Sister Novena's PortaPulpit

2008-11-25T01:42:00.002-06:00

Is That the November Chill I Feel, or is it the Icy Hand Of Death?

I'm coming to this a little later than I wanted to, but it's my beautiful Christopher's birthday today! Or tomorrow, except sort of yesterday-ish as well -- the time difference between here and Australia still baffles me. Anyway, sometime around this approximate date is Chris' birthday, so happy 39th... wait, is that right?

(counting)

Holy shit dude, are you really 39? For reals?! Good lord... that means you'll be 40 next year. That's fucking middle-aged... you're going to be my first middle-aged friend. Statistically halfway between cradle and grave. You might even have to start taking your first medications soon -- will it be statins? Maybe arthritis pills? Something for blood pressure? God, this is all going to take some time to digest.

And speaking of needing time to digest, it'll also be my friend Diana's birthday on Thursday, which is why I'm going ahead and getting her in now, since nobody will be bothering with this lame blog on Thanksgiving I hope. Even I have better things to do that day than hang around here.

Anyway, I count both Chris and Diana among my most reliable, steadfast friends, two of those tiny number of people you get during your lifetime who stick around in spite of everything, even though they're not related to you and thus free of obligation. These guys have seen my life change and then change back and then change again, the distances between us (both geographic and temporal) widening and narrowing, and yet they're still here for me, and I'm still here for them.

Happy birthday to both of you, I love you more than you could know.

2008-11-18T22:19:00.004-06:00

Mandelbrot

So, you remember a couple of weeks ago I was talking about the Mandelbrots? Well, I've learned a few new things since then.

I have this friend at work, Jay. Jay's job at Fnorders is basically to stand by the door and keep an eye on people. He's not a security guard as such, since he has no real power to do anything, and as much of his job is greeting people and directing them around as it is preventing theft from the store. He's mostly just there to make note and inform management if something seems fishy. And Jay is singularly well-suited to the job. He's a young guy, 19, quite bright and thoughtful, but happy to stand relatively still and think his own private thoughts most of the time. It's fun to watch him think, because he's so expressive when he's thinking about something -- his interior monologue is being constantly reflected on his face, and you can actually watch his conversation with himself taking place.

He also likes to talk to people -- not to anybody and everybody, but to those people who tend to want to talk to him. We get a fair number of lonely old and/or mentally ill people wandering in, and they love nothing more than to find a receptive audience, a role which Jay will happily fill. He's been known to subtly take the piss out of them if they're not aware enough to catch him at it, but he never means to hurt any feelings. Mostly, though, he just enjoys talking to crazy people, and he's good at listening to them.

He also shares a trait with a couple of other people I've known, in that he'll ask anyone nearly any question, no matter how mortifyingly personal it seems to the rest of us. And he asks so guilelessly that they'll usually answer him. It's something I'm profoundly disinclined to do myself, so I admire it that much more when I see someone else who can do it.

Anyway, Jay got to have a 45-minute conversation with Eunice Mandelbrot not long ago. I wasn't there that night -- god, how I wish I had been -- but Jay listened closely and finally got to tell me the whole story night before last. Here's what he learned:

Eunice lost her eye falling down the stairs, where she landed on her face and her eyeball popped out.

George and Charles' names are, respectively, John and Mark. They're twin brothers. John is significantly mentally disabled, to the point that he can function a bit but can't take care of himself. Mark is the family genius, and has gone a number of interesting places and done some interesting things. He's written a book based on his grandfather's letters and photographs, detailing some historical massacre in Turkey or some such place, which apparently actually stands a chance of being published. However, he's now housebound due to severely swollen legs that cause him constant, excruciating pain, which is why it's only ever Eunice and John that we see in the store or out on the streets.

The Mandelbrots were forced out of their house on the west side a couple of years ago and now live in a shitbag motel room out on 82nd, on the ass end of Portland. They have no money apart from what Eunice brings in by begging, since neither of the brothers can hold down jobs. The family's fortunes, as Eunice figures it, now rest on Mark, and more specifically on the screenplay he's writing, which is their presumed ticket to a new life in the west hills. Hence all the money she's dropping on expensive Criterion Collection discs, for Mark to study.

Jay, realizing how much of the family's funds Eunice is spending on DVDs, suggested maybe trying the library instead? But Eunice seemed too addled to understand the suggestion, and probably wouldn't remember it long enough to pass it along anyway. Jay, being the sort of person he is, asked if he could come visit them at home sometime -- a request which Eunice politely but flatly refused. "Mark can't cope with visitors," she told him. And yet Jay says he'll continue to ask whenever she comes in, because he's become as fascinated with the family as I am. I told him if he ever gets to the point that he's visiting the Mandelbrots at home, we'll start thinking about interviewing on camera. However long it takes, however slowly we have to tread, if we can get there, I'm on board. If anybody could establish a friendship with them, Jay could. And if I can help, I will.

I'm a little torn. I say this is Grey Gardens-quality material, but that's not quite true. The Edies had fallen a long way from their society perch, but they were still proud, if eccentric, people. But the Mandelbrots are not proud; their life is a humilation. They're not without hope, but even that seems a little humiliating when you consider the way it's likely to end. They pin their hopes on a screenplay built around the aesthetic ideals of Mizoguchi and Truffaut, which they expect to sell in Hollywood for millions of dollars. And even if Mark could pull off the former, how can that ever translate into the latter?

And as Jay anxiously points out, once Eunice is dead -- which will be soon -- what's going to happen to the brothers?

It's an engrossing little family drama, one of the most compelling I've ever come across in real life. I want to document these people if only to acknowledge that they were here, and that there was, after all, a kind of dignity in the way they struggled gamely against their own bizarre fates. I could never have made up a better story. At the same time, I'm acutely aware that documenting them would be dangerously close to holding them up for ridicule, which I emphatically would never want to do. But I don't know quite how to avoid it without forcing a single perspective onto the subject, which would defeat the purpose entirely.

I don't know what will ever come of it -- probably nothing. The Maysles brothers got the Edies because the Edies loved attention and wanted to be filmed. If the Mandelbrots don't, there's nothing I can do about that, and I wouldn't want to invade their privacy anyway. I also know that even if there's no film in it, the Mandelbrots will probably appear in my work in some form or other, because the story is too good not to tell. I hope, if nothing else, that I get to find out how it progresses; if not, I can probably fill in the blanks for myself.

Off-subject, but it's made my whole week: do you remember James Burke?

Back in the 80s, I used to love this old-ish BBC series that they played on the Houston PBS station during every pledge drive: Connections, and later The Day the Universe Changed. It made enough of an impact that I've remembered it ever since, even though I was just a kid when it was being aired. Anyway, the whole series is available on YouTube. It's a lot of time spent watching video in a little square, but it's more than worth it -- even thirty years later, even accounting for the immense technological development since it aired, this series is still amazing. A surprising amount of what he discusses has since come to fruition, not always as he thought it might. But the core concepts are still totally valid and immediately applicable, and if anything more obvious now than ever. Burke was damn near up there with Sagan, even if he wasn't as widely known.

Just go and watch it. It's a fine way to spend a weekend.

2008-11-04T14:35:00.004-06:00

Election Day/Night

I expect to have laptop and WiFi access tonight, so I'm starting a running post for whatever election day miscellanea seems worth documenting.

For the record, my prediction for the night is Obama 364, McCain 174.

(11/5, replaced prediction map with current EV map)

Update: Well, the comfy corner in a friendly bar thing worked out great -- some friends came to hang out and watch, we were surrounded by Obama supporters, it was an amazing night. Unfortunately, the WiFi thing didn't work out as well, but I guess you can't have everything unless you plan farther ahead than I did.

Still, this was a fucking beautiful day. In the bar, when the election was called, when McCain conceded, when Obama gave his speech -- people were laughing, cheering, crying, dancing, hugging each other. To see that much emotion at what was a relatively self-possessed election party should tell you something about how much this meant to all of us. Even going home, people were cheering on the train, cheering all up and down the street, laughing and singing and calling to each other.

Just keep saying it: President Obama, President Obama, President Obama. Those are some sweet words. Happy, happy night.

2008-11-04T14:31:00.001-06:00

Okay, THIS Is The Post You Were Expecting

Four years ago, give or take, I was hanging out with my friend Diana in Memphis. And I asked her if she'd seen the amazing speech given at the 2004 Democratic Convention by this guy named Obama. She hadn't, so I dragged her down to the Co-op to watch it online. "This guy is going to be the first black president," I told her.

Seriously, ask her. I'm sure I've got the details slightly wrong, but the story is true. The point being, it was obvious that the man had some intangible force already pushing him towards today. I wouldn't care to indulge in much conjecture about what that force might be. If pressed, I might settle on a definition like, "the force of millions of people collectively wanting the same thing, and then finding the wherewithal to make it happen." But there's also the quiet sense that this was something that wanted to happen on its own, and we were all simply facilitating its arrival.

I know, I'm writing like we've already won, and we haven't yet. But jacta ilea est, the die is cast, whatever is going to happen is already mostly beyond our control. We've done what we can on an individual basis, and today is just the day when we wait to see it was enough. And maybe I should be worried -- I know a lot of people who are worried -- but I'm not. I'm just smiling and waiting. Because I've known for four years that this was coming, and today's the day when it finally arrives.

Everything's going to be cool.

I voted weeks ago, so there's nothing for me to do today but hang out until the polls around the rest of the country start to close and send in their results. I'm off work, so I'm going to call my mom, run a few errands, and then go stake out a spot at a bar downtown with friends to spend the evening watching the returns. In 2004, I spent election night alone in my grandfather's guest room, watching Kerry slowly lose. It was miserable. I wanted tonight to be the opposite of that.

But mostly, if Obama wins tonight -- and I'm almost certain that he will, as much by the inexorable force of history passing as by electoral mechanics -- then tonight will be one of those era-ending/era-beginning moments you might get to see a handful of in your lifetime if you're lucky. Not just because he's black, not just because he's a democrat, not just because he's the first of what I consider my generation to get to the presidency, although those are all important things. But this is something a bit more than that. This might just turn out to be the day the 21st century finally arrives in the United States.

Here's how I see it: back in 1998, I got on a plane in the America I'd always known and left for England, where I spent most of the next three years. While I was away, something went terribly wrong, and when I came home in 2002 it was like returning to a version of America that existed in a parallel dimension that was almost exactly like the one I'd grown up in, but slightly... sinister. Some of it was just the reverse-culture-shock talking, the way the flags seemed a bit unnecessarily garish, the stars and eagles on the money a little bombastic, the people talking a little too loud, the rhetoric a little more inflamed than I'd remembered it. But years later, I still feel as though I never quite made it back to the country I'd left. I've never felt entirely comfortable here since then.

But today, maybe the parallels will begin to re-converge and I'll find America again, settling back under my feet right where I'd left it. Or maybe it could be better still -- maybe I'll even get the America I've always wanted. The one where when I'm in pain, I can go see a doctor even though I'm poor. The one where we make education a bigger priority than wealth. The one where people who speak with unfamiliar accents are interesting rather than scary. The one that's more interested in using science to propel us forward than in using religion to drag us backward. The one where a family with multiple dads or moms, or just one of either, gets the same respect as one that looks like a 50s sitcom. The one where soldiers get to come home and stay home, leaving people in Iraq to re-build their country with international support rather than American interference. I might get an America that knows it's a rather important part of the world, but not the sum total of it.

After today, we're still going to have an intractable mess on our hands. Lots of things will still be bad, there will still be impossible problems to deal with, and the parts of life that are painful today will still be painful tomorrow, and probably getting worse in the immediate future. The hardest part of getting Obama elected is over, but Obama himself, exhausted as he must be, is faced with the beginning of some of the most difficult work any President has ever done. At least, I hope he is -- if he's the President I'm hoping for, he will be. But maybe today we get an America that's tired of indulging all its worst instincts, and ready to start dealing with its problems with optimism rather than fear. More than the fact of Obama himself, it's this collective decision that I find so promising, as if we've finally decided to stop running in frantic circles, to pick a direction, and start walking.

Kicking and screaming will some of us be dragged into the 21st century. Those people have delayed the rest of us by almost a decade already, and I know they'll be working to make it longer still. But sooner or later there'll be more of us than them, sooner or later they're coming whether they like it or not. We're heading towards a queer-friendly bilingual blue-collar agnostic immigrant book-reading mixed-race future, powered by carbon-efficient fuels, Higgs Bosons and stem cells, WiFi, pad thai and student grants.

It's still not "coming home" to the America I left ten years ago, but that's fine -- that America wasn't exactly living up to its potential, either. But I might now be able to wake up some morning in the America I began to imagine while I was in Europe, a better America than we've ever known. Better than we've even really dared to imagine. Barack Obama doesn't make that happen; we make that happen. But the fact that we're electing Barack Obama today might be the first concrete sign that we've begun to imagine that future, and have decided to pick that direction and start walking.

2008-11-04T02:56:00.007-06:00

Not The Post You're Expecting

As I've said before, one of the "benefits," if you will, of my current job is that I meet a lot of people. The meetings are superficial, but frequent enough that I can now walk through downtown Portland and recognize a respectable percentage of the people around me. Sometimes I even know their names, where they work, what kind of stuff they're into, whether they have kids, that sort of thing. Occasionally one will even recognize me outside of work, though they tend to be confused when they do, unable to place exactly where or how they know me. Point is, I have a passing acquaintance with hundreds of Portlanders. And most of 'em are nothing very interesting. Don't get me wrong -- they're fine people, I'm sure possessing many admirable qualities and virtues, and I'm sure if I took the time to really get to know them, I'd find something interesting in most of them. Not many people are really that boring. But for all the would-be personalities in this town, there aren't all that many real characters.

I have become fascinated, however, with one family in particular. There are three of them, as far as I can tell, of whom I've met two in person, and one only over the phone. The one I see most frequently is a stooped, hunchbacked, one-eyed crone we'll call Eunice Mandelbrot, which is similar to her real name, but isn't. She can usually be found begging for spare change up and down the bus mall and in other high-traffic areas downtown, around Pioneer Courthouse Square and along Burnside. She walks like one of the UrRu from the Dark Crystal, hanging her warped frame over a walking stick, looking up at everyone from a thirty-degree angle through her one good eye.

(this is not Eunice Mandelbrot)

Half of downtown seems to know her; she's a standard figure on the streets out here. She has a surprisingly genteel manner, asking politely for any spare change you might have in your pockets. She seems to dress in rags, but I expect any clothes you draped over her would look ragged. Her hair is long and grey and stringy, but she never smells bad.

I've also met her son, George -- I've never heard his real first name, but he seems sort of George-ish to me. I see him much less frequently than Eunice, but when I do it's memorable: the guy is, to be blunt, fucked-up. It's hard to gauge whether he's intrinsically fucked-up through disability or mental illness, or whether he has somehow had his fucked-up-ness foisted upon him by vice or circumstance. His speech is barely coherent, and his voice is low and strained. He's tall, thin in that way that still carries a pot belly, he has his mother's long, stringy hair, and a full beard and mustache which I always notice because he invariably has a long strand of snot hanging in it. I mean a big, nasty gob of yellow snot, hanging out of his nose and pooling in his mustache. It's hard to miss, especially the second and third time. He tends to lurch around, unable to keep his physical coordination together, and his snot-string will often swing perilously away from his nose as he sways, which keeps the eye riveted on it in case it launches and one has to duck.

I saw George a couple of months ago, and he looked a lot better for a change. His hair had been cut short and his bear trimmed, with no visible snot string therein, and instead of his usual black jeans and stained black t-shirt, he was in chinos, dress shirt and corduroy sport jacket -- they weren't in the best repair, but it was still a big step up from his normal state. He still swayed when vertical, and he was still uncommunicative, but I was unexpectedly heartened by his improvement.

Obviously everyone in the store who's been there for longer than a few months knows about the Mandelbrots. We tend to give each other a heads-up when one of them comes in; they have a bad reputation among the management in spite of never having really caused much trouble as far as I know. Eunice is a bit of a coupon-scrounger, but that's true of the elderly in general. Apparently a few years back the Portland Mercury wrote a story on them, something about their being evicted from their home because they couldn't pay rent, and Eunice out begging on the street, and something or other along those lines. I've looked for the article in their online archives, but so far I haven't found it. And if this was all I knew about them, I'd probably just write them off as a pair of tragic figures, two more of the lost causes that cluster inside our store when the weather gets colder and wetter. But there's one other thing.

They have fucking impeccable taste in film.

The only thing they ever buy from us is DVDs. And it's never run-of-the-mill crap, it's never the newly-released shit that makes up 95% of our inventory. It's always the most sublime, avant-garde, artful foreign films, usually Criterion Collection sets that cost $40 or more, films to make a former film student weep. Mizoguchi. Bresson. Eisenstein. Rossellini. These people are not fucking around when it comes to movies.

But this -- these people, these films -- it makes no sense. Eunice doesn't know a thing about them; she's generally the one to come buy them, but she only pays, she doesn't choose. They're often special orders or reserves, and she just buys whatever's on the hold shelf under her name. Does that mean George is the cineaste? I mean, maybe -- but George doesn't even seem to know where he is most of the time. So for months now, I've been sitting at the special order desk watching these beautiful editions of high-brow titles come in, trying to riddle out how the two people I've met relate to the films that they're buying. And nobody else buys them -- almost all of our best stuff is bought by the Mandelbrots.

It was only a couple of weeks ago that I got the third piece of the puzzle. A man called while I was working in the multimedia department. He was soft-spoken and articulate, and he asked about several similar titles -- I don't recall exactly what, but they were all foreign films, and all films that would appeal to an unusually sophisticated cinematic palate. I ended up putting a Criterion disc on hold for him, and when I asked him his name, he said "Mandelbrot." So this is the guy!

I took the DVD up to the registers and asked the girl working there to make note of what sort of person came in to pick it up. The voice on the phone didn't sound much like George, but if he'd really improved lately it might be possible... and if it was him, I wanted to know. It was Eunice who eventually showed up to make the purchase, so I was left intrigued but unsatisfied. Who was this new Mandelbrot, the one apparently actually buying the films?

I still don't know, but tonight I got a bit more information. The new Mandelbrot -- let's call him Charles -- has taken to calling on nights when I'm there, so I've talked to him a few times now. Each time I stifle the urge to say, "you know, I can't help but notice that you have amazing taste in film," just to see if I can squeeze a little more information out. He had a bunch of titles he wanted to check on tonight, The Last Chrysanthimum, The Red Balloon, Battleship Potemkin, a couple of others. I had some, not others, and I suggested that if we're not carrying them, he might try Facets, since they carry a lot of hard-to-find stuff. At the end, he said, "I'm sorry, and I don't mean to disparage the other people on staff there, but I just wanted to tell you that you're the only person I've spoken to there who's helped me in a professional manner. You're the only one who seems to know anything about film." And I laughed and thanked him and said, "yeah, well, that's what two degrees in film is good for, I guess." And suddenly he got very interested. "Really? I'd love to know; I used to work in the European film industry years and years ago... I worked with Antonioni and lots of others..."

Two things at this point: one, I've got another call waiting on another line; and two, whoever this guy is, his family is seriously messed up, and I don't know if I want this guy to know too much about me. So I sort of wave the question away and say, "oh, it's a long story. If you come in sometime, maybe. Can I help with anything else?" And he let it go, thanked me, and said he'd ask for me specifically the next time he needed help with a film. I dealt with the other call, and got back to work. An hour or so later, Eunice Mandelbrot comes in to pick up the films Charles had on hold. Except one was missing, one I'd put up for him days ago, and it was nowhere to be found. So she asked, "may I call my husband?"

Her husband! Charles is her husband. Except there's no way, unless she's much older than him or much younger than she appears. Eunice isn't a day if she's not 75, and Charles is doubtful much more than 60 from the sound of his voice. I mean, it's possible, but it still leaves me confused. Who the hell is Charles, then, with his rag-picker of a wife begging on the streets and his son performing aerial acrobatics with his excess mucus, while he stays home and watches post-war Ozu?

Having this new information only makes my curiosity burn hotter. Whatever is going on in this family, it's capital-fucking-I Interesting. It's Tennessee Williams interesting, it's Grey Gardens interesting. My co-workers tease me about my fascination with the Mandelbrots, but I feel both repelled by them and protective of them. I want to ingratiate myself, go to their house, find out what the fuck is going on, interview them all extensively. I want to know how they got where they are. I want to cut them down until I have a perfect faceted jewel of a story. I want to keep looking at them until I can really see them.

But I also worry that if I did, I'd want to show others. And if I showed others, they might laugh, and I don't want anyone to laugh at the Mandelbrots.

PS: this is the most heartbreaking, tragic, bittersweet thing I've ever, ever heard.

2008-10-25T23:45:00.004-05:00

Other People's Blog Ideas

I got a request from my friend Diana to use this blog to direct some attention towards a recent interview done with Stephen Spoonamore, a Republican computer fraud expert and vote-fraud whistleblower. And I'm quite happy to oblige. I think we can assume that at least two or three more people will hear about this now. :)

Here's a link to Mark Crispin Miller's page on the subject, which links to the entire interview in ten parts. Of if you'd prefer a more succinct run-down on the issue, here's an interview with Miller in which he hits the main points.

Personally, I have mixed feelings on the theory. On the one hand, it's obvious that electronic voting machines are waaaay too easily tampered with, and I don't really doubt that various interested parties have probably used those vulnerabilities to their advantage. And obviously if our ability to vote is in any way compromised, then our entire political system is bankrupt. This is a crucial issue that arguably transcends every other issue, in as much as if we can't rely on our votes, then all other issues become moot for us as voters. So I think this is something that absolutely has to be addressed, and so I'm always interested in what knowledgeable people have to say on the matter. And Spoonamore certainly seems like a very knowledgeable party.

On the other hand, while I wouldn't be remotely surprised to learn that some tampering has been going on, and maybe even enough to make the difference in certain crucial elections, I have a little trouble believing that it could be so widely used that a serious challenge could be overcome through election fraud alone. If McCain et al. are planning to steal the 2008 election, why do they so convincingly act like a campaign that's about to lose? Do we really believe that the Obama campaign doesn't understand the threat, however large or small it might be, and hasn't considered how to counter it?

As it currently stands McCain has to win at least nine battleground states -- Iowa, Missouri, Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Florida, New Mexico, Colorado, and Nevada -- to have a chance of winning the election. And that means nine states that he HAS to win, every single one of them, with no losses among them. If it were one or two states, I'd be quite worried; but at nine, or more, it seems implausible to cheat his way to victory, even with a few electronic aces tucked in his pockets.

Again, I don't doubt that shenanigans are afoot. There have already been instances of irregularities in a few states, and weird goings-on in others. And it's not just electronic voting that's an issue -- mass purges of voter rolls, interference at polling places, and disinformation directed at specific demographic groups make it fairly obvious that there are some very corrupt, dirty games being played. You see stuff like this, and you know that our electoral system, already imperfect, is being badly damaged. Assuming Obama wins, I really hope that among the big priorities of his first term will be to address the widespread tactics being used to undermine our elections. This shit has to stop.

But I just can't bring myself to believe that even cheating is going to deliver this one for McCain. I could be wrong, and in a few weeks we'll know for sure. But at this point even McCain is acting like he doesn't buy it.

For whatever it's worth, it seems to me that Oregon's voting system is as good as it can realistically be. I got my ballot in the mail about a week ago, and spent an hour or so that evening going over all the measures and local/regional candidates with my laptop, filling in all the appropriate ovals on my nice paper ballot. Then I took it to the library and dropped it off (I could've mailed it in, but it seemed like a waste of stamps), and that was that. It was easy, convenient, verifiable, secure, etc., and judging by Oregon's election turnout numbers, it definitely encourages participation. I don't doubt that there are ways to game any system, this one included, and I've heard occasional mutterings about ways in which Oregon's system could be compromised. But that will be true of any system that's designed to be accessed by millions of people, and the benefits obviously outweigh the drawbacks.

It seems like it must be time to establish a more coherent means of voting, and a paper trail would be so simple and would do so much to alleviate the issues involved in electronic voting. Just give me a fucking receipt for my vote, you know? In addition, it's painfully obvious that private enterprise has absolutely no place in any election. No private firm -- right-leaning, left-leaning, for-profit, non-profit, faith-based or secular -- should be handling elections. I absolutely agree that we've got a big problem, and one that should be easily fixed. So for that reason alone, if you're interested, the Spoonamore interview is interesting stuff.

Totally unrelated, but I liked it a lot, and I hope Greensmile will forgive me for stealing his entire post -- it's just that it was so short. :)

If there is not at least one person to whom you would literally never lie, one person to whom you fiercely and at any cost, present your truest self in every moment and circumstance, then your life is shabby, a string of compromised amusements, a toying with the devil as he grooms you for his version of eternity.

I have no such person, so I feel like a failure now. :) However, I also think it's a beautiful sentiment and quite true, and when I read it earlier today I wanted to tack it up on my wall. I've thought I might've found that person a few times, but it always turned out that I was wrong. I think this is probably the closest I've ever found to my definition of real love; it's the ideal to which I have always been drawn. It's why I've learned to mistrust being "in love" -- being in love is the most gratifying part of being alive, but by definition you're never really, honestly yourself when you're in love. It's impossible. Being in love with someone is by its nature a delusion, a projection of perfection onto an imperfect human being. There's no such thing as love at first sight. Capital-L Love, real love, worthwhile love, is only possible after all that ends and much time has passed, when you can no longer hide behind the veil of perfection that someone else drapes over you; when you're exposed as the dysfunctional, ugly, fucked-up person you are and accepted anyway, and can in turn accept the dysfunctional, ugly, fucked-up-ness of someone else. It takes years to find, or decades, a lifetime. And I haven't even begun yet.

2008-10-22T22:44:00.004-05:00

On Secret Knowledge

I think this is likely going to be the first of several posts on this subject -- I know I've got more to say about it than I can coherently fit into one short post, and even in sections it might not be entirely coherent. But I'm really hoping that people will speak up in response. I'm not aiming for any particular conclusion, and I'm not looking for the answer to any concrete question. It's just a sort of floating conceptual cloud I've found myself in from time to time over the last year or two, and I'd like to chew on it for a while if anyone else is game.

When I was young -- 12, 13, in that neighborhood -- I got a book that kept me occupied for several years: High Weirdness By Mail. I initially got it for various reasons, but I was fascinated by it for just one -- it told me about stuff no other kids my age knew about. Thus, as a newly-minted teenager, and well before the internet was accessible to anyone but university folks and determined enthusiasts, I was learning about William S. Burroughs, the Principia Discordia, the Children of God, the space brothers, and lots of other less pleasant delusions. None of this stuff was so much as whispered in daily life when I was coming up -- unless you somehow wormed your way into some urban underground somewhere, where I was far too timid to venture -- so that book became my thin, shining, clammy link to everything I wasn't supposed to know about.

Being a kid, and a slightly gullible one at that, I bought into some of the gentler stuff more than I wish I had. But fuck it, that's what kids do, and as a grown-up skeptic it clearly didn't do me too much harm. I even expect the eventual disillusionment inoculated me against a lot of the crazy shit I see people lapping up every day at my job. And while my peers were reading Sweet Valley High and listening to Guns N' Roses, I was digging in to Burroughs and Kafka, and listening to Talking Heads and Negativland. I didn't fit in anyway -- ungainly, unstylish, and perpetually the new kid for seven years -- so it was just as easy to create my own mobile youth culture, built on whatever random elements I could scrape together from the outside world. I wasn't the only kid on earth to have done it, but I was the only one I knew of for a long time.

Now, however, this stuff is all just assumed. If I look for differences between my generation and those coming up more recently, the one I perpetually land on is that everything that was illicit and hard to acquire back then is now easily accessible. If I wanted a Talking Heads CD when I was fourteen or fifteen, I had to wait until we took a trip to a city with a decent record store, and then hope that they had one in stock. Alternately, I could send off (by mail) for a catalog, wait a few weeks for it to arrive, and mail-order the damn thing. It wasn't easy for a kid in rural Arkansas to expose themselves to much more than base culture in the early 90s, much less anything remotely fringe-y. Now a brief visit to the iTunes store or the Pirate Bay will net me then entire catalog of the fringy-est, most obscure bands in minutes, at most. Any dumbass teenager can go digging around in any murky cultural backwater at the faintest whisper of an impulse. Stormfront? Smart drugs? Whatever weird shit Japanese kids are into these days? You probably don't even have to be able to spell it to get access. It's all just there.

And we won't even get into the porn situation. When I was a youth, we had to work to get our hands on real pornography. These days, one simple link can end with you watching Two Girls, One Cup.

This isn't intended to be some kind of "get off my lawn" thing -- I think by and large this is a very positive development. A lot of people -- well, most, really -- aren't going to make much good use of it, but the ones who do will have an easier time getting through their own ungainly adolescences than I did. But nothing is obscure anymore, according to the formal meaning of the word. Nothing is hard to find. I'm not sure if there's any such thing as an underground anymore, or anything left on the periphery on society. Information has become one all-encompassing blob, Katamari Damacy-style.

But here's the thing: people love, and maybe even need, to have access to "secret knowledge." This is something I've become much more aware of by doing my current job -- people desperately want to know something that nobody else knows, or to find some knowledge that was previously denied them. Different people look for different things -- how to attract the people they desire, how to become rich, how to manipulate others, how to avoid being manipulated, how to exert power, how to finally be happy. The Secret is the most obvious example (and the most all-purpose), but I'd posit that fully half our inventory is devoted to "secret" solutions to the universal problems involved in being human. Kevin fucking Trudeau has gotten filthy stinking rich by offering questionable advice to the gullible specifically as forbidden, secret information. And David Icke, as laughable as he is, still has plenty of avid, if furtive, readers. More than you would ever guess if you didn't see them hunched over his books in the "speculation" section.

And the whole concept is further muddled to my mind by questions about what constitutes this "secret" knowledge. Absurd conspiracy theories, absolutely; the rules for attracting a husband, sure. But what about quantum physics? Sure, the information is fairly readily available, but beyond the most superficial level it becomes arcane in the extreme. How does string theory fit into the secret knowledge continuum? I know more about evolutionary biology than the average citizen, enough to know what Hox genes are and a little bit about how they're expressed in an organism. But I certainly don't know enough to understand how the proteins they encode controlled my fetal development, so that I find myself sitting here with four limbs rather than six. I could, if I were determined, learn. It's not being kept from me. But I don't know, and if I am honest, I probably won't bother to dig that deeply into the subject -- or if I do, then I probably won't ever put the effort into attempting to understand quantum physics. And that really is information that very few people possess.

Which knowledge is more "secret": intelligent design, or the best current theories about abiogenesis?

I suppose this is all my way of trying to sort out what information is worth seeking, and what's not, and how I make the distinction between the two. And I know the answer to that, really -- reason, and her daughter science, can be relied upon to separate truth from bullshit eventually. But then, the conspiracy theorist mutters, that's exactly what they want me to think.

2008-10-22T00:09:00.003-05:00

So Is There Still A Blog Here Or What?

Yes, sorry. Sorry for not posting, or sorry for resuming posting -- take your pick. I've been indulging in a brief hiatus, only because everything I feel like saying I don't feel like saying quite this publicly. Sometimes that's just the way it goes.

It'll come back around, I'm sure. It generally does.

2008-10-03T20:34:00.000-05:00

Doesn't Seem Like It's Been That Long At All

It's funny -- I've spent most of a year considering this post, but now that it's come time to write it, I'm having trouble.

A year ago tonight I rolled into town in a car with no tail lights and one headlamp out. It was raining that night, a bit like tonight, and I missed most of the Columbia Gorge because I spent the last two hours of the trip trying to keep my car between the lines on the road. When I got in, I was exhausted, my hands trembling from stress, I had no idea where I was or what would greet me, but I was glad to be off the road and ready to get started in my new city.

The year since has been a little bit of a mixed bag. There were some losses, some disappointments. But in retrospect, I've managed to pull off most of what I hoped to do during this first year. I moved and made it stick; I've worked consistently, if not always contentedly; I've made more new friends than I left behind in Memphis; I've done at least a little bit of work in my preferred field; I've gotten to know the city a little bit and have established a few regular spots. I went to the coast, I went to a few shows, I taught some kids how to make films, I read a huge pile of books. I have a comfortable little room. I still have my car, but not for much longer -- I've got a bike, and I'm riding it a lot. I've met so many people that I now recognize someone almost everywhere I go. I've drunk with an opera singer, met both the current mayor and the next mayor, and I've held someone else's Oscar. I found a beer I think is tolerable. I've wandered the streets at 2AM. I've tried the donut with the bacon on it. I've gotten rained on a lot. I don't have all the people around me that I would've wished, but I've got the friends I need, if not all the friends I want. My job sucks, but it's not the worst I've had, and many days I feel relatively lucky to have a job at all. My life isn't yet everything I dreamed it would be, but it's a pretty good start.

Portland itself is amazingly hospitable. Almost everything I want is here; I've never gone without. And a year on, this still feels like a place I could finally establish a long-term life, a place that could serve as home, or at least home-base. I spent much of the first thirty years of my life on the move, constantly leaving people behind; now that I'm settling in here, it has occurred to me that I might be entering a phase where I am the one being left. Already I've made friends with new(er) arrivals who've since moved on to the next place -- it's a weird feeling to watch people go. I've never really done much of that before. But it feels like it's probably my turn, and that it'll all work out okay.

There's a lot of work still to do. I have to forge some kind of working life for myself that doesn't involve selling books (at least not retail.) There is so far still nobody here who really knows me, but there are a few potential candidates hanging around. And there's still a whole city left to map out -- I've got the outlines down and I've roughed in a few details, but much of Portland is still a generality to me. I have a beginning, but no history. But that's the point of staying, I suppose.

So by and large it's been a good first year. I'm happier on the whole than I have been in a long time, since London at least, and whatever sadness has come along hasn't been enough to throw me too far off-track. I was thinking recently that the trip I made to get here turned out to be analogous to my time in Portland so far -- some setbacks, slower than I'd hoped, with moments of serious doubt whether I was going to make it at all. But whatever else happens, and however frustrating my lack of progress is at times, I have never yet failed to get where I was going in the end. And that'll be true with this as well.

I have no idea what my second year in town will bring. Unlike this time last year, I have no real expectations, just the hope that a year from today my life will have changed again. You'll know as soon as I do.

2008-10-01T22:58:00.004-05:00

Bike Love

Yeah, so, sorry for the silence this week. I'm writing a post to go up in a few days, but mostly all I've been thinking about is 1) Kurt Vonnegut; 2) my bike; and 3) politics. And I don't have much to say about any of those things that y'all don't already know.

Have I mentioned, though, that I love my bike? I wish it were more huggable, because I'd definitely hug her if it weren't for all the hard pointy bits. I still can't ride as far or as fast as I want to, but that will come with time. As it is, I'm riding it to work more often than not, and getting the hang of riding in heavy traffic and all that other stuff that comes with riding in the city. And the city changes completely from a bike. Portland is peculiarly bike-scaled for an American city -- you could ride clear across the east side in 30 minutes. From my house, it's a short fifteen-minute ride to the supermarket; or I can buy flowers or go to the video store, I can buy Italian pastries, Mexican coke, or obscure Indian spice mixtures. I can go out for breakfast, I can go read in the park, I can shop for shoes or tools or specialty light bulbs, I can pick up a pizza, I can get to one of the better show venues in town, or I can go get a damn fine margarita. And that's just within a range of a short, easy ride, up here in my unhip, transitional neighborhood. That's not even crossing the river or getting on a bus.

It's pretty nice, that's all I'm saying. And it literally makes me happy -- I feel better in general on days when I ride. Only six weeks since I got back on a bike for the first time in twenty years, and already a day without riding feels like a day wasted. I'm going to miss driving, which I've always loved; but I think I can be satisfied with this instead.

Anyway, I'll post again in a few days.

2008-09-16T15:21:00.011-05:00

Hopeless Romantics

I had the weirdest customer transaction ever last night. I'm going to transcribe it as closely as possible, and you see if you can figure out where things go off the rails. The dramatis personae include "Me", and a dumpy late-middle-aged lady who looks harmless but is buying two romance novels, hereafter referred to as "Lady." Which isn't intended to imply that all readers of romance novels are untrustworthy, but I've determined that regular readers of the genre have a significantly higher rate of crazy than other customers. There's a lot of pent-up frustration in that demographic.

Anyway, I was up at the register backing up a co-worker for a few minutes after she got hit with a last-minute wave of customers. I call for the next customer and lady steps up and hands me her two romance novels.

Me: Did you find everything okay?
Lady: Yes, thanks.
Me: And do you have a Fnorders Rewards card?
Lady (handing me a $20): No.
Me (finishing up the transaction): Would you like a bag?
Lady (snapping): I'll just take my money and go elsewhere!
Me: ...
Me: Wait, what?
Lady: (suddenly staring evil bloody daggers at me)

I closed the till and handed her back her money; she put it in her wallet and stomped off. I looked around, looked at my co-worker, looked deep into my soul, trying to figure out what the fuck just happened. I went to find the supervisor on duty, Meg. The old bat had gone and complained after she left me, and Meg had been as nonplussed as I was.

"She came up to me -- her voice was shaking with anger -- and said, 'I was trying to buy some books, and I was asked if I wanted a bag!' And I stood there waiting for her to continue, but no, that was the whole complaint."

After some discussion, it turned out that the lady was pissed because I'd asked her if she wanted a bag, instead of just assuming that obviously she did and giving her one.

And there are some customers that you want to run down the street after, stop them, shake them, and shout, "do you realize that you're completely fucking insane? Well do you?" The frequency with which this sort of shit happens is shocking. Recently we've been moving a lot of stuff around, re-arranging sections within the small and strangely-shaped space we've got. One afternoon a woman came up to me on the verge of tears asking for help finding her favorite author in the romance section. (See? It's always the fucking romance readers.) I showed her that we'd only moved the section over three feet, and reversed the flow so that the alphabetical arrangement started at the other end. Everything was still there. "I just want to tell you that this is very bad for people who don't deal well with change!" And she dabbed at her eyes and walked off clutching her book.

And I thought to myself, that woman must have an incredibly shitty life. How do you survive getting that upset over insignificant things? How do you drag yourself through your day, and through your miserable existence?

Fun fact: the customers who say things like "I'll just take my money and go elsewhere!" are, in my experience, exactly the customers we're happiest to be rid of.

------------------

Sometimes in the evenings at work, the store is dead and there's not much do but stand around. Those are actually the moments when I hate the job the most. But I think to myself, maybe someday things will be so bad -- maybe I'll be sick, or always in pain, something like that -- that I'll wish I could come back to a night like this one instead. And I think that I should try to live one night at work as if it was that night, and I've come back from something much worse just for a while.

Other times I think I should try to do a day at work where I'm really cheerful and enthusiastic. But I think I'd probably overdo it and lapse into sarcasm.
------------------

I'm kinda bummed about David Foster Wallace killing himself. I'm waiting to see if anyone explains why he did it -- I mean, we can all guess, we've all been there, but I'm just so disappointed in him, and I'm hoping that there's something more than garden variety despair to justify it. It's the same way I felt when Hunter S. Thompson offed himself -- it's not that I don't get it, it's that you're supposed to be better than that, man. Thompson's life had been an endless frantic party that had finally ended; Wallace was the definition of infant terrible and actually managed to write the Great American Novel, as well as a body of other excellent work, but maybe his best was behind him. So you were in pain, so you were depressed... and? As a young man, Kurt Vonnegut had to clean the charred corpses of the old people, women and children his countrymen had incinerated, out of blackened holes in the ground. And he bore up under that horror for sixty-something years. More than that, he used it to help the rest of us bear up under the endless little horrors that make up our own lives.

When you undertake to write about what it means to be human -- and isn't that, after all, the point of art? -- then to end your creative life through violent self-destruction is to contradict everything you've spent your life creating. Suicide implicitly says, "everything I said before? That was all bullshit, life doesn't mean anything." It's ending your career with an irrevocable failure that degrades every prior accomplishment. It's the disclaimer that will hang over every word you ever wrote forever, saying that none of it really counted.* For David Foster Wallace to have had talent and genius and empathy and grace in the amounts that he did, and then end all that kicking and swinging at the end of a rope makes me ashamed on his behalf.

It's not that I don't get it. I do. It's that he was supposed to be better than that.

*Which would be pretty apropos for Wallace, come to think of it.

2008-09-10T01:04:00.002-05:00

Why Don't You Take A Flying Fuck At The Moooooooooooon?

So, there's been one unforeseen benefit to the birth of the baby: my roommates aren't cooking right now. And this is a good thing because as lovely a pair of people as they are, they're pretty gross about keeping the kitchen clean. They mess up every dish in the house, and then leave them sitting in the sink for days on end getting crusy and gross. I mean, I'm not so big on housework myself, and lord knows back in my college days my boyfriend and I could leave a disgusting pile of dishes around. But these days, for the most part, if I slop up a pot it's going to be clean within twelve hours at the most.

Anyway, the roomies/new parents have been too tired to cook, so they've been getting take out every night, and so the kitchen stays relatively clean. And that means I get a chance to cook a little bit. Normally I just don't bother; I want to spend as little time in that disgusting kitchen as possible. And while I haven't attempted anything ambitious while I've had it to myself, at least I'm getting a week or so of real food out of the deal. And it's a nice fucking change of pace, because since I moved into this house most of my home-based meals have been non-nutritious junk that just fills the void until my lunch break, when I might be able to get something better downtown.

I'm not saying this is a good arrangement -- in fact, I'm saying the opposite. It sucks. But it's what I'm working with.

My brain, on the other hand, is eating very well. I'm on a full-scale Vonnegut kick now, and even his "bad" stuff is better than 90% of everything else I've ever read. I already said this in a previous comment, but his way of joining his utter despair for mankind's prospects with a kind of silly, joyful optimism makes for some of the most beautiful prose I've ever read. I am amazed and so glad I finally came back around to him.

In a week or so my friend Rick and I are going to the Okkervil River show, since I swore I wouldn't miss another band I love after I missed seeing Beirut play a few months ago. I've spent most of today listening to their new album, and I'm very satisfied. Browsing around this evening I ran across Will Sheff's music writing, and found this essay he wrote about Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea:

It all sounds ridiculous, but it's dead-serious and indescribably moving, because actually Mangum is singing about the horror and beauty in the world, and about transcending that horror by allowing that beauty to annihilate you. He's singing about love, but much bigger than love between a boy and a girl; he's singing about loving the world that surrounds you and even loving those who try, and succeed, to destroy you...

Everyone I know who has this record treasures it. It has helped my friends sunk in depression, I've been to weddings where selections have been used as the first dance, I know people who want it played at their funerals. And I understand why Mangum, emphatically humble and self-effacing, must be terrified by the level of devotion this little collection of songs inspires, but I also understand that devotion. In a world that constantly seems crass and cheap and mean, where cynicism is the dominant philosophy and sarcasm the dominant conduct, where what matters most is showing off what you can buy, where the most popular television programs encourage us to laugh at ordinary people willingly allowing themselves to be publicly frightened and humiliated for money, this record shows you the world trembling with beauty, transparent, enveloping, able to be redeemed or destroyed by how much love you bring to it, and, ultimately, holy.

That's exactly what I hear in that album, and the fact that Sheff can write about it so clearly is obviously connected to the reasons why I like his own songs so much. That his new album is itself about music, or at least about musicians, makes it satisfyingly meta -- is Sheff talking about himself, or just about everyone else? I'm looking forward more than I can say to seeing this stuff performed onstage.

The one conversation I regret never having had with my recent rationality-driven friend is rooted in this: is music rational? There's a definite element of rationality in it, unquestionably -- on some level, music is all mathematics, and it's hard to be much more rational than that. And yet, it affects us so irrationally, and inspires so much raw emotion. My friend loved music, and introduced me to several of my now-favorite artists. But I know for that for myself, it's music's direct, visceral appeal to irrationality, to pure emotion that isn't necessary connected to anything in the real world, and its ability to liberate at least part of my mind from its normal constraints and structures, that makes it so necessary, and drives me to spend so much of my time under its influence.

Music is the one thing in this life I don't think I'll ever understand. It has never made sense to me how simple rhythmic sound inspires ecstasy in the human brain. And not only how, but why -- the evolutionary arguments about social cohesion and the rest make sense, I suppose, but they leave me unconvinced and unsatisfied. Our response to music is so much bigger than any utilitarian function it might perform. Music, which wraps its irrationality in the structures of pure math, rebuffs any attempt to rationalize its existence.

Didn't Vonnegut say something about that? "The only proof he needed of god's existence was music," written on an atheist's gravestone. I don't know if I'd go quite that far, but it's probably the only argument that might give me pause.

2008-09-06T01:19:00.005-05:00

And Here's Where Things Get Interesting

Sigh... I guess it's time. Female roommate has apparently gone into labor, and they're off meeting their midwife to begin the process. It's still two weeks until her due date, but her water has broken (god, that phrase makes me shudder) and she's having contractions, so I think it's pretty much imminent now no matter what they do.

It's funny... just today, before any of this started, male roommate and I were chatting, and he said, "so, are you ready for the baby?" (Side note: this is probably in the top five on my list of questions that will always startle me.) I didn't get the impression he realized at the time that they'd be going into labor tonight, but maybe they guessed more than I could tell. I answered that I didn't know how "ready" a mostly-uninvolved roommate could realistically be, but that I figured I was as ready as I was likely to get and that it would all be cool regardless.

Hell, I've lived six months with constant construction twenty feet outside my window and an incessantly-barking dog on the other side of my door; I can't imagine that a crying newborn is likely to break me at this point. But soon we'll know for sure.

His younger brother, a very nice guy, is here taking care of the dog and looking after the place until they get back. And then this place is probably going to turn into a major thoroughfare for visitors. That'll probably get to me a lot more than the baby will.

Update: Yep, it happened. Grandma is already fussing in the kitchen. To add to the list of things I find intensely annoying: giddy, elderly strangers attacking me with "news" while I try to stagger to the bathroom minutes after waking up.

Update 2: Wow, that baby is small. I don't think I've ever seen one that fresh before, and she's like a tiny pink, cranky wad of chewing gum.

The good news is, while I think she and her parents had a rough first night, I couldn't hear a damn thing and slept oblivious. Granted, she's only been breathing oxygen for 28 hours, and this may change as she develops some lung capacity. But I should be out of here before she gets really opinionated about things.

I brought her books -- some old-school Mother Goose and Richard Scarry. It's sort of a symbolic gesture, since it's obviously a little too soon to use them, but I think I could make a good argument that Richard Scarry gets some credit for my having become the person I am today. Or at least credit for my command of written English. Here, kid, read a damn book.

2008-09-04T15:49:00.002-05:00

Moving On

My mother suggested I do a political post, which isn't a bad idea -- certainly there's plenty to talk about. And yet I find myself stymied. What is there to say that isn't blatantly obvious at this point?

But there is one thing I come back to whenever the subject comes up: we are, almost certainly, about to elect the first black president. Not to count unhatched eggs -- we've got two months to go, and things can always go haywire -- but it's looking like the most likely outcome. And I personally think that Barack Obama is in his own right one of the strongest candidates that I've encountered, so in that regard there's nothing surprising about it. But it's easy, maybe, to overlook how everything had to come together to make it not merely possible, but likely.

The first black president was going to be an exceptional person before all else. You can elect mediocre white dudes for decades on end, but the first black president was going to have to be a phenomenon. That much I think we can assume. The same, of course, will be true for the first woman president -- Hillary is fine and all, I suppose, not great, but not horrible. But she wasn't amazing. And she would've had to have been to win the presidency.

But a phenomenal black politician still would've only been making up for the major issue of his race -- not the fact of his race itself, but the reaction of the electorate to his race. The simple truth: there are way too many ignorant assholes who won't vote for a black guy no matter how exceptional he might be. There's still a lot to be overcome, and an amazing black candidate can still lose to a mediocre white one. It helps, of course, if the mediocre white candidate has been put forward by a party that has been in power for much of one of the most difficult decades in recent history. If there's an unpopular war, the baggage of accumulated ethical scandals, and the demoralization of a general population crushed by a failing economy, that's a big help.

But it would be even better if the mediocre white candidate also screws up a lot. Over the last few weeks I've been watching McCain finally start to join the election in earnest, and in the process doing everything in his power to make himself one of the most ridiculous presidential candidates ever. I've been hoping for something to finally blow in the McCain campaign -- maybe a nice little "Macaca" incident, that foul temper flaring up at the wrong time, the wrong word passing his pursed grey lips with a mic in proximity. I definitely wasn't expecting Sarah Palin to turn up instead, but that'll do fine. I don't have anything to say about her that hasn't been said already; I just sit and watch and smile. This is the best election ever.

So maybe that's what it takes to get the first black president elected: a phenomenal black politician running an exemplary campaign, against and addled old fool and a corrupt small-town mayor who together have been chosen to represent eight years of failure and frustration. The whole thing is just embarrassing -- the McCain campaign is the only thing, it turns out, that could make George W. Bush seem serious and intellectually formidable by comparison. It's like McCain's not even fucking trying. And so we're almost certainly about to get a black president with a last name that's mostly vowels -- almost the polar opposite of what we've had for the last eight years. And I don't know what kind of a president Obama will really turn out to be, or what, if anything, it will mean for us in practical terms. But it will definitely mark an end to everything that's come before, and that's really all I'm asking for.

But what I'm really excited about is the aliens. Everyone knows from the movies that black president = alien landing. 2010 is the year we make contact!

PS: Comments are back to normal.

2008-08-27T16:30:00.006-05:00

Some They Crawl Their Way Into Your Heart, To Rend Your Ventricles Apart

Let's just get this over with; now's as good a time as any. I'm really wary of taking the wrong tone with this post -- it's not my objective to antagonize, though I probably will whether I intend to or not. At the same time, neither do I want to dull what is still, for me, something of a ragged edge. So all I'm going to do at the outset is emphasize that this is only my perspective on things, and I have no doubt whatsoever that some -- or to be precise, one -- will strongly object.

But fuck it, it's my blog. And I record everything else here, with the careful exception so far of anything about this. But there's no reason to avoid it anymore.

Up until a couple of weeks ago I had, at least nominally, a friend I genuinely loved. That hasn't changed, except that he is no longer even nominally my friend. Which is really only an adjustment towards the truth, since I don't think he's really been my friend for a long time now -- he hasn't acted much like one, in any case, and frankly for the last six months he's been a complete dick, barely disguising his impatience with me and my presence. But finally he said as much, and so it's done.

When I first met him, almost exactly two years ago now, he was so totally different a person, or at least different to me -- he was warm, gentle-natured, engaged in amazing work and unusually aware of the world around him, and seemed to interact with it out of curiosity and love. The first phase of our friendship was marked by surprising ardor and enthusiasm on his part, to the point that I was a little overwhelmed in the beginning. But it was fun, and enthralling, and easy to fall into. It felt like a big piece of my life snapping into place. And I was so happy to have found him, whatever he turned out to be.

Since then, the friendship has gotten gradually more and more difficult to navigate. There was never one single moment when everything changed, it was more of a slow decline. It's not as if he didn't warn me that it was coming -- on my last birthday, he practically said as much. When I alluded to "next year", he responded, "if we're still talking to each other next year." At the time I was taken aback -- why would we not be talking next year? What did he expect would, or even might happen that would end with either of us refusing to talk to the other? And yet, not even a year later, I find that he's gone. And while I could probably rattle off a list of likely excuses, I don't think there's any real reason at all except that he was done with me. I've certainly made mistakes, and I have real flaws, and more than once I know I annoyed him (though no more than he annoyed me, which was beginning to be a lot and often.) But I know I didn't do anything to deserve such complete alienation. And I strongly suspect that whatever excuse finally served to sever the friendship in his mind, if it hadn't been that, it would have been the next thing. Because where you're looking for a reason, you can generally find one.

The person I know now is moody, withdrawn, condescending, often cold, over-sensitive to any perceived slight, seemingly not doing much with his immense talents on his own behalf, resentful, angry, and enthusiastic only about the parts of his life that grant him escape. That's how it looks to me, anyway. I acknowledge that I don't have the ideal vantage point, but I don't think I'm wholly imagining it, either. He insists that nothing, nothing whatever, has changed. I think the changes are so blatantly obvious that either he's lying -- either he was lying then or he's lying now -- or he has managed to convince himself. Maybe it's both. Or maybe he is the same person, and I never understood the real nature of the mind in front of me. That's the possibility that distresses me the most.

The difficulty for me is that there have always been glimpses of my original friend in there, and that's the person I grieve over having lost. That person is the reason I put up with, frankly, epic heaps of bullshit, hoping to make contact again. Maybe it was always a hopeless pursuit; maybe that person was never real, or at least never any more real than the person I finally did lose. But the memory of that person breaks my heart and brings me to tears whenever I think about him. The loss of the person I know now brings, if anything, relief. And it's hard to sort out those two conflicting realities when it's all the same person in my mind. And yet I catch myself thinking of him as two occupants of the same mind. So there's also a lot of confusion.

I don't mean to cast blame. I made the choice, very consciously, to hang around even when things started to suck. As soon as I met him, I knew I was giving him license to be a source of either happiness or sadness, and while I wish it hadn't ended this way, he never made me any promises and I'm not arguing with his departure. There's life before you meet people, and then they're there, and later they leave, and then there's life without them again. The net loss is zero.

But seeing him go felt like being torn open.

My first reaction once it all finally collapsed was despair -- why bother with people? Why bother with friendship, with loving anyone, with trusting them, why bother with letting them into your life? If this is what you get, can it possibly be worth it? His big thing right now is rationality -- which in his mind is closely tied with masculinity (meaning that I, being female, am inherently irrational and thus inherently suspect.) And there's a strong impulse to agree with him -- if emotions result in this kind of pain, surely it's better to simply get rid of your emotions? Put them in a box, put the box on a shelf somewhere in the back of your soul, and forget that you feel. It would be liberating. You'd never have to fear being abandoned, being hurt, being rejected, being left behind. You'd be safe.

But for me, that's impossible. I can only be the person I am, and that person loves. That person loves wholly, deeply, and irrevocably. Even if I could give that up, even if I could turn it off, I wouldn't choose to do so. And if he's decided to cut off the influence of emotion in his life, including those of us who attempt in whatever small ways to inflict our emotions on his sanity, then that's his choice and I won't attempt to dissuade him. But it seems to me that he's cutting out a big part of his humanity. Rationality and emotion aren't an either/or, mutually exclusive proposition. If I live a life of shifting tension between the two, then that's something I have in common with every other human being who's ever lived. Including him.

We each only get a short time to stand on the surface of this planet and look around and know that we are. The universe doesn't care about us, doesn't even register our presence. Whatever came before no longer exists; and whatever we build for the future, however robust our legacies and monuments, they will eventually collapse into irrelevance. All we really have is right now, this single moment, when we can choose to act with fear or with love. The only sources of comfort and meaning we have are the others who share the brief time we have, the people we find ourselves next to while we're here. The people we know are the only place where our existence registers. And the one thing I've learned from the people I've loved over my life so far is that there's no such thing as love lost -- giving love to others doesn't diminish one's own supply, it increases it.

I really did love you. And even if you didn't care about me at all, even if it was only ever an illusion that I was gullible enough to believe in, I'm coming away from our friendship with more love than I had coming into it. And for all the fucking heartache, it was still worth it.

At this point, I expect the response I'd get (if he were responding) is that none of what I've written is true, that I'm an irrational woman inventing a distorted version of reality out of my own faulty thinking. He would probably say that all of this exists only within my own mind. He would point to this post and my having written it as further evidence, proof that his reasons for sending me away are correct. And maybe that's all true.

But I don't think so.

For me, at the end, the only question left to answer is: even if I'd known then how it would feel now, would I still have let you in?

My answer was always yes. It's just a fucking shame, is all.

PS: I still think the photographs are amazing. I thought so before I knew you, and I still think so now. And when you take more, I'll know that the guy who was my friend is still in there somewhere. And I'll hope that he's happy.

Update: I've pulled the link to his website, not because I don't think y'all should see his photographs -- I think everyone should see them because they rock -- but because I'm trying to conceal his actual identity, and that's the one link that someone who knows neither him nor me could follow to find out who he is. So I'm severing that link. I'm considering pulling the whole post, because things in the comments have gone off in a direction that I neither anticipated nor wanted. But I haven't decided yet. And it's not like anyone actually reads this blog anyway.

2008-08-20T23:57:00.007-05:00

Muh-Muh-Muh-My Monona

So, yeah, I got a bike. And she's the best bike that ever biked a bike.

As you know, I've been working towards this for a long time -- it took longer to get to it than I'd hoped in the beginning. Months longer. And in fact, I was hoping to have done this last week, but a beastly heat wave made the thought of test-riding bikes on my days off seem unbearable. But finally the magical alignment between money, weather, free time, and motivation occurred, and now she sits in my room (for the time being), shiny and winking at me.

Here's the thing, though: I haven't ridden a bike in nearly twenty years. Back then, mind you, I rode a lot -- I was a road racer, routinely riding 200 miles a week, working towards junior amateur competition. It wasn't entirely by choice, though. I rode the way any normal kid does for a long time, putzing around the neighborhood, and loved it. But then I was sort of pushed to do it in a more formal, more organized way, and that's when it became something I did because I was expected to and not because I wanted to. Still, I was pretty good, as anyone would be if they rode that much. I was reasonably fast, I could ride for a long time, and riding felt as natural to me as walking. I was never really going to be competitive in any serious way -- I was fast, but not unusually fast; I wasn't strong enough to be a good climber; and while I had very good endurance, that doesn't mean much if your heart's not in it.

Eventually the source of the pressure to ride left, and not longer after I quit riding entirely. I was probably fourteen or so at the time. And I didn't get up on a bike again until my first test ride yesterday afternoon.

Obviously I was nervous. I was intimidated. There's a lot of deep bike culture in this city, much of it decidedly up itself, and I am well aware that I don't fit the image of a Portland biker. I'd originally gone to the Community Cycling Center to look for a rebuilt bike, but they didn't have anything suitable -- it was the end of the summer during a year with the highest gas prices in history, and their stock of hybrid/commuter-style bikes had been totally depleted. A friend of mine was going through the same transition from car to bike, and had recently bought one and had a good experience at a particular bike shop, so she accompanied me there. The girl who met us at the door asked me a lot of questions about what I wanted to do with it, and then took me over to the bikes. She showed me a couple -- a sweet little Cannondale that made me feel nostalgic (my old bike was a Cannondale), and two Gary Fishers. My friend had bought the other Fisher and liked it a lot, but was experiencing a little remorse over not having coughed up the extra $100 to move up to the next model and get better components. The seller recommended it highly. And it was a seriously fucking pretty bike. I was smitten.

So we went upstairs to the test track for a little ride. I sort of hate to bring out the old, "you never forget how to ride a bike" cliche, but it turns out to be true -- twenty years on, I still knew how. I was, however, really fucking bad at it. The first time I pushed off I swerved straight toward the stairs. I backed up and tried again. I got to the end of the track, but I was as wobbly as the day I first learned how to ride. I had to keep a foot down around the turn. Jesus fucking Christ, how can something that used to be so effortless now be so awkward? I rode around the track a couple more times, making an ass of myself, finally starting to figure it out again. Neither my friend nor the bike seller laughed at me at all, bless them. She tried me out on another bike for comparison's sake -- a ghastly, heavy cruiser that had so much suspension it felt like riding a marshmallow. I rejected it after one trip around (ugh) and then tried the Cannondale. It was a really nice bike, too, not quite as pretty but still lovely and $50 less. Lots to think about.

My friend and I had lunch, then went to a few more shops to look at everything that was available. I decided to go home and ponder the matter before making any decisions. But I kept thinking about that first bike I'd seen, the first one I'd ridden -- it was a little more expensive than I'd planned, but not much, and it was perfect, everything I'd wanted. So today I went back and bought her. And now she's here in my room, and I'm falling very much in love

I did take her out for our first real ride this afternoon, mostly to further test whether I really could still ride. And yes, I'm relieved to say, I can. I rode her around the block and up through the neighborhood without much trouble, not far, but farther than I'd expected. I'm ungainly and graceless, weak, and much too tentative. I have no confidence. I used to be perfectly solid and steady, I could follow a straight line halfway across the state and back. Now my front wheel weaves and I'm constantly shifting on the saddle. There's a big disconnect between what my mind thinks should be happening -- what it still remembers of riding twenty years ago, when it was easy and natural -- and what's actually happening. But it'll come back. A year from now, it'll be easy and natural again. But I've got a lot of work to do.

The good thing, though, is that even though that first real ride was hard and surprisingly exhausting (it turns out that standing for eight hours a day and riding a bike use mutually exclusive muscle groups) it was also fucking fun. Once I was up and riding, it was nothing but elation, and it lasted for the rest of the evening, long after my first short ride was over. I've got my bike! And I'm going to ride every fucking street in this city before I'm done.

Of course, it's still not the most Portland-y bike. It's too new, too shiny, too complete. It's not sexy at all. And I'm going to look like a total goob riding it for months to come. But fuck it, we've all got to start somewhere.

2008-08-14T11:38:00.002-05:00

Science, Fiction

Pre-post note: I'm having a spectacularly shitty week. I haven't decided yet whether I intend to write about it -- sometimes I think I probably will, and other times I think, what's the point? And when I try, it comes out mangled and confused because most of my part in events is made up of bewilderment and a complicated mixture of sorrow, fury, philosophical resignation, and relief. It's hard to get that right in prose. So even if I do write about it here, it's going to happen later, when I've managed a bit more perspective.

But it's still been more than a week since I last posted and I want to get something up, so here's one I made earlier and put up in the freezer for just such an occasion:

I've been doing some reading.

I decided to make a superficial sweep of the science fiction section -- not trying to be exhaustive, but rather just hitting the high points, the genre benchmarks, the "classics." SF isn't really my genre, which is maybe surprising since I read so much science non-fiction and hold in high regard SF's narrative potential. But in the past, with only a few exceptions, the actual body of work always lets me down. I'd done a lot of them previously -- I've read the standard-issue Philip K. Dick, my Octavia Butler, my Gaiman, even that fascist bigot Card. And they're all okay for what they are, but they aren't what I'm looking for. I don't need a lot of fantasy in my literature, I'm not into fanboy idolatry, I really just want a well-crafted story that uses science-y ideas to explore this whole "human experience" thing in ways that might push beyond our current limitations. It's not so much to ask, right?

There are a few that do it for me: Douglas Adams is always worth reading, though I have trouble counting his books as real science fiction. It's more SF-themed comedy writing than anything. Harlan Ellison is still on my list of favorite-ever writers. I know I need to get better-acquainted with Vonnegut, and Slaughterhouse Five is next on my list. But there's got to be more out there.

I read Asimov's Nightfall years ago and really liked it, so I started on the Foundation trilogy. And it was fine, meh, whatever. Considering the entire book was basically men talking politics, it wasn't as unreadable as it might've been, but considering the series is one of the backbones of SF literature, I was hoping for something a lot more significant. I suppose it earned its place on the shelf if only for establishing so many standard SF themes, but I'm not sure that simply being the first to do what every high-minded SF novel since has also done counts for much really.

I read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash on the recommendation of a co-worker, and I hated it. It's fucking terrible! The characters were universally devoid of depth or life, the plot was annoyingly convoluted, and the forecast of a near-future United States -- written in 1992 as about twenty-five-ish years in the future, so the book is supposedly occurring more-or-less right now -- is pathetically laughable. This has always been my problem with cyberpunk. I'm sure that all of these weird little predictions about a future digital-age dystopia seemed perfectly plausible at the time, but if you're going to invent a future, it's probably best to put it out there far enough away that when you get it wrong -- which you will -- it at least seems charming. But to write about a currently-developing phenomenon as it might exist in the near future is just asking to be rendered irrelevant.

For example: major character engages in a sword fight (god help us) in the "metaverse," (virtual reality.) He slices up some random NPC's avatar. So far, totally plausible -- it happens a million times a day. But then the avatar just sort of falls apart into wiggling chunks, because the programmers apparently never thought that there would never be any call for blood and gore in virtual reality.

This book was written in 1992 -- Mortal Kombat was just coming out and being heatedly criticized for it's then-unprecedented amounts of grue. And ever since, the two primary uses of "virtual reality" have been masturbation, and butchering your friends in new, creative, blood-sprinklering ways. It's what little kids do after they get home from school every day.

Seriously, like Neal Stephenson couldn't see that coming?

It's a relatively small error, but it's the sort of thing that makes it impossible to take the story seriously. And the story is pretty bad to begin with and needs whatever help it can get, which only compounds the failure. By the end, I was begging for the fucking book to just be over already. And it was a shame, because I could see the fragments of worthwhile ideas underneath the piles upon piles of bullshit. But they all got lost under the crushing weight of an ill-devised alternate reality transposed on top of another ill-devised world.

And yet, it's a standard in the genre. A touchstone. A benchmark.

The closest thing I'm reading to a decent-quality science fiction novel right now is actually written by an author of modern westerns. I finally buckled and picked up The Road, which isn't so much science fiction as future-stone-age literary apocalypse porn, but at least McCarthy knows that the simplest ideas make the best raw material. This is some bleak, humanity-is-doomed shit, and the writing is amazing, so it has everything it needs to make a compelling book. My only complaint -- and I'm not sure that it really is a complaint, because I almost suspect it was intentional, and if it was, it would be the best proof of the writer's genius I could ask for -- is that at a certain point, around page 200, the book sort of "broke" for me.

Up until that moment it had been full-on, slit-your-wrists heavy, despairing, unbearable. But then, in a brief scene involving the spit-roasting of a certain unconventional foodstuff, it pitched headlong into black slapstick, and now I can't read it without seeing it through the lens of dark comedy. Fuck me and my Gen-X irony; the end of humanity is the last thing I might take seriously, and Cormac McCarthy had to fuck that up for me, too.

So I'm looking for some suggestions here. I want to read just one science fiction novel that transcends the genre and alters my perception of what science fiction can be. There are an awful lot of books in our SF section, so I figure there has to be one in there that'll fit the bill. And maybe one of you knows which one it is. So tell me.

2008-08-06T19:00:00.002-05:00

Obligatory Blog Post For The First Week Of August 2008

I have an acquaintance in town, visiting from Memphis. As it happened, I had a few days off coinciding with his visit, so I took him out and showed him around a little. He's contemplating moving to town, so I told him what I could about what it's like to live here. It probably wasn't the optimum time for me to be doing that -- I'm going through a phase where I'm feeling ragged and frayed around the edges, and a little angst-ridden. But I did my best. It's not like Portland needs a hard sell anyway.

The first night I went to hang out with him, we ended up at a bar/restaurant on Alberta. He's apparently a vegan now, so he was concerned about finding a place where he could eat -- I tried to explain to him how extensive the veggie population is here, and how universally they are provided for at every joint in town that isn't solely dedicated to animal flesh. It's a natural instinct for a southern vegetarian to worry that he won't be able to eat except in a tiny number of dining establishments, but it's just not an issue here. Still, upon selecting a pizza from the menu, he wanted to confirm that it was indeed vegan, so he asked the waitress.

"Well, it's on pita bread, so it's got wheat it in."

We looked at each other... wheat?

"Yeah, so there's yeast. Some vegans won't eat yeast."

And this has been bugging me ever since. Why the hell would a vegan refuse to eat yeast? It's a fungus, not an animal. It already resides in your gut, on your skin, and in every nook and cranny of every orifice you possess. Every time you inhale, you ingest a squillion of the motherfuckers. I mean, would a vegan refuse to eat a mushroom? So then what's the problem with yeast?

I'm thinking she was really talking about the gluten-avoiders, which is a whole other thing, but makes more sense considering the wheat warning. Either that, or this "vegan" thing has gotten waaaaay out of hand.

There's maybe/possibly some borderline interesting stuff coming up: work stuff, side-project stuff, personal transportation stuff, and pretty soon, I guess, some home-life stuff. So I expect I'll have more to talk about in the near future. I'm getting better at the daily writing (though I've missed a few mornings), and it's yielding some small benefits, mostly in the form of an uptick in my creativity and general interest level. But it also means that I don't feel like writing as much on the blog. And when I lack obvious material, I have a harder time getting myself to sit down and squeeze out one of these bullshit posts.

Sometimes I wish blogging could work both ways. The problem with this medium is that y'all can read everything about me (though why you'd want to I wouldn't hazard to guess), but I don't really get to hear anything about you. Maybe I'll start making shit up about all of you and posting that instead of the daily minutia of my own life. At least it would give us something to talk about.

2008-07-29T21:18:00.004-05:00

PYD Part II: The Reckoning

I got called in yesterday to sub for a sick instructor at the other branch of Project Youth Doc, the fully-paid one that works out of the Hollywood Theatre itself. This is a whole different game compared to the New Columbia group I taught for three weeks -- these are mostly middle-class kids from progressive homes, they pay the full tuition to participate, and they're treated accordingly. They get much better equipment, more is expected of them, and their accomplishments reflect those expectations. And it was night and day, y'all -- it was night and fucking day.

First, they're expected to produce a full hour of footage for each of their five shooting days. To put that into perspective, at NC it was a triumph if we got a full hour out of a unit over the course of the entire project. And yet getting these kids to do it was so much easier -- they took initiative, they made a plan, they took chances, and they got the work done. The crew I was working with got seven interviews today, plus about twenty minutes of solid b-roll. That would've been unthinkable at NC. They even did it under (for them) somewhat intimidating circumstances, approaching teenagers with whom they'd never normally have much contact apart from being the object of light bullying and the occasional swirly. But they pulled it off brilliantly, and were rewarded with some really good footage. I had enormous fun working with them and would happily spend the rest of their course with them if I could.

But it also breaks my heart. I hate that in the comparison the New Columbia kids come off so poorly -- they're good kids too, they just don't have the background that these kids do. The NC kids aren't accustomed to being asked to make an extra effort, to work harder, to do more than the bare minimum. Nothing has ever been expected of them, and that's exactly how they act. They get shoddy equipment because they can't be trusted with quality kit, they have to be begged and cajoled into making even the most modest effort, and even the hardest-working, most motivated among them would be barely scraping the minimum level necessary to keep up with the kids I was with today.

But I wish I could mix the groups together so maybe the NC kids would see what they're up against -- "look, this is what you're going to be competing with for the rest of your life. If you don't start caring now, you're going to keep falling behind until there's no hope for you anymore. And you're going to end up stuck in New Columbia or somewhere just like it." The kids who could make the most of the program -- the kids who might actually use something like this to start changing the course of their lives, and the kids who could make the most interesting contributions -- are exactly the ones who seem least able to take advantage of what's being offered. And I don't see any way to solve that problem.

Sigh.

Regardless, it was a good day for me. I wish I could do this work full-time, because I really do enjoy it. On the drive home, I looked off to my left and saw a girl waving excitedly at me from the back seat of a silver Volvo -- it was one of the little girls I worked with months back for Girls, Inc. The fact that she recognized me and remembered me to the point that she was happy to see me driving alongside blew my mind. I was even more astonished to find that I was genuinely excited to see her, too. I've been in this town less than a year, and already I've got all this behind me -- it's not what I expected to be doing, not what I was hoping for, but I'm pleased as fuck to have done it.

2008-07-28T13:22:00.006-05:00

Aaaaanyway....

This is turning out to be the weirdest election ever. I mean, does it fuck with your head as much as mine that we're barely three months away from the presidential election and we still don't know who the VP nominee is going to be? Have you noticed that McCain has so far turned out to be an inert puddle of bile that grumbles when you poke at it, but not much else? It's like he's decided the best thing to do is to go back to napping and find out what happened once it's all over.

Just sayin' is all.

It's been an exhausting week, hence the relative silence. I don't have anything in particular to which I might attribute it; I guess some weeks are just more tiring than others. There was an incident over the weekend that I think started things off. My roommates spent a night away in Corvallis -- with their sprogling set to emerge any time now, they seem to be desperate to get away while they still can -- and left me to take care of the dog. It's not a big deal, I feed him and let him outside and spend a little time with him. I had to work that night, though, so he was left alone later than usual. When I got home I filled his bowl, let him eat, and put him out, same as always, and set about making my own dinner while he took the night air.

Going to the fridge, I noticed a few dark droplets on the floor and wondered what they might be -- jam? juice? gravy? -- but I didn't think too much of it. If I might gently say so, my roommates are complete and utter slobs in the kitchen, and stains of unknown origin aren't uncommon. So I just went about my preparations. Once dinner was on the boil I let the dog back in, and noticed that he immediately began licking an awkward spot on his leg. And then I noticed other dark stains on the floor, and on the carpet. And then I realized that the spots were dried blood.

Which probably counts as one of the main things you don't want to discover on the floor on the one night you've been entrusted with the care of another person's pet.

The stupid dog had managed to gash his leg open on something, somewhere. It was no longer actively bleeding, but it was ugly and painful-looking and a couple of inches long. I had no idea how long he'd been that way, but my guess was a few hours. He didn't seem particularly upset -- he was unhappy, but calm -- and he wasn't limping or avoiding putting weight on the leg. Hell, he was still trotting around the house and running to the windows for a rousing bark whenever he heard a noise outside, so his behavior wasn't much different from the usual. So I called my roommates and asked what they wanted me to do. There's an excellent 24-hour animal hospital in town, but getting a vet's services after 10pm ain't cheap, and there's no way I'm paying for this. I described his state and injury, and they discussed it, and told me to let him take care of himself for the night, and they'd check it out when they got home in the morning.

Poor, stupid dog. I decided that if he was my dog, I'd at least attempt to bandage him up, so I ran to the supermarket and bought some gauze and pads and tape and brought them home. But when I tried to bandage his leg, he wasn't fucking having it, and I didn't want to press the issue, so I left him oozing blood on the carpet. And then I proceeded to spectacularly fail at sleeping that night because I was too worried about him. The next day his parents took him to the vet and got him stitched up, and he came home with one of those subtle canine-torture devices around his neck. He's oblivious to it, though, so he keeps banging into stuff. Which is pretty goddamn hilarious.

Stupid dog.

Otherwise, it's been a quiet week. I've started taking the first half hour or so of my morning to write -- not for the blog obviously, but just to be writing. I've produced nothing so far that I'd care to show anyone, nor even anything that I think is likely to turn into anything good, but at this point it's more about establishing the behavior than seeing results. Looking at it now, it seems to me that while this blog has had its uses -- the opportunity to vent, to record a few years of my day-to-day life, and take my modest talent out for walkies now and then -- it's also done a certain amount of harm. Writing here is easy -- too easy, easy enough that I can do it off-handedly and lazily. Writing on this blog is like walking down a well-worn path on a familiar street: I know the way so well all I have to do is plod along and I get where I'm going without even thinking about it. I start at the beginning and write and write and write and then I wrap it up and I'm done.

But now I'm realizing that the same structures that serve me adequately on the blog aren't going to get me much further. The habits and thought patterns that I rely on to write here aren't useful for much else, but they've become so ingrained that I'm finding it difficult to break out of them. So if I ever want to write on a bigger scale, and about things that are bigger than me, all this has to change. But this is all I've been writing for nearly five years now. The rut is deep.

So my morning writing is mostly geared towards writing stuff that I'd never, ever post on the blog -- hacking away my accumulated bullshit, trying to get back to a phase where I didn't really know how to write, and so didn't make any assumptions. It's easier to get into the right frame of mind while I'm still fuzzy from sleep and mentally relaxed. And while it's frustrating to spend this extra time working and by definition having nothing to show for it, and while I may have to start working through the suck all over again, unless I want to spend the rest of my life as a formulaic, unknown blogger, I think it's something I just have to do.