plague of frogs

I have a new favorite political radio show: This is Hell.

Website has archives, headlines, podcast, so-on-and-so-forth.

it’s a hard world sometimes for little things

I just gave myself a fucking adorable haircut and no longer resemble the woman from Dilbert.

Cool.

(Inertia is not going to get me. Viva la revolucion.)

I can’t articulate how much I’ve changed in the last week, so I suppose we’ll all have to watch this unfurl.

hungry ghosts

(Thinking: events in the middle east; safe and illegal abortions; money money money money; the first and second rapes; women in a factory in China make fifteen cents an hour making mardi gras beads which end up littering the streets after the mass hangover begins; dull headache; listening to Les Rallizes Denudes at TOP FUCKING VOLUME is very satisfying; Ferlinghetti; Beowulf and Grendel; the monsters of modernity; bite your tongue?)

It is not necessarily true
that a war needs to
be writ large
to make the news.
(Numbers help: it’s in
the public interest.
Newsprint on the fingertips,
talking heads and static
in dry mouth. She’s been drinking
since three thirty
and it’s only made the
five-pointed star
inside her chest
burn dull.)

Split the sky, bone
cleaved by metal,
bloody-oh and why
we swear our loyalties.
Gunshot wound to the head.
(He missed: whatcha
gonna do? His aim
was true; either case
breath escapes.)

There are no heroes:
war all the time
in the hungry ghost realm.
Sometimes we forget about the missile,
go about our daily business
as if we could not do bodily harm.

propaganda songs

I saw one of the women who had been involved in Jane: Chicago speak today, and it broke my heart again and again. First, that women were ever in such a position: that one’s choices, upon being fertilized, were reduced to 1) possibly fatal danger or 2) motherhood (these and only these); second, that people in this world are doing their best to see that that binary choice returns; third, that that reality is a legislative slip of the tongue away (one Mississippi). And fourth, that women could overcome their personal differences to make a localized yet meaningful change in others’ lives: that ordinary people could see around and through the system to the skills they needed to acquire, that they did not let their fear stop them from doing what they believed was right.

Though there is no grand narrative, no pattern, no meaning save the arbitrary granted wish, I want to make the most of my time breathing in this body. I want to make this incredibly fucked-up world a tiny bit better for at least a couple of other people. I want to do what I can.

And I will not let my fear stop me from doing what I believe is right (though I am not THAT bull-headed and I will compromise. I have my ethics, though, and I will stand by them).

Sometimes, though, I get very sad and tired. One of the women in the Jane documentary said something that resonated with me: that doctors had some training in professional distancing, which is something she’d never learned to do, and that eventually seeing all that suffering (no matter whether she had a part in ending it or not) began to bruise her.

I can’t remember a time I haven’t known evil like that, that I haven’t seen suffering.

Sometimes I wish I was better at distancing. Sometimes I get very tired.

Nothing is really binary, not truly. All those shades of grey like car exhaust, toxic. Exhale, inhale: everything gives you cancer, but there’s always a chance you’ll be the lucky one this time. In hope, fear. In fear, hope.

Holy shit.

what makes a man start fires?

There was this woman on the bus yesterday who kept cackling in a raspy, throaty manner. I don’t think she was talking to anyone; nobody was talking to her. (I can’t be entirely sure as my eyes were closed.) It was fairly disturbing. One expects laughter to have an object.

She got off at Cabrini Green (the proximity of which to the Gold Coast has always been of note to me; Chicago is a fairly segregated city, even still. That’s built into the grid).

If I was more superstitious, I’d have thought she was a banshee.

kill the racehorse

I swear, I do, I do solemnly swear that I will actually post some creative writing in this fucking blog.
I’ve hit a point with this one story I’ve been working on where it sits in my hard drive, slowly maddening. Every day, I stare at it, I make a few edits, I am unsatisfied. Something isn’t hinging. I need to take a little time off from it and come back fresh, I think.

I’ve been thinking a good deal about ethics and responsibility. I was always taught to take responsibility for myself, but where does the self end and the community begin? K always tells me that I don’t have to save the world, after all.

I cannot carry blame around. It’s heavy and my back is already sore. I have no use for it. I have no use for assigning essentially arbitrary ‘good’ and ‘evil’ tags to the people and events in my life. That kind of sorting and categorizing is inherently human – it’s how we navigate the world – but it seems to have consequences far beyond. We make small things mean too much – at least I do.

Kind and soft, sharp and small.

A couple of musical notes:
1) Keiji Haino/Sitaar Tah! is the best double cd to fall asleep to;
2) I like des_ark despite myself;
3) New Criminal Damage is so anthemic;
4) I’m buying a four-track this weekend.

A couple of literary/political outside-the-text-box notes:
Anyone interested in the American health care crisis should read this and this. If you’ve got time and are interested in Mayahana Buddhism and/or psychology, you should read this – it’s in pdf format.

gates out of my hell

This guy is my personal hero. We all should think about community in such a way.

great lakes, great escapes

Items from this weekend:

1) I drove 1400 miles by myself. 1408 miles, really. Part of it through a monsoon of sorts. The best part: post-storm, in the mountains of Pennsylvania, at dusk with a million fireflies.
2) Despite a broken middle E (busted, I believe, in the trunk when I had to brake suddenly due to the person in front of me – in heavy traffic – slamming on THEIR brakes for what appeared to be No Good Reason), I played my best. I’ve never been joined with my piano in that way before. People seemed to like it? The important thing is that I played my best, really.
3) People seen on the road:
a. Two old women in muu-muus wandering aimlessly around the parking lot of a rest stop;
b. The man from last year’s Dirtfarm Fourth of July party flyer come to life;
c. Hagerstown thug with tricked-out Pontiac Firebird; ‘SHADEY’ (misspelling intact) across the back windshield in Olde English, ‘MONEY OVER BITCHES’ in smaller Olde English in both windows;
d. Man who grabbed my arm and insisted on looking at my tattoo in a gas station; he then showed me his (“I WAS DRUNK AND I JUST GOT MY NEW TAT GUN!”) – it was an eagle (facing backwards) with a “USA” banner and big blue flames. “The eagle is watching my back,” he said. He tried to take a picture of me but I somehow evaded this happening.
e. Lost Daniel Clowes character with black eye leaning against truck in rest stop parking lot smoking sullenly and staring
4) I don’t think I’ve ever been in the same room with all of my closest girlfriends at one time, and it was somewhat magical;
5) Somewhere between October 2005 and today I grew apart from the context of my DC/Baltimore life, and though I still love my friends there as much as I ever did, we have diverged in some day-to-day way;
6) Emotionally exhausting, but worth it.

you can’t hurt me no more

I got to see Nurse With Wound play their first show in 23 years and though they only played for 45 minutes it was the entire Salt Marie Celeste set and it was entirely worth it. I was entirely sober and it was still beautiful.

D (happy birthday) is right about San Francisco. It moves differently from other cities. It is less interested in hiding its seedy underbelly. Where other American cities degenerate quickly (Levi-Strauss was right) into greyness and decay, San Francisco fades quietly to pink, green, cream. It is a place I would like to live someday. It feels entirely different.

Speaking of Levi-Strauss and cities, he wrote in 1955 regarding Washington DC: "… with the possible exception of Washington, D.C., which is neither wild nor domesticated, but is dying of boredom and captivity in the cage of radiating avenues in which L'Enfant enclosed it (Tristes Tropiques, p. 97)." Apparently we were just playing in the ruins.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the parameters of love: love without attachment, love without expectation. Raoul Vaneigem (I am rereading) writes: "Love in its turn swells the illusion of unity. Most of the time it founders and is aborted in triviality. Its songs are crippled by the fear of always returning to the same single note: the icy fear, whether there are two of us or ten, of finishing up alone as before. What drives us to despair is not the immensity of our unsatisfied desires, but the moment when our newborn passion discovers its own emptiness. My insatiable desire to fall in love with so many pretty girls is born in anguish and the fear of loving: we are so afraid of never escaping from meetings with objects. The dawn when lovers leave each other's arms is the same dawn that breaks on the execution of revolutionaries without a revolution. Isolation a deux cannot overpower the general isolation. Pleasure is broken off prematurely and lovers find themselves naked in the world, their actions suddenly ridiculous and pointless. No love is possible in an unhappy world. Love's boat breaks up on the reefs of the everyday. … Lovers should love their pleasure with more consequence and more poetry. (The Revolution of Everyday Life, p. 41)."
And Chandrakirti says:

First we conceive the "I" and grasp onto it.
Then we conceive the "mine" and cling to the material world.
Like water trapped on a waterwheel, we spin in circles, powerless.
I praise the compassion that embraces all beings.

young arsenal

I promise I'll post those stories soon. Work has been really busy (this is a good thing).

I just wanted to post to document (for myself) that something very good and very important happened somewhere between my brain and mouth today. I don't want to lose sight of it or bury myself in distractions again.

I feel free.