Backwards and Forwards

Been intense around here lately. Not just that my roommate's been wound too tight. Like, clocktower tight. Or that my mood swings have left me to wonder at the state of my brain and my potential for things like schizophrenia or a tumor...a wacky tumor. Or the constant parade of strange, wonderful...strange people that end up in my living room, eating my food and breathing air that, while not technically mine, still likes me better. Or the desperate poverty that's kept me from these interwebs for over a week. Or that it's the end of the ju-months.

Or the crushing loneliness, it's not that either.

And, to be fair, know that from my perspective, none of the events above counts as bad. They're just puissant.

No, I think it's just the juggling of it all, the terrible antagonism of those things together. I couldn't be a hermit, but I envy them something terrible. And to a period marked by the arrival and departure of a finite but unknowable number of women, all of them extraordinary (seriously, how many beautiful women do I know? I could start a softball league), let me take a moment to blame your corrosive yin energies for interfering with my life. Come on, don't you know that it's men whose powerful, generative yang makes the world go round?

Kwizatz Hatrack

I may get a hat. I've never been a hat person (a headband person, yes. Ask me later) but I think perhaps a panama hat would go well. I met a man recently wearing a panama hat, and commented on it. "Oh no", he said, "it's not a real panama hat. It's an ersatz panama hat from Sebastapol." It was the prettiest sentence I'd heard in a while, and I told him so.
One more story, and then head down for a week or so behind the arrival of many women, or un-men. I have a good friend who recently hung up his apron at Capella for the busy, glamorous lifestyle of an instrument salesman. When I spoke to him last week on the phone, he remarked to me that he'd hurt his back. "Lifting a tuba?" I said. "No," he said, "not lifting a tuba." So I've told everyone I know that he hurt his back lifting a tuba. Just after spreading this story around at work the other day, I passed a customer with a tattoo. A tattoo of what, you might ask? A tattoo of a faceless man, bending over, to pick up a tuba. Swear to fucking god.

Epiphany Elmo

Lay your hand on the ground between your feet. The point on the far side of the world, deep in the antipodal sky, is your nadir. Look for me there, as I am filled with woe and far from my joy.

Intricate

My heart sings out at the wonder and the breadth of the people that I know. Like stones in the river, they rub up against me, whether I want them to or not. And by them I am shaped, and smoothed, and cracked. And it's all so beautiful.


...


It's enough. It really, really is.

Bill Hicks, thank god.

The world is like a ride at an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it, you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills and it's very brightly coloured and it's very loud and it's fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time, and they begin to question: Is this real, or is this just a ride? And other people have remembered, and they come back to us, they say, "Hey – don't worry, don't be afraid ever, because this is just a ride." And we … kill those people. "Shut him up. We have a lot invested in this ride. Shut him up. Look at my furrows of worry. Look at my big bank account and my family. This just has to be real." It's just a ride. But we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok. But it doesn't matter, because – it's just a ride. And we can change it anytime we want. It's only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings and money. A choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as one. Here's what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.

Naked in my living room.

My earliest childhood memories are of my incarceration. Until my 15th year, I was held in the Troutdale Asylum for the Criminally Delicious. I was released just after Flag Day, 1992, when the wardens discovered that I had for some time been injecting myself with a potent and zesty speedball composed of various spices-notably coriander, cumin, and nutmeg. (I had acquired said spices through various schemes and daring escapades. The coriander came from the courtyard garden, cultivated by a man who kept a cat who looked like Hitler. The cumin, I collected from the storm drains after the Vindaloo Rains of 1989. And the nutmeg I carefully rendered from Christmas breads-which were, of course, stolen.) This concoction had rendered me permanently unpalatable, and thus, unsuited for the asylum. The long-term effects are still unknown, though still, in the summer, I tan to a fine nutmeg.

Heat

It's killing me, sapping my strength and leaving me pink. Gestern, adventure and beauty, the dappled sun and the wind and the sea. Today, the heat and the regret of staring at the sun. I lay beneath it-in the summer, I tan to a fine nutmeg-and ended up with a radiation burn. Sunday.

Waffling

It's early in the morning, and the wafflemaker's hummed to life. Fresh, delicious waffles. Out of town today, flying down the road to the coast with a gelfling and a sociopath to a wedding. I like weddings, as variations from the norn (Verthandi) and as sort of homemade holidays. A friend, likewise, will be attending a funeral today, and I wish him well at his own strange holiday. I like funerals too, not for the death, obviously, but for the strangeness of it. And I've been to some delightful wakes in my day. Incidentally, should I die, I'd like a wake, and I'd like some Zevon played. Maybe later, there'll be pictures.

Bright future in the minefields

I'm not blogging enough-I lay that at the feet of my job, where I go to have my face eaten. Tired, so tired, and stuck in town on a day that should have meant a trip to Capitol City. Bittersweet, not having to go to Salem to see a dentist. But I'm sorry to miss out.

Lots of things, coming and going. Crazies and old friends and marriages and flirtations and the aforementioned face eating. I'm worn out. I just ate several things that looked like punctuation marks-periods and colons and ellipses.

My namesake, if not my doppleganger.