Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow

Everybody's lonely. The human race hasn't learned how not to be; the inner language doesn't exist. There are degrees, times, places, people, who are more or less so, but it's true for all. Many know how to mask it, some how to stand it, and some make a lifelong mission of beating it. The skillful or the lucky minimize the effects in a surround of love. Some are relentlessly tortured by their desolation. Some have found peace in their quietude. You can appeal to the godhead, try to meditate your way out of it. You've seen others make a spectacle of themselves straining to caper and titter their way through it, to surround themselves with bodies that only increase their isolation.

For most the feeling of anomie comes to the fore just now and then, due to some event or from the lack of event, of distracting stimuli.

Here, in "developed" nations, loneliness is seen as a kind of plague; in Japan there's a word for people who live and die alone, kodokushi, and it's seen as a national problem.

I'm easy in my solitude, I like it, but I know what the Acid God told me of old, I know what the voice of the turtle whispers in the land; down in there somewhere I must be lonely. A while ago I had a dream in which I was hiking into a hilly landscape, happy, eager to explore - I've had a lot of these good dreams - when I saw that the terrain was just empty, lifeless, black volcanic sand. No one there but me. I took a few steps back, onto a hummock of cindery grit, lifted my hands to the empty sky, and raised my voice, "I don't want to be alone! I don't want to be alone!"

That was the message from the Black Planet. I took it to be a warning: fix this.

Later, though, a casual carpool driver, a woman who loves the constant flow of being, that life is change, told me that these sharp moments are just that, the weather of the mind, leaves in the wind, haiku. Pay them no mind, they pass.

Could that be true? What a relief if it is. I can go on like this, not burden myself with the assignment of pairing up. No grotesqueries like online dating or adult classes. Free to be me unbothered. Unhounded by the pitchfork-and-torch waving persecutors of the loner.

Solitude is a social heresy; it is rejected and despised, the obverse of "having a life," while the solitary is shamed, pitied, and mocked. The epidemic here isn't being alone, it's fear of being alone. And of being thought to be alone.

Solitude and loneliness are not the same. In solitude there is strength. Aldous Huxley wrote, “The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”  But then, anybody can say anything. The loneliness is still there somewhere.

A popular quote from Faulkner's As I Lay Dying: "It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end."

Whether you do or whether you don't. My mother told me how a volunteer came to her assisted living home and held her hand through a long night of pneumonia. She said that physical contact, that warm palm, kept her tethered to life until morning and revival. I believe her. She died anyway.

In those moments of alienation, a Dylan line comes up: "...the bitter dance of loneliness fading into space..."

Fading into space...

Human contact, real intimacy, is a vitamin; a deep need. The eye to eye, the touch of a voice, the presence here now of someone who sees what you see, who sees you, whom you see.

So is the need to be by yourself.

You know what I think? That I know I can make it alone, I've done it for most of my life, talking to people who aren't there and can't hear me. The love is still there. If you know that the world is love, that being is love...if you know...

Everybody knows how to die. You can't fuck that up. What a relief. 

Yeah, I know I can take whatever comes, and enjoy myself most of the time. But with that one-tenth of a percent of the illusion of free will that may actually be at our disposal, I will make it as good as I can, as deep and fine. With (a few) people. Simplicity, authenticity, depth, beauty, warmth, direct connection. Be real. Don't be a hardass.

"Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word "loneliness" to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word "solitude" to express the glory of being alone."
Paul Tillich

Measure Twice, Cut No One

Gave the guy an old folded one-dollar bill, took a Street Spirit from his stack; scanning as I walked I read that UC had sent bulldozers into Peoples Park and taken out the whole west end, the gardens, arbors, trees planted in the seventies; and did it without alerting the community liaison committee per contract. "To clean out the rats," they claim, lips moving. Where would Food Not Bombs go now, the writer asks?

Now I was mad. Murderous. Peoples Park is the only tangible trophy we - the whole larger Great American Long Hair We - took out of that shambling hieroglyphic fuckaroo they call The Sixties.

That information poisoned the rest of the morning; I kept probing around in myself to find someone over there to hurt, something to break, someone worth killing. The best I could come up with was keying the Beemers of all the regents in local residence, and even that was predicated on learning where they live and which cars were theirs. I was pissy to the sinless counter guy at Radio Shack on Shattuck after walking out of the one on University because I couldn't get the flash drive off the rack or figure out how it was locked. Tried to twist through the cardboard but the plastic coat was too tough.

After a while I calmed a little and decided to study real possibilities for a while. Sometimes I come up with workable strategies. Meanwhile, I'd ride over to the park to survey the damage.

Parked the bike on the sidewalk and ambled inland. First thing I see, the food platform is still there, guys sitting on it laughing. "Nice bike," one of them says. "I hear they bulldozed," I say back. "Yeah. Cleared out the rats," he says. On the green, the usual folk humped in sleeping bags, reading, spinning frisbees. Looking west, the same old arboreal pathways. I meander through.

I can't see anything different. I don't go there all that much, so I wouldn't pick up details, but it looks fine to me.

I mount up and ride off, thinking, hey. Good. I don't have to be mad anymore. And it's kind of a fine day.

What's the moral? Besides that you can't trust activists (in which there curls a post)?

Check your facts. And...

The friend of a friend said, "Never give up high ground." If he lived by that, his skeleton surrounds an empty canteen on the tallest peak he ever climbed. But he had a point. Every step you take down is a step you'll have to take back up; unless you want to live in the ooze at at the bottom.

On the other hand, do you know how it feels to see a line of heavily armed cops fall back?

Diogenes Hits on the Hot Chick

 

There is one best reason for speaking the truth. Do you know what it is? There will be a short quiz at the end of the lecture

I have to say I'm cynical about people who insist that they demand honesty from their sweeties - you can be pretty sure they don't mean all the truth all the time, they just mean a certain kind of "honesty" about a few select things. And if you give them anything outside of that..."No, those pants don't make you look fat. You ARE fat..." they'll say, "you aren't being honest, you're being MEAN." Whether you are or not.

Then again, if someone is telling a "hard truth" with intent to hurt it isn't the truth.

Any utterance to a specific effect isn't honest; honesty is the whole truth and nothing but. It isn't a missile, a band aid, a doggie bone or a prescription. It isn't tailored or trimmed or dispensed, edited or enhanced; it is spoken from the center of being without regard to any consequence other than that of not speaking the simple central fact as experienced.

There is a taxonomy of lies, and of liars. One species common in daily life is classified as "Fabrication." This doesn't mean just making stuff up. It means that you don't know whether what you are saying is true or not, but put it forth as known and true.

An insidious kind of liar will lie first to themselves then pass it on to you. They're not really fooling themselves, but they pretend they are and cherish the deniability. Good idea to watch out for that in oneself, too, Self.

Scary how easy it is, when regarding myself, to forget how many lies I tell. Of how many types. It takes work, and grit, to dig them out. To find them, in, for instance, this exposition. Okay, sermon. One bullshit detector isn't enough.

You need one for pleasing people - 'specially your girl/boy friends - you find yourself fudging your word choice, changing your tone, getting a little too saccharine, or coming on too big and strong (or wee and helpless). You ever fake anger when what you're feeling is relief? You accept flattery as compliment. You exaggerate, you omit. You pretend you don't want to get down on your knees and say please. You act like it matters that she got her hair done. You pretend that you like it. You are afraid he'll notice. You act like you don't mind. You seem not to notice that he's afraid. You pretend to come. He pretends to care if you come. You get the drift - all those little things, and some big ones. 

Once I walked down a street counting the ways in which I'm one honest cat when a cop pulls up to the curb and asks if I'm carrying. He's just bored and playing with me. I say I'm not and walk on, but I had reefer in my pocket. Stop: you lie. Yeah, but that's a cop, man. You don't have to be up front with cops!

No? Or who else? Job interviews? Ugly girls? First dates? Your time sheet? Online dating services? Your dying mom? Your kid? The one you can't stand to hurt?

What if your lover asks you, "what are you most afraid to tell me?"

Fuck you, I'm not gonna tell you that!

Well, relax. Most of us don't ask that much of ourselves anyway. Right?  We're just trying to make it through the week.

Pop Quiz: why speak the truth?

Because it feels good.

That's why. Do you recognize it now?

Liars relish the taste of victory when they think they've put one over. They don't know that what they're feeling isn't good.

Dictum: every time they can make you lie, they win. Every time you can say it straight despite them, you win.

***
Wikipedia entry for "Lie":

Alexandra Meets Diogenes

Sixty-Six in Sixty-Four

Establishing shot: eighteen year old kid standing by some residential street outside of Atlanta, Georgia, in August of 1964, thumb out, satchel at his feet. The satchel is iconography, visions of a 30's dust bowl drifter hitching west just for the hell of it. Got it from folk songs.

I'd just been to the centennial reenactment of the battle of Kennesaw Mountain. I was in blue. The rebels, flipping the actual event, outnumbered us five to one. They were still fighting that "woah," in more ways than one; the Feds had just dug the bodies of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner from a levy in Mississippi. Three civil rights workers murdered by the Law and the KKK; two Jews and a black kid. The white guys were shot, the black guy was beaten with an impact weapon, bones broken in three or four places, and shot.

"We won't talk about that," said my first ride, a slender, quiet, courteous local man. We must have talked about something else. He was a southern paradigm; polite, gracious, crisp, intelligent, devout, bigoted, racist, possibly violent.

A plump, congenial woman picks me up in Tennessee, and, further down the road, buys me lunch at a family cafe with smoked hams hanging from the ceiling and walls. It was crowded and we were getting a lot of disapproving looks. I didn't know why and, in all my accrued wisdom, still don't. They thought she was bonking me out of class?

Night comes, I find myself at a bend in a country road, hitchhiking in front of a shingle-side store; on duty is a blond kid about my age, son of the owner, and his buddy. I'm a little leery; here they are, the crackers who spit on little black girls. And there is a touch of the sinister in their camaraderie toward me, though I can't exactly place it. We're drinking Cokes out of the red machine in front; the real stuff, with a kick, in the curvy bottles. Insects hit against the light in the humid night.

A black kid comes by, they all know each other, and I'm watching them for signs, but they're neighborly. When he ambles off into the dark, they turn their slit eyes to me with a grin, "Stupid nigger," the son says. There it is.

No rides. I walk up the road a ways and sleep in the grass, I guess. I don't remember carrying a bedroll.

In the morning I get a ride with a family in an old sedan; wiry little man, big fat wife, two or three kids. The wife doesn't want me there and is sending off evil pheromones at the sneakily gleeful guy. There's a peppery, fetid odor coming off the woman in her mother hubbard; I think she's got gas, but I'm not sure.

Arkansas is a series of haunting tableaux - all these humid, prehistoric fields lined with windbreak trees, cutting off on long diagonals to the road - unpainted shacks - unfamiliar, Cretaceous era vegetation. They drop me off in Texarkana on the Arkansas/Texas state line. I don't remember most of Texas; sorry, whoever you were.

I'm on the west end of Amarillo; somewhere around there we picked up Highway 66. A a crew-cut guy in a candy stripe shortsleeve shirt and aftershave pulls over, he looks like he might be one of the Kingston Trio. We're riding through endless flatland, each two-lane crossroad leading to a little cluster of farm structures in a willow stand halfway to the horizon. The guy is asking me if, back home, I ever "played around." Huh? "Got a little action?" Well, I don't want to admit that I've never even held hands, never been on a date - I'm an outcast like you wouldn't believe - so I say, "A little." Then he starts to take a right up one of those roads. "Where are you going?" Turns out he's gay. I knew the word from the Time Magazine glossary. I still recall his eyebrows popping when he realizes we have no understanding, not at all. And can feel my own jumping off my forehead.

There I am, Nowhere, Texas, and thirsty. Not a car in any direction. Lonesome highway satchel at my feet. Alive! Young! Free! There is a chance - remote - but a chance - I might get laid someday.

A man in a new pickup truck lets me ride in the bed with the dog - he's on his way to San Jose, California. I take off my shirt and face into the hot dry wind our MPH generates. I get off with a windburn on my chest that leaves me picking at blisters for the next week. You ever get windburn? Know anybody who did? Rock climbers, maybe.

Memory wakes up seeing the green and white highway signs on 80; Berkeley. Oakland. I'm dropped at a gas station some damn where there and pick up a pay phone.

You know, I think I'll stop here. In a minute my bearded brother-in-law Vernon, the youngest certified chemist in the state, will pick me up and land me in their circle of pothead bohos in that twilight transition from beatnick to hippie. San Francisco Bay in nineteen sixty-four, motherfuckers, and just to stand there was a bone deep thrill.

Fear of Smells

Rough tough denim on my teeth, hairs gleam from zipper glitter, humid fumes sopping the membranes back in my nose, you yank on my big ears, “They’re red,” you growl, head in the ceiling light.

Fish-mouthed, I blow through the sling of your cotton lollipops, that vein popping in my cheek, your nails in my nape. I make a forced landing in your bayou as your butt welts on the chair’s hard edge. Fear of smells, of tastes; of piss, sweat, menses, smegmas, woman stew; slobber sloshes my back teeth.

Down at the pit, chemical soup boils, but up here my tongue goes dry prying at the sealed seam under the tangle; then searing acid tangs the diamond drill-point. White flecks on your sticky coral folds peeling sleepily back like band-aids. Scents of talc, broth, and acrid spices.

Vertical flesh flanges separate as I furrow my tongue up the gullies, gorges, wettening arroyos; soft cheeses mingle in my spit. The taste warms like lake water when you’ve been in a minute.

I hawk-circle your shy rose beeper, breezing across her like a shadow, nipping with tooth tips; you try to stay still. Spasms at the arc of your thighs.

Vigorous beaver-tail laps, good hard bone under the soft stuff, hair sopping all around, my chin oozes sauce. I see sparks in your mind. What’s it like? What’s it like?

You claw my scalp, knees at your ears; I burrow into you like a swimmer, carving out big steam shovel gobs, the shape of my face is molded into your meat; you order me to crawl in, all the way in! My tongue shoots to your furnace, my guy down below whines “Me too!” but uh-uh.

I go south, follow the knobbled seam to the bad part of town, the far side of the moon, oopty-doop; I feel you wince, bad girl, dirty girl. WHAT ARE YOU TWO DOING BACK THERE?

North again, I suck you in with a plip and spit you out, suck in fistfuls of cunt; fins, folds, polyps, whorls of animal plasm. Your legs lock around my head, they flex, squeeze, crunch; it hurts. I whip my face back and forth, tongue out stiff; you buck back, slamming from the base of your spine; I try to stay latched on, eyebrows slathered with our mess.

You’re breaking my neck, I’m losing teeth. You just tore off my ear!

There’s no detail left in your crotch, it’s all seething, crawling, cellular lava, it’s giving off light like melted steel, I want it to STINK but,

There’s no smell. There’s no taste. There’s nothing.

Silence. Sky. A parachute opens.

~~~~

Note: this was published in Yellow Silk in the 80's. I got a free copy for it. A conversation in which a poem (by Charles Simic) is titled "Eating Out the Angel of Death" brought it to mind. Great line, poignant verse.

~~~~

A Discourse on Models of State Formation

Okay, I'm browsing Archaeology Magazine online and there's an article on a Peruvian site called Taraco near northern Lake Titicaca, titled "War Begets State," which tells how, evidently, somebody burned the town about 1900 years ago which allowed their closest neighbor, Pukara(1), to flourish economically and technologically. Thus the title. The article is written by Julian Smith, the excavation led by Charles Stannish, but the key quote comes from a guy named Steve LeBlanc. From Harvard. I googled up a lecture of his called "Prehistoric Warfare: Pervasive, Deadly, Rational and Relevant." Figures. His line goes, "The models of state formation that do not see warfare as a central key element do not have it right."

"The models of state formation that do not see warfare as a central key element do not have it right. The models of state formation...."

I cite everybody involved so as not to trigger a war. Then they might found a civilization on my ass and I, like Huck Finn, have been sivilized before and I can't stand it.

Poor Steve LeBlanc. He must be hurting. He and his guys have had the floor all their lives and the lives of their fathers and their fathers before. "War stimulates invention." All the Ur nations, the first cities of man, were built to defend against bullies. Uruk, Memphis of Egypt, Erlitou in China, Çatalhöyük (pronounce THAT, teach), Mohenjo Daro...all knew the sword and the flame. This makes for good, manly theories, justifying plenty of "defense" spending.

But here comes Caral, Peru.

These old piles of stone rubble in the coastal Supe valley had been known by archaeology since the 40's (and by the locals forever) but were ignored as just another middle-horizon knock-off, nothing to fund an excavation over, until a stubborn Peruvian digger named Ruth Shady Solis took her trowel and camel's hair brush there on her own dime and found some rough cotton textile that looked old. She sent it to Chicago for a carbon-14 test and it came back confirmed: 4,600 years old. Twelve hundred years older than any urban settlement known in the Americas.

This takes the site all the way back to Ur. All of a sudden the New World is running with the big dogs. This is monumental construction, with pyramids, plazas, palaces, temples, and an amphitheater -- it's pre-ceramic, meaning they didn't even have pottery, but they were advanced enough to marshal a work force capable of major civil engineering projects. Of startling sophistication and grace.

But the trick is this. There is no sign of war. Organized or otherwise. No layers of ash, no mass graves of crushed skulls and shattered bones, no city walls, no hilltop forts, no weapons. Their influence spread rapidly over a wide area, several river valleys, but not by military conquest. This was a religious, cultural expansion. Other peoples just thought they had a good thing going and wanted in.

We call this, knowing nothing of their language or identity, the Norte Chico civilization. They were followed by a dozen or so others we also named at our whim -- the Chavin, Sechin Alto, the Nazca, the Lambayeque and Viru valley peoples -- and these shared the same disappointing peace-torn method of expansion. They had a better mousetrap so people bought it. They built it and the people came.

It went on this way for, check it out, LeBlanc, a couple thousand years. Eventually you see graphic depictions of pretty gory stuff on Mochica ceramics, decapitations and tortured prisoners, but there's still no sign of organized warfare. Not until the Mordor of the Andes pops up in the sixth century CE (the old AD), the Wari. Their imperial phase was contemporary with Islam, which is to say, way late in history.

And yeah, around 100 CE the Pukaras probably burned Tarapaca and had a growth spurt. Stuff like that happens. But we'd had two millenia plus of city-building peoples rising and fading before the Wari invented war. And even that's in question.

But you know who else pulled that off? California. Word, dude. When the white man found the left coast the people there had been at peace for at least fifteen hundred, and very probably for more than five thousand, years.(2)

California(3) is now the most diverse and populous region north of the Rio Grande. On the other hand, California before the white man was already that way, with the most languages and cultural roots, the most people per square mile. They had been living the same life style for time immemorial. Again, here, none of the artifactual stigmata of armed conflict.

Fifteen hundred years ago there was a change in burial techniques, which, anthropologically, tends to indicate invasive influence. But still no burned villages or mangled bodies, no war clubs, swords, weaponry. And, in fact, no confederations. Each village was its own people, they didn't form organized alliances.

Californians were technologically primitive compared to the eastern tribes; no pottery, textiles, or agriculture; their tools weren't as cool as the fighting/torturing confederations of the woodlands or prairies. They didn't have to be. They had everything they needed to live well -- mild weather, infinite game and all the acorns they could leach. But they knew how to get along with their neighbors, they had refined social methodologies. Territorial borders were maintained, mostly, for hundreds, probably thousands, of years. And they made great baskets.

They weren't hippies; you wouldn't want to live with them; they had no concept of the individual, or personal freedom. Everyone was an organ of the community. The ultimate punishment was banishment.

Maybe there were formalized, ritual wars; maybe each village would send out a team, to resolve some issue. But if somebody got hurt, that would be it. Shake on it and go home.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, there were some tribes who liked to fight down in the extreme southeast corner along the Colorado River, around Needles. These guys were influenced by the pueblo cultures of the southwest, who were in turn touched by contact with the Mexican city-builders, the Aztec types, who were bellicose as hell. But their shit didn't migrate across the Mojave to the rest of California.

Check it out. Look it up. We here in LAAATD aren't proposing that war doesn't stimulate creativity, that it doesn't make for good stories, that it's not more fun than anger management interventions or playing Scrabble; but the west coasts of these continental land masses are here to say that it doesn't have to be that way. You can live without war. It's been done, long and well.

The models of state formation that do not see warfare as a central key element have it right. Live with it. Peace out.



(1) Pukara means "fort" in Runasimi

(2) Thanks to Malcolm Margolin, The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco-Monterey Bay Area

(3) California is named for an imaginary island inhabited entirely by black women, from the novel The Adventures of Esplandian by Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo, 1510

Barefoot in the Grapes of Wrath

I run barefoot. Three or four miles, six days a week, barring sick lame or lazy.

I started on the first day of Operation Desert Shield, spring of '91, when I came to that point in life when you realize you have to take arms against the slings and arrows of outrageous fat or drown in a sea of lipids.

At first I wore shoes like anyone, but when I emailed a friend who knew me of old, she said, "I bet you don't do it barefoot." What? What? The hell I don't.

People ask me why I do it. I say,

For a woman (see above)
I'm lazy - shoes are heavy
I've always done it (I grew up in the country and went bohemian as young man)
General Vo Nguyen Giap, who whipped US techno-ass in Vietnam, said, like, "take away an American's boots and he's helpless"
Identity. I'm a barefoot kind of guy
To feel the world
It feels free
And, of course, nostalgia. Nostalgie des pied nus.

All these are true. I don't do it for the attention, although as time goes on there's a whiff of addiction in it. People (often the poor but also other runners) cheer me on, while others whisper or spit that it's ugly and unhealthy, and institutions throw me out onto the street, claiming laws and regulations, which is a damn lie, they're just making that shit up. Those laws, when considered, get rejected as nonsensical. How would my bare feet be more unsightly or infectious than their bare face?

In the early long-hair days I used to get yelled at out of car windows all day long. Some pretty picturesque catcalls, too. I kind of liked it. It makes you feel...special. So, the barefoot running thing has the same effect - I'd rather do it off in the country all alone, and will, by god, but the ejaculations of the Coliseum have become a secondary motive, a form of functional autonomy.

The Australians, I found, are a whole lot more at home with bare feet, even in restaurants. Interesting. I hadn't realized how puritanical we are. I'm going to try this in some other countries soon.

I don't do it for health, I have no idea whether it's good for anyone or not. Me like barefoot.

***

"In the United States, a few businesses or restaurants display dress code signs requiring shoes and shirts, claiming to be there on account of a health code,[citation needed] although no such health codes exist.[7] Also, it is common belief that there are laws against driving barefoot. However, no such laws exist."


Wikipedia article on Dress Code

Salt on the Dead Girl

After posting an entry on this topic, I thought I should mark the same event in my personal "log," and doing so, noticed a big drop in the altitude of the tone. No audience. So I killed off the elegiac prose and copied the notes to myself (slightly redacted) here.

***
Saturday December 17 2011 224 pm

How could you do that? You beat me to it.

Mary Ann’s dead. Died June 24, 2010 - 17 months ago. Died “unexpectedly” in her home. Bottle and pills is my guess.

I woke last night thinking about her, ran long fantasies about meeting her on the street, BART, wherever - then about exchanges on the blog - later, in the morning, I had to admit that I miss her and that she probably had the power to bring me back in just as before - put a lot of the morning into her, actually; so it’s no big coincidence that I googled her. Always before I turn up nothing, but today I got her obit.

Bet she couldn’t stand losing her beauty, her (pretty powerful) allure. Bet she saw herself alone. Bet she had the guts. Can’t guess what other factors were involved. I should have been there; I should have had my eye on her pulse. Glad I didn’t contact her before that, though, because then I’d think it was all about me. It was all about her. Or somebody else.

White wine, or had she switched to mixed drinks, vodka or gin? What tunes was she playing? Was she still in the Parker street place? What tunes.

I cried off and on for an hour or so, re-reading her songs to go on the blog. All Those Midnights got to me first. I put that and the “they” one online. She’s the first close friend who has died since the fallout from the sixties, Gene and Vernon. And she’s probably suicide too.

I don’t know that. But it makes the most sense. She didn’t slip in the shower.

Just Like a Woman? For You? Something from high school? Something from after, the 90’s? She had a lot of songs. But something was playing. She would tune out laying stretched on her living room floor with the music on then get up in the dark of the morn and climb into bed. That’s it; but this time she didn’t get up.

Once she sang to me:

They
Asked how I knew
Turtle shit is blue...
I
Looked at him and said
Sir you are misled
Turtle shit is red...

Adios.

That was her parting salute on that last phone call...I’ve been using it ever since.

Although there was that time a couple years later I called her (and everyone else) trying to offload those tickets to the Bammies; then I think all she said was “no fucking way.”

And there you go.

Like my dad’s last words to me were “That’s your tough luck.”

I doubt she stayed mad at me though. Just half-mad. Like me. God I wish I could hold her as she lay there fading out.

Well, I wrote to Eve that there’s nothing in all this we don’t already know. But maybe that’s not so. This isn’t something I’m used to. In fact, it’s a new world. Subtracted. How could she do this? I know how she could. I just don’t know how she did.

Now that I'm saying this it occurs to me to revise my scenario - she might have taken up pills and not have organized a suicide; exactly. She might have just gone a little too far. But knowing that one night she would.

Dead

All right. That’s it.

Fucking cunt

What’s the point in looking cool if Mary Ann is dead?

***

The Green Death Eco-Rite Prospectus

The great Boomer die-off cometh. There must be money in that somewhere; there are a lot of us (well, I missed the us-bus by ten days) and somebody’s got to put us all somewhere. See the funeral industry rubbing its soft white hands and salivating. But wait.

Is that how you want to go? Lowered into some manicured storage grid in a lead-lined hermetic container, veins full of chemicals and a face nudged into some pious smirk it never knew in life? Useless even to beetles and worms, not even returning a few pounds of fertilizer to the earth you gorged and shit your way through for however many years? At a fat profit to a commercial monopoly you don’t like or respect? One fed and protected by a razor-wired concentration camp of laws?

Not me. I want to leave my bones on some windy hilltop in the wild rice and Queen Anne’s lace, a purple thistle pushing through the ribs where my heart sunk back into the dirt, decommissioned by ants, beetles, and yeah, the worms. I want small varmints and birds to pick me apart, rain and sun to disappear me and no human eye to monitor the process. I want to give back at least that small part. Lyrical, I know, but. That’s my picture and maybe I’ll see it through.

I bet I’m not alone in this. I know I’m not. Already you know somebody who’s had their cremains blown off a rented boat over the bay, or scattered in the back field or a national park, with or without permit. That works, but you still pay up the waz for the cremation and it may not be what you really want.

What if you could go online and choose the nature-friendly farewell of your choice? At a quarter, or an eighth, of the price of a standard funeral?

Please browse our brochure.

The plains Indian burial - a slender pine platform open to the sky on a lone and level prairie, under your chosen blanket (or one from our selection), among your spirit totems, face to the wind and stars, as time and weather return you to the fund of all being.

The Viking pyre - a platform of native logs will be your vessel to Valhalla, surrounded by your friends and family and the songs of your life, as the sparks fly upward.

The Henge - nestled under a monolithic ashlar on the solstice, equinox, or ecliptic that guides your fate, your secret names inscribed on an amulet on your breast, perhaps to be found by some millennial spiritual descendents. Menhir, cromlech, dolmen, as your heritage requires.

The Bear Cave - in a grotto beneath granite boulders, marked with petroglyphs of your design or by our resident paleoartisans.

The Nazca - you lie at the center of a pattern of stones lined in a design that only manifests when seen from the sky...an image of your choice, or selected from a the cryptic Naza Lines of the ancient and mysterious civilization of Peru.

The Medicine Wheel - the sacred stone wheel of the Blackfoot, Lakota, Anishinaabe, Hopi, and other First Peoples, older than Stonehenge, will be your spirit-powered ship to the stars...

The Cairn -

The Paracus - desert only - wrapped in a textile of design so complex its weaving requires an implicit command of advanced trigonometry, you are left to mummify naturally in the healing sun. You will be recognizable for three thousand years.

The Ozymandias - for the 0.05% - we build you a 150 foot tall pyramid of native sandstone blocks, riddled with secret tunnels, at its heart a hidden sepulchre where you lie in state in a sarcophagus of solid gold. All secured by the most potent of curses.

The Dump. We truck your carcass out there and dump it. Fuck all that spiritual shit. Let the coyotes have it. (For $10 more we pass around a bottle of Jack and tell lies all night until we pass out. For another dime we let Jolene come along. We’re not paying for her Cuervo.)

And the Return - our simplest, cleanest, most natural and economic choice - you select the landscape of your deepest resonance, plain or hilltop, prairie or mountainside, woods or marsh, or any of many other locales, where you will give to the earth what you have taken from it - yourself.

You choose your invitees, your rites, your music live or recorded, your dances and chants, your eulogies; or choose from our comprehensive list of celebrants, experts, artists, musicians, hierophants, and resources gleaned from cultures and traditions across the globe and the universe. Full video and photographic records included as digital files or on optical disc. A memento medicine pouch provided with some selections. I have this condition.

Okay, just sketching it out here - I’m not into enterprise myself - any suggestions, ideas to contribute? This is copyrighted but not patented, feel free to use the concept.

Of course, there are those national, state, and local laws to skirt; I’m thinking you’d work with sovereign First Peoples – picture Wind River, Nanavut, the southwest - there’s plenty of open land and they have their own legal systems - negotiations for revenue sharing and employment will depend on earned trust. We will be honest and prices low, it’s the volume, the volume...they’ll be dying in droves and it won’t be long. They won’t all want to enrich the morticians in their mortuaries. (Transportation laws must be considered too.)

Feed the eagles, people, enrich the earth. Whatchy’all think?

Air to Eat

Breathing feels good. Do you ever catch yourself breathing so shallow you could be in suspended animation waiting to awake in Jupiter orbit? Then you take a deep breath and its like a first bite of ice cream.

Long ago, when we still thought we were winning, I lived with a woman for a couple seasons; I loved her, I love her still, but the evening before she went back north to school we crossed to a park in a strange giddy mood; a massive weight had lifted from me (and from her; neither of us ever married) and I ran the perimeter full out until I fell and lay gasping great lungsfull of air. Rich, nutritious, clean, generous, delicious atmosphere; there was all of it I could ever want, the whole planet is wrapped in it, and it was free. What a discovery.

(One of my three friends, Tom, argues that air isn't free; we pay taxes to regulate emissions.)

Years later - it might have been a mid-life crisis - I had an obsessive/compulsive love affair. The passing of time turned to a poison drip. It took five years for that stone to lift from my chest, but when it did, for the next year, it felt good just to breathe. Nothing more was required. To suck in air, to expel it, was ecstasy. Just to breathe.

When you're young sometimes you see an ancient humped over in their wheelchair and the highlight of their day comes when a Little Brown Bird hops onto the aluminum frame of the sliding plate glass window of the managed care facility. They wait for that LBB all day. And you vow that you will never let yourself become so diminished.

Maybe they swore that too. But something happens as you age. You cross a line. If you intend to bail, you'd better be aware of that line and see it coming. Because the day comes when you don't care about the details anymore.

There's a line in Full Metal Jacket: "The dead know only one thing. It is better to be alive." That's my mantra when I want to wake up, to sharpen my senses and bring the here-and-now into focus, I invoke that incantation.

There comes a time when you just want to keep on eating air.

Regret Shy

There's a rusted out M4A4 Sherman tank still sunk in shallow water off the tropical island of Tarawa, its turret twisted backward for one last shot, much photographed over the years. Jerzy Kosinski described it in the novel Cockpit as a symbol of a man still armed and on guard long after the war is done and the enemy gone. Of time and love wasted and regretted.

I thought of that, and went to the shelf for the book, and it was gone. I must have culled it in one of the book purges I do when I run out of space. This gave me a small, sharp, sense of loss. Why did I toss that one? It was thin, hardly a burden on the lifeboat. Damn. Was dumping Cockpit a mistake?

Fear of regret. I don't find that one on the phobia lists. Why not? There are words for fear of chickens (alektorophobia), cheese (turophobia) and no bars on your cell phone (nomophobia), but not for fear of regret. But who's not a little afraid of regret? You? I am. It is a pervasive inhibition and limits my life.

I have too many things and I'd like to shed a lot of them. Remember when all I owned was pants, shirt, sandals, cap, jacket, and a bedroll? I don't kid myself that I'd go back to sleeping by the road, but when this job is over in fifteen months - if I make it that far - I'd like to be able to move my stuff in one medium U-Haul. Hell, in the back of my Metro. But when I start counting off what I can do without, I run into that phobia. Just one instant of that blade of sorrow would outweigh the benefit of divesting. Hey, I dumped "Ancient Evenings?" That's...sad! I'd probably never read it again, but...

There are three or four main orders of regret. One species of regret affects the identity, the vision of yourself you use to get things done in the world.

Fights I backed out of. There are a couple of those. It would have been worth getting pummeled in public to have stood up and stepped in. Existential gold, Mailer called that. The guy in the laundromat, I just chickened out. I didn't even have to strike the first blow, I could have just lifted his folded clothes off my own, where he had with his shitty little smirk put them. Now I run that event through my mind with different endings, over and over. It drains color from the inner portrait.

That mythical hero within? Worthless. Forget what you ever did or didn't do. Reach into yourself where you stand now and what you need is there or it's not.

Opportunities to fill your existential pockets, that's another.

Girls I inexplicably and to my own wonderment turned away. They were pretty, lovely, some of them, warm and willing, my personal valence put us together there and then. Why did I pass them by?

Maybe my inner eye saw something the outer mind didn't. There is this directive that says "Get Everything You Can, never pass up a chance to piss, sleep, drink, or fuck." I don't have to obey. Maybe it was truer to myself to make an intuitive choice.

The life you leave yourself with, after all the choosing, that's a third. The price you pay for being you is being you. Times I work when I could walk out under the sky. Times I lazed when I could have built.

Once here I reclined at the open north window, bare heels on the sill, musing on what my kid self would have made of what I've become, on the broken promises to the ten-year-old. How I just let time run through my fingers like smoke. So I considered, what was it, actually, that I had wanted from myself when I grew up? I ran the surviving film-clips of those peak moments, the ones I bookmarked for now, let them run through and distill, and I had to laugh. I did laugh out loud. What I wanted most as a kid was free time. Time to burn, to waste, squander, time for myself. No chores to do, no garage floors to sweep, cars to help fix, arithmetic to learn, work to do. No empires to build, mountains to climb, no Satisfaction from a Job Well Done. That's what I wanted from my grown-up to be. And that's what I gave myself. It's what I did, and what I have. And since there are no grownups to feed and house me, and I have to do those things myself, the forty-hour week is the least intrusive way I know. Much less work than selling art, doing business, or charming benefactors, and far less enslaving. Just between you and me, it comes pretty close to drifting through a summer's day.

See now, the point is, gazing out that window bathing in self-reproach, I turn a key in myself, that opens a door, that lets in light, and whuff! The regret is gone. It was always illusion. I had good reasons, for doing as I did. So I think, for all the remorse that still remains inside, is there a key? Can I turn it, and one day just walk out, feet on the earth and head in the sky, and let all that foolish weight evaporate, just let it go? Say, like Edith Piaf, no, I regret nothing. What is the point in looking back in sorrow? When all the sorrow exists only in that act? 

Actually, I haven't done much that I hold against myself, and most of that is through doing too little. But that's a choice I've renewed numberless times. To leave the world alone. Cross the river without leaving a ripple, walk through the grass without bending a blade. Nobody fucks things up more than people who do things. Stop it. Now.

Well, that's just me, friend. It's not for everyone. The categorical imperative, like the golden rule, requires nuance in application.

Another type of regret is simple consequence. Do I want to wake up somewhere without the Aubrey-Maturin series? Sharpe? Flashman? Can I dump the old drawings, thirty-five years of journals? That forty pound Epson printer/scanner there? If I throw them out, would I be sorry?

Jerzy Kosinski's tank rusts in that tepid foil-blue lagoon, salty as tears, off Tarawa telling him that he waited too long to let down his guard, that he could have climbed out of that turret and walked barefoot to the beach a long time ago. Too bad that he didn't. He pictures that Ozymandian relic of past war pointed at torn coconut palms and shattered bunkers, deserted, a minor-key melody for bamboo flute. But that's not what's there.

Now that little island is one of the most intensely populated places on earth. Thatch and corrugated bungalows knitted together by informal footpaths house people in lava-lavas, cargo shorts, tank tops, tinted sunglasses; fifty-percent unemployment among the youth, but not squalor or misery - the guy who drove me to the airport up the island chain told me that you can always go out on the reef for fish, pick fruit or coconuts off the sand, nobody starves. So far. There's no sign that the people envy developed nations or would like to move to San Jose. They don't care about the war, they don't honor the dead. The pillboxes and shore batteries are covered with graffitti and littered with toilet paper and plastic bottles, the Japanese strong point at Red Beach One is the garbage dump. You don't want to walk in the water. They're not a war metaphor, they're organisms peopling the planet, living.

Point: everything regretted is past and everything past is mirage.

What is the function of regret? Am I missing something? Will it show up at my door later tonight, with a summons?

One thing - there is a price for giving up regret; with it you surrender your hoard of triumphs - the glory of fights where you did stand your ground, all the spoils you have brought here for yourself, the lovers won, now on display in your museum. 

Well, this is a long, screwy entry, isn't it? Not the most lucid. If I publish, will I be sorry?

Alea iacta, Ace

There is also, BTW, a fear of giants. FeFiPhobia.

Shotgun List

Here is another "to remember" list, created because I find myself going "Damn, what IS that word (name phrase idea)! It's gone AGAIN!" If there are repetitions from the earlier bunch, don't be surprised. There will be a short quiz at the end of the hour.

Xenoglossy – putative paranormal phenomenon wherein a person can speak a language he could not have acquired by natural means
Clades – all descendants of a single ancestor
Shan (Yin) 1766-1050 bc
Teosinte – sacred grass – maize
Nurdle – re-production plastic pellet
Mohenjo Daro 2600 bc
Immane – huge and monstrous
Incitatus – Caligula’s horse
Asthenic – weak, slender, fragile
Tupper and Reed
SWT – Sallah allahu wa ta’la – glorious and exhalted be he
Sam Barber, Adagio for Strings
SAW – Sallah allahu alayhi wa salaam – Peace be upon him (PBUH)
Huchiun – local Ohlone
Deck fin
Crichton
Egypt = 2500 years
Spongiform encephalopathy
Anthropic “ – Kuru
Girl’s names – Euphoria, Anesthesia, Salmonella, Trivia, Unique, Chemise, Epiphany, Melanoma, Aphasia, Anathema, Queue, Genitalia, Liaison
Peter Arnett
“Whereas formerly we suffered from lawlessness, today we suffer from laws” – Tacitus
M soy wa – don’t mention it
Chamorros - Guam
Degree = 60 miles
Curtis LeMay - Air Force; advocate of nuking cities
Malvina Reynolds - Little Boxes
Coatlicue
Assembly Resolution 181 – UN Partition Plan
Linda Zingarro - Eve's gypsy shrink
Rome = 1200 years
Caral – Supe Valley
Quin Shi Huang – 260-210 BCE
Korsakov’s Syndrome – K’s psychosis –amnesiac/confabulatory syndrome, degenerative brain disorder caused by lack of thiamine (vitamn B1)
Long-term encoding
Anterograde amnesia – affecting memories of a period following a shock or seizure
Retrograde – affecting memories preceding trauma
Episodic semantic
Non-declarative
Procedural
Rules of Engagement: They’re responsible for civilians, hospitals etc.; we’re held to situation as seen, not as is; they fire first, we respond in force; we fire first, priority is collateral damage
Tocoy Ricoc – Inca - he who sees all
Meroitic – 25th Dynasty – Napatan, Kushite, Nubian
Harry Dean Stanton
Philtrum
Wasichu
Larry Lindenau
Khurkri – Ghurka knife
Chachapoyas
Dithyrambic - wild dionysian frenzy
Vexillology – flags
Apotheosis, epiphany, revelation, insight, flash, theophany
Hypertrichosis – wolf hair face
Amaterasu Omi Kami - sun
Mandan (Metuthankie)
Dolmen/menhir/cromlech
USS Samuel Gompers
Agape, philia, eros, cupiditas, storge, caritas, compassion, fraternitas
Heuristic
Nomological (nomos = law) – basic physical laws or rules of reasoning
Earl H. “Pete” Ellis
Yupik
Nanuvut
Mustelidae – Wolverine family; gulo gulo gulo, gulo gulo luscus (America)
12th Armored Cavalry Regiment - Norman Mailer WWII
Clemmys marmorata – western pond turtle
Michel Foucault
Anthony Hopkins
Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species
L’audace, toujours l’audace – Georges Jacques Danton
Hobbes – Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short
Do ita shimash’te – c’est rien, machts nichts, de nada, m soy wa
Tribadistic – lesbian
Aveyron Wild Boy – Bonaterre, Jean Marc Itard
Meme
Oleander - used on highways to discourage campers
Cochineal – Inca red insect dye
Demotic
ProcyonLotor – raccoon
Instant – this month; Ultimo – last
Mother Bickerdyke
H34 Choctaw
Earth’s surface: 197 million sq miles
Amauta - wise man, scholar
Confirmation bias
Anthropic
Quaternary alluvium
“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer” DH Lawrence
Anamnesis – recalling to mind; loss of forgetfulness
Lemuria – Phillip L. Schlater
Masma – open-sided house
Tungus = Evenki
Malin Genie, Mauvais Genie
Angkor Wat – 800-1200 CE
Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani
Seng go tiyu – orgasm
2nd Movement of 7th Symphony aired on Disney’s Petshop and Ren and Stimpy simultaneously, 11/24/95
Didactic, pedantic
Seraphim, cherubim, powers, dominions, thrones archangels, angels (classic)
Seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominions, principalities, powers, virtues, archangels, angels (Gregory)
Zeugma – the lights, his cigar, and the cat
Antinomy – contradiction between two apparently valid principles
Hypatia – Library of Alexandia
Tengriism – Mongol sky-god religion
Iguaces (Anaqua) – Cabeza de Vaca’s Indians
Concrescual Approximation – Ralph Pred’s concept
Tourette – Jean-Marc Gaspard, Marquise de Dampierre
Genocide – Raphael Lemkin
Aristotle
Cañari
Speed of earth around galaxy cluster – 67K mph
Anabasis – Xenophon
Robert Lowth, grammarian inventor of picky rules
Cable ties – zip cuffs
Neuromuscular incapacitation – electro-muscular disruption (EMD) technology

(end of list)

"It's a full life, Charlie"
Jules Fieffer

Solitaire En Colère et Peur de Mourir

I hear Air France is more relaxed with you than US lines, which treat you like a POW. Certainly Australians were less judgmental, sanctimonious, and dictatorial than we are, even - or especially? - in liberated Berkeley. 

Cops in New York cheer their indicted brethren and boo the courts at arraignment for fixing traffic tickets for friends and relatives - the union says it's a "professional courtesy" and is a tradition of many generations. It is their right. Other charges are planting evidence and protecting family dealing drugs from their property. As far as I can see, no cop is and maybe ever has been imprisoned for murder over killing a civilian. 

Bank of America had to back off a $5 monthly ATM card fee but are sneaking back around by raising other fees, while huge bonuses and multi-million dollar retirement payoffs are typical from banks that received huge bailouts. Called on it, they laugh in the government's face.

Mississippi is taking a referendum to have a fertilized egg defined as with Personhood at conception to stop abortion.

Our president has backed off environmental protections and rescinded health care protection from his one already compromised stand. Guantanamo is still doing business in military trials and enhanced interrogation. He sold out to the banks upon taking office and has acted as if the corporations have his children hostage.

Which may be true. The anti-Obama movement runneth over with blatent racism - check the comment columns on the web.

The two-party system is a two-step oompah waltz that you'd have to be stupid drunk to take as democracy.

We treat other countries like foster children and our own people like arrestees. Our only excuse is that it's worse elsewhere; but, people, it's better elsewhere too. And it has been better here.

Defiance

I find myself messing around in my head looking for the face of my reader, the many faced murky image in there who is the roaring crowd and caustic critic and hypocrite lecteur and who at this point probably doesn't actually exist, because how would you find your way here? To this remote tendril of the web? And I find myself trying to please you, to live up to you, and I wonder what damage that does to this work. Then I think of Layla Anwar and her blogs, how among her various states of rage are those directed toward her readers, her defiance of them - you and me - her insults and accusations, stools flung, fists shook, palms raised against us. Some of that will be assertions of fact she wishes to convey to us for our edification; and some are incantations against our influence over her style and content; over her power to express - or just to perceive, to call up from her depths - whatever she can. The guts that takes. Produces some volcanic writing.

I'm not writing to the people I'm mad at and I don't hate the people for whom I write. Not today anyway. I been mad at the world so long it feels like normal to me and I'm tired of it. Too much pettiness in it, too much delusion. As long as the anger is there, though, it's got to be accessible and sometimes let off its rope.

As a kid, defiance was the genie that kept me on my feet and in the fight, that kept me alive and intact. I am glad for its presence and proud it was mine. The situation required that since I lacked the weaponry - the very strength - to walk the world without it and survive. Now I can. There will be days, though, and reasons, to call on the old demon. And maybe against you, especially if you become real and independent of my imagination; who knows where this will go. So if I need to struggle upright and throw off some chains, shake off some grabbing hands, rip off badges, tear off helmets, wipe off grins, break some lacquered fingernails, kick some balls, claw some eyes, puncture some egos, shut some mouths, burn some cities, topple some statues, wipe my ass with a flag or two, whether it leaves me standing and laughing or clubbed to the dirt and kicked in the face, I can always reach down in there and pull up...defiance. Mon semblable, mon frere, mon enfant, ma soeur. Kid.

Insight

Insight - perception - revelation - glimpses - illumination - the flash - apotheoses - the breakthrough - theophany - epiphany - anagnorisis - realization - intuition - the vision - getting it - that light bulb over your head...

Sometimes a little satori will come upon you in the nine items line. Once the checkout girl nodded at the big bottle of wine in my basket and said, "Don't drink that all at one time." I heard myself reply, "There is only one time."

Another checkout asked me, "Did you find everything?" Without thought I answered, "Everything is everywhere." Just a little joke, but at the center of the instant there was a flash.

They're what I - still - live for. Those are the payoff. To suddenly see something new. Feeling good feels good and victory's a gas and love is the heart of it all but all of those come to me best as those moments of dawning. The best of them are beyond language and some of them wriggle away before you can nail them and I'm not entirely sure that all of them together have done my life any tangible benefit but those arrows of light are the target of whatever I am.

For instance, I twigged the intent of existence. In all its levels and manifestations. Gazing at a stalk of horsetail (snake grass) on a work break in the Olympic Peninsula the first eye opened on that. Wondering what the force was that extruded this simple green being into all the nothingness...

The point of existence is to do everything it possibly can. To fill all the nothing with every form of something, to proliferate and elaborate, to be all that it can be. 

That was long ago. There was another small eruption a couple days ago developing out of the question, does the universe have infinite RAM? Or are its resources limited? It is an act of pure imagination?

Another thought. It – even this cosmos here, our hometown, must be at least as smart as we are. At least.

Twice I've understood time, once sitting on the roof of a garage. I didn't need to write anything down, it was so obvious. Now I have no idea what I was seeing; so I can't weigh the reality of it - was it bullshit? Or some worn out cliche?

These cerebral easter eggs don't have to be lofty, they can open some small box, but the point is that some recurring question gets answered a little more or...some question that's never been asked. The acid-flash blossoms, whhhoooommm!

I gave up long ago the bayonet charge on nirvana. What Jay Stevens called Storming Heaven. It makes my skin crawl to even consider it. Becoming a monk: Zen, Sufi, barefoot Carthusian, trying to intrude your way into divinity by main force - like taking a difficult shit - not for me, man.

But in topical increments, probing my way through the textures of normal life, that's all right. That's my direct deposit.

Why Angry

A few weeks after the Death Valley trip I found myself popping off on strangers - losing my temper with people who didn't know how to properly form a line for the train, who blocked my path, who blew the yellow light with people in the crosswalk. I chased one to the next light. I growled at another to get the fuck out of the way if he's not boarding. I shouldered another out of my way. Too many people get on the elevator, I curse, "Fuck. I'm getting out of here," and push out of the car. These people are on my schedule, I'll see them again; I'm poisoning the waters. I need to get control, I tell myself. But it comes on too fast to see, then it's done.

So, apparently, I'm angry. There must be some freight of pain hiding in there unseen in normal life, no aesthetic surface.

I've been mad all my life, my mother said I was born angry - I wouldn't breathe until the doctor slapped me. Howling in rage is a form of breathing. But it was an abstract, enduring, generalized, pervasive refusal. I didn't really have a temper. Now it's a petty, mean, explosive thing. I mean, sure, those perps are annoying in their little ways, but I used to be above all that. Not some cranky old cane-shaker.

One day a few years back walking away from my place I thought, "I'm tired of being mad all the time. But there's nothing I can do about it." Then, a few weeks further on,I cautiously noted that the ancient black cloud had begun to lift, as if speaking the wish had effected some inner alchemy; the old dudgeon seemed to have dissipated. That was the historical, world-kicking wrath. Now I'm forced to recognize this shabby tempermentality.

Actually, that was born, hatched from its leathery egg, while driving cab in the 80's, but it stayed sequestered, off to the side, behind the wheel, until the last few years when it began insidiously creeping into everyday life.

So. Ask me how I am. I am lonely, angry, and afraid to die. How are you?

Why Lonely and Afraid

Looking west across dry ground over Furnace Creek to the ridge I asked myself why I don't live under a sky like this all the time - compared to the grayscape wherein I live and work. There is a slippery place when I try to recall the next step of the mind: to the suicide I've always kept in mind for when I get too old to carry a pack on a hike. Maybe it went, if you're not living right, why live? To leave behind the city doesn't seem like so much, but here, under this vast empty sky, breathing the dust, feeling the heat, eyes full of shades of dun and dull green, the most skeletal world, there comes over me a mighty fear of death. The world without me, that's okay; but me without this world, that's unacceptable. I'll never have the guts. That's a revelation. I wondered but here, it seems sure. And when I picture the irreversible act, finger on the trigger, looking into the little round black eye, in that moment with the fear comes an unbearable loneliness. That isolation is always there, sleeping in the Cthullu dark, waiting to open its eye on you.

So when I rode out of there I carried an interesting insight. I'm lonely and afraid to die. It's lucky that I have a sense of humor, for if there's an antidote, that's it.

Key Words

The mind is a monkey, so it's said...it does play tricks. One of the lesser pranks is with memory; it, with an evil little grin, locks up on some word you've had at hand all your life...for a few years it wouldn't let me remember Max von Sydow and Maxfield Parrish at the same time. So I make lists to consult. Sometimes just pulling the clipboard from by the bed is enough to kick the demon off and free the word.

Now I'm going to use that list for another purpose: to post keywords to hook google searches, and to define my mind to anyone diverted to this site. Here's the current list, populated mostly in this cube farm, where I now hear one other keyboard clicking...that rapidity probably means personal email...a throat is cleared to the southeast - a (here's a case, my monkey makes me have to look up Bernadine's name) Bernadine passes by like a ship in full sail, militant in requiring that I Have a Good Afternoon...I can do that...I accept that responsibility...at this workstation this list is extruded into the world...

Sat sri akal = god is timeless and true
Idiom
Innuendo
Mitochondrial Eve 200K YA
Y-Chromosomal Adam 60-90K YA
Nitrian monks killed Hypatia
Phatic = small talk to perform social task
Agnosia = loss of ability to recognize objects, persons, sounds, shapes, or smells
Dunning-Kruger effect = where dumb people do dumb things because they’re too dumb to know they’re dumb
Nzinga = Laari (Brazaville)
Starets = religious teacher or advisor
Pourriel = spam (French)
Arabic:
Gazma, kundara, Tozz fiik, Kuss umak
Maluus
Chaldean = Iraqi/Turkish Assyrian Christians
Druze = Syria, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan sect, 11th cent, Gnostic/neo-platonist etc.
Alawite = Syrian Shiite
Skitsnack = horseshit
Turritopsis Nutricula – jellyfish lives forever through regeneration
Crypsis = biology; avoiding detection through camouflage, mimicry, mimesis, etc.
Serer – Senegal, Gambia
Borla - crown
Tocapu – inca textile patterns, possibly logographic
Evolutionary Epistemology
Uncu – inca tunic
Mathangi Arulpragasam
Neoteny – kid traits in adults
Evenks – tungus
Mbuti-bambuti – (Bantu)
Armillaria ostoyae – Oregon honey mushroom 2400 years
Taxis – trope
Giorgio Chirico
Adenosine Triphosphate
Manuel Zelaya
Palladium catalyzed cross-couplings
Ayanna Andita
Ghanian, Yoruba
Tene
Tony & Johnny
Eyeworms = floaters, myodesopsia, enoptic phenomena, muscae volitantes, mouches volantes
Lorraine Feather
Shikran, afwan (F1)
Ni hau ma? Wo hen hau
Gravamen
Alan Blanchard
Until it seem I must behold immensity made manifold
Raphael Lemkin – coined genocide 1943
Ali Ibn Abi Talib – (cousin) Shia
Abu Bakr (friend) – Sunni
As salaamu alaikum; wa aliakum salaam
Kundara = shoe
Ce ne fait rien
Tririga = Roman 3-horse team
Male gebi, cau ni ma
Hindot ka = fuck, Tagalog
Walang hiya ka = you are without shame
Putan ginamo
Riemann hypothesis, Poincarré conjecture
Discipline, rebuke, reproof, reprimand, castigate, penalize
Gung hay fat choy
CCPOA = California Correctional Officers Association
Jamais plus
Desulforudis Audixviator = lonely sunless bacteria
Parahippocampal gyrus, amygdalae, temporal lobe
Emanations and penumbra
“They know and they do not know that action is suffering”
“Only the fool fixed in his folly, may think he can turn the wheel upon which he turns”
Khamwat = crime of close proximity
Faltaneh = too free girl
Apophatic, catophatic
Osmophobia, autodysmophobia
Pilcro (paragraph sign)
Chilango – from Mexico City
Nakba – Palestinian disaster
Niitsitapi (Original People) Pikani, Siksika, Kainai (Blood), Piegan
Liquichiri (also Kharisiri, Sacamanteca) – steals human fat to make soap
What’s the word, hummingbird; what’s up buttercup; what’s the deal banana peel; what’s the story, morning glory
Her eyes were enormously given to all the world around her – Pynchon
Lane-splitting, filtering, white-lining, stripe-riding
Chathab = liar
Munafiq = hypocrite
Abu Al-Jazari 1136-1206, polymath, brazen head
Jannat or Jannah = heaven
Zulamaat = darkness
Niqab, hijab, burqa, khimar, chador
Synechdoche, metonymy, metaphor
Solecism, malapropism, catachresis
Kodukushi = people who live and die alone
Abdul Karim Qasim
pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem
Keep it simple, Stupid (all Occam's Razor)
Paraphilia, hybristophilia
“Short letter” – Cicero, , Augustine Blaise Pascal, Sam Johnson, Twain
Gluconeogenesis – makes sugar from non-carbohydrates
Irhabi, hirabi = terrorist
Necrotizing fasciitis
Lin Yutang

Okay, that's it for this swivel chair. I think I can jerk "crypsis" from the monkey's paw now...call it up on command...There are more lists in my three-room 360 degree attic...I can't claim a garret 'cause the roof ain't pitched.