Learn From It

I read a piece today—or was it yesterday?—about the change in what the United States of America means to the rest of the world.

In the 70s we were one of the superpowers. After Reagan, with his head full of vicious intentions, outspent the USSR, we became the sole superpower and then, in short order, became the "world's policeman".

Not happy with a peace-officer role (where's the FunExcitementGlory in that? That's only DutyDiligenceHonor), she goes on to become the world's "indispensible nation".

Here's the scary part. After the events of 9/11 (that's 11-9 to the non-USAers out there), we have become known as "New Rome". Now, that's a pretty high honor, considering how powerful and important the Romans were. Until you remember how that all ended.

History has this interesting way of coming 'round the bend again and again, trading tri-corns for fedoras and togas for business-casual, and it only shows up when the world isn't looking. Pretty stupid of all of us, really, but patterns are patterns, gravity-wells are gravity-wells, and orbits are strongly stable, especially those that swoop around Strange Attractors. In this case, the Attractor is question is the soul. Humanity, that is.

The culprit this time? Same as the Romans: the rise of militarism. Other folks on the net have posted the n-steps towards Fascism, but the Romans were never really fascists. They ended up with the burden of Empire in their laps. Who can say, really, if they chose it, or their oligarchs chose it, or whether they were all on a collective bender, lubricated with the self-salubriousness of being the self-declared Best Republic That Ever Was.

Shakespeare, perhaps, is most guilty in hiding the True History from the rest of us in favor of wringing entertainment out of historical momentousness, but it's not like he closed the libraries and burned the books so to frustrate the curious.

And his Brutus—and perhaps Brutus' Historical Himself—had to know that Caesar wasn't the problem and therefore Caesar's elimination Rome's salvation.

And that gang of assassins had to know that the Eides of another March would bring a Marc Antony, had to know what effect their bloodsport would have on the general population.

Shakespeare, Brutus and those in charge (and those in power) here today all use the one lever guaranteed to create one-way motion: the general populace.

Brutus knew that Caesar was not Rome's problem, its people were: they allowed a Caesar in the first place.

When a nation shifts from self-involved to self-anointed, from self-preserving to self-interested, the lever has been employed. One way.

It ends when the fulcrum breaks and no sooner. And by then it have to have been in fire and the shit-storm of violent revolution.

Bush isn't our problem. We are.

As for the one-way movement: prove me wrong. Vote.

Posted by Jeff at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My Big Gay Day ends (at least while standing) with Facials, thanks to Queen Helene's Mint Julep Masque.

I think I really am gay! I know! Yuh huh!

Posted by Jeff at 08:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Golden Desert surrounds, but we spent the day running around doing silly-ass errands with Regina. She sat in the back of the Jeep, while her "two dads" drove her around to her tasks. We went to the Golds Gym here. We went to a Best Buy. We ate at a Mall food court. Reg & the Boy went tanning....or in their cases, PINKING while I remained in the Jeep listening to my little Silver iPod mini, reading Tom Robbins.

Tonight the Boy and I sit in his bedroom watching the Oscars.

Good Lord. Am I gay?

I'm beginning to suspect so.

Posted by Jeff at 07:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, you make sense of it.

I see people out there making laundry lists of things they like, things they don't like with respect to a potential mate. People have physical "types" they go for, and somehow that's supposed to ride lock-step with matehood potential. Timelines get constructed: "oh, you must wait at least a year after someone becomes single" before you can consider him/her a good prospect or, even more bizarrely, you should wait at least a year before you date someone else.

We want our hearts won; we want hearts to lose self-control. But we seem to want to decide when and how we get won over, and we want to keep a tight rein the events leading up to (and including) the well-choreographed moment when our hearts actually do lose control.

But, PiggyBiscuitGod, you say, isn't there a time and a place for spontaneity?

Siiiiigh.

To this I say to all y'all: pull the fucking stick out, already. Really. You can't make rules about rules, or worse, rules about the kind of rules you don't want there to be!

Any heart that finds pragmatic, logistic, historic, pre-historic, geographic, chronologic, atmospheric, politic reasons not to grab a potential mate's hand and leap together with him/her into the unknown deserves to be left standing on the sad, cold seacliff looking on with yearning at those who took to wing or took to sail for parts unknown. Those that would ever utter told-you-so's or live-and-learn's to the broken-on-the-rocks-below, broken-hearted don't deserve even the cold-comfort of having been correct.

Love, like San Francisco, is not for the rigid.
Love, like New York, is not for the timid.

Some wise man* once assigned those meanings to the cities. Love subsumes both, all.

So just step back quietly away from the wait-a-year's and the not-my-type's and the you-only-get-one-chance-to-hurt-me's and, bitterly-best of all, the I'll-forgive-but-I-won't-forget's. They're not your friends, they're retardants.

So much work to construct the spec for the perfect love, when in my little brain it just makes so much more sense to devote energy to making it work with someone with whom you feel a spark, even if he/she is off-script, off-book in your scripted, bookish view.

...moment from a dinner conversation with the Boy tonight:

Boy: "We'll be together for the rest of our lives...well, the rest of your life because you're older than me."
Me: "Yeah, but if I'm going down, I'm taking you with me."
Boy:"I ain't skurrrred,"

* Ok, so the 'wise man' is me and I'm going to go blind from so much masturblogging.

Posted by Jeff at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Planetary mountain ranges and impossibly tall skies. Hippie coffeehouses on 4-lane urban surface streets. The ridge in the skin at the edges of a large tattoo. The wooly feel of a fresh haircut, the wooly chest hair sliding against my back. A calloused hand on the neck. Importunity knocks and body parts answer. Secrets are more fun when conspiratorial. Timbre and envelope, aspects of a mirthful laugh. Sleep comes down but you catch each other's fall.

Empiricists balk; rationalists scream "moot!" Tom Robbins ambles on his with jangly-juxta's. But Ms. Rand would make an intellectual exercise out of a simple natural continuity.

Pity.

There is genius, sometimes, in permitting things to go unexamined, but never in allowing things to go unawares.

The Life I was handed was magical by virtue of the mere existence of it. The Life I am making is magical because it can be made. Ol' Immanuel knows what I'm talkin' about.

Posted by Jeff at 04:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Jeff at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm at SFO, boarding in about 10 minutes to go to Tucson. They cancelled my much later flight and so I'm flying out a bit earlier (14 minutes earlier) on a tighter schedule (arrive 11:15pm instead of 2:03am), and the kind folks at AmericaWest upgraded me to First Class for free (a $100 value) for my "trouble".

I can't fucking wait. It's a good thing a 17" PowerBook covers one's lap, very good indeed, at the moment.

Pork.

Posted by Jeff at 06:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Happy Ass Wednesday, everyone!

Posted by Jeff at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The man is just dumb. Politically dumb in the bigger-picture view, I mean. His push for a Constitutional Amendent which would limit me to nothing but sham marriages is the result of a few years of bottoming for the Pharisees in the Marketplace. And now they demand their due.

Never climb in bed with a Control-Crazy Christian, George. If you want a serious Control Top, try Dick Cheney (ask Mary), or just buy some pantyhose.

Seriously.

W did something lovely for us, in a way not seen in a few years ("Dr. Laura"), at a magnitude not seen in almost 30 years, if ever (Anita Bryant). And this time, it's not just some shrill self-limiting, self-esteem-lacking shrew (ok, well, it is), it's the United States Constitution, chil'ren!

Most ideological infighting has disappeared on this issue; the overwhelming majority of current Democrats (I say current because I expect some conservative Demo's to jump ship) and a not insignificant section of the Republicans (those who actually always did want libertarianism through smaller government) are united against the notion of a Constitutional Amendment barring same-sex marriages. This is not surprising to me, and that surprises me.

Upping the abstraction level for unification feels damn good.

And if any of you lefty liberals out there do anything short of welcoming the Log Cabin Republicans, Andrew Sullivan and that ilk with open arms and without bitterness or smug self-superiority, I swear to god (of biscuits) I will hunt you down and hurt you.

Seriously. Don't fuck this up.

And in case you're wondering why Governor Schwarzenegger is so anti-gay on this whole thing, being part of Hollywood as he is, just look to Orrin Hatch et al's Bill trying to change things so that you no longer have to be born in this country to be President.

Those LCRs out there, Andrew Sullivan (who's looking damn good on TV), let's just fucking do this thing. All of us is what it's going to take.

Posted by Jeff at 08:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When you're a tech kinda person, whether by trade, career, talent or avocation, you're subject to the wide and deep gravity well it elaborates. You get sucked in. You start to believe that technology can enable just about anything. Can improve the Human Lot. Can bridge distances, cure diseases, take you higher.

All true, inarguably, even to non-techies.

Today I said goodbye to Bill & Edgar, my next-door neighbors and two of the more comprehensive influences in my life, a life already embarrassingly full of eventfulness.

I had convinced myself that infinite minutes on my cellphone, and broadband internet with full 30fps 2-way video would ameliorate the thudding silence from "over the backyard fence" that I must now endure. I had convinced myself that cheap airfares, coupled with a rather significant personal buying power on both our parts would help the making-due make due.

Duh.

I headed out back this morning because I heard the two of them making the kinds of noises white collars do when performing blue collar activities (hot). Now, before you start to think I turned into a weepy mess, I assure you I did not. It was more like that bucolic serenity in the beginning of Bambi meets Godzilla.

When we were done with smalltalk and the last bits of moving stuff, Bill said, "I guess we won't see you again before we leave."

The smooch-and-bodyhug is the greatest gift gay men have given the world. Ever.

First it was Bill. Two somewhat powerfully built men, chest to chest, expressing plain affection and sorrow. Then I hugged Edgar. Same level of affection, same sorrow. So much the same reaction it was almost completely different.

It was during all this that I realized that free minutes and 30fps are nothing at all compared to a yell over the fence or a hello-hug. So the highest-tech thing I'm willing to take comfort in is a 5-hour flight to NYC.

That's a big admission for me.

Posted by Jeff at 11:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I had wanted to stay abreast (no, not the right one) of the timelines for submissions (hot) for Project Greenlight, but alas, it got away from me. The deadline for submission (hot) of screenplays ends February 29.

And while I'm not 100% certain that I could not crank out a screenplay in that amount of time (however awful it ended up), I frankly have no idea about things like format, pacing (meaning, how many pages == a 2-hour movie?), etc.

I'm fretting over my lack of knowledge about the format and packaging of a screenplay, simply because I've never done one before. That's where some of you may come in. I know of an app called Final Draft that takes care of the formatting and appears to be the near-ubiquitous way to write a screenplay or teleplay. What I don't have a clue about, as I said, is pacing something like that. Do any of you (Crash, I'm thinking of you) have any pointers to books or even better, copies of well-known screenplays that I might use as a guide (or rosetta stone, of sorts) to help get me into that kind of groove?

Mucho grassy-ass for any help you might be able to provide. (Next up, i'll be asking for Spanish pronunciation keys.)

Posted by Jeff at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The boyfriend, turns out, will not be moving until the Fall, and he's going to be taking the long way.

"Interesting Times" can just fuck off, already.

Posted by Jeff at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As if you didn't already know I was beaming with pride about being a San Franciscan, as if *I* didn't know it, I am damned proud to be Of This Place.

I talked about this with my good friends, Mike and Rich, and my mom today over lunch at Savor in Noe Valley. The steady, constant thrum of my pride in the CIty is a thing that emerges from the City's willingness—or is that its charter?—to go its own particular direction, in essence ignoring both the stampeding and the bovine docility (is that a word?) of the mainstream herd. But this?! This is something New. San Francisco has something to teach the rest of the world, and she's doing so proactively, whether the rest like it or not.

And she's doing it with her own style.

Call it what you will, the whole 2600+ same-sex marriages that have been performed in the last few days. Call it a grandstanding by our Mayor, or call it a stunt like some of the folks around on the web.

Call it any goddamned thing you want, but be sure to also call it what it is. Call it Fair. Call it Right. Call it "About Fucking Time". Call it: Marriage.

I think Newsom is a political genius; I also happen to believe that he believes all the things he says about the topic of same-sex marriages. That's part of what makes him a genius. Think about it. He does something that he and most around here think is simply Fair. He does something proactively positive instead of just a criticism of someone else's agenda. He does something liberal and strong at the same time. He remains steadfast. He vows to fight for fairness. And with pure political savvy, he rightfully passes the buck...only he passes it right up to the California State Constitution. Woo hoo!!

Mayor Newsom goes walking through the front door, a door which Willie Brown should have walked through years ago.

Look at the myriad pictures around the web and in the news of the couples getting married. Look in any one of their faces. Do you think it's a stunt? Do you think they're all just acting contrarily? Do you think activism is what brought these couples down there? If you do, you're dead on the inside and I pity you.

To Mark & Rigo, to Mike & Rich, to Steve & Michael, to Matt & Brian and to all the newly-married, especially those newly-married who have been married for years and years already, I'm so happy for you all.

As for the titular Birth? Gavin Newsom's strategy *IS* the New Liberalism. You heard it here first—or at least early—folks. We're on a roll.

Posted by Jeff at 05:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This, by way of her. Choose your favorite MP3/AAC player, hit random, and write down the first 10 songs. I'm using iTunes on my PowerBook, out of a total 5030 songs I've ripped or bought from iTMS so far:

1. I Love the Nightlife — Alicia Bridges • "Sounds of the '70s 1978"
2. Shabby Doll — Elvis Costello & The Attractions • "Imperial Bedroom"
3. Ain't No Crime — Billy Joel • "Piano Man"
4. Hard to Say — Dan Fogelberg • "The Innocent Age (Disc 2)"
Heartbreaker — Pat Benetar • "Best Shots"
5. Love at First Sight — Kylie Minogue • "Now That's What I Call Music 11"
6. I Wanna Be Loved — Michael Feinstein • "Isn't It Romantic"
7. Gemini — The Alan Parsons Project • "Eye in the Sky"
8. Hymn to Her — The Pretenders • "Get Close"
9. The Sun, The Moon and Stars — Prince • "Rave Un2 The Joy Fantastic"

Not as embarrassing as I thought it would be, but be gentle, folks.

Posted by Jeff at 08:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Trickster of Myth is one that takes two realities and collides them—or colludes with them—in order to create a new reality. This is most often done, especially for Coyote, for selfish and self-centered reasons. There have been more magnanimous Tricksters; Prometheus comes to mind, as does Hermes.

I, on the other hand, am at my most successful as the Trickster when one or both of the realities are my own, when I set out to break through to something new, so new that even I am elated with surprise. I am not known for altruism, at least that which leads to calamitous levels of abnegation. Perhaps that's due to my insistence (one misunderstood by most) that altruism is nothing more than indirect selfishness, greed at a distance with guarantees provided by karma or presence of general good will.

It's a theory which happens to fit the facts, but one that is frustratingly orthogonal to things too close to home.

A hedge of nettles that separates two realities must fall so that the New can be borne of the resultant free-passage, and so far all my attempts have been bootless. Instruments sharp and blunt have failed, or my application of them is to blame; vaulting it provides a change of venue alone, not the change in reality that I had long ago determined must occur. A blaze may be effective, but no one can control such a thing once started. Burrowing is another option, but claustrophobia and fear of dark spaces may prove too much of an inhibition.

And after all this special pleading to the ether, maybe all that it will take is another Trickster who will help discover an end-run around the muricated.

Posted by Jeff at 11:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Good Lord Jesus Skateboarding Christ Almighty.

If I hear one more story about the doomsday upon us because of Janet Jackson's breast (singular) and cloned stem cells (plural) I'm going to exercise the Gifts of the God of Biscuits and rain dry British cookies all over the shrill stupidheads going on and on about all of these developments.

That's a lot of cookies, folks. You Republicans had best be watching out for the heavy cookies. While your fat heads may make easy targets, they're mighty thick, and it's not like you really need you brains for your quotidian functioning. But I'm willing to make the extra effort, y'all.

Then again, there is one thing that would make me freak out as much as others are now freaked out: Ann Coulter.

I'll share the nightmarish imagery: Ann Coulter's Breast. Ann Coulter Cloned.

Sleep well!.

Posted by Jeff at 07:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sitting here this evening, watching TV with my folks (they're visiting me for a couple of weeks from the great commonwealth of Pennsylvania) earlier this evening. I don't know what they're watching because I was on the phone with the boyfriend in the other room—he wanted to hear my voice before he went to bed (awwwww)—talking about about the opening of an unexpected door. When I came back in to the room at the back of the house, they were watching something called Extreme Makeover.

Have you seen this freakshow of a freak show, with freaks being significantly surgically altered to look less freakish, becoming, in essence, more freakish with their new plasticine, hyper-normal façades? If there had been a drinking game where we all took a sip of beer every time Skippy shuddered, I and my folks would be plastered right now. Plaster! Fake chins! Laser dermal regeneration! Ahhhhhh!

I'm going to have nightmares tonight, feeling a little squiffy (despite tea-totalling) and a LOT mawkish.

On the other hand, there's a bit of solace in knowing I'm not hermetically jaded.

Naaah, i'm just gonna have fuckin' freak-ass nightmares.

Posted by Jeff at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This last visit, having regrettably ended on Sunday evening, made me feel more at home both with the boyfriend and with Tucson in general. While it may not sound so terribly romantic nor exciting to talk about settling-in and being-comfortable with one's romantic partner, you're just going to have to trust me that it is. Trust. All those exciting, nasty, whispered, furtive, dirrrrdy things that one comes to expect in the beginnings of a relationship actually take on a further intensity when trust and love and a dowdy, nesting behavior have also taken hold. "Dirrrrdy" takes more chances, takes different chances, with paradoxically less of the icky kinds of emotional risk. [Ok, stopping now....am in a public place....going to work in a few.]

Settling into Tucson comes as just as much a surprise to me as it probably does to those of you who've read me and/or who know me. But it has it going on in some interesting ways.

Reasons Tucson Kicks My Ass

• The Boyfriend
• Mt Lemmon and the Catalina Mountain Range
• Working in the same place with the unfeignedly brill Panchesco.
• Coyotes
• Compass-point mountain ranges which tell stories
• The Big Sky
• Sunsets
• Mexican food that borders on Religious Experience
• Bentley's Coffeehouse

Tucson is a funky big-little-town, and I mean that in lots of good ways. It has its problems, like a huge politico-economic issue—undocumented peoples—that appears to the outside as unvarnished racism, the cultural influence of a large military base, the cultural influence of a large state university, but it has its thing going on, something that defines it and prevents it from being swallowed whole by outside influences.

If you ever find yourself down there, stop in at Bentley's and say hi to Richard, at least.

Posted by Jeff at 07:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

No one sees fit to remember an explosion as it's happening; it's a singular event, a gestalt. The details of an explosion are dwarfed by the fact of it: "It Happened" is all that is relevant. The quiet-before and the quiet-after are only delimiters, the mental handles for the memory of the Boom.

Heading towards the Tucson Airport is always the wrong direction. All that matters is back behind me, sitting beside me in the truck. The moving-away-from is shrouded in quiet, just as the arriving was. But the energy, like the travel direction, is completely opposite. That silence was the growing back into, the absorption of minds and the adsorption of bodies. Conscious thought stumbles in its linearity; words are a hammer that makes every nuance look like a nail.

This silence is preparation for the nail being forcibly removed from out of the plank.

Time fails me; it compresses a worthy interval into a single bright fireball. Time fails me; it elongates, post-explosion, a morose doppler droning betrays the swiftness of departure. Time fails us; without time there is no space, ergo, time is to blame for distance.

It is told that fonder hearts are found in absentia; indulgent souls are ill-prepared for rapture, they say. If these things are discovered to be true after all, we are trundling along on days borrowed against some spiritual eventuality of a grand karmic manumission.

There's no happiness to be found in slavery, not at the level where the enslaving happens. But love, like art, requires limits. Without limits there is no creativity and without a creative act, the purest love, the most cleanly delineated karma, becomes subject to time, subject to decline.

Creativity requires choice. And I choose Now. In certain auspices, the future must be allowed to attend to itself.

Posted by Jeff at 08:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)