Dirge

It's like coming to an old place after a long absence. Because that's what it is. I tend to isolate, and I don't have internet at home. Profoundly depressed last night, but I don't let it get me down. Just remember to breathe. I'm in the habit of just observing the madness. I realize that I've given up. I have no expectation of happiness. That's not to say I don't have happiness. I suppose happiness is too imprecise a word. It's that I will always be alone. As I say, I isolate myself, so where's the hope.

Someone was talking about how he'd stopped drinking and his former friends became former because they didn't like the change. "Come back when you're ready to be sociable." Something like that. And he said they didn't like the positive effects -- leaner, more energy, better outlook. I made the observation that spite was the second oldest human story ... the oldest was loneliness. Adam, you know, and then, later, Cain. Then I said I'd have to think about whether it was true or not, cuz I'd just made it up. Spite is the third oldest ... I'd forgotten disobedience. It's all so closely related though. The yearning to be with someone else is almost a yearning to be them, to own them. Envy and jealousy are like that too. No wonder then that the ethical religions preach selflessness. It's the only thing that needs preaching ... selfishness comes naturally.

I pulled out one of the very few pictures I have of my son, from when he was very little, three, and I just smile at how sweet he was. When he was 8 or so he heard the ice cream man coming and wanted some money, and I said yes, if you never ask again, and we made a contract, and he abided by it. Once or twice afterward he'd hear the bells and perk up, but then he'd remember and hold himself to it. Tonight, again, I felt very guilty about that. I took advantage of him. I'm sure there was a character lesson he learned, and that's good, but I just wanted to avoid the hassle. I'm pretty cheap, too. I don't think I can ever forgive myself for the mistakes I've made. I'm not good at forgiving. Maybe it's that I don't forgive people I don't love.

I'm like a stranger in my family. I don't touch anyone. I feel guilty about that too, sometimes. I should hug my mother. She's getting old. It's a vicious downward cycle, each failure reinforcing the pattern. And it's not that I don't know how to change it. I don't really want to.

But I called, then texted my son. "Love you." I forget to do that. There didn't used to be texts, so I made sure he never left the house without getting a hug. "Love you, honey boy." That was my pattern. I'm not so much a hello hugger. I'm a goodbye hugger. The message I want to send is not that I've missed you while you were gone, but that I want you to take my love with you when you leave.

Oh, I have a lot of political observations. It's just not convenient to make them. Part of my most recent depression is that my sleep schedule has been erratic for a couple of weeks, and some nights I've gotten literally no sleep at all. A week of that, no sleep, a few hours, four or five. Very wearing. Someone I know has recently been feeling some emotional turmoil, depression and anxiety, basically debilitating. I don't suppose I've been much of a comfort, but I haven't had much of a chance. These things come and go, and we cannot let them rule us. Feel bad, or good, and do right. I've never been able to comfort those in distress, because I can't lie about the future. I have no idea if everything will be alright. Maybe it will get worse. My own life experience suggests that's the case. But it also gets better. We need these horrors, real or virtual, to mature us. They can destroy us, damage us irreparably, as mine have -- or we can grow wise and strong. Dude, it's only a feeling. Feel bad about how you treat people ... or feel good.

Ah well. I grow smaller with the passing months. I miss having kids. I like kids, but I keep a distance now. They're not mine, you see. I used to be the father to children who weren't mine. I was not strong enough to survive the consequent pain, and now I'm off the board. That makes me pretty mad, but my courage is spent. I continue on this planet out of stubbornness and a sense of duty, but the purpose for which I was given life has been lost. I just don't have the energy for it, the heart. You can see that, in my increasing silence.

Don't let me get you down. I say these things here because I have to say them somewhere. It's the first human story. We just tell it, over and over. It needs hearing, because communication is the only thing that lets us break free of ourselves. Let us speak of kindness, like Jesus speaking to the Roman world. They'd never heard such things. Kindness as more than a whim. They must have paused, grown still, his strange ideas pulling at them, some of them, called up a yearning we don't have words to express. It is a wonderment. What's the alternative. Living life in isolation, growing too weary finally to stand, breathe, and we express our final breath with a sound like remembering a small sadness.

Maybe next time I'll talk about Obama. Speaking of serpents.


J

I am so

sorry, but I couldn't resist:

You'll never see it the same way again. Ha ha.

Dude, check out this package! Made you look, suckah! Now you're gay.

On the other hand, if she's old enough to speak

she's old enough to give consent. (Ed. note to Internet Police: this is meant as bitter social commentary.)

But speaking of erotic...This is the kind of filthy dirty dirty smut Romney will purge from the internet!

Romance: a little show, then dinner.

Perception:

and reality

Lies, baby ... all lies.

What, you imagine you notice a theme? That's you, homes, not me. I'm good. Yes it is true that I've been doing some strength training, notable for elevating hormone levels. I however am beyond all that. FP is a work of art, sublime, and everything here has multiple meanings. Of course you would chose the low road.

It's so lonely up here on my intellectual summit.

J

Beach Weather

When I get tired of chillin in my bitchin hottub,

...which is a real babe-magnate

(my honey on the bus comin over for a booty call),

... sometimes I take some neighborhood kids down to the beach

...where I like to take in the sights of man and nature ... you know, work on my tan

...watch the athletes at play

...pick up a few tips about hittin on the chicks.

Not that I need pointers ... got hotties all over the world tweatin me.

I like to read body language.

Ah, Life! You are too wonderful for anyone to realize you!

Nature, surmounted by that pinnacle of Creation, Mankind!

For you see, Nature can always be improved up.

Mankind! Thine ingenuity is infinite!

Thy spirit unconquerable!

Thine art unbounded

So I finally got that tattoo I was wantin.

Bitchin, right? No lie.

There's a doo at the beach tomorrow. I don't think I'll go though. I didn't go last week, for some high school reunion. If they want to see me, they can come to me.

J

Back

Well, I'm back. That was unpleasant, I must say. Maybe a little bipolar something going on here? Except there's no real up phase. My maniacal tendencies are entirely under control. This one was interesting, though. Different. Usually it's a black interstellar cloud that envelopes my sun and brings on an absolute zero of oppression. I sense it a fair bit, nowadays, crouching below the limit of perception, like the Angel of Death. But that one has been keeping its distance. This was different.

Just some little precipitating event, an implied criticism. Quite unmanly of me, so asymmetrical a reaction. Yesterday I got a handle on it though. It was that I was afraid I had lost something, a relationship that is important to me. It's not some criticism, some mere issue -- it was a symbol embodying my sick stupid past, a poison pill, so small, so explosive.

So here, I wrote, last time, something about my father and his bullwhip. There I was, just writing it out. Another thing that existed in my past, no biggie. Then, later, it occurred to me that people might think it was pretty weird, not just how my father was, but my current attitude, of acceptance, matter of fact, that's just the way it is, so? Then I thought, should I feel differently about it? -- this idea that my father not only had but used a bullwhip on his pre-teen sons? Seems excessive, when I think about it. It certainly was, in my specific case. Nothing I ever did would merit something like that. Of course it only happened a few times. Usually it was the belt, his big black four inch wide belt.

Oh, he was a character, my dad -- big wide belt, cowboy hat, custom made knee-high leather boots, muscleman in the '60s, an uncommon thing. Sort of a homoerotic stereotype, only somebody has to be the real thing. Might as well have been my dad.

I don't know. What do you think? It seems strange to me, like he was playing a role. But don't we all? I'm more subtle, professor jack, the angry hermit, the lonely poet, the wounded child.

So there's that, those few insights, latest gleanings from this latest darkness. Fact is, I'd rather be whipped than have my soul undermined. It was the assaults on my masculinity, my budding manhood that cause me, still, the most rage. Oh, I'd better go no further. I'm growing filled with rage.

I was very bright, gifted, testing smarter at 8 than my brothers were at 12. IQ closer to 200 than 100. See how happy that has made me? Significantly closer. Why, if I had any accomplishments, I'd be, like, a genius. But I was immature, and emotionally troubled -- I need to be nurtured, and instead I was, well, attacked. Now I'm around pretty normal people, but it's superficial. I don't invite anything more meaningful. It would really frighten me. Beneficial though, the example of normality. I watch it sometimes, the casual interactions, the banter. It's very interesting. Ah, so that's how it's done. I'm only good with information, observations and analysis, self-confident intuitions, but there's no great market for any of that, and it's only okay, to continue doing what you're good at doing. No growth, in staying the same.

I've been taking the month slowly, physically. Focusing on strength rather than conditioning, and it's halting and hard. Doing a fair bit of bjj, with a very very strong white belt, and it's frustrating, mostly just hold him in my guard trying and failing to make opportunities. Usually I'm the strongest, and that's most of my game. Without that, I suck a fair bit. I'm not really a brown belt. I just look like one. Against a big strong skilled player, I would suck unbelievably. Makes me nervous. I don't like being inauthentic. I need to be demoted. Problem is, I'm only getting slower with age, and not a lot stronger. Oh well. Little by little will have to do.

Don't get me wrong. I will still die alone, and I will never again have meaningful tenderness in my life. Who knows, maybe I do have a booty call. But it wouldn't be meaningful, or frequent in a sustaining way, and I wouldn't call it sex (keeping in mind the semantical precision of a former occupant of the White House), and I wouldn't count it in any of these discussions. But she's hot, if there is such a person (as OJ said, whoever did it must have loved her very much). I reserve my right to privacy, ambiguity and satire.

This blog is performance art. My life is my canvas.

J

Post

What, is it only one day later? Feels longer. Usually this thing passes, but it's stayed with me. I like to suppose I'm not noticeably depressed while in public. Subdued, sure, but people don't know me, so they wouldn't notice my quietude. But I had to be in a public that knows me this morning, so I adapted as best I could, trying to stay out of the way. Yes, I am aware of these things, even in my self-absorption. I find myself actually twitching, and flinching. There's this frantic tapping of a finger or a foot. I hold my breath. Grimaces. I could weep like a little bitch for no reason. God damn this world.

Let's call it an anatomy of melancholy and pretend I invented it.

There's nothing to be done. I'm not going to do violence, to myself or another. My hands ache and grow large sometimes with the desire to murder, wrap around a throat and assert my ego. That's always what I did as a kid, when I got into fights. I turned a kid purple once across a schoolyard bench. Broke bloodvessels in his eyeballs. I might have been ten. I pulled a kid by his neck out of his chair from behind his desk and held him down while I banged his head on the floor. French class in '73. He'd shot a spitball at my eye -- stuck to my horn-rimmed glasses. It was the disrespect that did it.

My old violence tended to be psychotic. There was no bluff, no flailing inefficiency. I really was, for the moment, going about the serious business of terminating a life. I always stopped early -- a momentary rage only, albeit subsuming. A matter of pure intention. As I recall it happened once every year. I never got in trouble. Too fast. Even in French class, Ms E, who was so hot, just sent me into the hall to calm down. I was calm.

My father had a bullwhip that he used on us, my two brothers and myself. We used to go to Tijuana and pick up souvenirs -- pots, firecrackers, wrought iron, leather goods. One of my brothers imagines he was sorely abused with the whip. I have no sympathy for him. He deserved anything he got. He should have got more. He should have been tied to a post a flogged until he was crippled. Maybe he was. For me the worst of it was the emotional oppression. The constant, literally constant disapproval, criticism, blame. Who did this!?! The lectures, as we called them, that would go on for hours and hours, about his childhood -- how they sodomized and stoned to death his little horse -- and the curse, and how he was a failure and we would be too, how we would be bad fathers, it was the curse. I'd go back to my room and be as cold and emotionally shut down as, well, as I am now. Not all whips are leather.

This of course explains a lot. I don't know how it plays into the whole of my inability to trust. I cannot face but I cannot avoid the idea that I was interfered with sexually. It would explain everything, but I have no hint of actual memory on the matter. I was sexually active as a very small child, four five six seven, but then the behaviors stopped, if not the physiology. In any case, I know by now that I really was ruined, somehow, and that I am incapable, by now, of true health, mental or spiritual. I function, and I do good in the world, and somehow I have a son. But I will never again have meaningful intimacy, and I will grow more and more alienated from normality, and I will die alone.

It's so much easier to write, as here, than it is to speak to actual people. I don't need to trust you. You don't exist. People do, with their judgments and agendas. Even friends, even people I love ... I have loved before, and I can think of no instance, save my son, where it has not resulted in rejection and or betrayal. So today, when I'm at my lowest ebb, well, I was in public, and who can say, the damage I have cause, the enemies I have made. You may scoff. But my experience has always been that when people find out how I really am, they hate me, or something that amounts to it. I couldn't fake it today. Hello, nightmare.

It's not hard to write this, with my large and intentful hands. I am cold. I feel rage at injustice, and I mourn my lost potential, but something needs to be beaten to death, and it might as well be me. Slowly, this time, and subtly. Oh, I'm subtle.


J

Texting

Usually depression comes upon me for no discernible cause. There's a fragility deep in me, that I go to extraordinary lengths to protect, because I know how I am, and little things can set it off, and if I weren't bound in iron it would consume me. I've said it before, how, loathsome though the fact is, we need other people. Not only do I not want to need other people -- I don't want to continue living. There's a part of me that's like that. But when the car accident almost but does not happen, we are thankful and relieved. Life goes on. Hurrah. We accept these inconsistencies, of need and independence. Life isn't supposed to make sense.

Someone I know had a business inconvenience the other day, and communicated to me that it was my, uh, not fault, not responsibility ... my failure. I needed to do a better job. Well, that's an infelicitous phrasing, but maybe it's true? I am very proud, arrogant in my way, but I doubt many can be found who, objectively, are more diligent in communicating information, which was the issue, so it is easy to imagine that I do not agree with the unfavorable assessment of my general or specific performance. Take this, combined with my aforementioned fragility, and it won't be surprising to see me plunge into despair. I'm too canny to give credence to an emotional tenancy to catastrophize, but I've been betrayed in some pretty calculated ways, so while I stay rational, I brood.

The best I know to do is keep my mouth shut in such cases. But that's my pattern, and it's not always so healthy. So last night I texted, something along the lines that it had bothered me, this questioning of my ability to convey information. I didn't do it lightly. I waited for hours, to see if it needed to be done. Communication is supposed to help. And there is a difference between a lack of respect, and disrespect itself -- between criticism and condemnation. I had enough blame in my formative years to unhinge me to this present degree. So blame had better be deserved, when it comes.

"Bothered" -- an emotional word, self-revealing. I don't like anyone to know what I'm feeling. But it's a human thing, to communicate not only about information, but about feelings, person to person. It's also very dangerous, an invitation to ridicule, an unguarded house all swept out and waiting for demons. I expect to be judged and condemned, when I let my guard down even a little. I am a profound fool, for this, but there's nothing I can do to not be a fool. It's what I am. Like God himself, I am powerless.

So another piece of garbage has acted on his nature, killing a dozen and wounding scores at the Batman opening. Thank goodness he only used guns. Oh, you disagree? Guns are the worst thing he could have used? A flamethrower would have been both more dramatic and more effective. Spraying that crowd of teens and twenty-somethings with napalm would really make a statement. As it is, the joker only got three score and ten. Yeah, he identified himself, per one report, as The Joker. My store of indignation has been used up on self-pity over my own incomparable tragedy, you know, about how I'm not sufficiently appreciated, so I may come off as a tad indifferent about what monsters do to strangers thousands of miles away.

It's so easy to be a villain, and there are no superheros. I have lost sons, sons, to deliberate evil and deliberate betrayal and inevitable craziness and inevitable corruption. There comes a point where pettiness becomes as important as matters of actual substance. What hope, then.

I just don't understand it. What's the point? Everyone dies, mostly in pain, and those who remain, for the moment, feel grief, spite, indifference or triumph. It's just a matter of when. What fills up our days and lives? Communication? Emotion? Information? It seems completely pointless. Life is the time spent being betrayed, thinking about betrayal, and avoiding betrayal. We think we're going to the midnight premier of The Dark Knight Rises. Instead we get splattered with brain tissue. What a stupid world. My bitterness with God and his incompetence is boundless.

J

Outrage

So Penn State did an internal investigation and found that there had been a reckless disregard at all levels re the constant in the sense of long-term buggery of little boys by Sandusky. All morning long the phrase "football cowards" has echoed between my ears. You know, cuz of the idea that football in some way has anything at all to do with the term "hero." Anal intercourse upon 10 year olds in communal showers is, uh, a right? -- a public service? -- an initiation into young manhood? Hey coach, put me in! If there is any lack of clarity re grown men playing a game chasing after balls, like dogs ... well, insert here your own joke re dogs and balls. (Hint: "doggy style", "balls slash penis", "anus".) Venerable deceased Joe Paterno, in charge of PU's football & sodomy program, knew and did nothing. Wink wink. His corpse should be dug up and fed to pigs. May the stink of his indifference pollute his name forever. Fucking scum.

Just wanted to share.

There's a Sorkin show on TV now, The Newsroom. Unwatchable. Utter garbage. There's a slight temptation for me to explicate it in detail, almost line by line, pointing out the corruption, but that's too much bother. Oh, slick production, if a bit old-hat by now, sort of a West Wing vibe to it, and that was, like, from decades ago. And the dialog sounds slick too, until you think about it. Then it's just glib. So easy for the supposed Republican anchor to win his prosecutorial point, against the genuinenly stupid Tea Party activist morons. Lovely the way the "evidence" is cherry picked and stacked. Convincing the way definitions are twisted to make the point that the Lefties want to make. Easy and lovely and convincing, beating up these rightwing strawmen. That's the politics. As for the writing itself, it's the obvious cheap setup and payoff thing -- tell a story, distract, sum up with a callback to the story. It's not hack per se. It's hack because it's a one-trick pony. Hey, Sorkin, knowing a formula and having a grasp of political jargon and having yer actors talk fast ... that in itself ain't good writing.

My foolish mother, out of christian charity, had been driving my father, her ex spouse from 35 years ago, to the doctor, weekly. He now has an irregular heartbeat, and needed some sort of shock to re set it, which did not work. She now finds his conduct and demeanor/demeaner intolerable and was all guilty about cancelling her contacts. She wanted something from me, and I couldn't tell what, but it was just that female thing of affirmation and sympathy, which I'm not good at. I finally got the point though, and the upshot is, to hell with him. He simply doesn't let her speak. "Don't scold me!" "Let me speak!" "No, I do the talking!" "Don't finish my stories!"

I'd visit him, out of guilt, but I can't face it alone, trapped with his madness in his mausoleum. So nobody visits him. I wonder how long his body will lie there, before it's found. Probably only a few days, or weeks. He has tenants.

I have been silent in these pages for quite a while. I don't know. No reason. You don't appreciate me, but I no longer write here out of a feeling of obligation to you. I do as I please.


J

Arrested Development

Last time I encountered BuzzFeed I had the impression it was a hardcore Lefty site. Back in Oh 4 someone was using it as his source re Abu Ghraib intel. I recall calling the site ButtFish, among other distortions. It just seemed appropriated, to distort. I doubt that it has straightened up in the ensuing years.

In any case, someone emailed me this link, as Interesting. Lots of pics, some moving, some risible. As below:
Typical Lefty bigotry. And no, I'm sure everyone made their own signs -- they just all have the same sort of girly penmanship ... penpersonship. But consider the sign that says "I USED TO BE A BIBLE-BANGING HOMOPHOBE":

Looks like the sign should read, "I am currently a Homo-Banging Biblephobe." To the immediate Left of the Nearly-nude (a diagnosis in the DSM 4R), I think we may espy Chaz Bono. Keepin' it real, Chastity -- you go girl! Ain't gonna let no extra X chromosome get you down! Frankly, they all look like they belong on the near-side of the barrier. Mr Obama, tear down this wall!

Incidentally, this spellcheck does not recognize "homophobe". More homophobia. They won't let us marry, they won't spellcheck the greatest evil human history has ever known ... it just makes me so mad!

Some months ago on my advise my mother declined an offer from my father to have her garage painted. Prior to my input, she'd let her house be pained; it is colored stucco, which never needs painting -- up until now, that is. Diminished the value of the property, and I didn't see the need in furthering the damage. Clean, don't paint. So the other day I heard about my father's reaction to the thwarting of his will. He repeatedly called up my mother and ordered her to allow the stucco to be painted. He said the painter was terrified of me (I had very mildly told him that she didn't want the job done), and that he was going to call the police and have me arrested. "For what?" asked my mother, baffled. "For abusing you! He can't stop me from painting my own property!" Maybe he misspoke? Maybe he's a tad delusional, and thinks my mother's house belongs to him? Surreal.

I spend a fair bit of time each day trying to keep people happy. Well, there is much to be said for something like that. It's a good thing. I'm not a flatterer, or a small-talker, or very friendly. But I keep my eyes open and attempt to fill needs that need filling. That's how I see it. It's like being a parent. My problem is that I don't have any sustaining personal pleasures, not a lot of meaningful ways to unwind. No social life, which, I'm told, helps people recharge.

This past week I've been tired and sore and under-performing in terms of my own goals. I joke about it, but this week, for the first time really, I'm feeling old. I realized that my capacity for recovery is diminished. Doesn't mean it's down hill. But it's slower, uphill. I should join the Y again and use the hot tub. I could use the treadmills there. But everything is so hard.

Outside of theory, I am losing my grasp on the meaning of life.

J

Trust and Competence

Had an intense conversation the other day about Obama's incompetence. Short on specifics, since we were in agreement, but blood pressure nevertheless raised. What an incompetent.

I just read that Obama has, for his possible reelection, so far attended 160 fundraisers. Well, at least he's not trying to govern, while speechifying. Small blessings. And consider if you dare all this inexplicable and coincidentally election-year leaking about how amazing Obama is. Who needs WikiLeaks when we have ... WhitehouseLeaks? -- WhiteyLeaks. Might as well have gonorrhea, for all the slime dripping out of that hole.

Take for example Obama's heroic personal accomplishment, when in person he heroically slew the monster Osama bin Laden, sliding down the rope out of his lone helicopter ... no, it was a paraglider, kicking in doors with his size 13s, backflipping into the, uh, pleasure chamber of the Beast 911 and piercing him through the throat, no, eyeball with a crossbow bolt. And he had a big knife between his teeth, which, spinning agilely, he flicked into the, uh, throat of the most senior Mrs bin Ladin who was stealthily approaching the Prez's back intent on garroting him. Oh man, it was bitchin'. And we know all about it cuz of those fortunate White House leaks. Thank heaven.

Not to mention, hardly, the double-agent in Yemen. Who can be bothered to remember. Some dude infiltrated a terror cell? I really don't suppose it's so hard to do that. Just kill some babies or something, right? -- some jew babies? Small price to pay. Double agents like that, and jew babies, we can afford to sacrifice, if it gets us even more of this fabulous hope and change.

Not to mention the drone war against al-Qaeda bigwig big turban big beards. Seems Obama plays solitaire with himself, using terrorist playing cards, or tarot-ist, get it? -- sort of a Go Fish thing, the Hand of Fate, one a week, just to send a message, that Obama is a Playah but he ain't playin. Be afraid, be very afraid. Terror to the Terrorists. The Great Provider has a kill list of those who have been naughty and naughtier. Smells like justice to me. I wonder if they're actual cards, of if it's a video thing. In any case, sure am glad it's been made public. The public has a right to know. All the news that's fit to leak.

And did you hear the one about the Stuxnet cyberworm attack on Iran's imminent islam bomb (distinct in degree if not intent from your typical islam bomb, suicide or IED)? Of course you have. It's all over the web. It's gone viral. Man, is that Obama amazingly fierce against them islamists. "A vote for Obama is a vote for strong government." I'm gonna submit that to the Huffington Post as a campaign slogan.

Peggy Noonan offers us a delectible tidbit, quoting David Sanger's book, Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power:

During the search for Osama bin Laden, American intelligence experts had a brilliant idea. Bin Laden liked to make videotapes to rouse his troops and threaten the West. Why not flood part of Pakistan with new digital cameras, each with a 'unique signature' that would allow its signals to be tracked? The signal could function as a beacon for a drone. Agents got the new cameras into the distribution chain of Peshawar shops. The plan didn't catch Osama, because he wasn't in that area. But 'traceable digital cameras are still relied on by the CIA . . . and remain highly classified.

"Well, they were," adds Noonan.

She continues, "During the Arab Spring, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was insistent that Mr. Obama needed to stick with Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, even, Mr. Sanger reports, 'if he started shooting protestors in the streets.'

"King Abdullah must be glad he called."

That's not the sort of thing that best practice allows to become public. Sort of undermines any basis for, um, trust.

Some might suppose leaks are okay because the enemy cannot read. But there is that one book they love so much, and it is not reasonable to suppose they are illiterate in all but matters of theology. Does Islamabad have no cybercafes? Some whispers do not get distorted in the transmission. 'Psst, Obama uses cards to personally decide who to kill with drones!' 'What's that you say? Osama called Hooters on speed dial despite his kids being home?'

I cannot resist, a final time, Ms Noonan's, summary: "There's something in the leaks that is a hallmark of the Obama White House. They always misunderstand the country they seek to spin, and they always think less of it than it deserves. Why do the president's appointees think the picture of him with a kill list in his hand makes him look good? He sits and personally decides who to kill? Americans don't think of their presidents like that. And they don't want to."

Oh well. There's nothing to be done, except continue to be Americans, whatever that is Evolving into. Maybe protest having to contribute to a retirement fund? Maybe call in sick so I can scrapbook all day? Maybe borrow a stack of bills to buy a bunch of crap to stimulate the economy? Maybe write a letter?

Dear Mr Obama --

Please next time you run for president, in four years, use as your slogan, "Trust and Competence".

You suck.

Very truly yours,


J

Just Talk

For reasons that need not be explored here, I've been feeling extra betrayed lately, so I'm a little edgy. I think I've got a pretty good handle on my moodiness, when I'm in public, but I think it showed this evening. It amounts to paranoia, and when that's the case, little things, that I usually have the ego strength to not even notice, get magnified. That's what it's like to be crazy. Not actual voices, but a huge weight, of oppression, like being covered in cold tar.

As a spur of the moment thing I suppose, I was invited to an eatery. Yes of course you know my answer, its gist if not the details. At the time it seemed logical, my excuse. I had a thing to do, for the next 20 minutes. I'm an orderly guy, and things have to be done in their proper time. When they're not, it unsettles me, inordinately when I'm, uh, moody. I cannot possibly expect anyone to get my weirdness; I get it. I need advance warning, so I can work through my initial impulse.

Spontaneity? That's for monkeys. As I say, I'm just getting stranger and stranger -- I looked up the proposed restaurant online. This need, in me, makes me sad.

I got an email from someone who knows my blog, wondering if I really thought people were evil. Is that the impression I give? I think more accurate would be that I myself am joyless. That's an overstatement, arising from my current funk, but it's not unfair. It's been this way for so long I can't see any other option. I do not understand the meaning of life, outside of theory. I get the theory. Do good things, love, be kind and generous. I understand that this sort of behavior makes for good feeling. And that I am troubled for the very need of goodness -- why is there suffering, that needs kindness? -- that's overthinking matters, as if we had the mind of God. We don't. No matter that our goodness is as filthy rags, it's as good as we can be, and it's all we can do. Deal with it, God.

I had a really troubling thought, that arose from something I wrote here recently. We've always known that Jesus was innocent, and good, and suffered for our sins that we may be forgiven. Point is, he was innocent and good. But I thought, if he is God, and God allows all this suffering, then God should be punished for it, not as an act of sacrifice, but as justice for his actions. You see the problem: Jesus deserved what he got. It is utter blasphemy, of course. And bad theology, since it conflates the Trinity, and misstates the role of the Father, who allows but does not cause, and for reasons we cannot fathom, this allowing yet does not make him guilty, because it is somehow necessary, and a greater good comes of it. This is where faith comes in, because from my mindset it is complete sophistry, mitigated only by revelation and higher, highest, authority. The evidence of things unseen, because what I see is shit.

It is my mental illness speaking of course. My mother is mentally ill. My father is mentally ill. The faith to move mountains, about the heft of a mustard seed, must surely be enough to heal a mood, or a few wrong ideas. But even God does not have enough faith to heal what doesn't want to be healed. Pretty weak. Turns out God can't save much. Had to destroy the world with a Flood, after all, and someday, again, with fire. Take away lesson is that destruction is easy. Saving is hard.

I've never doubted my salvation. So now it's just a mood that's speaking.

Good night.


J

Treadmill

I’m the kind of guy who says something whether or not there’s a need to say anything. Not always, of course -- I’ve learned a few thing over the years. In fact, sometimes I’m actually quiet. So I suppose I should amend the statement: I’m a guy who sometimes says things there’s no need to say. Take today, frinstance. Someone told me that I had been missed … just in the way that you might miss the presence of a friend. Well, that was nice. And I said something like, for all that I loathe myself, I’m still a pretty nice guy … awfully nice.

Even at the time it seemed, oh, how to say, sour. Loathe is such a strong word, and my tone didn’t quite do the job of softening it. And being me, I had to question myself, later, about the truth of the statement -- because we may find truth in any number of surprising places, even in the throwaway one-liners of emotional deflection. Do I actually loathe myself? Cuz I know I’m an awfully nice guy, in my own peculiar and autocratic way.

Not loathe, of course. It’s just that I have missing parts, and I feel their absence. As the years pass, I become more phobic, more reclusive, more confirmed in my isolation, for all that I have daily social interactions. I can’t speak to determinism or predestination. I do believe that it doesn’t take much effort to completely ruin a child, though, and the adult who follows.

The spiritual hunger that results from abuse and neglect is consuming, the way cancer consumes. The fact that it is, finally, a spiritual hunger answers its own question: spirit fulfills the spiritual man. The other side of that coin is that not all spirit is light. We have free will, and we can chose healing or decay. At the pool of Bethesda, if memory serves, Jesus asked, do you want to be healed. Not a rhetorical question. Not everyone does.

That’s what I mean by loathe, then. No man ever hated his own flesh. On the surface this is clearly an incorrect statement. Suicides hate their own flesh, their lives. But of course what they really hate is their pain. The only thing they hate more is what it would take to actually cure it, rather than pass it along to others; someone after all has to clean up the mess.

For my part, I am sometimes furious, sometimes despairing, at the very idea of my having been trapped in the moronic situation of my childhood, where every moment seems in memory to have been either the presence or the anticipation of rejection, mockery, contempt and invalidation. I make a joke of it nowadays, but I don’t seem to be able to allow myself any actual comfort -- always avoiding rather than confronting. It’s no way to live.

I had a wife once, long ago now, and I picked her because she was the broken mirror of my broken soul, a bad match, voluble where I was terse, sexless feminine to my male aggression, incomprehending and probably even more resentful than I myself was. I loved her as best I could, and still do for all that I never turn my thoughts to her, and I would still be married to her, regardless of the presence or absence of love -- because loyalty is a duty whereas happiness is just a blessing. Point is, she was my chance, and it didn’t work. I’m afraid that I don’t even want another chance. That’s what I must mean, by loathe.

I was told there’s a picture of my son on his facebook page where he looks super amazingly ripped, which he is. I spent some time trying to find it, cuz I don’t see him much, but I can’t figure facebook out. What a stupid idea. Incomprehensible. The company was supposed to be worth two thirds of the GDP of New Zealand, and what is it exactly that they sell? Chitchat? Pictures of cats playing with yarn? Worthless. Next year UqWelbBiq will replace it, and facebook will be myspace, the way Kodak became Victrola.

I need a treadmill. A fast one. Fat boys are beating me in running, and this cannot be tolerated. I used to be fast, but it seems I will only train on treadmills.


J

The Leeks of Egypt

We are commanded to honor our parents, our father and mother. It's a commandment that carries a blessing. Must be important. But why? Social order? Well, yes. But there's more to it. Where is the social order in honoring what is not honorable? And not all fathers are honorable. Yet we are commanded to honor them. Give honor to what is dishonorable? There is no justice in this. There must be some other reason, than justice.

My father has not been an honorable man, in many ways. He is diagnosable narcissistic borderline personality, but maybe he can't help that. His neurotic treatment of his adolescent sons was unfortunate, but such is the burden of life, and maybe he thought he was right. His serial adulteries, however, his betrayals, and his rejection of his middle aged wife for a younger woman, or younger women, rather -- not only is there no honor there, but it is contemptible.

Yet I, somehow, have been commanded to honor him. His failures to his sons, as a father -- well, men fail, and need not be condemned for it. His manipulations and dishonesty are burned into his character, and are part of who he is. It's a confusion, then. And I, dutiful, mostly, most of my life, tried, when I did try, to obey that stupid and incomprehensible commandment. But I seem to be done with it.

The word honor is unfortunate in its multiple meanings. Not clear. It seems, in context, to mean respect or revere or value. What if a father is disreputable? -- or irreverent? -- or dangerous? Value him from a distance? That is obedient only as an expedient.

God wants us to honor our parents, because he wants to be honored, himself. We look at the stupidity and evil of the world, the confusion, the betrayal, and we know that behind it all, the presiding intelligence of God himself is responsible. He is not the active agent, but he is permissive. In any court of law, this indicates culpability. God, however, for good or ill, is not subject to our law. Well, there was that one time.

Again: God wants us to have the habit of honoring even dishonorable parents, so that we will honor him. It's not that God is dishonorable. It's that the evidence, sans revelation, suggest that he is. Thus he reveals himself, that we may act rightly, in not judging, but rather honoring him. We get into this habit, of obedience, by tolerating the madness of our crazy and dangerous and toxic parents.

We don't understand. We don't see the greater picture. We are submerged, and the only thing that keeps us from sinking to the utter depths is a lifeline of faith, which is obedience to things we may not agree with. It is, then, not so much about honoring a parent, as it is about ourselves being humble.

I really hate that.

Yesterday I learned that something I had said was taken, months ago, as a cause for offence, and someone got emotional and subsequently permanently avoided my company. Now I do have a tendency to brood, but this is just what it is -- someone being neurotic. Can't help other people being neurotic. For my part, I've concluded that while I can learn, I can't change. I can try to modify how I speak, but I can't change my intentions. I try to be tactful, but often I'm blunt to the point of being gauche. Too bad.

Most of what most people say and do is a manure pile, but often we find an onion growing there, tasty and nutritious, and on occasion we find a diamond. That's what being human is: being sustained by the onions in God's manure pile. And if we have a more noble character, we are thankful.

J

Convicted Terrorist and Pornographer Brett C. Kimberlin

Apparently Friday was official "International Blog about Convicted Terrorist Pornographer Brett C. Kimberlin Day".

I know this because one of my countless internet fans sent me a couple of links and asked me to comply. Thanks for that. Apparently the party in question feels there are not sufficient satanic hordes arrayed against me, so I need to flag down a few more monsters and invite them into my back seat. No, wait, that metaphor didn't work. I'd be in their back seat, if I flagged them down. I could run them over I suppose, and put them in my back seat, or trunk, or maybe on the roof or hood like a struck moose. No matter. I don't eat dead things.

Here, and here.

But it does raise the question, why do we allow satanic scum to control our byways? We allow scum to manipulate and exploit our liberality, to literally ruin people's lives, to imperil wives and children, and livelihood and peers, and life. We should be held up, hoisted on a string of lies to be the target of unbalanced minds and uncivilized conduct? The answer is, yes, we should. Not a moral "should" -- rather one of expedience.

The swift and bloody, the hard men that Orwell told us we are protected by that we may feel comfort as we lie in our soft beds ... they have, many, been castrated. And not by the savage and immoral scum such as Kimberlin. Rather by soft and comfortable citizens, ovine line-standers or check-receivers, or by their rat-eyed enablers behind the government partition, the union members who both collect and dole out other people's tax dollars. You know, bureaucrats, in agencies, provocateurs for that ultimate equality, decline.

I personally do not understand why Kimberlin is not killed. Not by me, of course, or any reader -- I most urgently urge passivity and compliance to all regulations regarding the mandatory support of evil in our culture. But surely there is some sane American left? One who has read a little of the Old Testament and realizes that God does upon occasion call and raise up a Gideon? Not me, most assuredly. I am thoroughly castrated, for all my 8-hour erections. It is an entirely different sort of manhood under which I suffer. I'm talking about usefulness here, and character, not about hormones and their frustrations.

Kimberlin publishes the home addresses of the families of his targets. He needs to be stopped. Far be it from me to suggest someone go to his abode, remove him into the desert and torture him, reducing much of his body to small pieces while he is yet living, eventually, after a prolonged time, ensuring his complete disappearance into the digestive tract of maggots, rats and crows. Indeed, I plead and beg that no one should do that at my suggestion. My solution, rather, would be to sit down and have a nice heart to heart with the fellow. Not me, my social skills aren't that effective, but surely one of my countless readers could do that? Who saves a life, saves a world.

Kimberlin "reportedly" does or has done something called SWATing. Make a false police report to get a violent response. I have personal experience with this, having myself been the recipient of such attentions. First, they went to the wrong door. Then they saw me looking out my window, bewildered re the noise, and one of them said, "There he is!" Next I found myself on my knees, hands behind my head, my home being searched. Then I was told by an incompetent that I was under arrest. I said, "No, I am not 'under arrest'." To which a superior officer added, "Yes, he's not under arrest." To which I added, "You need better training, sir." Point is, there is a vigorous response to such false reports, but there is no meaningful follow up, re finding the actual criminal. With my smart mouth, I could easily end up dead. The only thing that saves me is that I don't drink.

Where is justice? Recently in Southern California a young man, Brian Banks, has been exonerated of a rape conviction. As a teen he was accused, and pled no contest, and spent years in prison. The lying scum bitch who falsely accused him is on tape admitting she lied. Her mother sued the Long Beach school district and got one and a half million bucks for not providing adequate security -- all gone now of course, as we must expect of lying scum. Point is, where is justice? That the bitch be raped, since the crime is already paid for but never happened, and put in jail for rape, since that's what she brought down upon someone else? Justice is just a theory.

Mr Banks got a raw deal. But he pled no contest. What that means is that the state of California is not culpable. He didn't fight it. Had a bad lawyer. Well, I've had bad lawyers too.

It's hard to know the right course. Prudence says to take a deal. Innocence must be defended, though, even when it is one's own. And when the load of this world's shit buries the innocent, well, uh, I have nothing new to say about that. But Prudence also suggests taking the safe course, and that is the one that allows scum like Kimberlin to thrive.

Do I seem ferocious? It's all talk. That's all anyone of us do, is talk. Lying false-accusers only talk. Kimberlin only talks ... well, aside from that little terrorist bomb thing. Even so, it's so rare one might almost get the impression there were no actual crime in the world. But we know that's not the case.

Anyway, I googled it, and could not find Kimberlin's home address online, nor that of his domestic partner or maiden aunt or whatever he claims as next of kin. I know I can be found, which I'm not happy about. Hopefully I will go unnoticed. Satan must have bigger things on his mind, and I've been effectively neutralized.

J

Nostalgia

The fact is that the islamists are right. Oh, not in the details, or in the tactics, but overlooking such incidentals, they are correct. They actively pursue their own best interests, in a most idealistic way. They're willing to sacrifice themselves, or their adherents, for a higher aim. How noble. Change the details a little, and even we would call them heroes. In fact, some of us have called them heroes. bill mahr for example, at his most fairminded, of the 9-11sters.

Remember that quaint old phrase, "The White Man's Burden"? Long before your time, of course, but you must have heard of it, even if in some snide or ironic tone, the way you'd hear patriotism used, or religion. It is a troublesome phrase nowadays, in our post-White world, because of that word, white. If we tweak it a tad, and more accurately call it the Civilized Man's Burden, or the Compassionate, or the Competent ... well, blessed be Allah, the civilized, the competent. Because that's the new standard, the newish. Islamism. In the olden days the West -- by which we may suppose is meant the Anglophone world -- was unapologetic in supposing and imposing its superiority. Farewell to that sepia-toned image. Images in their entirety, except perhaps the pornographic, are against the increasingly and confidently asserted laws of Allah.

But out with the old and in with the new old. New lamps for old, by which we may and must read one book only. You know the moslem world has published fewer books in 1300 years than Portugal did last year. I made that up, but it's true. Why write books when Allah wrote one already? That would be blasphemy. The islamists then logically must be the strongest force for literacy since McGuffy, or Reading is FUNdamental.

All they want is for us to believe as they do. Completely reasonable. Even those squishy liberals who propound some notion of tolerance want us to believe as they do -- in their version of tolerance. For all that America is a melting pot, well, that says it all -- a melting pot melts away the differences, into a recognizable if not uniform identity, as copper and tin make bronze. America is not a race, but a culture; elements of culture include a common language, a shared understanding of justice, agreement in general goals of government. Et cetera. When the West becomes increasingly balkanized, then, along comes islam, offering Arabic, the language of Allah, and shariah, perfect justice, and a Caliphate, the perfect government. The future appears to hold the Caliphornication of the West.

Guess what. I don't believe it can be stopped. Mark Styne is one of those few Cassandras who see as clearly as they speak, and after perusing this latest of his, I don't see how Europe can be saved. Saved: a loaded term, but that's me all over. I can envision some civil war, some uprising of actual Europeans against the invader and eventual subjugator, but only if there were some sort of awakening, one hesitates to say spiritual.

And really, what's the big deal? That's why I see no realistic hope. All they have to do is comply, these infidels, unfaithful -- submit, the very definition of the word islam. Convert. From nothing, really, from no religion, into islam. Easy. Easy as drugs. Give your life to something. Sure, the gays and the jews will have a hard time of it, but, uh, well there is no but. They'll have a hard time of it. But that's just tough? They came for the jews, and the gays, and the gypsies, and I said nothing, and when they came for me, I said There is no god but Allah, and Mohamad is his prophet -- and so did you. Easy. Now we can all tolerate each other.

There is no hope because Europe invited the hostile and contradictory alien into its heart, and what happens when you inject a virus into your heart? Suicide is an active display of will. Conservatives are the antibody, but what seems likely, in France, say? The majority-minority rioting moslems will, uh, convert? -- stop reproducing? -- go back home? France is their home. It's just that they are not French. The native French will herd them onto reservations? -- slaughter them? -- drive them out? ... convert them? What a droll notion. What will happen is that Europe will indeed become moslem. So what. Albania is moslem, right? And Bosnia? -- or do I mean Kosovo? Anyway, redolent of ethnic cleansing, these names.

Individuals can be reasonable. A mob cannot be reasoned with, nor an invasion, nor an actual as opposed to a nominal religion. There are transformative tides, as of the French Revolution, and although they do not last as such, they change everything, forever. If there were such a thing as prophecy, rather than merely false "Prophet Mohamads", then there might be a book that has such prophecies, and it might speak of the End of the Age, and it might include the idea of a Great Deceiver who attempts to unify mankind under a satanic god. That would suggest that perhaps at least one religion is not false. Hard to believe, since we've spent so much time speaking here of lies, and of the malleability of conviction.

They all think they have integrity, these baby-bombers. They are not wrong in thinking that God is bloody. Even my God once required blood sacrifice, and, once, after a false start in Isaac, an actual human sacrifice. That's what I mean by an end of an age. And here we are again. This time it's a civilization that's going to die. By suicide, assisted suicide.

Glad I never bothered to plan for a retirement. I don't have long for this world.


J

Puny

Bandwagon? I don't know what the hell you mean, bandwagon. I ain't jumpin on no stinkin bandwagon. I can't believe you disrespectin me that way. Bandwagon. Sheesh.

So there's Harvard Law's first woman of color, Elizabeth Warren, and Harvard Law's first Law Review Editor of color, Barack Obama, and, uh, um, well, my grasp of the details is a bit shaky, so I can't make a longer list, but the upshot is here's a pic of the Warren woman:
Now while it is true that Ms Warren does not give the impression of not being a blond blue-eyed shiksa, this is an error of your biased misperception. She is not colorless, as you, a big bigot, appear to insist on asserting. She has color, baby, lots of color. She is a woman of color, and I don't mean white. White is not a color. I can't believe you didn't know that. She is not white, and if you were not such an imperialist racist you would have known that, and a sexist homophobe too. Now if I can be allowed to steer the conversation away from you for a moment, and back to the point, uh, well, I seem to have lost my train of thought. Thanks for that, loser.

Warren claimed as family lore that she had Cherokee blood. Some ancestor had high cheekbones, the way they all do, those Indians. That was the extent of her evidence, and on this basis she wrote on her various resumes and job applications that she was Native American. Unbelievably shoddy, of course, but it got her a job, at Harvard. After much scrambling, her instruments have produced a marriage certificate from the 1800s that lists some sort of decent from one of the tribes. Warren is, then, perhaps, potentially, one-thirty-second of color. Call it three percent.

Now Obama is most certainly a person of color. Black, as you will know, is not a color, but he is not actually black; I do not refer in this instance to his half-whiteness, via his mother -- rather, no one is black. Melanin is not black. Let's just say he's further along the continuum of brown upon which all humans find themselves. What Obama is not, is Kenyan. Oh, well, yes, from his father of course, and whatever the laws of Kenya are, would determine his citizenship in that regard, re a child born in America to an American woman by a Kenyan father. And yet, given that Obama is fully and completely and utterly American, born as he was of an American citizen, he himself has claimed, via his literary publicist, that he was born in Kenya. It's more exotic that way, makes his book, one of his autobiographies, more exotic, more authoritative, more saleable.

So I get it. Claiming some taint -- is that the right word? -- glory? -- of minority status conveys material advantage, in employment, and government charities, and social status, therefore people of low and slimy character tell lies to exploit this corruption in American politics. It's like Yahoo's CEO pretending to have a degree in computer science. It's like Radio Shack's CEO Edmondson claiming degrees in psychology and theology ... well, it's easy to fake that. It's like Notre Dame's head football coach, O'Leary, claiming a Masters from a university that doesn't exist, and three letters in football even though he never played a single game. It's like CEO and Pres Papows, of Lotus, claiming to have been a captain rather than Lt. in the army, and claiming a PhD never earned. Who was that hero politician who claimed a few years ago to be a hero but wasn't really? Well, that's almost all of them. No matter. Catch me if you can.

For my part, I am also part Native American. Honestly. First, the Five Civilized Tribes had a high component of Scandinavian culture and blood. So a more accurate formulation would be to say that Native Americans are blonds. But that's being pedantic. No, for me personally, I also have very high cheekbones ... so high that they're on my forehead. That's high, baby. And even more, when I was ten I heard one of my aunts say that my paternal grandfather had a rather rich heritage, for all that he claimed only Norway. I remember hearing he was "part Scottish and part Irish, and Indian, a lot of things..."

Therefore, on this basis, I am also Native American, and I mean the Indian kind, not just having been born here, and so a native, like me and Obama and my son, who was born in Australia but to me, and therefore fully American and eligible and electable to be President. But I prefer to be called Indian. Speaking as a person of color, as family lore affirms, I reject the whiteman's paternalistic indulgence of renaming me and my people. If Indian is good enough for casinos, it's good enough for my reparation checks, which I will be demanding shortly.

And it's not a bandwagon. I've had it with you and your wagons, crossing the plains and stealing my land from my people. Pike's Peak? Mine. Mt Rushmore? Mine. The LaBrea Tarpits? Mine. It's good to be brown, and I am golden brown now, man of bronze, rippling, sinewy, brilliant, gorgeous.

I'll just leave you with that image, to compare to your own sallow bigoted puniness. Pathetic. I feel like I should say something about my penis, but you can search though this blog and satisfy yourself the way I know you want to do.


J

Bonal

Another mark of my incomparable genius: I invented the word, bonal. As in, Bonal strength is stronger than tendon strength. I’m submitting it to Funk & Wagnall.

I have a buddy who has unreliable inlaws. If we’re lucky, and wise, we chose wisely in our love. If we’re lucky, we have a choice. Once we’ve done that, we accept the bother of new relatives. The love and faithfulness that we receive, and give, to our beloved, cancels out the crap. Such inlaws are the manure out of which grew our rose. To look at it any other way is to see thorns rather than petals. For the sake of her love, let’s say, we remain patient, and kind, and generous.

My mother remains a very foolish person. She was a bit shrewish to her latter husband, scornful and disrespectful, and that was something I pointed out on some number of occasions. He deserved better. My theory is that she did it out of guilt. She knew it was not appropriate to be squandering her savings, and his, on one of her nearly ne’er-do-well sons, and thence on her grandchildren. This particular brother of mine was a truly rotten kid, and I have no problem at all believing, still, that he should have been tied to a post and publically flogged, repeatedly if not unendingly. Real sadistic scum. Perhaps you think I am harsh? I call it justice.

Point is, now, these scores of years later, and even as a younger adult, he is a pretty nice guy, if of a pretty weak character. Be that as it may, he remains a taker, and not a repayer. And my mother, sucker that she is, and falsely loyal, squandered her retirement on that branch of the family. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. Frankly, were it not for my efforts, she would have lost her house. I have conflicted feelings about all of them. But our actions have to be clear.

Yes, I am aware of the apparent hypocrisy of that statement. My father is a topic for another time. I do not respect her dishonesty, her duplicity, her manipulations to get her way, to enable a dysfunctional family and protect it from the harsh corrections of reality.

I myself have been harshly corrected. I remain loyal. I hope to God I am no longer stupidly loyal. I probably am. But I do try not to be stupid, anymore. Part of maturity is knowing the need to walk away. As for the timing, that takes more than maturity -- it takes wisdom. In any case, circumstances conspired some years ago to teach me all about powerlessness, and loss, along with lessons of corruption and incompetence and the casual cruelty of indifference to injustice. This is now what I think the world is. Perhaps I learned the wrong lesson?

Regardless, what I know is that there comes a point when generosity becomes enabling, and kindness becomes weakness, and patience becomes an encouragement to evil.

Debts that remain unpaid do not become gifts. They become cancers. The distinction must be asserted and maintained. It is not for the person who owes, to determine the difference. I have decided that your loan to me is now a gift. To acquiesce is to partake in the fraud. It is the nature of corruption to spread, like a creeping fungus. The bitterness, as found in my own heart, at having been the perpetual sucker, until it was too damn late -- better to have been forthright in the very beginning, or shortly after.

Over the weekend I heard an NPR radio show -- because there is no good talk radio on the weekends -- about psychopaths, and the test for those traits. One segment focused on a CEO, sixth worst ever, who was notorious for his enjoyment of firing people. His mansion's topiary was of carnivorous beasts. Lots of huge sculptures of panthers and alligators. He took the test, and did not score as a psychopath. All the soft little Lefty nebbishes on the NPR show took the test too, and scored a zero out of 40. Very empathic, you see. As opposed to remorseless, which makes for a psychopath, but is not diagnostic as such.

There are two ends of the continuum; at one, the psychopath, and at the other end, the nebbish end, we find the highly neurotic. Consumed by self-doubt and anxiety and apologies, as opposed to being fearless, confident, aggressive, bold. Ah. Oh. It’s not a continuum then, but a spiral, that returns to itself, only on a different level, of increasing or decreasing health. Leadership or manipulation, confidence or arrogance, justice or cruelty. Patience or sloth, tolerance or decadence, compassion or cowardice.

Generosity, or castration.

Maybe I’m just full of advice. That can get old. I certainly keep my mouth shut more than I used to. Nowadays I don’t even bother to form private opinions about a fair number of things. I’m so sick of theories anyway, about how things should be.

Things are the way they are. We have about as much say as a boat in a storm. Sails in, hatches battened, steer straight. So I’m not full of suggestions, about how anyone else should act. I look at my own family, and just shut my mouth, mostly, and try to remember to breathe, and recite a sad little mantra, about how stupid they are, and me too, somehow, for being stuck with them. My mother has yet another dog now, sweet but just a member of the pack, 5 or 6 now, that pisses and shits inside the house and barks all night and sleeps all day and is completely untrained and useless except to keep a foolish old woman company -- which is good enough, if that’s all there is.

And, if the family curse is correct, as my father prophesied, that is indeed all there is.

J

Tag

It will be obvious to the diligent reader that your author uses these pages as a tonic to cleanse his soul of some of the dark forces that assail it. Does he really feel so very much animus toward the current occupant of the White House? Of course not. His antipathy is theoretical, if not feigned. It has no power, no effect, and no real life. It has to do purely with ideas and judgments. If astrology were real, it would be like that: Obama has as much influence on our lives as the moon, or, say, inevitably, Uranus. There's nothing we can do about fate, except to make free will choice in conformity with our natures ... or to act randomly, which is as much as to say the same thing.

I have been attempting to purge anger by expressing it in this harmless medium. It gives me an opportunity to vent, to sublimate, to luxuriate in the indulgence of spitting venom at a target I cannot reach. Where's the harm?

As for what I'm really angry about, well, it comes and goes. I'm angry with myself, mostly, for not being strong enough, wise and healthy enough, man enough to just move on, get over it, the thing, these things that have crippled me since I was young enough to form character out of temperament. I don't think I've really indulged deeply here in a forthright explication of my malfunction. The diligent reader will have discerned my sense of privacy. For all my circumspection, I am honest. But I am frequently silent where people think they hear meaning.

I just came to the idea that the way we are sexually is the way we really are. Courteous or selfish or twisted, robust, intimate, repressed, virginal, alone. Eye-contact. Mechanical. For my part, I remain silent. My intimations may very well be games, ironies, not half-truths but incomplete, like chapter endings in a murder mystery. What is explicit is that I am emotionally unengaged, isolated by inertia and distrust.

I would really like the love of a good woman, a new and growing family, this time two or three kids. Sort of the reverse of what my father did, with his first family of three boys, all of whom he disrespected, and does, and a wife he discarded when he found something younger. And later, another wife, whom he also cheated, and made into an enemy, and an only, new son, given my name, whom he has not seen since 1994. You'd think sometime during that span the boy, now closing in on 30, would have visited. But I went 15 years without visiting, too.

I'm waiting for them all to die. Then it will be too late. But I'll be free of obligation, if not guilt. Something to be said for that.

That's another reason I need a wife. I am completely unsuited to take care of myself. I've been developing phobias for years now, and I need the anchor of a sane person who respects my strengths and helps me through my weaknesses. I know, it's an unrealistic dream. Hope is the last thing to die, though. I got lucky, in a way, with my first wife, who simply outlasted my craziness until I could love her. Turns out she had her own issues, but I was lucky to get as much as I did. She didn't harm me, and she was a good mother. Next time, I'd just like to be, you know, actually loved.

Somehow I've gotten a new laptop. It only really works when it's operating off battery power, and I don't get wi fi internet free gratis out of nowhere at home the way I used to, and I've fallen out of the habit of having a computer, and out of the habit of regular writing, which is a bit of a problem, since that is one of the things I was born to do. And I have a work-related iphone, which yesterday malfunctioned so that no one can hear me, and it has a sort of internet that uses up gigs everyday, which exceeds the plan, and I don't understand that, and fixing these things pushes into my place of phobias -- just don't ask. It's one of the ways I'm measurably nuts.

Sometimes I worry about myself. What will become of me. I'm too proud to live in somebody's spare room, and I'm too unvested to think that I can buy a property somewhere, you know, like a home. I'm a steady guy who has been violently unsettled by a few of life's arbitrary if not impersonal upheavals. Makes it kind of hard to trust in the Steadfastness of a Benevolent Providence. A moment of betrayal undoes a lifetime of faith. Hence the term, sucker punch.

Hope you had a pleasant Sunday afternoon. The weather here is delightful.

J

Mission Accomplished

Americans ... um, My fellow americans. Er, uh, Yo yo listen up, america! huh er eh Now hear this, it is I, aaah President Barack H Obama, speaking ha unto you! eee ah um yuh yuh. America, remember how I killed Osama bin Ladin? Wasn't that great? So you should elect me again, and the technical word for that is reelect, I'm an associate professor, I mean President, so I should know, and I will promise to continue doing the fantastic job that I've been doing so great. I promise, and I always keep my promises, that I will do it again too! Just like I did before, keep on killing Osama again and again, and it will be so great. But that other guy, the bad one, Romney, he woudn't have done it the way I did. So Vote For Obama! Obama?Biden in '08 no I mean '12, but wasn't '8 a really great year? Probably the best ever. For I, Barack Obama, a black american became then president of the Racist States of america! And isn't the timing great? Just around my re election time we can be celebrating my great victory with the 18th month anniversary of when I killed Osahmah. It's the greatest victory ever. Cuz he was so relevant. Man I'm the bomb. Rah rah rah, O Bah Mah!!! Me me me, hee hee hee!! Ho ho, hey hey, how many Osamas did I kill today!?!

A man can be elegant and still have no class. Who would have thought it. As for bill mahr, that was a punch line of one of his "jokes." Obama is so great that he became pres of the RSA. Submoronic. If it's racist, how did a halfblack man become president? Yet the lemmings in his pit all went huzzah. Born to a mother on food stamps, BO was. Such an ordeal. To be raised by a deadbeat self-seeker who pursues her own agenda rather than supports her child? The man is a hero. To be raised, rather, by a white Berkeley post graduate vice president of a bank grandmother? To be a matriculate of prep schools and Ivy Leagues? Maybe he was a good student? We don't know -- no transcripts. Food stamps he claims she was on ... was he a success because of affirmative action? We don't know. But cuz he's such a supergenius, smarter than Adams and Jefferson and Lincoln and Wilson and TR and, um, carter and clinton, it is racist of me to suggest such a thing, whatever it is I'm trying to suggest. Probably that O is a second-rate hack.

But that's just me, being racist the way I am. Y'see, a racist is someone who explains things through race. Because O was elected because of his race, therefore, by holding such an idea, I am racist. Yes, it is I, I who am the racist. And his countless, endless catastrophic incompetencies, these are irrelevancies. All things are explained via the one factor.

Someone involved in this diatribe is submoronic. I suggest it would be the party who does not recognize satire on the one hand, and on the other, one's own hypocrisy. To be unaware of one's inconsistency is sad. To be aware of it and unrepentant is evil.

Yes, I do mention race, re Obama. Perhaps I seem to dwell on it. Not an important thing, except, uh, his people make it so. "His people"? And I am one to hold a nose to the stink of one's actions. Sorry, that's just me. Since I am anonymous here, I can do that. Something to think about.

Good thing O went to Afghanistan to anounce another bugout and to affirm that we would never use bases there and that we and they are exactly and perfectly EQUAL partners. Yep. That's what we are. The full equal of a country whose standard of living is 172nd out of 196 countries in the world -- that's in the top 99.12 percent! Impressive, in its way.

J