The nocturnal effect of effervescence

(Blaine Transue, Sonoma)

Late yesterday I could feel the soreness in my body creeping through me. The only relief was to recline in bed with the lights off and my eyes covered. Walking in my bare feet through my apartment to the kitchen and back made me shiver a bit and wish for sleep. I had skipped both the gym and cycling for two days. My body was exhausted, I think, or I was becoming sick, possibly both. Hard to say, though they must be related. I dropped the boy off at his mom's house after dinner and after him eating a strawberry cheesecake ice cream cone at La Michoacana, the Mexican place at the top of the hill that makes us both so happy with its delicious vanilla. I came home promptly and dissolved two Alka-Seltzer Night tablets into water and watched future vitality bubble to the surface with the sound of happy applause. I do remember things after that, though I am unsure if the visions and sounds were real or imaginary. Twelve hours later I awoke, lucky to be in my bed. The sun was up. I had neither tossed nor turned in my sleep, I do not believe. This store-bought elixir is the type concoction that is used to trick coroners into believing a patient has passed, so that they will be buried alive in the very next scene. My heart rate slowed to ~4 bpm and my body met the room's temperature, somewhere around 68 F and then stayed there for the duration. I couldn't tell where I stopped and the room began. My eyes opened in the morning, but just barely, and only after several attempts. It took a few tries before I could see any value in the effort. As the light made its way through my vitreous humor some portal to the universe then moved out and away from its watch post inside of me, where it had set up residence within me. I know now why people implore, Do not stumble towards the light. It just might be the bonfire of eternity. 

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Intercontinental Ballistic Tweets

Doesn't it feel like it's just about time for another war. People have become far too blasé about militarized conflict, war, particularly the nuclear option. Trump, I believe, knows that if those warheads are not used then they are wasted. In fact, they cost a lot of money to dismantle. Usage is nearly free, in a sense. A great business mind like his will figure that out soon enough. When viewed as inventory: everything must go. He'll sell the leftovers to raise money for the Contras. I'm certain of it. He is a man that will have plenty of Oliver Norths lying around. The Donald Milhous Trump that he is. I do not wish to waste my single paragraph here on the presidential clearing-house sale. But I must... One gets the feeling that America hasn't quite learned its lesson yet. Since the election I have grown far less tolerant, mostly of self-described liberals. I had been growing tired of them throughout much of Obama's tenure, while I grew to like him more and will now miss him. Once Obama started rolling back the drone assassination program, at least publicly, it allowed me some room to do something other than criticize him. I remember being at a friend's house in NYC the night he won. The New Yorkers in attendance were ecstatic. I said simply, He will do nothing to roll back the presidential abuses that Bush took. In fact, he will expand presidential powers and will abuse those same powers. This statement was met with outright scorn, mostly from the sneering woman across the room who would one day soon after become my wife. 

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Open Sesame!

I'd be a contented kid if I could choose to do it again. To watch is to remember, to recall the joys, the hiding, darting whispers, the giggling at being found. Experts of spaces, counting numbers in the distance and the hurrying to hide, footsteps as clues at a distance, a hushing silence as the finale of numbers approaches. Wandering out into the vacant world, two clocks ticking on excitement. Private keys, pacts and allegiances, each bursting with youth, the creation of codes yet unknown. Parents, outsiders to the secret, strangers to the thrills of adventure. All of life accessed with a single command, a magic worth remembering. The only password that matters. 

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"At least you haven't become a Christian"

(A heart-healthy post)

A buddy warned me yesterday against the dangers of treading in Triathletism. He cautioned that my talk here is becoming close to outright advocacy for wheat-grass endurance. I assured him that my diet is as horrific as it's ever been, and as long as I am not publicly discussing the desired consistency of feces then I still have a handle on how things are meant to be. I heard his warnings, though, and he is quite right. Few things are more tedious than a person publicly bettering themselves. It is the story that no one wishes to hear and only the water-brained wish to share. Private tragedies can be memorable, public self-improvement is always pathetic. I know this, of course. I was trying to be comedic about it, but it is a thing that is only funny when viewed, and rightfully ostracized, in others. Of the many things that I get wrong I had not thought that being healthy would somehow arrive on that list. But, there it is. If a thing can be done then it can be done incorrectly. You can count on me to find a path towards that. So much human error can be found amongst the strengths. I am overly playful at work sometimes, also.

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The Bellows

I have finally figured a part of life out, at least for now - I will only take pictures of other cameras and keep my posts to a single paragraph. Too much of my runaway self has made its way onto the pages here. The teenage runaway, the troublemaker. I have made my life explicitly comical, drifted too far into jocular criticisms of the murky political principles of others. I have probably scared away readers through inadvertent insult, perceived bigotries - as in my pronounced distaste for female chauvinism. That was the old me. This is the new me. I am so much more tolerant of casual and celebratory sexism now... I guess this should be a new paragraph: I will need to buy a Rollieflex. What self-respecting amateur medium-format photographer does not own one. I grew mildly bored of the soft-focus lens more quickly than I had thought that I might. It is good that I did not buy the 56mm Lensbaby Velvet, though I will not want to return the one that I have borrowed. Perhaps I can pull a CS and claim that it never worked when it arrived. The thing to do is to buy cameras faster than you can learn to use them. This is what keeps a hobby interesting. One must have dreams that are thwarted by the realities they provoke and demand. It is how one breaths life into the red flower of fire. There is the scuffle that accompanies notions as they emerge from the depths, moving towards a life of their own. Just as other types of love unfold, it should hurt a bit, confusing its subjects as it provides its quotient of pleasure. Never quite knowing which way we face when the spinning ceases. That is how some tales are gauged. There remains as evidence the staggering, blinding cost of it all, the memory of it seeming free. 

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Helpless

(My face has two navels)

Something has to give. It might need to be this site. Such intense navel gazing takes its toll. I feel happier some days in the afternoon, too often on days when I've skipped being here. I had a stressful night last night being a single parent. I fell asleep reading on my bed, woke an hour later, or rather, the boy woke me. I had nothing left to give. We went to sleep an hour early, at 7:30 and I slept until 4am this morning. When the boy woke well after 7am he asked me to play him some music that I've made. The first time he's ever asked such a thing, first question of the day, so I played him this. It's a song I do for him around the house on guitar and piano, though not terribly often. He was excited to hear my voice coming out of the computer. I was more ambivalent. I do not wish the boy to become solemn, but thoughtful. Can one become one, or either.

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"The blackbird whistling"

(Niki Boon)

I was happier when I was heartbroken, I think. Now, I am just bored. There are three recurring seasons of life: love, loss, ennui. None able to resolve the last, each returning by unseen timepiece, ticking off seconds days months from some calendar kept elsewhere. 

This is the third post that I have written this morning. There was one that was quite funny, though it was also vulgar and playfully sexist, a thing that we are told can not exist. I wrote frantically for about an hour before some other part of me stomped on it with editorial authority. Oh, the beauty of inflections or the beauty of innuendoes. I entertain myself with crudities because I am lonely and hostile to love. I feel as if love has picked a gripe with me and I have lost the capacity for magnanimity. I lack the refinement of feeling that affection can produce. I have so very little left to be careful with. 

I miss the craziness of love, the unexpected predicaments that accompany shared and private affections. 

Have you ever watched people that are falling in love? It's a silly creature with extra legs. Each duo teaching one another to dance using the signed language that they have only just invented. It is so sweet and wonderful and genuine, worth sometimes enduring all that follows. 

Loss is so easy, anybody can do it. All that is required is first being inauthentic to yourself. 

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her; If you can bounce high, bounce for her too, till she cry Lover!, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you! 

- Thomas Parke D'Invilliers

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Mighty Hoax, I bid you undo!

(Jesus' Lowrider)

I went to a local school's open house yesterday. It's a big decision, one that I intend to apply some thought and consideration towards. I want the boy to be happy, to enjoy learning, etc. The school is on the short-list of schools for the boy to attend soon. Likely a place where he will have some of his earliest memories.

Speaking of memory, I tried to explain to the boy that even though his is very good now he will likely not remember much of what he has known up to this point. It just confused him and made me question what exactly, the fuck, is wrong with me... I felt understandably stupid, immediately wishing that I could forget why I would ever tell a child such a terrible thing. Wise up, kid! Everything you know will disappear, and soon!

This is why women are needed for raising children. I don't mean that women should do it on their own, or even that they are "better" at it, but only that they are different and that difference is vital, crucial, valued, etc. Most women, I do not imagine, would try to explain to a child that their current frame of reference and the world they know is imaginary and transitory, that it will soon disappear from them, as a matter of dispassionate fact. It might terrify or perplex a child, unnecessarily. This thought had not occurred to me, as I was busy talking when it should have. So, out of my mouth it arrived. 

Men don't think ahead as much, or as far, it seems. Women think ahead a little too much, for me. I suppose my approach has been to give the boy whatever information that I have and to let him draw his own conclusions, offering guidance when needed. 

This is not good enough. I see that now. 

The age of four is maybe a bit young for those sorts of revelations. It is very odd though, to know that most all of the memories that he and I have shared up to this point will simply vanish and become an amorphous past that will be formed within him mostly through our careful retellings. So, I have time to tell him over and over again that I never told him he would forget everything, that will make it more true. 

At the school I listened attentively, made the occasional joke that nobody seemed to understand. As an example, the administrator that was giving the tour spoke of how the children, when studying Rome, might march in lockstep as if they were Roman soldiers. I asked how they were at making roads. Ten blank eyes looked at me as if I had just suggested child labor in earnestness. Less than three seconds before that an admin at the school was militarizing children, but the mere mentioning of the famous road building abilities of Romans was apparently beyond the accepted set of references permitted. I opted not to follow up with a mention of Justinian's Codex, Digest, or of the Institutes. 

The not understanding of jokes is becoming a real problem. I write too cryptically, or I make references that nobody seems to understand.  I'm not trying to be a snob, but I'm beginning to suspect that my online friends are a bunch of dumb-asses. I'm not sure where all of the clever people went, but they are all universally absent from my life now, when I need them the most. 

I blame my Facebook persona. It is insufferable. 

One parent whose child was already attending the school - and I could never quite figure out what she was actually doing at this open house - fell back as we walked, so we chatted. She asked what I thought a bit about the school a little too eagerly, as if I was on the verge of being inducted into some sort of sect. I explained that everything looked fantastic, that I loved the learning environment, and that all the children seemed very happy and pleasantly attentive to the activities in each classroom. The last of which was instruction on fractions. It caused me to look at the balck-board twice before internally confirming an answer to the teacher's question. I wanted to sit in on the class, take a bit of advantage from the remedial education. 

I expressed a little concern to this woman about the low immunization rates at the school. She explained that immunization is a personal decision and that each child's immune system develops differently. She stopped there. I nodded at her, because both of those things are true. All the while knowing that her response excludes a much larger truth.

Vaccinating doesn't put a child in a magic spacesuit, one that can alone protect them from disease. There is no way of knowing if a child is protected except by exposing them to the disease, something that must seem okay with a growing segment of the population. This fact is used as an argument against vaccinations - that they are not 100% effective in every child to which they are administered - which is true. They are 0% effective in children that have not had them if the child is exposed, which is best accomplished by achieving social immunity within the population. 

It was troubling, to recognize that the liberal enclave that is (presumably) educated Sonoma would act upon such faulty data, and under the culpability umbrella of it being a personal decision. The assertion itself claims an impossible conjectural knowledge of the development of any given child's immune system and what might be best for that system, to which the parent has no visibility whatsoever. More so, this presumptive position is held even when it endangers the health of others. 

I'm all for parents being able to cripple their children as part of the personal freedom that all Americans should wield over the innocent. The ability to experiment freely with the spread of airborne infectious disease is enshrined in who we are as a people. Because what is liberty if not that? 

But still, something was eating at me. 

The full vaccine conversation was perhaps too much for the parent of a child to undertake, and understandably. People have such divergent views, prepared to defend their stance with all sorts of available online information. The current state of politics is best understood as a precursor to the return of polio as a national epidemic, a sort of canary in our abandoned coal mines. Because, you know... there is information out there that says things, and I agree with those things. Between the libertarians on one side and the liberals on the other, we're all fucking doomed. The root word that functions more as a prefix that I have become most suspicious of: liber. 

One side insists that we should die from preventable disease, the other prefers gunshot wounds from bad guys being stopped by good guys. America has a liberty problem. Everyone agrees that it's either a surplus or a deficit, but it's a real problem, and one party has one answer. 

California has recently done away with the "personal belief exemption" to immunization. If you wish to have your child attend a public school you will now, at the very least, have to explain to a doctor why vaccines scare you so much. It's important to look your doctor in the eye and ask if he has ever read Jenny McCarthy's peer-reviewed studies on the subject? Clinical trials and real world benefit can be damned in the face of that blue-eyed tele-genius. 

If you wish to inform yourself on vaccines then do a Google search for: "Which blonde celebrities best understand the causes of autism in children"

Part of the discussion is very straightforward: Some children will be rendered safe from certain communicable diseases, others will not.

The Wikipedia article on immunization is one place that you might expect would include both sides of this complicated science-story. You would be wrong. The article on immunization makes no mention of its detractors or critics. To encourage them would be dangerous, by providing them the type credibility that Jenny McCarthy's clinical studies can not. Rather, Wikipedia compiles these concerns into their own article, where they can not infect the actual article on immunization. 

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To cry yourself thin once again

(unrelated photo)

I think that I've derived the source of my sudden weight gain. I've been using heavy whipping cream in my cereal. I had thought that the extra animal fats would help my training, but it turns out that all of those delicious animal fats must be balanced out with lots of breads and pastas. Ah well, I have at least determined the source of this mysterious weight gain. As soon as I've worked my way through my 50 gallon barrel of heavy cream then I'll adjust back to using half and half for my morning, midday, and evening bowl of cereal. I had believed that the extra fiber would push things through before any of those calories could take up residence on my belly.

Turns out that fiber does not contain the "negative calories" that I had ascribed to it. This was just dietary nonsense, which seems impossible, because my site advancing this method of weight loss has received millions of hits: tears-have-calories-too.gov

Ugh, I wandered off and came back and found this page still open. I had forgotten to keep writing. 

Well, I'll curb my eating, I hope. I step on the scale at the gym as often as 3-5 times a week, so there is a visceral reaction to the gain that is exterior to how my jeans feel when I put them on. Hopefully, that will be enough, watching lead slide up the scale and away from the earth's center. It is odd, how my sense of self becomes tied to my weight. I know that it's not "right" but the sensation of it is very engaging. I tell myself different things when the mirror is pleasantly listening. Charm arrives with less struggle. I am easiest on myself when I've put in all the time at the gym practicing an active self-hatred of sorts. 

Odd, that. 

I kid, but only a little bit, no more than a thousand calories worth. If you fall out of practice having those stern conversations with your wardrobe then you have to offer a few ultimatums to arrive back at a place that feels healthy. It is awful, sometimes, what the mind does to the poor body... Even when I was meditating, I had to resist the temptation to perpetually repeat the phrase, Calm down you fat fuck, pay attention, stop masturbating all the time. 

Every now and then I'll swap that out with: Your pretty face is going to hell. 

It is my ad hoc bliss slogan, my maxim mantra.

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Mother Effer!

(There is no tomorrow!)

I went to the gym after work and confirmed it: I've gained ten pounds since accepting the Olympic invite less than two months ago. I've known for a while that I am an anxiety-driven consumer of great foods, but fuck.... since deciding to summit Olympus Mons I have been eating more vigorously, with a champion's appetite. 

I keep looking at spoonfuls of pasta and thinking, Yep, I'm going to need that. Doesn't matter, it could be dripping with hot cheese and oil and all that goes though my mind is, There's delicious fuel for a few extra important training steps on my path to eternal victory.

Back to the all-you-can-eat drawing board, I guess. I put on a shirt over the weekend and I thought that I didn't look quite as svelte as I had before. I immediately blamed the shirt, then the mirror, thinking that they had betrayed me, that they were back to their old tricks. Now I see that there was a waistline coup d'etat already well underfoot. 

I left the gym after only a few sets, feeling deeply dispirited. It was my weight creeping back up where I am now that prompted me to stop drinking about a month and a half ago. Now I am forced to question that wisdom with renewed doubt. What's the point of being clear-headed if I'm not going to have a slender physique to match my wit and charm. 

The universe refuses to be happy for me. There is no pleasing the great weightless beyond.

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Few honors await the irreverent

There's no way the weekend's already over. The last two days were a near total cheat. Election night all over again. November 9th, 2016 would make a great Groundhog Day. 

I watched Patti Smith slaughter Dylan as part of the Nobel committee's presumed honoring of him. Do yourself a favor and read his acceptance speech included in that link. It rolls off of the tongue like what might soon be a first draft. He just needs to add that initial touch to it. Jesus, it's like listening to the semi-lucid ramblings of a stinkin' hobo. They found this speech in his pocket, with what might have been a raisin stuck to it. I hope somebody immortalizes the napkin he scratched it on. 

I suppose that's part of the greatness and charm of Dylan, though. It must be difficult to be so honored for having been so irreverent for so long. 

One great thing that mechanized recording and reproduction did for us is that it greatly reduced the weight of the opinions of artists concerning their own careers. We have the documents now to draw our own conclusions. Everybody's a music scholar, by virtue of the expansion of the available library. Your insight awaits only your click. They can't take their albums away from us. 

Madonna's calculated misstep "MDNA" is not going away, ever. Its release was reportedly the only time the grand-diva ever blushed. Could have been smeared rouge, I suppose. Did she really think that she could just slip an album like that in and nobody would notice? It's like watching Madonna drop a dookie-pie in your favorite record store. She's over in the jazz section with her pants down, ankles cleared from the drop zone, holding herself up by the bin that houses Coltrane. She just keeps looking at you and giving you the index finger to the lips to be quiet and the eyes that say just be cool about this. But she's pooping on the floor just because she's Madonna, because she can. Somebody's going to find it and then they're going to have to clean it up. It doesn't seem right, even if they do sell it on eBay. The poop shouldn't become the record store's property just because she left it there. Spiritually, it's still connected to her. 

Writing about Madonna pooping makes me feel queasy. It's because she's old. There's something about the thought of the skin on the surface of her ass cheeks that bothers me now. It didn't used to. It's not my fault. I'm sure with the young Madonna it might have seemed reasonable, but not now.

Age and weight discrimination are still sort of okay, though it really should happen only towards men, where it's even welcomed from time to time. It's the discrimination that nobody questions or takes seriously. Just read what everybody had to say recently about Bertolucci and Brando, those two fat old sweaty rapists. 

We could perhaps use another world war, if for nothing else then it is useful to re-establish clearer classes of denigration. Does anything define arbitrary hostility better than does a little world warring. It's as if every nation is suddenly caught in commuter traffic, screaming out their window at the stupidity of all other commuters. Everybody's a bigot when stuck in traffic.  I'm convinced there are groups of people that should be taxed based on choice of car color alone. It's one of the many platforms that I have tried to advance that has also effectively kept me from amassing political power. 

Fuck Prius drivers, though. Right?

It seems that the world is right on the verge of figuring things out again. 

I look forward to Kanye's Nobel acceptance speech much more than I did Dylan's. He's going to do an interpretive rant. It will at least show some spark of deeply misguided and half-thought comedic effort. He is emphatic when not vehement. He should have his own blog, too. 

Once Trump starts hosting America's Nobel Prizes on NBC we'll get a glimpse into lots of varied acceptance speeches, as well as blunt public rejections as a proxy for beheadings. The sub-theme of the program will be "controversies." That Simon Cowell doesn't get to weigh in on the Nobel winners tells me everything that I need to know about that sham of civility and self-celebration. Simon is the only judge on the Supreme Meat Lovers Court that even matters. 

Of all of the criticisms that I've ever heard of Bowie the one that lacerated my poor glittered fading heart the most was an attempt at praise: Bowie invented Madonna! It's not true, of course, but it does contain a kernel of pre-insight. One has to heat it in oil to get any life out of it, but it pops just like corn does after a little bit if you stare at it. I'm nearly surprised Dylan didn't use this little Bowie/Madonna gem for his Nobel speech.

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"...an official Red Ryder, carbine action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle!"

(Christmas-clickbait)

I'm drinking my coffee black, again. It is a sure sign of being old. I either can't remember to buy milk or I have given up caring that the coffee is softened at all by it. I'm sure it is the morning gateway drug. Speaking of, the last two nights I've slept a total of 18 hours. This may not sound like much to you. For me, it is a crushing victory against the cousin of death. 

Ouch. Fuck. Black coffee is hot. I tried to take what would be a normal swig of morning coffee, but hadn't remembered the full role that milk plays in that relationship. I guess I could just be drinking a glass of milk right now, if I had any, but I would have to suffer the opinions of others to do so and to admit to it. Something about cruelty, or man's inability to digest cow's milk, or something. True liberals always have the strictest of diets. It's how you can gauge liberalism without being rude.

I suppose that some of all that health-yammering might be true. My diet is poor. It must be from ingesting all of the fake nutrient news sites online. Those sites should all put a little banner on the McDonalds ads in my news feeds letting me know that's not real food. How else am I to know? 

There is nobody left to argue with. The election has emptied the country of what little sense of humor it had left. People were afraid that Hillary was too corrupt. Some of them voted to show how sick and tired they had become of that. They voted in a guaranteed outsider: a celebrity that no one likes. Our first verified multi-megalomaniac in the oval office. Only a celebrity outsider can get rid of the corruption in Washington. Any fool can tell you that. He's like a Rambo that never sullied himself in battle. The requirements for beating the democrats were basic: He must be hated by liberals, he must speak the racism in his mind without fear of censure or recriminations, and he must wear a baseball hat leading up to the election. 

What's a little racism once those criteria have been satisfied. Turns out that the word "He" was the most important one in the sentence. 

America has created another division for itself, between the angry and the exhausted. There are people who want the battling to continue and then there are those who are too tired to beg for it to stop. 

One component of the multi-faceted civil war in Beirut was between those who wished for the war to continue, believing still that victory was possible, and those who only wished for the fighting to stop, at any cost. Each side in that struggle became likewise divided along those lines, as well as all of the others there - political, regional, and religious. 

So, there is that to think about here on Sunday morning. When you think the country is "too divided" it's fun to think up ways that might even make matters worse. It's easy. 

I don't mind that the democrats had their asses kicked. It's more fun for me when the republichens lose, but it's nice to see everybody get a turn up at bat. Looks like some family values will finally return to the public conversation. At the end of it all the people who study these things will tell you that everybody showed up to be a single-issue voter, and there are about 150 million issues in the US. 

There is the now famous video of the shirtless tatted meathead screaming "make my burrito" at what appears to be a Mexican-American protesting the Trump rally. This ink-bedazzled athlete had only one issue - he wanted someone to make him a burrito. You can sense his exhaustion at hammering this point home for so long now. His weariness at wanting a burrito has now become anger. I know plenty of Mexicans that would be happy to make him one.

I would have paid money to have had an election night webcam on that guy. His excitement must have been simply Hitleriffic. 

Ok, that was just my practice intro. I had not wished to write about politics today. I am a rebel for both sides, one wanting to stay and argue the other wishing to retreat, to regroup, to re-brand for next election.

Ok, well, that was my intro. as well as my post, it seems. 

It helps to warm up with politics, creates an enemy, something to write against. I had intended instead today to tempt the nebulous. Maybe tell a Christmas story, one that everybody except the godless can agree on. 

The boy is up now and will want some breakfast, some fruit and then something I will prepare but will not eat. An Eggo waffle with butter and syrup. Maybe I'll try just one bite, to help offset the coffee. To oppose the bitterness, in its own way, with nature's maple sweetness. Some xylem to offset the phloem. 

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The Christmas Spread

(Niki Boon)

10 hours of sleep. I would have written the word ten but it didn't seem as impressive as did the digits. Last night before sleep I took a melatonin, a Xanax, a huge dollop of medical marijuana, and a few swigs of cherry NyQuil... voilá, I am healed. Any extra sleep I get from here on is pure gravy, drops caught from the shaman's ladle. 

I couldn't find the acute on the Mac keyboard for voilá. The accent mark ´ points the wrong way. I don't need an acute, I need a grave (I only know this because I looked it up).

Wait, I can do this, I copied and pasted from wikipedia, then removed the html around it: voilà.

Victory.

I'm going to be dangerous on this site now. My diaereses will be umlautastic. I'm going to syntax the shit out of this fucking page.

Well no, but it really should be easier to find accent marks.


Ok, it is raining here in Sonoma and has been for days. It doesn't feel like Christmas, at all, except maybe for the eager expectations of the child. I haven't set up a tree yet, and do not wish to in the rain. I am a fair weathered fan of Christmas. I only cheer when my team is up by at least eight points at the end of the 3rd quarter.

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An Obelisk for My Hominids

I went to a two-cocktail lunch yesterday in which most everybody had three, except me. I had the self-satisfaction of explaining to each of them that I am training for the Spring Olympics, and also that alcohol is an evil and wicked compound enjoyed only by pedophiles or by the international fans of football, or both. 

Sort of. 

I did go to a lunch with a handful of people from my company. The CEO took us out and gave us all a nice, shiny Apple Watch. It will help me on my path to Napa Victory in 2017. I have become focused again. I recognize the problem that I've been facing and have realized that the best way to deal with it and to move forward as a creature is to build a wall on my southern border. If I don't stop the calories from climbing over my belt and making permanent illegal residence on my unprotected waistline then those immigrants, which are known as anchor-babyfats, will send back home for their relative lipids to arrive and destroy what was once beautiful southern territory, that was also once theirs. 

No, wait. I'm conflating two or more things that do not need to be blended in this way. 

I'm still fat enough to be concerned about it, I now have an Apple watch, I've been with my company four years, and Trump is a useless twat. 

See? 

Those things have no real relationship outside of my odd morning ceremony here. I dance around a cup of coffee wearing a witch doctor and drop things generously into the cauldron of my newly coffeed mind. 

I can text people without typing now. I've had that power in my phone for some time, though it was disabled. Now, for reasons external to me, that feature is on and I am using it like I imagine Paris Hilton might, if she were cool enough to own an Apple Watch. 

I experimented by texting a few people last night, dipping my toes into the ocean of unchallenged chatter. I spoke towards my arm and magic emerged, sent out to those lucky recipients that happened to be towards the top of my text history. 

Who would have ever guessed that, right? A computer watch! One that already knows me... That was the 70s-80s dream. It was nearly impossible to be anything imaginary in those decades that did not include an elaborate communications device built in your watch. It's how you would receive assignments from the super-secret-spy-agency that you worked for. 

A computer wristwatch that fired lasers was everything, then. If it could occasionally show the image of a naked woman then it would have ended the need for all other things - food, safety, shelter, even oxygen. But the technology is not quite there yet. One day, you will be able to project an HD image of an anonymous naked woman onto the stall wall of a bathroom using only a watch and a dose of neurotic sexual desperation. 

I am certain that this technology, when used properly, is going to change the way men think about women, and where they can appear naked. 

I'm not sure when I gave up on my dreams but one of them found its way back to me yesterday. I hadn't thought that I would care that much about the watch, then I started playing with it and already I want it to do more. I look forward to new watch releases now. I wore it to sleep. That's just how on fire for Jesus I am about this new thing.

I feel like the ape that discovered the the giant domino in 2001, A Parking Space Odyssey... about 15 years too late, and it's surprisingly smaller than it was in the movie, though more well lit. 

Everybody has embraced the wrong enigmas. We have each somehow missed the best of the mysteries. 

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"And so this is Christmas..."

In March I will have been a tax-paying member of the American work force for ten years. I think I'm going to celebrate by taking the next decade off, maybe pick a few fights with some six-figure Texans, or fight for deals on televisions at Walmart. I want to live the last third of my life differently than I have the first 4/6ths.

I transitioned from dj'ing to working as a technician, (a Genius they aptly named me...) at Apple in early 2007. When I went to training in Cupertino I saw Steve Jobs walking around with an iPhone prototype a few times. He sat and chatted with a few students who were also training. They were all quite titillated. For a kid of my generation it was pretty cool to see the real Steve Jobs as an actual human, with one of the most hyped devices of the technological revolution in his hands.

It was just as useless to have an opinion on him now as it was then, though an opinion being useless has never prevented me from holding one on any given subject.

When we returned from training, upon my first week or so of work, it was announced that all Apple employees would be given a free iPhone. Mine stayed in the box for months afterwards. I offered to give it to a girl that had lost her phone, though she ended up finding hers and made the mistake of telling me. At the time I didn't have phone service, so I had little need for a smart phone, or a monthly bill. 

Oh my, my... how things change.

I don't mind working, though starting it later in life and earlier in the day is the key, I think. Youth should be squandered, otherwise it is too easily mis-spent. 

I forgot to meditate when I woke this morning. I knew that I would forget. My mind is great at nightly clearing out things to do in the morning, each small task dispersed somewhere into the dew, as the memory of years worked, roaring with so many, right out of college. 

I told myself that contentment was the enemy of creativity, so much so that I became content only with not creating. I lacked discipline, so I told myself that discipline must be bad for a person like me, it must impinge some thing about me in ways that should not be allowed. I told myself all sorts of things. Things that I've mostly forgotten now. Perhaps it's time to read more Shakespeare. I never finished. 

Oh my, my... things doth change.

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Lost Tango

I should stop writing posts in the morning. I wake and feel tough, ready to fight the things that need fought, but the day passes beside me. Things change, soften. Seconds eat at the hull. Clouds pass and then pass again, disguised. I feel silly for having felt the other way, the tough way in the scrappy morning, after the sun drops. Knowing that changes knowing it, that's all.

I should wake up and meditate. I'll probably forget. My mind will have been cleared of the thing for it not to do. I should, though, meditate. Exercise is losing part of its spiritual component for me, is becoming more focused on the physical. It has to do with the earth being tilted by its Atlas, my portion leaning into the darkness of its arc.

Maybe if I don't have my phone with me in bed then it'll feel like meditating when I wake. I'll confront again some sense of not knowing what next. I want some of my life's emptiness back. 

I want, I want, I want.

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Let's say both

(Niki Boon)

I forgot to write a post this morning. I was rushed. There was some training at work, early. The boy's mom had to come over to pick him up before to take him to pre-school. Then there was left only the new complexities of work. It is no wonder that people wish to relax, to get away. I am starting to understand why. Forced to understand, in a sense. Applying myself is difficult. Intelligence alone isn't good enough any more. I had hoped that I could just glide through life on just that. Turns out, no. Either I'm not as smart as I had thought, or that never really worked in the past, either. Maybe both. Probably both, then. 

"Everybody's coming to get me..."

I must find a new way of handling things, am not managing the stresses of life very well, may need to stop checking my email over the weekend. In addition to my turning off of text alerts I should also ignore the responsibilities of work when not working. I'm starting to feel as if there is never any escape from increasingly complex issues. They all seem to require about twice the attention span and research that I am currently applying to them, so they are growing around me. Sunday evenings should be peaceful, but instead I am watching emails arrive, reminding me to what I must soon return. This weekend was the first that I felt as if I've had to myself in a while, but it wasn't enough. It passed just as two weekdays might, which feels unfair. 

The weekend didn't stretch out in front of me the way that it has in the past. Like most things in my life now, it seems as if time was racing something else, like a better version of time. I realized only too late that the race was on. By the time I set out, I was losing. It doesn't help at all that I've run out of both milk and half-n-half. I'm drinking my coffee black here in the early morning of California. The bitter truth of adulthood. 

I wish that I could meditate every day, maybe instead of drinking coffee. I suppose that is a choice, but only coffee in the early morning makes me think about doing things like meditating. The best part of my weekend was the bike ride I took after meditating on Saturday morning. I arrived at a relaxed tempo on the bike that seemed nearly effortless, or was achieved with less effort, or maybe just the right effort. In any event, I felt as if I was being rather than only doing. 

Odd, that riding a bike along a rural highway in traffic can cause such a sense inside anyone. We live in absurd times. Living within a second or two of death and disfigurement should not bring such peace, but it somehow does as long as there's no slippage. None.

The fire in Oakland was real. I am seeing the names, images, and links to people's profiles locally that perished or are still missing. Not to be a social vampire, preying upon the misfortune of others from a distance, but it hits close, both in actual proximity and to those that I care about. It is part of the scene that I once greatly enjoyed, sometimes still do. 

There is usually a balance between the abstraction and the reality of any given tragedy. There is one's ability to consider it at a distance and then one's personal sensation of it not having involved those known. Even with the abstraction, there is the knowing that those that suffered or were lost were real people who died in terror. It requires very little imagination to feel a connection with the loss, the fear, though it is also easily ignored if those thoughts become too much. Usually. Thought buffers against the loss of life, creates a distance from it in which it can be examined and compartmentalized or dismissed at will. Though it is thought that haunts us most of all. Ghosts are made of memories bubbling into the present. 

There was a young woman there whom I had a little crush on a few years ago. We had kissed twice, the second being much better than the first. She escaped the fire. Seeing her posts online, relaying the surreal feelings that she was contending with, is an odd one. Every day it seems that I become more and more of a "father." I just want everybody to be safe, to avoid places where fires might break out, places where there are inadequate precautions and/or a clear escape route. I hear myself speaking more warnings within my mind, cautioning against danger everywhere. It is the result perhaps of having a soon-to-be five year old boy. It's his job to test the boundaries of my cautioning. He lacks the imaginative capacity to understand what a car would do to a four year old. I don't lack that at all.

You don't want to become one of those people that perpetually mutters, Don't do that. Oh, don't do that.... but you are. I am, I should say. It's what I've become. Tragedy ignites my imagination in ways that I wish it didn't. Fire is just like fire once inside the mind - not so easily put out, spreads quickly when not extinguished, ruins everything it touches, killing before it even arrives. The remains of fire, barely even a reminder left. 

My life has become a litany of whispered inner-appeals for my son to live and be happy, for him not to be in places where fires trap people on the second floor, or any floor. All loss now seems to be a warning of sorts, one not easily ignored, at least by me. Love is one of the curses of parenting. 

I look back at my own life and recall the uncounted number of warehouse parties that I have been to and I pretend to shake my head. I remember an old theater, I believe it was in Bucharest, where there was a smell that suddenly filled the place, as if there had been some sort of a chemical leak. Everybody seemed worried for a few minutes, looking around from each to next. Then, after it became semi-obvious that we weren't all going to die, the volume of the music crept back up and we carried on as if this was normal, and maybe it was. Those that had left the building returned after a half hour or so. Onwards, well into the early morning when I had to leave for the airport to fly all day home to New York on a Sunday, thoughts of Don DeLillo's White Noise still spinning within me. 

What the fuck - We didn't die, let's have another, or let's have one another. Fatalism comes so easy, at first. 

And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means

    Time held me green and dying

  Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

- Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill

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Nudies

I'll eventually be arrested for the picture above, for its pornographic content. My main complaint with it is that I missed the full curve of the back of his feet. We'll all live with the new artistic sensibilities now. The government will cut off funding for every program except prison, which will be considered educational now also; the only institution that works. Make the Great Wall Again. If Trump simply lined up all of America's prisons on our southern border then that should just about settle that issue. We'd just need to prevent any escapes from the northern side and all will then work itself out the way that nature intended, through the ebb and flow of incarceration and escape. 

CS tells me that there is a shortage of photographer-fathers that take good pictures (candid portraits?) of their sons. That's not what he said at all. That is my perversion of what he said. I just need to brush up on my Photoshop skills. I could be the next Sally Mann. Sally Mann had two daughters and a son, though, so she was able to establish a dynamic of compositional relationships.

(Sally Mann)

For those who do not know, Mann received some heat for the provocative candid pictures she presented of her children in the book Immediate Family. She was accused by some critics of exploiting her children. I have the book and I don't see that, at all, but rather only see a photographer astutely connecting with what makes images interesting - vulnerability, innocence, beauty, pain, etc. That they are of her own children seems nearly incidental, except for the intimacy of the setting in which they were taken and the affection that a parent has for their own children. That's part of my take on her work, anyway. That her children exhibited early signs of sexuality would surprise or shock only the willfully ignorant. 

Right now my son has a pretend fantasy that his mother is also his girlfriend. I believe that's somewhat normal at that age. I used to date her, also. I probably believed a similar thing about her at one time or another. 

In an unrelated sentence: It's the normal. 

My friends are becoming worried about me. I've turned off my phone during the week and have disabled the alert messages on my work computer. Life was driving me mad. It was causing me stress, so I had to let it go. Now I live in a silent bubble at my kitchen table, one that allows me to work. The biggest problem so far is that when I do check my phone it's usually towards the end of my day, while I'm trying to go for a bike ride. I become overwhelmed and withdraw. I ignore the texts and go for a ride, but it eats at me, which defeats the purpose a bit. 

I used to think that people became more distant as they aged. Perhaps as a result of the diminishing of their senses and faculties, enthusiasm slowly being replaced with disinterestedness, indifference. Now I see that they're just protecting what remains. Few things equal the perpetual trauma and crisis of aging. For those that are paying attention it all starts to become funny as you head towards fifty. You realize a thing that you can realize in no other way, similar to what Mark Twain had to say about carrying a cat by the tail. 

Yesterday, I thought that I was going to a beginner's yoga class. I had it listed in my calendar incorrectly, so I ended up at a meditation class instead, which was fine and well and needed. I was still able to bow at the end and say Namaste... It improved my bike ride afterwards, truly. 

Just before going in yesterday I saw the news about the fire at a party in Oakland. It was posted from a friend who was there, letting everyone know that she was now safe. I have reached out to another friend, to verify, as I noticed she hasn't updated Facebook since the day before yesterday. The "dad gene" is kicking in. I'll wait until morning has dawned before I text her. The last time I checked on her was shortly after Trump won. Who knows what may have happened to her since. She's probably protesting the Dakota Pipeline by now, feathered headdress on, doing a water-dance under the desert Milky Way. She is quite the dynamo. 

Well, my weekend is now half over. I rode 25 miles yesterday and did not make it to the gym afterwards. I had told myself that I would do more, but the day sat opened in front of me inviting naps and showers, not lifting leaden weights and sweating. I spent the latter half of the day reading, trying to finish up a book that catalogs the parallel horrors suffered by two kids in France and Germany during the war. It reads like a Pulitzer-prize winning book. Always a little lightning at the right spots, to prepare the way. 

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Flowers!

(Boy Blue)

I think I'm going to go to a yoga class this morning. 

That sentence was written without irony. I keep trying to add a qualifier to it, but they all make me sound mean. Or worse, stupid. Yoga is the exercise that everybody gets to poke at. I'm going to start chanting a mantra while I do reps at the gym. When I leave, I'll walk around the gym bowing towards all of my many Mexican friends, giving them a nice, fine "namaste..." as I leave. I wonder how long before somebody would bother to kick my ass senseless, leave me in the parking lot bleeding from my ears. Not very long, would be my guess. 

I bow only to bowling lanes. 

I've been pushing my workouts up in repetitions and time, in preparation for dominating Caitlyn in Napa. I'm going to take back Montreal '76, you know, for America. 

Each day I arrive at exhaustion. The idea being to push that point slowly backwards in time until I am young once again. It's taking me much longer than it used to, which is pissing me off. 

The worst part of aging - beyond the cellular process itself, which results in an estrogen fueled tiredness - are the opinions of other people concerning how to react to age. People that hardly knew what to do with the youth they were given are now filled with advice on how to spend my middle years. They get pissed when I say, Sure, if I wanted my life to resemble yours at all.  

I don't get it. I don't walk around parties explaining why carrots are bad for everybody, or how many calories are in a banana, or why you shouldn't vaccinate your child. Getting older is almost like having a child attached to you. The unsolicited advice just starts pouring in on what to do with it. 

Now, in fairness, I did sort of write yesterday about the differing experiences of drinking and that of abstaining. So, I guess I asked for it. You can't write about intoxication without begging to be examined for the purpose of improvement. It's what people do. They regularly commit to a state of being that requires assistance of some kind whenever recognized in another. I hope that I never become such an abstainer that I try to help others. 

I have my own 12-step program. It involves 3 steps, done 4 times daily: get some sleep, exercise, drink water.  

Also, to clarify, my boy was not the unexpected product of drunkenness as my post yesterday may have suggested to some. I'm not sure if I've written about it here or not before, but he was the result of what must be presumed to have been a mature decision by myself and his mother. I would not want the boy to one day read anything written here and experience confusion concerning the nature of his origins. There is already far too much dubiety about the origin of mankind, at least when explained by any of the world religions. He was wanted and welcomed here. 

Let me end today's qualifier post on a lighter note:

Yesterday, when riding up towards the hills on the east side of the valley, I passed a woman that had her child wrapped in a body wrap on the front of her, as mothers often do, making them one again. For the brief moment that I rode by I saw her looking down lovingly, glowing. The image of a young, happy mother. After having a child of my own I have a deepened appreciation for such scenes, for the natural beauty of a woman's love for her child, etc. 

The child was not a newborn, though I discovered that only as the concise experience passed. A small hand emerged from the wrap and pointed up towards the sporadic and fluffy clouds that dotted the bluest of Autumn skies above. The voice of what I believed to be a young girl excitedly said only, "Flowers!"

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Slake the thirsts

Oh, sweet delicious Friday. You are mine.

There is a work party tonight in the city. I am leaning towards not going. My current Jesuit-Judo sabbatical from demon alcohol whispers within me, Don't Go, Sean.... My present sobriety has eroded my social life to near nil. I don't meet as many people when alone on a bicycle riding down country roads as I do when chatting amicably at a local or distant bar. 

I mean, sure, such a thing can be done - going to a holiday party without drinking - but, why? I'd much rather prove, again, that I can drink than to perpetually prove the opposite. Any imbecile can abstain. It takes a special dullard to indulge. 

What I have learned about drinking is that it must be accomplished one day at a time. If you try to drink in the future then you might stumble on things yet to happen. The past is as crowded and unlit as a whore's attic. In that temporal fact, drinking is like most other things: best accomplished in the moment. 

You can try drinking tomorrow, or in the yesterday, or the day before that, or further beyond that, ad infinitum. Eventually you'll find that it is only drinking today that will run the risk of making you happy, if at all. Anything else - dancing to remember, dancing to forget - leads to a type of dream travel, a common side effect that accompanies drinking. The liquid flight of inadvertence. Once there, the future appears unexpectedly bright, swollen, and aching all around of you. 

Readers here might suspect that I am a mild misanthrope. The opposite is true. I am a social guy, some say much too much so. There are cat people and then there are dog people, I'm a heavy drinker. I don't give a shit if you think cats are superior to dogs. I think that you're a stupid twat for thinking such things and your cat probably agrees with me. 

Drinking, it's what I like to do while I'm doing it. It doesn't always make me as happy as I might hope. When I stop, I no longer enjoy it. Instead, I examine it quizzically as from afar. Almost as if it is someone else that is so irredeemably thirsty. I have come to a minor realization about drinking that I now accept as a personal truism: For me to drink as I do then I must forgo other pleasures in life. When I think of it in this way then it makes no sense. None. Yet when engaged with drink, I do not have that same thought often enough for it to be of any particular use. Transient ideas hold little sway over a transient mind.

I believe the term to describe the behavior is compulsive, though that term seems harsh, even unforgiving. I would concede a spasmodic urge, though it is not irresistible. The pot-butter has filled me with far too much second-guessing and laziness for me to now pretend that I am at a disadvantage to my own impulses, or that I have the ambitions to pursue them to completion once entranced by their whisperings. 

My ex might claim that it is among the reasons that we are no more. The bottle can be totemic with its charms and spells. If I continued to drink as competitively as I had been then I might have continued disagreeing with her that we were no longer meant to be. It has the effect of making a person captiously recurrent, even when in love. It has caused as many marriages as it has destroyed, in that order. Double that number in babies. Though it fails at sustaining anything outside of itself very well.   

That's part of why I've escaped it for the time, I have grown tired of the boorishness. I kept hearing myself say things that I had already said, each time the words seemed a little louder. A careful reader grows tired of a lazy script. Counter-intuitively, many writers are destroyed by sobriety. They can not bear the weight of it. 

I'm not sure when I stopped drinking last. It was sometime after my birthday. I remember having a glass of wine at dinner that night. I don't remember after that. Or rather, I don't remember what day I stopped drinking shortly after that, only that my weight had crept back up to around the 210 mark. I became alarmed that I was sliding upwards on the balanced slope of the leaden gym scale. I only joke about "blacking out." That has never been a feature of my life. I am cursed more with memories than with their absence.

Talking openly about drinking makes people uncomfortable, I have noticed. That's why I like it so much. Nobody can take this perverse joy away from me. There must be something to that, though. People become uncomfortable discussing urges, even when they are not their own. People seem to understand what animals we all are. Self-consciousness and imagination prevents most of us from ever addressing it, dressed in civility. For every impulse there is a matching virtue of the imagination designed to counter it.

Ah well, I have set out to train for the 2017 Spring Olympics in Napa. Best not to tamper with the delicate framework that is my mental and physical health. I expect nothing less than to take home the Gold. 

You'll be seeing me on the television, Ma'. My fists'll be raised in the thrill of victory...

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A Maze

Batman Jr. and I went to a local winery yesterday, Buena Vista. There is a hedgerow maze there that I had wanted to let the boy run loose in. It was a touch uncared for with it being the onset of winter. Little matter. The boy and I had fun racing around within its pretend walls, playing a loose land game of Marco Polo, giggling as we went. I took a few pictures as we criss-crossed paths, indulging and enjoying the sensation of not knowing where we were or where we were going next.

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