Cholila

Capricorn

2012-01-16T12:20:00.003-05:00

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Happiness isn't a state you acquire by luck. It takes hard work and relentless concentration. You have to rise up and rebel against the nonstop flood of trivial chaos and meaningless events you're invited to wallow in. You have to overcome the hard-core cultural conditioning that tempts you to assume that suffering is normal and the world is a hostile place. It's really quite unnatural to train yourself to be peaceful and mindful; it's essentially a great rebellion against an unacknowledged taboo. Here's the good news: 2012 will be an excellent time for you to do this work.

Citalopram

2011-12-17T22:18:00.001-05:00

2011-12-17T17:26:00.002-05:00

self portrait with Leica M5

2011-12-07T23:48:00.001-05:00

Transgression

2011-11-26T00:23:00.000-05:00

trans·gres·sion (trns-grshn, trnz-)
n.
1. A violation of a law, command, or duty: "The same transgressions should be visited with equal severity on both man and woman" (Elizabeth Cady Stanton). See Synonyms at breach.
2. The exceeding of due bounds or limits.
3. A relative rise in sea level resulting in deposition of marine strata over terrestrial strata.

This life

2011-11-26T00:04:00.001-05:00

New Digs

2011-08-15T21:05:00.004-04:00

A neighbor.

Mom coming out soon.

Steve Malkmus' Mirror Traffic is coming out soon, too! Wierd Memphisalia: dude gets hit by a car after a show at the Hi Tone 2 days ago. He was on his bike and whoever hit him fled the scene, they won't get caught. 3 days ago the principal of the Seventh-Day Adventist school I went to all through 9th grade got stabbed to death in a classroom. I can't convince any of my family to leave. It's a black hole.

Oak Creek Canyon

2011-06-14T02:08:00.002-04:00

neil

2011-04-21T23:44:00.001-04:00

I am the Cheese

2011-04-10T23:21:00.007-04:00

2010-08-04T22:40:00.006-04:00

Yep

2010-08-04T22:01:00.009-04:00

I'll tell you a story about Jack of Knorr, now my story's begun. I'll tell you another about his brother, and now my story's done.
-Gage S.

My great grandmother would tell me this sometimes at bedtime and she thought it was the funniest thing ever. Now I do the same with my niece and I see why it's so funny. She gets the same frustrated look I used to get.

David Millar

2010-07-11T12:22:00.006-04:00

The 2010 Tour de France is in effect. As of stage 6, David Millar was in 15th place. In stage 3, he was taken down by a dog.

David Millar competed Stage 6 of the 2010 Tour de France today in 05:37:45. He ranked #157 for the stage. Mark Cavendish won the stage in a sprint.

Including the Prologue and first 6 stages of Le Tour, David Millar is now ranked #15 in the overall general classification. His current GC time is 04:39:36 and he has a total gap of 00:02:06 from the yellow jersey.

David Millar is riding for Garmin Transitions and is managed by Jonathan Vaughters. The 2010 Tour de France kicked off on Saturday July 3rd, and ends in Paris on July 25th.

Sylvain Chomet - Les Triplettes de Belleville

2010-07-08T23:44:00.003-04:00

Franklin.

2010-06-21T21:44:00.006-04:00

Emily vs. Joan Miró

2010-04-13T11:47:00.009-04:00

almost there.

2010-03-28T00:36:00.004-04:00

treatment.

2010-03-24T19:43:00.004-04:00

http://www.moehlmann.com/

miles jackson

2010-03-20T00:46:00.002-04:00

2010-03-20T00:45:00.000-04:00

Blue Monday (My Birthday)

2010-03-17T08:58:00.004-04:00

My birthday is officially the most depressing day of the year.
(I KNEW IT!!)

Blue Monday (date)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Blue Monday is a name given to a date stated, as part of a publicity campaign by Sky Travel, to be the most depressing day of the year.

This date was published in a press release under the name of Cliff Arnall, at the time a tutor at the Centre for Lifelong Learning, a Further Education centre attached to Cardiff University. Guardian columnist Dr Ben Goldacre reported that the press release was delivered substantially pre-written to a number of academics by Public Relations agency Porter Novelli, who offered them money to put their names to it.[1] The Guardian later printed a statement from Cardiff University distancing themselves from Arnall: "Cardiff University has asked us to point out that Cliff Arnall... was a former part-time tutor at the university but left in February."[2]

According to a press release by a mental health charity[3], the formula is:

where weather=W, debt=d, time since Christmas=T, time since failing our new year’s resolutions=Q, low motivational levels=M and the feeling of a need to take action=Na. 'D' is not defined in the release, nor are units.

Arnall says the date was calculated by using many factors, including: weather conditions, debt level (the difference between debt accumulated and our ability to pay), time since Christmas, time since failing our new year’s resolutions, low motivational levels and feeling of a need to take action. Writing about the calculation, Goldacre stated: ... the fact is that Cliff Arnall's equations ... fail even to make mathematical sense on their own terms.[1]

This date allegedly falls on the third Monday of January. The date was declared by Arnall to be 24 January in 2005,[4] 23 January in 2006,[5] 22 January in 2007,[6] 21 January in 2008,[7] 19 January in 2009[8] and 18 January in 2010.

Mr Arnall also says, in a press release commissioned by Wall's ice cream,[9] that he has calculated the happiest day of the year - in 2005, 24 June,[10] in 2006, 23 June,[11] in 2008, 20 June[12] and in 2009 19 June.[13] So far, this date has fallen close to Midsummer.

happy new year.

2010-01-06T18:50:00.003-05:00

another failed relationship behind me. good to be alone. for now. shades of green fill my thoughts. listening to lots of the walkmen, gizzly bear, tom waits. made a cd mix for someone who barely knows me. no worries, i won't give it to her. i'll probably have to remind her of my name when i see her again. safe.

what i want out of the interweb. besides amazon.

2009-07-03T23:51:00.006-04:00

you know what, i haven't yet found a website that is pleasing to me in an all-encompassing, one-stop fix. there are a couple that are really fun for their own specialties, but not as a single sweet spot.

i'm thinking that maybe i have to make my own. bikes, music, literature, film, cultural geography, comedy, a dash of politics, maybe some sweet photos... you know, life.

but i don't want to do the work. and i have a.d.d.

transference occurrence

2009-03-15T14:44:00.007-04:00

farmington skate usa.

The Walkmen

2009-03-11T11:33:00.001-04:00

good morning

2009-03-09T18:46:00.008-04:00

its been almost 2 years since i posted anything on this site. i'll have to figure out what this means for me now. back then it was something to keep me from losing my mind in new england. now i live in durango, colorado.

i can ride my bike if i want to. i listen to the music i like. i read a little here and there. i hang out with my girlfriend. we walk the dogs. i get my feelings hurt sometimes. sometimes she does too. we tell each other "i love you." we have drinks. i hang out with friends. we go for rides if we want to. we listen to the music we like. the only part that's tough out here is the money thing. everything else is pretty golden. people out here have to work shitty jobs and say, "thank you for my shitty job."

i have a dog now. miles jackson. he's very handsome and makes for a great friend. i hope the feeling is mutual. i get to see my 2 best buds alot. one lives here (chinatown, currently) and one in ridgway.

i get to talk to my niece every week. she tells me what is hers. i miss her so much. i look forward to her visiting me out here when she is older. i have a feeling she'll love it out here too.

i guess in a way this is a journal. of sorts. and a celebration of what makes life worth living, for me, right now. this is what always gets me. i have this strong compulsion to write but i never know why i'm writing. fiction seems the logical choice but this stuff i do is almost always first person....

i just ran 42 circles around the house trying to figure out what i wanted to do next.

all my good friends have failing relationships. my girlfriend broke up with me this week. we got back together the next day. i broke up with her last night. we're back together again. i'm really trying not to take myself too seriously. i just watched the fountain for the third time. cried my eyes out again.

all i really want is to spend several hours a day on my road bike. i drink a lot of coffee and even more tea. i download music from soulseek. i don't pay because its not possible. i drink different things at night. gin and tonics if i'm home, beer if i'm out with a friend. pastis or absinthe if its a writing night.

i keep telling myself over and over that i just want to write what i would want to read. the closest i've ever come to reading what i would want to read, so far, is eileen myles. well, maybe mark sundeen. yeah. guess its a tie. and neither one has much out.... brian said i'd like michelle tea if i liked eileen, i don't know.

mom's coming out soon. it just turned daylight savings time. its 7:10pm now and still light outside.

JUST KIDDING!!!!!

2007-04-04T12:31:00.004-04:00

This
Afternoon

Rain

Hi 37°F

Tonight

Snow/Sleet

Lo 33°F

Thursday

Slight Chc
Snow
Hi 46°F

Thursday
Night

Breezy

Lo 28°F

Friday

Slight Chc
Rain/Snow
Hi 47°F

Friday
Night

Slight Chc
Rain/Snow
Lo 26°F

Saturday

Chance
Rain/Snow
Hi 44°F

Saturday
Night

Chance
Snow
Lo 26°F

Sunday

Chance
Showers
Hi 45°F

horse badorties.

2007-03-16T15:25:00.000-04:00

its what you put your WEED IN, man.

national anthem

2007-03-09T15:26:00.000-05:00

the end! every time i look in sky i see why purple says glow down. you ink loins where time destroys and comic pollution questions apparitions. fire? ranger, tell me where diary sits.

is forestry for you? what would it bring? do voice boxes ring? let's take it down and back. let's walk slower down the same trail we were on. let's hold hands and see what happens when we sit our eyes on and through the blade. it's there. welcome. i said welcome.

i was too caught up most of the time in the drinky state of tennessee's nights to stand next to you on your road. i just wanted you to be on my team. battin' h's. i just wanted to see you next to me in my rear view. always in the rear view. thanks for not giving in old brother. old lover. my sister.

2007-02-21T16:59:00.000-05:00

they took off with no warning. giddy, laughing about what they had that no one else seemed to have, and the stuff they didn't that everyone else apparently did. "keep it suckers!!" and they were gone again.

Montana's Official State Lullaby...

2007-02-16T11:49:00.000-05:00

From New West:

Montana House members grew dreamy and placid as cowboy poet and singer Ken Overcast serenaded the chamber with the proposed Montana lullaby. Rep. Wayne Stahl, R-Saco is introducing a bill to designate the song as the official state lullaby. If passed, Montana would be the first state to have an official lullaby.

Found a nice old map of the Missouri headwaters.

From the Lewis & Clark Exhibit, Newberry Library, Chicago:

Ac ko mok ki's Map, 1801

This remarkable document illustrates the confidence Native people possessed in their knowledge of their environment. It also demonstrates the relationships that had been forged between Indians and Europeans prior to the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Drawn first in the snow by Ac ko mok ki, a Blackfeet leader, in February 1801, this map was copied onto paper by Hudson’s Bay Company trader, Peter Fidler.

Ac ko mok ki’s map describes a region of some 200,000 square miles. It is drawn with west at the top of the page (wink!); the double line crossing from left to right represents the Rocky Mountains. It shows two rivers running west from the Rockies, and seventeen rivers flowing east. The Missouri River is represented by the line down the center of the map. Fidler added details regarding the Native American tribal populations in the region.

The Jefferson, Gallatin and Madison Rivers come together just north of Three Forks, Montana to create the Missouri River. This is one of the most beautiful wetlands areas I've ever seen... Its been 10 months since I was out this way. I'll be at TMM headquarters in a week and a half. Yes. While there I gotta try and get over to Pony, Lahood and definitely get a steak at the bar in Willow Creek. Gotta pick up a little stone for Steve from the Jefferson. Smooth behind the bar.... Head into Bozeman and say hello to Amanda & Chris. Maybe head over to Big Sky with Amanda for some R&R.

but there's so much Culture!

2007-02-14T14:13:00.000-05:00

This Afternoon...Freezing rain...Snow...Rain with a chance of sleet. Precipitation May be heavy at Times. Snow and sleet accumulation around an inch. Blustery with highs in the lower 30s. Northeast winds 15 to 25 mph with gusts up to 40 mph. Chance of precipitation near 100 percent.

Tonight...Freezing rain...A chance of sleet and rain in the evening...Then a chance of snow after midnight. Total accumulation of 3 to 5 inches. Lows around 18. Northwest winds 10 to 20 mph with gusts up to 45 mph. Chance of precipitation near 100 percent.

Bridgestone RB-2

2007-02-12T15:52:00.000-05:00

Got a new 1993 Bridgestone road bike Saturday. Never ridden, just out of the box with fresh grease, new tires, cables, housing, bar tape. It's truly a stunning time capsule. Coming up with a name is gonna be tricky for this little gal. Gonna be a keeper. Hopefully tomorrow night I'll get some numbers from the local bike shop and start fitting her to me. Need new stem and headset, new pedals. Celebrated with a couple Sierra Nevada 2007 Bigfoot Expedition Ales. Very fine, very fine... 9.6% love by volume.

On movies, Catherine Hardwicke is set to direct The Monkey Wrench Gang, a bit of info here. Filming is slated to start in May. Keepin an eye out for these coming up: Seraphim Falls, No Country For Old Men, Into the Wild, 3:10 to Yuma.

unemployment works

2007-02-06T12:24:00.000-05:00

more free talk from an older andy earles post, i'm assuming these tips are from gregg turkington...?

**You can use a Uruguayan 10 centismo piece as a U.S. quarter in many candy and cigarette machines. These coins can be obtained cheaply (or if you’re lucky, FREE!) in Uruguay and can really cut your expenses down drastically for candy and cigarettes. Similarly, the Icelandic 5 auran piece (pre-1972) has been known to work in parking meters and some bathroom condom/novelty vending machines. Stock up next time you are in Iceland!

**FREE gasoline. Park in a service station directly over their filler hole. Lift off the lid (you may need special tools for this steal them!) and run down 35 feet of rubber tubing through a large hole you’ll need to cut in the floor of your car ahead of time, then turn on the electric pump which you have installed to feed into your gas tank. All the bastards will ever notice is a parked car full of smiling freaks.

The Welfare Scam: Pretend to be crazy and poor. The red-tape loving bastards don’t make it easy to get this FREE money, but since most of those who really need it are too uneducated and drunk to be able to make sense of Uncle Sam’s bureaucracy, us freaks can use our patience for their endless game playing and form-filling-out to make ourselves wards of the state and let that beautiful silver shine in our pockets on a regular basis.

while panning for gold is still my favorite free money scheme, i'd have to say that seasonal jobs in locales west are by far the most lucrative and productive: job terminates, collect unemployment for 6 months, eat on food stamps, get a new seasonal job at end of 6 months. work half the year at a ski mt or in the middle of nowhere on fed land and spend the other half in the desert (in the middle of nowhere) or whatever else you can think of. but its true, the game-playing and endless forms can wear on you- you gotta use someone's address who is geographically stable and have access to a phone to call in bi-weekly and answer questions about your financial situation and report on how you "go job-hunting all the time but with no luck." all in all though, definitely worth the cash.

homeless in california

2007-02-05T11:16:00.000-05:00

excerpt from an article by charlie leduff, posted on north bank fred's site

While the federal welfare overhaul five years ago put single mothers to work, many California counties continue to make payments to capable indigent men. For instance, San Francisco gives $395 a month plus food stamp vouchers. Similarly, Los Angeles gives more than $220 and $135 in food stamps.

The counties' welfare programs are not linked by computer and there is little to stop a person from collecting his benefits in San Francisco, jumping the freight train and making his way to Los Angeles to collect again.

With fake identification, a person can collect welfare perhaps four times a month. The tramp will more likely spend it on crack and booze, since mission food is free.

"These riders are billing the system for tens of millions," said Detective Mike Quakenbush of the Portland, Ore., police, who five years ago hunted down a tramp known as Sidetrack who was convicted of killing four tramps and using their identities to cheat welfare.

"He had upwards of 20 accounts and kept a book to keep it straight," the detective said. "He was whacking guys, then opening welfare accounts across the country in their names. The welfare authorities don't like to check."

ny times review on leduff's new book, US GUYS - The True and Twisted Mind of the American Man

sw travel sites & misc fun movement

2007-02-01T17:40:00.000-05:00

most excellent utah travelogue, killer photos w/ panoramia
james kay photos
dels journey
asa hopkins photos
california chaparrel

photos in this post are from 1st link (oz.net)

dirt nap

2007-01-29T12:44:00.001-05:00

lee hazlewood story in the nytimes here.

ahead

2007-01-28T10:56:00.002-05:00

i gotta take myself outta this place. spiralling inward too quick. this city does that to you, all of this part of the country does- you shoot inward, you put too much emphasis on your thoughts, of the processes you come up with in your mind to progress your thinking or to enable the progression of your thought processes... see where this is going? a loathsome inward spiral of self-awareness.... etc so lets take it out. take me out of it.
here. i'll try and get a new focus by seeing through another's eyes...
i'll stay here for a while.

sold.

2007-01-25T10:46:00.001-05:00

just before moving to montana i sold most of my valuables. i regret having sold my touring bike sometimes, but i can replace it. i hate the word regret. and i don't like people who refrain from using the word hate. i'm not sure i even regret it, i just wish i had a touring bike now. and 2 of the guitars i sold! epiphone les paul. mmmmm the crunchy love. not that i could play worth a shit but it was nice to be able to play when i wanted to. adios hagstrom viking... aint she a doll?

really wanting to write but i can't seem to get a focus or direction. i am full with material and about to explode but i have no blueprint in my head. i'm too scattered. i need a week away, alone. out of the city. i need woods. badly. and drugs and alcohol and nicotine. and a temp lover. well maybe not that... not sure i remember how any of that even works. i do need woods though. i need no voices. i could use a good friend here, thats for sure. got a nice surprise from mom showing up the night before my birthday! total surprise. very sweet.

had to take mom to the airport at 4am this morning, drove around boston till 5:30 trying to figure out how to get back into cambridge. tunnel partially closed. asked 2 guys in a taxi, they ended up following me and asking me at the next light if i needed anything else, "noticed you had out-of-state tags." people are so kind here.

1975

2007-01-18T16:53:00.000-05:00

i'm starting a list of books/movies/music (or other fun) created or originating in 1975, my birthyear. i think it was a good year.
(happy birthday, me.)

horses, patti smith
monkey wrench gang, ed abbey
tonight's the night, neil young & crazy horse
one flew over the cuckoo's nest
pine ridge indian reservation shootout
nuthin fancy, lynard skynard
red-headed stranger, willie nelson
zuma, neil young & crazy horse
watergate

7am's

2007-01-15T17:41:00.000-05:00

"I’ve seen just how much I can stand
One night in Kansas City, we thought about killing a man
Seen my number fly by on Interstate Ten
Seen the mountains of Montana at Seven AM.
And I keep it all together for the sake of the kids
Got your fine-ass self on the back of my lids
Hell No, I Ain’t Happy.
But I ain’t too crappy, too crappy at all."
- drive-by truckers

not so much.

2007-01-12T22:23:00.000-05:00

just saw pan's labyrinth in harvard square. okay visually but i can do without the repeated bludgeoning. and the girl being the only one privy to the gore-enriched fantasy underworld- was it her imagination's creation? whose souped-up 12-year old imagination are we talking about here? honestly not too impressed with it. some of the sets were so dark i just started to feel like they were afraid of detail in the production. even a dreary, lonely, new england night has more feeling, depth and color than pan's world. i'd like to invite guillermo on a tour of the enchanted forest in the basement of goldsmith's in 1982 downtown memphis. sorry. pretty uninterested in everything though. no revelations here.
cambridge, you are dead to me.

Overnight

Showers
Likely
Lo 41°F

Saturday

Showers

Hi 49°F

Saturday
Night

Chance
Rain/Snow
Lo 34°F

Sunday

Rain/Snow
Likely
Hi 40°F

Sunday
Night

Rain

Lo 34°F

M.L.King
Day

Rain/Sleet

Hi 36°F

listening to neko case's canadian amp tonight. chinky version of neil young's dreamin man. watched the entire 3rd season of l-word over the past 4 or 5 days. plasticality, but fun and oh so addictive. although they try and cover a broad (?) cross-section of lesbian americana (albeit in plasticality central, ca), i don't think there's one girl on there i'd wanna take an extended camping trip with. where are the bull dykes we all know and love? where are the bad juke boxes and back-woods rebas? where are the psychos with overly ambitious self-esteems and the pathological liars with eating disorders that i've so often found myself with? yeah, t.v. world is nice. speaking of relationships, woody allen hits the nail on the head with this little gem.

don't burn the fires

2007-01-07T23:54:00.001-05:00

dead moon retired.

Running away, i knew i was wrong
I tried to fit in where i didn't belong
Wearing their clothes, playing their games
Being a part of that urban decay
Don't burn the fires, i'm never coming home

When the morning sky was cold and grey
I could hear the whispers of my own mistakes
Those warning eyes, that final touch
No one seemed to care that much
So don't burn the fires, i'm never coming home

And when i'd reached my destination
I thought someday i might return
Cause deep inside was the need
To feel the home fires burn
But a faltering voice merely whispered
My name as if we'd never expected to
Hear it again, and my heart grew
Cold to that indifferent sound
As i slowly laid the receiver down

-dm

1-800-LETS ALL NOT DO COCAINE

2007-01-06T14:11:00.002-05:00

hey massachusetts, lets be so miserable and wretchedly uncomfortable in our own skin that we only feel okay when we deconstruct everything to the point that there is no longer any soul or essence left in anything we touch, ok?
6 months left to go here. got a nice surprise from bailey showing up in town. of course, its supposed to rain the couple free days i have that we could ride.

really wish i had a copy of andy earle's patio tapes. 1-800-for the love of god, can we all not do coke? its been years since i've heard it. been too long. seems shelby was involved.
lately i feel the urge to do anything physical just to feel alive- snapping my wrists all night with rubber bands, tightening my stomach muscles while i pace the floor (its tricky like the pat-your-head/rub-your-belly thing), wearing as little as possible so i can be cold.
looking forward to ass-long trips through the high desert, red rock and mountains on bike with chico. weminuche camping trips... my new sleeping bag is bored here. chris m used to do pulls on the van window while transporting crap between stores. anything to keep moving. speaking of, i think i've acquired restless-leg syndrome. its been a couple weeks since it bothered me while trying to sleep but my legs were getting so jerky that i couldn't lay still long enough to fall asleep. it would go on for 2-4 hours most nights. maybe i'm just so tired now from being up late at a night job that it doesn't effect me....

4730 Hillmont

2007-01-01T12:14:00.000-05:00

went by the old house in nutbush/berclair on christmas eve. a tradition i usually carry out with melissa but she has a family now and was with in-laws for more holiday celebration. stopped at a gas station to buy a couple sweets for mom's stocking and splurged $6 on powerball and scratch tickets. its christmas. this gas station sits directly atop the land i used to run through till i turned 13 and mom's new husband moved us to a nicer area of town. (begin nonconnah creek/ softshell turtle years).

it wasnt hard to figure things out back then, when i still knew the exact line between my world and the insanity of others. right where that gas station now sits, i could feel the presence of a box turtle a couple seconds before i walked up on it. daddy taught me this way. he grew up in these woods too. the wolf river bottoms. he took me fishing down here. during the years he was driving 18-wheelers he kept a couple bamboo poles inside the bushes in the backyard. nylon line wrapped tight around the length of hollow yellow.

our old house had the best lights on the block this christmas eve. the parked ski boat at the middle turnout/cove was gone.

southern sloth

2006-12-23T07:54:00.000-05:00

morning in the delta.
i just woke up in a new subdivision on an old soybean field in a sand/clay-layered section of the kudzu south. hardwood deciduous bottom lands. nothing new to this story. mom moved 15 miles further east away from the city and has a new car for weekly ventures to the clothing stores and the grocery. the cops are always watching out here, trying to keep it safe for money to move out this way, almost an hour from the crumbling 3rd-world city these sprawling suburbs create. crime is up in the delta.

this is my favorite time of year in the south. the mosquitoes and wasps are gone, moccasins and copperheads asleep. walking through the woods is alot easier; the underbrush is all dead. the colors are gorgeous. tufts of dead grass highlight the golds, browns, greys of the sky and earth. exactly how las pampas will look if i walk south for 6 months past 100 degrees of latitude.

the loosahatchie river runs toward town about 5 miles north of here. saw a new subdivision on the wolf river's floodplain yesterday while driving to my grandmother's house. lawsuits will fly within a year or 2 when they start getting flooded out. somebody's getting paid big bucks to give the ok on these permits. and the corp of engineers probably wont update their floodplain maps for another 20 years....

cross

2006-12-15T14:54:00.000-05:00

might go to providence this weekend for cyclocross nationals. puke-fest. i would never do a cross race but it is fun to watch...probably shouldn't say never but come on. mud, cold, jumping on/off bike, running with bike? knees can no longer take that kind of impact anyway.

went to nationals. fun enough. pics came out kinda fuzzy...

i like this one of georgia gould.

chad representin d-go.

babies,

2006-12-13T08:37:00.000-05:00

duggar family aint got shit on me. can you say SINGLE-PARENT-HOME BEEEOOOOOTCH

nettie moore

2006-12-07T10:02:00.000-05:00

lordy lord. i think i'd probably be locked up right now if it weren't for the gym. as boring as it can be, i have access to 4 within walking distance from the house. most near harvard square. havn't gotten too into the swimming though. that used to be a daily thing for me, just dont seem fun no more... lot of time on the bike, trying to strengthen right knee with some light weights. i took katt williams' advice and listened to lil jon while on the bike. fun. got some new pearlizumi knee warmers. i look like a right idiot walking around the house in cut-off jeans and those stickin out. dressed 4 success.

if i gained nothing else from my time spent in new england, at least i met john malkovich. and he thinks this is an awful town too. driving to graceland in a week. gran has me committed to 2 days of cooking at her house. she's gonna put 5 pounds on me over the holiday. bringing back 2 iron skillets, skateboard, waders. hope to catch up with some old buds. its the last time i'll see that town, prolly till next xmas. can't say i'm too depressed about that....

if i were drivin down solo i'd stop in wv and see if i could talk sue haywood into hangin out for a drink. lookin forward to checkin out the offroad to athens dvd. yummy

honduras

2006-12-06T09:22:00.000-05:00

looking down on copan, honduras

freddy

near the town of tela

ellen willis, 1941-2006

2006-12-04T14:12:00.001-05:00

SUPERSENSITIVE: in the habit of hearing insult and bigotry where none is intended; Jews are traditionally the worst offenders, being inclined to take constructive criticism like "Pale-faced Jew-boy, I wish you were dead" as evidence of anti-Semitism.
-ellen willis

holy chro-moly!!

2006-12-04T11:41:00.001-05:00

had a date a few nights ago. the first since last summer. thought i'd make an effort, put myself out there... i'm really not a good sport. or maybe i just don't like the sport of dating. i'm not a recreation-oriented person. i don't want a good-time buddy. i want a real partner. i want someone to read to me. draw me corny pictures. save newspaper articles for me to read. buy me an eclair or a bavarian cream. a best friend. i want a copy of myself!!! yes its narcissistic. at least i'll own it.

so after being in this town since july, i actually asked someone out. i got lured into the excitement of a real date. hung out twice, then immediately got sideclocked in an email!! well i tried.

i saw the fountain last night at the theater. if a movie can save your life, this is the one. after getting dumped by someone i had never even kissed, i was feeling a bit fragile. i got teary a couple times on the drive over, the early night was coming on fast. i knew i needed to hit the seat and get distracted before i lost the ability to walk through a crowd without tears streaming down my paling new england face.

hugh jackman couldn't have been a better pick. well, maybe i should say nobody could have played this role better. and no computer imagery to enhance the visuals. all organic. so glad i caught this one on the big screen.

colurango

2006-11-29T14:56:00.002-05:00

can't wait to get back to my
chinatown campspot. las animas!!
seven months...

met up with kage at the b-side in somerville last night.
excellent time. a little weary of her psych degree
"why do you think that is?" questions...

"the longest train i ever saw went down that georgia line. the engine passed at six o'clock and the cab passed by at nine."

monkey off my back

2006-11-25T17:03:00.000-05:00

and it feels good. fresh start.
xmas xmas xmas
yummy walks, seeing all the lights.

2nite will be fun. anticipation is killing me...

oh, beautiful new england.

mount chocorua.

2006-11-12T09:24:00.000-05:00

i was actually pleasantly surprised at how nice it was.

arrived too late to make it all the way up the 1st day. stayed just off the trail, hadn't seen stars that bright since being out west. blinking and winking through the trees at me. dark at 4:30...

talked to a couple old friends recently. since i've been here, i've had nothing to offer - like i'm just on hold.

i feel bad about talking to people from my past because i don't know what to say. all i can do is ask questions. there's really nothing to tell.... there is nobody in my life that i'm close to, i have no overwhelming or exciting experiences. i know, snap out of it....

nice line from built to spill's latest: "when things are all you think of, and plans are all you make, and thoughts are all you dream of, and falls are all you take - look out the world's destroying you. relax it isn't fair. mother nature's disposition, she don't mind, she don't care."

new fun!!!!

2006-11-06T11:58:00.000-05:00

msr miniworks water filter
marmot 'never winter' 30 degree down bag
or snowline mitts
sierra designs portable attic for sirius tent
msr 4l dromlite bag

the water filter is super-easy to use & maintain. no tools required. i was relieved to get to the end of the instruction manual in only 6 tiny pages! it works really fast too. screwed it onto a nalgene, had it full in less than a minute. tested the new bag 2 nights ago when the low was 31. maybe if i hadn't been on a second-story porch it would have been nicer but my face was really cold all night. the rest of me was warm inside the bag but i came back inside at 2am. i'd say the bag was perfect. weighs under 2 lbs, compresses to probably half the size of my winter bag and is gonna be a good friend in the desert....
this weekend i'm going up to the whites. the ringer. probably solo unless j wants to go too. won't be taking the new bag! hopefully i'll get snowed on. yesiree.

"Too bad they don’t know that the struggle of the twenty-first century started here, a tiny creek in Death Valley." - erik gauger on pupfish in death valley

ny

2006-10-31T13:58:00.000-05:00

met a girl who trains monkeys for paralyzed people. once the monkeys are trained, they help out their new owners with simple tasks- turning a page in a book, getting them water, etc... its a local non-profit organization downtown. i want to work there really bad.
spent the weekend in ny and jersey with the fam. 2 grandmas, 4 moms, 5 cousins, 6 sisters, 8 daughters.
saw saturday night live in ny. fun. there was a monkey hanging out down on the set before borat opened. it would take it's hat off, put it back on, look around, and do it again. i imagine that anybody who really thought about it would agree that yes, they would like to have their own personal monkey. what better present could there be? mine would be named lucy. lucy goosy.

(colossus of roads)

2006-10-20T00:34:00.000-04:00

saw this at the coolidge corner theater couple hours ago. 16 years in the making. lucky me! best $7.50 date i ever took myself on.

seldom seen

2006-10-17T18:32:00.000-04:00

seems like forever since i've been out of this house. its got the feel of our youth in it lately. spending so much time with melissa, emily. a treasure i'll have forever. growing up, it was just us 3- mom her and i. something warming about the combination.

rain.

sweetest holly! (want to see you again soon)
how funny. 1993 was the last time i'd seen or talked to her. same sweet girl. whoa!!!
the walls we build inside us and around us over time...
can't wait for xmas. see all the family. there will be a ton of kids this year. last year was the first year i wasn't in mtown for xmas. i want xmas music all the way home. cheese!!

need to get on the selling train and lighten the load a little more. had a throw-out party last weekend. felt good. the new built to spill album is solid. 'you in reverse'. guitar aint kiddin. watched the townes van zandt documentary again today. his melancholy reminds me of grandaddy. the few songs i remember of his were the same brand of heartache.

it was cold. i waited. i got drunk. i wrote it all down. i saw the lights of the city start to twinkle. coyotes howled from across the canyon. the wind stopped hours ago. i woke up and made coffee. i walked back down again. how many times can i want the same thing? i find it wherever i go.

she aint revved till the rods are thrown

2006-10-05T08:59:00.000-04:00

somethin in the wrinkle in your forehead tells me there's a fit bout to be thrown....

weekend need-to-do's....
movie? riiiiiiide. vacuum. wine. kale & beets at sto. eggs. oj.

drinky time.
cein watson
cein's work needs to be looked at in more detail. good stuff.

weekly standard, the perpetual adolescent

ahaaaaaaa just read buckner's blog entries. fucking hilarious. cracker seed in montana, feeling like a cockroach trapped in someone's hand in boston...

"Got up early to get my broken window replaced in Albany before leaving for Boston and an incoming storm.

And Boston...Take a map, rip it up, throw it into the air: where it lands is the street layout of a town that overturns cars whether or not their team wins or loses. Sprinkle with scraps of LL Bean khakis and blue button-ups. Played a small stage in a club steeped in folk traditionalism: i.e., loops and e-bows need not apply. Driving out of Boston, you feel like a cockroach trapped between someone’s giant hands, and every turn you make, the hands move and you’re lost again. You just wanna turn over on your shell and kick your legs up into the clammy air."

yeah the road life. need to make a list of good road movies.
here's one of my favorites

can't wait to see penn's version of into the wild

why i eyes ya.
chilly fingers.

home

2006-10-04T11:51:00.000-04:00

surfin the web, i think i found a place where i could spend a lot of time, if not the rest of it. and i'd only be 2.5 hours by automobile from friends. nice.
why do the hutterites always like the cold environs? fucking germans. why do i stay up so late? i should change my name back to it's correct german spelling...
fucking americans.

ok, so i'm going into hibernation soon. hunkering down for the nasty new england winter. approaching fast. finally got the tent dried out from the ny rain. fuck this nasty area. why the hell would anyone in their right mind want to live in this part of the country? "oh but there's so much CULTURE!!!!! there's so much to DO, so much HISTORY!!" wow. i forgot. how could i FORGET??!!!

no use

2006-10-02T13:41:00.000-04:00

quitting the paint factory

2006-09-29T16:37:00.000-04:00

QUITTING THE PAINT FACTORY
on the virtues of idleness

by Mark Slouka - Harper’s Magazine – November 2004 issue

Love yields to business. If you seek a way out of love, be busy; you’ll be safe, then. -Ovid, Remedia Amoris

I distrust the perpetually busy; always have. The frenetic ones spinning in tight little circles like poisoned rats. The slower ones, grinding away their fourscore and ten in righteousness and pain. They are the soul-eaters.

When I was young, my parents read me Aesop’s fable of “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” wherein, as everyone knows, the grasshopper spends the summer making music in the sun while the ant toils with his fellow formicidae. Inevitably, winter comes, as winters will, and the grasshopper, who hasn’t planned ahead and who doesn’t know what a 401K is, has run out of luck. When he shows up at the ants’ door, carrying his fiddle, the ant asks him what he was doing all year: “I was singing, if you please,” the grasshopper replies, or something to that effect. “You were singing?” says the ant. “Well, then, go and sing.” And perhaps because I sensed, even then, that fate would someday find me holding a violin or a manuscript at the door of the ants, my antennae frozen and my bills overdue, I confounded both Aesop and my well-meaning parents, and bore away the wrong moral. That summer, many a windblown grasshopper was saved from the pond, and many an anthill inundated under the golden rain of my pee.

I was right.

In the lifetime that has passed since Calvin Coolidge gave his speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in which he famously proclaimed that “the chief business of the American people is business,” the dominion of the ants has grown enormously. Look about: The business of business is everywhere and inescapable; the song of the buyers and the sellers never stops; the term “workaholic” has been folded up and put away. We have no time for our friends or our families, no time to think or to make a meal. We’re moving product, while the soul drowns like a cat in a well. [”I think that there is far too much work done in the world,” Bertrand Russell observed in his famous 1932 essay “In Praise of Idleness,” adding that he hoped to “start a campaign to induce good young men to do nothing.” He failed. A year later, National Socialism, with its cult of work (think of all those bronzed young men in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will throwing cordwood to each other in the sun), flared in Germany.]

A resuscitated orthodoxy, so pervasive as to be nearly invisible, rules the land. Like any religion worth its salt, it shapes our world in its image, demonizing if necessary, absorbing when possible. Thus has the great sovereign territory of what Nabokov called “unreal estate,” the continent of invisible possessions from time to talent to contentment, been either infantilized, rendered unclean, or translated into the grammar of dollars and cents. Thus has the great wilderness of the inner life been compressed into a median strip by the demands of the “real world,” which of course is anything but. Thus have we succeeded in transforming even ourselves into bipedal products, paying richly for seminars that teach us how to market the self so it may be sold to the highest bidder. Or perhaps “down the river” is the phrase.

Ah, but here’s the rub: Idleness is not just a psychological necessity, requisite to the construction of a complete human being; it constitutes as well a kind of political space, a space as necessary to the workings of an actual democracy as, say, a free press. How does it do this? By allowing us time to figure out who we are, and what we believe; by allowing us time to consider what is unjust, and what we might do about it. By giving the inner life (in whose precincts we are most ourselves) its due. Which is precisely what makes idleness dangerous. All manner of things can grow out of that fallow soil. Not for nothing did our mothers grow suspicious when we had “too much time on our hands.” They knew we might be up to something. And not for nothing did we whisper to each other, when we were up to something, “Quick, look busy.”

Mother knew instinctively what the keepers of the castles have always known: that trouble – the kind that might threaten the symmetry of a well-ordered garden – needs time to take root. Take away the time, therefore, and you choke off the problem before it begins. Obedience reigns, the plow stays in the furrow; things proceed as they must. Which raises an uncomfortable question: Could the Church of Work – which today has Americans aspiring to sleep deprivation the way they once aspired to a personal knowledge of God – be, at base, an anti-democratic force? Well, yes. James Russell Lowell, that nineteenth-century workhorse, summed it all up quite neatly: “There is no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on its keel, and saving it from all risk of crankiness, than business.”

Quite so. The mind, however, particularly the mind of a citizen in a democratic society, is not a boat. Ballast is not what it needs, and steadiness, alas, can be a synonym for stupidity, as our current administration has so amply demonstrated. No, what the democratic mind requires, above all, is time; time to consider its options. Time to develop the democratic virtues of independence, orneriness, objectivity, and fairness. Time, perhaps (to sail along with Lowell’s leaky metaphor for a moment), to ponder the course our unelected captains have so generously set for us, and to consider mutiny when the iceberg looms.

Which is precisely why we need to be kept busy. If we have no time to think, to mull, if we have no time to piece together the sudden associations and unexpected, mid-shower insights that are the stuff of independent opinion, then we are less citizens than cursors, easily manipulated, vulnerable to the currents of power.

But I have to be careful here. Having worked all of my adult life, I recognize that work of one sort or another is as essential to survival as protein, and that much of it, in today’s highly bureaucratized, economically diversified societies, will of necessity be neither pleasant nor challenging nor particularly meaningful. I have compassion for those making the most of their commute and their cubicle; I just wish they could be a little less cheerful about it. In short, this isn’t about us so much as it is about the Zeitgeist we live and labor in, which, like a cuckoo taking over a thrush’s nest, has systematically shoved all the other eggs of our life, one by one, onto the pavement. It’s about illuminating the losses.

We’re enthralled. I want to disenchant us a bit; draw a mustache on the boss.

INFINITE BUSTLE

I’m a student of the narrowing margins. And their victim, to some extent, though my capacity for sloth, my belief in it, may yet save me, like some stubborn heretic in fifth-century Rome, still offering gifts to the spirit of the fields even as the priests sniff about the temple for sin, I daily sacrifice my bit of time. The pagan gods may yet return. Constantine and Theodosius may die. But the prospects are bad.

In Riverside Park in New York City, where I walk these days, the legions of “weekend nannies” are growing, setting up a play date for a ten-year-old requires a feat of near-Olympic coordination, and the few, vestigial, late-afternoon parents one sees, dragging their wailing progeny by the hand or frantically kicking a soccer ball in the fading light, have a gleam in their eyes I find frightening. No outstretched legs crossed at the ankles, no arms draped over the back of the bench. No lovers. No be-hatted old men, arguing. Between the slide and the sandbox, a very fit young man in his early thirties is talking on his cell phone while a two-year-old with a trail of snot running from his nose tugs on the seam of his corduroy pants. “There’s no way I can pick it up. Because we’re still at the park. Because we just got here, that’s why.”

It’s been one hundred and forty years since Thoreau, who itched a full century before everyone else began to scratch, complained that the world was increasingly just “a place of business. What an infinite bustle!” he groused. “I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no Sabbath. It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work.” Little did he know. Today the roads of commerce, paved and smoothed, reach into every nook and cranny of the republic; there is no place apart, no place where we would be shut of the drone of that damnable traffic. Today we, quite literally, live to work. And it hardly matters what kind of work we do; the process justifies the ends. Indeed, at times it seems there is hardly an occupation, however useless or humiliating or downright despicable, that cannot at least in part be redeemed by our obsessive dedication to it: “Yes, Ted sold shoulder-held Stingers to folks with no surname, but he worked so hard!”

Not long ago, at the kind of dinner party I rarely attend, I made the mistake of admitting that I not only liked to sleep but liked to get at least eight hours a night whenever possible, and that nine would be better still. The reaction – a complex Pinot Noir of nervous laughter displaced by expressions of disbelief and condescension – suggested that my transgression had been, on some level, a political one. I was reminded of the time I’d confessed to Roger Angell that I did not much care for baseball.

My comment was immediately rebutted by testimonials to sleeplessness: two of the nine guests confessed to being insomniacs; a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters claimed indignantly that she couldn’t remember when she had ever gotten eight hours of sleep; two other guests declared themselves grateful for five or six. It mattered little that I’d arranged my life differently, and accepted the sacrifices that arrangement entailed. Eight hours! There was something willful about it. Arrogant, even. Suitably chastened, I held my tongue, and escaped alone to tell Thee.

Increasingly, it seems to me, our world is dividing into two kinds of things: those that aid work, or at least represent a path to it, and those that don’t. Things in the first category are good and noble; things in the second aren’t. Thus, for example, education is good (as long as we don’t have to listen to any of that “end in itself” nonsense) because it will presumably lead to work. Thus playing the piano or swimming the 100-yard backstroke are good things for a fifteen-year-old to do not because they might give her some pleasure but because rumor has it that Princeton is interested in students who can play Chopin or swim quickly on their backs (and a degree from Princeton, as any fool knows, can be readily converted to work).

Point the beam anywhere, and there’s the God of Work, busily trampling out the vintage. Blizzards are bemoaned because they keep us from getting to work. Hobbies are seen as either ridiculous or self-indulgent because they interfere with work. Longer school days are all the rage (even as our children grow demonstrably stupider), not because they make educational or psychological or any other kind of sense but because keeping kids in school longer makes it easier for us to work. Meanwhile, the time grows short, the margin narrows; the white spaces on our calendars have been inked in for months. We’re angry about this, upset about that, but who has the time to do anything anymore? There are those reports to report on, memos to remember, emails to deflect or delete. They bury us like snow.

The alarm rings and we’re off, running so hard that by the time we stop we’re too tired to do much of anything except nod in front of the TV, which, like virtually all the other voices in our culture, endorses our exhaustion, fetishizes and romanticizes it and, by daily adding its little trowelful of lies and omissions, helps cement the conviction that not only is this how our three score and ten must be spent but that the transaction is both noble and necessary.

KA-CHINK!

Time may be money (though I’ve always resisted that loathsome platitude, the alchemy by which the very gold of our lives is transformed into the base lead of commerce), but one thing seems certain: Money eats time. Forget the visions of sanctioned leisure: the view from the deck in St. Moritz, the wafer-thin TV. Consider the price.

Sometimes, I want to say, money costs too much. And at the beginning of the millennium, in this country, the cost of money is well on the way to bankrupting us. We’re impoverishing ourselves, our families, our communities – and yet we can’t stop ourselves. Worse, we don’t want to.

Seen from the right vantage point, there’s something wonderfully animistic about it. The god must be fed; he’s hungry for our hours, craves our days and years. And we oblige. Every morning (unlike the good citizens of Tenochtitlan, who at least had the good sense to sacrifice others on the slab) we rush up the steps of the ziggurat to lay ourselves down. It’s not a pretty sight.

Then again, we’ve been well trained. And the training never stops. In a recent ad in The New York Times Magazine, paid for by an outfit named Wealth and Tax Advisory Services, Inc., an attractive young woman in a dark business suit is shown working at her desk. (She may be at home, though these days the distinction is moot.) On the desk is a cup, a cell phone, and an adding machine. Above her right shoulder, just over the blurred sofa and the blurred landscape on the wall, are the words, “Successful entrepreneurs work continuously.” The text below explains: “The challenge to building wealth is that your finances grow in complexity as your time demands increase.”

The ad is worth disarticulating, it seems to me, if only because some version of it is beamed into our cerebral cortex a thousand times a day. What’s interesting about it is not only what it says but what it so blithely assumes. What it says, crudely enough, is that in order to be successful, we must not only work but work continuously; what it assumes is that time is inversely proportional to wealth: our time demands will increase the harder we work and the more successful we become. It’s an organic thing; a law, almost. Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly, you gotta work like a dog ’til you die.

Am I suggesting then that Wealth and Tax Advisory Services, Inc. spend $60,000 for a full-page ad in The New York Times Magazine to show us a young woman at her desk writing poetry? Or playing with her kids? Or sharing a glass of wine with a friend, attractively thumbing her nose at the acquisition of wealth? No. For one thing, the folks at Wealth and Tax, etc. are simply doing what’s in their best interest. For another, it would hardly matter if they did show the woman writing poetry, or laughing with her children, because these things, by virtue of their placement in the ad, would immediately take on the color of their host; they would simply be the rewards of working almost continuously.

What I am suggesting is that just as the marketplace has co-opted rebellion by subordinating politics to fashion, by making anger chic, so it has quietly underwritten the idea of leisure, in part by separating it from idleness. Open almost any magazine in America today and there they are: The ubiquitous tanned-and-toned twenty-somethings driving the $70,000 fruits of their labor; the moneyed-looking men and women in their healthy sixties (to give the young something to aspire to) tossing Frisbees to Irish setters or tying on flies in midstream or watching sunsets from their Adirondack chairs.

Leisure is permissible, we understand, because it costs money; idleness is not, because it doesn’t. Leisure is focused; whatever thinking it requires is absorbed by a certain task: sinking that putt, making that cast, watching that flat-screen TV. Idleness is unconstrained, anarchic. Leisure – particularly if it involves some kind of high-priced technology – is as American as a Fourth of July barbecue. Idleness, on the other hand, has a bad attitude. It doesn’t shave; it’s not a member of the team; it doesn’t play well with others. It thinks too much, as my high school coach used to say. So it has to be ostracized.

[Or put to good use. The wilderness of association we enter when we read, for example, is one of the world’s great domains of imaginative diversity: a seedbed of individualism.

What better reason to pave it then, to make it an accessory, like a personal organizer, a sure-fire way of raising your SAT score, or improving your communication skills for that next interview. You say you like to read? Then don’t waste your time; put it to work. Order Shakespeare in Charge: The Bard’s Guide to Leading and Succeeding on the Business Stage, with its picture of the bard in a business suit on the cover.]

With idleness safely on the reservation, the notion that leisure is necessarily a function of money is free to grow into a truism. “Money isn’t the goal. Your goals, that’s the goal,” reads a recent ad for Citibank. At first glance, there’s something appealingly subversive about it. Apply a little skepticism though, and the implicit message floats to the surface: And how else are you going to reach those goals than by investing wisely with us? Which suggests that, um, money is the goal, after all.

THE CHURCH OF WORK

There’s something un-American about singing the virtues of idleness. It is a form of blasphemy, a secular sin. More precisely, it is a kind of latter-day antinomianism, as much a threat to the orthodoxy of our day as Anne Hutchinson’s desire 350 years ago to circumvent the Puritan ministers and dial God direct. Hutchinson, we recall, got into trouble because she accused the Puritan elders of backsliding from the rigors of their theology and giving in to a Covenant of Works, whereby the individual could earn his all-expenses-paid trip to the pearly gates through the labor of his hands rather than solely through the grace of God. Think of it as a kind of frequent-flier plan for the soul.

The analogy to today is instructive. Like the New England clergy, the Religion of Business – literalized, painfully, in books like Jesus, C.E.O. – holds a monopoly on interpretation; it sets the terms, dictates value.

[In this new lexicon, for example, “work” is defined as the means to wealth; “success,” as a synonym for it.]

Although today’s version of the Covenant of Works has substituted a host of secular pleasures for the idea of heaven, it too seeks to corner the market on what we most desire, to suggest that the work of our hands will save us. And we believe. We believe across all the boundaries of class and race and ethnicity that normally divide us; we believe in numbers that dwarf those of the more conventionally faithful. We repeat the daily catechism, we sing in the choir. And we tithe, and keep on tithing, until we are spent.

It is this willingness to hand over our lives that fascinates and appalls me. There’s such a lovely perversity to it; it’s so wonderfully counterintuitive, so very Christian: You must empty your pockets, turn them inside out, and spill out your wife and your son, the pets you hardly knew, and the days you simply missed altogether watching the sunlight fade on the bricks across the way. You must hand over the rainy afternoons, the light on the grass, the moments of play and of simply being. You must give it up, all of it, and by your example teach your children to do the same, and then – because even this is not enough – you must train yourself to believe that this outsourcing of your life is both natural and good. But even so, your soul will not be saved.

The young, for a time, know better. They balk at the harness. They do not go easy. For a time they are able to see the utter sadness of subordinating all that matters to all that doesn’t. Eventually, of course, sitting in their cubicle lined with New Yorker cartoons, selling whatever it is they’ve been asked to sell, most come to see the advantage of enthusiasm. They join the choir and are duly forgiven for their illusions. It’s a rite of passage we are all familiar with. The generations before us clear the path; Augustine stands to the left, Freud to the right. We are born into death, and die into life, they murmur; civilization will have its discontents. The sign in front of the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Work confirms it. And we believe.

All of which leaves only the task of explaining away those few miscreants who out of some inner weakness or perversity either refuse to convert or who go along and then, in their thirty-sixth year in the choir, say, abruptly abandon the faith. Those in the first category are relatively easy to contend with; they are simply losers. Those in the second are a bit more difficult; their apostasy requires something more… dramatic. They are considered mad.

In one of my favorite anecdotes from American literary history (which my children know by heart, and which in turn bodes poorly for their futures as captains of industry), the writer Sherwood Anderson found himself, at the age of thirty-six, the chief owner and general manager of a paint factory in Elyria, Ohio. Having made something of a reputation for himself as a copywriter in a Chicago advertising agency, he’d moved up a rung. He was on his way, as they say, a businessman in the making, perhaps even a tycoon in embryo. There was only one problem: he couldn’t seem to shake the notion that the work he was doing (writing circulars extolling the virtues of his line of paints) was patently absurd, undignified; that it amounted to a kind of prison sentence. Lacking the rationalizing gene, incapable of numbing himself sufficiently to make the days and the years pass without pain, he suffered and flailed. Eventually he snapped.

It was a scene he would revisit time and again in his memoirs and fiction. On November 27, 1912, in the middle of dictating a letter to his secretary (”The goods about which you have inquired are the best of their kind made in the…”), he simply stopped. According to the story, the two supposedly stared at each other for a long time, after which Anderson said: “I have been wading in a long river and my feet are wet,” and walked out. Outside the building he turned east toward Cleveland and kept going. Four days later he was recognized and taken to a hospital suffering from exhaustion.

Anderson claimed afterward that he had encouraged the impression that he might be cracking up in order to facilitate his exit, to make it comprehensible. “The thought occurred to me that if men thought me a little insane they would forgive me if I lit out,” he wrote, and though we will never know for sure if he suffered a nervous breakdown that day or only pretended to one (his biographers have concluded that he did), the point of the anecdote is elsewhere: Real or imagined, nothing short of madness would do for an excuse.

Anderson himself, of course, was smart enough to recognize the absurdity in all this, and to use it for his own ends; over the years that followed, he worked his escape from the paint factory into a kind of parable of liberation, an exemplar for the young men of his age. It became the cornerstone of his critique of the emerging business culture: To stay was to suffocate, slowly; to escape was to take a stab at “aliveness.” What America needed, Anderson argued, was a new class of individuals who “at any physical cost to themselves and others” would “agree to quit working, to loaf, to refuse to be hurried or try to get on in the world.”

“To refuse to be hurried or try to get on in the world.” It sounds quite mad. What would we do if we followed that advice? And who would we be? No, better to pull down the blinds, finish that sentence. We’re all in the paint factory now.

CLEARING BRUSH

At times you can almost see it, this flypaper we’re attached to, this mechanism we labor in, this delusion we inhabit. A thing of such magnitude can be hard to make out, of course, but you can rough out its shape and mark its progress, like Lon Chaney’s Invisible Man, by its effects: by the things it renders quaint or obsolete, by the trail of discarded notions it leaves behind. What we’re leaving behind today, at record pace, is whatever belief we might once have had in the value of unstructured time: in the privilege of contemplating our lives before they are gone, in the importance of uninterrupted conversation, in the beauty of play. In the thing in itself – unmediated, leading nowhere. In the present moment.

Admittedly, the present – in its ontological, rather than consumerist, sense – has never been too popular on this side of the Atlantic; we’ve always been a finger-drumming, restless bunch, suspicious of jawboning, less likely to sit at the table than to grab a quick one at the bar. Whitman might have exhorted us to loaf and invite our souls, but that was not an invitation we cared to extend, not unless the soul played poker, ha, ha. No sir, a Frenchman might invite his soul. One expected such things. But an American? An American would be out the swinging doors and halfway to tomorrow before his silver dollar had stopped ringing on the counter.

I was put in mind of all this last June while sitting on a bench in London’s Hampstead Heath. My bench, like many others, was almost entirely hidden; well off the path, delightfully overgrown, it sat at the top of a long-grassed meadow. It had a view. There was whimsy in its placement, and joy. It was thoroughly impractical. It had clearly been placed there to encourage one thing – solitary contemplation.

And sitting there, listening to the summer drone of the bees, I suddenly imagined George W. Bush on my bench. I can’t tell you why this happened, or what in particular brought the image to my mind. Possibly it was the sheer incongruity of it that appealed to me, the turtle-on-a-lamppost illogic of it; earlier that summer, intrigued by images of Kafka’s face on posters advertising the Prague Marathon, I’d entertained myself with pictures of Franz looking fit for the big race. In any case, my vision of Dubya sitting on a bench, reading a book on his lap – smiling or nodding in agreement, wetting a finger to turn a page – was so discordant, so absurd, that I realized I’d accidentally stumbled upon one of those visual oxymorons that, by its very dissonance, illuminates something essential.

What the picture of George W. Bush flushed into the open for me was the classically American and increasingly Republican cult of movement, of busy-ness; of doing, not thinking. One could imagine Kennedy reading on that bench in Hampstead Heath. Or Carter, maybe. Or even Clinton (though given the bucolic setting, one could also imagine him in other, more Dionysian scenarios). But Bush? Bush would be clearing brush. He’d be stomping it into submission with his pointy boots. He’d be making the world a better place.

Now, something about all that brush clearing had always bothered me. It wasn’t the work itself, though I’d never fully understood where all that brush was being cleared from, or why, or how it was possible that there was any brush still left between Dallas and Austin. No, it was the frenetic, anti-thinking element of it I disliked. This wasn’t simply outdoor work, which I had done my share of and knew well. This was brush clearing as a statement, a gesture of impatience. It captured the man, his disdain for the inner life, for the virtues of slowness and contemplation. This was movement as an answer to all those equivocating intellectuals and Gallic pontificators who would rather talk than do, think than act. Who could always be counted on to complicate what was simple with long-winded discussions of complexity and consequences. Who were weak.

And then I had it, the thing I’d been trying to place, the thing that had always made me bristle – instinctively – whenever I saw our fidgety, unelected President in action. I recalled reading about an Italian art movement called Futurism, which had flourished in the first decades of the twentieth century. Its practitioners had advocated a cult of restlessness, of speed, of dynamism; had rejected the past in all its forms; had glorified business and war and patriotism. They had also, at least in theory, supported the growth of fascism.

The link seemed tenuous at best, even facile. Was I seriously linking Bush – his shallowness, his bustle, his obvious suspicion of nuance – to the spirit of fascism? As much as I loathed the man, it made me uneasy. I’d always argued with people who applied the word carelessly. Having been called a fascist myself for suggesting that an ill-tempered rottweiler be put on a leash, I had no wish to align myself with those who had downgraded the word to a kind of generalized epithet, roughly synonymous with “asshole,” to be applied to whoever disagreed with them. I had too much respect for the real thing. And yet there was no getting around it; what I’d been picking up like a bad smell whenever I observed the Bush team in action was the faint but unmistakable whiff of fascism; a democratically diluted fascism, true, and masked by the perfume of down-home cookin’, but fascism nonetheless.

Still, it was not until I’d returned to the States and had forced myself to wade through the reams of Futurist manifestos – a form that obviously spoke to their hearts – that the details of the connection began to come clear. The linkage had nothing to do with the Futurists’ art, which was notable only for its sustained mediocrity, nor with their writing, which at times achieved an almost sublime level of badness. It had to do, rather, with their ant-like energy, their busy-ness, their utter disdain of all the manifestations of the inner life, and with the way these traits seemed so organically linked in their thinking to aggression and war. “We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia,” wrote Filippo Marinetti, perhaps the Futurists’ most breathless spokesman. “We will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers….. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind….. We will sing of great crowds excited by work.”

“Militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers,” “a feverish insomnia,” “great crowds excited by work” … I knew that song. And yet still, almost perversely, I resisted the recognition. It was too easy, somehow. Wasn’t much of the Futurist rant (”Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly”) simply a gesture of adolescent rebellion, a FUCK YOU scrawled on Dad’s garage door? I had just about decided to scrap the whole thing when I came across Marinetti’s later and more extended version of the Futurist creed. And this time the connection was impossible to deny.

In the piece, published in June of 1913 (roughly six months after Anderson walked out of the paint factory), Marinetti explained that Futurism was about the “acceleration of life to today’s swift pace.” It was about the “dread of the old and the known… of quiet living.” The new age, he wrote, would require the “negation of distances and nostalgic solitudes.” It would “ridicule . . . the ‘holy green silence’ and the ineffable landscape.” It would be, instead, an age enamored of “the passion, art, and idealism of Business.”

This shift from slowness to speed, from the solitary individual to the crowd excited by work, would in turn force other adjustments. The worship of speed and business would require a new patriotism, “a heroic idealization of the commercial, industrial, and artistic solidarity of a people”; it would require “a modification in the idea of war,” in order to make it “the necessary and bloody test of a people’s force.”

As if this weren’t enough, as if the parallel were not yet sufficiently clear, there was this: The new man, Marinetti wrote – and this deserves my italics – would communicate by “brutally destroying the syntax of his speech. He wastes no time in building sentences. Punctuation and the right adjectives will mean nothing to him. He will despise subtleties and nuances of language.” All of his thinking, moreover, would be marked by a “dread of slowness, pettiness, analysis, and detailed explanations. Love of speed, abbreviation, and the summary. ‘Quick, give me the whole thing in two words!’”

Short of telling us that he would have a ranch in Crawford, Texas, and be given to clearing brush, nothing Marinetti wrote could have made the resemblance clearer. From his notorious mangling of the English language to his well-documented impatience with detail and analysis to his chuckling disregard for human life (which enabled him to crack jokes about Aileen Wuornos’s execution as well as mug for the cameras minutes before announcing that the nation was going to war), Dubya was Marinetti’s “New Man”: impatient, almost pathologically unreflective, unburdened by the past. A man untroubled by the imagination, or by an awareness of human frailty. A leader wonderfully attuned (though one doubted he could ever articulate it) to “today’s swift pace”; to the necessity of forging a new patriotism; to the idea of war as “the necessary and bloody test of a people’s force”; to the all-conquering beauty of Business.

much thanks to http://adamantine.wordpress.com/ for putting this article on the web. it knocked me down the first time i read it back in '04 - gets better every time.

wanted

2006-09-28T12:24:00.000-04:00

wanted: ibex alpstar pants. steel crown jewel, mango orange. new fork for the yo. 0-deg down bag. time wasted in locations i didn't like. christmas music. winning lottery ticket. land. a chagall. a home. a really nice stereo system.

the farmer in the dell

2006-09-21T12:29:00.000-04:00

got a head cold. congested. freezing even though its probably 70 degrees in the house.
grapefruit juice. need to go to ny this weekend but really don't want to. would rather meet up for a camping trip halfway...
have been sick 3 days now. i never get sick. i miss daddy.

grapefruit juice is the truth.

saturday i rode for several hours. 50 miles on the royce. before i turned around to come back east toward cambridge, i stopped in a large parking lot, sat on the curb. i felt like the boy in i am the cheese. i felt that i was sitting exactly inside a scene from the story. this book was a very important one to me growing up. not sure what age i was when i got it, probably between 9 and 13. i just looked it up on amazon, and sure enough, its set in massachusetts, although the starting town, monument, might be fictional as i can't find it anywhere. i still have it, duct-tape holding it together and riddled with the crucial underlining and notes of a piqued young mind.

a few underlined passages:
I love Amy Hertz. It's ridiculous that her name is Hertz- she's probably heard a thousand car-rental jokes and I have vowed never to make one. 14

My legs are weary and my back sings with pain because I am out of condition. Frankly, I have never been in condition, which is a source of delight to Amy Hertz who dislikes all kinds of physical exercise. 15

Impressions. Crowded, with luggage. Faces, my father's cigarettes, not the smell of smoke, really, but the smell of his matches, the sulphur of his matches. Strange... 19

I was always aware of two smells, my mother's perfume and the way my father always smelled of tobacco or smoke or the matches. 19

We never went back. Not back to what I thought was home. We were in a different home. A different house. A different aura to the house. 20

i wonder how i got that book. aunt b used to take me to a bookstore on perkins every once in a while, i remember the first time- she told me to pick out a book; i chose a douglas adams fiction. we discussed books often. early on she asked my opinion of teddy, the last story in salinger's 9 shorts. she asked inadvertent questions that were her way of beating around the bush, testing me to see what i got from the story without coming right out and asking me a specific- "what happened to teddy?" from then on, she spoke more candidly with me. you know that disheartened feeling you get when you answer a question knowing that you're giving the answer that someone wants to hear? i really don't know if i gave the answer i thought she wanted or if i believed whole-heartedly the answer i gave her but i remember feeling like it was just a little too easy, or that i'd been underestimated. i imagine that because of our blood she was able to sense much more. ought to rent the movie again.

np. she wakes when she dreams. daddy always had a couple lit merit 100's sitting around his spaces. need to find some of his old stories from his youth down in the wolf river bottoms.

I have seen your wandering brother,

I have heard the river's voice.

Regarding your lost brother,

The river was his choice;

And the river is his Mother,

He finds solace in her voice.
- lfshook

lord, let me die with a hammer in my hand

2006-09-16T09:43:00.000-04:00

another solemn weekend.
riding a bit later, looks like the day will be clear after all. the weather has turned cool here, seagulls pitch overhead towards downtown. lonely still. the animals of the house wait and stare, i have nothing to offer and they they don't drink. doing the same as the stillness gets heavier. wine still in my head from last night. i watched shortcuts until i fell asleep, early for once, by 9:00.
np. american music club - mercury. reminds of the carr house porch, h digging with a brick next to the house, fighting memory and itchy skin. never quite forgotten his smell.
looking forward to a show on tuesday.
swedish fish. cheap coffee. old rings. blurry morning.
thinking of a book i'd write if i had the gumption. been batting it around in theory for a while. a girl following a season south through argentina. forced to create her own music, living on the accuracy of her own timing. there are no other people in the story, much less her. "it's a little weak for my taste"
the battle to edit is a bloody one. rank as it is and stale with dread, nobody wins. i lose first. i wouldn't mind sand if there were no water.
and i don't mind the living, it's the crooked mind that kills the play. i know how easy the quitting is and it's been a long time since i realized the price. the cypress still sings the mirror. no shade on the ride to forgiveness where water slows the softshell.

One mornin', one mornin' as work I begun
What did I see ridin' out of the sun
On the road from Lexington

One rider, one rider beatin' the breeze
Down on his saddle, low to his knees
Comin' through my willow trees

Now closer, the terrible work of the gun
Was stiffened and black where his blood all had run
But I knew my wayward son

One mornin', one mornin' the boy of my breast
Came to my door unable to rest
Even in the arms of death

gillian welch

mom's in town

2006-08-18T11:13:00.001-04:00

good to have mom here. last time she was here, emily was just a week old. now almost 12 weeks.
took a long walk with her yesterday, checking out a local public garden: tomatos, gourds, squash, flowers, mint, basil... then walked to a used bookstore i love in davis sq. mom got the living, annie dillard. i almost bought the sheltering sky but changed my mind. money's tight. 3 on the way from amazon right now anyway.

missing out on watching some friends do the leadville100 run. wish i could be there. camped out last year outside of town with friends and whiskey. pretty humbling race to watch.

ok so i decided to name my bike ushuaia. np. sunday morning...

45N

2006-08-14T14:47:00.000-04:00

does it always have to be about what-used-to-be? yes. i like to live in the past, never the present. so,
things i miss in montana...

playing jawbreaker in the lift shack with amanda & jon

eating mushrooms on the clock (not being on the clock)

snow coming in under the door

waking up to white

now playing

2006-08-14T14:11:00.000-04:00

recoil

come home and my guitar
has nothin to say to me
i recoil from all my friends
and then i'm in misery
been so long since i've been held
really since i was his
probably just need to be held
that’s probably all it is

course, then i think of my dad
who time travels mostly now
back to when he was free
and holding out hope somehow
who sits all day in a line
of wheelchairs against a wall
inventing ways to play out time
like us all
like us all

to all the people out there tonight
who are comforting themselves
if you should happen to see my light
you can stop and ring my bell
i'm just sittin here in this sty
strewn with half written songs
taking one breath at a time
nothin much going on
nothin much going on

little flashing zero
on my answering machine
rats scratching at my brain
brain shuffling its feet
yes i have my father's heart
it may or may not keep on trying
can't really tell you what it is
keeps me this side of that dark line

but i'm not there to take care of him
and i'm not here to take care of me
i'm going outside to watch the house burn down
across the street
i'm going outside to watch the house burn down
across the street

to all the people out there tonight
who are comforting themselves
if you should happen to see my light
you can stop and ring my bell
i'm just sitting here in this sty
strewn with half written songs
taking one breath at a time
nothin much going on
nothin much going on

-ani difranco, knuckle down

bike gang + hate people = no bike gang

2006-08-11T13:21:00.000-04:00

how do you start a bike gang if you can't bring yourself to talk to anyone? well it aint easy. i've been here over a month and have probably talked to a total of 4 people.
but i want a bike gang!!
army of one.

going to acadia np in the morning. it'll be nice to sleep out under the stars. maybe i'll forget where i am for awhile. the beach will be fun.

Random, CO

2006-08-10T17:26:00.000-04:00

It's great to be in Cambridge.

Cambridge, MA 8.10.06

2006-08-10T17:22:00.002-04:00

Although a far toss from the dirty south, still not where I wanna be. Miss my friends, now all out West.
Consolations:
new family member, Emily (2mo.)
new (15 yr old?) Royce Union bike
new book: Edward Abbey, a Life
portable music device

and i'll say this, glue is a fine companion for a pet. my old girl would have hated her.
it's been less than interesting here lately. well, pretty much since i got here. fun thing a couple days ago though, i met the painter at independent fabrications. she was in her space suit and i was wandering around trying to not find anyone there so i would'nt feel guilty for taking a couple of their fucked up frames they had in their trash bin. no luck. first time there. it was really crazy to see the place where so many love affairs have begun... need to take the yo by and ask her if she remembers giving it the powdercoat. miss the neon green, maybe she'd paint it back to the original color.

bikes around boston/cambridge/somerville are hilarious. either there's a shit-ton of welders around or there's a few really busy drunks with alot of friends. either way, bravo, greater boston carnies.

still one girl stuck in my head. never any news there.