Started this at work..

Front page of yesterday's Wall Street Journal featured a touchy-feely story of GIs running a US miltary-civil information center in Baghdad where Iraqis bring their occupation problems. On Fox Network, Ollie North pronounces that Iraqis don't like the US because Iran makes them so. Few days ago, President Bush says that Afghanistan is now America's "friend" in the Middle East... I'll be the first to confess I have a fair deal of trouble making friends, because I'm quite lost in the intrinstic social conventions. Now, the Bush Administration has solved all that with the simplest of solutions: Social saturation bombing. All I need to do is blow up the home of a potential friend, then (somewhat) selectively neutralize their better friends, family, and possibly religious figures. And here I thought it was all about then respecting social boundaries and sharing knowledge, when it's all about selling off prospective buddy's possessions (the ones left, that is) like you own them, and then they are your best chums. See the wonders you can learn for your real life from US foreign policy?

I've been learning all sorts of amazing things from the cornucopia of media. I caught a bit of that American television institution, The 700 Club the day before last. Even the right and righteous Pat Robertson thinks the Patriot Act is a bad thing, a blatant invasion of the constitutional rights of American citizens. Okay sure, he thinks this because bible prophecy saw the Patriot Act coming, and it's all part of the rising of the Beast and the second coming of Christ, but apocalypse shmocalypse. Long as he, and his evangelical power base, believe that we should fight the Patriot Act. Hey, if the American Zionist Jews and the Fundamentalist Zionist Christians can get ubti bed with each other, so can I. Right after, I join the Log Cabin Republicans.

I was told this would be my last twelve-hour Saturday. I'd keep at them if I didn't want to push my luck with my back. I'm already marvelling that I'm holding down my first full-time job in a two handfuls of years. I'm not sweating making the money for the move so much. But I still cannot shake the powerful doubt that I will find work in Seattle within two to three months. Since I can't drive myself so nuts about gathering the funds, I've moved onto focusing on getting a job there. Reality being that I think a narcoleptic squid would get work over me if it had experience and Microsoft Office skills. I have a dab of campus work o over a puddle of service industry jobs. I have no degree, and limited office skills in software. I'm actually pretty sure someone did hire a squid over me, becasue it had the better resume. Then the fact that American enconomy is tanking, well, tanking unless you are in the top wealth percentile. The only scare from the recession most of them got was they couldn't order a fifth course. I want to believe, but I feel this is something it'll take more faith than I have to in mathis blog simply because I've had trouble holding down thoughts because I keep wandering back to this. Honestly, I'm pretty pissed about this. For someone who tells people he thinks more laterally, I am cursed by entrenchent conditional and linear logic. For most of my life, I have been haunted by plans and hopes based solely on shaky "IF-THEN" propositions. If I get this diploma, then I will get work. If I get work, then I can become independent. If I do this or that, then I will get what I want. These statements become these absolute beatified external pillars that I must intensely and overdramatically focus my whole being on, which as you can guess is just about the least pleasant place to be if they do come out as false.
I just feel so hypocritical, in a way. I'm always shaking my head at the cavalcade of supermaterialists that I see daily, working slavishly so then they can have the right clothes, the best car, and the biggest home. How much different am I from them? I'm chasing my more intangible dreams down the same maze, hunting for different cheese. I'm upshifting my mindframe into the always uncertain waves of the future. I might be here, but all here is something to get me over there in time. As the Buddhists would say, my suffering comes from still grasping for the physical and impermanent. I can measure the phases in my lifes by the goals I set, and did little to improve the process, so many of those goals were never reached. This is not about gaining something. I should know this. It's about doing what is right for me and mine and doing it everyday. The passions of the process are empowered by meaning in the experience of process. I should do what I have to do. When I come to what must be done next, I will do all I will have to do to make it come to be. But until then, I should ride along meaning as I work this part of the process. And then. And then.... No then. I will live as one who loves to live and seeks freedom to just be, earning my way by being on the way. I know what my dreams are, they intensely express themselves in frenetic technicolor displays in my imagination. But what happens if I find more of my dreams in how I look at my dreams? I think back to the zen story I included in my last Monday entry, and it makes more sense. After becoming the Master, the Master now fetches wood and carries water, with compassion, reverence, and joy, but it is still just fetching wood and carrying water.

When the time comes, there will be no logically joined conditional propositions. There will be me, the great dark unknown, and the call to leap. I'm perfectly fine making the leap, getting across the abyss, but tripping and slamming my face into the far cliff. Well if it's funny, that is. Humor is Manic Passion told painfully and unmasked. I don't make people laugh, I tell then what I see, and then they laugh if they can handle it.

Okay bedtime. I've had a good purgative ramble on my blog, now to go make thge unity of small Jew and big bed.

Quod absurdum est.

In yesterday's San Francisco Examiner, once a solid paper, now a tabloid front to justify a backdoor deal to make this a one paper city, Warren Hinckle wrote about a new gay term he found in (I have to quote this) "The pinkish-hued New York Observer." The Observer named Armistead Maupin as a "shmo-sexual." Shmosexuals are "gay men who don't give a fig if they look or act like queers, so confident in the sexuality. It would have to be a New York Yiddish derivative that would be the label that caught up with my brand of homosexuality. Damn, and I was having so much fun being unlabeled in the "family." But then again, I don't give a fig about being gay, because it seemed something less worth being neurotic over than the other dozen issues I had when I came out. Does that make me a meshuggayesexual?

A young student asked of the Master "what did you do before you became Master?"
The Master replied "I fetched wood and carried water."
The Student asked "What do you do now that you are Master?"
The Master replied "I fetch wood and carry water."

I got into a great novel tonight (Songs From The Stars by Norman Spinrad.) It's about this post-atomic culture with one of the main characters being a "perfect master" of "The Clear Blue Way." Just got me thinking about my Way. Lately, I've done nothing really, but work, read at work, and sleep. It's an old behavior. I just get myself totally focuses on some external thing, that I think is superimportant, as the main thing in my life, and then I ignore everything else. I should be in a more positive space. Shit, I haven't had a Marlboro in two weeks, and my next paycheck will be as nice and fat as the first one I got this week. I should be doing the Hora. Or least singing Havah Negilah. Yet, I'm sort of numbly shambling through my days. I can understand that I am on the way out of The City, but hell, it's San Francisco. I should be using my two days off to exploit the high weirdness while I can. This is all about the journey now. The life I am trying to leave, everything was about destination. I justify my life on a single issue, as the Prime Mover, and that justifies my major extracirricular activity being lethargy. I'm tired of living for some nebulous future where all would be well and good, and there would be much rejoicing. This is about the meaning. That's why I thought of the Zen story above. How can we live in the spirit if we have to do the mundane. You make the mundane sacred. Enlightened or not, you have to shit, shower, and shave. So to speak. There have been "Golden Ages" in my life. And those were the time that each day felt meaningful, even if it was mundane. Honestly, meaningful... and funny. To have the world, I have to live in it, right? Why am I waiting for the move to start this? Oh, don't see myself becoming a boddhisvata between now and then.. I just like to live in a clean apartment, have some nice walks, and get plowed with friends a few times. I want to go across the bay and see the Bay Area Anarchists take on Local Communists in a soccer grudge match. I've missed the first of three games.

I want to ride The Clear Blue Way.

All week I've wanted to right about what happening in my fair corner of the world, home of the supposed progressive elements. Someone pied Ralph Nader, okay it was cake, but it was pastry-based. That shmuck Dubya ends up King of the Hill by subversion of the electoral process of the Supreme Court, and people out there are still mad at Ralph for taking away votes from Gore, who was elected by the popular vote, anyway. People out there are considering listening to some ambitious white Republicann' campaign to trash the current Guv and select a Austrian weightlifer turned action hero, who hasn't even sat on a school board before this. I think I'm more mad, because as a humorist, even I couldn't come up with something so ridiculous. I am again bowed to power of absurdity in these times. I'm just not twisted enough to think these things.

I've been darn naughty about keeping up with my Just Finished, because I'm tearing through novels like a chainsaw. I've read 5 in two weeks. well two weekends. But I did finish The Arch Conspirator by Len Bracken. I'm finding situational thought very interesting. Now is why I quit smoking. Now I can afford a few more books a month. Well, something classic in using one vice to take over from another. I'll list the novels, in a few days. Honestly again, I think maybe two or three are worth even mentioning.

Saturday night in San Francisco. The social parade. It's the night when I realize, even if I wasn't in the monkey suit, I'd still be just as terminally unhip. I am simply without hipness. I'm more back of the kneecap, or third rib, than hip. I wouldn't know cool, if I was dunked in a barrel of liquid nitrogen. I'd say I was a true square, but I think I have so many sharp angles of uncoolness, I am a hexagon.

As I loosened my tie, another shift over, that I would do as I thought earlier, and come home to write about politics. But then I live in California and under Dubya, it's too easy. Will Rogers once said, "There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you." My MUNI pass slides through the turnstile and I walk down the steps to the platform, and I know I won't write about my dad, or Seattle. I wouldn't be composing, I would be dwelling. I'm too tired to defenestrate myself over the angst of battling my father, and I won't tear any more chest hair out about it; since I have so little chest hair in the first place. I let a crowded car go by and wait for the next one where I can sit. What will I write about? Am I forcing myself to produce for the handful of my readers, and not for myself? Am I just tapped? What do I have to say that is fresh and captivating? It's hard for me to accept that most of the time, I talk so much, but have so little to say. I give up on reading Bracken's General Theory of Civil War. A situation comedian reading situationalist ideals. The week without cigarettes impacts me as my returning sense of smell reteaches me how pungent city life can be. I slide across to the other side of the train to escape the strata of odor, with a car's full day of workload perspiration, the saccharine of clubgoer haircare product, all shallowly covered by stale urine. My reflection in a window. Existential moment. Then I look away and think on that moment, and lose it.. like you lose Zen by trying to be Zen. Last lollipop in my backpack. Watermelon. Echo Hill Ranch Camp, where my parents sent me each summer for five years. I think again of writing Kinky Friedman. He was the first real individual I remember ever meeting as a kid. I just want him to know. I am not going to walk home the same way I always do. If I don't base my life on conflict with Dad, what will I base it on? Urine again. Blech. Homeless camp. I veer wide of that as much as I do the issue of what will happen if I don't find work in Seattle. I decide to remember the street I walk down. The Brazilian resturant where I went to dinner with the gay ex-Jehovah Witness who is the friend of another ex-Jehovah witness who is now a Unitarian heathen. The intersection where I waited twenty minutes for the anti-war march to come by so I could join. What is with the pungency here? Rotting produce and spoiling leftovers from the fancy restaurant. The chalk coating in the nostrils from the settling construction site just around the corner from home. Fog off the spire of City Hall. Must be the end of summer. Keys. both doors. There is a big mirror along one side of the lobby. Without the tie, and the collar loosened, I look like I just got home from a gig as a cheap Bar Mitzvah band. I wonder if I do weddings. Elevator. Floor. Front Door. Safe.

I know I've been letting my blog slip the last couple weeks, after writing in this thing pretty much everyday. Alot of it is my head already being in Seattle, now that I've really committed, all the more for the second round between my father and myself. I have to write in my blog, considering how surreal life is becoming. Hopefully I'll have something more after work today. I should rant about politics. I'd like that.

"Ours is a world where people don't know what they want and are willing to go through hell for it." - Don Marquis

"... Shall I tell you about Love?"
"Must you?"
"Yes. The human race - although what I say is applicable to virtually all mammals - the human race has achieved so much more than any other species in the time it's been this on earth - a couple of a million years, which is no time at all; about as long as it takes a sulphur dwarf to learn to walk - that the imagination is unable to cope with all these things that the human being has done. The human races created Things. They built wonderful buildings, invented wonderful machines, brought into being poetry, music, and art. To beguile their eighty-odd years they have every conceivable diversion, from the symphonies of Beethoven to the Rubik's Cube. They can rush round in sports cars, they can shoot elephants, they can travel around the world in days, or even hours. In virtually every respect, they have made themselves the equals of the Gods. Most of all, they have all the Things of the World at to use and entertain themselves with. And what do they like doing best of all? They like taking off their clothes - clothes over which they have expended so much effort and ingenuity- and doing biologically necessary but profoundly undignified things to other human beings. Any pig or spider can do that, it's the easiest thing in the world. But you bloody humans, who can do so much more than any species could ever do, you can't do that efficiently. You agonize over it. You make an incredible fuss over it. You get it all wrong, you make each other's lives miserable, you write dreary letters and take overdoses. You even invent a medicine that deliberately makes the whole process futile. My god, what a species!"

from Expecting Someone Taller by Tom Holt

Recovery from last week's shifts means I've been given more to watching DVDs and drooling on myself. Not very condusive to blogging. Dunno, it's more than that. I feel like my focus is swinging so hard back and forth, like a pendulum with the palsy. My Pilates instructor called me like he letting me down after the second date, to tell me that I'm too unfocused and call him in a month when I might be more. Oy. Have to readjust to my late hours. I hate it when the signs are coming in neon. bright pink neon. I'm still focused so intently on the end of the road, I'm not paying enough attention to my driving.

I did get to talk to my friend, Mat, the Ghetto Rennaisance Man of the Inland Empire. He, and Jim from Las Vegas, are probably my closest friends. No, no mushy stuff about them being my real family, the brothers I wanted but never had. I know those two are both my brothers, because sometimes they do the damnedest things and I want to throttle them as only a sibling can. Hell, I'm so stressed I miss San Bernardino, and I spent several years fighting to get out of that hellhole of an urban wasteland. I've always said that San Bernardino only really produces three things: Concrete, Oranges, and Disaffected Youth. But still, I had the best social life I've ever had there, and I miss the whole gang. The pointless drives to nowhere, or just to LA for coffee. I'm really tired of doing all the things I wanted to do in San Bernardino, that I couldn't, by myself. This is going to be a grand mystery for me when I leave. How did I leave a craphole with tons of friends who call just to drag me out when I wanted to hermit... to living in one of the coolest cities on Earth where I handed my number out like confetti strips and I can count the ones that called back on one hand. And how much is my own natural talent, and how much was it the City? Hell with it. I've still had fun here. I've had my picture taken at the grave of Joshua Norton the First.

I don't know why, but the other thing that I keep remembering is the first time that I refused to go to High Holy Services with my dad. It was the second time I ever ducked out of being in shul on the pinnacle of Jewish holidays, the year after I was asked to leave UC: Santa Cruz. I was in my "agnostic" period, which means that if I had met the Jewish God, I would have gladly kicked him in his more holy and celestial nads, because he was a symbol of authority. Later, I would stay non-observant because, I felt ethically wrong to go do worship in a way I don't believe in, for a higher power I'm not sure I believe in, but I don't know.. I might still nut God on the first meeting. I do have bitterness issues. Anyway, err.. I told my Dad to smeg off, and I never remember seeing him more livid in my life. He didn't yell at me.. well, to start with, but he spoke in that trembling regular voice like he wanted to make me believe he wasn't going to get angry enough to lose control. The thing was, he was upset, not primarily for not observing my duties to God as a Jew, but because if he showed up to services without me, he'd be very embarrassed. That's my experience of religion condensed into a single event.

I've been really lax in my "Just Finished" section too.. so I'm going to catch up for the last week.
When The Cat's Away by Kinky Friedman
Singer of Strange Songs: A Celebration of Brian Lumley by Brian Lumley and Others.
The Return of Nathan Brazil by Jack L. Chalker
Hell, I read two of those through just about in the one twelve hour shift.

"Good books, Good friends, and a sleepy conscience - this is the ideal life." - Mark Twain

[Insert Witty and Erudite Blog Entry Here]

Just in from a twelve and a half hour day. If it hadn't been for my bad toe, I doubt I'd be so cranky about it. The overtime is fifteen an hour. I'm actually amazed by how well I handled the pain of my foot and my right shoulder. Before, I would have called in to get myself replaced, but I took the pain and did the whole half-day of work. I make no compunctions about the fact that I am a wuss. A big fat wuss, in fact. I hate pain.. any pain. I think it's easier to wuss out when you know you have the room to wuss. Now, I don't. I have a concrete goal, with time constraints, and I'm challenging myself to transcend my wussness. But, I still don't like any pain.

Couple of quotes to tide my entry over until I hopefully write more tommorrow:

"The only real difference between Christians and Jews is that Christians observe the crucifixion and Jews observe the circumcision. In circumcision, you just merely cut the tip of the penis off. In crucifixion, you throw the whole Jew away." - Introduction to When the Cat's Away by Kinky Friedman

"All things are unique in regard to their irrepeatable time and place in the sun. Whereas money can be replaced, you can't, as Cratylus says, step in the same river once. Like the sun that we recognize by the way it continiuously squanders energy, societies and individuals reveal themselves by their waste - the wasted energy of festivals, dance, and laughter. The real manifestation of wealth requires engaging human passions in art, eroticism, revolution, war = moments when the future vanishes like smoke. The solar economy foregrounds these sumptious activities that have no economic use value, activities that don't figure into the calculations of mainstream economics. Infinitely larger that the restricted economy which it encompasses, solar economics include all human activity and all life under the sun." From "Solar Economics" in The Arch Conspirator by Len Bracken

Yanno, watching some PBS. Why is it that Euros seem to be so anti-GM food and all that kind of shit, but yet they all seem to smoke?

I've developed some kind of post-blister thing on my foot, placed perfectly that every time I take a step, a jolt of pain rides up my leg. It's probably developed from all the damn standing I have to do, which doesn't help heal it either. I know I cut such a noble swath, hobbling around in my monkey suit on rounds. I've done everything to keep my back from giving me problems, so something goes wrong with my foot. Some people have bodies for agility, some have bodies for vitality.. I have a body for catastrophe. Least my mind is sharply twisted as always. To keep my head off the pain in my foot, I tried to contemplate deep important thoughts, but that failed. In the end, I got through the aching with hamsters. I kept imagining hamsters. Hamsters on motorcycles. Hamsters on motorcycles re-enacting the town scene from The Wild One. Luckily by the time I was about to hear a Marlon Brando squeak out "What kind have you got?" I got to sit down.

All for the cash. All for the cash. Speaking of that, I had my digital cable killed today to save 35 a month. I still have basic, but for a TV junkie like myself, that is like trying to kill the cravings for heroin with mexican dirtweed. I've lost TCM, IFC, and Sundance. I'm already starting to twitch. Even worse, they don't even have cable in the house in Seattle. I shall surely perish from the lack of distraction.