The 20-year-old grandson-of/property-manager-for my landlord is leaning against the building next door, enjoying a late summer daydream, his boyish limbs a-languor, his meditation central and deep. And secret. He is tall and blonde though not stunningly handsome, and cordial but not particularly charming, yet nonetheless I find moments of him - such as this secretly stolen spectre - especially delightful.
The determined reader will have found that much of my writing is (and I am not proud of this) a ponderous mass of whining and self-pity. The casual reader never stays, I think. The reason for my depressed style is perhaps the same reason that I am fascinated by this plain boy outside my window; regret.
I read, in Bono's commencement address to Harvard, "...Is missing the moment unacceptable to you ? Is wasting inspiration a crime? It is for a musician.". I must therefore be a musician. (!). I am no more a musician than I am a writer, but I am so in love with the moment and the inspiration that I am stuck lamenting their loss. It's like I am focussing on everything not just as I am receiving it as a free gift form the universe, but just as it has passed; as if choosing a vantage point in the lull of the wave's wake is preferrable to riding its curling lip on the event-horizon of disaster.
I was a boy. I am not now. I was absent from my boyhood in lamentation for my lost childhood. And still looking back, I am absent from my manhood in lamentation for my lost boyhood. Missing the moment, wasting inspiration.
Just twenty minutes passed, and the meditative boy ouside my window is long gone.
Will I make it to work on time?
Went to bed sick. Woke-up sick. Decided, in some sort of fear-of-death Puritanism, that calling in sick would be... well, lazy. And that would make me bad. (As if showing up late is somehow redeeming?). So here I am - in my underwear, with foreign things moving furniture in my abdomen, and with twenty minutes to be at work - and I am typing.
(You needed to know that.)
I just love this (new?) blog, with lines like, "so he invited our priest and her boyfriend the policeman over for dinner tomorrow night," and throughout using the endearingly utilitarian title 'the husband' whenever referring to the companion/lover/significant-other/canasta-partner/whatever.
And this. Delightful. I hate that he is younger than me. ; )
How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons
I'm sick. But I'm not complaining. You can't know that, though, because it sounds exactly like complaining. How do I say it the way it is meant?
There is a language I have not learned, a rapid fire rata-tat-tat of syllables that would dance and tumble from my mind with effortless precision like Nadia Comaneci, a way to tell you in perfect tens, or in spades, or in quadruplicate forms, or in two hundred ninety five million divided four ways; a way to say in one life, with one heart, just one word that cannot be misunderstood. There IS such a language, but I am possessed of it not. Not yet.
In the meantime I do night school, here with my blog, alone - like an autistic trying to get through. To you.
Someone advised once long ago, in the pre-history of high school perhaps, to just write. Don't think the words to death, but get them out and put them on the paper. Make room for more; despite my fears, more will surely come - it always has. And when more words do come, put them on the paper too. With a flow of enough words over enough time, I might get through. Hell, just a trickle made the Grand Canyon, after enough time.
Enough time. I'm sick.
It matters less than not at all what particularly is wrong with me, or rather, my body. It matters less than not at all the hour and the day when these words will end. What matters is how many went before. I could have done better, from the beginning until now. And who knows what I'll do between now and the end.
But I won't be a Navy pilot, and I won't be a movie star. I'm not going to have a beach house, or probably any house at all.. I might not ever ski again. I'm never going be able to play all the games I've learned in this life - I've spent all my time learning new games (or re-starting old ones, maybe) just so I could avoid getting too deep into any games; like life, or love, or family, or friends. Me.
I think it all gets stuck inside me, like an infection festering, or a poison that my liver tries to contain within itself in a futile effort to save my life. It makes my stomach hurt - everything from my ribcage to my waist, swollen and heavy like a garbage bag full of water - and it wants to get out. Maybe it is just sick of waiting, and since I am never going to start the flow on my own, maybe whatever is stuck is going to just come out, like in 'Alien', and there is no way to be ready for that. There was never a way to be ready.
Return of the Lockbox, a column by Mark Weisbrot at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
I am not an economist; to me, economics seems a study in conundrums. But all this 'either raid the trust fund, or pay down the debt' rhetoric is not informative or even helpful. It is, rather, the two major political parties jockeying for advantage.
I am usually a politician-basher but, you know, they must be as fed-up with us as we are of them. As an electorate, we are lethargic, disinterested, and a nearly unrousable occupant of our own careening destiny. The tedious decisions, the tough decisions, the consequential decisions; we choose to discard them to the custody of our elected representatives who, without guidance from their constituents, have no choice but to find other lights to guide them. This is the inevitible result of popular non-participation in government, and we should not expect it to be different. Unless we participate.
We cannot expect them to do what we want unless we tell them what we think. And, yes, that makes the letters and the calls and the e-mails and blah, blah, blah all very important. But the tedious work of telling them what we think is not the hardest part; thinking is.
Thinking leads to feeling, and feeling leads to a meaningful response. If we have conviction, then the e-mailing, the letter writing, the phone calling - even the sign making - is a cinch, and not tedious at all.
Personally grappling with the intractable conflicts that confront our lawmakers is the very chore which we elected them to relieve us of. That is a self-deception. We are responsible; all they do is represent us. And to overcome our disinterest, the politicians present us exaggerated details with histrionic drama, and that is OK with us - even when we know that what they are doing is not strictly truthful. That's OK, as long as they just keep making our decisions for us, relieving us of our responsibilities which, really, are impossible for us to surrender - whether we like it or not.
Found in the Boston Globe this morning, with coffee: US to tap pension funds, report says.
Shifting Social Security funds to other government expenses has no impact on benefit payments, but has been considered taboo since 1998, the last time the government used part of the surplus for anything other than paying down debt. Office of Management and Budget director Mitch Daniels yesterday called that policy a ''symbolic commitment,'' arguing that while it was a noble cause, it should be considered a luxury in boom times, not a necessity during an economic downturn, and that the budget estimates should not hamper investments in defense.
Please tell me what we need defense from, if not from these worry-mongering Queeg's who live in fear and seek to codify it.
Sorry. Pomposity is not a good way for me to start the day.
Me and Irene are looking at another apartment this morning and, in the cyclical nature of things, it is across the street from the apartment which I moved out of 6 years ago to come to my current place.&nbs. It is on the third floor of a gorgeous old brick Victorian that is showing its age. All hinges on the quality of the renovations now ongoing.
This brings back memories from when I worked at a garage, especially the complex hydraulic control-channel casting. Ahh, the pre-silicon seventies... Howstuffworks: "How Automatic Transmissions Work."
I can't stand the 'B' stuck to the top corner; I want to make it float. I guess it's not going to stay so simple after all.
'Hi, my name is Joe, and I am a javascript addict.'
I've been gradually reinstalling stuff lost to my operating system upgrade. (don't ask.).
I recently reinstalled AOL Instant Messenger, as well as the new version of ICQ, and that has allowed me to reacquaint myself with a couple chat buds with whom I failed to maintain contact over the last year or so. The reacquaintance has been really ...well, let me just say it has been very nice. Isolation can be pleasant in small doses, but excessive isolation just seperates me from everything, always. That was nice for a while - not needing to accomodate anybody else's needs, or respond to anything outside of me - but the deadness creeps in, and the creator within me becomes despondant.
I've spent a lot of time there, in isolation, reflexively closing doors without any consideration for what (or who) I was excluding. It got so tiresome that at one point, I almost closed the final door - with a rope. That made me realize that what I really want is to stop closing doors.
But it is opening them that scares me. Yeah I know, that's just like everybody else. Only everybody doesn't buy th. rope.
I suppose I'm going to have to do a lot - a whole fuckin' lot - of work on the reasons why I like having doors shut before I can fling them all open without a care. But to have gotten so far as to have closed them all but one, and then to have chosen quite deliberately to stop closing doors - that reversal is enough, for now.
My future is all open doors; I might even find occasion to close one, from time to time. <insert lyrics for tacky 70's song, 'Behind Closed Doors'>
Back from round one of apartment 'cruising'. Me and Irene didn't have any appointments set up to see places, so we just did a series of 'drive-by's'.
The first one is a condo in a three-unit building, and the next door neighbor (whom Irene drew out onto his back porch) is a very attractive black man with light brown highlights in his hair, and a very pleasant personality. She says he liked me, but that would be too much to hope. Besides, my whole life will be undergoing some significant changes - my astrologer told me so - and I hope (tentatively) that I will be changing my habit of objectifying men. I'm really, really not sure, but I think I might prefer to meet and get to know them - to engage with their heart and mind without bailing and diving into their pants.
But that is a nice thought, still.
Apartment hunting. More to follow...