The Day Before the Earthquake Hit

...feeling totally miserable the day before the earthquake hit...thought I’d reply to some e-mails...y’know, reach out a bit...but was finding it difficult to say anything about my life that didn’t come across like an outtake from a Dostoyevsky novel...

...so trying to put things in perspective, decided to describe the catastrophically horrible day leading to my miserable outlook...only to find that, as details appeared in little black letters before my eyes, it didn’t really appear all that bad....slept badly, had an unpleasant driving experience, dropped my ipod in a swimming pool...(with things kinda spiraling from there, mentally, at least, to more general money concerns to self-laceration for a history of klutziness to a life seeming in such dark moments to go nowhere but the next costly fuckup...y’know, that kinda crap)....but, then, how many people got to spend a good chunk of a sunny summer Monday lying around in a swimming pool, thus allowing expensive electronic toys they’re fortunate enough to have to get wet, in the first place?...so, I left that part out, too...

...(then, I’ve never really understood how the other people have it worse thing is supposed to cheer anybody up....it’s more likely to make me think oh god, there’s misery everywhere...just as look at what a good life you’ve got makes me think jeezus, there’s no hope for anybody....and, anyway, both kinda translate as you’re an asshole for feeling bad...which doesn’t make me feel better at all)...

...then the spigot farted out something nasty when I tried to get a glass of water...so went downstairs to see what was up...

...towards the end of the yoga teacher training, they had us write letters to ourselves, put them in self-addressed envelopes...which would somehow be sent to arrive when you most need it....I thought it sounded all touchy-feely and new-agey, but, nonetheless, wrote something heartfelt...

...and there, as I asked about the water...turned out the plumber was working on the pipes, earlier...in the basket, was an envelope with my name written on it in my own chicken scratch...containing a lotta semi-poetic stuff about untapped possibilities and diaphanous veils all too easily mistaken for reality...and, at the very bottom, five words: you are on the path...

Talkin' Nonsense With Dostoyevsky

Talking nonsense is man’s only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms. If you keep talking big nonsense, you will get to sense. I am a man, therefore I talk nonsense. Nobody ever got a single truth without talking nonsense fourteen times first. Maybe even a hundred and fourteen.
Dostoyevsky

...a guy I know shares a birthday with the guy who wrote Mein Kampf...I got the guy who wrote show me that I’m everywhere and get me home for tea...and I’m only a day away from the guy who said he shot a man in Reno just to watch him die....honestly, I don’t think this means much, but I’m not complaining, either...

...berenice left a comment on my Postmodern Yogi Bear post with a link to a story from the BBC involving a bear found sleeping in a campground in Washington state, surrounded by thirty-six empty beer cans...taken from campers’ coolers and opened with teeth and claws...need I mention that this makes me feel proud to be an American?...

...when I was twenty-one, hitch-hiked with a friend from Rome to Pompeii, where we had to leave our backpacks with this old lady in black who seemed like she’d probably been there since before the volcano erupted, to go and wander the ancient dead streets...climbing through windows where we weren’t supposed to go to see things closed off to other tourists....as we traipsed into the empty coliseum, history's weight seemed almost overwhelming...I thought wow...Pink Floyd played here...

...connections, it seems, are always tenuous...a shrink once told me small children go through a crisis when they realize they're actually separate from their mothers...autonomous, lonely beings in a frightening world....my question is when, exactly, does that crisis end?...

...if something is disappointing I know it’s not nothing, because nothing is not disappointing.
Andy Warhol

...Lao Tzu wrote when you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you....that is, with the right attitude, you can have everything you want...just like the new age people say....I doubt he was really talking about the mansion in the Hollywood hills, the private plane, or the movie star significant other, though...more likely, I think, he meant you can have everything you want when you stop wanting anything you don’t already have...

4th of July, Wissahickon Park (Scalia)

We have it in our power to begin the world over again
Thomas Paine, 1776

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons
Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Reality has a liberal bias
Stephen Colbert

On the transcendent issues, the most important issues of our day, I've been totally in agreement and support of President Bush
John McCain

Lesley Stahl interviewing everybody’s favorite Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia on 60 Minutes:
STAHL: If someone’s in custody, as in Abu Ghraib, and they are brutalized, by a law enforcement person — if you listen to the expression “cruel and unusual punishment,” doesn’t that apply?
SCALIA: No. To the contrary. You think — Has anybody ever referred to torture as punishment? I don’t think so.
STAHL: Well I think if you’re in custody, and you have a policeman who’s taken you into custody–
SCALIA: And you say he’s punishing you? What’s he punishing you for? … When he’s hurting you in order to get information from you, you wouldn’t say he’s punishing you. What is he punishing you for?

Freedom’s just another word for...nothin’
Paraphrase of Justice Scalia’s comments, with apologies to Kris Kristofferson and Janis Joplin

Those willing to give up a little liberty for a little security deserve neither security nor liberty
Benjamin Franklin

Happy hour is now enforced by law
Jello Biafra

The first time I got arrested isn’t worth talking about, much. I was outside of a Dead show in San Francisco—in a state of mind that certainly made it seem significant at the time, though it might’ve been anyway, except that it wasn’t. We got set up by this older guy who handed us something and promptly disappeared, mere seconds before somebody else grabbed me, saying “guess who.” I answered “I dunno,” then saw the little blue earphone. A quick search showed we weren’t worth their trouble, but the story was enough to get me rejected for a jury twenty years later. More interesting was the second time, maybe a year later—standing or crouching along the fence, joking, probably, enjoying the desert sun and each other’s company—me, Hilary, Don, Jeff P., Mel, maybe Elyse and Tom—until we heard the sound of the drum—some hippie kid who’d been picked the night before around the campfire to give us the signal—and, as somebody started raising the strand of barbed wire, I thought ‘shit we’re actually doing this,’ and climbed through. Then we were walking across the desert, trespassing on government property, hand in hand, spotting the biggest jackrabbit I’d ever seen. Up somewhere way ahead, where we certainly didn’t expect to get, was Mercury—name of a planet, in honor of a Roman trickster god—where scientists toiled, building devices and testing them underground to make sure they worked—and that was exactly the problem—they worked way too well, and there were way too many of them, and yet more were being built and tested, and here we were, crawling through barbed wire and trudging across the desert, trying in our feeble all-too-theatrical way to say no...please...stop. That was all we could do, perhaps, but it was something. There has to be some value in simply saying no, even if no one listens. After a while, tired and simultaneously hot and cold as hot desert sun wrestled with icy winds, we saw the Wackenhut up ahead—back then, in the mid-to late 80’s these armies for hire were already a growth industry, if nothing like what they are today. We decided to at least make a token effort to walk away, but didn’t cause him too much trouble. Casually approaching, he let us know we were under arrest, herded us together with a group of others, and politely asked us all to stick out our wrists for plastic handcuffs—they were easy to slip out of, though one poor guy learned not to do so too blatantly in front of them. From there it was a three hour bus ride north, to Tonopah, where they put us in an auditorium, told exactly what statute we’d violated, then said we were free to go but would have to find our own way back. Good one, State of Nevada. And so we packed every bar and restaurant in that little town until enough cars made it there to drive us back down to camp, some to be arrested again the next day, some, like me, to drive up in support. One of my releasees was kind enough to treat everyone in the car to a dip at a hot spring on the way back down. The day after that, a bunch of us headed to the bay area for another Dead show, where this time I managed to stay out of police custody.

Well, boys, I reckon this is it — nuclear combat toe to toe with the Rooskies. Now look, boys, I ain't much of a hand at makin' speeches, but I got a pretty fair idea that something doggone important is goin' on back there. And I got a fair idea the kinda personal emotions that some of you fellas may be thinkin.' Heck, I reckon you wouldn't even be human bein's if you didn't have some pretty strong personal feelin's about nuclear combat. I want you to remember one thing, the folks back home is a-countin' on you and by golly, we ain't about to let 'em down. I tell you something else, if this thing turns out to be half as important as I figure it just might be, I'd say that you're all in line for some important promotions and personal citations....
Slim Pickens as Major T.J. Kong, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

freedom won through non-violence will mean the inauguration of a new order in the world. There is no hope for mankind in any other way
Mohandas K. Gandhi