The Color Pinkle

Do not read this post if you wish for your own happiness to be the result.

Yes, it's true, sickness is boring, though it was all I had to mention yesterday. There is little to tell, and what there is does not qualify as being worth telling. Only the worst people wish to listen with interest to the ailments of others, or advance their own onto others. I've known them. They are awful, boring people, incapable of passion or romantic love.

That made me laugh for reasons I should not admit to. Or rather, I should only remove the proper noun from its telling. 

Here you go:

I used to know a woman who would endlessly prattle on about her various headaches and body aches and other personal misfortunes. She would sometimes try to universalize these afflictions by waiting until someone around her made the mistake of mentioning one of theirs first before launching into her own history of mysterious pains, both acute and very dull. A Debbie Downer if ever there was. 

She was desperately seeking attention of a type that she could obtain neither naturally nor otherwise, so she would settle on whatever she could extract from others without verbal or physical consent. We were all forced to suffer her advances, both men and women. If she were a man, in this current climate, then I'm certain that she would be the object of collective scrutiny by now. Perhaps me being brave enough to come out here now and tell my story will help others to also be brave and tell theirs. She would trap us in places where it was difficult to escape then project a discussion of her maladies with the seeming intention of deriving pleasure from our discomfort. A real serial dinner deflatist. There were times where I felt as if I had been drugged and I would come to and she was just finishing up her awful litany of physical displeasure. 

You may think that I am kidding, and in one way I am, but trying to seek affection in unpleasant and even non-consensual ways is not a behavior that is exclusive to men, nor are they the sole cause of bad sex, as some women seem to be suggesting from the recent embracing of the Grace testimonial, which should be treated as a diversion rather then the thing that also really needs to be talked about now. Yes, I understand that men can be awful, but the attributes of being disingenuous or dishonest are not qualities that men exactly control the market on. 

That's right, I'm telling you that women really do lie, and they can also be pushy and demanding. When you encourage all women to believe they are victims then it should surprise no one that they will start to see and frame themselves exclusively as such, which will in turn affect how they understand their own predicament as well as their responsibilities to others. Self-defined victims are far less burdened with their own moral accountability. It's a form of feminism without courage. Like when a woman will auto-cry to "win" a potentially difficult conversation that in no way requires the use of tears. It is a fallback mechanism of feigned weakness to take conversational power over another person. The scripted arrival of temporary emotion when the only other option is to admit wrongness is not honesty and is not victimhood, it's bullshit, and every straight man I know has suffered plenty of it. Fuck all of that, I say. It's emotional bullying.

Oh no - Oops. I should stop. I just realized today is the Women's March, a political rally that I very much do support. Women should organize and vote with their interests in mind and they should seek to elect representatives who will protect their interests and advance equality for all. I don't have to agree with all of their individual demands to believe that democracy should be the solution to their problems, and the effective satisfying of their social and political claims. I would hope that they would include demands that are for the collective good of all, as embodied in the ideals of equality and justice. But that is my wish for any movement, it does not also need to be theirs.

I feel the same about Christians. If they want laws to reflect their values then they should vote, and they should accept the results when and if they lose. We should all feel some version of that. If our needs are out-voted by the needs of others then so be it. No laws should be put in place that are unjust, but we should all learn to accept that not everyone shares our values, and if you're going to self-identify as part of a group smaller than "citizen" then accept that you have already agreed to your own self-limiting definition and any political restrictions that doing so might engender.

Are people too dumb to know what the word engender means? Probably. I could use another word, but that one makes me happy because it seems to suggest something other than its meaning. 

There is only one group that I truly hate and would vote to subjugate to cruel work camps: the willfully stupid - those predisposed to intellectual laziness or denial. 

Well, I should be more careful, I could end up in America's financial Siberia with such admissions.

Ok, done with that portion for now. My favorite writer on the subjects of feminism and the difficulties of sexual politics is Laurie Penny (<<< her latest post linked there). I don't agree with everything she writes, of course, but I feel as if she approaches things with a very passionate honesty. Much more so than so many of her contemporaries. She is almost as much fun to read as she is to disagree with, though in large part I do agree with her, even when she is at her most revolutionary. She comes very close at times to being "anti-man," but she seems to be aware of framing her arguments in an anti-male behavior kind of way, which speaks an important kind of truth to me, one that I can hear and embrace for anybody. If a man reads her writing and comes away feeling as if her brand of Resistance is about you, or an attack on you, then maybe you're a complete shit-head and you deserve to be set upon with ideals that counter your assumptions. It is very tone-smart writing, yet is also deeply irreverent to the status quo, so I love her. She is smart, impassioned, and not wrong, which hits on two of the three attributes I look for most in any writer. 

I can suffer a writer being wrong - especially when that fault seems to only be the occasional too-careful selection of supporting facts - as long as they're smart and also impassioned by what they believe then I can overlook a lot. Being right has never been a requirement for me, but if you're reading here then you already know that quite well. I could easily spend the next ten years going over these posts and disagreeing with them, but why, when I could also spend the next ten years being wrong about other new and exciting things.

Well, if I can recover my sickness enough then today is also the day of the Pine Derby Race. 

There is nothing very fascinating about diarrhea, but let's talk about it for a while and see how we all feel. 

By the way, a quick little aside: nauseous means to cause the feeling of nausea. So, if you tell people you are nauseous then accept it when they may just nod and agree with you, like my dour acquaintance described above. Contemporary definitions have adjusted because people have misused the word so often and to such degree, but nauseated is the word you're likely looking for when you are experiencing rather than causing the sensation. 

Be careful when describing your maladies to me. My favorite type of sarcasm is usually only for one listener in a given group, which is why people sometimes struggle talking to me: they think I'm not making any sense, which is is of course also sometimes quite true.

After those pedantic semantics I will spare you my thoughts on liquid excrement. I'm certain there are some who will be disappointed, but what can one do, really? There is only so much time in each morning and I can not possibly satisfy the digestive curiosities of all. I must focus on my general readership. 

Now, what is the Pink-Bismol and how does it relate to today's March?

Well, I'll tell you: there is no relationship beyond the use of the color pink. 

- One is meant to suggest the pussy-power of femininity and that those thusly adorned with knitted battle gear would not have their pussies grabbed by celebrities - the wearing of which virtually guarantees this. It is a vague type of protective witchcraft. Its power emanating from its sympathetic magical connection to the thing it is meant to represent. This is of course a definition which derives from cultural anthropology, and not a slur. They wear the magic pussies on their head in an enveloping, declarative, and protective manner - it is a sign of unification for all those who have pussies, while sending a potentially conflicting message to those who only identify as women and wish to one day wear one on their heads, or possess one elsewhere. Its imitative apparel power proceeds from the sexual organ to which it corresponds. 

I derive what might be considered a perverse pleasure by wandering around these rallies complimenting women on their chapeaus. This works pretty well until I ask if I can touch, wear, or sniff them. Its power is not intended to be misused or shared in this way, even if I do get the occasional laugh, smile, or smirk. Those are the very rare exceptions. So few seem to have a sense of humor about wearing symbolic genitals on their heads, where the symbolism would become quite metaphorical if they would just lower theirs onto mine. Perhaps I'll stop by the March today ambivalently wearing a silk purse, in solipsistic solidarity. 

- The Pepto product uses pink only for brand recognition. 

I may walk around at the Pine Derby Race today guzzling from a nice fresh bottle of Pink-Pepto, to show my allegiance with the cause of reclaiming the word pussy, snatching it away from the lips of famous men everywhere. I suppose I could call it "Pussy-Juice," but contextually I understand how some might find that usage problematic. Perhaps the meaning and intent of the color pink can not be appropriated by a man merely hoping to treat his own diarrhea. 

You gentle readers, must always decide for yourselves. You would not want me suggesting how to think or feel. 

You can glimpse how I might get it all irretrievably wrong, every single time.

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The afflicted area

I started to feel bad yesterday afternoon, at work, in SF. I took two more aspirin and hoped for the best. By the time I was at home it was a full blown something - chills, restlessness, sweats, nausea, and worse. I took some Alka Seltzer Cold and went to bed, but it didn't seem to have any effect. It didn't put me to sleep as I thought it might, like wonderful NyQuil nighttime. I just watched shows off of a tablet and then my phone when the first battery went dead. I fell asleep much later than I normally would have, which made no sense. I awoke two hours later, then again another two hours after that. Four hours a night has become the new normal for me. I still felt terrible but the effervescent tablets seemed to have done something. 

I read recently that we're supposed to get eight hours of sleep a night, and many people do, which seems impossible. How can it be that I regularly sleep only half of the norm? 

Why me?... as the most basic of the old existential questions goes. I did lie around long enough that I drifted off for part of another hour. So, there was something in the Seltzer stuff that must have helped. My sinuses were clear and dry when I woke up, though they were not a problem beforehand, I just noticed that they seemed drier than usual.

How fascinating this information must be to my doctor. For the layman reading here, it was three paragraphs snatched from your life without a single redeeming sentence to satisfy your interests. I should delete it all and start over. But where? The sickness comprises the details of my life. 

Well, there is more. I'm writing about this recent unexpected sickness, perhaps, to avoid writing about the other. The boy went to the doctor yesterday and we were given confirmation that he has a truly disgusting condition, one that we must deal with immediately as well as undergo treatment ourselves. It is common and nothing to worry about, but unsettling and repulsive. 

The entire drive home from the city yesterday Rachel and I (yes, were were cutely carpooling) were revolted by the news. We must take immediate action and sustain a change in hygienic regimen for six weeks. It is all very simple and can be dealt with, nothing to worry about, a common children's affliction, though one that I do not ever remember having as a child. 

Who knows, perhaps my mother kept such information hidden from me. Mothers do tend to shield children from certain things. I'll say this much: we suspect it has been giving the boy bad dreams, the night terrors, as that is one of its symptoms.

We are already back on the path to healthy living. 

Team Cusick! Etc.

Nature boy:

Nature:

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Just be old?

(concave reflection)

Reading too much online reporting leaves me with few conclusions to draw. It seems that people do not like each other very much. If you question any of their feelings, actions, or motivations then you might very likely become the target of their misguided embitterment. Not even by them, but by somebody who has read what they have written and wishes to advance or enforce it. Everybody wants to be heard, but it seems that too many only wish to scream. 

I just don't believe the internet quite benefits people in the way they believe it does. I've returned to reading books more and I'm almost shocked at the disparities between the two experiences. I know that sounds obvious to many, but I've been focusing on how different writers will attempt to employ rhetoric to persuade, or its near complete absence while still making a very persuasive point.  

Then I look at my posts here, how some will resemble essay writing and others will more closely resemble what passes for online journalism, while only being an opinion piece. I try to write in a variety of styles, but I'm least happy when what appears here falls into that last category, but that's where so much of the fuel for writing seems to come from, at least here. I've written several unpublished pages recently that were just that: opinion pieces. There were some good passages, but mostly their presence made me feel a little queasy if I just sat on them for a while, similar to how reading too much of the online stuff makes me feel.

Ah well, I was happier when my interactions with certain types of people were more limited - when they only happened by chance encounter, occurred face to face, and were limited in scope by those circumstances. Now, it seems that everyone is having the conversations that only the more extreme participants were engaged in during the 80s and 90s. The conversation seems to find its richest resources when it taps into the need and ability to vastly overstate its purpose. I mean, I get it, things have changed, but it seems that many are convinced that they have only changed for the better. The term "tone-deaf" seems to have come to exclusively mean "old."  Because youthful zealots are the only ones privy to nuance. 

Places like Facebook seem to self-explanatorily prove such a notion, but then people will tell me that I am to blame for looking in the wrong place. But it seems to be a very large microcosm of what is happening everywhere. The comments section of almost any major publication, for example.

To discuss a moderate position with an extremist makes you their enemy. I'm not even usually a fan of moderate positions. I always try to imagine a position more extreme than the person I'm talking to, but being only an extension of their own position, to see how much weight the extremity can possibly bear before we're forced to admit to at least some absurdity. I'm often curious in that way. 

This is why I have no problem telling people that I'm transgender, even though it is only true inasmuch as it is true for anybody blessed with the imaginative capacity. Do not misunderstand me, I'm not suggesting that being transgender is only of the imagination, but that is the only way it is possible for me to feel or understand, purely through my willful imagining. Anybody can do it, you just close your eyes and wonder what something might be like, which will result in any number of feelings that you're not used to, some of which may make you uncomfortable, others otherwise. Those are specific to the person, and almost always in flux.

Being transgender has been very easy for me and has resulted in no negative social encounters, yet. Stating that might anger some people, which makes me wish to state it all the more often. I've always believed that there must be something important embedded in that ire, but now I'm not so sure. It just seems bland to me, flat vexation for all. 

People do not wish to share the claims which seem to provide them with the identities they are making the claims for, which strikes me as odd. I can choose to be ambivalent about anything, at will, but ambivalence is not what people wish to hear concerning your understanding of them.  People have suggested that my exercise in transgender feelings is even dangerous. Yet how is anybody expected to have empathy for another's circumstances without conducting some sort of similar exercise within themselves? I wonder. Are they fooling themselves, or do they genuinely believe that only a certain category of person gets to experience and express thoughts and feelings about a given matter. I can never tell and there is so much disagreement and anger concerning anyone's authenticity and motives.

People seem to wish to express rage towards straight white males most of all, and perhaps that explains it: nobody wants to give them an escape hatch. They have them cornered, and now they wish to unleash the full brunt of their fury. That was the subject of a lengthy piece I wrote yesterday morning but then didn't publish. Instead, I went with an incoherent piece of garbage later in the day that I have since removed.

For me to have developed understanding and empathy towards the gay experience I listened to a number of gay friends recount what their lives were like, what wishes they had for their relationships with their family, what corollary or unrelated wishes they had for their romantic relationships, how they wished to live their lives, and what regrets they had, if any. The last category was often the most veiled and protected, understandably. In time, I became more and more comfortable with hearing about the private circumstances of their lives and I found that this exercise greatly increased my capacity to love and feel for them, which also allowed me to develop a shared sense of humor with them, something that seems to be lacking in this brave new world's understanding of one another. It is no longer allowed to find anything funny if you are not suffering as greatly as another within a given context. People seem to have lost the ability to detect when they are being laughed with or laughed at. I blame the internet for this. It is a horrible place to make new friends, and none of my old friends use it in the way that I seem to, or try to.

This understanding has resulted in more than one friend believing, and even trying to convince me, of my own homosexuality, just by being sensitive to their life, and pains, and joys. It reveals to me how incapable people are of understanding one another. We only seem to attribute to others values that we ourselves are capable of possessing. 

In a similar way, I have female friends, and many of my male friends will try to get me to admit that my only real intention in being their friend is to have sex with them. The only conclusion that I have been able to draw from this is that they are incapable of being friends with women without the desire to have sex being the primary motivation for forming the friendship. Now, I do only befriend attractive women, but that's because they seem more charming and clever to me. Again, this is a sensual observation and not necessarily a sexual one. 

You must remember that I did not grow up in what could be considered a southern liberal stronghold. I grew up in Florida in the 70s and 80s, where this type of understanding must be learned and developed, and where other attitudes, like casual racism, had to be daily resisted. Complex understanding of others did not appear fully formed in the hearts and minds of adolescents in that locale and time period, etc. It is practiced until it becomes natural. My experiences in nightclubbing helped greatly. There was a period in which, as a group, we all seemed to come to a fresh collective understanding and acceptance of one another, fueled in part by the use of what used to be called a designer drug - Ecstasy. The most appropriately named drug ever made, most of all when created and ingested correctly. There are many variants of it now, not all leaning with equal effect towards benevolence. 

At almost 50 years of age, it seems that the development of understanding for others must only come in the form of reverence to their circumstance and of them as individual people, no matter how much pushiness and bullshit arrives with it. I feel similarly about so much feminism, or rather collections of feminists. They are, or too often can be, bullies. We are reminded to stand up to bullies, for the sake of the weak, but they pretend to also be the sole persons in possession of any supply of weakness, even as they are attacking with startling vitriol and malice. It is the advantageous claim of victimhood when used as a social cudgel. 

It makes no sense to me, that they can not see they have become the very thing they claim to hate. They resemble men in their casual assumptions and in their demonstrations of the use of the power of condemnation. Nobody wishes to be called a bigot or a chauvinist or a sexist, but it has become almost comically scripted when interacting with any number of online factions. The first thing they notice about you - maleness, whiteness, or those two qualities combined - generates an automatic dismissal of you as a person and anything you might have to say.

I know, I know... these are white, first world problems. I just fail to see how they don't see what they are doing. There must be a complete vacuum of imagination or the ability to self-register the marked similarities in tone, content, and delivery of the thing they have defined as that which they most wish to topple. 

It was Kafka that I recently quoted here: Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy. 

The same is true with too many liberals who wish to discuss and advance transgender rights. Only they or the people they believe themselves to be defending are ever qualified to speak, and then it must only be from the agreed upon cue cards. Easy fix: be a member of the aggrieved group and think and speak as an individual. Few things will reward you with hatred as quickly and definitively, even when you find examples of an accepted transgender saying the exact same thing. 

I have, quite literally, copied and pasted sentences from transgender testimony into online conversations and been met only with severe hostility, and was then provided with any number of reasons as to why I do not get to speak that way. It makes no sense, and yet I see it everywhere. It is almost all that I see. 

So, what does a thinking person do? Give up? Walk away from the conversation and accept the fate of my own tone-deafness?

Just be old? 

A hermit or a troll?

Would it matter for there to be one less person to hate?

(mostly plane)

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Why Everyone Should Own and Use a Gun

One of the things that I used to love about the internet, perhaps ten years ago or more now, was its irreverence. People seem so very unhappy about it all now. Empowerment seems to be making people angry. Perhaps something other than empowerment is resulting. Who knows. I enjoyed the thing much more when it was mostly a global repository for bad manners, even worse grammar and spelling, and the many joys of endless insouciance. People seem to have embraced the notion that what happens there somehow deeply matters. I mean, it does for them in their living room, but not in the way they seem to believe. I've never seen so much bad opinion flourish. The internet is where nonsense goes to find its center and then excel. Accusations, rather than ideas, have taken flight. Luckily there are plenty of volunteer cops out there now, to talk the stunt thinkers down from the ledge and corral them back into the safety of the fold. 

I'm on the side of the nonsensical from here on out. I don't want to win arguments, I don't even want to have them, I only want to disrupt them. I want to make sure that people feel stupid for discussing politics, some flimsy redefining of justice, or to set social mores. Absurdity must be cherished if it is to be preserved. Nobody should be immune from confusion. The angry most of all. They need it as respite from enmity.

People are becoming afraid to undermine narratives. They seem to be buying into the false notion that only the most recent narrative is the one to be revered, or perhaps the next. Endless progress without evaluation. 

I don't mean trolling. 

Inappropriate incongruities need not be provocative or inciting, only derailing. Okay, it is trolling a bit, I guess, but without the intention of encouraging quarrels. Just some healthy sowing of confusion, planting the seeds of risibility. 

I only ever wanted to be a smart-assed skateboarder that flaunts parental instruction for the pleasure of their friends, but still has good table manners when none of them are watching. 

Everybody has their dream, I guess. 

Mine is to buy a skateboard. 

My son seems to have it all figured out. He has a semi-directional fart gun. Whenever I start to lose myself a bit in parenting he'll sneak up on me and blast me with a little pre-recorded bit of unexpected brilliance. We were driving around Sonoma yesterday with Mom, his walkie-talkie set on scan, finding other kids that were out there communicating in the best way kids around his age can (secretly, they presume), luring them into brief conversation, then blasting them with some audible genius. 

It was the most fun I've had in weeks. We giggled ourselves to sleep last night with it. 

He exercises both his first and second amendment rights at once, without even knowing what they are. 

Texted audio clips from this device are, by far, the best thing in my life for the last 24 hours.

I want my life to be more like his. 

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Pine Derby Downhill Racer

Nothing to report. I have written a handful of posts in the last few days and again have decided not to post them. 

Yesterday, Rhys and I went over to his buddy's house and made our pine derby racers. There is a race next weekend and we were preparing for it. I had not thought that the Scouts would be as much fun as it is, but it is, truly.

People with hobbies seem happier. I know this through photography. It is fun, of course, but there is more than that. It helps me frame my life a bit, to see it as a spectator as well as a participant. To experiment with the telling of my life.

Writing does this also, of course, though that leans more towards observation, even as I am relaying actual events that involve me. At those moments most of all. It is therapeutic, in a sense. Anyone is free to observe or psychoanalyze at will and draw their own conclusions, and yet I rarely agree with them.

So be it.

I'll try to keep our sessions short, interesting, and at in-network fees.

Forgive me those moments when I dawdle.

"In the end, writing is like a prison, an island from which you will never be released but which is a kind of paradise: the solitude, the thoughts, the incredible joy of putting into words the essence of what you for the moment understand and with your whole heart want to believe." - James Salter

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Mad Men

(... even madder women)

There was a 65th birthday party last night in the city for a man that Rachel works with. It was Mad Men themed. The birthday boy (65 yrs old) did resemble Roger Sterling quite a bit. So we dressed up a little bit along those lines and went out, to help make America great once again, like post-war great. The entire time we were there I kept praising California's governor, the inimitable Ronald Reagan. Rachel wore a stylized dress, with pearls and gloves, that make her appear to have stepped right out from a page of the 60s. I wore a standard blue suit (my black Hugo Boss was cut for a lighter man than me). I brought a manual Nikon film camera, assuming most people would not know the difference between the 80s and 60s, at least with that technology. I was right. Our outfits worked, I think. 

It will take me a little while to get the film processed and scanned, then perhaps you will see some results from the night here. 

Well, since it was our prom night, I'll give you just this one. Rachel encouraged me to delete it, so I'll post it here before she can erase it from my phone...

(cropped iPhone pic)

In keeping with the times, I fluctuated between telling everyone that she's my office affair; then later, after a glass of wine or two, she became my secretary; by the end of the night she was my wife, a very happy housewife, my second. This was to help give the evening some much needed chronological perspective into the arc of 60s love. 

Not everybody was off getting shot at Kent State, you know. 

That was a woman's natural trajectory then: from a secret to secretive. Don't be mad at me, men. I am angry at the errors of history also, probably angrier than you, I had to live through some of it. If you'd like to compare our comparative levels of outrage, just let me know. 

Privately, in one of our early Bad Men episodes, I pressure her into getting an abortion while we smoke cigarettes and drink martinis she's made us at her studio apartment, well after the decent hours. The happiest music of the time playing lightly on the background radio:

This would be very bad for both of us. The timing's just not right. What would your parents say? Your father? If we're going to do this, then we should do this right. Now's not the time. You know this.

That's all that I could remember about Mad Men and as much effort as I put into my characterization. I offered to pay for everything, of course, because I am nothing if not a gentleman of the times. 

The important thing is that no one finds out. We should protect your reputation. 

That's the new brand of equality: women should pay for their own abortions.

No, that's hideous. The costs should be split evenly.

One day not very far off abortion might become illegal again, because that's what people seem to want. Many argue that it was never really an issue of privacy. Sonograms have changed how people feel about Roe v. Wade. That ruling has rested on a tenuous legal pedestal, one easily toppled by a court that already leans. Christians will capitalize on the application of science, and will once again move towards re-instituting God's law in America. The Supreme Court is better prepared to reconsider the issue now, you see. When people demand the sanctity of their things they allow themselves to overlook what is sacred to others. Life may one day soon be precious again.  

Then... it might all start with the case of a woman getting caught having a famous man's child illegally aborted without his knowledge. She will be outed for it, prosecuted and persecuted, then the backlash pendulum will swing. We'll be encouraged to clear the air concerning the evils of sex. 

Do not be so naive to believe that necessary moments like the current one can only be the harbingers of future good things. Everyone should be in suspicion, if not fear, of sudden consensus in matters as complex as sex and mating. I'm not talking about sexual assault here, at all. I mean the vague or specific assertions being made that one half of the mating process is deeply iniquitous, by their nature. 

Imagine the things that can be easily said, with only a slight change in social temperament:

Men were robbed of their agency in the matter. There was never any consent to abort. 

It doesn't matter that it was legal, it was wrong. 

Etc. Etc. Etc.

People rarely seem to see where demands of blanket justice lead. It doesn't require much imagination, only some historical perspective, to see how easily these things can go terribly wrong, and too often have.

If you believe that the forces that put Trump in office will just accept that as their high water mark victory, and will now back off, self-satisfied with their singular accomplishment, then you have learned nothing at all about the dangers of self-claimed righteousness when matched with the fear of otherness.  

I'm wary of those who insist on bringing the light and clarity of condemnation to the private complexities and ambiguities of human experience. Those whose task it is to finally "expose" the hidden moral horrors of humanity; of whom one group has only suffered, the other only perpetrated; those who have no hesitation snickering condescendingly at the obviously glaring faults of yesterday. Those types of virtuous divisions are always self-serving and make it too easy to conceal much duplicity in purpose. Things are rarely less true than when universally accepted. 

What was it that old Clash band told us about such things:

But I believe in this, and it's been tested by research

He who fucks nuns will later join the church.

Well, I had not expected to trod down that well worn path again. 

I'm writing from habit, as is my occasional ritual. 

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Streets Photography

I've decided to shift the focus of my photographic interest towards shooting intersecting streets, preferably in the desolate dark so that people will know how serious I am as a person, an artist, a driver of cars, and one who dwells in living spaces. I'll call it, of course: Streets Photography, because we live in a plural society and that should always be reflected in the contrasts of our shared roads. One goes one way, the other goes another, but they each meet in the middle and seem to get along. That should be a good, hard, level lesson for everybody to construct a set of morals around. 

Without smirking, I will refer to my art as "both highly and lowly intersectional." When taken as seriously as it deserves to be then it will obliterate all social inequalities. There will, of course, always be those who attack my premises, through ignorance, hatred, and occasional road rage. 

In a few years I'll expand my interests to Driveways - where they meet the road, and how. One must strive to traverse the gutters, etc. It will cement some needed national discourse on the nature of public and private property. My work will be hung in galleries and people will fly from all over the world to marvel at my subtext. Concretion will shut the asphalts up. I will pave the way. 

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Birthday Pics - Someone Else's Child

The insomnia has not relented. Last night I collapsed on the stairs at Mom's house. Not physically, but emotionally injured by the strain of sleeplessness. I was trying to explain to her that I had done my best to endure the day. Not wanting to slip out on the boy's birthday, obviously, left me awake and partially dealing with kids all day. Then there was a dinner. When that was done I had become internally frantic. I sat down on the stairs and tried to talk but could hardly do so. I started crying because of something that I had said, something about having done everything that I could do just to be there, that I didn't have anything left. 

I went upstairs and fell over in Mom's bed fully clothed and didn't wake up for another four hours, just at midnight. She was already sleeping next to me. I left quietly and came home, where I was able to drug myself, to glean another three hours from the hand of darkness. I awoke feeling uncertain, sedated. But not in the fun, Ramones high-school kind of way. I was just very lethargic, still enduring the half-life of the drugs I had ingested to accomplish partial victory over the malady.

Don't worry, nobody else knew of my wrecked emotional state at dinner, I do not believe. Grandma might have thought that I was acting strange, but she doesn't like me so much anyway. She would have probably just tallied it up to my general poor manners. That is the term she uses to try to influence behavior: manners. She has the good kind, or so the repeated claim goes, and others mostly have the other kind. She'll let you know when is when, which is which. 

I was going to make a phonetic Hansel and Gretel joke there, but that's just my mind speaking. 

The birthday went well. The boy was very happy with jumping on trampolines, the opening of presents, the eating of cake. All the birthday stuff one should expect. Play, and lots of it. 

We had agreed with the boy beforehand that we would have a small birthday party for him this year, just a fun day with his elite friend squad - The Navy Squeals - then we would have a more complete birthday party for him at the midway point between his birthdays. So that he could have a summer pool party with all of his friends invited. January 7th is a tough time for a birthday in Sonoma. We are in the grainy season - gray and rainy. 

If you've ever tried to take a picture in near complete darkness of a child blowing out the candles on a birthday cake then you'll know what unwanted grain is: the digital kind.  Taking pictures is not always as easy as the pros make it look. I probably should have used my iPhone, I'm sure there's some setting on there that would have been at least as good as my current camera and lens. All cameras do better under good light (compare above and below).

I shouldn't whine about advances in technology. The Apple Corporation is the reason that we have a son. Once I had a job mom really wanted to start sharing the world with another. Just one more... So, that's what we did. 

All the pieces fell into place: love and employment. 

(Natty)

The same as yesterday, I will be a dutiful reporter of the boy's celebration. Here are some more pictures to satisfy your possible curiosity about someone else's child, and to fulfill my paternal photographic responsibilities.

(The Gaming Commission)

A friend wrote me a very nice and flattering note yesterday, letting me know how much she enjoys my writing about my son. Flattery goes so very far with me. I never tire of it. 

(Vienna Corn Doggin')

Who doesn't like to be told that their efforts are enjoyed?

(Obstacles, of course)

We're each still somewhat like children, in that regard, I think. The best of us are.

(Tesla - Radio Flyer)

We can survive without praise and thanks, but the quality of living is sometimes greatly increased by a few kind words. 

(Uber Youth)

Like Mom's words, last night on the stairs. The final thing I remember hearing: 

Why don't you go lie down and get some rest? You did great today. Rhys is a very happy boy.

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The Big Year: 6

Like a dumb-ass, yesterday, I tried to explain to Rhys the meaning of today being his sixth birthday:

So, you'll be entering your seventh year. 

You have "completed" six years, as much as you are now six years old. 

You now begin your seventh year on the earth, because you started at zero. 

Do you understand?

What the fuck is wrong with a nearly fifty year old man, or rather, a man that is forty-nine, but in his fiftieth year, to do such a stupid thing to a child for the purpose of advancing a slightly more correct understanding of mathematics? He's just now coming to terms with addition and subtraction. The concept of zero has not quite taken hold yet. For his birthday dinner I might gift him with a brief lecture on Poincare's conjecture.

In any event... today is the boy's birthday. He's six now. Don't let me try to confuse you about it. He recovered pretty quickly from all this, after I stopped talking. Mom giggled about it for a bit. 

I haven't been sleeping well at all, it's been causing me incredible stress. I blame that. I've been hyper-sensitive to noise, particularly chaotic nosies. I was barely able to function at a sushi dinner the other night because the venue was filled with the sound of chatter. I nearly had a nervous breakdown. So, I attribute that for the boy's testing of my upper limits of mathematical knowledge.

We took him to a Cub Scouts event yesterday where he was able to play along with one of his buddies. I wasn't able to get the best pictures. Having a child-subject facing a wall does not the best photographic results create. Add to that I was trying to get two-shots of him and his buddy, and, well... here, since it's his birthday I'll post the most recent pics I've taken of him. Below, from yesterday at a rock climbing warehouse, one that smelled like my middle school locker room.

Afterwards, we took him to a local skate shop where he picked out the skateboard he wanted. He chose the Bob Marley "Natty Dread" even though mom and I tried to direct him towards one that had what we thought was some cool robot artwork on the bottom. He refused. After looking around a bit he knew he wanted reggae under his feet.

In an almost unbelievable coincidence - and I swear to the veracity of this - he went to the gym with me yesterday morning and I played that album on the gym's sound system. Natty Dread. I hadn't realized until the skateboard and all his pads were being rung up and saw the name on the cash register when it dawned on me.

For those who might be unfamiliar with Marley's career beyond the hits you've heard, likely to the point of nausea, this original album version is well worth hearing:

Rhys prefers Burning Spear to Marley, even requests to hear them for dinner music sometimes, but that's likely only because I play them more often.

You know how kids can be.

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Hillbilly Redux

I am nearly finished with Hillbilly Elegy. I have some mixed feelings about where I can feel him drawing the conclusions of his narrative, mostly towards republicanism as virtue. It is a memoir of his life, so there is no need for it to conform to my left-leaning biases and sensibilities. As with most books that I carefully choose to read and finish at this age: I am glad that I did. 

It was sad and stirring in parts, tragic in the everyday sense of the word, that the circumstances he describes are everywhere around us and yet still conveniently enough ignored. It is in some ways a rebuke of the notion of white privilege. By that I do not mean that it does not exist, but it does not confer its advantages to every white person equally. There is little question remaining that the author created many of his own opportunities and they had nothing at all to do with his version of whiteness. He was helped and encouraged once he showed personal ambition, but that was not exclusive to his being white. 

You, dear others, are encouraged to draw your own conclusions on the matter. I'm certain that you will find fallacies littered along those meandering train tracks of thought. There are some that will claim in the 21st century that no amount of white poverty can approximate blackness, and yet will still jab at rednecks the same way that I do. Why see dissimulation when you prefer to see only one's whiteness or blackness?

Much of the book reminded me a little bit of my own mother. Or rather, her sensibilities and opinions. She was from the western part of Virginia. The hills. Then later in her childhood, her family resettled closer to Richmond, where she dropped out of high school to care for her dying father. Like the grandmother in the book she possessed a fierce and sometimes irrational commitment to familial devotion. Overkill, nearly. Yet also lived as an outstanding example of her own hypocrisy, as she never protected my father in the way that she insisted upon protecting "family." She nearly always treated him as an outsider to what she claimed to have accomplished alone in that regard. 

As I mature now, late in life, I recognize that my mother manipulated me to distrust my father. Long after her death I have been forced to re-assess her effect on my relationship with him. She hardly ever said a good word about him, but forced me to wait until after her death before I could do the same. A mother's protective love and what it must provide her in terms of emotional needs from her child can be an unfortunate dynamic. As a boy, all I wanted was to believe in the sanctity of that lopsided love. 

This strong sense of genetic devotion, that could also be applied at will to those outside of our small family tree, was a trait that perhaps I rebelled too much against, or grew to be quietly ashamed of later. I was probably wrong in feeling that way also. I did not see the personal errors and foibles of my family as something to protect with unexpected and explosive savagery, but rather as examples of the human condition that were also worth acknowledging and maybe even openly laughing about. Not at the people, but their mistakes, their chosen or inherent flaws. I felt more kinship with the characters of childhood recollection found in Woody Allen's films than I did with my own family. 

People only accept confessionals from those who have either never sinned or those who have sinned so badly that the confession becomes a requirement, not a choice. 

It was wrong of me to reject the stability of my own family, when it is clear to me now how desperately I needed and yearned for it, or something like it.

One thing about the hillbilly lament that I did enjoy was the author's sense of the power and purpose of choice. He spends many of his memories examining the effects of the poor decisions made by those around him. Then towards the end of the book, how his choices towards the optimistic pursuit of education paid off. However pedantic this might sound in description here, it works in the book, even with its occasionally overt didacticism and flawed political conclusions. 

I give the book two gold stars, one for each of its important moral lessons. Yet I am forced to suspend the rewards of these praises because I know how conservatives will misuse them. His conclusions are a touch of Ayn Rand dressed in overalls. He is, if nothing else, a Semper Faithful redneck, and a lawyer trained to convince his listeners. 

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The Bronze Age

We're rapidly approaching this site's 8 year anniversary. I'm not sure what anniversary gift is appropriate for the upcoming bacchanalia, but I'm thinking that maybe I'll buy matching infinity rings to wear with each of my readers. This site has been that financially lucrative. Or, maybe I'll get a box of those "best friend hearts" that are cracked down the middle. I could wear one half and my readers could wear the others. Not sure if that word should be plural - maybe "other" - but this is a year for very high hopes. I'm hoping to double my daily readership to two. 

The phrase seanq6.blogspot.com means "prosperity" in Chinese.

I greatly enjoy how people will sometimes refer to anything as meaning something in Chinese. It's akin to saying that "schadenfreude means happiness in English." We're all just one big cheery lingua franca family. When I'm around people that won't challenge me then I'll say things like, "The word masochism means mayonnaise in Mandarin."

No, that's the old Sean. I've changed. And anyway, now there are people with phones who will look things up and dispute my claims. Only to let me know that they don't understand jokes, and possess technology that can demonstrate the fact. Even after letting them know that they are the joke they'll think that I am the one that's confused, or in error. 

I'll just say, "Oh I must be getting it confused with Cantonese."

Speakers of American can be so silly, so demanding, yet so deeply connected. 

Okay, so I looked it up, sweet readers. Traditionally, this would be our bronze anniversary - the big 8" - which means that we lost to silver and gold. So, we'll console ourselves with it being our victorious Olympic year of copper and tin.   

We seem trapped somewhere between being proto-urbanites and stinky nomads, what I imagine hipsters must strive to be. Nobody talks about hipsters any more. That must give them such conflicted feelings. They wish to be obscure, never ignored.

I read recently that millennials represent the smallest portion of the population. Being a Gen-Xer, this information is supposed to have made me very angry for some reason, but I don't hate midgets. I just don't want them to touch me. They are the product of sexual union with one of the devil's demonic emissaries. Best to leave that for the pearly heavens to figure out. 

Nobody asks the important questions any more. Like, "Do albinos have souls?" Everybody is so afraid of treating people unequally that we have forgotten that most are soulless, empty vacuums. We were given the divine gift of distinction so that we would know how and when to sin appropriately.

Many are called, but few are defrosted. 

Jesus, how am I going to dig myself out of this narrative hole? 

Let's see... Perhaps there is but one shared soul between all of humanity and it resides, most of the time, in Asia. Mathematically this makes sense, but go ahead and argue with anyone on those grounds. You'll see. 

There.... Getting out of that proverbial pickle of differentiations was much easier than I thought. I just needed to stop writing. Now, finally, all of the liberals can be happy. I've taken a somewhat pantheistic approach to spiritual escape.

My biggest fear is striving for greatness, achieving it, becoming famous, then having journalists discover this site. That's it. It would be my #MeHere moment. I don't care much about the fear of cancer. I can secretly laugh about that. I don't care about winning an Academy award. Harvey Weinstein has ruined that dream of mine. And most of all, I don't care about becoming president. 

What everyone repeated when I was a kid turned out to be true: once you go black, you can't go back. 

Oh, get your panties out of the gutter, my new BFFs.

I didn't mean sex, I meant the Neil Young song. 

Is everything sacred any more?

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America's problem with problems

Let's see if I can write a post before I head into the city. It looks as if Rachel and I might commute together today. Such are the dynamics our new shared work-city-parenting lives. She has begun a job in SF and is now commuting in also. Fun times in the car with morning coffees and conversations. 

I generally like to depart much earlier than her. In fact, wait, let me go take a shower....

Okay, shower done. We won't have any surprise departure times now. I wake up long before her, hours most days, so I should be the one that is ready to leave as if it is an emergency. In a sense it will be, for her. I do not envy people that are forced to wake up with an alarm. I only ever set an alarm when it is absolutely necessary. I'm not proud of this. Wait, yes I am. Fuck alarms, I hate them. But it's not as if I sleep in past when one would be going off. My pride comes from a sleeping malady. It is a by-product comfort at best.

Ok, the image comes from one that I was going to use for yesterday's post, but the mention of Ivan Drago was only a closing thought. 

I want to Make Sylvester Great Again. 

Remember when he defeated Russia by being an underdog boxer, and then won the Vietnam War after the fact by being a lonely killing mercenary?

Those were much better times.

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Hillbilly Elegy

After mentioning the book here the other day I decided to read it. I had skimmed a few chapters when I first bought it sometime in 2016, before the author became temporarily famous for being a possible cypher of understanding into Trump's election victory. 

Also, Rachel received a copy recently and started reading it. We like to read the same books from time to time so that we have meaningful, purposeful, literary and liberal conversations lying in wait for us. We have read a handful of books this way, even two by Dostoyevsky, though I do not believe she ever finished The Brothers Karamazov. I'm just not sure. 

We were a tangled mess of interlocked appendages when reading Crime and Punishment. Like an octopi that had been split and was desperately trying to conjoin with its confused lost half.  

We went to St. Petersburg during White Nights and I dragged her around the city showing her statues of Turgenev, Gogol, Pushkin, and Gorky and asked her to name any city in America that revered its writers the same way. Central Park has a couple, like Shakespeare, but no American writers that I know of. I showed her underground bars that were open late into the night, where we were treated as guest oddities. I made sure to satisfy those curiosities.

I slept all day, if it could be called sleep. I was stricken the worst case of jet lag I've ever experienced - drugged by the expansive spherical surface of the earth. My mind trapped in one time, the body in another. 

I don't have much to say yet about the book, Hillbilly Elegy, except that it is easy reading. He doesn't burden his memoir with many studies or statistics. It is a personal telling and the narrator seems a likable enough fellow so far. He ends up as a working lawyer, so I reserve my right to rescind any and all payment of compliment upon discovery of treachery and or sneaky legalese, etc.

That paragraph ^^^ is binding.

Ah well, I wish to understand more about the redneck mind. I grew up with them, but knew to avoid them whenever possible. They could be a fun bunch, but I have canoed up and down the Wekiva River enough to know that they are not to be encouraged too much in this regard. They project a sort of unprincipled frontiersmen attitude where their entertainment is derived directly from your discomfort. Never ones to back away from a frog that jumps, entertainment can quickly transition to pleasure culled from fear, pain, or cruelty. They are the only people I've seen to openly celebrate this fact towards animals, and the animals near them seem to understand this dynamic. 

Not all of them, it's always important to qualify, but enough of them.

Anybody that has grown up on the waterways of Florida is at least familiar with the fear of encountering them in the wild. They are not the type to have ever read Crime and Punishment, nor would they have gathered much from the existential message that because life can be confusing, painful, and perhaps even void of meaning, we should each make a leap to provide our lives a semblance of meaning through the adoption of, and adherence to, a morally principled code, even if that code is also absurd, meaningless, and arbitrary. The leap itself is the moment where meaninglessness becomes meaningfulness. 

Is that an oversimplification, of either them or the book? Probably. They are people that invite oversimplifications. It is the one social crime that we are all encouraged to commit: You can always kick a southerner. 

As for an oversimplification of the book, I'll accept it, even if I have misunderstood the intended message. 

Who wants to argue Dostoyevsky with an old white man from Florida?

See?

There is something fucked up and dangerous about even the thoughtful people who make their way out of the swamp. I possess and export far too much randomness for the type conversations that most people wish to have, ones in which they expect a quiet surrender after a well made point. That's only the point where I seek a greater audience. I'm the intellectual equivalent of a monster truck rally. It exists, though for what specific purpose it is always tough to say. 

I miss some of the craziness of my youth - Florida in the 70s and 80s. A friend has recently been reminding me of some of the stupid shit we used to do. He has been my mind's wheelchair, ushering me into memories that no longer recognize me. He retold a story of us "stealing" an abandoned shopping cart and pushing it home and then chucking it into his family's swimming pool where it sunk to the deep end, where we no longer controlled its destiny. That was for his father to deal with when he got home from work.

I didn't remember doing any of this, but fuck if it didn't make me giggle inside a bit. 

Not exactly fledgling Raskolnikovs, little youngsters he and I, but unprincipled troublemakers nonetheless. The main difference between us and the rednecks was that they had to push their shopping carts into rivers, maybe from a bridge overpass, or just down any convenient embankment. Who knows, maybe they were hoping to trap some river lobster.

He and I spent the early 80s despising and fearing all things Russian, of course. Now we invite them into our political process as old trusted friends and allies. It seems that few things are more inconceivable to the conservative mind than Russia having any direct interest or influence in our political process. A conspiracy from within is the only thing that seems to adequately explain all the emerging facts. When Russia's knocking, best to blame the press. 

My how things sure have changed. We were trapped between local redneck heresies and certain nuclear annihilation from a hostile foreign power. All we had for defense against Ivan Drago were a couple rock albums that seemed to promote the triumphant American version of freedom. 

Listening back now it's tough to say if anybody won, or even who was fighting, or against what.

We've created half a worldful of adversaries right here, and then half allies, each side always talking about invading.

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Sean Q6 has invited you to play Candy Crush

I'm looking forward to going back to not drinking. Don't worry, I'm not becoming an evangelical teetotaler of any kind. I only need a break. I had a couple weeks of alcohol abstinence leading up to Christmas Eve. Then Rachel, our guest from London, and myself started a ten day stretch of celebratory winter drinking that has culminated in me feeling drained of almost all energy. The drinking wasn't even that heavy, just consistent for the holidays. Perhaps by some standards it may have been heavy, once you factor in other people's natural drinking handicaps, but not by my heroic standards. 

It can be tough to be around other people's family members. Families are fucked up places, populated with fucked up people who insist upon it. I can hardly understand why people invest the energy into them that they do. Few things seem as dangerous and stupid as giving deference to some bitter tipsy fool just because there is some shared DNA involved. 

My body and mind are yearning for a return to normalcy - bike rides up into the hills and gym sessions in which I'm not cursing myself for the great pain that I have caused. I desire some clarity. This is not a resolution of any kind. Those are for television audiences, so don't worry about that either. I'm not inviting you to play Candy Crush Saga on Facebook. There is no pyramid scheme here to be revealed. 

All is as it should be with the universe. 

Except Trump is still president. That part still baffles me and probably always will. White people must have been absolutely humiliated when Obama was president. The shame they felt grew to titanic proportions over those eight years. The resulting backlash of Trump is absurd, unreasonable, and tremendous overkill, but nothing else makes any sense. I've read articles and skimmed through books like Hillbilly Elegy and the only conclusion I can draw is that white people don't have any idea what their best interests are any longer. They just wish to re-draw the lines between what it means to be white in America and what it means to be black. It is nothing short of stupefying that they chose Trump to make that message more clear. For them, Trump is not what is wrong with whiteness, but what is right. 

Absolutely fucking bewildering.

Fuck politics, though. I spent far too much of 2016 and 2017 beating my head against the wall of supposed conversation. Whatever I used to believe was "my side" of the struggle: we failed. There may be some more marginal victories against conservatives in 2018, but my prediction now is that Trump will win a second term if he doesn't get run out of Washington by too closely surrounding himself with prison sentences. Impeachment is probably the best, if not only, hope at this point, but that possibility continues to seem remote. The glee with which liberals post about the possibility tells me that the hope is cursed.

Unless a truly significant secret is revealed shortly, showing actual orchestration between the campaign and Russia then there is no hope. The list of crimes so far won't be enough to do it. 

Fuck politics. I don't want to start the new year this way. I wish to write about anything else, but it's what I've been reading this morning. I really should wake up and read other things. Politics is like masturbating out of anger. You might climax but there is so little pleasure involved. It results mostly in shame and a mild personal mess. Then arrives the recognition that you are alone in the universe. As that observation sinks in the door opens and somebody pokes their head in to check on you. There is of course a cover up, but nothing to indict on.

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In The Year Of Our Lord, MMXVIII

(But with a face like that you got nothing to laugh about)

I think I stayed up until after midnight. We went to a neighbor's house and played card games and drank and ate. Wine first and then whiskey. I think it was whiskey. Whatever it was it was good. I mean it tasted good. It is now conducting its toxic invasion on my internal organs. The drinks just kept arriving and there was so little fluid in each one it didn't seem as if it was cause for any alarm. Now I just look forward to going back to sleep. I am sitting here drinking coffee, wondering what the day might hold for me.

CS writes of vague health plans, not resolutions but intentions to improve his health, a change in habits. That is sensible. I am happiest when I'm healthiest. It is one of the lessons that aging teaches - feeling good is better than feeling bad.  When you're young you'll tell yourself almost anything about your feelings. Those little and big lies catch up, of course. It is best to not keep forgetting that. 

I woke up at Rachel's house wanting to crawl into a dark hole and be left alone with my misery. Everyone else was still asleep, so I drove the hundred feet home and now I sit here, pondering the possible meanings and purpose of pain. That seemingly harmless whiskey, maybe it was bourbon, is conducting its all out onslaught on the lining of my skull. 

I am considering going to London in mid February. A friend has offered me a place to stay and it has been a long time since I've been. I want to go to the Tate Modern and the British Museum, or maybe the Victoria and Albert. We could go look at the Botticelli and Bernini works. London accumulated quite a collection in their more imperial and colonial years. I used to be more knowledgeable about art. Much of that has slipped through the crevices of my mind - the disappearing ghosts of once was. 

She and I used to go to museums regularly, when we both lived in New York. We would often go under the premise that she had a writing assignment of some sort and she was curious what my observations about certain pieces were. The only way that I could communicate, or perhaps the best way, was to write down my thoughts, to organize them into paragraphs, to breath structure into reactive feelings. She has a degree hanging around somewhere as proof of this process. 

No, I only kid. She is a very smart woman and a perfectly capable student of art and writing. We had fun organizing our collective observations on art exhibits of various sorts. 

She never turned in any of my writing that she didn't agree with. 

I have been a ghost writer a handful of times in my life. It's fun, in a way, to write either anonymously or through the imagined facade of another. It's good practice, to abandon the style that makes me most comfortable and to attempt to think and express as another. I should do more of that. I take on different voices here, but they are incompletely formed, just moods passing through. It is useful to force yourself to sustain the voice of another.

Maybe I should read Under Milk Wood aloud and see if I have a sense of character. Perhaps that could be my resolution for the new year: to do more things that make less sense. 

Right now I am going to curl up underneath my covers and curse the spirits that carried me across the threshold of time. 

I suppose I could try to look at the bright side of whiskey.... if I were on a diet then I would have already lost one day by now.

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