Pareidolia

My mind snapped its imaginary fingers and the second weekend in a row was over. My fourth of five days off is coming to a close. I went into the city last night, just to prove that I can still drink. I went out to a nightclub but left a bit after midnight. I turned into a pumpkin shaped dad with a misplaced glass spider. I don't do so well any more staying out late. I have no idea how I used to do it. Decades battering the once indefatigable nervous system.  

The ex and I are getting the boy his passport this week. We will commit to more travel. I have been a homeboy for far too long now. Travel is expensive, and there are no guarantees that America will be here when I get back. I wonder what horrors await me once the NSA's indexing bots have adequately analyzed this site and then determined that I am a danger to a free state. We're all living inside the conspiracy now, we have abandoned the theoretical component. The leaks are real, we're told, the news about it not so much. 

The rain and the mild hangover prevented me from riding or going to the gym today. Daily exercise becomes a daily compulsion. A day without it feels like a day lost, some small defeat, though I know that's just silliness. 

Silliness doesn't hurt much, though. I could use a few more days of it, silliness and the time to enjoy it. I may request a few more days, even though I will do little more than sit at the window and look out to watch the rain. I desperately needed a break, now I have the impulse to cling to this new feeling, the breath of directionless days.

Had forgotten a little bit, how to happily waste time, to laugh at its meaningless passing. The shapes of clouds resembling things, nouns made of moisture vapor drifting by. All that is required to prove their random existence is a day or two in which there is nothing at all else to do. Just look up, lie back. Look up and let yourself see.

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"Vagina Diapers"

Success. We "camped out" in the living room, loving the playfulness of it  He wore his new Star Wars BB-8 pajamas to sleep, as happy and sweet as a boy can be. We made a "camping style" dinner which consisted mostly of hot dogs, popcorn and other crap foods, all of which I am now struggling to overcome. We topped it off with s'mores, the marshmallow and graham cracker foundation broiled in the oven, the chocolate and top half added once the marshmallows had sufficiently softened and lightly browned.  We treated ourselves to a luxury bubble-gum bubble bath before reading adventure stories for the night. 

Once he had slipped off to sleep I retired to my bed. The air mattress is very nice and works great in a camping situation but nothing loves a man as does his own bed. 

The boy is still combining the fledgling "bad words" he has access to. Last night he dropped a new phrase on me, Vagina Diapers. It was too good to not include here, somehow. 

I will find a way to use this casually in conversation, and soon. Be ready. 

Today we may go see a model train exhibit at the Napa Fairgrounds. They sure love trains, boys do. There are never any young girls at these events. I don't think that they're allowed. The complex and delicate world of model train dioramas is quite resistant to females of all ages. 

I often spend my time at events like this trying to figure out a way to bring a Superman-level catastrophe upon their little miniature world, something from which time can not be turned back by causing the earth to spin backwards, by orbiting it in reverse at high speeds in a leotard with a cape, out of frustration at the loss of love, the loss of the beloved - dams bursting, global chaos, nuclear warheads detonated at the San Andreas fault, the riven earth swallowing Lois Lane's care which then drops into the crevice of darkness and death, etc. I can see it all now, as if scripted in the heavens. I wish only to misuse my imaginary powers for evil rather than good. 

I'll pour an entire 7-Eleven Big Gulp at the highest point of the display and then let beautiful nature take its course. It's the only time that I truly get to feel like a God, when bringing short-circuit destruction upon the helpless unsuspecting with a tidal wave of syrupy Coca-Cola. Maybe today I'll bring a gas powered leaf blower in with me and cause more than just biblical flooding and power grid failures. These little well-crafted towns are in need of a few tornadoes to help unite them as a community. Small plastic towns of this sort have no defense against my divine wrath and malevolence. I am the Great Tasmanian in the skies. 

It's always the adults that ruin everything, dressed in overalls and striped denim caps surrounding me and screaming their chorus of incoherent anger. Before they attack in an effort to force God from the clouds and out into the parking lot, the last thing I'll scream: This isn't a fair fight. All of you guys are in NAMBLA!

But first, strawberry pancakes and maple syrup. 

Perses the Tasmanian Titan Destroyer must bulk up on carbs to sufficiently foul the mood before noon strikes the summit of Mount Olympus.

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Stars of Amber

We set up the tent, the air mattress, the lantern, pillows, preparing the living room to be camped in. 

We will listen to the rain celebrate its landing, read adventure stories under the lantern's light, the heat running on high as the night cools and darkens, dialing it down and closing up the windows some once the boy has drifted off, when there is more reason to be sensible. His toy turtle which will cast colored points of light - green and amber and red - across the walls and ceiling, collecting in the corner as if the galaxy had a cube being pushed against it from underneath and the light was trying to get inside.

Strawberry pancakes in the morning, maple syrup, fresh fruit.

I like the pic the boy took, the flatness of the eyes, the Manson-esque stare. 

The vacation is working. This ends my second day of it, entering the weekend right where I would otherwise be leaving. I have done nothing all day long. So easy to forget that nothing is the occasional goal, nothing the expectation, nothing the desire. Only stillness, the sound of the sky's wet collision with the ground. A universe made of nothing stretching on, distances that can not be thought, can not be held, each night unreturned to.

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The Longshot Weekend

(Pic taken at the boy's school)

Maybe it's too much coffee. I sit here on my first of several days off and I still feel anxious, unable to sit still or to think coherently for any period of time. It's exhausting. I awoke around midnight, after dozing off around 9pm, and have been awake ever since. Great way to kick off my time off from work. I should have offered to work overtime. I could use something to fill the empty hours, and who among us doesn't like money.

I had meant to start writing about passive experiences - books, art, photos. 

Yesterday, I suited up to go swimming, the first time since my biking accident. Flexibility and strength have returned to my right shoulder, arm, and abdomen after two weeks. The athlete who had our team kicked out of the Napa Olympics called and said that the pool was closed. We are still investigating the claim, but I went over to her house anyway and sat and chatted politics with she and her boyfriend. At first the conversation was fun, we made good jokes about the absurdity of it all, but then the middle-aged sensibilities took over and we all agreed to stop talking politics. It's not easy.

The world is a less pleasant place now than it was only a few months ago. Those that detest globalization and progressivism will get to have their say. We will see how much the world likes doing things the other way. It is written, and has been signed. The white nationalists' numbers are growing in protest and fascination. 

I have a weekend with the boy. We will set up the camping tent inside the apartment and sleep in it, a precursor to future adventures. I will spend today and tomorrow practicing being relaxed. I will read an old book by Richard Ford, and one by Bernard Cooper, a book that contributed to the subtitle of this site years ago, Emails Without A Home, along with a few photo projects that CS was doing at the time. 

It should probably be ... An Home, I think. There is no hard consonant sound to start off the following word, Home, which I believe means that it should be An. But that feels wrong, like starting a sentence but first. And you remember what old Bobby said: When something's not right it's wrong.

We'll see what other truths the past might hold. 

(Kids are great fun)

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(Facebook, probably)

(Facebook, probably)

Less than little to report today - the world is advancing swimmingly, am taking some time off from work, the weather just turned gray again, am hoping to find some time to read, or write. 

A friend just reached back from Peru, he decided to walk elsewhere for a bit. 

I'm digging it, meeting lots of friendly peeps locals and travelers alike. Lima was a charm after I got a feel for it, huge swing between how the rich and poor exist, consumerism flowing like dirty water. I've come south through endless sand dunes, in Nazca now, got my archeological hat on and heading through the mountain tonight to Cuzco and the sacred valley. Slowly dropping into travel mode, my step is not as quick as when I arrived and I'm fastening a knot to lasoo the growing neck of time:)

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Orange Dawn

(All the world's a balcony...)

I'm just going to write about the albums I listen to, or the books I read, or the ones that I look at. It's easier. America is killing me. It seems that half of the nation is okay with runaway, barely checked, secret power, and the likely collusion with Russia. In fact, they seem to prefer politics that way as long as a woman isn't calling all of the shots. Trump does force a glimpse into the very heart of whiteness. 

The message is clear enough now, if the actual electing of Trump did not make it more so: Russians are less scary to white people than the dark-skinned mystery refugees and rapists that are sneaking across our borders to vote in the millions, or less terrifying than is a single woman named Hillary. When you have orchestrated a voter fraud so effective that there is no evidence of itself outside of the mind of the president - I mean, other than the millions of fake votes received in California - then who knows what you are capable of. Truth becomes boundless when unsullied by evidence. 

We have an intellectually incurious president that is openly attacking the foundations of democracy and half of the nation seems to be following him down that rabbit hole simply because it is easier to accept a conspiracy theory than it is to understand that others in your own nation disagree with you on principle. What could be more radical and conspiratorial to a conservative than liberalism, after all.

Liberalism, the term is a joke about itself, defined by a sense of tolerance, the holding of liberal views... Grasshopper, we're fucked here. America needs a new Mike Tyson and a new Public Enemy. It would help if they were Mexican, also. America badly needs some undisputedness again, something we can all agree on, something which leaves no room for disagreement or controversy. Let's hope it doesn't present itself as the daytime blossoming of a nuclear detonation, because I am starting to suspect that there are Americans out there that wish for America to express its power in one of the last ways that it possibly can. 

White people are much more fun when they're scared than when they're angry. Angry white people frighten even me, and I can fit in with their crowd easily enough. All that is required is for me to shut up. Let me try that for a while.

That was me trying not to write about current events. 

So, nobody "liked" my post about 12 year old girls yesterday on Facebook. Fucking pussies. I should have tagged a bunch of my overly heterosexual friends on the post and made a few crude comments about how delicious girl scouts are to the taste. 

I mean, the cookies, of course.

I don't mind people being pussies, I do object to them whining about things that they pretend to be angry about. We're going to need more than privileged anger to get out of this one. 

Okay, no more. I wake up and this garbled nonsense is at the forefront of my mind. We have a president that is appointing Russian moles to the highest security positions in our nation. 

What, me worry?

And one small clarification, I noticed on the front cover of the Sally Mann book that the subtitle is "portraits of young women" which begs me to treat the photographic subjects as women, not girls. I should have been more careful in my observations. I could have written "a young woman's pubic mound" and should not have used the word "child" in that sentence. 

I was treating the subject poorly through the use of ill-defined terms.

(I'd love to read the "Feedback" results for these definitions)

Well, I haven't read any new stories or looked at any new books on photography, so I have very little left to write about. I just wanted to make my mission statement here more clear. This site will no longer be dedicated to trading recipes for disaster. I will liberally express my thoughts and feelings on art and literature, before it is all disappeared. 

I watched Lego Ninjago with the boy last night, though I suspect few would find interest in my exegetics there. 

I did listen to Elbow's new album yesterday, Little Fictions. It was okay. They should stop trying to write such obligatory anthemic tunes. Their efforts are too overt, too self-conscious, too patently British in the arrangements. Beyond that, they are brilliant songwriters and musicians. They have the poetic twist, the flair for the type of nonsense that most deeply involves the human heart.

(... and one boy in his time plays many parts.) 

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At Twelve

I borrowed a book from the ex last night, At Twelve by Sally Mann. The images still possess the power to startle, perhaps they always will. That being the very point of the book, it seems. One of the great taboos, the sexuality of girls as they straddle innocence and what comes next. 

(Sally Mann)

What knowing watchfulness in the eyes of a twelve year old... at once guarded, yet guileless. She is the very picture of a contradiction: on the one hand diffident and ambivalent, on the other forthright and impatient; half pertness and half pout. She disarms me with her sure sense of her own attractiveness and, with it, her direct, even provocative approach to the camera. Impossibly, she is both artless and sophisticated; a child and yet a woman. - Sally Mann

The book is something to look at. Impulses start to appear from who knows where, telling the eye to look away, that you are looking at something that is not meant to be examined in that way, like the pubic mound of a child for example. Then some other part of the self starts to argue with the eye, wishing to believe and advance its own agenda. Some little imaginary war goes on between the sense of aesthetics and the memory of virtues, between act and accusation, between viewer and subject. Or rather, viewer and the viewing.

It is an interesting experience. You are not meant to deny the sexuality of the subject, that is its very point. How did something so seemingly simple take on these attributes, one wonders. The answer to the question arrives immediately, yet there is something else. It is, or seems, taboo beyond just the societal forces that make it so. I am left to question whether or not some taboos are the result of those social forces, or if they are more innate. The fascination is innate, we know that, though perhaps the caution is also. We are told that men are more susceptible to image than are women, which begs yet another set of questions. 

Sally Mann doesn't bother helping you resolve those questions, she restates them. 

(Sally Mann)

Does it mean anything at all to accept or deny the sexuality of young girls. The asking of the question creates a phantom answer, That's not for you to ask! On any other subject my response would be a swift, Why not? What is the hesitation that happens before that response appears in my mind as it would otherwise. The response seems less sure of itself, immediately surrounded.

Like a stain on the mind of mankind, it seems impossible to remove sexuality from the observer, because, well just look at the images!

Talking about the sexuality of young girls is similar to talking about the experience of alcohol. To comment at all is to form a space around the subject, with the speaker trapped inside. You must feel either this way or that if you are discussing it at all. To have formed opinions seems indicative of something. How else would an opinion magically appear where it is not needed and was not invited? The assumptions abort conversation before it can begin. In this way honesty is denied, then denounced as untruthful obfuscation. For a young girl's sexuality to exist at all it does not require an observer, though some aspects of it are dependent upon that observation. 

Everyone can see it. It requires no special vantage point. Yet it remains one of the grand invisibles, the silent situation, the unspoken act of public puberty. Fascination with the human experience alone seems an insufficient reason to gaze at images of pubescent girls. Though what impulse could be more plain? It is why we look at all things. These general reasons do not satisfy the mind of some, though, and likely never will. 

Sexuality occurs in that magic bubble where the mind and body of one meets that of another. Nobody can stop what occurs there, so it is guarded fiercely from the exterior. Parents can occasionally reach in and pull some uninvited intruder out, though not very well and often with partial success. Some attraction is strongest at its point of denial.

Recently I heard the old apologetic phrase derided once again: Boys will be boys...  The purpose of the stating of the phrase was so that we would understand that we are not to simply accept this as an excuse. If one approaches the images of Sally Mann with a similar assessment, that girls will be girls, then something very strange happens. There is a difference that arrives immediately to mind, one that seems to make clear how we allow men and women to use their sexuality in different ways. Not even allow, but insist. Social forces that might otherwise expect equal treatment between sexes continue to suggest that there is something inherently good about women, something which achieves its zenith at the time of blossoming, and that there is something inherently wicked about men, something that begins it dangerous descent at a similar developmental stage. 

Embedded deep within the traditions of inequality rests the odd disparity of sexuality, the dual claims of difference. Mysteriously through all of this people still emerge with some semblance of self-possession and dignity, a balancing act between the sexes that relies as heavily on its counter-weight as it does upon itself.

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Rattle and Hum

U2. There is a goofiness to their sincerity. It renders them lovable, at times. They have a visible flaw, an error to forgive them with. I remember that now, from driving around and listening to their attempt at Sandinista! yesterday. Blasting it in the car, to remind myself what it feels like to feel like.

They falter and fawn over themselves and their heroes a bit, but fuck... it's the sound of a band having a lot of fun, and one at the peak of their powers. They seem intent on loosening up musically. If this album was their Sandinista! then they spent all four sides proving that they are not as creative as The Clash were, though more focused and perhaps better songwriters. Their brilliance felt choreographed here in every sense of comparison, which is not an easy feat considering The Clash were an entirely manufactured entity. I suppose if you crave coherence most of all in the music that you listen to then U2 just might be the band for you. I mean, if you were forced to choose. 

After this album they became unable to transcend the U2 form ever again. They look like an Irish Los Lobos. They tried to appeal to the dance crowd, but their choice of partnering with Paul Oakenflab was no less an irritant to the senses than most any EDM of today. It was marketing in search of market. It appealed mainly to people who wanted others to note the legitimacy of dance music. In their confusion they thought that U2 could somehow do that for them. The fact of the situation was very much the reverse of that. U2 was publicly acknowledging their loss of creative focus, their desperation to remain relevant. 

Achtung Baby was their last listenable collection, and this is of entirely unrelated tracks. It's not an album, not in the sense that Joshua Tree was. It's a studio version of new material that plays along even less coherently than does Rattle. It's only an aggregation of songs that were recorded during a time. It's almost as if U2 took their ill-defined White Album-era as a band and then just stretched that out for the next twenty years or so, hoping for the best. 

Brian Eno has proven it over and over again: turds are made to be polished.

The Clash would not have been able to perfect tracks the way that U2 did on Rattle, not that deep into their trajectory as a failing band anyway. The Clash had broken up well before this point. Making a live concert film to release along with their next album would have been the next logical step for them also, and one that would have documented their breakup better. Both bands formed in 1976, by early 1980 the Clash had released their third album, London Calling. U2 had not yet released their debut, Boy, to give some comparative perspective. Rattle and Hum came three years after the remaining half of The Clash had finally Cut The Crap. 

Best one-word record review I ever read was of that doomed effort - Cut The Crap: Didn't.

Shat the What? Back to Twaddle and Bum.

While Rattle is a result of U2's creative peak, it is also the sound of its own ending. It is post-zenith, even in its brilliance. They were either working with their heroes, covering their songs, or writing tributes to them - B.B. King, the Angel of Harlem, Bob Dylan, The Beatles. To a lesser degree also Van Dyke Parks and Benmont Tench (for the "real music fans" out there). They revealed their ambitions to transcend the punk rock that they first attempted to assert their own credibility with. I would have liked them more on Rattletouille had they covered anything off of Metal Box or Marquee Moon, the two albums that handed The Edge his guitar sound that so many claimed as being "unique" at the time.  

The live re-workings of their own songs like Still Haven't Found and Pride (In the Name of Love) are mostly gratuitous, though energetically and pleasantly so. The first becomes a white-girl spiritual, admittedly well played and fun to sing along with if you want to feel the way white girls do, which is what we must assume is the spiritual source of Bono's passion. He is a teenage white girl caught in an aging Irish midget's body. He brings the spirit of Benetton to Amnesty International. The latter remake, Pride, is redundant to anyone that owns The Unforgettable Fire. It offers nothing new to the essence of the song. It only proves that they are able to play their songs live, and that no band like U2 could possibly leave out Martin Luther King Jr. when they are appropriating significance from the collective past of others. It feels as if U2 was trying to claim they were at a famous party that everybody knows they were not. So, they photoshopped pics from the after-party.

MLK was not shot on the early morning of April 4th, btw.

Some of these choices seem naive, though from a fan's perspective you feel at those moments that one of your favorite bands was also falling in love with your musical heritage (if you were lucky enough to be an American at that time). The results made so much sense that it was nearly their Ziggy Stardust moment, where they assumed their own greatness, claiming the "rock-gods" title, where the arguments against the pretentious claim were drowned out by the sound of cheering stadiums. When it was all over, though, they were no David Bowies. 

The album is a lot of fun, even though the seeds of disappointment are planted deeply within it. The contemptible proselytizing in Silver and Gold is annoying enough in its own right, but then to escape the bridge where Bono is rambling off his newly secularized version of Christianity with, Okay Edge, play the blues... The Edge plays a great little bit of his effects-heavy minimal riffing, which is very cool, but it is not the blues. There is something false and flat about this plasticine sincerity. Bono's need to make claims has been overrun by his inabilities. 

The band questioning their faith is fine within the context of a song, a musical proclamation of the uncertainty that many must feel, but it is unsightly as an accident advanced as something else, as the passion of someone whose inspiration can be summed up as, Must say things, now.

Am I bugging you? I didn't mean to bug ya...

This is a song that Charles Manson stole from The Beatles. We're stealing it back.

Holy Jesus. Bono, please shut the fuck up! He has an inexhaustible ability to ruin songs. Listen to the extra verse he adds to All Along The Watchtower.... Something about three chords, a red guitar, and how only you can prevent forest fires.

Tomorrow we'll move on and away from the spy plane designed to steal secrets from other lands. I enjoy their music most when I am able to suspend my capacity for thought and revert that thoughtlessness back to the teen years that were filled with my newfound love of, and faith in, rock and roll. 

One last observation: In the Rattled movie they go to visit Graceland. At this point we must assume that U2 had mysteriously never seen the film Spinal Tap before. There is no other explanation for it, because they would have never chosen to re-make a scene from that classic rock comedy without the benefit of its very well-written script. 

They all sit there with the same pompous and dumbfounded reverential sincerity of Nigel Tufnel and David St. Hubbins. The only thing missing was those four potatoes trying to sing Heartbreak Hotel in four lost parts harmony.

At the gravesite, Nigel says it best: 

It really puts perspective on things, though, doesn't it?

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Neverthelesses

Women, are they ever going to shut up? 

Not if McConnell has any Neverthelesses left in him.

Nope, no politics. I had more fun writing about the boy yesterday than I've had in many mornings here. Politics are a two-sided poison. Though as CS has pointed out, there is no escape. America sure loves its democracy and capitalisms. If you listen to some they would have you believe that those are one in the same.

I almost want to see the Libertarians win soon, and big, just so we can put that version of the American myth to rest for good. Jesus, they are an annoying bunch - smug in their ideals, bereft of all evidence. We could have had Gary Johnson. Right now we could all be laughing at President Johnson, but his tongue got in the way.

Ok, must stop, otherwise the doomsday device loses all of its charm and power.


I didn't actually teach my son any pre-dirty words. I did give him the phrase "Butt Lightyear" to champion among his friends. He's a big fan of the Toy Story series, so it made perfect sense. Irreverence must be cultivated, else how is it to grow? Irreverence requires the nurturing push of a cynical mind.


I have been listening to a lot of 80s music. I'd like to say non-nostalgically, but it does slip in there. Oh, but what fun - The Cure, Talk Talk, R.E.M., The Replacements, U2, Talking Heads, Bowie, New Order, The Sisters of Mercy, The Cult, Wire, Love & Rockets, etc., etc. I've given each of these bands a recent listen, and to at least a couple of each of their albums.

My advice: don't go back and listen to The Cure's Pornography. It is a lugubrious event. I mean, that must have been their intention, but fuck... Smith rendered himself unlistenable on that one. It sucks because with Seventeen Seconds and Faith it seemed as if the band was going exactly where I would have wanted them to, but no... No, they did not.

That one album aside, it has been a lot of fun. R.E.M. was not quite as great as I gave them credit for at the time, though still very good. U2 should have been lost in a plane crash just after finishing Achtung Baby. Not killed, just lost somewhere, maybe on an island where they could try converting the natives to the doctrine of self-righteousness. Talking Heads are the greatest band of their time. Nobody else even comes close, though New Order's charms outweigh their occasional mediocrity, No matter how many times I listen to them I can't quite determine how they pull off this very magic task, but they do.

The Replacements make me want to drink, at least up until All Shook Down, which makes me never want to drink again. They were a band that could have used the help of Alcoholics Unanimous.


Ok, it's the weekend outside. If I don't motivate then my list of things I want to get done will begin to taunt and haunt me, like that dismal Cure album. It is pornographic, if you confuse frustration for satisfaction, or the by-product of a thing as the thing itself.

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Concerning pronunciation of the word "vagina"

My son has expanded his lexicon to include the words Butt, Penis, Vagina, Fart, and Poop. He celebrates these additions with every conceivable combination, sometimes in an excited and recurring string, arranged in new and laughable ways, then repeated ad infinitum. 

About a week ago he lured me over to where he was sitting with a "secret" that he wanted to tell me. When I leaned over and put my ear to his mouth he whispered, Vagina Butt Fart. I giggled along with him at this revelation, but then as a father also took the time to explain that there is a more economical word for such an event, sort of, and that he will one day learn that term, and then hopefully celebrate it with the same level of enthusiasm he has now. 

Much to mom's dismay. 

He ran into the living room where I was reading last week and announced, Penis Butt Fart! 

I told him, Son, take it down a notch... 

At this, his shoulders slumped a bit, his volume diminished, the tone dropped half an octave, then he labored out a single tired word in three syllables: Vagina.

That: comedy gold. 

I laughed with him for several minutes and then periodically afterwards, though he and I may have found different sources of humor in the event. I suspect that he might have thought that I found vaginas unusually funny, which they can be, to be certain, though their hilarity often does not crack the top five reasons for my sustained interest in and about and around them.

After that, he proudly lionized the word Vagina with all of the acclaim that he could muster. 

We were at mom's house when he was trotting out his litany of verbal mysteries and he said the word again, at which point I corrected him on the pronunciation. After all, it is a parent's duty. And yes, I just said "duty." We have been teaching him the letters of the alphabet in conjunction with his school's efforts at same. This week's letter was "n" so I taught him a few "n" words (don't be stupid...). 

Ever the believer in continued education, I pointed out that, lots of words have the letter "n" in them. Like penis and vagina, for example. I made sure to articulate each, emphasizing how they both have a common fulcrum point in the pronunciation of the consonants. I also explained that the V creates a different sound than does the P or the F that he had been relying on to advance his concept of the enigma. 

It's not pagina or fagina, it is V-a-g-i-n-a.... I slowly said "Vagina Victory" and "Victory Vagina" a few times so that he could process the purpose of this sound. 

Mom looked on proudly as Dad made sure their son knew how to correctly pronounce the words that he's not allowed to say at school. Or rather, they are allowed, but not quite in the recreational capacity at which we can enjoy them in the leisure of our home. 

It is still an ongoing conversation between us:

Son, what is so funny about butts?

Well, butts fart and butts poop, and buttfarts make surprise poop!

You got that right, little buddy - never trust a fart.

To add to this miasma of functional confusion concerning the biology of oneself and others, he was sitting on the toilet the other day, eliminating waste, so he called me in for a little father-son chat. At first I thought he called me in to help him wipe, as that is still a two-person activity, but he had a question for me. He was being very bashful about it, but he finally said he wanted to know about me and mommy. After a few clarifying questions I realized that he wanted to know about something to which he was as yet unable to form questions, lacking the language for the conversation.

Oh, I thought, that.... He wants to know what part poop plays in sex. 

I can do this.

Well buddy, when two people love each others' butts very much then they rub them together until a baby boy pops out of the mom's butthole. With girls, nobody quite knows where they come from. It's a mystery, but they don't have penises and it's best to always remind them of that. 

I gave him an eloquent synopsis of how beautiful love occurs - that babies are made in a mommy's belly, and then there is only the disgusting magic of birth to complete this circle of circles. 

I did emphasize two very important sentences: Making babies does not involve the butt as a requirement. It is considered an optional form of adult love, one that invites some coaxing, some pressing on the actual button to loosen it up a bit, and just a little bit of trust... after that it's all smooth sailing. 

I could tell that he still had questions, so I told him that Mommy knows far more about any of this than anybody I've ever met. I also told him that Mommy used to have a penis, but she pooped it off. That's my understanding of it, anyway. It's important for me to impart my wisdom on this kid. He'll need it. He has questions, and those questions deserve answers. 

I also taught him that the word butt is pretty good, but there are ways to augment a butt that can help one become a more descriptive speaker. 

So, now he has the suffixed form of Butthole in his arsenal, also. 

And Balls. He got quite a kick out of familiarizing that part of his anatomy. Balls.

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Pretending is Fun

(Beware of the Dark Side, Son)

I don't have post-apocalyptic visions running through my head. It's only a quip, an equivocation, all of the day and all of the night, mostly in the mornings. I'm channeling what I see online, on social media - the runaway fears, the irrational reactions, our doomsday president, the Republican Brotherhood trying to implement Old Testament Law in America... It's a fun time to distort the zeitgeist by amplifying it, as if it is my own. As if.

I do enjoy working my way through scenarios in which I accrue a team of nuclear sex canaries. I'm not entirely sure what a sex canary is, or how they could be best utilized in a post last-days world, but that doesn't stop me. I can picture several of them perfectly. I would be their post-pimp. 

Is it sexist to be a pimp? Are there pimps in the afterlife? Are we allowed to ask those questions? Better check with the sexes. 

Writing this way helps nothing. Though it can be fun, pretending. I don't think that I am ever going to see a woman naked again without the event being preceded by the exchange of capital, probably followed by it as well. I imagine that sex acts that are entered into with an eye on getting a bargain become renegotiated mid-coitus. That's how I would do it anyway, knowing what I know. A sort of bait-and-bait tactic. 

That women accept money for sex is not my fault. I need everyone to understand that fact before we move on here. I'm the victim in a series of victimless crimes. 

There was a time when I believed that things matter. I am distancing myself from that position after a more thorough review of the evidence. I'm not flip-flopping. I have the needs of my constituents to consider. Pretending is great, though it offers no return.

Having a kid is difficult. There are a new set of expectations that require you to pretend more, though differently. Then, there is group of experiences that you might deny. There are independent events that emerge as being the only reality there is, and one enforced. Lastly, there is a subset of emotions that it becomes best to just forget, or at the very least to put away. Not forgotten perhaps, but boxed off with the other remnants of the past. 

It is dangerous to keep your past out. Some would end that sentence one word sooner. Memory seems to exceed its evolutionary usefulness for reasons that continue to entertain me. I am exercising the imaginative component as a method embraced, to keep from arriving each morning crazed and desperate, half awake, swinging wildly at the stars. Life is fragile, if you carry it delicately then you're more likely to drop it. Try to be natural, run for the shadow. Etc., etc.

The problem with people is that they need temples. Then there is the other problem, once they build them.

I worried that one day my cynicism would become a burden. Those days are dead. Now, I pretend to worry that cynicism has been replaced by despondency and horror.

See? Pretending is Fun. 

Cynicism will have me back. It's a bad relationship that has a few grim laughs still left kicking around inside of it. Old, half-forgotten jests that have a little life in them, when retold unexpectedly and at all the wrong times.

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The Bravest Of All Possible Worlds (The Nuclear Family)

(A Manumission Minuteman)

It's the rain. It's been raining for weeks and the forecast shows it as being non-stop at least until the weekend, where I might find my Eureka, Jesus! moment once more. I went for a ride yesterday, my first since my self-inflicted accident the Sunday before last. There was a break in the rain, though not in the clouds. It was enough to let me get out and ride for an hour. It's nice to feel that my mountain bike still has some use. I took it up Thornsberry Road, which runs behind my favorite vineyard, Gundlach Bundschu. I rode happily without a helmet along the edge of many houses and farms, and rolling-hilled wineries. There is a freedom from self to be had in exertion. 

I read online that people who post the details of their workouts have something wrong with them. The article didn't say what was wrong, exactly, though it danced around the subject of narcissism. I thought, Well, that sounds like me... I should start posting more of my exercise routines. I want that to be something wrong with me, too.

It's nearly all that I do online now - ape the outrage, humorlessness, and lack of ironic detachment of others, though sometimes I do get too close to the fires of single-thought outrage and get sucked in. After 9/11, conservatives loved claiming that "Irony is finally over..." Nope. When the history of irony is written in its ever opposing codes the ascendence of Trump will mark the much better breaking point for its recurring permanent failure and temporary death. 

One way to combat irony is to deny it power by refuting the meaning and purpose of your own actions. It's the mechanism of irony without the humor. 

This is one of the reasons that nobody can touch Trump. He is paradoxical for the purpose of duplicity, rendering him less affected by sarcasm, which orbits the heart of irony. With a sweep of his Tweet he rubs away his detractors, simply because he and his cabinet have started repeating na-na-na-na-na-na-na to everything that is being said, to every question that is being asked. Irony can hardly sustain itself in open dialogue that can not agree upon its own intended meanings. Denial of fact provides less bearing from which to be ironical, or to fix the target upon which it can then function.

Even the criticisms of SNL, couched only in slight exaggeration, seemed for a time to be effective, to somehow get through, though less and less so as the weeks pass. Once Trump starts to ignore the imitations of him as a failed leader then those remaining on the left will find themselves looking at one another and wondering what happened, entertaining themselves again. 

The next thing to come will be retaliation against criticism. A national emergency will be invoked to justify the opening up of the libel laws. When bluff is used as a rhetorical technique it leaves less of a center of meaning from which to negate, deny, or attack. This allows motive to be obscured, often just enough. The emerging assertion that his inner cabinet does not understand what he is doing is manufactured. It is the same tactic that was used to great success in the campaign. Everybody just acts as if they're doing everything that they can to get a grip on what crazy old president Trump is up to now. All the while it's pretty easy to see what he's doing. He is dismantling the liberal advances of the last eight years and testing the limits of his power so that he'll know best where he needs to expand them next. His failure at grabbing power will seem to be only a liberal restriction, one in desperate need of immediate correction. 

There is no innocent buffoonery happening here. His cabinet will use their own previous accusations of Obama's executive overreach to normalize their own continued overreaches. The question of his legitimacy as a president will soon enough fade into the background. He will need to become something more than a president, a sort of ultra-president. The current title will prove to be insufficient to his purpose and he will move away from its use. A self-defintion of his purpose will emerge, becoming a necessary part of this transition. Or, the title will be kept only as something to consider with open disdain. He is already flaunting its position within the structure that sustains it. 

That's what I do to get to sleep. I sit and dream up the avenues by which the next and possibly last major power grab will go down. America used to depend on emergencies to keep itself at crisis. Trump has advanced a position on immigration that is in advance of any and all emergency, which is an important shift from the past. It's as if that Obama was just sitting back and waiting for things to go wrong. Trump advances the Why wait? pogrom.  

Liberals have tried to argue for the humanity of allowing continued immigration as it has been. Bad move. They should have agreed all along that we need to protect America first with strict immigration procedures. That we already have these in place seems to be the big mystery here that too few seem willing to state out loud. The right has been very strategic in their use of ignorance. They just keep asking, Well, what are those procedures? Are they good enough for me? As if nobody knows. You can't counter xenophobia with an appeal to decency. You have to first acknowledge the fear, then try to agree on its source. 

If you can't demonstrate a fear to be irrational then you can hardly convince anyone to not experience it. Any parent can tell you this. We tried to talk to conservatives as if they were adults with legitimate adult fears. Bad move. We should have just asked them all along: Which Muslims? Where? The naughty ones that sit in the back of the class?

Oh, I see. All of them? Everywhere? 

That should be a reasonable starting and ending point to that dialogue. 

I started playing out post-apocalyspe scenarios to get to sleep last night. Then again when I woke up this morning. It's what I do now. Can you see how this, combined with the Bladerunner rains, has kept me worked up a bit?

In the early days of the end of times I thought that families would bind together into sensible "survival units," where being single again appeared to be a disadvantage. The families would seek to keep out lone individuals as being far too risky to the collective needs of their family survival structures. Then, I thought that with limited cell networks still available then survival apps would start to emerge, where singles would be more able to mobilize quickly and effectively, organizing themselves into loose adaptable patterns, eventually enslaving the families who would naturally fight to stay together, falsely believing this to be to their own collective advantage. This important twist on slavery - keeping the family units enslaved together - will prove to be very important as to how the more mobile actors in the post-apocalyptic world will be able to use the strength of the nuclear family against itself.

Well, I entertained that along with some other milder post-apocalypse diegeses. 

In some Revelations-fueled synopses the more right-wing gun enthusiasts would be used to form protective shields among larger social groups, organized strictly along the lines of protectors and protected. Watchmen Of The Apocalypse, or some other title of imaginary honor would be given to them. They would all be part of a seven-headed dragon, or something. Still believing some vague patriotic nonsense, they would be willing to die to protect groups that they were told would one day naturally reform to Complete America Again. There would be two types of soldier: the stars, and then of course the stripes. 

It would take an entire generation of them dying off before this call to the glory of the past would also fade along with that generation. The tribalism of their fathers eventually being replaced by a less nationalistic version of same. Local tribes would kill one another off until it made more sense to enter into treaties amongst themselves. This is where I would rise to power, as a negotiator for the rebellion. 

I wonder if anybody is still reading any of this without memory of my mentioning irony. I'm not a gamer, so I am less practiced with these fantasies. Maybe that's what I'm missing in all of this. Had I developed an abiding love for single-shooter scenarios then perhaps I would have a better grasp on what possibilities exist in a newly collapsed world, where rightful power is restored to the individuals with the guns, the brightest muzzle flash, and the most quickly replenishing ammo. 

I dunno, with a little luck maybe one day soon we could all join the Militia McCarthy.

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Next, that

(boy q6)

Something is bound to snap - too much rain, too many gray days; a road injury, not enough exercise; the transition to a more sedentary style of beer intake; needing to wash laundry for the last ~30+ days. It's time for time off. I'm not focused, or rather, I'm finding it difficult not to ring all of the bells of our doomed apocalypse with every breath, which can be distracting as a disposition. Those sorts of feelings, like religious ones, nearly. Fucking locusts, and shit, man.

I never even got around to putting in my request for time off.

Next, that.

"All we really want is to get to the point where the past can explain nothing about us and we can get on with life." - Richard Ford

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You'll see, anything can happen

Directly out of a weekend with the boy into a week at work, one in which I am on-call for certain types of emergencies. I went home from a Super Bowl party early last night. The boy and I had been out and about since Saturday morning. I falsely believed there was no way that Atlanta was going to blow a lead like that. As long as you don't have an aversion to the type athlete that cheats here and there then that Tom Brady is really something. Now, if you believe cheating discredits a person, well then, just ignore the record books. Cheating makes people smart, and being smart is the only way that a person can become wealthy. 

He is still sleeping now, a solid hour after his normal wakeup time. I guess the weekend was tiring for him also. Having fun sure does take it out of you. It steals energy from the future, fun does. I know. I'm reasonably sure that I am just now working my way through a few weekends from the late 90s. 

Ugh, nope. I tried to write a blog post and gave up.

Let me see... I'll try to be like Aaliyah, just dust it off and try again. 

It's the littlest things that matter. I just wish there weren't so many of them to always attend to.

I just cleaned a sliding glass door, restoring it to its intended purpose: to let the available light pass through. Some time back, when he was much younger, I let the boy put stickers on the door. I surmised that it served a two-fold purpose - to give him something to do in that moment and that it might one day prevent either of us from walking or running into the door when it was closed. The stickers also prevented me from cleaning the door, which for a time I counted as an additional benefit and purpose. 

Time passed, smudges started to accumulate. As is true with so many things, it being dirty became familiar, to the point that I became blinded to just how dirty it had become. Let's say that the window needed to be cleaned two years ago or more, about the time I moved in here. 

Anybody familiar with kids, either through having their own or looking on with disgust at the predicament of all parents, will understand that things just build up and there's very little that can be done about it. Children revel in the chaos of filth. Order and cleanliness, to them, must be a concept as diabolical as the Grinch. Or worse, it must equal the evils of parenthood. 

Cleaning behind them is either a constant task or an impossible one, and you only get so much say as to which of those two choices it ever will be. For whatever reason, this morning became "my morning" to turn one tide back to the ocean from which its waves came.... I asked the boy to peel off the stickers there on the glass door, assuming that it might require some scraping or even some nail polish remover. I came back from the kitchen with the Windex and paper towels and all of the stickers had been removed. Just like that, it was easy. Now, what sunlight there is above fills my bedroom, as little miracles sent from our local star. I keep walking into my room to marvel at the simplicity of it. 

I offer this semi-anecdote only as expository for a later post. You'll see. 

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Term limits

(Uncle Abraham)

The so-called president is killing me. I can't escape it. No matter where I look and no matter where I go, the talk is all the same. America had grown tired of politicians and the mainstream media. They wanted a real Washington outsider to run the show, so they got their il-dream-duce. Nobody's tired any more. 

I don't know why everyone is so upset about it all. What are the chances Trump will live as long as Mugabe? Term limits should prevent him from anything over eight years, if they can hold. How much damage can any one man do in that time? It's those two evil sons of his that I worry about most. Men that ugly, when born rich, have uncertain longevities. There's just no current science to help us understand what to expect from those two. They get daily infusions of tortoise blood, so they could live well into the 2220 elections.

The online memes are pollution. All of the false equivalencies and bad logic don't seem to raise anybody's sense of ironic detachment. Steve Jobs' father being a "Syrian refugee" is meant to inform our current view on things, apparently by blurring the lines between what it means to emigrate and what it is to be a refugee. The now popular meme also leaves out that his adoptive parents were not college educated. I guess we are left to presume that skipping a college education must then also be likewise advantageous, and help in the process of creating billionaire children.

And just think, Apple was that close to having been a Syrian company:

(Also, a renowned son of a bitch)

The diminishing importance of college education is yet another popular though unrelated opinion advanced online by people too dense to understand what makes nations become something that might be considered great. I have a once college-educated friend who recently pointed out, in a meme of course, that about 80% of the jobs available do not require a college degree. I'll let you do the math and necessary consideration on what that is meant to mean.

Speaking of greatness. Everybody agrees, our institutions are outsized, we should all return to the glorious time of the writing of our constitution - horse and carriage, or just carriage if there are no horses left. I've been re-reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road for a few laughs and to help keep my sprits light. I read it to the boy at night, to help us fall asleep. It gives us a visual image of what adventures might still be awaiting us. I still believe McCarthy should have titled this allegorical work, The Old Man and the Parable. 

Well, in others news... my buddy and I took the boy to the California Academy of Sciences yesterday. He loves looking at all the snakes and butterflies and birds and bugs and fishes. We ate sushi and pizza at the cafe, then returned to my buddy's house to watch Minions and Hotel Transylvania. Too much enrichment can ruin a day. Later, we went to eat at "Cheap Chinese." That's the actual name of the place, it was not a slur, and it was both inexpensive and unsurprisingly did specialize in Chinese food. 

At dinner, I tried to explain to my friends of Jewish and Filipino descent why it is so vital that we keep American culture free from foreign influence. Plates of food arrived, so I missed a few key talking points and I then couldn't really rally the troops after that. I was going to try to get them to set a Kiehls store on fire with me, but they explained that Kiehls is an American company, much to my surprise and incendiary disappointment. Back to the drawing board of the purity in racial complexion, I guess.

What would American nationalism even look like? Does it mean that I won't be able to eat Thai curry? No more burritos, or guacamole? Oh goodness, I hope not. Can you rally a nation into eating only cheeseburgers and drenched fries? It seems that even the most staunch of the American Insisters might break from ranks every now and then for some Fettuccine Alfredo at The Macaroni Grille, when nobody's looking. 

I like pretending that sensitivity to other cultures is like going to a mall food court. You don't have to eat at Panda Express or Chipotle Grille, but neither do the presence of those places require that you firebomb the place and then burn Nordstrom to the ground. Even if you see a white kid serving food at Panda Express and you just can't stand it, just let it go.


Why do I get the feeling that Ikea will be safe in this New America? What would a rise in American nationalism look like? It could start with an insistence on drinking Sprite over Mountain Dew, because it's purer my führer. Arguments will arise, spectrophotometric considerations will be advanced, all concerning the turbidity of Pepsi as compared to Coca-Cola. It seems that American nationalism might require me to gain some weight, just to fit back in. American nationalism might be the first movement of its kind to slow itself to a halt with diabetes.

How will the resistance ever devise a test to see if they've been infiltrated? They'll order egg rolls and fried rice for dinner but then those fat fuckers will just eat it all, even though they're not supposed to. The paradox of American Nationalism. Whoever eats all the egg rolls will either need to be silenced in the basement or maybe they're just a famished freedom fighter.

Okay, what the fuck. I'm never going to recover from this Trump New World. I thought that it might be funny for a while, but no, the best among us have already lost their sense of humor. Instead of laughing at people like Milo Yiannopoulos we have online feminists debating the moral considerations and complexities of whether or not it's okay to punch Nazis. They repeatedly go out of their way to insist they are otherwise pacifists, but what do you guys think about punching Nazis? The paradox of American Online Heroism: I've never punched anybody, because violence never solves anything, but I would so love to Snapchat a Nazi punch.

Maybe that should be the name of the new online resistance: Otherwise Occupied.

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How I escaped offline politics

Well, good. I wrote another piece. I couldn't find an appropriate picture to use with it, so it will remain unpublished. It's just more of the same, you've heard most of it before - the ongoing bitter tears of your favorite post-liberal snowflake. I outlined what the divorce of a sitting president might look like. Maybe waking up even earlier and writing a political page or two every day is what I need to get it out of my system. That, or I'll need to give up coffee altogether.

Okay, the boy and I go into the city today, a few little adventures, probably the Cal Academy then an overnight visit with our buddies - dinner, a kid's movie, bedtime. The boy loves this stuff. I'll admit it, also, the more we practice the better we become at things. Something must be done to fight off the feelings of winter, the nearly perpetual physical discouragement of rain.

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Anus Young

I saw this image about a week ago. I haven't been able to think of anything else since. It's like peering into an Egyptian crypt and wondering what the fuck is up with all the cat hieroglyphs. Why hasn't he accumulated the necessary strength to stop wearing that fucking school boy's uniform? How has that strength not just appeared on its own, naturally?

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Between this and that, nothing at all

(We've got spirit, yes we do...)

I knew that just the right article would eventually find me lurking in one of my many news streams, and here it is. Voila'!... I have been thinking about dating all wrong. I need to apply the lessons I've learned from triathlon training to dating, like the result of letting my jacket get caught in the brakes of my bike - sudden stops, road rash, that sort of thing. I've been thinking about this all wrong. I'm going to become a cheerleader for rigorous athletic dating goals.

I am happier when reading dating advice from other serious triathletes like myself than when focused exclusively on politics. Cato still sends me tweets from various people in different states of hysteria about what is happening to our government. There is the question as to whether or not we will ever recover and how long will it take republicans to get rid of their new leader. He will continue to assuage the right's collective political wants as part of his appeasement strategy, for now. But, let's not get too far down that path before we nip it all in the bud. I'm not being apathetic here, I'm just being anti-hysteria. Or, trying to be, anyway. 

Anything less than hysteria does seem to be a less than adequate response. 

I'm with CS, I'm going to start spending money. Perhaps on travel, but who knows. I still look fondly at the advertisement for this lens every single day. The thing is hideously expensive, but I have grown tired of the two older comparable lenses that I currently own. Ever since seeing this ad I have noticed the lenses I own struggle to find focus more than they used to, they look too old to be of much use any more, they are far too familiar to be useful. It is all in the mind, of course, but that's where I sleep, so this stuff matters. A new lens will make me feel differently, cool. I'll only regret buying it if I don't use it, and that's just not like me. 

There is something about working out obsessively that bores me witless even as I enjoy the act when it is happening. There must be more to life than health and well-being, though that and parenting the boy seems all that I am able to focus on lately in my free time. My social life is comprised mostly of waving at other cyclists as we pass on opposite sides of the road, or sometimes honking at people in traffic. 

I saw that my brother posted about it being two years since our father's death. Time sure does fly, until it lands. 

I bet that he'd encourage me to exercise, my dad would, even if it was the last thing that I would ever do. Some days it is only that which constitutes the dangerous difference between being bored and alone, and just being alone.

(No. I went to the gym and now I feel very differently. My happiness is too bound up with daily exercise. I stew without it, become pissy, even when it is only functioning as a diversion from something else of which I am not sure. Perhaps then most of all. What is it about uncertainty that makes me feel this way, the dark fascination and occasional fear of caprice.)

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