held up to wealth. Made by families that worked somewhere, creating their dream homes together, or even through separation and worse. These were not homes made with a swiping of the hand, as if they rose naturally out of the land that they commanded. 

I suppose it could be NYC, or any other American city divided upon lines of wealth between east and west, though to live in the hills at all confers some sort of advantage of resources. The geography and feel of what I found made me to steal a physical form found inside the fictive one. The dual neighborhoods held apart by valley screamed East and West Egg. I imagined locally famous infidelities that must still haunt the present. Cars screeching out of driveways in the night, glass shattering, scenes remembered. The police called, though they just all stood and watched. 

The last new homes that were built there happened sometime in the late 70s or early 80s. Each was different from the others, though same in that they were on a similarly sized lot and built with materials and design ideas that only differed in degrees. Each reflected the stylistic preference or lack of the original owner. Some humble, others trying to say more than they were, even then. Each was of a kind. Homes that represented single qualities - youth, wealth, vitality, cool chic, whatever, even the nest, as if the house was meant to resemble a fancy European cuckoo clock. You could hear the whisper of disco coming through the windows of a few. Saturday night parties that perhaps still get talked about here in our little enclave from the world.  The first time for trying this, or that, or more of that. Some who just stood and watched.

Others seemed sensible, as if the owner believed themselves to be a farmer. So happens that their farm isn't located on farmable land, never was. They neglected to buy the empty lot next door in time, another dream farmhouse popped up too close to theirs, then on both sides. The farmhouse sunk into a suburb of variables. Some had chicken coops or a few rows of grapes, anything to indicate something else, meant to mean the ruggedness and hard work of the inhabitants, perhaps their love of earth. Either that, or their modest alignment with the more glamorous life of the metropolis. The thin vertical windows appearing along the sides of the contemporary houses that hinted of skyline at night, each populated with a similar angle of a similar room. A twist on the idea of a fishbowl. Some houses seemed almost to be dresses as much as buildings, picked out and purchased by those with too little experience in making those choices. Not knowing how, many chose poorly. Aesthetics only considered when gravely below a certain threshold, and too late in construction. 

All of them were once nice. The remainders that could be called such were scattered here and there. Many needed some sort of visible repair, a cleanup or makeover. There was a dispiritedness about some of them, a long absence of pride or care, as if they could sense the decade that they had been built and what they must look like now, and just to hell with it. All of the homes were past the age of bearing more children - the kids that had been had since flown. The nests needed trimming, though few neighbors would likely take it upon themselves to say so. Some of them must have looked much better at night, when the lights buried in the yard were turned on and shining upwards at what used to be flattering angles.

There is a single-home wealth there, nothing like what exists across the valley up in the hills on the eastern mountain line, snuggled into the valley of the skies, where one wonders if this is one estate among how many others, and where in the world. The expanses in the eastern fold seemed to have live-in guests as the norm, entire structures built around the very idea of guests, of owning celebrated friends that currently lacked the requisite wealth but were cared for graciously nonetheless. The structured act of perpetual charity. It is either a pool house or the divorcé chateau, depending on season. 

In the other hills along western ridge there is the sense that almost all guests went home that night after dinner and drinks, some living within walking distance, of course. The others, let loose on the mountain roads to swerve their way downhill, toward their own. 

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Early bird, worm. Get the picture?

Jesus, what is happening to me. I am becoming a different version of myself, already, again. If I had a garage then I'm certain that I would have filled it up with junk by now. Shelves representing layers of years. I might be found puttering around in it at any given time, a ghost of broken devices, all awaiting excavation. I'm becoming a cantankerous tinker, the mutterer of Christmas past. I'll be wandering the hills here soon, sleeping out under the stars on my days off from being a father. 

Increasingly, I wish to be left alone, though there is some invisible thread that will sometimes tug at me from great distances, bringing be back slowly towards the sound of people talking.

I return, usually only to argue a bit, then move on. Some middle-to-late-aged discourse about the paucity of political choices, the increasing price of things as related to our current trade agreements, whether or not sunspots are the actual cause of climate change, or even if there is any. You know, subjects in which it is tempting to be agreeable. 

Climate change, for me, is fascinating and ideal. It reflects more than most any other subject the danger of letting voters get their ignorant little toe inside any doorway to any topic. I don't pretend to be knowledgeable on this subject, only argumentative. That there are unanswered questions concerning the nature of climate change creates just enough space for the American mind to fully politicize it, and yet still discuss it as if the speaker is a well-informed pseudo-scientist. Then, it is an easy enough leap to deny that it is happening at all. Voila', problem fixed. 

Only a liberal would worry about such things.  The real conservative men of science scoff at the preposterous claims of sissies. We'll never know if sunspots cause global warming, we'll only ever be able to tell that man can not change sunspots any more than a leopard can. 

Ah well, what can one do. Talking about it changes nothing except the temperature in the room. 

I just want the world to sustain one more lifetime's worth of happiness.

Every morning for the past week, precisely at 8am, an alarm of one of my neighbors starts going off and will continue for almost an hour before it finally stops. The volume is relatively low from where I sit, but persistent and in the form of an alarm. It is maddening, to know that there is some happy fool sleeping daily through the very source of my misery. I don't mind being unhappy so much, I just can't stand being ignored about it, unnoticed. 

I want to wander around until I find the room that the sound is coming from and start whispering unsolicited life-coach advice in through the open window, though I'm not quite sure how that would fit into my wanting one more lifetime's worth of happiness.

I suppose I could set an alarm to start at 7am and just leave it in my open window. It's precisely what I would have done in NYC.

See? I am becoming a different person, again.

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