End of a superlative day. I made the peace rally, with Jim the Elder, and marched on my own, the whole route. Then I worked seven quiet hours. Of course, my feet are murdering me. The opening of the anti-occupation rally was discouraging, but unsurprising. The crowd was sparse, compared to the pre-war demonstrations. Beyond the post-invasion frustration, this one was happening the same day as the last Giants game before playoffs, the SF Blues Festival, and that annual fetishists' delight, the Folsom Street Fair. I bought a "Books not Bombs" button and Jim replaced his lost beloved peace sign button for his satchel. Still, once the march got started, the people really got energies and the motivation was helped greatly by the Brass Liberation Orchestra. Man, that marching band swung. I heard probably the best rendition of The Internationale from them. I was somewhat unnerved by the chants for "Long live the Intifada!" but I did join in a few rounds of "Whose Streets?" It's amazing to know that I have done four of these marches in a row. But next time, what will probably be my last march in San Francisco, I will make my own sign, dammit.

I got very stressed at work, wound myself very hard again. For me, it's like I can't keep all the thoughts from hitting me all at once. It's hard to describe what nearly overloading is like when you are hyperactive, but closest demonstration is try to read three books, watch a half-dozen TVs, and play your stereo as loud as possible while changing radio stations every five seconds. But the strangest thing happened. I just let go of the stress, without thinking about it. I breathed in and it drained out of me. I'm not going to sing hosannas over this, but it a hopeful thing if I can calm myself more instinctively.

Tommorow is a huge day. There is a big peace rally and march that I've been waiting to attend. I may march alone, since Jim the Elder probably will only do the rally. I do so little politically, this is my chance to make a showing. More news tommorow.

Here we are again, nearly a week since my last entry. But the weird weeks keep rolling. My cat developed a bald spot on his back and nasty scabby stuff under his fur. As you can imagine, I freaked. But the vet says it's probably just an allergic reaction and I'm doing a pill regiment. My graveyard relief decided not to show for work twice, including last night. But least that is more shekels in the bank. Oh, and Happy Jewish New Year.

This has been another weird week amongst a strange month... I worked two twelve hour shifts in a row, and miraculously missed a third one. I was late today because I was picking up the painkillers I would need if I worked that third shift. Six hours in to my shift, I was resigned that I would be working another six. As one can guess, my mood was less than stellar. Then on another pointless hourly patrol of an empty building, I cheered myself slightly with the thought of the extra funds for the move to Seattle, and I was thinking about the choices I had made lately, and the choices I've made all my life. And I started to remember a saying, that I just looked up to get right.. "We have to believe in free will, we have no choice." I did get the author right, Isaac Bashevis Singer. Zing. Clear Blue Truth. When I chose to leave school, that was my choice. When I chose to move to Seattle, that was my choice. These were acts of free will. I have been practicing will, but not free will, all this time. It was a subtle epiphany, but my head still is trying to process. It's like so many understandings, deep but isolated, are simultaneous trying to connect. Things that I've accumulated, people I've come to know, experiences I have gathered, now make more sense. It's not satori. I'm not going to start floating and dispensing wisdom for the ages. Even though, in California, I could make a good living doing that.
But I'm already seeing some things that are making me squirm It's just so weird, and so achingly absurd, to know that the reason I keep living as I always have lived, never testing my limits, just keeping myself distracted, and holding back from what I need to do, is because I know this is a choice I can make, that I have always made.

"Truth burns up error." Sojourner Truth

I haven't written in close to a week, but considering I just got off a 12 hour shift (due to the next shift officer's following of the old service industry tradition, "If they get mad at me being late, then I'll just stop showing up at all.") I tried to write something at work but all I came up was this fine single axiomatic sentence: Life will be the death of me yet.

I do have a Today's captured fragment of perception. A couple walking side-by-side down the side alley street beside my building, both talking on cell phones. A snippet from the woman was about catching a bus to the Border.

Just finished a powerful novel of alternative history, The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinthat asks the question, "What kind of world history would we have from the Black Death until now, if the plague had taken 99% of Europe's population?" Imagine a world where the two defining forces are Allah and Buddha. Like really good alternative history, like Dick and Turtledove, this novel is a philosophical character study of history as seen by the lives of those who might live it. What makes Robinson's centuries-spanning speculative history is weaving the recurrent narrative of the reincarnation of the same karmically-entwined souls through out that span of time. I just wanted to quote a selection from it.

"The deep sense of solitude that had afflicted Bao since the Pan's death began to slip away. Although the people he lived among were not Kung, nor Pan, nor Zhu Isao - noth the companions of his fate, just the people had just fallen in with by accident - nevertheless, they were now his community. Maybe this was the way that it had always happened, with no fate involved; you simply fell in with the people around you, and no matter what else had happened in history or the world, for the individual it was always a matter of local acquaintances - the village, the platoon, the work unit, monastery or madressa, the zawiyya or farm or apartment block, or ship, or neighborhood, - these formed the true circumference of one's world, some twenty or so speaking parts, as if they were in a play together. And no doubt each cast included the same character types, as in Noh drama or a puppet play. And now he was the old widower, the baby-sitter, the broken-down old bureaucrat-poet, drinking wine by the stream and singing nostalgically at the moon, scratching with a hoe in his unproductive garden. It made him smile; it gave him pleasure. He liked having neighbors, and he liked his role among them."

September 11 has come and gone, though the talking heads on cable are still "exploring the tragedy." I wrote this at work, and after seeing how many channels are "exploring the tragedy," I decided I definitely needed to transcribe what I wrote at work, although it was so busy. We had three bike messengers in one hour! I'm utterly exhausted. Here we go...

Two years since 9/11. Just thinking of what has followed since then, nearly threw me off writing this entry. It is easy enough to work myself into a righteous froth and harangue anyone within a short range over their part in the response to this unmitigated tragic event. Made even easier by the soul-rending absurdity of the tragedy and its aftermath involving two particular insanity I loathe: Blind militaristic nationalism and irrational religious zealotry. Add in aggressive and short-sighted avarice and you have the three stooges of geopolitics. These are hard times for the humorist when naked absurdity of a select few doing unmistakably insane things with and to the fearful many, because being right is a power to be gained and held at an any cost. You can make reality if you have a good enough credit rating. And if there is anything I've learned growing up in a proper Jewish household, is to never underestimate the force that can be generated to prove yourself right, even when not.
Anyway, give it a week and the talking heads will be too busy diverting attention onto some other issue, like the latest cute white suburban girl kidnapping or how everything wrong in the universe can be laid at Clinton's feet. Back to the empty symbols clashing over a dissonant chorus chanting verbose arrangements that don't match the actual song, but do agree with the conductors.

I most miss my car when I need to see the stars.

I've so wrapped myself around myself, creating a gut-wrenching tension, that I need to put myself in place. When I was like this, back when I lived in greater San Bernadino, all I had to do was get in my car late at night. I would drive over the San Bernadino Mountains and into the High Desert, and pull off on some ill-used highway so I lay on the hood of my car and look up. Just look up. There, beyond the urban glow, under the clear desert sky at night, I could feel very small. The dome of stars, so many more seen out there, would suck the hubris right out of me. Here I am. That up there is the universe. Star upon star, each a system in our spiral galaxy, They are so far away from me, that I am just seeing the light that took countless years to get to the Earth, light from a source that isn't probably there anymore. Usually, that's when I'd start laughing. If you really want to ask me why I am funny, the fucking big universe that's why. Then I wonder how I'm going to make something very good out of something so very damn small in the big cosmic picture.
The endgame of all that was I got stoned, broke my month off cigarettes, and climbed the fire escape ladder up to the roof to look at the full moon on a rare clear San Francisco night. I saw Orion the Hunter, took me a while since the stars are so dim, and I've always identified with that constellation for some reason. Maybe because it's just really easy to find. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. I've made myself so tense lately, I swear I don't move, I twang. I'm stagnating in a pool of stress that I've filled myself. So maybe, it wasn't the desert sky at night, but I do feel a bit smaller, and my problems I have seem less earth-shattering. I know I shouldn't have bought smokes, but I'm going to have one more, then drench the rest of the pack and trash it. Yet it doesn't bug me that much. Doing all this on a work night, it was a necessity so that I would be able to get out of bed and go to work tommorow. But it doesn't settle me completely. This drama I put myself through, that I know. Who will I be when I put away the drama and stand on my own?

Yesterday, I was walking the perimeter of the building I guard, and I was in the alley street, setting my building behind a row of much larger buildings. I looked up, and above the buildings, these low-flying gauzy clouds were passing at an amazing speed. It's nothing unusual, since it happens often around this time of year and it's just a marine layer phenomena. But for some reason, watching the clouds stream by just caught my eye. When I was still in university, celebrating my golden ten-year jubilee as a professional college student, I took a fascinating class focusing on the comparative studies of humanism and mysticism. I learned a main definition of mysticism as focusing on the ineffable experiences, and how they are expressed as best they can by those who experience them. I snorted at that, I recall. I had a big problem with anything being ineffable. Course, I'm a humanist, so I was being snooty toward mysticism. Have to acknowledge that. Now, with a head ful of Zen, I realize that it's not that you have ineffable experiences, you have experiences that are bet left undescribed. It's the power of instinct and emotion, that are stripped of meaning when you try to encapsulate them in language. How do you capture now when it has passed?

Just finished checking the magnitude of tonight's little tremblor. 3.9. A real jolter, too. I was in, of all places, the elevator of the building I guard, doing rounds on the floors. I distinctly recall saying that an elevator cab should not make such noises. But in the end, it's nothing big, quake-wise. I've seen a seven, two sixes, and a handful of fives. When your first earthquake is the Loma Prieta, 7.1, and you are 50 miles from the epicenter, after that, I remember eating breakfast through one of those sixes, the Landers. I really have to watch myself, come to think of it. Wherever I've lived, I've managed to be around for a major natural disaster. I slept through most of Hurricane Alicia, when it hit Houston, my birth city. And where I've shifted within California, large earthquakes tend to follow. Now, I'm moving into another earthquake zone, with a honking big volcano right next door. Remind me never to live in Malibu, where you can manage a menu of disasters, including quakes, landslides and brush fires. You may think me guilty of believing myself sole responsible for this coincidental chain of events, but when you've has as surreal as life as I've had, you tend believe just about anything is possible, if it will happen to you.

"In the commune, the struggle was for the conquest and defence of the liberty of the individual, for the federative principle, for the right to unite and to act; whereas the States' wars had as their objective the destruction of these liberties, the submission of the individual, the annhiliation of the free contract, and the uniting of men in a universal slavery to king, judge, and priest -- to the State."

- from The State; Its Historic Role by Peter Kropotkin

Well, I've let five days go between entries.. I don't want this to be another of my passionate projects that I lose interest and wander away. My closet is full of half-done projects. I know that I am in a limbo-like state, with two and a half months until I move, but this doesn't excuse working toward living beyond just work, sleep, and television.

Anyway, I must get the house in order. I have to face one of the hardest challenges, deciding what to do with all my books. I know I can't take them all, but I can barely ponder selling even the unwanted books stacked in the back corner of my closet. I've spent years collecting these books, and many hold powerful memories, intellectual accomplishments, or both. Do I keep the Terry Pratchett and get rid of the Alan Dean Foster? Do I sell or donate my Victorian works, and hold onto my Roman history? I know that I am grasping at my collection as a physical representation, when I should let go, but I doubt I will be able to seperate myself from half of them. When I make it (and not if, but when,) I hope to have a huge library. There will come a day that I will have to let go of what my books mean to me, but I don't think that has to mean I have to let go of all my books. Plus, you couldn't have my Lovecraftian horror until you tear each book from my cold dead hand.


"My pen is my harp and my lyre, my library is my garden and my orchard." Judah Halevi