Today’s Words:
confess
dreary
maker
sketchy
gutter press
bystander
swagger

I am much taken lately with Twitter. Every day I get much pleasure out of spitting little blurts about my daily goings-on. It’s like having a portable confessional. Meanwhile I also get to follow my friends blurts. Many of which are comments on other frineds, who I then also can follow. It makes an otherwise dreary day full of amusing links, news I actually care about (not gutter press), and online socializing. It’s like working in an office. An office full of really hip, geeky, fun, interesting people. And I’m not just a bystander, wishing I was cool enough to be in the cool conversation.

It makes me want to start a blog about online culture, openness and transparency and authenticity, about freedom of information, and about how the accessibility revolution is the newest cultural shift and how it will impact everything. Accessible in terms of easy-to-use and easy-to-grok, but also freely-available and open-to-everyone. Low-cost, open-source, it’s all happening. The world is changing and the forefront of culture is here, on the internet. The next revolution won’t be televised, it will be podcast. But not just podcast - blogged, tweeted, emailed, YouTubed–there are so many channels and they are all free or very low cost to enter. Every cheap digital camera has a video camera built in. Quality still matters, but ideas matter more some times.

Which is why I think it’s so important to learn how to cultivate your own creativity. This brave new world revolves around ideas, around pure creative output. Can you do something new? Interesting? Funny? We’ve seen funny cat pictures, but can you take it one step further?

How do ideas get created? They don’t. Brilliant ideas come through us, not from us, and therefore we need to keep the channels clear. Open up wide, and flush out the cruft. Picture yourself as a hose, and the energy is pouring through you out onto the page. Are you a firehose? Or one of those lame coffee straws that you can barely suck air through? Either way, keep writing. Keep creating. That’s how it happens. And keep telling yourself I am meant to create. I am a creative being, and this is what I do…I allow brilliance to manifest through me. Shine, shine, shine. Yee-haw!!

i must confess

i drank from the gutter

(press)

a bystander saw me

swagger my way dreary -

down sketchy streets

soaking wet where

i fell

and almost met

my maker

• banter
• girth
• hag
• outgun
• coda
• regent
• whip

Today, I’m going to use all of those words in a sentence. But first, two algebra haikus. Written during algebra.

Do you know what’s fun?

Simplifying radicals.

(That was sarcasm.)

While in algebra,

I often say to myself,

“When will I need this?”

The regent outgunned the hag with his banter and his whip; the hag sang her coda as she only had her girth to defend herself with.

Unfortunately,

That is all I’ll write today.

Sickness is no fun.

Today’s Words:
banter
girth
hag
outgun
coda
regent
whip

My mouse is blinking at me with a red evil eye. FEED ME BATTERIES. Oh blah.

I have no witty banter in me. My grouchy inner hag has outgunned my PollyAnna with a barbed whip. I don’t feel like writing.

Today’s Words:
tyke
speckled
ambassador
diamond
shadow
schmecky
real

Schmecky isn’t in my little wordweb dictionary, so what do I do, go off and find it? Can’t. Only have a few minutes to write.

Diamonds. That necklace I wrote about the other night, the one that Manny gave me, had a little diamond in the middle. I think all the stones were real. I should have wanted to destroy that necklace. It should have reminded me of a creepy old man who came on to girls in high school. I shouldn’t have had some fond memories of the old tiger. He was quite dashing, actually. He owned a construction business, and smoked pot all day long. He had long black hair that he wore in a pony tail. There was something poetic about everything that he said, the way he mixed English and Spanish. He also had this brightness in his eyes.

A wierd thing happened about 15 years after I hung out with Manny smoking pot. I was on a motorcycle ride with this guy I knew from Computer Science school — Tom. Tom might be something like a serial killer about now. I mean he was certainly the profile. Bachelor, lived alone, reserved, trouble with women. Hence the hanging out with the lesbian who had no interest in him. One time, Tom wrote this amazing stack routine in Fortran. This was Fortran without pointers. He did this elaborate thing to simulate pointers, and thus built this stack. I would look at the code for the stack and it was so elegant. Tiny little pop(), push() routines. And cute comments like, “just for housekeeping.” Tom lived in an old palce in the South Valley, he called it the dead lady’s house. I only went there once. We stopped to pick something up. Indeed, an elderly woman had lived in the house before Tom occupied it. Her relatives, in a hurry to get rental income from the house, hadn’t bothered to clear out her things before they found Tom. There were wierd things, like one of those caddies for bills, that you put envelopes in, with cute labels like “Electric”, “Gas”, “insurance.” I was kind of intrigued, and asked Tom what it was like to live there. He said it didn’t matter to him, he didn’t think about the dead lady. How oculd that be? He then walked me to the back of the house, and opened a door which it looked like he rarely opened. Inside, the room was full of her stuff. Boxes everywhere, of clothes, china, knick-knacks.

Not sure why I was hanging out with a would-be serial killer, but we wrote wierd code together, and there we were. We went on a aride one day that took us all the way to Corrales. Corrales is where I grew up, and it’s where Manny still lived. We went down this road called “Old Church Road”–because, guess what, the Old Church is there. And the old graveyard. Kinda creepy, with the tumbleweeds blowing through. So as we round the bend where the Old Church is, there’s Manny, sitting on an old car, surrounded by a bunch of friends, partying. He looks right at me, and I look right at him. He doesn’t recognize me at first, and I’m kind of relieved. Tom was going very slowly on the bike, almost stopped but didn’t. At the last moment of looking at Manny, I saw that recognition in his eyes. Ah! That high school girl I wanted to bang, so long ago. Nothing about his look betrayed the slightest bit of anxiety or guilt; if anything, what I saw was an excited, even older dirty old man, wondering if he might somehow, 10 years later, get lucky.

Then my morose & geeky chauffeur hit the gas and we were gone.

Today’s Words:
tyke
speckled
ambassador
diamond
shadow
schmecky
real

There’s a book called I’ll Take You There: Pop Music and the Urge for Transcendence. It’s about how modern culture listens to music to get those glimpses of communion people used to get in church. I agree totally. I’m the generation, of course.

Sometimes we sit around
Just the two of us on the park bench
Sometimes we swim around
Like the dolphins in the ocean of our hearts
But then I think about the time
When we broke up before the prom
And you told everyone that I was gay, OK
Sometimes I walk around the town
For hours just to settle down
But I take you back and you kick me down
'Cause that's the way, uh-huh uh-huh, I like it

That’s LFO Every Other Time. I love it.

I’ve always found music cathartic. But dude, is catharsis the same as transcendence? I posit no. I posit that it is a speckled ambassador to the realm of God. Emotional billows of borrowed pain give the illusion of release, but it’s all a pale shadow of true surrender.

But maybe it is some kind of left-hand path, glorifying attachment and the tragedy, the melodrama, the Everything I Do, I Do It For You, the Every Breathe You Take, I’ll Be Watching You. Maybe it’s POSTMODERN GOD. We detach by reveling in our attachments, giving ourselves over to them, rolling in the dung of their absurdity until our egos offer themselves up, spent.

Whatever - does it matter? 2012 approaches and Girls Just Wanna Have Fun! Should I get a schmecky and a diamond and a tyke? Look how those just lined up! But no, that’s not my dream-realm. I want a house though, lately, in a vague, picking up fliers kind of way. I can’t get that scene from Carrington out of my head, where she paints the whole wall in the living room like a mural but better in it’s inside-ness. I would feel so Heaven is a Place on Earth waking up to that each day.

Baby Baby, Seasons Change. A Change Would Do You Good.

That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore.

Friend is a Four Letter Word.

i hate calling in sick, because i have to sound sick over the phone, so i test out my voice to make sure it sounds appropriately sick and then i call. it’s dumb. because you and i both know that i am truly sick. yet why must i feel that i am playing a charade. anyway, i called in sick and now i’m sitting here with my coffee like i would do any other day when i was not sick.

i took some nyquil last night. it’s a syrupy dark blue-green medicine that you drink from a tiny plastic cup. it’s the only cold medicine i would ever take, because it makes me sleep. most people hate it. i don’t. i like the way it tastes. but i was always strange that way, as a child i loved to take my medicine. even when it tasted gross. i never put up a fight or a whiney fit. hey, give me a giant gold star, just go ahead and plaster it right to my fevered brow.

it becomes more and more apparent that i have got to get away from here. alas, i will not leave until i have a suitable plan of action in place. without a plan of action, i will become a free floating depressed ion tossed upon the atmosphere. i would much rather be a toad. i do love toads. damn, i can’t wait for this winter to be over. even new jersey will look pretty then. so many trees…

so you see, i am cracking up. it would be good for me right now to be back at work where i am completely occupied. it’s not nice to leave my mind wandering. ‘ tis a danger.

maybe i’ll do some laundry. nah, too many steps up and down. (washer and dryer in basement). hope i have enough clothing to wear to work for four days. guess i could open the closet door and check. maybe later. right now i have half a cup of coffee left. i don’t like to leave my desk until the coffee is all gone.

i will continue using escape fantasies to pass the time. i wander the internet, looking at houses to buy, airstreams to roam in, different jobs, new businesses to try, but i settle on nothing. now’s not the time to ramble on.

Today’s Words:
conversion
skin
famulus
seek
opposite
schlep
weary

I live near a big boulevard, Glisan. Glisan cuts a long swath — hundreds of blocks across Portland, East-West, but the swath is only wide–4 lines wide–for about 20 blocks. I live within one of those twenty blocks. For those 20 blocks, Glisan is inhospitable to pedestrians. And yet, because there’s a bar, a cafe, and a Max station along those blocks, those 20 blocks are often traveled on foot by people. So, it’s a strange thing, taking a sidewalk next to a superhighway. I always notice the squirrels and cats in attendance, taking refuge high in trees and rooftops, sitting way back on porches, careful not to come too close to the road.

One very early morning, unable to sleep, I crossed Glisan heading north–the direction it’s not so fun to go, because north of Glisan lies the railroad tracks, the max line, *and* US-84, which in turn is a highway that crosses the entire country. I found this out firsthand in January 2005, when Lily and I got on I-84 in Portland, stayed in 84 for about 5 days, and only got off 84 when we took a state road to get to 15 Walnut Street, in Dumont, NJ.

There’s a house that I often pass, and feel sorry for. Most of the houses have a fence, or hedge, or other natural barrier against the garbage de Glisan. But this one house is defenseless, and as a result, every morning, there’s a pretty good accumulation of beer bottles, Coke cans, and cigarette butts.

Someone must be coming out in the afternoons to pick that stuff up, but I’ve never actualy seen them. I don’t think they come out before noon, because if I’m on Glisan before noon, the garbage is there. But any time after 5 pm, the garbage is gone. I often wonder, when I pass this house, how long the present occupants have lived there, how long they’ve been doing this daily task. I wonder if they thought about the garbage issue when they bougt the place. Or was Glisan a smaller street back then? I wonder if, when they put the house on the market, the realtors will come by every day to clean up the garbage.

Now, mind you, I don’t have a lot to do with my days.

So I’m going to have some fun with the poor, trash-collecting house this week. When I go to the cafe down the street, I’m going to bring a plastic bag. On my way back from the cafe, I’ll quickly clean up the trash in front of the old house. It’s sure to puzzle whoever has had this task all these years.

Tonight, when I shlepped some stuff home, I ran into my OCD landlord on the landing. In a suspicious tone of voice, he asked me if I had dumped a bunch of cardboard boxes out near the dumpsters, rather than properly disposing of them. I told him no…not me… and I came in longing to live near a river, in a little house a long a tree-lined lane. With hippie neighbors who love to sing and play guitars. I think I might just head out to Craig’s list now. G’night.

how many hours have i spent

staring at the blank white ceiling

while, outside, the raindrops rushing

to meet the earth collide with leaves

and sing a sweet, soft lullaby

despite this, i lie wide awake

my weary thoughts refuse to rest

all of my friends, they seem so sure

of what their place is in this word

that god is watching them with care

there is, there never was, the need

to step outside the cage and ask

why they’re being told what to think

by something that might not exist

but is it better to be free?

or maybe ignorance is bliss…

Today’s Words:
conversion
skin
famulus
seek
opposite
schlep
weary

When we die, we must spend a good amount of time just recuperating. Sitting around in the etheric plane, feeling at one with everything, just weary from the years of trying to be an earthling. All the seeking and the schlepping and converting and getting together and breaking apart, living in bags of skin, so squishy and confusing, finding dreams and then seeing them grow tarnished, our attachments worn down and worn out by the sheer exhaustion of holding on. Does anyone learn to surrender, or do we just get tired?

So, desiring a break from dualities, from the constant interplay of opposites, we sit around on the great cosmic couch and play we-are-all-one with our long-lost buddies, the cat that died when we were five, Joan D’Arc, who also played the part of our mom several times and once our twin brother. Joan was far from her favorite role, although it was of course the most famous. But in the afterlife, earthly fame is seen as a bit of an embarrassment. Yes, that was me. Yes, my ego, yeah, I get it OK? Stop reminding me.

What I would really love is just to take a bit of a break now and again, take a vacation to the afterlife, take a breather from the living and the striving. Don’t tell me to meditate, I’d rather die a bit and come back. But eh, probably I just need a nap. I’ve got razor blades in my throat from this damn cold and all the remedies I’ve found make me retch.

I know I’m far from done, my ego has great plans for me, it gets bored so easily and wants to go go go like sixty-thousand, so I know why I came here. I just wonder, really? Like, what, in the end, is all the striving for? The striving feeds the beast, the attainment of desires feeds the craving, so what to do?

Well, live from inspiration, right, that’s my mantra, so why don’t I do it? I tell you, sometimes. I think perhaps my existential ennui is only a mental habit, and it will float away. It’s already much less intense than days of yore. It’s a mild disgruntlement, a need for a nap and a crying jag, not a full-on depression with mad TV binges and Doritos and jelly beans for breakfast.

So really it’s all getting better. My personality is stabilizing. I’m becoming happier every year. So hah! Good for me! Eh, I feel ill.