A handful of songs

I don't care any more, about so many things that seemed so important not so long ago. So, so, so. That's part of why having children must seem so odious to those who don't. Parents stop caring about other things - things shared - and divert their attention and concern to only the one thing, and that one thing can not possibly hold others' interests the way that it does a parent's. So, so, so.

What can be said about it?

I read articles that discuss, statistically, a person's late in life dissatisfaction and disappointment with having had children at all. Many report a sense of disillusion with the results of procreation. That seems plausible. It's perhaps no good to wrap up so much in something whose trajectory is outward. But it is a lot of fun for now, and until very recently it helped keep me from peering too much inward. 

The LSD experience can be an interesting one. Acid. If you do it enough times then eventually you will find yourself alone as the drug wears off, with the sensation that all of your friends have drifted away from you and are off elsewhere. Or, if you're like me then you might experience that. Many experience their worst fears come to life's immediate horror at these times, and only wish for the drug to wear off and for the experience to be over, and to sleep. Not me. It's during those times of intense self-reflection that I am most interested in what the drug tends to invite. I would treat it as a sort of spiritual house-cleaning, as mawkish as that may sound. Along with so much expected reflection there was also a recognition of the simplicity of certain things, the sound and tone of one's own voice, and the nature of the things the mind says to itself if you let it. 

Lately, for reasons I don't understand, my inner voice has been unusually despondent, and filled with grayness. I'm trying to listen and not be consumed, to laugh along with my own self-directed observations, no matter how bleak. It's not always easy. The years drifting by have a way of robbing some of the frivolity of life, its laughter. I've never been a very lighthearted person but I always felt that I was filled with some strange humor that helped get me by. I felt as if I was getting away with skipping class after class, but now I awake with irrational fears that I have left some assignment undone, and irreverence alone does not always transcend the baseless imaginings. Or, not any more. 

I've played a handful of songs on the guitar this morning. I can hear the uncertainty in my voice when I sing. You might hear it, too. 

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I walked all over

The strangest of moods keeps overtaking me. I struggle to get words around it; some midlife change. Some embarrassment of time. It's all very boring, but aging comes as a personal revelation of sorts, one that defies easy expression. One that I long suspected would arrive and that I would somehow be prepared for, perhaps having accrued so much wisdom. Reading is not synonymous with living. Its descriptions meant to convey are far less mundane. Midlife is no less surprising than youth. It manages to arrive unexpectedly. I spent my youth waiting for something to happen.

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I promise to go wanderin'

Sunshine can help so much, sometimes, when it falls on your skin. I had a much better bike ride yesterday than I did the day before. I was only a minute and a half faster, but felt stronger and fought the road, the bike, and myself less. Perception counts for so much, and at all times.

I don't remember if I ever posted that picture here before. It is near the caldera of the volcano, Irazu. I like it. So many of my pictures are just candid portraits, shot with expensive lenses. There is something compelling, at least to me, about seeing a small remote figure in the distance of an unfamiliar and possibly hostile landscape. I like it.

I remember at the time thinking how far away the boy had wandered, and how long it would take me to run to him if anything went wrong, and then how silly I felt for thinking that I could do anything at all to protect him if the volcano suddenly became active. The rupture in the earth's crust could have burped up any number of gases that might have killed us all quickly. But to the edge we all went and peered over at the mineral rich lake that had formed there. Then we each wandered off our separate ways for a little while.

All day when I lie down I feel as if I am falling into the ground, towards the center of the earth. Even when I open my eyes, it is as if everything is falling up and away from me, like the sudden descent before a waking hypnic twitch. 

  

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Rock and Roll

My son took that picture of me. I like it for that reason, of course. The other day I paid him 50 cents for every chord he could play on the ukulele. He played four: C, Am, F, G. I explained to him that there are a bunch of songs that we can play with those four chords, then proceeded to play him Let It Be by The Beatles and D'yer Maker by Led Zeppelin, but two examples that rely heavily on those chords. 

I owe him 2 bucks. 

I await the clock's ticking to 4pm, when I am free to go ride my bike up into the hills. It is what I look forward to every day now that the sun is finally out here. Perpetual gray does terrible things to my spirit, and I have so little fight in me, nowhere left to hide or run. 

A friend texted me last night verifying that I had insurance and encouraging me to get a colonoscopy now that I'm 50 yrs old. Had I not been so rattled by the sudden thought of silently growing ass-cancer then I would have told him that I thought the entire purpose of this site was just such a prolonged and invasive examination. It's a sort of experiment in anal-gazing, but it sure beats talking to myself out loud about politics. 

I am a news feed junky, truly. Not because I thirst for facts or truth, but because I am fascinated with the news cycle. I subscribe to all sorts of different publications, from across the political and social spectrum, and when a big story hits it is really something to watch them compete to own the narrative with their headlines alone. Some outlets are so very good at this. It makes me happy, to watch the manufacturing of the meaning of any given event. I studied this process in school a bit, but never at this level. I am from the older and now forgotten Generation X.

Ok, it's time for me to suit up and prepare to demand the pleasurable exhaustion of my lungs and legs and heart. 

It's time to start wasting time again.

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the graceless enthusiasm

It has been raining for weeks, now the sun has come out but I am in a self-imposed prison of sorts. It is a security position at work. I must be within minutes of my computer at all times. Though I am aching to get on my bike and ride.  

A new lens arrived in the mail today. It is a beauty, one that I've wanted for a while now - Nikon manual focus 35mm f1.4 AI-S. When I have collected all of the manual film lenses that I want I am certain that the major film manufacturers will cease production. I am like CS in this. What can I do except move to the Ukraine, or somewhere in which some version of 35mm film can still be bought, and all phone calls are made with a rotary dial. What? I should be ostracized from the digital world as a heretic. 

Say what you will, but slowly I have accumulated the film camera body (FM3a) and set of prime lenses that I want - 24, 35, 50, 85, and 135. I suppose that I could also have an 18 and 105, also, though I rarely ever bring more than one lens with me when I go out shooting. They are all beauties, each a cascading new height of post-WW II Japanese engineering. 

I - on the other hand - have just become a massive dork about them - a form of eccentricity that feels feasible. 

If I ever come into money then be assured that I'll roundly denounce Japanese camera and lens maker, then become a newly patriotic German. Touting their strengths. You've been warned. If you're going to be a camera dork then Leica is the system to own. But I am lazy, my aspirations towards snobbishness only ever strive to the mid-market, and I am smitten for the collecting. 

It's what happens to a middle aged man when he is left alone with his paycheck. 

I have retained so much of the graceless enthusiasm of my childhood. 

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Notes from the Afterlife

After a grueling bike ride - mountain, technical, exhausting, 1500 feet of climbing, slow moving progress - in which I further aggravated a ligament or tendon in my left shoulder there was the yearly Pinewood Derby race. I shot with auto-white balance and everything came out terribly yellow and/or red. When will I learn...?  I ordered a white balance card. The ligament issue in my shoulder had me walking around as if I had a lame arm, afraid to lift it, then last night I woke up with some muscular issue on the right side which I'm convinced is a reaction to the other side. Pain shot down the side of my neck like electricity sourced from pain. Now I'm walking around as if I have broken my neck several times and the cervical vertebrae - whichever ones are opposite of the atlas and axis -  have fused, reducing my head's mobility to near nil. 

For two years now I have had almost perpetual ligament injuries and muscular strains of some kind. They just seem to move freely around my body, bouncing from side to side as if playing tennis with my nervous and muscular systems. These pains chew on my mind. The victor malady maybe one day getting to claim the triumph of my suicide. Okay, okay - too dark. But constant physical pain is as legitimate a reason as any other, and there are many. I'm not contemplating suicide. I'm only justifying it, and not necessarily for future reference.

This is why I don't want to write any more. At least for today. 

iI blame last night's lunar eclipse.

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Pet Adoption

We might adopt this dog soon. We filled out an adoption application with Pets Lifeline. We'll see. We found her wandering the neighborhood last week. I convinced Rachel to leave her alone, though we were concerned. I surmised that she had a collar on and did not accept food or water, so she was somebody's dog that seemed unstressed about being loose. Her owners would find her soon, I reassured everybody.

That didn't happen.

Somebody else in the neighborhood called Pets Lifeline and then she has been there ever since. There was a call-in claiming they knew the dog and so they gave the info, but the Lifeline people called and sent certified letters to the presumed owner, but they never heard back. So, we went to visit her yesterday, with Rhys, so you know how that went. She needs us to save her. I'll think about her name once the adoption is complete, but so far Akira Ichiban Q6 is the working name I've given her.

I am in love with her a little bit, at least to the degree that a person my age can fall for a canine that they barely know. So, a lot. Much more than I would have guessed if someone else was telling me this same story. 

I hope that Barkley understands - he's a reasonable Shih Tzu most of the time.

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The Niña, the Pinto Bean, and the St. Pauli Girl

Ok, let's try this writing thing in the early morning once again. What could go wrong? I've just been reading news feeds for the last hour, contemplating, posting rebuttals on social media, etc. My head seems in the right place. I am prepared to do battle with the emptiness below.

It has been raining here for three weeks now. There has hardly been a day without it. When it's not raining the skies remain a reminder that it will again, and soon. Bike rides have been close to impossible. It cripples a part of me. My happiness seems ever waiting. The forecast says the sun is still days away, but getting closer. A man of little faith, I will believe when I can feel it on my skin.

Today will be the Pinewood Derby race. I shaped the wood for the boy and then left the project for him to show interest in. Mom painted the car last night after the boy went to sleep - black. It is meant to suggest the Bat Mobile. 

Yes, the two pics in this post were taken under (almost) the same lighting, different cameras. It's what I do now - the projects and pastimes of a seven year old. 

Maybe it is better to write at the end of the day. I vacillate uselessly between reflection and opinion. The world has ceased meaning as much for me as it once did. I seek modest pleasures for reasons I barely understand. The moment is here, but I can not grasp it. 

I feel adrift in this life, attached mostly to being a father. Some would praise such an admission, telling me what should matter most. It does matter, of course, but I was not quite prepared to relinquish everything to it. Anyone with an imagination is entitled to wonder what their life might have been otherwise. I read recently that those who write their goals down are statistically more likely to achieve them. 

Write yours here:

 

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Now what

On my computer I moved pics from one folder to another carelessly, using a search to find them all in their place of chaos, which had the effect of taking all of the images out of their respective folders and scattering them by the thousands into their new folder. A rookie mistake and I should have known better. It has been a while since I had to give any thought.

I picked up my stack of processed film negatives today. There will be one year's worth, unscanned now, in April. Thousands of 35mm images taken this last year, for the having. The most I have ever taken by several factors.  I should find the time to catch up. Perhaps I've leaned too far and too long towards just the taking of the pictures, fascinated with the mechanics of framing, the feel of constant composition. Now what. 

And at all times

Again I waited and watched the day move by me before sitting down to test again my feelings. I wanted to post this pic, mostly. The other day we played with four fun dogs plus Barkley at the school field. I like the pic in the way that parents like seeing their kids grow and become. This life's quotidian joys and tussles are both dull and golden and everywhere by all bearings.

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Its absence

I utter to myself: write a post every day for a while, see how it feels. The end of the day appears, things are different. Parts of it are already drifting off. 

It's not what used to draw me to it, the feeling of recounting, of looking back and trying to express the recent, though that is always a part.

Waking up and having a modest purpose seems to drive some other thing, also. Its absence is the otherwise.  As if I'm trying to recapture the pleasure of conversation. 

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Follow me on Instagram

Life is simpler and easier on Instagram. You just scroll through your feed and like other people's pictures. What could be easier? There, I am @realq6. There, you will find me to be a peaceful, loving man who is satisfied with liking things that please. 

I'm not always the best dad, though it is maybe too early to make that assessment, and I am not the person to make it. But I can't help my devilish nature at times. This morning the boy was telling me about all of the wonderful things that his buddy can do. He rattled off a short catalog of cool things, presumed accomplishments that he employs to wow the kids in the recess yard.

Can he summon the souls of all the dead chickens he has ever eaten?

It is for things like this that I must sometimes censure myself. I have filled that kid's head with so much voodoo and bad info that he'll be lucky to avoid becoming a zealot for the ancient science of astrology. 

Okay, I give up. I came here in the hopes of clearing my head of some of the useless noise of the day, but it has only amplified it like listening to mariachi through a bullhorn. 

Don't have children. Not because you'll regret it but because your love for them becomes everything. Not a bad gig, at all, but the pay is expensive and the hours are eternal. 

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Ouroboros Upkeep

Fuck. It's as if I can't stop myself. I can't seem to find a suitable subject to write about and in my eagerness to avoid politics I'm sounding too much like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but without all the pesky intellect. More of a High Maintenance than a Zen or Motorcycles scenario. 

Well, what can one do? 

People are posting pics of themselves from ten years ago and then other, recent ones. A celebration of time and gravity, it seems. A wrinkle in the space-face continuum. So, here are mine. Do you see now what a decade will do to a man? For the purpose of this post I wish that I had changed genders. It would be more interesting. I could have demanded much more from my readers. 

It was interesting to go through old pics that I had taken in NYC and other places. I saved most all the pics I had taken, so it is difficult not to come to the conclusion that I drink too much and I should put my camera down when doing so. It is almost as unsightly as a stumbling drunk - the poor, shaky images from the camera of an amateur. I used to wander around NYC with my camera, ready to annoy people, pretending to be a street photographer. More gutter than street. 

I am not being tough on myself. It's all true, I have thousands of very poor images. I took a lot because it was the only way that I could occasionally get good ones. My "abilities" seem to have improved in relation to my gear purchases. It's a bit dispiriting to scroll through past efforts. It has made me want to take a small point-and-shoot out and re-learn everything, starting with patience. Does one learn patience, or just practice it and then sense its value. How often I have told myself to quickly find more of it, then watched the thought depart in such easy dismissal. Need to get some, soon. 

I haven't been writing here because I'm struggling finding anything other than my son to care about. I know how tedious it can be to hear someone talk of nothing but their child, or the love that created them. It is worse when they have more than one. The barely concerned listener is expected to remember their differences, as when you start to carelessly read a Russian novel and you can't quite distinguish the individual characters yet. You don't want to go back. You'll just try to pull the story up from the miasma of events and places. You'd rather just be vaguely confused about why any of it matters, until of course one or more of them do something that does. 

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Losing My Edge

I began to write about security but became unsure. I realized that anyone reading what I wrote might think that I was referring to financial security, or sexual, national, or anything else that fills in the blank. No matter how I looked at what I was writing it was wrong unless I wrote very explicitly, which then seemed like a confession. There are forms of security in health, self-possession, romantic, and in the basic belief of one's own goodness, and many more. Few of these feelings overlap very much with the others, and most all of them rely on some sense of abundance, or a mechanism to have internal needs met, often by others. It is easy to blur satisfaction with security, in the same way people confuse pleasure with happiness, contention with love, and lubrication for the temporary delights of friction.  

Whatever works is my policy. That's why we must build the wall! Security, you see. 

You can add the phrase "a sense of" before the word security and it will be equally accurate, if not more so. 

My conclusion: security is oftenest an illusion that depends heavily on the illusions of others, and confidence is a form of ignoring the darkest truths of your own imagination. Even the most confident of people must tremble when a doctor privately utters the word "cancer" to them in their office. Followed by the word malignant. 

We must move fast. Few sustain a sense of security in such situations. Imagine walking to your car in the parking lot alone, knowing that you must call your significant other or your lone parent and find the words to say what must be said. Heart attacks, likewise, have a crumbling effect on the sense of safety. I've never had one, but I've seen someone having one. They seemed so very concerned about the future, and of course the present. I recall seeing my father thusly, twice before he disappeared. 

Well, I had not meant to go so dark so soon in this post. But yes, cancer and heart attacks, in case you had forgotten. That's what I wake up chanting to myself now.... my mantra is the word hypertension... it relaxes me. If you're like me - a white male living in the US in 2010 - then this matrix should help you relax a bit. 49.5% of deaths for white men between the ages of 20-24 is stupidity. 

It just occurred to me that the last post I wrote was as a substitution for what would have otherwise been an email response to an occasional reader here. I had meant to write her back, but wrote an unrelated post instead. Does such self-involvement also reduce one's sense of security?

I don't know, but I am a deeply self-involved person, or that is what I tell myself. I thought that I was the relatively moderate one among my friends in terms of living within one's own thoughts, but in mid-life I realized that no, I had just surrounded myself by others who were far worse than me, at least in that one regard. Having your own child can cause you to be less permissive and understanding of childishness in adults, though I hate that effect, rather than relishing it. I want my friends to be silly and selfish. It seems to make possible, or perhaps only easier, the act of creativity. Or, perhaps silliness and selfishness can be the result of creativity. I can suffer whimsy if there is creative output, but what does that say? What a horrible thing to think and feel, that it's time that whimsy produces something useful. Aging is the horror in which the room empties of all but you and your belief that life should be a certain way.

Watching kids will teach you much of what you need to know concerning the tyranny and triumph that is human interaction at the imaginative level. I sit with a (now) seven year old and we work on Lego projects, somewhat together. The impulse to exert your will over that of another's, for the presumed betterment of the creation, runs deep and strong and knows no age. Encouragement gives way to quiet exasperation, then my eventual admission that the boy had a much better idea for a submarine shaped interstellar space laser guided (and firing) ship than I did. It was the shark-shaped fin he added to the top that did it, etc. 

Never go toe-to-toe with a seven year old in a Lego battle. That is my wisdom. Once he's done I will pretend that I just thought of a name for the ship, knowing that I had been thinking of it all along, wanting to somehow brand the thing with an indelible tag that includes me in the creative process. He'll just add another shark fin on the bottom and rename it to his liking. That is his wisdom. 

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Without all the laughs

It has rained for 24 hours without stop. Or rather, without a break in the glowing grey above. The air is moist and the ground is wet and will be for days. The forecast predicts much more, on this point they are hardly ever wrong. Predicting the weather for a given moment must be very difficult; for a week, sometimes it must be easy. The computer shows a screen full of clouds moving along the coast, dragging precipitation with it. It is heaviest around the SF Bay and north of that where we are, but moves all the way up to Vancouver, becoming sparser and sparser as it goes. 

I must go and get a coffee.

Okay, done - delicious clouds in my coffee. 

I am charging a camera battery. Today is the boy's birthday. Well, today is his birthday party, the day that he is more likely to remember. I have begun to worry that he will be too much like me when he grows older. Seven seems the right age to kickstart those parental fears into dragon-like flight. I suppose that must be a normal concern for parents, unless you're like mom and you enter an extended period of denial that you ever lived the life that you once did. I'm not sure why women find Jesus once they give birth, but some do. Not the actual Jesus, just some weird echo of saintliness and terra-divinity. Suddenly familiar behaviors become shocking instances of bad manners, the likes of which they have never known. It's pearl clutching time for the aging ravers. 

Well, I'm not sure this qualifies as an update on family life. We are just rolling along like everyone, looking for death everywhere in the hopes of avoiding it. 

Here is the boy reading Santa's response to his letter and cookies and milk on Christmas morning.

He'll be seven years old on Monday. What more can I say? The kid has changed my view of the world, and of life. I might have done that without him, but I hadn't yet, and that is a project that I might not have ever started. 

I am more afraid of things than I used to be. I wander less, am home earlier, drink less, exercise more, practice caution as if it were good manners, and might not ever return to Burning Man. 

Like this, but without all the laughs:

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Upholding the Law

Remember when they said that separating children from their mothers was just someone finally upholding the law and well, at least somebody's doing something!... ? 

You're going to hear a lot of newfound apathy about some laws - and a renewed focus on maintaining order! - over the next few months. From those same people. The ones who just don't think that lucky Colin Kaepernick should be making such a fuss when he's got it so well. They will, somewhat rightfully, argue that this is just an understandable breaking of a law that a businessman like him shouldn't be expected to know, showing genuine surprise that it's even a felony, or a few.  I mean, c'mon.... what are we talking about, here?  All of us will be expected to be cool, and understand. To think otherwise will be unreasonable. 

Free the Birther!  

That ^^^ makes me want to organize a local voting faction of far-right wing feminists, all males, that start making t-shirt style demands in preparation for the Trumpheaval. That they'll all share vague similarities to the possible phrasings of reproductive rights advocates will be explained away as an unintentional coincidence.  

One of the worst parts about getting older is listening to every group or individual making a claim and then having to separate them into either the bullshit or i don't care piles. 

It all makes me so sad. I want my son to glimpse a father that cares about the direction of the world but I can't have him peer into the eyes of the raving madman every few minutes to get that impression.

As side note: I was telling everybody my age, or culturally older, that I thought Colin Kaepernick looked a lot like Angela Davis when he had an afro. But, you know... the kids really struggle with that sort of wisdom now.

Sorry for those outbursts, and all the others. I'm trying to wean myself from social media but I already miss screaming angrily at strangers with the screech of cheap polemics. 

I'll need to find some way to adjust. 

I have the strangest feeling, of floating, of disappearing. 

Free the Fucking Birther!  

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Confidences

With that last thought in mind, I'll keep this as a repository for snapshots. Why not? I'm trying to get back into the practice of telling stories, arranging this little universe into narratives, vignettes.


Everywhere, the world is confused or worse. Or, perhaps it's me. The tyranny of aging, perpetual questioning of what seemed to be past certainties. If not certainties, that mostly untested sense of assuredness. I've been deleting all of my old Facebook posts. There's a Chrome extension that uses a little javascript to scroll through them year by year and deletes them. I'm not entirely sure why I'm doing it - I know that it doesn't change their ultimate existence - but since making the decision to wipe them it has changed how I interact with people on that platform.

My old nemesis finally unfriended me. Another old friend's daughter read me the riot act about abortion. I am, of course, pro-abortion to the point of even wanting to make it a national constitutional requirement that rotates on a six month cycle, but still... Something about all of it makes me sad now, like viewing an addiction or addictive behavior, after the fact of it. It makes my mind and blood race a bit but mostly only shamefully. I've only ever learned how to be reclusive, not alone. Not happily so.

It's similar to an addiction - the compulsion, arranging your life around it, always making it convenient, crave it a little bit and then a lot whenever deprived. There are certain drugs that certain people should be kept from - I'm quite certain of it.


My unstated goal was to get off of social media altogether, only interact with friends on presumably closed digital channels. I've been feeling lonelier than usual lately. I wish to be more careful with the quality of my human interactions. Superficial connections are wearing me out, sometimes with people I care for most of all.


I've written all of this before. It's a part of moving to Sonoma and having a son, I think. I suppose that age has had as much to do with it as anything else. But it's time to be more careful with my time, finally, remembering how to treat seconds as precious when the moment asks it. So that maybe I will have a reservoir of kindness leftover.

I sang part of a song out loud this morning, my voice was noticeably nervous, my timing cautious and unsure. It is so odd what singing can do for your confidence, and to it.

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Documenting a life

("That's no moon")

Okay. I have been trying to organize my life, going through old iPhoto libraries, trying to merge them using Apple's abbreviated version of in-app file management. Across the many OS's of time, all now adrift on the iBysmal Pro. 

For the money I spend on photography it is heartrending how little I have done to preserve my own photography in any form larger than about 330kb digital, scattered across a few machines, drives, and now an unplugged server. This site has become the best source for most all of it. I just wouldn't even know where to start.

I've done it to myself. I wanted snapshots; got 'em. 

So onwards and on wards of one's own - more snapshots, now and then again soon. 

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Demented from Indistance

I found this little picture of the boy and his buddy, J. They were sure, adorable little fuckers. Being a dad was so much simpler then. I say that with neither comedic nor ironic intent. Being a father then was easier. I mostly only had to feed him and keep him away from danger and then feed him. Now I have to explain the mercurial and metaphorical nature of all types of danger, only to watch my words be taken at their flat, literal value. Me, knowing that I will spend my life repeating the same exact things that I have to say now, only in a hopefully different form. 

Feeding him has become an ongoing negotiation, one in which I am always starting at a bargaining disadvantage. He has learned a basic aspect of the power of autonomy: it is much easier to stop somebody from doing something than it is to convince them from doing that same thing. 

If something can be a single word then samething should also be permitted. 

Thanksgiving was a minor family victory. We managed it without disasters large or small. We had to monitor the boy's intake of refined sugars, of course. That was the only thing that seemed to require our persistent attention, yet somehow it was the collective nature of it that caused the failure. Kids will work the Halloween-into-November candy angle. Everything else could be safely ignored, which led to our modest victory. 

Grandma left this morning and gave me a short speech about our - mine and hers - ability to get along. I desisted from commenting on what I believed to be the real cause of this dynamic behavioral anomaly between she and I. 

I don't like to remake waves after they have already crashed. 

Who does.

It takes all of my energy and looks so sad, and stupid, and pathetic, and demented from a distance. 

That last part made me smile.

“... the sills of their disappointments walk outside their bodies aimlessly for the most part, locked and forgot in their desires—unroused.”

- WCM, Paterson

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Table Photography

Am trying to create time to sit and write every day again. It is not easy, habits once broken do not mend back to life at will. Habits, habits, everything becomes one. At midlife they are everywhere around me. Every day consumed by the things I am accustomed to doing. 

The boy is still sleeping. I am going for a ride this morning - mountain biking. I need to train for my upcoming bikepacking trip in three weeks. I will be going further and with more weight than I do in my current riding habits. Perhaps this is just like the triathlon. I'll do it, but there will be a reminding injury afterwards. Maybe that is one advantage to aging - I listen to my body's warnings now. I used to only hear them as a challenge. In youth, everything in my own mind seemed to be prefaced by a double-dog dare. Some stupid little voice chanting the invocations of danger and self-harm.

Ah well, I survived.

I finally bought an external hard drive to store my photo library. It is a big part of why I stopped writing: I had run out of space for pics on my work computer. So, I gave up. I now have thousands of 35mm film scans to do. It is not an exaggeration. There are about ~100 rolls of processed film waiting to be scanned, most of them are 36 exp. each. I should hire somebody to do it. I wonder if there are any migrant photographers or film development technicians in the southern caravan. I need a Sara Facio, or the street eye of a Sergio Larraine.

Maybe I should wander wider, in grand sweeping circles that can not be easily traced. Maybe oblongs will throw the law off my trail. 

Ooops, I always thought this verse ended with the line, I promise to go wanderin'

I’m ready to go anywhere, I’m ready for to fade
Into my own parade, cast your dancing spell my way
I promise to go under it

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Little books

Rachel bought me a very sweet little follow-up gift for my 50th birthday. Every year Black Sparrow press used to make a New Year's card and send them out. She found me a bunch of them between 1985-200, all of them including a few uncollected poems by Bukowski. They must be collector items. Just little books she found for me, because she was looking. She can be such a very sweet woman. It is good to be loved by her. I spent a handful of years here outlining my frustrations with her, and her love, but you are under no obligation to believe any of that if you so choose. It's what I do, also - choose.  

I chatted with CS the other day. He feels similarly, or so I gathered. His romantic partner has helped usher him back towards health, back from his head-on collision with a truck. Back from the dead, if you let him tell it. 

On the days that I go to the gym and lift dumbbells over my head in a wide dual arc from the waist to a zenith point above my head and then back again I sometimes think about the titanium supported ribs he now has, how much such a thing will hurt when he can return to it, if he wishes to return to it, which I imagine he must. Who would elect to do anything else?

With aging, I have become more sympathetic and understanding. It barely seems a choice - one of the little things I get to lie to myself about, congratulating my idea of myself as if it were really me, freely optioning in for another year, selecting the advancing digits for pre-approval as they arrive in front of me. Light as morning, heavy as coffee spoons. 

... have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons

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with pennies

Perhaps I need a spectacle, something to cheer me; without obligation, with only miniature costs.

Speech seems to always insist that it is somehow helpful. 

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Rights of the Reproduced

I don't know what I'm thinking, ever. I've started a public argument about reproductive rights with a young woman. She is the daughter of a very old friend. I'm trying desperately to get her to validate my opinions. So far no luck. I don't think she likes me. I'm two responses away from invoking the name of the Lord.

I opened the book Still Life by Sally Mann and read a passage about how to move from one project to another, which seemed to be great advice if you're the type to finish and start projects.

Sitting here, working. Thanksgiving's third trimester. Trying to stay free from trouble. Everywhere I am over-interacting with people, having severe conversations. It is agitating me, which seems the right response. 

I just wrote a three paragraph comment to a reasonably straight-forward technical feature question that delved into the importance of legacy information and the paradox of time. Thankfully I caught myself before doing a third draft; sent two sentences instead. 

Burt Bacharach. I listened to a link. Is maybe a rash aspect of age that I enjoyed it happily between ironically and sincerely. I would have felt so silly if anyone had been here, of course, or if they had walked in and caught me. 

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The Duke of Hennessy

Not my most inspired post yesterday. I get it. Inspiration usually catches me when I'm already up at a trotting speed, if at all. For whatever reason I feel as if I need to justify my basic position on life more lately. A public accounting of sorts, my mid-life earnings statement. 

I've exceeded projections but have instilled my investors with a growing sense of unease towards my diminishing position in the overseas markets. 

It seems unfair - I've done so little in life, yet have enjoyed it disproportionately so. And now, even on more modest means than I have known in the past, I am still basically happy. 

Perhaps that is not quite the right word for what I am. Yesterday I briefly described my feeling that life has no objective meaning, and today I use the word happy to describe myself. And yes, I understand those things do not have to agree to also both be true, otherwise all happiness would be meaningful. It's not. The time in my life that I would most wish to return was filled with moments of inconsequential joy. 

Do not try to convince me otherwise. 

So, I will try to revert to just reporting the events of my life here.  That, I believe, is what might be of the most value to the boy as he grows up - to have an eyewitness telling of his own life, through his father's experience. 

Though, who knows, as soon as I thought that... I wondered if I would want such a thing from my father. I immediately feared that it would be too sparse, that I would critique or ridicule it. But that's just me. Nothing is ever good enough, but the smallest gestures bring me to tears. I spent a fair portion of my life believing that my father never understood me, never tried to. There was just enough lack of evidence in that regard for me to believe whatever I wished, and wishes find a way of becoming petrified. 

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Too much looking back

I've discovered a few things about myself by not writing here any longer. Few of those findings have felt very good, but I suppose they were important feelings for me to have. The feelings have seemed unavoidable, so that is what I tell myself: that they were, and that they have somehow mattered. They are difficult to describe, and doing so might alarm some of my friends, but they seem to revolve around one basic theme: life has no objective meaning. That has been the overwhelming sensation that I've been dealing with recently. It arrives everywhere within me now, at the oddest times. It strikes even at happiness, deflates it before it can swell and be.  

This is not to suggest that individual people have no purpose, they do, but that means very little to me. I'm not sure that my life has had any purpose whatsoever, and when I ask myself honestly to prove, even to myself, that my life has any objective purpose, I can't do it.  

It's filled with the veneer of subjective purpose. Like most people I can be consumed with the details of my own life, the microcosm of self. But that all fades away at the macro level and I can no longer align myself with the star stuff from which I arrived and will return. I no longer feel a connection with the universe and doing hard psychedelic drugs now lacks the synthesis required for such youthful emotions and observations.  

It's a feeling that I've been struggling with. It has to do with me turning 50, or so it seems. I've been asking myself questions that I can't answer. Because I can't answer the questions I tend to conclude that the answers have no meaning, nor do the questions. It's circular logic and as such seems impenetrable, because it dismisses all argument before it arrives. Death is the obvious result of life, and one searches internally for ways to indicate or prove that their life has had meaning. All that I am left with is that I love and need the people around me and many of them need and love me. That must be enough.

Though, when I ask myself what meaning there is now to the people that have passed I recognize that the deaths and lives of others all fade into meaninglessness, no matter the magnitude of love for that person. Once I learned to accept that as a fact of being then it was a very small leap to arrive at the recognition that my life and death would result in the same. 

This last Dia de las Muertos really fucked me up a bit. I've started placing pictures of myself all around the house, have built little altars to the idea of my continued existence, filled with fresh fruit and incense, burning candles and peyote buttons - little temples of voodoo. 

So, that is what I've mostly been thinking about since not writing here. This daily confessional script gives me some small sense of meaning or purpose. I recognize its absence, and miss my attempts at framing the world into personal meaning each morning. I'm told by simpletons everywhere that one must find a way to give their life meaning, and they offer their methods always as the best possible resolution. Believing perhaps that if everyone just embraced their pathway to purpose then the world would be a better place. Maybe they are right, all of them. 

I would probably encourage everyone to write each morning, to try to provide one's fears and hopes with form. To discover some way to laugh into the darkness and light, towards one's own reflection without self-defeating malice or shame, and with a governed sense of self-praise. Writing here for almost ten years means very little, but there is more of me that can be found here than can be found elsewhere. It is even more me than is my own presence in a room, for anyone interested. 

The idea that I began to struggle with was that my son might be my only future audience. But I accepted that, and am okay with it. I frightened or angered most all others away; I have tried to be honest.  

I've been examining the way that I have lived my life, and I've found a few missteps, but none so bad that I wouldn't give it a second go. My catalog of mistakes are not the ones that most people might guess. I don't regret all the wasted years of dilapidated living, the misspent or vacant ambitions, or even that I squandered much of my intelligence on being far too self-involved, never learning how to work well with others. I am fine with most all of that. I prove that by continuing to be the same way today. I only regret being in such a foul mood for most of my life. What I had to be so disappointed about, I'll never know. 

Well, now I'm here: 50. 

From the outside I must appear to still be just learning to ride a camel. I've somehow outlived something about myself. I've found a way to stay just barely in front of my demons, most of the time, though only rarely riding above them. One thing I have learned is that they do not disappear. 

I worry that I might live too long - nobody wishes to become feeble, without resources. To live in the moment is fine and well, though I might not ever win another lottery. 

Am trying to find a loophole in the universe that is not a celestial noose. 

"Not only is it necessary to prove the crystal but the crystal must prove permanent by the fracture." - William Carlos Williams

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Salsa Timberjack NX Eagle

It was time for a new bike. Rather than put money into my old bike this new bike kept talking to my thalamus, pons, and cerebellum. So, I bought it after special ordering it from a local store. I went riding today - about 3 hours, 16 miles, and 2400 feet in elevation differential (for the Strava nerds that might be reading). 

It has several attributes that my other mountain bike - a 2016 Kona Honzo AL - did not: 27.5" wheels, dropper post, and a 1x12 cassette for greater gear range.

So, now I own two mountain bikes. My needs outgrew my possessions.

CS is still in the hospital. I, of course, worry about him. So many things are unfair, but to be hospitalized for long periods of time can be dispiriting, to say the least. Recovery is not always the word to describe what happens afterwards, either. 

I once had a pretty terrible accident with my foot. I was about 17 and CS would have been in his early 30s. This was about the time when we first met. I almost lost my foot, but a French laser microsurgeon - Lionel Foncea - was able to save it. I was told that I might not ever be able to walk normally again. CS sent a card to the hospital, letting me know of his concern. It was not the reason we became friends, but I remember it as being a sympathetic generosity many years later. 

I'm not sure why I have developed such an interest in mountain biking as I approach 50 years of age. Maybe the answer is dull and obvious - that I am just having an existential crisis, one of chronology. The decades distant somehow narrowing the impending.  Perhaps I am looking for an escape route, a loophole, an alibi carved along the fibers of the heart, a getaway from decades gone. A getaway from getaways.

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What life is like for a Pentecostal

My buddy CS has been in a terrible accident. He is still in the hospital, has been for several days now.  There was a collision involving himself and a truck, and the Vespa. It was a near head-on incident, from what I gathered. He is now in some agony. It is dismaying, of course, to know that he is in this condition, and in pain. If he is anything like me then pain brings other concerns, ones that are not so easily dismissed when the relative absence of physical suffering arrives. 

Perhaps I think of my own mortality too much. Or, not enough. I guess it depends on whether you embrace westernism or not. Everybody seems to have an opinion on how much is too much when it comes to thoughts of death and dying. 

Why think about things you can't change? seems to be the general attitude. 

Why think about things you can? is my response. 

Why think at all?

Has extreme self-consciousness helped any of us? I wonder, mostly for myself. We were sold on the idea of such self-scrutiny as being a vague sort of "therapy" to help us recover from being humans, a task to which there is no apparent goal, nor end. 

Fuck all of that, I say. I hope that saying that helps. 

Well, I'm worried about my old buddy. It's no fun to suffer. I know this, too. 

I would pray for him, but I make neither grand nor modest appeals to the beyond. I am often hesitant in such matters, when sober minded, perhaps fearful that as I move closer to the edge of the known that something hidden there in the darkness might begin to recognize the sound of my voice, then call out to me, like a voice of whispers, like one of sleep.

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Between Scylla and Charybdis

I am happiest here when documenting the simple events of my life. The politics and bloviating prove their dual uselessness, though uselessness alone is not enough to kill them. I re-read the political pieces and experience shame, but even the combined effect of shame and uselessness is not enough.

The only thing missing from the Kavanaugh testimony, for liberals, was him wildly screaming with bloodshot eyes as he was dragged away from the Senate building, "BUILD THE GOD-DAMNED WALL!!!" 

Other than that unexpected outburst he seemed quite temperate and judicious - America's guy. 

The Clintons are a conspiracy at this point. Brett was quite astute on that very important fact. Does anybody even question the international subterfuge of the Clinton cabal any longer? Only those who wish to see more children being traded along the underground sex trafficking railroad maybe. The old Chuck E. Cheese Express. 

We now have a supreme court justice who, as part of his confirmation hearing, floated a Clinton conspiracy theory about his own alleged sexual misbehavior in high school. Should we give him a handful of mulligans just to get him started in his new life?

America always wins.

But that's not why I'm here this morning, and hopefully that's not the reason that you are here, either. There must be better sites out there for child sex trafficking conspiracies. We must assume that you stumbled in here entirely by chance, as what was once my "regular readership" have gone on to enjoy their own lives. That's what I've been trying to do, also. 

But I have nothing to report from yesterday. It was a relatively non-eventful day spent bumbling around the little hamlet we live in buying bagels, croissants, coffee and socks. Then, a little siesta at home while Rhys and one of his six year old buddies giggled throughout the house, playing with Legos and having their creations compete in mock interstellar battle. With me napping, adrift somewhere between heedless bureaucracy and and grievous boredom. 

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