Slow, Futile Constructions

Due to the temperature outside, sometimes water will attempt great feats of collaboration, building upside down ladders to the ground, perhaps tired of merely throwing itself violently, hoping for an easier, softer and more pleasant route.
I sat and watched the icicles form for a little while. Beadlets of water, attempting to cling and freeze to the end would stretch, screaming, groping, then shuddering would fall, and break into little pieces of water on the concrete below. Then the next would try. Then the next, and on, bravely sacrificing themselves to build this city, or perhaps merely victims of a determined future who were hopeful that they would be one of the lucky ones, the ones who sit comfortably back, scaffolding and roadway for the great many who they watch plunge to their screaming, horrible deaths.

I must say, I am not entirely convinced that we are not all mere beads of water, running down the most logical path, success being merely a matter of luck and circumstance. I like to think that we are not, but I cannot say for sure.
I, for one, don't see anything wrong with this. Droplets of water forming into icicles is a perfectly beautiful thing.

My house

The curtains were tired, hanged til they could hang no more. The carpets were all ashamed and ruined from being walked on, defaced and stained, even urinated on a few times over the last several years. The windows shuddered and banged when the wind blew, hoping it would break and kill them, knowing it would not be long. The pipes in the floors and walls groaned, sadly, so old and tired. 

Occasionally a doorknob would fall off a door, as if the door had leprosy, and as I grasped it's hand in greeting I would suddenly find myself holding the detached hand of a door, who was too terrified and shocked to start screaming yet. I would frequently rush to try and get the knob back on as quickly as possible, feeling quite bad for the door, who could only stare silently, tears streaming down it's face. 

If my toaster were brave, and tried to  run away with the vacuum cleaner, our electric blanket, any lamp we may own... they would not make it far. It would be like a group of geriatric paraplegics trying to escape their hospital. They would surely die.

Because entropy is in full swing, in this place. Sit a moment, and appliances will die around you, gutters will crash to the ground outside, the pipes will burst beneath your feet. Like facing an extremely slow murderer, a person must continue to move out of the way, sighing in annoyance, that they might survive another moment.

A picture of a flower

Because

I am a mountain, packed neatly into this tiny mole-hole, and sometimes, a tiny piece of music will shake me at my core, threatening imminent release, an inevitable disaster. Sometimes when I am singing along obnoxiously, alone, in my car, to a song because it feels good, I will lose my breath, and not be able to catch it back. Secretly, I am not a rock. My wife already knows this. I try to hide it from her, but with a mere smirk and a sentence, she can bring these walls down and destroy me. I am no match for that.


I am soft inside like the back of a baby's head. Don't tell.

And that's some of the rest of the story....

When I was young, I used to imagine that I would one day be nobody, and that I would fail at things that I eventually would hope to achieve.  At the time, I had no hopes of achievement, as this would certainly be merely feeding the flames of the inevitable bitterness. I only hoped one day that I would be maimed severely, or blinded or something- nothing that would make me too unattractive, but might heighten my other senses or force me to overcome it by gaining amazing skill or strength in a specific area. I had never watched the Special Olympics. I thought that they would be glamorous, because the guy in the wheelchair that I knew, Victor, was so nice, and had such huge arms. 

When I was young, I used to think that grownups were entirely fallible, and frequently made mistakes.

When I was young, I would dream at night that somebody, always a grownup, would be driving a car in which I was a passenger, and they would always drive me off a cliff, because they were too busy  reaching down for lipstick or something. Once I dreamed that I saved myself from Native Americans on a beach, who had tied me  to a chair, then, feeling quite proud of my cleverness, got into my mom's car, and we promptly went over a cliff. Sometimes in mid-air, as we were plummeting to our certain doom, I would scream to my fellow passengers, reassuringly "Don't worry. It's only a dream."

Same fLY Same LEaF

Fly on a LEaF

When I die

When I die I want the corpse that I had inhabited to be mulched. Put it in a mulcher and grind it up. Collect the pulpy mess in zip-loc bags and give them to my family and/or friends. I ask then that they all go out and plant a garden with my pulp. In the garden they must plant avocado trees and cayenne peppers. Someday they must all gather together and eat a spicy guacamole from my garden. It should be fresh, delicious, and painful. There will not be a dry eye after eating my spicy guacamole. Feed it to my friends, and feed it to those who hated me. everybody will get a chance to suffer the sweet, delicious, and painful experience that is honoring my death.

Update

A few new items up including a song, slapped together, emotion barf called "Something"



Also some pictures. One of them is here. This picture was taken from my front steps. My neighborhood does not actually look this nice. When I was showing this to a friend, I explained to him that one thing I loved about photography is the hunt for something beautiful. One must frame what is already there in such a way that the image is not merely a reflection of the blurry mess we live in. Most often it is distinct, whether distinct in it's beauty or distinct in it's hideousness, or distinct in it's contrast of the two. When I was explaining this brand new philosophy to him, in the way that I explain things when I've just stumbled upon a new way of framing an idea only seconds ago, we were walking through a parking lot, and I said "Somewhere in this parking lot there is a beautiful photograph. I have only to crop out what is not in the photograph to find it." I  am reminded of Michaelangelo and his stone-work being only a removal of what is not the sculpture inside. To the right of this photograph is one of the most hideous houses I have ever been forced to look at. This picture is given the opportunity to say something, not drowned out by it's hideousness.

And this picture makes me happy. It is rain crawling down my car window after a day of class. The world and it's colors are being washed away, and I have a sense of closeness. It is a similar sensation to the rush of adrenaline I used to get when we would build a fort, dig a ditch and put plywood over the top, arrange pillows and blankets in the living room and make a maze, hack away blackberry bushes and create a series of tunnels inside that led to little rooms. This buzzing sensation, it comes back when it rains. It comes back when the clouds cover the sky low down, and it is just us in this tiny space. This is the type of space that things would always happen in, that secrets would be told in. What is it about this space, and why am I programmed to respond so childishly?

My Music Stick

I have invented a game

Games are a wonderful bonding experience. They encourage people to let go of their reservations, their self-control, their social protocol, and often encourage them to act out on their emotions. I have invented a new game.

In my game, one team is in charge of the balloon, which behaves like one of those 'day-after-the-party' balloons. It doesn't exactly float, but it doesn't fall fast. When hit up, it will hover. It is very easy to keep it up, if that is your goal. Keeping it up is the goal of the first team. They can hold it, hit it in the air, and pass it around the room.

The other team carries some sort of slashing or stabbing instrument. It could be a dagger or a knife. A cheap alternative is box cutters, exacto-knives, or straight razors.

Gameplay is simple. One team protects the balloon, and the other team tries to pop it.

After a few minutes, the balloon should be pretty slippery with sweat and blood. This is when it gets interesting/ comical. Gameplay should be stopped if anybody hits a vein or artery. Get it wrapped up, take a few minutes, cauterize if necessary, and get back into it. Watch your co-workers turn into primates. Feel the heat of one another's blood on your skin and bond like only brothers in battle were previously given the opportunity to. Office managers, watch from the sidelines and analyze how certain characters target one another. This is a quick and cheap method of finding out how your team is working together, who should be promoted, who should be transfered, etc. Your only other method is to ask people to tell you honestly how the office vibes are going, and they would have to be an idiot to tell the truth.

Self Portrait

Bored to Tears

I was granted an audience to tour the grounds, the gardens, the streets and the facilities of what turns out to be our universal afterlife, where we are all going to end up before this earth is slated for destruction due to age, to self-elimination of humankind, or due to the action generally slowing down. (Word from the top is: if humans find a way to survive the deadly chaotic cluster-fuck that is outer-space, and are not eliminated by climate change, he's going to pull another full out divine intervention and just flush the whole thing out. I had a talk with the big guy while I was up there, and he seemed a bit perturbed by the U.S. Space Program. He kept saying "How the heck am I going to kill people in outer space? No floods... nothing! Not even air!" I got a chance to hear him talk about the disproportionate amount of money the U.S. spends on it's space program, in comparison to the quality of life it's inhabitants are afforded. He just kept repeating, "Irresponsible, God-dammit! Poor people everywhere and you're building billion dollar toys!"

I think he was just frustrated about how he was going to kill them if they space-colonized, though. I genuinely felt bad for the guy. He had a plan, and for probably the 20th time, it wasn't working out the way he had expected.

Heaven (or New-Earth, as they called it there), was a decent place. People generally kept to their own, much like Earth but more accentuated by the fact that there were fewer people, less places for them to go, and within a neighborhood you would have Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and all other religions mashed together, the majority of which were still living with a sense of bitter shock that their counterparts were allowed in in the first place. I never checked up on the rules for acceptance into Heaven. There were definitely people missing, but some of the people that were there were completely unexpected- like Janis Joplin. I was perfectly thrilled to see here, but for the life of me could not locate a bit of ink or a scrap of paper, rendering me unable to get an autograph. I'm not usually an autograph guy, but for fucks sake... Janis Joplin.

The weather was decent. We had a few light showers, and for several hours my robe would be damp and uncomfortable. Honestly I would rather spend a week in Monterey, but it wasn't terrible, and at least it was interesting.

 I would say it was a mildly enlightening visit. There are a few details that I have been asked not to divulge (in the way that God asks sometimes- the way that means 'if you tell anybody I will seriously fuck you up'). I do, however, have one item to pass on about the goings on in the afterlife. This is the issue of digital displays.

Digital displays are not visible from a separate lifetime. On Earth, people are constantly being spied on by bored and curious onlookers from Heaven. These voyeuristic people watchers often pass their infinite time by watching their loved ones, their hated ones, or people that they don't even know. They watch them eat, they watch them fight, they watch them have sex. They watch them play music, they watch them break the law, they watch them do their jobs, they watch them perform in plays, they watch them sing in the shower. But digital displays, due to some scientific disconnect having to do with the faculties of Earth-watching that they somehow have, and the way that digital information is displayed on a screen, cannot be seen at all. They appear to Heaven-dwellers as glowing yellowish panels. Some of them have attempted to get around this by watching TV shows get filmed, or movies get shot, or reading what the critics say when they find somebody with a newspaper open to the Entertainment page, but, needless to say, this is hardly a substitute for an episode of 30 Rock.

On Earth, the internet revolution has massively driven people out of their lives and into the nethersphere of digital mind-fuck. 50 years ago, TV watching was perhaps a thing, but it accounted for only a fraction of life lived. Currently, a person can work, socialize, date, and play on the idiot-box, and what they do outside of that life is only the drab and monotonous, the uncreative aspects of sustenance and sleep. With the advent of mind-reading technology, quite soon we may be able to take the chemical, the fleshy, and the analog out of even those specks of verbal communication we are forced to engage in. When I am shoved aside in the subway by some jerk-wad who's not paying attention, I will hold up my iphone 55G, and through it I will relay a thought. On Jerk-wad's Iphone 55G, a message will be transmitted directly to his brain, indicating my precise location, and he will hear my voice in his head "WTF MF-er?" And what did my mom see when she was watching me lovingly from on high, trying to watch over her little boy, all grown up and on his way to work in the government-owned robot-doctor factory for the Motherland' socialized death-care industry in the Divided Kenyan Republic of Obama (or Kenya 2, as we call it then)? She will see a slightly perturbed look into a glowing yellow panel, and the guy next to me look into his own panel, and then a few minutes of heavy breathing as we both stare into our panels, perhaps exchanging blows in virtual reality, perhaps just yelling at each-other, or maybe even having gay sex, all digitally, and all invisibly.

It is so sad to think about them up there. They would love it if we would pick up a picture book once in a while. They would really love it if we would go engage in an activity. It could be cooking. When I visited Heaven, the people up there were already a bit bored. It was already a bit crowded, and any attractions had enormous lines and short turns. The cafeterias at least had conversation about Earth, because then there were still some things going on. Plays still happen, sports are still played, people still communicate verbally, people still have sex because our not quite yet communist government has not made it illegal yet. We are still something to watch, something to talk about up there. But will we be for long? And when this generation dies, will Heaven really be anything desirable at all? Or would it just be wiser to find the secret to an opt-out?

playing with darkness in the camera

 

 
 
 
 

22 September, 7:21 PM

The date is 22 September, 2009. I am tired, and tired seems like such a normal thing to label what I am. The last two days were only barely fueled, just barely sleep-fed enough to make it through until late at night, until I lay down and fell asleep in seconds. I have pain in my lower back- a pain that makes sitting exhausting and standing a short relief, then exhausting; and sitting again a very short relief, then quite exhausting. Sometimes I lift one leg up and shake it, rattling the little socket connector that keeps my leg on, rattling it against it's connector socket. We are like playmobiles, we seem so sturdy until we are irreparable. We seem so happy until you see us with our hair off. We seem so heroic, until the cat walks in and chews our faces off, or until the very young ones crawl in, pull our legs off, and chew our faces off.

I am composing this first installment with this pain in my back. I have mentioned it to you before. I mention it a lot, to everybody I speak with- this is not that many people, I know, but my rate of mentioning back pain is quite high. It is probably close to 100 percent. I do not mention it to people in public bathrooms who say things like "shoelace is untied", or "excuse me", or "Please please stop talking. I am pooping, and I do not wish to speak." I almost do. I almost mention back pain to these people too. I know that this would not be ok, that these people are inflicted with their own inflictions. They do not need to hear about mine. I want to show them all what true pain is, what true suffering. They think they know, I am sure. We all eventually lose somebody we love. But if they felt, for just one small moment, this lower back pain, that flares up when I pronounce consonants, I am sure that they would find themselves face to face with me. I would stand and stare stoically into their tear welling eyes, and when they whispered, softly to me, as tears ran down into the corners of their mouths "I am so sorry", I would smile, not unlike Jesus himself, and I would say "No my child. It is I who am sorry. That you have endured but a moment of this. It has taught me the strength to bear it's very lesson, and you are just a visitor, unaccustomed to this glaring reality. You must go now."

When I am spent, when this back of mine finally gives way and I simply break in half, and fold, skin stretching, to die by a heavy hit to the head, to die when somebody picked the earth up, and unexpectedly moved everything striking me where my feet were firmly planted, but the rest of my body was pointing downward, bent backward at the hips, finally pulling off that bridge that I used to agonizingly contort myself into. I remember in gymnastics when I was young. I wanted to keep up, so I did bridges. Palms firmly planted, feet firmly planted, and pushing my belly to the sky, vying for the approval of my wonderful gymnastics instructor, Jeannie, I was not just planting palms and feet. I was planting the seeds of my own eventual death. Oh cruel irony, why do you toy so with these lives of men and boys?

I hope that when I fold in half like a massive game of Jenga, when that last all to risky move of pulling a critical vertebrae out from under this tower of manhood ends this story abruptly, I hope that I am hugely drunk on Campos Reales red wine. I hope that I am drunk to that point that when falling, there is no indication of falling. There is no sense of up, and the ground simply rises, slowly and very slyly, up behind me, and I have no clue that it is there. I never find out until it is all over. Perhaps it is behind me right now.

That bald feeling

 

 

(all images are unshopped)

Hey, you! Moth!

 

Back Pain

Back pain is whole body pain. Back pain makes me look like I'm having a bowel movement in the middle of sentences. Back pain makes me stand up in class, in the front row, and lean from side to side, switch my balance back and forth and back again, lean back, clutching just barely not my ass, massage myself in front of people I barely know, lift my shirt and reach down the back of my pants to see if it has just been a fucking knot in my muscle these last few weeks. Back pain first made me sad, then made me angry, and now has me tired. The seat in my car is tired of being re-adjusted. My wife is tired of listening to me moan when I move. My 2 year old son just wants to be loved, why, daddy why have you forsaken me? Why are you laying there on the floor like that? Why don't you pick me up? Let's go to the park, daddy...
Fine. If I can't go to the park, I'm just going to climb on you.

Self Portrait

Fear

I just woke up sitting at the computer desk. I looked at the time, which read 7:39. I didn't know if it was morning or evening. I didn't know if I was late for work or had just fallen asleep while sitting at the desk for a little while, while the little one goes to sleep in the next room. I have not felt terror or confusion like that for some time. I was so scared. Now, my mind is slowly piecing back together.

While Standing In Line

While Standing in line at Safeway, I poured lavender scented dish-soap on my jacket and pants.

I was just waiting, holding both bottles upside-down, and one of them was open.

There was a splattered puddle of dish-soap on the floor, next to my soap speckled shoe.
I didn't tell anybody. I internalized guilt and moved to a different line.

That line was shorter- I had realized only once the cool soap in my pants had woken me from my stupor, my soap-spilling daydream. Being in this new line reduced my risk of slipping on soap- soap that had pooled in the middle of the aisle like some liquidy monster, waiting for the unsure step of some frail old lady- to make her fall, undramatically and quickly, and crack her thin skull on the otherwise sanitary floor, killing her instantly.

Con-Man

We are not victims. We are perpetrators.

On a lonely night last week, I let a man convince me he needed help. He told me his wife and two year old child were in their car. He showed me his cancerous stomach, and this seemed relevant. He wouldn't shut up. He made me smell his breath, and look at the veins on his arms, and told me how relevant this all was. I walked with him to his hotel and paid for his room. He heaved like an obnoxious man having an asthma attack. He told me how amazing I was. I did not feel good. I wished he would shut the fuck up and just let me get back to being lonely.

He asked me for one more favor, and it was the first strike of realization. He asked if I would get him some food, you know, for his family. It took the wind out of me. I told him I had to pass. He apologized. I asked him for a favor- Let me take his picture. He looked suspicious. I thought- fuck you.

I kept my hand on my camera-bag. He asked to see it. I stepped back from him and lifted it out of it's case. I put it back in a very short time. I was still trying to operate as if he were not a lying creep. He told me he was superstitious about having his picture taken. He was speaking more quickly by the second. He told me he didn't know what I would do with the pictures. I thought- how dare you you pathetic, fucking pathetic crook?

I spent the next morning talking with the hotel manager. He said the man had tried to get another night at the hotel on the same credit card. I told the manager that if he could not eject the man by check-out time, I would have the police out there to make sure it happened.

I am not a victim. I walked up to the counter with my feet. I handed the incredulous Indian gentleman my credit card, with my hand. I signed the receipt with my pen. I went home and explained to my wife that I had paid for a criminal to stay the night in a hotel. This did not go over well. I don't imagine there is anything ridiculous about that.

I am a perpetrator. I am an accomplice. I feel guilty about this. I don't want to dupe anybody else out of their hard-earned money. I don't want to take any more money from my children or my wife, only to hand it over to strangers, to have them do with it as they will. I am a con-man in my own house. I am glad that I have at least warned my wife.

The Atomic Cafe

Quite a film about the Atomic Bomb, entirely made up of archival footage. Originally released in 1982. Not a feel-good film.

Why John McCain Has to be So Sad

McCain has long seemed to me to be a great guy. I lost a bit of respect for him during the campaign, but that mostly had to do with his unfortunate willingness to play puppet to the ideologies of an entire party. He probably wouldn't have made it as far as he did without it (playing puppet). It was sad to see him jeered at when he defended Obama during the campaign. It is sad to see him jeered at when he defends Obama now. It is sad to see somebody genuine forced to waste their political time maintaining their personal dignity by not letting childish partisan comments just stand un-challenged. Bravo McCain... with your sense of empathy, you would make a wonderful non-profit manager.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

There is a group of workmen just down the hall from my desk, demolishing office walls. Something that they are doing is a thudding, thump, thump, thump. Every time that reverberation hits my body I clench, time stops for an eighth of a second, my heart like a fist.

My daughter has a new bed, with soft nets, and no longer has rails to hit her head against, a thudding, thump... thump... thump; I used to feel it in my feet when I was upstairs with my headphones on, and would realize that I had been clenching, unaware, for some time now. My body knew, had heard through these soft reverberations, and was tightening like a knot. I realize then with my mind and run down, and she is crying in bed, rocking, thudding, her soft head making a hard noise on the railing. I feel like a shit-head for not spending every waking hour sitting here in her room, cradling her head so she can rock in bed, back and forth... it is something that she appears to enjoy.

My daughter has a new bed, and I can sit, peaceful, in the office, as long as my son's feet are not padding, thump thump thump, against his hard-wood floor.

In my office I can feel it, pulsing through my feet, heart like a fist, forcing myself to not stand and run.

Somewhere down the hall, my daughter is assisting work-men, breaking through walls with the back of her head.

Auto Tune the News

Let's Have a Culture War!

Let's have a culture war. Let's pit our tribes' nebulous then specific then nebulous ideologies against one another. First we'll brace our bodies, gird our loins with personalized facts, made true and more true through repetition, through volume and rage, through tears because tears are the punctuation of actuality. We'll forge these swords in fires of fear, of rumors made fact through repetition, beaten and worked into fine points which we can use to separate skin from skin, open up flesh where flesh was not built to open, force these pipes to burst and let the life flow out.

Let's have a culture war. We are enraged that they dare and they, in turn enraged that we. Convinced we are that we defend the motherland,
And it is they who's backs are to the sea.

A video that really ought to have been seen by everybody by now

Why this web-log is disappointing

The most disappointing thing about my web-log is that I frequently find myself with nothing to say. My mind is a chaotic mess of noise, teeming with something, like insects eating each-other or something, and yet I often find myself dry-heaving absolute nothingness, sitting blank with a pen and notebook or finding something entirely else, entirely less satisfying than writing, to do online. I am sure there was something insidious about the dream I had last night. It had nothing to do with killing my children, in case you're wondering.

My inability to connect with human beings is proving to be more of a handicap than I had expected. "Fine!' I told myself long ago. "Fuck them. Who even needs friends? Only needy people need friends." 

As it turns out, three years into "abandoning" all my friends by default (the ones you just end up with based mostly on geographical location and popular-ness factor), there are an extremely limited number of people I talk to besides my wife. I won't tell you the number of people, since using a relative term like "limited", it will mean an equal amount of pathetic to everybody, regardless of their limitless capacity to meet people.

I even stooped as low as to look in the craigslist ads section "strictly platonic", but the three people there who were not looking for "just friendly hand-jobs, then we'll see what happens" seemed pathetic to me. Their content was perfectly normal, but only pathetic people look for friends on craigslist. I have to have some standards, right? 

You would have to really really fucking impress me to have me respond to a friendship ad on craigslist Baltimore, tomorrow... I can do hand-jobs.

Gay Porn

Caution: The following porn is very graphic in nature, and should not be read out loud to humans younger than 18. Instead, show them a violent film in which only very bad people die. This way, our children will grow up with a clear picture about who and who does not deserve to die. This prepares them for future decisions like, should I shoot this person while they are running away from me. A good film example of this would be... say... Bambi. Let your kids go watch Bambi, while you read this Gay porn I have written. Here we go:

I was sitting on the other side of the couch. Calvin was sitting on the other side,
the side I wasn't sitting on. We were very drunk. This story is about to get very sexual.

When Calvin started to undress, I did too. I was happy to see that he was as scrawny
and pale as I, but his nipple hair was, to me, horrifying. It dug in like the terrible legs
of an insect. I wanted to help him, to shave it off, but the thought of Calvin's bleeding
nipples made me feel sick. This story is about to get very sexual. I looked at Calvin's pale,
dry lips and thought about whether they would be rough, if he were to run them, closed,
down my back. Would there be white scratch marks when he scraped my back with those lips?
Would I like it?

When Calvin asked if I wanted to touch penises with him, I said yes. It was weird. Our small,
limp penises kissed like monkeys with no eyes or bones in their faces. I don't know how Calvin
felt about this.

When Calvin asked if I wanted to arm-pit with him, I said "what is that?"

A few minutes later, we were interlocking arm-pits. Calvin's face was really intense.
I think he really liked this. I felt like he was sweating alot more than I was, and hoped it didn't make him feel insecure.

When a pocket of air made a farting noise between us I was done.

I dressed quickly. "Thanks, man. That was really good."
I don't think I should drink with Calvin anymore.

I know Bill Maher is often a bit much but..

I am not the type of person who would do well in the audience of "Real Time with Bill Maher". I enjoy his comedy and appreciate a great deal of his insight, but he often strikes me as a radical-- almost the Rush Limbaugh of the Democrats (only mounds of shit more pleasant). I think he is a very smart guy, I think he has just over-committed himself on many of the issues. That said, I want to share a piece he did on his show. I have extracted this from a written version on the Huffington Post website.



New Rule: Not Everything in America Has to Make a Profit

How about this for a New Rule: Not everything in America has to make a profit. It used to be that there were some services and institutions so vital to our nation that they were exempt from market pressures. Some things we just didn't do for money. The United States always defined capitalism, but it didn't used to define us. But now it's becoming all that we are.

Did you know, for example, that there was a time when being called a "war profiteer" was a bad thing? But now our war zones are dominated by private contractors and mercenaries who work for corporations. There are more private contractors in Iraq than American troops, and we pay them generous salaries to do jobs the troops used to do for themselves ­-- like laundry. War is not supposed to turn a profit, but our wars have become boondoggles for weapons manufacturers and connected civilian contractors.

Prisons used to be a non-profit business, too. And for good reason --­ who the hell wants to own a prison? By definition you're going to have trouble with the tenants. But now prisons are big business. A company called the Corrections Corporation of America is on the New York Stock Exchange, which is convenient since that's where all the real crime is happening anyway. The CCA and similar corporations actually lobby Congress for stiffer sentencing laws so they can lock more people up and make more money. That's why America has the world;s largest prison population ­-- because actually rehabilitating people would have a negative impact on the bottom line.

Television news is another area that used to be roped off from the profit motive. When Walter Cronkite died last week, it was odd to see news anchor after news anchor talking about how much better the news coverage was back in Cronkite's day. I thought, "Gee, if only you were in a position to do something about it."

But maybe they aren't. Because unlike in Cronkite's day, today's news has to make a profit like all the other divisions in a media conglomerate. That's why it wasn't surprising to see the CBS Evening News broadcast live from the Staples Center for two nights this month, just in case Michael Jackson came back to life and sold Iran nuclear weapons. In Uncle Walter's time, the news division was a loss leader. Making money was the job of The Beverly Hillbillies. And now that we have reporters moving to Alaska to hang out with the Palin family, the news is The Beverly Hillbillies.

And finally, there's health care. It wasn't that long ago that when a kid broke his leg playing stickball, his parents took him to the local Catholic hospital, the nun put a thermometer in his mouth, the doctor slapped some plaster on his ankle and you were done. The bill was $1.50, plus you got to keep the thermometer.

But like everything else that's good and noble in life, some Wall Street wizard decided that hospitals could be big business, so now they're run by some bean counters in a corporate plaza in Charlotte. In the U.S. today, three giant for-profit conglomerates own close to 600 hospitals and other health care facilities. They're not hospitals anymore; they're Jiffy Lubes with bedpans. America's largest hospital chain, HCA, was founded by the family of Bill Frist, who perfectly represents the Republican attitude toward health care: it's not a right, it's a racket. The more people who get sick and need medicine, the higher their profit margins. Which is why they're always pushing the Jell-O.

Because medicine is now for-profit we have things like "recision," where insurance companies hire people to figure out ways to deny you coverage when you get sick, even though you've been paying into your plan for years.

When did the profit motive become the only reason to do anything? When did that become the new patriotism? Ask not what you could do for your country, ask what's in it for Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

If conservatives get to call universal health care "socialized medicine," I get to call private health care "soulless vampires making money off human pain." The problem with President Obama's health care plan isn't socialism, it's capitalism.

And if medicine is for profit, and war, and the news, and the penal system, my question is: what's wrong with firemen? Why don't they charge? They must be commies. Oh my God! That explains the red trucks!

Sadness

Sadness was easier when I was young.
Working construction is easier when you're sad. Digging ditches is wonderful when you're sad.
Working on a computer is hugely more difficult when you're sad. I wish I could do this job by heaving heavy things around. That would get me in trouble, here in my cubicle.
Sadness is not allowed around little kids. I feel like an asshole when I'm sad. It used to be that when I was sad, I felt like everybody else was an asshole.
Sadness is not what it used to be. I can not wait to be done being sad.

Protecting my Family

Last night my wife asked me if I've been leaving the basement door unlocked. Yes I have.
We hang out there now. We've set up a sweet little youthful oasis in our basement, escape from the perpetuity of parenthood, where the music is always loud, the air is sweet and damp, sin is condensing and forming mold somewhere.

It's funny when I think about it. One of us will go downstairs for a little bit. The kids will be hanging with the other of us in the living-room or sun-room. The floor will begin to vibrate, and if you were an adult, you would recognize the faint tinny hum of heavy metal, of hip-hop, of 90's grunge, as if a car were passing. The speakers are huge. I love to feel the ground shake. Love to itch the inner-most reaches of my ears with noise just barely painful.

Last night my wife asked me if I've been leaving the basement door unlocked. Yes I have.
It makes it far more convenient to get to the basement after I've been reading outside.
Upon answering, I understand immediately how idiotic this is. We have invested headache-inducing amounts of time and money to get the house alarm installed, then to have the phone fixed, then to have the alarm fixed, then to have the phone fixed. It is silly to give all the roaming serial murderers a free way in, one which leads to a great stereo system that they would probably like to blast painfully (it wouldn't wake us) in order to get pumped up. I would recommend Eminem's new album. It would probably get them nicely in the mood if they needed it.

So I went downstairs, naked. The basement is creepy. I poked my head in, making sure the murderer was not already in the house. If he was just about to come in, I would see him open the door, and his jig would be up. But by now, he could have easily hid himself in the pillows on the couch, in the massive pile of crap we have to sort. There was a noise that probably was just the rats upstairs trying to eat each-other. The murderer was well hidden. I locked the basement door. If he was there he had no escape. Now he would have to kill us brutally just to leave. The alarm had effectively become an alarm that we were now safe. Why would a murderer want to trip an alarm just to leave everybody unharmed? He wouldn't. He would want to kill us, brutally of course.

I placed a bag of cat-food on the top step. If the murderer tried to walk up these steps in the dark, it would fall down the stairs and spill cat food. It would make enough noise for me to get up and find a chair to hit him with. Every time I think of something like this a fight scene will play in my head, starring me. I lose frequently. I wonder what this means. Just writing about it, and there goes that fight scene again.

I lay awake for a while last night, listening for the sound of cat food on stairs, somebody saying "What the hell!?"

Waking up

This morning my wife woke me up. I was naked, sitting up on the couch in the livingroom. It was still very very dark. I didn't remember getting there. I sleep naked, so that factor is not that odd. I do wonder, however, if I will find myself in these situations when my children are older, because I don't remember ever finding my dad naked anywhere. He pretty much slept in bed, fully clothed, as far as I knew.

When I got back to the bedroom, it was time to get up for work. I had to turn my alarms off before I went to take a shower. I still feel like this waking up experience is casting ripples across my consciousness. Waking up is important.

Perhaps waking up is the most important thing we do any given day.

Waking up is the only clear boundary between our bodily reality and our dream reality. I know that I don't get fully paralyzed by dopamine in my sleep, frequently blurring the lines between my dream experience and my physical experience. Perhaps some people don't stop dreaming when they wake up.

Perhaps waking up is the biggest mistake we make any given day.

Go ahead and tell me that quantam physics and string theory are not etherial and fanciful dreams: myths. Sure they may be true, accurate, provable, scientific. They are just as real to scientists as demonic posession is to an Orthodox Christian or a Catholic.

When I hit the ground after falling from a building, if only in my head, I feel the impact as my body spasms in reaction. I cry when I drop my 8 month old son and his neck breaks, if only in my dreams. I smile and laugh in my sleep. My wife tells me she loves me in her sleep. It's probably a matter of survival that we have these dividers, like dopamine. You don't want to wander off into the woods with no physical awareness, only to impale yourself on something or fall off of something.

But we have written dream off as false-reality. Just as the atheist has written off God. Just as the Christian has written off Nirvana. Just as the skeptic has written off global warming. Just as the homeless crazy man has written off work, has written off love, has written off sobriety, has written off society, and he, alone now, is real. You frequently hear him refer to the past, when other things were still real, before they all fell apart, before he slipped into his nightmare and lost the ability to wake up.

My son's eyeball

I have a consistant history of horrible dreams about my children-- accidentally hurting them, watching myself purposefully hurt them, generally harming them, etc...

In my dream last night, the yoga instructor was super pissed off at me. I was always late to yoga. She closely resembled the demonic succubus cow-head lady from True Blood (great series). She was talking down to me. She wanted me to sit in the corner and recite something embarrassing in front of the whole class. I was pissed off. I screamed at her. It wasn't even my fault I was late this time. I had stopped at the outdoor coffee shop halfway up the hill, on the way up to the ruins where yoga class was held. The clock at the outdoor coffee shop said it was only 6:30. Yoga didn't start until 7:30. I don't know if it was morning or night. It wasn't my fault. Two clocks had said it was 6:30, although I did rush up the hill really early (according to the two clocks) because I had a feeling they were wrong. Why did I think that, I wonder.

I was really pissed off. I don't remember much between me screaming at the yoga instructor and me holding my son. I tripped while holding him and lost him. I was already pissed off for being such a f###-up. I remember being terrified about what people would think about me as I watched my son roll off the cliff. He slid down the mountain side. I dove after him, not sure what the plan was. I slid down the hill, missed him. Somehow, he came to a stop on the steep hill-face. I slid past him, trying to grab him, but missed. I groped at vines about 30 feet below him, stopping myself, saving myself. I clambered up. I couldn't get to him. For some reason, I think he may have gotten to safety (slid down or something), but he had lost an eyeball. I had to get it for him. I was pathetic, slipping and sliding on the muddy face of this cliff. I don't remember how this turned out.

* * *

Somehow I was in a blocked off city. Nobody escaped, nobody got in. Some people had huge guns. We were trying to survive. I shot some people in the face. They laughed at me. How impotent I felt. I think I may have spoken to one of them...

Things I like to hear

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Reverse Racism
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Mark Sanford

What is Original Anymore?

Inundated with music, saturated with old ideas, it is refreshing to see somebody do something truly new.

Diego Stocco - Music From A Tree from Diego Stocco on Vimeo.

Picking Teams

If I was playing basketball (which I would not enjoy in the slightest, because it's not a real sport), and we were picking teams, and one of the captains picked two white guys in a row, and the white guys who were picked first "raised the roof" and said "Sweet! White guys! I'm glad we have a bunch of white guys on this team!"

I would feel strange, uncomfortable.

If one of the captains picked a black dude, and the other black guys gave him a fist bump and started busting out some freestyle that expressed the equivalent of "bruvahs in da house yo"
I would feel equally uncomfortable.

If there was only one Jew, and he got picked and the other guys on the team were like "Sweet, we got a Jew." (perhaps Jews are good luck?)
I would be uncomfortable.

For the most part, when it comes to sports, you get a chance to see people rise to attention and fame and money based on talent, based on skill or strength. People do like to talk about details, but they are trivial, circumstantial, irrelevant to what is really going on.

If I were captain, and I had to pick somebody for my team, and I already had a Jew (lucky) and I already had some black dudes and some white guys, and there was a choice between a Mexican dude and a white dude, and I was gonna ask a humongous favor of every Mexican that I knew in a few years, and they were pretty much evenly matched (it's not like I knew them super well), and I knew that no matter who I picked, there was gonna be some bitching and moaning about it, I would pick the Mexican dude. Even if I wasn't gonna ask that favor of every Mexican I knew, I would still pick the Mexican dude. I would pick that guy because an effort to blend classes, to blend origins, to combine races, to be inclusive and actively so, is an attempt to be blind to race when we very much are not. Until we are not, perhaps we have to pretend to be.

I have the same instinctive reaction as many when I hear people talk so much about race. It bugs the piss out of me, in the same vein that white people celebrating whiteness would, just without the humongous history behind it. There is an unfortunate instinctive trait in us to be only with those who look like us-- tribalism. It used to keep us safe. These attempts at a higher morality are in direct opposition to something that is ingrained in us. I am happy to meet people who have grown up without that somehow (I am not one of them). In a place like Baltimore, strangely enough, they are few and far between.

Observation: Holding the Door

I am 20 feet behind the girl. She is walking through the door. She makes no effort to hold the door. She lets it fall back, leaves it for me to push.

It is something that I do very intentionally, every time I walk through a door. I am trying to change the world. I am trying to get people to let go of this silly, stressful habit-- if somebody is behind you in any way, shape, or form, you must hold the door. Complete foolishness.
Somehow I am pissed off by her nonchalance, by her care-free "why should I give a damn about you having to push open a door". It is an instinctive reaction. I have successfully been programmed.

I don't like to run to get to the door when somebody stops and holds it, with easily 20 seconds before I would get there, if I didn't have to worry about them standing there, holding the door. Somehow we've created an environment where walking through doors (a common activity, and one that only slightly interrupts mindless motion with minutely sentient activity) has become, much like conversation with an unwelcome proselytizer, who has interrupted an otherwise meaningful stream of existance with abstract awkwardness, like an invitation to dance, silently with them, and I am trying to remember the correct moves so it's not too awkward-- but I am dancing in my doorway, trying to be polite and locate the magic words to make them go away.

And I am running when I could be walking, because this asshole thinks if she doesn't hold the door it will instantly categorize her as a bad person. We are paranoid, superstitious idiots.

And yet this girl pisses me off, just shoving the door aside and letting it swing back, like a large flat weapon, like there's not people walking here, about to get there. It's probably just that time of the month. Where have manners gone in this day and age?

New song posted

I find that when I present instrumental music, people are quite comfortable and pleasant about it. I line up all the notes correctly, and they say, "That's very nice."

But when I throw words on top, and screech them mercilessly into my computer, so it can then screech them, mercilessly, into somebody's head-holes, I am more likely to get a reaction that a 12 year old can expect to receive when they announce that they have gone to the potty, all by themselves.

*disconcerted brow furrow*

"That's very nice. Keep it up."

New song is on top, and I am aware that the long songs cut off before they are finished. That's why I don't listen to my music. Why should you even care? It's called Tell me How to Walk

The first few words of a song I may never finish...

I think the title or chorus of this song is:

That which doesn't kill you just might break you down

Verse:

let's just assume that pregnancy and birth are perfect,
That condom-less pill-less sex was worth it,
Nobody has ever been born evil,
And all babies are created equal.

The primary question of the song is: If babies can be born with, oh I don't know, Rett Syndrome, or be born Sociopaths, we all stand a chance of being randomly screwed by chance. But let's pretend this is not the case. It gives us the opportunity to blame people, rather than nature (or God, that stupid bastard): blame the parents. Blame the schools. Blame the priests. Blame video games. Blame voodoo, or whatever happens to have been there for the fourteen years before the parents noticed their sweet boy catching animals on fire. It's a terrifying thought to think that my son (I have one) might just grow up to be what people like to call evil. How dare you judge my two year old, when he has just killed, when he has just raped, when he has just led hundreds of thousands to kill and rape for him; but not for him. No. For God and country of course.

I am vulnerable. I am weak. I am a mere person in the face of this torrential, massive wave of influence. My son is more so. He is fine, dry sand in a hurricane. I am desperately trying to hold on, clutching dry sand to my chest, with the aid of my many fingered wife, but the gaps in my fingers are so big. I can watch specks of him fly away, no longer in my control, no longer in his.

What do you tell a parent who's teenager is in Juvenile hall? When you are not facing them, you say: "Shame on you, you should have beaten them more", or "You should have beaten them less". When you are facing them, you say: "Do not fret, I know another boy who..." or "But he's such a sweet kid..." or "He'll grow out of it". I grew up with absolute surety that parents were responsible, and parents were to blame. Why do absolutist talking heads get to tell us how this is? Why did I grow up thinking that parents were responsible, and yet feel sorry for them that I did not turn out a certain way? Why do I feel like I controlled my own destiny when I was but a wee lad? Just because I'm driving the car does not mean that whatever comes flying through the windshield, killing the passengers, or killing me, or sending us all straight to hell, is my fault. Just because you are older does not mean you can tame this beast: This Chaos.


The funny thing: if my son grows up to be a mass murderer, or a huge prick, I expect to blame nobody but myself, and it will be devastating.

New Widget

I have just now added a new widget-- the Huffington Post's most popular stories, to my web log. I was thinking, 'now, at the very least, if people find nothing of interest on my web log, they will see a great news story on the sidebar', like Ryan Grimm's story on the LSD use of Steve Jobs, he calling it "One of the two or three most important things I will ever do", or Nico Pitney's Iran Uprising Live-blogging series (a very nice example of the utilization of modern technology in the thwarting of Orwellian censorship).

My first glimpse was disappointing. The widget was filled with trash, not news. Three of the stories were about Sarah Palin. One of them was Michelle Obama's fashion. These, America, these are the stories that mean the most to you. This is what you live on, you feed on, you perpetuate your droll, voyeuristic lives on-- your sawdust filled grain. Can we please have steak for dinner? Why can't we just have something nice for once, that tastes good and is good for us? A salad perhaps. A sweet and salty dressing on top of crisp leaves, that leaves us refreshed, healthy, better. No, please, I don't want Taco Bell again. There's no food in those pastel wrappings. There is only trash.

I do not hate the media. The 24 hour networks do what they do because it is what we ask of them. They would not do it if it was not profitable. They are merely businesses. The reason that Michael Jackson is still crowding out the sick, the dying, the suffering, the starving, and the oppressed is because we are the ones who inflated him, collectively put our mouths to the nozzle of this giant freakish blow-up doll; and that air will be a long time in escaping, especailly after death. Especially after death because death is just the kind of drama that gets our saliva flowing. That and Sarah Palin I guess.

{update: 1 day later I have removed the widget. Over a period of 24 hours, the top stories have changed in author, have changed in wording, but have changed far too little in content. I will recommend the widget to the next fashion blogger or completely wasteful bullshit blogger I run across}

On Religion, post one of infinity

I recently wrote a letter to a friend who I still call a friend, but have spoken to so little in the last few years that-- how is he different from anybody else now, be they the really nice homeless person or the slightly less nice person who I used to talk to with my wife at coffee, who we are unsure has a home, but he says he does. He had a boat, but says it sank. He says he owns a doctor's office, and is very fond of children, but we don't know if he even has a home. We don't know if he sleeps at night underneath the tugboat company that sits out over the water of the Baltimore inner harbor because he hates his devout, Protestant wife, like he says, or if there is another reason-- something more sad. In the middle of the letter, I talk about religion:

My sense of spirituality only goes so far as what I know to be absolutely true. I do not know that the Bible or the Koran, or the Torah or the Tibetan Book of the Dead, or the Harry Potter novels are fact or fiction, whether we are watched by ghosts or by Greek Gods or by Jesus or by the god of the old testament. There are plenty of people who would love for me to believe one of these things, or one of the thousands of other things. They want me to because they are concerned about my soul, and worry about how shitty it’s gonna be for me in hell after I die. I don’t even know how many of these people are right. How the hell would I know? Everybody has proof, and everybody refutes everybody else’s. 
 What I do know is that I was born who I am. I could have been African, born into a tribe at war with other tribes, convinced that this was right. I would believe in the indigenous religion I was taught. Perhaps some missionaries: Mormon or Protestant most likely: would come and convert me. Then I would believe that my family was in danger of going to hell, for holding onto their religion and not accepting Jesus or Joseph Smith or whoever. My parents would be ashamed of me, for not holding onto the one true faith. 
But I was born Orthodox Christian. I left the church when I was 18, and am silently rebuked by the world I came from for letting myself be dragged away by demonic powers (I am sure my wife is blamed by many). I do not condemn religion. I do not think there is anything wrong with religion. Go ahead, it might make you a better person and give you a good life and explain your world and make you happy and convince you to help others. I do think that there is something wrong with nearly every religion though. Because somewhere in the massive list of details, there are almost always condemnations, there are almost always hurtful and derisive rules. No mother should think their son is going to hell for being a homosexual. No Catholic homosexual should feel like they might as well become a priest because they’re never going to know a happy marriage. No Catholic should ever feel devastated when their Protestant or Muslim friend dies because they’re going to hell for sure. Nobody should ever be afraid to talk to another person, to marry another person, to befriend another person, to listen (really listen) to another person, allow that person to sway them in their foundation, or to question their reality and their own religion. Everybody told me they were right. Everybody told me they had proof. The only logical conclusion I could come to was: there’s no way this really matters. I don’t believe in a god who thinks special words and special moves and special ropes and special food are our only salvation, or even a part of our salvation at all. I think god is better than that. My god is smarter than your god.

Note: I didn't tell my friend that I thought my god was smarter than his god. I thought it fit in the Blog format.

Friday night

This is Friday night. I am looking forward to my son sleeping. He is pacing right now- little feet padding across hardwood floors. He he had better be smart later, or it will all have been for naught. I have officially run out of things to do in the office while I wait for him to sleep. I have photographed everything in this tiny room. I have a desire to document my life.

The reason I enjoy photography is because it allows me to trap memories. Otherwise they- memories- simply peel away like dead leaves- little bits of my existence that no longer mean anything to me.



Perhaps memories are formative, and add up to who I am. That may be true. However... I like to have them, safe here on a physical hard-drive, where I can look at them. Something to look at, to enjoy, and to prove that I was not born an instant ago. The photograph I have included in this post has very little to do with what I am talking about. It was not taken tonight. It was taken by my wife on our anniversary. We went to several restaurants that would not let us sit outside. We finally found one that would let us sit outside if we didn't require service and got food to go. We sat in the freezing cold, smoking and eating steak dinners with plastic utensils. Only my wife gets to take pictures of me smiling.


The reason I enjoy music is because it resonates inside me, it scratches the atrophied and itchy emotions I rarely use. The reason I have a hard time reading is because my mind is working while I'm trying to read, and it causes me to lose my place, and makes for extremely slow reading. The photograph I have included has very little to do with what I am talking about. It was not taken tonight. It was taken by my wife on our anniversary. We went to several restaurants that would not let us sit outside. We finally found one that would let us sit outside if we didn't require service and got food to go. We sat in the freezing cold, smoking and eating steak dinners with plastic utensils. It was definitely in the top 4 on my list of favorite anniversaries. Only my wife gets to take pictures of me smiling.