Beaver Creek

Beaver Creek Lift/Runs Map

This is what I'll be doing today - women will love me, price will be no object, my feats of athleticism and skill will wow the many onlookers and fans. 

Hardly. I stayed up last night and drank a bottle of red wine and had a baked whitefish dinner with my buddy, Tim. We talked about old times and recent times. We talked of the suicide. Apparently the friend who ended it had become obsessed with conspiracy theories recently and had somewhat even fallen from the grasp of the deep end with them. He had not emerged recently from the proverbial online basement and was given over to increasingly wild speculations and claims. He went Q-Maganon.

Their romantic relationship had suffered greatly from the increasingly detached and angry political stances. He and his wife had been separated for over a year because of it. Or, that was at least a part of the cause of separation. Or, that is what I was told. 

Okay, I must wake my buddy up soon, so that we can start our long and exhausting day. This resort has very long runs. If one wishes you can pretty much snowboard the entire mountain, then take a series of lifts back to the top and do it all over again. Doesn't sound like so much fin when described that way, but for a person that has always been happy to purchase or barter for the temporary feelings of freedom, it is something. 

Ritz Carlton

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Limantour redux

The boy and I went to Limantour beach today, with the husky puppy, Akira. Then, we went to Nick's Cove for seafood. The boy ate fifteen oysters. I only know because I noticed that neither of the two dozen we bought were shared quite equally. I can be quite understanding about such things, and love nothing more than to see the boy happy and hungry.  

Raquel and the boy depart for Arizona tomorrow, from the same Sacramento airport that I'll be flying to Denver from, though two hours earlier. A week in the desert, for them, with grandma. The same week spent funboarding in the snow, for me - Beaver Creek, Vail, Breckenridge - listed only to drive CS dippy with the opulent sin their resort names must evoke in imaginary costs, prestige, and of course privilege. 

We will have cocktails at the Ritz-Carlton, again, my buddy and I. Etc.

My life is not so enviable, though. CS' impression is a distorted one, but how could it possibly be otherwise? What was it the old Allman Brothers said about such things?

I've got to run, to keep from hiding. 

That video is well worth watching. It's a time capsule, of sorts. It documents the true and genuine pride with which some women of a certain region and era used to display their receiving departments, particularly how such behavior is directly related to cars and music, though the connection is rarely ever made explicitly. 

Of course, my impressions have perhaps always been distorted.

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The heretics

Identity is the inward sense of being that one projects outwardly. Or, I think that's what identity is now. It can consist of other attributes and phantasms, also. A shared sense of self, particularly as it conforms to a recognizable heritage, though that sense can become delimited by an array of ambiguous cultural and racial superstitions. 

To note another's unshared heritage is heresy. 

Only we can assert me. 

I got the news this morning that a friend committed suicide. He was one of my favorite old people, from back before the war. His mother killed his father, then herself, many years ago. I remember when he told me, one afternoon when we were listening to records. I was shocked by the truth of it, the complete and violent supremacy of the act. There can be no murder trial in such cases, except in absentia, when there is money to be fought over. 

His children found his body on Tuesday. 

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We'll call it even

I have been looking at watches again - Swatches, even. They are as fine a thing as most all else - finer, even. I suspect that I have discovered why I love watches - they need no one, ever. 

I see now why, and how, life spirals into its funnels, eddies of strong downstream currents; fun without escape, ever and ever; even Eden, Eve.

Look! A mechanical moon, sun.

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Short-Term Capital Gains

Vacheron Constantin, ref. 57260

The watch would not only be for the storing of little souls. The science is still undecided on whether or not midgets even have souls. I've read that they're using albinos as a control group for testing, though I'm not sure how that would possibly settle the question. It is impossible to say what truths mankind has missed out on by ignoring some of its most cherished rituals. The science of cat-burning is no more. It fell out of favor as an area of serious intellectual inquiry hundreds of years ago. I suspect there may be fringe scientists along the coasts of Mississippi and Louisiana, doing God's work. 

The watch pictured above is considered the most complicated mechanical watch ever built, with 57 complications. That is, 57 functions that go beyond the simple relaying of hours, minutes, and seconds. The watch I bought recently has a single complication, to give you an idea - it mechanically relays the date. 

Cost for the Vacheron Constantin: somewhere near $8 million. It is not a watch that is meant to be touched very much. 

Why the fascination with mechanical watches? I do not know and can not quite express it, but I feel it. I tend to doubt that I will buy another. They are not quite like cameras, for me, where each one does something slightly different, and where lenses can be used on multiple bodies. Or, even if each one does do something slightly different, I believe that I only wished to satiate my desire to own a mechanical watch once. I have no interest in becoming a collector, though there are a number of beautiful watches out there. People who collect watches are an interesting and odd group. There are many websites dedicated to the pursuit. Here is one that I find to be better than most of the others, also for reasons that I can't quite put my finger on.

The deep divisions within that group that the word "Rolex" evokes is a fascination unto itself. CS is against the chronograph behemoth. I will admit that they make fine watches, though they have never entered the truly haut de gamme market.  CS says they are for douche-bags and there is evidence aplenty to suggest this is the case. Tag Hauer is not far off from Rolex, either. I'm thinking about going to a watch show just to see if I can get somebody to take a swing at me. My Casio is probably the best watch to be wearing for a fist fight, and jail. 

 

 

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Now, some people

I've decided that I am going to use my new watch to house people's little ephemeral souls. This perfect miniature mechanical world seems the place for it. Or, even better, the one pictured above, from Milan. It has more of the look and feel of a reaper, a storer of spirits. Between Italian and German watches I suspect I'd have all of my soul repository issues pretty much sorted. 

Now, some people, when the location of souls is discussed, find it demonic to suggest that one person should be the housing for another's soul. Others incorporate the idea into their religious practices. I'm neither kind. I just want to know and feel that the spirits of the tortured and joyous are held alike and forced together inside my wristwatch, where I can hold it to my ear and discern their frittering. Not forced together in the standard sexual manner, for visual pleasures, but rather forced to coexist in this timekeeper's idea of chronological harmony.

Using the watch above as an example: On the 6th of every month, when the date field reflects both the correct numeric for the representation of time of day as well as the day of the month, then we will celebrate Satan - whether this likely imaginary entity either is or isn't, whether Beelzebub exists or otherwise. The 6th is his day. The 5th is reserved to celebrate man, in accordance with the scripture of The Pixies. We know what the 7th represents. That will be the day that no underwear is allowed to be worn or spoken of in all of paradise. 

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How you wait

I don't take pictures any more. I am just going to write longingly about my deep and abiding love for expensive vacation locales. I might write a slim volume of poetry about Tahoe, employing the pathetic fallacy in every stanza. That is what seems to keep my fans happy. That, and the stock pictures I can pull from the internet and use without permission. 

I go back to Colorado on Sunday. More snowboarding. I'm going to ride as much as I can until the inevitable lifelong injury. 

There is only waiting and death. It is how you wait that seems to matter most. 

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The Big Pond in the Sky

I did not take this pic, and do not like it

Yes, it's true, in some ways I have a charmed life. I am CS' Paris Hilton, without the chihuahuas. I keep reminding him to stop being poor, but some messages just can't ever seem to land. He is resistant to the finer things in life. I do what I can, but he may be beyond reach or repair.

I sit here again this morning at the big A-frame window watching the sun come up over Lake Tahoe. It is even more beautiful than it was yesterday with the rich pinks lining the horizon. I know that color functions as a possible warning for our drive home, but who cares, we will have a full day of skiing and snowboarding. The drive home will take care of itself. My Audi is all-wheel-drive, so what could we possibly have to worry about. 

I have started calling the place Tahoe Lake just to piss people off. It grates against their expectations and people do not care for that. Comfortable people should have their sensibilities disrupted from time to time, if not entirely upended. That's what the IRS has just done to me. For the first time in my life I have money set aside for an emergency, or perhaps to buy a house. But I made the mistake of saving too much of it too quickly, through the sale of stocks. The mathematicians that work for the government decided that I was their kind of citizen and generously bumped me up into the next tax bracket, which allows them to take enough money from me to knock me down into the next tax bracket. Instead of calling this a wash, they just keep a lot more of my money than I expected. This resulted in. me making less money than I did the year before, by making more money in 2020. That's not a joke, they literally took all of my raises, post-tax bonuses, and even some of my stock sales away from me. I kept much less only because I made some more. 

Complaining about it is not patriotic, I know. What I've learned from the experience is to never just barely enter the next tax bracket. You should always make enough to leap to the center or higher of it. Anything less really does feel as if you're being punished for your ambition and success. 

It is only a matter of time before I start decrying the wastes of social welfare programs, advocating for a flat tax for all. 

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Incline Village

I know that CS will lose a little bit more of his mind at this post, as he is just on the verge of traveling and I have hardly stopped, but we are at Lake Tahoe again for the weekend. Two friends were in town and they had a spare bedroom at the place they're staying, so away we went. Next Sunday I depart for Colorado. When it comes to winter sports one must strike while the iron is hot.  Metaphors don't always work for me, sometimes it feels that I am only a contract worker for them. 

Watching the sun rise over the lake here this morning is beautiful. The house my friend rented for a few months sits slightly up the hill at Incline Village. The waters of the lake can be glimpsed generously through the trees. The morning sun placing in spotlight the tall trees that surround the house like sentinels. It truly is a lovely place for white people to contemplate the meaning of things. It's going to be fun when whites are no longer the majority in America. It will open many comedic opportunities for me in conversation. What a privilege that will be. Perhaps my irreverence will finally receive its just rewards. 

Okay, we have planned to be at the lifts early. I must go manage my body's expectations for the day. 

Hate me all that you wish to. I am ready to travel, also. 

From CS's post yesterday (it made me giggle):

 It is my fretting and worry that holds the world together.  My world, I should say, for the rest of you seem to enjoy life trouble-free, or so it would seem.  It must be nice, for instance, to have the Life of Q, with its hundred vacation days in Aspen or other haunts of the rich and famous each year.  New cameras and expensive wines and boogie watches and the natural beauty of California's Wine Country--the boy never tires of reminding me that he has it made.  He rides me like a cheap mule.  

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And are you satisfied with the life you're living?

Even bad sex can keep you in a relationship. Ask your priest. Imagine how bad some of the sex must be between the fathers of the church and one or more of those flirty kids that lure them away from Christ and into sexual relationships. That more priests don't strangle kids to death during sex is a testament of their dedication to Christ and his principles. Though, sometimes I suppose it must feel as if they are floating, freer than they have ever felt before, liberated even from the prying eyes of their beloved savior, when a child parishioner seems receptive to their kindnesses and coquetry, to their touch. 

That said, initial penetration must be a real shocking nuisance for the child. The human anus only becomes elastic with practice. 

Fuck, this is not at all what I thought I was going to write about. This should stop, it is hideous. I mean them, not me. 

The only time that I ever considered fucking a priest, I stopped myself, I was merely using him to get to God, and the sacrament of wine. Nuns are useless in this capacity. Worse. They are oftenest the tattling teetotalers of the sacristy. God humors the weaker sex. It's called punishment. You can read about it in the expository biblical chapters. My favorite is Exodus. How did the Jews know about Bob Marley then? All credit must go to Jah, on high. Prophecy, it is written.

Do you see what happens when I don't write in the mornings? Ugly and misshapen things spring up from my mind like a fount of holy water. 

I'm getting into identity as a focal point for my entire moral and ethical framework. I am a middle-aged white cis-gendered male living a privileged life. I like the sound of that. No commas, just descriptors without separation. Who would not wish to live the privileged life? I'm absolutely all for justice under the law and equality of opportunities, but those are very easy principles to support in speech. Anybody can do it, even the Trump children. What sort of monster doesn't want those things for everybody? Well, there are some. But, what sort of person can rest until their full fruition has come to be? Those who are not sufficiently anti-racist, and willing to make public displays of their allegiance with their allies. The kind that I described earlier in this paragraph. 

That is whom: Them.

I wonder when or if American society at large will return to the idea that they are free to choose their own identities. Things were not always as they are now, they have been better and worse. We heralded rappers for their assertion of identity. Or, I did, from '88-'92. We herald serial killers with binge-worthy passion on Netflix for their unique pathological dispositions, and its expression in crime. We share a national heritage of fierce individualism, which includes Billy the Kid as much as it does Harriet Tubman, Abraham Lincoln and Lee Harvey Oswald, Kurt Cobain and his wife. Etc. The lists of individuals go on and on and on. Yet, we all seem willing enough now to accept a type as a possible shield against the very things we had hoped to enshrine: the burden of defining yourself. Identity is much easier to adopt or claim than personality is to develop. 

Soon, I hope, we can mostly all just agree that the strict identitarians whose voices have become loud and amplified by others are at once boring, loathsome, and wrong about what it means to be human and free. 

No group has ever been all that fascinating. Name one identifiable social group and I'll demonstrate that there are thousands or millions of forgettable and insignificant people deeply attached to it. 

Glory is fleeting, but identity is for never. 

Like this: I am a middle-aged white cis-gendered male living a privileged life.

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Raquel Garterbelt

Similar to CS, I wrote a post but then deleted it, now I have nothing left to whine out loud about. I took Raquel and the boy out in the back yard yesterday and subjected them both to a few candid portraits, to better document our time in isolation. In truth, we have not suffered very much. Learning to become a teacher has been the most difficult part. I leave for Colorado again in two weeks, to go snowboarding. We go to Tahoe next weekend, for the same. It is not as if we are being punished much by the pandemic. I should feel bad about it, but I don't. 

Many years ago - when Rachel and I were dating off and on, breaking up as much as we got back together - her maiden name was Rachel Gartley, which I converted to Raquel Garterbelt whenever I would write her postcards from wherever I was in the world, which she seemed get tickled by. It seems another lifetime ago now, and it is, one in which there is no possible return. Twenty years have come and gone. I remember one postcard that I wrote from Barcelona that read only: To see you naked is to recall the earth. It is a quote from Lorca, I believe, and I do believe it. 

Oh, those wonderful early years when our love was fresh and new and volatile. I wish now that I would have written it all down, to give myself a trail of crumbs to climb my way back towards it. All of it. There should be pictures which bring to life the desperation of our love. 

 

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After Time

I am happily back to my series of underwater pictures. I received a new work computer and also fixed my old work computer, which granted me access to the beloved submerged family portraits. There are so many things I should do today. So many things. 

Ha!... submerged family.

Last night's post provides ample evidence of why one should not write after drinking a bottle and a half of wine. It seemed to make sense as I was blathering it all to myself. I even went back and edited it a few times. To endure another's drunkenness, or the after-effects of your own just as you recorded them, is horrid. If I had less capacity for shame I would probably censor myself. But I seem able to absorb all of it, time after time.

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Neither North, Nor Forth

Now is just as good a moment as the others, once and for all, to be final and honest about my adult drug use, Sirs. 

Dear, Honesty - the principled sense is, neither morally forth nor upright. 

No airs; some stairs; keep climbing. 

Who wish to be honest about things - the thes and thoses and that's this, then there is the thusness - none of those shrugs assure the fuss - none of those things consider fixes - undertaker, of this, I promise is and ises. Undertaker of these, our promises. 

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Playing Catch

The wonder-pup, Rizzo. I know how beloved my pet photography is here on this site, and I do not wish to disappoint. Also, I have stopped taking any new pictures, so this is what I have left - a sweet and loving dog. This dog will play catch with you or put its head in your lap and love you for as long as you will allow it. Truly a sweet and noble creature, filled with joy. I have known the dog its entire life, and now he is old and having heart problems. His briefly stops about 2200 times a day, sometimes for up to 10-12 seconds at a time. His best friend - Nelson, another sweet and wonderful dog - passed away a few months ago. There is but one end to the sadness.

I am saddened by last year's taxes, and the emailed news that I awoke to this morning. Between California and the IRS they want several thousand more dollars than I have already paid. Apparently they moved me up into the next tax bracket, so that I would have kept more of my money if I had made slightly less of it. I will be a Trump supported by next tax season. They do not provide any accountability reports on what they have done with the taxes they have already taken from me, nor what they plan to do with the additional money they will take next, but as a good liberal I'm just going to write a check. That money might have gone towards something I really want. Perhaps I'll offer to send California my watch and see if they'll just "call it even." Who knows, perhaps there is someone corrupt enough to just take the offer. 

At some level I believe in progressive taxation, I think, but it stings when you make enough to enter the next bracket, but only just barely. The system only seems to reward you if you leap to the middle of the next bracket up. I'm tempted to try less at making money. Maybe I too can be a Reagan Welfare Queen. 

I'm going to start telling everybody "poverty isn't a sin, but laziness is." That should help me gain the trust of the people who can help me get my tax revenues back and where to hide them once I do. It is important to first gain their trust with tropes. Once you have their trusts then you should try to snatch their hedge funds, also. 

 

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Mama Tried

Halloween '20

It's hard to tell just yet, but I might have a day off from work today. I try to avoid writing about work here, but I slipped into it for a bit yesterday. Then today, there was an unexpected change that seems like it might result in me having at least a few hours away from it this morning. All of my most recent pictures, the underwater ones, are on my work computer, as useless as a bag of rocks. So, today I will treat you to an older pic from last year.  It is one of my recent favorites.

If so, I will go for a nice, long bike ride and hope to make the most out of the unexpected pause in activity. I almost wrote, The Good Lord knows I could use it... but then thought better of it, considering I had made overtures to some temporary adopting of fanatical Christianity yesterday. I was never very good at convincing people of the righteousness of my beliefs, though not for any absence of effort. I was an impassioned and idealistic young man, which can result in all sorts of beliefs and convictions that simply do not last. I was no Greta Thunberg for Christ, either, but was convincing enough to my little circle of prayer friends. I think back to some of my young Christian friends very fondly - Lisa, Tim, Jeff, and the young woman that committed suicide after years of both heavy and destructive drinking. 

I shared a memorable and tender period of youth with them, the ending of its innocence. They, most of them, tried to save me from whatever wickedness there was in the world. After I started getting blow jobs from the young girls that seemed to be everywhere at the time, and quite willing to find out what all the fuss was about, the loving arms of Christ were never quite the same for me again. Yet I got married anyway, twice, to see what all the fuss was about. Twice. 

One and only rebel child

From a family meek and mild

Mama seemed to know what lay in store

Despite all my Sunday learnin'

Towards the bad I kept on turnin'

Til' Mama couldn't hold me any more

- Mama Tried, Merle Haggard

Witchery '20

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Is it valuable, usable, and feasible?

Hippie Chicks Ride Free

I have run out of images to use on this site. I will return to some previous ones used. Okay, found one. It is, at least, an energy sustainable image. I bought that shirt for the boy at a Dead & Company show at Shoreline Amphitheater, a couple years ago. It is incredible to me that there are still traveling hippie collectives that drive their vans from show to show and sell merchandise, but there are, and they do. They really do make the best tie-dye shirts. There is no other group that compares, or even comes close. Most tie-dyes are obnoxious and poorly done. 

My favorite moment from that show, I think, was when they did Fire on the Mountain. When intelligent people feel free and happy they cease to recognize themselves. That's the point, I think. Happiness is a state of mind, intelligence is a scope of mind.

I'm not sure we're allowed to say, Hippie Chicks Ride Free any more, but they do. Everybody in California knows that. 

Cash, grass, or ass... I wonder how old my son will be before I drop that historical nugget of hitchhiker wisdom on him. I hope it's still yet a few years away. 

I have been thinking more lately about scope of mind. Believe it or not, I love what I do for work. It can be challenging, and sometimes never lets up, but the people are good, if not great, and the pay is more than sufficient to provide for a modicum of satisfaction. I have few complaints, truly. Though, it seems that there is so much more out there and that I should start actively thinking about that, because it takes time to arrive anywhere in life. Emotionally unstable people tend to cling to security when they find it, to a fault. That's what I've been doing for about fifteen years now, it seems. Every few years the imagination yearns for more, or something different, but the fear of instability functions as a constant reminder of what life was like when I was more entrepreneurial in my choices. 

That's where I am now - not at all unhappy, but thinking about what a different life might be like and how to possibly get there. It is tough to leave departments where you have many friends. Comfort zones are so nice and deadly, everyone there has such a nice watch. 

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Cupid and the Sleeping Racist

(Cursed to forever chase what we can not know)

I feel guilty writing a post this morning after posting such a poor one from last night/yesterday, but what can a blogger do? The blog must go on. I have chosen an article that CS sent as the basis for today's post. We will see where that takes us. 

So much that I had learned concerning racism while growing up is now considered inadequate, or worse: iniquitous. Merely treating people with respect and as social equals, we are now informed, is just another way of ignoring your implicit distaste for others, which masks your desire to subjugate them. There is no need to register or record this unconscious merging of distaste and desires, it informs all that we do and think and can possibly know on the subject, but does so mostly without our conscious knowledge. Race is today's Victorian sex. It secretly controls all of our motivations. Just look around and you will see evidence of it everywhere. Denial is the ultimate proof of its existence, and what attaches its strange power to its willfully unwitting adherents.

So, to be clear, I am not denying the existence of racism, nor would I. I'm just not entirely sure that it functions in the manner which we are currently being told it does. I am convinced that there is some truth to the claims that racism affects each of us in ways we do not quite understand, and yet I also feel that these claims are not enough to satisfy the burden of proof that it controls our conscious minds without our knowledge.  Racism exists. That much seems abundantly clear. Does it drive all social interactions? Of that, the evidence is scattered and difficult to collect in an empirical manner. We must each trust our feelings, in spite being told that is the very danger we face. Not all feelings are created equal.  

But you're white!, cries the chorus, Just like the Trumps! That I refuse to acknowledge this basic social/racial fact is proof positive of my inherent moral failings. All that it takes is to interact briefly with racially informed individuals and they will point to this always conversation-aborting fact. You must be woke if you hope to avoid racial slumber. 

Those who have studied the matter seem to conclude that race is a biological fiction, that the term is used mostly as one of social convenience. I do not mean that having a particular race is convenient, only that the term is used to describe people whose ancestral lineage stems from various and differing places on earth. Once you move past the arbitrary quality of skin color the science is, for the most part, settled. Race is no longer a scientific question or matter for serious biological inquiry. It simply does not exist in the way that it is being discussed in social circles. In this case, we are not encouraged to trust the science, because it also lacks the unquestioned objectivity that only the woke can provide. One must swear allegiance with, and demonstrate sufficient levels of, anti-racism to have the mob move on to seek allegiance elsewhere. Once the dialectic of racist/anti-racist has been firmly established, the conversation can then proceed. 

I have some familiarity with how these type of morally oppositional dynamics are formed. Many may see the following analogy as insulting and indicative of the very problems they are describing. I hope so. That connection is vital to the point I am trying to make. 

When I was a barely pubescent teenager I walked around my hometown with an evangelical Christian group and stopped random people to discuss "the sin of abortion." We were given brief huddle-style training on how to frame the questions and how to respond when anyone posited rationale over morality. The sin of killing babies was where to keep the conversation headed. Do not let the demonic forces of reason dissuade from God's righteous purpose, etc. 

It did not seem to matter to the youth instructors that engaging random people in this way might cause some emotional anguish. That was the point, to find a way in that precluded any response other than guilt and shame, even if it was only just the sins of pride or apathy. Always it was pride and apathy that kept the sinful from accepting their sins. Sin blinds its victims to its curse. Once the morality of the issue had been successfully bifurcated and Satan kept at bay by His eternally loving sacrifice there was only the individual coming to Jesus left to see through to its glorious completion, usually with hands-on public and private prayer. 

It is impossible to say how many souls I saved, though my guess is fewer than one. 

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Grand Canyon

Another weekend lost to wine. I drank several bottles, now I am eager to scratch my way back up the hill towards the cross of Christ. There are signs everywhere that God is out to love me. He has commanded me to be happy most of all, says CS. Or, maybe he was quoting somebody else. Yes, that makes much more sense. 

I am trying to figure out what the boy and I will do for the first half of his Spring Break. We have tossed around the idea of flying to Vegas, to drive, to the Grand Canyon, to do a helicopter tour over the mile-deep gorge. I like this idea, but it is expensive and we will be a little bit rushed. We also discussed just driving the coastline here for a day, with the dog, to get some seafood at our favorite place along the coast: Nick's Cove. I have written about it before here. Oysters are less expensive than helicopter tours of one of the most famous land formations in the world. 

Nothing more to report. Mondays are flat in all directions. 

(This post was so boring, I forgot to post it yesterday.)

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"How Long, Oh Lord?"

(Charlie, Las Vegas)

A lazy Sunday morning, after a night of wine drinking. Then, a little later, one oval Xanax and one circular Cyclobenzaprine. Yes, I know that drinking and combining benzodiazepines is ill-advised, but I was going to sleep where nothing bad ever happens. I had not drank anything in about a week. It felt good to have a few glasses of wine. I have given up eating red meat and I need something Catholic to imbibe every so often.

I say that I have given up red meat, but I noticed that Rachel bought a rasher of bacon, which now sits in the refrigerator like an uncooked temptation. I am a sex addict for bacon. It arouses my sensibilities and imagination. We will see how well my abstinence holds up under the tremendous pressure of the scent of cooking pork fats. 

I am already conducting an internal debate about whether or not I will exercise today. The wine's tentacles have crept deep into my morning thoughts, where their grip has its hold on me. By noon, I will feel differently, though, something close to normal. 

It occurred to me that I have already used the above picture here, back in September, shortly after coming home from Las Vegas. So, I will add another one to help keep this site in balance. Oh look, I have an underwater shot that I have not used yet. Here is the boy, in the most recent of a series of time-lapse images of his birth.

(Longing Legs)

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Well Psyche, and Cupid

I have not wished to buy anything else since getting the watch. I have grown bored with the curse of the Amazon. Yes, I know, I will stop writing about the watch soon. Though, I have noticed small changes in my psyche, which is one of the things that exists to be written about.  

The strangest thoughts have occurred to me over the last few weeks. New thoughts, followed by new feelings. A friend of mine passed away unexpectedly a couple weeks ago. For several days now I have felt that he's still alive, that this is all a joke or a trick, that he will reveal the ruse soon. It is, of course, just a form of denial, but I've never felt it in quite this way before as an adult. The mind is a funny thing.  

Today, the boy goes to tryouts for baseball. They have decided to start the season up in the expectation of things improving, and with the practice of social distancing that a baseball field affords, and masks. I'm happy that the boy gets to play with other kids again. It is a normal thing to want, an abnormal thing to be deprived of. He will start going back to school part-time in April, also. 

So many changes, after living so long without them. 

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Terrifying

Terrifying, said one of my friends when I sent them this image. It was not the image that I hoped to take, but the one that resulted. I like it. The distortions that water provides do something for me that I can not do for myself. For this, I am grateful. 

My love for the watch has settled down, a little bit. Yesterday, I held the watch to the boy's ear to let him hear the second hand's ticking, three times each second, and the piece that shifts to wind the spring automatically when the watch is moved from one side to another. It can be seen through the back side of the case, through the windows of the Bauhaus. I explained to the boy that my fascination with the analog world is motivated mostly by its disappearance. Exile on Mein Screech. It is a German watch, after all

I have always depended on the blindness of dangers.

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I'm hoping that it changes

Oh yeah, my new watch arrived. It is everything that I had hoped and it produced the desired moment of happiness when I put it on and wore it to dinner. I will wear it for a while and see if it similarly produces satisfaction over time.

Why all the underwater pictures, you wonder? They are all that I have. I have almost stopped taking pictures of the boy and Raquel, except when we are on vacation, and underwater. Photography has become, for me, an excessive burden and luxury. Rarely are my hands ever free enough any more to carry a camera with me, and when I put it in a backpack it tends to stay there. It's too bad I can't do the same with money. 

Nothing remains effortless for very long.

Oh yeah, the new watch is barely water-resistant. It is not recommended to even take a shower with it on. Submersion is gravely ill-advised. So, it is unlike most any other watch I have ever owned, more vulnerable and delicate, entirely mechanical yet dependent upon human adjustment. I'm hoping that it changes me. It needs me. 

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The Night Through

... and just like that, if this is it, I feel a bit better. A few bike rides, some healthy food, good sleep, and I am back in business. Raquel and I are suffering predictable, and likely usual, relationship problems. You can see it in our faces in the image above. Something is not right with us. We're currently working on it. 

I blame Covid, in part, but who doesn't? I also often read depressing books, or worse: cerebral. I just finished Gerald Murnane's The Plains (1982). I recommend reading it if you like Kafka and Beckett and other trifling writers of the 20th century. I don't know why I keep emphasizing to everybody that the book was written in 1982. It is a strange tic that I seem to have adopted for this book alone. 

It is called a tic in the parlance of those times. 

Last night, the boy was restless after a day off from school in which mom and dad worked all day in the adjoining rooms where he was watching movies, like Weird Science. So, he suggested we drive over to Napa, with no specific plan. We put the dogs in the car and off we went. After a detour through downtown and across the river we ended up at a chichi cycling shop. I peered in through the window to see what super-expensive bikes they had on display. Then, we noticed a restaurant with a rather large outdoor seating area with flames rising in obelisk-shaped heaters at every table. Pizza and wine it was. It felt nice to do something relatively normal, like have dinner at a restaurant. 

The drive home was lovely in the moonlight - the rolling hills and vineyards, the estates on tops of hills. The lone hill here and there, topped likewise by a lone tree against the background of the sky. Glimpses of mystery as the trees and posts closest to the road flashed by. We all seemed happy. 

After, we came home and kept our promises to ourselves, slept the night through.

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if it will

The house is empty. The boy is playing baseball after having stopped abruptly a year ago, along with most others. The last pre-covid pictures I took were of him playing on a team with his best buddy. That was the Thursday or Friday before we left for Spring Break together in an RV. Well, let me see if I can find one. Done. Images too plain and wholesome for the tastes of some, nonetheless it is part of what I like to look at and what you are looking at now.

The house is empty. I have been feeling cramped and crowded lately. It is not at all a good feeling, though there must be worse feelings to choose from. I am trying to take this time to feel the serenity of being alone, but it hasn't yet arrived, if it will. 

The house is empty. I want to go for a nice long Sunday bike ride, but I am holding off until the boy and Rachel return, so that I have that as an option then, and not squander it now. It is not at all a good feeling. 

No more, no less

It's a doggy-dog world out there.

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Time of the Season of the Witch

I bought a new Dyson vacuum cleaner, also. That does not appeal to me as a subject in the way that the watch does, but I'll give it time. As a symbol, the vacuum cleaner sucks. What could be more domestic than a vacuum cleaner. Every object can be a symbol, if you attach it to an accessory and use it to clean the carpets and wood floors.

So much in my life right now is causing me grief of one kind or another. Being the boy's co-teacher with Raquel every day has worn me down, and it has not done anything noticeably better for the boy. He is tired of it, I am tired of it, yet it must continue. A parent can not signal to their child that education does not matter. 

California lets teachers decide when it is safe to return but the decisions must be unanimous. All that it takes to keep every child at home and away from their other classmates, and the fledgling social circles they are forming, is for one teacher to express concern over health and not wish to return to in-class learning. It would somehow be too accusatory if they were to just let that one teacher stay home while other classes resumed. Imagine the feelings of being shunned that they might feel at such a system. It is always the system that is to blame. That is, in fact, what I am doing right now: blaming a system. 

Systems pulled mankind out of the feces they had been eating for 100,000 years and sent us to the moon, and now Mars, but we are reminded that they are inherently wicked. No good ever seems to come from them, as they generate inequities. The family is a system. No children born into one ever achieve at the same rate. The solution to this is obvious: never have more than one child. The system of family produces inequality. 

Coming out of the experience of this last year I may not have the same tolerance, or show the same support, for teachers that express how overworked and underpaid they are, even though I know that to be true. The one does not invalidate the other. Though knowing is not the same as feeling.

There are other things that are bothering me - money, work, love, sex, etc. 

I did not come here to rant, and I hate that I am. My mind is cluttered with thoughts that do not suit me. 

A suit, maybe that's what I need, to match my new watch. 

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Junghans Max Bill Automatic Bauhaus

I bought a new watch, a self-winding mechanical, a thing of industrial beauty. Simplicity is elegance, a friend once relayed me. I believe she was quoting someone else. The phrase remained with me, even though it is quite obviously untrue in many cases. At least as it pertains to design, it works for me as an axiom. In personal devices I prefer the thinnest of lines. I might be seeking in the external world what I often fail to achieve within myself - an easiness of being, a delicacy of spirit.

No numbers for the hours, only the day of the month - just lines, sweeping red hands, and little dots that glow in the dark. Two at the top of the dial to distinguish its orientation in the dark, when perhaps it is not on the wrist. 

The 20th century is filled with scenes, both written and filmed, involving wristwatches. All manner of metaphor and symbolic import can be attached to them, if you wish. This is where many of my Romantic ideals take flight: from the past. Within a year I will stop setting it and it will never have the correct time available. How absurd is it that I will use my cell phone to correct it, when I do. How much more useless can an object be. It exists and functions, if at all, as a result of newer and better technology. An ornament that makes a trophy from my apathy. 

The watchmaker was the official timekeeper for the Olympic games in Munich, 1972. Black September, etc. Maybe I won't remind people of that if I find myself talking about it to anybody. It is not as if the watchmaker was to blame for the terror attack. They just happen to be based in Germany. Dumb luck, that. It could have happened to any German watch company. Most of my friends are lost in a miasma of historical confusion anyway, so there is little gain and little lost in offering this tidbit of data. I just like to know that I have an in-built way to divert or abort conversation, as I choose. 

I had hoped that buying the watch would help pull me out of a spiraling blue funk that I have been in for months, a feeling of useless malaise, covidepression. We will see when it arrives if it has this effect. There is something about participating in a dying process that I cannot seem to keep myself away from. I look at all of my old Nikon film cameras and manual lenses and I wonder how long they will keep making film. I'll look at this watch often when I first get it, never actually caring what time it is. 

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The myth of life

I invented my childhood. Then, likewise into adulthood until the facts of my life caused my mythic dirigible to perish in flame, year upon year. 

Still, there is some truth to the stories we invent, even if only of the personal kind. Lies are among the most creative activities we engage in. It is a wonder that so many treat the act with such impoverished disdain. 

I enjoy the fabrications when at the onset of drinking. Those first few glassfuls can contain - or is it release? - a glorious yet ignoble freeing of the imagination, even when mine takes flight in a too familiar direction. It is the next day when the myths most often meet their reckoning. Lie meets lie, lying in bed. 

I invent elaborate unspoken apologies for those I've wronged, then enjoy the shame I am obligated to feel. 

It is all a part of the act - my morning soliloquy. 

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When isn't it

I am cornered into ways of thinking, by design. It is a now familiar process. Perhaps I have gone too long with or without something; I can hardly determine. I know the feeling of wanting to blame, and its reflection. It is depression, but when isn't it. I want so many things that I want.

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