Our first choice for a house was owned by a very nice man. When another group of his tenants suffered a devastating fire in their house he offered them “ours”. We did not get that house.
My Ambassador and I discovered our second choice of a house while on a walk around the neighborhood. We were (or, at least, I was) on a St. Patrick’s Day quest for Guinness and noticed the house. Two blocks down from our current moldering roach trap. Three bedrooms. Two stories. A back yard. A detached, two door garage. A finished basement complete with carpeting and a secret room I’d loved to turn into a Batcave…all this and a tree in the back yard, its branches pruned and sawed away, true, but it was still a live and I planned to see that it grew strong in time…but we were slow.
As a unit, as a household, we were slow. Uncoordinated. There are four of us now: my self, my Co-President Dye, my Ambassador (who is also my love and heart) and our new member who of this writing has not received nearly enough ceremony. She has yet to be initiated into the modern self-made family/nation state we call Monster Island. I supposed she will be Speaker for the Conclave at some point (thereby giving us a Legislative branch to balance our Duel Executive) but that point has yet to come. At present she does not even live with us. And while she has the soul of a patient confidant I have the distinct impression that she is not yet One of Us…and will only become so through the same patient weathering process that drove all of us toward each other and made us all what we are now.
We will find a house. We must. We can no longer manage this place. Rent is up a hundred dollars in three years and we’ve suffered a parade of foolish, self-infatuated toads who’ve posed as our Apartment managers. The current batch are no better than their predecessors. They check smoke detectors. They hand out maintenance request forms. They accept rent checks and general ignore us, their “valuable” tenants. There is no doubt that when (no longer “if”) we get our house they (and their corporate masters) will rape us for every penny they deem necessary to repair all the “wear and tear” in this moist cardboard box.
I suppose I should take another walk. It’s warm enough. Spring has come and my adopted city is green and good again. Who knows what I might find.
Saturday, April 07, 2007
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
My Presidential Predictions
With the Main Event still eighteen months away and the field crowded in what the The Daily Show has rightly termed a “clusterfuck to the White House,” I’m going to go out on a limb here and toss out my prediction for InDecision 2008. Because politics, like war, is quickly becoming a matter of who gets their first with the most, as the current obsession over the candidates first quarter fundraising (Mitt Romney leading the pack with $23 million in the bank) shows us. The most money in the bank and the most boots on the ground. The most Secretaries of State on your campaign staff and the most voting machine companies on your contributors list. The most family friends on the supreme court and the most family members in swing state governorships. And while it is exceedingly hard to measure little things like that at the moment (none of the current candidates have allowed anything more than the usual suspicious signs to flit through the media filter…hell, at this point, they all know no one but the camera crews are really paying attention…they can, at this point, pretty much get away with anything short of going on Larry King and admitting they enjoy sodomizing cheerleaders on the hoods of expensive sports cars) I will go out on a limb and predict that our next president will be…a white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant male.
Surprised?
Surprised?
Monday, April 02, 2007
Preface to Initial Conclusion after One Day of Experimentation in the Field of Modular Thinking
Today I mastered the ability to do my job without the need for directed, conscious thought.
Let me explain: though I am a thoughtful soul, and would never advocate the voluntary suspension of conscious activity. However, as my job does not demand even the slightest pretence of such activity, I would much prefer my cognitive energies be directed toward something else. Anything else.
So I began experimenting, knowing that while the Western tradition is quick to separate body and mind into distinct, oppositional objects, the Eastern tradition is in large part based upon the idea of mind and body affecting each other in a holistic unity. Trance states, hypnosis, self-induced feats of superpowered mental control...all these are, theoretically, possible, in so much as anything is possible. Proceeding thusly, I managed to spend the entire day plotting a scene from my current story, while at the same time working a full days work to my usual high degree of capacity. I know, because my work is so routinized, so autonomic, so absolutely unvarying, that any variance in the movement of my hands, the timbre of my voice, or the inflection in my callers response instantly dragged me from my self-induced, story-plotting state (what my bosses would no doubt label “daydreaming”) and into full attention.
I didn’t fuck up. And I didn’t get caught. Loose yourself in a story, especially one of your own, in any other public place…a school, say…and it wouldn’t be long before the local jumped up authority figure came down on you hard for having a spark of interest in your glassy-eyed stare. (Capital crime in my old school…you could drool all you wanted as long as you trained your eyes to follow the teacher…but all the gods help you if you stared out the window.) But at our jobs we are truly isolated…as apart as you can be in a room full of people, answering the phone all day. The walls of our “pods” (a cubicle by any other name still has three sides and no privacy and no view of anything other than my coworkers cubicles) separate us from each other. The phones separate us from our “customers”. Office doors separate our supervisors from us and miles of distance separate me from my home, this apartment, this chair, and the…absolutely…beautiful creature sleeping in my bed…
The point is, no one noticed me. Tonight I came home, wrote down what I’d thought about, and found enough inspiration in that to write more. It was (even though my superstitions make me loath to admit it) a good day, all told. I hope to repeat my experiment tomorrow. Whoever may read this: wish me well. I’d do the same for you.
Let me explain: though I am a thoughtful soul, and would never advocate the voluntary suspension of conscious activity. However, as my job does not demand even the slightest pretence of such activity, I would much prefer my cognitive energies be directed toward something else. Anything else.
So I began experimenting, knowing that while the Western tradition is quick to separate body and mind into distinct, oppositional objects, the Eastern tradition is in large part based upon the idea of mind and body affecting each other in a holistic unity. Trance states, hypnosis, self-induced feats of superpowered mental control...all these are, theoretically, possible, in so much as anything is possible. Proceeding thusly, I managed to spend the entire day plotting a scene from my current story, while at the same time working a full days work to my usual high degree of capacity. I know, because my work is so routinized, so autonomic, so absolutely unvarying, that any variance in the movement of my hands, the timbre of my voice, or the inflection in my callers response instantly dragged me from my self-induced, story-plotting state (what my bosses would no doubt label “daydreaming”) and into full attention.
I didn’t fuck up. And I didn’t get caught. Loose yourself in a story, especially one of your own, in any other public place…a school, say…and it wouldn’t be long before the local jumped up authority figure came down on you hard for having a spark of interest in your glassy-eyed stare. (Capital crime in my old school…you could drool all you wanted as long as you trained your eyes to follow the teacher…but all the gods help you if you stared out the window.) But at our jobs we are truly isolated…as apart as you can be in a room full of people, answering the phone all day. The walls of our “pods” (a cubicle by any other name still has three sides and no privacy and no view of anything other than my coworkers cubicles) separate us from each other. The phones separate us from our “customers”. Office doors separate our supervisors from us and miles of distance separate me from my home, this apartment, this chair, and the…absolutely…beautiful creature sleeping in my bed…
The point is, no one noticed me. Tonight I came home, wrote down what I’d thought about, and found enough inspiration in that to write more. It was (even though my superstitions make me loath to admit it) a good day, all told. I hope to repeat my experiment tomorrow. Whoever may read this: wish me well. I’d do the same for you.
Sunday, April 01, 2007
April Fool
The scene: 9:45 a.m. I’ve just woken up.
Her: “You know those at home pregnancy tests?”
Me: “Um…yes…”
Her: “Well…I already took one…and you know what…we should play the lottery…because we’re good at beating long odds.”
Me: “…you’ve got be fucking kidding me. There’s no way. There’s just no way.”
Her: “There’s something else.”
Me:…what is it?
Her:...April Fools!
Spring is here and I feel a profound sense of disconnection. For the past months I’ve only felt comfortable when truly alone. When you’re alone there is no self-censorship. No selective omission. No need for strategic truths. When you’re alone you’re completely cut off from the responsibility of interacting with others. It is a condition as liberating as it is potentially dehumanizing.
Most of the time I long for nothing more than a quiet moment to myself. A moment to stare and think. An hour. An entire day. I rarely find time for things, being that I (foolishly, perhaps) chose to live in a major American urban center…with people that I love…rather than go all Walden on everyone. If, as Thoreau said, “A man is measured by the things he can leave behind,” then I have certainly inherited the dreaded “short gene.” I am too lazy to build a cabin in the woods and too antisocial to do anything else. I work all day at my mechanized job, and at night I lock myself inside a room and star into my computer. This soul-less, humming box that is certainly inhuman in its unfailing ability to do only what it is told.
I feel as if I have assimilated some of its less-enjoyable traits. I, too, seem to suffer from a bad habit of doing what I’m told, of acquiescing to other’s needs, of not getting what I want, or even knowing what that is. Of having nothing to want…or wanting only the impossible.
Jagger said, “If you try some times, you just might find you get what you need.” I will continue to try. Otherwise all of this is going to turn balls-up, into the sixth season of Buffy. And nobody wants that. That would just be maudlin.
Her: “You know those at home pregnancy tests?”
Me: “Um…yes…”
Her: “Well…I already took one…and you know what…we should play the lottery…because we’re good at beating long odds.”
Me: “…you’ve got be fucking kidding me. There’s no way. There’s just no way.”
Her: “There’s something else.”
Me:…what is it?
Her:...April Fools!
Spring is here and I feel a profound sense of disconnection. For the past months I’ve only felt comfortable when truly alone. When you’re alone there is no self-censorship. No selective omission. No need for strategic truths. When you’re alone you’re completely cut off from the responsibility of interacting with others. It is a condition as liberating as it is potentially dehumanizing.
Most of the time I long for nothing more than a quiet moment to myself. A moment to stare and think. An hour. An entire day. I rarely find time for things, being that I (foolishly, perhaps) chose to live in a major American urban center…with people that I love…rather than go all Walden on everyone. If, as Thoreau said, “A man is measured by the things he can leave behind,” then I have certainly inherited the dreaded “short gene.” I am too lazy to build a cabin in the woods and too antisocial to do anything else. I work all day at my mechanized job, and at night I lock myself inside a room and star into my computer. This soul-less, humming box that is certainly inhuman in its unfailing ability to do only what it is told.
I feel as if I have assimilated some of its less-enjoyable traits. I, too, seem to suffer from a bad habit of doing what I’m told, of acquiescing to other’s needs, of not getting what I want, or even knowing what that is. Of having nothing to want…or wanting only the impossible.
Jagger said, “If you try some times, you just might find you get what you need.” I will continue to try. Otherwise all of this is going to turn balls-up, into the sixth season of Buffy. And nobody wants that. That would just be maudlin.
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