A Sale of Two Titties

It was the best of times, these were the rest of times. At least Styx was no longer a band. He had that going for him. Everybody did. Everybody except, of course, Styx. They were a band that shuddered and loathed death, we must assume.

Jesus. Nothing ever quite works out for me. I just looked it up online - Styx is still touring, they regrouped in '95 and whosever responsibility it was to prevent such a thing was sleeping. Do they have no mercy at all in their hearts? Think of the children. They were our future. 

I esteemed so much bad music when I was a kid, only ever partially recovering in adulthood. I don't just mean Styx, either, there were a lot of bad bands. Too many to mention. I can still go to a used record store and marvel at all of the bad choices I have made over the years. Yet I'll still walk out the door with a couple hundred dollars worth of new bad choices. I can't seem to help myself, Narcissus forever gazing at the reflection in the passing waters. 

Many of my stupid addictions tend to resemble my other stupid addictions. It's not even as if I have changed very much as I've aged. I mostly just have less energy to make the same frequency and magnitude of bad choices. I create slightly less catastrophe now and it makes me sad. People avoid me more now than they once did. It is my curse. One of them. You can make tremendous mistakes when you're young and most people barely even notice. That's what I did. It is the well from which I now draw my distorted and outsized sense of misguided pride. Few find my stories to be nearly as funny as I find them to be. 

Earlier tonight somebody told me to act my age. Well, in a sense that is what they told me. I said that drinking to excess is painful, that it makes me uglier and dumber. They told me that most people learn that lesson in their early twenties. I didn't want to tell them that I learned it then, also. 

Some truths only flow from the stream of continued exaggeration. 

Caravaggio

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Exhalation

Perhaps writing a love letter is what I should do. I have been writing emails, outlining what I see, what I feel, and understand. They have not had quite the tone of a love letter, though there is love in them. 

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Armenian Gothic

If you make the realization that life is meaningless, that your existence here is only a matter of genetic chance, that all that you are is an insignificant dust mote in the magnitude of the cosmos, then why go on? Was it Sartre that asked if he should have a cup of coffee or commit suicide? Or, was it Camus? I forget, but it's a good question, particularly once you start to live in pain. Life offers some pleasures, which can then become distractions. There is beauty in the world, though I increasingly have less time to enjoy much of it. Everything seems so impossibly far away. Drinking seems to help in the temporary sense, but the overall effect does not at all seem positive, or even pleasurable. We are told to live in the moment, and to prepare to die at some undefined moment in the future. 

Well, few encourage anyone to prepare for it, but everywhere there is a sense of needing to shut up about it, and to endure. If life is short and meaningless then the argument is to enjoy it as much as you can while you're here. 

My hands have started to seize up on me. They are always sore and have lost much strength, particularly certain fingers. I'm not sure if it is arthritis, but it is something. My guitar slipped out of my hands and became cracked on the bottom side when it collided with the corner of the wooden bed frame. So, I bought a new one, a very nice one, though now I can barely play it. Many chords require more strength than my hands can deliver. The result is increased pain. Barre chords are out of the question, or playing them for any length of time is. My left hand will simply give up in a spasm of sharp and sudden pain. Barre chords are what I have mostly relied on all these years without ever really stopping to consider that there might come a day in which I would need to learn to play chords differently. Perhaps it will all be for the best. I may learn to play fewer notes and accomplish a more careful sound than fully strummed chords, which always sound the same. The stiffness, soreness, and weakness is there whenever I play now. 

It hurts to hold a camera for any period of time, also, and my eyes are going. I'm only 52 years old. I had thought that this type of bodily decay would not arrive until I was 60 or maybe 70. 

Those are my complaints for the day. Sometimes pain just goes away. 

Fuck. I did a Google search on my work computer to verify the question. It was Camus. Suicide hotline numbers came up and a lot of resources ready to help prevent people from committing the act. I'll probably get a call from HR before the day is out. 

No, I called in sick today instead of having to deal with anything else. I am not feeling well and have not for many years now. I feel sickened. 

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Recipes for the Pastor

Cells aligned in youth to create more youth - perched to spring, launch, collide into the gametes of strangers, or what may one day become a stranger. 

Bursting with glandular joy at the prospect. We travel here and there preparing to prepare. Making ourselves more complete to complete the task. To give life a crucial buoyancy, its sense of rising. Having balanced itself enough to surface well upon or approaching a natural death. 

The child, of course, becomes something else. By and by there is growth of its own accord. As if, and so much of it. There is something selfish about living, though worse accusations can be leveled about much less.

The well-rounded people I know regard loneliness as an occasional luxury to explain or describe their occasional sadness. If they feel the unexpected need to bother. The least are full of the most that can possibly be endured. 

 

Broken and empty and increasingly meaningless. My life is not what I might have chosen. It is not what I choose now. It is not what I had seen those years ago. Yet, I recline in a sometimes quiet place to read or play the guitar or listen to an album. In the end little is satisfying. What used to fascinate me now appear as stars 

I have been reading too much, trading recipes for too long. I.

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Brandy, the Lady Whiskey

Strange life, this. How does anybody stand it without some fond sense for the depravity of stupidity.  

I intended to write another post tonight, but wrote the two sentences above and then retired to bed to read. Now, it is later and neither much reading nor much writing will be getting done. People must be crazy to write. It makes no sense to confess thoughts and feelings in this way, yet there is an unuttered loneliness without it. 

There was a passage from Submission by Houellebecq that briefly outlined why writing matters and just how absurd it is that there are institutions that teach it. It is more difficult than it should be to write after reading a good author. Perhaps he is great. I am trying now to find what I do not like. Nothing breaks my heart as much as nothing mattering. 

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To have spoken freely

There are basics that some seem incapable of communicating, agreeing on; structure must be imposed, usually from without the understanding than from within it. It makes perfect sense, yet it's not the love that was wanted. We are primates howling fits of gloom and joy towards and past one another.  

No, wait. I am reading Philip Roth's My Life as a Man. It is in part about marriage, sex, and wounded prides. A trinity of trifles and grievances. There are other themes, but those jump out. 

Well, I started writing that two weeks ago or more and that was as far as I got.

I'm reading Houellebecq's The Map and the Territory now. My life is just a series of laughs and giggles.

Perhaps CS chose a better way of conducting this: behind a mask, at night, with all of Gotham and Wayne Industries to hide behind, from which to launch attacks of uncertain motivation.  It is safer to maintain tenable deniability. 

Denial is the surest evidence of crime. What could be more indicative of guilt? There is witch-catching weather in the winds. Everywhere. My thoughts have nothing to do with themselves. 

I felt young then my memory started to fade. I'm not the person I was seven seasons ago, I insist and repeat. Something cracked, split the billion year old carbon. 

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El Jaleo

Sargent

It makes no sense. I keep fucking things in my life up.  Resembling the suicide impulse - it feels similar - though displaced outwards towards others. Too much personal chaos, too much fumbling. Little fouls that refuse to go undetected. I should disappear. I would, but there is nowhere left for that now. The world has become an infinitely visible place. No end to being detected. A life composed of the sound of sirens. The seasickness of disorder. 

Somewhat fanatically seems the only reasonable way left to be, to live. This sits on the young like an enticing shirt, on the old like a lost helmet, on the wall as a guitar unplayed. 

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Run, run, run, run

I brought a gift over to my friend's house last night, a token of my appreciation for all that he has done for me, and sat on his back porch and had a beer with him. We talked of a number of things, mostly work-related, but also of the shifting interests of our own lives. He studied music extensively and has a doctoral degree in the subject. He relayed that he now questions the meaning and purpose of his previous involvement. He has begun to ask himself why he chose "that dream" and what that means to him now in a changing, later life. 

Several observations occurred to me on the drive home. Some where I felt lucky to feel the way that I do, others not as much. The ways and methods in which we give our lives meaning are mostly petty and far less significant that the meanings we ascribe to them. Yet if we never realize this then we are - at times, and only some among us - able to accomplish wonderful and nearly super-human things. People create art, help others, work towards improving their world, or even their own situations, quite admirably when not restrained by doubts. I recede and whine and wonder why. 

Some others go on killing sprees, presumably to assert an implacable statement about life and death in the hearts and minds of themselves and others. It strikes me as an interesting fact that cops never execute a spree killer at the moment of apprehending him, even "by accident." If we are to believe all that we are told of their nature - cops - then one would think that every now and then one might, quite literally, take "justice into their own hands." I wonder what the public opinion would be of the lone officer that might decide to do so. I imagine that their action would be regarded along almost strict political lines, as most all else. The "good guy with a gun" crowd, I imagine, would be elated and would decry that officer's arrest and likely conviction. Who, I wonder, would denounce the act.

The hyphenated phrase "extra-judicial" has always tickled me for reasons that I can't quite explain. Or, can not explain very well. It reminds me of an old phrase that I used to say all the time to people about drugs: "If a little bit of fertilizer is a good thing for your lawn, then a lot must be great."  

Sometimes I wish that I would have listened to myself more along the way. Other times, I wish that others would not have done so. 

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Aura

Well, they did it. That's my update for the day - my friends made a baby. A little girl. Not much more to tell there. I have encouraged my friend, the father, to stop practicing Satanism, but no advice beyond that. 

There are some experiences in life where people feel free to comment, for reasons that are difficult to determine. Having children is one of them. You don't have to agree with the prevailing opinion that it is a happy moment for those involved, but to undermine the life choices of others invites a commensurate response. 

If anybody is interested in my opinions of those who choose to never have children then just speak up. It's easy, all you need is doubt. I have plenty to say about the practice of reticence and negation. I relish the opportunity, etc.

All that said, I am happy for my friends. 

Life is great. It is death that I oppose. 

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Makin' Babies

Oona Dahl

Two friends are expecting their first baby any day now. I have sworn not to discuss details, so I won't, but they're having a baby girl soon. It is nearly impossible not to share a bit in their excitement and nervousness. Say what you will about the disappointments of life, of which there are many, creating a life has not been a disappointment for me. 

Some readers here hate honest admissions that they can not make, or those that they have not yet made. Statistics are wisdom, statistically speaking. Yet there is no such statistical category as personal wisdom. There is only the solace of the anti-crowd; amusing counterpoints to the stated mores and claims of the fierce individual. 

Uniqueness dissolves somewhat in the creating of life. It is everywhere ubiquitous, yet wholly unique. 

Ignore the voices that barely know the half of the half of it. Meaning does not derive from meaninglessness, conjecture, nor critique. 

Being counter does not mean what the word necessarily suggests. One must also add to contribute, to count. 

They both happen to be close friends of mine, these parents of tomorrow. 

The father is a partner in a musical project that includes examples of our proudest collective moments in dance music. 

Here is the slightly clubbier version, and here is the after-party, housier version, and here is the remake/remodel version. You can skip the first and last approximately 1:30 of all of those videos, as that is the portion where DJs are mixing into and out of the track. 

It is drug music, so act accordingly. 

Oona, Baby, and Three

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Another useless Monday

The boy returned to school this morning, no afternoon after-care, but a full four hour day of school, two days a week to start. Mom and Dad are hoping that we return to five days a week soon, with after-care until 4-5pm every day. It may come as a nasty shock or pleasant surprise to have a little bit of extra headspace and quiet in the house. Who knows. If mom returns to work in the city, even one or two days a week, it might save the relationship between us. Dad is over all of it and desperately wants some space and time and peace for himself. It is difficult to care about others when there is so much noise coming from every direction. Every nerve feels brittle, vibrating with an increasingly steeply pitched set of anxieties. 

Another useless Monday. 

 

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Almost anything

I taught myself to play I Can't Go For That (No Can Do) on the acoustic guitar today. Yes, Hall & Oates. I know, but it is fun. What can I do? I am defenseless against pop music. 

Easy, ready, willing overtime

Where does it stop?

Where do you dare me 

to draw the line?...

Yeah, I'll do anything 

that you want me to do.

Yeah, I'll do almost anything 

that you want me to, yeah...

Then there are some other lyrics. The chords don't change. Just slight dynamic emphasis as the chorus repeats. 

They're not that different from Steely Dan or Cat Stevens - Hall & Oates. It's an era of songwriting in which, after the melodies have been committed to memory, the emphatic subtleties are the only things worth noticing, which becomes tiring after those have been exhausted, also.

I can't go for being twice as nice

I can't go for just repeating the same old lines...

 

Imagine disappearing

How much futility is one person expected to endure, I wonder. Everywhere there is much and in many directions. Life can be quite boring when you put your mind to it. I am reading a book now, I am almost ashamed to admit. It is wrong think, or posits itself as such against the current social backdrop. Well, I should finish reading it before I write about it. I might accidentally advocate for it before it has had its chance to adequately disappoint or lose me. I'm trying to give everybody a fair listen, you see. I have a renewed sense of commitment to being fair minded, or trying. This is a great practice if you're not drinking, impossible otherwise. 

I love getting drunk and espousing my opinions. Truly. Few things bring me as much satisfaction. I've noticed it often in others, too. 

At a friend's suggestion I watched a Netflix series on Formula One racing. Every now and then I like to surprise the algorithms that are watching me sleep. I devoured all three seasons, so far. My son started asking me why I was so suddenly into car racing, and what did it mean for our future. I told him that everybody should be briefly fascinated with whatever is possible.

I don't have an explanation for anything any more. The friend also relayed the final months and weeks and days of our mutual friend, how his body was found. There should be services that will help you administrate your own departure from the world. Imagine disappearing. The fantasy of vanishing. 

 

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Always traveling

I took a few pictures of the same familial subjects. Don't worry, they will run out soon. There were only a small handful. We were outside, at the boy's baseball practice, so I briefly lifted the personal moratorium on photography. I took none that I like, only a couple that are passable here, where the rules of artistry have been lifted, an island of aesthetic limbo. 

This is the section of my life known as "personal interest stories."

I sit here, finished with work for the day and wanting to go get a beer, but not wanting to be or get any fatter. It is the perpetual conundrum. CS addressed it the other day. Why must so many of the things I love be bad for me? It's a mystery. I'm just relieved that I like vegetables as much as I do. Hopefully those will always make me happy, when they are free of salmonella, listeria, and E. coli.  I like soup, too.

Oh, what a world.

Still I think I'm doing fine.

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This Be The Verse

Things move up and things move back. Everything starts to fall towards a semblance of a familiar place again. The baseball season is under way - AA Little League, which I found comical.  Dads have stern talking-tos with their kids learning to play baseball, upset that they didn't do well. Demands to toughen up. You can see the anxiety in the kids' bodies, the fear of not performing well as they go to bat. You wish that you could help them, to tell them anything that would change the feeling, though not entirely sure if the child on the mound would send you back to the dugout, either. It's a tough thing to watch. Then you see the parents, usually the fathers, and you know at least a part of where it all comes from. 

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

I anxiously await to hear from my CPA. To see if there is any magic that he can pull that will prevent me from giving all of my money away to the government. The more he looks through my records the more he asks me why I don't have a financial advisor. I have mismanaged my money for no reason, and now much of it will need to be given to the government. They are very against the things that I have done, which was just put as much as I could in savings. He has hinted that there might be some good news, but then he went silent for several days. 

Ah well, I was only going to buy a new car or a used house. My life lacks direction from too much waiting. 

Raquel just now asked from the other room, would I like to go eat oysters? 

... my heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

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Rabbit is

My life is falling apart again, or so it feels. Everything is a race to something that is rarely ever done on time. Every day a struggle to find some peace and space of my own. I would take a week long vacation every other week, if it were possible. Though even the vacations take a week from which to recover. There must come a time in the lives of many as they age and age in which death becomes the only thing new or interesting left to do. 

Neither greedy nor satisfied. Here I am, there I run. There are books that I should rush to re-read. 

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The Lords of Death Are Always Bilingual

The title of tonight's post was a personalized license plate idea, but of course the state of California has so many character limitations. 

I tried to negotiate and get a plate composed of Diabl*w but civil servants are hardly yet trained to recognize the unseen metaphorical value in wildcard vowels. No witness could ever mistake the getaway car, I explained. 

They have no stamps to represent the asterisk where the customizations are labored and honored. It is in the state prisons, you must understand, they possess no tilde, either. 

The manager insisted I substitute a - hand, heart, star or + -  I begged them, please ... use the + twice, 45 degrees at a time, with your most skilled prisoner overseeing the double heat-molding. No liberal would ever mind. We are friends. It is fine.

Yet, and always, there is bureaucracy to curb the most misunderstood and helpful ideas; freedom compress the rest; slime precedes shame. 

What have we done - eats coast, wets coats - freedom compress the rest; slime precedes shame. 

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Being smart is not good enough, so far. Not only is it not that, it's impediments, hindrances to the wagons, targets to lost arrows, fire near matches, in returning inwards, online obituaries, having no paper. 

Such the blessed curse - anti-venom that begs for cures. 

For this we love sores.

Horror screams to those who can't speak but can scream and scream. 

Terror, silent, noisy, 

crowded with void

Credit willingly annoyed. 

Couples charges denied

it seems

I am the owner of this comic book shop. Fighting an animated partner. Bought and taught with arguments and insulting offers, disagreements in an unlit parking lot. Drive away with boxfuls of victorious colorful wounds. Many years beyond meeting, the strip mall is gone. Time is further and further away than me. 

I am not a curiosity. I am like most everybody's curiosities, fast and molasses. 

That is that and was just always there. Now it's here, now it's shown. 

Shame is Time's son. 

Easter's struggles are thus gospel.

Super: 

More loco than a powering motive. More ing than ive. 

I've much more verb than now. 

Tranquilo, at this quiet moment:

I am only noun.

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The right person's ear

I was trying to get a new job, but not trying very hard at it. Or rather, I recognize that if I took life more seriously I would have done more to prepare for the interview process. I didn't, and I accept the results. I didn't get the job. The hiring manager was a friend. I felt bad for him, having to deliver the news. 

I'm not at all unhappy in my current job. It affords me the Swiss, German, and Japanese watches that I like. 

That's right, I like Japanese watches, also - Seiko, Casio, Vaer. There are many. Everything the Germans can do the Japanese can do less expensively. Or cheaply, if you possess that sort of anti-Asian sentiment that is so popular right now. 

We are living in a material world, and I am a material man.

Some girls romance

Some girls slow dance

That's alright with me

If they can't raise my interest then I

Have to let them be

Some girls try and some girls lie but

I don't let them play (no way)

Only girls who save their pennies 

Make my rainy day

We are living within a material plan, and I am the material man.

The third thing I notice in the picture above is the caution cone hiding in the vines, separating the figures. It's hiding because it has yet to move to the front and center where it belongs. Give it time. It can be used as a bullhorn, too, and it likely will one day. I know how bullhorns work. If you whisper an innuendo into one end, it will emerge as a fully formed truth from the other. The inverse works also, as long as the small side is held up to the right person's ear. Otherwise, the lies are all lost. 

 

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The Habit of Looking

Ah, yes. We're all sick, the whole house. Not Covid, thankfully. Seasonal allergies, but unpleasant nonetheless. I wonder how much longer I can write here without taking any new pictures. I am reading a book that suggests that I should take all of my cameras out of their boxes and bags if I wish to form a habit around regular shooting. It must be true, as I packed them all away the last "fire season" we had here in Sonoma and they have not been unpacked since. No pictures have resulted from the cameras being stored away. That's just the science of it. Those are my conclusions. 

I have read that more than half of the brain's cortex is occupied with processing visual information. This is one reason why people commonly close their eyes when they meditate. It offers a "freeing" sensation from visual activity in the present tense. Then, there are just the gentle breezy reminders for the mind to shut the fuck up and leave me alone, and then voila! 

Nirvana.

 

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The Day Elon Musk Tried To Kill Me

Oh yeah, I got hit by a car. Enough time has passed now that I think I can talk about it. It happened in August, of the year before Covid. I wrote about it here, but CS very rightly encouraged me not to write any more than I did. I think I even took one post down, as I admitted some fault. When you watch the video above take note that the driver sped up to make the changing lights and at the last few seconds crossed over into the oncoming lane of traffic. Then there is, of course, the collision. I walked out of the trauma center about three hours later. 

The hospital bill: just north of $50k. The only universal health care that I support is that some other entity covers the bill, comprehensively. I have this video because it was a Tesla, and the fool driving it submitted it to the police as "evidence." And sure it was. It showed that I was not entirely to blame. Teslas are very quiet, and low profile, and sneak up on unsuspecting cyclists as they are innocently trying to enjoy thiner day. The next time Elon tries to kill me, he had better use SpaceX. 

I knew I felt bad last night, unrelated to the video above. I was becoming ill. A sinus cold, I hope. All day I have suffered in different positions. My body sore, my mind besieged with minor miseries. It is a lucky thing that the sickness did not strike until Wednesday night. I had a challenging Mon-Wed, but it is now over. Tomorrow I die. You'll hear from me again on Sunday. That is the modern power of NyQuil, my cherry flavored savior. 

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