My Back

 Sometimes I say things I wish I hadn’t.

The bad news is that I’m certain now the hip problem is a disc.  Compressed, bulged, slipped, herniated, ruptured -- many possibilities, but all in the same place.  L5-S1.  Where the relevant nerve splits off into the legs.  Not so easy to draw all the evidence together, but now that I have an organizing principle, it comes into focus.  Occasionally two numb toes, index and middle, if that’s the terminology. And the foot gets cold.  Only a few times, but icy.  Pain that’s just hard to isolate.  Sharp pain given specific movements, adduction, coughing.  Now I recognize that the instant pain that coughing when lying down causes is not a pulled muscle, it’s a spasm, the nerve contracting the muscle maximally.  I’ve thought of spasms in terms of the throbbing back pain I’ve had at various points in my life -- this is a different kind.  Overall, muscles tighten up and put pressure on an already stressed area, a nerve bundle impinged by a displaced disc.

But this is also the good news.  Now I can do something about it.  Inversion, anti-inflammatories, hyaluronic acid, various stretches and exercises.  Bought a new mattress, after 11 years.  I’ve had just a thin little pad, really.  Fine for me, don’t need luxury, but it’s pressure on the area now, and that doesn’t help the healing.  Memory foam -- feels like decadence.  BJJ is out for a while, and that’s disappointing.  I only get worse.  Maybe I should actually study it, rather than be so random.  In any case I’m out for a while. 

I am very detrained.  So I’m doing tabatas now, intervals of 20 sec work 10 rest, six rounds right now, four movements. I can row, and I’ll try holds, planks, iron cross, L-sit, handstands.  Situps are out.  Can’t really do kipping chin-ups.  But putting together a plan.  Do what you can do.  It’s not ideal, but it’s ideal for what is possible. 

Causation?  It wasn’t any dynamic movement, not big strength training with poor form.  It was, I believe, a combination of generally poor sitting posture, decades of slumping and slouching with a round back, combined with too vigorous running.  The slouching, distortion of the lumbar spine, predisposed the area, and the running over-stressed it.  I could feel the muscle in question, for many months before the onset of the problem, as a twinge of pain -- but as I ran it went away.  Until it didn’t. 

What I should have been doing is stretches, not big splits and toe-touching, although that too -- rather, small and postural muscles along with the prime movers.  It’s not about dramatic flexibility, it’s about general maintenance, and I’ve neglected that.  And I should have been using inversion, boots or table, as a disciplined and regular practice. 

Word to the wise, son.

The chiropractor helped with the back issue.  It’s gone.  It was a different problem, most likely exacerbated by the way I started to hold myself to compensate for the hip.  Man was I tight.  And it’s nice -- expensive, but nice -- to know I don’t have ebola and cholera and leprosy and bubonic plague and any of those other communicable diseases. 

I’ve even been getting massages, two so far.  Student massages, good price.  Can’t speak to the quality, since I’ve got such limited experience.  So far though, not vigorous enough.  I’m not looking to relax, not looking for pleasure.  I’m looking for therapeutic muscular benefit.  Dig in and wring it out.  I’m told there’s some sort of massage where they stretch you and squeeze you until it’s actually painful.  I want me some of that.  Does it sound like I’m against pleasure and for pain?  Oh sweet child, how wrong you are.  I’m just compartmentalized, goal oriented.  This is where I’d normally make some quip about booty calls, but I’m all alone.  If I want to be touched, to cure my poor pain-wracked flesh, I have to pay.

I took a look at my checking account and was distressed by the drain.  Such is the cost of slouching.  Sit up straight. 

And tuck your shirt in.  You look like a busboy.  

J

My Health

It’s always been virtually perfect, my health, my physical health. Colds once every five years or so, flu back in the early 80s -- nothing else comes to mind. It’s a lifestyle thing, not an amazing constitution. Feed the immune system and it will do its job. No guarantees, just prudence. Floods come, and wipe away whole towns. Not every flood, however, need do that.

 I’ve had a hard few months though. Something exceptional is wrong. I don’t fret, in fact I can be positively bovine in my placidity, but something is wrong. Pain so sharp that my leg gives out under me. Takes a while to stand, sometimes. A pronounced limp. Comes and goes, but staying more and more. So in January I started going to a specialist chiropractor. Good news is that the midback thing appears to be gone. I can feel a tightness, and it makes odd pops and it wants stretching, but the real issue is not recurring, and that’s nice. The right hip is pretty bad, and a few weeks ago there was another new pain in the thigh of the other leg, which is creeping up into the hip tendon. Sup the hell with that?

 It was so bad Friday, both, that I could hardly walk. Then I recalled that the day before the chiropractor had given me some real pain, pushing with his thumb into muscles and tendons, so Friday was a reaction to that -- like a hard workout. Saturday the thigh was better. Complicated? Point is I think it did some good.

 Meantime, although I am not a hypochondriac, I had to think I actually had a disease. I mean, not only not healing, but spreading and getting worse. Sounds like a disease. Went onto WebMD, but that wasn’t at all helpful. I’m not the most responsible person -- irresponsibly neglectful, in fact -- but I went to an MD, and finally, this week, got a whole bunch of tests done.

 They took A LOT of blood. It’s been a few decades since I gave blood, and, well, I wasn’t faint, but I was sweating so much that the lab tech, a Filipino woman of course, had to laugh merrily. I was funny, in my discomfiture. I don’t care much for blood, or needles, and taken together I get pretty queasy. One of the reasons I’m vegetarian. She had a very very very hard time getting through my vein. It was easy to see, easy to find, but she couldn’t get the needle in. I could feel her jabbing and pushing and tugging. Ironic. A little like being raped. Then all that draining. Well, finally done.

 Tested for the more common communicable diseases. Mostly, sadly, STDs. Well, I know, virtually certain, that I don’t have Hep C. But got tested for it. And the last time I had unprotected sex was with my former wife. That’s also the last time I had sex. Understand, I say for clarity’s sake, there is a clintonian precision in my choice of words -- sex is vaginal intercourse -- sexual behavior contrariwise includes a vast panoply of activities. I reserve the right to remain enigmatic as to sexual conduct. I had to ask what some of the tests were -- weird codes or medical jargon. HIV, I don’t know what all. Not only STDs, as I say. Communicables.

 Truth be told, I’ve been preparing to hear that I have AIDS. I woke up not long ago with a rash. Ah, a weakened immune system. And sometimes at night if I breathe deeply I cough. And malaise, unrefreshing sleep, heaviness. Something is wrong. I’d thought the rash was an allergic reaction to some pretty intensive exposure to rubber cement a day or two prior, but eventually I figured out it was related to, uh, athletes foot. A fungus. I had a fungus. Me. Made me feel a little like a syphilitic whore. Point is, my immune system let me down -- didn’t fight it off.

Over $800 worth of tests. I knew perfectly well that I don’t have Hep C. Very expensive test. Ouch. But what am I going to do? Shop around? Operate on hope? Something is wrong.

 So I got a voice mail a few days ago. Knew intuitively that it was the doctor’s office with the results. My understanding from afterschool specials is that they always call you into the office to discuss the results in person. I put off listening to the message until just now. I was wrong. They just came out with it. All tests positive.  So that's good.  Positive is good, right?  Just kidding.  Negative. Negative is the good one.

Not a surprise, not much of a relief. I can prepare for something that I don’t expect to happen. Where would I get HIV? But where would I get any communicable disease. Bumping heads? Stuck with a stray needle? Spittle flying through the air and landing in my eyeball? But I had to rule it out.

 So the hip thing is something else. What disease. Something myalgia. But myalgia is just muscle soreness, and that’s a symptom, not a disease. Given the clear pinched-nerve pain, and an occasional and previously disregarded numbness in two toes of my right foot, I’d have to say it’s a disc impingement.

 So I’ll give the chiropractor one more session, maybe more. Meantime I’ll use the inversion table, and stretch, and I think I’ll have to hold off on any vigorous athleticism -- let any presumed inflammation subside.

This blows. I haven’t spent this much money in my whole life, for sure, on medical specifics. Of course, last time I went to a doctor was in the mid-90s. Makes me very very uncomfortable, blood and needle uncomfortable, spending so much. It’s obamalike. Except it’s my money.

It has prepared me though to be more understanding toward people with real health problems. My body has never failed me before. It’s like being born rich, or with a sane family -- hard to relate to the less fortunate. If it doesn’t get better, I’m crippled. But I’ve looked into how to cure the AIDS I don’t have, so I have a plan on how to fix a disc. I’ve done it before, in fact. We shall see.


J

Time's Up

These things just suggest themselves, somehow.


J

Twattle

Someone recommended this new internet sensation, Twattle.com.  Said it was made for me, or I for it.  We were made for each other, like government goes with tyranny, or empty carbs with masturbation.  Well let me assure you, I am not unfamiliar with Twattle.  I twatt, as we say, all the time.  Constantly on my Blueberry sledging the slope, as we say.  I am one with-it dude.  There's no meaningless flash-in-the-pan fad that I'm not mounted on like Madonna

on a mechanical bull.

So I'm not going to give my name du femme, as we say in French, because that account has my face and full body shot as wallpaper, along with my professional contact info -- I'm a part-time celebrity spokesmodel for something French, and also I have a new reality television program all about my daily adventures, like who it is who's eating the leftovers out of my refrigerator, and I solve the mystery by installing a nannycam behind a strategic hole placed in a full body shot pic of myself in the kitchen.  And then I'm at Starbucks and I use some chick's wifi to remotely view the culprit, and it turns out to be Victoria Principal,

 

my old squeeze from the late '70s.  And then I burst in and confront her, and I'm all, "Dude, what's up with this, you eating my egg salad like that?"  And she's like, "You left me, Jack, you left me holding the bag, for that skanky slut Heather Locklear,

 

and I never forgave you!"  "No! No! It was you! You cheated on me with that preening peacock Lorenzo Lamas

and ain't no way I'm gonna play in his sloppy seconds!" "You bastard! He meant nothing to me, nothing! I was totally coked up at Studio 54

and it just happened!  No man could ever compare to you! You awesome stud with your sexy big organs that turn me on so much!"  "That's right babe, you know it!" I purred sexily, "now put down that tupperware and get your hot bod over here!  Oh, and here's Justin Timberlake

... all the merrier!"  It just gets better from there, so tune in every fourth Monday at 2:55 AM on LogoTV.com, sponsored by MySpace.  Blow your mind, baby.

But re Twattle that whole 144 character thing is a bit constricting, which I don't mind in underwear but my brain must roam free like the wild antelope bounding cross the expansive American plains of the Old West.  Nevertheless, I'll share a few of my deep twatts with you:

• Ever wonder why hot dogs come in packs of 8 but buns come in packs of 10?
• Man, ever notice how bad airplane food is? 
• Did you ever notice that dog is God spelled backwards?  
• Ever notice how people are always on their laptops at Starbucks?

Well, that's all I have so far, it's harder than you'd think, coming up with these brief bone motts as we say in French completely out of my own head and still staying fresh and happening.  But if anyone can, it's me...


J

Odd

I'm still feeling sorry for you, about how you missed that terrific true story about my heroism and saintliness.  Man you're dumb.  In one of the scenes I ride in on a golden Arabian charger and rescue a little girl and a puppy.  It was so awesome.  But you missed it, because I posted it and then took it down because it was too exciting for normal people to be able to handle.  And in another scene I dive a thousand feet to the ocean floor and gather up an unrolled roll of secret film tangled in the sinuous testicles of a giant squid about aliens that will change history and mankind's understanding of himself and his place in the universe.  Sweet.  And I tell it with such power and poise, like an epic poem from the Ancient Classics only in modern and very accessible language, but lofty, it would make you thrill and weep, your heart would leap in your bosom, and you'd finally come to understand a little bit about my noble character and what a total hero and man I am.  And I finally reveal the true nature of evil, and how I and I alone have combated against its invidious effects in our age, but I was overcome in my human frailty but nothing could daunt my mighty spirit, I just had to retreat as even great warriors sometimes must to recover from the unbearable treachery of the cowardly stab in my broad muscular back metaphorically speaking but literal too, the muscular part, not the stab, because I wasn't actually stabbed with a knife, but the psychological effect was even more devastating and would have annihilated a lesser man but nothing can ultimately turn me away from the path of righteous victory.  And that's what you missed, because you were too busy eating empty carbs and masturbating to facebook pictures of your high school crush that you were too much of a wimp to even talk to.

So now that's settled.

It occurred to me that I'd like to see the Super Bowl game, see what the fuss is about, but as my son pointed out, it's a social event, a party thing, and I'm not the sort who invites invitations.  My son observed wryly that he didn't even know the names of the teams. I no longer remember the names of the positions.  This was last year.  Since then, he's decided that there is merit in the sociability of it all, and I have to agree.  My boy is wise.  Some years ago he noticed that I had saved the old bunk beds he'd had as a kid.  He asked why I was keeping them, and I said maybe I'll want to use one.  He smiled and gently observed, "Well, that's not really very adult."  And I had to pause and realize the truth in the statement.  "You're right, it isn't."  I don't seem to be wired quite right.  The other day someone was observing that bjj schools attract some very odd characters.  I wasn't quite privy to the details of the particular story, just caught some tidbits about an odd man out.  But I did peripherally catch that someone nodded in my direction in agreement, about odd characters.  It was a benevolent observation, nothing malign.  Well, yes, I'm odd.  But is it that obvious?  I mean I flay myself to the bone, here, so you may have cause to think I'm strange.  But publicly don't I fake it at least passably?  No.

Now I've decided the hip is not a pinched nerve.  It's too muscular for that -- if I tighten my phenomenal abs it gets activated.  But the back issue has been very good for a couple of days now, and that's pleasing.  I've never had any concerns about my health before.  Unsettling.


J

Jan

The good news is that I believe I've figured out the hip thing.  A disc is impinging on a nerve.  I've been going to a chiropractor slash ART guy -- "active release therapy" -- pushes with his thumb really hard into a muscle while someone moves my limb.  Breaks up the muscle facia.  Well, it's a theory, and I've been at my wits' end. This is truly dispiriting.  The ART hasn't done much -- know a guy who says it cured his running issue, so it was a possibility   Different issue, though, I think.  Not sure about my back, the thing between the shoulder blades, but at least it's not stopping me anymore.  Something new and weird on my other thigh, though, like someone punched me, only no one did.  Thought it was just a bjj thing, but it's been two weeks.

You see my dilemma.  This is no ordinary situation.  I seriously lack energy, and rest is unrefreshing, and I have strange new persistent pains.  I'm not a hypochondriac, but one's imagination does finally get to working.   But I think the hip is a disc thing, cause and effect, wear and tear from starting running again.  So I'll decompress it and see what happens.  It's important to feel that there's something one can do.

Rolling with some talented white belts.  Man I suck.  I need to train regularly or I regress, fall back on instinct.  Had  a guy in a triangle and just couldn't think it through.  World's worst brown belt.  Embarrassing.  I can fake it with novices, but I don't want to fake it.  If I rolled with someone my size and belt, I'd get killed.  Train train train, and I just can't, much of the time now.

I've had some time now to get some perspective, re my former boys.  Sort of tore open old wounds, finding them, online, the way I did.  Well, the whole story is out now.  Oh, you missed it? Well, I posted it,  the denouement, the Hamlet-like pseudo-climax -- my exciting adventure about Jason's final betrayal and what happened afterwards.  So sad, you missing it like that.  You should be a more faithful reader of these pages.  Now you'll never know.  I use my anguish to amuse you, and you repay my vulnerability with indifference.

Obama?  Nothing to say.  He is my, dare I say it, whipping boy.  It's either that, or think about God, and futility, and loneliness.  Allow me my indulgences.  It means nothing.


J

Unnogurination Day for The Occupant of the Benighted State of Newmerica

No, not Elephants on Parade. Rather, The Teddy Bears Have Their Picnic.  Give them their day.  Like Satanists and Nazis and child molesters and traitors, they think they're right.  And, like Darth Vader, from their point of view they are.  America is just another country, but bad because it has misused power. Did I mischaracterize anything there?

Really, one of the worst, most eyebrow raising speeches I've ever heard.  What a hack.  Incredible cynicism.  Did you catch it?  Did you hear? He was actually, literally  barefacedly imitating the actual speech patterns of MLK.  That's all I have to say about that.

With the confirmation of Obamaism, I have lost faith with America.  It has lost faith with me.  America, by which is meant the voting majority, is a whore.  So many whores in my life.  This is to say nothing at all.  Every country is a whore.  The difference is that, of all countries, harsh reality aside, it is America that has had, up until this time, the best mythology.  We had the best aspirations, the most noble creation myth, the highest benevolence and idealism.  Doesn't matter whether or not we were right.  No one is good.  We tried to be good -- not as a government, but as a people.  Now, by rejecting our myth, we've made it into a lie.  Just another country, with citizens, or occupiers, migrants, exercising the tyranny of the majority, confiscating the wealth of the wealthy and of the future.  Not just like any other country, then.  Worse.

Gun control is the most current distraction from the real issue of incorrigible spending and debt.  Look, stupid, something shiny!  The Second Amendment is there to protect the First. It’s not about hunting, sport, or crime. It’s a check and balance against the Government. The Second Amendment is military. Of course the Founders didn’t anticipate fully automatic assault rifles, not for citizens and not for soldiers. They didn’t anticipate a permanent standing army, either.  What they knew was that whatever soldiers have access to, so with civilians -- citizen soldiers. If the government neglects to regulate a militia, that does not remove the right of citizens to arm themselves. Such is my thinking on the matter. Not mainstream, but accurate.

 If an oppressive government takes over -- or continues to grow -- and armed agents under color of law are sent to destroy liberty (read, The Constitution) ... do citizens have the right to fight back?  If self-defense is not an absolute right, there is no such thing.  It’s not a matter of law -- rules that entrenched apparatchiks decide they want -- but of Natural Law, which is the very authority that allowed the Colonies to seize independence from the Crown. Which rebellion was unlawful, under British law. But not unlawful. Simple. It may very well be that the Confederate states had a right to secede. They did not have the power. The Second Amendment takes at least a faltering step in the direction of throwing off a Despotic Federal Regime -- you know, one that seeks to rule by Executive Order.

 Ah well. Theory about how things should be can make you crazy. My theory is that voting should be tied to owning property -- as has been the case throughout history.  Voters need to be citizens, who are vested in the best long-term general welfare.  Words like comity and commonweal and probity come to mind.  My reasoning is that, if the indigent and idle poor can vote, they will vote higher taxes that go to themselves.  Killing the Golden Goose. Under other circumstances this would be called charity, but, per the dominant Leftist ethos, charity steals dignity. I don’t think anyone under age 25 should vote ... isn’t that the case in Switzerland? – or used to be?  Immature opinions do not improve in quality just because they constitute a significant power block. I could defend these theories much more rigorously, but couldn’t be bothered. Just write me off as a reactionary crank.

 Here’s what I thought when I was listening to the radio news, about French protests re gay marriage. The spin is that gays want equal rights. The obvious answer is that they have equal rights – they can marry any legally consenting oppsex adult. (Yet another new word from Your Humble Author.) What I realized is that gamarriagists want not equal but extra rights. They want to be able to marry twice as many people as otherwise. One might say hetero won’t marry same sex and homo won’t marry opposite, so it evens out. But that’s the case now. No one can marry just anyone they want -- can’t marry your closest blood relatives, or the currently-married, or the underaged or those who cannot give consent, or animals or corpses. The matter is clear. It’s impolite to point it out, but the moral clarity is questionable of people who think the anus is a sexual organ.

Charles Krauthammer, brilliant in his brevity, answers those who think a Republican House can impose its will: "The country chose Obama.  He gets four years."  Four more years.  This is the reality.  We, the collective, the Collective we of Post-America,  Neo-America, The Collective State of Newmerica, Wemerica, somebody stop me, have spoken with the voice of Democracy.

Now we can see, finally, why there have been so few democracies in history.  Churchill was wrong -- this is not the worst form of government, except for all the others.  It's as bad as any other.  It's the people that make a country great, and we have changed.  We call back to Ancient Greece, the democracy of Athens, and its decent into tyranny.  They abandoned old principles, myths, for short-term answers and pragmatism.  Sweet child, haven't you been listening?  We're like a craftily plotted novel -- echoing both Ancient and Modern Greece.  At least decadent Rome had the excuse of barbarian invasion.  Took them 400 years.  We're doing it in 50.


J

Regret

I realize now that God does not carefully guard those for whom he hears no prayer.  We hand them over to God and trust they will or may grow into honorable men.  They won't.  I think that God is blind, I think he simply cannot see those upon whom prayer does not shed light.  He sees only those who are foreordained, and those others who are blessed by the blessings we ourselves give them.  If God could look upon the damned, and do nothing, would he be good?  Hell is where the damned cannot see God, and he cannot see them.  But they never saw each other during life, either.  It's just a thought.  A possibility -- God after all is not all-powerful.  He can do only what is possible.

I prayed.  But inadequately.  Insufficient fervor.  Not hysterical enough.  God heard but did not understand.  My faith was not that of a small child -- not moronic enough.

I hadn't realized, hadn't stopped to think about how much time has passed.  I saw Joey only in memory, the young boy he had been, and I understood he had grown into a man, but I could not see it.  A failure of imagination, but practical -- I should not torment myself with the unknowable.  The unsettling fact is that he has not changed at all.  The child is father to the man.  Then it was squandering every discretionary penny on pokemon and pogs.  Now it is hookups for threesomes with lesbians.  Just having fun.

Of course I was never meant to see that, such a truthful expression of sexual interests.  Then again, I can have no real expectation that I am even remembered, or that my disappointment could act as an inhibitor of dishonorable behavior.  Just some guy who was in charge for a while, making kids do extra homework.

Well, I'm a little screwed up sexually anyway. Here I am, with an aggressive sexual appetite,  almost completely suppressed.  I manage it at the cost of near-total disassociation from my body.  No perversions or fetishes, but I'm delicate and not getting more open, more trusting as the years pass. It may be morally correct, but it's not healthy.  A life charted for still waters.  So when I get intimations of those I care about acting in a sexually profligate manner, it distresses me.  There's a right way of conducting oneself.  I seem to be almost alone in thinking this.

He's employed, and has stated- if not pursued-goals, and finished high school and went to college.  But he seems not, from my web gleanings, to be the man I would have wished him to be.  I find no pride here, after my however-many years of hands-on training.  What real good, lasting, did I do.  God may be pleased by our futile strivings to do right, but we need more than rewards in heaven.  Maybe it's a delayed gratification thing?  Work motivated by only a promised blessing.  Who needs motivation, when you have faith.

I called him Joe.  He wrote his name as Joseph.  But he chose I see to be Joey again, the silly, sweet, undisciplined pleasure-seeker, a true child of his earliest upbringing, the product of utterly incompetent and passively malevolent adults, mother such as it was -- I have no words hateful enough to describe her -- grandparents who tolerated/practiced incest.

As for Jason, I might have loved him most.  He certainly needed it. But it is as should be expected.  I cannot imagine this assault would be his first criminal offense.   He came back into my home, aimed like a poisoned dart, to destroy it, and he did.  "At least I got Joey away from you."  Why would the man be different than the boy?  Please, be logical.

These are people I have loved.  I wish I never did.  But I did.  And being me, unteachable for all my acumen, I will say, with words, that I love them still. Knowing me, as the complete fool that I am, it's true.  I feel alone, I feel abandoned, but what am I to expect.  I isolate myself, and accept no comfort.  These boys ... well, men, likewise have rejected a right course.  It is an error shared between us, differing only in quality, not quantity.

Uncertainty allowed hope.  Of course there's hope still, hope in miracles, but it's the kind that disregards present reality. This is very hard on me.  Very hard.  Harder than a prolonged and silent death.  All things considered, it would be better if I had not looked.


J

Wake

We watch our sons grow, and hope and work for the best, but it’s like the weather -- you make plans, and then it’s out of your control. I watched my son grow and mature, and when he was very little I was secretly a bit disquieted by how unexceptional he was. Bright and healthy, and a joy to me, honest, kind, but just the vocabulary of a regular kid. I’d use words he didn’t understand, and I’d think, why doesn’t he understand that? -- this is how I talk. But I didn’t press him. We want our sons to be taller than we are, and stronger, and smarter. Well, I did, and you do -- not the case with my own father, but that’s a different story.  Most, however, we want them to be useful and honorable men.  To find what is worthy of respect is a duty, and privileged, and pleasure.

 I went online and searched my boys’ names, my lost boys. I've done this every few years.  Now maybe I found one of them in Fresno -- right age, right name, went to a high school that’s a most likely possibility.  Brown hair, blue eyes, six-three -- check, check, and makes sense.  Inferentially, the right zodiacal sign.  Dim memory confirms the name of a younger brother, now a "stoner".  Involved in video game design, reportedly, which could work -- my boy wanted to design robots.  Went to a state college. Says he's an artist and writer -- ungrammatical, sadly. Says he's the most truthful person you'd ever meet -- ask him anything.

Several pictures, on various sites.  It might be him. This was the boy who -- when he was nine, and just come to me, out of the vast orphanage group home -- lay in a crumple and cried at night because he could not remember his mother’s face. The one who tried to kill him by taking him onto a freeway -- I mean, walking and pushing. The crack whore, seven kids by six different men, who abandoned him to the institution when he was four. And here I am, not sure that I recognize his face. Well, I'm not good with faces, and it’s been half his lifetime since last I saw him, pubescent. It might be him.

Has a son, but doesn't want to talk about it on facebook.  Works in a game store, smokes a lot. "Buddhist." Sometimes silly, sometimes shy.  Just wants "to have fun".  Entered on several sex hookup sites under a user name.  He's looking for "some fun" with two lesbians. Fetishes: tattoos and role play; likes "doggy style" and group sex ("Orgy and/or Gang Bang"). The internet forgives nothing.

But yes, it's him. Growing conviction re the picture.  And I just found the birthday.  I have no plans on initiating a facebook contact -- "poke"?

And I definitely found the other one. Full tripartite name, date of birth. Charged with a felony in another county -- assault with a deadly weapon, other than firearm, with great bodily injury ... carries up to a four year prison term.  Well, he pulled a knife on me once.  He's grown an inch and gained 50 pounds -- heavier than me now. I have to expect that it’s fat. No mug shot. He’ll be 30 in August.

I don’t know what I feel. It’s too buried. All I have available is platitudes, with which to soothe myself? I expect I saved their lives, somehow. I taught the one to read, and brought him up 5 math levels in three months. Seems like necessary preparation for designing video games, or robots.  At least he finished high school, and perhaps college.  The other one, I just don’t know.  At least he's still alive, or was in May of 2012.  But I was steady, and calm, and unflagging in my dedication. I loved them and they knew it. Love is not enough, of course. It’s like weather -- sometimes it brings catastrophe.

I have written in sand.

Getting some painting done, and some cleaning, etc.  Gonna work through the night.  I think of many interesting things.  I should write them down.

Ah.  Here it comes.


J

Boom

I've been in intermittent and semi-debilitating pain since October.  Finally made a chiropractor apt, but it was for two weeks away, which ends tomorrow.  See if he can crack my spine into place.  I frankly expect to feel good, for a little bit, and then it goes back to what it knows.  So that would not be a solution.  Don't want to be negative though.

Got some building inspector issues going on, which is disquieting and fretsome.  It's not so much worry.  I've had real catastrophes, so I've learned some equilibrium.  But life has not increased my innate optimism.  Barely even supporting it. Neither can I sustain a belief in Americanism, the American spirit, American exceptionalism.  That has been voted out of office.  Yet another cause for mourning.

My observation is that it takes a certain, call it European mindset, to want to work for the government, as a bureaucrat.  Not an entirely fair statement, but understandable when we consider the alternative to government work, which would be private business.  The latter, well, that's American ... old-school American.  Authentic American, like some jive talking gangstah is authentically black.  Was that gratuitous?  Some less confrontational example might have been adduced?  Call in an artifact of my new-found enlightenment.

There never was an America, of course.  It's always been a myth, the way Aryanism was a Nazi mythic identity.  Only ours was for good.  Ah well.  When the god Pan died, all the Classical pagan world fell to grieving.  Oh, you don't know that story?  It's in Plutarch.  A divine voice announced it over the waters.  So, weep for Pan for he is dead.

As is my wont, I've given some thought to Hell.  I think it's just a place, as it were, a state of being, entirely outside the presence of God.  A place of complete futility and utter meaninglessness.  Not a place of active torment.  A place to spend eternity, alone with your thoughts. The Outer Darkness.  Hell.  The Lake of Fire is clearly a more dynamic image.  I take it as applying solely to the fallen, the damned angels. A different fate for a different order of being. I haven't done a study of this -- just working from memory.  Gehenna, where the worm does not die nor the fire go out -- this is the fate of most humans, but it's not literal.  ;Hell as Gehenna is the Valley of Hinnom, the city dump outside of Jerusalem.  You know, where garbage went, some burned, some wormed, but the point is just to get rid of it.  That's human damnation. Out of my sight.  Once out of sight, God gives no more thought to it, for punishment, any more than he gives thought to the sins of those who are forgiven.  Heaven is fulfilling work.  Hell is eternal futility.

Pretty good, eh?  Thought of it myself.

For reasons of my own, I've been dipping far back into these pages again.  I don't remember most of what I've written here. But man, I'm good.  There must have been a few years there where I was literally inspired.  What a waste.

So it turns out that God would rather have America come to an end, than have a Mormon President.  Better the hypocritical lipservice of a false and nominal Christian (not a secret Moslem), than a good man who denies and changes the nature of Jesus Christ (as the Mormons do -- spirit brother of Lucifer).  For all that Jesus rebuked the hypocrites, it is they who make the world go round just as much as the spiritually just.  Good works, after all, are good works.

Jonah preached repentance in the avenues of Nineveh, and that vile empire was granted another 40 years.  We need a 4th Great Awakening.  Or we need 2nd 9-11.  Here's my sad, grim, almost traitorous prediction:  Washington DC will be nuked with a dirty bomb.  Silly-time needs to be over, and no small rebuke will do.  If God cares for America, he will punish it.  I don't want it.  I don't know if I even expect it.  But the Prodigal is comfortable with his pigs, no self-loathing at all, no repenting of himself.  If the Father loves him, no more time will be spent waiting at the gate, gazing forlornly down the road, a tear in his heart.  America, stupid lazy corrupt betraying America, needs a father who comes marching with angry strides down the road, braiding together leather cords into a whip.  Boom.

Thank you, Allah and your disciples, for recalling to our minds that America loves God.


J

Cremati

If we don't savor and cherish the joyful moments of our lives, we have no justification in mourning for our loses.  Oh sure, this is good, but something bad will happen later.  Might as well say, Yes this is sad, but I'll be happy later.  It's not a zero sum game.  It's not about keeping score. There is no logic to it.  Life is greater than the sum of its moments.  The meaning of life is the meaning we bring to it.  A morbid and melancholy temperament will draw an utterly opposite meaning from the same event as would a brighter soul.

There is much that will remain unsaid.  Some truths I would write only under the guise of fiction.  But there was a question as to whether or not Monty will have a memorial service.  There will be one, even if I'm the only one there.  We are a strange tribe, but there is common decency, and it is simply not civilized to allow a life to evaporate with hardly any notice at all.  Some people die softly, but this does not mean their lives have been invisible.

I have no authority to speak to the disposition of Monty's remains.  I would cremate, but his body has been donated to science.  My mother has provided that the same should be done with her body.  This is a wish that will not be honored.  Med students have enough bodies to dissect, and if they don't, that's not my lookout -- I consider that my duty lies elsewhere.  I'm not sentimental, but the thought of my loved ones' bloating cold corpses spread casually on some stainless steel tabletop while prodding grad students chitchat about this and that -- I'm not going to have it.  My expectation is that she made such plans to avoid fuss.  I, barely equipped to handle the bother of daily life, will yet summon the fortitude to telephone a funeral director and end up with at least the monument of an urn. Ashes are for scattering to the wind.  Ashes, not lives.


J

Dec 27

So much death in the world, and so much of it by choice. It’s like people don’t know how serious it is. They haven’t apprehended the meaning of life, have a wrong theory about what it’s about, and waste it, their opportunities, and those of others, forever. It would all be easier -- not better, but easier -- if there were no God. How nice that would be, aside from the unchecked barbarism. In that magical universe, where things happen for no reason, created by itself out of nothing, self-organizing, just simply magical, there would be no ultimate accountability. Every life would end in nothingness, the candle out and no more light, ever, from it. Only the universe, somehow, would go on, self-sustaining, magical. How nice, to get away with every assertion of willfulness, every undiscovered crime, with everyone getting the same reward slash punishment in the end. I really do think that would be preferable. Life, you see, for all of its value, is unjoyful to me, like a miser’s gold.

Much of what I write in these pages is nonsense. I’m not really like this. Here is where I vent and blow and indulge opinion that I would rarely share, and then only either as a lack of self-control, or to a good friend. But artificial though this be, it is necessary to me -- not the internet broadcasting, that’s just a self-indulgence, but the formulation of feeling via words into thought. So.

I’d known my stepfather since I was a teenager, over 35 years now. But the past tense comes easily, given his long decline over these past few years. He died today. Can’t say it was unexpected. A great unexpressed sadness, but I’m stuck right now, and not feeling it. I have tears, but they do not flow. That is not a metaphor. I write this with long pauses, upwellings of some emotion too inconsistent to be grief. Yet. Forgive me my isolation.

 As much as we can know of anyone else, I think he was saved, as we Christians say. I’m always a bit skeptical, but it’s not my business. There are three options: oblivion, hell, or paradise. Reincarnation is absurd. I don’t believe in oblivion, and hell is unthinkable. What am I to trust in, here? Not in God’s goodness. That is what it is. I have to believe that my stepfather believed, sufficiently. Because I am a skeptical man, I find little comfort here. So I won’t think about it.

Heart attack, apparently, bedridden and sudden. Seventy-two years old, and old before his time. He was a very simple man, hard working, could hardly read and never did. A small town Illinois way of speaking. He stamped his feet when he laughed. It endeared him to me. Here’s the thing that sums up his life, and my love for him. He was born with a deformity, so his left arm was permanently stuck raised up over his head. A surgery corrected it when he was seven. His mother hated him, literally. I won’t go into the abuse. Not a good woman.

 He was my very good friend, and kind and generous to me when my various calamities fell. I lived in his house for over a year when I got back from Australia -- finishing my BA and preparing for manhood. I am pleased to believe that he knew I loved him. I think he was a better man than I am.

 His name was Monty.


 J

Safe

Christmas Day and I'm doing a little cleaning. Some construction, dilatory of course, is going on and one must keep down the dust.  Got another new wetvac, the last one was faulty, and it's a pleasure to see the floor get actually wet and then sucked.  That's what she said.  Gotta expect contractors to go slow over these holiday days, but I get a tad fretful.

Went to church, a church, for the first time in, oh, 12 years.  Is a "christening" the same as a baptism?  It's the first of that nature I've been to.  And I was at my own baptism, twice.  Lutherans  (took me about 8 tries to spell that right) do infant baptism, and of course an old-time Scandinavian like me was raised Lutheran.  Christmas Eve was present-opening time.  Objectively, that does make more sense.  Now I don't even bother.  (Just texted my son.)  Second time as an adult, over twenty years ago now.  I've been wayward.  The sect I identified with, and still do, if I were to, did adult baptism -- it is after all a conscious decision -- and infant dedication.  In either case, of infant "baptism" or dedication, it has to be about the adults.  I took my own son down to the dam and "baptized" him, because even then I had a sense of what it was about.

A Methodist ceremony, this Sunday.  Not as liturgical as Lutheran, but very, uh, methodical.  There was a call and response prayer, that I read but could not speak outloud.  It was a promise to do things, be holy, be Christian, in a way that I with my dark heart could not commit to.  Made me very sad, to face how far I've wandered.

Held a baby for the first time in decades. The pastor, a Korean woman, while she was officiating held up the baby but did not support the head.  Not a mother, I'm guessing.  I was chanting to myself, hold the head hold the head, and some matron in the congregation actually called it out.  Later I got buttonholed by a too-friendly fella who wanted to talk about history and global warming.    Well, at least it's something to do -- I'm not good just standing around with strangers.  The pastor's sermon did not have one word of actual Bible teaching.  If they don't preach the Bible, they're just making a speech.

So.  There are people you like, people you love, someone to call when you need help, someone to ask advice of, confide in.  What is the world, life, but memory and phenomena, experience and interpretation.  Life is crowded not with objects but with relationships, large or small, many or few, but filled.

The most recent media monster set a fire then murdered the responders and killed himself. Bang bang. Years ago he'd hammered his grandmother to death, yesterday he killed his sister.  Left a note that talked about burning down the neighborhood the way he liked to do, something like that.  He saw himself as elemental, a force to be reckoned with.  Fearsome, powerful.  Unstoppable will.  Not at all pathetic or contemptible.

Whether it's Beslan, with hundreds of young children blown to bits by terrorists, or a lone gunman in a kindergarten classroom -- an atrocity precisely one order of magnitude less horrific, statistically -- well, life is not safe.  Some people don't want to be hurt, and it controls them.  Some people want to hurt others.  You think this is a too-obvious observation?  It is the secret of existence.

The great lesson and error of my life is about how painful love can be.  The error is that I'm afraid, now, to love.  Ho hum.  It's going to be a very long day tomorrow, and I'm not going to be able to sleep.


J

Presto

I don’t like it when people hostile to me are right. My wife, my father. She was going to a psychologist, a therapist, oh, 20 years ago, when we were still technically married. I think it was Carl Faber, well-known, a mythology guy -- used to hear him on KPFK, the gay communist Pacifica station -- quite eloquent and passionate, died sometime in the mid-nineties -- just looked it up … thought he’d killed himself, but it was cancer. Using the evidence of my wife’s testimony, he concluded that I, her estranged and unloved husband, “wanted to be taken care of.” So she triumphantly informed me, as a trump in her on-going suit against me and my failure as a man and husband.  I was scandalized at the breach of professional ethics, to diagnose the husband of a client based solely on one-sided evidence. He must have uncritically swallowed her side of the story. Seems naive.

 I would never have admitted it to her, but he was right. I did want to be taken care of. What she didn’t ever see, and so could not have communicated in her rants and complains about me, and men, was that I also wanted to take care of her. I wanted us to take care of each other. Seems like what a marriage is supposed to be. I wasn’t good at it, broken vessel that I was, but I find myself right now needing to believe that people who get to know me see that I am highly motivated to help -- a weak word, but it will have to do. It wasn’t any different then. I wanted her to be happy, and tried in my frankly clumsy way.

These past few days I’ve been mulling over a memory, about how, in the early days of my marriage, in Australia, we visited some friends of hers who’d just had a baby. I saw the baby and laughed, and said in my loud gauche American voice that it looked like Uncle Fester. Now, 25 years and more later, I am astounded at what a fool I have been. How the parents refrained from slapping my face I don’t know. How they must have hated me. And I simply, blithely, didn’t get it. Had I been slapped, I would have been outraged. You see how unprepared I was for the adult world.

Aside from the usual, I married her, largely, because we both believed she had healing powers. I was sort of New Age in those days. She had no healing powers, which fact must have fed her hostility towards me. Turns out I was more insightful than she was, for all my profound blindness. But intuition and lack of trust may in this case have been the same thing.

 Some other time, between these two events, in the early nineties, when I was trying again to have a relationship with my father, he, out of the blue, for no discernible reason, told me in a tone that brooked no disagreement that I did not like myself very much. This was just another criticism from him, disguised, and I had the wherewithal, no longer being a vulnerable child, to respond that, no, it wasn’t that I didn’t like myself, it was that he didn’t like me. “Oh, no, I like you.” “Right, so you, who don’t know me very well, you like me -- but I, who know myself really well, dislike myself.”

 Problem is, he was right. I didn’t like myself very much. Still don’t. The other problem is that he didn’t like me either. I mean, some other occasion, occasions, he told me in those very words. Thrice, as I vividly recall. “I have to love you, because you’re my son, but I don’t. Have. To like you.” Once when I was a teenager, again in my twenties, and then in my thirties. I’d forget it if I could. Like I’d forget the Uncle Fester thing. But such memories burn. One of the things I don’t like about myself.

 We are what we are made to be. I was raised to dislike myself. Something about no-win situations, about constant criticism and hypocrisy. Double-binds can make you crazy. I’m only neurotic, and someone else’s craziness made me pretty good at resolving contradictions. Free will and election aren’t all that hard for me. I’m good with meta-solutions. I understand terrorism, fanaticism, mass murder. I understand evil, as much as is possible without submerging oneself in it. It’s just a matter of thinking you’re right. That’s milk to me, wrong people who think they’re right.

 So tonight someone I’ve known for some years offered to fix my back -- just a few quick pushes between the shoulder blades. Well, I’d have to be crazy to pass up a chance like that. And indeed, a few things popped into place -- not vertebrae, but some sort of muscular stuff. Not fixed, but it is significantly better, enough to lighten my mood. Couldn’t expect anyone to start digging in on what I euphemistically call the hip thing -- it’s really deep in my right glute. It’s so bad it spasms if I sneeze. Last month I needed a cane … didn’t get one, but I needed one. It’s not touching I mind, it's vulnerability, which is another word for intimacy, also known as trust. See? It all ties together! Specifically in the fact that I have the phone number of a recommended chiropractor, but, in love as I am with my pain, I may delay indefinitely setting up an appointment.

 I want to be taken care of. But I don’t like myself very much. One of those paradoxes I’m so good at accommodating.

 I hope you appreciate how skillfully I pulled all that together. For something free you found on the internet, you’re really getting something special. So sad that you don’t like me more.

 This latest school murder-spree atrocity, I said my piece on it. Here’s something to ponder -- call it a party game: which is more evil, what happened Friday, 20 little ones killed all at once, or this same killer, killing 20 little children, only just one, every six months or so over a ten year span? And then he kills himself. Sudden magnitude and national grief on the one hand, isolated family doubt and loss on the other. Posing it thus, it’s just another clueless and insensitive blurt from me. I don’t mean to be glib. My point is, how is this current spree less evil than serial killing? He was crazy only briefly, albeit monstrously. Had his life been longer and the number of his murders the same but wiped over more of the calendar, would the pundits be calling him “troubled”?

 Please note that I was exactly right about him -- living in a basement playing death video games. No word yet on the pornography. Do not let people who are highly interested in actual guns spend all their time alone with kill games. Not good parenting. Good parenting is patient, clear, firm, consistent, supportive, affectionate. I admired my son, and didn’t keep it a secret. I took joy in him. He valued my approval so much, that he earned it. I like myself as a father very much indeed.


J

Web

The best and most fantastic thing about Obama's reelection is that now I can be so very much more agreeable.  In the old, BO days, Before Obama, when the Lefties were unceasingly asserting how bad America and Americans were, selfish and greedy and fat and stupid, I would hasten to correct them, saying they meant humans, not Americans.  I will no longer be asserting that point.  Now Americans have clarified and affirmed their stupidity and laziness and stupidness and greed and stupidosity and incompetence and stupiditude.

Every now and again I find myself saying, outloud, whether I'm alone or in public, in an exaggerated hayseed backwoods voice, Mahyjuk buhynz?!  Were kin Ah git me sum uv theym mahyjuk buhynz!?!   We've just traded all our pigs for some of them magic beans -- I mean, they're magic!  So I can agree with the Lefties.  It's not even a compromise.  I'm on their side.  I've been converted.  Americans are the stupidest.  America is the stupidest.

Aside from the macro destruction, slow but inexorable like the progression of ice age glaciation, we have the localized insanity, today, of a massacre at a Connecticut elementary school.  There simply are no words for it.  An entire classroom of kindergarten children murdered.  The killer first murdered his father -- perhaps, speculatively, I won't bother to corroborate this -- in New Jersey, then transported himself to his mother's hometown and murdered her in her home, then went to the school where she taught and murdered her little students.

The murderer was dressed all in black.  Some official, or a talking head, or talking mouth on the radio, characterized the killer as "troubled."  He didn't seem to have much trouble.  Euphemisms.  Well, as I said, words cannot suffice.  No word or words will do.  Scum, garbage, monster ... "shooter", etc.  Meaningless in their inadequacy.  There is no consolation, no justice, no explanation or understanding.  There is only the inevitability of Hell -- the purpose for which God made it.  Had the killer not killed himself, the only appropriate response would be summary execution, first armed man on the scene puts a bullet into his head, no goodbyes, no speeches.  Mad dogs need to be put down.  Isn't it a shame that there are mad dogs.  Tsk tsk.  But kill them.

Dressed all in black.  He wanted to be scary, see.  All those tens of thousands of hours he had spent playing video games, kill games -- the concrete fantasy he had constructed in his mind, the sexual emotion power terror of it all.  Kewl.

The Lefties, who have been proven right by the recent Revolution, will of course be right in their triumphant calls for gun control.  I think this will do it, actually.  The next big thing.  Save the children -- not repeal but ignore the Second Amendment -- just a scrap of paper.  First Term, ObamaCare; Second Term, SaveTheChildren.  It's obvious.  So my idea, of banning killgames -- it's a nonstarter.  Guns, not murderers, slaughter kindergarten classrooms.  It would be unconstitutional to ban killgames.  Free speech.  First Amendment.  The Constitution rules, and never mind any apparent inconsistencies contained within this paragraph.  You need to get your head right with Obama.  It's a New Age.

You notice I have not spoken of grief.  Did I not say there were no words? I have no emotion.  This is the way the world is.  It's the new normal.  I'm not being my usual sarcastic insensitive self when I say we can expect more of this.  We are the terrorist islamists now, who want to destroy our civilization.  We stupid stupid stupid worthless scum Americans, who see what is good and innocent and sweet and kind and generous, and are impelled to hate and destroy it.  I expected the onset of the Tribulation to be more obvious in its religious nature.  Turns out to be a lack of religion that set it a-going.  Islamism doesn't count -- it is on the outside, and cancer is what will get us.  The islamist can sit out this Jihad -- we'll do the job ourselves.

The killer is reported to have been developmentally challenged, Asperger's perhaps, an A student, Honors, with no interpersonal skills at all, always alone, didn't appear in the school yearbook, pencils in his pocket, walked with his hands straight at his sides.  Mother said to be very attentive.  Very clean house.  Highly involved with her kids.

So something like 20 little coffins, and a few adult-sized ones, will be the most recent monument to our culture, where regardless of reports to the contrary I believe adolescents are left alone in their rooms to drive themselves mad with videogames and web pornography, while not one single adult makes more than one single effort to intervene, intercede, rescue, pray for, this lost indifferent poisoned desperate and degenerate generation, whatever its trendy denomination, Gen Y, Gen Mill, Gen Nil.

That's all.


J

MH

A few minutes ago I picked up the voice mail, two actually, left hours apart but containing precisely the same information. Left this morning? I don’t know, there’s no time signature on the messages. The battery went dead, maybe yesterday, and I just plugged it in. My step father has been moved to hospice care. The decision has been made. In his next crisis, no meaningful measures to save his life will be taken. Meantime, his pain medications will be increased and attempts made to keep him comfortable.

It took a few minutes for sadness to overtake me. At first, and for a time, nothing, just acknowledging, absorbing, processing the information. I was asked to pray in the messages, and I wondered then, and afterwards, pray for what? That he become healthy? That he live forever? A miracle? I had no answer. Pray for what. And just now I figured it out, guessed, the right answer to the riddle. Pray for peace, peacefulness, acceptance. Prayer doesn’t change the external world. It changes minds. Apparently. 

Very softly, like the onset of trembling, I started to weep, slow, quiet, as a hesitation. Alone, but I covered my face. Not loud. Very soft. A dear man, that I have loved, and who I think loved me.

Incomprehensible.


 J

Neo-Con

There are such things as neo-Confederates. Lots of states rights, I imagine, which I'm all for, but no doubt a lot of Lincoln-hatred as well, and that’s a deal breaker. Lincoln is my favorite. I know someone who’s expressing an interest in Jefferson. Jefferson holds no great interest for me. A bright guy, very bright, talented, creative, curious and accomplished. Complicated. But just another second-tier intellect, and morally unimpressive. Not hero-material. Lincoln exhibited a breathtaking wisdom. So any contemporary movement no matter how sound in some of its precepts, that is too obtuse or biased to recognize greatness -- not my thing.

Otherwise I might now have started calling myself a neo-Confederate. Not in its Slave Power aspect. In its rebellion against, in the modern case, growing tyranny (rather than in the Civil War over-reaction to Lincoln’s election, and a loathsome love of individual tyranny, over slaves.) Was that a confusing sentence? The current Federal government is doing now what the old-time Confederates falsely accused Lincoln’s USA of doing. You don’t see it yet.

So while it will of course never happen, I am not  -- ill-thought-out though my idea is -- inclined now to argue strongly against the dissolution of the Current Union, into something more along confederated lines. A closely allied body of semi-dependent states, sharing a universal Constitution which oversees general rights, border security and national defense. In other words, what the current Constitution was designed to secure.

The Framers were shrewd men, not idealists. Franklin placidly concluded that every republic throughout history becomes a tyranny.  George Mason, per Madison’s notes said the government of the Constitution would start as “a moderate aristocracy” but it was at that time “impossible to foresee whether it will, in its operation, produce a monarchy, or a corrupt, tyrannical aristocracy. It will most probably vibrate for some years between the two, and then terminate in the one or the other.” I think we’ve been vibrating for just about long enough. Aristocracy isn’t an American word, but we sure do hear a lot of talk about the elite. These next few years will reveal whether or not we really do get an Imperial Presidency. Every Third World pathocracy calls its dictator a President -- maybe that’s what the word really means now. We shall see.

I was having a conversation, or a monologue, the other night, just a few words really, didn’t want to get all agitated and impose my rather narrow views on a tolerant confidant.  I made a few assertions about how stupid Americans were and how we needed more immigrants, hard-working, who come here to prosper and contribute -- you know, like how it used to be -- to save us from ourselves and our stupidity and decadence. You see why I’d be reluctant to go on like that, outloud I mean, rather than here, in the harmless pages of my little secret garden of nettles and weeds.

 The teens I used to teach who were fresh from Mexico were well-mannered and respectful; their classmates who had been here for a few years and had become Americanized were lazy smartass morons -- you know, American. We expect teenagers to be teenagers. We also expect them to engage in that normal level of pretense and hypocrisy, called good manners, that allows civilization to continue existing.

 Why does it bother me, our current trajectory? Politics is my spectator sport. Like football, which is not my spectator sport. But similar. Not the same, though, for a number of reasons. For all that there may be cheating, and corruption in sports, a payed-off player, a biased ref, the whole game is out there for everyone to see. In politics, often, the loser wins. The lesser man, the incompetent, the foolish, the delusional, the destructive. Can win. Hence the emotion and outrage, in this case, from me. It’s not just a game. The outcome sets the course, and there are real consequences, not only statistical in nature.

 The world has never been good, and America was not better in the past than it is now. The rich always buy influence, subvert politicians and process. Of course. The difference is not in human nature. It’s in the erosion of our institutions. The checks and balances of the Constitution are ignored and distorted, through the accretion of tradition, like Roman Catholicism or Rabbinal Judaism (sorry, if that’s your thing), at the expense of the meaning of the original document.

Nothing lives forever.

My hip thing is better tonight.  Took half an aspirin earlier, so maybe I'm living in a fool's paradise.  Well of course I am.  But the pain in my back is pretty bad.  Someone gripped my shoulder this evening and it just informed me how seriously I need some sort of chiropractic manipulation, or something.  I finally managed to get the number of someone who's recommended.  We shall see if I do anything about it.  I do seem to be in love with my pain.

It occurs to me every once in a while, not as often as you might suppose, that I am a very strange guy.  I was honed in on someone today, giving information about some particular topic of mutual interest, and when I do that I completely tune out the rest of the environment, almost a tunnel vision thing, my one dependable intimacy.  How sad.  I hope it doesn't seem rude.  I suppose I should think to make introductions, or include others in the conversation, but I don't think to do that.  Not good with names, hard to recognize faces, no small talk.  Before people enter the inner circle of my awareness -- where they become individuals, who matter -- they are pretty much objects to me.  Of course they matter, but I relate almost entirely on an informational basis.  I depend on the kindness of friends, their understanding and tolerance of how odd I am.  Otherwise I would have no friends.

Ah well.  Ah well.


J

How to Save America

Ira Glass, of This American Life, has a pitbull that bites strangers. Its needs are constantly evolving, as of specially prepared foods due to allergies, and it menaces him, and is dangerous and useless and for the past 7 years has taken up all of his and his wife’s free time. Rational thinking could only conclude that it should be put down. It has damaged the quality of his life, contributing nothing meaningful except the obvious. But he loves it. I should say, he “loves” it. I’m out of patience with parasites. At the very least he should have the dog’s teeth pulled. Cruel? See me after the dog, the PITBULL tears free of its leash and rips into a small child -- I mean “rips” literally.

 You have seen how disturbed I am. What to do what to do what to do. Somehow buy up the media outlets -- especially Spanish language? Wash out the brainwashing from Three’s Company and Married With Children? -- and that utterly perfect symbol for what America has become, reality tv? No amount of soap and hot water will ever suffice to wash such brains. It would take fire -- hopefully only, only the spiritual kind. Refining fire, my heart’s one desire; I want to be holy, set apart...

 Talk of Texas seceding. Nonsense of course. Did it once already, remember? I’ve heard it said that Texas has a special right to leave, because it had been an independent republic for a time, and voluntarily entered the Union, and therefore somehow retains the right to leave. I’d have to see the original document that ensured this right. Isn’t one. Anyway, the matter is settled.  So the Union is indissoluble. As a citizen of the once great state of California, now irredeemably ruined, I have to watch traitors and scum rape (is my diction immoderate?) the treasury and culture and middle class, wondering what will save us from the alien invasion when we’re already controlled by podpeople and demoniacs. I know, I’m mixing metaphors.  I have become unhinged.

Yes, I know, when you hear the word "culture", you reach for your speed-dial to the ACLU.  Bang.  I lose.

 How to save America? Constitutional Convention, Article V of the Constitution. So here’s the plan. I’ve been against the idea, because the quality of politician is not what it once was -- and once only, 225 years ago. But the way a Convention works, one of the options, is through the states, each state getting an equal vote. When there are 75% “red” states over “blue” states, 38, my brilliant scheme could work. Not a fresh start -- a reset, Amendments to make the rules even more clear -- like, the Constitution not being a living breathing document, but something set in stone, like the way it really is, needing amendments and conventions to change it, not the whim of judges and the arrogance of pols.

 Specifics? Please, not such inanities as an anti-flag burning amendment. Moronic. Not an anti-abortion amendment -- that’s already unconstitutional as a Federal issue: via the Declaration of Independence, under the “life” part of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” This is not a time for special issues. It’s a time for clarity. Something about fiscal responsibility, secure borders, separation of powers. Please, sir, these things are already clear, but idiots need to have facts kicked into their heads.

 Obama, all unbeknownst to the world if not to himself, is like that most disastrous former president -- not Buchanan, who fiddled while Rome burned (more aptly, who watched as kindling was gathered and flashpoints marked). Rather, Obama is a cross between Franklin Pierce (who like a Satanist conjured destruction, rehearsed the Union’s unraveling in the dryrun of Bleeding Kansas), and Jefferson Davis, the outright enemy. What else is it, to cede US sovereignty to the United Nations? You don’t see it yet. I fear that you will. Point is, we are already in revolutionary times. To arms! The Bluecoats are coming!

What were we to expect? The enemy won the Vietnam War, by which I mean the hippies, and that generation of vipers has been the ruling class for a generation.

 Ah well. You know me by now. I’m a fool, a foolish, foolish fool, and I’m just blathering here, with nothing important to say. Platitudes like save your money and tell the truth, be kind and obey just laws -- might as well leave cookies out for Santa.

 It’s just that something needs to be done, to save America. Seems like it’s worth saving, at least the idea of it. All the world rushes toward communalism, tribalism, socialism, dependence.  Let's pretend that we value the individual, and liberty, and self-reliance judiciously mixed with generosity -- you know, Americanism.  Sure it's just a fiction, but let's be idealists, and act as if it were possible.  It's not mythical, it's endangered.  Let's save it.  Liberals save crazy pitbulls. Save America.


 J

Neener Neener

We may not be living in the most corrupt time in American history, but this is a very corrupt time. I’m not referring to black-bag payoffs and stuffed white envelopes. I’m talking about a conspiracy of silence, about an institutionalized media bias that is tantamount to Jim Crow in its pervasiveness, its self-righteousness, and its repudiation of justice. Yes, it’s Leftist in this case, but that says nothing about the Right.

 The Right can be and no doubt has been and probably is as corrupt as the Left. Right and Left have no reference to integrity -- just to stated positions regardless of actual conduct. The Right values self-reliance, the Left values generosity … so the cliché goes. Who can argue with clichés? Both, either, are honorable only when firmly adhering to honesty.

That’s what fairness is. Honesty. It’s not equality of outcome, it’s not generosity, it's not everyone feeling good about themselves andor the world. Fairness is the disinterested application of pre-determined and presumably just rules.

 What is corrupt about our specific age is the indifference to lack of integrity. A tautology, sadly, and I apologize … lack of integrity is corruption. Words fail me, which is only slightly ironic, since I’m condemning the (Leftist-controlled) mass communications media. The fact that a big deal was made of Romney’s family vacation wherein a crated dog was transported on the car roof -- contrasted with the whitewashing not of Obama’s childhood meal of dog … but rather of his abandonment of his ambassador to Libya to a desolate and terror-filled death by smoke inhalation. On the one hand there is the incomprehensibly trivial tattle-tale hack reportage, gotcha, and on the other we have the perfect embodiment of the total failure of Obama’s Middle East policy with its much misheralded “Arab Spring” -- a term which must always henceforth be enclosed in sarcasm quotes.

 I get tired of being such an idealistic fool. It is unbecoming of a man of my years, middle of middle age, for all my material insecurity and lack of stodginess. But what a pleasure it would be, to find a liberal with integrity, fairminded, honest in evaluating his own side, sincere and clear-eyed in approaching the Right. I’m speaking theoretically, since I know of no such person. I just don’t follow it that closely -- I imagine there is such a creature, outside of the bestiary of mythology.

 How I would love to find common ground with such a person, and put aside important but circumstantially peripheral differences, that we might join to, oh, say -- in my little solitary evening musings here -- clean up local government, purge the go along to get along blight, the mutual backscratching for personal rather than public good. I have no big problem with cronyism, as long as the bidding process is honest and open. Two equal propositions, you go with the guy you know. Fair enough. That’s the way the world is. Honesty doesn’t mean you have to disfavor someone just because you know them. Grow up.

 Politics is by definition about compromise. That means there’s a built-in tilt against integrity. The key is to have a core, know your values, and within that context identify where compromise is possible. I’m all for manipulations, and pressure, and wheeling and dealing. Spice of life, and human nature. Saints can’t do politics. Shrewd is good. Cunning, crafty -- just be subtle about it, because in the tattle-tale schoolyard, trivialists excel most, of their many excellences, in hypocrisy. Paparazzi isn’t a term just for photographers -- or rather, scribberazzi will henceforth describe that group previously known as journalists.

 What we’re really addressing here is courage. It’s not easy to examine your beliefs and be open to correction. I may be having to do that myself. In these pages, most of what I write is not serious. I’m purging, I’m dramatizing, I’m just ranting, as one might do when one is alone. These are the shameful, dark and secret eructations of my disappointment and anxiety. No matter, I have a right to express myself thus, privately, as this is. I do have an antipathy to Obama, and I am distressed over the direction of America. Perhaps I overstate things, but I have a gift for invective, and it satisfies me to exercise it. This is said in the context of courage, because I have to examine the truth of my emotion, as well as the truth of my judgment.

 Perhaps Americanism is irrecoverable. Perhaps I’m just being emotional. What isn’t emotional, no matter the expression, is the observation that media, and thereby the electorate, is thoroughly corrupt.

I've decided that and/or shall hereafter be spelled andor.  So with scribberazzi that's two (2) new words I've given to humanity today.


J

Talk Radio

...is not enough. No serious -- by which is meant successful -- change, revolution, reaction, return to the Constitution can prevail until approximately half the organs of mass media are controlled by the Right. By mass media we mean of course propaganda. It is important to mean what we say, and say what we mean. Turns out that even more than character, words matter.

 We can give up on the fantasy that Americans are intelligent. They’re as stupid as any other nationality. The slow accelerating drive toward decadence slash socialism slash tyranny is not so much a choice -- if voting always brings a bad outcome, where is choice? -- cannot be stopped or slowed through application of business as usual. Witness the Tea Party -- good ideas, lots of fervor, inconsequential impact. Grass roots makes no difference when the soil is toxic.

 So it’s propaganda. After all, that’s what the Left has done, taken over all sources of information and entertainment. In our culture, what else is there? Football? I should have thought that wasn’t an entertainment, but an activity. The forces that have made sports a spectator activity are the same that voted in underwhelming but sufficient numbers to prop up Obama once more in front of his teleprompter. The incessant drone of opinion and assumption in which television submerges us has emasculated us, unmanned us, the way a bicycle seat through constant pressure and vibration can make a man sterile.

 Conservatives need to buy controlling interests in entertainment corporations. Need to fill decision-making positions. Conservatives need to be creative. Rather than accounting and engineering, building and repairing, and other productive and useful occupations, we need to sacrifice ourselves for a generation and engage in the frivolous, fundamentally meaningless pursuits of fiction, dramas and comedies, telenovelas, with an underlying message too subtle for censorship, of self-reliance and individual generosity, patriotism and self-sacrifice.

 I think we have abandoned God, and God has abandoned us. I think one and a half million abortions every year are enough of a human sacrifice that Satan is empowered and God is repenting himself that he ever established such a thing as America.

 I think that there is a clear and hideous chance that could recall America back to its senses, ie, another traumatic attack upon us from the middle of the East. By which the fecklessness and frivolity of the Obama Error will be laid bare, shivering and cold in the nakedness of the current Occupant’s incompetence. It will be a devastating price to pay, like a hail of meteors prior to a worldwide Flood. But if the warning is heeded, the Flood may yet tarry.

In the stark light of evaluation, all these years later, I have to conclude that Bush did more harm than good. My reasoning is thus: regardless of honorable, even correct intentions, if the job can be undone so disastrously, and decline can come so precipitously, then where was the leadership? Leaders have to plan past the next election cycle. Ideally, I mean -- the way we should take over the entertainment industry … a fantasy, a fiction, frivolous.

I’m thinking now that America was always just a dream, a fantasy. Jefferson is the exemplar. In his first term, he was that small-government low-taxes minimalist, against banks and industry and cities and armies. Second term, he bought Louisiana and tried to take over Florida. In other words, he became a Hamiltonian. If there were no rest of the world, if we are alone, with no alien and competing forces, then that first vision would be practicable. Notice my use of the subjunctive, the language of if. In the real world, only exploited colonies have no armies. Our compromise has to be in choosing our enemies. There will always be enemies.

But I'm rambling.  One rant at a time.


J

Crunch

I am beyond even the need for confession.  Beyond reason or rationality.  Consumed now utterly with destructive passion.  Obama.  Grounds for my obsessive antipathy are obvious and well-founded, but I need no excuse for the immoderation of my emotion.  I am deranged, as upon returning home to find my family murdered.  I know who the monster is, and mere justice as demanded by society with its probity is insufficient for my grief.  Hell is not soon enough.  As I say, I am deranged.

Evidence of O's incompetence is over-abundant and in every instance superfluous.  He is capable of nothing good.  If he is "responsible" for it -- by which I mean, if he does not blame someone else for it -- it will manifestly redound to the detriment of America.  Obama = Destructive Incompetent Arrogance is a tautology.

What brought all this on, you wonder?  Well, my dismayed and betrayed love for America, for one thing.  But more immediately, the picture, above.  What could I possibly have to say about the above picture?  Ignore the crimped, closed body language, all knotted up, sharp defensive angles, twisted, akimbo, skewed.  No, I ask rather that you observe the hand.

He's using that hand to support his intention.  He had three options, with such a gesture.  Palm up, chopping, or down.  Palm up says, I'm reasonable, I'm making a case, here it is, do you agree.  Sideways says, Here's a point, this is what I think, very clear, there is another side but this is mine.  The Obama gesture, his thing, diagnostic of his character such as it is, palm down, says, That's it, case closed, calm down, stifle all non-Obama opinions cuz I won. 

You think I've read too much into this?  (Obama gesture.)  Settle down.  Try to be rational.  I once worked for two summers in a law office, and I organized some street theater, and then I was in a state assembly.  So I'm the smartest and most qualified Pres ever.

Did I say I was going to stop saying you were stupid?  No can do.  Mental instability has undermined my character, and now I make promises I can't keep.  That's my excuse.  I'm not just lying, you know, like Obama.

I just can't get over how stupid you are.


J

Breathing

I’m thinking of taking morphine. Good idea? If it’s not one pain it’s another, and tonight another muscle in my back is tormenting me, actually spasming. Can’t hardly breathe. Have to hold my breath when I move. Haven’t had that in a while. Maybe I’d better start stretching? It’s been a bad few months, full of mysterious pains and drains. I’ve stopped bjj for a week or so, kept on activating that hip thing. I feel it wanting to be a problem, and I don’t quite know what sets it off, but I’m being careful. Had a for-no-reason muscle issue on the left of my back, now it’s on the right side -- I did 150 ring dips and 300 squats in 16 minutes and 2 seconds, maybe 3, but something amazingly awesome, like the way I am. Now for some reason a specific part of my right latissimus dorsi is spasming. So if you know any cheap drug dealers, let me know -- brother looking to score some pheen.

Fine talented young athlete is doing bjj now, comes from another sport and learns quickly. His father was watching tonight -- shaved head with a tight little ponytail, tats probably, big muscles. I suspect he’s an actor on some toughguy tv show. Big knotty arms, not much in the shoulders. Once you educate your eye, it’s a very odd and disquieting look. I just figured it out: it’s fine if you wear a t-shirt, but not if you wear a wife-beater. Short sleeves, no sleeves. Same thing with pro wrestlers -- big steroidal gym muscles, manly pecs and thick arms, and then these misdeveloped deltoids, all round and aggressive up front from all the benchpressing, and missing in the back. Gym bodies, entirely about appearance, pleasing or intimidating the uninformed eye.

I’m at an age now where I need therapeutic massage. Not sensual. Know anyone with reasonable rates? Need someone to wring the kinks out of me. I’m half calcium by now.

 Something else I wanted to talk about. Now what was it. Something about some huge sexual body part I have? That sounds right. Now what could it be. It had something to do with my thinking about if I were a woman I’d have really large breasts. I mean huge. Like, I cup my hands out in front of me, all the way at the ends of my arms, and that’s how big. Not even useful or attractive. Now what was it. My unit? No, that’s pretty normal, height-weight proportional. Scrote? -- nads? No. Libido? That’s under control, regardless of size. Well it’ll come to me. Nagging me though. Wish I could think of it, cuz it’s of general interest.  Deltoids? No. Glans? epididymis? vas deferens? Ah yes, now I remember. My pubic bone. Huge. Like a bull. Really fills out my chonies. Chicks dig that.

 Now you may suppose that sometimes my discourse becomes silly and unseemly. To this I would reply that every relationship is a compromise involving patience and sacrifice, and you enjoy the benefits while tolerating what you must. Along with the searing political insights and incisive historical analyses and devastating social commentary and rollicking satire you delight in and crave from these pages, you must endure my rampant narcissism and infantile obsession with my intimate body parts. You could start by being grateful that it doesn’t focus on my anus. Would you like me to drag you through that fervid swamp? I didn’t think so. At least a man’s primary genitalia are right out there in the clean and open air. At least mine are, at least when I’m at home. I’m a nudist.

 Every time I’m feeling ready to start some necessary project, I get some injury or find myself mysteriously depleted of vitality.

 The Obama Conjuration has traumatized me. It’s just a betrayal, by a voting majority and a plebiscite via silence, against Americanism. The word for Obama is mountebank. President Oakland -- there is no there there. We, by which I mean you, elected the Wizard of Oz – not the giant papermache head this time, rather the flapping curtain man, revealed, exposed, slight and stammering. It is the product of hope sustained by reality tv, a lottery mentality that imagines success always comes always through undeserved blessings.

 Universally observable human nature is no longer part of the calculus: as with the rest of nature -- say, climate -- saying so makes it so. Like, if communism could work at all, the Soviets, or the Red Chinese, or the Cubans, or the Khmer Rough would have made it work, and the whole world would now be enjoying the Age of the Workers’ Paradise … instead of enjoying a population periodically and cumulatively diminished by several hundreds of millions via Purges and Plans and Great Leaps and Killing Fields. Indeed, a man could fly by flapping his arms, if he could make his arms flap in just the right way.

 Lancelot has a wound, that will not heal, and it will kill him. So much for reality, and for myth.


J