Learn From It

Today was a Billy Joel day. And by that I mean nothing more than I listened to Billy Joel albums for most of my work day. And usually I listen to it for reasons of familiarity, for, at this point, a staid background of right-sounding songs in front of which I can focus my mind on the tasks at hand, the tasks of the day.

So it was a bit of a surprise when one old song hit me in a rather new way. And in newness, I felt a little old. Not because of the song, and not because of how it hit me today. Not even about how I used to think of the song. But rather, in the large difference between how I thought of the song today and how I usually think of it.

The song is Vienna.

Slow down you crazy child
You're so ambitious for a juvenile
But then if you're so smart tell me why
You are still so afraid?
Where's the fire, what's the hurry about?
You better cool it off before you burn it out
You got so much to do and only
So many hours in a day

I used to be that person by choice. The subject, not the singer. I was a sturdy, industrious young man, the Alex P. Keaton of my class. Or at least I gave the appearance of being industrious. President of my High School Class. A-student. Student Council honorary appointment. Teacher-Student Committee. Not valedictorian or even salutatorian, but because I wasn't really as industrious as I looked. Things came easy to me. The grades, the votes of confidence. Didn't need to study so I had time for these other things. And making decisions was really the only real work to be done in any of those capacities. That and being visible. I loved being visible. Big fish, small pond kind of stuff, though. I think I knew that even then. In any event, I didn't really take it all so seriously that I would think of anything I was doing as “ultimate” or even “penultimate”.

But you know that when the truth is told
That you can get what you want
Or you can just get old
You're gonna kick off before you even get halfway through
When will you realize...Vienna waits for you

Slow down you're doing fine
You can't be everything you want to be
Before your time
Although it's so romantic on the borderline tonight (tonight)
Too bad but it's the life you lead
You're so ahead of yourself
That you forgot what you need
Though you can see when you're wrong
You know you can't always see when you're right(you're right)

Perfection is the thing I didn't have time for. I mean, who does? Well, many seemed to devote so much time to it. Oh, don't get me wrong, I was (was?) a sanctimonious asshole when it suited. Thank the goddess it didn't suit all that much. I mean, I did have a lot of really terrific friends. Or at least terrifically situational ones.

My grades were pretty good. Certainly envious of most of the ones in my class, even moreso by the fact that I did absolutely no lifting in order to end up with the 3.7-something or 3.8-something I got. My most treasured grade? A “C” (my only one) in Lew Isaacs' “modern history” class. I remember the John Birch Society pimping video tape that we had to watch. I remember finding the student editions of U.S. News & World Report to be a little bent away from what the local news and national news was telling us. It wasn't until much later that I'd found that The John Birch Society isn't just a bunch of happy patriots, that USN&WR isn't just like Time or Newsweek. But mostly, I remember thinking that at least people knew when I was being sanctimonious, versus his spineless stealth-mode whoring for the Republican Party (this was in 1982, for those of you keeping track).

You got your passion you got your pride
But don't you know that only fools are satisfied?
Dream on but don't imagine they'll all come true
When will you realize
Vienna waits for you

Slow down you crazy child
Take the phone off the hook and disappear for a while
It's alright you can afford to lose a day or two
When will you realize...
Vienna waits for you.

This is the part that really got to me. “Afford to lose a day or two”? Back then, no! Of course not! O, the Humanity! A day or two out of touch would cost me....would cost me....well, it would have been just too horrid to think of!

Ugh.

Today? Today, I'd love nothing more than to choose the fuck-all option, to kick off one or two months worth of time just to get away from it all. Sometimes it almost feels like I can't afford not to lose some time.

The Puritan Work Ethic is not what prevents me from taking off. On the contrary, all that time I had “off” during the dot-com-dot-bomb—and previously, another by-choice stint—cured me forever of the work-work-work “ethic”. That's why the Puritan Work Ethic exists at all: because it already exists and prevents people from the time away that's required in order to discover that the need to work for work's sake isn't really a valid position.

Sort of like “god”.

But you know that when the truth is told
That you can get what you want
Or you can just get old
You're gonna kick off before you even get halfway through
Why don't you realize...Vienna waits for you
When will you realize...Vienna waits for you

Today I'm close to halfway through. I'd run the numbers by y'all, but frankly, I don't like to dip my qualitative wick too deep into the quantitative ink. It's unseemly! And? It leaves a stain.

Suffice it to say that I'm still the “crazy child” of the song, but like most things, it's a situational condition. The same crazy in two different situations can come off as brilliant or belligerent, as creative or cataleptic, as faithful or just plain fucked.

Vienna is Elysium. Elysium is the place, according to Greek Lore, where the gods conveyed the heroic after death. It's where words like “elude” and “elusion” come from—meaning 'to escape detection'. For those who've earned it.

You know, those who can afford to lose a day or two.

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Posted by Jeff at 05:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

After twelve years with DirecTV, I switched to Comcast cable. Why? HD, baby. DirecTV wanted too much money, and they're abandoning TiVo. Bastards. Comcast gave me a helluva deal on the DVR (not TiVo, but it will be soon).

So anyway.

Shrek 2 was on one of the HD channels and I'm still at that phase where all those extra pixels shamelessly seduce me easily, so I watched. And...well....Hot Shrek is HOT. Sam noticed the same thing when we'd watched it the first time around.

But Shrek is just a cartoon. But then, so was The Incredibles, but that didn't stop both of us from feeling a little funny in the pants when Mr. Incredible's butt was on display.

Does that make us shallow? Well, maybe, but at least we aren't two-dimensional. Oh, yes, I went there.

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Posted by Jeff at 09:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I don't subscribe to schadenfreude. I know that “justice” when visited on one's self, can burn so much more than a wrong accusation.

I don't wish Scooter Libby ill. But I expect that if he did what he did, he'll have to pay for it. Nothing more, nothing less.

And as I sit here at home with a fever and feeling yucky and watching all of this as it plays out on television—and doesn't ABC's Bob Woodruff have beautiful eyes?—“nothing more, nothing less” than due process is the theme of the day. Thanks to Patrick Fitzgerald.

He was flatly honest. Blatant in his defense of the law and of the reasons for not disclosing the public, candid in stating that the American public does not understand some things. Flawed in his politesse by using the “negative” words that are so sound-biteable, rough in his eloquence and lack of savvy.

In lacking all those things, he showed something that no one in the Bush administration has shown at all: respect for the process and the law, the balls to admit when he wasn't equipped for something, the willingness to live within the limits of the law, and eager to impose limits on himself and his power for the good of the ethic.

Power attracts the corruptible, and Fitzgerald, while he seems to understand the necessity of possessing certain powers in this case, is clearly not comfortable with those powers lasting any longer than need be.

I don't know if he's politically affiliated with the Demos or the Repubs (since he's DoJ, I'm guessing Republican), but I like him so far.

And when's the last time the Left and the Right had someone all could like?

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Posted by Jeff at 02:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Wow. I'm, like, totally not one to speak in superlatives, evar-evar-evar, but like this was totally the worst movie.

Someone needs to take Nora Ephron out for a cocktail or a hot dog or a long walk off of a short pier. Something, please! She at least has to pay my dental bills for all the sickeningly cloying sweetness (that nonetheless leaves you with a flat, stale taste. Huh.).

Now, I loves me some Nicole Kidman. I truly do. Will Farrell? Small. Doses. PLEASE.

There's an irony (irony?) in the movie where the new Bewitched TV show in the new Bewitched movie is retooled to give Darrin the focus, in a movie retooled to give Will Farrell the focus!

Who the fuck gives Will Farrell the focus when Nicole Kidman is standing right there? (I mean, I'm a big flaming 'mo and I'd rather see Judy Barbra Bette Madonna Michael Stipe Nicole than Will Farrell!)

Why, Nora Ephron, of course. Which is why she needs to be sacrificed for the sake of the glue industry. Sorry. Just does.

But what about You've Got Mail and Sleepless in Seattle, Biscuit God? Well, tell me that Nora Ephron isn't like Erma Bombeck on a day she forgot to bring the funny gravitas afflatus cleverness intelligence!

I hope there isn't a heaven, for the simple reason that then I could be certain that Elizabeth Montgomery, one of the greats of all time, hasn't seen this movie.

Will Farrell?????

I wish they made a suppository for the brain.

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Posted by Jeff at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

My baaaaaby is DJing at the White Horse Bar in Oakland/Berkeley tonight.

He's talented and exquisite and beautiful. He rocks.

Come see and hear.

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Posted by Jeff at 01:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Some people enjoy the footfalls of syllables and sounds of symbols thrown down the metered hallway of prose; others prefer the lyrical poesy of too many rules applied to too few utterances.

Some escape the swoon of the siren's call of their own voices or the voices of the author or the poet and find meaning. Or at least for value.

Yes, escape from the swoon, a sobering up from the narcotic bliss of Truth! by attaching one's self to the speaker, the writer, the lyricist. He speaks Truth! one may say, falling all over herself to get the sweet misery just right. And up on a pedestal the sayer goes, a ceremonious removal from regular society, from merely mortal minds. A tall and a narrow pedestal, so easy for others to knock over.

The words of the speaker wither whither? To thither, of course, shuttled off to an out-of-earshot echo chamber on a wave of irony, cleaved from the speaker by the sycophants.

It's the thing that probably kept Flaubert up at night for, the reason he was so hell-bent on the separation of Church of personality and State of art.

Today we are asked to accept the writer, the poet, the philosopher, the mathematician, the priest, the saint, the martyr, not on merit but on Tradition. We humans have produced a great many great thinkers, or at least we have noted them. Noted them and whisked them away from Time and Refutability of Person.

Aquinas did not have the option of feeling in his bones the possibility of absence of a god; Gödel did not have supercomputers available to him; Peirce did not have Watson & Crick to rely upon. We do have all those; we are future Kant's and Nietzche's and Tutu's and Ghandi's. I do not puff myself up and suppose I am such a great thinker as Gödel or Russell or Kant or Peirce or Hegel, but neither do I accept that I am ill-equipped to challenge what I think are their shortcomings.

And after all, the Greats did not stand in the shadows of the giants who preceded them, they instead climbed upon the shoulders of such, saw what others priorly did not have available to them, and expounded on the view with their vision.

Shouldn't we all be doing the same?

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Posted by Jeff at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Forty is not so—
Who am I kidding? It's OLD!
Been there and done that.

Very best wishes
Tho, to palochi, the best
draw to Chicago

That I can think of.
Sure, I am a day too late
But I'm 41

So cut me a break.
Besides, one day is only
The smallest fraction

Of a life stretching
out these fourteen thousand, six
hundred eleven

short and trundl'ing days
Think of it this way, Mouse
The alternative

sucks. And all of us
are better for having you.
(or having had you! :)

Seriously, I
hope you had a damn good one
You deserve the best!

Happy Belated Birthday, Scott!

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Posted by Jeff at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

fudge fac•tor
noun informal
a figure included in a calculation to account for error or unanticipated circumstances, or to ensure a desired result.

That's what Free Will and Entropy have in common: they're both fudge factors in the domains in which they operate.

Neither is very easy to describe and they certainly require more than a dictionary definition. Let's take Entropy first. It's Science's Big Fudge Factor. Entropy is real, and yet not real, in that way that science and its symbols maintain a sort of duality. Entropy is a concept and a quantity. As a quantity, it steers into thermodynamics territory (and hey, let's leave that to the Creationists Intelligent Design Advocates Religious Right, who always seem to understand thermodynamics better than the rest of us); as a concept, it refers to the degree of disorder (oh, hey! religious again!) and randomness in a system.

Free Will works just the same way. It's a concept and a quantity. As a concept, it's introduced as the reason for suffering in the world, that quantity outside of the omniscience and omnipotence of god that lets him off the hook for all the conceptual suffering.

Talk to Aquinas about what might lay outside of omnipotence; I have no use for it.

There are good thinkers out there who didn't limit themselves to certain suppositions like Aquinas did. Charles Peirce is one. I was pointed at Peirce by Ted. I haven't had much of a chance to read Peirce, but I did find a quote by him that made me like him instantly: “DO NOT BLOCK THE ROAD TO INQUIRY!” Oh, I'm sure he's the bane of tyrannical absolutists everywhere. And I know I shouldn't derive such pleasure from something so easily accomplished, but I do get a little happy every time they get their panties in a bunch over all of us Evil Falliblists.

Hegel is another goodie: “Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.” He dares apply a phenomenology to the spirit, and, like Peirce, seems to sit on that bit of the Venn Diagram of the Ages where Science and Religion overlap. Two Rights? No Wrong? Heresy! Profanity! Relativism!

And if that isn't bad enough, Hegel is French. That means the Righties can hate him without having to think a single thought about him.

Sometimes I think “chippin' away” is the only thing that separates science from religion. Science has faith that it can keep the fudge factor as small as possible by inquiring, by learning, by doing, by understanding. Religion, on the other hand, turns assertion into Fact and calls it an objective day, dismissing the entropic-unknown and calling it Intelligent Design.

But, oh, all this stuff will bake anyone's noodle. And so I don't blame the more fearful and timorous for skulking in the long, dark shadow of god instead of remaining exposed and vulnerable to the unpredictable winds of entropy or the undeniably self-responsible exercise of Free Will.

But for me? Free Will is where God Isn't, by their definition, and that is where God has directed me to be (well, you prove He didn't!).

So Free Will gets on the treadmill and the mechanism spins order out of chaos. That's the right place to be. Another good place to be? In a room with him and him, not just for the sheer physical beauty that would surround me (hubba hubba), but to expound on all of this, attempt to understand—and perhaps advance—all of this, and because it'd be rarified air, up high and in the bright, bright sun, where you can bake your noodle and maybe, just maybe, end up with a casserole.

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Posted by Jeff at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBacks (0)

Heaven
Long Piety
Bloat, like too-risen bread
Yeast infection of sorts. The world's
Leaven?

Living
Just surviving
A heavy, heavy toll
The faithful taking, the profane
giving.

Reversed:
More charitable
The further away from Rome.
Who mourns for these wicked? The “bad”!
Perversed.

Tombstone
Purifying
In death that which could not
Be immolated out of life
Sin Cairn

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Posted by Jeff at 09:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday, someone visiting here from Mark's, who hails from France, was the 100,000th visitor to my humble web-abode.

It took 28.5 months to reach this milestone, but hey, I finally did it.

Go me!

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Posted by Jeff at 01:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Subtle thoughts come thronging soft, delicate, crowding rooms of the mind. But only when silence is had. And silence gains purchase only when isolated by a sense of security, something harder and harder to come by in the world today. A luxury so astonishingly costly, at times, that the mind can blank: a different kind of silence, the enforced tranquility of shock, an epinephric dousing.

But no, nowhere to be found is the unobvious. Not found because not searched for, not abided. These soft and delicate thoughts require the utmost care and the air of time to find their way out of complexity and nuance and into the harsh and awkward and desultorily ponderous light of language, then agreement, then broad acceptance.

Who would sit at Philosopher's Table to create? And which of those would labor to champion that which is not so easily seen or so easily understood?

Who might care to show that the not-readily comprehended isn't incomprehensible after all?

When the naked philosophy of tooth and claw is so ragingly insistent*, when the harsher elements of the immediate kick off the velvety festooning tapestries of a kind and decent and decorous and polite society, God makes a fist instead of presenting open arms of welcome. When a surplus of good will is traded for the surplice of a priestly soldier or a surfeit of sacred is traded for the conceit of sanctimony, when the chasuble protects not the child but those acts of the predator upon the child, there seems to be no chance that those who dare...with good conscience and good intent as concomitant companions...to permit their reach to exceed their grasp are given the chance to do so. And how else are we to forgive the future?

Instead, a priori angels swoop in, Votaries of a Lesser Godhead and notaries of a soul-management bureaucracy, offering truculent piety instead of beneficent humility.

Too loud, too rigid, a theopolistic cocaine that regiments the thoughts and focuses them on only that which can be seen, disgarding subtlety and variance, whimsey and caprice, in favor of Normalcy and a labored indifference towards Other.

* from Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again

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Posted by Jeff at 08:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My very own Auntie Mame, who passed away 10 years ago—and only six weeks after Allen had died, what a summer, heh?—would have been 75 years old today. Yes, she was born on 10-20-30.

I miss her, but the things she taught me, gave me, showed me will be with me forever. And every day.

She had a car. She had the car: a 1965 Pontiac Bonneville convertible. White top, white interior, midnight blue on the outside. It looked a lot like this:

Although that picture doesn't quite do justice to the sheer mass and sprawl of the car. These do a better job (click for a full-size image):

It was the chosen shape and grace and spirit in which she glided through the world. She didn't always have it easy, but she always had her fun. I loved her very much.

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Posted by Jeff at 02:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

We, still in shadow
They, on a faraway hill
Lit an antique white.

The sea air plays tricks
The bumps and swellings of hills
Co-conspirators.

Some light etches depth
This light flattens, erases.
There. And Here. Same thing.

I will miss all this
When our clocks refuse to budge:
Taking Back Sunday.

A least for an hour
Heralding almost six months
Of light-shifted days.

D.S.T. Haiku?
Why not? Trices of beauty
Are where you find them.

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Posted by Jeff at 08:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You fit in with: Spiritualism Your ideals are mostly spiritual, but in an individualistic way.  While spirituality is very important in your life, organized religion itself may not be for you.  It is best for you to seek these things on your own terms. 60% spiritual. 40% reason-oriented.

Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com

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Posted by Jeff at 01:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I haven't been writing here much lately. That is not to say I haven't been writing. But that, in turn, is not to say I have been prolific. But a fecund imagination is where the writing always starts for me, and this time around appears to be no exception.

I carry index cards and pens with me: in the back pocket of my jeans, in the car, in my backpack, at my desk at home, at my desk at work. So totally analog, I know! But it's more immediate than opening up an iBook or even firing off an email-to-self. And there's something further-fertile in arranging the index cards with no regard to the order in which they were written and no regard to any kind of kind-groupings. Jangly juxtaposition is a powerful tool for me, rising above the mental quirks of sitting down to write (the font and the size and the margins must be Just So in order for me to write narrative, for example—and these days, I favor MacJournal in its brilliantly simple and self-effacing Fullscreen mode, with Baskerville 14.0 pt text and a column width of 4.5 inches).

On the train, I've even slowed the reading I so love doing, in order to think about character development, plot points, devices and settings. Connectivity is the enemy, one of the unwelcome distractions that obstructs the path as the novel tries to find its way. I do so love trains. How did I manage to forget that over the years?

Ironic that this blog approaches the 100,000 milestone, that the entries have become less frequent.

I hope that I find a better balance. Nothing but serious-delerious good things have come from having this blog. It's not going away, much as the Confederacy of Christian Dunces would wish otherwise.

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Posted by Jeff at 02:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I think National Coming Out Day is a huge success. I will cite you the only statistic that matters; it is not universal, but personal. It is not objective data, nor should it be. It is well-researched. It is hard-fought and hard-won. It is the end of a long road. It is an end that happened years ago.

The success is this: I have no one to come out to! I haven't for some time. Or at least no one I've had to save it for until October 11.

When I started work at Apple in March, for example, the HR form for benefits had multiple checkboxes for “others to be insured”: Spouse, Domestic Partner, Dependent. That's it. That's how Apple “found out” I was gay: a benefits form with a checkbox that had equal footing with those to whom marriage is an earnest option. My employer is so extreme.

My new boss knew I had a partner because I said so. He told me about his wife, so I told him about Sam. I'm such a flaunter.

All that said, I have to say that the day...today...National Coming Out Day...holds a bittersweet place in my heart and head. It reminds me of the hard work still ahead, where difficulty takes the form of the base insult of having to discuss on such a conscious and direct level something which is so fundamental, so basic to one's very nature, that one can't do it real justice, can't convey the true experience of it. Our very lives and livelihoods set out on display for the enlightenment-challenged and enlightenment-unwilling out there to cast stones upon, to inveigh about, to use as a masturbatory exercise of their own Fundamentalist cosmology. Yes, even a chance to flaunt their chosen lifestyles in our faces.

I would offer that coming out has the strange benefit of being both the most effective and the least radical thing that any gay person can do to help the cause of equality. Christians, like most humans, find it so much easier to hate a phenomenon rather than hate a person. They'll tell you as much: hate the sin, not the sinner!

Everyone I know, to whom I have come out, has found understanding where there was only surface reaction or has found empathy where perhaps there was only sympathy or has found that siding with the better angels of their nature is preferable to throwing a tantrum in Leviticus' no-fun zone.

Coming out is not flaunting anything. Insofar as any given heterosexual's (true heterosexual or chosen-lifestyle) sexuality is a fundamental aspect of their lives and families and societies, my homosexuality is fundamental to who I am. If it seems to some that Pride and Coming Out Day and Halloween (yes, that one is ours :) are an exercise in self-promotion and self-gratification, well, you're right. But you have Easter and Christmas and the Fourth of July. If it seems from our parades that all homosexuals are either drag queens or leather queens or dancy nancyboys, well, remember that we don't assume all heterosexuals are cheerleaders, band members or Mummers. If it seems we have an agenda, well, we do. But that one is your fault. Just as Pride is a response to the Shame you have foisted on us, an agenda is the natural consequence of organized defense against those who would treat us as less. It's really as simple as that.

We don't want more homosexuals in the world; we just want the ones that are already there to be as fabulous and as unimpeded in their lives as you seem to fancy yourselves.

So for those of you who have not come out to everyone, do it because it's the right thing to do. For the cause of equality. For your fellow gay folks. Most importantly, for yourself. It's the most selfishly selfless thing you'll ever do.

Also sprach der Gott der Plätzchen.

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Posted by Jeff at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

For reasons that I'd rather not get into (not right now, at least), I have a fixation on the spaces of large train stations. The most famous, in this country, is Grand Central Station in Manhattan. But I'd also add in Thirtieth Street Station in Philadelphia and Centraal Station in Amsterdam.

The favor is this: images.

I know I can get images from images.google.com and from other places on the internet, but I'd like to get some images that are somewhat personal to people: features of said spaces and other images that caused someone to care enough to snap a picture.

I would be most humbly appreciative!

You can email images that are less than 5MB to blog@godofbiscuits.com. For larger images (which are also most welcome, even preferred!), send me email at that address and I can figure something out (like provide an AppleShare, SMB or FTP drop box).

Thank you in advance.

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Posted by Jeff at 07:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I always ride the train facing the City. In the mornings on my way down to the Mothership, that means riding backwards. Some people can't do that; it throws them off or makes them nauseous. But there are all kinds of balance, and there are all kinds of centering and there are all sorts of ways of finding one's sea legs.

Grounding is probably my favorite—or at least the most-used. It's an anti-dizziness spell, focusing on the horizon, or picking a point on the wall behind the audience when public-speaking (that always worked better for me than the old “imagine them in their underwear” routine, because, let's face it, I'd either end up horrified over-amused or put off or turned on by that spectacle in any audience).

San Francisco is my point on the horizon. In facing it every day, twice a day, I measure distance-from and nearness-to. The mornings are a pull away; the evenings, a hurtling towards. San Francisco is, perhaps over-usedly-so, the “End of the Rainbow” for many. For me, it's the horizon—in studies in perspective in art, also known as the Vanishing Point.

It's a strange thing, living at the horizon, at one's own vanishing point. You might think it impossible, but so many of us do it all the time. Physicists tell us that without Space there is no Time, and without Time, no Space. No Where without a When and vice versa. But when Here meets Now, convention shatters and a sort of gyroscopic balance is found. Sempiternity and Oblivion ride Roman and anything is possible and no base reality can be pigeonholed.

Conventional reality is overrated.

Oddly it's the godly lately who stately claim with territorial pissings the purview of their own Anthropomorphized Absolute, replete with walls and gates and VIP parking, a mad dash to define what's Outside.

In San Francisco, there is no Outside: die Anderen winks in and out, astable, the mundane world shimmering in a way that only the interlucency between pointillism and strange attractor orbits can.

The City is both a potent gravity well as well as the rainbow of bent light it produces. San Francisco is nothing you'll understand well unless you try to stop trying so hard. You can't wish it into existence—and sometimes, don't wish you could stop wishing?

The City is both the destination and the reason to never book another destination again, a library of souls who may, from time to time, in order to travel from place to place, check themselves out of the stacks for a time. But once part of that grand collection, they never really stop possessing and being possessed of, The City.

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Posted by Jeff at 09:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Today, “activist judges” in a New York Federal court decided that it was ok to discriminate based on religious beliefs. Now, honestly? Who the fuck in their right mind doesn't already know that religious organizations like the Catholics and, Fundus on the Family and all those kumbaya, hippie/huggie groups like CWA and jodhatesfags.com already significantly discriminate against people they don't like? That I can almost stomach.

But the Federal Court decided today that it also just doesn't matter if those religious organizations also receive federal or other government funding! Thanks, W!

Can't get your Constitutional amendment act in gear to keep the faggots at heel, so you'll just get your judges to chip away at our humanity instead, all the while dumping federal moneys into the cause?

Well, fuck you.

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Posted by Jeff at 07:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

So I decided to reread Angels in America. Today I finished Part One, Millenium Approaches. I was on Caltrain heading home. I put the book back in my backpack and took out Part Two, Perestroika.

I was already twenty or so pages into it when my phone went off. I answered the text-message and picked the book back up. Hmmm, the book was stiffer than a regular paperback, especially one so slim. I flipped through the pages and discovered the reason: a postcard. A postcard of St. Thomas.

A postcard signed “Love, Jeff & Allen”. A postcard from 1994.

Good lord. As if it's not already to the point that I'm so spooked by Angels that I sometimes hear words in the humming and thrumming of everyday things.

Conventional explanations are within ready reach: I last read the book while on St. Thomas. I last opened it when reading it. I wrote the postcard while in St. Thomas, but failed (obviously) to mail it. I mean, I knew at the time that I wouldn't mail it from St. Thomas (I knew me well enough to know I would have put it off) and the text of it, addressed to Flea and Stork—and prophetically without an address!—says as much.

Flea and Stork don't read this blog. I wonder if I should fill in the address and send it to them. I don't know if it would freak them out or whether they'd get a chuckle out of it, or whether they would simply be pensive and reflective for a bit.

A lot has changed in eleven years. The big things regular readers already know. But smaller things! I don't use use fewer exclamation points (hey, I was newly uncloseted to friends and nervous, or I was tired. Oh, poo, whatever). Flea and Stork now live just up the hill...

Anyhow, I scanned the postcard. I'm still a bit wonky over discovering it—just like I once discovered a plane ticket of Allen's in another book which had overlapped a story of his from years before which I'd happened to be thinking of.

Like I said, a bit spooked.

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Posted by Jeff at 09:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Have you noticed all the Christians who have been throwing themselves on their swords, giving up their very lives for what they believe?

Me neither.

Have you noticed all the Christians who have been throwing themselves on their metaphorical swords, giving up at least their livelihoods for what they believe?

Me neither.

But Jesus wants, apparently, a strong economy and a strong national defense—he was just having one on the moneychangers in that story—and for abortion doctors to be killed (thou shalt not kill anyone but a “killer”, it would seem). Jesus knew the jig was up with the whole Creation thing, it would also seem, and so wants his shallow and often pedantic crowd to cover for Their Lord in Heaven: Intelligent Design, as supported by clearly learning-impaired non compos non-intelligentsia. Jesus would also like everyone to be able to own semi-automatic weaponry and cop-killer ammunition.

Isn't It Ironic, Alanis?

I'll answer for her, and say, sure, if it weren't so very very sad. They all seem like they're betting on a horse more than being followers of the Biblical Jesus, going all Rapture and End of Days-y on our profane asses and crying Chicken Little one too many times. The sky is, indeed, falling, but not for lack of trying by the “liberal” folks out there to stop and hopefully reverse ozone depletion (they're waiting for Jesus to do it, I guess).

But, Our Lord God of the Biscuits, you say, doesn't God help those who help themselves?

Of course, but like any rank amateur or outmoded anachronism, he didn't cover all his bases. He allowed room for interpretation! Silly goose.

Now he's got a bunch of his crowd loving sinners, hating sins, tending vineyards bursting with grapes of wrath, and otherwise having dialed their focus so off from the original that now everything is upside-down.

I don't blame them, on a certain level, though (think: lions). Sure, Jesus said that if someone slaps your cheek, present the other one to him for the same treatment. Historical Jesus was a hippie, a lover of men (cue the Church pedants apologists academics swooping in here on their I-ain't-no-Monkey's-Uncle-wings to clarify that one to you all), a disruptive force and, dare I say, socially a communist! (you people! drop the needles, drop the camels: it just ain't gonna happen)

Fealty is defined as: a feudal tenant's or vassal's sworn loyalty to a lord and/or the formal acknowledgment thereof.

The religious West has stepped away from its abstractions, from its expansiveness, from its loving kindness and its spiritual hospitality and traded it for nothing more than a mean little corner of the world of humanity, erecting walls around what they believe and then telling you simultaneously that there's no room for you and that you are invited to their table.

Naturally there is a continuum of individuals in any membership—much as the super-elastic inversely-iconoclastic Christian Right would like to narrow and eliminate the spread—and naturally I do not mean to include those who are still abstract and expansive and kind and spiritually hospitable about Jesus or Vishu or the Flying Spaghetti Monster or whomever their belief system rests its butt on.

I mean those for whom a glint of the verisimilitude of righteousness appears in their eyes when they see the “godless” suffer or the “liberals” falter. There's a sick glee in Pat Robertson when he's blaming the faggots for Hurricane Andrew a few years ago, and in others blaming the “sins” of New Orleans for Hurricane Katrina or telling you outright that god simply hates fags unequivocally or whack-jobs in Eastern Washington desperately arguing with vehement voice that Matthew Shepard was dead from anything—anything in the world! Please God!—other than homophobia gone unchecked.

My friend, Lee, came up with the world for the twisted pleasure these Biblytic monsters derive from the pain of the ungodly: god-enfreude.

It would be funny, if it weren't so very, very true.

Where are those other Christians, by the way? The ones not so Very Right all the time? The ones who should be defending hippie-Jesus from misinterpretation? Someone has to. I think we all are fairly certain by now that God's not coming back.

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Posted by Jeff at 08:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)