Haiku and Desire

Morning iced puddles
George Michael sings in my head
What a day to live

I have the strongest craving for French bread pizza (or FBP as the kids are calling it these days). And I mean like a big ol’ slab of French bread with sauce, cheese and sausage.

Bright, winter sunshine
Through the gooey, head trip toy
Paints red my cube walls

Rolling around naked, on a train moving quickly through a snowy landscape, sounds like an awesome time!

Office Holiday
Shamed by co-workers as I
Hate Secret Santa

I wish I could go back in time and avoid myself seeing the George Michael Faith video so many damn times. That song’s a lingerer, and I always felt a little uncomfortable at looking too long at his ass in those tight jeans.

Found a good use for
The Flaming Fist of Praha
Whiners on the phone

Long Stemmed Rant

Ranting is not necessarily fun for the listener; unless it’s a crazy homeless guy doing the ranting and he talks really enthusiastically about the underground slave trade of corporate drug dealers using mass transit to traffic. There is a fine line between fun and scary, and a not so professional crazy “ranter” can sidestep fun faster than a big headed toddler will fall down. And some of these guys can use telephones…

There’s something bothering me, and I want to try to not get too histrionic about it, ‘cause that’s no fun. Bush is getting flack right now from the Christian Right, who can sidestep fun faster than a coke fiend can ramble, for having his Christmas card say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”. The place I work for is also getting a large number of complaints regarding the same issue. There is apparently a holy mission to make this country ‘all God, all the time’.

So I’m just going to say this quickly as a means of venting:

Not everyone in this country is a Christian, fuckheads! As President of the United States, it might be important to be inclusive of EVERYONE and not just you judgmental, exclusive, hypocritical, self-righteous, holier-than-thou, shit eaters! P.S. Much like that whacky cult Scientology, your religion is also based on book some people consider outdated science fiction!

This sort of thing makes me so angry that my eyes fall out of my head and burst into fiestas of flaming glory. I often need eye replacement surgery. I’m on a list in major hospitals around the country.

And please, do not get me wrong, I am certainly not against religion or anti-Christian. I am against people taking what is a good set of ideas and perverting them to justify hatred, racism, self-aggrandizing and disregard for anyone who does not think the same way. The basic idea of love and be good to each other becomes fascism.

Okay, sorry everybody. Let’s all just settle down, it’s only Wednesday.


Song Stuck In My Head Right Now: At My Post by Grandaddy

Snow Day #1

As I like to organize within disorganization, as I like working with themes, and as the weather forecaster’s keep saying “snow” with gleaming and malevolent eyes, we’re going to make each Tuesday in December a “snow day”.

Are you ready? This is going to be fun!

Back when I was in 4th grade it began snowing pretty damn hard while we were sitting in school. As it got to be towards the dark end of that day, there were concerns that we were going to be trapped, that buses weren’t going to make it.

Let me set the scene for you a little bit. I grew up in a part of Washington that at the time was, if not Butt Fuck Egypt, it was right across the county line. I lived many miles from the school I attended; many windy, hilly and narrow miles – all of which were now covered by a lot of snow.

The news that we very well may have to spend the night at the school was a thrilling one. It was very similar to that childhood dream of being trapped in the mall and having to spend the night there. I’m not sure why though, as I think the thrill of spending the night in the mall would be getting to play with everything, the only thing to play with at school would be like chalk and yardsticks and the gerbils. I guess for a lot of us it would be like an adventure, like sleeping in a couch fort.

For me it was the thrill of getting to sleep next to Cherity, the girl I had fallen in love with in second grade. Nothing was going to happen, I was 9 years old for Christ’s sake, but the idea of laying next to each other and talking late into the night… I still remember how excited this made me feel.

The busses came though, trudging through, complete with their morbidly obese and lonely drivers. The overnight school adventure dream was broken, and as a final kick to the groin, the bus taking me home could not make it all the way up to my house. I walked the final ¾ of a mile, literally uphill and through the snow, at around 9 at night.

I do remember the dark silence of walking through the middle of nowhere, large, feathery snowflakes falling lazily. It was beautiful and somehow primal, it is the scene I see in my minds eye whenever I read of a dark and snowy night.

Lap Dissolve

I walk down the street and catch the furtive glances of people and feel like somehow they know the history, there is an air of envy, a soft spoken look in the eyes that I have been healed.

This makes me think of a conversation with Christy and Matthew about something Chris had said and I go a little dizzy thinking about all the seemingly random connections and the complicated chain of events that led me to San Francisco to begin with. And I think, that at the moment before I die, I will remember everyone I ever met and remember everything ever said to me, and I will see the connections there and how it all fits together, and I will know that all the torment and worry throughout this life were a monumental waste of time.

Expecting people that don't belong here, looking for someone through a time fuzzy overlay and wanting to cry at how easy it is to get lost in that space between those layers. I feel like San Francisco is a city built on the shining promises of thousands of broken dreams, on the sheer balls to surf that light and smile. Seattle feels like the second to last refuge of a wanderlust soul, too petulant to realize itself as a safe harbor for the outcast.

I feel like I'm at home, I feel like I could travel forever.

Bathroom Etiquette - Attack of the Moans

Unless you walk in with a friend, and are trying to be funny - and sometimes, not even then - it is never (let me be really, pristinely, fucking clear here), EVER cool to grunt in a public restroom.

I don't care if your fucking in the stall. I don't care if you're finally crapping for the first time in seven days. I don't care if you've subsisted on a strict diet of broken glass and tacks and have hemorrhoids the size of small dogs to avoid down there.

I don't care if you've seen the holy light of god, and the infinite has seen fit to fill your fragile mind with the knowledge of the universe, and you and your people have been raised for generations to express your most supreme joy by sounding like some sort of rutting, hog-like animal...

Don't do it, don't grunt in a public restroom.

At home? Grunt it up, monkey face! Make yourself a grunt song. Recite the Gettysburg address with a wince, long low tones and words apparently spelled with only N's or M's. Just keep that sick shit out of a respectable men's room.

Seriously.

Dream Series #4

Another dream series that I have is I call the “travel dream”. The travel dream entails me having to get somewhere (usually by train for some reason), but my luggage is elsewhere, or not everyone in the travel group is present, or I’m running really late, or I have lost my tickets… Essentially, they are very stressful dreams.

My travel dream last night involved me getting on the train (the interior of which looked remarkably like a ferry) a split second before it took off. And as I sat down in the only available seat, inexplicably embarrassed at being the last person on, I realized that I had forgotten to bring my maps and phrase books for the destination. I started to panic a little bit.

And then something happened that I think is rather healthy, I said to myself, “bitch, relax and wing it”. Okay, that wasn’t the precise wording, but the thought was the same. This is when it gets weird…

As soon as I said this to myself, the dream changed to me, my mom and my brother sitting on the side of the road up high on a mountaintop. Baseballs would occasionally fall around us, and my mom would threaten that the next time somebody tossed their ball up here, she was going to do something about it. But she never did. At some point, this kid comes stumbling out of the bushes; they were apparently his baseballs. I realize at this moment that he is the living representation of a parable that I have since forgotten.

The kid and my brother become friends and they watch me take part in this ritual where I slice open slits in each of my toes with a huge Rambo knife. I will then stuff rings into these toe slits. I have apparently done this action many times and it doesn’t hurt, but I wince before I do each toe nonetheless. My brother turns to the baseball kid and says, “He’s slow to do this part, but just wait till he gets going”.

I realized while I was brushing my teeth what this part probably represents…

First

Welcome to December everybody, welcome to the dark advent calendar of the soul. We’re busy here counting down the days in cold, bitter and dangerous chocolates. What makes the chocolate dangerous? We won’t tell you, and that’s what makes it dangerous.

Could be spikes in it, stolen from old school punk bracelets. Could be eating a piece signals some sleeper agent nearby to throw something at you; something hard and flaming. Could be it just tastes like broiled broccoli.

Okay, and I shouldn’t be sharing this with you, but the dangerous chocolate is only a ruse to keep you from eating all of it in one sitting and then slyly taping the cardboard doors shut afterwards. Just like when your younger sibling gets to open the next day's piece and finds there’s no treat and starts crying like a wounded marsupial and you’ve got that stupid look on your face like, “they must have forgotten to put the chocolate in that one”.

Like there’s no advent calendar quality control. There is, my good people, and they’re burly and poorly educated.

I shouldn’t be sharing this with you either, but the fifteenth has a Life Saver, no chocolate. While the Wint-O-Green really sort of represents December to me, I had to go with the Butter Rum. Butter Rum will one day literally save my life.