Going to Eleven: The Obligatory New Year's Resolutions Post

The Dormouse: You've got no right to grow here.

Alice: Don't talk nonsense. You know you're growing too.

The Dormouse: Yes, but I grow at a reasonable pace, not in that ridiculous fashion.
Lewis Carroll

These go up to eleven.
Nigel Tufnel, This is Spinal Tap

As I believe I said, or at least vaguely referred to (more likely), I don’t do the New Year’s thing. Nonetheless, to show my deep commitment to personal growth, I here present:

****Eleven New Year’s Resolutions****

1. To forget the lyrics to “The Gambler” by Kenny Rogers.
2. To write the Great Southwestern Antarctican Novel.
3. To be the first postmaster general of the United States to unicycle to the top of Mount Everest wearing leiderhosen made of pancake flour.
4. To master new and original yoga poses like Inebriated Oxen Herd, Three Point Sweater, and Muppet Off His Meds (and, of course, to translate each of those into Sanskrit).
5. To eat my weight in zinc every morning, half my weight in artificial sweeteners every evening, and wake up to drink a third of my weight in melted styrofoam every half hour during the night.
6. To read Moby Dick aloud, unabridged, backwards, to an audience of millions, with live musical accompaniment by Amy Winehouse, Jimi Hendrix, and Ludwig Van Beethoven (performing simultaneously).
7. To end all international conflicts that aren’t likely to inspire good movies.
8. To invent the one device that will make the xylophone, zebra mussel, and cotton gin obsolete.
9. To experience photosynthesis and deep-fry myself.
10. To have my tonsils, adenoids, and appendix replaced with those of Werner Herzog, Alfonso Cuaron, and Pedro Almodovar, respectively.
11. To make the Venus de Milo smile.

The untold want by life and land ne’er granted,
Now voyager sail thou forth to seek and find.
Walt Whitman

Ghosts of Christmas Past #1: Acid, Incense, & Abject Terror of Nothingness

In other ways, too, our laments for lost paradises may really have much more to do with our own state of mind than with the state of the place whose decline we mourn. Whenever we recall the places we have seen, we tend to observe them in the late afternoon glow of nostalgia, after memory, the mind’s great cosmetician, has softened out rough edges, smoothed out imperfections and removed the whole to a lovely abstract distance. Just as a good man, once dead, is remembered as a saint, so a pleasant place, once quit, is recalled as a utopia. Nothing is ever what it used to be.
Pico Iyer
Christmas 1986, I’d just dropped out of college for the first time and, once the family thing was out of the way, flew out to San Francisco to fulfill a life-long dream of being a real-live hippie...Melinda asked if I we might’ve met, but we probably didn’t...I was one of those 80’s Grateful Dead types who, for the most part, the more punk types couldn’t stand...though, I didn’t fit in with the latter-day hippies too well, either...both too overtly cynical and, ironically enough, too into the Clash and Sex Pistols...who, ultimately, were as out of sync with the Reagan/Rambo/Van Helen/pre-yoga-Madonna present as the Dead....though, at that point, anybody else’s past seemed better than my own....

...acid, incense, and balloons...
the Jefferson Airplane

...no future for you...no future for me....
the Sex Pistols

...everything I owned fit into a backpack on the floor of a tiny unfurnished room with a bare lightbulb and mattress in a college friend’s sister’s apartment on Page St., just a block or two from the corner of Haight & Ashbury...where strung-out derelicts and runaways, well on their way to being derelicts themselves, breathed in two-decades-stale pretensions of creating a new society...$300 a month, which was a lot then, particularly for somebody trying to scrape by as a Greenpeace canvasser...a job at which, it should be mentioned, I was singularly lousy...lived on peanut butter and weed....then, one night in January, seeing the Dead at the San Francisco Civic Center, I got lost in some lonely, dark place between galaxies...unmoored...inconsequential...every body and every thing I might reach for dissipating into white space vapor....afterwards, having landed somewhat uneasily in the park across the street, a friend and I got grabbed by undercover cops who read us our rights before, following a quick search, deciding we weren’t worth their time and effort...and so, for just a moment or two there, I felt good about being inconsequential....

I Hate the Internet

Is it ridiculous to give a blog post a title like that? Probably. Then, it’s not even close to the most ridiculous thing that’s been written here. Seriously. Check the archives if ya don’t believe me. (The most votes, currently, seem to be for that comment last time about women not...y’know...until they’re in their 40’s. But I read about that...really...).

There was this Calvin & Hobbes comic strip a long time ago (yeah, that modern American version of “a long time ago”—we’re not exactly talking the Mesozoic era here, or even the pyramids...more like six or seven Madonna CD’s ago) where Calvin’s reading something and asking Hobbes what he thinks “religion is the opiate of the masses” means. In the next panel there’s a T.V. set with a thought balloon that says: “It means Karl Marx hadn’t seen anything yet,” or something like that (new motto: Yoga for Cynics: Where Sources Are Not Checked For Fear I Might Be Remembering Them Wrong). Right now, there’s a thought balloon hovering over my computer (yes, I am a cartoon character). It says: “Bill Watterson hadn’t seen anything, yet, either.”

I need to cut down on my time on-line, seriously. I mean, the election worked as an excuse for a while there but, much as I like to frighten myself thinking 2012 is only four years away (which, in actual fact, it is)...I need to clean my kitchen...seriously, it’s disgusting in there...no matter how many important novelists have rhapsodized about cockroaches...and do something about my deficit spending (not in the same galaxy as the Federal Government’s, but a perfectly valid source of nervous anxiety, nonetheless—the center cannot hold, mere chaos is unleashed on the world, the worst are full of passionate intensity while the best lack all conviction, all that kinda shit)...buy new shoes...find a girlfriend (preferably one who’ll like me even if I don’t buy new shoes)...get new glasses, since, let's face it, after all the times they've been crammed into my tiny bicycle saddlebag in the rain, there’s no way anybody’s gonna be able to effectively cleanse those cheap plastic doors of perception; they've gotta be replaced..finish this damn blog post.......