Learn From It

I've seen some crazy shit in the (supposedly) conservative blogosphere, but I finally found one that left me speechless (I know!) for quite some time.

This one had to do with the bombing of the Golden Mosque.

But first, I'd like to exercise my rights as one of the “Moonbats” in this darn “reality-based” world I live in and give some perspective about the bombing:

• perhaps in excess of 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died during the U.S. occupation
• there are multiple religious groups in conflict in the ruins of Iraq
• the U.S. troops are spread thin and don't seem to be very effectively keeping the peace
• the Golden Mosque is one of the holiest Shiite sites in the region

The last point bears repeating: so holy is this mosque that the entire country is in danger of a full-scale civil war. For all the “bleeding heart” accusations the Rightwingers make about the Liberals, for all the contorted heart-wrenching the Progressives have done over so much death, so much injury, so much violence, so much fear, so much hurt, the fine, fine folks at blogsforbush.com post an entry entitled, More Bad News for Democrats, an offensively myopic and rabid notion that the Democrats might consider it “bad news” if a civil war in Iraq is avoided.

Yes, so horribly perverse they've become that they can't even celebrate the hope that civil war might be avoided! Instead, they try to paint it as a bad political turn for Democrats.

They're humanity stretched to its lower-limits. They couldn't find a realistic perspective with both hands and a flashlight.

Delusions of grandeur and intense paranoia might explain the rightwing blogosphere's behavior, and maybe they've become this way because they're starting to understand that keeping power requires more finesse that seizing it.

In any event, I can't avoid the overarching sense that they're simply despicable.

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Posted by Jeff at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday evening, quite a while after I got home from physical therapy I started to feel very very cold. But it wasn't cold. I thought I had a fever, but no fever. I thought it might be something I ate, but I hadn't eaten since lunchtime. By body was shuddering (more than just the chills, but less than convulsions) and shaking. It was slightly frightening.

So, curled up in a ball—insomuch as I even can, given my ongoing shoulder issues—I drew an afghan (the yarn kind) over me and ended up asleep for nearly three hours. The chills/tremors were gone, but my shoulder started pounding out some pain in waves not long after I woke.

I was awake until about six this morning, then awoke at about 10:30. Felt fine. Until we got in the car so Sam could drop me off in the Castro (I have been officially stir-crazy for about a week now, so getting out is a Good Thing™).

I was at Starbucks for a while—good place for people-watching and running into friends and acquaintances, but a lousy place for coffee or karma—then walked up to Sweet Inspiration, about 8 blocks' worth of walking. Even before I left Starbucks, though, I started to feel sore all over. Closest I can come to an analogy is having a sunburn and being exposed to the sun again, that uncomfortable pain/tingling experienced anew with each step as my clothing rubbed against my body.

That would have been just fine—or at least manageable—except that the body chills/shuddering started again. I took another anti-inflammatory dose of ibuprofen when I got here to Sweet Inspiration, but that was 45 minutes ago and I'm feeling only marginal relief from it. And, of course, it does nothing to abate the blossoms of pain from my shoulder which leap along nerve channels like a sprinter (I'm not above mixing floral and faunal imagery, children). To add to the fun, my hands are shaking now and I feel like I've got either 11 or 9 fingers when I type.

Aaaaand I've been taking neurontin 24/7 since about five days after the accident (today marks 8 weeks since GoBBy go BOOM). I hate that stuff, too. It feels like it shaves a good 30 IQ points off of me. Good thing I've got another 50 at least, left over.

Sometimes the pain is an annoyance, like a puppy nipping at your heels or a Jack Frost nipping at your nose (hey, it's Winter somewhere), but other times it's a menace and a threat, a schoolyard bully in the engineer boots that makes you cry when you know you shouldn't.

Jack Frost or Jackbooted, sometimes you can only wish it would go the fuck away already.

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Posted by Jeff at 03:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Did I ever tell you about the time I shoplifted a frozen turkey from a Piggly Wiggly wearing nothing but a tube top and daisy dukes?

Here, have a wire brush to scrub out every vestige of that image from your minds. Yes, even the bare, hairy midriff.

Aren't non sequiturs fun? Technically, it's just a spurious image. Fractious Filiations of an in-between state of mind.

I've just been to physical therapy which—thank the goddess—involves a holistic approach...Korean Ki Gong, which offers that the mind-body problem is no problem at all.

The energy of the Earth comes up through the feet, feet planted on the ground, core muscles appropriately set and held, breathing up and in, up and out, in and out, out and down. Connectedness to the Earth, its energy coming up through the body and releasing through the hands and fingertips at the extensions of the arm movements.

White and light and black and dark. Matter and mist, dust and spark. The body is a conduit through nerves which plumb and pump and simply agree to let it all pass unimpeded, frictionless.

Today my physical therapist, J., performed what she called “energetic therapy”, which turned out to be a ministration of energy up through her feet and into her hands and fingertips into points of my suffering shoulder and into my compensating back and spine. Imagine the breath of a loved one next to you. You feel it on your skin, giving you clues as to distance and position of the breather. This is like that, only you feel it through the skin and deep inside, running along nerve channels. Comforting like that. Given freely, accepted freely. Given not from her, just through here from the Earth below and Heaven's energy from above.

There is a certain peace and a larger and restored proprioception. Where lie the arms and legs and core is of little matter when you're sensitive to the artificial nature of boundaries: you see how self is innervated by the Rest until there is no Here and There, just Here. No Rest-of-It, just All-of-It.

This kind of therapy illuminates the whitespace around the injured parts, giving you a sense of well-being with some healing required. It's more appealing—and in an organic way—than focusing on the blossom of pain and feeling like the other parts of you are along for the via dolorosa.

A living thing generates an ambit and casts it aside simultaneously. Mind animates the body and body propels the mind, each inhabits the other and together with others creates the reticulum we all inhabit.

We create Andere, Other, in order to observe from an objective distance. My injury is not me; the accident created an Other, an injured part, and physical therapy and bodily healing help dissipate the distance between Me and Other, and one day I'll put it all back together into a Here with no There, and I'll feel Whole again, Whole and Connected.

Somewhere in human history we created a There and populated it with a God in order to understand the world as a contained Entirety, but we forgot that we were also supposed to bring it back and put it all together.

Perhaps too many were seduced by the power of pointing a finger, an act which requires a There, subject and object. Perhaps a pattern held in place too long becomes a structure, rigid and unyielding. Perhaps its easier to Know than to Understand.

I know very little, other than knowledge, like truth, is subject to time and change, but I understand more and more as I continue through Here.

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Posted by Jeff at 07:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Agnus Dei. That's Latin for Lamb of God, did you know?

In 1985, there was a movie whose title was a play on those words. Actually, first it was a play whose title was a play on words. It was called Agnes of God.

Anyway, Agnus Dei is Jesus. Jesus is the Lamb of God. Jesus Is Lamb.

It's difficult to overestimate the effect that ol' Is-Lamb has had on the Western world (even though some would claim the entire world).

The Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the whole Microsoftian embrace-and-extinguish approach to non-Catholic cultures. The Reformation, essentially a cell-division of Catholicism into enemy Christian factions leading to all-out wars in Spain and the Netherlands and just about any other place you can think of—any other place in the West, that is.

Is-Lamb is almost everywhere in the West. It's the “almost” that really pisses off the flocks of followers. Almost isn't enough. They want it all because all is an absolute and absolutism is the only thing that matters. The rest is just relativist crap. The rest is the not-Good. The rest is Evil. There's a certain syllogistic elegance to it all, in their illogic “thinking”.

Is-Lamb is to blame for so much good and so much bad. Is-Lamb has brought unity, and the idea that there's something more than a given moment or a given individual to consider. Is-Lamb can be blamed similarly for nonpareil violence throughout history, that which stems from Absolutist Illusion.

Only it's not just Is-Lamb that aligns all the ecstatic energies of its followers into the fire that drives the crucible that removes the so-called impurities, is it? It's any dogmatic reverie that finds traction in the reality-based world of accident and time.

The Ideals must be expressed! Is-Lamb wants us all heterosexual and applying our genitalia to only state-approved tasks. Is-Lamb insists, moreover, that it own the reproductive apparatus of each female. Is-Lamb wants your babies so that it can continue to feed on a never-ending stream of humanity. Is-Lamb wants and needs, takes and feeds.

Is-Lamb does violence, just as Islam extremists do violence. Is-Lamb is more insidious, more clever, more covert in its violence. Is-Lamb has learned to adapt and pervert itself in order to continue to exist in its multi-cultural environment.

Islam hasn't yet had to adapt.

Is-Lamb sips where Islam gluttonously gulps. Is-Lamb obstructs where Islam extinguishes. Is-Lamb institutionally cuts you a thousand times with the paper pages of the Bible while Islam individual extremists resort to scimitars.

Is-Lamb knows there is no reflexive relationship: it does unto others whatever the hell it will with impunity. Islam suffers from a conscious form of absolutism.

Is-Lamb knows that it cannot literally and absolutely interpret its own texts, act upon them thusly, and expect to survive in a multiculture. Islamic extremists have yet to get over their own xenophobia and join the rest of the cultures of the world, much less try and survive in the face of all of that.

Frank Herbert once wrote:

Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: “I feed on your energy.”

Is-Lamb sits back and slowly nods the head atop its massive bureaucratic body, knowing that real wisdom lies in context, not fervor.

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Posted by Jeff at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

For some kinds of pensiveness, only the Psychedelic Furs will do.

IMITATION OF CHRIST

another christ is on the cross
the nails are words
the nails are lies
to make it crawl
and make it scream
and make it real
and make it bleed
and make it bleed
and make it bleed
and make it dream

imitation of christ
imitation of christ

this you who lie and scream
you fall to dust
you fall to dust
in walls of words
the words are blind
you speak and you are dumb and blind
the word is that your god
is you who fall so low and fall so far

imitation of christ
imitation of christ

fly to the moon dear
sew it on a stool
tie on the carpet all the cowboys fall
see the cowboys fat and reeling
dancing underneath the ceiling
leave the bar the theatre's closing
make a wall of your religion

imitation of christ
imitation of christ

mary mary
mother mother
you and me and
god the father
jesus is a woman too
he looks like all of me and you
your money talks and
all your friends
will laugh at her pathetic tits

imitation of christ
imitation of christ
imitation of christ
imitation

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

The Rightwing Christians are suddenly anti-censorship, since it suddenly suits their own selfish purposes to take that tack. Dear me, moral relativism! I'll hold my breath for them to start supposed naked breasts and erect penises on primetime broadcast television.

Remember how up in arms the Christians got because of these works of art? The only difference is that here, with wide and varying access to differing points of view (enjoy it while it lasts, folks) helped to temper and mollify, diffuse and expand.

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Posted by Jeff at 09:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

1. In San Francisco, when one man takes another man into the woods and shoots all over the other's face, we call that a Trick.
   
   
2. Saying “Dr. Pepper” when you really had beer is like going into a gay bar wearing a t-shirt that says, “I'm only here doing research.” I'm sure that for him, being drunk is “just a phase”.
   
   
3. How much do you wanna bet that Dick Cheney was sure to burn the dress that had the beer stains on it? (I'd go for more, but I don't want to even think about what passes for a Texan Bohemian Grove.)

Cheney was quoted as saying, “You can't blame anybody else” about the shooting. But who's really blaming anyone but you, Dick? Eighteen hours happens to be quite long enough for anyone to piss out whatever alcohol they were drinking. But you know, if that's your story, just be make sure no one finds a way to do an end-run around your story, have your friends tell the press that you did have “one cocktail” (which is up from “no cocktails” in the original story) after they took you friend to the hospital.

But then again, what kind of message does that send to [cue crying violins] the chilllllldren! when you take a drink to calm your nerves? That drugs really are ok to use as a coping mechanism?

Funny thing, when you've created such a privilege for yourself that you can be the head of the US Government (let's not kid ourselves) and still expect people to “do as I say not as I do”. On second thought, there's really nothing at all funny about it.

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Posted by Jeff at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The power is out in our little neck of the hippie woods of San Francisco's Bernal Heights area. Our little sylvan hill—or at least our little area of it—is without electricity. It's so quiet in the house that it makes me need to seriously think about the number of gadgets that we keep running at any given moment.

Anyhoo, I shouldn't be here. Shouldn't be typing into my blog, shouldn't be online. No juice, right?

We have in our possession a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply), one that I totally forgot we had. But as the power went out, there was a beeping coming from the front rooms. Lo and behold...net salvation!

We plugged in the cable modem and the Airport Extreme Basestation into it and voilà! Our iBook and PowerBook were back in business.

Good Lord, we're geeks. Ahh, and now the power is back on.

[beat]

Isn't it funny how sentiments are a subjective thing, and so the expression thereof can be so wildly different from couple to couple while the sentiment itself, according to all evidence, so similiar?

♥♥♥ Happy ♥alentine's Day, Hallmark! ♥♥♥

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Posted by Jeff at 05:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Those Muggles never stood a chance.

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Posted by Jeff at 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Leave it to that shrill bitch to pour gasoline on a fire.

She calls for all blogs to participate in a “blogburst” to post all the “forbidden” cartoons. “Forbidden”? God, if I didn't hate that bitch's self-loathing rhetoric so much I could applaud her for her sense of theatrics. Instead, it's just histrionics.

Malkin and the crazy right wing blogbursters—the selfsame people who accuse the progressives of being “blog-addicted”—are purely, puerilely hostile. They're not speaking freely, they just want dissenters to shut up.

And for all the posturing in this country about the sanctity of ____, and the fear that the Christians are being plowed under and are “under attack” by the larger American society, she sets out to be the biggest cunt she can be by espousing the tactics she sooooo deplores in others.

She's counting on the irrational pleadings of hyper-religious leaders as the sole source of information in order to accelerate the violence and extreme religious reaction.

All of this, you stupid bitch Michelle, is called hypocrisy.

Freedom of speech is one thing, a sacred thing if that parlance is more organic to you. But crying fire in a crowded moviehouse isn't free speech, it's hostility.

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Posted by Jeff at 05:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

OMG my eyes are soooo pretty, riiiight? Well, riiiiight?

Seriously, I really mean to stress the “old” part of it. As in, I'm back on the bifocals kick. It all started a couple of nights ago when, to my horror, I was about done reading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (not the porn version, Hairy Pooter and the Prisoner of Ass Cabin—hey, I should revisit the funny-porn-titles thing again!). And I didn't have the fourth book yet!

I know, I'm one of the last people on the planet to have read them, but I do own the DVDs of the first three. I have yet to see any of the movies (including Goblet of Fire) in the theater. And the only reason I have been reading them at all is that my friend and famous Clever Monkey, Steve, gave me a boxed set of the first three books. I must say that the packaging and the cover art on the original hardbacks is quite lovely. Even the fabric used to bind the hard covers are well-chosen contrasts of color which are whimsical and definitely not “normal”: bright green and lurid purple, vivid blue and that same kelly green, etc.

Anyhow, I wasn't going to read them since I already knew the stories, but I started. And so help me Satan Dumbledore, I could not stop. Maybe I just hate Jesus because J.K. Rowling seduced me into it.

Anyhow, with a fucked-up sleep schedule (at one point, I was sleeping from about 9am til 3 in the afternoon after having been awake all night long), and blessing the giant corporate we-can-outlast-the-little-bookshop-in-hours-of-operation Borders Books for staying open til 11pm, I dashed down to China Basin to complete my fix book collection.

There, I was faced with a choice. You see, Books 4 and 5 are already available in trade paperback. So do I buy the paperbacks and save >$40, or do I buy the hardbacks and have a complete and proper collection? Feh. I'm not one for collectibles (and that is certainly not to say our house doesn't collect a lot of crap in it!) and special editions and all that folderol. A book is what it contains, and the content is the same in both editions, so I walked out of there with two trade paperbacks and one hardback (Book 6).

I got home and started devouring reading Book 4. Then it hit me: the pages (and thus the typeface) were significantly smaller than the hardcover editions. I immediately regretted buying the paperbacks. God, I'm old.

Yes, I was wearing my “progressive lens” glasses and yeah, I'm able to read the type without any discomfort, but I was still wishing for the regular-sized type.

So I was sitting on the sofa reading Book 4 and eating some chocolate Sam had picked up earlier at my request. Why did I request it? Well a) it's chocolate! but b) several mentions of “Eat this. You'll feel better. It's chocolate.” in Book 3 made me want to eat chocolate right then and there!

J.K. Rowling is a genius and she keeps reeling you in and making you feel part of it—and without making you feel like you need to identify with any character in particular (though I must admit that if I had to choose one whose disposition and temperament matches my own, it'd be Dumbledore).

And yeah, I know. He's old, too. But (at least in Philosopher's Sorcerer's Stone and Chamber of Secrets) he also had blue eyes! Coincidence? I think not!

Oh, and apropos of nothing, when we were wee little lads, we three boys hated the original Ol' Blue Eyes, Frank Sinatra. Why? Because Marie once mused that if Frank Sinatra ever asked her to marry him, she would. Ahh, the “worries” of a bunch of kids in an idyllic household, huh?

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Posted by Jeff at 06:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (0)

I ♥ Fred the Plumber. He's adorable and cuddly and he's my closest friend.

People have said we look alike...big round bald heads, facial hair, short & stocky powerful builds. But I never believed it. Until my own mother's first comment after she met Fred was “You guys could be brothers.”

I love him like a brother. And like a sister.

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Posted by Jeff at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

21-10! Nuh uh! Git aht! Go Stillers!

Wish I had an Ahrn Pahnder to celebrate with.

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Posted by Jeff at 07:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

All my references are melting together like glue. Or goo.

Maybe it's too much TV. Or TV + vicodin. Or maybe just the need to be functional under the under-the-radar influence of the gabapentin and difficulty in punching through to less hazy waking times.

Jinkies.

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Posted by Jeff at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Cake!

Yeah, on that kick again. Well, shoot me. I have the time, and the box mix, and it's one of the few physical things I can do to any sense of completion, so I made another cake. This one is a yellow “butter recipe” cake with chocolate frosting.

So I had to go for a 13x9 cake than a layer cake because, well, easier. Helloooo.

Those are easy to frost because you really just need to drop all the frosting in the middle of the cake and spread it out to the corners. Also quick. And easy.

Except this is where “easy” gives out to “gay” (just when you thought “easy” and “gay” were complementary!). I simply had to swirl a pattern into the frosting. I was always trying to get my mom to make layer cakes instead of 13x9 cakes and when I did manage to convince her to buy the round pans and make the damn thing, I'd try so hard to get the frosting to look like the box that I'd end up tearing up the cake by the time I was done. Leading to never using the round cake pans again and going back to 13x9 pans until the tragedy was forgotten and then, well, lather, rinse, repeat (which reminds me, I once did sit through the first Lord of the Rings movie).

So I empty the can of chocolate frosting into the middle of the box cake (oh, how I relish that imagery) and spread it out to get even coverage using the knife in just one direction to avoid ruining the cake (a gay boy learns a lot from his earlier mistakes, at least in baking), and then I'm swirling a certain pattern into just the surface of the frosting before I know what I'm doing. That done, I dragged the knife around the entire perimeter making a flat border.

Then it hit me: I had just fashioned into that 13x9 rectangle the same design that my father Jack, the stone mason, fashions into each concrete form he pours. He makes a sort of squiggle pattern across a slab of concrete using a nylon-bristled broom and then uses a special type of rectangular trowel called an edger (brotherman Sam will correct me on that term if I'm misremembering it) to frame each sidewalk with a flat surface.

I bet you didn't know there was a sort of signature to poured concrete sidewalks. Next time you're walking down the street, just look down! (well, unless you're in San Francisco, because they only pour small squares everywhere with nothing interesting about them).

So the cake tastes ok, but as soon as I took the first bite I remember why my mother never went in for the “butter recipe” cakes. They taste, well, like butter. Once again, the wisdom of Marie trumps the superficial application of cultural faggotry.

Maybe that's why we shun box cakes?

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Posted by Jeff at 11:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

I was sitting in Joe the Barber's waiting for Sam to get done with his haircut. I'd already gotten mine (and if you've never had your head shaved with a straight razor, you haven't lived) and I was reading gloss. gloss is a small-format, local periodical that's made up almost entirely of ads for dance clubs and choir-preaching editorials, but it's better than nothing (well, arguably).

[beat]

Ok, right now Joan Rivers and Shannen Doherty are on an episode of The Graham Norton Effect and I uttered to Sam words that I never thought I'd say: Poor Shannen Doherty. Joan is telling her trademark two-part tasteless jokes and Shannen is mortified. Nuff said.

[beat]

Anyway, I was flipping through gloss and near the back were the horoscopes (or, given that it's gloss, whore-oscopes?). I read mine, and for the first time, I felt like I couldn't even try to apply this or any horoscope to myself. It made assumptions of mobility and participation and ability. I mean, how was I going to keep my life on track when it's not on track now? Have you ever noticed that horoscopes don't ever answer that type of question?

Then again, am I so desperate that I'm insisting that a gloss whore-oscope come through for me? Then again, I'd missed a couple of doses of neurontin, so my brain was [mis?]firing again on all cylinders.

Then again. Stir crazy. Yeaaah.

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Posted by Jeff at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)