Piercings, et al.

I had a strange, though not entirely unfamiliar, feeling yesterday. I have lost 25 pounds in about two months, but as I was getting dressed I felt as if I had gained back some of the weight. I suddenly felt as if I was slipping backwards. I studied the mirror carefully, in desperate pirouettes. I knew this feeling to be inconsistent with reality, so I found it an odd one. It was mixed with a variety of other feelings, but the sense of it moving through me was familiar enough. For a brief moment I believe I knew what it must feel like to be a fat girl. 

I was reminded of William T. Vollmann and his Book of Dolores. I shuddered at the connection there. 

My immediate reaction was to move past the sensation. But, I stopped myself, and thought about that more, that feeling of wanting to escape. I wondered why there was the immediate impulse to abandon the line of thinking, or the ribbon of feeling, the bow of emotions. 

What if I pursued the sensation to find out more about it. A healthy curiosity. It is, of course, my right, but there were immediate internal pressures, ones not entirely unrelated to the initial feeling of being a fat girl, that seemed to act in a prohibitive fashion. Shame. I wanted to eat chocolate and be alone. 

I was left with the feeling that I wasn't being quite honest with myself, only because I wished to avoid an unpleasant sensation. I wondered where the tipping point in such a feeling might be, how close is it, and can one feel it arriving, and is it invited. I suppose that point must be at a different internal marker for each person, if at all. Perhaps it's true, some people must have no curiosity about such things, or very little. 

Then, there emerged a perversity that uses its own language to announce its wants and needs. I succumbed to this during the drive to pick up the boy, for fun. I suddenly had an intense desire to know what it feels like to be a fat girl. To flaunt it, even.

Yes, fat girl. You read that phrase right. I'm not sure why the feeling arrived with a gender other than my own attached to it, but it did. My feelings have rights, also. Who am I to argue with any of them. If there's one thing that we have learned it's that white men should shut the fuck up and let their unorthodox feelings do more of the talking, if not all of their talking. We've heard just about enough from my previous kind. 

Equality, etc.

Well, I would write more about this but I have bankrupted my time again this morning, and have only begun to explore my less traditional identities. Its what trans-ams do at first, I think, notice that the mirror has shifted a bit.

Perhaps tomorrow I'll feel a little butch, and we'll get back in here and knock a few things around just for fun. I'll start wearing flannel underpants and challenging chicks or small dudes to arm wrestling matches. I'll smoke cigarettes and proudly display my latest body art. 

Silver rings, arriving from the flesh nearly as they enter; inexplicably, but by plan; completing the circle of circles; penetration, implied permanence. 

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Stella

Back to work. Few adventures this weekend, but good ones with the boy and his mom - discovering secret hidden passages at the storage unit space, exploring the back yard more fully, expelling the villains from the area before dinner, pondering the river, reminding mom that she's great, tulips, etc. 

Now, thrust headlong into the work week. 

Suddenly, I feel as if I want tomorrow morning's coffee.

My brother posted a scan of an old color pic from the family photo albums. It caused me to consider my mother gently yesterday. As I age, I become more sensitive and forgiving of the fallible, even myself, every now and again.

The young girl in the background of the image above shares a name with my mother. 

Stella.

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Why I chose childhood

I awoke slowly, lingering in bed, trying to determine if the light emerging through the blinds was bike riding light or a prohibitory light that had brought its message through rain and cloud. I found my phone buried underneath my abdomen, partially stuck to my naked back. I had fallen asleep watching something, old episodes of binge-easy tv. I have returned to enjoying being alone again, I think. It doesn't take much, just a little well placed apathy.

All I need at first is somebody to text - a woman - then I am basically happy. Somebody to talk to. I should learn not to over complicate that. I should just learn to be a simple guy. It all requires practice, and life is cursory. 

The world has changed much. I have been watching Netflix documentaries on the 60s and 70s to prove as much to myself. It is an odd feeling, to witness in retrospect the world that shaped me and yet to see it as foreign and distasteful, lacking in the contemporary charms and horrors. 

I must seem much to bear - excitable beyond the permissible capacity of most, even in texting. During the years that I was in love my youthful intensity became something else, something in need of a woman's touch. A fixer-upper. Now, it seems I am expected to somehow reel it all in and rebrand myself, while the overarching lock-eyed message is just to relax and be myself, but I am a child. I must be misunderstanding the actual message, the mainly unspoken one.

It is all a lot of work: the self, and then the others. Few openly claim they want you to change but none accept you as you are, for very long. They reserve that very special love for themselves, because they alone are deserving of it. That is what a breakup teaches us about love, somebody should have changed. 

If you want to observe how much people don't want to change anyone then just watch them with a child.

And listen.

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Grasping is clumsy

What else is there to do without proficiency. I started experimenting with off-camera flash this rainy afternoon. A dad at home without his son, doing dad things. 

The interests that require time and study. 

Hopefully, some little magic, sometime later for the boy. 

Some thing still in the future that I hope to remember.

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Psychopomp, I

(Neil Leifer)

I conducted an unscientific experiment with my own body. I stopped working out for a week, drank heroic quantities of Dionysus's tears, sacrificed sleep to Hypnos, traveled along the edge of the arriving night as Hermes, shamed myself in the usual ways, of course, then some new ways, finally returning withered to the gym this morning. 

When I stepped on the scale I was happy to note that I had lost some weight, but as soon as I started working out I quickly realized that it was mostly muscle mass. My strength and endurance were gone, after only one week. So, I'll struggle through this week to get back to where I was, likely gaining some weight in the process. 

I have been eating like Hercules.

It was foolish of me, of course, to set a numerical weight loss goal and then dive into working out. Muscle is a bit denser than fat, so it looks nicer on the body, but if the goal is only to lose weight then taking on muscle only makes me happier about the slower progress towards that goal. I suppose I could chop a leg off, that's sure to make the scale jump in the right direction, if I don't break it hopping up onto it. 

Well, I must go tussle with the local gods and titans. My travels are over for this breath in the falling pages of the calendar. 

It is to this life I must now concern myself, not the other, out along the morning desert horizon, dancing with the lambs of Diana.

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But, I'm a good customer!

I despise owning a car, much of the time. It is the by-product of the choices I've made, I know. I lived for many years without one and was not at all unhappy as a result. I put my car in the shop to get new brake pads. I called, they said come pick it up in 45 minutes. My ex-wife gave me a ride to the shop, so I bought her lunch around the corner from the shop. A cute little deli/wine shop: Sonoma's Best. 

Then, they called. 

Ooops, we were working on two VWs at the same time. Yours needs brake pads and rotors. You can pick it up later this afternoon. It'll be $600 instead of $200, as of right now.

Plus lunch, I said.

It's usually best to have the power to stop when so freely given the power to go. I can think of many things that I'd rather spend my money on, which is part of the problem: I always do. I'd like to learn to manage my money better but I know that I only want that capacity so that I could waste it all much more grandly when I do. The idea of saving appeals to me, though only for the purpose of more significant splurging. I'd make an ideal crack-head, even though I harbor some moral opposition to paying for crack. If I changed my feelings on the matter, ever so slightly, then dealers would be fighting for my business. Beating down my door with a better mousetrap, etc.

Speaking of, I used to write about more topical issues on this site, but the presidential race combined with social media has beaten the topics of cancer and capricorn right out of me. 

Now, I sit here working, trying to remind myself of any good financial decisions I may have accidentally made. There haven't been very many, and they are all quite spread out, not entirely unlike my ex-wives. There haven't been many, and they have been spread out.

If I live long enough then perhaps I'll be frivolous enough to squeeze into another one, just before the final bell, before the last of the glass bulbs drop.

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New Mantra: You broke it, you bought it...

I'm back - limping, but back. There is no such thing as "recovery time" at the age of 53. It is all just lifetime injuries and sustained damage. I'd love to just tally it to lack of sleep, but there is the tremendous scent of subtext in that. I just can't conduct myself as if I'm 47 any more. 

I've never wanted to go back to the gym so badly in my life. The best thing to come out of all of this is my as yet unconfirmed belief that I must have lost some weight, though it does seem possible that my caloric intake actually increased over the last week, from alcohol alone. When I say alone, I mean it. 

I wasn't drinking like a fish, I was breathing like one.

At some point I was trying to figure out a way to send everybody in my address book a lone question mark: ?. I believe that I was naughtily trying to dig up some mystery. 

Still, I kept my word, the last drink I had was in Vegas before I left for the airport. Now, I get back on the rocky road of abstinence from alcohol, moderation in diet, and exercise of course. The great reminders of damage done. 

I will write more as the grip of it slowly releases me, as the angels return from Holland.

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Well before hunger, just after dinner

Arrived. Flights were delayed. Rain in Vegas. I was bouncing by the time my plane landed. I have become excitable for adventure, for difference. I skipped dinner, which somehow adds to behavior rather than what might be presumed to function as a subtraction. 

Food matters.

My excitability dimmed slowly, after midnight. I tossed and turned and then awoke in the morning desert light. Well, not desert but Vegas. Henderson, just next to Vegas.

Sleep, even less than desired, has been more than I needed. I think of how different a person I might have been had I only been able to sleep eight hours a night. The prisons and madhouses must be filled with those similarly afflicted, though I suspect there must be many lethargists as well. 

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Stardust and Rave Lasers

I ordered a small lighting stand, an umbrella swivel, a reflective umbrella, a hot shoe trigger, all of it. When I get back from my sojourn in the desert I will start experimenting with off-camera flash. I'll need to defrost my memory of key lights, fill lights, spots, strobes, all of it.  I'll still be using only a flash or two for now, but I'll start looking for other cheap lights as well. I can, at the very least, start to see where all of my future monies will disappear. It's fun. I have a plan to start getting the boy and his buddy to dress up and act out adventures. I hope to make sets and shoot in a different way - fewer, if any, snapshots, but rather hopefully more fantastical images.

I'll need a tripod for my camera, though I'll try handheld for now. We'll see.

Once I re-familiarize myself with two-point lighting I'll brush up on some stage blocking and alternative composition. I mean, alternative to snapshots. It'll be nice to finally put my degree to some use, twenty years after the fact. I've felt new impulses and urges lately.

I don't even know why I bothered with the cable sync, I should have just gone wireless, though a starter set there is $200. I'm still waiting to sell my first print next week, at cost. A signed, numbered, named print was requested by a reader here, so I am feverishly working to produce. Well, the heavy lifting will be done by Photoworks in SF, but you get the idea.  I'm a get-things-done kinda' guy before this weekend. Let's check back in on progress next Wednesday. You might find me mumbling something about stardust and rave lasers. 

You know... lights, lights, action, action.

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Shirts vs. Blouses

It is not yet the last minute, but soon will be. I leave for the desert tomorrow evening. I washed clothes yesterday, haircut today, etc. I made a list. I will put off packing until the car is warming up. There is not much to do. I already know which camera I'll bring - the Fuji Hipster-Shot. It is a clothing optional event, so I'll bring a blouse and flip-flops, just in case I get chilly at night.

Speaking of blouses, I was thinking about Prince this morning on my bike ride, remembering him from the 80s and what it was like then, to have this unexplainable and somehow sexually ambiguous star appear. For all of his pro-sexual advocacy he also seemed to maintain some odd inner resistance to what might be referred to as immorality, though I do not believe he used the word. 

No other single person separated the conservatives and the liberals more completely at the time, the Reagan years. It wasn't until Cirque Du Soleil came along that republicans finally had a place to feel safe while being gay again. But oh man... did they really not like him at the time, the Purple One. Even his faux-name seems sexually threatening. He represented to them what they wish to keep out of the women's bathrooms now. 

  

To have been a fan of Prince at the time, I heard all of it. Little did they know. It should only be called sexual confusion when it happens with another person, otherwise it's just confusion, sort of. One could sense the palpable anger at difference. There seemed to be an insistence that the world would simply be a better place if everybody would just listen to the music of somebody who is sensibly heterosexual, like Bob Seger, but that's not how it all happened.

Bob Seger's name sounds like a pair of old bloodhound's balls. It's as if the font is even sagging when you look at the word. There is something sad and atrophied about him, like pubic hair once it turns white and becomes too sparse to be considered as the forest under-region that it once was.

I was offered something last night that has had me daydreaming about the past, a tour of Central America, to DJ. Now, some of you might remember that in a previous incarnation I was a debauched musical ne'er do well, but I pulled myself up by my bootstraps and moved on from that life. First, I bought my own crack mattress, then I had an entire room sometimes to myself, before long I rented a set of keys, and… well, you know the rest, I ended up with a job. 

Then, last night, a message arrived telling me of a future tour of Central America, driving from nation to nation, ciudad to ciudad, playing music and enjoying life with some old friends. It makes me want to get high. It really does. I don't mean pot either, I mean strong chemicals. Not some little snow flakes that grow on pot flowers, I mean some ball-shrinking pharmaceuticals.

That's right, if a drug does not reduce your cock to the size, texture, and usefulness of a male nipple then wave a loaded gun in your dealer's face and demand justice, atonement, and reparations. If you're a woman then the best way for you to test the strength of a drug is by guessing, and then doubling your current dosage. Do not get so ill though that you can not continue to function as a sex object. That's how real men will know you've done too much and that maybe it's time to take a break, a little nap, curl up like a kitten and wait for the tide of waves behind your eyeballs to ebb. 

Though, in an effort to be fair, this suggestion that dresses like a rule goes for men also.

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If you see something, say something

The other day, when I quoted Woodrow Wilson and his addressing of the inherent problems of any historian with adequately assessing the past, I was not referring to the piece pictured above. This is a work that answers some of its own questions, and accusations, while somehow also retaining an inner mystery. 

In art, most questions are best left unanswered.

Today, I make my final plans to re-enter the desert. It is a weekend festival that presumably celebrates drug addicts with jobs and money. That being said, it will finally be nice to be in a place where whom-uses-which bathroom is not as much of an open concern, mainly because port-o-potties are all same sexy. In fact, they have art tents out there in the desert dedicated to people evacuating themselves on one another. I would call it an "installation," but it serves as more of a performance piece. It's titled Mostly Water for Algernon.

Different people show their support for causes in different ways.

Everyone keeps focusing on where people will be peeing, conveniently ignoring the fact that this issue occupies the #1 and #2 spots in the American mind. People are afraid that their sons and daughters will come in contact with human feces in the privacy of a public bathroom. I guess nobody told them what happens in bathrooms. 

We must protect our son's and daughter's pooh. They are after it. They covet the precious waste of our children for their demonic liberal rituals. 

I am still of the dedicated belief that anybody with an erect penis smaller than 6" should be using the women's bathroom. No exceptions. This will result in all the males entering the Men's bathroom with 6"+ erections, which should solve most of our problems.

I am still searching for my agenda-identity, give me time.

Okay, the world isn't going to fix itself, which I think is the real message that we can take from the piece shown above. The world simply is not going to correct itself any further. Enough is enough! 

Sometimes healing requires a quant ceramic curio in which a dog is shown to be happily sniffing a ginger child's dirty or recently misused anus-hole. 

Confusion, even more than suffering, produces spiritual growth. 

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To opine upon the opinions of others

Open Journal: April entry, 25th day of 2016, The Year of Our Lord. 

I was experimenting, all in-camera, to see how closely I could get a snapshot to look like 35mm b/w film. I walked around the town square yesterday, just before dinner. The unedited picture above works, I think, though not for the reasons that I had quite hoped for, or was "shooting" for. It is that I wasn't holding the camera quite level and intentionally did not "correct" the composition of the shot. The sunlight that is starting to wash out the left side of the image almost looks more like light leakage onto film. Though, perhaps a man should not give away all of his secrets.... After all, it is half of their charm: mystery.

I like it. The picture, I mean.

If photography is half-of-a-truth then I am satisfied with the contribution of my little lies to the other half. 

I've been asking people to shave my back, just as friends, but so far there are no takers. I've promised not to make eye contact while it's happening. This lone stipulation has not been adequate to find the right person for the job. I've also offered sustained eye-to-eye contact through the use of a mirror for the entire procedure. 

If only the boy was a little bit older and could handle a straight edge… I know that he would do it for me, though it does run the risk of traumatizing him. I can see him in some future therapist's chair, describing the horrific details of shaving Dad's back during the summer.

If I could speak to his future therapist I would explain the situation perhaps much better in advance than it can be done after the fact. It would be an awkward conversation, of course, illuminated by the expansive terrain of my back hair, lit only by an open bathroom bulb with me trying to impress upon this youngling that one day they will become a therapist and my son will seek their professional advice, in doing so it will come to light that my son used to shave my back hairs, and that's why they're looking there now. It is vital to the therapeutic effort that the therapist understand the depth of the trauma. 

The patient works their way out of a forest one memory at a time. 

I'm not quite sure how to get this future therapist to understand the importance of all the details, nor if my methods are entirely feasible. Therapists are just critics that have learned to hold their tongues. It's a way of saying, You're not okay and you probably never will be, but try this experiment anyway. 

Nobody likes critics, but even fewer will admit to loving everything just as it is.

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To give a kite lift, you run

By chance, we went to the Marin headlands, then the Discovery museum. There was something wrong with mom's car. In the process of them borrowing mine I was convinced to go along for part of the day. We started to hike a trail along the headlands but mom turned out to be afraid of heights, a thing I remembered just after she did, or just after she announced it. 

So, we turned around.

I posted a reversal of the image above online. I doubt that anybody will notice the impossibility of the arrangement of the bridge to the location of the shot. Nobody outside of SF, anyway. I don't post many father-son portraits. I don't have many. I prefer individual portraits to group portraits, but he's my boy. I love him much. Mom wanted to take pictures today, so why not try to take advantage of that to sneak in a family picture. Why not.

With any luck the critics will give up on me.

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Son of a nymph!

(Cow, #9)

Cycling clears the head, almost too much. There are a number of thoughts enjoyed on any given ride, then a recurring thought to myself, Oh, that would be a good subject to write about… By the time I get home it has vanished of course, along with the key phrase that I thought clever, all gone the way of the revolutions, the circular patterns of life, of love, the pumping along the road ahead. 

I think about sex often enough, though I'm told that is what men do. Some say it is all that they do, oddly by those who seek equality, though there is little evidence that they are trying to catch up in any meaningful way in this regard. Others say that they have already arrived, and have perhaps surpassed men in that way also, as if there is a competition among the most dangerous of the impulses. Baudelaire claimed to have sex because it gave him a chance to participate in evil.

The perpetual pumping motion and physicality of the act seems to invite specifics of reminiscing and projection. If only my daily rides ended in orgasm… or, even as a beginning. I'm getting to the age where I have begun to tell myself that sex does not matter as much as I had previously thought, but then the idea will waft through the curtains of my clothing and my body asserts a very different telling of events. 

I wonder if I will look back at my life and think to myself, All you really did was seek sex. Then, I wonder if that realization will sadden me at all, or if I will accept it, or if I will maybe perform the mystical hand-dance upon myself in honor of that memory. Yes, honor. 

One might think that once you have satisfied the ubiquitous genetic impulse by producing offspring that you can safely become a weathered satyr, just a horny old goat still wandering the pastures with the heart of two lions and the lone rusty eye of a tiger. But no, there are those that expect you to forego all of that once you have produced progeny, in defiance of all natural logic, those wonderful and oft contradictory carnal impulses.

Well, I still have a handful of bike rides before I really need to start thinking about all of this in earnest. There is a sense of landing at middle-age, though not with the landing gear down and at an unfamiliar airport in near total darkness. The feeling of the earth moving beneath the wheels is comforting until the plane comes to a halt, where morning must be waited on.  

What next, jungle, what next.

A friend recently told me that I am obsessed with my own age, though fascination describes it more completely than does the other term. I hope. I am just as repulsed by the aging of others. It is not all about me. I hate it for others, also. She keeps herself young by having sex with young people. I am all for that method, of course, and have told her as much. Perhaps we'll work together in finding me an appropriate portal back towards youth. This magical elixir of juvenescence is best found in close contact with the bodies of others, as an antidote to the inertia of withering. 

Narcissus became fixated with his reflection alone, as opposed to what had been absorbed by the water. Incapable of abandoning that misunderstood and partial apparition, he also lost his will to live. He became a circle, independent of motion, a still echo of self desire, a beautiful Onan also killed off by the gods. As almost anyone who has lingered looking into a mirror might already know, and have yet again forgotten… 

… to relearn, reflections best pass gracefully enough along those store windows in the dark, as the avenues go, lit by the city's unintended largesse, the softnesses of each passing moment in the mirror.  

"… when a memoirist sounds self-aggrandizing or whiny, it's usually not because he's a jerk but because he has failed to meet the technical requirements of the form. In a good essay or memoir, the author typically makes use of self-deprecation, self-doubt, or some sort of self-division that allows him to cast a skeptical eye on his own impulses, tastes, and certainties." - Elaine Blair

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"Don't sing this one to me, Daddy…"

It was "Take Me with U," this morning in the car. 

I was stunned and crushed, though proud. That he was able to detect Prince's singing as far superior to my own gave me some consolation amidst the heartache of being hushed by a four year old. It stung, but what can one do, really? He asked if we could listen to more of Prince's music this weekend. 

Of course we can, buddy, of course we can.

I explained to the boy that Prince had recently passed away, which he immediately converted into the more useful and honest phrase: He died.

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Life is shortening

Well, fuck. I thought it was a hoax. It was not. 

I'm too busy with the concerns of the living to write today, and have not felt much like writing lately, so I've been forcing it. The effects have been quite literal. 

The more I write, the dumber I feel.

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Run, Rabbit!

The inner voice becomes increasingly willing to accept the tiniest of distinctions - learns to rely on them, expects, insists, then lets them all go again as if that was the idea. 

The piñata principle: start out noble and containing great inner riches, festively colored, garbed for the party. By the time you realize you're not getting a piece of cake you've already been strung up in the backyard with fishing line, surrounded by blinded screaming kids with broom sticks, spinning in helpless circles, preparing you for the night when they arrive with the torches and pitchforks. 

Hard colored candies blossoming in the afternoon sunlight as they seem to rise then each trickle towards the ground, brought down by squeals and cheers, dancing amidst the latest shafts of light, falling at the stamping feet of laughing children.

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Garbanzos!

Dinner last night was good. The spiced meatballs were unsurprisingly better than the chick pea salad, which was a little bit dry. Nobody seemed to mind much and we ate in peace. If I were to make it all again I would use more olive oil on the chick peas. I've decided that cooking with others is almost as much fun as cooking by myself. Monday nights are taking on a very different dimension. I used to arrive at my friends' house and proceed to drink a bottle of wine or more while they cooked, I talked, then we eventually ate. Now, we discuss recipes and home improvement. I was relaying a story about having found something I liked at Williams-Sonoma when I realized that my foot had crept out of the closet. I had taken a picture of the almost prepared meal, but it was before I added the wedges of tomato and avocado, so it is not enough to look at and wonder in delight concerning my culinary or presentation skills. A handful of people that I know from the clubbing scene have become chefs along the way and many of them are being helpful with recommendations and recipes. I have tried to keep it simple, but the temptation to use more spices and take on more challenging dishes is in line with so much of the rest of my personality, one that seems nearly incapable of doing anything to what can be considered a reasonable extent. I hung a spice rack recently, then filled it with spices that I thought I might need, not really knowing what those might be. Nature abhors a vacuum.

Mine does.

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A taking off of sorts

Working perverts the sensibilities. A day at the beach becomes a weekend event rather than just something you do when you please, as you feel the impulse to do so, as if. You return to work on Monday and consider the consolation of having had some free time, any at all, and the resources to do as you wish for a day. You can afford almost anything that can be done in a day, or perhaps a weekend. Beyond that, you might as well be homeless; at the beach every day until they force you away with uniformed authority.

An advantage of working, of course, is taking the occasional day off. There is the feeling of being naughty, playing hooky, of running into the ocean.

It is both restful and exhausting, the beach, one of the few places in which you do not feel increasingly puzzled by your surroundings. Nothing there has changed in millennia. There is the circling knowledge that you must return the following day to the world that is now changing faster than you are. It does not invite you to stay for long. In everything it does it reminds you of returning.

The waves appear as individuals, lost in the finality of that sole expression, returned meaninglessly to the water. Little evidence of sand collected or constructed lasts until the morning of the next day. Waves advance the impression of futility simply by vanishing tenderly. They can be chased, to a point, like most things. How absurd and comical it can all become, as if it must. In this, the beach is ideal.

No surprise, that the beach evokes thoughts of pleasant sex and certain death, the arching over of the waves as they break. What else is there - the sound of the surf, the impulses, the breeze and the warmth on your neck. In the end there really is very little, almost nothing at all, that doesn't disappear. The sun and the sky, the inability to fly.

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The one man mutiny

("He's pretty big for a four year old.")

I tried to start weening myself from refined sugars. Instead of making my morning coffee with the crystalline stuff I've started using replacements, like half a stick of butter. It takes forever to melt, and cools the coffee considerably, the dishes are difficult to rinse, but the taste is exquisite. 

Another day ahead of us, perhaps the beach awaits. I was not able to determine if the boy's team won or lost yesterday, then I discovered that winning and losing are concepts that have gone the way of the dodo. I was told that we now celebrate participation.

Sure, I said, but did he participate as a winner or as a loser?

Nobody likes me for very long. Coaches have a special disdain for my skeptical approach to life.

I should have never used the word "replacements" above. I can't think of anything else now. I missed my chance recently to go see them in London with an old friend from the college years.

I've never been sure if Paul Westerberg sings "… and everything is a lie" or "… and liberty is a lie…"

You tell me.

Look me in the eye
Then, tell me I'm satisfied…

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