Demons

"I ain't sayin' you fellas are, and I ain't sayin' ya aren't. All I'm sayin' is -- Times have changed. Even old fellas like me are more accepting than we used ta be. I'm not saying I think it's right. All I'm saying is, times have changed."

The old man at the Scoreboard says this to Gabriel and me, the 47th time we are assumed to be gay in the last...week.

(If I keep writing about this, does it look like -- you know -- "The lady doth protest too much"?)

I tell Lee Ann: She says, "It's just because you two are so stylish."

I've never thought of myself as terribly stylish.

***

Today, payday, "pay" day, and I learn my account is overdrawn, not 30ish dollars as I feared, but $150 or so. Including fee, fee, fee, fee, fee, fee, fee, fee.

Money is something that I've never understood and never made sense to me. Usually I don't care. Today, I want to cry.

But crying is what the Gay do.

I want to complain: In the schools, you are never taught about financial literacy, about budgeting, about debt, about credit -- especially not about credit. And I wonder that it's on purpose, and want to Rage Against this system, and then I think about "politics," my radicalism, and how much of it is only my desperate way of distracting myself from the actual lived difficulties of my day-to-day my life.

It's so easy to have passion and feelings about political matters: They are far away, they are unchangeable, your rage directed that way is a way to make you feel better about stuff for a minute by diverting your energy toward something you can't do anything about (as opposed to your emotional life or your psyche's health or your wrecked relationships or your job or your budget), which makes everything easier, because you exhaust yourself mentally & catharsize (notaword) (it is now) without having to go through the difficult process of doing anything.

(In the preceding paragraph, the word "you" means, of course, "I.")

(& ask yourself: What is this "radicalism," scion of the American bourgeois?)

***

Or sometimes politics exhausts itself and I flee to my fantasy worlds.

A dozen storylines, characters, places in my head, most of it unwritten.

This is what I'm thinking of today:

There are two characters. One has spent his life a conservative, struggling to fit in with his society's individualism and militarism and masculinism. He has failed, and failed, though kept this failure a secret from his current companions, all of whom are from elsewhere, and at the very last finds himself questioning the values he learned as a child.

His name is Josther, he is 7 feet tall and green skinned and carries a sword and he is from Io, the volcanic moon of Jupiter, terraformed by advanced Singularitarian technology to support human life. He finds himself now in the company of a band of outcasts, pirates and revolutionaries from an asteroid civilization called Archipelago, in the Kuiper belt beyond Neptune. In this moment he is on a planet far away, a "primitive" world of smallish folk that make their living herding giant echinoderms like land-dwelling starfish; a world which has now been invaded by a horde of Ionians acting in the service of Marishta, the Witch-Queen of the Galaxy.

You with me so far?

Josther, questioning his own society's values, turns to his friend Arok for comfort. Arok: Once, he was a priest of the Galactican faith, the dominant religion of the Archipelagan society. Looking around him, Arok saw the corruption to which the priesthood had fallen into. He saw the chiefs, kings and nobles of Archipelagan society living in luxury and starving their peasants and ignoring the simple truth that the asteroids survived thanks to ancient technology which was failing; that, in fact, Archipelago was dying, and these men with power did nothing but enrich themselves. And Arok began to secretly support the Revolutionary Command, based on the hidden asteroid, Haven 3. And eventually left the priesthood with a younger woman, a novitiate priestess, whom he would later marry, and became a leader of the resistance movement, though never abandoning his faith.

They are talking about religion. Josther is an Ionian pagan, worshiping fiery war-gods that live beneath the volcanoes and reward skill in battle and cast aside the weak. Arok tells him of the Galactican concept of Redemption. ... I have written out a stretch of dialog between the two, including a long speech by Arok on this topic, but in order for it to be tolerable, it is necessary that it comes after scenes of wonder and terror and battle and sorcery. Some of that is written, some sketched out.

It may be that this will be my project tonight.

***

Can I tell you a little more about this story, these characters?

I wrote a short novel in October called The Dreamers of Caldren.

It's about 8 people on a ship. It's called Ship. They travel around space and time, planting human DNA on millions of far-flung worlds. They stole the ship from Marishta, the Witch-Queen, who now pursues them across the galaxy. I told you before that they are pirates, brigands, rebels.

The Dreamers of Caldren was one of my favorite things that I ever wrote. It is flawed. It doesn't remember who its main character is. Its middle is, maybe, too short, cop-out-ishly so. All 8 are not as developed as they could be.

I tried to write more adventures.

I wrote one story about how they go to a planet 10 billion years ago and encounter a nightmarish alien Power that tries to kill them and instead makes its home in the mind of one of the crew. This story was not very good.

I wrote the story I talked about above. Except that it was too short. And too scattered, focusing on too many POV characters. And I committed a ridiculous cop-out at the end.

I tried to write a story called The Planet of the Field Mice. This is honestly my favorite. It's about a world in a billion years. Humans have evolved into thousands of species, and all of them are sentient, and all of them live on this world: And so, there is nothing to eat but OTHER SENTIENT BEINGS!!!! So it's about ...

That was the problem. I couldn't figure out what it was about. Which character? I tried to write it from 4 different POVs. Dumb! Now I want to return to it too and I don't know how.

I don't know how, I don't know how.

So when I'm stressed or tired or sober I flee to this world and a Ship and these characters, I know them all, they are living in my mind and crying because I keep not writing their stories, and maybe they will remain unwritten, and this will be sad. I don't want them to fade into Mnemonic Oblivion They must be writ soon or forever disappear.

God of drunks and would-bes shine your light on me.

It is only a mess of silliness and not too much to ask.

Exogenesis!

Other Notes

Because that last post struck a dark note, and because bicycling through sunlight to work today was a joy, here are some other things in a neutral or even happy tone:

• I have decided that I love the song You Never Even Called Me By My Name, by David Allan Coe. It is one of the songs (the other is, sigh, Freebird), that we hear every time we are at the Scoreboard. This irritated me, until the other night we didn't hear it, and I was sad. Then Lily played it the next night instead of Billy Bragg in attempt (I imagine) to irritate me, and, instead, I was elated.
  

• Speaking of music at the Scoreboard: somehow, playing Bauhaus got us a free pitcher of beer and an invitation home for veggie burgers and other, um, vegetous refreshments.
  

• And finally, I have left the following items in Gabriel's car:

1. My AmeriCorps hoodie;
2. The umbrella his boss gave me;
3. My plastic water bottle, which is now illegal in Canada
4. The Order of Things, by Michel Foucault.
   

• Were he to return them, I would be delighted.

• Special thanks to "Stuff I Left in Gabe's Car" for giving me more points with which to fill this post.
  

Groping Toward Catharsis

Another Monday, another late waking, I sleep too much anymore.

Here is my recurring dream: I am standing near an entrance to a cave or dungeon. There is a demon waiting there, and I have to go alone to face him. I am always too afraid. Sometimes I seek out allies (usually elves of some kind); always they turn out to be empty and useless and nothing but twinkling lights. I have to go alone, and I have never been able to.

Question: Is it because I enjoyed Joseph Campbell so much (particularly during formative years when I was shedding my Christianity) that I dream in Jungian archetypes?

***

We all have to go into the cave alone.

***

Spring in a World a moment; but I am not wholly a fool, a holy fool. Or maybe sometimes syntax is the better fate; and wisdom should be first; but I cannot, holy, kiss you. & "write the saddest lines."

(These poems are little demons that run around the forests of my brain like wild animals -- or are they domesticated, and has my mind become a farm-- milk the e.e. cummings cow & slaughter that lamb se llama Lorca.)

(a shadow at her waste, dances on her balcony -- I watched you melt as I recited. But the past is dead and I ducked out & fled into the Pittsburgh night. & faraway, dreaming dreams of -- revolution, social change.)

***

Yesterday I planted a garden but it will not grow. I think. Maybe it will, and we will enjoy a nourishing carrot grown guerrilla-style in the forbidden yard. But I should have read a book about soil first.

(The Yard: Emblematic; the quiet violence of everyday life. Domination democratized; an American dream. Be sure you kill the dandelions.)

I have: Heirloom cornseed, pole-beans, squash. My current quest, then, is a place for a three sisters garden. I was thinking the courthouse lawn.

***

I am out of talk, again.

Random Days, Random Thoughts

• There is a very important article at Counterpunch today. Read it! Highlights:

My own [Stan's] anecdotal evidence, without using worm castings but using simply composting mulch on organic compost over non-compacted soil, is that in 12 square surface-feet, one can grow three species of food, with six plants each... producing okra, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, peas, bush beans, etc. Mixing them, and adding a couple of marigolds and aromatics (like mint or parilla) seems to keep the little critters from taking more than their share. Last summer I had one cucumber vine that produced around 50 mature cucumbers, totalling well over 20 pounds of food, for around three months. By rotating seasonals, it is easily conceivable to take a 12 square-foot plot in a temperate zone and raise 100 pounds of food a year... being very conservative. Neither Syngenta, nor Cargill, nor Archer-Daniels-Midland want you to know this.

They want to sell you mass-produced food, for money... which you have to work for. Let us not forget that Enclosure (forcing people off the land, or separating them from their land) was the method used to compel people into the monetized industrial economy in the first place. A 12-foot garden bed is three-feet by four-feet. How many of these can you build on a half an acre? The key is always in the design.

• The young children at work have decided to befriend me, for reasons I cannot fathom. Lately they have been asking me from time to time where Shelby is. Today -- not for the first time -- I informed him that he had died. Again. Eaten, it seems, by evil goats. Result: A delightfully graphic picture of Shelby being eaten by an Evil Goat is now hanging up over his desk.

• Has anyone else noticed this: There is a house in the middle of Roseburg with chickens in the yard. I mean the middle of Roseburg, downtown; and I mean a whole fucking swarm (or mess or flock or whatever a group of chickens is called) of gigantic chickens almost as big as the turkeys that run around the college just hanging out in this yard.
  

• It makes me wish there were hundreds and hundreds of chickens just wandering about town, allowed to eat what they want. They're a good bit sightlier than pigeons, and if there were so many of them I would never feel bad killing and eating them.
  

• In fact if you did that, and banned all the cars, and increased taxes and used them for the bus, and got an Amtrak station, and forced people to use their useless lawns to grow food, and maybe let some other animals wander about too, and instead of planting ornamental shade trees planted apples, walnuts, etc as shade trees, and confiscated all the private property, and required of each citizen a contribution of -- say -- 40 hours of public community service/week, which could include everything from tending the trees to teaching to building a house to patrolling the streets, in exchange for which each had the right to partake freely of the communal food supply, housing, medicines, schools, & all this was regulated by a governing body consisting of the whole citizenry of: a given house; a given street; a given neighborhood; a given quarter; the entire town,
  

• Well if all that was true then this would be a pretty darn good place to live.
  

Things on Other Peoples' Minds

My mind is relatively vacant and I don't have many thoughts to write, so here are some thoughts thought up by other thinkers:

Jon Zerzan, in interview with Derrick Jensen:

I would say Anarchism is the attempt to eradicate all forms of domination. This includes not only such obvious forms as the nation-state, with its routine use of violence and the force of law, and the corporation, with its institutionalized irresponsibility, but also such internalized forms as patriarchy, racism, homophobia. Also it is the attempt to expose the ways our philosophy, religion, economics, and other ideological constructions perform their primary function, which is to rationalize or naturalize—make seem natural—the domination that pervades our way of life: the destruction of the natural world or of indigenous peoples, for example, comes not as the result of decisions actively made and actions pursued, but instead, so we convince ourselves, as a manifestation of Darwinian selection, or God’s Will, or economic exigency. Beyond that, Anarchism is the attempt to look even into those parts of our everyday lives we accept as givens, as parts of the universe, to see how they, too, dominate us or facilitate our domination of others. What is the role of division of labor in the alienation and destruction we see around us? Even more fundamentally, what is the relationship between domination and time, numbers, language, or even symbolic thought itself?

Peter Kropotkin, "Anarchist Morality":

The idea of good and evil has thus nothing to do with religion or a mystic conscience. It is a natural need of animal races. And when founders of religions, philosophers, and moralists tell us of divine or metaphysical entities, they are only recasting what each ant, each sparrow practices in its little society.

Is this useful to society? Then it is good. Is this hurtful? Then it is bad.

Nestor Makhno and the Dielo Trouda, "Organizational Platform of the Libertarian Communists":

Authority is always dependent on the exploitation and enslavement of the mass of the people. It is born of this exploitation, or it is created in the interests of this exploitation. Authority without violence and without exploitation loses all raison d'etre.

The State and Authority take from the masses all initiative, kill the spirit of creation and free activity, cultivates in them the servile psychology of submission, of expectation, of the hope of climbing the social ladder, of blind confidence in their leaders, of the illusion of sharing in authority.

Emma Goldman, "Anarchism: What it Really Stands For":

Religion, the dominion of the human mind; Property, the dominion of human needs; and Government, the dominion of human conduct, represent the stronghold of man's enslavement and all the horrors it entails. Religion! How it dominates man's mind, how it humiliates and degrades his soul. God is everything, man is nothing, says religion. But out of that nothing God has created a kingdom so despotic, so tyrannical, so cruel, so terribly exacting that naught but gloom and tears and blood have ruled the world since gods began. Anarchism rouses man to rebellion against this black monster. Break your mental fetters, says Anarchism to man, for not until you think and judge for yourself will you get rid of the dominion of darkness, the greatest obstacle to all progress.

Property, the dominion of man's needs, the denial of the right to satisfy his needs. Time was when property claimed a divine right, when it came to man with the same refrain, even as religion, "Sacrifice! Abnegate! Submit!" The spirit of Anarchism has lifted man from his prostrate position. He now stands erect, with his face toward the light. He has learned to see the insatiable, devouring, devastating nature of property, and he is preparing to strike the monster dead.

...

Just as religion has fettered the human mind, and as property, or the monopoly of things, has subdued and stifled man's needs, so has the State enslaved his spirit, dictating every phase of conduct. "All government in essence," says Emerson, "is tyranny." It matters not whether it is government by divine right or majority rule. In every instance its aim is the absolute subordination of the individual. Referring to the American government, the greatest American Anarchist, David Thoreau, said: "Government, what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instance losing its integrity; it has not the vitality and force of a single living man. Law never made man a whit more just; and by means of their respect for it, even the well disposed are daily made agents of injustice."

"A Las Barricadas," a song of the Spanish Revolution:

English:

Black storms agitate the air
Dark clouds prevent us from seeing
Even though pain and death await us
Duty call us against the enemy

The most precious good
Is freedom
We have to defend her
With faith and valor

Raise the revolutionary flag
That carries the country to emancipation
On workers feet to battle
We must destroy the reaction

To the barricades
To the barricades
For triumph
Of the Confederation

Espanol:

Negras tormentas agitan los aires
nubes oscuras nos impiden ver.
Aunque nos espere el dolor y la muerte
contra el enemigo nos llama el deber.

El bien mas preciado
es la libertad
hay que defenderla
con fe y con valor.

Alza la bandera revolucionaria
que llevara al pueblo a la emancipacion
En pie obrero a la batalla
hay que derrocar a la reaccion

A las Barricadas!
A las Barricadas!
por el triunfo
de la Confederacion.

No One Much Liked This

But this is my blog and I can post whatever I want.

It was the heady days of 2006, and the Iraq War was at its fiercest. Casualty rates were climbing, car bombs were a daily event, and all around me ten thousand hipsters got drunk and had sex with each other.

Meanwhile, I have always loved rousing drinking songs, you know, pound your beer on the bar and singalong and There's whiskey in the jar! and the like.

So I wrote a little ditty in response to both of those inputs. Nobody much cared for it and a friend whose brother had recently been deployed threatened to beat me senseless if I ever sang it at the bar again. But perhaps with the renewal of conflict between Iraqi government forces and the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al Sadr, it regains some of its relevance.

Either way, here is A Rousing Drinking Song:

Oh! Look at the beards on the little boys faces
And check out that girl with the choppy black hair;
Somewhere a child wails for her mother
Her mother's intestines are strewn through the air.

But pour me a Pabst and please turn up the jukebox
Cause Morrisey's singing my favorite sad song;
They're gunning down towel-heads in Al Sadr City
"Iran is supplying Moqtada with bombs."

But don't trouble me with these troublesome politics!
Saturday night's here, I want to get laid.
Sing Allahu Akhbar and get in this car
And drive to the playground and hit "detonate."


O-oh detonate, O-oh detonate!
Oh drive to the playground and hit "detonate!"
O-oh detonate, O-oh detonate!
Sing Allahu Akhbar and hey! Detonate.


There's talk of a draft but that doesn't affect me;
I'm a graduate student with lots on my mind.
They'd never send me to go break into houses,
To murder and rape and be murdered in kind.

And if bodies keep piling in Baghdad's black morgues
Without legs or arms or a hand or a head,
Then I'll walk around campus and carry a sign
But it's just not my kind decapitated.


It's just not my kind, It's just not my kind!
It's just not my ki-ind decapitated;
It's just not my kind, It's just not my kind!
No, my kind don't get decapitated.


We're all very hip here, we all know our music,
We're all working hard on our novels and plays.
The guns in the distance they just can't concern us
As much as the haircuts of four guys on stage.

But somewhere a soldier is killing a child,
Somewhere someone's bumper says Support Our Troops.
Someday they will learn that even white liberals
Helped steal their oil and smash all their hopes.


And then it's my kind, And then it's my kind!
And then it's my kind decapitated.
And then all of us, And then all of us!
And then me and you get decapitated!

Update: Small Victories

In the last five days, no one has deleted my name from the "Notable Residents" list on Roseburg's Wikipedia entry:

Steve Thomas - Popular blogger and journalist, known for his flamboyance and hard-hitting interviews.

Comes the Rain Again

Nothing is on my mind.

The lack of a lack of rain is beginning to make me insane, again.

I wrote two new posts today but do not know whether to post them. They are a little racy.

Maybe I will post them anyway.

One contains a poem I wrote about having a girl some years ago and also admits a thing or two I might prefer to keep hidden; the other is my anti-war song from 2006 that nobody liked.

Gabriel told me I should not post the first one, therefore, I think I may.

I like having content.

I wish I liked being content.

That is a reference to another thing I've been up to, which is reading Erich Fromm. His book, To Have or To Be? introduces this idea of There are two modes of existence, the Being mode (not us) and the Having mode (us). In one section, he illustrates the differences between Being and Having in various areas of life: Conversing, Reading, Remembering, Exercising Authority, etc. Here are some of my favorite quotes:

On Reading:

[In the having mode,] the school aims to give each student a certain amount of "cultural property," and at the end of their schooling certifies the students as having at least the minimum amount. ... The difference between various levels of education from high school
to graduate school is mainly in the amount of cultural property that is acquired, which corresponds roughly to the amount of material property the students may be expected to own in later life.

On Faith:

Faith, in the having mode, is the possession of an answer for which one has no rational proof. It consists of formulations created by others, which one accepts because one submits to those others ... It relieves one of the hard task of thinking for oneself and making decisions.

On Love:

Can one have love? If we could, love would need to be a thing, a substance that one can have, own, possess. The truth is, there is no such thing as "love." ... In reality, there exists only the act of loving. To love is a productive activity. It implies caring for, knowing, responding, affirming, enjoying: the person, the tree, the painting, the idea. It means bringing to life, increasing his/her/its aliveness. ...

When love is experienced in the mode of having it implies confining, imprisoning, or controlling the object one "loves." It is strangling, deadening, suffocating, killing, not life-giving. What people call love is mostly a misuse of the word, in order to hide the reality of their not loving.

What are we to make of all of this? Tiles to add to the mosaic called "A Framework for Interpreting Reality (Incomplete)," perhaps; or fanciful ideas that would be nice if they were true; or fanciful ideas deserving of actualization. I like the discussion of love in particular, and think it is a very nice corollary to the thoughts I expressed in the last post, that Jim felt were so Jay-like. I think I need to let this marinate in my subconscious before I can find any conclusion.

It Got Dark Again

40 degrees and raining, April 21st 2008. 9 days until payday; 19 until food stamps. 10 Day Forecast: You will not see the Sun.

And here come all the Buddhas to tell us why we suffer. "Listen to these noble truths, give up attachment and never hurt again." And every one of them can fuck off.

We ache because we laughed and we cry because we loved, and we can't have the one without the other.

"And don't you know, wise Subhuti, how some are reborn in this world and some are reborn in hell, and the very good are reborn in heaven but Look: Nowhere in 10,000 worlds are the Pure reborn!"

And take your purity and keep it, and reborn every day I will accept these lifetimes of hell in payment for glimpses of heaven. Purity like mist: drift away in the wind and vanish, in the world and never of it, nothing in your heart but I'm Too Wise to Care. And Browning:

"...What if the rose streak of morning
Pale and depart in a passion of tears?
Once to have hoped is no matter for scorning!
Love once, even love's disappointment endears.
A minute's success pays the failure of years!"

***

Roommate said to me yesterday: "Dood my face hurts from smiling and kissing her so much." I laughed and told him it was the cutest thing he had ever said, and then said, "But be careful: You don't want to get too into her too quickly, invest too much of your emotional energy and wind up getting hurt."

He said, "That's a good point."

I said, "Fuck that, don't listen to me. Throw yourself into it; don't hold anything back; if you burn it will be worth it and you will burn bright and glorious having felt and been alive."

I was right.

& so Let's take an oath you and I to always throw ourselves into the Ocean and let the currents take us: sometimes we will wash up on rocks broken and drowned and the crabs will eat our skin; sometimes we will remember that the crabs are our friends and good company and be glad to say hello to them and share a bit of supper. & all times we will be alive and moving and, faith in the Sea, arrive in the end on the happy farthest shore.

Notes on a Rainy Day

Sunday, after more nights of raucous and maddening. Highlights and things on my mind:

• Why do people want to fight me so often? I don't really think I do much to bring it upon myself. Last night a man asked me whether I would like it if he tore off my head and shat down my neck. I said that I would prefer he didn't. He then accused me of believing that I am the smartest guy in the world: I informed him that, No, the smartest guy in the world is Michel Foucault. (And everyone knows that I'm the cleverest guy in the world anyway.) The night before, a burly and terrifying-looking man approached me with rage in his eyes at the bar. I said to him -- whose hat, I noted, read "Iraq Combat Veteran" -- that if he wanted, we could fight, and that would be okay, but would he rather talk about what is on his mind? He spent the next hour pouring his heart out to me about his ex and the guy that she's fucking and how he could snipe the motherfucker from a thousand yards off. I believe I successfully persuaded him not to do this and gave what I hoped was comforting advice.

• Yesterday I had to buy a new pair of jeans, on account of my old ones being ripped in the region of the crotch. Buying jeans is one of the most stressful things in the world for me. I freak out and feel like I'm surrounded by little denim goblins with a thirst for my blood and often end up screaming RELAXED FIT NEVER LOOKS GOOD ON ANYBODY! EVER! GET A FUCKING CLUE!! after trying on half a dozen pairs of pant-shaped tarps and finally storming out of the store.
  

• In the end I found a pair of Levi's 501s. Pros: They fit, and I like the color. Cons: I hate, hate, hate button-flies. It makes the process of going to the bathroom like 4 times more difficult. Also, I prefer jeans where the legs taper at least some; these are straight-leg.

• As I have stated before, I really like Challengers, the New Pornographers album, and have been listening to the title-track repeatedly this afternoon. Here is my problem: There is a line that goes "Whatever the mess you are you mind, okay." I wanted it to be, "Whatever the mess you are, you're mine, okay." Because wouldn't that be an incredibly sweet thing for a person to say to you? Sigh.

• I am bored and lonely some and I wish you would come online and talk to me.

• Why don't you?

• Sigh.

Startling Revelations

A friend has recently informed me that there is a genre of Iranian film called Velvet Hat -- Meat Broth -- Cabaret. In her words it is about, "tough Robin Hood-like guys who wear velvet hats and drink meat broth and hang out in cabarets. They are sort of street-thugs, and their girlfriends are hookers, but they attempt to uphold traditional Iranian values in a society decaying due to Westernization."

This is amazing, and immediately inspired me to begin rapping:

Yo
I'm a velvet hat meat broth carabet thug
With a blog about gardens and a picture of a slug
And you know that I'm not still takin' drugs
And I quit eatin' meat; I don't even step on bugs.

But I uphold the values of Persian civilization
Against that pernicious influence: Westernization
And discourses based on global totalization:
Give me local knowledge and Islamification!

Break it down.

[Musical interlude.]

Yeah
That
Line was a link to Michel Foucault --
Comin' at you: PoMo hiphop, yo
These days are the age of Web 2.0
Democratize! New Media.

Breakitdown.

***

As always, points to anyone who can write more verses.

The AM/PM Alarm Clock Switch

We all know how this goes.

Wake up. Slowly come into consciousness. Think: My alarm didn't go off. Is it Saturday? What time is it? 8:30! Oh fuck! Oh -- scramble out of bed, pull your clothes on faster than at any other time in your life, miss a button, mismatch your socks, don't realize until later that you're wearing the same shirt as yesterday. And:

What the fuck happened? I set my alarm for 7:00! Like I always do! And you look at it and realize:

It's not set for 7:00 AM.

It's set for 7:00 PM!

What the fuck? What the fuck!? Who the fuck did this?? Who the fuck came into my house, while I was sleeping, and switched my alarm from 7AM to 7PM!? God damn it, Why!? They knew I needed to be at work at 9. They knew how important it was! God damn them!

And now it's 9:45 and you get to work, and everyone looks at you, and maybe they want to mention how you're 45 minutes late, which is pretty fucked up, and you're like,

Don't you get it!? This is a major crisis! Someone came into my home! They snuck into my bedroom, while I was sleeping, and they switched my alarm clock from AM to PM! I don't want to fucking hear about work! Who did it? Was it you? Are you fucking trying to sabotage me, by switching my alarm clock from AM to PM? I'm not going to let you do this! You've always had it out for me -- Jerry the Maintenance Man! Oh yes, they probably taught you everything about alarm clocks in custodian school. You know all about how to get into them and take 7:00 AM into 7:00 PM.

Damn you. Damn all of you! And obviously -- obviously -- finishing this grant proposal is going to have to wait until this mystery is resolved!

***

I just realized that as I was typing out that rant, in my head my voice sounded a lot like Dane Cook.

That is very troubling.

Let's talk about something else.

***

Dreams:

Last night I dreamed that I, Allen Paxtor, visited the People's Democratic Republic of China, which was located on the island of Taiwan. I was a crewman aboard a sailing ship, and we put into port and toured the socialist paradise. Everywhere there were pictures of the island's leader and heart, Lady Mao. So I decided to visit her, in her gargantuan Tower in the island's center.

Lady Mao gave me an audience, and we talked. In particular, we talked about every woman I (Steve, not Allen Paxtor) have slept with in the last few months. And she condemned me very, very harshly for it, and cried. And I felt like I had betrayed socialism. And I left the lady's Tower and headed back to my ship.

Random Notes

• I like the song Can't Hardly Wait, by the Replacements, even if it lent its name to and was featured in a 90s teen movie. I never saw that movie; it came out like 10 years after Pleased to Meet Me (the album on which the song first appeared); I don't really begrudge artists the right to make a heap of money from a bastardization of their work; and I don't fucking care what you say anyway.

• Every day I go to the store and, using that miracle of left-wing economics, Food Stamps, purchase: A superfood drink, usually the Naked "Green Machine"; an Odwalla soy-protein drink; a bag of Snyder's of Hanover Jalapeno Cheddar pretzels; and a bag of organic almonds.

• Reason to be proud of your heritage: According to The Guardian,

A recent poll found 63% of US Catholics want same-sex couples to have the same rights as heterosexuals, while 62% think abortion should be legal in most or all cases. That makes them not just more liberal than the Vatican, but also more liberal than most Americans.

A Letter to the People of Roseburg

Dear Roseburg,

I am not gay.

Sincerely,

Steve

That's so negative. It sounds condemnatory. Not to mention defensive.

Dear Roseburg,

I am not gay -- but it would be okay if I were.

Sincerely,

Steve

That's a little better but still problematic. The old "Not that there's anything wrong with that!" defense from someone who clearly believes there's something wrong with that.

Dear Roseburg,

My orientation is none of your business. However if you really must know, I prefer women. Not out of any kind of religious-authoritarian "morality," but mainly for aesthetic reasons. Women are prettier than men, their skin is softer, their kisses are sweeter. And yes, I know this from experience -- Because I'm not so afraid of society's condemnation that I am unwilling to explore the urgings of my own body.

Sincerely,

Steve

Okay, that is the best so far. But you know? I'm still bothered by this whole business. Why should I have to fit myself into a set of socially-constructed categories?

Dear Roseburg,

What do these terms, "gay," "straight," "bisexual" even mean? They are only words, and do not actually describe objective reality. We can know this, because we can point to cultures throughout history in which those words would have been useless. The Sambia of New Guinea, for example -- Were the men all gay, or bisexual, because of their belief that men could not produce their own semen and must -- ahem -- acquire it from some other source?

What we are ultimately talking about are the sexual urges, preferences and sources of pleasure of individuals. Historically, in the West, certain sex acts have been proscribed -- and the nature of the human libido seems to be such that within a given population, a given number of individuals will prefer these acts. Meanwhile the sexual urge is powerful enough and, indeed, important enough to the individual's psychological health and peace, that the proscription of such acts becomes a terrible burden on individuals, particularly when "proscription" includes the infliction of state-violence against individuals as had been the case throughout much of the Western world.

In the twentieth century we saw the emergence of identity politics as a means for large groups of individuals to counter state violence by creating a common identity and organizing to protect one another and change the laws that targeted all of them individually. Though this began with marginalized "racial" groups, it did not take long before these tactics were co-opted by others against whom state violence had been directed: Including those labeled "homosexual."

Individuals targeted by the state have the right to resist in any way they choose. Identity politics has proven an effective method of resistance, and no one can begrudge so-called "gays" and "lesbians" (and "bisexuals" and the "transgendered") the right to their employ. This does not change the fact that "gay" as an identity is an artificial, cultural construct, and not a thing in-and-of itself, an objectively verifiable component of concrete reality (inasmuch as there is such a thing). And for myself, I reject the idea that I must identify myself with an essentially hollow social category. Culture is produced and reproduced by individuals, and even when we don't see it, we all have the choice as to whether to participate in a given cultural construct's reproduction.

In this case, I choose not to participate. I look forward, rather, to a day when such labels are unnecessary and we are all free to love who we choose in the manner of our choosing, without fear of the law, without fear of those trembling authoritarians (i.e., homophobes) who prefer violence to love and would rather kill a man than see him live his life in the manner of his choosing.

Therefore, I am not gay.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Sincerely,

Steve

I think we've got it!

Mistakes Were Made

It began wittily enough.

First I was in the grocery store and the cashier had to slide my card a bunch of times. "I'm sorry," she said, "Your card wasn't communicating." I looked at her and said, "Yeah, that's what my girlfriend says about me."

I'm single, but everybody still laughed.

***

Later it was time for Little Murphy's. It was an important evening for me, the Night of Restitution. I walked in by myself. Bill the BarBack was there and said, "What do you need?"

I said, "First, I owe you seven dollars from last Thursday."

He looked at me in shock as I gave him seven bucks and two for the tip jar. "That's the first time that's ever happened," he said.

For one fleeting moment, I was an honest man.

I was waiting for LeeAnn, but she had decided that there is little difference between 7:00 and 7:50. In the meantime Gabriel and Megan turned up. Says Megan: "What should I order?"

I noticed on the menu that there is a logger sandwich, Roseburg being a defunct logging town. I suggested that. "The logger is so you."

"Why, because I'm from Roseburg?"

"No, because you're malty with a smooth finish."

***

Some weeks ago, Gabe and I were at The Idle Hour when a woman turned up and chatted with us about how we are intellectuals.

Last night the very same woman was there, and accosted Gabriel, Megan and I as we were smoking cigarettes outside. She is crazy and we were irritated. "Hi intellectuals! You guys are so cool! You're the coolest in town!"

...It was obnoxious, until she started giving out Awards! You know of course that this is not the first award I have received this week, but it was the first award presented by Sloth from The Goonies.

The 2008 Sloth Awards

brought to you by psychedelic mushrooms, or possibly the use of intravenous drugs during pregnancy

Presented to:

• Gabriel. "You are the Smartest."

• Megan. "You are the Prettiest."

• Steve. "You are the Cleverest."

I would say that everyone was pretty satisfied with the results.

***

It is the next day, and I am left with a few lingering questions. Among these:

Why did it make sense to go the DeathMetal Bar at 10:00 at night?

Why is my bank account suddenly so depleted?

What is this pounding, pounding, pounding in my skull?

I searched all morning for the answer, before deciding: Perhaps there are some mysteries Man was never meant to unravel.

The End of Days

Yesterday was the 8th Day.

Notes on the 8 Days of Broke and Sober:

I only drank during 5 of them.

They included one of the bigger disasters to befall our group of friends.

It didn't befall me directly, but since I was present, I deserve almost as much sympathy.

My friends are very good.

They would be good even if they didn't a) buy me drinks and b) indulge my self-obsession. Yes,

• Gabriel (full-blooded Jewish-Catholic and finest of the world's Burien);

• Megan (the safest driver in America);

• TeacherMichael (who is actually a really good guy if you ignore all the words he says);

• NewVistaLexie (who earned my approval with her love of Springsteen but, come on, you're actually going to call Tunnel of Love his best album?);

• SarahtheLeader (who uses her crypto-Stalinist Leader powers to be nice to me);

• LeeAnn (TONIGHT IS TUESDAY! I CAN PAY MY BAR TAB!)

• Lindsey (with whom I have now bonded thanks to lizards, manzanita and bewildering rockgoblins);

• Adrienne (Thanks For Being You!);

• DrunkLily (absent this week but forever alive in our hearts);

• EmilyOnTheCoast (O friend faraway & lonely beside the Sea, May the Springtime sing a thousand blended joys to you & the winds of Oregon return you to us soon);

• KatieTheBartenderAtLittleMurphy's (Tonight is payday! I am coming back to pay my tab!!);

• And finally, yes you knew it was coming, SteveWhoIsMe (Keep on doing what you do, man):

Yes, all you great and fiery-blooded people are the first ever recipients of

The Better Cats Award!

Some cats are good cats. These cats are Better Cats.

(Photo: Left to right, Gabe, Megan, Emily, Me, LeeAnn, TeacherMike, and Lindsey prepare to play ultimate frisbee).


Congratulations Everybody!! And to all you good cats out there: Don't give up hope! Your time will come!

In My Dreams I Was A Werewolf

Well, not me, actually.

Dream: Girl and I are in film class (for some reason taught by my high school Spanish teacher) about to watch The Wolf Man. Girl and I cuddle, the movie begins: Close up on a scraggly-haired bearded man, biting a woman repeatedly on the neck as she stands on her front porch. He leaves. The door opens, and her boyfriend is there. Close up on her face: her eyes are wolfish yellow, the shape of her face subtly changed and sinister.

Now I am with my girlfriend (a different girl from before) in her father's laboratory. He is demonstrating the miraculous properties of fire and water. "Look!" he says, striking a match, "How powerful fire is." There is a bowl of water on the table in front of him. Somehow I know it contains several drops of my girl's blood. Father continues, "And yet when exposed to water--" he dips the match in the bowl. A gout of flame shoots up, and I know. Father and I go into the back room. "My daughter eez a verevolf," he says, in a thick Eastern European accent. "I know," I tell him. "Their blood is combustible, isn't it?" "Oh yez. I remember last time" (brief flash of a bowl of blood and fire) "Oooh! It still give me hangovers to think about it."

She is waiting for us in the other room.

End dream.

***

I have only just realized: The girl bitten and my girlfriend in the second scene are the same, and I am the boyfriend character in the first scene.

Why does it start in the form of a movie?

What is it about?

The fire in the blood passed on, one person to the next, by that bite.

...Isn't that all of us?

The Rains of Monday

Write on, right on.

It is Monday and Oregon is up to its usual tricks again, teasing us with the loveliest weather since I've been here and then snatching it away as soon as it could.

Another weekend passes us, with a new cast of characters and plots unfolding. Highlights from the last several days include:

• Our Newest Friend. There is a new VISTA (actually there are two, but we only met one) (Is that the royal we, or have I started to think of Gabriel, Megan, and -- heaven help us -- Mike as extensions of myself?) (Let's go with the first one) in Roseburg, and her names is Lexington. Lexicon has already made positive contributions to the Good of the Whole, including being present for ultimate frisbee, buying me drinks on Friday, and being the only one of the McMinniman's crowd to come to Megan's and experience the Best Fire Ever. Yay for Lexus!

• I don't have a picture of Lex, but she looks something like this:

• Ultimate Frisbee. I think I have played this game once before, & hadn't really expected to do so again. In Oregon, though, it is the most important thing you can do after disc golf. So we gathered the Group at a very nice park to play. It turns out, I'm not very good at Ultimate Frisbee. Not even while drinking a beer. Not even while drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette.

• The Fire That Burned Everything. Some might say, it is unwise to place a bottle of lighter fluid into a fire to see what will happen. Others might suggest that when it takes you five minutes to notice that your foot is engulfed in flames, you are too drunk to be playing with fire at all. To these I say: Fuck off!

• Awkward Stories.

...Okay, this is one I actually need some advice on. Let us say that I have a friend named Bartlebee. And let us say that Bartlebee called me at the bar on Friday night to say: "Steve, I need some advice. You know that kid, Chad?"

This took some thinking, because all of Bartlebee's friends are named Chad, but then I realized which one he meant. "Yes," says I.

"Well tonight," says he, "Chad was grabbing my ass and--" Bartlebee went on to describe a number of other much-too-forward actions by his apparently-gay friend and continued--"So should I pound his face in?"

And I said, "No. No you should not. What you should do is state, firmly and clearly, that you do not have any interest in him and that it is not okay to violate your personal space."

"Okay, but what if he continues? Then do I pound his face in?"

"No. Then -- Use the power of shame. Point out his actions to the rest of your Chads, mock him a little and ostracize him from the group."

Now, to me, that seemed like the best possible solution. If a person violates another's space, this is an aggressive act, and is not to be tolerated: And this has nothing to do with the sexual orientation of either the violator or the violated. Face-pounding, while everyone's right as a last resort, was completely uncalled for in this situation; among 19-year-old Boys, meanwhile, shame is a powerful tool.

Yet when I told (Let us call him) Rick, who is himself openly gay (one of I believe 3 such individuals allowed by law within the city limits of Roseburg at any given time), he condemned me for prescribing the use of shame. This despite the fact that I was not recommending shaming Chad for being gay, but for acting in a manner inconsistent with the values of politeness. (Granted, I am also afraid that the revelation that there are as many as 5 male homosexuals in Roseburg might send the town spiraling into a bloody cycle of witch hunts, purges and show trials, but that is a different matter).

I think I did the right thing.

***

Finally, speaking of purges and show trials: I have recently been reading and rereading this little work of horror. It is Nikolai Bukharin's final letter from prison to Stalin. (Ignore the commentary attached on the website, it is completely asinine). In it, Bukharin praises the "great and bold idea" of the general purge of which he has become a victim; professes his love for Stalin and the Party; and begs for forgiveness. I am simultaneously horrified and fascinated. What produces this sort of mind-set? How does it arise from the original socialist impulse? These questions are hardly new and really are as old as Stalinism but...This is the first time I've asked them. & I don't know either what the answer is.

The Haunted Forest

That, my friends, is the face of a Slug! There were many of them out and about today, and Lindsey, Sarah, Sue and I many times paused to say hello to them as we hiked our way through the woods of Somewhere East of Roseburg, guided by a fellow named Seth. Pictures are, as usual, at Picasa. Highlights include:

• Manzanita. I didn't know what it was before and only knew the word from the Gary Snyder collection by the same name. It turns out Manzanita is a city! and the trees of it we met were aswarm with bees and flies and lizards.

• Indian mounds. Now, raised an Anthropologian in the east of America, the term "Indian mound" to me conjures up images of burials, Cahokia, and the beginnings of socioeconomic stratification. Here in Douglas County, Oregon, "Indian mounds" refer to piles of rock heaped up by young men (and women?) out on vision quests. These were located at the top of a hill at the end of a half mile trail, dozens of piles of rocks seeming to resist the laws of physics in the way they were stacked. I didn't notice them at first, then there they were; and my companions seemed to have disappeared; and it felt like the rocks were looking at me, and there was a presence there, and it was older than trails and ecotourism and much more potent. It never occurred to me to get out my camera in their presence, or even to speak, and I think to do either would have been terribly disrespectful.

• Waterfalls! Is there anything more to say? Waterfalls are awesome!

***

Here is another thing on my mind. I have been (I think you know) drinking lots and lots of superfood drinks. And my favorite thing about these is that they contain algae. When I think of algae, I picture an endless sea, by turns blue-green and deep red, under a sun as soft and orange as the memory of childhood, but racing swift across the waters in which strange creatures dwell. And think: This is the image of Inside-My-Body! My stomach, my gut, an ecosystem or universe, an oceanic home of a trillion myriad beings, existence physical and metaphorical, home of ancient dreams and urges and intuitions.

My Self, nothing but a haunted forest.

The body as landscape, as universe, animate with the divine magic of mind and thought -- my mind, my thought? -- microorganisms, tiny minds, a billion, a trillion -- a storm passes through a sea of neurons, and somewhere "I" laugh or blush or pine for lost love -- and here consciousness is an illusion, or maybe it's not, and the immaterial components of thought pass as ghosts through the cities of intestinal flora.

Isn't this the ever-inspiring-image? Don't worry, everything is fine, you are nothing but a universe.

I do hope so.

Better Cats

I have had a thought, and I may act on it, depending on how much willpower I have.

My thought is this:

Recently, we at Better Cats and Gardens introduced the Dionysus Award. This went over very well, and everyone who received a Dionysus personally called to thank me. So I was thinking of introducing a new award: The Better Cats Award.

And this would perhaps be a weekly award, given out every Thursday or Sunday or some such.

And who would be the recipients of the Better Cats award?

Why, the Better Cats, of course! Which is to say -- All my friends! I would post a picture of a given friend who had particularly pleased me that week, and write a bunch of stuff about how much I like them.

...Does that seem like too much sentiment?

I consulted a wise person on the matter: She said, "It would be really cute." I believe she is correct. So, introducing, the Better Cats award! Starting soon, everyone is eligible! (Except for people I hate, they are not eligible.)

We will see how this goes.

***

On a completely different note, I think this is the saddest poem ever written:

With rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.

By brooks too broad for leaping,
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.

--A.E. Housman

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Here is the dilemma, sons and daughters of the wild Sea.

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"
--Jack Kerouac, "On the Road"

Reading this many years ago and I said "Me too" and took it as my central understanding of life.

And here is another quote, and this one is from a Tibetan Buddhist nun named Pema Chodron, and it goes:

Wandering in the world of desire involves looking for alternatives, seeking something to comfort us -- food, drink, people. The word desire encompasses that addiction quality, the way we grab for something because we want to find a way to make things okay. That quality comes from never having grown up. We still want to go home and be able to open the refrigerator and find it full of our favorite goodies; when the going gets tough, we want to yell "Mom!" But what we're doing as we progress along the path is leaving home and becoming homeless. Not wandering in the world of desire is about relating directly with how things are. Loneliness is not a problem. Loneliness is nothing to be solved. The same is true for any other experience we might have.

...and this too, not just this alone or this one book alone, but this whole idea-set, mind-way, of learning about peace and not-judging and not desiring, coolness, wisdom; stillness and mindfulness; this is terribly appealing to me too.

But are they separate paths? Is there room for the one in the other? Do the wise still burn? I do not want to be cold. (Wise-man: "There you go: but what happens when the cold comes to you? Do you run away in terror, and hide under security blankets of alcohol and warm bodies?)

(What else, then? Sit and dwell, cry, boo-hoo?)

(But not that either: To run or to dwell, I don't want to do either of those, no, no I don't.)

And is there any room for Bacchus in the Pantheon of the Wise? Because if not I don't think I'm interested.

But is your Bacchanaliad pure if you seek it out of fear of Februus?

Is that what I actually do?

Or: Am I attacking myself, Accuser My-own-mind, make me guilty for my Unenlightenment. There is wisdom in wine, and you can go ask Li Po if you don't believe me; though wisdom too in temperance; and a season for every thing and a time to every purpose under Heaven!

The Elephants Out of Babel

One thought I had was to write these 8 Days away, but what is there to write? I believe I shall write about my writing.

Let me tell you, then, about a story I wrote. It was called The Elephants Out of Babel, and if I ever finished it and it was good, I would be o'ercome by joy.

So this began life as a terribly dull short story. Two men ride over a barren land, somewhere in the post-apocalyptic ruins of the American Midwest. As they travel they discuss religion, and are revealed fundamentalist Christians eking out a life as farmers. In the distance they spy a herd of elephants. One man is filled with rage: Once, he declares, such animals lived in zoos and performed for men's amusement. Now look how they roam free, while we struggle to survive!

But his friend thinks: Why don't we abandon our farms, and follow the elephants as free hunters?

Later they come upon a piece of ancient technology: Behold, a Re-Shaping Machine! Capable of sending out zillions of tiny nano-bots into the landscape, to reshape it and rebuild it according to our wishes!

But the man who would have hunted the elephants thinks: It was such technology that laid waste to this, God's earth. He murders his friend, and leaves the machine behind, goes home to his wife to take her off after the elephants.

***

You will have noted that this is rather dull, nor does it make a great deal of sense. Though somehow I did not myself see this when I showed it to Chuck Kinder, my writing teacher at the time, and he was...unimpressed, at best.

I put it away, and in the meantime, read two stunningly brilliant science fiction novellas, Brian Aldiss's story Hot House and Galactic North, by Alastair Reynolds. If you can find them, you should read them; Hot House became the first chapter of a novel by the same name, and Galactic North is now the eponymous story in a Reynolds collection that has just been released.

And suddenly I realized why my story sucked: It was freaking boring! In Hothouse, we open with a whole world full of strangeness. The earth has stopped rotating, the sun is brighter, and tiny humans struggle to to survive in a world of sentient plants and gargantuan trees that reach as far as the moon. Holy Freaking Shit!!! that is clearly a million times cooler than a bland and stupid desert without even a fucking rabbit to look at. Reynolds' story, meanwhile, begins with a firefight--not a dumbass horse-back ride--and expands into a million-years-long journey across the galaxy.

Kablamm!!!

I returned to my Elephants story, and wrote:

The danger increased the closer they came to the City. Lightning spirits and black terrors abounded here; and even ordinary threats like fireweed and murderbirds seemed to increase in ferocity the closer to Babel they came.

I went on to describe a landscape where

Everywhere black glass flowers and shifting, luminous pattern-ground covered the landscape, while metallic insects of varying sizes scurried here and there. Off to their left a small herd of well-diggers clattered along on their segmented legs, pausing at times to extend their water suckers deep into the ground, swelling the great red balloons on their backs. Here there was no sign of organic life besides scattered stands of dandelions and, of course, the ubiquitous cockroaches.

Now, that is so much cooler than stupid boring nothing shit. (Also, I am pleased to note that, from this distance, I am considerably less impressed with the phrasing than I was then. This is a sign of hope!) The basic premise of the original story remained: The two men (now named Lot and Abram) travel across the post-apocalyptic landscape, find elephants and a re-shaping machine, and Abram kills Lot in the end. But with some differences:

• The landscape is much cooler. Machines have become self-replicating and have largely taken over from organic life, forming a new machine ecosystem. Things once weapons of war have become predators; a device formerly used as a crane is now a dragon. There are giant dandelions and cockroaches.

• Lot and Abram are coming from an agricultural village called The Parish, in fact the ruins of a football stadium, which Lot rules as the 200-year-old pastor of a religious cult.

• This time they went seeking the Re-Shaping machine on purpose, somewhere in the heart of a ruined city, that they might regain control over the world.

• Lot is in possession of a book called The Book, which is actually a few scraps from a very old Bible, recopied by him over the years. Lot and his Parish perceive their world as occurring after events described in Genesis and in Revelations, and take also the book of Revelations, the story of the Tower of Babel and the story of Soddom and Gamorrah to be descriptions of the same event: a nuclear war which annihilated an advanced civilization some 200 years before.
  

• Back at the Parish was a woman named Ki, and Abram loved her, and, oh dread, Lot raped her, though Abram does not realize this.

• Abram is captured and "eaten" by the gigantic dragon. Some robots come to "digest" him but, before they can, he is taken away by Gigantic Sentient Rats!! And he is brought before their Queen, who has wings like an eagle. And she breastfeeds him, and he is healed.
  

• Then Abram kills the dragon and frees the rat-people, and finds Lot, and kills him too! Then he goes home and calls himself Abraham now and leads all the people out of the farming community to live as hunter-gatherers.

Bah-duh!!!!!! This was a 9,000 word novelette. And a bit of a hit in my fiction seminar at the time. And structurally unworkable, having as it did a dragon on page 2 and a four-page flashback on page 12. Also, more than a pinch of incredibly heavy-handed would-be anarcho-primitivist morality.

I rewrote it again. And again, and again, over like 2 years, adding and taking away and adding more, until now it is 17,000 words long.

I opened this time before the journey begins, introducing the Parish, its structure, its way of life, leading up to Lot and Abram going on their journey.

***

The Introduction is about the most convoluted and ridiculous thing I have ever written.

First, Abram is in a cornfield, weeding his crop. Then he realizes: the crop is infested with things called needleworms! These are nasty bugs that can kill you dead by exploding. They start bursting in the corn, and Abram realizes he's in trouble, lots of trouble, because only sinners let bugs get in their corn.

So, he has to go and tell his Uncle. His Uncle gets really mad. Only instead of there being time for anything to come of this.....BAM! The Parish is attacked by AN ARMY OF FLYING ROBOTS!!!!! Holy Freaking Shit!!!!!! Abram runs away and hides in the deepest basement he can find.

...And who does he meet there?? But, A GIRL!!!! And somehow she is really really smart and really tough (he's kind of a complete pussy at this point) and remarkably similar to girls that I like to have sex with. She decides they better go fight the robots, and somehow she has a spear. He's scared but he follows her. They come upon a robot about to kill Michael, a leading warrior. But the Girl kills it instead while Abram hides!!! And THEN, out of nowhere, PASTOR LOT who has been missing for seven years returns, and the Uncle who yelled at Abram before is with him, and tells Abram "You didn't get out of trouble just cause we were attacked by robots and you talked to this chick and the Boss came back just in time to save us, boy." End Scene.

Next Scene: Abram is chained to a rock. They decided to put him outside the wall for the night cause he was bad. He's probably gonna die. But then they take him inside. And take some of his blood. And PASTOR LOT adopts Abram as his son, cause Abram has good blood. Next Scene: We're in church, and Lot announces that Abram is his kid, and they're going to go on this journey out to the City, to reclaim the World from Satan and his Machines. And it only took a whole bunch of absurd coincidences to get us to this point!!

***

Wow.

So this story, begun as a heavy-handed morality play, now has life as a Series of Kind of Stupid Events.

Is it worth salvaging? What is left? What do I see in it; What do I want no more to do with?

I like:

• The idea of the future world where all these relics of past technology (biological, nanotechnological, etc) now run around causing trouble;

• The theme of breaking free of the control of religion, security, childhood dependency, and discovering your own voice;

• The structure of the Hero's Journey in general;

• The bit about The Book, and how it was used.

Do I like anything else?

Abram/Abraham is too much of a type, a cipher. He's the Boy Who Becomes A Man and The Kid With the Destiny. Blah, boring. We're all boys who become men, sort of; doing it because I Have A Destiny is retarded. (No, you don't. )

Okay, so then there's Ki (that's the girl). The character of Ki is The Tough Chick In The Patriarchal Society. But since she has no power whatsoever, she's really just The Weak Girl That Boys Fight Over, in Tough Chick guise. Boring, boring, boring.

The character of Lot is somewhat interesting. Mentor and Evil Wizard. 200 years old, clinging to a destroyed past, clearly a genius, clearly a madman....and also, for the vast, vast majority of the story the only one with any agency.

***

This is quite a lot. Is there enough to go on, here?

....I don't know. Clearly all of Act I has to go. Clearly the character of Ki has to go or completely be rearranged. This is a Hero's Journey story, and in those stories Boys have adventures with Jungian archetypes and learn to be Men. Do I want to write that kind of story? Do I really actually like that kind of story?

I do.

But if I'm going to write a Hero's Journey, it needs to reflect the kind of journey I'd like to see a hero take. I don't like Heroes who become kings in the end; I'm not interested in nostalgia for monarchy nor in the statement that to be Men means to be Authority. I'm not interested in Heroes who get princesses at the end, and then they get married: I like my characters too much to ever make them get married. They can get laid, and should, but, no wives, for godsake.

So what we need is a new beginning. And a new Call to Adventure: the "Your blood is good!" thing from Lot to Abram is stupid. And a new resolution: the basic idea of Abraham leads everyone out of the Parish stays, but I think 85% of them are not going to be elephant hunters. (The other 15% will, cause that's still pretty cool.)

All right, I think it's either time to stop blogging about writing and start writing, or at least time to post this and do something else.

....Does anyone else have any ideas?







Cantar, arder, huir, como un campanario en las manos de un loco.
Triste ternura mía, qué te haces de repente?
Cuando he llegado al vértice más atrevido y frío
mi corazón se cierra como una flor nocturna.

The Second Day

And here are some random announcements:

• Better Cats and Gardens sub-heading has changed, given that we have begun to leave The Land Beyond the Sun. Now it is "the days of Vista Steve." Should I change it to:

Like the Awesomest Thing That Ever Happened,

....These Are the Days of the Steve

• ?

• Gabriel the Burian has recently posted his own documentation of the grand Easter Journey to Coos Bay, and I reccomend you look at it, here.

• I wish I had taken a picture of myself and Emily this weekend, because Gabe has one on that blog and we both look so very different now...
  

• For the first time in months, I have undercooked my fried potatoes. Since I fell asleep last night dreaming about how I was going to make fried potatoes today, I think you can understand how upset I am.
  

• I still have this virus, and so have taken the day off of work.
  

• So far it's fun, but very soon I will run out of food and medicine.
  

• Will you bring me some soup and orange juice? Please? And maybe some cough drops and tylenol.
  

• I'm going back to bed!
  

Days of Broke and Sober

Attentive readers will recall that I recently received the prestigious Dionysus Award for drinking every day last week.

It is a new week now, and as I look at my bank statements I suddenly recall why I stopped drinking every day of the week.

...Yes, friends, I am broke.

Those blessed institutions, Food Stamps and A Woman From The Local Parish Who Sends Me And My Roommate Gift Cards To The Grocery Store Every Month ensure that, unlike last year, this year being broke does not mean I will not be eating. I will eat and eat well, I just won't be able to drink or smoke cigarettes.

Until the 15th.

How many days is that?

Today is the 7th. 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14.

8.

8 Days of Broke and Sober

What will I do to fill up this time???

...

...

...I don't know either.

I was about to despair, but then I thought: "I've got it. Let's BRAINSTORM!"

So, here are some things I may do with the 8 Days of Broke and Sober:

• Heal. During the Week of Drinking Every Day, I barely ate food. This is because I was taking Cymbalta (by the way, I'm not doing this anymore) and its primary side effect was the loss of my appetite. A week of no nourishment but alcohol and tobacco has resulted in I am sick. During the 8 Days of Broke and Sober, I will eat a lot and the food I eat will be healthful, and thusly will I recover my power.

• Clean. My place is a wreck. You should see my fucking bathroom. I did my laundry on Saturday, and my clean clothes are just kind of piled on my bedroom floor. Underneath the clothing there is a trail of coffee grounds leading from my coffeepot (on the stand by my bed, of course) out to the kitchen.

• Read. I've been doing this a lot. Let's do it more! When I last left Paradise Lost, Satan had returned to the Garden to make a second go at it. Will Adam and Eve be strong enough to resist temptation???? We'll find out. I also started Stranger in a Strange Land for the fourth time since I've been here, and this time I'm actually getting into it. It's pretty long. It should last me a while.

• Brood. I really would rather not but somehow I think it might happen.

• Write. I would absolutely love to return to the sci-fi thing I was writing before I left Pittsburgh, but somehow I can't seem to. I have so many ideas and no ability to pull them off. Maybe I'll have someone take a look at some of this stuff and see what they think.

• Blog. Obviously I am going to do this.

• Watch Babylon 5. Let's see. I have seasons 2, 3, 4, and the first and last episodes of season 1. A whole tv series is kind of like a project, and a series like Babylon 5 especially. I can blog about it, and make this even nerdier.

• Play Sports. There was lots of talk at the bar Friday night about such things as frisbee, kickball, and volleyball. Perhaps they will happen. [Update: I see Teacher Mike has sent an email suggesting ultimate frisbee tonight. Hmm...]

• Drink. Maybe I will spend the last of my cash on a bottle of Jameson.

• Work. Now there's a novel idea...

Days of Wine and Roseburg

It was a good weekend.

For the first time ever, there was a party in Roseburg. That was Saturday, and I'm afraid my camera wasn't working so I can't actually prove it occurred -- but I bet somebody else can. The party was GabeFest 2008, a party in honor of Gabe on account of his getting a real job.

I am so pleased with GabeFest, with the weekend in general and with all my Oregon peeps that I have decided to institute the first ever Better Cats and Gardens Party Fun Time Award.

This award needs a name. I'm thinking,

The Dionysus

...presented by Better Cats and Gardens for contribution to Mirth and Merriment in all their myriad forms.

This weekend's Dionysus Awards go to:

• Gabriel, for getting a job and thus making necessary Roseburg's first ever party.

• Emily, for driving all the way from Coos Bay, being happy and not going to the dark place, and contributing the weekend's only known vomit.

• Megan, for having a house, and for falling out of a chair to the amusement of all.

• Drunk Lily, for being more fun than I ever expected.

• Gabe, Megan, Teacher Mike, Drunk Lily, Jake the Law Enforcement Officer, and Me for somehow having the fortitude to do it all again the next day.

• Me! for fulfilling my goal of drinking every day of the week.

• Megan, for the same.

• Matt, for pouring lighter fluid on the fire.

• Jake the Law Enforcement Officer, for being such a good sport.

• Teacher Mike, for saying, "So yeah, Jake is a law-enforcement officer" before I revealed more information, like my address....

• Emily, for the force-feeding of cookies.

• The Bartender at the Idle Hour, for getting hit in the face.

• Megan's Dad's Band, for putting on such a fine show.

• LeeAnn and Lindsey, because I hadn't seen them in a while and they liked my haircut.

• Fried Potatoes, for being the best breakfast in America.

• Drunk Lily, for doing stuff I said to do.

• Lily, Teacher Mike, Megan, Gabriel, Emily, and Me, for being on the couch this morning. Let me tell you: Lying there with the funny pages and that horrid purple seawater drink I felt like I was hungover on the Couch of Infinite Love. Yay for Everybody!!

Friday Afternoon

Things on my mind:

• I wish Oregon would quit fucking with me. Every day this week I have worn my heavy coat, the mornings being frosty and cold, and every day when I am walking home it is much too hot. So today I wore my light jacket, and apparently it won't be getting warmer than 50 degrees.
  

• Being the youngest one in the room is weird. Sitting in meetings with everyone else in their 40s, 50s, 60s I cannot be unselfconscious.
  

• I keep trying to edit Wikipedia's entry for Roseburg to add myself to the list of notable residents. But for some reason every time I do it it's deleted within minutes. What the hell, Wikipedia? I'm the most notable man in town!

• Possible solution: A wiki entry on me, to which I can link; maybe another one for Better Cats and Gardens.

• Better idea: Rather than a WIKIpedia entry on me, a CONSERVApedia entry!

• "Conservapedia: Giving voice to the retarded since 2006."

• I want to take a nap.

I sang this on my way to work today

[Verse 1]
In the brine and the murkiness under the Sea
A wicked old Jellyfish grinned fiendishly.
While the sea-worms got drunk at the Jellyfish Bar,
That wicked old Jellyfish hotwir'd my car!

[Chorus]
Oh! Jellyfish, Jellyfish, under the Sea,
Jellyfish, Jellyfish, Come back to me!
Jellyfish, Jellyfish, Don't go away--
Oh, Jelly. Dear Jelly. I love you! Please stay!

***

And now a contest! Who can come up with more verses??