Everybody gets the bogeyman they hope for

Perhaps America did not stop being fun for everybody all at once. It happens in degrees, for each to each. Watching it flail now, on the morning of the vote to confirm a new justice to the Supreme Court, is a strange and unsettling experience. It seems that everybody feels and knows that Kavanaugh did something ranging somewhere from naughty to horrible. How horrible the thing he did is seems to reflect the inner-being of each person speaking more than any objective act of crime. None of us are permitted to question the certainty of those who were not there. 

One side holds to belief in the accuser's testimony, the other wishes to mock it away. Or if the conversation becomes serious, there emerges angry denial. My friends comprise a collection of both reactions. Both versions of the story can seem as true to its believers as it needs to be. Though each side requires an annihilation of the other's truth. The result can't possibly be any good. 

Certainly there must be other justices? so ask the liberals.

For something that she claims happened in high school...? arrives further inquiry from conservatives.

Both of those things are probably true. And on and on. Men are scared, either for the women they love or for their own hides. 

If only Kavanaugh would have acknowledged that he acted inappropriately...

As if we would all magically agree on the outcome of that, as if we could. Of course he's going to indignantly deny. That's what he has been trained to do his whole life. He wrote an opinion/apology piece in the WSJ. It was odd, reading it. A part of me wanted to sympathize with his circumstance, but the memory of his indignant testimony was still too fresh. He probably is a very good father, husband, and coach of a girl's basketball team. He probably has spent much of his life being respectful and courteous and even protective of the women around him. None of that erases the frenzy of youth, of course, but for him it seems as if it probably should. He has proven his worth to those around him, and he does love beer. His testimony attests to his own sense of victimhood in all of this. There was no mistaking that. It's a witch hunt! 

But certainly you must see, he has proven that he relinquished witchery so long ago. 

All else is hearsay, says the honorable he.

To surmise and mock the judge's attitude: There is no word that a man can call a woman that is nearly as awful as rapist.

Now, did you hear all of that, you cunt?

There are those that attack the motives of Professor Ford, and make claims about how she has been sadly manipulated by those sleazy Dems. Fear, I guess. Fear that they might also be one day held accountable for their youthful indiscretions, or even their adult ones. Who knows. If you use the word courageous to describe Ford's decision and actions then expect and accept what you already know to be the response. When it comes to people mattering, just look at what they've done to that poor man...

All of America seems to think and act as if they are on the verge of soon winning a lottery that will open the future wide and extinguish their narrow past. 

It has been said already, that perhaps they are both telling the truth: Brett Kavanaugh did something horrible to Christine Ford that he does not quite remember, or not in the way that she does. That seems plausible enough. Though for whom does such an axiom matter, the rape apologists or the simply reasonable? If I was to study the conversation then I would conclude that most men think groping high school girls is okay. It's when the word rape is used that things begin to get very uncomfortable. If you buy the narrative then you might surmise that conservative women miss being groped and they instruct their daughters on how to be receptive to it. Liberal women don't have daughters, they have warriors.  

For what it's worth, I believe Professor Ford. Her testimony was credible and precise where it mattered most. Kavanaugh was also very believable, though not at all how he must have intended. 

Nearly every woman that I know has been the victim of some type of sexual assault or harassment. Nearly every woman I know has advanced a significant untruth about their romantic partners. Both of those things can be true, also, without any need for one to erase the other. The same two sentences can be said about men, though you will not find many men that will admit to the first. Men sexually harass other men so often that it simply gets ignored. I can barely interact with many of my adult male friends without there being some form of sexual harassment involved. We have all just learned to ignore or enjoy it, reinforcing an idea that it is all just harmless. Those dual truths help underpin much of the derision and suspicion that I see people expressing as reaction to this dilemma. We are made deeply uncomfortable by parallel truths, few are taught to accept them. 

This seems more clear to me now; I wish that I was wiser in my youth. 

People insist upon their imaginary experiences in near equal proportion to their actual encounters. It is one of the ways that memory and persona interact, to create the story of self. America seems determined to embrace only one version of anything - not even their own version, of course, but that of another. We marvel angrily at any brute who could choose some other plausibly deniable version of unknown fact. What we choose to hate becomes equal and indistinguishable from what we believe.  

America should move to Northern Ireland.

By the end of today we will have a man appointed to our highest court who has claimed that he has been treated unfairly simply by having to respond to an accusation of impropriety. That same man might also be guilty of the sexual assault of that accuser. He will likely be the deciding vote on women's issues for the foreseeable future, a truth that can not possibly extinguish its counterpart.

America, what have you done, where have you gone?

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Try to end on a word that lasts

How many days should I, can I, come back here and explain to myself why I'm not writing any more? A friend asked me the other day, before I could answer Rachel repeated an explanation that I have voiced before: happiness makes for poor writing. Complications prevent me from reinforcing that again as a complete truth, but sure, that's part of it. I have stopped going through pictures that I've taken. That must also be a part of it, or a corollary effect of the same feeling of exhaustion towards life. I've let go of my desire to tell stories about my life. Perhaps if I look through some pictures some little hint of an impulse will come back to me.

When I opened up this page I noted that the only page views I had gotten recently were for posts that seemed to be about sex. Titles like "Define - pornology" , "Because I Like My Sugar Sweet" , "Slut Walk" , "I Want the Hobo to Watch" , "Moist Panties" , "Traditional Fetish Objects"... Eight views of each page, all at the same time, making it seem as if I had a sudden surge in readership. Spider bots, web crawlers, doing their methodical documenting of imaginary worlds, of the words that hang and linger for the picking. 

Nope; I tried. 

Just pictures of us the last time we went to the beach, or rather, the time before last.

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Never dreamed to love routines

The human form, good for so many things. 

I've written several paragraphs this morning, all now deleted. I then retreated into email for a while. Practicing, I guess. This site was meant to be an ongoing open email to my friends. Well friends, I am dreading the present now in a way that I did not used to. Every observation tinged with decay, weariness at the prospect of rot, its inevitability. 

Why go on? 

I do not mean life, but rather only with this post. 

There is coffee to be made, a bike ride to begin.

If we have butter there may also be toast.

There is some pleasure, a prayer of whispered sins.

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Try not to feel doomed

Uptight. There’s no group left in America that owns any sarcastic distance, though all seem to be fighting to claim some. Nobody has “dispassionate cool.” Without a mocking sense of humor that speaks some casual truth about a situation people quickly lose their bearings. Once the bearings are shot, no more skating rink, no more disco. 

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An astrological warning for the future

I left NYC seven years ago. Or rather, we did - the newly pregnant wife, the middle-aged dog, and myself, the soon-to-be dad. For whatever reason I put the date in my calendar and I see it repeat every year. I guess because calculating the date against Rhys' birth date must have seemed a task too difficult to confidently accomplish with any regularity. 

I thought you might want to know.

Each time I sit down here to write it becomes more and more clear why I'm struggling to do so: being honest becomes increasingly difficult, if not impossible, and unpleasant by necessity. So, there is just a spiraling backwards into adolescent humor, or the frustrated disappointment of politics and social issues. All of it an ineffective diversion. The truth is that I have refined my life's focus around the organizing principle of fatherhood, which does difficult things to the mind and spirit, not all of them grand or beautiful. I'm not complaining, just trying to be honest. Many would rather I keep to only trying to relay the difficulties in a comical way, but I am slowly losing the ability to take pleasure in my own sense of humor. I noticed some time back that I have been laughing less. Levity is not the result of choices, but rather one possible result among a series of them.

Don't worry, mine is not entirely gone, but in the last couple of years something has changed. A sense of dread is replacing a feeling of buoyancy. 

Maybe a military parade would help cheer me up. A cavalcade of missiles and fighter planes lining the street, trumpets and drums, cadences broken by the triumphant punctuation of bugles in revelry. What sort of nation would not be stirred by such a display. 

I cancelled my 50th birthday. It's not going to happen. It was becoming too complicated, it seems. Or rather, I was not organizing enough. Both. Maybe that is a part of what is adding to my feeling: I don't want to become anything. I don't like aging, at all. It feels as if I'm contracting some agreed upon malady, and I'm supposed to accept it gracefully, with composure.

The diseasing of neither, its flickering of seasons, three at a time pass without blinking, bereft of poetry, symmetry, all of the other and either.

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"I would prefer not to"

(The Met Breuer)

I'm not feeling well today, have taken the day off from work. My job can be very stressful at times. It accumulates and one must know when to eschew its demands. Not feeling well. Was old Bartleby simply depressed, or was he (less than simply) pursuing a higher truth?

I had more that I was going to write, but it all escapes me now. I have somehow reached a crisis point.  I've lost faith in everything that I have to say and most all that I have said, or written. I believe nothing except that maybe love is mercurial; sleep transitory; and death, probably final.

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Nikon EM, FA, FE2, FM2n, FM3a

I left NYC seven years ago this week. It's the only timeframe that has ever made any sense to me, one in which I can place events correctly in relative chronological distance from the present. It has to do with measuring time through the life of my child, but it works better than any calendar or set of personal memories outside of that experience. It also represents the same basic time that I started shooting film in addition to digital images. 

I received my new vintage used camera in the mail from Japan yesterday - the Nikon FM3a. It is what I expected it it be - a noticeable improvement from the other F series cameras that I have in both design and function. It is considerably newer, so it feels better, somehow more intentional than the older cameras that all have their little quirks, all accumulated over time. 

I can now maybe get rid of one or two of the ones that I have, if I choose to. I will hold on to them and claim that it is for sentimental reasons, but that's a lie. The truth is that I can load each of them up with a different kind of film so that at any given time I can pick up the camera that holds the film that I wish to shoot with at that moment. 

I am a spoiled child. 

I own five Nikon manual film cameras. Many with similar interests to mine would probably say that I already own every one that is worth owning, but I would still listen to someone that told me I needed an F3 or an FG or both, to complete my "collection." I suspect that I don't need either of those. Some might tell me to throw the EM away, but that's the one I bring to the beach with my cheap lenses. 

The new one cost me $600 - three times the price of any of the others, and one that I told myself over and over that I did not need to buy for that very reason. 

My logic always seems to hold, as long as I don't try to convey it. 

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A man's morning truth

(Seen at The Met Breuer)

Every time that I write here now I have to delete the entry. It has become confessional beyond my tolerance for such things. I'm settling into mid-life - a fat, Cretaceous bee that has landed on amber to take a look around. This age is no longer just a passing mood, one that can be fought off with exercise or sleep. I spend far too much of my time wrestling away from feelings of disappointment, distress, or boredom. Family becomes a palliative for those feelings, though I know how those types of  sedatives bring their relief. 

The idea is to kiss a woman's stomach and titties as much as she'll invite you to do so. 

Not the most groundbreaking truth ever there was, but it is mine this morning, and a man's morning verity is etched from stones. My fondest moments of happiness have been during the upward rushing of love's embrace. Breasts never before seemed so soft, nor tasted so sweet. That period where everything is becoming more and more mutually unbelievable, every waking and sleeping moment improving and expanding like a metaphor. Since each of us only usually gets to feel that a handful of times in a lifetime, and it only lasts 90 days for either partner, no matter what anyone tries to claim, we learn to live with the grand compromise. 

I'm not talking about my relationship with Rachel. Or rather, only insomuch as the arc of that relationship has somewhat resembled others, though with a greater rate of recurrence. 

We all make so many compromises, it seems. Concessions is perhaps the better word. Everything need not be couched in the language of loss. That is as dangerous as any of the other mental snares. That ever popular Marxist dialectic in which there is always the oppressor and the oppressed. How can anyone be free of such dynamics. The manacles of mental mechanics. 

Well, I don't have anything to say this morning. I am just looking around and around at the world and wondering aloud, What next?

What next?

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Nikon FM3a

I finally bought the Nikon manual film camera that I've long wanted - the Nikon FM3a (far below). It is a wonder of industrial beauty. I own a few similar cameras -  the Nikon FA, FM2n, and FE2 - but not the one that I've wanted. It was always just a little bit out of my price range: ~$900. But then I found one yesterday in Japan for $600.

At least one writer seems to agree with me concerning the camera's desirability and has even chosen my favorite lens to argue his point [here].

Now I can stop buying manual film camera bodies, there is nothing left to want.

Nothing left in the now defunct Nikon manual lineup, I mean.


I took the images of the boy with my iPhone and the Tin-Type app.

Cato says they look like a Tom Waits album cover and I agree - dark, carnivalesque, with a hint of something satanic going on, dark voodoo of some sort.

Boy Conjurer.

I'll try to remember to point out some shots I take with the new camera once I have them processed and scanned. They will, of course, seem no different to you the viewer from any of the other ones you may have seen posted here. 

Its joy derives from the shooting experience, not the photographic end result.

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"Kite" would be a good name for a drug, probably already is

(Helena)

I finally went through my pics from my trip to NYC. My friends are fetching. They make me seem much cooler than I am. Helena is adorable, very photogenic. If it were up to me I would photograph her and Rebecca (below) more. Helena has delightfully mastered the faux-demure pose and Rebecca's joy is both infectious and beautiful. They are each a rich source of pleasure, just to be around them. 

Mom, the boy, and I might go to the beach today, or to a local pool. But swim we will. It is already 9am and we have not yet made a decision, which seems foolish when running on "family time." Everything happens early or not at all when you have a family. Plans must be made and acted on long before that of an individual. There must be a schedule of morning deployments if anything is to be hoped for within the day. 

I bought a kite while my brother and nephews were here last week. We needed one, having lost our "shark kite" recently at the beach. Mom was winding it back in and the line slipped out of her hands, off to sea it went, slowly and gracefully, until it was no more to us.

It looks to be a pretty nice kite, the new one. It was almost $50, so let's hope so. It is of the "delta" design, so it looks to be some dumb fun, capable of achieving great altitudes, speed, cuts, etc. 

I adore that moment when a kite is lifted into the wind, soaring suddenly upwards, the sound of the wind pressing against its wings, flapping as it ascends, quickly, as if alive, free from almost everything, one more time.

(Rebecca)

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Dog Days

I finally went through some of the pics I took while in NYC. Mostly family stuff, so far. I did a little bit of street photography while I was there, and there are a lot of gallery pics. I like the family stuff, but mostly because I miss the people in them. Maybe I'll post some of those tomorrow. 

Today is a dog day, though none will be sacrificed to Sirius in appeasement. Those days are over, for now. Who knows what superstitions might bubble back up into this grave new world. 

The modest amount of travel I've done in July is over now, also. My brother and nephews returned to the mire of Florida, the muskeg crucible. 

Yesterday was spent alone with the boy. We found a new sushi spot not far from home, a replacement of sorts for our lost local sushi restaurant - Rocket. We went and spent almost one hundred dollars on raw fish of all sorts - squid and octopus and scallops and hamachi and toro and much more - a mixture of maki, sashimi, and nigiri. 

We drove home happy, satisfied with our choices. 

There is nothing, or so very little, to tell. 

Certainly you must sense that, also?

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The feeling of freedom

(zip-lining)

Well, the vacation is over, in a sense. The biggest part of it is over - my brother and his sons have left for the airport. I don't return to work until Monday. It was good to see the boy have fun with his cousins, something I never had. Or rather, I had a cousin named Jane but only met her once and have no idea what happened to her. My uncle - my father's brother - died when I was very young. I barely remember it. I only remember my father crying when he got the news, a rarity and something that left a postcard memory in me. He was not known for showing emotions that hinted at vulnerability. Yet he was a thoughtful man, I discovered a bit late in his life, and mine. 

My mother - like my son and his mother - was an only child. Small family all around, though numbers alone hardly tell the story. Family can be a sometimes difficult burden with one member or a hundred. Though this week was not burdensome. Tiring, but not weighty. I was a little bit concerned that it would prove to be oppressive, but the opposite was true. It was satisfying to have it happen at all, to see Rhys in the context of a family that is foreign to me. 

Perhaps mom has a "rounding" influence in her new role as "Auntie Rachel." We'll chalk it up to that. Women are very good at so many things. She was perfect this week, likely saving me from myself any number of times. 

I want to buy a condo in Tahoe now. After spending three days there I realized that should be our getaway place. It's peaceful and beautiful and offers all sorts of great outdoor options. I wished that I would have brought my mountain bike with me. 

I rode it as soon as I got home, few things in life make me feel quite as free.

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Last day of vacation

(My Pocahontas)

I don't do very well with "family." I've never understood why people put so much energy into such an awful conglomeration of assholes that share some genetic code. My mother was the glue that held our family together. When she died  the nuclear experiment failed. What remained were three men who didn't need each other and who had very little in common. Mom died Oct. 27th, by Christmas of that same year it was obvious that we were all three about to go our own ways. Now there are two of those three men remaining - my brother and I, with a total of three kids between us, all boys. 

Those three kids seem to have none of the hangups that my brother and I have. They just like to have fun, and that is what this trip has been for them. Yesterday, we went zip-lining. This is a stupid enough activity in which you hook yourself up to a suspended pulley system on a cable and use your own body weight and gravity to defy death while running from tree platform to tree platform, some of which were 60 ft in the sky or more. Exhilarating for all the reasons that the most basic portions of your mind seek to keep you alive, and you have found a way to flaunt those instincts.

The kids freakin' loved it.

Rachel has been a tremendous help here, having relied so heavily on her extended family to help her navigate her own nuclear family meltdowns. She has been a tremendous partner to have, knowing just when and how to divert my neuroses elsewhere. She does very well as Aunt Rachel, also. If only she and I could have arrived at the place we are now sooner. We would have saved ourselves a stupendous amount of pain and uncertainty.  

Some say suffering produces growth, which makes me want to inflict some on them, to find out. All that pain and suffering has ever done for me is to reduce my ability and desire to believe in life. Growth has happened during periods of both love and wretchedness. The only message received through heartache was the empty absence of love. I didn't grow from it, I withered, as if the arms of the sun had atrophied and its eyes had gone blind, its life-giving warmth turned to malice. 

People will say the dumbest things. Like: Great minds think alike, and There's no such thing as a stupid question. I wish all of those people would go Take a bull by the horns. 

I'm going to go judge a few books by their cover.

(Or Sacagawea)

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Fuck the literal world

Yes, I am going to focus on blur. Motion blur, of either the camera or the subject, or of both. I tend to prefer taking pictures of people. Portraits. Blurred portraits of people. That is what the world has been begging for and I will provide. It is relatively easy to do and from frame to frame the differences can be quite pronounced. The image below was taken approx. 1/5th of a second sooner than the one above. I was walking towards Rachel as she turned towards me. I like the one above simply because it is less literal. 

Fuck the literal, I say. It should only ever be used by investigators, prosecutors, and judges. 

I have expensive cameras and lenses. They are capable of taking very sharp and precise images when used correctly, even when there is low light, but fuck all of that. Any fool can take a sharp image with that equipment. I wish to be the other sort of fool for a while. 

There was yesterday's image, also. Here is what the preview of it looks like, for reasons I do not understand.

I want little fragmented portions of the world to be blurred, perhaps beyond recognition. Just colors and shapes composed within the frame for the purpose of pleasure. Mine. 

I never wanted to be a wedding photographer, though I do like making people happy with images of themselves. There are people that hate to have their picture taken, until they get a really good one. I hope people like my fuzzy and sometimes out of focus shots of them now as much as they've enjoyed the crisp reporting of the truth of them. 

I want my images to seem as if they are sinking into the haze of pain relief, perhaps at the initial onset of the morphine high. 

Doesn't have to be morphine, of course, it could be something much stronger.

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Truckee, CA

I have become so disorganized with my photos. I transferred my old work computer over to my new one and created another photo library, but I'm only pulling a pic or two at a time off of my camera cards, so all is fucked. I am adrift in a sea of disconnected images. 

The above image is my nephew. We were doing a tour of a "Liberty Ship" in the SF Bay, a thing my bother wanted to do mostly, but then I found myself far more interested than I thought that I would be. Function fascinates me. 

That said, I think that I'm going to start trying to do more abstract photography, blurring anything representational; longer shutter times, a focus on motion and time's passing, lights in lateral motion. I tend to like those images the most. What could be accidents. Also, my beautiful boy is starting to show signs that he is tiring of me always taking his picture. The curse of self-awareness. Without him, I have no model. Mom is good for a few pics, but must be flattered into the mood, which is half the fun. I flirt with her as if I'm still 24 yrs old. 

Okay, we're in Tahoe. Today we take the lift up the mountain to where there is some sort of entertainment complex for both kids and adults. I should have brought my mountain bike. There are trails everywhere I walk. Looking at them makes me twitch with glandular discharges. My calves tighten and my heart races, like the memory of the culmination of a moment in love.

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Latest Vacation Update

Another vacation post. What else would I possibly have to write about? Being an uncle is fun. I get to say all sorts of stuff that I wouldn't say to Rhys, then regret it when I hear my nephews repeat it. It is the way of the nuclear family, and how those molecules interact. 

I brought the desired lens into the city yesterday and took a bunch of pictures, but the camera is downstairs, and everywhere there are children and adults sleeping. So, you get an unrelated image that I like. This visit so far has been good for me. I don't spend much social time with my brother, though we talk on the phone more regularly than we used to, but to see the boy play with his cousins is really something. They all seem very happy, which makes me happy.

I've never thought of Rachel as an Aunt Rachel, but of course she is perfect for the role. She seems happy to be making dinners and planning activities. The house is full of giggling kids, which keeps her from abducting another child, sanding off its fingerprints, and calling it ours, at least for a little while... She wants another baby, but there is little chance of that happening now. We waited too long and circumstances are working against it. There were too many obstacles in the way. Us.

I look at people with two kids and I'm not exactly envious of them, but that's probably because I have just enough imagination to see into their lives but not enough to see anything outside of my own. It is what children do to the mind of a parent. They steal and then run off with whatever remaining intellectual curiosity might still be lying around, knowing how best to use it. They scoop it up in cones of curiosity and call it ice cream.

Life is meant to be sweet, silly.

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Chinatown SF

(the cousins)

I very rarely go street shooting, and yesterday was going to be "my day." We planned on going into the city for an evening baseball game (Giants vs. Brewers) and to show the visiting nephews around the city - Chinatown -  and I decided this was the time to bring in my bigger camera, the Death Star... Nikon D810, and a few heavy lenses filled with precision glass. I carefully picked two that would do well for my purposes - a 17-35mm f 2.8 and a 85mm f 1.4D, skipping my usual 50mm so that I could carry less glass and still have some variety.

Before we left to catch the ferry I took some loose pics of the kids playing in the back yard, using a 135mm f 2 DC, so that I could be reasonably far away from them and still take candid pictures. 

That was the lens that remained on the camera when I hurriedly put it in my bag with the 85mm, thinking it was the 17-35mm, leaving me only portrait lenses and higher in terms of focal length. The ever important wide angle stayed on the table in the kitchen. 

I was forced to shoot at 85mm all day. 

So, no wide shots of the ball park or of SF, only close-ups, the frame filled with faces and very little contextual info. The one above was the only useful image I took, it being the perfunctory establishing shot - kids on vacation in SF. 

So be it. Fuck, fuck, fuck! 

(Q6, by Raquel)

Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown.

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Family Fun

(nephew of Q6)

My brother and his two sons arrived yesterday. I spent the main portion of the day driving to the airport to get them, and then back, with a detour through Fisherman's Wharf. Maybe I'll dig out one of my camera cards and provide some photographic context. We will go back into the city today. There is a Giant's game tonight, we'll be there. Also, Chinatown and a few other places. Maybe we can find a comic book store in SF. The boys ages range from 6-11, so Peter Parker looms very large in their worlds. We'll take the ferry across the bay. They should love that. I know I do. 

I'll be doing stuff like this for the week. There will be a couple more trips into the city, then Tahoe for a couple days.

Yesterday, we went on a WWII era sub that floats in the bay as an attraction, one very similar to the first one that my father served on during reconnaissance missions off the coasts of both Korea and Vietnam. My father's life seems so distant and foreign now, gone beyond just death, though I wish that he could have seen more of his grandchildren's lives. That always seemed to make him very happy. So be it, I say, when it comes to the happiness of others. Give some of your time, I say, it is practically an act of charity. 

Rachel and I have been talking about the value and importance of family. We don't agree on very much, but without a fight I concede that I wouldn't necessarily want anyone to agree with me. It's one of those subjects in which no one really has to agree, they just have to avoid assigning too much value to any given disagreement. There is no winning. 

Not everything in life needs to be as simple as Thanksgiving day. 

(Cousins)

(Canine Q6)

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Following a dissatisfied ghost

No idea why some are so compulsive and others not. Not sure what quality or faculty, or lack of same, produces fugitive impulse. If I enjoy it then I enjoy becoming an addict of it, whether the result is health or ruin or worse. The largeness and complexity of the world reduced to that singular thing. A moment dedicated to the pursuit of its pursuit.

Frenzy drives me and drives my friends crazy. They believe I have some control over it, or should, as if I am negotiating with a very reasonable demon. I must seem like such a sensible person otherwise. They believe intelligence is a controlling or mitigating factor, or should be, because it has been for them. Wit is a catalyst. Its grip is its grasp. 

Temptation doesn't starve; hunger is fuel.

I don't yield any more, or very often any more, for this reason. There is a type that produces intense isolation. Loneliness, some free time to indulge it - the magnetism of more.

Few talk about their ecstatic desperation in terms other than fearful reverence or guarded comedy. There is an enormous roomful of people, few seem able to connect the most hopeless parts of themselves to the expressive faculties. Obsessions lurk in quiet places. Between there is the chatter. 

Confession becomes testimony, shame rushing in to fill a cavern of urges. 

There emerges the freedom from. Peace, of course. So, piety becomes practice. People will do anything for happiness, but that one thing. 

Temperature only decreases by degrees.

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Self-Liquor in Convex Reflection

I'm selling prints of this one. Reach out to me privately, I can put you in touch with a dealer near you. You can see the curvature of the earth in this one, proving once and for all that convex convenience store mirrors are round. 

Today, I go ride my bike up a mountain. I am having a little trepidation. I've not been living the healthy life since slightly before I left for NYC, have not been riding my bike very much. The old legs lose some of their strength, the heart and lungs lose capacity, reducing endurance. I remember a time not so long ago when masturbation used to last five minutes or more. Just a continuous, furious outpouring of the energy of love. Not many more. 

How is everyone in America not demanding change in the streets? Maybe they are - all of the nation is asking if anyone happens to have a spare quarter. We have a president that seems to have no understanding not only of the constipation he swore to correct, but of basic law and legal procedure. Why should he have to know that stuff, though, really? He's rich. He wants to redefine attorney-client privilege now. He is shocked at the unprofessionalism of his primary lawyer - the guy that ran the taxi cab scams - at having recorded their conversations, which potentially documented one small sliver of his illegality. 

Even I have started asking myself how many years I'd spend in prison for Trump. 

Okay, none of that talk. That's what ruined me here: politics and social issues. Opining. 

Petty punditry. 

Do I have s tory to tell today....

Yesterday, we went for a hike, all three of us - mom, the boy, myself. We went to one of our local favorite trails, the Sonoma Overlook. It was closed for repairs. Luckily, there was an alternate trail advertised as part of that closure, Montini, whose trailhead was only 1000 feet away by foot or by car. We hopped in the car and drove over to it. We parked in the Sonoma police station parking lot, a thing that left me feeling uncomfortable, but I kept pretty quiet about it. 

We walked the perimeter of the baseball field to the trailhead and crossed over a small service road leading to what I believe are some water reservoirs. I saw what seemed to me to be a trail and started off on it, but got some pushback from the others. I kept going, insisting that this nature preserve was so small that there was no way to go wrong. This is rattlesnake season and there was a recent report of a grandmother strangling a rabid bobcat with her bare hands (watch that video, it falls into the category: genius of speculation), but what the fuck... must we live our entire lives as if always shopping for groceries? 

There was enough of a trail there to trust it, so we did.

The less than official path led more directly up the hill, along a few small crevices where water had been running for a century or more. It meandered but continued along a sensible route, spreading out so as to almost disappear in open areas, reforming as a footpath when required by the tree-line and terrain. Such things teach small lessons about the recurrence of being human, lessons learned over and over, though each time they are interesting to witness, or can be. You can see the thoughts of others and the effects of physicality in a subset of population over time. 

This renegade trail eventually met up with the official one, at the red rock quarry. The boy and I climbed around inside on the rocks a bit, discussing where snakes like to rest, and how they feel about being startled. He is developing a taste and fascination for the natural world, as so many young kids do. I first wrote boys instead of kids. That was and would have been more true, but we are reminded of the damage we do by stereotyping particular types of people and things. Categories of thought are bad and should be extinguished. We know that now, and we are all committed to fighting thought at every possible front. Language is imprecise and dangerous. It is what has been making us all so unhappy for centuries now, it seems. Being anything that there is a word for is oppressive. 

Where we finally met the real trail it went off in two different directions, as trails do. We chose to continue going up, to the boy's mild dismay. He was hot and had eaten too much sugar earlier in the day. It was, in fact, the reason we were out for a hike. Mom could not take it any more. The kid was fueled by maple syrup on pancakes in the morning, then chocolate and ice cream around lunch time. We know that sugar doesn't do any such thing to kids, but you can't get anyone to believe it, and it is a convenient excuse to punish a child with an uphill hike.  Scientific tests and observations reveal that sugar does not change a child's behavior, but rather only changes a parent's expectations. 

Don't try to discuss this with a parent. They need science less than they needed Hillary.

Anyway, we used the dreaded sugar to explain our son's behavior to him, flaunting the facts, insisting on the nonsense that suited our narrative, and so we told him that we would need to institute a stricter daily cap on intake. Later that same night we went to see a movie and we shared a cup of some frozen ice cream nuggets that were simply delightful.

As we kept heading up this new trail, we came upon a number of sheep grazing, all protected by an electric fence that we had been warned about by a sign at the onset. I was immensely curious about the charge it carried, and had my son not been there I'm confident that I would have tested it. I am from Florida and these things must be measured with human flesh, and do not trust anyone that would come to conclusions otherwise. It is the best way to be sure of danger, possibly the only way.  

Mom and I took the opportunity to discuss electricity with the boy - how dangerous and yet fascinating it can be. She spoke of sudden death, but also of balloons against wool and rubbing your feet across carpet in socks. I spoke of police tasers and 70s rock and roll. Our words tried to convey the tingling menace and lighting-fast nature of electrons suddenly allowed to freely traverse a point of contact. We talked about low level currents producing sensations that can be silly and fun, holding charged balloons over your head and feeling your hair rise in response, then up the danger scale to involuntary muscle contraction. I may have tried to use the word fibrillation in a sentence. Then of course: death.

So, a fun family hike, filled with useless parental information.

We reached the end of the trail, unceremoniously. There was a sign warning that the trail was ending, then another just beyond that threatening private property and what would happen to heedless transgressors. Like the other path earlier, it was apparent that not all had abided this warning. We were tempted, but parents must teach a child restraint. There are rules that govern behavior, and those are best understood before entirely abandoning them. At least then, when hat times comes, the consequences arrive as less of a surprise and more of a patch of rebel honor. He is still too young for all of that and I should not be the one to guide him, such a thing perhaps sends the wrong message.

We stopped in the shade at the end of the trail and drank water from a shared canteen. I wrapped my t-shirt around my head and went shirtless on the descent. 50 is the new anything. Mom tried to have me put suntan lotion on, but that stuff is tick butter. I know better.  We found one on the boy when we got home, so I was right. 

We took our newly found alternative pathway down, once we re-discovered it, just as we had ascended, retracing our own steps as best as we could, agreeing on direction and pace. I had mentioned the flow of water on the way up as being one way to keep a relative idea of where you're going and how one should return. So we commented on water's path, even though there was no water at the time and there had not been in quite a while. Its effects carved the ground before and beside us. There were only a few areas that would have required any climbing and the downward sloping contour of the valley did not require it. 

We arrived at the service road where we had started, all agreeing that "our" path was superior to such an intentionally uniform one, planting the idea of rebellion in one of its forms, in spite of ourselves. 

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whatever that word means

Up so early, too early. Two hours before Starbucks opens. Some mornings I miss writing here. It gives me something to do in the early morning darkness, some small way of organizing the universe into what I hope are, or become, understandable pieces. Writing too much nonsense is dispiriting. Even when you joke that nothing matters it shakes something inside of you a bit. Maybe I loved chaos more than I was meant to, more than is healthy, whatever that word means. 

CS just sent an incredible political statistic concerning DT's support among republicans, but I will be strong... I have promised to keep my political diatribes on social media, where they can do neither harm nor good. 

I'll say this, though, with absolute certainty: the dems do not have a chance of beating him in 2020, yet. If they don't find a barn stormer then there will only be barns burning.

Okay, fuck it all forever. Starbucks opens soon and I should go sit there in that artificial morning, drink my coffee, and read my book. I want to travel, almost anywhere to take pictures, rather than lying here in bed for one more doomed second.

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hollow and harrowing

Taking a sabbatical ruined me. It gave me too much time to read, which disabused me of the inclination towards writing, when the hope was its opposite. One who only plays writing does themselves some harm by reading great writers, great writing, though it need not always feel like harm. It rarely does. It overwhelms, marvels - lovely thing for a reader, potentially deadly for a lonelier business.

Have been taking pictures. Never budgeting any time to go through the stuff shot. 

The apartment that the above friend is standing in burned down just a few days after this picture was taken, on my friend's birthday (below). We were bouncing around the city for his b-day, we ended up at a planned dinner party. The severe image above was taken in frivolity and celebration, but I saw something other lurking in it. The pictures of that same place burned out, ruined, were haunting for me. Ever recurring, everywhere, forebodings must now materialize. 

So much spooks the middling years, horses flashing in the dark, shadows made of action. Certainly such feelings must soon fade into the bliss of time's passing. As if, a dark laugh of life.

Before I become too morose, I'll stop.

So tired. The words of the world, hollow and harrowing. 

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Having a sit at the Kit Kat

(Blondie in Berlin)

Cato says that I need to get out of America and he is probably right. He thinks that ideology - my own and that of others - is tearing me apart. He wrote that message in an encrypted text just before he entered his favorite Berlin sex dungeon, to retire for the evening, as it was then mid-afternoon. What he fails to realize is that my only ideology is to be right. Like, super-right. 

From this point forward I want all of my words, both written and spoken, to be italicized.

I realize now that most people argue politics because they feel personally helpless. They want the nation state they live in to resemble their own vision of morality because they have so little power to do anything to change the world. People on the right seem to accept the idea that life is "kill or be killed," where there is only natural dominance (theirs) and economic submission (most all others). Where the left wants the world to be more like a dinner table; everybody brings something and we all share. The right seems to think that they are the sole funders of that same dinner.

Perhaps that is an oversimplification.

Nope, I read the paragraph again in its entirety. It represents the totality of my political thought and is a cosm to itself.

I need to go to Berlin and find my own sex dungeon. The problem with sex dungeons is that there are only two types of people there - strangers and the occasional accidental friend. When I say "Find my own sex dungeon" I mean one that is called  "Sean's sex dungeon" or something unmistakably similar, maybe "Sean Cusick's sex palace of submissive women." Yes, that has a nice ring to it. Possibly several, since women is plural. Maybe that was a typo. Well, to be less guilty of pleasure and to communicate our healthy progressive intentions to the public I suppose we could modify the sign out front to be: "Sean Q6's sex palace of submissive and consensual women (who are also being respected as equals)."

I mean that they each respect each other, of course. What sort of sex dungeon would have the sex slaves be treated equally to the sex patron? That doesn't make any sense. I just read the entire above passage to Rachel, who is sitting on the couch smirking at me. She seems to understand a thing or two about how sex dungeons are meant to work, so she has made the tough managerial decision that I am to be barred. That's right, 86'd out of my own intercourse oubliette, and long before I could even dip my finger or other proboscis in the proverbial jelly jar.

86'd is a verb, though perhaps not any of the ones that you may now be dreaming of.

It is "off" by at least 17.

Wow! and Ooops... I made the mistake of trying to find an appropriate image for today's post so I did an image search for "Berlin sex dungeon" (on a work computer). Do not do this.

I would have used one of Cato's many images that he has recently sent to me, but to do so without getting pre-approval would violate the sacred trust that one who owns a phone and receives illicit images has unwittingly agreed to.

He has transferred some real doozies.

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Avoid the poor like poverty

(Me, discussing politics on a weekday)

I had an experience a couple weeks ago now that has been bothering me in micro doses ever since. I'm told that I brought up politics at someone's house party, and I probably did, though I'm confident that I framed it more as a socio-political concern. I must have mentioned the separating of children from their parents at the border. The result was that at least one woman outlined her frustration with Mexican kids getting free lunch while hers did not. I was then blamed for her frustration and departure, though I'm not sure how or why, other than the obvious: I gave her license to speak her mind. 

What came out must have driven her a little bit mad. 

Ever since, I've been thinking about it and I'm still wondering where the magic all happened. How does the one person mentioning something become responsible for the adult response of another? And why does this mainly apply only to religion and politics? Are people so hideously misinformed that we shouldn't even talk about it. 

I guess so. People can talk about sports all they desire because that subject is entirely inconsequential. 

I found out later - a thing I didn't know at the time - that the criteria used for school lunch assistance programs is the line that distinguishes who is above or below the federal poverty level. So, if I am to understand this woman's frustration more fully, it is that her family is not as poor as some of the Mexican families whose children go to school with hers. Perhaps her thinking is not that sophisticated and she simply believes that others are getting what she deserves and the issue need not be confused with specificity beyond the obvious difference in skin color. 

Who knows. At one point I might have mentioned that where we were standing used to be Mexico. I don't remember all of the details. To be very honest, I thought it was a normal conversation all the way up until the woman was leaving angrily with her family and I was offering an apology that I truly had not meant to upset her, and I hadn't. I'm not sure what I said that changed things. I suspect it might have been that another woman there agreed with something I said and so she may have felt outnumbered. Though I now realize that she might not require my input to be angry on this subject at all. 

I saw the woman - who seemed to hate me for existing while holding differing opinions - at the July 4th parade. She gave me the stink eye because I had not yet reformed to her way of reasoning. She looked at me as if I was an illiberal immigrant. I gave her a fine, big smile to show that there were no hard feelings. I wished that we had more time to chat. I could have reminded her how she asked me how much money I make, which is a lapse in social grace of another kind. The forgivable kind, it seems. She then used that imaginary financial chasm between us to emphasize her victimhood, though I'm still not quite sure how she did this. All things seem to become my fault within the alchemy of argument. 

There are two types of people now that detest wealth: liberals and conservatives. It must be so tiring to always have the wealthy above you and the brown people below. They're not opening up any new spots in either location.

Where do good, honest Americans even go any more?

All that I learned from this experience is not to talk to poor people. A hard-won lesson at a discount price. Poor people don't think like me, they don't share my values, they support policies that they don't seem to understand. Perhaps the use of the word "policies" in that last sentence is giving them more credit than they deserve. They probably do not register "policy" in their prejudices and preferences, but rather they seem only suspended in ever ossifying opinion. 

Ah well, I am not here to further denounce their poverty and ignorance, beyond what their own words have already accomplished in that regard. They are the people that my politics attempt to help, or so I've been told. Just think, there would be no poverty remaining had Bernie won. Maybe a little bit left lying around with Hillary, if only to keep up political appearances.

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July 4th 1976

I meant to wake up very early and go riding this morning, but I left my shoes in the spare bedroom and we have guests, so there may not be any riding early today. I can not walk into Starbucks, either. They frown on the shoeless there, even after their day of diversity training. There are always experts who will be happy to remind you, "That's not enough!" and maybe they're right. 

There are two stories that seem plausible enough. One is that things are improving. 

One of my childhood memories was of July 4th, 1976. It was a big deal, the bicentennial. I was with my family, we were going to see a parade together. I dressed in all red, white, and blue perhaps because ideas of the inherent goodness of showing patriotism had been impressed upon me, by them. My family ridiculed me for it, and they all encouraged me to change my clothes. They were of course right. Children should be mocked when their parents sensibilities appear on their surface. 

Later that day the mc of the parade and festivities invited all the kids that were wearing all red, white, and blue to come up to this stage where they were each given a big stuffed toy prize. 

I fumed eternal.

My mother leaned over and told me that we would stop and buy me whichever one I wanted. I snapped back that it was about the recognition, also. I was seven years old, so there were concepts of glory and praise already surging through the freshly plowed channels of my mind. I refused to talk to any of them. Or that is the memory that I have repeated and encouraged upon them and others ever since. I later claimed that this was the moment when I recognized that much of life is a sham and a cheat, and that if you listen to those who claim to love you, and allow your actions to derive from what you hear, then you are no better than any mark, or stooge. There is a tremendous cheat involved in almost everything. We're also reminded that things are improving, that things do get better.

The same day - far away in Sheffield, England - The Clash played their first ever live gig. 

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