I was going to just quote some article on humanistic environmental ethics over the old morality model, but honestly, it is really boring. Anyway, I talked to a good friend of mine who is about to enter in this online writing contest, and I admire that alot. I figured maybe in some kind of cock-eyed honor to him, I'd post one of my old stories. Who knows, it could make me regret that I haven't written something new, myself. Wish good luck to my friend.

Writing so long, I’d gone through my whole pack of smokes. Of course, I had to smoke my last Marby a little after midnight. You know how it is, trying to find somewhere that’s open to buy cigs at that hour in this town. Especially somewhere open at that hour in my part of town. Forget about it. Might as well go hunting for the Holy Grail. But, did I need my nicotine death cylinders, man, and so did the quest thus begin.

I wandered for hours. Okay, maybe just forty-five minutes. I’m telling you, they need to rename those places as inconvenience stores. Not one open, not a single liquor store, and not even a damn 7-11. All the way to the top of the hill on Van Ness, up and down those streets. Not a real nice part of town, if you know what I mean. Found a lot of kinds of nothing. Only thing I found was how much faster you can walk when you’re sure that guy at the corner is sizing you up for a rather rude withdrawal from your personal mobile funds. So I cut back toward Van Ness, feeling defeated in my task of shaking hands with Old Saint Nic.

So I spot this quiet hole-in-the-wall bar off the narrow alley. Wham. Bing. Light goes on in my head. Sometimes in the old bars, the bartender sells smokes. Mind you, they mark up the price to somewhere between “you have got to be kidding” and “where do I sign over my firstborn.” But, hey, I figured was worth a shot. I walked in through those corny old-style padded red vinyl doors and passed under the flickering neon sign of the place. I’ll always remember that joint’s name. “Ain’t Life Divine?” I swear, that was the name of the bar!

Sure, it was a dive, but there was something real different about the club. Something real unusual. Think the first sign was the bartender. I walked up to the bar, ready to ask if he had cigarettes for sale. First thought it had to be a trick of the light. When the bartender turned to ask me what I’ll have, I see the guy has a glowing halo of golden light around his head. You know like they painted on those medieval church windows and icons. I’m telling you, he really had the face that looked like of those Christian saints! Being Jewish myself, hell if I knew which one. Emanating some inner holiness, he takes my money and slides down a pack of cigs. Asks me if I want anything else, I shake my head no less to say no but to hopefully shake out the hallucinations from hitting my word processor for way too long. Dude had to be some kind of saint, as he sure made a miracle. Only charged me two bucks for the smokes.

So I light my first cigarette in hours, and just try to figure why I’m not freaking. I call for a shot of whiskey from the beatified bartender, down the shot, and look around at more holy cats surrounding me in that bar. All these guys glowing with transcendent sacredness, on a totally high plane of existence, but just sitting at tables and milling around the bar while nursing beers, joking around, and doing all that kind of normal guys-in-a-bar stuff. I mean, I took a long drag on my Marby as I watched Krishna beat Mohammed at darts. I was in the presence of more spirit made flesh than I could fathom, and all I could bring myself to do was call for another shot of Jack.

Over the rim of the glass, I see some guys sitting around a private table set off more to the back. Pretty normal for these old-school bars. Just three old regulars playing cards privately. Name of the game seemed to be Hearts. What wasn’t so normal was the regulars happened to be Vishnu, Buddha, and the Big Guy of the West, God. Probably wondering how I knew who they were so quickly. Hard to miss the illuminating golden aura around the Enlightened One, sitting on a chair dusted with flower petals. Plus he wasn’t that jolly fat baldy you see while waiting for your Chinese takeout, but the righteous thin man like in the Indian temples. Think the four arms, and the flaming cosmic glow gave away Vishnu pretty quickly. That, and he was actually sitting on a floating lotus bloom hovering over the sawdust-covered floor. You know Michelangelo got the Supreme Cheese’s face right? Long beard, glowering paternal eyes, and the whole thing. Heavenly light shone down and bathed Jehovah as he shuffled the deck of cards.

Then HE looked at me. Yeah, Mr. Most High gazing right at me! And then the Celestial CEO actually waved me over to the private table, gesturing to the an empty chair right across from Him. God says to me, “We need a fourth for hearts. Why not join in?” So, I did. God dealt out the cards, real slick and practiced. Buddha and Vishnu played it all silent, putting on real heavy game faces for divine manifestations. Cards go down, next round gets dealt, and we play a few hands. It was pretty good. But I can now say that it was hard the first time I had to slam the most nasty Queen of Spades on the transcendent embodiment of universal love and compassion. But, I got over it. Stuck Vishnu a round or two later with ease. Considering the gang around me, I was real surprised that nothing profound was said by then, and even the usual banter was light. But who was I to try to comprehend these deified powers, the real sacred cats behind three major world religions. Could have been four, but no way was I gonna be the one to ask God how his kid was doing.

Anyway, don’t know if they made it so they closed down some of their cosmic senses, since I did manage to come out on top in a few rounds. Still I had more points than I wished I did, only losing more to Vishnu. After a few more hands, I couldn’t help myself. I had to say or ask something. I cleared my throat loudly and asked, “Well, I gotta ask what’s the meaning of it all? You know, me, being a mere mortal, wouldn’t mind knowing from you what’s up with this whole life thing?” The Hyper-holy Trio just smile all big and knowing at each other, like They had know I’d ask sooner or later. Course, hello, they would know I was gonna ask that sooner or later. Duh!

Not getting any quick answer, I took up the cards, and dealt out the next round. Vishnu doesn’t look up or around with any of His faces as he holds the hand in two hands and arranged the cards with two other hands. Buddha looked like he’s meditating on what to do with his hand. Finally, God flicked the two of clubs down, and said, “This sounds more like Buddha’s turf, but this is about it.” I blinked some, and asked, “What, playing cards?” The three divine beings nod to each other and then to me. We kept playing through, totally quiet. Well, except for Vishnu asking Buddha to change his karma so he could stop getting deal such lousy cards.

Soon enough, the canonized barkeep shouted out last call, and I knew I should get going back home. I did make sure to buy another pack of smokes. Buddha took the last hand. I stood up, slipped on my jacket, and lit one more cig. Vishnu harmoniously chimed, “Good game. Good game, gentlemen.” Buddha nodded in agreement. Having shot the moon in one of the last rounds, God came out on top with the least points. God stroked his celestial facial carpet, “First time I’ve won in a few weeks, I believe.” To which, I replied, “Well, you win some and you lose some, but it’s all cool as long as you enjoyed the game.”

And I swear that as I turned to exit that old bar, those most transcendent threesome grin from ear to ear and winked at me. Profound, huh?

I figured I would do something truly rare and do a morning post to this blog. The blessed bakers of Top Pot Doughnuts, a Seattle institution, opened a shop a mile or so from my home, but since there are two massive hills between myself and the shop, I used the utterly rare rental of a car to come down here before I had to turn said vehicle in. Doubly, I can scribe a bit easier now that I've recovered from the lingering hangover left from too much German Beer, some shared with the Indomitable I, who is set upon another drinking foray this weekend. Normally, I wouldn't consider two major inebriations in a week, but then I'm usually not walking the razor's edge over my immediate future.
I did rent the car to get some practice, for when I get the callback for the driving assessment for the blood courier job. Seemed reasonable that the first time I get into a motor vehicle for months not be the driving assessment. Plus, my parking has never been a strong suit, so I had to get some of that in over all else. Least now, I feel more confident when the test comes, as I managed to cover a great variety of road types yesterday, from the classically bass-ackwards directionals of downtown Seattle, to freeway through the the far suburban hinterlands. It's been so damn odd having a car at my command, as I did for most of my adult life, because I don't really want to have a car at my command anymore, honestly. Yes, I miss my rambling drives, and fuller roadtrips, but a car is so much hassle. I could have gone to Capitol Hill or something for coffee last night, but the spectre of city parking kept that at bay. I've grown accustomed to the costs of mass transit, and the gains in just sitting back to watch the changing urban landscape are much greater for someone devoted to observation. But, I am still somewhat curious about a scooter purchased when the winter ends, but we'll see. A bicycle first, really. Lately I've been mocking my own Americanism, but its kind of true that more of my classic Americanism is falling away, which is a good thing. But I know there is plenty of selective political and environmental blindness left to keep me in moderate standing as a modern US citizen.

One last thing... As I sit inside the cafe style interior of Top Pot, I can't help but note they've fallen back on the books by the pound on the wall shelves style. Most of the books are old encyclopedias full of obsolete information, and probably institutional racism, or collections of classic history or literature. The old lesser-know fiction and non-fiction catch my eye. I wonder about the authors, who might have thought they were writing a great work for the ages, and now their intensive literary dreams end up sold on the cheap by weight. It's too damn theoretical for any worth, really, since most of them are probably too dead to worry about the matter now. But still. But then, wouldn't be enough to know that the fruits of their labor still sit somewhere, existing in lesser obscurity, but existing nonetheless? Just something I guess I'll wonder about if I ever publish. Then, I might be just like them. Wholly desiring of getting what is within to be without, and gaining in that more than the renown and agelessness of the work itself.

Oh well. Time to finish my coffee and drop the car off. Might be more today, mattering on if I feel like staying out.

Noted for the record. I am halfway between by fourth half-liter of beer. The wonders. Oh, the wonders.

I've noted, not without some pride, the Woman has nicked a few axioms I have quoted here for her own blog..... so in that spirit, I turn to a selection of quotes from the Oxford Book of Quotations made some time ago for some more admirable selections. May they be spread.

"My soul, do not seek for immortal life, but exhaust the realm of the possible."
- Pindar

"The world is not a 'prison house,' but a kind of kindergarten, where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks."
- Edward Arlington Robinson

"If I am not for myself, who is for me? And being for my own self, what am I? If not now, when?"
- Hillel the Elder

A status report long in coming is made finally due to coins in a pickle jar. Although the loan check from my father arrived today, that money is sancrosanct lettuce, but I still needed a drink. I took my pickle jar full of spare change gathered for the rainy day fund, ran it through one of those usurious coin machines at the supermarket, and still came out with more than enough to make a journey to the German tavern. I'm working on the pilsner gifted by the waitress who has great sympathy with my jobless plight. I couldn't stay at home anymore, with my thumbs planted rectally, and fret. Note, please, I do have a job now. But the logistics and variable pay of being a door-to-door shuttle driver make the position only comforting as the last fallback. But it is a job, no matter if I'll have to learn a territory that is slightly smaller than Rhode Island to do it. What really drives me to drink is the interminable wait until early next week for the blessed job I really want, the one where I do something that matters. A rare week of staff meetings keeps the hiring manager from making the decision on which of the three applicants get to become a substitute courier delivering blood from a renowned local blood bank to local and regional hospitals. Yes, a job where my work might actually help save a life or two. Its not hard to see why I am am ready to chew my fingers down to the knuckles as I wait for the callback, then take a driving assessment before getting the job. Madness. Madness, I tell you! Of course, it's possible that the wait will cost me the fallback job if I try to delay training for another week, but I have no choice there. The courier job is nearly my obsession now. I do have a secondary fallback option in the making, which is to work for the most rabidly anti-union security company in Seattle, but my everything-but-the-stool-sample application process is on turbulent seas, and aiming for the rocks. And that may not be resolved until next week also. Thusly becoming supplicant to my father as the lengthening wait has utterly wasted my bank account. And thusly again, being driven to drink. And drink more if the Indomitable I and his roommate, the Latin Marx, manage to go out this weekend. Status report complete. In recognition of the outside probability of divine intervention, I've recently begun working my way through the global pantheon of deities, starting with Aten, and hopefully working all the way through to Zeus.

Never a big fan of nostalgia as a lifestyle, I've had to bite my lip recently as I'm hit by the damnable want of a return simpler times in my life, which is only comparable of a Russian for a return to the orderliness of communism. Sure, things were simpler when I was younger, but that was mostly because I was invested with delusional divine psychodrama of the besought and ostracized hyperactive hermit. Life is bound to be easier when you have no momentum to leave your room, except to eat. and that was sporadic. How complicated adulthood must be for someone to reflect wistfully on dissonant childhood. Least I've gained something in the learning of how humans can easily retouch their pasts with a huge sloppy application of barely opaque gloss. Then I do have a natural resistance to nostalgia that is born of knowing that in the Golden Ages so sought by Americans, I'd be lynched or committed. Whichever came first. Ask a black man about the wonderful gentility of the olden days of Southern gentility, and see what answer you get. Okay, I pine retrogressively for a future history that is some utopian egalitarian dream of freedom, but that is countered by knowing that is the past can repeat itself, I could just as likely be put up against a wall and shot for the crime of social deviance. I wish both those temporal factors could center me better on my sense of nowness. But that could positively un-American of me.

Whatever the case, there is a change in the climate of my inner landscape that indicates scattered clouds of doubt with a growing chance of clearing intellectual skies. Not just a gain resultant from seeing any possibility for a rewarding job, but a gain in something I can't easily quantify. I'm taking alot of this on faith, risking belief in a positive result over the pragmatic weighing of an intellectual value-judgement that prepares for dissapointment. I do really believe that this job is mine, and its only a matter of time, and from this I gave the most confident and lucid job interview ever. What I found the most shocking was how little I stuttered during the interview, and didn't fall into my usual hesitancy when faced with tougher questions. This all could be narcisstic patting myself on the back, allowing myself to percieve something that was not, but I doubt it. For once. I really accomplished something, that I am sure to bury in tons of the usual negative deterius, but that I can't abolish or dissolve. I'm still working off that current decision to back off the heavy philosophical interpretation, but its hard to take any of this on face value alone. The truly spookiest thing to think about is what kind of place I could be in when I get this job, and I finally gain, even in a small way, a feeling of the value of physical gains for my work. It's going to be a whirlagig, when I can fall back on the meaningless of my life as some catch-all for my angst.

Feh.

Something good will come of this. It has to. I believe so.

In the great American tradition of confessing our sins publically in a futile attempt at absolution by delusionary honesty, I am writing this while eating overpriced fish and chips and drinking a couple pints at a fake upscale Irish pub (the real one a block away doesn't have wireless, which is probable part of what makes it real,) and charging it my credit card while unemployed and down to my hundred bucks. And now I can fool myself into not feeling guilty for the act. Let alone, that my shrink will probably be miffed when I show up for my appointment mildly tipsy.

I was about to write about learning my lessons, and all that. But that would be faceitious of me to do so, really. The fact that I only seem to clue into the possibility of a lesson only through desperation, belies that. Then to top it off, I am bored so senseless by my lack of a centralizing activity, I have too much time to add elaborate gothic flourishes to my desperation. I've tried to hold onto the idea that job first, philosophy second, but it's harder than I thought. As long as I keep up this damnable persecution complex, which is undoubtedly the paradise of the narcissist, and consider that this world belongs to "them," I've learned just about nothing. Even though the world doesn't belong to "them" either, because the world will go on without me or them, in the end, hasn't really sunk in. If it did, I would be doing more writing than in this blog. I doubt I will know I've learned anything until I create enough work to fill an author's portfolio.

This week has been loaded with the kind of dichotomy that if I could really capture in my writings, I would finally feel life born in the words I place on screen and paper. I ran into someone,I barely knew years ago while exploring my philosophy through role-playing, who had been wanting to thank me for playing with such a sense of independence and fearlessness, that I had helped him decide to finally come out of the closet and live true to himself, overall. I was bowled over by the idea that I helped someone, when all my active attempts to "advise" other people online turned into a exhortation on my false individualism, and I looked back on those times as the reason why I stopped trying to play the self-effacing sage. But then only days later, my Grand Canyonesque blind spot for social dynamics resulted in picking the most personally favorable choice in a double message, and angering The Man whom cursed me sincerely for the first time ever. What I dream about doing, I can do, as long as I don't dream about doing it. Somewhere in here, I am totally missing the Dharma.

Usually, I beat myself up about the fact I still act with the motivations of the over-indulged and manipulative child that I was, but there really may be truth in looking backward. My life has always been safe, secure in a broadband of being because I never had to work hard to gain what I wanted, and I could always dodge what I didn't want using my disabilities and emotional difficulties. In other words, I've never had to really sacrifice anything, by doing just enough to pass, or fall to failure when I've reached the point where I would clearly have to lose to gain something more. (I do have to say, for the first time, for all my mockery of religion, I see how a wrathful higher power could be useful as a motivator, as the unmovable authority. But since God, or whomever one could quiver before in majesty, is still subjective, he/she/it can be believed to be appeasable.) I've never really had to do anything I didn't want to do, and I've been to justify this intellectually. Maybe this is the real compromise position that has been unravelling, since sooner or later, we all have to do what we don't want to do, and not just economically or physically. That's not to say I should give up all my individuality and swim with the stream, but I will still have to work without, if I want to later gain within. The Buddha came back to teach mankind that you can't end the trap of suffering, unless you really suffer and give yourself over to that suffering to gain understanding of it. It makes sense in the face of how I felt for a long time now that I couldn't really write what I wanted, and what would be meaningful, until I figured out what my life lacked. That was the reason I left college to "find myself" in the "real world." I can practice compassion, since I can't say that what I believe, even if mired in my own possessiveness, hasn't affected the life of anyone, and make them reach for more, but I'm still in my own way. And I still can't turn to God, Country, and King to force me over that edge. But I can't turn to myself either.

I shouldn't bitch. But this does suck.

Pat Tillman, Our Hero

Dave Zirin

I don't believe it," seethed Ann Coulter.

Her contempt was directed at a September 25 San Francisco Chronicle story reporting that former NFL star and Army Ranger war hero Pat Tillman, who was killed in Afghanistan last year, believed the US war on Iraq was "f***ing illegal" and counted Noam Chomsky among his favorite authors. It must have been quite a moment for Coulter, who upon Tillman's death described him in her inimitably creepy fashion as "an American original--virtuous, pure and masculine like only an American male can be." She tried to discredit the story as San Francisco agitprop, but this approach ran into a slight problem: The article's source was Pat Tillman's mother, Mary.

Mary and the Tillman family are relentlessly pushing for answers to the questions surrounding Pat's death in Afghanistan. They want to know why it took the Pentagon five weeks to tell them he died in a tragic case of friendly fire. They want to know why they were unwitting props at Pat's funeral, weeping while lies were told by eulogizing politicians. Mary is now hoping that a new Pentagon inquiry will bring closure. "There have been so many discrepancies so far that it's hard to know what to believe," she said to the Chronicle. "There are too many murky details."

The very private Tillmans have revealed a picture of Pat profoundly at odds with the GI Joe image created by Pentagon spinmeisters and their media stenographers. As the Chronicle put it, family and friends are now unveiling "a side of Pat Tillman not widely known--a fiercely independent thinker who enlisted, fought and died in service to his country yet was critical of President Bush and opposed the war in Iraq, where he served a tour of duty. He was an avid reader whose interests ranged from history books...to works of leftist Noam Chomsky, a favorite author." Tillman had very unembedded feelings about the Iraq War. His close friend Army Spec. Russell Baer remembered, "I can see it like a movie screen. We were outside of [an Iraqi city] watching as bombs were dropping on the town.... We were talking. And Pat said, 'You know, this war is so f***ing illegal.' And we all said, 'Yeah.' That's who he was. He totally was against Bush." With these revelations, Pat Tillman the PR icon joins WMD and Al Qaeda connections on the heap of lies used to sell the Iraq War.

Tillman's transition from one-dimensional caricature to critically thinking human being is a long time coming. The fact is that in death he was far more useful to the armchair warriors than he had ever been in life. When the Pro Bowler joined the Army Rangers, the Pentagon brass needed a loofah to wipe their drool: He was white, handsome and played in the NFL. For a chicken-hawk Administration led by a President who loves the affectations of machismo but runs from protesting military moms, this testosterone cocktail was impossible to resist. The problem was that Tillman wouldn't play their game. To the Pentagon's chagrin, he turned down numerous offers to be its recruitment poster child.

But when Tillman fell in Afghanistan the wheels once again started to turn. Now the narrative was perfect: "War hero and football star dies fighting terror." The Abu Ghraib scandal was about to hit the press, so the President found it especially useful to praise Tillman as "an inspiration on and off the football field, as with all who made the ultimate sacrifice in the war on terror." His funeral was nationally televised. Bush even went back to the bloody well during the presidential campaign, addressing his team's fans on the Arizona Cardinals' stadium Jumbotron.

We now know, of course, that this was all a brutal charade. Such callous manipulation is fueling the Tillman family's anger. As Mary Tillman said this past May, "They could have told us up front that they were suspicious that [his death] was a fratricide, but they didn't. They wanted to use him for their purposes.... They needed something that looked good, and it was appalling that they would use him like that." A growing number of military families, similarly angered, are criticizing the war in Iraq through organizations like Military Families Speak Out.

As for Chomsky, whom Ann Coulter would undoubtedly label "treasonous," Mary Tillman says a private meeting was planned between him and Pat after Pat's return--a meeting that never took place, of course. Chomsky confirms this scenario. This was the real Pat Tillman: someone who, like the majority of this country, was doubting the rationale for war, distrusting his Commander in Chief and looking for answers. The real Pat Tillman, the one with three dimensions, must stick in the throat of the Bush-Coulter gang, a pit in the cherry atop their bloody sundae.

- from The Nation Magazine

Least this time, I gave fair warning it might be awhile before I can sit before Avram and wax philosophical. I'm not exactly sure why I am able to write today, here on the Broadway strip, but like many things lately, I'm trying not to ask too many questions. I'm surprised I didn't write when I committed a personal heresy of mammoth proportions by telling my shrink that I think he (not him per se, but therapy in general) could be part of the problem, and I wasn't sure I should see him again. I've been in therapy since I was six, when my ADHD situation blossomed fully. I'm coming to this point where I have to question even the basic "help" structure I've been immersed in, especially after the Great Breakdown of '92, which has delivered one of the two messages that have both given me strength when needed, and failed when that strength turned poisonous. The idea that I should still aspire to some form of mainstream acceptance, and take the world on its own terms, is mostly on me for its creation, because of my unconscious cravings to be finally embraced by others, parents and peers alike, and which for all my current rebelliousness was the defining motive of my life during much of my childhood. The failure of the first idea probably gave birth to the second one, formed in opposition to the first, that the failures of acceptance were not born of me, by flaws in the world, which therefore meant that I should foresake the decrepit world, and the soulless minions, to form something in me wholly my own since I could count on no-one else to be there for me. I've often said of the pre-GB days, that I can't see how I saw back then now, but I'm wrong there, since I see more least why I saw as I did.
Now, I might not return to therapy for a wholly different reason: the failure of the third way of thinking. As pretenscious as using the US Civil War as a metaphor for my internal battles is, It works. Two diametrically opposed sides, with powerful factions defining the will of the other factions below them, trying to main some kind of union in the face of an expanding frontier and the high-cost success of the original properties, forming a totally uneasy alliance through hostile compromise that only held as long until the frontier became too large to hold under the synthesis of the two philosophies, and bloody battle that consumed the whole came when reality set in that neither could share the same space. Let alone how the fight was defined in glorious sacred ideology, but came down to a fight between old and new for which was best. Its not that the third way didn't work for me, it did but like the first two, only up to a point. And now I am past that point. The third way was necessary to hold me together as a functioning unit, one that did many good things in that time, including completion of my first two years of college, and the gains in independence that made Seattle possible. My greatest error, and an easy one for an overly introverted intellectual to make, was the same I had made in the last two ways, where I wrapped my survival in lush and complex philosophy to hide the justification of the places where the pieces of the puzzle didn't fit. Even this blog can be seen as a working of that third way, even if I still feel the gains in placing my position in existence down in some sideways public means.
So do I start looking for the fourth way now? I'm not so sure. The third way broke down recently due to finding that I didn't want the answers so I asked the wrong questions. Now I wonder if I should worry about getting the answers in the first place. If the fulfillment of my life is freedom, then am I restricting that freedom by bogging myself down in needing definitive answers? Maybe I still want the answers, not to know, but to suspend the need for having faith and trust in life's own meaning. Trust is interwoven heavily in my narrative, mattering mostly on the tense and subject of the predicate, but in the end, I've come to trust in nothing. That means I lack faith. But how could I have made it so far without some modicum of faith in the possibility of something bigger and better?
I won't press this much farther, least for right now, because I could easily fall into the cloud of frustration and waste that comes from not having a job, and worrying about how I will pay rent and eat without turning back to the sources I left so I wouldn't need to turn back to them. Nothing is simpler than leaving some of this until I least find a job of some sorts, nearly of any sorts, and returning the base stability needed to think and feel more clearly. There's a few small things I might try to do, but I doubt I will, as my general motivation is lacking in the face of unemployment.
I finished two books in the last couple weeks, and here I am writing, even if it is just some existential handjob or not, so I might be doing self-flagellation for my current woes, but least I've taken off the hair shirt. I'm even going to leave a resume at the internet cafe I am at now. You never know.

I spent about thirty minutes composing a post, written over pre-therapy coffee at a nearby cafe, and then I realized I sounded like a total ass for what I wrote, and I deleted it. I might write after therapy, I might not. I'm not sure if blogging is a good idea right now, as I'm sliding toward overdramatic melancholic melodrama right now, especially after I didn't get a job that I should have gotten, even thought I've known I couldn't do the job, and it was a logistical nightmare. All I am doing by blogging lately is fulfilling things that are best left unfulfilled for now. I guess I'll have to see. Least I am really seeing why I haven't written a fictional word in close to three years. I'll look for others' interesting words to fill the space if I can.

"1. Find a subject you care about. 2. Do not ramble, though. 3.Keep it simple. 4.Have the guts to cut. 5. Sound like yourself. 6.Say what you mean to say. 7. Pity the readers." - Kurt Vonnegut