The best moments

The boy has grown tired of me taking his picture unless we're somehow actively engaged in doing something in which he feels he can demonstrate some thing, or to put on some sort of a show, like jumping into water where I wait underneath the surface, hoping to click the shutter release at the correct moment. Or rather, the best moment. 

Those two sentences should be my entire post for the day. Those who know me also know better than that. I have neither learned nor practiced the art of silence much. I have never been the strong silent type, but rather the dangerous and talkative sort. Meaning, if I talk enough then eventually I will bring trouble upon myself.

Just a few nights ago I was at a party and somehow brought up immigration. It ended poorly, with somebody scolding me for bringing up politics at someone else's house, which may be true enough though I was not the one uttering offenses, I hope. Mostly I just listened and acknowledged our shared and inevitable doom. Apparently if you mention anything political then you become responsible for all of the unintentionally revealed ugliness of others. I said so little, really, by comparison. 

I learned my lesson, again. Don't encourage people to tell you what they think, or give them a chance to prove that they don't. Just let them live in peace with their own grotesque set of preferences. Nothing that you're going to say is going to help anyway. I'm talking to myself there, again. Maybe others are very understanding and say thoughtful things that help people become better humans. I must be the other guy. I look at most people as if they are horrors of humanity. Most of the time I'm not wrong, or not entirely. 

If you want to know if a person has taste then take note of what they eat. Or rather, what they consume, then produce. 

After that, it's all so very easy. 

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Watching great white shark videos with a six year old boy

The skies here in the east are red again. There are more fires, somewhere in the northern distance, names of places I've never heard of before now burning. When I was a child I saw a show about burn victims. Few things terrified me more afterwards than being disfigured by flames. Those poor souls who would never return to their unaltered somatic selves. 

A friend self-ended on Friday. The news has kept me from sleeping well for two nights now. It doesn't take much for sleeplessness to be the result of my psyche, though to lie awake in the dark and ponder the end of one's own existence, brought about by one's own choice, is plenty enough. I spoke briefly with an old friend about it and she agreed that suicide is always lurking everywhere. Nobody knows, though this one did not arrive as a surprise. He had struggled with depression and had made verbal overtures to the act many times in the past. Still, nothing could be done. What is there to say when a person no longer wishes to be. Get all of your goodbyes in early, before the rush.

My body and mind subject me to much unpleasantness when I get less than three or four hours of sleep each night. Topics which might normally only be passing thoughts stretch out before me and within me, their elasticity menacing time. The rising red dawn a beautiful curse. 

Ok, I had meant to write more and on different subjects but now the boy is awake and insists upon his narrative of the morning. I pointed out the color of the skies to him and right away realized that perhaps this was a mistake, sending possible tremors through his psyche for reasons unknown to either of us.

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HELO is other people

Perhaps I have this site figured out. I should write a single paragraph when the mood takes me, but no more, never any politics - though, you can say what you will about Hillary, I'm pretty sure that she would not have started a war with Canada - and no more arguing with online phantoms either, the straw men and women of the apocalypse. I will leave the egregiously categorical assumptions of 3rd rate or wave feminism to their own. Why battle like for like. I'll just make observations about the world that can I see, far from the computer and television screens. The internet seemed like such a promising thing only twenty years ago. Now it merely resembles the television, except that everybody has their own network suited to their shared preferences and sensibilities, and the advertisements are interactive rather than requiring any specific consumer action. Soon enough the government will pass a law that will allow advertisers to pull money from your bank account if they can detect that your eyes lingered on their ad long enough. It will be a form of consensual purchasing. Why not charge people for looking at things? It just makes good American sense. Museums do it, every sport does it, television does it, the internet does it, why not advertisers? Let's tear down the pay walls and institute pay retina-scanners. You'll have to go to court to argue that your gaze was inadvertent or accidental. You'll need to prove that your eyes sometimes look at thing unintentionally. Oh, I just said no more of that. Did I? Perhaps my cynical view of the world is not a response to anything specific. How is one to possibly know in these matters? We live within the miasmic whirlpool of response. Our minds are made that way. I should charge people to provide them with "a peaceful internet experience, with home installation included." I'll just swing by and unplug their router for them and collect the cash. Persistent stimuli is why I never question that anybody drinks or drugs themselves stupid. I only question how some people don't. I would have started a new paragraph by now, under what might be called normal circumstances, where I can write to my heart's content, or until my mind sickens me witless. We are, each of us, lone floating internets of sorts, walking globes of interconnected networks struggling to agree on a communication protocol with which to share something, anything. Each, an ACK to every HELO. EOD. 

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Confidences

(CS)

The world is filled with cliches and love. It all gets to be so much. I wish to crawl inside of myself, if only to avoid the poorly framed sentiment of others. Sometimes I do. There are still some who would try to make me feel guilty for lying in bed all day, watching old films, napping as needed, rewinding the narrative to where I drifted off, only to drift off again, enjoying the leisureliness of time that the childless might call boredom in their many endless hours of luxury.

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Happy 6.5

Today is the boy's birthday, sort of. It's the day of his birthday party. We agreed to give him a summer celebration this year because his birthday is on January 7th. The joyful trappings of being the only child of an only child. His mom, I mean. She is one of many only children in my life - one of my close friends, my mother, my son. I have often thought of myself as an only child, mostly because I thought family was something to be escaped, and at times it was, and I did. 

I have not always held the healthiest of opinions concerning some things. 

Anyway, too late to worry about most of that now. We must make a trip to the store for last-minute needs. Yesterday there was an afternoon visit to Costco. I have been feeling ill for a few days, even took a day and a half off from work this week, a rarity for me. Today I must spend energy wisely and throughout the day. It will be the first day above 90 degrees this year. I'm not quite sure which camera to bring.

The party is already a hit. We scheduled it to coincide with his graduating of Kindergarten and invited his many young friends, so the RSVPs have been simply rolling in. He's a popular and gregarious kid. My mother, the only child, used to say that I was that way also when I was young. Something changed. 

Something changed. 

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Emails Without A Home

(CS)

I am envious of the image. He told me only the barest details on how it was created. There is no point in relaying those here. It is a glass dry plate. The birdbath I am familiar with, having seen it in his yard now for many years. I once did some landscaping, mostly weeding, for him when I needed money or needed to get away. I forget now. I flew down from New York and spent the days weeding flower beds, drinking whiskey in the evenings. 

A photograph like this takes on some metaphysical dimensions once the mind begins to come to terms with it. It is the mystic in us which causes us to ascribe those qualities to the facts of photography, I believe. It is an art form that works along like the mind. Better in some ways, reminiscent of the sense of memory in others. As if the mind could produce an image and remain focused on it in stillness, the way the manifest mind can not allow. There is a reduction of scope with images. This makes contending with them sometimes easier than it can be when done internally. The inner world is difficult without end. We hold so much there. So many unhunted whales of white, each ephemeral and growing. 

Our little postcards of sentiment seek chutes, waterfalls, pathways, and hooks to the outside world where they might connect or collide with the actual. Escapes that make much sense in the moment, the way in which music seems to reach where things tangible can not.

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"As one great furnace flamed"

I've never had such contradictory feelings about expressing myself before. I used to take a determined pride in it, knowing that it was right, no matter if there were wrongs generously mixed in. Taking a break from writing here has caused me to realize (more so than before) that writing contains a deeply therapeutic component. It can, I should say. That recognition felt has caused me to not want it to be about that, though. With everything there emerges some new ambivalence with which to tussle. I'm not sure if I can be the one to stop it. It's as if I'm past the zenith of an acid trip and I find myself babbling a series of confused truths, but can not find a way within myself to stop, to shut off the stream of consciousness.  To silence the newly freed hobgoblins. 

My head has been filled with noisy garbage since I stopped writing. All of the nonsense that piles itself up in the washrooms of my mind normally finds its way out here, for good or ill. My bike rides have been constipated realizations that I depend on being able to arrange the world in such a way that my response to it will seem superior to its own predicament. At its best it's a persuasive trick of rhetorical writing. But I know it's what I'm doing, so it doesn't have much power over me. After I've won the arguments in my head I know that I am no better for it.

At its worst it is a middle-aged man railing against the perceived faults of the present, my heart filling with fears of and for the future. So much for therapy. 

I miss documenting the mundane occurrences of my life, though. Without some sense of reflection on my own experience then all of life blends together and becomes dull, even rote. Living life isn't dull, reflecting upon it from a distance makes it seem so. Everything melds together to become less than tale-worthy. Writing in the present is an attempt to control the past. Photography, an attempt to preserve its specific form. My current life is rich with experience, though it is oftenest of the domestic kind - comical in its ubiquity. There are times that playing with my son in a pool or at the park can seem like a miracle of grace and beauty, honey dropping from the heavens, though viewed from a distance it might only seem to be a mildly pleasant mirage. There is little difference between flying a kite and seeing a kite flying.

I've stopped posting these to Facebook. That was a part of my problem, I believe. Whether you want it to, or believe it to be, it is just a lame seeking of validation. My best pieces are ignored, or so I felt. The pieces that received the most encouragement were when I was expressing the dullest and most pedestrian thoughts.


I began reading two new books this weekend. The first, a collection of short stories by Gerald Murnane. I should maybe not reveal this here, because what I thought of most when reading this story was that I wished to try and imitate his style. I had not yet finished reading the first story in the collection when I ordered a copy of the book for CS. Such was my strong, and perhaps premature, impression of what the writer was doing. I felt the way that one does when they discover something new and of great quality - an intellectual excitement, a secret that requires some effort to share.

I remember feeling similarly about Henry Miller long ago, when I first read Tropic of Cancer, so there will always be some inherent limitation to feelings.

There are people in my life that can not stand it when I suggest that feelings are not the most important and vital part of being a human. Some claim that it is the only thing that matters. I offer to leave them alone with a child for a year and see if they still feel that feelings are the dominant attribute of happy humanity, and if so, why do we all try to correct the presumably errant feelings of others. There is no end to the mysticism of emotion.

The other book was Snow Country by Kawabata. It is a novel told in the style of a haiku, through the contrasting of images and events. It is one of those books that can be read a single page at a time, over long periods, as an invitation to a recurring dream. Events are shrouded in apparitions of time, they can not be touched. There is a sensation when reading the book that the author is telling you one of your own forgotten dreams.

It's what I do now - try to read good books. Life is short, there is so much of it that has already faded. Images that become overexposed by time, an attic of disinterested ghosts.


My life has become moderate through circumstance only. It feels sustainable now, where it used to stumble with an passionately marked uncertainty. People worried about my instability but did little to encourage stability. Excesses of all kinds were encouraged until they became unending folly. It is a dangerous place to be for one who never wanted to be anything more than the best class clown that he could be. They do not offer degrees in advanced clownism. The job market eschews the independently irreverent, no matter what they may claim. People expect you to be a very good dad first, a funny dad third or later in the list, if at all. People will suffer an entertaining and impudent youth, though they become vague when ever pressed to define the moment at which such youth should end.

Everybody seems to have children for the wrong reasons, if they have any at all. Filled with a lifetime of irrational expectations, for themselves and of their progeny, they stumble towards an imaginary horizon, far beyond the goal posts where no scores are ever tabulated, none recorded. The answer to the question of why we do it is equal in emptiness to why others do not. 

Why is it so difficult to assemble those things that really matter in life and to dwell among them only? I am referring to certain landscapes, persons, beasts, books, rooms, meteorological conditions, fruits. 

- James Salter

That comes to all; but torture without end
Still urges, and a fiery deluge, fed
With ever-burning sulphur unconsumed:
Such place eternal justice had prepared
For those rebellious, here their prison ordained
In utter darkness, and their portion set
As far removed from God and light of heaven
As from the center thrice to th'utmost pole.

- Milton, Paradise Lost

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The tunnel at the end of the light

(unknown artist, but not unloved)

Yes, of course, I am juvenile. The temptation to make masturbation jokes when the film's subject in incest must be too great for me. Going to see Chinatown on Monday night were two hours and ten minutes of cinematic paradise for an old aging film lover like myself. There is nothing quite like orchestrated light bouncing off the silver screen. Rachel and I discussed a drive-in movie theater project. We are currently seeking investors. 

I have started writing emails again. Since this site was predicated on the idea that people don't write, read, or bother responding to emails anymore, I have been writing them again. It's been nice and I have connected with a few old friends in different ways. 

My one continuing email correspondent - the Scottish anarchist from the Netherlands - has not had one written by me yet, so maybe I should avoid advertising my failures in that regard here, but what the fuck... as with most all things I am always exaggerating. I've only written a few emails, mostly in response to a birthday invite I sent out for Florida in November. I'll be turning 50, so I sent out a save-the-date. 

My birthday is in October but there were scheduling conflicts with one invitee who will probably end up not being an attendee. It's the way of things - the most difficult people at the onset of any event's planning are most often the ones who do not attend. I am kidding. She is a very crazy woman, yes, but nothing if not genuine in her commitments. 

People are always fictionalizing people, writers even more so. People have an unhealthy obsession with the idea of objective reality. Few people have disrupted this notion as much as Trump, for good or ill. He is not only impervious to the idea of objective truth, he also seems insusceptible to his own impressions of sustained personal subjectivity.  

So, if you want an email then write me one. I'll write back. I have put some creative effort into a few of them. Writing for individuals is different. It's not nearly as easy to make jack-off jokes towards the subject of incest. It requires intense and uninvited use of personal resources, and the requirement that the reader can not opt to escape.

No, I can of course write about other uncomfortable subjects, also. Just give me an idea of what bothers you most deeply and I'll give it some thought. 

(The mighty John Huston, and Jack)

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Chinatown

(Jack and Faye)

There was a screening of it last night, here in Sonoma, at the historic Sebastiani theater. I was there of course, with buttons and bells on. Or rather, with wine and roses. The film is an absolute miracle - everyone deserves one of those from time to time - each scene more fascinating and beautiful than the last, or fraught and terrible, each turn of phrase more clever than the one that preceded it, each witticism delivered as if conversations of that kind just occur naturally, and in perpetuity. 

I had forgotten that this was the film where I stole the line, as little as possible, when Nicholson's character was asked what he did in Chinatown. I have been using it as a rebuff to the question, What do you do for a living? for several years now.

Now, I suspect I know what you're likely thinking: but Polanski is a celebrated child rapist... Harsh words which are technically true - he is celebrated and the charges are still pending. He famously fled the country when it was discovered that the judge secretly planned to not honor the plea deal to which he had previously agreed. He was going to sentence Polanski to 50 years in prison. Had he not fled the country the case might have been thrown out because of this lapse in judicious behavior. Some have demanded that this be done in absentia, on Polanski's behalf, though I do not believe such a thing is allowed when the defendant has fled from the grip of justice.

Some of the film-watching mob have insisted upon a renewed hatred of the filmmaker, recently succeeding in having him expelled from the Academy of Motion Pictures. The esteemed Academy's ethical concerns seem to have caught up with them somewhat since they awarded him with Best Director about a decade and a half ago, for The Pianist.

The law does not offer many smiles for the fugitive. It also does not allow minors to grant sexual consent. I was at the screening partially to express my objections. I tried to masturbate at one point, in protest, though I was afraid that my actions might somehow be misinterpreted. When you resort to onanism as a form of objection it is all too easily misunderstood by the plebs, patricians, poets, and police alike. Or, that has been my experience with the many pleasures of such public protest. I was simply trying to have my demands met. 

I am not here to moralize today, least of all with jokes about self-stimulation of genitals. It should also be clear to all by now that I am no legal scholar. My knowledge of criminal law has mostly arrived ex post facto, as they say in the faraway Latin lands. Rome, they say that there, I think. All sentences eventually lead to Rome, or consulerent.

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"Everything I've Ever Wanted"

(Pic by Rhys)

I wanted to post a recent picture of myself - taken by my son - so that I will not disappear soon and forever from this universe.

I look happy. Somehow, I've accomplished this simple antithetical lifelong fact with a nose that might make others so deeply unsatisfied. 

Too large for my face; too small to last.

And it goes so slowly on

Everything I've ever wanted

Tell me what's wrong?

"There goes another novelty"

(self-corporate, Balzac)

A strange thing happened when I stopped posting here. Well, I suppose it is not that strange, or perhaps not at all: I also stopped scanning film or dealing with most of my digital images. There are three packages from Photoworks in SF waiting to be scanned. They sit on my kitchen table, untouched, waiting for me to set aside some time to deal with them. I am usually so eager to see the images, to get them scanned, to share them here and elsewhere, hoping that Paris Hilton will one day like me, or one of those Kardashcam women, the ones with those big, round juicy butts. 

Over the last two weeks there were things that had occurred to me, sensations that I wished to attempt to relay here. They are all gone now. The desire to go back to sleep is all that remains. I won't, but I'll want to and wish to and dream towards, as the day gets up and gallops away.

I lost more than just the daily writing. It is apparently wrapped up with my interest in photography. My vanity requires at least two art forms to be adequately scaffolded, in preparation for the eventual hanging. 

I once became involved in a conversation/argument in which I maintained that all art was self-involved. I stepped back my argument a bit, but I was never entirely sure if I was wrong. Most all contemporary or modern art that I have experienced deeply involves the self, otherwise it would not exist. None of it is for all, but rather only for others.

Yes, I am living in a charmed little bubble, one in which I am contented and pleasantly in love with a woman that I have loved secretly or openly for decades. I suppose that the desire, or need, to share exists even within contentedness. It can be therapeutic to write; perhaps it only seems that way. It does something to me, to interact with myself verbally, to take some pleasure in it and yet see more clearly the shape and magnitude of my own inner obstacles. I make them seem clear only so that I might better ridicule them, as if that helps me transcend their power over me. 

Do not believe that I believe everything that I pretend to believe, either. What sort of monster do you think I am. It is only partial reaction to the polemics of the social media sphere. The love of argument meets departure from fact. 

I was curious how my life would be different without daily writing and I'm not sure that it is. Or, not very much - I had more free time in the mornings, I was less occupied with other things, was able maybe to focus more on work before the boy wakes up, or to just lie in bed and watch tv in relative peace and seclusion. Though, I stopped framing the world. Or, at least insomuch as I do so for the purpose of relaying things here. All for a personal blog - nearly ten years of my life. Maybe I have an unhealthy mind, or one that relies on a nearly perpetual outpouring of noise. Of course I am enamored with myself. It is what nearly everybody suggests you should do, until you do. 

Love My Way, and  all of that. 

They just want to steal us all, 

and take us all apart, 

but not in... 

I follow where my blinds go. 

That song, and those remembered lyrics, made me think of this:

The details of my life are quite inconsequential. 

I don't know. I look around me and I see varying degrees of neuroses everywhere. People either learn to live with it or they struggle and scrape and demand towards others. Help is ever elsewhere, always on the way, never arriving. 

I do not wish to suggest that love completes me, but my happiness over the last year has ruined my ability to write well, or in a way that satisfies me. I'm not sure if my best writing is what I like the most. Nobody should discuss their own creations. It is vain and wrong for the reader, eventually, if not sooner. 

People seem to spend a fair bit of their emotional and intellectual energy just trying to be and feel and seem okay. Some insist they are, others act surprised that you are not but, you know... those ladies doth protest too much, methinks. 

Love is satisfying. Why must it annihilate every dissatisfaction it finds?

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The trouble with ease

The problem of me not wanting to write recently isn't CS, nor is it my job, nor time away from my job, nor returning to it, nor any other reason I may have cited in my last post. The problem is that I've become reliably happy. I struggle with feeling pleasure from time to time, though that alone doesn't make me unhappy, usually. Pleasure and happiness are not nearly as related as I had believed them to be. They are connected - that seems apparent - but not dependent upon one another, or not entirely so. Feelings become their own dominion as they age and declare whatever distance from other sensations.

It seems; it feels. 

I can endure almost any emotion or sensation for a while, about thirty days or so, maybe sixty. After that, I get bored, then sometimes subsequently dangerous. This is the first time that I remember being consistently contented in decades, which is of course unforgivably boring, lacking any vestige of redeeming vice. 

My life has flattened considerably; apparently it was what was needed. I'm not sure if I've tried to aggravate the circumstances of my own life, or if some inner mechanism - a gear with a broken tooth or two - has caused me to live life the way that I have. Nothing runs smoothly for very long. I've thrived on inconsistencies, all the while bemoaning the chaos in smirks. One thing I've never been expected to endure, nor prepared for, were moments of extended satisfaction or contentment. Now I'm trapped.  

It would be easy to blame Rachel - I have before - but that hasn't brought me any cheer. Who knows what either of us had hoped for in that regard. Our recriminations failed, also. She has been a significant part of both my happiness and its nemesis, of course, but she can not alone account for any of my feelings in totality. Imagine if anyone tried to make her answer for me and the tempestuous whimsy that has marked the last twenty of my years. That would be absurd. 

I've documented my life in detail here with reasonably understandable inaccuracies. This started when she and I were newly married, through our move to Sonoma, the birth and early life of Rhys, our divorce was in there, the boy's growing up, our reconciliation, and now it has become a family vacation travelogue. Perhaps it is a good time to stop. What more can be said now, or anymore. 

I'm not sure what good it has done me. It has functioned in part as a tool for self-analysis, though I'm not sure that I hit any of my improvement benchmarks, or if there ever were any. I outgrew some of my licentiousness, and a handful of my more favored sins. I watched in horror as I grew up, like a newborn taking its first wobbly steps across the mind. It was fun. I've tried to remember to laugh at myself. I hope that is part of what I've done. If not, it's what I meant to do. I remember giggling along many mornings.

People worry about social media platforms having betrayed their privacy. Look at what I have willingly done to mine, here and elsewhere.  

The truth shall make you free, from what I wonder - the creditors or the credit, the debtors or the debt?

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An opposing concord

Not sure what happened, but I don't have much energy to write here any more. Nothing to say and no joy in saying things that don't matter, even to me. It could be because CS has stopped writing. Perhaps waking each day and reading his post and writing my own had created a habit or ritual that now seems cracked, in need or repair or a discarding. 

Or, perhaps it was returning to work. 

Possibly a touch of recurring anhedonia, the likeliest of causes. I have struggled deriving any pleasure lately, more than a week now. Always dangerous periods to navigate. Out of habit I often blast my senses with treacherous intoxicants, trying to remind myself that I am alive, or to obscure the loss of sensation. To test it, to push it into a familiar corner and then bully it.

Perhaps I need a sabbatical from this now, from trying to organize the world around groups of words. As if.

I spoke yesterday with an old friend, he reminded me that I've been suicidal. What can one say about such things. I'm still here and no longer feel that way, though also know that those feelings are never very far off, never entirely so. Thoughts of my own childhood have been stirring some sadness within me lately. Beauty is loss, youth doubly so. 

Mentions invoke and invite the common hex of a sullen mind. Of the curses to endure, a memory of having once been funny strikes at the bittersweet bell the loudest, most boldly. Much of life now leaves only aftertaste. Doubly so. 

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"Tough Titties"

(My Source of Sleep Deprivation)

Sometimes having a child sucks. Love does not compensate for a lost night of sleep. Most love is supplementary, it doesn't replace the satisfaction of basic needs, like sleep.

The boy came into my room last night after I put him to sleep. I fell asleep in his room for a little while, made it to my room at an unknown hour, then was awakened by the boy around midnight. That was all the sleep I was to get for the night. Maybe three hours. Kids - they're not exactly roommates, are they?

So, I finished binge watching Wild Wild Country, a new-ish documentary on Netflix about the Bhagwan Rajneesh and his crazy crew. It's worth watching.

I saw no footage of children on the compound in Oregon, so maybe they slept happily there. They frowned on the basic family structure and instead opted for a form of free love that sometimes left bruises and welts on the flesh of the believers - on this point I thought they were maybe onto something purposeful - but the filmmakers didn't address the aspect of family life on the farm very much. I saw no kids in the archival footage. Had a handful of children died from a mass suicide or government takeover then it would have been all that we would ever heard about. 

This cult stared down the state of Oregon and practically begged them to try a hostile overtaking of the ranch, which I thought was pretty fucking righteous but the whole thing fizzled out with Osho on the run in a Lear jet. Nabbed in Charlotte, turned over to the feds for voter fraud or something equally absurd, but it was enough to boot him back to India. 

If you'd like a dose of his spiritual wisdom then he is speaking at the beginning of this track - one of my favorites from the early days of what regrettably came to be known as progressive house, a dirty word in what used to be my world. Or, a great word by the true believers of its message of celestial perfection attainable here on earth, in a nightclub. 

I vaguely remember all this happening when I was a kid, but coming out of the 70s when passenger planes were being hijacked every other day and cults were popping up like pimples, it was not a tremendous blip on the radar of puberty. Watching the doc last night made me want to participate more fully in a sex cult, though. The leader's secretary seemed like a freak. Sheela. A real firecracker - a wire-tapping, bio-terror having, braless loving, cult organizing, always dressed in red, sexual freak. My kind of chick - a dynamo that chooses to live life on the edge, of prison. One got the feeling that something was definitely about to happen next.

Oh, my beloved Sheela, I would so cult with you...

If the internet were a more perfect place then we'd be able to ask Squeaky Fromme what she thinks of the Rajneeshees and their brand of cult-sex-violence, maybe find out of they're just a bunch of fucking lucky amateurs or not. When you are left with unanswerable questions best to rely on the self-made experts of enigma. What would little Squeaky do.

(Sheela, my secret crush)

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The First and Last Lines

All I have are vacation photos right now. Hate me, if you must. 

I had hoped that by now someone else's family would hire me to be their personal family photographer. All that I have done is build out my portfolio for such a position. Yet no offers have arrived. 

The first and last lines of any post here are often the most difficult. I started today with, Don't tell anybody, but every now and then I like to have a drug problem. 

Mom's out of town, so I thought that some might take such a statement too literally. It stemmed from a playlist I'm listening to made by a friend, all downtempo stuff, like 154 hours of it or something. 

Well, it all just had me thinking about seizing the day, or something, I guess.

I also tried: I don't think the love of money is the root of all evil. Masturbation is also in there. 

And: Trump supporters wake to find America not always first.

I guess that's what Facebook is for now. People seem angry about something that should have never even surprised them. They believe their privacy has been violated. Had they created some bullshit alter-ego for use with Facebook or any other social media platform then they wouldn't be in this problem. Most people's biggest mistake is in trying to be right rather than being absurd. Few things will make you seem absurd more quickly than trying to be right online. Even trying to live within a quanta of truth is preposterous. But they never seem to make the leap and connect their behavior with anything other then the presumed righteousness of personal candor. 

Now they feel betrayed. If Facebook had only given us some sort of sign what their intentions were. Some little hint embedded in their ever changing privacy policies. 

If I were a fledgling dictator then I would use the list of compromised Facebook accounts to purge voter registration lists, but that's just me. As dictator it wouldn't matter very much, it would be more of a symbolic gesture, for my people. 

Oh yeah, my account was compromised. I received a notice from FB letting me know that one of my friends used a game that gave away all of my vitals. You can imagine my shock and horror when I realized that the below picture was now going to have to be a part of my public persona. How will I explain this to my son, I wondered. 

It was in the 90s, son. No, not the nineteen-nineties, it was around 90 degrees or more in the shade, but there wasn't much of that to go around. In my day we used to have to walk across the playa. Uphill, in all directions, etc. 

But daddy, why is that desert man-queen wearing mascara?

Because it makes him feel pretty, I guess, son. 

It's true. I have no idea how I'll explain things like "Pat" to my son. I'll confidently mumble my way through something about body image, genetic variations, and the important role of personal choice. 

The truth is in there somewhere. I'm certain of it.

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It was a low-light accident

Reminds me of much modern art I grew to revere, though mostly only after reading, as an adult.

I staged the image, left the shutter open too long without that explicit intention. Having her stand in the light created the circumstance that created the image. Circumstances often do, though this time maybe more so. 

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An attack on our country

Half of the country doesn't want to be wrong, the other half correctly insists on always having been right. Everybody ends up with a piece of the pie - half for the Hatfields, the other half goes to the McCoys. 

Or, maybe the deep state meets deep pockets. Who knows. 

I want to see that fucker brought down mostly for my interest in Shakespeare. I missed out on King Nixon, so this is my time. Every generation gets their villain at the top. I can't decide if he's a Lady Macbeth, a Claudius, or a Richard III. Maybe two little tiny handfuls of each, with an unhealthy touch of King Lear thrown in to keep things surprising and saucy. 

He might be a Titus Andronicus in a month or two.

I tried to stop writing about politics - or more, specifically: Don T. - but this is just getting too fucking good to ignore. Over 100 criminal charges already filed in the independent investigation. Where there's smoke there's usually some barbecue. Both sides seem to be eating this shit up with lots of napkins - one with relish, the other with the sweet taste of disgust. 

He'll get what he wants one way or another: to go down in history.

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The decade of retrograde

Why does the image of someone holding their arms out in a crucifix position, especially when inverted, cause me unsettled feelings. I like it, and even think it's beautiful in its own way, but it bothers me. I have tried to be a good atheist. I swear it, but something lingers in the orbital pneuma, a reverence for death perhaps or sacrifice. Reverence or fascination; I don't know. Perhaps it is that the image is my son.

Maybe I spent too much time playing with Ouija boards when I was enduring puberty. Who knows.  There was some retrograde going back there for a decade or two. Mercury, etc.


I was thinking about something I said, I mean wrote, here a few days ago concerning the amicably suggestive nature of psychics. It occurred to me that everybody wants to believe that their lives have consequence. People argue one another to try to establish it, others fret the desperate sense that there is none. But a psychic lets you feel the idea of consequence for your own life, then imbues it with some connection to the universe. Who doesn't like a bit of that?

I have tried to be a good atheist. That made me smile.

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Arbeit Macht Frei

I had hoped to be done with vacation photos, at least for now, but that's all I have. So, here is one of the boy walking around an ash field next to a massive volcano's caldera. I like it - texture without statement. It evokes something without saying anything, perhaps. 

That's why I like it, anyway.

I am back at work today. The world didn't collapse or explode without me, which is of course disappointing, for them to go on without me, as if.  Others should need me more, sort of. 

I'm never sure if it's preferable to be needed or to be anonymous, involved or unnamed, desperate or desperate to depart. I suppose that everybody is a bit of both or fluctuates between the two, else romance might be less complicated, or maybe even much more impossible than it already is. 

Not my romance, I mean yours. Your relationship has problems; I don't know why. I could tell you a partial reason, or make a plausible one up, but you wouldn't believe me for very long. You'd find me interesting for a while because I would be talking about you, like a psychic that notices essences which please and fascinate you. 

That's why there is never any end to discussing the issues of love - people don't change, they adjust. Those adjustments are never good enough for very long. It's called "growing apart." It means that someone is getting bored when they're not feeling provoked or becoming infuriated. Love arouses little curiosity concerning the self. Who among us was born imperfect in this regard. 

And infidelities. Those are a problem that often follow other problems. People are unreasonable. They expect others to change for them. If you wish to be left alone then eventually you will be.   

We should ask the citizens of the Planet of the Apes how they did it, then model our new world loosely off of theirs. All we know with certainty is that ours is broken, paradise is tomorrow or the day after, hell is eternal yet somehow ever connected to the sins of the new and the now. 

It makes no sense. The next best idea will be ideal, faultless until the thinnest of cracks appears along the outer curve of the crystal, presaging the need for its shattering. The past accessed through splinters, cinders, and shards, each sharper than ones that arrived before, until distance becomes soft, dull, lost, or out of focus. 

I was listening to a song called Eternal Recurrence as I wrote that last paragraph - blame it, blame time, blame anything but me, blame yourself for having listened, blame the volcanoes, blame the apes, blame the love, condemn the dust, the grapes, the vine, don't change but jesus please adjust. 

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... jiggity-jig

(Mom, the boy, and the blissful pacific)

Home again, home again.  They're my friends; I made them. Already sidetracked by Bladerunner. 

That was the first sentence of today's post and already I am losing grip on my subject. How do I do it? 

Well, it's easy, you see... just commit to maintaining a scattered focus in the mind. It's sort of the opposite of meditating. 

Be that as it may... We returned from vacation in Costa Rica yesterday. It was two days of travel from the time we left the beach. I used to be better at travel in some ways - less anxiety about dying, now - but worse in others - I dread the time lost more. It seems arduous, losing the hours and moments of a day. The tax of time's passing. I suppose that temporal forebodings are the occasional byproduct of aging. Or, can be. Be that as it cliche... time isn't the subject of today's post ,either, or at least not explicitly. 

What am I trying to write about here? I guess I'm just wanting to finalize the journey portion of this series. 

We returned, there were details to relay, but none that jump to mind now. 

I wanted to write about the rains while we were there. They were something. Maybe tomorrow, when my mind has dried out a bit. I drank for a week straight but avoided any on the way home yesterday. Though I still feel as if there is a slight cloud of hangover hovering over my mind, a storm made from choices. 

Drink is something that the smart and dull alike can disagree on. 

I have to run to get something to eat and go for a bike ride. I must try to step back into the routine of living. Or rather, the routine of my life. Tomorrow I return to work, like all you other schlubs.  

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A modest family vacation slide show

There used to be a time when families would go on vacation and then when they came back there might be a slide show for the presumed pleasure of the neighbors in which the authority figure - so often the tyrannical and patriarchal father - would dispense his enforced wisdom and voice his laborious tales concerning the minutiae of their trip. Luckily there were some people even then, neighbors - I mean the 70s and 80s - usually another tyrannical father, fueled by booze, who was willing to be openly irreverent in the face of such collective domestic stupidity. 

Yet that is how I first remember experiencing the idea of travel, and its associated jealousies. 

So that's what today's post will be: a family vacation slide show of sorts. It is best viewed by projector onto a white wall with the occasionally blinding white frame where I forgot to add a slide correctly. Your entire family should sit at strict and quiet attention when viewing these priceless images. Imagine my reassuring voice reciting the lead lines for each, like a slightly depressed and American version of David Attenborough. 

Here is my son telling me not to take his picture when he's taking a poop and playing with Legos.

Here are our Costa Rican friends, Leo and Eles, whom we came to visit.

Here is mom, happy about being on vacation.

And here is the only jungle god that I was able to find who was worthy of my reverence and worship. I spent all of my time mumbling incantations towards it, burning incense, trying to appease its occasional volcanic anger.

As usual, I was more than prepared to throw a virgin into a volcano and spent my time near the pool searching for one, demanding to inspect the hymen.

There is a shop on the way off the peninsula that sells these stone gods, so that I might be able to better worship at home, or from afar, also.

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Osa Peninsula

(I didn't take this picture)

We made it. A full day in the car driving through the impressive mountains and jungle. I have been to Costa Rica many times before but tend to visit the central and northern coasts because that's where the parties that I have played have been. Never having been south of Quepos before, to my memory. It's not as if I have necessarily avoided the more touristy southern areas but that has been the result of me being brought here by friends who do so. Now I feel a little bit cheated by their choices, though that is of course ridiculous, the places I have visited have always been very beautiful. But nothing like this.

There were torrential rains last night as we were preparing to sleep in our jungle cabinas. A close lightning and thunder strike sent the boy jumping into bed with fear though that subsided quickly with me holding and assuring him all was safe and well. He thought that he would not be able to fall asleep with so much sound of rain and thunder, but that was not the case. I told him that I found the sound comforting and easy to sleep to but that turned out to not be the case, though my sleeplessness might be caused by any number of things, notwithstanding the rain. 

The result is always the same - my mind races with anxiety. I got up sometime well after midnight and ate a few Xanax, hoping for the best, but the best was not to be. They only committed my body to a style of lethargy. My mind was able to dismiss them easily enough with its usual runaway reveries and celestial concerns. The jungle rain and darkness providing the screen and soundtrack upon which they could cast their horrors and summon them to life, ratifying the endless unscripted acts with only minor climax or denouement, though boundless conflict staged from the merest fragments still lying around in the folds of what was once my own mind.  

I would write more but I am on vacation. There is a bar near the restaurant that overlooks the valley that leads down to the ocean. It is an arresting view. They make a type of margarita there called the Mexicana, with pineapple juice and just a touch of grenadine. These help offset the beer nicely, and they seem to simply sing with the pharmaceuticals, like a choir made from the auditory fecundity of nature, now everywhere enveloping. 

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Teaching the puppies some English

The boy is making lots of new friends, and learning that dogs in Costa Rica understand Spanish mostly, but he is able to make good friends with them anyway. 

Yesterday we had a fish luau, we cooked a variety of seafood in an earth oven covered in banana leaves - salmon on halved passion fruit, crabs, shrimp, mussels, onions, assorted veggies. I'm certain there was even more than that but my mind has emptied in retaliation to me gorging my stomach with all of it. There was a case of beer in the refrigerator yesterday and now there are none left, etc. It was all so delicious and went down so easy with the cold beer. 

Now we are all getting a slow start this morning. There will be a winding mountain drive that might not sit so well with all of the buttery fish and seafood, and all of the missing beer.

Here we are on top of the cloud cover, at the volcano Irazú, before all of the seafood and beer. 

There were no more pictures taken once we had entered the murky digestive underworld. 

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Irazú Volcano

Not much time to report today. We are heading out of Cartago early, where we have been staying with friends, to head towards the coast. We will spend one night somewhere before traveling south to the Osa Peninsula, where we will explore the jungles and beaches for another two days.

Yesterday we drove up to Irazú Volcano, a place that I have tried to visit in the past though unsuccessfully. You must get there in the morning most days for it to be clear enough to see the dual calderas, which we were able to do. I have some pictures on my camera but am lying in bed, pre-coffee, and I will not get up to deal with them now.

Here are two that I found online that give you pretty much all the idea that you need to have about it. The volcano is known locally as El Coloso because of its history as being active in the past, and somewhat terrifyingly so.

The waters in the caldera were not purely green yesterday. They were a variety of colors, but with one glance you could see that they were very mineral rich. They were far more interesting to look at than the picture above shows, but not enough for me to be anything more than lazy in this moment.

It famously erupted when John F. Kennedy was here visiting in 1963. I have slept in the room that Jackie and John also slept in at the old US Ambassador's mansion. It was bought by a friend of mine and I would stay there often when I would visit in the late 90s and early 00s.

Okay, nothing much else to report. It is coffee time now and then we must get on the road for our next place. I have no idea if we will have wifi there or the place after that. You will have to keep checking here to see if I have again updated my mostly stationary travelogue.

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In the hills outside San Jose

We both wondered why, afterwards, we chose to take a red-eye flight from SF to connect through Panama to get to Costa Rica, but it was too late for questions. We arrived with varying degrees of fatigue expressed in grumpiness that is both familiar and yet unique to the individual.  

There were presidential elections here yesterday and everybody, at least among my friends, was very worried that the "other guy" might win. He is an evangelical, whose wife often prays in the tongues of gibberish, that has espoused some unsettling Trumpian political ideas. He ran on the "return to appeals of the past" also. Some in his camp have mentioned the death penalty for homosexuality, etc., so his "return" seemed more complete, reaching back all the way to the male-on-male abominations of Leviticus. 

As many of you who read here must have already known or assumed, the editorial staff at this site denounce the abomination of any and all sexual acts that do not result in procreation, or those that are not properly ended with the uttering, Praise be to Allah the cherisher and sustainer of the worlds. 

The novelist and ex-rock star, the more liberal minded candidate, Carlos Alvarado, won instead last night. This set everybody at ease for the remainder of the evening where we cooked at home and ate dinner at the kitchen counter drinking wine, listening to music, and telling stories. 

Today we will bring the boy to go see a volcano and an animal shelter/preserve that has been recognized as being among the best of its kind worldwide. I will explain that I have connections to Trump when I apply for a big game hunting license.

Tomorrow there will be something different, maybe the beach. There is very little to do in San Jose, at least what I am aware of, though perhaps I would not make the best tour guide, having spent all of my time here previously playing house and techno records all day and all night, trying to fashionably establish my reputation as epitomizing the temporal forever.  

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