The Blog

This is not really writing.

It’s only typing. Actual writing does not seem to be a possibility for me lately. I’m distracted by everything. Maybe there is too much information about the world available to me, but I am frazzled thinking about all the things that seem to be going wrong.

Like that multi-train bomb attack in Mumbai. When did it stop being Bombay, anyway? And when did it become accepted procedure to make your political point by indiscriminately killing and maiming unarmed civilians who don’t even know what you want and are not involved in preventing you from getting it? I can’t face the story. Are the bombers proud of themselves? What kind of asshole would be high-fiving back at the secret headquarters over such a brutal and outright chickenshit act? I can’t hear this news. My mind freezes when I think about it, and I can’t even recall if I’ve heard what it is that the bombers say they want, or what they are protesting, or if they’ve spoken up at all.

And what about the Supreme Court saying that the U.S. government has to treat all prisoners humanely, according to the Geneva Convention? What the walking fuck is that all about? I’ve been a loser in my political hopes and dreams for so long that I can’t believe my side – the good guys – seem to have come out on top of this one. It’s only a tiny skirmish, sure, but it seems to be for real: The Supreme Court! Still, I am mistrustful. Maybe it’s some kind of a trick, something Karl Rove dreamed up in cahoots with Chief Justice Roberts over cognac and cigars in the back room of an exclusive Virginia bistro, alone in the dark with the curtains drawn, under high security. Something that can be used as an OctoberSurprise to turn the midterm election around and increase the Republican majority in Congress. I am circling this story like a coyote in a hungry, suspicious pack, not sure if the wounded prey might still be strong enough to defend itself, or if it’s time to eat. Is this the beginning of the fall of the neocon takeover, or just a kooky anomaly? I shouldn’t be thinking this way, but I am muddled.

And I don’t care about the three Israeli soldiers who were kidnapped, any more than I give a shit about whether or not Israel is “overreacting” in it’s response. I feel only despair when I see this new violence taking place, and it doesn’t matter who is bombing whom. It just makes me think that there will never be an end to this crap, no matter how we pray, no matter how many world leaders act like they hate war. This particular conflagration is based, somewhere way back in time, on religious animosity, as so many wars are. You can talk about your political alliances and why Iran or Syria might be getting somethng out of this, or why doesn’t the Lebanese government rein in Hizbollah, or can’t the UN do something, but the bottom line seems to be that Muslims hate Jews. Maybe Jews hate Muslims, too. I know that’s not politically correct to speculate about, so fucking picket my house if you want to. I’ll bet Jews are capable of stupid, blind, murderous hatred just like the rest of us. My brain won’t track this story, either. Wait: Are we in Northern Ireland? Vietnam? Indonesia? Chad? Iraq? Somalia? If it’s Sunday there must be mindless bloodshed somewhere.

My job, and thus my life, has turned to shit. I can’t ignore it any more, which is something I used to be able to do. Really, of all the things I can’t write about, I probably could write best about this subject, but I am too identifiable on this blog, and the things I would say about my company would be offensive to my superiors and coworkers alike, and I would either get beaten up or fired, probably both. So I’ll have to find a different venue for that particular rant, and probably my supportive friends will never see it.

So I have gone in with another guy (my brother) and bought a PA system, and I am getting together on Saturday afternoons with some other players in my living room and I am taking out my frustrations on my guitar. So far we have jammed on the three hottest Saturdays of the year, and my house is not air conditioned. But it’s the only therapy I know how to do on myself.

I hope it works.

Another week and I still don’t feel like writing.

It’s been hot in Southern California. Not like that time in Yuma, when it didn’t drop below 90 degrees 24 hours a day for the whole five weeks I was there. You’d wake up at 10 AM and it would already be pushing a hundred. You could get sunburned in ten minutes while submerged in the motel pool. Not me, of course. I don’t get sunburned, thanks to my eastern European swarthiness. Fleas don’t bite me, either, maybe for the same reason. The agent said if I did good in Yuma in July, she’d see about getting me some gigs in Alaska for the winter. I did pretty good there.

I met Debbie there that summer. Just a little thing in tight jeans and a big cowboy hat, but she drove a three-quarter ton Dodge pickup. If you’re driving a pickup just for show you get a one-ton. If you want a work truck, something to haul fertilizer or tile or two-by-fours, a half-ton will do. My first day off, Debbie picked me up at ten in the morning by driving her truck into the gravel turn-around at the motel and honking for me, several times. I was already sweating when I got out to the truck and read her bumper sticker: WHEN IN DOUBT, WHUP IT OUT. She handed me a longneck as we spun out of the driveway, throwing gravel through the fence and into the pool.

I felt so cheap.

It hasn’t been that hot here, but I think it might have hit 90 degrees in Long Beach today. I took a vacation day, so I could be home instead of in my air-conditioned office. I saw the national holiday coming up on the calendar, and the weekend just ahead of it, and that pesky Monday was the only thing standing in the way of a four-day weekend for me, so I zapped it with a Vacation Request Form. We’ve got a new Head Guy where I work, and I think mine was the first VRF he’d seen. He was recruited from outside HugeCorp, so he doesn’t know about all the stupid rules and forms we have. He gave me the standard half-joking bullshit about why do you want a day off, don’t you like it here, blah, blah, blah, but I didn’t play, and he was faced with signing it on the spot or appearing to be indecisive in front of a lesser human being (me), so he signed. I should have given myself a raise while I was at it.

So my third consecutive day of freedom, I sat alone in my hot house, and got nothing done. I seem to be paralyzed. Thoughts parade through my brain, and it’s an interesting show, but I don’t seem to care enough to grab one of them and wrestle it to the ground. I felt fatigued, though I haven’t done much lately. I felt uninspired, though the ideas are almost tangibly floating around in the room. I felt helpless, though my hands are not bound.

I feel frustrated, and vaguely disgusted. If I get a handle on this (see title of post), I’ll write it here. In the mean time, thanks to you Precious Few who have continued to comment, though I have become sporadic, and more boring than ever. My heart beats sporadically for you.

Stalkers: This is not me.

The guy in the second paragraph. Leave him alone. He’s not guilty. I’ve never even been to Pittsburgh. Also, my oath to the Vikings would preclude me operating on this particular patient. Nothing personal, you understand. Just benign neglect.

Because sometimes, you just need to laugh.

I don’t remember where I first heard this joke. I think my brother told it to me. It was long and convoluted, and when I started telling it, it kept getting longer and convoluteder. I think this was partly because the setup has to be just right for the punchline to work, and partly because I knew I was going to crack up before I got to the end and be unable to utter the final words, so I was always playing for more time, trying to choke back the guffaws. In fact, if you’re like me, when you repeat this, you will probably find yourself falling apart on the next-to-last line of the joke, the one that sets up the payoff, because it’s funny in itself, and because you will not be able to not think of the next line.

It comes off way better when you hear it rather than when you read it – it’s that kind of a joke – so, because I spare no effort for you, the Precious Few who read this blog, I have a video presentation, for your chuckling pleasure. The guys in the video get right to the point because, unlike me, they’re joke-telling professionals.
Now without further ado, I give you…

Wow, I forgot I had a blog!

My head has been in the sand. Well, not in the sand. I don’t know where it’s been. You know how it is – you get busy doing something else, then when you turn back, your head is gone. Off who knows where, doing who knows what with who knows whom. That’s what happened to me, and I still haven’t found my head. I have nothing to say, and everything. I won’t be able to fit it all in, though, so here’s some Random Jottings:

• I am freaked out that down in San Diego, where Republican Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham got caught taking bribes and is actually doing time, they went ahead and elected another Republican to take his place. I was hoping the voters there would be sending a message to the Repubs that the party is over. But it’s a Republican district, and I guess reality has yet to set in there.
• I heard Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate of The United States, on Fresh Air (NPR) this evening. He’s an interesting guy, and one of the things he said was that he likes to get bored. The reason for this is that he has discovered that his bursts of creativity always follow periods of no action. He thinks he needs to have nothing going on for a while, and then his mind starts working on his art. I’m not sure this same formula would work for me, but hey- he’s the (former) Poet Laureate. Maybe there’s something I can learn from him. I’ve always assumed I could live my life any way I wanted, allow an unlimited number of distractions, porn stars, copulating possums, stick people on the backs of SUV’s, and then sit down at a moments’ notice and write a snappy new song. Since that hasn’t been working for a while, maybe I need to try and figure out what are the best conditions for me, and then see if I can precipitate some creative juices.
• I am shocked, shocked, that the Republicans have brought up gay marriage as an issue going into the midterm election season. Now that the evil, godless Democrats (along with seven apparently godless Republicans) have blocked the Senate from approving a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, the GOP can use it as a club to beat up liberals all the way to the polls this November. Jeez, can you guys be any more transparent? You don’t care about these things except at election time. And we know that you know that almost nobody else cares about them either – just a rabid minority of religious, bigoted right-wingnuts who will go out and vote for these wacky proposals and what’s this? Democrats on the ballot? Out with them!! I keep thinking this can’t possibly work again, but the voters keep shocking me. Is there some way I can denounce this behavior without implying that the electorate, whom I love, truly, is just plain stupid?
• There are twenty-six bones in the human foot, mine included, and I guess I am going to break them all, one by painful one, before I am through, which must be coming pretty soon now. However, the Ace Bandage will have to go down as one of the great inventions of humankind, right after clumping kitty litter.
• There are firings going on at work now. Our know-nothing corporate masters are “making some changes,” so what was previously just low morale has degenerated into abject fear. The Executive Manager is a dead man walking, and the underlings he brought with him are very nervous. People are gathering their personal items together, just in case. Account reps are slipping quietly into my office and casually inquiring if it would ever be possible to get the computer to spit out a list of their clients, with phone numbers and mailing addresses. Those who are not afraid are disgusted. Others, like me, are too numb to be anything other than bemused. Wish me luck, people, or I may be coming to live with one of you.
• Hey, those wacky Scientologists are entering NASCAR racing! I can never read the stuff that’s screened onto the hoods of those cars. They’re moving, what? a hundred and fifty miles an hour, aren’t they? If it weren’t for the easily recognizable colors and logos of the various sponsors/purveyors of alcohol and tobacco, I would have no idea what’s being advertised. So how will I be able to decipher anything like the first chapter of L. Ron Hubbard’s book? And who the hell calls himself “L. Ron,” anyway? If you want to have a cool space alien or African-American name like Elron, just say it, man. Everybody knows you’re real name is Larry, the catch-all Hollywood code name for “dorky neighbor” or “gullible nincompoop.” Anyway, this could mean trouble for the auto racing world, because any team that beats them might find themselves named in a law suit.

I’m glad I got those things off my chest, and have also finally put the whole Gravatar thing behind me. I really have been having some Serious Thoughts lately, having to do with the meaning of life (well, my life, anyway), but I can’t seem to get around to writing them down. Then there’s that whole forgetting I had a blog thing, too, and the missing head. But I want you to know that I have been reading blogs – all of your blogs and more. I’ve been an active commenter too, here and there, so I feel like I’m doing my part to keep this whole 21st Century CB Radio thing going.

Next time: the Penguin-Ice Cream joke. Maybe.

I live near cemeteries.

Ghosts walk my street, always behind us, just around the corner, with cries we cannot hear, wounds we cannot bind, restless hungry ghosts. It’s too late for them, their time is past, we have covered them with the earth and made up stories about their lives, how they were loved and honored, and we shed real tears not for them but for our memories of them, our twisted memories, how they would have wanted it, yes, they would have wanted it just this way, vengeance for their deaths, proof for their lives. They faced the enemy, they saved the world, their flesh was torn, the glory and the horror burned their eyes, and yes, they would have wanted it this way. We will follow them down, our holy dead, and we will kill for them, and we will be killed, and in this way we will honor them.

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