July 30, 2009 - Coffee Break - Kansas City, Missouri

-
All the teachers are getting bored with their summer vacations and they are hanging out here in the coffee houses, but not him. He is just back from bicycling Egypt – an adventure rather than a vacation, he says. They want you on the tourist trains not peddling down the roads. The risk is too great the police explain. There are a lot of fanatics lurking about. Or it could be that he's viewed by authority as a  vagabond – more trouble than he's worth – stimulate the economy – spend your tourist dollars here. But I have digressed and he is telling his story to a group of avid listeners, too many to get their chairs all up to the table.

Some teachers are anxious for the new year to begin and some dread the day it will. Some are bored and happy to have the opportunity to be so. Some are bored and want to escape back into the routine. They are counting their time now in days rather than months and those that went on an adventure rather than a vacation are returning to tell their tales. I really envy you – all that time to do just what you want.

Homecoming does not signify a recovery of identity; it does not end the journey in the virtual space of imagination. A modern nostalgic can be homesick and sick of home at once – Svetlana Boym

The past is porous and the present is fluid. If it were not there would be no need for a future.

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting – Milar Kundera

A quotidian poem

This is, it shall not soar

No seeing over

            The horizon

There’s no bird’s eye
View from here
Inch along the worm
            That you are
Nose to the grindstone

The mind would like to get out of here / onto the snow. It would like to run / with a pack of shaggy animals, all teeth // under the moon, across the snow, leaving / no prints or spoor, nothing behind. / The mind is sick tonight – Raymond Carver

Plaques offer facts
       Bare facts
That can be relied
       Upon
The plainer  the facts
The clearer the truth


And what we learn
From the autocrat
         Is to read
Between the lines
Look
         For what remains unsaid
Even then
There’s no guarantee


When each word
Must be weighed
         And agreed upon
By consensus
Reality is under
         Construction

There are tests that have right answers, which are returned with a number on top in a red circle, and there are test with open-ended questions, which provide insight into the test-taker’s mind – Noam Cohen

A special elevator
One of twenty-eight
Ascends directly
         From the underground
         To the high altar
Reserved for VIPSs
Whose big cars need

          Oversized accommodation
The Cathedral of Christ
          The Savior
Has re-arisen among the dead
Constructed in record time
           By the heroes of labor
This First Church of the
           Mercedes

[One forgets] not by cancellation but by superimposition, not by absence, but by multiplying presences – Umberto Eco

The test for the bureaucrat is how to turn the one into the other. Everything must have a measure. Be on a scale. Be Manician. The bureaucrat can only thrive in a clearing defined environment. The world must be made save for the bureaucrat. And it was said that God must love the bureaucrat cause he made so many of them.

From the Notebooks (#1 – Jan 12, 2004 – San Francisco – The Royal Ground @ Fillmore & California

From the Peruvian Indian basket I grasp my glasses, wallet, bus pass, keys and loose bills and fifty cents in change. I check to make sure I have a pen in my shirt pocket (the green checked shirt). I grab the notebook and some reading material. That is the big choice of the morning - what book shall I take. I head for the front door, automatically feeling my front right pocket to make sure that I have my keys. They are there, good (the last time I had forgotten them was Labor Day and it cost me $140 to get back in). I open the door and exit (sometimes I wait to verify the presence of my keys until the door has already closed - kind of a useless gesture by that time). The lock goes click and the door closes and I verify that the keys are in my pockest one last time – a form of paranoia. Sometimes I have to do it a third time.

So is it alright to talk to yourself as long as you do it silently or in text. Is it only a problem when you do it out loud. What is they say, its ok to talk to yourself just don’t answer. But this writing just is not the same as my talking to myself; its an entirely different cognitive process. After I boarded the #1 California I remembered that I had made a mental note to myself to write something down but could not for the life of me remember what It was, I just knew that I would think of it sooner or later and that it might not even be worth having worried about (most things aren’t) once I did remember what it was that I had reminded myself to jot down. And when trying to remember one thing something else comes to mind – oh yes the barmaid at the Cha-Cha-Cha was Linda and not Mary which is what I had written down (I went back a corrected that entry). How obvious once you remember what it was that you were trying to recall and it just pops into your head – “so obvious what am I stupid!” and you hit yourself on the forehead. And it comes as an isolated word, “Linda, Linda, Linda, why is that name on my mine, oh yes, the barmaid who paints transvestites and fires and I had called her Mary.”

Generally you can make the connection. But when you don’t - Oh that’s really annoying..

So I am sitting here on the bus thinking that there was something that I was supposed to remember to write down and that it had nothing to do with my green checkered shirt. Then I remember, it was that mundane process of checking my keys when leaving my apartment in the morning that I wanted to write down..

Catholic school girls in uniform - wash your armpits with soap and don’t use deodorant. They are conducting a body order science experiment. Someone is doing a science fair project and needs to gather data. Miss Nolan handed out textbooks…science book…have at home…have mine…so annoying…In our class Ms Gearson and Patrica were high school buddies…that was the most boring project in my life… no it was hole punches…out of cardboard. Thin cardboard. Did you hear my story about the guy. No, and we don’t care Aerial. He sat next to me and he was so gross…shatter, shatter, shatter

At the next to the last stop (before I got off) a bunch of pubescent boys got on and the whole back of the coach was reverberating.

She say, “I like the color of your green shirt. It looks like springtime”. “Yes”, I say that’s what I thought this morning when I chose to put it on..

A cup of coffee, regular, in a glass mug. And time – I have plenty of that today. A long faced red-haired lady sits knitting a bright pink yarn. She’s sitting in my usual window seat. Walter comes in and says that he has a new name for me - he is replacing “Steve Freightliner” with “Peter Built” and is changing his own name from “Mack Torque” to “Max Torque”. “With an ‘X’” he says.

David was complaining that he continued to write the same thing over and over. After he read a passage back to himself from the year prior he stopped keeping a journal. He had written exactly that day what he had written on this day - verbatim he had complained about the difficulty of writing. He is trying to write a screen play (everyone is) but is having difficulty coming up with a project that will sell. He had been working on one about Emperor Norton but then learned that someone else had already sold that idea and a film was in the works. I told him that I thought this would have been a great opportunity for a stream of conscious self analysis - why was he using the same words? Did they mean the same thing this time as the previous time?

Writing has to be about the mundane because that is all that we can ever know. Reading is about the exotic because we are just discovering something new or looking at the familiar with different eyes. “Do you ever go back and read what you have written” he asked. “Sure”, I said “A writer also needs to be a reader.

The objective is to make tomorrow different from yesterday, but not too different.

July 27, 2009 - Coffee Break - Kansas City Missouri

At dusk the cicadas start in – chirra chirra chirra - and when the chorus  stops in one spot,  from another tree it picks up the line again – chirra chirra chirra – and then another – chirra chirra chirra. It’s the first time this summer. Remember the year of the cicada –chirra chirra chirra even during the heat of the day – and which cicada cycle was that?                    CHIRRA CHIRRA CHIRRA

And I shall sit here listening until the wine runs out or I start to fall asleep – and already it is too dark to write. And now the wine is gone – that only leaves Morphius

CEOs can matter, but we all might be better off it they didn’t – Harris Collingwood

One thing suggests another
And then it’s a matter of
            Knowing
When and how to stop
            And I can’t

Good leaders can make a small positive difference; bad leaders can make a huge negative difference – Jeffrey Pfeffer

Hep cat
Cool cat
Big cat
Top dog

The cicadas creak and so does the new wattle fencing that shelters the terrace, a nameless insect is crushing grits between its shards, the reddish bird in the pine tree calls every ten seconds, and the west wind, circling watchfully around my walls, leaves unruffled the flat, dense, hard sea, whose harsh will softens towards nightfall – Colette

SUMERTIME


And by late afternoon
Two lovers lay on the grass
While the clouds still moved
East to west
In the mostly blue skies
As they are serenaded

By cicadas


Summertime


He is leaning on the palm
Of his right hand
As he playfully slaps her ass
As they lay entwined
In the green grass


Intermittingly watching
The intermittent white clouds
Blue skies
Green grass


Summertime


As the sun goes down
The poodle parade resumes
The young lovers are long gone
The cicadas more vociferous


Summertime


It is starting to cool
Down

Too far, too late or never at all! Of me you know nothing, I nothing of you – you whom I might have loved and knew it too! – Baudelaire

A dog and his bone
Buried it deep
A cat and its kittens
Without any mittens
A bird and its feathers
Can never be naked


You’re a dead duck
Living a dog’s life
Serving as a mule

Having promised Jose the chef a handsome indulgence, absolved him from bigamy, and raised his wages, Cardinal Pirelli, in gastronomy nothing if not fastidious, had succeeded in inducing him to brave the ghostly basement of the monastery on the mount – Ronald Firbank

7:17 and all is well

The first wave of workers

Are at their desks, in their cubicles

They are the ones that get things ready
For the masses who shall fallow
They are the pathfinders
The day breakers
Night wreckers

Only false memories can be totally recalled – Svetlana Boym

The years of the seagull coincides

With that of the cicada,

This is no coincidence

Pick them off on the wing

Enough to fill their bellies full and more
Until they can poop them on out
They have to sit in the grass of the park


Bears catching salmon have a similar condition
Swatting them as they leap onto dry land
And eating only their livers


Bad florescent light ballasts
Millions and billions or
As Carl Sagen would say
Billions and billions


They shot buffalo from train windows
And for years afterwards rag pickers
With rickety wagons and two nags
Could make a decent living
Gathering bones up from the prairie


The seventeen-year locust
Have invaded the tri-state area
They promise it will only be for three weeks
Isn’t their allotted time about up
Women get hysterical
When they land in their hair


Their strategy is called
Predator satiation
But it didn’t factor in man

There was even a specialist cicada in South America (Entomology, vol CXXI/27) that feed and bred in diesel engines. It lived on emulsified fuel – Jim Crace

She’s ugly
She drunk
She’s hollering
And trying to sing
She persists
In not shutting up


From the notebooks (#48 - 6/8/07 – Nielsen’s Bakery – Ridge St & Homewood – Homewood ILL)

A big big storm front moves in – hot air is meeting cold and spawning tornados. But it is a no go for here. No big storm materializes here.
-

Lakes are our modern form of a commons. The commons have not disappeared; it is just that they are underwater and invisible.

The three-week rule of the seventeen-year cicada is nearing its end. Too many of the old folks sitting and gabbing here in the café drinking coffee – telling stories, making lame jokes and discussing their medical conditions to suite my taste. And it is proclaimed, now you are one of us, like it or not. It’s not a choice, is it? I say.
-

When the mortgage on the average home equals the average income there is no equilibrium. It is the crest of a tidal wave.

July 26, 2009 - Broadway Cafe - Kansas City Missouri

And the political merry-go-round goes round and round. The ones that cause the problems control the solutions. And we call this justice? Remember it was the Robber Barons who were born of the “Long Depression” and the great corporations sprang out of the “Great Depression”. All real solutions arise from the bottom, when we don’t behave as we are expected to. They conducted surveys and they made projections, but they missed by a mile. The forecast was off but with hindsight they have made adjustments and everything is now on track. History is a continuity – sure there are disasters like the Black Death, and the Mongol invasions – but circumstances readjust. And if you are living through it (or not) it may appear to be a calamity but historically it’s just a burp. We have almost finished normalizing Hitler and are quickly forgetting Katrina. Hitler, who’s he? Oh yes, that was before your time!

I’ve been back here in KC too long now. I am finding thick thighs very appealing (so long as they aren’t wearing tight shorts). Now if only I could get interested in woman my own age. But time treats women differently than it does men and it’s not a physical thing but an attitude thing.

Alas, every dollar of what we call waste is what somebody in the [health] industry calls “income”. So anything that makes the system more efficient makes somebody unhappy, and that somebody has a team of lobbyists – Jonathan Chait

The failure of conservatism
         Meaning here – restorative
         Nostalgia not traditional
         Behavior


Is its intolerance of
        The other


It achieves its strength
        In a consensus
        To delimit
              Descent


But it become inflexible
        In its responses

Abraham Lincoln was, first and foremost, a politician – Sean Wilentz

Bob is on the left telling me

About when a function
       Is truly intergratable
By the way the reason why
I buy Joe an occasional beer
       Is that he provides me
       Frequent rides home
(I know this because Joe
       Complains a lot about this)
It is posed to rain. In fact it has
       Been sprinkling for

       Sometime now

The man on my right nods

       His head as he drinks

       His beer

Jeff comes in and asks if I had

       Seen Joe. He promised
       Me a posthole digger, he said
Not yet, And he said, I’m going
Out on the deck for a smoke

Why will men believe a lie, an absurd lie, that could not [be] impose[d] upon a child, and cling to it and repeat it in defiance of all evidence to the contrary – Abraham Lincoln

It’s horrid
         When you read
Something you don’t like
         And recognize something
         Of your own


Style in it – you disparage
         Of your creativity
         Can you be that bad too
Time to change don’t you know


It’s just too easy to emulate
          And make a train wreck
          (Too obvious of a metaphor
                  Don’t you think?)
          Of what had merit


But where do I go from here?
And here I am – going down
          This beaten path once more

I want to express my anguish in verses that tell / of my abolished youth of roses and daydreams, / and the bitter deflowering of my life / by a vast sorrow and petty concerns – Ruben Dario

Things happen
         And if it is good
               Take the credit!
And if not
        Pass the blame
        Not like ammunition
                More like a live
                Grenade


Hoard credit, shovel blame
The shit that it (he) is


God said – this is good
But gods create by mere thought
                 For us humans it is more
                       Complicated
                Than that

Percentage of all existing blogs that have not been updated in four months: 94 [Harper’s Index]

It is very hard work
Not to do it sequentially


John Cage – “read in whole
        Or in part; any section

        May be skipped
        What remains may be read
        In any order”


And though I generally follow
        Instructions rigorously
        (Being a product of public
                  Education)


I cannot do this – some rules
        Take precedence over other
        And sequenciallity is one of them
        Capitalizing the first word of every
                   Line is something
                   My computer does automatically

Robert Raushenberg - “To whom it may concern
         The White Paintings
         Came first, my silent
         Piece came later”


And rigorously I proceed
         From the beginning until the end
                  Alpha to Omega

Dante is an incentive, providing multiplicity, as useful as a chicken or an old shirt – John Cage

I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I’m doing – Raushenberg


I wept in truth only once. The sun when it disappeared cut off your face. Your head rolled into the grave of the sky and I no longer believed in tomorrow – Rene Char

From The Journal [Volume #1 – 1/09/2004]

Walter wants to make sixty-second spots on why people give their pets the names that they do. He turns to Linda and asks, “How did Bumper got her name?” This got us off onto dumb dog stories. And Linda goes on to tell how she took Bumper with her on her visit to her trailer trash family - all of who were “big” dog owners. They are concerned about Bumper - they worry that she might step on her and smash her - it’s a big joke, this teasing of her little dog. Linda’s brother waves his hand in front of Bumper’s face, “Look” he announces “there’s nothing there (and Linda does admit that Bumper is pretty damn dump).” Her father says, “I think you got the green weenie.” Walter is proud of his interview and says, “If I had been filming this, you would have been my first.”

Giamerette Paresasis’ Rome morphed from a quarter of a millennium into the present, almost intact except for the Tiber Levees. It was amazing given that 85% of ancient Rome had disappeared in the Millennium prior

I went to the Limelight Bookstore for a celebration in honor of the renaming of Theatre Bay Area’s Backstage to the TBA Bulletin. I discussed the concept of a “delicious project” and Irving Goffman with Brad, TBA’s executive director. Then I talked to Becky who was off to the New Langston for the opening of Harrell Fletcher’s “Happiness Follows Her Like a Shadow”. Or was that Shawni who I had talked with – yes, I think it was Shawni . This is my third wine this evening, in addition to the Grippman’s porter that I had earlier at the San Francisco Brewery. I did not make the film at SFMOMA which had been my original destination when I left home.

I am sitting here watching the cattle cars loading up the suits. They are all headed towards the financial district with blank stares on their faces – off to the meat packing plants and then the meat markets.

Yesterday a black taxi driver sauntered into the café wearing high waisted bright yellow pants, a wine red shirt and white tie. Most people would have looked like dorks in such a costume. He looked cool. It was the way he carried himself. A geek would have scuttled like a crab, someone trying to look inconspicuous so as not to draw attention to the fact that they had just pissed in their pants (that would be me). This guy, this cool dude, could never be inconspicuous - he just ambled along like he owned the world. I give him a thumbs up

“Happiness fallows you like a shadow” Walter says. “I can push my shadow ahead of me in a wheelbarrow,” I tell him. Water says the guy in yellow pants was faux cool, not cool. “Cool would have been having that outfit in your closet and wearing blue jeans instead. Cool would have been having bright red suspenders”. I say “Cool is being on the edge of the fashion envelope. Wearing red suspenders with that outfit would have pushed him over the edge. He would have been just another doork”. Walter says “having red suspenders in his closet would have made him cool”. I say “How do you know that he doesn’t.” “We don’t”, Walter replies”. “My point” I tell him “we have to allow that he may have red suspenders in his closet and allow that he is cool.” “No” Walter insists, “Faux cool - because you can never be sure - Only he knows if he really is cool”. “Well”, I say “he appears to know it.” So, I conclude, it’s just a matter of attitude and how you carry it off.

Bad Bad Leona Brown - slinks onto the bus - tired, worn down but not unattractive in a rough hard sort of way. Down coat draped over her shoulders, she slumps down into the seat and is immediately motionless except for an occasional twitch of her foot. She has headphones around her neck and backpack style leather purse in her lap. Is she just tired? Is she ill? She has a straight unbroken nose line and she is wearing dark sunglasses. Can I assign a story to each stranger I encounter?. Why not! At Van Ness and Market she is up and off with a spring ready for the quickly fading dusk of the city.

Then I arrive in the Mission and go to the Cha-Cha-Cha while I await for Joe Landini’s fundraiser to begin at the Shotwell Studio. Change a habit a day I tell myself. New fried potatoes and an Anderson Boont Amber. No change there. Then another Boont. I was following the New England Tennessee game on the overhead monitor. It’s a point of focus. What’s the temperature there? Walter had promised that it would be below zero. “Fahrenheit or Centigrade”, I had asked. “Kelvin” he replied. Well the receiver’s hands do not shatter upon his grabbing that pass, so, so much for Walter’s creditability. NE is ahead 14 to 7.

It will be another fifteen minutes before I need to head to Shotwell. Whatever happened to Mary the little Japanese bartender, that feisty little painter of transvestites and fire. Did she return to Italy. No, her name was not Mary. now was it - that was just a convenient place holder because… because, I couldn’t recall her real name at the moment. No, it is Linda. I can do that when writing – reserve a name that I can not remember with another – but not when conducting a conversation.

“So, Rosalie, are you pregnant “, I asked? “No, just getting portly…Would you have felt bad if you asked a woman if she were pregnant and she said no?” she asked. This is one of those trick questions like “Do I look fat?,” I thought. I contemplated an answer for what seemed like thirty second but was probable only three. I wanted to say “No” but didn’t. And before I made a stupid reply, she said, “Yes, I am”. “Congratulations”, I told her. “This will be your second, right? And by the way, just for the record, I didn’t ask the first time that I noticed” “Due in April” she replied.

There’s two fifty nine left into the second quarter. At half time I shall head towards Shotwell, which is only three blocks away

Ah, a coffee colored white woman with yards of blond dreads. I was just then imagining this little lady in her final term with swollen breasts and belly. It was about as fecund (like a prehistoric figurine) an image as I was possible of conceiving on only two beers. She was just slightly pregnant (is this today’s secret word – will Groucho’s duck descend upon me here and now?). She was bearing four pitchers of Sangria towards the back room. And Bad Bad Leona Brown with her soiled light green bra with spaghetti straps, her olive skin and her extended belly was not even in the same league with my new goddess.

“We need more masculine names” says Walter. “Then Walter and Fred?” asks Linda. “Yeah - like oh say, Vin Diesel” he says. “And I have chosen ‘Mack Torque’ because it sound like a truck” he announced. Walter always spends his late nights when he can’t sleep thinking out these types of concerns and comes into the coffee shop the next morning with his script in hand “And I’ll take Freightliner” I pronounce. “Uh, that’s it, ‘Steve Freightliner’ that your new name” Mack Torque proclaims.

‘Gauchisme’: the collective beliefs of the French Left that formed after May 1968 - Maoists, anarchist tendencies, and sometimes incorporating the Trotskyist groups. “I participate, you participate, we participate, he profits” - Ecole des Beaux Arts Poster - 1968

With a pocket full of quarters I venture forth to do my laundry. With a stripped bare bed and a dwindling stack of underwear, I announce, “this is Sunday morning at last!”.

Dave asks “Will that become a book?, pointing to this notebook. “I have no idea”, I reply. “That’s like planning your child’s career before it has been conceived. If it takes a life of its own then I will nurture it. If it is not a book that results, it will be something. It is something now, is it not?” The ground seems fertile enough, and hence this blog. And when people ask, “Are you published”, I can now reply, “In a manner of speaking, yes!” But it isn’t a book is it? No, thank God! And I haven’t killed any trees today. See I’m just as green as Al Gore is, only my trees are not virtual trees.

July 14, 2009 - Plaza Library - Kansas City Missouri

-
Kansas City - 83º (94 had been predicted), clear, wind – NW @ 3 mph, humidity – 63%. Doesn’t seem too bad at the moment for KC, but it can be a bitch in the summer (in the winter too). So why come back here in the middle of the summer – because everywhere nice is full of tourists or too expensive. I’m looking for a home – a small town with a coffee shop and a bar with a variety of draughts (not just Bud lite and MGD). Someplace to follow high school sports and more than a Baptist church. Where winter is not devastating and summer is at least tolerable. I haven’t found that place yet. Oh, yes – I don’t want to hang out with snowbirds at the local Hardee’s and if MacDonald’s is considered the gourmet spot, then screw it. Larry McMurty claims that the DQ is the community center of any North Texas town. With a good local library I can get anything I want to read through Interlibrary Loan even if they disapprove of my reading taste. I’m hoping that with the economy in the shape that its in I can find rental digs without having to sign up for a year. A spot to do some gardening would be nice. I’m not yet ready for a dog.

The duration of future pleasure bears no intrinsic or necessary relationship to the agony of current waiting – Stephen Jay Gould

The competition is on
Who knows who, who has one
     Spoken to or been
     Addressed by
We’re like that – holding out
     A hand with fingers
     Intertwined
The most celebrities
     Entertainers, sports figures
     The movers and the shakers
          The media darlings
Rarely are politicians or intellectuals
     Ever mentioned
I should know, you’d think
     That I’d would have
     Run into some
Dead celebrities don’t count
     Well maybe Elvis and Michael

Beauty cannot be loved fruitfully if it is loved only for the pleasures it gives. Just as the search for happiness for its own sake brings nothing but boredom – Marcel Proust

To be old is to be
     Out of contention
And we bemoan
     This condition
“I could have been
     Somebody”

They succeeded, they did keep the South placated, and in the Union, which was important, since if war had come in 1850, instead of 1860, the outcome might have been very different; the South had all its assets in place – and the North still needed to grow. And precious little thanks they’ve got from history for it – the dough faced Presidents. History loves blood. It loves the great blood spillers – John Updike

An April 9 Rasmussen Survey showed that only 53% of Americans believe capitalism is better than socialism (37% of those under 30) while 20% believe that socialism is better (33% of those under 30). But I believe that there is much confusion about what the words ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ really mean which has been caused by the radical right's use of the term ‘socialism’ to lambaste any solution to healthcare – calling it socialized medicine implying that the mess we have is capitalist healthcare and anything better is socialized medicine. What a lark – conservatives are creating a demand for socialism, although neither those in favor of or against have any idea what the term means. And without the ‘evil empire’ as a counter example who is to say what it means – they didn’t seem to have any better idea of its meaning than does Rush Limbaugh. And my fondest hope is that all of this will creates a real debate (which I doubt – we never have had the necessary preliminary discussions) about the nature of the ‘American Dream’. Have we had such a debate since April 1861 – and that one was cut short by a call to arms! But, oh, what joy are these statistics that show almost as many socialists as republicans (more if you only count those under thirty).

Average poets don’t just stand within their age, they compose it – David Orr

What you are taught serves not your needs but the needs of those who teach it to you. What you learn is to your own benefit.

They [cattle] are all breed beef: beef hash, beef hide, beef hocks. They’re a human product like rayon. They’re like a field of shoes… You can’t see through to their brains as you can with other animals; they have beef fat behind their eyes, beef stew – Annie Dillard

The Sarah Palin phenomena – so what does happen to losing Vice Presidential candidates? What are the chances that she will continue in a leadership role? About a third of tour former VP losing canidates are returned to the House of Representatives (1) or to the Senate (11), some serve in an appointed capacity; Ambassador (5), or a Cabinet Office (4); only one returned to state politics; 10 returned to private practice; two pursued other careers (as University President and a news commentator); and for eleven there is no record of a subsequent career at all (how pathetic to top of a distinguished career make a failed VP attempt). Only four remained rising stars – Franklin D Roosevelt (Governor of New York and later US President), Earl Warren (Supreme Court), Joseph Robinson (Senate Majority Leader) and Nicolas Butler (Columbia University President best known for his anti-Semitism). Chances that Sarah’s star will continue to rise – 1 in 10. Best chance - run for US Senate.
-

The Volvo door slammed. When we had bought that station wagon the year of Nixon’s landslide because it somehow showed you were a liberal, against Vietnam and for abortion and conservation, but it had always seemed to me to give a bumpy ride and mediocre mileage – John Updike
-

The mythology is all estranged

Hanging out their flags as if it’s

Rivers painting Washington’s

Crossing the Delaware

(Burnt on one corner in the

MOMA fire and severely smoke
Damaged) – Just like queers


To be still camping and swishing
When nothing contains any reality


Reality is a nude posing. Just carry on
Nothing real is going on
Such a rude awakening

He was a bit of a dude, a bit of a gangster, a solid family man with some flings on the side – a man in love with all the angles life can be approached by, with no time for books, for history, for doubt – John Updike
-

Obama is the boy toy

Of the paper economy

He’s mighty busy

Repapering the walls
Of his new house
It’s a fixer upper – he’s a flipper

Just as Herbert Hoover could not, in the end back away from the best economic advice of the 1920’s, Barak Obama is sticking with the “key men” of the 1990s – Kevin Baker

From the Journals #1 - 01/06/2004 - San Francisco - Royal Ground

“One hour and fifteen minutes and Click & Clack will be on”
“On 91.7 Click & Clack will be on in fifteen minutes”
“91.7?”
“Yep, 91.7”

Muni riders remember - front seats are for seniors and person with disabilities …Approaching one car Embarcadero in one minute…Next stop Castro Station

I Boarded BART at the Montgomery Station headed for the Berkeley Transportation Library to research the topic of emerging vs. established markets expenditures for road construction vs. road maintenance. It was for of the BP bitumen proposal. I was looking for data of highway construction and maintenance expenditures for Russia. And I didn’t want to be sitting there in the office.

Oakland City Center - 12 St Bart Station - I transfer from the Pittsburgh Bay Point train …Richmond in seven minutes…I get out at Berkeley Station walk towards the UC campus.

I have a sudden need to urinate. I’m on the second floor of McLaughlin and I am no longer looking for the Library. I am looking for a restroom, any restroom - noting on this floor - down the breezeway to Engineering - security lock - have to turn back. As I turn the urge gets stronger. I am waddling back down the breezeway - getting a little wet by still managing to hold on - upstairs or down stairs - down stairs is less strenuous. At the bottom of the stairwell is a floor guide. I’m in luck there is a restroom to my left (the direction of the arrow). I am now both waddling and holding my penis. Oh Oh, the front of my pants is getting warm. I make it around the corner - there is no sign of a restroom. I spot the women’s restroom on my right - where the hell is the men’s - then I spot it just as water begins trickling down my leg into my shoe.

Its no longer warm and comforting - its now cold, wet and chaffing my thighs. What did they make of big puddle of water outside the door, in the hallway. He says “Hello” and I say “Hello” as I walk out the door. I feel a little guilty about not cleaning up the puddle, but that would just have called attention to what had happened. I head off looking for the library.

I’m slowly changing my routine, puttering around in my Pjs. I do a little cleaning, reading on the bed and I hang up some clothes. I remove the shoes from the middle of the floor. It usually doesn’t bother me. I leave them were they are removed until I need them again. I’m sleeping later and enjoying the last few minutes of the coziness of a warm bed.

I did some Australian petroleum exploration success benchmarks for the Santos project in the afternoon and then called Dallas regarding some data for a marketing letter. I reply to an inquiry from London and provided them with some market research studies from Solomon. Otherwise it is all quite on the Western Front. From where will the next attack be launched? Not my concern, I am due for rotation.

Finished with today’s work and I’m at the Royal Ground by 4:15 after having picked up my laundry.

My strategy is to make them want to get rid of me and the more than they thing I want to stay the better my bargaining position (trouble is I can’t do any bargaining; bargaining is reserved - manno y manna). It’s hard to play a hand when you’re not allowed to sit at the table. I am attempting to make the problem their’s and the solution mine.

How nasty of an AH can I be - pretty damn nasty and loving the opportunity. I wonder, how much unemployment I would qualify for if they fired me – that would be the value of a zero sum game. I’m enjoying this game - move over Bevis and Butthead.

Everybody experiments with himself, improvises, makes experiments, enjoys his experiments; and all nature ceases and becomes art – Fredrick Nietzsche

July 12, 2009 - Broadway Cafe - Kansas City Missouri

-
Well I’m Back in Ol' KC again, forever escaping and returning and it’s raining and I again have my usual window seat having arrived early enough to make a claim upon it. That’s Michael there behind the counter with his friendly little red teddy bear beard. Haven’t seen him in over a year – since having left North Town. Michael! It takes him a good pregnant pause but he comes through with a big grin – he knows who I am even with my shaved head and this new beard and all this time and the displaced geography (that’s the hardest – placing a name with someone out of context). How are you doing? I hoped that I’d run into you here. Just back in town – got back last night. How long you been here? A couple of weeks. He insisted on buying me my coffee this morning and I gladly accepted the offer – we slapped each other on the back – two big burly men hugging.
-

Soup – the ultimate dish

Not as thick as water
Not as thin as a sauce
Everything must swim
And fit onto a spoon
If you can eat it with a fork
         Or cut it with a knife
          It ain’t soup

Whole days would go by, and later their years drifting like a bridge against the sky – JohnO’Hara

The disappearance of community life has meant that there is no longer anyone who is widely know other than the celebrity – hence small town gossip has been replaced by celebrity gossip – our faux neighbors live more fulfilling lives than do we. Anxiety is the basis of consumer society.

The swell of the heart is not landscape / but the fatal pull of the moon at our roots – John O’Hara

The more ubiquitous
         The phenomena
The more insidious
         The consequences

The happy ending is the happiest lie of all – Kathleen Norris

If the family sedan’s
          Odometer can give us
The Millennium a year early
What has the “Father Knows Best”
          Metaphor done to our politics


To too many it is a natural fit
To others a monster aroused
         From its slumber by
         Nuclear testing


Must I forever be haunted by

The ingratiating Eddy Haskell
         Gee, you look nice Mrs. Cleaver


You should pick your heroes
          Wisely. They will growl old
          And you never will

You can see the creatures die and you know you will die. And one day it occurs to you that you must not need life. Obviously. And then you’re gone. You have finally understood that you’re dealing with a maniac – Annie Dillard

To see this artifact
Its necessary to immerse
     Oneself in the mire of time
But It is a mistake to think
     One is looking at the past
For What one is really doing
Is looking forward
     Into the present

Perhaps in all great works of art, the true function of the imagination is paradoxically, not to imagine – in the sense of inventing or transforming – but to see; to see the reality which is concealed by habit and the phenomenal world – George D Painter

This day is full of
      Thick thighed ladies
       In short pastel skirts
This is Kansas City
And they are on they way
      To church

From “The Journal” (#1 – Jan 4, 2004 – San Francisco, California)

“Explanations were becoming obese”

At Royal Ground – Walter was on a roll, he was on about getting animals drunk - starting with the dog, then the cat, we moved on to birds and alligators. Would alcohol bring out the man in the beast as it seemed to bring out the beast in man. I had my doubts. A drunk gerbil might be ok, but  I did not wish to encounter a drunken lion or an orangutan on smack.

There was a Diane Arbus exhibit at the Mordern (SFMMA) – the anti-portrait - psyches frozen in stone holding up the portico. Her individuals isolated in the center of the her frame - Small groups symmetrically arranged. A 2D slice of depression, where their  presence will go on forever, where nothing else will ever happen to them and perhaps to ourselvdes -  - it will never get any better, it will never be any the worst - time is frozen here in stone (silver iodide crystals to be more exact).

The Green Street Mortuary Marching Band was strutting though Chinatown for a Sunday afternoon funeral. One block down I catch sight them again on Jackson St as they pass the ally off from Pacific. Shall I catch up with them? No, instead, I dash into the San Francisco Brewery for a Gripman’s - black with a little foam - chocolaty - served slightly cool - not cold

Pink plastic shopping bags - a true Chinatown souvenir

Today I’m off to the Management Center at 9AM for my first writing workshop - grant writing – there is also a workshop on finding your own vice at the Great Well Lighted Place for Books . That workshop will be a couple of weeks. I’m engaged in attempt to re-invention the mundane - This morning I decided to switch the blanket that I placed on top of the quilt so that the quilt is now on top (the blanket is in its conventional position - between the sheet and the quilt) - I didn’t do it - but I spend several minutes contemplating doing it. And there are other routines which need startling -getting up, taking a piss, brushing my teeth (the whine of the Soncicare has become routine and thereby soothing), shaving, getting dressed, opening the curtains, making the bed, stuffing my pockets with their normal contents (wallet, keys, change, pen), selecting a book to take with me and grabbing this notebook. It’s only then I rush of to the coffee shop - oops forgot my pen – must return. Oh yes, I brush my hair too.

The routine…awareness is the beginning of transgression


To be unheard is not the same as to be silent