Getting Personal...

...contrary to the impression some may have gotten from that last post, this blog’s not gonna prostitute itself for hits, gratuitously throwing around keywords like big boobs...kinky sex...or hot throbbing orgasms...so don’t worry...

Oh I just don’t know where to begin...
Elvis Costello

...actually been doing some intense personal writing...off and on...since the trip to Mexico...where somebody told me I should write about the stuff I don’t wanna write about...things I tend to hint at before making a joke about big boobs, kinky sex, or hot throbbing orgasms...

...finding I can only dig into that stuff in pieces...going in, then backing off, then going in and backing off again...sometimes it helps to drink three quarters of a bottle of red wine first...saving the last quarter for afterwards...but, in the long run, that’s probably not the best idea...

Humanity’s hope lies in its capacity not to accept the way its past has played out.
Joel Kramer

...I didn’t really need to be told that...I mean, hell, it’s what I’m trying to get other people to do...dig into their deep trauma and put it into words...capture it in narrative...encapsulate it...put it outside where they can look at it...re-envision...reevaluate...reinvent...

...then, other people’s problems are always easier to confront...and it’s not exactly unusual for the cobbler to wear no shoes...ask anybody who’s spent any time with shrinks outside of their professional capacities....I’m the son of a psychiatrist and a social worker, have had a couple messed up shrinks as friends, even went out with one for a mercifully brief time...I’m not gonna tell ya what she was into...

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
J. Krishnamurti

...as far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing better, if you’re gonna try and help somebody else, than an awareness of just how fucked up you are yourself...to know you’re not one inch above or below the person you’re trying to help....sometimes I get the impression that the addicts I work with see me as more like one of them than one of the staff...and I take that as a compliment...

It's Not Easy...

...there’s nothing more clichéd to be said about green than that it’s the color of spring...though that might be a perfect example of the dictum that a cliché becomes a cliché because it works...though that, as somebody pointed out in a movie...though I can’t remember which...is also a cliché...and, by now, the point that the cliché is a cliché might be as well...and thus far more old and tired than spring-like and green....I’d better start over...

...spring, like green, is more complicated than we might think...April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire...rising fresh and green from the comfortable dirt can be painful...things get buried for a reason...but spring brings it all back up...

...I tasted green for the first time in April 1983...seventeen and far too alienated and miserable to be too bothered that, according to all I’d been taught, green would quickly lead to heroin and death...it didn’t, was actually rather refreshing, for a while ...even if it ended up a dead vine that held on tight for far too long before finally peeling away....nowadays, I’d rather do yoga...

...or take a walk in the woods...consumed in luxuriant green....it’s hard not to be clichéd here, too...might as well give in to my inner muppet...why wonder, why wonder I’m green, guess that’s the way I wanna be...though it might never be the same after I ate that deep fried frog at that Chinese restaurant back in November...like chicken, but a lot more bones...so you're right, Kermit, it's not easy bein' green...

...even worse, though, would be talking about the environment...the green of photosynthesis, mountains, meadows, and life in general squaring off against the most all-consuming green of all...and guess which wins almost every time?...“green” labels seeming to represent the first serving only to bring more of the other to oil and pharmaceutical companies...

...god, is it possible to be more cynical and morose in writing about green?..those reading this in the archives, or the tropics or southern hemisphere might wanna note that it’s February in Philadelphia...my 43rd birthday rapidly approaching...(as mentioned previously, my sign of the Zodiac is Charlie the Three Toed Sloth...though I also share the day with the guy who wrote show me that I’m everywhere, and get me home for tea)...and green seems far away...

...in the end, though, green is a state of mind...I now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin wrote Walt Whitman...knowing, even though 37 back then was a lot older than 43 now, that a person can begin at any time...and, however misused, let’s face it, green will outlast us all...

A Series of Dreams

Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.
Sigmund Freud

Nothing too very scientific, just thinking of a series of dreams....
Bob Dylan

...there's this dream I had, around the time of the Clinton impeachment hearings, and a few months after I’d passed my qualifying exams....I realize there’s still something more I need to do to fully pass...another examination....turns out it’s a face-to-face thing, with one examiner...who, as it turns out, is none other than the senator from Mississippi, Trent Lott...with his smooth Southern accent and perfectly coiffed hair...and I know, the minute I walk in and see him, that I’m doomed, that he's gonna fail me for purely partisan reasons...and he seems to acknowledge that, saying “look I don’t wanna ruin your life,” suggesting things I might do while waiting until I can re-take the exams...so I start pleading with him, telling him I’ve already started my dissertation...he seems interested and asks what it’s about...I start to tell him it has to do with Native Americans...immediately realizing that I should have said “Indians” since the term “Native Americans” pegs me as a liberal...and I’ve therefore sealed my doom....

...a mathematical dream—starting out with figuring out grades on a grid—what happens if you go by elevens instead of tens, up to 110, thinking that it’s simple, but then I realize that 110 isn’t 11x11, but 11x10, and that in fact 11x11 is something completely unsymmetrical—not the perfect 111 one might expect, or even 110, that 11’s lose their magical quality when multiplied beyond the single numerals (since even 110 isn’t 1010), and I see this as something violent, bloody and personally tragic for poor 11...

...series of fragmented dreams in cough-filled night, in which I'm the mafia, and the coughs some kind of foe or possibly inside informant, ruining all of my carefully laid plans...

...one of those cable news talking heads is doing a financial report on T.V....and, to dramatically portray the state of the economy, bleeding heavily—blood pouring from his leg like a waterfall on whatever’s below his desk...

....waking from a dream—seeing printed words and hearing a voice, giving a fragmentary review of the dream—criticizing, I think, its weak characterization...

It's All In Your Mind

Dreaming is free...
Debbie Harry

...unfulfilled fantasies can be painful, says a friend...and yet they’re better than no fantasies at all, says I...yeah, I know, live in the here and now...and that makes sense, too...and yet there’s something to be said, while you’re living in the here and now, for letting the mind wander and stretch...even if that means mixing metaphors...to see what we can explore even as we create whatever it is that’s to be explored...that the line between creating and exploring is far hazier than we usually think...that wandering and wondering are essentially the same word...to see what pleasures are possible within the mind...since, ultimately, all pleasure is both created and experienced in the mind...it doesn’t exist anywhere else...that’s one thing you learn from antidepressants...acids flowing, momentarily flooding the grey tissue before receding...even God, they say, may exist somewhere in the frontal region of the cerebral cortex...not far from where the yogis say the third eye is located...or maybe I’m making all of this up...

‘Prisoner, tell me, who was it that wrought this unbreakable chain?’
‘It was I,’ said the prisoner, ‘who forged this chain very carefully. I thought my invincible power would hold the world captive leaving me in a freedom undisturbed. Thus night and day I worked at the chain with huge fires and cruel hard strokes. When at last the work was done and the links were complete and unbreakable, I found that it held me in its grip.’
Rabindranath Tagore

The Truth, the Whole Truth, and...Whatever....

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—
Emily Dickinson

She had nothing left to say, so she said she loved me.
And I stood there grateful for the lie.
Doug Hopkins

Everything Possible to be Believ'd is an Image of Truth.
William Blake

The Quakers believe very strongly in telling the truth. In the early days they called themselves “Friends of Truth,” which eventually morphed into “the Society of Friends.”

Then, they're also quite proud of the role they played in the Underground Railroad, which wouldn't have worked so well if they'd told slave catchers "I cannot tell a lie. They're hiding in the root cellar."

The moral of this story is: there's a time and a place for everything, even those things that don’t happen to be true.

Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear

Rene Magritte, The Human Condition

Is it possible to plagiarize yourself? If so, we’re probably doing it constantly. I know I am...imitating myself, as well as being highly critical of what are often shoddy, dissolute, unconvincing performances. I am not, I’m afraid, anything like my own Tina Fey. Then, isn’t much of life little more than bad acting? And isn’t that understandable, with such nonsensical scripts? Like Liam Neeson playing a Jedi knight with a mullet more appropriate for a monster truck rally than inter-galactic combat, aren’t we simply working with what we’re given? People talk a lot about the importance of being yourself—from Polonius’ to thine own self be true to Mr. Rogers’ you’re special! to Monty Python’s “You’re all individuals!” “Yes! We’re all individuals!” to those lame-ass red and white Be You t-shirts for sale at the Boston University bookstore when I went there....so, whoever the hell you are, it’s obviously pretty damn important. I will not speak lightly of it. Trust me.

I accept chaos. I am not sure whether it accepts me. I know some people are terrified of the bomb. But then some people are terrified to be seen carrying a modern screen magazine. Experience teaches us that silence terrifies people the most.
Bob Dylan

A sudden death in the family is upsetting for lots of reasons, of course—a lot more than I’m about to go into here, and, anyway, to communicate any fraction of them effectively would be to tell the complete life stories of all involved, and even then there’d be countless unfillable holes in the plot...the conclusion in particular not making one lick of discernible sense...like if Moby Dick had ended while they were right in the midst of chasing the whale, or the closing credits started running on Gilligan’s Island while it still seemed like they might get off the island this week....All in all, it’s difficult to shake the idea that life isn’t a novel or sitcom, or anything else that might have any chance of obeying the narrative rules we try so hard to lay down....There are a lot of ends, but few satisfying conclusions, and more perfect comebacks are spoken in a single Oscar Wilde play than you’re likely to manage in your entire life....