Gazing, Staring, and Glancing

I am pleased with the progress I made over this three day weekend in which which I was left to myself. I had no plan. I'm relieved that it unfolded with three days of productivity towards something.  Anything. After I scan a few more rolls of film I will be caught up to within the last year - August 2018. It doesn't sound like much. It was a fair amount of work. Approximately 750 image scans, so far.

Years ago CS said that what I would likely enjoy most about photography was documenting my life. It is mostly all that I do, but it is what I enjoy most. I stopped writing here because I stopped enjoying it. But I kept taking pictures. Eventually, my need to be noticed re-emerged. 

Is that what is is? There must be more.

Scanning old photos is like opening little time capsules. I barely have an idea what is on most of these rolls. Each frame a little glimpse is given - part memory, part surprise at what was saved, partly a new creation. 

One of the rolls was almost completely useless. It looks like I shot it 3-4 steps darker than it was meant to be, and even then the images are out of focus, suffering from camera blur, and plagued by other failures. I'm pretty sure it was when I borrowed that Olympus XA-2. The film stock was Fuji Velvia 50. I bought a roll at Photoworks in SF to use with it, I think. There was one image that I liked from that roll, though. I'll use it here soon. 

Like CS, my eye is drawn to the mistakes, the failures or the things not meant to be preserved. Something about film makes some of those moments seem immortal. Their lack of intention speaking their clearest truth. I share fewer of those here, but I like looking at them almost as much as the more obvious successes. They seem somehow both less and more mundane, depending on what eyes you look at them with, whether gazing or staring or only with a passing glance. 

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All it ever said to me

I discovered what I'm going to do with my free weekend: scan 35mm film pics. It chose me as much as I chose it. The stack of processed but unscanned negatives was becoming absurd. After two days of scanning it is now 10% less absurd than it was previously. I found a few pics that I like, so there is always the unexpected pleasure in that.

I have no idea why I ever shoot color film. It is a lot of work and my success/failure ratio can be dispiriting when compared to digital. Any phone can take better color pics now and there are filters to simulate all the old film stocks. I guess it's because there is something Zen embedded in act of photography. The process is sometimes as satisfying as the result. 

I just scanned three color rolls from our trip to Costa Rica last Spring and I found about two images I liked. Ah well, what was I going to do with all that talkative money anyway? 

You know what Clifford Odets had to say about it:

... all it ever said to me is goodbye.

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18576

I should be excited. There are road improvements happening everywhere. The repairs will stretch into Autumn, maybe Winter. Sonoma will soon be a better place.

I have the house to myself, so I broke out a stack of processed negatives and my scanner and went to work. I didn't quite put a dent in it, but I have begun rolling the pebbles up the mighty hill again.

I should be exited.

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Probably just this

I'm back on the other (work) computer where most of my images are. How I allowed such a thing to happen is still a bit beyond me. But that is how things have unfolded. This is my life. 

That's the boy jumping a little creek on a hiking trip. It makes me happy.

I am eager to get out of the house and go somewhere, though every time I have an opportunity to do so I can't think of anywhere that I'd like to go. 

I am spending another $2500 on a car repair very soon. Money that could go towards my own happiness - a new bike, some camera gear, a vacation. Those are the remaining things that seem to bring me temporary pleasure. 

The people here at the house now are all soon taking off for Southern California. A road trip/mini vacation. The new dog, the pup, is to be put in a kennel. I have opted to stay home and experience some peace and quiet. The house is always crowded with adults and children and dogs, all great things when you want them, but together and collectively they create a lot of noise and nearly constant needs. Not actual needs, but always there is the expectation of a response, which is a need of sorts. I am eager to have some time alone, though I have no idea at all what I would do with it.

Probably just this, what I'm doing right now.

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Polaroid Portraits

All of my other pictures are always on my other computer. I thought the cloud was going to sync all of the fragments of my life together into one gloriously unified whole. What must have happened in the cloud? 

I took lots of pics at my 8 yr old buddy's birthday party, most of which I gave to the host, my old friend, the 8 yr old's mother. A few I had to take out of the stack I gave her. They captured the occasional inadvertent youthful indiscretion or a minor unfolding drama with an accidentally uninvited guest.

Well, what happened was this: a birthday invite email went out and it had a girl on there that was not supposed to be. There had been a falling out of the friendship. I can't quite tell what is wrong with this girl, but whatever it is there's lots of it in her. I'm sure she's a fine child and someone's absolute miracle but she is odd to interact with, and mildly unpleasant.  These are but a few of the pics of her.

Well, I shouldn't say all of this. Some of these are proxy opinions for those of others. I don't really know the she-demon. But my little buddy, indiscrete 8 yr old that he is, kept telling her that she wasn't supposed to be at this party and that she should leave. She had been dropped off by her dad, I think, and the text had already been sent to come pick her up. I encouraged my buddy to go easy on her, to not be hurtful, and to focus on all of his friends that showed up for his birthday party. But you know how kids can be - vicious and remorseless. 

I tried to ignore the unfolding drama and only paid attention to it insomuch as to make sure that no one was being really ugly or provoking anyone emotionally or physically. Again, kids are little tyrants and shoplifters. They say that racism is taught, but exploiting any perceived weakness of others isn't, after a certain age. Decency is molded and not necessarily innate. 

When I was looking through the various candid shots that I had taken I found her sulking quite often, with most of the other kids just ignoring her, though not for any lack of trying on her part. 

But not my little buddy. He was driving it home like a two-ton semi-tractor that she was unwanted. Every chance he had he ran by her laughing. This went on to the point where I had to remind him that Santa sends out covert elf agents on kid's birthdays because he knows that's always the best time to see what kind of kid you really are.

That didn't work. He looked at me skeptically, as if my lie was too obvious. 

Here she is enjoying the little pool with the other kids.

Though upon her departure she did give me my favorite polaroid portrait of the day.

The Fuji instant film stock sucks as much in daylight as it does in low light. 

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The Great 8

Went to a little buddy's birthday party yesterday. He turned 8 right in front of our eyes. It was really something. 

Kids have it made now. Of course they lack the frame of reference to understand their complete and total victory over family life. They are attuned to the messaging that things could always be better for them. I asked a kid at the party what could possibly make it better and he had a very specific answer: water balloons. 

Never challenge a child to the game of "what could be"... few things will give you a clearer idea of the great and silent distance between yourself and childhood. That's what I've learned. I like to think of myself as childlike and imaginative, but these little fuckers never tire in dreaming up new paths to happiness. They do it in their sleep.

We didn't have it so well in the 70s, in Florida, as they do now. Though I remember seeing news' reports of school closings for snow days, somewhere way up in the distant north of us, and I would dream of that for all of us, too - the free days. Dreaming of snow falling over Florida, the swamps and the alligators and Mickey Mouse and me.

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Pythia'd In My Yoga Pants

Okay, back again. I am going to try to get back in the habit of posting every day, no matter how short on words or ideas I might be. It is images that I run out of most often. 

I did my ride yesterday, many miles, though just short of 50. Nowhere near a mile in vertical climbing, probably only about 1700 feet. I used an app on the phone designed to gather this info, but on the second half of the ride I got a network error message so I turned wifi off, forgetting that it is required for the app to work. I know the ride well, the distances and the elevation differentials, from having ridden up and down the valley to these exact spots in the past. I am happy with having done something close to what I set out to do. I have been feeling sedentary lately, even as I have been more active. I was going to start telling people I was anemic, to explain my perpetual lethargy. 

I am desperately trying to cycle to a faraway place in my mind where I won't feel guilty for buying a new bike. I currently have three of them but would be willing to give up one right away if I get a new one (swapping out those whitewall tires), and possibly another if the new one satisfies my conceptual and physical wants. I struggle with getting rid of things, always telling myself that past use will one day mean future use. I am constantly trying to restore the republic of my memories. If the future is anything like my memories of the past then it is no wonder why I am filled with such tidal anxieties. 

Okay, I am going to the gym soon. The gym is a strange place where memories of what once was collide with the knowledge of what will become, while the struggles of the present moment are all that one can see in the mirror's reflection. My gym is called The Oracle of Deltoids.

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... then nothing is cool

Let's play Twister, let's play Risk .... yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah 

See you in heaven if you make the list .... yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

I've been swapping out old cds in the car again. 

Okay, I have decided to go for a nice long bike ride today - ~50 miles and a mile of vertical climbing. I should get out on the road before the sun climbs to 100 degrees today.

I'm not an old guy, my behavior insists. 

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Everybody loses

Well, one of the bikes I was looking at - a real contender - has a security recall. We can't have any of that noise harshin' my sweet west coast mellow.

Well, fuck. I just sat down to write a post, but then an invitation to dinner came flying in on the airwaves. Everybody loses.

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Abhorring Vacuums

In need of a new adventure, have become something that is not quite sedentary, not complete. What energy there is, spent riding a bike in the heat, neither wasted nor saved. If you squander the kinetic it dampens the potential. I hardly have a vestige of vigor remaining with which to grumble. 

Don't worry about me. I am still looking online at young naked women and exotic bikes to buy. The accretion of mass potential energy rolling up in adipose rings around me, giving my arms a soft bumper when they collapse into me with exhaustion or surrender. I currently need to lose more weight than that bike weighs - 16.3 pounds. There are some who might force themselves to lose the weight before buying the bike - poor spirits. 

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One bargain - no passengers

I rode by the hospital where the boy was born. The doors and windows were all shuttered years ago. I remember them pushing Rachel and Rhys out that door to the right in a wheelchair. I went and pulled the car around and we drove home. Two years later we were divorced.

Test riding the black bike. It is a beauty. I will not buy it though, I do not think. It is excessive and surpasses my needs. I'll test ride another one within the week. They are both absurdly expensive for basically being exercise bikes, though once you have refined your tastes there is hardly any going back. There remains only longing and hell.

Love's a tussle, it gets at all of us.

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Three Day Weekend

More pics of flowers. They are all that I have. Well, not all, but close. 

I am preparing for a ride. It is overcast again. Unfortunate, as we are camping tonight and it had been clear for a few weeks straight, almost the thing you come to expect from California summers. The weather always only turns when you need it to least, as the saying goes. Can I use always only? The negation of opposing hyperboles. 

I'll give it some thought as I go. 

I took the day off from work, for no reason, and let work know that I would be doing this every other Friday for the foreseeable future. They were fine with it, though I didn't present it quite in those terms. I'll be having alternating three-day weekends for a while. I bet that I'll begin to detest the two-day ones, eventually. Sooner than latté. 

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Sugarloaf

The boy has been over here with me a bit, also. We're going camping tomorrow night, all of us and our visiting guest. I want spots by the river, so I will go early. It is the most pleasant place to awake. To hear the creek's murmurings before it occurs to you to open your eyes. Camping is no longer uncomfortable, the way it was when I was a kid, when we slept on gravel and tree roots. Air mattresses must have improved greatly. I'm certain of it. I usually sleep well when camping, which makes little sense. Need, I guess - there is some internal truce that allows and invites it. I'm certain of it. 

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This is....

House-sitting is going splendidly. It is more enjoyable than I thought it might be. I had guessed that I would just want to be at home, which is only right around the corner and we have a lovely guest, but some quiet time to myself has turned out to be more valuable than I could see from behind the wall of noise and distraction that is being a dad.

I brought some camera stuff with me and have been wanting to set up and play with some pictures here, for the change, but all that I have had time to do so far is play with a soft-focus lens. If you like to do drugs and water flowerbeds the way that I do in the afternoons then maybe you'll find something to like about those two. They each have a charm for me, but that could also be the sudden sense that I am alone in a house with no other living creatures. No needs but my own.  

Perhaps I'll sleep in the garden tonight. There is a flat spot. I am preparing to go camping this weekend and should try the air mattress. There's an idea. Always, it is the ideas that make a person seem old - not following them or the other. 

Everybody needs some alone time. I say it often, to others. It's easy to say, and believe, and easy to believe that is what I have when I am at home working with the dogs. But that is not being alone. This is.

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... how did you get here?

Turns out I was fine. How long, oh great ocean, how long?

Silvia Plath is one of my favorite poets when I only read her work one random line at a time on Twitter. That's my favorite picture of her in a bikini, also. 

O love, how did you get here?

O embryo

"... back where you came from"

Proud days for American politics. 

I enjoyed waking up early and alone. It was novel. Went to Starbucks and drank a coffee and pondered the uncluttered feeling. Went back to the house and then went for a bike ride and to the gym. It has been some time since that was part of my morning. Along the way I shifted to exercising in the afternoon, if I felt like it. It must be something you enjoy doing. 

Reclining here on the couch now writing this, trying to convince myself to get up and go for another ride while it is still mostly golden weekend sunlight. Torn between feelings - It harrows me between fear and wonder. 

Yes, and listlessness and anxiety. For half the day today my chest hurt. 

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To be alone

My friend went to Lisbon. I have his house to myself. I haven't had a night entirely to my own in a year or more. More. It would have been last May when I still had the apartment, before I let my friends stay in it the last month. I'm going to start doing this more. That is my first-night resolution, before the demons come to do me harm. Maybe I'll just go get a hotel for the night, occasionally. To be alone. You lose something when you're never alone. CS will tell me what it is that becomes lost. I can't think clearly now. My mind is fuzzy and distracted. And he is pretty good with the vernacular of solitude. 

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What?

What the fuck. I really don't have any pictures of my own, and it's my own fault. My life is disorganized. I ponder if it will return to the point that it was at just a few short years ago, maybe two. It wasn't perfect - I had time to indulge my interests and passions and other. 

Now, I have a packed box of unscanned negatives - thousands. I must live with the idea that there might be good pictures in there. There must. 

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Simulation

Nothing to report, just wanted to hear the sound of my fingers against the keys. Would it be annoying or possibly pleasant if each letter made a slightly different tone. Probably the former. Too many notes for it to be anything more than chaos. Unless some letters repeated the same notes at different octaves, and you could choose the key, or change the key by striking certain combinations of letters, certain words.  What a dull and unoriginal thought. 

What am I writing about. I am off to a lonely start. It is loneliness that I feel now, most of all. I shouldn't, I know. I am surrounded by people who love and need me, those whom I love, but still there is a nagging loneliness to my life. It is everywhere and what I felt for a time I had escaped in nightclubbing, even though I knew it was as near or nearer there as everywhere else. Few things are as empty as electronic music can be when listened to while isolated and perhaps feeling less than loved or desired. 

We went to the beach on Sunday. We forgot to bring our kite, though we had a pretty good time without it. 

Next time, we said, we'll bring it next time. 

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Oh, I know a dirty word

Well, CS was in SF. He brought a companion with him who had promised to be his lady chaperone for his first Pride celebration. I haven't heard from him since. He can be like that. I tried to tell him that most of the bathhouses are no more. Some people you just can't reach.

Maybe I'll hear from him when he comes up for air. 

We had a mostly uneventful weekend. Went to a local spring-fed pool here - Mortons - brought the dogs, lounged on the grass snacking, listening to the old "Social Living" album by Burning Spear at a respectful volume. That, and Black Uhuru's "Red" and The Abyssinians "Satta Massagana" and Glen Brown's "Termination Dub."

I had made myself a THC concoction before we left. I spent the day with mirrored shades on, smiling at everybody, walking into the pool at the shallow end, nodding, terrified of what was unfolding in my head, terrified of speaking. Or rather, terrified that I would not be able to stop talking once I did, which I spent the day being on the verge of. I misjudged my spoonful of the magical medicinal elixir. THC ceases being a soft drug at a certain level. I can't tell you what that level is for you, but I now know what it looks like when overfilling a 1/2 tbsp measuring spoon from our kitchen drawer, for me. 

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"Such substance makes"

I've had the strangest day. Fragments of weirdness connected to one another and stretching back until morning. I was lying here trying to go to sleep and something made me get up and look into my own eyes in the mirror. No idea why, just an impulse. Nocturnal concern. I went to the gym with Rachel this morning and then for a bike ride, something I haven't done in a while. I raced another rider up the hill that I ride almost daily and won. Maybe it rattled something loose. 

I am still out of new pictures. Have been shooting film and doing nothing else. Of what purpose I  could not say.

I follow a Sylvia Plath bot: "Such substance makes"

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Invocations

Another night, late. Fewer and fewer pictures of my own to post. I should go to bed, it is not far away.

The hills on the west side of the valley, towards the ocean, have turned golden. The fog sits on top of and behind them, moving along the soft summit ridge as living curses being whispered into coffee and cream.

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Coordinating Conjunctions

I don't have any new pics. That is a part of what has kept me from writing. And mortal despair.

I love starting sentences with And. 

Like dating a witch. Or her sister. 

But without the drama.

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Add To Cart

First choose an image, then write around it, or to it. Or, let it set the tone. I tried that, but had to skip past about a hundred pictures of the boy before I could find another image that I haven't already used. Such is the breadth of my laziness.

Well, the picture captures how I feel, in part. 

I've stopped buying myself things when I feel bored. It has only been about two weeks but that's long enough for me to notice a difference, or rather the lack of difference. Buying things doesn't make me any happier. I guess I needed to feel that for a few weeks.

Perhaps I have not deprived myself long enough. It's not as if I'm not online looking at ways to waste my money. I am, I am. I'm just not getting the satisfaction of clicking the Buy button. My money still disappears, somewhere, but I endure less guilt this way. 

I told you, the picture captures part of it.




I have nothing left for this day.

Take this, REO:

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Lucky Accidents

(CS)

Perhaps this image was a charmed failure, as CS says, but I like it more than just about any other image I've seen in a few months. If I could create images like this, in-camera, then it is all that you would see from me for a while. I have grown too comfortable with the family snapshot portraits, and I have made a few lucky mistakes, but I am unorganized and rarely learn from my mistakes, or remember how to repeat them. My life as a series of charmed accidents. I tried some street photography the other day but only by walking out to the street in front of our house and trying to find anything of interest. There was none, or very little, to my eye. For that, I miss living in a city. I want a road trip, just to take pictures. 

I awoke to songs and praise and love and kisses and gifts. Rachel and Rhys had worked together to create a nice little Father's Day surprise for me. There was a new toolbox waiting on the kitchen counter for me with handmade cards and funny store bought ones. I was asked a while back and it was the most functional thing I could think of that I needed - a new toolbox. They went into secret action, and found me a very nice one. It looks like it will last another 25 years, as my last one did. Rhys is eager to transfer everything out of the old broken one today and into the new one with all the clean compartments for screws and nails and whatnots. What could possibly be more wholesome and sweet, than is his simple and pure desire to just be my son and to participate in my life. 

I've spent so much of my life wondering why people aren't more resilient. They seem to be traumatized by everything. Perhaps they are. Life is tough and psyches are fragile, trauma gives people something private to hold and share about themselves, or to keep bundled up like a secret, still-born baby. Perhaps they wish to reveal the thing in parts or whole, to help explain the chaos that leaps around inside of them at times. 

People make mistakes, and then there are others that are always vindictive and cruel, as if that behavior forms a form of truth about existence that should be shared, to help toughen up those who might otherwise fall prey to those actions elsewhere. Kids and dogs don't have very many options for escape from such situations. I have seen it. I was relatively lucky. My life was free from what would be now considered abuse for the most part, though few believe that and there are some quizzical components to my past, to be sure. But I never felt abused, just misunderstood and mildly neglected. I'm fucked up mostly because I wanted to be. I allowed it, then encouraged it, and then couldn't stop it. So, here I am. 

But not this morning, not with a new toolbox - a fresh place to sort through the broken chaos, the runaway pieces of hardware, fasteners made of metal, sharp little objects capable of piercing the skin,  or affixing boards of wood, the unfinished or never started projects of my life, the chaos involved in a desire for an ability to fix things. Those things that become collected because few people discard what might one-day become useful again. 

Now, I have a new place to repeat the endless partialness of being. If I had ever learned to complete things then I might know how to end this post. Somewhere there must be a fortified plastic box of bright colors designed to hold all of the loose question marks, exclamation points, and of course the ever-needed period, used to pin down and hold an otherwise unwieldy and runaway stream of words in search of their meaning, adhering itself to what came before or arrives next while also magically separating itself from it. Bent nails in uneven timber, hobbled together with the intention of bearing weight. 

Measure twice, once cut.

It all seems so simple - I hug my son often and tell him that I love him and believe in him, and hope that he remembers that. I feel comfortable growing old in front of him, more than anyone else. It's likely because I can not possibly keep up with him. Trying to would prove the fact. 

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... then of course I would

I hate Apple's Photos app. Truly. It is an embarrassment for them and they don't seem to notice or care. I just spent about 20 minutes wrestling with it over a simple file management and editing issue. The best conclusion that I could come to after multiple efforts and some online research, and years spent troubleshooting technical problems, is that Apple is a company that deserves to suffer and die a shameful, expensive, public death. I hope that one day happens after my own, of course.

So, here is a 35mm pic from maybe two years ago. It is one of the boy's school buddies. They are all getting older around me at an noticeable rate. Why does every mention of the passing of time cause me to think of my own death, now? It didn't used to, and I'm still young, or so people say. Are others this morbid, though only privately? Or, perhaps other people healthy in their hearts and minds.

Answer me!

Tough call on the relative health of others, glad I don't have to be the one to make it, at least not this morning. It is the morning of Father's Eve.

As I age I value most people less, though I still see glimmers of beauty and hope and mystery in many, but few my own age. 

Age is among the great discriminatory categories. I see it everywhere, now. How it is allowed in almost all regards, short of cruelty or flagrant discrimination. But so much is subtle, particularly when it comes to how groups tend marginalize types, without ever needing to agree on it openly. It just happens, you start out as one thing and you gradually become another, without realizing how the gradual becomes the inevitable. Until. 

As you age you matter less. Of course this is not true for everybody, some accumulate useful resources. They somewhere keep pirate treasure maps in locked trunks. If you are a parent then you might matter more to your children, or so the hope goes. But this simple recognition doesn't prevent me from observing that the other thing is still happening, also, everywhere now and forever. If I was younger then of course I would fight up against it with the sudden fury of what was once me.  

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The mighty diamond of depression

Back in that other life I went to a getaway wedding at a getaway destination - Mykonos. In an attempt to appear normal, and to sustain a sense of normalcy for a week spent mostly without sleep, I stopped taking some medications that were ostensibly meant to treat manic-depression. Mine, they said. 

Now, whether you are afflicted with manic-depression, or only lightly touched with it, this has only marginal bearing on what the cessation of those types of medications - lithium bicarbonate and Lamictal - has on the psyche and well-being of the patient.

I was being the patient. A stumbling buddha - the sound of one hand laughing. 

I remember there being this immense clarity of just how full of shit everybody was, how false. I could be reached by neither love nor reason. It was overwhelming, to see my friends seemingly as they truly were. Similar to having recognitions concerning yourself and others while on very strong acid, and after. It burns a nearly intractable impression - even about those that you have known so long - on the fragile and perhaps weakened mind. Perhaps damaged. Don't be weak if you're also going to be vulnerable. 

The actuality of such de-acclimatizing from mood stabilizing cocktails works in a very stark and somehow unknown reverse order of operations. 

I learned and suffered a little taste of this with a friend of mine recently.

The details are irrelevant. But. I was given a glimpse into the odiousness in which I operated, and what that must have been like from the perspective of the other person or people around me. The one(s) hopefully operating at nominal levels of regular sleep, food, and meds. 

Nothing can be done. Or, nothing that I will ever do. I have few regrets, or a few, none other than how unlucky time and love can be when arriving and departing at such erratic and regular intervals. 

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A feeling of duty

(Carl De Keyzer)

I'm on my new computer but I have no new pictures on this technological terror, and I need one. 

Do I? Fuck it, take that pic ^^^. It is the only pic by this photographer that I have ever seen. I linked to his site out of a strong feeling of duty. 

Ha - duty. 

I can never seem to recover very well from childishness here. I think I know why that is but do not wish to fix it, and only part of the fix is with me, or cause. There are readers' expectations to which one should also offer their duty, the effects. 

Ok scatologists, I admit defeces. 

Damn it. I wanted to write something good today, something that made me feel good.

I wanted to expel the troublemaker.  

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The skin of the fruit

(Modigliani)

Turning in this sleep

One hand finds this other hand

Teeth breach the skin of the fruit

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Sailing Along The Southern Coasts

Went for a bike ride yesterday, my first in weeks. There were problems. Some time was needed off, but a bottle of wine or more every day started to make me feel more lethargic than enthusiastic. I enjoyed it much. Then its time had both arrived and departed and departed again. 

There is some building hope for another ride today. That is sometimes how exercise works. You get a little rush when you return to it, suddenly you have a challenging personal secret - how you feel when you try. Of course when returning to riding after an extended break of any kind I immediately start dreaming of buying myself an extravagant reward for having done so. Yesterday it was of taking today off from work and going to a few bikes shops, ending the day with a brand new gravel bike. It brought me much pleasure yesterday to imagine such a series of events happening today. But they did not happen, not yet. That's my nature, as an imaginative guy. My imaginings often involve the many things I would buy and enjoy if my life were little else but leisure. If freed from the shackles of employment. My wants seem modest but often involve the purchasing of things that are several thousand dollars - cameras, lenses, bikes. Everything else that I want I just buy without much hesitation. 

I rode my bike by an all wooden sailboat yesterday that had a For Sale sign on it - $3500. I wondered if that included the trailer and I told myself that it must. I came home and told Rachel and Rhys about it and for a short time we thought of what it would be like to have a small sail boat, what learning to sail together would be like, or what we believed it might be like. We all loved the idea of summer sailing, visiting lakes within a day's drive that we probably don't even know about yet. That is what we all talked of as we drove through the lights and towards town.

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The Beach

Family pics - they are what I'll do more of now. They are fine with me. They are mostly all I've done. I take lots of pictures, and tend to post images that matter more to me than perhaps the viewer. So be it. 

I only took one of these. 

And I still find it so hard To say what I need to say

But I'm quite sure that you'll tell me Just how I should feel today

I see a ship in the harbor I can and shall obey

 

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Beth-machista

I don't know what pushed CS over the edge but he has stopped talking to me, ever since he threatened to do so. Who knows - old people are unpredictable, except when they are angry. 

Mom also gets mad when I talk about how much hippie-pussy the boy is going to one day get (see picture above). Maybe CS suffers from a similarly arranged moral apoplexy. He's always aligning me with some other values dressed up as bohemienne. He will make a great housewife also, someday.

I can never remember if it's the Philistines defeating the Israelites or if the other team won and the good guys are still allowed to love art modestly. You tell me.  

The Old Testament is fading for me, like so much Faulkner that I never bothered reading, any more than about rather than the thing itself. 

It is all heard by this idiot, fluff of sound and furry, 

signifying bread crumbs. 

Out, out, Greek salad, 

this way to crouton crumbles.

all of our cucumbers have olived feta.

Horiatiki, Horiatiki, Horiatiki

Caper berries in this petty place, 

from day to day.

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Still Dead and Companied

A second night at Dead and Company. It's as if the music never stopped. I don't have any pictures from the second night, but they would have looked just like the pictures from yesterday. The show was good, again, though I'm not sure how much I need to go to multiple shows of the same band over the course of a weekend any more. This is the second time in about two or three years. Last time it was the Grateful Dead, also, with Trey Anastasio. The Fare Thee Well tour.

Well, once my buddy wakes up from his late night journey to Jupiter then we can start getting back on the road, maybe drive through SF and get some dim sum. That always makes things better. 

I bought the boy his first tie-dye t-shirt. He will be happy that I brought home something from the show. 

CS says that he can't know me any more, in yesterday's comments section. Who knows what combination of things said yesterday could have been his final undoing, that I went to a Dead show, openly admitted to eating acid or I found John Mayer's behavior to be sleazy. You know, it is possible to get very young girls high on drugs and still be a creep. 

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Dead and Company

(Shoreline Amphitheater)

Here is the setlist for last night's show, for people who love such things, of which I am an occasional one who does. We're returning tonight for another show. We still have some acid left, I think. That stuff is best eaten in the afternoon. Anything later in the evening becomes too insisting of its effects.  

John Mayer is a douchebag, but a very good guitar player. It is an odd combination for him to be playing with these old hippies, but I suppose that he and Bob Weir share the love of sex with young girls, so they have more than just the tenuous musical connection that I perceive for them. 

They are in a band together, so my opinions matter very little here. That I am at a weekend's worth of shows to watch them further dismantles the flat argument of my opinion. It must bother me that he was born in 1977, or something. It's okay for me to be an ageist, now, I hope. 

Mayer is douchey. I met him one night when I worked at Apple. He had a fourteen year old girl with him, high on drugs, at 4 in the morning. He was gloating a bit, that he gets to do such things, in a very sleazy way. Perhaps it was some moral sense that I'd like to pretend I don't have, but the fact of his creepiness was unavoidable. I was not alone in this feeling. Even by my liberal standards, it seemed wrong. 

She could have been a young looking 17, I suppose. I mean, she was very high. Cute, etc. 

Seemed for some wrongy. 

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The physicality of fumbling up

Few things remain simple, or only hauntingly so. I've had to learn to keep quiet about almost everything, which doesn't always make for good writing, not for a confessionalist. 

I'm going to start telling people that I'm heavily into Civil War reenactments, that I'm on the side of the Confessionalists. I go every year. Make up some plausible name for a city in Virginia. If anybody challenges me then explain that they're confusing it with a city in Tennessee. Do this of course with confidence. 

We were in bloody battle with the Secretists. Family against family, brother against brother.

For no known reason, the other day, I started telling Rhys about the biblical story of Cain and Able. God's question to Cain in the garden, to which he responded, Am I my brother's keeper? A shitty attitude to have with God but good question. 

I tried to explain to Rhys why I believe the answer to the question is Yes, that we are culpable for the well-being of one another, and it is best to acknowledge that to one another. Immediately I started following it up with qualifications, of course. 

Does any of this become easier, or does it ever become any easier? Any of it?

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