Today, also, I can proudly declare my freedom from a truly haunting presence in my life, something nearly unspeakable that I have had to confront nearly daily for the last few weeks. It's gone now and I breathe easier. Someone removed or ripped down the flyer for "Queer Mime Gardening and Entertainment" from the telephone pole that I must pass just before the bus stop I catch to go to work, and the grocery store where I buy my casual amenities. The flyer adorned with a photo of a Marcel Marceau wannabe badly miming fear about a laughably Faustian, who is about as frightening as fresh Tapioca pudding, stared at me day after day and taunted me with the terror of sheer tackiness. Let's examine this closer by dissecting "Queer Mime Gardening and Entertainment." Surely, no problem with Queer. I'm Queer. Nothing wrong there. Now combine this with Mime. Mimes.... what can be said about Mimes.. Death. Death to all Mimes. Maybe not Shields and Yarnell. Childhood thing. Where was I? Yes... death to all mimes. It's like what happens when clowns get theatrical pretensions. Clowns are funny. Mimes aren't. They are unsettling. And here are two gay amateurs.. who do not just Entertain. But Garden. Garden? What? They come over and mime weeding your flowerbeds or mime mowing your lawn? Does this mean you can mime paying them whatever probably large pay they want? Entertainment. If you have a tea party of a birthday party where you have mimes as entertainment, you get whatever you deserve.
Why didn't I just ignore the flyer, you might ask? I wish I could have. But everytime I passed that telephone, there were those two white-face ninnies frozen in that same ridiculous photo... pulled by some powerful magnetic force, I had to look. And look. And look. Queer Mimes!! Queer Mimes!!!
Thankfully they are gone now. I breathe easier, and read my book untroubled at the bus stop. I gain one comfort from this whole affair. The whole time the flyer was up, not a single tear-away phone contact tab along the bottom of the page was ever taken. It restores my hope for humanity.

Oh hey..... I have been looking at my site meter and seeing some addresses I have no idea who they are... so if you are actually reading my blog, and not going, "Oh, bouncing Buddha's balls... another whiny gay Jew philosopher's blog" than do comment to me at realmoneone@yahoo.com. I know I should show something resembling basic web skills and make a reply to link on this blog, but I will not provoke the magic goblins in the grey-beige box that make things go. They have too strong a Union, and I'm not going to get them a dental plan. So until I actually get off my soft Hebrew rump, and you do want to comment, again, email me at realmoneone@yahoo.com

Thank you.

I was late by an hour to work today. I set my alarm clock wrongly. The old PM instead of AM goof. I'm getting more distracted as the full impact of where I am in my life sets in. Either that, or I just have my head that far up my ass that I need to put glasses on my penis to see what I'm doing.

Had a great weekend. The "other woman" of the house, or H, as I will call her in my journal, invited me to visit the house that her primary/husband (who we will call M, even though, I could call him the "other Jew,) bought in the sticks. Ten acres in the agrarian wilderness just beyond Seattle. I'm not usually one for living in the countryside, but the house is lovely, and the relative solitude gave me a needed respite from the city and the House. Most of it was just relaxing. Seeing the property. Helping clear the path down to the creek, I got to swing a machete, and therefore fulfilled my machismo clause in my biological male contract for a few months. I whacked a thistle, and sparks rose from a rock beneath. I had brought the blade down on a soft and flinty bit of chirt, which I sliced rather cleanly into three parts. They decorate the rustic house now. I got a chance to talk with H, who I know the least of all my housemates, and gained a greater affinity for M. I was "away" for a night and a day. H took the longer ways back. I got to walk across the cable suspension bridge over a mountain river after eating chocolate-dipped donuts. It poured rain some. Oh, and M's dog, the terror of children, didn't eat me, or even chew on me any.

What was really great, and had been desperately necessary, was that I got to see stars. It was an unusually clear night that I spent over, and I turned off the lights after H and M retired upstairs before going out on the deck to just look up. It wasn't as majestic as if I was out in the High Desert of Southern California.. or deeper anyplace from light pollution, but I could see the celestial light show more clearly than I have in a number of years. The stars offer perspective. Makes a philosophical human feel amazingly less important and fills the soul with the absurdity of being infintesimal before the infinite. How can God be picking on me if, he/she/they/it are running this big a machine.. if it is actively run? It reminds me that I'm on my own, and that's the way it was meant to be. If I have a purpose in this whole shebang, it isn't for the Prime Mover to endow onto me, it is for me to discover and establish it.

Today is the Roman Emperor and Stoic Philosopher Marcus Aurelius' birthday. I've loved his Meditations since I read it for a humanities course. So in his honor, I'm going to do a bit of bibliomancy. I'll open the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius at a random page, and record what comes of it.

"If the choice is yours, why do the thing? If another's, where are you to lay the blame for it? On gods? On atoms? Either would be insanity. All thoughts of blame are out of place. If you can, correct the offender, if not, correct the offence; if that too is impossible, what is the point of recriminations? Nothing is worth doing pointlessly."

Book Eight, Selection 17.

Good day. Nothing special day, but somehow, good day.

I overslept. Again. I did manage to pick up my security blazer, wash my work slacks, and iron my dress shirts. Something felt different about the day, even though I doubted it would be much like yesterday. On the bus to work, as I watched the world go by through the windows, on the pretty day, I realized that this was my day. Not that I so much owned the day, but that day I belonged to no one else. I was in my uniform, in my bus, on the way to my job to make my money. My senses felt acute. The sky was bluer than usual. I smiled at passengers, and shared the smell of spiced onions coming from the grocery bag of the guy across the seats from me. I've never really felt in possession of my days. They were always like I was serving some unseen hand, outside myself, that held the minutes from me. Work was tiring, but not as tiring as before. I'm adjusting to work, which I have been hoping I would. I did my tasks without the nervousness that I didn't know what I was doing, or I was doing it too slowly. The shift passed quickly and easily. I argued the limitations of Marxist theory before developments unseen by Marx. My supervisor and a co-worker discussed the value of joining a union. There was a big fancy business party at one of the buildings in my pod, and the caterers gave the officer there a bunch of gourmets leftovers he shared with me. My bus was so late, I ended up taking the slow bus that would leave me to walk five blocks on achy feet. But in the end, I enjoyed the ride through U of Wash campus and The Ave, reading Twain. I walked in peace, enjoying the mild child of the night. Now I sit here, rat on chest, and write.... My day is done. It was really an unspectacular day, yet I feel right about life for living this day. Oh, sure, I expect days to be even better.. social life and new intellectual vistas and all that... but right now, right here, this is what I want. To live each day in my life drenched in meaning in mundanity.

Oh, and it didn't rain until I'd been home for an hour. How good is that?

I'm always swearing I will not use my blog as a kvetch launch platform.

But, damn, my feet and knees hurt. I haven't been in this much pain in a long time. This job is either going to get me into shape, or my body is gonna have a total meltdown. But it technically fits the sacrificing the body to the cause thing, so least I gain some new levels of hubris and drama. The Woman has problems in the fact that I celebrate my problems. I take pride in my faults. Which is true. It's my way of understanding myself and the absurdity that is truly part of the human condition. That given everything within me that makes life difficult, I'm still here. I'm not dead. Everything birthday, I am still startled by the fact I didn't die before I reached eighteen. How else am I supposed to face life, with the stoic fastness of will that is more a mark of my parents? This is my life. I can't always tell the true depth and width of things in my field of vision. My eye-hand coordination is at part with say... an spastic tree sloth. Memory? I'm lucky if I remember my own name sometimes. What I ate from breakfast? A miracle if I recall it. Oh, and don't forget the hyperactive mouth, that seems to go around with my foot stuck far inside it, I can sit down without a stool. I can't ignore my limitations, but in a way I can celebrate them. They are part of what makes me different, in the good way. Would I be the person I'd be if my brain wasn't wired so oddly? Doubt it. I'd be the nice straight Jew who lives well under the thumb of his family, suppresses his own dreams and thoughts, and lives in a feedback loop of drapes, religious observation, and a desolation of the soul.

I think that is what ruffles me the most in this house. The Woman expects me to totally bow before her stalwart neurochemical troubles, since she can't change them.. but that apparently, I can change my stalwart neurochemical troubles to more easily fit into her life. I don't know what troubles me more, how much certainty I load on my identity through my life issues, or how much more certainty The Woman seems to place in her immutable life issues. In the end, there's probably little I can do. She comfortable in her "house as the center of her world" belief system, and her attachment to the owner allows her the believed power to enforce her reality on all those around her. She's actually more the Jew than I let on... she doesn't just suffer... she has to make sure everyone else knows how much she suffers.

Then I end up facing my own blind spots. Where I am unsure where my parents end and I begin. Where I am unable to tell is the border between where my limitations and my self-sabotage. How much is my own grasping to make the world fit my image of it, where truth is blurred by fog banks of delusion. Now that I don't live AND work alone, it's all the more clear for it. I work so hard that I hurt as much as I do now, because I so desperately want to make this job work, but at the same time, I'm being watched closely by management and shiftcrew because I'm so slow, I must be slacking off somewhere. That I seem to forget things so much... that I feel I need help more, but in asking for that help, my co-workers think I am trying to pass off my work duties onto them. I patrol the floors where the bank's investment offices are, with the constant ticker, and three screens to every desk.... look and ponder that working at the speed required for that kind of work would probably kill me. Literally.

Strangely, in the end, this is what I blessed with. The chance to work with my difficulties and limitations, to not solve them. But accept them as some kind of practical karmic joke, where I am not the joke, I'm the punchline. This is the point where I hold onto hope that's kept me going nearly double my believed life expectancy. where I have probably my only real sense of true faith. That maybe no God, or no higher being/state/force, made me the way that I am, but that these are the gifts of a universe that plants the seed in everyone not just to be guys, or Jews, or hyperactives... but to make those who are trying to fight to be just really swell human beings. It doesn't seem like a bad way for the Big Show to run itself. Least in my eyes.

In the end, who knows? maybe my limitations were planned to make The Woman consider hers. You never know. She's touched by her loving God. I could just be a tool.. a guide.. on Her path.. to bring out her humanness. You never really do know. I think Albert Einstein was wrong, God does not dice with the Universe, but he has the TV Guide.

Sleep now. Gammy leg or not. I go back to work Saturday. I'm even more sure that if I met God for lunch... I'd enjoy the meal, feel better for it... but I'd still stiff God with the bill.

Spent some time with the Woman in the studio, after I tried to Googled some of the companies and firms in the building I guard. Nothing really. About the worst is a timber company.

I wonder where I'll be in a month. I think I'll join Flexcar.. a Seattle carsharing program. I can get a car long enough to do some one-day roadtrips. I've been in Seattle for five months.. or coming up on it.. and I've never been any farther than the periphery of the city. It would be nice to go see the new state I live in. Supposed to be damn pretty out there.

I wonder who'll I'll be in a month.