... like the gentle bending

The hills create puddles of frequencies, cycles repeating.  The road flickers through them.  Radio stations drift in and away.  They wander out in static, jumping together in unexpected ways, with unannounced urgency and chance inconsistency, or serendipity.  Returning again to the place they left, seconds later.  Portions of seconds lost across the hills to frequencies bouncing, not stopped by.  Rock and Roll becomes Spanish evangelism, if only for a moment.  Late night jazz gives its soft way to talk radio streaming across the bay from Berkeley or beyond.  Serious conversation had in abbreviated pieces with serious people, riding on rates of occurrence.  Advertisements toppling them all, capital concerns oscillating, chopping across the valley with routine regularity; onward transmissions.  Local affairs, or larger considerations.  Leftists announcing their strategies of resistance.  Murmuring their intentions towards the better society, murmuring their fears, hushing us into the future.  One can imagine the signals bouncing off the rocks as they meet in moonlight, can almost feel the radio traps approaching in the dark.  With closed eyes the waves are so easily seen.  Between two hills I imagine that I am traveling through fields of fuzzy sound, passing through the static of time; of course I am, just like the gentle bending of roads.

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Giving up

(The evidence of my defeat)

Not much time to write today.  I woke up late, meaning after 5am.  I will have to try to finish this post when the boy takes a nap.  If I can get him to take a nap.  Yesterday I had to drive him to the In-N-Out Burger in Petaluma to get him to sleep.  The car almost always puts him to sleep.  Still, he only slept for just over half an hour, and driving the car is not like sitting at my desk writing.  But those burgers sure were good.  And the milkshake, chocolate, was delicious.  It all helped the hot dogs make their way through my system, I hope.  It has been an assembly line of digestive carnage down there for days.

Something left over from last night, notes from my phone as I was drifting off to sleep.  I had gotten yet another vague electronic hint that I've somehow "given up"...

I cheated on my wife.  I feel really, really bad about it.  That I did this in the baby's room does not help.  That I performed this evil inside the baby's crib, with his pacifier as a clitoral/anal stimulator, only heightens my shame.  But I can't wait to do it again.  I remember the mobile scratching my back from above, and the wood from the crib creaking madly with our illicit joy.  There was a childhood melody floating past, as the soundtrack to our wickedness. 

Honestly, I can't take it any more.  I have gotten so many texts and emails suggesting that I am no longer who I said I was.  I've simply decided to lie about everything from here on out.  All because I've had a child... sort of.  

Being happy is not perfect, but neither is it necessarily a retreat from character.  I still make mistakes. They're just new ones, ones that might not interest my old friends quite as much.  Ones that don't involve me making as much of a public fool out of myself, but instead mistakes that just leave me feeling foolish at the newness of life. 


The paragraph above is another fiction, by the way.  Cheating hasn't been one of my traditionally recurring mistakes.  


I simply got tired of being tired of who I was.  

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It is written...

I awoke this morning dreaming that people were trying to kill me.  Everybody wanted me dead, the Pope most of all.  There were helicopters involved, cameras everywhere.  It was like a really low-budget James Bond film, set just behind the suburbs.  The whole thing felt like a bad story-board chase scene.  It was incomplete, told in scattered fragments.  

The meanies were all professional wrestlers so it didn't matter that much.  But still, it was not a pleasant way to dream.  I had notified The New York Times about their nefarious plans, though they didn't say so until the very end of the dream, that that was the true source of their rage.  It was what finally, once and for all, led to my bespoke thrashing on a neighbor's front lawn as I was attempting to make my escape on foot.  I was almost in the clear when the last black car pulled up with my doom.  

When I came to my mouth was dry and I remembered that I had to take the trash bins down to the street.  I should have done it last night, but I didn't.  We live in unincorporated county, just outside the city.  It is post-suburban.  It is just beyond where Tim Burton thematically dwells, and moralizes, about the special uniqueness of adolescence.  It's like an after-school special.

Meaning, after the kids have dropped out of school and are daily re-enacting the movie "The River's Edge."

I think those hot dogs have finally begun to bully their way through my system.

I  also dreamt that I had a tattoo.  I looked down and there was the effect of transitory whim inked into my arm, the ever-lasting impulse.  After I had made my tea this morning I quietly vowed to myself to get a tattoo once Rhys is old enough to speak in full sentences.  I'm going to let him decide what tattoo I'm going to get, and where.  I want it to be special.  So, if I end up with Spiderman or The Pink Panther on my forehead, so be it, don't be surprised.  

It is written.

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Waits just a second

I'm in a similar boat as Ol' Selavy.  I'm getting in trouble for writing fictions.  Please, I beg of everybody that reads here.... Either I am entirely making stuff up, or am inflating one small part of my day into something larger, or I'm taking something that I've read and pretending to have feelings about it, or I'm fictionalizing part of my day to make life more amusing for me.  It's all just a joke.  I am just pretending to feel the way that I do.  I'm laughing along with all of it.

If you read about yourself on this site and you wonder at my harsh treatment of our experiences it is only for the sake of humor.  I promise.  The author of this site apologizes.  

I've eaten far too much acid in my life, it's what happens to the mind, it needs perpetual distortions, for entertainment.  To make things seem real again they must be modifiable.

There is a music critic in New York that I will often source for opinions.  I do this in almost equal amounts because I agree with him as much as I disagree with him.  It's fun for me.  It's what I do when I'm not stretching the truth about my experiences on this site, or masturbating in public.  

So, I was listening to Tom Waits tonight and reading through some online articles about him when I came across this link.    If you are an avid fan of Waits then read through the rather terse album reviews found there.  They will enrage and excite you, I hope.  He has some good points about Waits' weaknesses but he fails to really get the point, I think.  Tom Waits is also writing fictions, like Bukowski.  We are not meant to believe that every tale is true.  They could not possibly be.  He is relaying the essences of experiences.  He's also parodying himself as he goes.  All of it is done with a wink, I think, even the self-mocking.

I won't go through and rebuff each album's review, point by sparse point, but I think the main objection I have is that Waits gives us enough indication that he is kidding along the way as to be forgivable.  He knows that what he's making isn't quite as authentic as it is meant to sound.  It's half a joke, half not - from today, from yesterday.  He's a little like Otis, the town drunk, from The Andy Griffith Show.  The actor that plays "Otis" I mean.

It's why you will mostly see black and white pictures of Waits from the 70's.  His image began as a fiction, becoming increasingly colorful only as he discarded the costume of the past.

His crime, to me, doesn't seem to be that he lacks "the intellect or self-discipline his talent deserved"* but only that he is laughing a little bit too much at himself as he goes.  Sure, Frank Zappa was supposed to be very talented, people tell me all of the time, as if they're trying to convince me so that they can rest at ease with their convictions if I don't put up a fight about it.  But knowing that he's talented never makes me want to listen to his music, and it's never stopped me from listening to Captain Beefheart.  Similar artists, of the same time period, that stand miles apart to me.  One I love, the other I let other people love.  One reduced his talent to a series of jokes, the other I freely laugh along with, etc. 

Waits functions in a similar fashion, though occasionally accomplishing both states.  I listen through the self-mocking pieces, granting him his drunken blunders and whims, discarding the bathetic, to get to the pieces that possess genuine sentiment and true beauty.  Even when he undercuts his sentiment with internal derision he still pulls off moments that are well worth the price of admission.  Sometimes he just seems like a kid that has convinced almost everybody but himself, and he's not going to rest until that remaining doubter believes.

* - From Christgau's review of "Swordfishtrombones" 

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Biting the Dust

Temporary victory against the ants.  The neighbor brought over a little vial of liquid poison, a thing that was meant to decimate their troops and forever dash their little ant hopes.  He instructed me to place a few drops on a piece of paper where they are entering, directly across their supply lines. They love the stuff, he says.  They bring it back to their mound where chaos ensues, if all goes as planned.  It is the doomsday liquid.

I awoke imagining the carnage.  When I rushed downstairs and checked the piece of paper there were thousands of them still on there.  As soon as they saw me they began to disperse, all over the house.  I suspect that those godless fuckers were cannibalizing their own troops.  I must have been like some great moving eclipse to them.  They dashed.  It was pure ant terror, and I their new god of wrath.  I lost all respect for the supposed "order" of the colony.  The desperate fuckers must have been transmitting, "Every ant for himself!!!"  They made no discernible concerted effort against me.  I, however, scrambled into action against them.  I ran to the outdoor shed where I keep the ant spray.  It was gone, of course.  Rachel had moved it.  I knew this instantaneously.  Women are always moving things.  Always.

She had asked me several days before where the ant spray was and I told her it was outside. She said, "Where outside?"  I responded that it was in the only possible place where it could be outside and with all of the other outside things we own, the poisons.  I guess she didn't like this answer, so she moved it, closer to Rhys I must assume.  It is, after all, a powerful toxin.  I suppose she wanted it to be closer to our child.  I was right.  It was under the kitchen sink, awaiting its discovery.

I went into action.  By the time I got back to the line of ants they had dispersed.  They are always referred to as an "army" of ants.  Absurd.  They had scattered everywhere.  I now wondered to myself if they perhaps also had a hidden navy.  How could so many troops mobilize and evacuate so quickly.  I glanced around for a possible airlift.  None on the radar.  Those gluttonous little fuckers must have been feasting on the stuff because many were left apparently dead in their wretched, chaotic tracks.  That, or they were frozen with fear; an Irish Godzilla approaching from above.  I let them have it with pure chemical warfare, WW I style.  I doused them.  I covered the kitchen floor in a fine even mist of chemical ruin.  I finally felt the joys of carpet-bombing. 

It was like Waterloo, and I Wellington.  Let them eat mace.

Moving on....

Nobody can be left alone any more. It is like a law of parenthood that nobody tells you. Every mundane thing must be talked about, and your response is required to every single incident that occurs in the universe, from here until the end of time.  For those who like to prattle on endlessly about the mundane, the trivial, or worse, then the state of parenthood must be wonderful for them and I now understand why they mindlessly crave it.  It's like crack for healthy people.  

For others, who wish only to have moments of peace throughout the day, it is unfailing torture.  Never before in my life has my daily conversation been so unnecessarily filled with pointlessness, and you must remember that I kept myself surrounded with drug addicts for more than 20 years.  Even addicts are more absorbing, and make more interesting points, than those tasked or gifted with the rearing of a child.  

Finally, a "nothingness" that is foreign to me.

I am already getting Father's Day cards.  They are, of course, hideous lies, filled with saccharine excrement... "Being a father is the most important job a man will ever have..."  If that's true then why do we let a nanny do it for us.  Why don't they just be honest.  It's the second, or perhaps third, most important job a man will ever likely have.  The first always comes with a paycheck and everybody knows this.  Why do we accept lies in place of truth?  

Some of you might say, Well, having a job is part of being a father.... This might be true if it weren't so obviously false.  Many people have jobs who are not fathers, more than half of America, I would imagine.  When you factor in women, those who choose to not have children, and those who can not, then I think the numbers will reflect that more than half of the people who have jobs are not fathers.  The two things exist independently of one another, though many would argue otherwise.  I'm currently living in one of the first-hand lies of feminism, equality.  I don't mean Rachel here, she is very loving and supportive.  But many others will openly show shock or slight disdain for my life choices, with directed questions, implication and vague accusation.

I'm just going to keep this Father's Day card with me everywhere I go and read it aloud whenever anybody has questions or doubts.   "Being a father is the most important job I'll ever have..."  See?

Wow.... Well, thank-you.  I might not have ever known this.  You sending me this card is very likely the most important thing that you've ever done, or will ever do.  Imagine that I might have gone through life thinking my child just a terrible mistake, with me running off to work each day like a god-damned fool, thinking that task somehow more important.  Idiot I.

The card could have read, "Being a father is the most important job you'll ever have to your child..."  

I know other people that could easily claim, and already have, that having a child was a form of giving up.  "Another One Bites the Dust" is how one friend framed the conversation.  A phrase nearly biblical in its implications, and would be, were it not so closely related to the rock band Queen.  They could have just as easily said, Another Two Bite the Dust, or Three.  

From dust to dust does life springeth forth, biting as it goes....

What if the card read, "Being a father is the only job you'll ever need, God will take care of all the rest for you..."  That would be as self-evidently untrue as it sounds.  "Being a father is the only job you'll ever want."  A partial truth might be hidden in there.  "Being a father is something we'd all like you to do well."  Much closer to the truth.  "Being a father is something we'll be judging you on."  Now we're getting closer.

When somebody sends you a card that makes a vast, untestable claim, couched in phony sentiment, no matter how superficial - telling you what you are and then the importance of what you are - then it comes along with certain expectations.  The card is actually asserting a supposition, a prediction, an expectation, almost a spell of witchcraft.  It is trying to say, "I am going to prioritize your life for you and I am going to make that priority known to you with this social incantation that gets oft repeated, never questioned.  Once that priority has been magically established, by me, then I will be in a position to assert my expectations upon you and the role that you have accepted, you silly recipient."  

Any rebuttal to such a claim seems ungrateful, if not worse.  For me to respond back to the sender of the card, "If being a father is so important then why is welfare unevenly distributed to mothers?"  Or, "If being a father is so important then why are criminals allowed to do it? "  Yet again, "If being a father is the most important thing that I'll ever do then why did you only send a card?"  A card seems an insufficient gift to match such a task.  I would think that sending me another mother would be more helpful.  If a family supports one another, and the mother's task is supreme, then why shouldn't all families have two of them, just in case.  How much better at fatherhood I might be, a truly load-bearing role, if we only had another nice woman around to ease the burden.  I could help pick her out.

Or, we could hold a contest for her.  It would be the most important contest ever held...

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Trophollaxis

"I don't believe in evil, I believe only in horror.  In nature there is no evil, only an abundance of horror: the plagues and the blights and the ants and the maggots."  - Isak Dinesen

Last night I awoke to get a glass of water.  I walked to the kitchen and poured one.  As I stood there drinking it in the dark I felt little monsters crawling up my legs.  I turned on the lights.  There were thousands of them.  Ants.  Everywhere.

I turned off the lights and went back to bed, telling myself that there was nothing I could do, that I would take care of it in the morning.  When I woke up in the morning they were all gone.  I thought that I had suffered a bout of night craziness, or early onset menopause, or that maybe it was only a strange dream.  

I asked Rachel.  She wanted to know how bad it was downstairs.  I told her that they were all gone.  She could hardly believe me.  Only a few minutes before she had removed a bag of recycling from the floor, putting it outside in the bin, then washed the jar of honey off that had been left out, putting it in the refrigerator.  That was it.  

I had expected to look at the jar of honey in the refrigerator and see them trapped in the sticky stuff like miniature dinosaurs trapped in amber.  But there were none.  I suppose they were after whatever remainder was on the outside.  I had hoped to eat some of them, to celebrate our victory over them, crunching hundreds of miniature mandibles in my teeth at once.  I imagined their horror at such a thing.  Godzilla, I. 

They have colonized every land mass on earth.  It was only a matter of time before they came after our honey jar.  I had somehow always known this.  

Thousands of them that had been deployed to retrieve whatever trash they were after, and to bring back as much of our kingdom's honey as possible, were then recalled back home to the mound to enjoy their spoils.  To make merry with the byproduct of our sweet nectar.  They will be reveling all day today, I'm sure of it.  I can almost hear the celebratory sound of miniature gunfire in the distance, the rat-a-tat-tat of semi-antomatics.

I just found one on my desk.  Rachel found a line of them upstairs just now as I write this.  Perhaps there are more reconnaissance missions that we have yet to discover, penetrating deeper behind enemy lines, trying to flank us.   

This is the second time they have made their way into our place. We will have to be more proactive in the future. Who knows what sleeper cells they have left in here to reek havoc once the place goes dark and they can have their way with our sweets, produce and refuse.  They are black ants so I'm not as worried as I would be if they were red.  Even so, it is unsettling to know that an army has made its way past your front lines and is ransacking your kitchen.  

Okay, I spoke too soon.  Rachel just discovered a line of ants that leads all the way upstairs.  They have huddled together in a corner of the stairwell where we can not reach them.  I have sprayed all of the lines of ants that lead to the clustered group but I have no way of getting up to them.  I feel like Adolf Eichman, but what is one to do?  It really is an "us or them" situation.  We will need to contact the Homeowners Association and seek a Final Solution as these ants are coming in from the outside.  They are what is known as outside agitators.  

One day I will be asked to help some ants with a broken down car on the streets of Argentina where I will be abducted and then brought back to the ant mound for justice.  I don't think those little fuckers would ever be able to hang me but who knows... perhaps they have devised an execution far worse than hanging.  

Rachel is understandably upset.  There is an infant in the house.  She can not accept ant infestation in any ongoing manner.  Ants are in the same order as wasps and bees, making them a potentially formidable opponent.  I must find the mound outside and poison the well at the spring, cutting of their supply lines.  I know that most solutions are only temporary, that it is very difficult to eliminate a colony, even for the experts, but we must do what we can to persuade them to scavenge elsewhere.  

They are often portrayed as hard workers yet there were hundreds that somehow found the time to frolic in our kitchen all night.  I refuse to believe they were all working.  Certainly there must have been sluggards among them.  They were wandering around on the floor as if it was just a big outdoor rave.

Rachel hates me right now for reasons I don't fully understand.  We tried to talk last night and it was as if every thing I said only exacerbated the situation.  Now there is the ant issue.  Somehow I will be blamed.  Perhaps the ants were a punishment for the hot dogs, sent in from places unknown to terrorize me at night.

Last night for dinner I ate four hot dogs and a soft boiled egg.  No buns, just dogs on a plate with mustard.  I didn't feel like preparing anything and the hot dogs seemed the easiest.  They were, but then I felt guilty after eating them, worse than guilty.  I worried about the effect they would have on my digestive track.  The timing was bad for my relationship.  I wrote about infant feces the other day so I won't go into any detail about the possible effect that those hot dogs will have.  I fear that this site may become too scatological.  Anuses can have a certain charm but one must be careful with them.  They can lose their charm very quickly, and unexpectedly.

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Retro-Raver

For anybody who knows this "scene" and might find this anecdotal snippet humorous:

Last Thursday night I went out to hear a dj play, an old friend from England.  It was nice to see him and the night was fun, he played very well.  He played a lot of music that I liked, to the point that I was asking what some of the tracks were, almost a faux pas in that community.  

It is called "trainspotting" and can annoy the victim of it.  But we are friends and it can also be a sign of respect, and of course, genuine interest.

At one point towards the end of the night a young woman came into the dj booth and was showing her enthusiasm for the dj with a lot of nodding, imbibing, and the occasional screech of eagerness.  I believe she might have been Australian.  I was committed to not being certain.

She leaned towards me, "Mate, these people just don't know what good British music is."

"This is Carl Craig."

"Who?"

"Carl Craig.  He's from Detroit."

"Mate, this is Sasha.  He's from London."

"Oh, I thought you said British music.  This track, this music, is American...  I didn't know Manchester was a neighborhood in London."

"What?  Manchester's not in London.  

"Neither is Wales."

"I don't know what you're on about, mate, Sasha's British.  This is the finest in British music."

"I see.  It's too bad San Francisco just doesn't have any clue what good music is.  All of those people on the dance floor could be having fun right now.  It's a terrible shame."

I walked away, knowing it was better to do so than to pursue the conversation any further.

Maybe I'm just too old to be going to nightclubs any more.  I don't know.  I can hardly stand talking to most of the people there and I'm quite confident they feel the same about me.  

The guy pictured above was a retro-raver.  He had his rave accoutrements in place and was furiously networking with his iPhone and accompanying headset.  It's too bad the place was so dark, a good picture would have covered a thousand words, or so.  

I used to be a freelance leader in the stalwart opposition to taking any pictures in a nightclub. 

My, how things change....

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A deal, a bet

Strange dreams, a broken camera.  Is it possible that not having a job is beginning to actually get to me.  I awoke being stressed at my inability to fix a camera that had broken.  I was fretting in the dream that the lens had broken and I had no way of replacing it.    

Who knows.  I tire easily of those that try to interpret dreams, either their own or those of others.  Most dreams seem self-explanatory.  The mind creates stories out of nearly random synapse firings, a waterfall that slows to a trickle in sleep but does not allow itself to cease altogether.  In the waking hours the semi-conscious mind begins to direct the flow of ideas.  With us all there is a negotiation in the dark.

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positional considerations

Something has occurred to me.  If you want to have things to write about, at least for a certain type of writing, then you must have experiences.  Events give rise to stories.  Seems simple enough, right?  I've known this all along, of course, but it has really jumped out at me in the last two days and throttled me.  

I went into SF to see a friend, then quite unexpectedly found that another friend was in town the following day.  So I stayed longer than I had thought that I would, running into many other friends along the way.  I went to very nice lunches and dinners, taxi rides, bus rides, bars, nightclubs, hotels, friends' houses, etc.

I have no specific story to tell this morning, soon though.  The last two days has made me realize that if I want to take pictures and if I want to write stories then I must seek experiences.  I must have experiences, then I must relay them.  That's where many stories occur, in incident. 

The day-care daddy thing has its limitations.  I love it but much of what I'm involved in there cannot be relayed easily.  The audience for such a thing might be limited to myself and Rachel, perhaps a few more.  Certainly my readers will tire of hearing me relay minute advancements in Rhys' development, or even major ones.  

I occasionally have the impulse to delete "friends" from Facebook when they have a child because they become so tedious.  But that's just me.  I'm not a very good Facebook friend to most.  I'm an asshole, I guess.  It discourages people from trying to interact with me on any level other than the superficial, where I excel.

If it didn't sound like such a creepy thing to do I would start going to bars and photographing women playing pool.  I get an erotic charge from watching women concentrating in this way.  It invites positional considerations.  It is perhaps a good launching point to begin a certain type of story.  

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Best Buddies

I'm not so sure about being a day-care daddy.  It's not that I don't enjoy the sense of bonding that's occurring between Rhys and I.  It's more that I had perhaps harbored a few misconceptions about what it might be like.  I have been trying to do it very well, because I very much want to and because I fear that people might have suspected that I couldn't, or wouldn't.   I'm not sure why I felt this way.  I suppose that living in a "nay-sayer" environment eventually takes its toll.  

I have allowed people to subtly suggest that I'm just a fuck-about whenever it comes to anything that matters.  It is part of a persona I've cultivated, then allowed it to be developed and augmented by others, and then almost lost control of.  The persona's not entirely accurate, of course, but it taught me a few valuable lessons.  It's not entirely inaccurate either.  That's the part that I've struggled with.  

Nobody wants to feel incapable, they want to feel that they have choices and undiscovered talents.  Pursuing one can sometimes eliminate or obscure the other.

A regular reader of this blog, one that I'm not quite certain if I know or not, wrote to me through the comments section a few days ago, asking me not to publish the comment as it was a private message intended for me.  I tried to write back but could not locate an email address for the commenter.  I won't go into details - as it is not my prerogative to do so - but the message conveyed through personal accounting that I should be careful, that it might be far too easy to find myself in a situation where this is all that I'm doing and that I could find that I like it far less than I might have once thought.  The impression the person gave was that it is far too easy to let time slip by and before you realize it any hopes and dreams you might have had for yourself can be lost.  

It has given me a glimpse into something, but only a glimpse.  I've formulated no conclusions yet.  I'm still trying to let my talents and choices work together.

I am already prepared to demand equality though, and it only took me a week or two.  I think it's time that women realized that what a man does, when he chooses to stay home and take care of his child, is just as important and difficult as what a woman does when she goes off to work every day.  Being a house-husband is several full time jobs.  

Ok, I am kidding a bit, of course.  We all know that women should be working and they shouldn't be stopped from voting, or even discouraged most of the time.  Times have changed, and if all of you working mothers out there can't respect that a man stays home to fart and raise your child then you are just troglodytes trapped in a soon to be frowned upon past.  Go back into your caves...!!!  The next time that you come home and grunt that you're hungry, ripping open a beer and reading the paper with your feet up, take a good look around and ask yourself what that smell is.  

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I can't get no

Rolling Stone magazine reports that on this day in 1965 the song "Satisfaction" by The Rolling Stones was released, 47 years ago.  The very early days of Cock-Rock.  

It's interesting to hear the speaker's gender reversed in that particular song.  There is a wholly different meaning hidden in the code.  This version does something eerily powerful to the significance of the track.  Cat Power indeed.

I had thought that the original version is on a gold record, along with some other recordings that NASA felt were representative of the human race, flying through space on the Voyager explorer.  I checked, it turns out that my memory of the contents of the Golden Voyager records is off, way off.  No big surprise there any more.  My memories might as well be flying through space, exiting the solar system, entering the nearly eternal void, at invisible yet breakneck speeds.  

I can still remember a time when my memory was useful, barely.

As I was growing up I felt that I was born too late, in the wrong time.  I felt that the most interesting parts of history had already occurred and that I was involved in one long slide towards nothingness.  The Reagan years did nothing to dispel this feeling.  I know many claim that those years were great.  It seemed to me that his presidency benefited mostly from being 8 years without a war.  Clinton also enjoyed that same luxury, pretty much.  According to my memory.  Grenada and Somalia were hardly wars.  Grenada was a farce, Mogadishu was a mess.

We listened to the reports of the Grenada invasion from one of the few reliable sources of information being transmitted from the island, a HAM radio operator, where all of the major networks were also getting, then distorting, and distributing their information.  It was a sharp early lesson in propaganda, if nothing else.

I'm all for war, don't let those last paragraphs fool you.  I think we should have mandatory wars.  Congress could sign a bill demanding that we attack a different nation every other year.  It could all be done alphabetically.  We could then bill those countries for the expense of having liberated them.  Colin Powell could get a job as an advisor on security matters and global threats.  Dick Cheney's heart could rule from within the formaldehyde bubble.

Climate scientists predict that the sea level will be approximately 1 meter higher than it is now in 100 years, others deny this prediction as well as the science that predicts it.   Carbon represents 400 parts per million of the earth's atmosphere now, a higher level than has occurred in 800,000 years.  I'm sure it's nothing to worry about, probably just a liberal conspiracy, purely political posturing.  We'll know in another 50 years or so, we'll all just figure it out then.  Time is the one thing we all have plenty of, right?

Every day seems to escape me, each one breaking free from the last faster and faster.  They disappear into a blind past, leaving little evidence of their passing.  I scrape the walls of my mind here most mornings, scratching along in the darkness for the latch, for the switch, for a lever that reverses anything at all.

The world is only hurling javelins at scimitars.

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The strawberry moon passing

(Artwork by Rachel)

We had what was close to a full moon cross our bedroom - from balcony door to window - for two nights in a row, illuminating our bedroom as it goes.  I've slept with the light of the full moon on my face one too many times perhaps.  Early yesterday morning there was a lunar eclipse.  We couldn't see it against the horizon, the moon was already obscured, below the tree line.  It was still there though, of course - sending me slowly towards madness, taking me with it.

Yesterday was a very hard day with Rhys.  He has responded well to me for some time now, and that relationship seemed to be blossoming.  I thought I had it all figured out.  But then yesterday it was as if he had suddenly changed his mind, he no longer seemed to care for me at all.  He was inconsolable, crying in growing bursts.  It was maddening.  I felt like I had tried all of the things that I knew to try to calm him, none of them worked.  It turned out that he was just tired.  Even though he had slept earlier in the day he hadn't quite slept enough.  He would fight sleep and fight me trying to put him to sleep.   It was what many call a "learning experience" for me.  I am a much wiser man now, almost a woman.

(a joke, feminists relax, or agree)

My parents left this morning.  My father has recently achieved octogenarian status.  An impressive feat by some standards.  I'm over halfway there already.  So, less and less impressive for me with each passing year.  The decades are just cruising by now, barely even noticed.  They are marked and measured in new injuries sustained, rarely recovered from.  

My father is beginning to show signs of age.  There is the ever increasing fog in which he lives.  He is still surprisingly alert and aware for his age, but that alertness and awareness requires his attention.  We watched several games of basketball together and he was quite involved in them, commenting about strategies and the history of both individual players as well as the teams they've played for.  But his hearing is slowly getting worse, and his sense of surrounding seems to be dimming.  His wife, Carla, will have to ask him some things several times.  He will often respond to his perceptions rather than the actuality.  You can almost sense the conversations lingering within him, even as the confirmed one has moved on.

The last time he was here he would walk Barkley with me in the mornings. This time he declined, there has been a problem with his hip that he mentioned in passing, a thing that I believe he wanted to keep from me, an injury of some sort. 

But he's made it to 80, he gets to do and say as he pleases.  That's what I told him, anyway.  It's just pleasant to see him happy and to get along so well with him,  something that has hardly happened since he was almost my age.  

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5 months wiser

(Violet)

A new schedule, starting today.  I watch the boy in the mornings now.  In the afternoon and evening we will have the nanny come, giving me the remainder of the day to achieve something, hopefully a gainful accomplishment of some sort, monetary if possible.   Not having a job has been great, but having less money has not been quite as fantastic as I had envisioned.

It is one thing to think money evil, it is another to live a pious life.

Tomorrow my father and step-mom return home.  We will have an "empty" house again.  By empty I mean no visitors.  There will still be the nanny, the nanny's daughter Violet, the other part-time nanny Lisa, Barkley and myself, etc.   There were also some ants that made a highway through our place from the front door to the back but I chemically evicted them and shut down their toll road system through the living room.  There are an abundance of spiders outside, occasionally inside, and mosquitoes often come up from the creek just as the sun is setting.  Rachel saw a deer the size of a giraffe in the backyard.

Beyond that the place will be empty, just Rachel, Rhys, myself and all the rest.

Some of you might remember me moaning about my 401k and the potential for loss, if not outright disaster, at the iniquitous hands of others.  Well, it has lost $1000 in the last month.  I am told to blame the degenerate Greeks.  I don't trust anybody, especially the Turks...  It seems that all of these systems that are supposedly set up to benefit me never quite work out that way, like Europe for example.  It is only a matter of time before we learn about some new scheme, with some new name, a pyramid and ponzi merged, a ponzimid scheme, then all of my money will be gone for good.  I'm certain of it.  

I'm not an advocate of people losing their minds and running completely afoul of decency and societal restraints, but I see why it happens.  As I get older it becomes easier and easier to understand.  Before you know it you've found yourself building a small tank in your backyard on the weekends.  One day you just decided to take it out for a spin, without realizing it you've ended up heading towards the police station.  One thing leads to another, etc.

I have often struggled with feelings of detachment, as if I don't belong anywhere, that I am not comfortable in my own skin - that other humans, even my close friends, are remote from me at times, as distant as the stars - that I am drifting away from life.  I counterbalance those feelings with occasionally misplaced passions; stretches, reaches or grasps towards something meaningful, whether attainable or unattainable, or otherwise.  Anything.   I have lived most of my life fluctuating between despondency and fervor - sometimes genuine, sometimes feigned, and then at other times anywhere between. 

I wrote this in the early morning.  Since then Rhys has had a terrible day. He has alternated back and forth between being perfectly happy and being inconsolable, wailing in misery.  None of the normal remedies have worked to calm him.  Rachel is coming home from work, her first time doing so for the care of the boy.

There is no way to "detach" from this, no way to remove myself from it, to just not care.  I am exhausted and I have only been watching him for 5 hours.   The burden is immense and ever growing, the challenge ever changing.

He will be 5 months old on Wednesday, and I just shy of 5 months wiser.

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Rachel has a B.A. in anthropology

Today, an Ox Roast.  Something to fill the void; something to appease the martyrs, the maniacs and the mainstreamers.  

Beer, etc.

I worked in the sun yesterday, a rarity for me.  I am an albinoid so I must be very careful about such things.  I have beautiful, seductive, hazel eyes so most people don't ever notice.  Also, unlike all other albinoids I was born with a pre-determined gender; male-esque is what the doctors call it.  My penis is like a statue, an unadorned Doric column.  I have the Irish pigments in my skin, making me extremely fair-skinned.  My eyes, on rare occasion, glow pink.  Not the pupils, but instead the white's, usually in the mornings.  I was only in the direct sun for a few minutes but I somehow got sun-burned along my neck, by definition making me a "redneck."  I was hoping to get an even, deep, dark, tropical tan - but it has escaped me once again.  

The natives have stopped worshiping me and they began to throw stones.

Okay, no.  I did, however, work in the garden yesterday for a little while.  We planted cucumbers and red lettuce, in addition to doing some regular garden maintenance.  The cucumber beetles have decimated some of our crops.  They are pernicious little fuckers, intent on their own survival.  It's a good thing that they don't taste very good because I would make a minor feast of them, usurping their powers through the ingestion of their brains.

Okay.  This morning is taking a very "Golden Bough" turn.  It is only a matter of time before I cast Rachel out from the group, and make her sleep away from the tribe, because of fear and repulsion at her menstruation.  Wait, I don't even think she is menstruating again.  Recent pregnancy, etc.  So, for now she can sleep in the house.  But soon....

She's going to kill me.

"How did my menstrual cycle end up being a part of your blog again?"

I will start explaining the importance of Frazer's "The Golden Bough" and she will stand their looking at me like I'm a retarded shoplifter.  Maybe I am.  The incident rates run much higher in male redneck albinos, I'm told.

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Old and gettin' older

Grandma left yesterday morning.  Grandma and Grandpa from my side arrived the evening before.  Out with the old, in with the older.  It is startling what an infant will do to familial relationships.  Everybody wants to come visit now that we have a baby in the house, and now that we have a house.  Admittedly, Manhattan is a difficult place to visit and we offered few places to sleep that seemed appealing - air mattresses, couches that weren't quite long enough, yoga mats doubled up on a wood floor, large towels as sheets, reference books as pillows, etc. - none of them really sealed the deal when it came to visitors that were past their 40's.  We couldn't keep the 30 yr olds away though.  

Even Selavy occupied Rachel's apartment for temporary personal use when a perfectly good air mattress on a wood floor was waiting for him at my place.

Today we will go to breakfast, maybe take a nap afterwards, watch some tv, take a nap, go to the store, take a light nap, eat dinner, go to sleep.  In that order.

No, I kid.  It is quite nice that I have a good relationship with my father again.  It has been about 30 years since I've felt like I really like him.  Sometime during adolescence I saw him as a tyrant, for reasons I will perhaps one day explain, and I never quite let go of that feeling.  I've been told that excessive drug use can stunt emotional growth.  In some ways I am still a 17 year old boy, slightly angry at the world and wanting to fight it, even though I have endured a string of losses.

Speaking of...

Cucumber beetles have attacked the garden.  Those mother fuckers.  I will kill them, of course.  I just need to find out how, before they do any more damage.  We will discuss strategies at breakfast this morning.  I am prepared to kill, I want to kill.

I will kill.

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Holy Crap!

(miniature feces factory)

I've been watching Rhys more, as any of you who've been reading this blog already know.  I've heard tales of "full" diapers but I thought that they were mostly myth, exaggeration.  Nope.  Not at all an overstatement. 

Shorlty after Rachel left this morning, I had just picked the little boy up, I got a whiff that something was "off." I took him up to his room, where the changing table is, proud to be a father.  When I undid the buttons on his washable diapers I saw something terrible.  No sooner had I seen it did he have two hands in it, smearing it.  Red Alert.  Red ALERT!!!  Fuck, fuck, fuck....  The word "Hepatitis" kept going through my mind.  Help me Pamela Anderson, help me.  I grabbed his little arms and held them in one of my hands, reaching for the wet wipes with the other.  All the while he thinks we're playing and he's pulling his legs up, as he does.  This had the effect of spreading feces all over every available surface that was from the waist down.  

Spreading the stuff also spreads the smell, by the way.  

My focus was locked on not letting any of it make its way towards his face.  Other than his hands, which was an obvious misstep, I was doing pretty well so far.  It all existed from the waist downwards, but was spreading fast.  I got his hands clean.  I used about three wet wipes on each hand, just to be sure.  Getting between each of his little fingers, something I've never done.  I've looked at his fingers, and held his little hands, but I've never traced each of the fingers this way.  I had hoped that this revelation would be more magical, and less fecal.

Then came the hard part.  If you've never tried to keep a child's hands away from his own feces while you are cleaning the stuff up then I suggest you try it.  It should be a televised competition.   One mistake goes a long way.

First, I got the diaper away from his body.  There was still a wealthy accumulation of the stuff in there.  That immediately created another problem, there was lots more still, and now there was no barrier between it and the rest of the world, where all of it seemed to want to be.  I grabbed another cloth diaper from the stack of "dirty" ones, one that looked clean, and cleaned more of him up as best as I could, smearing and wiping the stuff as I went.  After that I got to work with the wet wipes, using about another ten of them, cleaning and re-cleaning, checking, looking, verifying.  

All the while he seemed to be having fun.  I was not.  I rushed to the bathroom to wash my hands and arms.  If you've never seen the shower scenes of the movie "Silkwood" then it's difficult to explain what was really needed in this instance.  I felt like I would never be feces-free again. 

I rushed back.

Then I got out a throwaway diaper and put that on him, even if it was temporary, it was going to help my peace of mind.  This is when my real troubles started.  

Now, I'm not sure how any of you feel about having large quantities of feces in the same room with you but I am against it.  So, I started to put one of his "onesies" on him.  I was perhaps rushing a little bit.  I could tell because he started making disgruntled noises.  This is somewhat normal so I let it go, focusing on a plan of action to permanently remove it from the premises.  Once I had him dressed I put him in his crib, rushed to wash my hands another time before putting a "binky" in his mouth, reminding myself of the dangers of that putrid stuff.  

There were no binkies to be found.  Not in his crib, not near the bed we have in his room, not in the bassinet we have in our bedroom, not on the nightstand, not anywhere.  We have about 100 of them in this house, I promise.  There were none visible.  His noises of dissatisfaction were building in intensity, slowly.  I finally found a brand new one that I ripped open and tried to get him to take.  It was dry and brought him no solace.  Even though I had been told not to moisten it with my own saliva (ph imbalance, cavities, something) I did so anyway and tried to get him to take it again.  His noises turned to a full cry.

I picked him up out of the crib and held him, rocking up and down, hoping that this would help. It eventually did.  I put him back in the crib hoping that he would stay calm, grabbed the little garbage can we keep near his changing table, and rushed off downstairs with it, emptying it in the larger garbage can we keep near the kitchen. One feces filled wet wipe fell to the floor.  I picked it up and started upstairs as his cries reached full blast again.  

I ran straight to the bathroom and washed my hands and arms again, Silkwood style.

Back to the bedroom only to find him rolled over in his crib, crying into the mattress.  I picked him up and held him again.  I felt like there were shit particles everywhere, spreading fast.  The room stunk of it all.  It's not like the adult version of the stuff.  It seems to be made of an ectoplasmic base that seeks to inhabit any space other than the one it is currently in.  I consoled him again.  He's really starting to see me as a comfort giver.  He buries his head in my chest when he's upset, and he falls asleep easily when I'm holding him.  It is a wonderful feeling.  So, I got him to calm down and then I went back to war with the waste.  

I could have thought this next part through a little bit better.  I started to wash the muck off of the cloth diapers in the sink.  There was far too much of it, it was far too congealed and resistant to water, and the drain in the sink was far too insufficient to handle the vast quantity of it all.  I was left with crap up to my elbows and a sink full of the stuff that did not want to drain, chunks of it were accumulated around the drain, taunting me.  Mired to the elbow, the boy started to cry again.  Crap.

I washed my arms again, this time vowing to not deal with the excrement any further until the boy was either asleep or happy.  It took a couple minutes to wash this time.  It's one thing to imagine that you have dung on you somewhere, it's another to have smears of visual verification.  I washed, then I washed again, then I washed again, putting the drying towel in the dirty clothes so that I wouldn't have to worry about that later either.  I picked the boy up and thought that I felt something in his diaper.  I checked.  Thank the doo-doo gods there was nothing there.  

I walked with him for 10 minutes, holding him in my arms, his head fell into my chest tellingly.  I walked with him another few minutes to make sure that he was definitely asleep, then put him in his crib with his dehydrated binky, which he seemed to finally accept as an appropriate object of succor. 

I looked around the room and felt like there was ordure everywhere.  I knew it was mostly in my mind, but it is sticky stuff to shake off.  I got in the shower and washed all places except my face and genitals, still afraid that the stuff was out to get me.  

I got out of the shower.  Fuck.  The towel was gone, of course.  In my cleaning fever I expelled it from the realm of possibilities.  A quick, wet, naked walk to the bedroom where I dried off using a dirty t-shirt.  Counter-productive?  Perhaps, but still better than the alternative.  I grabbed a towel, went back to the bathroom, took another shower, this time covering all potentially desecrated territories.  I vigorously washed my hair, making sure to scratch the scalp, knowing that the shampoo and the hair would work together to clean under the fingernails.  

I got out of the shower and there were still diapers on the floor of the bathroom near the sink, and the sink was still fouled.  I started the whole process over, this time with gloves on.  

Start to finish, approx. 30 minutes.  Victory.  Now it's time to give the boy a full bath.

.  

Oh, no....

(simulated receptacle)

Selavy stayed up all night last night putting ecstasy in his ass.  He wrote about it, sort of, this morning.  Last week he was buying sex toys, this week he's cramming drugs in his anus, drinking whiskey.  You get the picture.  He's begun the late-life slide into final debauchery.  He'll be bankrupt within a year.  He's probably already at a pawn shop.  

I was emailing and calling this morning, praying that he hadn't died.  There was simply far too much evidence linking the drugs from his lone horrific sex party to me.  I had fucked up, I realize this now. Total amateur hour.  I envisioned the investigators finding my emails, pleading for him to let me know that he's still alive.  Who knows what new illicit shame he had been bringing on himself in those last few moments.  I would only find out at trial, when they finally passed around the evidence known as "Exhibit A."  I wouldn't be able to withhold a chuckle, if not an outright laugh, at the image of my buddy involved in some final, disgraceful, battery-driven act.   A tarp spread out evenly on his living room floor.  

Hideous.

Oh well.  It turns out that he's okay. He was up until 4am writing emails, telling people that he loves them.

He claims the drug had no effect on him at all.  I told him that it mostly works at raves and that it has a much more pronounced effect on heterosexuals. 

An email came in from him, finally.  It simply stated that, "... a double-sided dildo is the only true win-win situation that I've ever known."  

I'm not quite sure what he means but I do worry about him.  He is far too old for this sort of thing.  His heart will burst, if not his anus first.  

Okay, another email just arrived, explaining that he never before understood how truly great the music of Burt Bacharach is, and wanting to know how to use a "bullet".... 

Oh my.

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The wind still moves the tree

Today I am a stay-at-home dad, by default.  The nanny called out.  I will see what it's like, sort of. Grandma is here to help.  I wanted a taste of what taking care of the baby is like.  I'll get one. 

For the most part I like taking care of little Rhys.  It can be difficult, of course.  It's not pleasant to see him get upset, to want something that I can't readily provide.  To see him struggle against sleep; a thing that is hilarious in its own way, to me, in retrospect.   

Yesterday we sat out on the grass in the backyard watching the sun descend, waiting for mom to come home.  There were hummingbirds and butterflies to marvel at.  We sat in the grass together, happy, watching the day float by.  He was quite taken at the wind moving through the trees, and I with him.

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Treading water

Treading water took its toll.  It took the whole day yesterday.  Slowly, I started to notice a pain running down my left side.  An old pain that had receded recently, one that has been there for years.  It's a pinched nerve, collapsed vertebrae.  I had an MRI done.  It is bad news.  I suppose the "eggbeater" motion of treading water aggravated it.  I spent the day walking increasingly lightly, favoring the right leg, drinking to kill the feeling.   

"Of all the things I've lost, it is confidence that I miss the most."  

Indeed.

Last night I had a dream.  I was working at Apple, helping a customer.  Things were going along normally but then something went wrong. I suddenly realized that it was my last day.  I told the customer to go fuck themselves, to get out, to get the fuck out.  

I awoke pleased with the feeling, but dismayed that I was dreaming about such a thing.  It was I who had got the fuck out.

"And therein lies the origins of religion, perhaps, the plea to expunge the past and past guilt, to miraculously make the future not reliant upon what has come before."

Indeed.

I felt like I was going to start whining about being old again, so I just went jogging.  It has a way of embedding some feelings and erasing others.  There is the initial shock of pain, then recognition.  If you push through there is more pain, of course, but then an occasional sense of triumph in that pain.  It was only 30 minutes, but long enough to have all of the needed sensations.  My knees will hurt tomorrow but for today I am Mercury, or perhaps Atalanta... or Artemis.

It is impossible not to notice the corollaries between the garden that we've planted and Rhys.  There is the new life sprouting out of nothing; out of what seems to be nothing, I should say.  It is an exciting time, to watch life grow around me, to become.  Out of nothing, something.  It reminds one of the important lessons, how fleeting life is, how fragile.  It has its drawbacks, life, yet it somehow retains enough charm to be affirmed over and over again.  

It is easier after a jog sometimes, easier than before.

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A lost poem, re-written

I could almost see ahead of me
a night of drink, perhaps love

how many like me have come home
cold and dead    from such nights
from such love

I could nearly see ahead of me, stars
bleak horizon and the jagged lost line
of inkblack mountain

from that darkness emerged
dark fountains, flowers found,
the faces of women
seem so beautiful,


sensuous us
though half blossomed,
faded and failed
in that nameless instant, now

just us

you and I in this unpieced place
where unknown
we fall into the eye of the unnamed

after all this, death, half-funny
another daze demised

sculpture not carved of stone
but of prayer, and blame,

of glass
anonymous death, half-funny,
half lame.

that much, at least,
was unanimous.

when nothing lasts,

nothing comes

awfully fast

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