All you wanna' do

(CS)

Fuck. I have become a working man. It seems that it is all that I do. With very little sleep last night, I still worked all day today. It was a strain and I did so with a persistent headache. Tonight, I have ingested the elixirs. I must write quickly before their grip drags me south to the underworld. There can be no fooling around tonight - sleep is a sine qua non. I must go into the weekend rested, if I ever hope to steal from it what is intended.

The picture above was taken when I was with another woman. A girl, really. She was somewhere between those two ways of being, perhaps. Camille - she played a big role in my life and then disappeared. Towards the end of our relationship her sex life became more active than mine. We're friends now, but that friendship did not appear easy at first. She had broken me. Broken me in the way that other women may wish to reserve for themselves. Broken me in such a way that Rachel would never forgive or acknowledge. 

The three important romances in my life - Honey, Camille, and Rachel. In that order, with generous overlapping in the friendships and some commingling of the romances. Camille occupied two years in the beginning of what might have been mine and Rachel's time, otherwise. Though Camille and I had started two years before Honey finally wanted no more of me. Not sex with Camille, but something worse: intimacy, fond and deep friendship. It caused Honey to marry a golfer.

Somehow Amy, my first wife, has drifted into the aether. Though I still love her and think of her fondly. She and I used to laugh often. Though the same could be said about Camille and I, and Rachel and I. Honey was very sweet to me, and tolerant. I remember putting my head in her lap and feeling something I had never felt before, something warm and affectionate and true. I miss her and think of her fondly as well. Of course: Rachel. You do not give a woman a child, intentionally, that you do not believe that you will love forever. Or, the version of forever that yet remains. 

My male friends have wondered, and some have asked, how I am able to lure such beautiful women into my life. It is the laughter. What is CS's saying, women find you funny until they don't. That is consistent with my experience. I have been lucky at making the women in my life laugh anew. It's not always perfect, but it is often unexpected. The best of things often is. 

I may wake tomorrow and think of yet another love I have had and enjoyed. The memory of laughter arrives on the waves of sleep like the whisper of a favorite and familiar song. 

That thunder in your heart

At night when you're kneeling in the dark 

that says you're never gonna' leave her

But there's this angel in her eyes

that tells such desperate lies

and all you wanna' do is believe her

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Don't Read At Me

My last post was prophetic. Can't sleep; I knew - tried to doze without assistance. Needs become something worse than needs under the guise of habit or therapy. 

The president suddenly announced that he's taking an experimental, clinically untested, drug to either help him fight the coronavirus he has, help prevent him from getting it, or he invented a self-apparently dangerous lie up on the spot, and America shrugged. We live in odd times. I try not to write about politics. I suppose this barely qualifies except that the subject happens to be the president. The longer that the surreality of this presidency persists the more determined it becomes to prove just how out of reach it must remain to be. Newsfeeds are filled with observations about him or observations about his observers. The perfect president for the time. What will online interactions will be without him? Will this same paradigm of interaction just spill over into the next presidency?

I've been watching Portlandia, and have laughed out loud a couple times at the mildly absurd bits. Twice I was nearly surprised at the sound of it in the near darkness of the room. The pup came in to sniff at me and nuzzle my hand. I rubbed the soft fur of her face and cooed at her a bit before she went back to the other room. Best 15 seconds of the night.

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God's Lonely Man

I started to watch Taxi Driver, but decided against it after the first act. The score stood out. Bernard Herrmann, one of the greats. Famous for his work with Hitchcock and others. I guess I wasn't in the mood to commit to an almost two hour film. It ends in sensational violence. Hard to forget that aspect of it. 

Going through old pics tonight, trying to find some that I have lost along the way. The first several years of taking pictures I had very little of an idea what I was doing. The few pics that I do like now seem to have happened mostly by accident, when seen in context with the others. I used to take so many more pictures of inanimate objects - buildings, windows, doorways, corners, cars passing, flagpoles, etc. Just compositional efforts, trying to learn the language of framing. Now, it is rare that I take a picture when there is not a human in the frame. Something changed. It must have been me. 

Odd thing, what images do to a person over time. You remember seeing a part of the world the way you saw it then, the exact way. For many of them I remember the specific context, also. That is a part of their purpose, I suppose. I once read that a large part of the mind is dedicated to processing images. Yet few of them require or incite much contemplation. Their effect is more immediate. Most of them require little contemplation, until one does. 

I have always had a poor sense of time's passing. Rarely am I ever able to accurately guess how long ago something happened in years or months or weeks. I don't imagine that's a sensibility that I'll suddenly develop later in life. Sleepless hours stretch out into an eternity. 

What happens to the sense of seduction? An obsession so mild that it works. I'm relieved that I didn't finish the film, though I would not have minded the music.

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I should have been better, to you

I had been watching films. I'm not sure what happened, or why. Perhaps it was because I watched a documentary last night. But something went terribly wrong. I watched a Netflix documentary about ZZ Top tonight. I can't believe I'm even admitting it now. It doesn't feel cathartic. It feels shameful. It is shameful. It's like admitting that you once became addicted to ephedrine. 

Don't watch it, unless you like listening to people who have been addicted to drugs for decades speak. The way that they can hardly form words any longer scares me. It is, perhaps, a premonition of days to come, but without any of the money that might somehow make it matter less.

I feel so stupid. I'm sure it was the last 90 minutes that did it, but I have no admissible evidence. Just hearsay here. But I'm sure of it, as sure as I'm sitting here with the chords of Jesus Just Left Chicago running through my head.

Muddy water didn't ever turn to wine.

Well, maybe something good came out of all of it. After the above video playing through, this one came on. I'm going to post before it finishes, so I could be wrong about it, also.

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Honeyland

If you wish to feel privileged then it is the film to watch. Such a loaded word for triggered people with uncocked pistols. It is is meant to indicate those who have special rights. Everywhere our attention is directed to the ubiquitous evidence of these in our lives. How can we not see? Always, there is just enough truth to the claim. Certainly I do not wish to trade my life with that of another, some much less so than others. 

This is a film about people whose lives you do not envy, but you do not look away. It is a privileged perspective. The anguish and loneliness and longing are great. I do not wish to see it again. Is that a special right, or are their circumstances simply beyond my control?

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The Matrix, Frankly

I didn't watch a movie yesterday. Mom and the boy watched Flash Gordon. Not my cup of kitsch tea. So, I drank a bottle of wine, and then another half, and argued with two old friends about social politics, about how the dems have jumped all of the sharks in the American Ocean. One of the friends has taken up the "more principled" argument of conservatism. Myself and another friend have chosen to defend liberal principles. You already know how this one ends: everybody believes they have taken the red pill and that all others have taken the blue pill. 

I just discovered that The Matrix is now considered an allegory for the trans experience, among other allegorical considerations. I've never seen the film, so I have no opinion, but have become aware of its basic premise through its cultural references - that we have a choice between painful self-awareness and numbing ourselves to that awareness. But since I'm mostly regarded as a white cis male, let me offer my opinion anyway: of course it is. It's like heavy metal: about half of the people who really get into it have gender identity questions. The other half, shockingly, don't notice and become defensive when you do.

There are a spectrum of phrases that have emerged into popular culture since the trans-rights movement, but my favorite is deadnaming. I mean the phrase, not the act of referring to somebody as the name they used before they transitioned, maliciously or unintentionally. If I were ever to become trans I would keep my name or make it even more male, if only to frustrate people's expectations further. I envision a world of female Franks. That is my dream of liberty. I'd keep my cock, also. I'd just install a nice little pussy slit underneath it. Dilemma: solved. Though I suspect bike riding might become more pleasurable or painful. The pussy will decide.

The idea that we must accept anybody's identity strictly in the form they present it is absurd and insulting. Nobody actually does this. Why do so few people mention Jung in the great trans conversation? We each form an amalgam of identity clues about the people around us, and we accept as being true a portion of what a person projects, mixed generously with how we feel about the person's identity, what we have intuited about them. If we are to exclusively accept the claims of others concerning themselves as being true then I have some inventing of my own to do. I want to be more toxic, pure toxic - and masculine, much more of that. My lifelong interests in the arts, literature, and music have left me vulnerable to the hurtful opinions of others. I want to reclaim my chosen half of the binary pie. It is critical that you grant me these things that I wish for. Anything less is unjust, cruel. 

Yes, I understand the differences and overlap between identity, projection, and acceptance. Read the heavy metal thing again. I am just bending the concepts to suit my own narrative. One need not transform entirely to demonstrate some mental flexibility. The claim that a certain type of self-knowledge can only be experienced by some is ridiculous. Understanding and acknowledging this does not make you an egg. I just learned that word, also.

Below is a visual demonstration of how some people see themselves, then how I see them.

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Tree of Life

It deserves all the accolades. It is one of the more beautiful films ever made. The attempted breadth and scope are awe inspiring. Yet it is pretentious. Too Christian for my tastes, though I don't precisely hold that against it while I'm watching it. It achieves the grace that it attempts to convey. I greatly enjoy seeing it occur and there is an emotional payoff, if you can stick with it. Many payoffs, in fact. But it leaves little memory of its visual beauty in me after it's over. I don't see it in my mind when I am not looking at it, the way I do other films. That could be my fault. Perhaps I lack the depth of understanding required to commit sequences to memory. That I miss its true visual and narrative message. I'm not sure, but it's rare that something so exquisite doesn't stick with me more. When I close my eyes few distinct scenes appear there for me to re-enjoy. It is a slow film but far from boring. It somehow evades memory.

I wish that I could have seen it in the theater. It is a marvel for the eyes. You feel lucky that it is happening. Blessed, even. Perhaps being blessed is what leaves me cold and empty. Perhaps the blessing is not transportable, meant only for the moment.

Some say that the theater will be no more. If true, films like this will be attempted even less. Who would commit the time and money to make something like this for a laptop screen? Only Kubrick ever attempted to convey the history and enigma of the human experience on screen with such ambition, pretense, and a philosophically inquisitive posture. 

The scenes of the father being strict with his son remind me of the imaginary childhood that I gave myself. My father did not pay as much attention to me, though, harsh or otherwise. Or, perhaps his love was also only a blessing of the moment alone. 

Ah, but man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for. - Browning

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The Third Man

Watching it now - there will be little commentary to offer. I have seen it before, and not that long ago, but I drink at times which has the effect of blurring my observations and memories. When it's not the drink, the drugs will often get me. What self-respecting film school graduate has not seen it? It is, I believe, the only film I have ever seen directed by Carol Reed. But Orson Welles is in it and the script was written by Graham Greene, so there is enough of interest for me to have interest. I have not seen all of the great noir films, but I have tried to see the examples that are considered the best among them. This is one. 

I seem to remember reading that Welles contributed the speech on the Ferris wheel, that it was written by him during filming. Perhaps that is an apocryphal tale. I do not remember now. I want to say that I read it in a piece by Bogdanovich, but everything escapes me now. Perhaps he only wrote that it was doubtful. Thoughts, like the people who appear as little dots on the ground. What does it matter if they stop moving, forever. 

He's only a scribbler with too much liquor in him. 

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La Jetée

This is not the film you want to watch now. I was rushed for time after cooking dinner and putting the boy to sleep. It is only 28 minutes long - a featurette, I read, in Wikipedia. I mispronounced the title to R and looked it up to confirm that is translates to The Pier, and to confirm my mispronunciation. I was saying it as, A Throw, in French. Or, A Jump. I don't know. I'm too exhausted to figure any of it out any more. Its message seems to be that we will never understand the present, past, or future, in that order. 

It is fascinating how little motion there is in this film - a woman blinking - yet there is a strong visual narrative - unforgettable, even. It is dystopian science fiction. The movie that was used as a basis for 12 Monkeys. Unnecessary to watch during a global pandemic, to be sure. But again, I was pressed for time and have not quite yet run out of stupefacients. Which is nice.

Witches nice.

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In The Mood For Love

(Christopher Doyle, cinematographer)

Perhaps I'll write pithy observations of a different film every night, until this lenient but unyielding terror passes. Many consider this film a masterpiece. For its lyrical moments and the tense romantic waltz portrayed poetically, I agree. It is hypnotic and beautifully filmed. That the two protagonists successfully resist their justified love is both counter-intuitively pleasurable and uncommonly troubling. Each time I see it I expect a different outcome. I wish for the different outcome with them, but also like them, can not have it. I can desire their desires. It is Lost in Translation for adults. 

No, that is not fair. I like that film, also. It tells a similar story and has some light-hearted moments, some laughs. That is all I meant. I take offense to its relenting of seriousness. In the Mood for Love is pensive, trifling, terse. The music, editing, and cinematography move together to form an indivisible whole. The slow motion montages could have been shot by Saul Leiter; the sounds of the desperate sobs of tender affection; hands being held in darkness; the lights of Hong Kong passing through the taxi; the taxi passing through the night. What a thing are the images of love - tragic in eventualities, graceless in the falling and failings.

I should watch Lost in Translation tomorrow night. I should re-watch every film I remember liking from memory alone. There could not be that many, perhaps one hundred, or maybe two. I could do it in less than a year. Imagine how profound and admired I would become after such monastic dedication. To lazily and passively ingest images and narrative and song, my eyes as fat and satisfied as that of a sultan's. I could become cosmopolitan and erudite and charming. What if I were to start all over. To re-invent the memories of my lived life. To promise to never be the first to fall asleep again.

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"It's not your fault"

I watched Good Will Hunting for the first time tonight. 

Many years ago I was being intellectually probed by somebody in front of a small audience. This person, who I esteemed, repeated the line several times to me: It's not your fault. Not knowing what they meant, but being intrigued by the power of the repetition of the line and its possible meanings I remembered the moment for years afterwards, but what I remember most about it was by how it resolved. I responded, Oh good, because I assign myself no blame. This person and I have joked about the interaction afterwards, but always through my line. It became one that we would say to one another, and likely still could, though it has been years. I never understood that what was being said to me was a line from a film. I never asked. I just assumed that I was the clever one, that I had made her laugh. Now, I believe I understand what she was saying but have no memory of the context which provoked it. I was in love with her for a while and she with me. It did not work out in the end. 

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I miss flying

I should not have written about my friends doing cocaine the other night. I dreamed about eating the stuff and it caused me some acute dream-restlessness. I'm not sure why I was eating cocaine in my dream. Perhaps snorting exists outside of the dream sphere - too unnatural an act; who knows. There were other aspects of the dream that did not make sense, also.

What happened to the dreams of youth? I remember that I used to have some in which I was flying. When I am swimming in large hotel pools now I will occasionally push myself off of the side of the pool wall towards the distant end and only paddle in a wide sweeping motion with both arms moving together in unison and I will pretend that I am weightless, in motion until the oxygen runs out.

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Kitchen Aid 600 - Pro Series

What says Mommy! more effectively than the acknowledgement that she cooks well and often for us - a KitchenAid mixer? What, I ask. We can make our own pasta sheets now, also, which will mean that maybe I'll get to use it sometimes. My lasagna recipe is always a crowd pleaser. Real men do not bake cakes.  I am old-fashioned, in that way. Some would say regressive.

Raquel was very pleased with our gratitude for all the hard work that she does, and of our thoughtfulness in a gift. I usually avoid buying appliances as part of what can be considered and called "kitchen work," but this one felt right and landed perfectly.

Mom is very pleased. Oh, there was other stuff.

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Island on the Shore

I have nearly run out of my medi-butter. It is what helps me sleep, when I take it before bedtime and then let myself drift away without distraction. I have promised myself to keep my phone and computer in the other room. There is only so much of the world you can take in a day.  

CS is right. He kept me up too late last night. I slept in also, though such a thing was ushered in on the wings of pharmaceuticals. I was drinking last night - wine - but it brought me little happiness. Before calling CS, I had called another friend in a faraway land and he was, surprisingly, there with yet another friend from an equally faraway land. They were doing cocaine. It made me feel a little bit depressed. Or rather, it added to my feelings of emptiness rather than assuaging them. Even though it was good to see both of them. They are not tasked with my loneliness. They may have felt that they were being their brother's keepers. 

There is nothing to tell. Or, less all the time. I am trying to find happiness in escape, knowing there is little there and is of a temporary nature. Then, I will wish escape from one form of escape to another. The tunnel at the end of the tunnel. 

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The Last Picture Show

Raquel and I watched it last night - we barely petted one another. 

Cybil Shepard is made of the flesh that Elvis used to eat.

There is something intangible and yet very touching around the redeeming quality of the beauty of truth, free from the visual and verbal notes of condescension. 

The film concerns itself with some immaterial aspects of who we think we are, and who we act out to be. I think. 

Never seen another film quite like it. 

I imagine Tennessee Williams became envious of certain scenes, wished that he had written them just as they were. The feel of his writing moved through this town as if through Truman Capote's eyes. 

I saw it, also. 

quite so - as almost 

quiet;

as the quiet

almost

always

says 

so

I suspect that my faith in love is dying.

Yet it was Larry McMurtry - the Patrick Nagel of the Raymond Carver of the writing in the previous time.

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It Must Have Been The Roses

By now you should be able to tell which computer I am writing posts from - work or home. Home is where I keep all of my family-oriented images. 

Jesus, I thought that I had made a little progress playing Grateful Dead songs. Nope. I tried to go back to them today, expecting to feel as if I had been invited back on tour in '77. But no, instead I was promptly ejected from the stadium parking lot. They can play very smoothly when the skeletons take them.

I probably should not have bought the 12-string guitar. I don't play it much. I should have bought a banjo or a Spanish/classical acoustic. 

My friends are all cracking. The pressures are much and many. I am keeping the extremes of my worries quiet most of the day. As always, it is at night when the mind-forg'd manacles come climbing down the chimney. I look at pictures of naked women to distract myself.

That's not even true. The truth is more banal. I watch series-after-series of adult animation. For a while I was reading well and often, but then I started Knausgård's My Struggle. It lacked something that Houllebecq did not. Knausgård starts to feel like a disciple of someone after a while, maybe a hundred pages. Not someone admirable, either, more like Deepak Chopra. You get the feeling he is trying to resolve something that, in the end, you aren't going to care very much about, and it won't be resolved anyway. You will have spent months listening to someone's intermittently interesting and occasionally fascinating inner monologue, then they'll ask you to leave. 

I could be very wrong - he is a highly regarded writer. 

I became interested in Houllebecq's characters and their circumstances. That is the only thought that I am trying to form. 

I will try to come back and write some more after dinner. We'll see. 

Nope. I came back after dinner, read the above, and surrendered. 

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This is here

I'm not alone and do not imagine very well that I am, or what that would be like. I envision general and specific aspects, but they are not united in the continuum of living. There is a better word than that. I am too lazy to think of it. Imagination lacks the banal thoroughness of the moment, or it can. It is this instant that has warped from recognition, still beset by then and when. 

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There is no refuge left

(Oct. 2018 - Disneyland)

This picture has no relationship to anything. I just happened to come across it. Every picture seems to get further away from me, lately. I worry about the future in a way that I used to only worry about my own life.


People that work hard often have less left to tell, less to say, but never short on screams. I've been working hard today. I ask myself why, but I already know: for the perceived security of money. Watching significant portions of it disappear with the market has not helped. Spending money to buy things I want has not helped. I don't want very much. I want more of something. Though I don't quite know more of what - leisure, love, leather, lust. 

Yes, Red-Headed Woman. It says some of the things that Raquel likes to hear. Or rather, she likes me to sing it to her while The Boss is also singing it in the background. That is what I tell myself, anyway. She is tickled by it and by a very small handful of other songs by him. The Boss. It makes her happy. She also sings along and smiles with her big green eyes.


They can see every cheap thing that you ever done

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12 parsecs

The Millennium Falcon is complete. It took us about three days, off and on. An oddly satisfying enterprise, though I tend to doubt that I would get as much joy repeating a similar act too quickly. Most of what made me happy about it was just sitting with the boy and sharing enthusiasm for it. 

I've held off drinking wine until just now. I mean, just now, today. I gave a neighbor two hundred bucks and he gave me a case of a red blend wine that was not bad, a case of Pinot Noir that was slightly better, and half a case of assorted but altogether nicer wines, all but one of which Rachel drank. They were sparkling wines, so it was her thing. 

The drinking of wine has rendered me tired most of the day. I have grown tired of being tired, but what the fuck else is there to do? I have been smoking opium, also, but it is of poor quality. I thought that I was smoking it wrong. Getting the perfect temperature is not always easy. So, there has been Xanax, edibles, and hash sometimes, as well. Time has become a flat, meaningless oval filled with rotating glass shards of death and suffering. But, you already know that. 

I was here to report on the good news to all of creation, the gospel, as it were. 

There was one moment today where I explained to the boy why we love Han Solo so much That... he went from being a self-interested smuggler to participating in a group for the common good. We get to see something mean more to him than what we had been led to believe, up until that point, that he was capable of. He was the Keith Richards of the the Rebel Alliance. I reminded him that Princess Leia and Han Solo also had a child together, then a falling out, and that the child they had was evil and stupid and snotty, but that we need not maintain any comparisons or consistencies with their galactic story and ours. 

I was probably confusing the poor lad. He has always believed me to be Darth Vader's father. 

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Call in the medical doctors

I've been calling people and playing songs for them on the guitar. It's true. It is part of my new remedy for loneliness: drunkenness. I struggle remembering the lyrics and it is as if I am discovering the chords for the first time, always, but singing songs is what it could be called by reasonable people.

The LEGO Millennium Falcon project is about halfway complete. Did I mention that here? I bought the boy the "beginner's" version. I only call it that because there is one that is far more advanced, and expensive. 

Here, I will post a picture. I know how much certain readers here love the very literal use of photography, especially combined with projects involving children. 

This one combines all three of the most cherished and beloved things - photography, children, and Star Wars. It has been fun and distracting. It is satisfying to watch it form. LEGO kits have only taught me one thing but it is apparently a lesson that I need to be re-taught often: go slowly and verify each stage. It is easy to rush and only realize later that you did something slightly wrong. But slight wrongness is all that is required for significant future failure. We've had to disassemble and reassemble parts a couple times now.


Like many, I am wondering when life might return to some version of normalcy. Our vacation in the camper seems more than a year ago. It was just over a month. Online I am watching the experts among my circle of friends debate the merits of opening America back up for business. I try to point out that very little has changed if you have Amazon Prime, but people get angry at me because I'm not taking their political prescriptions and resolutions seriously enough. I'm starting to understand why people don't trust the government. The other day, the head of the executive branch of government invented some speculative treatments for the situation with common household cleaners and intravenous sunshine. It was like listening to me play the guitar and sing, just free and unscripted and disconnected musical magic to the ears.

If that sunshine can get in your bloodstream, well, you just never know. We'll have the medical doctors look into it. 

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The metaphor of pussy walking freely along the beach

I am fluctuating regularly forth and back again between feelings that I do not care for and those which I can not bear. There are occasionally fits of unexplained joy, mixed in, though increasingly forced. Each time I have one, I can tell that I am prepared to announce its arrival. As if joy functions predictively, with honest whispers to the eyes. I scream to my counter-parts that I am okay, also.

 

Difficult times; focusing on work. 

Or, I am happy. Or, I am manically involved in any question raised there at work, fearful of my own possible or noticed or obvious misstatements; apparent lack of knowledge in any area; eager to offer my obvert version of truth; as soon as possible.... in the conversation, that has graciously left me. 

My increasingly irrelevant observations matter slightly less and yet more than the civility in conversation that those same observations breached. Of the unexplained need, there was still the needed.

People can't hear me. I am apologizing while they are trying to tell me that it's okay. 

I will go days without anybody seeing me. 

Still. 

Trying to work - working, ineffectually. 

Still.

Me.

Days.

I would be ashamed if anybody at work was managing this crisis worse than I. I am a crisis expert.

There are limits to the training for specific crises scenarios. But in a crisis, you still get the ideas. 

I have gone years; I will go days.

Who amongst us can claim the deservedness or undeservedness of living such a life? If we are able to briefly prove the value of our cries, who has the possible time to listen?

I meant: whom.

In a crisis, it is the whoms to to which we must address our unknown rescue. 

I have gone years; I will go days.

I will go days.

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Rebel Without A Mask

I am trying to keep my head down and do a good job at my new job. Things are going to get tough for many people. That much seems clear. People are becoming mean-spirited. Who knows why - minor inconveniences, I guess. That, and fear. I have seen people be such tremendous self-entitled assholes; at the grocery store, to tired and fearful employees. For no apparent reason. When they finally pass the law that says entering someone else's personal space is a form of physical assault then I am prepared to break the bones in my hands on some dumb mother-fucker's face. Maybe I won't wait for the law to catch up to what is right and just and deserved. That's how occasionally tired I am becoming of some people. I don't want to say there is a "type," but there is. You know they are that type as soon as they start to hint they might be. It has been a few years since I've punched anybody. I only miss it when it doesn't take more than one. If you have to swing or jab more than once then the adrenaline takes over and it's not as enjoyable. Just one punch right to the eye socket or nose. It does not need to knock them out or even down, only back, not even that far, but far enough to know they don't want another. That's how I've been feeling about some people lately. How are things going with you? 

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We see the tunnel at the end of the tunnel

I'm just fucking tired. The dog keeps getting out. It's never a good time for it. I have no choice to put off going to get her. Every time she escapes my life becomes more exciting. But I don't want my life to feel exciting right now. Excitement doesn't feel good. It feels forced. It is forced. 

Everything feels forced upon me right now. Every time I blink there's some new thing that I'm supposed to be doing, with fewer and fewer older and comfortable things to do. I just want to lie in bed and to be left alone, all day, maybe with some music. I want to read. I want a glass of wine. 

I could sleep for a thousand years.

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Easter Quarantine

The only thing that alcohol ever has the chance of improving is the moment. It's not a guarantee. I tried to extend the feeling of elation that comes along with the onset of alcohol since Friday. It just made me tired.

But Raquel made a truly heroic Easter dinner. I mean, she went all-out - prime rib, beet and goat cheese salad, potatoes and gravy, cheeses and breads and crackers, bottles of red wine, bourbon, cake. It was glorious. Now I am so very tired. The bourbon, in particular, seems to have enervating properties. 

We had guests - 2/3rds of a family that is going through a divorce. We took all the precautions that we possibly could. The kids were not allowed to touch each other and had to wash their hands in perpetuity. The picture above is the closest they came to each other all day, except when we were all sitting at the table sneezing towards each other. I drank wine at dinner, to let the bourbon wear off a little. 

Raquel and I got along swimmingly - sex, flirtation, affection, all of it. A break in the clouds of quarantine.

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Starting

I'm starting to get Stockholm Syndrome for Rachel. 

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The Civilized World

(Paolo Roversi)

Every time that I reach a place of acceptance some part of me screams that is only because I've stopped paying attention, and it is at least partially true. One must look away from the incidence and death rates, even as they are starting to look encouraging. Meaning, this might not be the apocalyptic epidemic that it could have been. 

I have been tempted lately to use phrases like the civilized world when discussing it, just to take on that Ann-Coulter way of speaking. I try to get my friends to laugh at recipes of undercooked bat, but there are fewer and fewer takers on such lines of humor. Suffering does not produce immediate growth, it seems. Its fertilizing properties must occur mainly in reflection. 

To help the conversation along, I'll ask if the virus has affected any of the savages yet, and does anybody have any ideas as to why not? Now is the time to suggest genetic differences as a primary risk factor. It's starting to look like being an Italian-American was one of the dumber things anybody could have done, but my math-based models are not yet complete. There might be dumber people still out there waiting to be discovered. Being a German is, of course, suddenly much more appealing. I'll try to mention that as closely as possible to any mention of "national success" and "national unity" and "viral supremacy."

How do you explain the success of the unified national response from Germany?

Jesus. I will stop. Somebody will find this and not understand that I am kidding. Science tells us any coronavirus should not affect the Irish as much. They have not had a High King since the 12th century. Why, you might ask, aren't more scientists looking into this obvious connection? The answer is really quite simple: political history has not yet been shown to be an effective strategy against viruses. I maintain that they're just doing it wrong. It is the appeal to history that unites a people. Give them a shared meta-story and they will happily kill their neighbors to make it appear true. 

Fuck, even when I try to stop, I can't. It's because I've been online arguing with a conservative, so I have rehearsed these types of responses. Whenever he talks about the success of Trump's Chinese travel ban, I'll try to work in something about building a wall on our southern border as a sensible pandemic deterrent, etc. He only notices about half of them. He gets suspicious if it seems like we're agreeing on anything. It rots my mind, and what's left of his, but what the fuck. 

Some experts say that Trump's Chinese travel ban encouraged American nationals to rush home from the infected zones, with no tests awaiting them upon their arrival at America's shores. 

Voilà! Ol' DT does it again. 

He always seems to find a way of making matters worse while still appealing to his base. It seems irrational until you look at his defender's responses. They are still touting his travel bans as a success, even though infection rates would indicate otherwise. I had to ask one friend about 25 times yesterday: Who is responsible for America's federal response to this epidemic? before he would finally admit that it is the president. 

He kept asking me what I would have done differently. I said: testing. 

Then, I had to ask why he felt America had more confirmed cases, by double, of any other nation. That's when speculation was suddenly permitted in the conversation. Something about Obama and Pelosi and Schiff entered into the equation. No surprises there. The president can not possibly be responsible for all of the disaster he inherited and has to live with every day. The logic is suffocatingly air-tight. 

Ah well, this is not the time for bitter partisan arguments. This is a time that we should rally around our leader. Anything less would be un-Amerified. 

I don't know why they're sending Americans $1200. Those Americans should be offering to pay an extra $1200, from every paycheck, to the conglomerate closest to their hearts. 

Maybe we can start a bailout movement: Thanks For Your Corporation!

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As good a time as any

(Rockaway Beach)

I am starting to enjoy this time in quarantine. The time that I have spent with the boy has been golden and mom and I are coming around to a period of sweetness rather than what we had been trading in - mild but persistent acrimony. What started out as some significant losses in the market have turned around considerably from a single biotech investment I made - CYDY. You should buy right away, because they're going to either be bought out soon, or some of their pending patents will get approval. It hasn't flattened my ledger books out completely, but it has offset some pretty serious losses elsewhere. It's a crazy world. I hope I die quickly. There's only one way to guarantee it, but I'll give myself time to negotiate and conduct more market research. 

I have loved my life, it has been filled filled with laughter and cravings in nearly equal measure. I remember lying in the grass and reading books, music arriving from a distance. I remember being carefree. I believe that I'll know how to return. 

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There is a pic, at least

What can I possibly say today. Nothing much has changed. We stocked up on groceries today. We went to Costco. The line stretched all around the enormous building and did not look to be moving quickly. Instead, we went to Target and then to the grocery store. I went in to Target and Raquel went in to the grocery store, so we double bought a few things. 

This is the least interesting post I ever remember making. What can I possibly say today. Nothing much has changed. 

I like the soft-focus pic of the boy. It being over-exposed adds something that I like. There is that. 

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Women are Tiny Houses

Richard Serra. That's how this isolation has me feeling, sort of. The inescapable menace, threat. The scale destined and designed to dwarf the individual that gets near, or is consumed by it. 

Raquel and I haven't exactly found a coherent way back towards our normal selves. I have to imagine that everywhere there are couples that wanted to divorce, and then this. It provides them a common enemy, though I have to imagine that a renewed sense of affection and gratitude may not be the automatic result in such a situation. There must be renewed questions about the financial concerns and uncertainties of divorce. Everywhere there are people suffering on every level. People get the hell they ask for, the hell they permit. Some of them just get an unimaginable hell without ever having done anything special to deserve it. Would you like to also hear my opinions on pain and death?

I had hoped to write something sexy, or maybe even affectionate, about Raquel. These pictures remind me of another time with her. They were taken at the DIA:Beacon. We took the train up the Hudson one day. Post 9/11. Pre-Covid. Before Christ. 

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