Its absence

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

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

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

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Follow me on Instagram

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ouroboros Upkeep

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

Well, what can one do? 

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

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

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

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

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Losing My Edge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Without all the laughs

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

I must go and get a coffee.

Okay, done - delicious clouds in my coffee. 

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

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

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

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

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

Like this, but without all the laughs:

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Upholding the Law

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

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

Free the Birther!  

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

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

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

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

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

I'll need to find some way to adjust. 

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

Free the Fucking Birther!  

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Confidences

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


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

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

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


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


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

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

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Documenting a life

("That's no moon")

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

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

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

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

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Demented from Indistance

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who does.

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

That last part made me smile.

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

- WCM, Paterson

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Table Photography

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

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

Ah well, I survived.

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

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

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

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

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Little books

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

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

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

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

... have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons

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with pennies

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

Speech seems to always insist that it is somehow helpful. 

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Rights of the Reproduced

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

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

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

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

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

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The Duke of Hennessy

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

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

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

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

Do not try to convince me otherwise. 

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

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

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Too much looking back

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, now I'm here: 50. 

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

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

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

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

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Salsa Timberjack NX Eagle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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What life is like for a Pentecostal

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

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

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

Why think about things you can? is my response. 

Why think at all?

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

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

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

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

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Between Scylla and Charybdis

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

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

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

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

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

America always wins.

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

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

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Everybody gets the bogeyman they hope for

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All else is hearsay, says the honorable he.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

America should move to Northern Ireland.

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

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

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Try to end on a word that lasts

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

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

Nope; I tried. 

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

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