Abstraction Auroras

Yesterday, there was some ice skating up in Santa Rosa at the Charles M. Schultz skating rink. The one that was spared in the October fires. Though its being spared was not among the first rumors that we heard or freely distributed. There was so much speculation and so many reports of little local landmarks being engulfed in the wild hysteria of hearsay. 

A few days ago I was riding my bike and smelled a wood fire burning. Before I had time to think about its effects it had already gripped me with a quick bolt of fear. Irrational as it is - the mind an attic crowded with ghosts. 

The pics from the rink were as you would expect, pretty much. Shooting under such comically mixed lights will generally either produce accidental images of interest, or none at all. My day was more of the none-at-all variety.

There were young skaters conducting their fledgling pirouettes in the center of the rink. As expected, most any possible photographic view was obstructed by graceless traffic, moving in ovals. 

I brought a lens that was not entirely conducive to that type of shot, at least from that distance - a lone 50mm prime. 

There was one girl there dressed in figure skater blue, born without a waist:

I tried to use the flash to wash out some of the mixed multi-color carnivalesque lights of such a place, never bothering to change my white balance to Fluorescent Warm, so the images were mostly crap. 

My favorite was the out of focus one above of my little buddy, J, but there were a couple others than I liked, if only because they were mistakes of one kind or another.

It was after skating, after dinner, on the ride home, that I started to have more fun shooting. There were scenes of mild action and industry on the roadside. Framed by the dashboard, the frame within a frame.

There is an absurd expectation of privacy that roadside workers sometimes have when it comes to pointing cameras at them from within your car. They have adopted the imaginary legal position of so many cops, that taking their picture is somehow a criminal consideration, or should be, one always left to their discretionary mood. 

There is no such thing as a reasonable expectation of privacy in public, and personal photography on public property requires no consent. Being in public makes you public. 

Always photograph cops. They simply love the attention. They'll sometimes go out of their way to single you out and tell you so.

I tried to capture familiar objects on the side of the road. Well, familiar to wine country anyway. Things like old wooden water towers, peppered here and there in the vineyards and old family estate homes. 

I did the obligatory motion-blur images that nighttime driving in the car demands. Every so often an apparition of light appears and almost takes on the characteristics of something living. Ghosts of the Machine Witch variety.

With light and motion being the main subjects, everything lucky takes on a kind of mythic quality. The subject of a given photograph exists in a quanta state in which you can vaguely tell what something is but never fully explain what it is doing other than moving through time - extraterrestrial  lights dancing in the road, signs riding some imaginary wave of time's passing, a truck insisting on its speed and direction. All of them lose some of their assurance of certainty. 

Once you forego the notion of there being discernible things of any kind then you are free to roam the near total but familiar abstraction of dancing roadside lights, framed by the perspective lines of the road, all leading to a vanishing point while seeming to vibrate away from that same point. 

I tried to lose the vantage point of the road, but all lights either remain ahead of you or pass by on each side, forcing the familiar pattern of lights dancing. Reminiscent of the last thing that you remember seeing as a teenager before you slunk down in the back seat and began to contend with the newfound fear of the drug that you had taken.

Any attempt to remove the road from the image results only in further illumination of the chaos. 

One last turn before home, rounding past where the ice cream place waits on the corner, the one with delicious flavors, so many kinds, where the colors of the well-lit sign invites the attention of parent, pedestrian, puppy, and progeny alike.

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Repetition Juxtaposed

(When he could be lifted)

I'm ready for the weekend to be over, for my own free time to start. Starting my time away from work with a three day stretch of parenting was unavoidable I suppose, but has reminded me that for all of its joys parenting is primarily a task. None of the synonyms for "task" have positive connotations except maybe "mission" and then only in the imagination of my younger-boyish self.  Chore, duty, and job all carry the weight of burden with them. They are heavy words that beg to be met with procrastination. 

Strange - I just tried to find a word that basically means a "happy task" but it doesn't seem that there is one. The websites I humored quickly devolved into talk of the joy of religious duty. My less than thorough research produced no word that would indicate joy in a responsibility embraced or completed. It seems that a word like pleasure or satisfaction must be combined with one like work to give a sense of what the speaker might mean. Having to use two words when there should be one is extra work, so it does capture the spirit of parenting. 

Only two things matter about being a parent - doing it well or poorly. Everything else is tedium to the minds of others. Good parenting gets a gesture of approval concealed in mock condescension or even genuine delight, depending. Bad parenting will always be the subject of perennial discussion. Everyone, it seems, is an expert on the paths to ruination.  

I'm convinced that social media is little more than the symptom and residue of unresolved familial neuroses. When I was involved in the whirlpool of underground dance circles I realized that I was surrounded by people with complicated or challenging family situations, or worse.  I was like them. I've never been quite sure why. It comes as either a relief or disappointment, depending mostly on whether I have writer's block or not when I stop to consider it. 

Family is the institution that most first seek to escape, and deeply involves their initial feelings of liberation from oppression. A child's first bicycle represents the untethered magic of independence. For me, it still does. Few that I know think back to their first bike with anything other than fondness. Even those that rode, remaining forever prodigal. 

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Makin' Bacon

The sabbatical has begun but I wouldn't quite know it yet. My body and spirit have not quite caught up to the idea. It seems just like any other weekend. Work takes so much out of you that you slide into a weekend as a short landing strip of recovery, not really coming to a stop until Sunday, if you're lucky, where you must prepare to return to the maelstrom of employment. Licking wounds and paying taxes.  

It feels almost like being surrounded in a fight by the weekdays, whenever you get too close to surrender you are pushed back into the circle where victory is impossible and defeat is always delayed. We are all a bit like Cool Hand Luke, or so we wish to believe. Rebels Within A  Clause. 

Well, that's a bit dramatic. It is a three day weekend, so maybe I'll feel as I expected to, or more so, tomorrow. For today there is still just the regular sensation of time that slips by too quickly, much more so than a weekday, over as soon as you have thought of it. If you do not have a plan for the day before noon then the gods and goddesses of time revoke your feeling of freedom. Also, as much as I love my son, having him this weekend has added to the feeling that I am still somehow "on duty." When I wake up Tuesday and the boy is not here, there will be nothing to do. Then I'll have to produce some sort of response for my existential predicament. 

One of my vague goals of this time off was to lose some weight. I believed that a more regimented diet might be possible if I just focused strictly on the limited time and and numeric weight loss goal. A modest target - 15 pounds in six weeks. That should be easy enough, and would have put me just about at 200 pounds by the time it's over. Except that I got sick the week before it started and I ate comfort food to heal myself, lots of it and chocolate, and ended up fatter that I had hoped going into this period by about 5 pounds. So, now I'll need to lose 3 pounds each week, for 6 weeks consecutively. Or, 3.point something... 

I'm currently baking a rasher of bacon, to see if that helps. I didn't sprinkle brown sugar on it, as I love to do, so I'm doing my part. Nobody has yet to include candied bacon in any of the diet suggestions that I listen to. 

Okay, I have spent the night arguing with an assault rifle advocate, one who seems to believe that he might one day need to lead an insurrection against the government, and that is somehow more important than the other - kids living through another day at school. He has correctly pointed out that knives can also be used to kill, so you know, where does the madness stop? He was unable to list the mass killings done with a fully automatic rifle, because you know, the ban on them must have worked. But if you listen then you'll hear the repeated claim: gun bans do not work. That's why mass shooters always choose semi-automatic weapons, because they like to show some modesty in their ambitions.

I guess everybody derives their concept of power from different sources. Some people like to imagine the joy of killing kids, others like to envisage killing American soldiers patriotically when the time comes, the way the nation's founders wanted. I like to read.

Wouldn't it be funny if an "original" draft of the constitution was found and the second amendment called for a well-educated militia? Or, if there was a requirement in one of the articles to update the language built into the document. The last time it was reviewed we transitioned to a well-regulated paint ball squad. Or better yet, a well-pregnated militia, so that only pregnant women were allowed to have guns. It will be left to their discretion as to how to avenge all allegations and to dispense final justice as part of the "Weinstein Clause."  They'll roam Hollywood, packin' heat, in black maternity sweats and full face masks with night vision goggles - the well-funded militia.  

Or, maybe if there was a simple constitutional requirement for gun owners to spell: well-flagellated munitions. Or, even better: well-repudiated minutiae.  

It'll be nice though, one day, for my son to see a time when we can all look back and agree that Americans, when really put to the task, at the very least knew how to be civilized. 

Oh yeah, Barkley turns 10 years old today... !!! 

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Post-VD

Yes, we went to Valentine's Day dinner with our boy. We weren't alone. The restaurant that we chose, one acceptably close to us, was filled with other families who thought similarly and brought their own kids. Who knows why, beyond the obvious. Babysitters are expensive and everybody wants their own love on the day set aside for it. Their special squeeze, young girls of babysitting age maybe most of all.

Who knows, we might not be allowed to notice the blossoming of sexuality in youth any more. We are reminded that the old natural is the new affront. It is the new natural that must be embraced. Always there are new morals to adjust to, an ethical hearkening to more civil times, advanced by those who must know. We have people openly walking into schools with semi-automatic rifles and shooting down scores of scared children, but to mention that those same kids are experiencing their sexual awakening is an egregious insult to the contemporary mind. 

We've heard it all before. America doesn't have a gun problem. It must be something else unique to the American character. The guns are incidental and could not possibly explain the numbers. There must be an invisible variable involved that we have yet to discover. This, in plain sight of what might otherwise be considered rational people. If only we could demonstrate that these killings were contagious, which they clearly are. They jump from host meme to host meme to infection, spread by direct and incidental contact. 

There is something more powerful than the NRA: voting elected representatives out of office. Don't tell, it's America's littlest secret: the democratic vote.

It's not a subject that is worth tackling any more and probably never will be. It's barely a problem worth shooting at from a highway overpass. As a nation, we've done nothing. If I could piss on the faces of the people talking, then I would for you. 

It's been a long time, too long really, since I've pissed one someone's face. Let's revisit that issue when I tell the story of the ex-girlfriend from yesterday's post. As long as I don't use names or provide chronological hints then I should get away with retelling stories that I find of adequate interest and merit. At 49 years of age it would be impossible for most readers to know if what I describe happened in the 80s or last year. It is one of the few joys of aging, concealing facets and facts within the folds of the decades.

I've had people try to tell me before that I have no right to relay the details of my own life here. There are things that are private, I've been told. To a degree, sure. Everything is so tender, exceptional, and personal until it's time to fill out the police report. 

Can you imagine R. Kelly's surprise when an allegedly intimate moment between himself and a consensual child became public. That girl, or her bitter caretakers, violated the sacred bond that exists between a grown man's urine and someone's face. In some cultures it is thought to have magical recuperative powers. He might have been in a shamanic trance and was trying to christen her, to cleanse her of evil, but without need of leeches. There are a lot of things that we still don't understand about urine and the role that it plays in magic. 

He was found not guilty on all 14 charges, yet people still treat him like he's Woody Allen. Not guilty is similar to being innocent, except you are of course stripped of some reasonable doubt in the process. In America we have the presumption of innocence until proven video.

Listening to people discuss Woody Allen can somehow be both interesting and tedious. They say all of the wrong things, proving that they don't know how to think. For some reason it is important for people to dispense their opinions of him as a person, which keeps his films mostly safe, secluded from the blinding lights of their wit. Morality is the enemy of thought. Virtue is the vague idea that there exists invisible behavioral doctrines that can not be politely questioned. They can only be overthrown with rudeness and repeated transgressions. Luckily the Many Moms of Facebook are out there acting as flying buttresses to the ever crumbling cathedrals of rectitude. 

Some of the most unpleasant people I have ever met tirelessly advocate for the ornaments of etiquette. Manners. Always their manners, which are superior to yours, otherwise they wouldn't have been forced to bring it up at all. 

What did Emerson say: A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Well, he wasn't discussing manners there, but I often dawdle in the territory of the implicit.

Why can't people study the films of Ron Howard instead of that nasty little reprobate, Allen? Howard's a nice enough fellow, no scandals that we know of. Instead of R. Kelly maybe people could enjoy the later albums of Elton John. Sure, EJ had his problems back in the flying Donald Duck days, but that's all behind him now. He was trying to find himself. 

I don't get it. People seem drawn to complications like moths to a light, spree shooters to children, and parched tourists to Italian fountains.

Ralph goes on to say more, of course:

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. 

- Emerson, Self-Reliance

I do not believe, however, that he was proposing erraticism here as a guiding principle, either. 

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Always on a Sunday

Happy Valentine's Day. I posted these here for you. Will you be mine?

Jesus, that sounded creepy, even by my standards.  I once had a girlfriend. No, wait, that is perhaps a story for another day. She said something so crazy to me one time that I wanted to document it, for the inevitable investigation into my death. 

Nope, still too dark. She probably won't kill me. 

Also, I have a girlfriend now. I think that's what she is. Perhaps partners is a better term for what we are. Romantic-Parent-Partners - several breakups, outnumbered by one reconciliation, one divorce, and one child deep... now one of us is well into their 40s, soon to depart the last decade that might still be considered part of an extension of a person's youth.  

There is of course more to that, and her, and I. We are going on a Valentine's dinner with our son. My idea, but I thought it was thoughtful and inclusive. He's a sweet little six year old lover boy, so why not. We armed him with adorableness today to give out to his equally delightful classmates. 

So sweet it is, youth - glacé.

I had hoped that I would glide into my sabbatical on the oily back hair of angel wings, but life will not let me. I've had an unusually difficult week at work, which was about half my own fault. It didn't help at all that I have come down with some sort of allergy cold. I've felt terrible all day, useless - body aches, headache, and sinuses. I slept less than four hours last night on a cup and a half of cherry NyQuil. So, I've been corralling my sensibilities for most of the day with very patchy success. 

I should be a conversational joy at dinner tonight.

I had modest dreams concerning the things I had hoped to get done today. None of which have yet been accomplished. I am supposed to go into the office tomorrow, but I feel terrible. I have Girl Scout cookies for everybody. I want to see people before I'm absentia, become persona mysterioso, abero opus.

I never wanted to be the type of kid that would grow up and run away on a Friday. I had an almost devout religious bent to my formal rebellions, making sure that when I did run away it was always on a Sunday afternoon, so that I could be brought back into the family fold before things became too serious, disgruntled and slightly ruffled, but ready for school in the morning.

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Romance To Ritual

Whatever spirit for being I had when I awoke this morning has been drained out of me through my interaction with a single other human being. The details match the plot in boredom quotient. It's why I am here so late this morning, with little to offer. I've been de-verved. 

We haven't been on any adventures lately, which is reflected here. Either the boy and I or the mini family pack. Lack of narrative drags and tugs at the putty of written time. 

We spend our time preparing to make good stories, sometimes to correct for the past, sometimes to relive it in echo. I realize that much more with the boy, it's somehow great, a simple shift that pulls back some imaginary curtain on an imaginary secret. I shift my focus of living into the moment and for the future. Sounds corny and silly and stupid and obvious, and it is all those things, but to live it is no less authentic. Without some vague sense of current and future adventure I may become obsessive rather than passionate, disappear like one who falls into love with a thing. 

I miss shoplifting. It was the first time in my life I felt independent and capable. 

Are any of the things we become good at ever a surprise.

I wanted to be loved for my mind. 

My personality must have been so jealous. 

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Only a mention

One of the girls in our group committed suicide, once she was a woman. I think of her death more often than I should, as is often the case with suicide. They tend to haunt. She used a gun in her departure, as unforgiving a device for such a purpose as ever there was. 

She taught me how to play scales on the piano and how to derive some basic chords from those scales. I forgot most all of it, but I do remember going to her family's house to play the piano, to try to translate what little I knew on the guitar to the piano. It was the only access I had to a musical instrument other than my own guitar. She was ushered into the Christian fold and held there by her family and whatever angels there were to help. She seemed to accept her religion with certain caveats. She was eager to give oral sex but patently refused to violate the sanctity of her crevice regions, though she seemed brimming with curiosity about how that might one day be. I suspect she likely found out, though she was no longer a part of my life for very long after high school. The last I remember seeing her was when Peter Murphy's Love Hysteria came out. I was maybe 20, she must have been 19. 

There was something vulnerable about her, a bit too much so. How is one to gauge such a thing, but that's what we do. It's the feeling one gets, I suppose, culled from what others project. There were girls whose approval she sought that were quite mean to her. Very mean. After I found out about the circumstances of her death it was almost all that I could think of. In part, I blamed their meanness for her demise. Across two decades I had some scorn for them. Still do. 

In men or women, some vulnerabilities appear beautiful and fragile, the crystal cracked, for reasons I've never quite understood beyond the purely subjective. These delicate fissures in a person are near poetic - to be protected or in need of some protection, some inner softness trapped out in the rain, ever receding, in danger of disappearing, taking everything with it. 

Other vulnerabilities just seem to be annoying weaknesses. Forgivable maybe, but very trying in the persistent self-presentation, the calculated perching-in-wait, of them all. People wield their weaknesses against others, as an imaginary appeal to the other's virtue. Demanding the sensitivity of others rarely results in anything of the kind, but rather silence or detestation is more likely. I see that much more clearly now. It bores me, when I do it most of all. I used to endure it more willingly. Everything's a disadvantage waiting to be used as a silencing cudgel. Pain repurposed as power, similar to how some people will confuse meanness for strength. I suspect that's what those girls thought they were doing, confusing spite for something much more cool. 

I had started a post that mentioned Raising Arizona when it came out, going to see it with a youth group. That's all it took, a mention.

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Why it's important not to read

(Blair Witch Pirate)

I need more conversation, less time spent alone, writing. I am trying to conduct a conversation with the world, by myself. I awake most mornings and read, anything from a book to online articles. I gravitate in those articles towards things I mainly disagree with. I find that to be more engaging, which is a type of pleasure. Then, too often, I respond openly here. It's not a conversation, it's only an argument with the darkness, a conversation without a conversant.

I've done it again this morning. I've been reading articles online. My response to many of these articles follows a similar trajectory and I strongly suspect that this is by design. The article starts with a basic premise, one that is nearly impossible to disagree with - people deserve equality of opportunity - unless you possess an ideological bent that insists on the naturalness of unfairness, or some other idiotic foundation for social cruelty.

Then, there is a secondary argument that emerges, one that is related to the premise, and that seems to follow from that premise but is often based on a logical fallacy of some sort. A false equivalence between general principle and specific anecdote, for example. Once the writer has freed themselves from the responsibility of their own virtue, cloaked in the honor of their premise, they are off and running into the wide open world of presumed injustices that of course result from the misapplication of that same value. Or worse, free to play with the suggested iniquities of the value itself. There is an If this, then why that? sensibility to all of it. If you happen to agree with the writer then this doesn't represent much of a problem and the writer's hope, I assume, is that reader not only goes along for the ride but internalizes the argument as truth.

I do a similar thing here much of the time, so I recognize the pattern. I try to convince myself of all manner of mania and attempt to lure the reader into a kind of complicity, because it's fun to pretend to pursue premises indirectly. One type of freedom is the unhindered use of the mind. Most freedom of that kind eventually seeks agreement and validation. Nobody wants to feel that they're not making sense on any level. The pursuit of a single line of imaginary logic is the minimum requirement for fallaciousness. Without it, comedy can not exist. Within it, rhetoric is birthed.

In these journalistic works there is a problem, then there is a suggestion of a solution. Or, if the writer wishes to seem inclusive they will end the piece with open hands, suggesting something along the lines of, I don't know, you tell me? This is a purely persuasive device made to seem as if they are in need of the reader's intelligence to draw conclusions. This, only after an arrangement of the narrative presented as a series of self-evident facts.

The conflict is often framed as there being oppression and oppressors. The reader is always encouraged to relate to the oppressed. Membership in the group of oppressors also follows strict notions of identity, the very thing the piece often purports to argue against - that these designations are somewhat permeable and always subject to personal choice. Everyone, it seems, is free to choose identity except those categorized as having benefited from their own. We all know the type: the very image of the enemy.

The conflict of the piece would fall apart and lose the reader's interest without this basic dynamic. Mixed throughout are suggestions and prescriptions for justice. These rarely rely on any accepted concepts of justice but rather only an immediate need and demand for it, often by the writer's terms and always in defense of their identified group. We are told that systems of justice favor the oppressors, so they must be done away with, yet no alternate system is presented. There is only the demand that one group must now pay. This starts with individual members of that group and advances along those lines until their power and authority have been dissolved.

Once the writer has established that there is systemic wrongdoing then the obvious solution is to overthrow that portion of the system, if not the entirety. Lack of adequate and enthusiastic agreement to this end or means identifies you as one filled with hate - a bigot, sexist, or racist of some kind.

In the less subtle pieces there is a sense of recruitment as well as that of a sharp defining of the enemy involved in the rhetoric. It relies heavily on group identity and the persistent need for that group identity. There is always an impression of group struggle and success provided. Very rarely, almost never, is there any open encouragement for the reader to think and feel for themselves or to research a subject in the spirit of open inquiry, then to draw their own conclusions. Because the world out there is always filled with very dangerous lies. This last assertion is the one that aligns them most closely with their own enemies.


So, I'll leave today's post with that encouragement: stop being such an adjective. Be a noun in pursuit of verbs. Don't spend your life hanging around waiting to be a preposition. If you look around and see only synonyms then you just might be one. Don't wait for a conjunction to clearly state your interjections.

Be the verb you wish to participle in the noun... (What MLK must have meant)


When you wake up tomorrow you'll still rush off to be a good proletariat. If you're reading this piece, then I already know you will.

See how easy it is?

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When The Mockingbird Hums

(Unrelated image to today's post)

Today is CS' birthday.

I've probably told this story before... 

He and I met after I dropped out of high school. I attended the adult high school that was part of the local college. He had heard from a friend of his who was also my teacher that I was reading a collection of poems by Rimbaud. He walked up beside me one day and casually asked about "Rambo." I didn't realize that this was a much closer approximation to how the poet's name was pronounced than mine - "Rimbod." 

I figured it all out soon enough, and was quite relieved that he was not trying to start a casual conversation about Sylvester Stallone's movie in which America gets to pretend it won the Vietnam war, ex post facto, through sheer bloodlust, fierce individualism, and jungle knives designed to eviscerate those on the wrong end. It was a way of claiming that America was superior at guerrilla warfare, no matter what the actual wartime losses might have suggested in that regard. The film had only been released a handful of years before this encounter and maybe a sequel was in the demented ether of the time. Blood of one kind or another seemed fresh on everybody's mind. 

Somehow an underdog boxer from Philly could also be a distraught vet whose struggle was meant to echo our own, etc. There had been a misunderstanding. Something about drawing first blood, and how spiritually repulsive such a thing is to the noble mind of all Americans. We are silly in our own admissions, most of all that we seem unaware of them as they are happening.  

I was either 16 or 17 at the time; I'll be 50 this year. So two generations have been born and given their fair shot at ruining the world in the interim, maybe more. Age is becoming so much more granular with access to an internet that can perform the requisite basic math for everybody. I am impressed with some of the recent generation's efforts, dismayed at others. I sit, like many others my age, discomposed in the purgatory of Generation-X detention - suspended somewhere between despising boomers and regarding Uber with the suspicion of repressed fascination. 

It turns out that knowing how to program a VCR to record an upcoming show truly was useless knowledge. We were told that Billy Idol would never spend his time this way and so we experienced the authentic technological shame and superiority that comes with knowing things. My generation still seems mildly bitter about it, like coffee that's sat out too long and now needs some microwaving. We had to get out of our cars and walk into record stores to find out about punk rock. We never quite recovered from the indignity of being and remaining obscure. 

The first time I had a chance to get to know CS was when I was in an environment in which he was expected to dispense wisdom, a wisdom which I sought mostly to undermine. He told me about writers he liked - Bukowski was among them - and I would sit and ignore him while reading poems under a desk with my then girlfriend, Amy. Mockingbird Wish Me Luck. 

She and I met as young people often do, through the hormones surging in our systems that acted as a catalyst to chance. 

In my car that first night she lifted her shirt in an attempt to explain to me why I would find her hideous. This was in advance of the sex we were preparing ourselves to have. She wanted to show me something before I saw her naked, where I might become confused or repulsed. She did all of this without yet using the words and phrases that would help me understand - pregnant, adopted the child away, there are stretch marks, etc. - so, I was left to first believe that maybe she had been in a fire that somehow only affected the skin on her abdomen. I strained to see and touch her flesh, and tried to understand her shame while not needing to understand. I wanted so badly to console her with my wanting of her. To heal her pain sincerely, right then, with desire. I would have atoned for any suffering within my power. 

It was too dark in the car. All that I could be sure of was that she was very insecure about a deformity of some sort. She needed to present me with an escape option, because afterwards there would need to be less of that. This understanding was and still is implicit. I didn't want to escape. I didn't. Her family treated me as if I was part of it for the next year until she and I eventually broke up. I liked them all very much - smart hippies. They had good books on shelves in their house and overflowing into the garage, where Amy and I would flip through old copies of The Whole Earth Catalog, The Anarchist Cookbook, The Village Voice, and volumes of poetry and prose by mostly beatnik writers, and those poets and writers whom the beatniks embraced or adored. 

Once when I was going to her house I started my car and the opening arpeggiated chords from Stairway to Heaven began playing, broadcast from the local rock station. The song lasted until I pulled up to her driveway and turned the car off, it being the only thing I heard on the drive, which must have lasted about 8 minutes and 2 seconds. It lent some credence to the notion that Zep was magical. 

Once, she and I wanted to have sex so badly we ended up in a school playground, one of those Florida "pod schools." There was an entranceway to one of the pods that offered some semblance of privacy and she prepared herself by lying down with her legs splayed, her jeans underneath her head as a pillow. I prepared before her, nude, on my knees, leaning in and ready to approximate pushups. 

By the time we were done, a handful of orgasms each later, my knees were bleeding lightly as was her lower back where the friction and motion of our combined youth evidenced flesh that had been worn past its surface. Each left with our own soft road-rash of young love, as if we happened to have just come to a stop there after a long and unexpected bit of skidding. The opposite was closer to the truth.  Those strawberries were the beginning of a takeoff of sorts that would not end, quite, but has slowed down considerably in the last handful of years. Perhaps the result of a different child born under different circumstances. 

I loved Amy and always have, still do. She is one of the few girlfriends that I have exclusively fond and tender memories of. We used to go to independently owned book and music stores to find early copies of artists that would later become very popular. For her: Suzanne Vega. For me: Bukowski. 

Wishing some luck again, little mockingbird you. 

What does all of this have to do with CS? Very little, I guess.

Amy's child was not the baby of the boyfriend she had at the time, the one just before me, a guy named Joe. They broke up over it, unsurprisingly, and CS happened to also be friends with that ex-boyfriend. A guy I am never quite sure if I met or not. 

He moved to California to be a writer many decades ago. So, you know, he was out of the picture. 

(Still unrelated)

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What is necessary?

The boy is asleep now in the tent in the living room. We set it up again last night, after he asked me why we ever took it down. I tried to explain that sometimes I like to use my living room as something other than a campsite, but the concept was either lost on him or irrelevant. The tent being set up, filled with pillows, comforters, sleeping bags and stuffed animals of all kinds is all that is wanted. Oh, to be young and filled with dreams of piracies and puppies. 

I'm in need of a long walking hike, perhaps Sugarloaf here in Sonoma valley. I need a hike that feels like a Van Morrison album, one that sits between the temporal and the eternal, the natural and the contrived. 

I mean the hike, not a VM album. A trail is a contrivance through nature. 

Yet that is what I need, the breath of flora and fauna. I've spent too many days waking up, sitting here reading bad journalism, drinking coffee, writing, working, then picking up the boy after, eating dinner, repeat, repeat, repeat. I need to lightly derail my life, to do something differently. Even if it is only a walk through familiar woods, along known ridges, to get off of the road and out onto my feet. 

... only a walk through familiar woods

Can you believe the way that I talk about my local portion of the mighty cosmos? It's narrow, dismissive, and unnatural.

I should stop commenting on my own writing. It's not necessary.

What is? 

We can mistake framing devices for the thing being framed. 

Or rather, I do. 

I want more life.

I might not be prepared to spend it any differently than I have. 

I should find a way of adjusting, reconciling myself to change, so that there would be more opportunities for experience. 

As it is, the only thing that might change my life would be a crisis. 

Is there more than only emergencies and routine, something good and unexpected, something that can sustain the weight of life, like a hidden hammock hung between two trees, somewhere as yet unknown - secret silence, solace, sleep.

Sabbatical is a religious term used irreligiously, particularly if you chant it with your eyes closed as I have, head hidden under pillows, in hurried and hushed whispers. 

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Voice Shopping, Free Listening

(Charlie Chaplin's passport photo, by Richard Avedon)

That's what the tape on my latest box from Amazon advertises - voice shopping, free listening. You can shop for voices and be listened to for free, or something equally convenient. We live cradled within the curses and blessings of interesting times. 

I watched the Falcon Heavy launch yesterday, standing in a room with a handful of people at work. I viewed what I thought was the landing of one of the boosters, but didn't have my glasses on, only to find out that two were landing simultaneously. The second one, from my blurred perspective, must have been registered by my mind as any one of a number of visual anomalies that occur to a person with mild myopia, an echo of something actual, or it did not register visually at all. 

Perhaps that's all that's ever happening: blurred vision that people accept as the clarity of truth. It's difficult to say. The terms that are used for being alert and aware all seem to indicate a clarity of educated consciousness, but then there still exists so much confusion about the facts. The word fact is rendered suspect most of all. Anyone can scoff, Whose fact? Political democracy has given way entirely to that of opinion, which has given way to the collectivist democracy of morals, which seems to demand the abolition of what is seen as faulty justice. The entire history of humanity has been put out to the garage sale. In a world of Amazon Prime people have grown so tired of due process. They want second day delivery on all matters punitive. It is dangerous to question the severity of someone's guilt any longer, much less to suggest a need to verify. Once they have been outed, best to leave them out where they belong. 

Only in this healthy climate of accusation can impartial righteousness possibly emerge. We have been told for so long - and yes, there is so much evidence to support the claims - that those that have been deprived of proper justice are the ones best capable of now dispensing it. The angry never seem to get anything wrong. How could they?

In preparation for what will become of America's private prison system I bought a copy of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. I tried to read Maxim Gorky's My Childhood but never completed it. I have tried - in the efforts of a layman, not a student - to give myself an opportunity to read at least two sides of the story as it pertains to Marxist-Socialism and the emergence of the Soviet Union. 

I attempted a similar thing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The only conclusion that I can draw is that I tend to side with the better writers. My opinions may be seen as more literary than political. I have read a few works by Sartre and enjoyed them, even as I struggled understanding them. Yet he expressed support for both Stalin and Mao. What is one to think?

There was a time when dictatorships of the left-wing kind seemed to be within the reach, defense, and embrace of continental intellectualism. Ideas that also crept into American favor in the decades that followed. The political right shows very little support for anything foreign, most of all ideas, and instead puts their faith in regimes that know how to dance along to the only anthem that matters. Suspicion of capitalism is not enough. But when has suspicion alone ever been? Ignorance can thumb its nose at anything and uneducated idealism has always gripped the hearts and minds of the righteous young. 

Che! and all of that.  

Gorky was nominated for the Nobel five times. Solzhenitsyn won it, for what that is worth. His status as a laureate is considered a political statement by some and not as much of a specific commentary on his writing. In 1970 and at all other times the Nobel committee has been charmed by virtuous and literate dissidents. 

Kafka and Proust were denied by dying too young. Tolstoy never won, nor did Joyce and others also deserving, to give you an idea of how faulty the process of voting can be. There are always two problems in any democracy: too many votes and not enough. 

Steinbeck won, which is perplexing, but then again so is Dylan's inclusion, and soon enough Oprah Winfrey. You must admit, she really made great contributions to the emerging world of daytime chat. 

Perhaps the kids are right, the hierarchies have all exhausted themselves. 

Tear down the pyramids! 

That's always been my main mantra: destroy the ever iniquitous past. 

Smartphones have engendered the dissolution of subject into mere reference, mostly for the convenience of dismissal without knowledge, or to render its holder as being instantly well-read. There is the requisite stabbing of the past in the hope that the sun'll come out tomorrow. All of human history has become the spring board for a musical, one vaguely about a revolution. 

Talk to most any young artist about those who are considered "the greats" of the latter 20th century, especially in California, and you will see some vague waving of the hand and shaking of the head. No substantive opinion beyond the obvious meaninglessness of the previous. Anybody can now claim the luxury of historical irrelevance. The idea that the best of one generation can dismiss or denounce the best of the previous generation is also an idea whose time has passed. A more effective way of discharging the past is to be completely and simply unaware of it. 

Today is the day in 1964 when The Beatles landed at JFK. I remember reading that Millennials are the first generation to outright dismiss them as a cultural force and musical group. Friday will be the anniversary of the date when they played on the Ed Sullivan show. Bowie and Elvis share a birthday but you'd never know it was the former's, the latter's has eaten up social media because he fits within it more neatly. 

I've never fully understood why the music of the generation that came before me was so important to me while I was young. I held the music of my own generation at a slight distance as it was happening. It wasn't until the mid to late 80s that I really started to trust the music of my own generation and embrace it. It seemed to be somehow less important, at times even artificial, by comparison. It was in some ways, yet in other ways that was its very message and why it was so important. I missed that until I was a little bit older and more capable of appreciating the subversiveness of it.  

MTV, while exciting and vivid, made me feel at the time that there was little left beyond the triumph of industry over inspiration. I was partially right. I have rescinded that opinion somewhat since, but not entirely. 

As much as I can now appreciate some of the artists that came later I still find them to be choreographed into something other than what I really love. To watch Justin Timberlake's Super Bowl halftime show made me feel ashamed for reasons that I suspect most anybody of my generation might understand. 

Something has died, or is dying. It's the idea that the unexpected and unplanned is only entertaining in proportion to the immensity of its shame at having been a mistake. To watch kids cheer orchestrated dance sequences that are designed to seem as if they were thought of on the spot is bizarre. It feels almost like discussing politics: you know where the conversation leads and you know it will eventually arrive there but the most interesting component is only when someone inadvertently makes a mistake. Timberlake's biggest mistake was not making any. His triumph was one more of athleticism than artistry. 

America seems like a vast political rally, synchronized to pop, priced to sell and dressed to kill, on spring break in Vegas but with the coordinated enthusiasm of a new Nuremberg, both the rallies and the trials, all on pay-per-view Prime. 

One day soon anybody will be able to blame everybody for the things that happened, or deny that it ever did. The biggest challenge of the future will be proving that there was one. 

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The great offense: time's passing

(Hylas and the Nymphs)

Yesterday, after work, a ride up into my regular, boring, daily valley. Halfway up a car pulled behind me and refused to pass. After a couple minutes of that, maybe the eternity of two, I pulled over and stopped, forcing the car to pass. As it did, a dehydrated old man had his window down and decided what I needed most now was his conversation. He started off slightly vexed, explaining, There are thirty-nine blind curves on this road... It's not safe to pass... I listened to the words while calculating in my mind that there was no possible way for there to be thirty-nine blind curves on this road, that number was too high, but he was nearing a hundred years old. Fuck it, I thought, just let the old man lie if it is what he needs. 

But then came my turn to interrupt. 

That's why I stopped, to let you pass.

Well, you're one of only three cyclists that has ever done so, and I've lived here fifteen years.

I don't like other cyclists either, that's why I ride alone. I think they're all a bunch of assholes. Their bikes are worth more than they are.

He held out his old dry hand to shake mine: My name is Ron, I live at the top of the hill, the house with the palm trees and metal chairs. Why don't you stop by, we can have a chat?

I would love to, but I'm racing the clock. I do this ride every day on my lunch break and I only have one hour to do it in.

You're going to do what in an hour? Did you say you're going to die!?

No, this is my lunch break, from work, I lied. I only have an hour to do my ride. I time it as perfectly as I can. I always race the clock, so that I don't have to ride with those fools. Time isn't money, it's worth more than that.  

Okay then, I understand. Stop by any time and say hi, if you want. You're a good guy, I can tell.

And that's how I pretended to befriend the owner of my favorite house in Lovall Valley. It's the one on the top of the hill, the one that I most admire. I've written about it here before. I'll never stop and chat with Ron, of course. When I am riding I have no chat or prattle left in me. It is all the lone echo of my internal monologue, pithy revelations concerning the self and others. Mostly one-liners that I never stop to jot down, or loosely structured paragraphs, also lost to the circulatory system. Nothing to share with strangers, just the shrapnel of long ago exploded gibberish. 

Well, except I do share most of it with the ones who have cornered me here. It's as if I've done some speed in my sleep. I awake and can't stop writing. The side-effects of a lifetime's monologue. I have never had writer's block, because I have fewer doubts than others. I just permit myself to be wrong much more often.

After Ron had pulled away, off and easily up the heart-bursting hill and into his three car garage, I summited the hill that I know better than any other. I half expected him to be standing out on his industrial lanai, near his waterfall, waving as I passed. Though of course he was not. 

After the fires, his house was the first in the upper valley that I was able to verify had not been consumed, and the one that made me the happiest to confirm. As I mentioned, it's my favorite. Not only because it sits at the point of personal victory - at the end of a row of uphill rocks on the side of the road, the finish line at the top of the hill where Sonoma becomes Napa, his house seeming to straddle both counties - but because of its design, constructed of smoothed concrete and naturally weathered corten steel. It's a genuine beaut of a place. All lines and sharp angles, the color of rust, concrete, and reflective glass. It sits on a hill that is at the top of another hill, facing the valley, the sky and the sun, with what must be quite an arresting view. 

Perhaps I will stop by some day and let Ron disappoint me with his casual conversation. He'll turn out to be far too much like me, wishing mostly to rant or rave, inexplicably wanting to be heard in his recurring complaints and scattered joys. 

Maybe he will confide that he is afraid, that whatever meaning he believed he brought to his life is now fading, disappearing from the surface and the soil of the earth along with him. Perhaps he is like many others - in part honest, though also scared, hurt, wounded, or worse. He'll likely never admit it. It will instead arrive in the standard envelope of anger and disappointment. The confusion of a life whose belief in purpose can not equal its point of purposelessness. The curse of watching one's final moments arrive meaninglessly.

Lucky thing for Ron. I always know just what to do in those situations: challenge him to an arm-wrestling match, then let him believe that he won.

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Today probably isn't going to be the first day of the rest of anything

A break from social media should be a part of my sabbatical, also. It has been nearly ten uninterrupted years of being fervently social. I am beginning to lose the memory of what the other world was like - its loneliness, or is it rather only solace? - and I want parts of it back. If I just delete the Facebook app from my phone and close that browser tab after logging out then I should be good, but I also know that I can not be trusted, and become easily misguided. 

I'm thinking about maybe traveling a little bit also. I don't know where, it would need to be relatively local, I think, but am considering options. Maybe taking the time off in the winter was not the best option, but it was the one that presented itself. Maybe I'll get a tattoo and learn to play the accordion, or have my fingerprints sanded off after I steal a car and head for the Canadian border, never to be heard playing the violin again...

Yesterday, at a Super Bowl party, a friend told me that if she didn't know me then she would suspect that perhaps I was being serious on this site. It is funny, to think that people take each other seriously. It's the source, perhaps, of far too many problems. What is there to take seriously about another person's thoughts? Very little. I mean sure, people deserve basic respect and to be free from tyranny, but as soon as they start espousing, as I do here, then that's a perfectly good time to turn off the concerns, as those other needs have hopefully already been met, pre-opining.

I guess it depends on your definition of tyranny and any of these words: respect, basic, deserve. 

And yes of course, nobody should be the victim of unprovoked harassment. If I ever argued for sexual harassment here then I am sorry, I was wrong. I had mistakenly believed that to be a component of traditional affection, or ardor. I see now that it is not a strict requirement of love. It is only acceptable within the confines of a consensual relationship, where it becomes your romantic responsibility to try to put your thumb in your lover's butt when she's sleeping. Women simply adore this sort of romantic pestering. It's not harassment, it's foreplay about half of the time. 

With love, one must always keep their eye on the ratios.

As for agreeing with people on social media:

People, I have found, are mostly full of shit. They want you to agree with them so badly because they're not very certain. They need confirmation and reification, mostly, and with some people I'm happy to oblige. Then of course there are the others, the willfully wrong, the adamants. 

In any event, Facebook will survive without me disagreeing with, and disparaging, their good members and participants for a while. You can sense how much people on that platform need to believe not only in their own sensibilities but also in their desire to have others concede agreement to their sensibilities. It is the very premise of the thing. Vague or acute emotional or intellectual hostility is the common result of conversation now. Life has become like an unending Thanksgiving dinner - everybody is so grateful to finally have the conversations they've dreaded.  

I hold with caution those people who are only confused or angered by the absurd. It's a strong indicator that they demand a sensible world and those people are dangerous to me - they are the ideologues, the literalists, the zealots of self-held fundamental truths. It is not enough for them to suspect or believe, they must crush your suspicions and bring your beliefs to the point of surrender. Inquiry gives its way to inquisition. 

I know, because that's mostly all that I care to do: shame people for their uncertainties. Or even worse: humiliate them for their confident convictions. 

That's what I always say, Fuck the believers!  

I can never understand how other people seem to arrive at their own faulty conclusions, especially when I am acting as a beacon of the light to reason for them. Instead, they cling to darkness. I suspect it's because they're masturbating.

It is one of life's enduring mysteries: the faulty opinions of others. 

Can't science fix this? Whomever and wherever the scientists are, they need to pull their thumb out and do something useful for once, like demonstrate how wrong and stupid other people are. What are they getting paid for, anyway?

I probably should write here more seriously, though. How will I otherwise ever expect to transcend the meaningless of my time? What legacy will I leave to my sole progeny, only page after page of orchestrated gibberish?

God, I hope so. He has already surpassed me in basic compositional arrangement (see above). 

CS had an interesting faux challenge a few months back that I took very seriously: write down your morals and try to live by them for a week, keeping record of when you failed. If that exercise doesn't disabuse you of any notions of consistency in moral dignity then I don't know what will. 

I tried to do it, couldn't even finish the list before I had shamefully transgressed myself. My morals can't even agree with each another.

I am one of those lonely souls that has competing virtues. That is, when I'm not too busy fending off my many victorious vices. 

When I have to choose between two evils, I always try to pick the one I haven't tried before. 

(Mae West)

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Super Sunday Politicing

The boy and I set up the tent in the living room again. Fun times around the homestead. We arranged it so that we could watch a show while lying on a big floor pillow together - The Incredibles, one of our recurring favorites. I may have even drifted off before the official bedtime moment happened. I remember fighting my way out of the tent and turning off the computer to go to my own bed at some point. The boy still sleeps there now in the living room. I almost couldn't grind coffee because of his proximity, but of course life must percolate onwards. 

I was browsing social media and I saw a post by an old friend. The subject was Stevie Wonder's string of albums from the 70s and the music on them. The sentence that leaped out at me, concerning his songs, was: They engage melancholy without being defeated by sadness; they engage anger without being defeated by despair. Yes, that is precisely what is so good about those albums. There are few artists whose religion I'll endure for the sake of the music, and not even the mighty Prince was able to get me to overlook all of his blatant proselytizing from the stage. But when Stevie Wonder sings about looking to God, I accept it, perhaps in part because he uses the word look in its purely metaphorical sense.

Ok, a cheap Stevie Wonder being blind joke to get out of that paragraph. Big deal. I didn't have any more to say about it. I love Stevie so much that I will even include Where I'm Coming From, Secret Life of Plants, and Hotter Than July in his "classic period," though admittedly as the weakest entires in the category. I don't know what happened after that 6 minutes of "I just called to say I love you" disaster. The only chorus less painful than that is Lionel Richie's "Easy Like Sunday Morning."

It's as if Wonder somehow became a Christian by the early 80s, even though he had been professing it all along. Something went terribly wrong, I started to believe his message, which rendered it unlistenable. It seems to have possibly been as simple as him transitioning from analog to digital synthesizers. I don't want to believe that's it, but that was at least a part of it. Anyone who can categorize his 80s music as having anything at all to do with his 70s music has powers of perception that escape me entirely. He became Phil Collins even before Phil Collins did.


Speaking of categories, a friend recently demonstrated to me in online discourse that racism can not be proven, particularly that of Trump. It is all alleged, the un-evidenced putative, the claims lack proof and therefore merit. All that is required to disprove racism is to deny its existence.

You can imagine my surprise to find that something as obvious and ubiquitous as racism doesn't actually exist, unless you yourself believe it to, and then it exists exclusively in your mind. It is only a pernicious solipsism. You create it by believing that it's there. You are to blame for America's racism, you have willed it into existence by noticing it.

Well no, that's not what he said, but he did demonstrate that a person can advance racially denigrating positions without having to sully themselves with actually being labeled a racist. Apparently there is no such thing as sufficient evidence for racism. Vindication requires only denial.

Alternately, to label a 17 year old unarmed black boy that was killed as a thug is quite easy. You just look at images of him, shake your head, speak, be white, and it magically happens: thuggery.

He also claims to be incensed about Colin Kaepernick's kneeling protest because it hurts young people by robbing them of hope. For him, the message from a peaceful protest is: things can't possibly get any better, and what a dangerous message that is, one presumably meant for fledgling thugs. Protesting police violence is a virtual thug factory.

Why, I remember a day when thugs were more quiet about violence. 

I'd like to see him to tell the #MeToo women to be more quiet about violence against them. Because, you know... all that speaking your truth peacefully does is to rob young people of hope.

Be thankful ladies, things aren't nearly as bad as they used to be. 

We live in crazy times. There are big, strong arguments for common sense. So you know that intellectual constipation will follow, then there will be the intellectual purge.

I don't know. I have enjoyed arguing with this particular friend because he does a fair job at poking holes in many liberal myths, so it's useful to have him around. But I can't help but feel that a series of manufactured justifications for using consistently prejudicial reasoning should be enough to unravel itself among thinking people. It seems that those days are ending. We are entering the phase of the new common sensical, where the world actually does appear flat if you just walk outside and have a look around. Everything is an appeal to the obvious.

You tell me, is the earth flat where you are? 'Cause it's sure as fuck flat over here. Why is it only ever round in pictures?

Who knows, maybe he's like me and he'll cling to a position just to see how far he can take it. I do that all of the time so I can't exactly fault others for it. I suspect he does secretly acknowledge that Trump harbors racist views. I just don't think he disagrees with those views very much. So he's demonstrating that Trump is innocent until there is self-admission of guilt. The perfect judicial scenario for whiteness; denial is neat and clean. Innocent until proven even more innocent.

I mean, there are shithole nations, aren't there?

How effective was that sentence by Trump? You can't tell me that Trump isn't really good at what he does: calculated bigotry. You just refer to the nations that liberals have said are too brutal for people to return to as shitholes and by doing so deftly undermining the claims, by easily pointing to the reaction to ugliness as being the only real problem. And that's it, really, it's masterful in a sense. The last two years have rendered the left incapable of either agreeing or disagreeing as to even what the problems are. The right seems perfectly content with Trump restoring the greatness of this great nation greatly, saving it from the ilk of liberalism, the nasty shackles of inclusive otherness, or other uncomfortable phrases.

Go back to Mexico! 

Sound familiar? Go back to anywhere!

There must be some out there that are just beginning to come to terms with the unpleasant fact that the reason they hate Mexicans is in part because they didn't even have the dignity to be our slaves. It must bother the American mind to have to find a reason other than slavery to think less of others, but then to be too lazy to do the research. I mean, where would I even start? I can't read Mexican.

Best just to rely on gut instinct with such delicate matters of the heart.


My prediction: Dems will do pretty well in 2018, but will lose the presidential election in 2020. The economy alone, if it holds, will carry the previously undecided. Then, much like Obama's second term victory, in reverse, the right will be able to make the claim that, you can't claim it was based on race this time...

There are plenty of people who will grow tired of the immigration argument. The repubs will equate prosperity with the deportation of immigrants rather than the reckless repeal of regulation. It will all be an easy enough argument to sell. The GOP will hammer on about it just enough to publicly rattle the dems before the election, like the North Carolina transgender bathroom argument. What an incredibly well-timed conversation to hit the national stage. Purely coincidental, it seems.

The left never seems to notice that an election is coming, even though it's all they can post on Facebook about. There is no divisive voting issue they won't try to tackle in the month leading up to an election. They really go for it, like a fresh green smoothie, to make sure that any undecided voters will have no question about which issues matter most to them. My guess is that in October of 2020 we'll be having a heated national discussion on whether or not children being deported should have a say in the route the ICE bus driver takes to get them to the border safely.

The GOP will solve the issue by funding new express train lines.

The repubs haven't forgotten that winning the election is what makes you right. Silly dems think it has something to do with running a campaign as if it's a daytime talkshow where the subject is always the ever deepening importance of the new suburban morality.

I know I've said that I'll leave politics alone, but it's what middle aged men do. They know that it's a very weak mechanism for social change, but also somehow seemingly the most important one.


Who knows, the best thing I've seen all morning is a baby sucking on her mommy's naked yoga titty. If you crave a glimpse into the angry and confused hearts of darkness then just read the comments. There are few things that the open internet can do better than raise other people's children for them. It's where humanity really shines. Women are nothing if not ruthless when it comes to the hatred of other's mothering. Apparently there are only a million versions of the single right way to do something. If it were up to online commenters then we would have had something like Sharia law a long time ago. America seems almost ready for the full, swift force of mob democracy.


Just keep clicking the Load More Comments link like I do.

The rewards of this life seem nearly endless, and the eye never tires of a nice, pretty titty.

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Parts of This

A long walk up into the hills - any subject and predicate that have some appeal. That's what is needed, some time away from people, from others. Nearing fifty is an odd place and age to be. I still have just enough desire to contend points, but am gripped with the increasing futility of it all. Before the grace of void, there go I. A fool and his time are soon startled. 

My mind is cluttered with too much nonsense. Always. I barely remember the analog world - reading and listening to records, waiting around the house for the phone to ring, the one that carried an actual electrical charge. 

I remember one time at mine and my girlfriend's house - Honey - her father came over. He was retired from AT&T and we were looking at the phone lines and he told me to hold one of the lines. I knew that I was being duped, but was curious enough. After a few seconds I was given a little shock, one which caused me to jump, startled. He laughed. I asked if that was because a call was coming through. He explained that the line has periodic charges sent down it as part of how it functions, that an actual phone call would have been an even greater shock. 

Afterwards, I walked around thinking of those intermittent charges running back and forth all over, under the ground, anywhere from half to almost the speed of light, in the lines hung above, into the houses, along the streets, everywhere there were bursts of power moving. The idea of electromagnetic waves moving everywhere appealed to me for years, periodic bursts of power moving along its conductive path, electrons trailing far behind, moving through those same lines, somehow being left behind in the current, separated even from the pattern of information being carried, also somehow being the only thing that can be felt by human hands. 

So, a long walk up into the hills; some subject, some predicate. 

Nothing more. Nothing shocking. 

Maybe a clause, a poetic phrase, some last desperate attempt at a modifier.

A run-on string of maybes.

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One Week Down

I've determined the source of some of my unhappiness: I wake up and read too many hot-button articles, on topics which have very little bearing on me, then I argue with nincompoops on social media. It's sad and demented, but I do it anyway and I don't know quite know why. 

I guess I'm, um, happy. 

Then, to make matters worse, I'll arrive here and respond to some of the articles I've read - on feminism, for example - and I'll try to rebut the article without stating their premise or doing any justice to their concerns. It is bad form. Politics and social issues have worn me out and I have too little space left inside to appreciate some of the things that I used to. 

I realized all of this while lying on the couch last night, unable to read a collection of essays by Capote, because I kept checking my phone. Engagement in cheap polemics was somehow better than mild enrichment through reading. That can't be right. It's not supposed to be that way.

Well, now that I know the shape of my vexations it is only a matter of waiting for them to emerge from the cave in which they dwell to forever vanquish the dragons of my mind.

We'll see how that goes. 

I have a whole weekend with Rhys, starting sometime after my bike ride this afternoon then stretching into Monday morning. There will be a Super Bowl in there, and the Eagles will need to win it.

I am one week closer now to my seven week sabbatical. If a single week goes by so quickly while I am working then I fear how time will cheat me once it impatiently arrives where I am waiting, probably napping, expecting something big to begin.

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