Memorial Day is over, but every day is still gray

Every time I read about a new act of violence (gun violence in particular) I feel like I've been hit with a baseball bat. The collective head of the United States has been beaten into a coma by the metaphorical bat of gun violence.

My two cents (which won't buy anything anymore): The two noblest aims of a free, democratic society are 1) to ensure that freedom of speech/expression allows every voice to say what it wills and 2) to ensure that the majority will of the people [regulated by an agreed upon (although inherently imperfect/evolving) moral code enforced by checks and balances] is enacted.

Mix capitalism into those principles and you're left with two two-word slogans that can basically explain your nation's entire history: "Sex sells" and "Money talks".

I've seen these people, ordinary citizens, in the news lately who walk around heavily populated areas (downtown, fast food restaurants, etc.) with their rifles and their shotguns strapped around them, in plain view. Their proclamation is that they are out supporting the 2nd amendment and trying to raise people's awareness that guns are not the problem. When people call the police on them because they are scared, they maintain civility while defending their freedoms (and videotape everything to post on the God-forsaken wasteland known as the internet, where intelligent, informed discourse came to die). To me, this is misleading. Essentially what these people are doing is patrolling areas with weapons stating that they're deterring crime and that they're the good guys.

But I keep thinking this: the reason we have police, the reason we have a military, is so that the vast majority of us who don't sacrifice ourselves in the line of duty can live a life free from fear. It is an horrific shame that we live in a nation where we can walk a downtown street, enter a movie theater, or simply go to school, and be afraid. Un-uniformed men patrolling our streets proclaiming to be our best option against gun violence is a sad state of affairs, and that's the point they're missing, I think.

Could I say I wouldn't have paid all the riches in the world for one of them to be present when the massacre at Sandy Hook took place? No, I couldn't. A right-minded person armed with a rifle could've helped. Could I say that I'd rather they, the responsible majority, have no access to guns so long as it ensured better gun violence prevention? Absolutely. The beauty is, neither extreme is required. America is supposed to be a rational place that takes the black and white issues of the world and turn them gray, prizing individuality and nuance. I suppose it's inevitable that that experiment failed. 

Imagine a guy walks around an elementary school with a loaded rifle, then walks in.

Now imagine a guy who walks around with a rifle strapped around himself in traditionally non-violent neighborhoods in order to display that he has a free right to carry a deadly weapon and to proclaim to the media that he is the only true source of protection (statistically speaking, have these stand-your-ground gun-toting people made any kind of significant impact on violent crime?).

That's the third world to me. But America has long been on this road of whip-'em-out to see whose is bigger. And like the 2nd law of thermodynamics, it shows that all spirals generated by uninformed, uneducated, disassociated participants is downward.

Every time I read about gun violence I think about two people that used to be in my life. And I think about how many million times over I would wish to suffer and die before any type of violent crime or even any provocative, potentially frightening situation should befall them. A little girl should not have to walk down the street and wonder why normal people are carrying rifles, as though we lived in a war zone. She shouldn't have to hear the explanation, "We're the only thing standing between you and certain (unpredictable) slaughter" but, more than that, she should not have to live a society where that is a valid explanation.

"Hashtag" fuck guns and fuck violent people. Words rule.

an "ugh" with infinite u's, a "sigh" with an infinite s

I've had a couple good jobs in this life, and I've had a bunch of horrible ones.

The worst job I've ever had is not even emailing her.

Great Moments In 21st Century Television

Homer: "Wait wait wait wait wait. No matter what I did, no matter how many people lost their pensions, it's forgiven like that?"

Catholic priest: "If you truly repent, then yes."

Homer: "Ooookay, let's make some magic here. I wiped a booger on your shirt, I made a dog and a cat kiss, I swiped a bolted down TV from a Holiday Inn, I coveted the wife in Jaws 2, I lied to a waiter, I masturbated eight billion times and I have no plans to stop masturbating in the future. Woohoo, I'm clean!"

Sometimes you have to wonder what's the point in even keeping track.

Maya Angelou died, but so did a pregnant Pakistani woman who was stoned to death for marrying a man against her family's wishes.

Sigh.

Great Moments In 20th Century Film

Shelley Winters' performance in Lolita.

Best line: "I wouldn't care if your maternal grandfather turned out to be a Turk... but if I ever found out you didn't believe in God, I think I would commit suicide."

Okay, that's just her funniest line, not necessarily her best. It really is a great performance.

what they call "eventful"

Spent a couple hours at the park, alternating between reading and kicking the soccer ball around. Today mostly listened to Amos Lee and then Okkervil River. Hooked on O.R.'s "Where The Spirit Left Us". I drove down the cliffside to walk in the ocean at La Jolla beach, but it was far too crowded. While driving down the road I saw a homeless man with his pants down squatting over a gutter. He began pulling his pants up as I passed by. I can only assume that he was defecating.

On any normal day, a homeless man defecating into a sewer opening would be the strangest sight that one would see. But today took a turn for the not normal quickly. Since La Jolla was too crowded I decided to visit the beach at Torrey Pines. Torrey Pines is the area directly north of the Salk Institute, which you may (probably not) recall is my favorite place in San Diego. Torrey Pines is a park on a cliff where para-gliders and hang-gliders launch from. There's a steep dirt staircase cut into the cliff that leads down to a beach. The beach is known as Black's Beach, and I had never been there. I descended the steps, and once I reached the sand I was greeted by a naked man in a baseball cap. At first I thought he was a confused elderly man. But after seeing several men walking naked across the sand, penises dangling, I quickly realized that it must be a beach where clothing is optional. As difficult as the descent was, I can't say it didn't make sense. But most people were clothed and I wasn't about to walk straight back up the steep stairs, so I took off my shoes and socks (and my shoes and socks only!) and went for a stroll in the waves. According to Wikipedia, "Black's Beach is the largest nudist beach in the United States". I had no idea. Really only about 17% of the population was nude.

Anyway, nudity doesn't bother me. Unless it's myself.

Strange day. The whole time all I could think was, "She would be laughing so hard if I could tell this story to her myself." I could come home and when she asked, "How was your day?" I could respond, "It was good. I practiced soccer, saw a homeless man pooping into the sewer, and then I unwittingly stumbled upon the largest nude beach in all of the United States." If that didn't make her smile, then I don't know what would.

"Spent a lot of time staring at the ceiling,
spent a lot of time talking to walls.
Spent a lot of time chasing that old time feeling,
spent a lot of time waiting on your call."

"Only wary in our lives
open-eyed and half-ashamed, it's just that way.
Float down that river, freezing, tired, fully-wired, a total waste.
That's where the spirit left us.
Only wary in our lives
your eyes all fire, your mind aflame, don't be dismayed.
When this sobbing world goes screaming by, I swear that if I had my way,
you know I would have blessed it."

Brief Encounter

Sure, naturally you assume I'm referencing famed British director David Lean's early 1945 film Brief Encounter, an adaptation of a Noel Coward play about a married mother's passionate but doomed tryst with a stranger. But I'm not.

The brief encounter I'm referencing took place at a grocery store. I was standing in line, the man ahead of me in a loose gray tank top, shorts and sandals. He was, by my estimation, in his mid or late 30s. He was purchasing a pack of beer. As we were waiting in line he perused the magazine covers. On the cover of the National Enquirer the headline read: "$100 MILLION AT STAKE: Michelle's SECRET DIVORCE FILE!" sandwiched between two grimacing photos of the president and his wife. The man shifted his pack of beer to one arm, pointed at the magazine cover, and said to me, "Now that would make my day." Before I could respond the man's significant other called him over to another line.

I was left to ponder why the failed marriage of a president would make this man's day. I mean, hate his politics all you want, but to revel in the dissolution of a  loving union seemed to me to be a whole new level of lazy, passive ignorance. Obviously we were both aware that the National Enquirer story was a joke. But the man next to me in line was happy to idly wish that the president of our nation might go through a scandalous, acrimonious divorce. "Just so long as the man is unhappy," is basically what this guy said, and I can't relate to that kind of personal vitriol. Criticize the man's professional performance if you must, but how could any man who has ever felt love wish it torn away from another human being?

: /

Alone, where I always am, my head fans the flames of memories constantly. I see a woman from behind, standing, leaning her head out the window of a hotel room, talking to the neighbors. In a night where it had rained. I see myself standing there, and I am jealous of that boy who got to touch her from behind, feeling more in two fingers than I had ever felt throughout my whole being, feeling more in his eyes than I will ever feel again. I remember a story about a little girl, lesbians, and eating muffins. I remember every noble feeling that ever passed through my failing body. My withering pauper's heart's pathetic attempts to seduce the queen, summed up so curtly: "You're not an idiot. Your only mistake was getting involved with the likes of me. : / " Years of hopeless dedication, desirous fidelity and stranded adoration summed up and slaughtered by an emoticon.

The sweetest moments of life have passed me by, burned furiously fast and wafted away in the smoke of the flames. Only the embers in the ashes remain alive to torture the sleepless with memories of fire.

I sat on a high cliff today, felt the wind and watched the emerald sea roll. I looked deep out over the ocean and pictured myself being dropped far out into it, left to float until I could float no more. Moments like those, where the thought is more like a warm blanket than a sharp knife, are the moments I have to remember the flames at their fullest most consuming brilliance. I have to remember being a big man in a small fort, reading a story to a most lovely companion. I have to remember hand-holds and communion in smiles. I have to remember the woman in the window, after the rain in a hotel room, looking like she was mine for a brief moment, like her heart beat for me and her body sang my song. Even if it's only ashes from a fake fire, I have to remember. I have to try not to throw myself away like a ruined pillow case, even if I can't wash off the bloodstains left by my leaking heart.

--- 

At least my friend Leonard Cohen was with me today:

"As the mist leaves no scar
on the dark green hill,
so my body leaves no scar
on you and never will.

Through windows in the dark
the children come, the children go,
like arrows with no targets,
like shackles made of snow.

True love leaves no traces.
If you and I are one,
it's lost in our embraces
like stars against the sun."

When I can't think anymore I go to a vacant field and kick a soccer ball around.

Today three songs really clouded my brain the same way gray clouds covered the sky: "Book Of Lies" and "Looking Back" by Ruth Brown, and "I Remember You" by Dinah Washington.

I had really sorrowful nightmares this morning. They're becoming frighteningly common. I don't see why a man asleep should have to suffer being yelled at in words that were never spoken by the one that he loves. Doesn't seem normal.

"Well when my life is through,
and the angels ask me to recall
the thrill of it all,
then I shall tell them 'I remember you'."

Self Portrait # 109

By the way...

I realized this several weeks ago, but forgot to put it down in words. I was walking the streets of San Francisco when I came across a mural on an elementary school wall. The mural contained a painting of a dinosaur wearing headphones. The section of the mural containing this image can now be seen in the header of this blog, and as I surveyed the painting the image/phrase of "dinosaur with headphones" stuck deeply with me like the cut from a thorn of a tightly held rose.

I had no idea why this phrase stuck with me or why I titled my blog that. But a couple weeks ago, out of nowhere, I realized something: the dinosaur with headphones is me. It's basically me with an ipod. I live in the past, with only one foot in the present. I'm such a dinosaur. I don't belong amongst the crowd I was born into. The only conveyance connecting me to this world is a piece of machinery that reduces the noblest of human expressions into a digital file. Despite what everyone on the planet thinks, we have not evolved. A file is a file, whether actual or virtual, tangible or digital. So I put on my headphones and do my best to pretend that I'm not here.

Great Moments In 21st Century Film

Roberto Benigni.

I could leave it at his name, but instead I'll explain. He's an Italian writer, actor, director. I won't say too much about him, other than that he's an international treasure, a true poet and one of few people of whom I would say their heart is made of gold. His wife is his eternal muse. He is one of a handful of actors I've witnessed who can speak in a foreign language and still communicate precisely to those who don't speak the same tongue. I just watched his 2005 film The Tiger And The Snow. It's about a poet/professor who is in love with a journalist and repeatedly attempts to win her affection. The journalist travels to Iraq, just as the Iraq War is starting, to write an article about an Iraqi poet who is returning to his homeland. She is the victim of a bombing and goes into a coma. Benigni's character travels (by any means necessary) to Baghdad to be with her. In an attempt to save her life he pleads with an Iraqi pharmacist for advice on how to cure her of her coma with the limited resources available in a bombed out city. When Benigni delivered this speech to the pharmacist, I pretty much lost it:

"If she dies, they can close this whole show of a world. They can cart it off, unscrew the stars, roll up the sky and put it on a truck. They can turn off this sunlight I love so much... You know why I love it so much? Because I love her when the sun shines on her.  They can take everything away. These carpets, columns, houses. Sand, wind, frogs, ripe watermelons, hail, seven in the evening. May, June, July, basil, bees, the sea."

I have felt that before... that at the loss of someone they might as well "unscrew the stars" and pack up "this whole show of a world."

Great Moments In 20th Century Film

I was watching Viaggio In Italia, which is an Italian film from the 50s about an English couple on holiday in Naples. They realize, through little scenes and interactions, how little they really know each other. One night, after attending a party where the husband observes his wife laughing with other men, they return to their hotel room and say the following:

Husband: "Have a good time?"

Wife: "No."

Husband: "That's strange. Been a long time since I've seen you in such a good mood."

Wife: "Well, you seemed pretty gay yourself."

Classic Ingrid Bergman.

She must've seen Springsteen...

God, I'd have given anything to hold her hand through that... even the rest of my life.

I wonder if she knows "The Ghost Of Tom Joad" is about John Steinbeck's fictional character from The Grapes Of Wrath. I wonder if she knows "Wrecking Ball" was written about the New York Giants' Meadowlands Stadium in New Jersey. I wonder if she cares... She probably knows. Her brain was always desirable. Intelligent. A beautiful, flower-filled field only the luckiest of men could stroll through... She used to pretend quite well that she liked my trivia. I wonder if she hears "Dancing In The Dark", "Thunder Road" or "Hungry Heart" and thinks of me.

I know if she saw him her smiles and her thoughts must've radiated like the sun. I just wish I was the tiniest of moons that could've had the privilege of orbiting around it.

long live freedom of speech/the idiots shall oust themselves

Donald Sterling's interview with Anderson Cooper is a clear example of why ignorant people should be handed a microphone and allowed to talk as long as they want. The more they speak, the more their drivel creates cleansing steam like water poured out onto a hot surface. This guy is so rich he can't even be bothered to know the difference between HIV and AIDS... may the remainder of his life be filled with the images of penises much larger than his wallet penetrating the women that he desires to buy (preferably penises of the African-American persuasion).

That guy is simply a moron. But the real problem arises when intelligent and/or privileged total assholes like Mitch McConnell, Rick Santorum, "Dubya", etc., come to realize the actual importance of language (or hire someone to realize it for them) and from then on cloak their ignorant bigotry and superiority complexes into easy-to-swallow, tasteless, odorless tablets.

My brain never liked me.

As far back as I can remember, it has enjoyed playing tricks on me. Is the heart a helpless follower, or are they in cahoots? Today did not go as planned. Midway through my brain convinced me to take steps that led to me viewing a photograph of a person with shellfish, then my brain crashed like a junked computer. My heart tells my brain that it is strong and resolved, my brain says "Of course you are," and my brain always gets the last laugh.

In the aftermath of my malfunctioning brain's rebooting all I could think to do was search desperately through the literal boxes of my life for books of mass importance. I found several of my dearest friends but my panic increased when I could not find Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger.

It is not easy to live like this. Leastways, not alone, with all your life and its lack of achievements or import all confined within one tiny room, viewable and dismissible in one passing glance.

Then my brain complains, as if nothing is my brain's fault. My brain whistles inconspicuously, twiddles its thumbs and says, "Who? Me?"

My brain is a crashed computer that remembers practically everything and loves to remind my heart of its failures whenever my heart finds the capacity for strength... that's the best I can describe it tonight, I suppose.

---

Read some Yeats and found these words, which accurately describe what my heart has often longed to say:

"Like the moon her kindness is,
If kindness I may call
What has no comprehension in't,
But is the same for all
As though my sorrow were a scene
Upon a painted wall."

My sorrow is only a painted scene, the same as all the others... a scene telling the story of how I only wanted to be special. Goddamn Icarus. What I want to know now is, how do I get to be one of those thoughtless, passionless, ambitionless guys that a woman settles for? Cause they seem to be the eternal winners.

happy mother's day, S.

I revisited the Salk Institute today. It's one of the most beautiful man-made places I've ever been to, and my favorite place in San Diego. I sat and watched a janitor scrape dirt out of the cracks of the floor as though he were raking a zen garden. I was jealous of his job.

At night my friend and I went to a gathering of writers who read 3-minute short stories to one another. I didn't read this time around because my story is a bit too long. It was a story about San Francisco, art and Otis Redding I would kind of like to have shared, but oh well. I hope I can come up with something by the next gathering.

I have to find a job.

I hope tomorrow involves soccer.

Who are your celebrity crushes?

I have two. Kate Winslet and Norah Jones.

I just watched Norah's hands punish an unsuspecting piano... so gorgeously.

the portuguese poet and the fallen can

An article on The Guardian about memorable but forgotten books led me to The Book Of Disquiet by Portuguese wordsmith Fernando Pessoa. Having a thin affinity for Portuguese culture and after perusing the summary, I gravitated towards the work. I visited, for the first time, the brand new complex that is the downtown central library of San Diego. I'm not far into the book. Pessoa was clearly a depressed man. In some books, particularly in Modern Library publications, they include a chronology of the author's life that details significant personal and contemporaneous historical events. A cursory glance of this chronology reveals the life of a man who lived in artistically vibrant times. He lived the death of Nietzsche, the births of Dalí and Jean-Paul Sartre. He lived the publications of Marcel Proust's A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu and James Joyce's A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man and Ulysses. He was breathing when Proust stopped breathing. He was breathing and seeing the sky and eating when Faulkner was writing, when Lenin died, Kafka... He was a human when Hitler became chancellor of Germany. In the chronology of his life it says, "1933: February: Experiences severe depression. [paragraph] Adolf Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany." A man in Lisbon, Portugal feeling and not feeling at the mercy of his miswired brain.
He pretended to be other people and tried hard to have other peoples' thoughts. He seems to be a man who loved the idea of dreaming but was constantly oppressed by the weight of reality. He felt like a foreigner in his homeland. But he loved his native language, and the majesty of words.

"To feel everything in all ways; to know how to think with emotions and to feel with intellect; not to desire much except through imagination; to suffer coquettishly; to see clearly in order to write properly; to know myself through pretending and guile; to become a naturalized citizen, a different one, but with all the appropriate documents; in sum, to use within me all sensations, peeling them down to the limit, but wrapping them all up again and putting them on the counter just as that cashier I'm watching from here is doing with the small cans of a new brand of shoe polish.
"All these ideals, possible or impossible, now are ended. I have reality before me --- it isn't even the cashier, it's his hand (I don't see him), the absurd tentacle of a soul with a family and a destiny who gesticulates like a spider picking things up and putting them down.
"And one of his cans fell down, just like everyone else's Destiny."

It Happened In Pacific Beach

The night after my arrival, my friend and I went down to Garnet Avenue in Pacific Beach to have a few drinks. We caught up. I only painted the broad strokes of my return because the people in San Diego are not people I share emotions with. When we walked back to her car, surrounded by boys in sandals and tank-tops yelling and laughing into the night, and girls buried in makeup, heels and short-shorts whispering and giggling, I realized something very viscerally: these are not my people.

And I knew that's exactly why I'd come back. These people, though easygoing and friendly, do not move me. I feel like a stranger here, and somewhere in me I unconsciously believe that that's how I should feel. Sometimes we can unveil the unconscious motivation for our actions, sometimes we cannot. But I see why I moved back here now, not knowing the true reason all throughout my journey. They say "home is where the heart is" and my heart is not in San Diego. I came back to get away from my heart. Whenever I get close to my heart, to happiness, when happiness looks me in the eyes and makes beautiful strawberry-sweet promises, that's when the lies burn most. These people can lie and use me and abandon me all they want, because they do not have my trust or my heart. The moments I believe in are the moments that kill me. I opened myself to the heart's possibilities one final time, but possibilities are 50/50 and I lost. "I Lost Everything", as Sam Cooke sublimely sings. Like a condemned building, I was demolished. So, I return to this anonymous place, having said goodbye to all that made me feel alive. This is my silver-lining play. Now I'm just a mouse in an elephant graveyard, and here I don't have to worry about the heart that isn't there.

"I've been doing some soul searching,
to find out where you're at.
I've been up and down the highway
in all kinds of foreign lands.

Someone like you,
make it all worthwhile.
Someone like you,
keep me satisfied.
Someone exactly like you."