Forum Jar is a website I discovered last week and immediately wanted to brag to the world about it. It takes its name from the giant vases of wine that every ancient Mediterranean household used to have and I guess the forum building of a community would have a special one and it was said that no forum could be a forum without a forum jar. As to the website, it has a search engine for whatever kind of forum you can think of, though rather a dearth of comments in most of them. I'd like to see people use forum jar more often. My favorite forums are the Aristotle forums, but I've also contributed to the Clothing Forum, the Dessert Forum and the Suffering Forum. I try to go to the site whenever I can to read stuff people have written under different categories, but I've stopped holding my breath looking to see if anyone's commented on what I've written because people seem not to check back for months or even years. I think I might need to create a Magick Forum. That might just captivate the interest of other witches, for we magicians are an active lot.
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Tonight's Presidential Debate (10/3/12)
I was really surprised at how well Obama stood up in the debate, given that Romney rose to prominence in the first place precisely by debating other Republicans (Remember last year around this time?) I sort of expected a different sort of thing. I really believed and still believe Obama had only the truth to defend himself with and kind of expected him to get really humiliated in the debate. I wasn't expecting the two of them to have so much fun and kind of to transcend the rules and have actual exchanges with each other and talk to each other and so it was kind of fun to watch.
I think what was hard for me about the debate was the amount of obfuscation Romney was doing about Social Security and my feeling that Obama made an aside about Social Security not working exactly except for seniors and his intention to correct the problem. I'm not a lazy freeloader, but I don't work for money but do volunteer work and then collect SSI to live on. All last year I earned about half of the money I got with paid work but I also was constantly accused of not learning fast enough, always inches from being fired and eventually I decided I'd rather work someplace else, but never quite got around to getting another job after I left the first one. Paid work is tough for a lot of people, but in my case I'm always feeling incompetent and like it would be hopeless to come up with disability accommodations that would suit all the different ways that I can't do my job right. It's kind of been my plan to use this year as a time to correct some of the ways I can't fit in with most work environments, but I'm not in a mood to get booted off Social Security when as a volunteer I do a lot of things that most people are too busy working for a living to do and that arrangement would really work for me if people didn't ostracise me so much for being a freak. I facilitate a debate group at Mariposa Wellness Center (which doesn't always work as a debate group but we do get to air a lot of differences of opinion in a respectful way without challenging each other. It's hard to get people with chemical imbalances to feel like arguing is a peaceful thing.) I also work really hard with my muscles and sweat and everything one day a week at Loaves and Fishes soup kitchen though lately I haven't been showing up as often as I'd like. I'm sort of thinking next year about more exciting volunteer opportunities like ones that get me picking up trash on the beach or even getting in the way of illegal whaling vessels with Greenpeace. Forestry would be cool, too, god this is an incoherent ramble.
Anyway, a lot of people like me would just plain starve if we didn't get SSI and there are those who are even more disabled than me.I really would like to see something like a requirement that people on SSI for a mental illness find a structured activity for at least six to twenty hours a week, allowing substitutions like any kind of constructive volunteer job or else school or paid work so that people would get used to us being just as helpful as anyone else and stop shunning us all the time or treating us like we're fragile or contrariwise being downright mean. I think the lazy freeloaders will probably vote for Romney because Romney is so vague about Social Security and telling us we don't have to listen to the rest of what he's saying or that "people are smart enough to understand that" when really we already know he wants to eliminate Social Security and let people's family take care of them. Yuck. And that scares me and I wish the lazy freeloader vote would just stop being lazy and wake up and realize Obama is the only hope a lot of us are going to have against ending up starving or in internment camps or both.
I think what was hard for me about the debate was the amount of obfuscation Romney was doing about Social Security and my feeling that Obama made an aside about Social Security not working exactly except for seniors and his intention to correct the problem. I'm not a lazy freeloader, but I don't work for money but do volunteer work and then collect SSI to live on. All last year I earned about half of the money I got with paid work but I also was constantly accused of not learning fast enough, always inches from being fired and eventually I decided I'd rather work someplace else, but never quite got around to getting another job after I left the first one. Paid work is tough for a lot of people, but in my case I'm always feeling incompetent and like it would be hopeless to come up with disability accommodations that would suit all the different ways that I can't do my job right. It's kind of been my plan to use this year as a time to correct some of the ways I can't fit in with most work environments, but I'm not in a mood to get booted off Social Security when as a volunteer I do a lot of things that most people are too busy working for a living to do and that arrangement would really work for me if people didn't ostracise me so much for being a freak. I facilitate a debate group at Mariposa Wellness Center (which doesn't always work as a debate group but we do get to air a lot of differences of opinion in a respectful way without challenging each other. It's hard to get people with chemical imbalances to feel like arguing is a peaceful thing.) I also work really hard with my muscles and sweat and everything one day a week at Loaves and Fishes soup kitchen though lately I haven't been showing up as often as I'd like. I'm sort of thinking next year about more exciting volunteer opportunities like ones that get me picking up trash on the beach or even getting in the way of illegal whaling vessels with Greenpeace. Forestry would be cool, too, god this is an incoherent ramble.
Anyway, a lot of people like me would just plain starve if we didn't get SSI and there are those who are even more disabled than me.I really would like to see something like a requirement that people on SSI for a mental illness find a structured activity for at least six to twenty hours a week, allowing substitutions like any kind of constructive volunteer job or else school or paid work so that people would get used to us being just as helpful as anyone else and stop shunning us all the time or treating us like we're fragile or contrariwise being downright mean. I think the lazy freeloaders will probably vote for Romney because Romney is so vague about Social Security and telling us we don't have to listen to the rest of what he's saying or that "people are smart enough to understand that" when really we already know he wants to eliminate Social Security and let people's family take care of them. Yuck. And that scares me and I wish the lazy freeloader vote would just stop being lazy and wake up and realize Obama is the only hope a lot of us are going to have against ending up starving or in internment camps or both.
Thursday, September 6, 2012
Linda is Healthy Again!
Linda is healthy again, so less fazes me now, but for a while I was having trouble surviving, too, because having a sick and nearly dead girlfriend for a little while awakened me to what matters to me about living and made everything else seem toxic and intolerable. I'm still having trouble playing the game, but still want the rewards that are dangled in front of me as enticements to try to play the game better, but I end up just feeling frustrated and wanting to open a window or something. I'll keep posting (notice how hard I try not to use the word "notify") and see if anything gets any better. Not fucking likely, but we create our own luck in the end, I think.
Thursday, August 2, 2012
Ashleigh, in case you read this.
Ashleigh, in case you read this.
Not my first dream, but my very first shamanic level dream was sometime shortly after my mom died and my dad and I got back from a vacation in Southern California and my dad had decided it was time to move out here. He had all his life felt stuck on the East Coast and at the time we were living in a suburban town in New Jersey which until the age of five was the only home I had ever known.
In the dream, my father and I are visiting an enchanted castle peopled only by cartoon characters with flat bodies that kind of stick to the walls of the castle like Silly Putty. I remember trying to study exactly how it is that they move from one part of the wall to another and then I kind of realize that they don't. Anyway, my dad and I decide it's time to hike our way home again because it's already gettiing dark and Mom is waiting for us. We look at the setting sun on the mountain and then at the miles and miles of hedge maze we have to pick our way through to get over the hill and home again. It didn't seem so hard finding the enchanted castle but getting home again is going to be really dreadful and scary. My father and I say goodbye about a million times and I find myself resenting the superficiality of the cartoon characters.
We disembark, walking and walking, and I'm falling behind as small children often do, until my father turns around, grins mischievously, and says, "Let's go back to the castle." I am so relieved and I laugh and then all at once realize that we're never going to get around to going home again and I never will see my mother again.
That dream is the most important dream of my life, the key to my whole psychological makeup, though all through my childhood I had kind of a sarcastic sense of humor and flipflopped a lot between wanting to live in a fantasy world and not wanting people to disrespect me and other children so much. There really isn't any way of saying enough on this subject so I'm just going to end this post and publish it now.
Not my first dream, but my very first shamanic level dream was sometime shortly after my mom died and my dad and I got back from a vacation in Southern California and my dad had decided it was time to move out here. He had all his life felt stuck on the East Coast and at the time we were living in a suburban town in New Jersey which until the age of five was the only home I had ever known.
In the dream, my father and I are visiting an enchanted castle peopled only by cartoon characters with flat bodies that kind of stick to the walls of the castle like Silly Putty. I remember trying to study exactly how it is that they move from one part of the wall to another and then I kind of realize that they don't. Anyway, my dad and I decide it's time to hike our way home again because it's already gettiing dark and Mom is waiting for us. We look at the setting sun on the mountain and then at the miles and miles of hedge maze we have to pick our way through to get over the hill and home again. It didn't seem so hard finding the enchanted castle but getting home again is going to be really dreadful and scary. My father and I say goodbye about a million times and I find myself resenting the superficiality of the cartoon characters.
We disembark, walking and walking, and I'm falling behind as small children often do, until my father turns around, grins mischievously, and says, "Let's go back to the castle." I am so relieved and I laugh and then all at once realize that we're never going to get around to going home again and I never will see my mother again.
That dream is the most important dream of my life, the key to my whole psychological makeup, though all through my childhood I had kind of a sarcastic sense of humor and flipflopped a lot between wanting to live in a fantasy world and not wanting people to disrespect me and other children so much. There really isn't any way of saying enough on this subject so I'm just going to end this post and publish it now.
Friday, July 20, 2012
You're The Guy I Want To Share My Money With
One of the only things that keeps me alive anymore is listening to KZSC radio on my radio when I lie down in bed at night and pretend I'm asleep. The other night-- at the climax of the most dangerous day for me in one of the hardest, craziest, most beautiful and desperate weeks I've ever had in this or any of my previous lifetimes-- I forced myself to listen to a show called Savage Bistro on KZSC even though the menu typically makes me so uncomfortable that it forces me to the conclusion that the entire show was made only focused with me as the listener and I don't get support from the universe when I feel that way and it can even get me killed sometimes (Blogger, please don't censor this because I'm a change agent and I need to do my work.) But I had been talking to faith healers on a call-in program earlier on the same station and I knew I needed to not shrink from that precipice For The Good Of Me And The Universe. Anyway, I want to do a paragraph change even though Strunk & White would censure me.
The dj played an album he said is called "You're The Guy I Want To Share My Money With" and he sounded very precise and almost medical when he said on air the name of the album before hand. It becomes clear to me in my state of consciousness heightened by all the horror I've seen lately that it is really important and deliberate that Laurie Andersen and William S. Burroughs and another poet on the album utilize such a powerful universal blessing in plain language as the title of their album and the dj said it again after it was over, because the album is only comprised of content so morally painful to listen to for anyone that you can't help but wonder if they're trying to kill you with words. and all of the sounds on the album are only words.
The dj played an album he said is called "You're The Guy I Want To Share My Money With" and he sounded very precise and almost medical when he said on air the name of the album before hand. It becomes clear to me in my state of consciousness heightened by all the horror I've seen lately that it is really important and deliberate that Laurie Andersen and William S. Burroughs and another poet on the album utilize such a powerful universal blessing in plain language as the title of their album and the dj said it again after it was over, because the album is only comprised of content so morally painful to listen to for anyone that you can't help but wonder if they're trying to kill you with words. and all of the sounds on the album are only words.
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Stop Giving A Crap, Write Illegal Stuff, Go To Prison
"Stop giving a crap, write illegal stuff, go to prison."-- Craig Ferguson.
My father recently said I could stay in the closet room off my brother's room when I come home to get my teeth worked on. I've always hated that room and given the adult horrors I've been dealing with lately I couldn't imagine what he meant. And then I thought, Maybe he means that if I need to come home for a little while they'll find a place for me somehow. And then I think now, that he thinks I've been frightfully juvenile and should be ashamed of myself. Be that as it may, I feel really ashamed today of the review I wrote of Modio-media because I call fascist what is clearly not fascist in light of the horrible weekend I've spent in the hospital with my sick and undying girlfriend (fingers crossed.) She was always a miracle woman of survival, sleighted to die before the age of 14, back in the 1950's, and then going on to survive an escape from an early marriage, the death of a beloved infant, a year in the jungle, innumerable drunken fistfights and worse, the entire 1960's drugs and politics culture, and then mental hospitals, the kidnapping of her second daughter by her ex-husband, and years of panhandling on the streets without SSI. The last twenty years have been a lot happier and almost all of it she worked full time, but now she's retired and sees her daughter every day sometimes. She also cares about me more than anyone else ever has as far as I know and she is so, so sick and "god" is telling me she's going to survive this crisis but it's been a horrible weekend and I acted in the hospital like a a werewolf in a convent and I just want her to be okay and for people to understand that I'm not playing "god" if being in love gives me unique insight into how she can get herself better when the hospital is wearing a lot of yellow and only checking on her every 45 minutes. You see, one of the first things she ever told me about herself is it's always been a awful struggle to make her body move but she didn't want to die and so she just kept fighting to survive and found she could often excel at stuff, like sports and school and fistfighting when necessary. And I have a friend who's a combination charlatan/stage magician/Tibetan healer who told me-- and I know-- that you can often choose your lifespan by choosing projects you won't die until they're completed. And I'm finding that mainly applying to me these days and all sorts of unbelievably unfunny kharma is coming to me like an old friend and saying, "You can't go until you pay your debt." and I guess I'm just really happy and I always did love those people and never wanted to go to Heaven, Paradise, or Nirvana even when I believed in that stuff. I could go hide like I always used to or I can embrace it and be glad I have a life.
And Linda is surrounded by so much love from me and her daughter and grandchildren that when her body doesn't feel pain she starts to transcend the physical and scare the shit out of us. And it's also true that she filled out an advance directive and I don't know what it says but I think she hates to be a burden on people and doesn't want to take care of us by letting us take care of her. I've been in that position a lot myself and it's crap. But today I think the hospital reduced her methadone and she's felt like crap all day and I call that clarity, because she's really really sick, so I feel better. See, I'm a sadist. But writing this blog post helps me to turn the situation over to the will of not "god" because I don't give a fuck what "god" wants but I think I can let Linda live or end her life or give up or take on more kharma or not according to her will and maybe I'm even cheering up about it.
All this may be academic because her kidney is a tiny bit better today, according to the doctor, and the swelling in one foot went down, though the other foot has a toes turning red with cellulitis and they drew a circle around it(!) They say they expect her home tomorrow or the next day and I'm taking care of my other relationships for a few days and taking showers and eating oatmeal and if she's back in her apartment Wednesday or Thursday I'll stay with her the weekend like I always do and do whatever it takes to lend a hand without overwhelming her with my panic attacks and my needs. Ha ha.
My father recently said I could stay in the closet room off my brother's room when I come home to get my teeth worked on. I've always hated that room and given the adult horrors I've been dealing with lately I couldn't imagine what he meant. And then I thought, Maybe he means that if I need to come home for a little while they'll find a place for me somehow. And then I think now, that he thinks I've been frightfully juvenile and should be ashamed of myself. Be that as it may, I feel really ashamed today of the review I wrote of Modio-media because I call fascist what is clearly not fascist in light of the horrible weekend I've spent in the hospital with my sick and undying girlfriend (fingers crossed.) She was always a miracle woman of survival, sleighted to die before the age of 14, back in the 1950's, and then going on to survive an escape from an early marriage, the death of a beloved infant, a year in the jungle, innumerable drunken fistfights and worse, the entire 1960's drugs and politics culture, and then mental hospitals, the kidnapping of her second daughter by her ex-husband, and years of panhandling on the streets without SSI. The last twenty years have been a lot happier and almost all of it she worked full time, but now she's retired and sees her daughter every day sometimes. She also cares about me more than anyone else ever has as far as I know and she is so, so sick and "god" is telling me she's going to survive this crisis but it's been a horrible weekend and I acted in the hospital like a a werewolf in a convent and I just want her to be okay and for people to understand that I'm not playing "god" if being in love gives me unique insight into how she can get herself better when the hospital is wearing a lot of yellow and only checking on her every 45 minutes. You see, one of the first things she ever told me about herself is it's always been a awful struggle to make her body move but she didn't want to die and so she just kept fighting to survive and found she could often excel at stuff, like sports and school and fistfighting when necessary. And I have a friend who's a combination charlatan/stage magician/Tibetan healer who told me-- and I know-- that you can often choose your lifespan by choosing projects you won't die until they're completed. And I'm finding that mainly applying to me these days and all sorts of unbelievably unfunny kharma is coming to me like an old friend and saying, "You can't go until you pay your debt." and I guess I'm just really happy and I always did love those people and never wanted to go to Heaven, Paradise, or Nirvana even when I believed in that stuff. I could go hide like I always used to or I can embrace it and be glad I have a life.
And Linda is surrounded by so much love from me and her daughter and grandchildren that when her body doesn't feel pain she starts to transcend the physical and scare the shit out of us. And it's also true that she filled out an advance directive and I don't know what it says but I think she hates to be a burden on people and doesn't want to take care of us by letting us take care of her. I've been in that position a lot myself and it's crap. But today I think the hospital reduced her methadone and she's felt like crap all day and I call that clarity, because she's really really sick, so I feel better. See, I'm a sadist. But writing this blog post helps me to turn the situation over to the will of not "god" because I don't give a fuck what "god" wants but I think I can let Linda live or end her life or give up or take on more kharma or not according to her will and maybe I'm even cheering up about it.
All this may be academic because her kidney is a tiny bit better today, according to the doctor, and the swelling in one foot went down, though the other foot has a toes turning red with cellulitis and they drew a circle around it(!) They say they expect her home tomorrow or the next day and I'm taking care of my other relationships for a few days and taking showers and eating oatmeal and if she's back in her apartment Wednesday or Thursday I'll stay with her the weekend like I always do and do whatever it takes to lend a hand without overwhelming her with my panic attacks and my needs. Ha ha.
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
An Unsolicited Review Of Modio-Media.com
Hopefully no one comes at me with a fasces...
I should say, as a qualifier, that it is my friend's company and that I always felt stirred in some way by her presence and all she does, both in a positive and negative way simultaneously, so that this cannot help but be a very biased and colorful view.
First of all, she and her husband produced the trailer for what looks to be an incredibly good film when they and the director get the financial backing to finish it. It appears to be their baby right now, as in, it is the work they are most proud of and rightly so. It's called, "A Thousand And One Journeys" (https://vimeo.com44550024) and is about Arab-Americans in the USA and both their struggles to adapt and ways that they were already adapted fine as Americans when they were still on the boat. The trailer consists of bits of interviews of faces I recognize and faces I don't recognize sharing primarily about their values and what they bring to a situation instead of seeking to take away from it. These are among the people who built the country, in every sense of the word, and they make no bones in saying exactly that, which I think is great. Modio-Media's obsession with Italy and with the video image disappears altogether behind the passion of telling the story, which is terrific. A++ I can hardly wait to see it when it's done. If I had the money I'd ask to invest in it myself.
I have more mixed feelings about the promo films for Modio-Media as a whole, however. If you truly have a product that could win you customer loyalty, Modio-Media is right for you, but if your product is just the envelope it was supposed to come in, I'd not trouble with it. Other than that, it appears to be a tiny studio with THX potential, but I found most of its promos aesthetically upsetting on a deep level and I want to explain why because I think it might get people curious about seeing for themselves and that could eventually win the company clients. They're capable of uplifting work, but only in the hands of an uplifting client with the vision to engage them in creative dialogue about the project. Gia admits it haas mostly "Italy-focused content," which is fine for clients in Italy, but I clicked on "television" to look for a promo film for CNN and found this newsclip that horrified me. It start to tell a story of the fires in the MidWest, but includes this agonizing footage of a rescue worker being dragged up accidentally into a helicopter (he survived), followed by a hospital corridor full of enhanced images of the arms of reporters holding microphones politely crammed together against both walls while the smoke inhalation victim from the first shot, having gotten to the hospital, comes crashing through them on a gurney...It's even more grotesque than I make it sound, defensibly Saturnalian, and displaying in every way the camera's overdeveloped eye for beauty and obsession for workers. But then I thought, too, that more people work and see themselves as workers than care about fire victims so that the imagery makes use of the psychological technique known as "masking" to use exaggerated details of workers as an Everyman for seducing a lukewarm audience into fascination with the story. It can then proceed to tell about people needing our compassion or admiration or whatever. The only reason a sensitive person may feel revolted by the apparent fascism of the heroic proportions and obsession with nationality is because a truly sensitive person will feel revolted by the fascism they live in every day, whatever country we happen to be in or feel most kinship to. And no aesthetic can bear the distinction of being more fascist than another, it's apples and oranges. Besides, I'm only complaining about what I feel to be the most original of the promo films. "A Thousand And One Journeys" shows how majestic and sublime their work can also be.
I should say, as a qualifier, that it is my friend's company and that I always felt stirred in some way by her presence and all she does, both in a positive and negative way simultaneously, so that this cannot help but be a very biased and colorful view.
First of all, she and her husband produced the trailer for what looks to be an incredibly good film when they and the director get the financial backing to finish it. It appears to be their baby right now, as in, it is the work they are most proud of and rightly so. It's called, "A Thousand And One Journeys" (https://vimeo.com44550024) and is about Arab-Americans in the USA and both their struggles to adapt and ways that they were already adapted fine as Americans when they were still on the boat. The trailer consists of bits of interviews of faces I recognize and faces I don't recognize sharing primarily about their values and what they bring to a situation instead of seeking to take away from it. These are among the people who built the country, in every sense of the word, and they make no bones in saying exactly that, which I think is great. Modio-Media's obsession with Italy and with the video image disappears altogether behind the passion of telling the story, which is terrific. A++ I can hardly wait to see it when it's done. If I had the money I'd ask to invest in it myself.
I have more mixed feelings about the promo films for Modio-Media as a whole, however. If you truly have a product that could win you customer loyalty, Modio-Media is right for you, but if your product is just the envelope it was supposed to come in, I'd not trouble with it. Other than that, it appears to be a tiny studio with THX potential, but I found most of its promos aesthetically upsetting on a deep level and I want to explain why because I think it might get people curious about seeing for themselves and that could eventually win the company clients. They're capable of uplifting work, but only in the hands of an uplifting client with the vision to engage them in creative dialogue about the project. Gia admits it haas mostly "Italy-focused content," which is fine for clients in Italy, but I clicked on "television" to look for a promo film for CNN and found this newsclip that horrified me. It start to tell a story of the fires in the MidWest, but includes this agonizing footage of a rescue worker being dragged up accidentally into a helicopter (he survived), followed by a hospital corridor full of enhanced images of the arms of reporters holding microphones politely crammed together against both walls while the smoke inhalation victim from the first shot, having gotten to the hospital, comes crashing through them on a gurney...It's even more grotesque than I make it sound, defensibly Saturnalian, and displaying in every way the camera's overdeveloped eye for beauty and obsession for workers. But then I thought, too, that more people work and see themselves as workers than care about fire victims so that the imagery makes use of the psychological technique known as "masking" to use exaggerated details of workers as an Everyman for seducing a lukewarm audience into fascination with the story. It can then proceed to tell about people needing our compassion or admiration or whatever. The only reason a sensitive person may feel revolted by the apparent fascism of the heroic proportions and obsession with nationality is because a truly sensitive person will feel revolted by the fascism they live in every day, whatever country we happen to be in or feel most kinship to. And no aesthetic can bear the distinction of being more fascist than another, it's apples and oranges. Besides, I'm only complaining about what I feel to be the most original of the promo films. "A Thousand And One Journeys" shows how majestic and sublime their work can also be.
Monday, July 9, 2012
Aristotle's "Metaphysics"
Aristotle's "Metaphysics"
I really liked this book all the way through even if it was from the beginning one of the hardest books to understand I've ever tried to read. I don't even know if I've come away with an kind of unified theory of his except that I came to the conclusion for myself, though I'm not sure Aristotle intends it, that Nature and God are the same thing, that it is a self-created, self-creating thing, and that it is something beautiful and precious. Aristotle's mind is likewise beautiful and precious, at least to me. I rather think he must have been one of those ancient Greeks who lived to be over a hundred and that he spent the entire time wrestling with the meaning of life and stuff, because dude actually came up with some answers! As well as being able to show in language all the steps he took to get there and all the other theories he either tried or didn't try to use and why he discards them one by one, and that's really why his writing is terrific. Everyone knows a lot of his conclusions have been disproven by now, but the way his mind works is so patient and precise that I find myself having all sorts of religious experiences while I'm reading him, even though I don't think he believed in gods. Anyway, he's on my profile as being up there with all my favorite authors, because I always feel better about life when I read him, even if I feel like I know less than I started with.
I really liked this book all the way through even if it was from the beginning one of the hardest books to understand I've ever tried to read. I don't even know if I've come away with an kind of unified theory of his except that I came to the conclusion for myself, though I'm not sure Aristotle intends it, that Nature and God are the same thing, that it is a self-created, self-creating thing, and that it is something beautiful and precious. Aristotle's mind is likewise beautiful and precious, at least to me. I rather think he must have been one of those ancient Greeks who lived to be over a hundred and that he spent the entire time wrestling with the meaning of life and stuff, because dude actually came up with some answers! As well as being able to show in language all the steps he took to get there and all the other theories he either tried or didn't try to use and why he discards them one by one, and that's really why his writing is terrific. Everyone knows a lot of his conclusions have been disproven by now, but the way his mind works is so patient and precise that I find myself having all sorts of religious experiences while I'm reading him, even though I don't think he believed in gods. Anyway, he's on my profile as being up there with all my favorite authors, because I always feel better about life when I read him, even if I feel like I know less than I started with.
Thursday, July 5, 2012
There is No Eye in the Pyramid
There is No Eye in the Pyramid
I see the most penetratingly cozy pyramid scheme
Of watchers reporting to controllers
Chowing with delightful risk managers
Answering to the whims of pirates
And never quite cutting loose from
The completely dysfunctional program
Of shitting where they eat.
(c) 7/5/12 Tim Conger
I see the most penetratingly cozy pyramid scheme
Of watchers reporting to controllers
Chowing with delightful risk managers
Answering to the whims of pirates
And never quite cutting loose from
The completely dysfunctional program
Of shitting where they eat.
(c) 7/5/12 Tim Conger
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Garcia Lorca, By Carl W. Cobb.
I've been sharing with you guys so much stuff from books I never finished reading that it gives me great pleasure to announce that I actually finished reading one recently. The tile appears to be "Garcia Lorca" and the name "Carl W. Cobb" appears below it and an enormous globe surmounted by Pegasus above and the number 23 displayed clearly above that to mark the book as number 23 in a series of presentations of the World's Greatest Writers in "clear, concise English." On the inside jacket it says "University of Tennessee" but the publisher is Twayne Publishers in New York and on the copywright page it says at the bottom "Manufactured in the United States of America." So with my typically imaginative mind I began to wonder if the whole thing were not a terrific joke by Lorca himself or effort to write himself into the history books by force.It's highly unlikely of course, but it was fun reading just to solve that mystery for myself.
The writer is clearly very knowledgeable about how to write poetry, how Lorca himself appears to have written poetry, and how Surrealism is created. Apparently, Lorca came up with a poetic concept he called "evasions," which can be made still more elusive so that they become surrealism, though of course it takes considerable talent to come up with a truly Surrealistic evasion. So let us say you are born an Andalusian dog and, moreover, are gay, or what was called homosexual back then. Society might look the other way if you kept it behind closed doors, but what if you wanted to write erotic poetry about people you loved? Lorca's answer is you would then read Freud's book "On Dreams" and then come up with things that are just a little removed from what you want to say, but which make no sense at all unless you are moved vicariously by the writer's passion. "The Evildoing of the Butterfly," a musical Lorca wrote in college was about a grasshopper whose parents want him to live at home his whole life so they can take care of him and keep him safe. But then an injured butterfly comes to stay with them and the young grasshopper has to share his room to save on space. As the butterfly recovers he tantalizes the young grasshopper with stories about how wonderful it is to fly until the young grasshopper begins to believe that he too is a butterfly. But then comes the day when the butterfly is all better and leaves with only a peremptory goodbye to the young grasshopper, who is left in the final scene alone on a darkened stage asking, "How can a loving God have created me? So alone and without wings?"
The author of the text considers the play very juvenile and not one of Lorca's best works, but it sounds absolutely terrific to me. It is as if the criticism were written by the artist himself, and not without that juvenile cunning that says, "If I pretend to despise my own masterpieces, how can you not then fall down in reverence of them?" I mean, I'm on the ground already, Dude.
The most brilliant part of the book is the description of how his boyhood faith in God kept his spirits up right after Salvador Dali ended their love affair and forged in Lorca and ever greater genius and an ever greater determination to love with his body in a carnal and even aggressive way. It's an absolutely incredible paragraph and I totally can't find it right now. Damn library books.But where the book taught me something about myself that I didn't already know is that Loorca reports that at the first riot of the Spanish Civil War, "he was very scared and stayed scared." For those of you who know what it's like to be continuously scared as a fact of life, you can relate to what he's talking about. Nonetheless, he kept on pursuing his art and championing of the theatre with even more risky material than before, as well as many traditional plays that the common people of the countryside or even the cities had never seen in their lifetimes. That's what being a hero means to me. It's just being yourself and taking risks to say what you want to say and do the work you want to see done and refuse to be so intimidated by fear of death that it let's it silence you. So I'm really really glad I read the book and I think I learned a lot about the technical side of poetry, too. And that's why I made damn sure I finished the whole thing.
The writer is clearly very knowledgeable about how to write poetry, how Lorca himself appears to have written poetry, and how Surrealism is created. Apparently, Lorca came up with a poetic concept he called "evasions," which can be made still more elusive so that they become surrealism, though of course it takes considerable talent to come up with a truly Surrealistic evasion. So let us say you are born an Andalusian dog and, moreover, are gay, or what was called homosexual back then. Society might look the other way if you kept it behind closed doors, but what if you wanted to write erotic poetry about people you loved? Lorca's answer is you would then read Freud's book "On Dreams" and then come up with things that are just a little removed from what you want to say, but which make no sense at all unless you are moved vicariously by the writer's passion. "The Evildoing of the Butterfly," a musical Lorca wrote in college was about a grasshopper whose parents want him to live at home his whole life so they can take care of him and keep him safe. But then an injured butterfly comes to stay with them and the young grasshopper has to share his room to save on space. As the butterfly recovers he tantalizes the young grasshopper with stories about how wonderful it is to fly until the young grasshopper begins to believe that he too is a butterfly. But then comes the day when the butterfly is all better and leaves with only a peremptory goodbye to the young grasshopper, who is left in the final scene alone on a darkened stage asking, "How can a loving God have created me? So alone and without wings?"
The author of the text considers the play very juvenile and not one of Lorca's best works, but it sounds absolutely terrific to me. It is as if the criticism were written by the artist himself, and not without that juvenile cunning that says, "If I pretend to despise my own masterpieces, how can you not then fall down in reverence of them?" I mean, I'm on the ground already, Dude.
The most brilliant part of the book is the description of how his boyhood faith in God kept his spirits up right after Salvador Dali ended their love affair and forged in Lorca and ever greater genius and an ever greater determination to love with his body in a carnal and even aggressive way. It's an absolutely incredible paragraph and I totally can't find it right now. Damn library books.But where the book taught me something about myself that I didn't already know is that Loorca reports that at the first riot of the Spanish Civil War, "he was very scared and stayed scared." For those of you who know what it's like to be continuously scared as a fact of life, you can relate to what he's talking about. Nonetheless, he kept on pursuing his art and championing of the theatre with even more risky material than before, as well as many traditional plays that the common people of the countryside or even the cities had never seen in their lifetimes. That's what being a hero means to me. It's just being yourself and taking risks to say what you want to say and do the work you want to see done and refuse to be so intimidated by fear of death that it let's it silence you. So I'm really really glad I read the book and I think I learned a lot about the technical side of poetry, too. And that's why I made damn sure I finished the whole thing.
Thursday, June 14, 2012
Wistfulness Is
"Wistfulness Is," first of all, is a terrible name for a prose poem, but the poem itself is not so terrible.
Wistfulness is an eternally recurring litany of old names. Streets I lived in as a child (Presidents' names) rewinding my stepmother's mind and mine to when we thought with one heartbeat.
Lincoln Street--and Linkin' Park!-- But back in North Carolina willow scents the air over my real mother's flowerless grave while an industrial metal band practices its tunes under the shade of a distant white gazebo to incite unrest among the dead.
But today I am with my sweetheart and we cut out paper dolls and coupons from the newspaper to string together magnificent crowns for our long flowing hair. And although I have even more regrets than a guilty man, I am not guilty for I know Ghod is with me. Amen. Rah.
Wistfulness is an eternally recurring litany of old names. Streets I lived in as a child (Presidents' names) rewinding my stepmother's mind and mine to when we thought with one heartbeat.
Lincoln Street--and Linkin' Park!-- But back in North Carolina willow scents the air over my real mother's flowerless grave while an industrial metal band practices its tunes under the shade of a distant white gazebo to incite unrest among the dead.
But today I am with my sweetheart and we cut out paper dolls and coupons from the newspaper to string together magnificent crowns for our long flowing hair. And although I have even more regrets than a guilty man, I am not guilty for I know Ghod is with me. Amen. Rah.
Monday, May 14, 2012
A Mother's Day Recipe
Today is Mother's Day and I was at Linda's house without having saved any money for today or bought her a present so it was very important that I keep the food costs low when I made dinner. She had broccoli from the food bank and a red onion and a yellow onion and fresh mint that I had asked her to buy last week and still had a lot left. Together we walked to the fruit stand and bought a big bag of mung bean sprouts (it feltlike six ounces) and a tiny yellow mango.
When we got it all home I fried a red onion on a roaring heat with 3 tablespoons of olive oil and one teaspoon of corn oil for instinct's sake. The red onion began to smell and sound really great and get really brown at the same time that it clarified, so I sliced up a a whole bulb of garlic in slivers so the flavors would be distributed but not uniformly distributed. I cut away slice after slice of mango from the pit in my hand and then separated each piece of cut mango one by one in my hand with a paring knife (As carefully as I could, which wasn't as carefully as i would have liked) and dropped them in the sizzling skillet. Then as if i were moving to the tune of a song in my head I rinsed the mung bean sprouts and threw them in the riotous pan.
I stirred over and over and was hearing Cuba somehow and was so happy and then I thought that all it needed was water so the hot oil would fight the cold water and it would be all pyrotechnic and everything. But I poured in too big a splash and it altogether stopped the cooking process.
Showing a lot of white in my eyes, I truned the heat up to high (which I would never otherwise do except to save dinner when I've blown it like this) and waited for it to boil and when it did I covered it and turned it to medium low and washed and rubbed between my hands some leaves of mint and cut them a little and threw them in and covered it again: then I cut up the broccoli as small as it would go and still look like little trees (Thanks, Maria, for teaching me that) and threw that in and then turned the heat up to medium again until the broccoli was soft enough I could eat it even though i don't have back teeth any more (I was a model). Even Linda coulodn't believe how good the food turned out to be. Oh yes. Ialso spiced it with about six shakes of cumin and the juice of half a lime, though if I were willing to add a grain of salt instead of lime I could have.
Congratulations to everyone out there stepping up and being their own mommies. This is your day, too.
When we got it all home I fried a red onion on a roaring heat with 3 tablespoons of olive oil and one teaspoon of corn oil for instinct's sake. The red onion began to smell and sound really great and get really brown at the same time that it clarified, so I sliced up a a whole bulb of garlic in slivers so the flavors would be distributed but not uniformly distributed. I cut away slice after slice of mango from the pit in my hand and then separated each piece of cut mango one by one in my hand with a paring knife (As carefully as I could, which wasn't as carefully as i would have liked) and dropped them in the sizzling skillet. Then as if i were moving to the tune of a song in my head I rinsed the mung bean sprouts and threw them in the riotous pan.
I stirred over and over and was hearing Cuba somehow and was so happy and then I thought that all it needed was water so the hot oil would fight the cold water and it would be all pyrotechnic and everything. But I poured in too big a splash and it altogether stopped the cooking process.
Showing a lot of white in my eyes, I truned the heat up to high (which I would never otherwise do except to save dinner when I've blown it like this) and waited for it to boil and when it did I covered it and turned it to medium low and washed and rubbed between my hands some leaves of mint and cut them a little and threw them in and covered it again: then I cut up the broccoli as small as it would go and still look like little trees (Thanks, Maria, for teaching me that) and threw that in and then turned the heat up to medium again until the broccoli was soft enough I could eat it even though i don't have back teeth any more (I was a model). Even Linda coulodn't believe how good the food turned out to be. Oh yes. Ialso spiced it with about six shakes of cumin and the juice of half a lime, though if I were willing to add a grain of salt instead of lime I could have.
Congratulations to everyone out there stepping up and being their own mommies. This is your day, too.
Donde No Hay Cook
Here is where I talk about my latest food and drink experiences. I think a lot more about these things now because I keep trying to quit cigarettes and have to learn to live without cigarettes. The old definition of "The Good Life" was an Epicurean concept that no one was going to come in and make people treat each other decently and no one was going to come in and make them enjoy themselves, though people are always trying to do both to all of us all of the time. So it is important for people who care about these things to take extra care to treat others as we would wish to be treated, to take at least a little care of our health, and to enjoy ourselves,, because no one would buy Snapple Tea if it were more expensive than Lipton or it didn't taste as good or, some would say, better.
I call this entry "Donde No Hay Cook" ("Where There Is No Cook") because all too often young people grow up fending for themselves without a set dinner time even when the family can afford to, skimming cheese from a three-thirds empty refrigerator and having your parents yell at you (Been There). People benefit so much when someone in the same age bracket guesses from institutional experience when a quote-unquote "family dinner time" is supposed to happen and says, "Dammit! I'm going to cook something. Where's the recipe book?" That's why they say it's never too late to have a happy childhood, because if you still have a spark in you or if one can be awakened with words or music, you can awaken to all those old childhood longings and begin to use your brain to plan how to meet them.
The I Ching has this wonderful hexagram of The Corners of The Mouth (#27) and I can never exactly interpret the text once and for all, but it always turns up for me when I'm asking if a new woman friend is going to turn out to be a girlfriend (meaning, Will we have sex?). What the hexagram says to me is it's like a person with terrible desire looking to another and finding a person with an equally strong different desire that doesn't meet the first one's plans. Can the two be friends?
Monday, May 7, 2012
My Meditation Focus Today Is...
My Mediatation Focus Today Is...
My meditation focus today is a yellow and white local sea snail shell with rays winding around its center like ribbons around a May pole. Its aimed white crown points the finger at an unknown breastplate, like a pyramid mace head on a spear, when the warrior hides himself even from kind or yielding glances behind the mockingly gentle curves of a perfect full body shield. Such is the flawless face of those who polish the ocean's depths by themselves.
(c) 5/6/12 Tim Conger
My meditation focus today is a yellow and white local sea snail shell with rays winding around its center like ribbons around a May pole. Its aimed white crown points the finger at an unknown breastplate, like a pyramid mace head on a spear, when the warrior hides himself even from kind or yielding glances behind the mockingly gentle curves of a perfect full body shield. Such is the flawless face of those who polish the ocean's depths by themselves.
(c) 5/6/12 Tim Conger
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
I wrote two poems tonight...
Hi Gang,
I wrote two new poems tonight and thought, "So why not expose myself to adoration and ridicule?" So here they are:
Provision,
by Tim Conger
Provision,
A reprimand at the change of a season,
Unlocking arm and knee shackles,
And a jaunty smack on the behind,
"Well, there I find you eating cereal again!"
Disturbing the bats in the Gothic attic above,
Young man and old go up to find the ancestor's matlock,
Wrapped in cheesecloth,
"Keep it oiled, Son,
"Keep it seasoned...And soaked in its victims' blood."
Having drawn masks over their faces, except for mouth and eyes,
They share the pipeweed of inherited guilt.
(c) 4/25/12
Untitled
I ope'd the jaspered box,
And flushed its contents away,
It could have been a lottery ticket,
No one will ever know.
(c) 4/25/12
I wrote two new poems tonight and thought, "So why not expose myself to adoration and ridicule?" So here they are:
Provision,
by Tim Conger
Provision,
A reprimand at the change of a season,
Unlocking arm and knee shackles,
And a jaunty smack on the behind,
"Well, there I find you eating cereal again!"
Disturbing the bats in the Gothic attic above,
Young man and old go up to find the ancestor's matlock,
Wrapped in cheesecloth,
"Keep it oiled, Son,
"Keep it seasoned...And soaked in its victims' blood."
Having drawn masks over their faces, except for mouth and eyes,
They share the pipeweed of inherited guilt.
(c) 4/25/12
Untitled
I ope'd the jaspered box,
And flushed its contents away,
It could have been a lottery ticket,
No one will ever know.
(c) 4/25/12
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
My Trip to Community Printers and what I found out about using other artists' images.
Okay, this is a big big update to what I wrote in my last entry, which was interesting but incorrect on most points. Linda and I went to a local typesetters called Community Printers and they had the answer to all my questions. Apparently you can't use anyone's artwork unless otherwise specified (like for reviews they sometimes allow it) but all you have to do is send the artist an email and say what it's for and ask if they need payment and you can work things out from their. First Friday Santa Cruz particularly gives people the chance to meet different artists and build a relationship with them, which is a lot more fun than digging around in the public domain for art by people who couldn't afford a lawyer, or who died over a hundred years ago. I'm looking forward to meeting you all, if I haven't already.
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Working at a Soup Kitchen
I just started working an hour a week in a soup kitchen. I probably shouldn't say which one because I might share details of interactions of people that are best kept anonymous. The head chef of the kitchen says I do a really good job and she can tell I've worked in a kitchen before. She always gives me these really hard tasks like splitting leaves of lettuce, cutting away pieces that are brown or shriveled or all stem, and then cutting the rest into bite sized pieces and throwing them in a pot. I like to talk to this other woman who has just as much cooking experience but is sort of the sous chef ("sioux chef"?). Other times La Jefe has me peeling garlic (which I hate) or peeling hard boiled eggs while they're still hot and the shells can come off easily, or cutting up broccoli as small as I can get them and still keep them looking like broccoli. Anyway, I usually feel a little discouraged when I first start each day and then I think of the skills I'm building and how good it will look on a resume if I need it to and I get my second wind. If nothing else, it's an adventure. And the coffee's good.
Monday, March 12, 2012
Trying an Internet Recipe and Having It Turn out Great.
OK, I got my recipe from searching "vegan recipes" on Bing search engine (not that you can't do t he same thing with google, but I am saying what search engine I used so people can retrace my steps) and then I think searching by season, "Winter" and turning up "vegan falafel" as the first and easiest recipe that was inexpensive to make. I was cooking for my girlfriend, Linda, again and I needed to keep meat and dairy out of the recipe for health reasons, though she said we could slide on the bean protein even though she's really not supposed to have protein more than once a week. Basically, if your diet is so pure that you make yourself miserable then you're either not going to live that long for that reason or you're going to suddenly devour a pound of carnitas every day for a week and wash it down with...dare I say it?...Alcohol! anyway, it's really important to let yourself have a little of the things that you love no matter what the doctor tells you. This is coming from the guy who quit smoking recently after chaining them down for thirty years and having pneumonia and bronchitis...That's me. But let me try to find the recipe I used:
1 can chickpeas (garbanzo beans)
1 package pita bread (about 6)
1 bulb garlic (all the garlic we could get)
1 tbsp olive oil
1 cup imitation sour cream (actually we cheated and used real sour cream. It was on sale.)
1 minced yellow onion
1/2 pint raita (we would have got more if we could. Also, raita is actually an Indian yogurt dressing and turned out to be slightly too jazzy for my tastes with this recipe.)
1 bunch fresh cilantro (Yes!)
black pepper
no salt
Anyway, I started by putting the onions on to fry and then really mashing the chickpeas as good as I could with a bean masher and then mashing in the other ingredients one by one (along with another 1/4 cup of olive oil the recipe calls for late in the mixing process) and what I found is (1) I didn't miss having a recipe in front of me, but I would have used one if I could have. (2) One of the reasons homemade and restaurant made will never taste the same is really good homemade always ends up misplacing the blender and not getting the beans perfectly mashed or the garlic properly distributed, but my funky homemade falafel ended up going to heaven while all the falafel in restaurants was only, well, angelic. But I don't recommend using my recipe to repeat my recipe. Rather I recommend searching "recipes by season" online and giving precedence to ones using ingredients you already have in the fridge. For one thing, falafel is meant to have lemon juice, mint instead of cilantro, and coriander, but I just had to McGiver it. Linda and I had no trouble finishing it all and I wish I could have some right now.
1 can chickpeas (garbanzo beans)
1 package pita bread (about 6)
1 bulb garlic (all the garlic we could get)
1 tbsp olive oil
1 cup imitation sour cream (actually we cheated and used real sour cream. It was on sale.)
1 minced yellow onion
1/2 pint raita (we would have got more if we could. Also, raita is actually an Indian yogurt dressing and turned out to be slightly too jazzy for my tastes with this recipe.)
1 bunch fresh cilantro (Yes!)
black pepper
no salt
Anyway, I started by putting the onions on to fry and then really mashing the chickpeas as good as I could with a bean masher and then mashing in the other ingredients one by one (along with another 1/4 cup of olive oil the recipe calls for late in the mixing process) and what I found is (1) I didn't miss having a recipe in front of me, but I would have used one if I could have. (2) One of the reasons homemade and restaurant made will never taste the same is really good homemade always ends up misplacing the blender and not getting the beans perfectly mashed or the garlic properly distributed, but my funky homemade falafel ended up going to heaven while all the falafel in restaurants was only, well, angelic. But I don't recommend using my recipe to repeat my recipe. Rather I recommend searching "recipes by season" online and giving precedence to ones using ingredients you already have in the fridge. For one thing, falafel is meant to have lemon juice, mint instead of cilantro, and coriander, but I just had to McGiver it. Linda and I had no trouble finishing it all and I wish I could have some right now.
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Happy International Women's Day
I don't want to say that women do all the useful work in the world, because it's not true. I particularly think of the night crew at Second Story Respite House, two of whom are male, as people who do a lot of arduous cleaning without credit and without a lot of complaining. But it's also true that a lot of health professionals are women and the management in my hotel is two women and I'm grateful to them right now. And basically women are beautiful. I don't know whether to hope they take over the world, but I can see why they'd want to. And I think I've been a lot happier in the last ten years with women enjoying better status and more wage parity than they did before. I think mostly when women misuse power it comes as a result of a lot of power being misused on them, not only in a personal way, but also in an institutional way and it's been going on since the dawn of time. So I do hope we all will try to interact more fairly in the year ahead, and that includes interaction between members of the same gender, too. if you disagree about any of this, please contact me at congertimothy@yahoo.com or tconger@cruzio.com . Thank you.
Tim
Tim
Plenty of Room At The Bottom
The title of this post actually comes from a mathematical concept I only heard about from an episode of the TV show, "Numb3rs" that comes on CBS sometimes, and also FOX. But enough about them.
I recently started answering emails that offered free deals as introductory offers to their business classes and so on and what I found is that I never met such a bottom feeding bunch of slime in my whole life. I particularly want to name the company AppSumo, because it offered to send me three business pamphlets for free that it never did, and instead it tricked me into downloading a 7000 gigabite file that slowed down my laptop by about 30 seconds every time I wanted to do anything. Nuts to them!
There was another website I had a bad experience with and I feel sorry about that, because I felt like there was things about it that were really great. The website, "wunderground," named after the Weather Underground of the Sixties, has a lot about it that's really terrific; it has great graphics and tells you all sorts of weather information and links to all sorts of great facts from all over the world. It's the perfect cure for Liberal Arts syndrome. The problem? Once you've signed their contract, you pretty much can't mention them or use their data in any articles you might write, to say nothing of business applications, and to me it looked like their terms and conditions were so exhaustive no one at all could stay out of trouble with them for long. Luckily, I never signed their contract or I wouldn't be able to write this review. Moreover, they kept reminding me that I had disabled the cookies on my computer and insisted in their terms and conditions on having access to any information I might have on my computer for making their own cookies for me. Anyway, they really creeped me out and I had to tear myself away from their site regretfully. It's a damn shame.
It just seems like our economy has gotten so bad that even companies that would have fostered latent talent in the Nineties nowadays just want to rob everyone of their last ten cents. It's a real shame.
By the way, the "National Weather Service" is a public service that does some of the same things the Weathermen do without the bullshit.
I recently started answering emails that offered free deals as introductory offers to their business classes and so on and what I found is that I never met such a bottom feeding bunch of slime in my whole life. I particularly want to name the company AppSumo, because it offered to send me three business pamphlets for free that it never did, and instead it tricked me into downloading a 7000 gigabite file that slowed down my laptop by about 30 seconds every time I wanted to do anything. Nuts to them!
There was another website I had a bad experience with and I feel sorry about that, because I felt like there was things about it that were really great. The website, "wunderground," named after the Weather Underground of the Sixties, has a lot about it that's really terrific; it has great graphics and tells you all sorts of weather information and links to all sorts of great facts from all over the world. It's the perfect cure for Liberal Arts syndrome. The problem? Once you've signed their contract, you pretty much can't mention them or use their data in any articles you might write, to say nothing of business applications, and to me it looked like their terms and conditions were so exhaustive no one at all could stay out of trouble with them for long. Luckily, I never signed their contract or I wouldn't be able to write this review. Moreover, they kept reminding me that I had disabled the cookies on my computer and insisted in their terms and conditions on having access to any information I might have on my computer for making their own cookies for me. Anyway, they really creeped me out and I had to tear myself away from their site regretfully. It's a damn shame.
It just seems like our economy has gotten so bad that even companies that would have fostered latent talent in the Nineties nowadays just want to rob everyone of their last ten cents. It's a real shame.
By the way, the "National Weather Service" is a public service that does some of the same things the Weathermen do without the bullshit.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
I don't even know what I'm going to call this post...
I'm starting to work for Obama again. Or rather, "I'm starting to work for our President again." Last night I got an email asking for help with the campaign, but I couldn't find an event to go to in this county, so-- get this-- I signed up to host one.
Actually, I'm looking forward to it. There is something exhilerating about a task where you have to figure out what needs to be done and assign yourself to do it. Being your own boss. All that good stuff. I gave the lobby of the hotel I live in as the location of the community meeting I'm hosting and sent out all the invitations and only today did I proceed to ask my landlord. You'd be amazed at how easily she said yes, but I don't want to give the impression she's a pushover. I think she just felt honored the Democrats would care how people in my hotel vote.
Anyway, for those of you who want to go and who will be in the Santa Cruz California area May twelfth, my email is tconger@cruzio.com or you can log in at barackobama.com and find your way that way.
There is something strangely alienating about life and the world as a whole. Things are easy as long as someone's telling you what to do and you have them to complain about with your friends and family, but when you make up your mind to live on barely any money and be your own boss it just does weird things to your relationships. For one thing, it's really embarassing how often I call my father and stepmother-- like, almost every day each. You'd think you'd have more to say when you talk to your friends, but so often it all gets lost in vagueness because you've built it for yourself out of nothing. There's no good guy or bad guy. Anyway. you'll probably see me posting a lot more often as if anyone were even reading it all. No offense, please, to those who do read this. I just find my life is really perfect except I'm really lonely. I never thought I'd want to "quit my day job."
Actually, I'm looking forward to it. There is something exhilerating about a task where you have to figure out what needs to be done and assign yourself to do it. Being your own boss. All that good stuff. I gave the lobby of the hotel I live in as the location of the community meeting I'm hosting and sent out all the invitations and only today did I proceed to ask my landlord. You'd be amazed at how easily she said yes, but I don't want to give the impression she's a pushover. I think she just felt honored the Democrats would care how people in my hotel vote.
Anyway, for those of you who want to go and who will be in the Santa Cruz California area May twelfth, my email is tconger@cruzio.com or you can log in at barackobama.com and find your way that way.
There is something strangely alienating about life and the world as a whole. Things are easy as long as someone's telling you what to do and you have them to complain about with your friends and family, but when you make up your mind to live on barely any money and be your own boss it just does weird things to your relationships. For one thing, it's really embarassing how often I call my father and stepmother-- like, almost every day each. You'd think you'd have more to say when you talk to your friends, but so often it all gets lost in vagueness because you've built it for yourself out of nothing. There's no good guy or bad guy. Anyway. you'll probably see me posting a lot more often as if anyone were even reading it all. No offense, please, to those who do read this. I just find my life is really perfect except I'm really lonely. I never thought I'd want to "quit my day job."
Monday, February 20, 2012
Commentary on "The Windows" by 19th C. poet Stephane Mallarme
"The Windows" is just one poem in a collection called "Du Parnasse Contemporain" and the translation is by Anthony Hartley and was published in 1963 by Penguin. This essay is copyright by Tim Conger as of 2/20/12.
I want to meticulously avoid biography in writing about Mallarme's poetry, howver tempting it may be, except where he wrote to a friend that his new poetic method was to "Paint-- Not the thing-- but the effect that it produces." Perhaps another writer might find that instruction strangely freeing. "The Windows" definitely reads like he applied his method on it, or at least the first nine or so times I read it, but eventually I see where adjectives find their nouns and adverbs find their verbs and adjectives. But the Dionysian twister of it is kind of fun in the meantime:
Tired of the dreary hospital and of the stale incense rising in the banal whiteness of the curtains towards the vast crucifix weary of the empty wall, the dying man cunningly straightens his old back,
drags himself and, less to warm his decay than to see sunlight on the stones, goes to flatten his white hairs and the bones of his thin face at the windows which a bright lovely sunbeam wishes to bronze.
And his mouth, feverish and starving for the blue sky, just as in its youth it went to breathe in its treasure, a virginal skin of long ago! dirties with a long bitter kiss the warm golden panes.
(Stanzas I--III)
Combinations of words that particulary work for me abound here, but I want to quote a few lines as I recite the poem. This may be copyright infringement, but it is in the interest of promoting and reviewing the poem: "...less to warm his decay than to see sunshine on the stones...at the windows which a bright lovely sunbeam wishes to bronze." This is the first of a number of lines Mallarme comes up with that summon for me an old self of mine, stuck in a hospital for psychosis or pneumonia or both, that speaks at me through the voice of Mallarme and says, "Bring down the wall a little."
He lives intoxicated, forgetting the horror of the holy oils, the tisanes, the clock and compulsory bed, the cough; and when evening bleeds among the tiles his eye, on the horizon choked with light,
sees golden galleys, beautiful as swans, sleeping on a river of purple and perfumes, rocking the rich, tawny lightning of their lines in a vast indifference laden with memory!
So seized by disgust of man and his hard soul, wallowing in happiness where only the appetites eat, and persisting in the search for this filth to offer to his wife suckkling her little ones,
(Stanzas IV--VI)
Sorry about ending in the middle of a train of thought, but it's hard not to wwith Mallarme! The longing for sunshine and the fantasy of the ships is most poignant and familiar to me, having gone nearly bonkers from a hyperactive imagination whenever I'm detained against my will. "Purple and perfumes" is a good example of taking something immediately aroound you and turning it into a hallucination, where what is most unfamiliar to me and most terrifying at all is the image of being rubbed with holy oils in the hospital in case you die when no one can come to your bedside! That's not one I've experienced yet, nor hopefully ever! What is most familiar to me of all, sad to say, is "wallowing in happiness where only his appetites eat." /you know, I'm reading right now in a book some theologians who said that when a holy person dies, only the soul dies, while God continues to perform good deeds. through them. Appetites eating int eh place of the comfortable person would bespeak a very different spiritual condition. But I can't say I don't feel that way all the time.
I flee, and I cling to all the casements from whence one turns one's shoulder to life, and, blessedly, in their glass washed with eternal dews gilded by Infinity's chaste morning,
I look at myself and see myself as an angel! and I die, and I love-- whether the glass be art or mysticism-- to be reborn, wearing my dream like a diadem, in the earlier heaven where Beauty flowers!
But alas! the world below is master! its obsession comes to disgust me sometimes even in thid certain shelter, And Stupidity's impure vomiting forces me to stop my nose in face of the blue sky.
(Stanzas VII--IX)
I can see the word "art" as in "art or mysticism" being used in more thanone sense in the poem; one the one hand, art is simply the making of false things-- on another,we have for the past few centuries become accustomed tot hinking of art as evidence of spiritual transcendence. But isn't that "making graven images?" And does Stephane Mallarme really care if it is? I think he's trying to show what compromises of self a hospital stay of any kind makes necessary.
Is there a way, O Self familiar with bitterness, to break the crystal insulted by the monster and to escape; with my two featherless wings-- At the risk of falling throughout eternity?
(Stanza X, last stanza)
I feel he's speaking personally to me-- call it "paranoid criticism"-- perhaps he's speaking to you, too, if you've ever wanted to time travel when you've been cooped up inside all day. /Stephane Mallarme, I hear and touch you back. If you absolutely must shoot at Athur Rimbaud, don't.
Stephane Mallarme was something of a mentalist. He was skilled at remembering in tranquility traumatic thoughts and sensations from his own life that he knew other people woulod identify strongly with. Even if you don't relate to all of it, or any of it, you don't know that he's shot and missed, but if he hits the mark, you say, "How did he know?" I can easily relate to everything he says about being in the hospital except that hospitals don't use holy oils any more. And indeed, so can anyone who's ever been in a hospital and wanted to be OUT. Not everyone would cop to being a vehicle for one's own appetites, but I see it in everyone just as much or more than I see it in myself. But it is an easy mentalist trick to make people feel that a message is meant for them personally if you insult or criticize them. In my case, the detail of the vomiting hits the mark, too, where it wouldn't with another person, but Mallarme may have only been referring to another patient in the bed next to his. Sooner or later a mentalist has to hazard a few details that he has noway of knowing whether they connect to the audience's experience or not. I myself easily fall for that trick. And then Mallarme finishes with a threat, "How do we break the crystal?" To us, it seems like he's talking about the computer, but he may have only meant-- besides the window in the hospital-- the glass of a crystal ball for scrying. It may also be that computers are designed with glass as they are only because, our technology grew out of an association with crystal balls for scrying. But that's just me trying some mentalism of my own and not because I actually think it's possible to make a machine out of tea leaves or yarrow stalks. /Every artist and every writer is a kind of mentaalist and I am using this essay as an act of mentalism, too. Perhaps, to "paint-- /not the thing-- but the effect that it produces" would serve to enhance the creation of these hypnotic effects as well as being all we really know about life and the world we experience.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Valentine's Day, 2012
I don't mean this so much as a review/advertisement ffor Valentine's Day, though I might have a lot to say about it. Mainly what I'm writing about is a terrific conversation I had tonight on the bus with someone I had never met and probably will never see again, but would really like to. I was at the busstop and she asked if I was waiting for the 71 bus and I said "yes" and she said, "Oh, good." So, People, if you want to know how to start a conversation with someone at the busstop, that is a polite way of doing it. I asked if she was going to the college and she said, "Yeah, I'm with the college." I asked, "As a worker or as a student." and she said she was in the first year of getting her degree. I said the looked older than twenty-one, which seemed to offend her slightly, but it didn't shut her down and she said she was going back for her secondd degree. Her first one was in communications and this one is in radiology. I said that seemed great because with expertise in both fields if someone comes in to the lab and isn't making a lot of sense she can use her background in communications to try to figure it out and not just assume stuff. She said the other application is if someone thinks they have psychiatric issues, but actually they've got a skull fracture. The conversation already seemed positive enough that I began to ask her about people around here I could see if I suffered blows to the head around the same time as I had changes in my psychiatric history, but mainly we were just having a conversation and I told her my current md is really great and would assuredly help me get tests if I asked him for them. So then she began to ask me what my diagnosis is just for her own education and I told her in this case I'd be happy to tell her. Then we got on the bus and her bus pass was out of date and I almost offered to pay for her ride because it was kind of an important conversation all of a sudden. We sat down and she asked me what triggers my illness. I complimented her on asking exactly the right question and I said, "Birth." It was kind of my show for a while because it's hard for any of us to get out of helper/helpee mode once that dynamic has started but what distinguished her was the boldness of her questions and at the same time the empathy. At one point she teased me that the medications I take give me a liquid lobotomy, though I knew she was just flirting, which made me feel comfortable talking about all the most crazy cosmic stuff I could think of. We did a lot of smiling and laughing. I told her my theory that I don't know whether anything is real or not, but that I know I prefer reality over hallucination. She asked, reasonably enough, "What is reality?" and I said, "I have no idea, but I'd like to think I'd know it if I saw it."I told her I'm not that sure she wasn't a hallucination, which she seemed to think was funny. By the time we got to her stop I felt so close to her it didn't seem odd she was clutching my hands and squeezing them and I hers. She said her name was Kim and I said "Kim and Tim." I didn't feel like asking for her phone number unless I run into her a second time (which I certainly hope I do,) but it's nice to connect with someone so strongly on Valentine's Day. Also, tonight was a romantic night, but I could well understand these things are time sensitive and I wouldn't assume I could kiss her hand the next time I see her where if I had done it tonight she probably would have been delighted.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Smasheltooth Flossing (a second draft)
"Smasheltooth Flossing" on blogger is my favorite besides my own. It's brilliantly written and she's going to have to help me figure out how to get graphics on my page, too, because her graphics are great. Mostly she writes diary entries or accounts of dreams and it looks like-- as is true with me, too-- her dreams are saturated with even more wisdom than her waking ego. I really like the dream account of meeting a member of her favorite hiphop band and then getting in a fight with her boyfriend over him telling people her secrets. In fact, I felt it necessary to ask her permission before letting other people know about her blog, but she was thrilled I wanted too so I think if people can take seriously what should be taken seriously and take with a grain of salt what should be taken with a grain of salt. What I mean is, a lot of her blog is very bawdy, like mine sometimes can be, and just as I wouldn't want a stranger coming up to me in public and asking me about orange jumpsuits, it's probably better not to interrogate Smashel about her teeth. But I really like her blog a lot and recommend it to people who like brilliant and yet funny and apparently vulnerable writing. I'd like to say more about what you'll find there , but false modesty is stopping me. I feel funny discussing my friends' issues about their teeth on google.
I wrote something about Smashel's blog here yesterday, but felt I needed to change it for whatever reason.
I wrote something about Smashel's blog here yesterday, but felt I needed to change it for whatever reason.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
In Defense of Seeking Extremely Mediated Experience
When I first was in college in 1983 I had known I wanted to "be a writer" since I was nine years old. But I received a warning through a book by John Gardner called "On Becoming a Writer" at that time. He recalls how he witnessed a gruesome highway accident at one point and was trying to come "to the rescue," but the whole time he was peeling away metal and freeing body parts he kept thinking to himself, "I've got to remember what I'm thinking...I've got to remember what I'm feeling..." According to him, he had programmed himself so much to think like a writer that he couldn't experience anything at face value any more. He says, "Don't let this happen to you." Mostly I look at things through a very different lens, but something I saw yesterday reminded me of his warning.
Recently my brother Greg shared with me a speech on the internet from someone named Slavoj Zizek at an Occupy New York event. I really liked the speech and so yesterday I was looking at clips about him on You Tube for something to comment on in my blog. I found most of the clips pretty mediocre, but I thought it might just be me, which, of course, it is. Then i noticed comments below the film window and one of the comments was, "Why are you watching a facsimile of a film about Slavoj Zizek?" I'm busted again. But I've also been thinking since that happened and I think that's what the comment-writer wanted. I think I have an answer to his question and I think you want to know what it is.
Why do I seek stimuli so I can blog about stimuli? First of all, we live in a world where most people spend all their free time online and I just can't fight that particular trend any more, because I can't stand the loneliness. Second of all, I decided it finally matters to me to publish my writing and blogging is a way of doing it that feels less nepotistic to me than the journals and magazines. All I have to do is get people to read my blog myself. Of course, there's no one else to filter out my bad writing from getting on the net, but maybe I wouldn't want that anyway. As to the content of the blog, I took an art history class at Cabrillo College a little while ago in Aptos CA and I felt I had unfinished business when the class was over. I really loved writing a paragraph or so each about all these different random pieces of art or package culture: in fact I stole this blog's whole concept from "Approaches to Understanding Visual Culture" by Malcolm Barnard, which was one of the main textbooks for the class. I felt I still had lots and lots of art I wanted to comment on. Mostly I use what he would call a very casual hermeneutic analysis: what is "God" telling me through this experience? I'm pretending you want to know.
And now for reason #3: my defense of seeking to experience the world only through extremely mediated experience. Marshall McCluhan says some people prefer to experience art and life though "hot" media, like painting, sculpture, poetry, theatre and architecture, while others prefer "cool" media, like fiction, philosophy, photography and cinema, though what goes in what category is a matter for debate. I feel like a little of both, like I like to experience "hot" experiences through the filter of a "cool" medium, or even a facsimile of a facsimile of one. I think if you've read books on he ancient Egyptians, Chinese or Mayas you'd agree a greeting from beyond the grave can shake off thousands of years of gunk and grab you just as vigorously as if you heard it firsthand today. Part of what I'm dealing with in responding to the question in the comment is precisely such an unmediated experience. Hermeneutics-- which comes from the name of theGreek god Hermes-- means precisely that, that no matter how you remove the message from the receiver, it just adds that much more force to the message when the signal is finally received and recognized, and nothing can stop it from being recognized if the receiver is receptive to it at that moment. The advantage of experiencing art as well as life is that I interpret events in my life as God or the Devil attempting to convey a message to me, but if I try to tell you about it, you might disagree about what God is telling me, so that I might become isolated. However, if I write about what God is telling me through art, you can believe me that "God" is telling me that without having to believe he or she is saying that to you or anyone else. Therefore, if you judge me for it, it's just your problem unless I'm somehow making you listen to me. Anyway, for those of us who write, writing is really hard and I think looking to experience pleasant things in a pleasant way so you can write pleasantly about it is perfectly all right and I contest that everyone who writes does that anyway, whether we're too jaded to admit it or not.
Recently my brother Greg shared with me a speech on the internet from someone named Slavoj Zizek at an Occupy New York event. I really liked the speech and so yesterday I was looking at clips about him on You Tube for something to comment on in my blog. I found most of the clips pretty mediocre, but I thought it might just be me, which, of course, it is. Then i noticed comments below the film window and one of the comments was, "Why are you watching a facsimile of a film about Slavoj Zizek?" I'm busted again. But I've also been thinking since that happened and I think that's what the comment-writer wanted. I think I have an answer to his question and I think you want to know what it is.
Why do I seek stimuli so I can blog about stimuli? First of all, we live in a world where most people spend all their free time online and I just can't fight that particular trend any more, because I can't stand the loneliness. Second of all, I decided it finally matters to me to publish my writing and blogging is a way of doing it that feels less nepotistic to me than the journals and magazines. All I have to do is get people to read my blog myself. Of course, there's no one else to filter out my bad writing from getting on the net, but maybe I wouldn't want that anyway. As to the content of the blog, I took an art history class at Cabrillo College a little while ago in Aptos CA and I felt I had unfinished business when the class was over. I really loved writing a paragraph or so each about all these different random pieces of art or package culture: in fact I stole this blog's whole concept from "Approaches to Understanding Visual Culture" by Malcolm Barnard, which was one of the main textbooks for the class. I felt I still had lots and lots of art I wanted to comment on. Mostly I use what he would call a very casual hermeneutic analysis: what is "God" telling me through this experience? I'm pretending you want to know.
And now for reason #3: my defense of seeking to experience the world only through extremely mediated experience. Marshall McCluhan says some people prefer to experience art and life though "hot" media, like painting, sculpture, poetry, theatre and architecture, while others prefer "cool" media, like fiction, philosophy, photography and cinema, though what goes in what category is a matter for debate. I feel like a little of both, like I like to experience "hot" experiences through the filter of a "cool" medium, or even a facsimile of a facsimile of one. I think if you've read books on he ancient Egyptians, Chinese or Mayas you'd agree a greeting from beyond the grave can shake off thousands of years of gunk and grab you just as vigorously as if you heard it firsthand today. Part of what I'm dealing with in responding to the question in the comment is precisely such an unmediated experience. Hermeneutics-- which comes from the name of theGreek god Hermes-- means precisely that, that no matter how you remove the message from the receiver, it just adds that much more force to the message when the signal is finally received and recognized, and nothing can stop it from being recognized if the receiver is receptive to it at that moment. The advantage of experiencing art as well as life is that I interpret events in my life as God or the Devil attempting to convey a message to me, but if I try to tell you about it, you might disagree about what God is telling me, so that I might become isolated. However, if I write about what God is telling me through art, you can believe me that "God" is telling me that without having to believe he or she is saying that to you or anyone else. Therefore, if you judge me for it, it's just your problem unless I'm somehow making you listen to me. Anyway, for those of us who write, writing is really hard and I think looking to experience pleasant things in a pleasant way so you can write pleasantly about it is perfectly all right and I contest that everyone who writes does that anyway, whether we're too jaded to admit it or not.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Superbowl Forty-Six
This year's superbowl was the first I ever watched willingly, and I even went out of my way to see it, begging my girlfriend's daughter to let us come over and watch it at her house and I was willing to bring snacks and gatorade and beer. There's been kind of a lot of disruption in all our lives lately and so the ritual of having the game on was kind of healing for me and--I think-- for them, too, though I drank too much beer and after the game I got upset over some trifle and demanded to be driven to the bus stop to go home. Certainly somebody drinking too much on superbowl Sunday doesn't raise many eyebrows. But, man, every single ad during the game was about beer. As if I didn't feel stupid enough.
I was glad New York won, because two weeks ago they beat San Francisco, so it helps me to feel like "we" had a tough adversary. Also, I kind of identified with Eli Manning two weeks ago when he kept looking so afraid of the ball, and still he kept on playing. For those of us who know nothing of football, Manning was the quarterback for New York, so he had to run or pass every play as long as New York had the ball. Last week I got this bean bag toy of Spongebob Squarepants wearing a 49er's uniform and looking really mad because he didn't get to go to the superbowl and I absolutely love it. I forgot to bring it to the game, though.
As for football itself, I wish it weren't played so dirty, but I think I don't dispprove of it any more. I finally outgrew all my resentment from being a weakling in school and I guess people going to all this trouble to slam into each other and get paid for it, if they're lucky, is kind of cool, though maybe I'll try watching baseball this year, too. Sometimes football seems kind of sublime to me, even if people do look mad and get in fights on the field. You have to hand it to anyone who will put themselves at stake so much physically, though I almost decided I didn't want to watch anymore two weeks ago when that man got so hurt on the field they brought out the stretcher. Luckily he was able to walk off the field, but I hope he's okay. There's an anarcho- capitalist philosophy called Agonism that I don't agree with, but some of it I do, like the theory and beauty of competition generally. I think on a small scale, like where romantic love is at stake, I really love the struggle of it all a lot and can be something of a jerk. Sorry. Likewise sports.
I was glad New York won, because two weeks ago they beat San Francisco, so it helps me to feel like "we" had a tough adversary. Also, I kind of identified with Eli Manning two weeks ago when he kept looking so afraid of the ball, and still he kept on playing. For those of us who know nothing of football, Manning was the quarterback for New York, so he had to run or pass every play as long as New York had the ball. Last week I got this bean bag toy of Spongebob Squarepants wearing a 49er's uniform and looking really mad because he didn't get to go to the superbowl and I absolutely love it. I forgot to bring it to the game, though.
As for football itself, I wish it weren't played so dirty, but I think I don't dispprove of it any more. I finally outgrew all my resentment from being a weakling in school and I guess people going to all this trouble to slam into each other and get paid for it, if they're lucky, is kind of cool, though maybe I'll try watching baseball this year, too. Sometimes football seems kind of sublime to me, even if people do look mad and get in fights on the field. You have to hand it to anyone who will put themselves at stake so much physically, though I almost decided I didn't want to watch anymore two weeks ago when that man got so hurt on the field they brought out the stretcher. Luckily he was able to walk off the field, but I hope he's okay. There's an anarcho- capitalist philosophy called Agonism that I don't agree with, but some of it I do, like the theory and beauty of competition generally. I think on a small scale, like where romantic love is at stake, I really love the struggle of it all a lot and can be something of a jerk. Sorry. Likewise sports.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
Thrive
I just watched the video, "Thrive", for the first time without the sound on and realize that's not the best way to watch it, but thought I'd write a reaction--preferably without saying anything that would take away the experience of watching it from someone who hasn't seen it yet.
It's funny how you get these recommendations in the internet world where someone tells you to look at something and doesn't tell you anything about it and it takes a certain amount of courage or foolhardiness to actually go to those sites, because you quickly find you really have no idea what you'll find. That is certainly my experience with "Thrive." But I am glad I looked at it and want to go back to the site when I've got my ear buds working again. I want to share it with others (unlike my experience with the work of Zach Galifianakis) but am quite far from clicking buttons on Thrive's site and maybe accidentally giving a bunch of grease monkeys access to my sites through some kind of back door. Funny what you have to protect yourself from these days.
I do recommend watching "Thrive", but qualify that I didn't watch it with the sound on. I want to go back to the site again when I've got sound.
It's funny how you get these recommendations in the internet world where someone tells you to look at something and doesn't tell you anything about it and it takes a certain amount of courage or foolhardiness to actually go to those sites, because you quickly find you really have no idea what you'll find. That is certainly my experience with "Thrive." But I am glad I looked at it and want to go back to the site when I've got my ear buds working again. I want to share it with others (unlike my experience with the work of Zach Galifianakis) but am quite far from clicking buttons on Thrive's site and maybe accidentally giving a bunch of grease monkeys access to my sites through some kind of back door. Funny what you have to protect yourself from these days.
I do recommend watching "Thrive", but qualify that I didn't watch it with the sound on. I want to go back to the site again when I've got sound.
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Two Videos by OK Go
I've seen two of this band's videos and each is more amazing than the other. The first shows them in street clothes dancing on aerobics machines with a choreography and litheness that would make Olivia Newton John and Britney Spears weep with lust or envy or something. It's not the sort of art that inspires novices to create more art, though, so I'm kind of going to give it short shrift in my review, because my primary interest in writing has always been as a writing teacher. OK Go's next video, though, gives a lot more to write and talk about; they filled a warehouse with a contraption the size of an old IBM mainframe built out of odds and ends and functional parts of preexistent machines that is meant to deliver golf balls short distances in time to the song the video is meant to promote. My brother Greg, who showed me the video, says this kind of "better mousetrap" type machine is called a Rube Goldberg device after a mathematician who theorized about these things that had been in the culture of comic strips and dormitories and so on before him.
OK Go has done an amazing job of varying the kinds of motion and materials in the operation of the machine and always times the motion of the golf balls subjectively with the pace of the music. Moreover, the machine is not without continuous surprising elements that come into play specifically at transitions and surprises in the music. This is an amazing video. Unfortuneately, it made it completely impossible to think about or remember the song. But the whole day after I saw this video I was riding the bus from Berkeley back home to Watsonville and thinking how much the history of the world's civilizations is really a history of the world's cities and how like a Rube Goldberg device it all is! I thought of how I've found myself in the course of my life riding desperately on some flying piece of flotsam through space and trying to come up with some kind of cover story to make sense of it all if the wrong person asks me why I'm living a certain way or doing a certain thing or how it is the castle I'm living in stays in the air. How like the famous Hieronymous Bosch tryptych it all is(!), particularly like his vision of Hell. Do you know(?), last night I heard a soul band named Velvet Wraith on the radio and it made me feel terrified and happy at the same time, because it is nice to know someone else has seen them, even if my memory of seeing them the first time was one of the most unhappy times in my life. I have a little more stuff to say about the video still, so let me say as an aside that although the counsel of my more Christian family members is a great solace to me, I disagree with them on the vital point of a person having what seems to be visions of Hell while alive being always a bad thing and still that doesn't make me a Satan worshipper. I believe these experiences do a fine job of advertising their opposite, and aren't given to people who aren't very kind and good people already, but that experiences of Hell are themselves also better than no contact with God at all. If you don't know what I was talking about, forget it, it can ruin your life. Just basically a lot of alchemy and religion and stuff.
Wow! Suffice it to say, OK Go's second video does a much better job of inspiring me to create on my own! On a much less demented note, it is my professional opinion, as it is with other writers and teachers of writing, that it can be a good sign if you want to be a writer and don't know if you have "The Right Stuff," if you start off writing the letters of the Roman alphabet, but by the middle you're writing in Gaelic and Hebrew. One might almost call it "Frankenstein Syndrome." In fact, I think that's its name. You think of a plot, make an outline, start telling your story, but then you start hearing your characters telling you, "I wouldn't do that,,I'd do this." By the end of your story, it resembles a Rube Goldberg machine unless you can clean it up and pretend you wanted it to be that way, but some people leave the original shape of the branches in the wood, like me. It's a school of writing, I guess, or more than one.
OK Go has done an amazing job of varying the kinds of motion and materials in the operation of the machine and always times the motion of the golf balls subjectively with the pace of the music. Moreover, the machine is not without continuous surprising elements that come into play specifically at transitions and surprises in the music. This is an amazing video. Unfortuneately, it made it completely impossible to think about or remember the song. But the whole day after I saw this video I was riding the bus from Berkeley back home to Watsonville and thinking how much the history of the world's civilizations is really a history of the world's cities and how like a Rube Goldberg device it all is! I thought of how I've found myself in the course of my life riding desperately on some flying piece of flotsam through space and trying to come up with some kind of cover story to make sense of it all if the wrong person asks me why I'm living a certain way or doing a certain thing or how it is the castle I'm living in stays in the air. How like the famous Hieronymous Bosch tryptych it all is(!), particularly like his vision of Hell. Do you know(?), last night I heard a soul band named Velvet Wraith on the radio and it made me feel terrified and happy at the same time, because it is nice to know someone else has seen them, even if my memory of seeing them the first time was one of the most unhappy times in my life. I have a little more stuff to say about the video still, so let me say as an aside that although the counsel of my more Christian family members is a great solace to me, I disagree with them on the vital point of a person having what seems to be visions of Hell while alive being always a bad thing and still that doesn't make me a Satan worshipper. I believe these experiences do a fine job of advertising their opposite, and aren't given to people who aren't very kind and good people already, but that experiences of Hell are themselves also better than no contact with God at all. If you don't know what I was talking about, forget it, it can ruin your life. Just basically a lot of alchemy and religion and stuff.
Wow! Suffice it to say, OK Go's second video does a much better job of inspiring me to create on my own! On a much less demented note, it is my professional opinion, as it is with other writers and teachers of writing, that it can be a good sign if you want to be a writer and don't know if you have "The Right Stuff," if you start off writing the letters of the Roman alphabet, but by the middle you're writing in Gaelic and Hebrew. One might almost call it "Frankenstein Syndrome." In fact, I think that's its name. You think of a plot, make an outline, start telling your story, but then you start hearing your characters telling you, "I wouldn't do that,,I'd do this." By the end of your story, it resembles a Rube Goldberg machine unless you can clean it up and pretend you wanted it to be that way, but some people leave the original shape of the branches in the wood, like me. It's a school of writing, I guess, or more than one.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Less is More (Buckminster Fuller)
I felt terrible. I've not been able enjoy any book I read or anything I do for about two weeks now and most of that I've felt like I was on acid. Moreover, I keep pouring beverages down my throat and spending money. I didn't want anything material, but I wanted to want something. Saturday I was all ready just to sit in the usual patio seat at the cafe me and Linda go to and enjoy a cold tea, but even before I opened the tea someone kept interjecting comments to us without actually asking if she could join our conversation so I could say no. Linda didn't seem to mind her, but I felt like there was a flat plane separating my head into an upper left half and a lower right half. Then I went inside the cafe and got on the net, but that went all wrong. We still had to go to Rite-Aid for pills and buy ingredients to cook something vegetarian for dinner. Experience was telling me I needed to pray and also try to coax the active part of my nature from looking for what I can take from others into looking for what I could give. It's true I was missing a lot of what I usually feel I need in order to be there for others, but I also decided a few years back I wanted to be so much a part of the solution that you could actually throw me into a national disaster area with nothing that anybody else didn't have and I'd still be trying to help people just as much as I'd be trying to help myself. My experience Saturday is telling me I still have a way to go. I was good about not grouching at anyone, but I still needed more "retail therapy" to put my head back together. Namely, when Linda was driving us to Rite-Aid I asked if I could shop in the Goodwill bookstore while she got her meds and I also asked if we could shop for dinner at Trader Joe's instead of at SaveMart.
I got Aesop's Fables at Goodwill and read one of the Fables. Cool. I also got a book about haunted happenings in our area (Monterey Bay region in California). The Greeks almost always make me feel better when I read them. I think throughout time a lot of different people from a lot of different cultures have felt that way about the Ancient Greeks, or even the modern Greeks. I should probably find out more about the modern Greeks.
So we ended up at Trader Joe's not knowing what we were going to buy, but I find I can actually shop there that way and end up with a better menu than if I go to a different market with a list. It illustrates exactly what I mean by package culture, because the sections are arranged more the way I think of the different foodstuffs than the sections in most markets are. And if I know a package of green beans are Fair Trade and grown in Mexico-- basically if I know where they're from specifically-- then I might feel like they are a delicacy and I might make a meal out of just green beans, but I get ahead of myself.
So I scanned the chips and salsa and dried fruit shelf just because it was the first one I saw and I was looking for inspiration. I said to Linda, "You don't like polenta, do you?"
She said, "It's all right."
"Could you get into eating polenta tonight?"
"I guess. I mean, I could." But we had never made it before and didn't know the ingredients exactly. So I looked at the stuffed pasta and sushi. None of it looked good to Linda and it looked too expensive. There was a readymade butternut squash and tomato and meat sauce and cheese thing that looked really good to me, but it was five dollars each. Ordinarily I would have bought it, but we were trying to meet each other halfway on our decisions. Besides, Linda's daughter has a garden so she eats a lot of butternut squash. I was talking about how sick I was of stir-fried vegetables and rice, because I've eaten then so much in my life, but then I said I still like basmati rice and Linda asked what that was. I said, "You've had it before. It's very perfumy. It tastes life saffron. It's in a lot of Indian food."
"Like curry?"
"Yeah." My eye glanced over at the fresh sauces and I though of the package of green beans with cheese sauce and basmati rice on the side. Linda didn't like the thought of cheese sauce, but we still had half a thing of fresh pesto at home and though it doesn't go with green beans colorwise it might actually taste good. We actually agreed on that and then picked up a pound of mozzarella just to have around for the fat content (it being winter and all) and I even had the presence of mind not to buy a beverage, because we still had half of a two litre bottle of Sprite at home.
Dinner turned out great. What made shopping different was I started thinking more like my family raised me to when I went into the store. that is to say, I pretended to be French. Less is almost always more. Of course, that expression is more Californian than French, but it has je ne sais quois.
I got Aesop's Fables at Goodwill and read one of the Fables. Cool. I also got a book about haunted happenings in our area (Monterey Bay region in California). The Greeks almost always make me feel better when I read them. I think throughout time a lot of different people from a lot of different cultures have felt that way about the Ancient Greeks, or even the modern Greeks. I should probably find out more about the modern Greeks.
So we ended up at Trader Joe's not knowing what we were going to buy, but I find I can actually shop there that way and end up with a better menu than if I go to a different market with a list. It illustrates exactly what I mean by package culture, because the sections are arranged more the way I think of the different foodstuffs than the sections in most markets are. And if I know a package of green beans are Fair Trade and grown in Mexico-- basically if I know where they're from specifically-- then I might feel like they are a delicacy and I might make a meal out of just green beans, but I get ahead of myself.
So I scanned the chips and salsa and dried fruit shelf just because it was the first one I saw and I was looking for inspiration. I said to Linda, "You don't like polenta, do you?"
She said, "It's all right."
"Could you get into eating polenta tonight?"
"I guess. I mean, I could." But we had never made it before and didn't know the ingredients exactly. So I looked at the stuffed pasta and sushi. None of it looked good to Linda and it looked too expensive. There was a readymade butternut squash and tomato and meat sauce and cheese thing that looked really good to me, but it was five dollars each. Ordinarily I would have bought it, but we were trying to meet each other halfway on our decisions. Besides, Linda's daughter has a garden so she eats a lot of butternut squash. I was talking about how sick I was of stir-fried vegetables and rice, because I've eaten then so much in my life, but then I said I still like basmati rice and Linda asked what that was. I said, "You've had it before. It's very perfumy. It tastes life saffron. It's in a lot of Indian food."
"Like curry?"
"Yeah." My eye glanced over at the fresh sauces and I though of the package of green beans with cheese sauce and basmati rice on the side. Linda didn't like the thought of cheese sauce, but we still had half a thing of fresh pesto at home and though it doesn't go with green beans colorwise it might actually taste good. We actually agreed on that and then picked up a pound of mozzarella just to have around for the fat content (it being winter and all) and I even had the presence of mind not to buy a beverage, because we still had half of a two litre bottle of Sprite at home.
Dinner turned out great. What made shopping different was I started thinking more like my family raised me to when I went into the store. that is to say, I pretended to be French. Less is almost always more. Of course, that expression is more Californian than French, but it has je ne sais quois.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
On Leaving My Job at Second Story Respite
A change of life...It is a euphemism for something that for me has been so mysterious and so overwhelming I despaired of ever finding a way of talking about it or containing its damage to my life. Basically, it expresses itself in more frequent panic and paranoia attacks and in performance anxiety and loss of memory whenever anyone asks me a question at work. I'm going to miss the cleaning chemicals, but I'll be looking for another job soon, and I will still be cleaning my own room.
My coworkers clapped and laughed when I said why I was quitting. There are other forty year olds there. Some of them said they could really relate. For me, mental health is one of those professions whee you have to be enthusiastic and confident and know your stuff, and I just lost the thread somehow. In my profession we call it "burn-out." But people said to stay in touch and some encouraged me to call them on their private numbers.
The Second Story Respite House, in Santa Cruz, California, is a two-week come-and-go-as-you-please facility for people with lived history of serious psychiatric diagnosis where we believe in enforcing as few rules as possible on our guests. Sometimes the place can be chaotic, but I usually found it really fun, and many guests have asked to come back. I still feel really grounded when I'm on the property, which is really different from the way I usually feel when I leave a job. Once I even slept over in one of the guest's rooms WHILE THEY WERE THERE, but that's a whole story in itself. They didn't seem to mind.
I would be willing to stay at the respite as a guest even now after I've worked there for a year, and less likely to check myself into a mental hospital. And I'd be less likely to do that, too, because a couple of time in the past year I've felt really upset and wanted to go to the hospital, but then I think I should put my money where my mouth is and go to the respite, but I work at the respite so I don't want to go there either, and then I just find a way to tough it out. Also, because the respite is almost entirely staffed by mental health clients or former mental health clients, they often know exactly what to say when I call to make me feel strong enough that I can go back into my life and deal, which is what I'm going to have to do eventually anyway even if I end up getting locked up for my own good and can't do anything.
I can't be sure about the respite's website, but you can probably find it under Second Story Respite House on Google.
My coworkers clapped and laughed when I said why I was quitting. There are other forty year olds there. Some of them said they could really relate. For me, mental health is one of those professions whee you have to be enthusiastic and confident and know your stuff, and I just lost the thread somehow. In my profession we call it "burn-out." But people said to stay in touch and some encouraged me to call them on their private numbers.
The Second Story Respite House, in Santa Cruz, California, is a two-week come-and-go-as-you-please facility for people with lived history of serious psychiatric diagnosis where we believe in enforcing as few rules as possible on our guests. Sometimes the place can be chaotic, but I usually found it really fun, and many guests have asked to come back. I still feel really grounded when I'm on the property, which is really different from the way I usually feel when I leave a job. Once I even slept over in one of the guest's rooms WHILE THEY WERE THERE, but that's a whole story in itself. They didn't seem to mind.
I would be willing to stay at the respite as a guest even now after I've worked there for a year, and less likely to check myself into a mental hospital. And I'd be less likely to do that, too, because a couple of time in the past year I've felt really upset and wanted to go to the hospital, but then I think I should put my money where my mouth is and go to the respite, but I work at the respite so I don't want to go there either, and then I just find a way to tough it out. Also, because the respite is almost entirely staffed by mental health clients or former mental health clients, they often know exactly what to say when I call to make me feel strong enough that I can go back into my life and deal, which is what I'm going to have to do eventually anyway even if I end up getting locked up for my own good and can't do anything.
I can't be sure about the respite's website, but you can probably find it under Second Story Respite House on Google.
Saturday, January 28, 2012
what the-?
Just typing into outer space here. I tried to select an image from Nicki Minaj's posts and comment on it in my blog and I found my system was thoroughly taken apart. And, yes, I too am softer than a gay person (pardon the offensive reference, people, but Nicki Minaj says one thing and then I respond and pretty soon everyone's offended.) I'm thinking it's just another example of me being paranoid if I think Nicki Minaj hacked my system, but that was the very last site I was at and I was reading there song lyrics that said literally "you are softer than a gay person," which I'll own up, and "tell me how you like my new lyrics." I didn't click like, because I don't like them, and now my system's hacked. I'm beginning to think I don't like hiphop music anymore.
Monday, January 23, 2012
#2 Victoria's Secret
Before Christmas, my girlfriend talked me into watching the Victoria Secret fashion show and I had one of those alchemical sulphur reactions that the alchemists used to try to avoid at all costs or they'd have to start the opus over again. I even thought the models were blowing kisses at me, Tim Conger, as I sat in my chair (horribile escritu!). A lot of the time I'm following the thread of a participation mystique just because I want my life to be less boring. Anyway, I knew I was being a travesty as a man but I made up my mind I was going to buy my girlfriend a "Love Pink" shirt from Victoria's Secret. But I felt it was shameful because although I knew I had good taste and was demonstrating it, the poverty I could see all around me as represented by the Occupy movements made me feel like I had to really go slow on buying vessels of corporate "free enterprise" for Christmas. Also, my own familly has always encouraged me to buy a little bit, or a lot, less for myself and those close to me than I want to, because I was born with strong spiritual leanings and shouldn't get sucked into lusting after everything physical all the time. And I had to look at my own motives for buying my girlfriend such gorgeous fool's gold stuff. But what I discovered when I searched my soul is I just wanted to live in the imaginary world created by all those designers and by Nikki Minaj's performance and her wonderful insulting song and the models and Maroon 5 and everyone looked so happy...In short, I was bit. I was in love with a store. I'm getting better. See entry #3
#3 "Very Sexy (for men)"
On blogger, we compose in the reverse order as it appears on the screen so I'm writing this first. I bought this fragrance for myself at Victoria Secret this weekend that is a butane cartridge that says only "Very Sexy (for men)" and it says its fragrance is a "bold mixture of bergamot, ginger and sandalwood" but all I smell is a musky churchy scent. I think I'm a little disappointed. But at least I didn't break down and buy Axe body wash. Mostly I bought it because I needed to feel my way into wearing deodorant more often and the participation mystique I've been in around Victoria's Secret products made it inevitable I'd buy it as a prompt to myself to do SOMETHING about my body odor. But I'll probably wear more often Ralph Lauren Polo cologne that I bought last year, because I really really chose the scent carefully and I still think it was a good choice. Unless I don't wear it. As for deodorant itself, Linda turned me on to Arm and Hammer roll-on and it's nice because it's odorless. But you have to actually wear it.
All in all I feel good about my decision to never buy Axe deodorant. It just seemed like shearing Samson or something. But that doesn't mean I can't take better care of myself.
Yes, I've started brushing my teeth more often--almost every day. Man, I wish I had brushed and flossed more before I lost all my back teeth! I have to nibble everything to death. And, yes, I feel really unattractive. But I'm still a good writer (or so she wrote) and when I work I work really hard, which is different (ahem) from the way I worked when I was younger. Work ethic pays.
All in all I feel good about my decision to never buy Axe deodorant. It just seemed like shearing Samson or something. But that doesn't mean I can't take better care of myself.
Yes, I've started brushing my teeth more often--almost every day. Man, I wish I had brushed and flossed more before I lost all my back teeth! I have to nibble everything to death. And, yes, I feel really unattractive. But I'm still a good writer (or so she wrote) and when I work I work really hard, which is different (ahem) from the way I worked when I was younger. Work ethic pays.
Sunday, January 22, 2012
On All Us Broken Dishwashers
Hi Aunt Jane. I'll send you an individual email soon, but I wanted to post something to your comment, since I really like getting comments. I don't know what it is about we men that, relative to women, makes our ability to get tasks done so dependent on our moods. I'll be praying for your dishwasher, but ask him to pray that I get better soon, too, because I am taking a few months off from a job I really enjoy that was keeping me very fit and active and I don't have the money for an exercise-bike or any of that nonsense. Well, I'm just as into buying things as the next person and quite a bit more so than a lot of our family, so I won't fault anyone for buying an exercise-bike. But cleaning the house builds a lot of upper body strength and then you can walk around the block once a day and before you know it, you're Charles Atlas. But I still wish I weren't taking time off from work and I'm going to get another job in the meantime until I can get more training and feel more ready for the situations that were coming up. Pray for my career. Or pray for whatever you like, but I'll be praying for all the broken dishwashers. Your affectionate nephew, Tim
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
New Year, Change of blog name.
New year, change of blog name. I was feeling like the name "brillocommentblog" wasn't working for me, but I wanted to keep the reference to pop art because I'm an Andy Warhol freak. I also got to thinking that what's new this year is I have a counselling job where I work with my hands a lot and cleaning products are my new best friends. Really. But I don't actually like using brillo that much, or any other kind of steel wool product. It makes me feel like I'm rubbing my fingernails on a chalkboard. What I really like are those combination scrubber and sponges we call "scrunges." I think "myscrunge" is a better site name, because it's clearer and keeps the connotation of "cleaning the house" which is what I like to do in my writing. Much of my writing is kind of shocking, but only in a muckraking sort of way.
Thursday, January 5, 2012
What is Lyracy?
A way of sharing responsiblity for the moraql implications of a group's actions, by putting one's own conscience at stake more. It is a discuourse that aims to hold to a happy medium by plainly stating the merits of an evil or selfish course of action as if it makes a certain sense, which it probably does, as well as the merits of an altruistic or even religious action as if it concealed an ulterior motive, which it certainly could. The aim is only to think outside the box in practical affairs, and to keep moral consideration alive, by always begging the question. It also helps to build group identity by including a circle of people in the best fruits of each other's thinking and the circle can always widen.
The immediate practical effect on group action is slight if any, particularly in a workplace, but it cannot help but affect participants in a deeper way if they are willingly participating. The good and evil of a person's nature can begin to rest on a very broad base.
I'm going to trim my little essay a lot here so the thoughts may be a little choppy. Sometimes being misunderstood is the most effective way to get your ideas out there. (Yes, I want to be famous more than I want more money.) Tu Wei-Ming of Harvard University wrote a book called "Confucian Thought: selfhood as creative transformation" and I need to credit him with a lot of inspiration credit for what I'm writing here. It's a very good book, if hard to read and using specialized philosophical language. It was worth my time to read the whole thing. Anyway, events sometimes suppress any kind of real historical dialectic from happening, even a material one and even an idealistic one, but in times of greatest ideological homogeneity people can still clown around about the right and wrong ways of accomplishing practical things and lyracy is the exaggeration of that process.
The immediate practical effect on group action is slight if any, particularly in a workplace, but it cannot help but affect participants in a deeper way if they are willingly participating. The good and evil of a person's nature can begin to rest on a very broad base.
I'm going to trim my little essay a lot here so the thoughts may be a little choppy. Sometimes being misunderstood is the most effective way to get your ideas out there. (Yes, I want to be famous more than I want more money.) Tu Wei-Ming of Harvard University wrote a book called "Confucian Thought: selfhood as creative transformation" and I need to credit him with a lot of inspiration credit for what I'm writing here. It's a very good book, if hard to read and using specialized philosophical language. It was worth my time to read the whole thing. Anyway, events sometimes suppress any kind of real historical dialectic from happening, even a material one and even an idealistic one, but in times of greatest ideological homogeneity people can still clown around about the right and wrong ways of accomplishing practical things and lyracy is the exaggeration of that process.
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Post of 1/4/12
A charming young pirate woman known to me only by the name "Smasheltooth Flossing" has recommended I write my dreams down here in my site. What's really funny is the whole time she was telling me that, I was thinking about how only the night before I had had a very convincing dream of having a three-way with someone I didn't recognize and Lisa Edelstein, who used to play the administrator on the TV show "House." Having given it some thought, I am not going to describe that dream in this forum. But I've spoken to young Smasheltooth at other times and I understand that where she is coming from is she likes to see a person present themselves in a way that bypasses their conscious control. Makes sense for a pirate to feel that way. We also talked about putting my I Ching hexagrams on the blog. But probably I won't do that either. Sorry, Smasheltooth, in my own blog my conscious mind rules supreme. Nice try, though.
You know, I've given it some thought and I have come to believe that although it is tempting to think that certain styles of magic are best suited to different personality disorders, that the best mentalists are sociopaths and sleight of hand people should probably be very down to earth sane people, I am beginning to believe to be a truly gifted mentalist you must by nature be completely psychotic. Case in point, two weeks ago I was talking to my therapist about how I've come to believe the kindest way to write a holiday card is to observe as much as you can about the recipient and write it all down, because most people like to feel observed even if occasionally our feelings are hurt or our paranoia or panic is triggered. To speak really truthfully, the more it triggers us, the more we like it. It helps if the person triggering us really is talking about us so we don't have to feel like we need more meds. It shows great vulnerability on the part of the person making the disclosure. Problem: my therapist seems to be among those who don't like to feel observed by their clients, because she cancelled yesterday's appointment with only five hour's notice and said she was sick and going on vacation for three weeks and wasn't ready to make an appointment with me when she got back, that she needed to think about it. And I hadn't been planning to mess with her head at all. I just wanted to get help with my stuff, vis find out what she thought about a new development in my life I felt funny about, like usual. Anyway, I'm really mad at her. Good to be posting again, I'm really done posting fiction in this forum, because it's too much work, but
You know, I've given it some thought and I have come to believe that although it is tempting to think that certain styles of magic are best suited to different personality disorders, that the best mentalists are sociopaths and sleight of hand people should probably be very down to earth sane people, I am beginning to believe to be a truly gifted mentalist you must by nature be completely psychotic. Case in point, two weeks ago I was talking to my therapist about how I've come to believe the kindest way to write a holiday card is to observe as much as you can about the recipient and write it all down, because most people like to feel observed even if occasionally our feelings are hurt or our paranoia or panic is triggered. To speak really truthfully, the more it triggers us, the more we like it. It helps if the person triggering us really is talking about us so we don't have to feel like we need more meds. It shows great vulnerability on the part of the person making the disclosure. Problem: my therapist seems to be among those who don't like to feel observed by their clients, because she cancelled yesterday's appointment with only five hour's notice and said she was sick and going on vacation for three weeks and wasn't ready to make an appointment with me when she got back, that she needed to think about it. And I hadn't been planning to mess with her head at all. I just wanted to get help with my stuff, vis find out what she thought about a new development in my life I felt funny about, like usual. Anyway, I'm really mad at her. Good to be posting again, I'm really done posting fiction in this forum, because it's too much work, but
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