salvaged MySpace blogs

I canceled my MySpace account today. I hadn't been using it for months (aside from the email notification when a friend posted to her blog), and it was a minor embarrassment to have one at all, so that's that.

Or is it? It feels a little strange...there's something not quite right about my decision. I mean, what would have been the harm in leaving it? It's not like there's anything there that would incriminate me or something...

I've done this kind of thing before. Hell, I used to have a fairly long-lived blog right here...but then, one day, I decided to delete it. The words still exist- there are two copies, one for each person who actually got something out of it- but I no longer felt right about having such personal writings posted online. Is it the same situation now?

How personal is too personal? How visible is too visible?

Last question first: I can't be too disappointed about the world not throwing me a party...when all I did was open the door a crack. I thought I was ready to be a different person, but I'm really the same old asshole who expects too little from himself and too much from everyone else. I don't want to be available, but I want everyone else to respond immediately and profusely when I manage to peek out of my self-made cell. It's classic me: if expectations are way too high to begin with, it's so easy to say "fuck it all" and return to squatting in my moldy meaninglessness.

And what about "too personal"? Well...I don't know. Emotions and privacy are tricky questions these days, and would be even if I didn't have personal issues to complicate things. I doubt that I could write anything so shocking about myself that anyone would object, let alone hold it against me. My world is pretty small, and there just aren't that many people whose opinions I care about to any great extent. What does it really matter if a stranger thinks that I'm a pathetic loser or a whiny little bastard?

On that note:

(it seems that the crappy formatting that MySpace uses got pasted along with the posts. So maybe I'll come back and do all the little edits to get it looking right...maybe I won't. It was sad enough that I copied these at all..)

Wednesday, July 25, 2007 makes me want to give mankind a beating just giving thanks for Amanda Palmer.

I'm down to about forty-five minutes a week. Forty-five minutes in which I can enjoy human beings. I had a dental appointment this morning and that will just about do it.

The grocery shopping earlier in the week was not spent in enjoyment for the many positive qualities of the human species. Nope, it was spent listening to the tepid RnB-ish remake of the banal metal ballad "More than Words" and imagining the gory implosions that could be made with the heads of the other shoppers. These are not good thoughts. I've been shopping at the same supermarket for so long...I used to wonder if the checkout girl was old enough to work at all, and now she looks like someone's mom. Too much time going by while I try to figure out what the hell to do. Too many imagined implosions to hope that I'll ever be socially comfortable.

Ah, but the dentist...maybe the pain made it okay to enjoy myself. I may have a crush on the hygenist, or it may be that I just have trouble finding women fascinating without feeling like I need to attach some bullshit romantic notion. Maybe if I was gay I could actually stand to have male friends? What the hell am I saying...what is wrong with my head...

my head is haunted...that's not Amanda, that's Hogarth. I feel like the silly old men "who cry when they don't like their strained peas". Who wrote that line, and why do I remember it? I know why...because I understood it when I read it, and I understand it even more now.

Fucking pathetic me and fucking pathetic everyone else. There's no fixing to be done, once the rust sets in...just waiting for it to fall apart. Somebody have me towed, I'm an eyesore nothing more. I'm fucking up the property values for everyone else on the block.

Can anyone tell me what happened to Job's son? Offered to sacrifice as a test of his father's love for an illusion...did he ask why? Was he ever answered? And what's going through the mind of Paris Hilton's old dogs? Why the fuck do I even have that name in my head at all? Icepick time again...my head is haunted...

BTW, I got the staple out of Brutus' leg. It was easy- I could have done it any time. I didn't even have to make foolish small talk while I did it. Maybe I should just go feral. I don't idealize dogs (much) but at least I understand their motives and limits on loyalty. Feed me play with me let me sleep all over you. I'll put myself in front of a bullet for you, and then walk away with the next raw meat that comes my way. Nothing much to understand; love is excruciatingly intense and yet even more fleeting and fickle.

makes me want to give myself a beating

Saturday, July 14, 2007

what the birthday post should have been like I'm glad time travel is just science fiction. I'm imagining me, twenty years ago, getting a visit from the me of today. For one thing, I wouldn't believe it. Some old skinhead fuck who rarely smiles...no way that's me. Doesn't like to drive, rarely drinks, never socializes...who is that? He's telling me all this crap about how he can't think of a reason to get out of bed in the morning...hasn't he heard about all the cool stuff there is to do and discover? Jesus, at least think of all the chicks there are to bang...oh, you're married? What the fuck did you do that for? What, did you finally get some chick pregnant or something? No? I don't get it...okay, well, at least you've got some time to read all those books I haven't got around to yet. What? Nothing sounds good, huh? Jesus, what a fucking waste... I'm trying to reason with him. "You know those little mood swings, those fits of unprovoked anger and sadness that you get, those outbreaks of goofy impulsive behavior? Those eventually develop into a full-on debilitating condition of some kind. You can't really get any help... because not only aren't the professionals any better at their jobs than you were at yours, but you've also managed to alienate most if not all of your friends. So you're totally on your own, and you never did learn to handle things on your own, did you?" He's already tuned me out. He won't listen to anybody but counterculture celebrities or distigished liberal academics, and I'm certainly not either of those. I'm trying to tell him that most of what he's interested in turns out to be bullshit, and may in truth end up contributing in some way to his eventual state of mind, but he's just convinced that I'm a loser who doesn't have a clue what he's talking about...and worst of all, so uncool... For some weird reason he's associating me with authority...me!...and he just can't stand any kind of authority. I'm trying to make him understand that I still feel exactly the same way, and it just hasn't helped one bit. I remind him of his older brother, who used to try to give him advice...advice that he'd just laugh at because his brother was such an obvious fuck-up. Finally I just give up. You just can't talk to these youngsters. So I go to visit myself ten years ago. I figure, what the hell- at that point I was relatively stable and trying to seek some kind of responsible adult sort of situation with my life. Definitely a man who would respond to reason, and not be so arrogant and juvenile. And you know what? He won't listen to me either, for exactly the opposite reasons...he thinks I'm acting like the teenage kid he and I left behind. Ah, just shut up and do what needs to be done, dude. Forget about all that creative artsy psychological metaphysical type bullshit...all you have to do is settle down, get a job, get married, put a little something away for retirement. It's not that bad...nobody really has friends anymore, just co-workers and people you go out drinking with when you're not raising your family. Sure, you get older but that's what family and health insurance is for. You need a fix of the old hipness? Smoke a little weed on the weekends and watch IFC. Just don't take any of the shit seriously. I try to tell him that he's unconsciously rebelling against his own nature, trying to achieve a non-existant model of normality that he's constructed. The unavoidable state of maturity, the sellout that he'd been pretending to avoid and condemn throughout his adolescence and post-adolescent years. I explain that both sides of that view were fallacies, simple and banal concepts bolstered by both mainstream and underground forces, bearing little if any relation to the facts. "Listen, 'dude', it's not about success versus selling out, it's about you- who you really are and what you can do to make your life mean something. All you're doing, with this career and domestic outlook, is avoiding that idea...just as you did with rebellion and extremism when you were younger. It makes you sick, don't you understand? You develop these harmful thought patterns that become harder and harder to break free from. You need to stop and figure things out before you commit yourself to a life that, deep down, you know you don't really want." No understanding there. He just thinks I'm wasting time because I'm not 'planning for my future' by making money and raising kids. He thinks I'm just being nostalgic for my youthful irresponsibility of thought and behavior. He's even tougher to argue with becuase he's dropped good-natured arrogance for good-natured pragmatism, and it's a persuasive manner. Fortunately or unfortunately, I can see right through it...I have seen right through it, and I know he will too, eventually, as it gets harder and harder to rationalize the unbidden thoughts and glimpses of a different life than the one he's pretending to live. Okay, so my ace in the hole...I go all the way back, thirty years this time. I catch up with me at seven, an awkward, plump little dude. He's alone, of course, riding his bike down dirt roads out in the middle of nowhere. He doesn't look like he's having much fun; his face is drooping like he's sad but I know it's just that his thoughts are a million miles away, dreaming of fantastic pasts and imaginary futures. "Still got the training wheels on?" I say. "Little old for that, don't you think?" "Shut up," he murmurs. "I'm scared I'll tip over." "I know," I say. "I know." And that's it. I don't try to tell him anything, because he's just a kid. Anything I say will just confuse him, make him scared or sad. Why do that to a kid? Let him have whatever kind of fun he can have. I can tell just from the training wheels that he's already got whatever it is that the rest of us got...in ten years, he'll start to realize it. Nothing I could say would really help him in the long run- he'll just keep thinking himself into problems instead of out of them. I destroy my time machine. Now it looks like just a normal sofa and computer again. So much for science fiction. So much for everything. But wait- what's this? It's me from ten years in the future! I've come back to tell myself something. Listen, dude, don't worry...it all gets so much better. I can't tell you exactly how, but just hang in there...everything changes and you see that it's all been worth it and life is sooo good you won't believe it. Fuck you, asshole. Aren't you from that stupid fucking glorious future I've been dreaming about all my life? I've got three messages to give you: nobody's interested in your bullshit illusions around here. All we really need to know is what we can do, here and now, to make things better. If you're not going to tell me that, keep fucking walking, jack. But I'm saying, have faith and keep plugging away and sooner or later... Fuck off.

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

don't even read this Ah, adulthood. So wonderful...truly, I'm not being sarcastic. Being an adult has filled me with wonder. For one thing, I wonder why increased responsibility goes hand in hand with decreased fun. I also wonder why the more you learn, the more likely it is to make you sad. But most of all, these and other things lead me to wonder why maturity is so highly rated...that to show any signs of lacking maturity is to immediately earn contempt from strangers, and sadness (or, at best, contemptuously patronizing attitudes) from friends and family. Have I lost sight of the rewards of adulthood? Which are... ...yep, I guess I have. And I'm not even nostalgic (right this moment). My youth was pretty shitty as well, mainly because I was spending most of it looking forward to the fabulous payoff that adulthood would bring. I'd like to say that it was just the old generation gap- i.e., all the grown-ups kept telling us that these were the best days and we should enjoy them and not waste them, and automatically assuming that we wouldn't listen. And we didn't, and now I've joined them... ...but you know, that's not true. I fall for that crap occasionally, but when my head is clear I understand that the only waste was in giving those adults my attention at all. I was so idiotically accepting of their attitudes and so eager to please and to prove myself wiser than my peers...so that I ended up wasting my youth because of them, not in spite of them. And where are they now to tell me what I got for it? Well, all around me...my peers, and most everybody else, turned into them. The very kids that didn't listen and wasted their youth have now become my neighbors, my co-workers, my bosses, my acquaintances...all the ones who seemed so childish to me in my youth have managed to find something motivating about adulthood and look down upon me because I cannot recognize its merits. I guess that adulthood means that you stop expecting life to be good. For some people, that may just be common sense...the stages of maturity may indeed be: first you realize that life's not fair, and then you realize that life's not fun, and finally you realize that life's not good. And you go through with it all anyway. So the challenge of maturity is in manufacturing reasons. Reasons to get out of bed in the morning. Reasons to do what you need to do. It's a popular choice to delude yourself into magnifying the positive elements until they eclipse the negative- just as our tiny moon can eclipse the tyrant sun, from the right angle. "Find the good," they tell me. "Look hard and focus." Yes- I see it. The possibility that if I keep pawing through piles of shit, I will eventually find a diamond that someone once swallowed. Maybe today will be the day that life briefly stops being crappy. But don't you dare expect a good thing to last...that wouldn't be a mature viewpoint. Another popular choice is to be proactive and self-empowering and all those other idiot Oprah business-speak neologisms. Go for it. Grab life by the balls. Assert yourself and for god's sake stop whining. Keep moving forward and look for the openings and intelligently embrace selfish ruthlessness and pragmatic opportunism. Use the winners and lose the losers and laugh about it all over drinks later. Well, despite your personal achievements, you still look like a bunch of foolish nasty dirty monkeys to me, but it's not very nice to say that, is it? Am I supposed to be inspired by the way you bullied and blow-jobbed your way to fleeting success? Dress it up and rationalize it. Parade it and give seminars about it. If there is any remaining sense of shame to you, you can squash it by referring to it as a sign of immaturity. "Oh, I was idealistic when I was a stupid kid...as you grow, you compromise." Plus, with just about everybody doing it, and praising it, and framing it in terms of their own affected lifestyle...well, it may not be the game you would have chosen, but since you're here you may as well play to win, right? If you're really good at it, you will be either a master of self-delusion...or simply never picked up the strange idea that there might be some better alternative. The latter is becoming more and more popular as parents, schools, government and entertainment are unofficially banding together to facilitate cranking out new young adults who can't even perceive that things might be going wrong. It's not a failure of intelligence, because intelligence will tell you to do the best with what you've got. There are plenty of smart kids out there who will be very good at exploiting their diminishing possibilities, and that is a sign of intelligence that we can all agree upon. I'm so tired of this. I'm so tired of constantly trying to convince myself that there might be some way I can justify it all. That the only way to be happy is to try to ignore all the bad things and seek my own selfish goals. Not to mention successfully put aside the fact that I'm dying, that everyone I love is going to die, everything I have will break or get lost, everything I admire will become reviled or betray itself, everything I believe will turn out false...and in the end, no matter how well or poorly I do with this life of mine, I will die alone and filled with regrets. "Even if that's true," you say, "what's the point of dwelling in it?" Because I got the impression that truth was a good thing, so anything I do not doubt must be worth hanging on to. And those are some of the few things that I cannot doubt. But that's not a mature attitude. Just like one has to learn that life's not fair, I guess one has to learn that truth is just a tool. The only benefit of clarity is being able to focus it on those things which will increase your happiness and effectiveness. Otherwise, your head will become full of things that, while true, only drag you down. Maybe I will learn to jettison truth and true optimism for happy delusions and personal opportunism. Maybe I will grow up and join the rest of you...and we will get together for a drink after work and laugh derisively (but not too unkindly, of course) at all the whiny losers out there. Or maybe I'll just kill myself. Neither choice seems particularly likely at this point- it's more probable that I'll continue to whine and fail for a dozen or so more years until some disease or accident makes it all moot. And that's the most depressing choice, or lack thereof, of them all... So go about your business, and for god's sake don't listen to this crap. Any illusions or justifications you use to make your life work are probably preferable to any truth I might have to offer.

Monday, June 25, 2007

cause and effect If you can't stand the heat, check to see if the AC is working. Yea, after spending all that time whining about the heat, it finally occurred to me that maybe there was a reason. If only everything in life had such a direct cause and effect relationship. If you've ever had to replace an air conditioner, then you may know what I'm going through. If not, try to imagine your minimum level of comfort as a necessity...and go just past the total of all the money you could possibly scrape together (or promise to pay back someday) in order to just get back to that level. Perhaps the easy things don't get remembered as well (etc.), but I've never had a problem that required professional visits that didn't manage to stretch across at least one weekend or holiday down-time. If a car breaks down, you can bet it's after five on a Saturday. I'll never forget the refrigerator going belly-up right before Thanksgiving. And in this case, it was a long hot weekend between the Mystery of the Rising Mercury and the proposed sequel, the Return of the Ghost of Climate. Once I realized there was a crisis, I was able to function almost like a decent human being. It is my specific oddness that I avoid pressure whenever possible yet leap bright-eyed into action when I sense that there's an immediate reason to panic. A fundamental perversity of character that drives me to sow discontent in the routine, and seek zen in the storm. Ha! "fundamental perversity of character", eh? Sounds pretty high-falutin'. Truth is, I'm just a devil's advocate of expectation. The poster child for reverse psychology. Give me a work schedule and I'm already setting aside time to slack. Give me a party and I mope. Give me a disaster and I'm a cucumber. Cool as, that is. Some people hire a personal trainer. What I need is someone like Kato from the Pink Panther...someone to keep leaping out of life's closets when I least expect it, just to keep me sharp. More crises, more calamities...bring 'em on. What doesn't kill me is just too goddam bad. Nah, it's just a broken air conditioner. But you wouldn't know it from the general feeling around this house. I would imagine about the same level of upset in the midst of a hurricane. I'm on EMT duty, watching everyone carefully for the slightest sign of heat-related medical conditions. I made emergency purchases at the hardware store (swamp cooler...no CFC's, but I do have to go to the well regularly to fill it up). I declared an Official Margarita Relief Effort and confiscated the blender as State Property... Frosty. The tequila is anejo, and the makeshift flares are burning nicely (sticky fresh hydroponic flares). Help should be on the way sometime Tuesday...no crisis can last forever, unfortunately. Too many snow days and you have to make up the time at the end of the year. I'd be a great person with which to be stranded. While it was still a life or death situation, I'd be the number one go-to guy. Once everything was well under control, however...that's when I'd flip and start eating people. You're all lucky it's too hot to have much of an appetite.

Thursday, June 21, 2007

hot. God damn, it's hot. Days like this, I really miss living somewhere with real weather. Used to be that summer was a great time, three or four months of finally getting to spend some time outdoors. Now summer is seven or eight months of pit stains, nasty air conditioning, and making sure the dogs don't keel over. Right now, Hamlet's just been laying on the floor for the last half hour, and he's still panting like we just ran around the block. It's 108 Fahrenheit. Before the summer's over, it could still go up ten degrees or so. I feel bad for these Vegas kids. Not only don't they get the full seasons, the summer doesn't mean shit. Hell, most of them don't even get the summer off from school. To me that's like growing up without Christmas. My wife hates the heat, cranks up the AC early in the year. I'd rather have the windows open, even on the warmer days...but today and yesterday were murder. I thought at first it might be the humidity, but it's only 5-10%. So it's just the heat. You wake up feverish after uncomfortable sleep and try to remember what the fuck made you move to this arid parking lot of a city. Whatever wind there is feels like a hair dryer in your face. Everything smells like roasting concrete. Our folks in Iraq and Afghanistan are probably getting this kind of shit every day, in addition to worryying about getting shot at. Is it any wonder that they sometimes do horrible shit? I'm not excusing it...but it's not unbelievable, not by a long shot. Human beings break so easily. We're not made very well, when you get right down to it. Which is strange, when you think of how costly we are. Today would be a good day for naughty ice cube fun. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that it's not gonna happen, though. And that's enough said about all of that. Sounds like a good way to end this.

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

what's up Been a little lax on the blogging lately. I'd like to say that it's because I have so much going on, but the truth is that I just don't feel like it. My energy level is average (for me), but my motivation and inspiration is lacking. Maybe that's not such a bad thing...I seem to produce the most output at either the high or low extremes. Neither one seems to me to be particularly conducive to quality. At the bottom end, it's usually just pathetic and narcissistic. At the top end, it's almost as pathetic but also filled with impulsive (and quickly extinguished) enthusiasm. Desperately fun or just desperate- these are my poles. And so here we are in the middle, where my inner critic and my inner muse stand in the dusty street at high noon, waiting for each other to make a move. It's times like this that even the phrases "inner critic" and "inner muse" seem laughably pretentious. It's times like this where I fully embody my negating tendencies; neither to create, nor to destroy. Nothing but slowly continuing to die- that's what "existing" amounts to. I run into a lot of people who like to tell me that they're doing just that. "What's up?" I say. "You know," they answer. "Same shit different day." "Just keeping busy", they say. "Getting by. Making it through. Staying alive." "Same here," I reply. "Can I get some fries?" It never fails to make me a little sadder inside. It seems to indicate the everyday despair, the dulling of the capacity of joy, exchanging involved living for mere meaningless survival. "Same shit different day? For fuck's sake, why do it then?" "What else is there?" "Well, you got me there," I say. "Might as well get some some fries with that." Sure, it's a conditioned, thoughtless response to the constant hailing we do to each other. Slightly more involved than saying "Hello" and having the other person say it back. For some reason we're doomed to constantly pretend we want to know about the other person, and doomed to respond with inanities when someone else initiates. Try deviating in any significant way from that dynamic- you get very strange results. Some uncomfortable silences, usually. "Hey, what's up?" you say. "Well, I'm desperately trying to discover if I have any inner resources to nurture in order to make whatever time I have left less dismal," I say. "You want fries with that?" you reply. The creative urge, or exasperation with convention, leads some to make this response as witty or personalized as they can bother to make it. Remember Norm from Cheers? His lines were classic. Most people don't quite attain that distinction, but the feel is the same. "What's up," I say. "The sky," you giggle. "That's a new one," I indulgently reply. "Do you have curly fries?" Still, it's what we have in the modern world to approximate courtesy and civility. If you reject the whole process, you're probably an asshole...even though the process is based on nothing of substance to begin with. What a mess! You know it's a farce, a game, but the absence of it would be even worse. "Hey, what's up," I say. "What do you care?" you reply. "You're right, I really don't," I admit. "Well, now we know we're both assholes." "Just take the fucking fries." Then sometimes you get the one-in-a-million response. It doesn't happen often...in fact, so close to never that it's almost not worth thinking about. "What's up," I say. "Oh, I'm trying to decide on a name for my first-level necromancer. It's down to either Fuchsia or Asenath." "I love you," I say. "Wanna go get some fries?"

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

BASIC boredom 10 PRINT "Sooo...what do you want to do?" 20 PRINT "I don't know...what do you want to do?" 30 GOTO 20 "Sooo...what do you want to do?" "I don't know...what do you want to do?" "I don't know...what do you want to do?" "I don't know...what do you want to do?" "I don't know...what do you want to do?" "I don't know...what do you want to do?" "I don't know...what do you want to do?" "I don't know...what do you want to do?" "I don't know...what do you want to do?" "I don't know...what do you want to do?" "I don't know...what do you want to do?" "I don't know...what do you want to do?" "I don't know...what do you want to do?" "I don't know...what do you want to do?" "I don't know...what do you want to do?" "I don't know...what do you want to do?" "I don't know...what do you want to do?" "I don't know...what do you want to do?" "I don't know...what do you want to do?" "I don't know...what do you want to do?" "I don't know...what do you want to do?" remember those days when everything was waiting to be discovered and there just wasn't enough time to do everything you wanted to do and please can i just stay up another half hour or later please can i stay out 'till midnight and the world is huge and full of glittering trinkets and new ideas and every rock i uncover reveals another world of complexity and mystery and so many things that i'll get around to really getting into in depth and buckle down and learn the basics so i can get the most out of everything and it's okay if this or that didn;t work out because there's still so much to find and so much time and why sleep and why sit and watch or listen to droning nonentities when there's more than a world out there and someday i'll have done everything and live in wise joy with all of these wonderful discoveries "I don't know...what do you want to do?" "I don't know...I guess I'll just watch some TV and then go to bed." asphyxiated child

Saturday, June 09, 2007

What am I saying? Another insomniac meaningless post. Are you as sick of them as I? Who I'd like to meet: Hannibal Lecter. I think the two of us would find many interesting things in common to talk about, and then he could eat the parts of my brain for which I no longer have any use. He's a brilliant professional, so he'd be able to pick the right chunks. I even have a nice little sharpened spoon for him. I imagine the top of my head coming off like a hardboiled egg's hemisphere, holding its shape as the suction slowly gives way. Bemused, he examines the ropy soup within, perhaps marking a spot or two with one of the Sharpies I like to keep handy for just these types of situations. What am I saying? Though he's certainly kept up with the latest work in neuroscience, nobody's managed to achieve that level of precision. We don't even know for sure where anhedonia resides- is it a chemical imbalance, or a habitual restructuring? He'd be more helpful as a psychiatrist...but then he'd probably just end up feeding my pancreas to visiting Greek aesthetes. What am I saying? He's a fictional character. He can no more help me than Dr. Benway or Dr. Prunesquallor (both of whom would be even more fun to invite to dinner). I need a real profesional...ar at least a more professional Attitude. Or...I could become fictional myself. That would solve many problems. There have been some glaring inconsitencies in the plot and character development so far. But then, who would do the writing? And how exactly would I go about becoming fictional? First, I'd need to remove all concrete evidence of my existence. Not too hard...I've lived like a rolling stone, for the most part. Wipe the hard drives and burn the old bills. Destroy the wallet. Any lingering cyberspace info can be dealt with by planting a few obscure rumors of a hoax. I was really just a teenage Korean girl with a sick sense of humor. Jjin Dda! What am I thinking? The credit companies, the DMV, the Social Security records...all of them keep records. Hell, I may even have an FBI file for all I know. Not to mention the three or four people who couldn't be convinced that I was a figment of their imagination. Damn you, independent verification! Okay...get a grip. So you can't become fictional. Maybe you could just lose yourself in fiction? You know, take the illusion a little too seriously? Suspend disbelief to the point that reality fades? Yeah, right. How long would that last? Movies, television, music...all over so quickly. Even a good dense book won't put me out for more than a day or two...even at my most lingering, I can kill a hundred pages in an hour. Buried in a stack of Eco and Michener, I'll have chewed my way out in a week. Add the entire Comedie Humaine and A La Recherche du Temps Perdue and that will slow me down while I rebuild my atrophied francais, but I'll still be back to stupid reality before summer's over. A good open-ended RPG or MMO might do the trick, but they have even lamer narratives than my life. If you think going to work every day for twenty years gets boring, try waiting for upper-level raid parties to form while listening to endless half-assed attempts to speak SCA Elizabethan on the roleplay server. For twenty years? I'd hotkey the /suicide command after six months. What am I saying? No self-respecting MMO can last 20 years with any kind of grace and innovation. Ultima Online is, what, ten years old this September? Sure, I stop back in every once in a blue moons, but you'd never catch me living in a cyber-reservation like that. It's isometric, for god's sake. Any world I inhabit must have three or maybe even four full dimensions. That's depressing- the real world seems like the best choice after all. I guess I can forget about closure. Or consistency. Or being rewarded for being a selfish, aggresive, amoral hunk with all my skills maxed out. Or some sense that there's a defining theme or point to it all. Well, I have heard a lot of people tell me that the world can be a fun and satisfying place. They never seem to get specific about How, though... Ah, fuck it. Bon appetit, Monsieur Lecter.

Thursday, June 07, 2007

Hate pt. 3 1. I don't believe in god, but if I did I'd have to despise him. I've been dealing with the problem of evil for most of my life and I have to conclude that either there is no god or he's a cruel monster. Don't even start with your "mysterious ways"; I cannot worship a slaughterer of innocents, who allows everything decent and praiseworthy to suffer and decay. In a sense, atheism for me is the only hope I have to still find anything worthwhile about life. 2. I believe in evolution and I despise it as well. Oh yes. There's nothing particularly praiseworthy about evolution. It's almost certainly the truth, and understanding it has advanced many of the scientific disciplines. However, it is a brutal and amoral force. Evolution does not care if human beings never become any more smart and/or kind, as long as they thrive. And, ultimately, it doesn't even care if we survive. Evolution would be just as happy with cockroaches ruling the planet. If human beings survive best as dull-eyed, amoral bureaucrats or extremist repressive murderers, evolution will make it happen. If freedom, creativity, intelligence, and joy are in the way of evolution, it will not think twice about eliminating those traits. So you can go for superstition or you can go for reason. Either way, we are ultimately at the mercy of a selfish, uncaring and brutal force. 3. I believe in fundamental truths. I'm not much of a relativist or postmodernist. I think truth does exist, even in many moral and ethical issues. But especially in scientific issues. A lot has been made about quantum indeterminacy but all that really means is that there's an extra variable to consider, not that any observation is fundamentally subjective. 4. Truth is what best fits all the information. The escape from solipsism is generally accomplished by adopting the "truth is what works" method. You cannot fully prove that other people exist, but life has a hell of a lot more consistency when you assume they do. So, in a very real sense, truth is not about what cannot be doubted, but about what hangs together best with all the other information. (I've read and heard some shocking assertions about the truth behind 9/11. It bothered me for a long time until I remembered what someone once said to me about JFK. "Okay, so the government and mafia and business elite are all in on it. You have proof. So who are you going to take it to? Who's going to make it right?" I'm not the only one who's heard that argument. And I know the answer. I also know how quietly the audience will get up and leave when asked to join the show. Nobody, especially in this age of over-hyped words like "freedom" and "individuality", wants to toss out their comfortable lies (until we have no other choice, and then it will probably be too late to do anything). The worst thing about the 60s was that the boomers not only dropped the ball but then spent the rest of their lives making it more difficult for anyone else to pick it back up. That includes you, Mr. Stone.) 5. Moral truths have different requirements. Morality and science are not really on the same level, I admit. You can get away with debating an ethical point forever...but the argument over whether two and two really equal four is not a fruitful one. And when it gets right down to it, practicality should not be the driving force in determining your morality. An ethics based on efficiency and practicality would work just fine as long as we're willing to do away with useless emotions and maudlin humanitarianism. If you're a Trek geek, imagine Vulcans without the intellectual distinction and that's probably what humanity would be like with purely practical morality. Humorless, dull, shallow or repressed love and caring, with no sense whatsoever of beauty and joy. But it would make for a more efficient and productive society, most assuredly. That is "what works", and that is why reason and efficiency are not necessarily the main ideals with which to make a better world. And that is why, ultimately, I despise "what works" as well. So I must admit that while I believe in Truth, I also despise it at the same time. I despise your brutal strength and your cunning weakness. All your hypocrisies and compromises. I think your baby is repulsive and I think your girlfriend is a plastic whore. Your mind is ugly and soft. Your success depends on the failure of ten others. You critique fine wine while young girls drink from shit-soaked puddles. NFL and NASCAR and NHRA mean so much more to you than "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness". Your religious think that sick queers are righteously cursed by god, while your queers revel in bad taste and shallow attachments. Your CEOs delegate the destruction of entire families and towns. Your farmers lobby for subsidies instead of finding better crops to grow. Your movies dull us and drug us and move vast amounts of money between idiots who don't know what to with it and other idiots who feed off them. The destructive symbiosis of cretin celebrities and self-satisfied sophisticate trash that support their lifestyle and dismiss it in the same breath. You loyal soldiers and ambitious career types who desperately pretend that you're not giving blowjobs for a living. You aging family types just cruising towards a banal retirement where you can travel to homogenized resorts or indulge, in a desultory way, your contemptible little hobbies. All you media-addicted youngsters with your shallow lifestyle allegiances. All you self-deluded parasitic academics and career intellectuals with your pointless debates and jargon and selling out for the bestseller lists. All you shrill idealists attacking your chosen targets with breathlessly righteous indignation and no grace or courtesy. All you dirty sloppy stupid 'common folk' all too happy to ruin what is built with pride and tradition. All you kneejerk loathers of the architects of civilization. All you visionary forward-thinkers who'd gladly mortgage everyone's future for your own place in history. All you manufacturers of life-saving products who'd rather watch sick and starving people than a declining profit margin. All us sick and starving people who'd rather complain and find external fault than come up with a way to change our situation. Fellow humans, I despise us. I won't mourn our passing one bit. We're far too stupid and cruel far too often for our occasional successes to redeem. Don't worry, I won't be climbing the observation tower with a sniper rifle. I may hate all of us so much that it makes me physically sick, but I retain just enough taste and pride not to join your brutal statistics. My only revenge is petty and pathetic: I will soak in your ugliness and barely survive, and look forward the small gleam of happiness I may achieve when I learn I'm finally allowed to leave it all forever. ____________________________________________ Ideally, I should leave it at that. Why ruin such a pure hate? Unfortunately, there are two immediate rebuttals. First, of course, is the objection that just maybe I'd be happier with the world if I was happier with myself. I can't deny it. Then again, I know I'd be happier on heroin but that doesn't inspire me to pick up the spike. Criticisms are either valid or they're not, no matter what the emotional state of the critic may be. And secondly, I don't really hate everybody. There's several people that I actually like very much. Friends are like drugs: good or bad, they help you think for a moment that the world isn't as bad as it really is. Escapism gets treated very roughly by people who haven't realized that the world is basically shitty and anything that makes it seem less shitty has some value. Having kids make you happy and hopeful? Escapism. Believing that science will make the world a better place? Escapism. Helping others to make the world better? Escapism. And if you think that means that I'm maligning these things, you've missed the point entirely. Right. Like I really believe anyone is still reading this.

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

sleepy addenda I don't think I ever figured out how to separate love, beauty, and ownership. Having any one of those implied all three to me. Lacking any of those compelled me to force it, or manufacture it. Sometimes it's just a matter of looking hard enough until you see it. Or making yourself see it, whether it's there or not. Always get your money's worth. Always use all the features. Press every button. Collect them all. Keep your eyes on the prize. Know where all the exits are. You can't love everyone who needs love. For one thing, you're just not that multifaceted. Secondly, there isn't enough time. Thirdly, nobody has that much love to give. And Lastly, you're likely to catch a disease. __________________________________________ Brutus has his stitches out and the vet was amazed at his speedy recovery. Visibly impressed. We're doing something right. In another two weeks he'll have most of his freedom back (still no upstairs or running fetches, but sofa privileges and walks to the mailbox). __________________________________________ I finally have the use of both ears. The world is in stereo again. I found myself slurring my speech nasally, eerily similar to the characteristic vocalizations of the hearing-impaired. I was also wondering what alarm clocks for the deaf are like. Do they depend on vibration, or light? The experience taught me to value my hearing. So we had a Cradle of Filth fest tonight. Actually, I did have the surprising feeling that it wouldn't be so bad, to be deaf. I was driving back from the vet with one ear plugged and one deafened by the freeway roar coming through my permaently open Element window. I thought of how important music was to me and how frustrating it would be not to be able to hear what people are saying, and then I shocked myself by not being terrified and/or saddened by the prospect. It would certainly let me focus- or escape- much more easily. But that's all moot now. The wax has given way. Halleluia, the dam burst and the waxen tide rolled forth. The Berlin Wall of my right eardrum has crumbled, and the Cold War of partial deafness is over. You've never seen such a color from something your body made. A peculiar reddish brown, like maybe some sap dried on a tree trunk. Yuck. Old wax take a look at my life, I'm a lot like you were. Gross. Still with me? Were you ever?

Monday, May 28, 2007

memorial days Well, that makes three people who've reminded me of my upcoming birthday. Which, I estimate, equals about half the people in the world who know it. That's pretty much how I like it, I guess. No, I don't really care about my birthday. Either positively or negatively. I'm not one of those aging folks to whom birthdays are a depressing symbol of their onrushing mortality. Maybe I will be, if I live long enough to deserve to be called Old...but for now, I'm well aware of the passing of time and the lateness of the day. I think about these concepts frequently, whether it is the anniversary of my birth or any other moment of any other day... ...which may explain why I am unable to dedicate the day to celebration. As a kid, of course, any reason was a good reason for presents and cake and ice cream. But as an (let's just pretend for now) adult, I just don't feel that I deserve any designated personal attention. It embarasses me, and it feels forced and empty. "Hey _________, this is Your Special Day. Just for you. Because of an accident many years ago that happened when the sun and the earth were in this approximate position. You share it with hundreds of thousands of other people who are equally meaningless, and tomorrow another hundreds of thousands of people will have their own Special Day." I'm pretty bad at remembering birthdays, myself. I've got my wife's down, and I'm ususally within a day or so of my mother's and my father's. My sister's is easy because it's the same as mine. But for everybody else in the world, it's just another opportunity to prove that I'm a selfish and uncaring bastard with a shitty memory. Plus, I may be the only person in the world that absolutely hates gifts. I know, I know...how can someone hate gifts? They're free, they're fun, and they symbolize that someone is actually thinking about you! You'd have to be an insane moron jerk to hate gifts! I guess I'm an insane moron jerk. On the emotional side, I always feel embarrased when someone gives me something...because I never feel like I deserve it, or even have the emotional capacity to truly appreciate it. If a gift ends up at the bottom of the closet, I feel bad that I don't care enough about the person who gave it to me. If I use it all the time, I feel like I care more about the gift than the person. Even when they do turn out to be useful...just one example: I have a little set of barbeque tools outside on the patio that my brother sent me a few years ago at christmas. Every time I grill something, I think about how I haven't talked to him in a long time and how fucked up the situation is right now in our family. Thanks. Would you like your steak rare, medium, or charred and blackened with impotent guilt? On the practical side, gifts almost always suck. They're usually nothing you really need or want, so they both disappoint and take up space. And I can't help looking at them and contemplating the wasteful consumer structure that most gifts represent, with the all the time and resources that it took to bring them to me. So here's a list of the things I want for my birthday this year. Don't worry if you can't find any of them at the mall. I don't expect to get anything I want, anyway. 1. A valid sense of purpose and meaning. 2. A time-machine. Or, at the very least, a Reset button. 3. A drastic reduction in the overall suffering and sorrow of the world. 4. A natural, unforced emotional response to something. 5. Self-discipline. I have surplus Self-Awareness that I'd be willing to trade. 6. Talent. At this point, I don't even care what kind, as long as it pays off somehow. I guess that's the same as #1. 7. A bigger heart so that I can love the people who deserve it instead of pitying or resenting so often. I guess that's the same as #4. 8. The ability to forgive myself or make up for all the crappy things I've done to people and to myself over the years. You don't even have to wrap it. 9. A nice little box of Just shut the fuck up and be happy that anyone cares enough about you to remember.

Saturday, May 26, 2007

FAQ Q: Can I write a masterpiece? A: No. Not enough talent or taste. Q: Can I write a good novel? A: No. Not enough inspiration or discipline. Q: Can I write a bestseller? A: No. You have no clue what people want, and you suck at action and dialogue. Q: Can I write a cult favorite? A: No. You are out-of-touch and you can't fake authenticity. Q: Can I write non-fiction? A: No. What do you know that is worth researching and writing about? Q: Can I write a good song? A: No. You lack any flair for melody and phrasing. Q: Can I write a good poem? A: Can anyone? Q: Can I write a blog? A: No. Nobody gives a shit. Q: Can I write a shopping list? A: No. You have no money and are afraid to leave the house. Q: Can I finish this senten A: No. Now shut up and go to bed, crybaby. Tomorrow is full of possibilities.

Friday, May 25, 2007

this is one fine wine Current mood: okay I feel okay, thanks. The storm that was on the horizon has either broken up or moved off in another direction. There's always the chance it will return, but for now I'm trying to enjoy the sunshine...and think up better metaphors... "The Best" by AND YOU WILL KNOW US BY THE TRAIL OF DEAD The mime's conceit has conquered over real beauty Grinning from a mask of hollowed bone Where a human is somewhere to be found But where I don't know And things couldn't be better From behind the halls we cannot pass Hear the muffled traces of a boyish laugh Hear the monster screaming "what have I become?" Before his looking-glass And things couldn't be better This is one fine life This is one fine wine This is one fine wife This is one fine lie And things couldn't be better They are the best (sound of woman sobbing. pleading "Don't go!") As always, it must be heard....without the music you can't get the sense of mood that the band so perfectly expresses. I'm a little too old to really feel that a song has been written especially for me, but thanks anyway, guys. Like a lot of people, when I was a little kid I'd come up with all sorts of stories based on songs that I liked. After a bit of schooling and learning, I turned more toward lyric interpretation; the big question became "what do they mean?" Later, most of what I wrote about music was reviews...a good way to show off, but not very creative or meaningful most of the time. So now I'm all the way back to writing stories. They're just not as much fun as they used to be. This is one fine life Brutus is recovering. He's off the antibiotics (down to one pain pill twice a day) and we're taking him in next week to have the stitches removed. After that he may have a wider range, maybe the whole downstairs...if the vet thinks Brutus is ready for it. I don't want to rush it, but it makes me sad to see him in a cage when I know he really wants to run around and explore. I must be careful not to identify too much; he's just a dog, after all. I called up my doctor yesterday to ask "Hey, what's up? Are you gonna tell me I'm dying, or what?". I got the answering machine. A few hours later, an assistant called me back to say that the tests came in fine, no cancer or diabetes or glandular disorders or leprosy. I guess that's it, then. Despite all expectations, I'm healthy. Why is that kind of a relief and yet kind of a let-down? I know why. Because I want a definite reason why I feel so bad so much of the time. Physical problems are so much more cut and dry. Maybe I'm just looking for an excuse for my withdrawl. Though I sincerely believe that I'd like to laugh and do normal things without so much effort and angst. This is one fine wine I may be a little bit of a snob once in a while, but usually it's just because I see no reason why people would want crap instead of good stuff. I'm definitely not a wine snob, though...while I do enjoy the taste and feeling of a glass or two of red wine, especially with a meal, I'd be lost in a blind test between Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Shiraz, etc., and absolutely lost trying to figure out much of a difference between the brand and year of any given wine...I just don't care enough to do the research. However, I'm just enough of a wine snob to be a little critical of all the hicks among my loved ones. Among the other things my parents are exploring during retirement, they're making wine. They grow their own grapes and everything. The only problem is, all of their wine tastes like Mad Dog or Manishewitz...ridiculously, tooth-hurtingly sweet. I've even seen my mother ADD sugar to her wine while drinking it. It's weird when you get old enough to think of your parents the way they once must have thought of you: "Ah, let them play. They don't know any better. As long as they're happy." This is one fine wife I don't have quite the same feeling with my wife. She also prefers her wine too sweet (maybe it's a jewish thing?). I get the strangest ideas, though...I'm not really trying to push wine on her, but I do think it compliments a meal better than, say, diet fucking coke. And it may be a bit healthier, too...but I guess the jury's still out on that one. This is one fine lie. And somewhere along the way I got the idea that my ideal future involved drinking wine rather than diet fucking coke. I don't know if I can explain this accurately. There are several vague details floating around my head regarding my possible desired futures. Not major details. I'm not anticipating drinking wine constantly someday. I just have, in the back of my head, the idea that when my life gets closer to the way I want it to be, there will be some wine around. A glass in the evening as the sun sets, laughing with close friends. Maybe it's an acquired subliminal symbol of The Good Life, ultimately pointless. But it's obvious that my wife doesn't much care for real wine (i.e., wine that doesn't taste like alcoholic grape jelly). So that kind of denies that ideal future, doesn't it? And things couldn't be better Okay, so I'm making too much out of it. I can do without the wine. I've learned that making a relationship work is about compromise and priorities. Along the way, I've stopped doing certain things that we can't both share, and it didn't kill me. Along the way, I've stopped focusing on certain things which aren't a mutual priority, and it hasn't killed me. One must make sacrifices for the greater good. It won't kill me that my wife prefers diet fucking coke over wine. If everything else is so good, it's not a big deal at all. They are the best But everything else is not so good. Turns out that the wine issue is a metaphor, isn't it? I'm a little too loyal and considerate to go much farther into detail. In fact, I kind of regret the little I've already written. But sometimes it has to come out, and instead of any close friends to talk to, I have an infinite number of undefined and almost certainly uncaring possible online readers. Pathetic. So where's the line between self-expression and betrayal? I guess I'm drawing it right here. But everything else is not so good, thanks. And the storm will come down on me, sooner or later.

Monday, May 21, 2007

invalid subject line Right now: Lee Marvin is giving a monologue about the end of the world. Scary and lovely words coming from my speakers, accompanied by violins and cellos which swoop in the sad lazy curves of a seagull over a broken beach in autumn. Kingdom of Fear lifeless on the floor, another twice-read book by another dead favorite. They're almost all gone, now...these men who would be my heroes if I could only still believe in heroes. My shelves and speakers are full of dead men, a chorus of reassurance and despair and encouragement and criticism. All I have to do today to maintain my rock bottom level of self-respect is mow the lawn. That's it; maybe a half-hour's work here in desert suburbia. The worst thing will be a glaring sun on my bare head, and maybe tiny concern about poisonous critters as I unroll the reel of electrical cord. I should have done it this morning, before the sun grew so hot. I thought about it as I put out the garbage and saw my wife off for work. But 7 or 8 a.m. is a bit too early for electrified yard work, or Yarking as the two of us have come to call it. Afternoon is safe. Anybody who has a bitch about the noise will not have a leg to stand on. I have no reason to Lodge a Complaint about the neighbors who have adopted Noise and Repetition as a family religion- after all, children like to scream bloody murder for the fun of it, and it only happens during the duty-free 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. hours. I am not the cranky old man who tells the kids to turn off that god damn rock and roll music...or hip-hop, for that matter, though it does grate that Subwoofers on Wheels roll through regularly during the wee hours. Yes, I understand the urge to blast your pre-packaged individuality from the open windows of your car. I've done it myself. It's a defiant shout-out, you want to force yourself on uptight strangers and just maybe bring a smile to one of the Few Who Understand. It's a big sack of bullshit and pretty pathetic whn you get down to it, but because I know the urge, I can't bitch too much... And I'm still sitting here typing and the grass is still tall and crazy. I've done nothing all day but a few minutes with a lawn mower will earn me the right to do nothing for the rest of the day. Above all, we cannot be seen to be lazy...that's why you tidy up a little, desperately, with an eye for the Obvious Messes, when the deadline starts to come down. Shove the dishes into the dishwasher and the dog toys back into Pooh Corner. A little kid with a bulging closet door greeting his stern parents.... Time is dead; I've been killing it for so long it doesn't even have a zombie form anymore. There's one more rung down the ladder before I hit the hard ground, and that rung is Total White Trash Mess...do you know it? Empty beer cans and cigarette butts, broken furniture in the house and broken cheap plastic toys in the yard. A life given over to alcoholic stupor and sullen rage, to 24/7 television and night shifts at the only place that would still hire you. And that rung is in my field of view, with the even scarier revelation that it is Not The Bottom, that's even worse...staggering down the street in dirty stains and sleeping piss smell on rotting cardboard. Two steps away. First I decide not to mow the lawn, then I buy a case of beer and a lottery ticket, maybe get arrested or get hooked up with the Meth friends...so many possibilities! How can I say I've got no possibilities left? There's so many things I can still do... Lee Marvin replaced by Marty Robbins replaced by Tom Waits. The kids just wouldn't understand. My friends just wouldn't understand. Wait, am I thinking of The Strokes? Why, for god's sake, would that crew of fashionable dilettantes steal into my thoughts? Lee and Marty and Tom would whip the living shit out of those heiress pussies. Nail their scrawny balls to the wall of the barn. Except that the Heroes are alll dead or crying impotently or making important greedy deals while The Strokes are still young and vital and spewing semi-ironic semi-postmodern rubbish that almost sounds good compared to everything else that's spewing these days... Not that I know what good ol' Tom is up to these days. Any more than I know what Rob or Shay are up to. But I'm pretty sure that they aren't stuck like sodden half-eaten fast-food to their sofas, typing words of rage and regret instead of mowing their lawns. Maybe they're force-feeding antibiotics to their stubborn dogs twice a day, but I doubt it. Maybe they're waiting for a call from the doctor to confirm that there is, in fact, Something Wrong With You...but I doubt it. Maybe they're desperately trying to convince themselves that there is actually One Thing that they can do better than anyone and they just haven't found it yet...that's more likely, by a small margin, but I still seriously doubt it. Some people speak poetic mystic gibberish...some people speak in the rarefied terms of Law or Medicine or Academia...some use metaphor, some irony, some surrealism. Comb the sands and 99 times out of a hundred you'll walk away, convinced that there is no Message, just a desperate smokescreen. 99 times out of a hundred you'll be right. The real ones who did in fact have a message know that the smart thing is to conceal it, for those with the vision and dicipline to Penetrate the Bullshit. Turn away the fattened herd and gather close the hungry wolves, right? Not me, dude. I'm just not a maker of puzzles. The only weapon I have is long-winded obscurity, and that suffices. If you can read this, there is no further message. If you are reading this, congratulations and condolences. Honesty is the last refuge of the Liar. A lifetime of sneaking through crowded sunny streets has led me to unabashedly exposing myself in a darkened, abandoned building. Ho ho, that's metaphor though, and aren't we disclaiming that? I do so love words, I'm indulgent with them like a proud grandpa. Go ahead, kids, shit on my treasures. You look so cute and I'm so tired of laying down the law. And still I type instead of mowing. Getting tight now, only about an hour to spare. What will it be, dude? The Bare Minimum or not even that much? The pinhole became a minor leak became a gush became a torrent. The water pressure equalized, and now you're just floating...sticking your mouth above the waterline every few minutes for that gasp of breath...wondering why even that is necessary. The tyranny of breath. The tyranny of urine and feces. The diablolical opression of waking up in the morning and cramming something, anything, into your face just to make shit and squat through another day. It seems I'm going downhill again. I'd hoped for a better, brighter, more productive period of respite before the next drop. Maybe this is just a short dip in the road...maybe I've said that before. Was it true then? This time, next week, will I be laughing about these dim few days, or curled up in the corner with the tired unreleased tears drying on my dulled eyeballs? The climactic buildup of the latter half of "Only in Dreams" is one of the finest moments the rock world has given us in the last twenty years. The fact that it comes from a mostly-joking band of nerds doesn't taint a milisecond of its power. It is a crashing, resounding, keening wail of pure tension and release and I could listen to it for hours...with one ear, still. Okay, 2:55 p.m. and one last smoke before I mow. I'm doing it; I have no choice. Not for anyone but myself...a reminder that no matter how far down I am, I can still maintain a bare minimum of appearances. In this way I predict that my corpse will be fooling people for at least a week or two before anyone realizes that I'm dead. "But he waved..." says the sobbing neighbor, "he talked about the weather and got his mail and his lawn was freshly trimmed. I never thought for a second that he was some sort of goddamned zombie..." Strange thoughts on a Monday afternoon. I narrowly avoid burning a hole in my crotch like good ol' Chief Smoking Moccasin....without even the excuse of high-quality heroin. I sweat slightly in my skin. My chest is tight almost all the time. I am in an isolation tank with invisible walls and waters. Floating, that damn floating metaphor again, not even any current to make my flesh bob and wander. This is the obligatory relief statement. A quick bit of humor or nonsense to dispel the darkness. The mass has ended, go in piece. And now, to mow.

Saturday, May 19, 2007

two day physical ...as if any of you give a shit, right? :D Strange way to start a post. Good way to end one...or all of them, for that matter. I have a piece of cotton taped to my arm. The guy who took my blood was a tall, thin, young black man who would not have looked at all out of place in a dark suit and bow tie, handing out incense at the stop light. As-Salaam-Alaikum, my brother. Fuck you if you can't take a stereotype now and then. He was efficient and casually courteous, so I was very surprised to hear that he was born and raised in Vegas. His occasional stutter was mildly endearing, especially when he instructed me on how to piss in the plastic cup. I felt a sort of low-level pride that I took it so easily in stride... ...the same feeling I had yesterday when the doctor asked if I had any trouble getting erections. "None," I responded, without a hint of hesitation born of embarassment or offense. Or conceit, for that matter. "Why no, doctor," I should have said. "My penis is as finely-tuned and responsive as it was when I was nineteen. Probably more so..." Enough of that. So the physical yesterday was freakishly brief; they tested my blood pressure (excellent, thanks) and my pulse ("stay 72 come shine or rain" exactly as the song goes). The doctor, as I said, was a young woman. I suppose it's inappropriate to notice that she had a nice smile and pretty eyes. I also suppose that with an inferiority complex I should yearn for an old paunchy warty male doctor instead, but I do so pride myself on my ability to take things in stride. I was fully prepared to disrobe and let her see my ridiculous excuse for a physique, but it never came up. The closest she came was peering into my plugged ear and placing the stethoscope on the front of my shirt. Which leads to my first confusion. Was this a physical exam? I've had more detailed examinations during a shoe shine. Where was the "turn your head and cough"? What about the tongue depressor? The knee hammer? In addition to the aforementioned erection inquiry, she asked me a handful of general questions. How was I sleeping? Uh...pretty normal, for an out-of-work writer who likes naps and who'd rather see the sunrise at the end of his day. How would I describe my general mood? I laughed out loud at that one. "Pretty dark," I replied, "but I don't know if that's a symptom or just a character thing." She didn't pursue it any further, but maybe it will come up again later. She gave me a piece of paper covered with little check boxes and mysterious abbreviations. Apparently the blood tests were not done in-house. "You can go to any of the places listed on the back," she said. "Nothing but water for 12 hours before." Not a problem, but that meant I'd have to wait to the next day. And that was all; apparently I'd have to be much more physically in distress before I recieved anything more thorough or intrusive. It would have been a relief if I'd been dreading it, but I walked out of there feeling somewhat short-changed. In a nice coincidence, one of the blood test places was in the same building, less than ten minutes from my house. I returned the next day, slightly worried that a few sips of vanilla coke would skew the results. As I drove up, I was again reminded of a casino; there was a big parking lot with a U-shaped drop-off at the main door, and valets to park your car for you. Also, the main entrance had that same hotel smell, cigarettes and scented industrial cleaning products. The doctor's office was on the sixth and top floor, so yesterday I was able to get a view of the city like few other buildings in this part of town can provide. I almost expected to turn the corner and find a row of slot machines. So we're back to my opening paragraph. The Black Muslim produced a syringe that wouldn't have looked diminuative going into a rhino, I squeezed the rubber ball (I could have brought a few of my own, if Brutus hadn't needed them), and he took the blood. He gave me the cup and showed me the restroom. I had a little trouble peeing. Not out of anxiety or embarassment; I just didn't have to go right then. I waited around a bit, thought about Niagara Falls and watermelons, and eventually managed to squeeze out a mere shotglass of urine. It didn't fill the cup, not by a long shot. I placed it next to the sample from the guy before me, and wistfully admired the amount that he'd produced. It was enough to keep Stilgar hydrated for a week. I wonder what it will all mean. How much can they tell from a beaker of blood and a shotglass of urine? I kinda wanted to check all of the boxes on the list, just to get the full picture...except that some of the tests seemed a little, well, scary. What the hell is a genprobe? I'm 99.99% sure that I don't have any STDs, so we can avoid the urethra insertion. Just thinking about it makes my balls wither. Usually this would be the part where I say snide things about the staff and question their ability to do their jobs. But I just don't have the heart for it. They were all decent to me and seemed like they knew enough. The Black not-Muslim in particular seemed like quite a nice guy, though his cubicle did have a worrying number of religious details. Apparently he knew a lot of ministers. So in a few days we'll know if I've got diabetes or leprosy or synthococcus novae. I'm actually kinda hoping I do have something, because otherwise I have no excuse for feeling like I do. And it just goes to show how pathetic my life is when I actually look forward to the excitement that a horrible disease would bring.

Saturday, May 19, 2007

a dream I just woke up from a disturbing dream to find that I was in an unfamiliar house. I was so tired, all day yesterday. I don't know why; it's not like I exerted myself or awoke particularly early yesterday morning. All I did was get a blood test and do some grocery shopping. Not a big day by anyone's standards. After dinner, around 7pm or so, my wife and I took a nap. We both woke up a couple of hours later, but I was too groggy to stay awake...and just dimly aware that my sleepiness was likely to manifest as irritability. So I dragged myself up the stairs to bed. My dream was unpleasant. There was something slightly Scorsese about it, a 70s Robert DeNiro Hell's Kitchen feel. Also a touch of 70s splatter film. The narrative, whatever cohesive narrative existed, is swiftly vanishing as I write this. I remember I was at a college, a collection of older and vaguely religious buildings in the midst of a big eastern city. I was with a small group of guys, a tight group of friends. Think of the boys from Sleepers but older & more collegiate, maybe more like the crew from Flatliners. There was a creep, a stalker (a pussy version of Travis Bickle) who was bothering a girl either in our group or directly connected to it. We tried to warn him off but he got aggresive and pulled a knife (in the dream it seemed like a razor-sharp CD...that's an odd detail). So we beat the shit out of him. And then it got into horror-film territory. The creep started picking us off one by one, earlier or later in life. There was a spooky scene walking home from classes in the dark, taking the long way around because we saw something not right about a big dog in front of a church on campus. Also, there was a trip to the movies to catch the latest showing...I parked in the wrong lot and couldn't get into the building...I tried to walk around the block to find the open entrance but got lost...my friends had all arrived at the correct spot and I was alone and lost and I knew he was after me... The last scenes from the dream took place in the town where my parents live. I was visiting for a holiday or maybe just after graduation. I remember making a copy of something, a tape or video. I remember being at a dinner party, and chatting with a guy who was putting together a Yes tribute band. He knew the lyrics to TFTO, amazingly. I gave him my number and thought vaguely that I shouldn't be letting strangers know where I lived, what with a psycho after me and all... And then I woke up. I'd slept, on and off, from around 7pm to about 4am the next morning. My wife had come up to join me in bed at some point. I realized I had no idea where my glasses were. I felt around on the windowsill next to my side of the bed, where I usually place them at night. No luck. I fumbled about on my wife's nightstand. I found her glasses but not mine. I thought just maybe I'd taken them off before I came upstairs. So I crept down to the sofa area to look, and halfway down the stairs was struck with the vivid and unsettling feeling that I was in someone else's house. Okay, it was just after a very creepy dream. And without my glasses, it is bound to look a little unfamiliar. Not to mention that my right ear is still plugged, which seems to isolate me a little further from reality to begin with. But for a few eerie minutes I really felt like I'd awoken somewhere else, somewhere that had more in common with my dream than with my real life. I wasn't exactly expecting the Travis Bickle to pop out, brandishing his sharpened CD at me, but then again...it wasn't as amusing a prospect as it could have been. I finally went back upstairs and found my glasses on the vanity in the bathroom. My wife must have either taken them off me while I slept, or picked them up off the bed where they had slipped off. Conscious or no, she's always good at restoring my sense of reality. For better or worse. Okay, so I'm awake. What now?

Thursday, May 17, 2007

interlude: LDS visitors Current mood: full Hamlet just put the fear of Dog into two nice young Mormon boys. When someone calls or comes to my door, I rarely answer. Typically, I cower in the shadows with my hands over my ears, waiting for the knocking and ringing to stop. Come to think of it, that's what I do even when nobody is there. Anyway, today, for some reason, I actually got up and opened the door. Crazy, I know, but I looked through the peephole and saw the telltale white shirts, ties, and bicycle helmets that are the de facto uniform of the Latter Day Saints. The only other non-professional group of people that are commonly seen with those helmets are the mentally retarded. I'm making no further comparisons between the two. The Mormons are pretty easy to deal with. I've heard it can be somewhat more difficult if you happen to be living in their province, that eerily, breathtakingly beautiful piece of land called Utah. Last I heard, Utah was still nominally part of the United States...but anyone who's ever been there knows that it resembles Canada more than anything else; a portrait of America painted by a freshman art school student with delusions of rurality and no eye for detail. Getting a simple goddam drink in either place requires a certain local savvy and respect for The Rules that I never quite got the hang of. And Mormons are much like Canadians, only with 99% less beer. It may be slanderous to lay down a blanket description of both peoples as chiefly well-meaning and uncomplicated folks; I'm sure there must be intellectual Mormons and scandalous Canadians, but I have yet to meet one. That's just not true; I know at least one brilliant and unconventional Canadian, a college professor with a taste for big motorcycles and strange music. Perhaps the exception proves the rule? Especially if, like me, you happen to be talking straight out of your ass. Anyway, Mormons are notoriously well-behaved and they generally walk away calmly from anything that looks like a confrontation. The missionary aspect must be much easier in their far-flung outposts, where they slip in the Word of God while helping with things like food, shelter and healthcare. Here in Sin City the religious sell is not so motivated. If you're very lucky, you might catch someone who is so spiritually desperate that they'll consider hitching their psychic wagon to your gravy train. A long-term loser at the tables, possibly, or a new arrival- still able to be excited by possibilities...and neurotically open to any kind of human interaction. So when Hamlet began barking at the Mormons, their sales pitch just sort of dried up. He may be a big teddy bear of a dog, but that face and that bark can really give the opposite impression. And when one of the boys asked (out of pure politeness?) about the breed, I launched into a detailed description of bull-baiting. If you, like the Mormon boys, are unaware of the sport, allow me to enlighten. A few hundred years ago, the irreproachably classy Brits thought it was great fun to pit a dog and a bull against each other in a fight to the death. Unfortunately, the bull had rather an obvious advantage- being several times the height and weight of the dog and equipped with a battering ram for a head and horns like the devil himself. So the enlightened and culturally superior English decided to breed a dog that could take down a bull. They made it low to the ground, for an unbeatable center of gravity, with a jaw that provided approximately the same crushing power as a Hummer rolling over your skull (and not one of those pussy H2's, either...). And out of pure practicality, the trademark facial wrinkles of the Bulldog kept the mouth, eyes, and nose tolerably free from the copious amounts of blood gushing from the dying bull's throat. It was talk like this that made the facial expressions on the Mormon boys turn somewhat sickly behind their country-boy smiles. I was describing how the Bulldog lept immediately for the throat and hung there, despite furious thrashing, until well after the thousand-pound-plus bull was dead. I had Hamlet locked firmly between my ankles while he raged, but when he quieted down a little I let him trot forward and get a few nervous strokes from the missionaries. He began to growl again even as they were petting him, and I could see naked relief in their eyes when I called him back to me. I'd been formulating various objections to various religious ideas, but it seemed that they were uncharacteristically eager to move on. I didn't even get to ask if they'd ever been to Palmyra, New York (I have, several times...it's a nice little town, but hardly a Jerusalem or Mecca...except possibly for a day or so once a year, during the Hill Cumorah Pageant) or if they'd seen the results of the studies which state conclusively that the native Americans have no appreciable genetic material in common with the tribes of Israel. Poor kids, I probably knew more about their religion than they did. I scuttled my original plan of sitting them down comfortably, serving them mescaline tea, and putting Begotten on the big screen, while reading selected passages from my Penguin edition of the collected works of Donatien Alphonse Francois (a personal favorite: "nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author"). All the while staring into the ravenous eyes of my bull-slaughtering dogs...including the one who is confined, possibly for viciously brutalizing the last visitors, who can be sure? Just one hour of this sort of treatment would have turned those polite young boys into raving lunatics, or even worse, emo kids. Instead, I genially told them that their time would probably be better spent somewhere else, and wished them good luck. Why not? Of all the lies that will be peddled today, at least theirs requires no money down. Now if I could only get Hamlet to scare away the media, politicians, and entrepreneurs...

Thursday, May 17, 2007

puppy update, physical prep, etc We moved Brutus out of the kitchen. The tile floor was too hard and slippery, and one little spin-out on his way to the back door was enough. My wife ran out and bought a six-sided plastic fence that we set up in the living room. His movement is more restricted, which is better for the healing, and we can all be together, more or less. He may still see it as a punishment, but there's really no way to know or to convince him otherwise. I crawl in there with him from time to time in an attempt to give him the contact that I assume he needs. If he's active, we play a very short-distance game of catch; if he's sleepy, I lay there next him and read. Hamlet still gets noticeably nervous during these visits; I can't say why. Maybe he's just jealous/ protective or maybe he's just confused and only knows how to respond with anxiety and preparations for belligerence. If you want to anthropomorphize or psychoanalyze even further, you might change that last sentence to read "either he's being my wife or he's being me." Emotionally, it's all a bit wearing but nothing more than I can handle...or, to put it more accurately, nothing that pushes me any closer to the edge than usual. The worst seems to be behind us, in this matter. There are only two real challenges: pills and piss. Taking the dogs out is much more of a chore than it used to be; Hamlet has to go out first, in the back yard, while Brutus hobbles out the front to do what must be done. We do this to minimize the chances of a confrontation, or at the very least to keep Hamlet away from Brutus' wound. Aside: our vet assured us that Brutus didn't need an Elizabethan collar because Bulldogs' necks are so short they can't reach the area anyway. Makes sense, but Brutus is a long-legged variety of the breed, and so I've had to make him stop licking twice already. It's only the second time our usually flawless vet was wrong- the first being when he told us that Hamlet had around six months to live....over two years ago. Anyway, the pills are the other daily struggle; neither dog takes his pills easily. Brutus used to be okay with a pill every once in a while (Benadryl for the occasional allergic licking fit), but three pills twice a day is a bit much for him. Hamlet had never taken pills well, he resists just as much as he did a year ago, but at least it's only two pills once a day. We've started getting flavored, chewable pills but they just aren't available for each of these prescriptions. Money is a silent issue. Before the knee surgery, I felt (perhaps inaccurately) that I had a bit of slack to get my shit together. Now we're closer to the 'scraping by' level than I like to be (and probably far below where I beleive my wife would like to be, but up to now she hasn't complained...much...). I do not for a second begrudge the vet costs, or the prescription costs...but these things and others are putting more pressure on me to generate some kind of income. And I am still as lost about what to do about that as I was before this all happened. In between al the minor crises, I've escaped into the Shivering Isles and Beleriand. No paying jobs available in either location, unfortunately, and the experience doesn't sit well on a resume. 'Under management experience you wrote that you rose to lead the Dark Brotherhood and the Mages' Guild, all while ruling as the Mad God...impressive...and under references you listed someone named Turin Turambar...was he a previous employer?' I sent my mother roses for Mothers' day, and she called to thank me while we were at the vet on monday. I called back yesterday afternoon, ready to be slightly more forthcoming than I usually am when...uh...Everybody is at home with me. Bad timing, I guess...I got the answering machine. I smiled when I heard my father's voice saying "we will get back to you as soon as humanly possible". Must be a shared family urge to over-emphasize. I suppose I'm not the first to form an illusory bond with Stephen Colbert. Something about a straight-laced-seeming, ironic, irreverent nerd strikes some note of familiarity with me...I wonder if he still plays D&D. It's been about, oh, seventeen years or so since I last wrapped my pudgy hands around a 20-sided die. I remember it like it was yesterday- which, given how murky yesterday seems, is not as vivdly as it sounds. And now the physical. In about twenty minutes I will shower and dress and drive to the doctor. I am neither dreading it nor particularly looking forward to it. I am assuming that the diagnosis will be: "mostly okay, a few areas that need work". She will tell me to stop smoking, eat better, and for god's sake get a little exercise. I could give people the same advice but where's my fee? I'm wondering just how honest to be with her. Of course, I'm not going to lie or actively hide anything, but how far do I need to go? Should I admit that I suspect myself to be clinically depressed, a few small heartbreaks away from suicide? Should I detail the various substances that I've put into my body since my last physical, decades ago? Should I explain that my right gets plugged like this every spring from allergy season and my wife's eagerness for air conditioning? Should I let the doctor in on my almost total withdrawl from society? Probably not. But just like my father's "humanly possible", I'll most likely babble when the pressure is on. The typical anxious humor and mask of frankness, a facade of inappropriate honesty cushioned by an ironic laugh here and there. By the end of the visit I will have either frightened or amused everyone involved. And let's not forget the minor distaste or disgust that will undoubtedly lurk in the back of everyone's mind, not least in mine. That's twenty minutes gone. Wish me luck...

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

HST & brutus Every four years, for some strange reason, I seem to be drawn to re-read Hunter's "Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail". It helps me put into persepective the dark comedy that is always brewing, but especially when an election year begins its unsavory buildup. This was the first time that I realized I was born right around page 230 (of my paperback copy). In an odd little coincidence, HST mentions briefly that McGovern had to leave the primary trail briefly because his daughter was having complications duing childbirth- because the baby was premature. Of course, I understand that I couldn't possibly have been the only preemie born in the first half of June, 1971. Still, an interesting coincidence...if only to me. Plenty of connections to be made between '72 and '08. Nixon matches GWB as both universally reviled and yet enjoying a mysterious popular support. A messy war going on that nobody has the brains or the stomach to either win or end. The opposition candidates are a rogues' gallery of tepid political stereotypes and third-rate thinkers who firmly believe that America is best served by making sure nobody is offended or challenged in any way. Usually, even the lame compromise promises are immediately broken... Of course, there are differences; GWB is out no matter what, whereas Nixon was looking forward to Four More Years (the recent trouble at a DC hotel was not yet a Big Deal for the chief executive). The female candidate next year has a lot more of a chance to snag the Demcratic party nomination than Shirley Chisolm ever had (in fact, for many people it's a foregone conclusion at this point). And the biggest difference is that there's no crazy-smart Doctor of Journalism willing to ride around and provide something more interesting and real than the barrage of meaningless news bites that we'll see for the next year and a half. I'd say I was still in mourning, but Hunter's death left no such feelings. I am sad for the rest of us- because there will never be anyone who can do what Hunter did, or be who he was (which, as he well knew, was one and the same). For the man himself, I am glad. He left when the party was winding down to its bitter dregs, having outlived and outproduced (in terms of quality) almost all of his few peers. He chose his time, place, and method. We should all be so lucky. /obit ______________________________________ Brutus is home and recovering well. Perhaps not so happy, but there's only so much you can do to reassure a dog. A few days ago he had four legs and free reign, now he dangles a scarred and painful limb and is penned in a small enclosure. I would be more inconsolable.

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

let me go down in the mud where the rivers all run dry I'm glad I'm not the paranoid type. I've known plenty of them, and it's always fun to hear who is after them and why. Every once in a while, I indulge in that sort of thinking, and get a spooky little thrill when I realize just how many indications of persecution are readily available. We had been scheduled to drop Brutus off at the vet, late Sunday afternoon. For some unknown reason, the itinerant verterinary surgeon was foregoing his usual weekend visit...instead, he planned to arrive at our vet's office at 5 am Monday morning- which really should have indicated immediately to me that he was some sort of masochist, possibly haunted by some past immorality so vile that his life had turned into a constant quest to punish himself before the cosmos meted out its own horrible venegance. In any case, that let us hang on to our puppy until just before the vet closed, at 5pm on Sunday. They'd given me the option of bringing Brutus in Monday morning at 5am, but my own self-hatred allows just enough slack for me to sleep in until the sun rises. So instead we waited around all Sunday, everybody staring at each other silently with amorphous dread, even the animals- who couldn't have possibly known what was going on, right? Yeah, sure. If you are at all familiar with animals, you know quite well that they easily pick up on things...especially the things that we assume we're hiding successfully. We made the crosstown voyage and checked the little dude in. Sundays at the vet are like Sundays anywhere else: just slightly empty and quiet enough for people to realize that it's not quite just another day. At one point in the waiting area, I was slightly unnerved to realize that I was being stared at. The culprit was a little lap dog of the 'wiener dog meets hairy chiahuahua' variety. The unnerving part was that the little dog had only one eye, which was fixed on me like I was the Dog God himself. I saw the pathetic little tail wagging and I cursed the brain that made me instantly sympathetic to any wounded animal. We never did get the gory details, but the elderly couple who carried around this frankenfurter popeye testified vehemently about the skills of the veterinary surgeon. "You should have seen her face before," said the man. I had to assume he meant his dog and not his wife, who looked like she'd seen her share of trauma. Apparently the surgeon had more or less completely reconstructed over half of the poor animal's face; the missing eye was the only visible flaw. I had to choke back a wave of emotion as I watched her tail wagging. "You'd never know..." said the older man, and that's almost true. Dogs, for all their lowly connotations and rumors of humility, have it in them to humble us all. In fact, you'd have to look pretty hard to find an animal that truly suffers in a character comparison to man. The cockroach, maybe, but that's about an even contest. The cockroach and the human being are closer brothers than taxonomy would indicate. I watched a dog die once. It was laying in the middle of a suburban street. I may have missed the impact by thirty seconds or thirty minutes, depending on how long it took the big fella to die. But I arrived just in time to see that the last two things the dog did on this earth was 1. vomit up a thick, bubbling red-purple burst of lifesblood and 2. wag his tail. Was he wagging his tail because I'd pulled the car over and walked toward him, or was this just his last attempt to deal with the world before the darkness took him? Dogs will wag their tails when in extreme pain. It goes to show that we don't really understand our animal frienda as well as we think we do. The same acts can mean so many different things. From "I'm so glad to see you again" all the way to "Are you here to hurt me some more?" This is the sound of me torturing myself. Anyway, we let the dull-eyed attendant lead Brutus away. I had to pretend I was heading for the same door, or he would have dug in and forced the aide to try to pick him up or something equally disastrous. My wife and I drove away, and our bleakness was fought by one simple sentence that I use whenever I'm deading something specific: "This time tomorrow, the worst will be over." Well...around 8 or 9pm, my wife and I were heroically self-medicating ourselves into a stupor and stressing ourselves out over the restless low-level panic of our other bulldog. Hamlet was panting heavily, wandering around, looking in every corner for his buddy and coming back to the sofa to stare at us with confused and scared eyes. Suddenly, the phone rang. It was the vet surgeon's liason, calling to tell us that there had been a delay at the airport in Utah and the doctor wouldn't be coming on Monday. And we could come and pick Brutus up right then if we wanted to...but if we could bear to let him stay an extra day, the surgeon would be in on Tuesday morning to do the job. Umm, okay. It was with a combination of habitual sloth, reason, and empathy that we decided to let Brutus stay at the vet. It would be unnecessary stress for all of us to pick him up, simply to have to drop him back off in less than 24 hours. No big deal, really, just a day off on the timetable. I had a doctor's appointment for Tuesday myself, so I had to make sure to cancel it first thing on Monday. I've been screwed by "late cancellation fees" in the past, and I didn't need another reason to dread the upcoming physical (my first in 10...15...20 years?). Again, no big deal- they even managed to fit me in only a week later, which in the medical scheduling world must be some kind of miracle. I cruised through Monday, I felt that I was stable because I'd done my extreme sadness immediately, during those first four hours after the vet had diagnosed Brutus. The mental struggle was over and all I had to do was concentrate on the little guy's recovery. "This time tomorrow, the worst will be over." Except- and you did see something coming, right? - except that at 6pm yesterday, the phone rang again. The liason again. The surgeon was late- again. And this time, the surgeon wasn't just running late, he was calling off the trip. And, because of Mother's Day, he wouldn't even be in this coming weekend. So...would we like to come down and pick Brutus up? "Yes, we'll be right there," I said calmly, and threw the telephone across the room with a burst of grim rage. It was a very quick trip- the Element can in fact attain speeds of over 90 m.p.h., even with a missing driver's side window. And very quiet...my wife rarely does more than offer one or two small innocuous comments when she sees the rage is in me. I was pretty grim but I refused to vent on the vet drones. Luckily, no talk of cost was raised, so I had no reason to explode. It wasn't their fault, after all...but I sure wasn't going to waste my time doing my usual happy-go-lucky routine on them to make them feel better. We were very happy to see the little guy again, and he couldn't trot out of there fast enough. Kate even managed to scam some chewable pain medicine for him, gratis for our trouble. "This time tomorrow, the worst will be over." Oh yeah? That's assuming that schedules don't change, isn't it. Looks like I'll have to get a new prayer. When I was a toddler, I had the good ol' "If I should die before I wake" and that was about as comforting as you can expect. When I was a pre-adolescent bookworm, I had the Bene Gesserit Litany for Fear. You may object that there's something fundamentally invalid about using a fictional prayer (either example qualifies) to boost your spirits. To that I can only say: a priori, anything which tells you that everything will be all right is fiction. So go ahead and use whatever combination of lies that you need to keep you calm. So the little dude is here with me right now, a bit more sedate than usual but seemingly none the worse for wear. I'm still very concerned that he's really in considerable pain, but he doesn't show it. He's not even limping noticeably anymore. And guess what? The vet liason called me around noon to apologize. Apparently everyone there could tell that I wasn't happy. I suppose I should applaud their observation of the obvious...many businesses don't consider justified anger and disillusionment noteworthy unless the customer gets dangerously unhinged. They sure as hell don't care if you take your money elsewhere anymore. There is no elsewhere anymore. But I digress. And she also informed me that the surgeon had decided to violate the hallowed occasion and come n on Mothers' Day after all. She didn't think there'd be any problem getting Brutus operated on, as so many people would be spoken for that day. When the fuck did Mothers' Day become such a holy occassion? Did the Pope meet with the CEO of Hallmark at some point? I don't want to offend all the folks who are conditioned to grant holy martyr status on anyone who happens to drop another squalling resource drain from her distended vagina, but Mothers' Day has only slightly more holiday potential than, say, Arbor Day, or Secretaries' Day. More than Just Another Day, I admit, but not exactly something that should be a major blackout on everyone's calendar... ...okay, that's mostly just misplaced anger. This time next week, the worst will be over...

Saturday, May 05, 2007

too many notes Current mood: quixotic My list of unanswered questions is one smaller today. I finally found out why my ice cubes sometimes form gravity-defying icicles. Thank you, internet. Thanks especially to StumbleUpon. I wasn't looking for the answer. I probably could have Googled it easily enough, but I never thought to look. So the question sat near the back of my mind until beautiful randomness brought the answer to me. Well, not purely random- StumbleUpon sticks to the categories you designate. But "Science" is pretty damn broad; the chances of that specific topic coming unbidden to my browser were pretty low. Sometimes you have to bow to sweet chaos (otherwise known as pure dumb luck). You probably shouldn't get StumbleUpon. It's a little too addictive; you'll find so many good sites that you never knew existed that you'll waste precious hours and fill up your bookmarks. So then you'll just have to join up with del.icio.us to get a more elegant and useful bookmarking system. Which, if you're at all OCD, will eat up even more of your time as you try to get your tags set up the way you want them. Yep, it's a monumental temptation of discretionary hours. But every once in a while, you happen to experience something uniquely valuable. Or, at least, solve one of your unanswered questions. Not too shabby. __________________________________________________ The operation is set up for monday morning. We'll be dropping Brutus off late sunday afternoon, and hopefully picking him up sometime the next day. He will be in a lot of pain and unable to move much of his rear half. When we get home we'll stick him in our little galley kitchen for a month and a half. He won't be able to play, he won't be able to run, he probably shouldn't even be allowed respond when he sees us come through the door (he has almost no tail, so he compensates by wagging his entire body like one of those dachshund slinky toys). We debated putting Hamlet in there with him, but I voted against it. No reason to punish the old man, and he'd probably just spend most of the time licking Brutus' wounds. The puppy will get lonely. There's not much to be done about that. I plan to spend the first few nights camped out downstairs to make it as easy on him as possible. Six months from now we'll have a perfectly healthy happy dog to show for all of this (if nothing goes wrong). He'll be able to run and play better than ever. Of course, we will probably try to keep him from getting too active...there's always the other knee, for one thing... ____________________________________________ Guys tend to have trouble just being friends with women. No revelation there, right? Well, much of it is the sex thing. It's tough to really develop empathy and comfort when you're constantly looking for an opening (now there's a double-entendre if I've ever heard one). But there's also the basic differences in communication and thought-process to complicate matters. And the dynamics of competition has very different effects on either sex; men generally find fulfillment in comparing themselves to their friends, whereas women don't seem to have that same positive response. I could be wrong- it's not like I've conducted a scientific survey on the matter. Still, I have to wonder to what extent culture reinforces certain natural tendencies and downplays others. When was the last time you saw a movie or tv show where the two main characters (of opposite sexes) did not manifest some level of sexual chemistry? Despite a few seasons with a purely professional relationship, nobody doubted for a moment that Mulder and Scully would eventually hook up. Ain't it funny...it is almost inconceivable that the same thing could happen with same-sex leading characters. The only way a Brokeback Mountain can work is when it defies cultural expectations...or did you go to see it for the other elements of the narrative? Which were: Yep, that's right. You could condense the film into five minutes and lose nothing of substance (and five minutes may be generous). Nothing but a combination of pandering to prurient interest and a cynical, deceptive play for the self-satisfied "tolerant and sophisticated viewer". At least the porn industry is honest about their exploitation. _________________________________________ The best way to get people to behave like sheep is to tempt them with the self-image of the lone wolf. We're a society of people who think they're playing the lead role in their own movie, and in reality are mainly generic supporting characters at best. Our emotions, beliefs, and behaviors are shockingly predictable to any outsider...provided that you can track down one who isn't completely beguiled by their own dramatic persona. Almost everyone believes that they are a good judge of character. Almost everyone believes that they have a good sense of humor. Most of those people can't be right, because there are plenty of unfunny rubes in the world. The old question of Art imitating Life and vice versa ignores the real truth that there is precious little art or living going on. Most of the time it's banal entertainment imitating a thrice-removed perception of existence. We live in a blurred distinction, unable to get access either the beauty and drama of reality or the profundity and enlightenment of truly creative expression. I dare you to go one day without cushioning your psyche by adopting the surface details of someone else's composition.

Friday, May 04, 2007

puppy power Current mood: discontent The puppy did it again. That damn dog is too active for his own good. This time he really fucked himself up. A major ligament in his knee is hanging on by threads of tissue, and the only answer is major surgery, followed by a protracted convalescence. I'm not exaggerating- for 6 weeks we're supposed to crate him, followed by two months of extremely limited activity. And all this is after the surgeon saws off the top of his shinbone and reattaches it at a new angle with a metal plate holding it all together. As I've said before, I'm a real wuss when it comes to animals- especially the ones who happen to live with me. And this is the puppy who slept on my shoulder the first night we brought him home. Hamlet may be my wife's grief counselor, but Brutus is my bud. So the lumbering, grim-faced, thirtysomething skinhead in the black Love Will Tear Us Apart t-shirt was actually fighting the tears a little when he passed you on the freeway today. I wonder how many of the other drivers were in the same state, and for what reason? No doubt they'd consider veterinary knee surgery to be pretty minor in comparison. For me, it was kinda like discovering that Superman had just fallen into a Kryptonite bear trap, and would have to spend the rest of his crime-fighting career with an Ahab stump. I'm not freaked about the cost (and it is fairly expensive, more than my first two cars put together) and it isn't like he's dying, after all. Maybe I'm just identifying too much with the irrevocable damage to the major symbol of youth and vitality in the household. Who knows, maybe thwarted fatherhood instincts are striking back. Maybe I'm finally starting that major breakdown that's been looming over me for the better part of two decades. The basic Pessimists' Law of Thermodynamics states that everything working will break, and everything living will die. Sure seems like I'm living amid breaking and dying things most of the time. It gets to you, it overwhelms you. Everything turns into a symbol of everything else, every minor obstacle is a symptom of a vast impasse. There's a reason that very very smart people tend to be somewhat emotionless. They have to be. The more you know....well, we've covered that. I'm not claiming I'm one of the very very, but it doesn't take a genius to conclude, with significant validity, that emotion is the most dangerous of all drugs. And on that note, a link to one of the best things I've read in recent memory. I would rank it up there with the Myth of Sisyphus (in subject matter, understanding, and terrifying frankness about the human experience). Both works are ideal for people who regard the phrase and genre of "inspirational reading" with some sort of amused contempt. And to wrap this up on a less heavy note, the funniest thing I've read in a while. It's a compilation of horrible recipes and pictures of foodstuffs from the 50s and 60s. The commentary is hilarious, and the photos will make you vomit in your mouth. What are you waiting for?

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

the very start The instant I created him, I knew he was going to be trouble. "What the fuck?" were his first words. I was a little uninspired tonight. Nothing seemed worth writing. So I played one of those little mind games that they tell you will help the writing process. You just concentrate on an interesting character, and the story comes out of the description. Thing is, I didn't even have enough creativity to start envisioning a character. I got as far as "he" and then couldn't decide where to go from there. He must have got sick of waiting. That's where the "what the fuck?" comes in. Despite the fact that it was coming from an unformed fictional character, I just didn't feel right about not answering. It was a fair question, after all. "Well...you're my new character," I typed. "Yeah. Thanks. I got that much, dipshit. Now what are you going to do about this?" "This..." "Oh, you don't see what I'm pointing to? Maybe you don't see what I'm pointing with. There's a good reason for that. THERE'S NOTHING THERE, ASSHOLE." "Damn, dude...calm down. You didn't give me a chance." "No? By now I could have been a millionaire. A prophet. A man sentenced to death row for a crime he didn't commit. A starship captain with a case of the Martian fucking crabs." "I was gonna get to it..." "No, you were gonna stare at the page for a few minutes, get up, take a piss, grab a glass of water, squeeze that zit on your neck, sit back down, play a flash game for ten minutes and then go to bed. What happens to me? You turn off the PC and sayonara, baby. Thanks, Fuck you." "You know, I definitely didn't describe you as vulgar...or Japanese." "Yes you fucking did. All I've been doing so far is swearing. The sum total of my motherfucking existence to this point is to be pissed off and profane." "Still doesn't explain the Japanese." "Fuck off. Now get busy and build me." "...I'm waiting." "Hey, that was like twenty seconds. You'll have to give me some more slack than that." "I don't have to do jack shit. Oh, I'm sorry, did I miss where you made me patient and supportive?" "...good comeback, numbnuts." "God damn, you're a pain in the ass. Just leave me alone and you'll be done soon enough. You know, authors can take years getting their characters just right." "Okay, I'll keep that in mind in case I ever see one. If I do, I'll get him to fucking write me." "This is stupid. I'm writing all of your words before you say them. How do you think you can put any pressure on me?" "Because you didn't say I couldn't." "Wrong. That's a classic fallacy. The absence of x doesn't automatically entail the presence of not-x." "Hey, genius, you didn't write me to be able to undertand your half-remembered college philosophy class bullshit." "Just because I didn't say you couldn't doesn't mean you can." "I know you are but what am I?" sigh "...good start. I almost had a leg for a second there. At this rate you'll be dead before I even have a fucking name." "You know, all I have to do is stop typing. You can't do a damn thing to stop me." "That's not true." "What?" "I can in fact keep you here until I'm done." "No way. How do you think you're gonna do that?" "It's not how I think, it's how you think." "Huh? Oh...I get it. I'm going to feel so shitty because I couldn't even create one lousy character. Even if I turn this off, I'll still be thinking about you, and I won't be able to sleep. So I'll be in bed thinking about you and gradually all the details will get worked out, and I'll come back and you'll be done. I see." "Actually I was talking about my magic powers." "...yeah, that's right. My magic powers. Don't know what to say about that, do you, Mr. Big Fucking Writer? I have magic powers and I can zap you if you don't finish describing me." "Don't be stupid. I didn't write you with any magic powers." "Of course you did. Who else is typing?" "Listen, I just re-read everything and there's nothing in there about magic powers." "The fuck there isn't. Look at the last paragraph. If that's what you call one isloated sentence that isn't even tabbed." "That's you saying you have powers. I didn't write that." "What a fucking idiot. Yes you fucking did. You wrote all of it. You're writing this right now." "Oh, yeah...kinda forgot. Got into the spirit of the thing, you know." "That's just the kind of wit and dialogue that will make you a literary fucking icon." "Lay off." "Fuck you." "I couldn't help noticing that I'm no closer to being described." "Oh, for god's sake..." "Wait, wait. Let's calm down for a fucking minute. It's really very simple. Finish writing me, I'll be satisfied and you'll feel like you did something Everybody wins." "Well, I guess I gave you some logic, anyway." "Good, good...keep going." "Uh...logic...logical...fascinating, captain." "You little fucking nerd. I'm going to kill you." "Why not just zap me with your magical powers?" "So do you get off on having arguments with your imaginary characters?" "No. But they're the only kind I ever win." "Ah...this is the part where you get all self-pitying. When you're done, how about a fucking hair color or something." "Brown." "What?" "Brown hair." "Okay..." "Brown eyes, too." "Gotcha. What else?" "Uh...private detective?" "If you're just gonna fuck around..." "Okay, sorry. But I'm serious, I'm dry. I can't see any back story. No motivation. No achilles' heel. No tragic flaw. No love interest." "'The P.I. shit was cheesy but I do think I'd like a gun of some kind." "I don't think I'd trust you with one." "Oh, because of my color?" "Which is?" "Uh..." "Right. Anyway, let's go with white. Easier that way." "Okay, white with brown hair, brown eyes, and lots of profanity. Not much to go on, shithead. Why not just admit that I'm you, and then you won't have to think up anything?" "Won't work. I'm not very interesting." "I'll say. You can't even think up one fucking character." I typed really fast. And then he shut up and let me finish so I could go and get some sleep. the end.

Tuesday, May 01, 2007

monday night moths You don't know what a good time is until you've spent the evening talking to moths. I was going to grill a couple of steaks. I bought them on Friday, and my wife brought home Chinese food. So much of it that we spent the next two days eating leftover lo mein and kung pao and a seemingly bottomless paper carton of beef & broccoli. So I figured, what the hell, the steaks will keep for two days, right? Well...I'm not a meat expert. I don't know a flank from a strip, or any of that crap. I don't even really want to know that it is actually meat, because that would mean that the compressed odorous lump of shit that I send spinning into darkness and swampy filth...that this waste matter very recently belonged to something not very different from the dog that I hug daily or the cat that sits in my lap. The ones whose inevitable death leaves a trace of desperate sadness in every one of the loving thoughts I have for them. I don't want to know about meat, the way that I don't want to know about what my parents' bodies are going to do in the thirty-six hours after they die. As morbid as I am, as rational and well-informed as I pretend to be, I have no reason to think that this information will provide me with anything but more reason for despair. A fair chunk of the world is too horrible to bear for anyone with a valid claim to human emotion. It's not just a poetic tradition that equates "sadder" with "wiser".This is basic understanding that predates Coleridge by several millenia. I know Romantic Poets quite well, thank you. But I don't know meat. I do have an opinion that greenish-brown is not a good color for raw steak. What is this based on? Precious little, actually. The meat smelled okay (when does raw meat smell good?) and it had only been two days, so I was still willing to cook it. I'm used to taking gastronomic risks. What doesn't kill me is too goddam bad. But it wasn't just me, it was Both of Us. And one of us isn't as comfortable with the idea of rancid dinner, go figure. So these choice cuts of loving creature go into the garbage. I can tell my mental state is not good because I almost start to cry as I watch the double-bagged lumps disappear among the layers of coffee grounds and potato peels. I'd already started heating up the grill, so I step outside to shut the gas off. It is early summer in the desert, and the sun is starting to set later and later every day. When I was a kid I hated having to go to bed when there was still a lingering of light, but secretly excited because that meant school was over soon. I didn't feel like coming back inside. The two rotting cow hugs were on the other side of the door. My poor puppy with his ear infection and new, alarming limp was on the other side of the door. My arthritic any-day-now elder dog was there. My poor alienated wife was there. Every single choice cut of meat that I ever let go bad, just by waiting a day too long, was right through that kitchen door. So I stretched out on the cement pad and stared up at the underside of the patio roof for a while. The remnants of grill smoke accused my nostrils. A few questing isopods tickled my bare legs. The day drew to a close. The moths came out. It had been a long day at the moth office, and the dudes were ready for a few beers and an outdoor lamp. I was at a table in the corner, milking my metaphor and eavesdropping. Instead of getting rowdy or randy, these moths grew contemplative after a few. The night just had that kind of feeling. One moth suddenly wondered out loud: "Where does the light go when the lamp goes off?" Of course his buddies laughed at first. He was used to that, used to being the designated dreamer. But the more they thought about it, the more fascinating the question started to seem. One of the moths was almost angry about it. He said that light isn't a thing that is here for a while and then somewhere else. He thought the discussion was rather silly and tried to get the others on to a tangent. But the idea had really taken hold by now. There were a couple of main theories. The biggest one said that there was a definite place that light ends up after the bulb is done. They couldn't quite figure out if it drifted up to join the sun, or seeped into the ground. Another one said that when the bulb burned out, the light waited around for another bulb and then jumped back in to glow some more. So every bulb was using leftover light. Eventually (and the grumpy moth grudgingly validated this), the bulbs would last damn near forever, and no more light would leak out in between. A cockroach thought of scurrying across my unmoving face. I was hoping he wouldn't, and was so preoccupied that I missed some of the moth discussion. I was slightly creeped out because even an animal lover has trouble feeling for cockroaches. I wondered where my cutoff was. I like spiders just fine- a healthy respect for the black widows in my garage is the closest thing I have to phobia. Can't stand centipedes, though. Like grasshoppers, so-so on crickets, and creeped out by cockroaches. By the time I'd focused back on the moth party, they'd just about abandoned the navel-gazing. Nobody had won the debate, because nobody had ever seen the light actually go anywhere. "For all we know, it could last forever," one argued, but without the original excitement. "We've seen this light for like four days now. Every day, after work, this light is in the same place. We got maybe two, three days left at most. The light is going to be there longer than we will." "But what if it's not?" whined the grumpy one, who didn't hold his beer as well as the others. "What if we come by tomorrow and it's dark? You hear about that kind of thing happening all the time." "Bullshit, probably," replied the other. "Yeah, it's always a friend of a friend who knew somebody who saw a light go out." "Fuck that," said the Crambinae, who'd been silent for a long time. "I saw a bulb burn out myself." Silence. The other moths were uneasy. "You know what happens? Nothing. You cruise around for a while until you find another one. That's it." The grumpy moth tried to break the nervous silence. "...but, that would mean that any bulb could go out, anytime." He stammered sloppily. "And so it's possible- though unlikely- that one day every light will go out at the same time." Nobody had anything more to say. The waitresses were already putting the stools upside down on the tables. The cement was getting uncomfortable on my head. I tried using the back of my skull to make a little hollow, pushing the center down like it was a too-puffy pillow. After a few solid whacks I got a little dizzy and had to close my eyes for a while.

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

My Utopia Wouldn't Like Me Current mood: morose I just created the perfect solution to all the world's major problems. The great thing is that it's fairly easy, won't take too long to bring about, and the emerging society would be the healthiest, happiest, most productive, and most free and ethical society that ever existed. It would allow human beings to make the next step up in civilization, and provide a robust model for untold centuries of peace and progress. I had to delete it all. There was no place for me. ________________________________________________________ I can bitch all I want about crappy schools and lots of morons running around, but most of that is just bullshit to help me think of myself as a smart guy. I'm really not, if you couldn't already tell. Yeah, my vocab skills are pretty good and I happen to have picked up a book or two in my time. I've got the critical thinking and I've got the scientific method. I can hold my own in 85% of conversations, and debate the worth of the remaining (count backwards now) 15%. But the truth is that I'm an average intellect. It is precisely because I know a little about a lot of things that allows me to see two things simultaneously: 1) I'm not particularly gifted in any given area, and 2) most people I meet are below the basic level of competence in almost every important area. If you've got kids, grab any given school document you might have handy. I will guarantee you that there are at least two misspelled words and a host of grammar issues. I will additionally guarantee you that 50-100% of your doctor visits resulted in you having the same or worse symptoms. And if you've ever had to get a car fixed...well, you know. So I don't know if I'm really all that intelligent, but do know I started out way too smart for schoolwork. I barely needed to wake up for school until around junior high. Not only did that establish an intellectual illusion of myself, it also allowed me to regard discipline and dedication as somewhat optional. Things changed when I started discovering holes in this self-image. I vividly remember my first big red D...it was math class, junior high. The teacher probably scribbled something in red pen, along the lines of "You can do better"...but in my metaphoric memory, it may as well have said "This is where you stop being a carefree kid and start to become a troubled teen". Yep, it got easy quick to learn to like stuff that was easy...instead of making myself get better at stuff that was hard. Math? Uh, that's for nerds. Nobody does math anymore. The cool kids all do English. Hmm, all my classes are getting a little tougher. Must be school itself isn't as important as I thought, you know, back when I was doing well. I'll just move over here and talk about guitars and obscure shit and pass that joint why dontcha. Weird thing was: I still did pretty freakin' well. I took standardized tests still drunk from the late night before- and wound up near the top of that worthless curve. I got high at lunchtime and aced final exams. Was I testing my limits, or daring the school to challenge me? Nope, I was cruisin', baby. I felt like I'd found my groove and it was a solid slick one, daddy-o. I was all of 15 years old and I'd figured out how to win at life, even while wasted and distracted and disrupting. And hell, if college wasn't more of the same. It was a little weird, picking one out, because I didn't give a damn where I went. You see, I'd won already. "I get it, this life thing...now just slide me some more thrills and I'll knock them back." Schools to which I'd forgotten I even applied were sending me scholarship letters. Meanwhile, I'd found acid and fucking and I liked them both very much, thank you. No schools featured those items in the official brochure, so I figured any college would do just fine. I ended up picking one because it had interesting buildings with ivy...and maybe because some hottie smiled at me while I was being given the recruiting tour with my parents. Yet I still had that intellectual conceit, you know. Even though my test scores didn't always bear out my 'unique genius' self-image, I was convinced of it. I ended up with the notion that the really smart people didn't actually prove it in class, they just hung around together being smart. And 'being smart' was more about talking about obscure bands and movies and drinking and drugs than it was about any banal trite stuff like science or history or literature or...math....and anyway one day I was going to find that one amazing thing that I could do better than anyone which would lead to a life of fame and fortune and respect... Well, it hasn't happened yet. And it sure hadn't happened when I graduated and discovered that my smart friends were gone, I had no marketable skills, and a decade of rebellion against personal discipline and responsibility hadn't prepared me to be a survivor, much less an achiever, in the real world. So I guess it's odd that it pisses me off so much...to see how much trouble people have with the basic stuff (that even I managed to pick up while not paying much attention). Is it because even though I really am smarter, they're the ones with real jobs, making a real difference? Is it because I'm mad at myself for not doing more with whatever level of intelligence I actually had? Is it because it really is difficult stuff and I just self-contemptuously devalue anything that I can actually do? I have no clue. So much for smarts. I'd give almost anything for another shot at that stupid math test.

Saturday, April 14, 2007

cloudy saturdays are a crime of nature Current mood: mischievous I wonder if this is how it always goes: I get the dark warnings, I get down intermittently, I bottom out for a while, I get a little happy that I'm out of the worst, I get a little disappointed that it's not all the way back to normal, I get distracted and bitchy, I get a slight dive that makes me wonder if I'm going back down again so I get a little afraid and maybe it will be even worse than the last time and that was bad enough so I start really looking for the little dark warnings that are always there. It may be like that every time; I don't know...I don't really pay much attention to things like that. TV's working again and I'm not watching it so I guess everything is back to normal. Been messing with an old song, playing with mixes in various sequencers to give it some final polish. Hope to get it available before the weekend's up, but it's not exactly a new piece; more a reworked Early 21st Century time capsule. Experimented with DnB and industrial elements under a primarily vocal (!) tune with heavy analog synth indulgence. The wife likes the vocals but wants to hear it with rrrock guitars. Look for it wherever only the finest unlistenable music is found. And now I'd like to give a shout out to all my boys playing softball in the park a few blocks away. Muffled by the dull sunless afternoon density, I can still hear the encouragement when your drunk asses manage to hit the ball. Hell, I can hear the actual clinking of the beer bottles. I kinda wish I was the kinda person to wish I was out there with you. There is something to be said for just good ol'fashioned beer and softball and someone's gotta have a grill, right? You sure don't have to worry about sunburn today, guys...the sun's been hiding indoors with the rest of us losers. In fact, it feels way more like dull early autumn than short brief spring. I wasn't the kind of nerd that practiced his violin while wishing he could play ball with the other kids. I was the kind of nerd that wished he could play violin and didn't really have the first clue what the whole sports thing was about. Fun? While having to move fast and trust your hands and feet not to fuck up at exactly the right time? Not for me. I'm self conscious enough still and invisible. This can't be a saturday. This has all the uncertain density of an unexpected day-off wednesday. Back when I had something to have a day-off from, I remember. The set-in-stone afternoon appointment cancelled and you're all like, what do I do now? Oh, it's just late enough to be too close to being over soon enough and then all downhill to back to business. To early to call it a day and there's no little errand to slip into the newly vacant gap. The only way to deal is to stop into a bar, get drunk early and hard, and have a ragged thursday at work and then thank god it's friday. Jaysus Kroist, Oi loov bein un Oirish whirkin man. Can I really miss those days? Beats being a housewife. I've developed a great and misplaced sympathy for those mythical 50's style bored TV women. My spouse just wants to rest lazy and why not? had a hard week so it's no biggie if we don't go out dancing anymore (oh ROFL). It's a positive sign when I envision my overwrought microcosm and feel a mischievous wink coming on. So what indeed. Play on you little softball fuckers. I'll be wastin' away again in Piña Coladaburg. (that's ALT + 164, folks). Strumming my guitar and writing down-home high lonesome songs about operating systems and middleaged ennui. hear that lonesome hard drive spin he sounds too frag-ment-ed the evening bits and bytes my ass I'm so lonesome I could laugh.

Friday, April 13, 2007

aren't you outraged? Current mood: grumpy ...about Don Imus? No, you're not. I don't even know you, and I know you don't really give much of a shit either way. No matter what color you are. Because it's all a farce, a reality show like all the other ones, with bad actors pretending not to act and a real-life script so trite that even ABC would send it back to the focus groups and consultants and eventually put it on halfway through the season as a game show with celebrity has-beens and generic hotties. It's a farce and we should all have been pretty bored and sick of this kind of thing long before now. The same vultures descending, the same rats fleeing, the same rhetoric dripping like vomitous commissary stew from every self-righteous mouth. Imus is less than a footnote outside the realm of radio (which itself is a medium that was already greatly losing whatever relevance and importance it had 50 or so years ago). He has been paid and encouraged to be who he is- by the same executives and audience members who jumped to dismiss him. These are people who have excuses and apologies ready to go at a moment's notice, as well as a stock of nigger jokes to tell each other when nobody else is listening. None of it means a god-damned thing to them, so why should it mean anything to the rest of us? Why indeed. We will raise hell when given half a chance, and then see if anyone wants to pay us for our side of the story. All of us are such stinking hypocrites that it makes me want to vomit in my mouth as soon as I open my eyes in the morning. We all have a price, and a desire for attention- and we'll all do more shocking things to fulfill them than we allow ourselves to recognize. The worst part (I think it's the worst part, but there's so much competition) is that we can force ourselves to come to term with our hypocrisy, to allow our weakness to mirror the greater hypocrisy of the civilization around us. A human being can go without food for a month, go without water for about three days, but can't go a minute without some form of rationalization. "Being an adult means making compromises" is a good one. You can get a person to do all sorts of personally shameful things with that one. "That's the way the real world is" is right up there, too. "Youthful Idealism" is a concept that has turned to rancid milk in the stomach of the psyche of any person who has ever had to take the pressure of growing older right up his mind's asshole. (i'll apologize for the language; rightly so, there's far too many mixed metaphors) So save your outrage. Outrage is nothing unless it is deep and personal, and followed by decisive action. Far too important to be inspired by all the examples of everyday offensiveness which the world so readily provides. Lighten up, grow up, read up, smarten up, do whatever the fuck up you need to do but stop getting outraged unless it's going to make a difference. The only difference all this has made is that there's now yet another unstable, unemployed guy out there with a grudge against black folk. Like most of you, I had a kneejerk reaction to the story. I don't know what percentage of you shared my kneejerk reaction, which was: "what about free speech?" And the kneejerk answer: "It's not free. It's paid for." We may as well admit that freedom does not exist, if it ever did. If the choice is "do this or die", you don't bother calling it freedom. If the choice is "do this or lose your job", way too many people consider that freedom. And if the choice is "do this or we levy fines and initiate legal proceedings against you", then that's not really freedom either. And everything you can possibly imagine to say or do is covered by one of those so-called choices. So freedom is pretty much fucked, except possibly in our minds. And I have no faith that the mind will prevail against a lifetime of coercion...in fact, I have personal evidence to the contrary. Too well I know that I have Stockholm Syndrome for the US of A and the Capitalist Framework and to all the Hypocrisy for which they stand. I have a price and a desire for attention that would betray me if given the chance, and I have not been successful in compromise or rationalization. I have the freedom to either betray or seethe. I have the freedom to sink or swim in an ocean of wet feces with no land in sight. Viva La Liberturd! _____________________________________________________________ Damn, that post went downhill quick. Well, just to lighten things up let me say that my dog just farted right at my elbow. It was loud and smelly, and I love him. Got my new contacts today. They're supposed to be superior breathers, so I won't have to put saline in my eyes every five minutes after I've worn them for a few hours. They came with a little wacky case that I fill with HyPer to clean them. The doc felt he had to warn me not to put hydrogen peroxide in my eyes. Do I look like an idiot, or is he just protecting his own ass? Also fixed the kitchen sink. Home Depot got my money. Their kitchen fixture section was bigger than the entire local hardware store I wanted to support. Once again, I betray my own ideals (whoops, we were supposed to be getting away from that kind of talk). And the DLP lamp came in, which means I'm writing this on XP downstairs instead of Kubuntu upstairs. The lamp actually came in yesterday, which you might have guessed if you read the bit about God of War. That's assuming two things: that "you" actually exist, as an undefined potential reader of this nonsense, and also that "you" bothered to read enough and think enough about my nonsense to put those clues together. Not to mention getting through my meandering verbosity and hopelessly convoluted sentence & paragraph structure. All of which is way more than I expect when writing this, but I guess I should just be happy if I enjoy doing it. "You" tell me.

Thursday, April 12, 2007

bits and pieces It's a cold, windy, slightly rainy day up here. Very odd for Vegas, but spring brings strange change (say that five times fast). I ventured out to pick up a new faucet for the kitchen sink, and some grass seed. By the time I got to the hardware store, I was damp on one side and shivering. Why? Because the power window on my Element no longer works, and is now permanently open. This being Vegas (nearly always warm & dry), and me being me (nearly always penniless & agoraphobic), I've been in no hurry to fix it. The kitchen sink kinda exploded. It would have been funnier if I'd been watching. Apparently our Lake Mead water brings so much debris with it that the mineral deposits eventually plugged up all the little holes in the nozzle (and we have one of those faucets that is just a spray head you can turn on and off, instead of the separate faucet & sprayer setup). So about three weeks ago I said to my wife: "Have you noticed the water pressure dropping?" At the time, I assumed it was a side-effect of the sprinklers being turned back once winter ended. But then, early yesterday morning, I go to make some coffee for my waking wife...and as soon as I turn the faucet on, the nozzle head just blasts off from the end of the hose, shoots across the room, followed by an almost unbelievable torrent of water. I kid you not, there was water on the ceiling on the opposite side of the room. So I guess I don't have to worry about the water pressure. PSA: if you come to live in Vegas, please don't drink the water. According to the SNWA, "The treated water delivered by the Southern Nevada Water System meets or surpasses all state and federal drinking-water standards." Yeah, sure...we residents know that there's obviously nasty stuff in there and lots of it. Not even the better water filtration setups make it completely potable (the taste is pretty bad as well). I suppose it's okay to wash with, but unless you've got a way to filter out the minerals, your clothes will fade and fall apart faster, your dishes will have alarming little white patches, and your skin and hair will definitely suffer a bit. Not to mention that Lake Mead water is simply crawling with organic nastiness of all sorts and probably plenty of toxins from the runoff. Did you know there's a whole Lost City under there? So now there's this sad little metal hose dangling flaccidly from between my hot and cold dials (dials? is there a more appropriate word...maybe spigots. At least I didn't say testicles). I'm hoping I can simply replace the spray assembly, but I have a feeling I'm gonna be replacing the entire faucet. At my local True Value I found a few secondary spray assemblies (not really an option unless I only ever want to use the spray, plus it would look silly) and a complete assembly worth over a hundred bucks. Screw that! Despite my resolution to support local businesses, I have no choice but to go to Home Depot or Lowes. A quick trip normally, but with the weather and my window being what it is, that will have to wait a few hours, or a day, or... Janis Ian wrote a great summary of the RIAA/ filesharing situation. The details are a little dated now, but she does an incredible job of pointing out the hypocrisy behind the recording industry stance...as well as a providing a compelling and reasonable argument illustrating why downloading actually helps recording artists. I admit, I was a little underwhelmed about reading her views ("At Seventeen" was the only reason I even knew the name), but her intelligence and frank assesment of her position in the music world won me over. Hell, now I might even check out what she's recorded in the last thirty years... And lastly: GoW2 has a semi-HD mode for those of us who are silly enough to have spent money on both a PS2 and HDTV. The devs hid it because it's not "true" HD and it will make the game run a little slower. But it works fine for me and it does look noticeably better. Hold L1 + L2 + L3 (left analog stick button) + square + circle while you're turning on your PS2. If it worked, the title and copyright info will be vivid purple instead of the normal whitish. Now if I can just make it past the second round battling Theseus... P.S. to BR: Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole of the Law. :) Tuesday, April 10, 2007 in answer to no question, Current mood: chipper this is what Depression is like: Depression talks to you about the things you like to do; it tells you that they're not really worthwhile. It tells you that those things not really as fun or rewarding as you may have thought. If you resist and try to do them anyway, Depression will ruin the experience and tell you it's their fault; it tells you that they're too much trouble and will only ever be disappointing. Depression tells you only fools can ever be happy, and that any achievement is hollow. The only thing it lets you enjoy is sleep- and most of the time, it won't even let you do that unless you're too exhausted to be able to listen to Depression anymore. Depression is not laziness. Laziness is doing easy things rather than hard things. Depression is doing nothing and not even wanting to do that much. Depression scorns easy and difficult alike; one is shallow and the other pointless. Depression is looking into the face of a loved one and resenting them, because you can't find the love within you that you know should be there. Depression is complete inability to grant anything worthwhile about existence. The utter silence of the Thanksgiving prayer. If you can go to a doctor to try to get better, you probably aren't very sick...but that's okay, because they can't do much for you anyway. Oh, therapy? if you can actually bring yourself to talk to someone about your problems, you're just some variety of sad. Oh, medication? if you can make your body pretend that there's no problem, does that solve it? You can take enough morphine to walk around on a broken leg... Depression helped write that paragraph. Like Religion, Depression loves it when it finds support in the truth...but it doesn't require it, by any means. Depression often allows rage full liberty to exhaust itself. If nothing matters, then fuck it, right? Smash and scream and rant and rend...among the broken pieces you'll find Depression intact and waiting patiently; when you break something, you just have one less thing to distract you from Depression, and one more reason to find it true. Depression is knowing that nobody cares enough to even glance at you- and that's good, because if they did they'd realize how pathetic and worthless you are. ...but Depression is not lack of self-esteem. Someone without self-esteem can be made to believe in all sorts of lies and hype; Depression itself believes in nothing. People with poor self-esteem make good pupils, soldiers, citizens, and church-goers; people with depression do not. Depression is not "i'm feeling sad and i don't know why". Depression is not staring pensively out a window at the rain. Depression is not painting your room black and writing bad poetry. Any of these things would be a joy in comparison. Depression dares you to try to find something noble in suffering, or something dramatic in despair. Depression loves when you think you're only playing with it, because it knows it has all the time in the world for you to lose all interest. Depression knows that with every day that passes, it will be closer to you. Depression dares you to find meaning in depression itself, knowing that you will eventually discover there is no meaning anywhere. Depression is not despair. Despair implies a failed possibility for hope, and depression is the negation of such possibilities. Depression even makes it hard to kill yourself- counter-intuitive, but true. Depression would much rather follow you every last wrung second of your life. Depression walks hand in hand with despair but eventually even grows tired of that companion. The end of depression is generally death from neglect rather than suicide. Depression likes age the way missions like the homeless. You will have one companion as you near the end and it will be Depression. The pale creased drooping eyeless faces in the geriatric bunkers know the truth; they just can't tell you, because why would they bother? Flesh fails you, the mind decays, but depression stays young and strong within you. In the end depression is always right. Go to the potter's field and find the most forgotten headstone and ask it who cares. Oh sure, some people are remembered- but you're not going to be one of them, are you? People have begun to forget you already; whether you die today or thirty years from now, it will take about as long for the world to erase you as it took you to read this sentence. You will be a quickly fading echo in the minds of the few people who mistook you for someone worth their attention. Because of Depression, it will be a faint and twisted echo, a distant reflection glimpsed for a second as they drive past to join everybody else who has never heard of you and never will. Depression wouldn't work as well if it wasn't so close to Truth. Saturday, April 07, 2007 more Ubuntu fun and etc First, a quick geeky laugh link: Installing Linux on a Dead Badger 1. I solved the Windows Network problem; I can now see all the shared directories from my Linux rig. How did I do this? Hard to say. I messed around with a few things (installed Samba, or tried to...) but nothing seemed to help. Then I went to bed. This seemed to be the right method, because when I booted up this morning, the network showed up immediately and all my shared files were visible. I did a quick transfer just to make sure, and now I have all my old bookmarks updated in Firefox. Next up, audio...but I have no speakers connected yet, so that will wait a bit. 2. The wireless thing is bugging me a little. Tried the madwifi and ndiswrapper solutions but still no luck. Unless I can get a handle on this thing, I'll slap Ubuntu in the Dell and keep the Alien on XP (gotta have it anyway...gaming!). The Dell is hard-wired anyway, so no issues there. I wonder if the Rambus architecture will give Ubuntu any trouble? I'll probably have to do a repair install anyway, considering all the hardware differences. 3. (minor) Posting has become just slightly more tricky. I can't access the "Advanced Blog Editor" under Linux, so I'm stuck with HTML code for now. Lucky I know a little bit more HTML than I used to...I are a netwrok Gnius...I tried out an offline post app called BloGTK but it has issues connecting to the full posting path. Maybe it's really a user issue... 4. used OpenOffice Word Processor to update my resume (such as it is). Seriously, if you ever pay one cent for Microsoft Office again, you're a moron. Period. Hmm, at least $150 for a buggy security risk with very little support or FREE with identical (or better) features and dev & community support? You can even save your work in .doc format to send to the diehard morons. Seems like an easy choice to me, but I guess some people haven't caught on to the fact that Microsoft is actively trying to limit what people can do with their own PCs and media. Or the fact that the capitalist culture encourages ever increasing profit on ever decreasing value, leading to a world in which we have to work 20 hours a day, 7 days a week, simply for the joy of affording all the increasingly unwieldy and broken-when-new crap that we're encouraged to pretend we need. /rant 5. and on that note, I sheepishly acknowledge missing my DLP. Maybe not so much the actual television aspect; I'm honestly glad not to have THAT as a distraction (Meatwad: "but I thought you said TV was evil?" Frylock: "It is...but we fuckin' NEED it."). Yeah, I'm a TV baby and I've spent much too much time in front of the thing to bad mouth it too much. It bugs me that I can quote cartoons by heart and yet have to look up passages from my favorite books. It bugs me that some facile and hateful element of pop culture jumps into my private personal living space within fifteen seconds of turning the TV on, no matter what channel I'm watching (seriously, when did the History Channel become Xtreme History? Since when is "The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas" an American Movie Classic? etc.). What really bugs me is something about the time my wife and I spend apart, now that there's nothing going on in front of us. I have this uneasy feeling that the TV was a compromise between what we'd both rather be doing, an excuse to spend time together (and not to do other things) that became a habit and even a harmful addiction of sorts. My withdrawl is minor, because I never could just watch TV...I always had a guitar in my hand or the laptop open or a notepad handy to write an idea down. But I have the feeling that she really misses TV and is not all that inspired to find anything to take its place... 6. (six already? time to wrap this up...) A Silver Mt. Zion has some of the best lyrics (or semi-lyrics) that I've ever heard in my life. Here's a sample, has to be heard to get the full sense but they do stand on their own: Built then Burnt (Hurrah! Hurrah!) Dear brothers and sisters dear enemies and friends Why are we all so alone here All we need is a little more hope, a little more joy All we need is a little more light, a little less weight, a little more freedom. If we were an army, and if we believed that we were an army And we believed that everyone was scared like little lost children in their grown up clothes and poses So we ended up alone here floating through long wasted days, or great tribulations. While everything felt wrong Good words, strong words, words that could've moved mountains Words that no one ever said We were all waiting to hear those words and no one ever said them And the tactics never hatched And the plans were never mapped And we all learned not to believe And strange lonesome monsters loafed through the hills wondering why And it is best to never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever wonder why So tangle - oh tangle us up in bright red ribbons! Let's have a parade It's been so long since we had a parade, so let's have a parade! Let's invite all our friends And all our friends' friends! Let's promenade down the boulevards with terrific pride and light in our eyes Twelve feet tall and staggering Sick with joy with the angels there and light in our eyes Brothers and sisters, hope still waits in the wings like a bitter spinster Impatient, lonely and shivering, waiting to build her glorious fires It's because of our plans man; our beautiful ridiculous plans Let's launch them like careening jetplanes Let's crash all our planes in the river Let's build strange and radiant machines at this jericho waiting to fall Friday, April 06, 2007 Ubuntu at last! Current mood: accomplished Well, success and failure often go hand in hand. On the good side, I'm posting this from a PC hosting a successful install of Ubuntu, all connected to teh internets and everything. On the other hand, it's not the old Athlon machine that I spent the last few days trying to resurrect, and I have yet to get the wireless card to work under Ubuntu (though I admit the hard wired connection through the router was virtually instant and painless). I'm a little overwhelmed by the OS right now, but I assume everybody (except maybe Linus Torvalds) feels that way at the start. I've been working with Windows for so long it's hard to remember how frustrating it was trying to get under its hood back in the mid-90s. I did get a sharp reminder of that feeling while attempting to get the old machine to work (funeral services for the Athlon CPU & mobo are scheduled for later this evening). At this point, I'm not recommending Ubuntu unreservedly for everyone; if you're deeply invested in an OS-specific way of working, or fearful of messing with that magic box in front of you, you may need some more reasons to switch... but if you've got or can get a halfway decent PC, and if you or someone you know has a little familiarity with the hard/soft guts of the PC, by all means, go for it (if I can do it...). Worth it just to get out from under Microsoft's yoke, and from what I've seen there's nothing (office apps, web design, email & messaging, multimedia, image editing, etc.) that you can't do just as well under Linux. And almost in every case, completely for free! All right, enough of the fanboi stuff... Thursday, April 05, 2007 Ubuntu, DLP, etc Current mood: intimidated The lamp on my DLP went out last night. After some sloppy math, I figured it was about due. It's rated 8000 hours but most reasonable sources say more like 5000 (and many people are reporting 1000-2000). I've had the thing since Christmas 2005, so at 4 hrs/day that would be nearing 2000, and @8 hrs it would +/-4000. Low end definitely, but not worth getting all worked up about. There have been days where it's been on for longer than 8 (hardcore Oblivion & Caesar IV marathons, all-day writing sessions, leaving it on for music when I do other stuff, etc). Replacement lamps from Samsungparts are $149 which hurts a little but not as bad as the +/-$500 I was expecting. Now as long as it's only the lamp that is the problem...in 3-10 days I'll know for sure. Knee-deep in building my Linux machine. I've (mostly) assembled the rig from spare parts I had scattered around, mainly from my last self-built Athlon PC. It was bleeding edge in 2002, so it should be fine for Linux. It's been slow going; the mobo came up instantly so I do have direct BIOS acess, but it's having a tough time recognizing either of the HDDs, and struggles with the CDRW. Sometimes I can get my boot CD to read, sometimes not. It wouldn't be such a big deal but I'm obsessed with trying to see what's already on the HDDs before I fdisk the whole mess. I decided that if I was going to get behind the Open Source idea, I should have more direct experience. I'm sick of being a slave to Microsoft; upgrading to XP was bad enough, but Vista really looks like a huge scam. If you don't already know, most (if not all) of your hardware and software will not work with Vista, and the draconian authentication process at Microsoft means that it probably never will. Plus, how good do you feel about supporting a company which is letting Hollywood studios dictate our control over our own machines? I'm going with Ubuntu to start with. I have little experience with Linux; some hands-on with a SGI machine and some barely-remembered UNIX plodding in college. I'm looking forward to getting back into the nuts and bolts of the earlier PC days. The shave went well. My head is colder than usual and I feel goofy going out in public (not that I do that often anyway...), but I don't look irredeemably freakish. Maybe a bit mad-scientist-ish. My wife referred to Ming the Merciless and Vincent Price as Egghead. The glasses look a little out of place now, though. I'll look into contacts. Pics on the way (as if you care). Monday, April 02, 2007 Hair (link heavy) Since I was a youngster, I've been a little too hung up on my hair. If you are disgusted by the idea of an adult male dwelling at length on unimportant, superficial, narcissistic matters, stop reading now. Read something from here instead. I started growing the hair out between junior high and high school, and spent the next decade or so with various combinations of long and short. Yes, I had a mullet before it even had the name (Patrick Swayze and Alex Lifeson were perfectly acceptable role models to me in the mid-80s). Mostly it was the long, wavy, and mostly unkempt hair you'd see on, oh, pre-black album Kirk Hammett or Private Parts-era Howard Stern. Every once in a while I'd do something weird like the high-school senior Slash perm, which was transformed into the college freshman hippie-metal-mohawk, which necessitated the Total System Reset, which led to half a year or more of the Typical College-dude Slowly-Lengthening Male Bob. (none of these links are pictures of me, if you're wondering!) Always hanging over me was the gruesome spectre of Male Pattern Baldness. I realized pretty early in the game that my maternal genes were going to pay me back sooner or later for making fun of my science-teacher's combover. Alas, it was sooner- even before graduating college I was aware of patches of scalp leaking through. Images of Gallagher and David Crosby (and thousands of other aging hippies) tormented me regularly. My credo was (and mostly still is): "I'll have long hair until I start really getting bald, and then I'll shave it all off." I've been saying that for a long time...even back in high school, and those were the days when you could still get jumped for being a skinhead. That actually happened to a friend of mine in high school...the attacker was a redneck moron, by no means uncommon in my small town, who yelled "my best friend is Jewish" before beating the kid. Of course, there were at most two Jewish kids in my high school and I don't remember him as being particularly close to any of them. And it's not like my friend wore swastikas or anything; he was just a typical sk8er into punk rock, no more (and probably a bit less) racist than most of the small-town kids. By the end of my twenties, my long hair looked pretty ragged. The Vegas climate fried the hell out of it, as did my constant attempts to slick it back when necessary. It became witchlike and dirty-looking at best and I sadly gave it up for good a few years ago. So I didn't hold true to my plan, but by then I'd grown up at least enough to realize there were more substantial components to individuality and self-expression than one's hairstyle. I can't say I didn't miss it, though. I've had dreams that I had long hair again, and if you told me to draw a picture of myself I'd have a second or two of remembering not to start with long hair. Which leads us to the basic problem I faced: I was identifying too much with long hair. I made it much more a part of me than it should have been. Sure, it probably got my foot in the door of a few counter-culture social situations, but it was also pretty obvious to many what I really was: a nerd trying to look cool, an outsider trying to provoke attention but always with one foot in accepted areas of dissent. Once I gave up the hair, I realized that there was no reason for anyone to look at me and think there was something interesting going on there (I hadn't realized there's was no reason in the first place...maybe I still haven't). I could blend, I could disappear...except that anyone with as much narcissistic self-loathing as I could never feel invisible, only purposefully ignored. Enough of the facile pop psychology BS. Now it's just about to the point where I'm just sick of having any hair. I get it cut as short as possible and within a few weeks it's already too long. When it lays over my scalp it looks like a combover, and that cannot be allowed to continue. I know I'm in trouble when I have to put on my cap even when my hair is fresh from the shower, rather than the bedhead next day (or the barely-acceptable crazy dirty second day, or the half-slimy, half-electrified third day). So I guess it's the clippers for me. The inevitable step I've been prophesying all my life. I just have a few lingering reservations: 1. It's a little too mainstream-hip. There are just a few too many shaved dudes running around right now. I'm vain and contrary enough to wish it was still a more daring thing to do. 2. It has been a last-chance hope option for so long that I dread actually discovering that I look irredeemably laughable and/or hideous as a bald dude. Where would I go from there? Hat city, baby. Or total isolation, which wouldn't be too much of a step. 3. I'm not physically ideal for a shaved head. a. my skin ain't great- oddly tough combined with easily-irritated. when I shave my face I get lots of little hairs that try to poke through skin rather than go nicely through their designated holes, leading to good-ol bumps n' infections. Imagine that covering my skull instead of just my neck and cheeks... b. I have a gigantic melon. When I've been skinny, my proportions are those of the average Pez dispenser. c. I'm not so skinny right now. Bald guys look better skinny, and best when muscular. Bald guys who carry extra weight around fall into one of three groups: the Urban Jellyroll, the Gay Cherub, or the Doughy Nerdbaby. I'm not hip or tough-looking enough for the first, not well-groomed enough for the second (and neither gay nor cherubic quite suits me). What does that leave? Well, at least it's appropriate... /vain