Movable Feasts

Good day, phantom day. Ghost of a day we all are living in, only once every four years. I woke up to luminous silver skies and unseasonable warmth. Talked shit to my co-workers, calendars with a rabbi, made the beautiful baker who comes through my line laugh out loud. A good day.

Nice Innacuracies

I should point out that my new header image contains one of my most significant pet peeves as a greengrocer. Note also that I'm waffling on header images-I'll settle on one at some point, but as we traverse the nadir of the year, I've yet to settle on any number of things.

ANYWAY...I love XKCD, it's one of my favorite webcomics. But in this case, he's made a terrible error. I won't quibble with his obviously subjective qualifications of taste-fruit appeals to different people differently, like anything else. And from a strictly professional standpoint he seems to have measured out the "difficulty" scale more or less accurately (though on the actual comic's site, the rollover bemoans the difficulty of cracking coconuts, suggesting they're "off the scale". This inaccuracy can be attributed to a layman's unfamiliarity with coconuts' numerous mysteries. When you know what you're doing, a coconut's no harder to open than a dead man's wallet.)

No, dear friends, my objection, the thing which fills me with a terrible rage, is his arbitrary segregation of apples into only two categories, "red" and "green". I'm shaking, even as I write this. Even now, on the far side of apple season, we currently carry no fewer than 10 different kinds of apple, many of which might be described as either. In my experience, for those people who lack even the most basic education in the taxonomy of produce "red" apples are usually Red Delicious, the nation's most common and most poorly named apple varietal for most of the last century. Delicious apples in general are uninterestingly sweet and universally mealy. Bland, grey, soviet apples.

"Green" apples, on the other hand, are usually Granny Smiths-a tart, crunchy apple that is good for cooking, and is in many respects (should you get a good one) the polar opposite of a Delicious apple. So that's two types, two of the most common. But in this, the Golden Age of Food, I'd think that anyone cosmopolitan enough to have broadband access to the internet would also have at least passing familiarity with Fujis (the bourgeois Red Delicious), Braeburns (a tart and crisp eating apple that keeps well and is also good for cooking) or perhaps this year's celebrity apple, the Honeycrisp (plebian, lowest-common-denominator crap, with a sweetness that recalls corn syrup and a crunchy texture best described as plastic. Still, they are popular). For those of you with whom I do not work, let this be your window on my greengrocery-this rant is almost verbatim my usual response to customers asking for Green or Red apples. 'Ware your local greengrocer, he/she might just be a True Believer.

This town smells like gym socks and marijuana

Riding around-which I have been, as it's now Spring, apparently-riding around on a bike allows you to experience the city very differently. You get to smell it. In a car or the bus you're separated from the outside odors, and walking isn't fast enough to get the sort of...spectrum of smells that being on a bike offers. Damp and hot asphalt in the first warm sun of the year. Diesel fuel from the bus I'm following. Three different clouds of pot smoke in two blocks.

February's no proper month. 28 days, stunted, deformed in the calendar. And this whole Leap Year bullshit. I saw Feb. 29th referred to as "Leap Year Day" in the RG...because "Leap Day" was too complicated? It's a lost day, a limbo day. Watergate had it's 18 1/2 minute gap, Doctor Who his Eleven-Day Empire...every four years, we get a phantom day.

I did laundry yesterday, down to the ghettomat. The realest place for ten blocks. I once sat in on a three-way deal twixt three different homeless guys there, trading guns for money for drugs. Thrilling. But not classy. There's nothing classy about my neighborhood laundromat-after all, it's my neighborhood.

But anyway, the owner just put in a vending machine-soaps, dryer sheets and such. And sundries, things like gum and candy. AND little individual packets of Pepperidge Farm Milano Cookies. It was the most optimistic thing I've seen in forever, and it made me smile. Later, I saw a lime-perfectly good lime-on the ground a few blocks from my house. This, along with the blueberries in the verge last week, lead me to believe there's something going on. I don't know what it is, but fallen produce crossing my path is apropos of something. Ominous, even. AND, last thing...the first honeybee on the blossoming rosemary just outside my door. February's no proper month, but Spring is the most proper of seasons.

On the fly.

Normally, I try to keep y'all updated on my comings and goings, particularly of the internet variety. Let you know where I've been and what I've been doing/seeing/terrified by. Last post, see. I'll try to keep this to a minimum-this is not a scavenger's blog.

But I couldn't keep this to myself, I just had to add it in. Go here, and I'd encourage you to spend a little time-it's worth it.

schadenfreude

Got it in spades-sort of shameful, really. All that joy. But...I find my own angst retreats in the face of the suffering of others, and, well, I have to do something with it. Lately I mean. My angst.

So...without further ado.


http://view.break.com/453711 - Watch more free videos

God is Dead

Hearts are for blood, and for breaking.

I hate being unhappy on a beautiful day. Sun shining and big white clouds(in February), and I can't reach any of it. Misanthropic and angry and bitter, and tired from the pointlessness of all those things. There would have been a time when I might have reached for them thinking that they'd make it better. I've long since learned different, and it wears me out with the failure of it. How wasted are those feelings and how broken I still am that they appear in the first place. I'm not afraid of you-of any of you. I'm the only enemy I have left, and really...the only one I ever had.

If you hadn't guessed yet, I'm going to ramble. There's a good chance most of this won't make sense, and what there is that does...well, too fucking bad. I may be cryptic, but damned if I'm dishonest.

Most of the time, I rise in the morning, and go to sleep each night comfortable in my skin and confident of my humanity*. Then I have a day like today, an inside-out day. Chewing on terrible things and catching myself at every corner. Quiet, because I stop having anything to say. I feel like a pantomime shadow-puppet imitation of myself, sustained only by the momentum of the person I was last night when I went to bed. I believe that my life is what I make it. I am constantly, moment-to-moment, in charge of what I do and say and choose. I am.

...

But I'm just so sad. And I can't choose my way out of that, can't bite down on it or reason with it. All those skills and practice prepare me for my guilt and my shame and my anger and my deception (self and otherwise). I have long transcripts of endlessly repeated conversations with myself about control and choice and accountability and judgment...and up against myself, or you, I'm ready. I have my way, my creed, my architecture.

For this, I've got nothing.

I think about wanting a lot. Someone called it Buddhist once. This thing I'm doing. If I don't want anything, there's no outcome to create, no opportunity for sin(best word I could come up with). Everything has to be on the table, too-choice, again. Desire and suffering, don't you know.

So maybe I should kill this, find the belief that leaves me lonely and take it out and talk it to death like I have so many of the other things that stood between me and being happy. Maybe I'd be happy. Serene and blissful and further up, and out. But I don't want to. I'm afraid to. I don't know what would happen if I pulled it off.

I feel unique, special, thinking about this. I think that none of the rest of you can possibly be wrestling with these things, be as wounded as I am, as clear-eyed and good as this self-inflicted dilemma makes me.

But then, I remember The Man On My Couch, and I know that I'm wrong.

Good luck, to all of you.






*I am a human being, I am a creature of choice. Those things, internal or external, that abrogate that choice don't just diminish me, they make me less human.

Not-so-super-tuesday

Schedule's all fucked up, can't sleep like a civilized person. And writer's block, I think I have writer's block. Lots to say, no wherewithal to say it.

On the plus side, I do believe I'm being more of a nuisance lately than I usually am-this isn't necessarily good for the rest of you, but I do take a certain pride in my capacity for mischief. Every pantheon needs a coyote.

Politics and personalities lately. Watching the news and going to work. Trying to stay one step ahead of my own particular problems, resurrected each time after I think I've killed them for good. And babbling, I do believe I'm babbling.

Meh.

Christ I'm tired.

I was at work from 6:30AM to 5:30PM yesterday...I'm up now, at 5:30 to go to work again. Hard day, toe to toe. Hard night, lots of dreams. Rich and vivid and filled with some of you. I'll shake it off. I have a new coat.