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.