Iraq Votes!
Florida 2000, Ohio 2004, Washington State 2004.
Iraq 2005?
I sure hope not. There are real lives in the balance for many who got out to vote.
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January 31, 2005
January 28, 2005
Echo...Echo...Echo...
Believe for a moment in a set of laws of physics wherein repeating a thing brings it into material reality.
Believe for a moment that expanding individual freedoms can be imagined to be an “enshrinement of deviant proclivities”.
Believe for a moment that the absence of a thing makes a thing more believable and not less.
Believe for a moment that Believers don't believe you when you nonetheless believe you've communicated effectively that you don't believe in much of anything overarching.
Believers are a strange bunch. It's been said that believers require the presence of non-believers; otherwise there's no instance of belief.
I tend to believe that.
Once upon a blog, I wrote about how people have taken noble things and reduced them to baser vulgarities (meaning common, not obscene). Believers will always employ the noble term to describe actions which are quite vulgar (meaning common and obscene).
“No Child Left Behind”, “God's Alone It Is to Judge”, “Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin”. You'll see it all over the place when Believers take to Politics.
When I was brought up, back in the day, we Catholics were guided to do good works instead of punish bad works, to be good people instead of to help legislate goodness. That this world and this life were temporary and that we should be, above all else, good people and not good believers. That we should persuade by good example of good works rather than coerce with law and with threats of damnation.
Sadly ironic, then, that this kind of talk—considered quite uptight and conservative at the time—now makes it seem as if I grew up in a commune with a bunch of hippies. That's how far the needle has moved to the right.
Believers have once again discovered the concept of a mob. Watch the villagers chase and overtake the Frankenstein monster. Watch the street urchins devour the faggot. Watch the Catholics of today form an unholy alliance with the Protestants just to eradicate the homos from society. Watch the good Christians enjoy the bloodsport of a good war. Watch the pro-lifers worship the Golden Fetus as they cheer the deaths of innocent Modern-day Mesopotamians.
The internet-enabled mob is a formidable thing. “On-message” they call it these days, y'know, because “here's who we hate today” just doesn't have quite the same ring to it. The giant electronic echo chamber: one polemic plutocrat says a thing and the throngs of adrenaline-junkie control-freaks remake the world in that on-message message.
Tens of thousands of brains poked through into the political echo chamber. It's dark in there, but at least it's safe. It requires elaborate and exhausting bodily gymnastics, but at least it's a well-known quantity. It's distasteful work, consuming and excreting and consuming and excreting and consuming and excreting the same matter over and over again, but at least it's better than hoping for joy and then ending up disappointed.
It's pretty much having your head up your own ass, but Believers believe it's for a good cause. Frankly, I find it scatological.
Today's Right-Wing Believers have become base, vulgar, spiritless, faithless, joyless fetishists who aren't quite human any more, who plot an ascendancy that has nothing to do with Heaven.
Money-changers get involved in politics for self-interests; Good Samaritans help other people because it's what you do when you Believe in the Greater Good of us all.
January 26, 2005
Ssssssssnakes!
Conversation at work today:
D.: Thththththth....
Me: It's not a lisp! Ssssssss!
D.: I can't!
Me: Sure you can. Like a snake: hissssssss!
D.: A gay snake, maybe.
Me: That's redundant. All snakes are gay. Look at the shape.
D.: So what do they do, adopt?
Me: Recruit.
Bitchiest Show Ever!
Tonight I randomly caught the show called Project Runway.
OH
MY
GODDESS
(that bitch)
Forget Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and even Queer Eye for the Straight Girl, this is the show that makes the Bravo Channel the gayest network EVER.
Watch a bunch of fashion designers try to work together, all the while bitching about the lack of leadership qualities in the designated-for-the-week leader. Cut to the fashion show segment. Watch the one woman be honest and complain about the leader's lack of, well, leadership.
Watch the rest of those bitches leave her twisting in the wind by being spineless and saying nice things about the leader.
Truth: the complainer was spot-on. Truth: the leader wasn't one. Truth: the palace intrigue of it all was faaaaabulous
Oh, and one of the guys on there, Jay, is from my home town of Dallas, PA.
You bet your ass I added a Season Pass to the TiVo for this one.
January 25, 2005
More than Half a Lifetime
When I was a wee boy back in college, at the beginning of my Sophomore year at Carnegie Mellon University in 1983, I had just sold the TRS-80 computer, printer and floppy disk drives I had bought over the years prior. My computer buying had begun at the tender age of fourteen, when I got my mom to co-sign a bank loan for $600 so that I could buy a computer. I suppose that was also be beginning of my debt.
Money well-spent/well-borrowed, I say! After upgrading the BASIC ROMs on the computer, upgrading the memory—$99 for 16K of RAM—buying an “expansion interface”, an Epson Printer and 2 floppy disk drives to replace the already-past-its-limits cassette drive, and after acquiring several hundred dollars worth of software, I sold the whole mess in 1983 for about $2000.
One day, when CMU had just opened their campus computer store—an unheard-of thing in those days—a few of us decided to check it out. Not much to see, just an office in the “new” office building on campus, painted cinder-block walls stock office desks. We looked at the price list and I had almost immediately decided on an IBM PC with 2 floppy drives and 16K of memory. Oh, and with the IBM display (monochrome, green characters on a black screen). This was going to clock in at around $1600. Fair enough, I figured. I was getting a 6MHz machine for less than I'd sold my 1.77MHz TRS-80.
As we turned to walk back out of the store/office, there on a desk sat a little beige machine with a mostly-white display. With one of those mouse-things attached to it (now, mice I had seen before, down in one of the quasi-subterranean floors of Warner/Science Hall....I wasn't sure what they were for, but a small box with buttons attached to a strange-shaped computer workstation made quite an impression).
A paint program was running. I moved the mouse around and watched the cursor on the little screen follow. I clicked the button; it made a dot on the screen. I held the button down and moved the mouse, and an oval grew from the starting point!
I got the whole catastrophic beauty of this machine in less than a couple of minutes. And on February 7, 1984, just two weeks after the official introduction, I had one in my dorm room.
To this day, I have never regularly used a PC, never bought a PC for myself. I have, however, had upwards of a dozen different Macs.
Apple & the Mac have been significant yardsticks in how I measure the progress of my life, important memory-prods into very specific times in my past and quite a fine ongoing example of majority-minority patterns. In other words, I've learned a lot.
So, Happy 21st Birthday (January 24) to the Macintosh. Click on the young Steve Jobs above to watch a streaming video of the original introduction. You, of course, must have QuickTime installed on your machine—and shame on you if you don't already.
I'm going to go spin the propeller on the little cap on my big head, and try like hell not to shudder when I think of what might not have been...
January 24, 2005
Feed a Man a Fish...
Now, I'm no stranger to defending myself and my ideologies from the continued incursions of the faithful staging their little—and not so little—Crusades against us Infidels, but even I often make the mistake of giving the marching-ever-onward Christian Soldiers too much credit.
I give them credit for at least being true to their own sacredly-held Apothegms, even as I see these people.
But remember, while I was raised Catholic and I begrudge no one for that experience, I discovered a whole cosmos outside the Papal Walls of Truth at some point and life outside the VatiCan't suits me just fine. I know the truths held tight there, and I assume that most Christians hold those same values.
When you see Catholic boys, girls, men, women masquerading as calvinists, spouting things like “Feed a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime”, I get palpably upset.
Is this what's become of the parable of Jesus with the Loaves and the Fishes? Do these people really believe that if Jesus came back today, he'd be a neocon?
Sure, it's great to teach a man to fish, but he won't hear the lesson over the rumblings of an empty stomach.
Teaching is a terrific thing; but learning is even better. But now I'm veering dangerously close to being one of those intellectual-elite snobs, huh? I can understand how people can feel threatened by those who can speak better, who can think more comprehensively...but there are also plenty of us who are eager to be around people who can speak better and especially think more comprehensively, because those are the learning moments.
There's nothing better to an old intellectual snob like me than to be around smart people who are open to change. Improvement doesn't come from stasis. Only decay does.
Too bad there seems to be so many more people out there content to rot in the stink of their own self-satisfied dogma.
January 23, 2005
Blue Bears
So as I said yesterday, I was heading out to a party with FTP, Donovan and Marcello. The theme: Blue. The outfits: blue. The boas: blue. The false eyelashes: blue. Me, because Sam wasn't there: blue (awwww).
Anyhoo, I posted most of the pictures to ofoto, but here are a few of them, just for general consumption. I'm ascared.
Click on each for a larger version—if you dare!!
January 22, 2005
Blue State
Sam's off to visit his best friend, Vacabill, for the weekend; he's been gone for about three hours and already I'm reverting to bachelor-nerd. I'd found my BroodWar CD so that I could again play Starcraft. I've never been much of a games player; I've been a games buyer, purchaser of tons of shelfware but the only game that ever really stuck for me was Starcraft.
Maybe it's that I sit on front of a Mac all day long, doing development, keeping up with work email, personal email, blogging...you get the picture. I think I start out buying a game with good intentions, but I usually don't even seem to get them installed, much less played.
I did have Sam pick me up iLife '05 and iWork today from the Apple Store. Definitely some cool stuff, especially iPhoto 5. This kind of software I use all the time.
Continuing with the bachelor portion of my comment, I'm going to a Blue Party with FTP, Madonnavan and a few others. Theme: blue. Dress: blue fuzzy boa, blue false eyelashes, blue paintsticks. I've only done drag the one time—and trust, you don't wanna see that mess. This is sort of merely drag-flavored. Blue jeans, blue shirt, blue vest, blue tennies. All of it male clothing. I'm just accessorizing drag. Yeah, that's it.
If it's not too scary, and you're good little boys and girls (you know who you are), I may post some pictures.
January 20, 2005
Dark Matters
I had considered “going dark” today, just like so many sites are, in protest of the Bush Inaugural. There's even a website with graphics stating why the website is dark—a paradox in and of itself—and I went so far as to change my
Why did I drop that and return the site to its usual content? To be honest, my heart wasn't really in the blackout. It's one of our Typicals, this protesting-if-it-doesn't-cost-us-much. This time around, Bush was elected, apparently by a wide-enough margin that no one is really contesting the victory. True, it's a victory based on lies, a victory based on a fraudulent election the first time around, a victory based almost single-handedly and single-mindedly on the Republicans' fear-peddling and strict-father-model dogma, but it was a victory as the system of election and government describes one.
I'm sitting this one out. Sitting out the Inaugural, too. It just makes me plain sick that he's still in office. Sick that so many Americans only care about revenge and nationalism instead of justice and patriotism. Sick that so many Americans don't even know the difference between nationalism and patriotism.
I love my country because of its ideals—life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—not for what it is these days. I have no interest in preserving this way of life, I have an interest in improving the ways of life of every person on this planet.
You think the christians out there—the ones who so virulently and vituperatively supported Bush and the Republicans—would want the same thing.
They don't want you to be won over in your heart by Jesus; they just want to win.
January 19, 2005
Accidental Beings in a Meaningless Universe
Once upon a time in the Midwest, my friend Rex would often posit that we are all accidental beings in a meaningless universe. I remember not so much arguing with him as against what he said. I found it dreary; I found it pointless; I found it tedious.
But mostly, I found it depressing.
But this is the standard-issue miserable scenario that most fear-peddling theists trot out as the sole alternative to a life dedicated to god.
It's all about expectations: you run your own thoughts down a certain path, trundling headlong without a care for where you used to be because you're dead sure that you're on the One True Path. In the absence of perspective, in the face of the arduousness of finding your way back across the void, you instead opt to thinking of The Other, The Outside as the void and nothing more.
Understandable, in at least some way, because we San Franciscans experience that here. You're in the City, or you're not. The rest of the world takes on a dull patina of sameness, of mundanity, where the only color and contrast to be found is in the Interlucent City.
Of course, this is only a temporary modality of thought, a little kick in the ass to remind you of what's special, a mental CGI to visualize the love of home.
But I digress...
I'd call it a failure of the imagination—or at least an unwillingness to use one's imagination—when you're of the Theist mind. You've become so dependent on the light of god that you believe that the absence of god can only mean the dark void.
Not so! We are not accidental beings so much as the product of accumulated accidents; the universe is not meaningless because we impart to it all the meaning we'll ever need.
And that, boys and girls, theists and non, is how lives can be filled with wonderment and magic, science and reason, love and vitality.
And, ironically, it's also how some of us have conjured up a creator.
January 15, 2005
The Long Now
San Francisco is a spectularly diverse—and just plain spectacular—place to live. Your life is touched, or at least neared, by people, places and things, the breadth and depth of which leave you with this astonished feeling. And that's a feeling that too many people are afraid to experience. Fear of the unknown is perhaps, at least the Westerner's, most enduring bugaboo. Fear of the Other, which is different to fear of the unknown, is just as insidious. Fear of change, fear of death (which in itself is just another change from here to heaven or to oblivion or to the next incarnation). Fear of upset expectation. Fear of Being Wrong.
Astonishment, to my way of thinking (and feeling!), is a blood relation to wonderment. Socrates' flavor of wonderment: “Wisdom begins in wonder.” That sort of thing.
Who bothers with wonderment anymore? The Age of Reason seems to have all but killed the Eons of Wonder. More's the pity, I say, and this is quite something coming from one who escaped intellectualism only by embracing scientism, and escaped that only by being defeated and overwhelmed by the wonders of the world as they are diverted through the prism of San Francisco.
To me, San Francisco helped make a multiplicity of spirit and of mind possible. It's a staging area, a testbed, a control (we never do escape the teachings and teachers of our youth), and most importantly it's a home base from which to believe nothing and everything, to be yourself and countless others, to choose and be chosen for, to progress and reflect, to conserve and to spend, to hurry and to tarry.
It's not so much losing one's self in the flood or one's footing when the riverbank washes away, so much as it is discovering a 3rd dimension—up!—and exploiting one's newfound freedom of movement.
And it was with this light and fearless heart that I went with my good friend Dave to an event at Fort Mason here in the City. I have known Dave since before I even moved to San Francisco. He and his wife Lisa have been splendid friends and sherpas throughout my entire time here, inspiring, cajoling and sometimes even instructing me on the Rest of the World, that which I never even dreamed existed.
Also at the event was my rediscovered friend, Steve, quite the clever monkey in his own right, and less credulous in general than either Dave or myself. In other words, a terrific and valuable presence.
The man speaking at the event was James Carse, author of Finite and Infinite Games, giving a talk on the relationship between Religion and War.
A too-simple background: finite games are those which have solid boundaries/rules, with the goal of winning. Infinite games are those whose only goal is to continue the play, and have horizons instead of boundaries (look at a horizon line and imagine going to that spot, look off in the same direction: another horizon!).
An infinite game might be hitting a balloon around at a family picnic and trying to keep it from falling. A finite game? Chess. Another infinite game: survival, as in the survival of a religion across eras, across governments and across ethnicities. Another finite game: war.
Carse described war as the application of finite game rules to an infinite game. A big, broad statement with too many degrees of freedom, to be sure, but that was his point. He described religion as an infinite game, whose followers often—almost periodically—wish to grab worldly power and play out a finite game with it.
It's all too easy to find an example in the world out there.
When talking of religion, Carse pointed out that belief is different to religion. This is something I had already figured out for myself. He pointed out that thinking ends at belief, that point at which we accept something as true or even True and stop considering the veracity of it.
Aquinas had a big old brace on his brain, in my opinion, in that he accepted the Creeds of his religion much too early in his critical thinking. I have gone even further in this, here and on other blogs, insisting that Aquinas was just a bad thinker and that his works suffered from begging his own questions. In Carse's parlance, Aquinas set out to prove that his own boundaries were correct, instead of just expanding the known horizon and humbly accepting its infinitude.
I find it odd whenever people of faith (or merely religion) attempt to use critical thinking in order to prove the correctness of their position. Arguably, proof is nothing more than a true-statement derived from the rules/boundaries of the system. And why do believers play this Finite Game?
Probably because they're more about their religion than their beliefs.
Of course, there was plenty more to Carse, and to his lecture, and to the Long Now Foundation, but we have plenty of time.
January 12, 2005
Would Have Beens
Bless me, Father, for I have lived...
-ahem-
Sorry, old Catholic verse creeping in. I'll give them one thing, the Papists, they do have a knack for cadence—there's a catchy pop-hook in all the more popular bits of Lectionary. Anyhoo, today marks an anniversary that always leaves me feeling accelerated. Hyper, maybe, is a better word. But at the end of the day—at the end of every nostalgic and every immediate burst—it all balances out. For every high, there's a low, for every lofty abstraction there's a concrete anchor to the here-and-now.
Having sufficiently buried the lead in terms of copy and voice, I'll say that today would have been Allen's 47th birthday. Strange to think of him that old. Strange to think of him not here, as well. See what I mean? Antipodal emotions. I wrote about him last year, and it does not seem a year has passed since then. It does not seem that 9 1/2 years have passed since he died. It does not seem we only had a little over two years together in the same house.
It does not seem less than two years since I met Sam. It does not seem fewer than forever, either.
Which just goes to show that Time is best measured by the heart and not the calendar, relative to now, instead of relative to then or relative to the luxury known as “some day”.
Now is forever, and the past is mutable. The future is probably fixed, but unknown, which is tantamount to mutable.
Noodle on that one for a while, and give a nod towards Allen, if you would, and towards everyone you have lost, even towards those who may have lost you.
But, jesus-skateboarding-christ, don't let it disrupt your Now.
Sssssserioussssly.
January 11, 2005
Must Have, Don't Need
Dammit, why do they do this to me? iLife '05, iWork, iPod shuffle, and most especially, the Mac Mini.
I want I want I want. $79 + $79 + $99 + 499 = $654.
But I don't need the iPod shuffle, I've got an iPod mini. Don't need the Mac mini, we have an iMac G4, a Power Mac G5...the list goes on and on...
Ahhhh, Mac mini...you own me.
January 08, 2005
Sleep Comes Down
So I slept last night for the better part of thirteen hours. I'm feeling well rested, except for feeling groggy. Comes with the territory, I guess.
Less immediacy in all things, less immediacy in specific things. More balance. More ease.
To summarize: rested...groggy...relaxed...balanced...at ease.......and oddly satisified. I mean, that was a dream this morning, right, Sam?
January 07, 2005
El Mundo Malo
Too many things going wrong. Too many wrong things said to me. Too many wrong things said, or wrong times mentioned. Too much work. Too much change.
A breaking point and a tipping point at the same wrong time and same wrong place.
Sinus Detonators!
They slice! They dice! They julienne! They blast the snot right out of your head!
Siiiiigh....I wish.
January 06, 2005
Dinner with Friends
Tonight we were invited by our friends, Wil & Steve, to have dinner with them and Wil's parents, who are visiting San Francisco from the UK. It was sooooo nice to spend some time with folks that I've wanted to get to know better for a while now.
Moreover, it wasn't any big event that has a build-up and then an afterwards (or aftermath, as the case might be for us sometimes); it was just a couple of hours having a meal and talking.
Thank you, Wil & Steve. Hope we do it again soon.
January 05, 2005
The Dog Whisperer
Sam and I have been talking about getting a dog for some time. This has escalated recently, mainly because we found a breed—and more importantly, a size—that we agree on. I've always loved schnauzers, and Sam, with his new haircut and facial hair style, came to love schnauzers as well. So we're talking about getting a Standard Schnauzer.
The pup wants a pup. And our friend, Bret, recommended we watch this show, The Dog Whisperer. Ironically, in the first episode we watch, in the first segment of the episode, there's a dog called...wait for it...“Boyfriend”.
It's a sign, I'm telling ya.
January 04, 2005
Measuring Yourself
There are things that we surround ourselves with. Favorite, important or sentimental are the reasons we give for these things. Sometimes, though, they're just useful things that serve purposes which do not change, no matter the other changes in our lives.
A comfy chair, a favorite set of slippers. That cut-glass statuary in recognition of service or duty.
For me, it's a heavy denim jacket. Its history has made it a thing of sentimental value. Its comfort and protection have always been a thing of real value. It's the sum total of all of its separate values that makes it a favorite of mine.
Odd then, that it was not my jacket to begin with.
It was Allen's. He bought it for himself, brought it to San Francisco with him, like so many things that used to populate the house. Those things are fewer and fewer, of course, but the jacket remains. It has become mine, became mine a long time ago.
Plenty of history surrounds this jacket.
I was already wearing the jacket for myself while he was still alive. He had others, and I liked the vague smell of the unsmoked cigarettes he kept in the inside breast pocket and the scent of him on the worn ribbon around the jacket's leather collar.
The jacket is there in my memory for so many things:
- Once, in 1994, Allen was flying back to Holyoke, Colorado to visit his family. It was in January and I took him to SFO and walked to the gate with him—remember when you could go all the way to an airport gate without a ticket for yourself? We were about to walk into the smoking lounge when he remembered what he forgot: the jacket. And he was off to Colorado in January. He was already so thin, and I knew that even the walk to the rental car would devastate his already devastated body. So it was up to me: I made a mad dash back to the car, sped up Highway 101, in the door, grab the coat, out the door, back down 101, back to the parking lot, back down the concourse to hand him his coat. Total round trip: 28 minutes. And it felt awfully good to do that for him.
- only the edge of the left sleeve is worn, tattered, from often pulling on the second strap of my backpack before I'd climb on the Vespa.
- I'd wear the jacket often when I rode the Vespa. One Friday in the wintertime I went over to The Edge, a bar in the Castro, for a happy hour with friends. I wore the jacket into the bar and stuffed it into a corner where other jackets were. At the end of the evening when I was ready to leave, the jacket was gone. I had to ride home in a cold, misting rain wearing only a wife-beater all the way home. Resigned to having lost the jacket forever, two weeks past that I was at the Metro bar with many of the same friends; I was telling FTP that I'd lost the jacket forever, when Dominic pipes up from the next table down, saying that he took a jacket that wasn't his because he was too cold. He had returned it to the Edge the next day. That little bastard. Anyhow, I got it back.
- As I sit here in the Gay and Lesbian Center with a few tranny youth and tranny not-so-youth around the $3 bill cafe (as in, 'queer as a', get it?), I'm wearing the jacket as I wait for the man I love to join me here.
I'm not sure who's worse for the wear, it or me, or who's better for the wear. But the jacket's still here. I'm still here. And now Sam is here.
A HOT New Year
I woke up Monday morning with a fever. A doozy of a fever; not all that high, but one of those incapacitating dry-heat types of fever. The kind that leaves you torpid of thought but not of body.
Still, I slept all day, woke up late in the afternoon feeling not at all refreshed. The opposite, in fact: exhausted, stale, unguarded.
Not the best time to have a heavy and deep discussion with your partner about your relationship, and, at the same time probably the only time to have that kind of discussion.
It's been a rough day, but I'm not unraveled. I'm pretty sure that Sam is not unraveled. Our relationship is far from unraveled.
But we have the world. And time enough.
January 02, 2005
Unwind or Unravel
Adjustments are never easy, especially the ones that overlap into areas you've based parts of your identity on. My danglies are run-on, and my run-on dangles. No matter.
I've come to a rather sobering realization (ironic, after the way this weekend has played out so far) that I can carry an awful lot of stress and worry—and even anger—on my shoulders, between the blades and sometimes, even in the soles of my feet.
After how the election played out (and got played), and after stooping to the bread-and-circuses fuckwits out there, I came to favor those reactions which would pull the world and the world of responsiblity to myself.
Bad idea.
Not one to make New Years' Resolutions, I make one nonetheless. Let's call it a coincidence of timing.
I'm better equipped to help, better equipped to be there for Sam, for my family, for myself, if I take a few steps back.
I'm not leaving the blog; on the contrary I expect to be here even more. More humor, more enjoyment. More according to my own nature instead of the soldier nature I seem to have acquired. They say that you become the worst in those you oppose.
Why oppose when you can cajole? Why have an enemy when you can just walk away instead?
Why not be creative instead of en garde?