JouRnaL
spring
2thousand7
02/23/2007
I never know what to say and it never stops me. I will stop commenting on the breaks between posts, they are so irregular now. I took four months and kicked my own ass. I got tired. I laid down.
I don't remember the last time that happened. The memory of two weeks in high school when I barely ate and spoke even less comes to mind. There is something about me that sways towards survivors' guilt although my very existence: each dawn is the plane crash. Each meal is a celebration, an exclamation of my life. I am the person I've been waiting for.
I've been to the art museum three times ths week.
Check it out, Sugar
I'm gonna let my groove in
It's so easy when
the beat gets you movin
You got me shakin, Sugar
shakin like a schoolgirl
on her first day
out in the real world
I can make it
I got it all together
I got my hands on the wheel
but it just won't steer
I'm singing as loud as I can
This is a song you won't ever hear
Hey oh yeah
Get up on it, Baby
Oh I know you can
Get up on it, Baby
Oh I know you care
Shake your hips shake your hips
spread your lips
on the tips of my toes
I can go where the wind blows
No reason
shoot me off like a gun
hundred suns set to stun
I'm never on the run
back dakota with my automatic weapons
keep 'em guessin where I'm comin
loud and clear
I'm playing as hard as I can
This is just the wild west
I'll put you through the true test
slap some sense up in you
with some bullets and a blood vest
million little babies bubble butts
up in mercedes
lady, what you talkin bout
I'm about to knock this fucker out
back up in dakota with my automatic weapon
got my finger on the trigger
there's a need to fill
I'm firing as fast as I can
-Bob Schneider
02/24/2007
So I am back at this again. I am up and running... I've started updating pages and as I cleaned house I found a lost journal entry from last March. It was a report of a dream. Last night I dreamt vividly of traveling -cloak and dagger- through the middle east. Hunting for something... some person with an item, a knowledge. Then I dreamt we returned to the states and we were building bombs. I remember feeling conflicted about the explosives but still we worked on. What they were for or whether they were used I never found out as I awoke. And as I write this I daydream of the investigators descending on me and anyone I name that was in my dream.
A paranoid public, a fearful public is not mindful of the capacity for love or compassion.
Hitachi has made RFID chips so small that a pile of them looks like powder to the naked eye. They are so small that they require an antenna as the body is too small to catch the radio waves meant to read them. I imagine them embedded in paper, in innocuous receipts. I imagine them poured into the breeze at protest sites, collecting in the hair on the heads of their unwitting hosts.
If identity theft is a crime then I own my identity and a certain level of privacy to my movements makes up that identity. Traffic cameras, TSA passenger lists and now nanotechnology erode the appearance of freedom.. or is the very freedom itself being eroded? Is it just the observation that is objectionable?
What I do in view of a traffic camera is not only mine, it is public. The externalized third person, the God, the common good, the conscience, the inquisition.. are not all these things mirrored in the lense? Calculatedly placed systems of overlapping surveillance.. should they not belong to the people just as the park bench or the drinking fountain? Should they not be struck away as any other unfit intrusion onto the commons?
Elise postulates that a large scale RFID system might approach broadcast regulation by the FCC. If the technology to effectively apply this in a national security sense exists I doubt we would hear of it until it was near obsolescence or replacement (see secret CIA prisons).
Speaking of national security, Dick Cheney is an impressively venomous ass. I am sincerely sore that the left has not answered him appropriately. Despite Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi firing back, they don't quite have the same acrid jugular instincts. Maybe someone out there is answering him capably but no one has dare put them on an easily accessible news platform. I guess I should sharpen up my L-D debate skills.
02/25/2007
I've been selling on Ebay and last month a fellow ebayer struck up a conversation that turned quickly into a vein of expression for me. I had no conscious idea that such things were on deck for the next unsuspecting audience. Some of the folks I email with know the types of emails they can get from me, uninvited. As the musings amused me I will reproduce them here. I don't have Peter's permission. Good luck finding him but part of me wants you to want to.
Peter said he had read that ebay was destroying the valuables market in the default world. "At one point people didn't sell and even bought when they found it at garage and other sales. Now, with a mouse click, they can tell how much is really available and at what price. There is no longer a scarcity value... We are just at the end of cleaning out my mother's estate (my father died 10 years earlier). They were pack rats and had a large New York City apartment full of stuff including antiques, silver, china, etc. at least 20 suitcases of things barely suitable for the Salvation Army.
I learned two things:
1) If you collect during your life, you need to make arrangements to "deacces" while you are still able. If it is museum quality, plan to give it away. If not, figure out who really wants it. Because your (adult) kids won't understand what you have or how much of your life went into assembling it, or just won't care and it is going to be flogged at auction or worse.
2) Stuff owns you; you don't own stuff...
I think the last time I fired a rifle it was an M-1... but that is another story."
Which is exactly what I gave him.
Some of me is offended by how easily ..in so few strokes.. I illuminate a benevolent ancestor but I feel that I have taken no ones dignity. In fact the elusive and personal truth I share lends more humanity to the whole ordeal than it was afforded by many in the first place.
I wrote to Peter something like this:
My namesake, great uncle George, ran a quarter horse farm outside of Nashville. He was the black sheep of his siblings and skipped most of high school for smoking, drinking, girls and pool halls. He ended up a bit of a country gentleman farmer in his own mind but was terrible with money and a pack rat. He would go to auctions and bid forty dollars on things titled "box of contents" and open it to find he had won 1500 chinese made screwdrivers. Then he would take it home and build another barn to store it. I think he ended up with seven or eight barns.
Collecting coins came naturally and haphazardly. If they were foreign or odd or inspired some sense of nationalist or humanist pride he would add it to the collection.. often ordered off late night tv. So there are Franklin Mint sets and circulated pocket change and proof sets bought at outrageous prices from resellers... almost all of it only worth the face value or its molten liquidity. There are incomplete folders of Lincoln pennies and Eisenhower dimes and baggies of foreign coins...
I guess I get to the guilt part where some of it is financing this very moment.
He had a good heart. I was pretty young when I spent time around him. When Patches, his blue heeler, was run over on the highway in front of the farm it was the first time I'd seen a grown man cry, much less a man that seemed as hard as he. He sobbed, "All she wanted was to be near me.. close to me every moment. And I sent her on out that door saying, 'Git, go on'." He couldn't understand why he had treated her like that, kept her at such distance with a disdain that whistled out beneath his front teeth in an exhale of cigarette smoke. He hadn't pushed her out on the road but you would think he had the way his heart broke and wailed.
I really didn't pause until now and I realize I had a lot to say. I reread the above and recognize that I am disassembling his attempts at completion while indicting my own: reflections of myself in memories of a man with my name.
He loved his wife dearly and cancer took her early. I guess even seven or eight barns full may not have been enough... at least holding onto it seemed easier than letting go, even as letting go may have set him free and filled that great hole.
I wrote a few other things to him. I need to tell a story of a burn or two. I finished "Jesus Was Not a Republican" today and then in the same sitting read Vonnegut's "Man Without a Country". Vonnegut talks a bit about storytelling and its qualities. I watched a documentary about the people involved with the Bush Biography titled "Fortunate Son". James Hatfield, the author, commits suicide. There's footage of his young publisher, awash in the debris of his idealism, as he tries to say something about Jim. He lowers his head and his shoulders immediately start to shudder in what you know is that sudden uncontrollable sobbing that even blindsides him. I begin to cry to remember it. I am going to bed.