November 2005
So here I am again. Welcome to the first (and hopefully not the last!) issue of Whuddafug. More than a decade has passed since I last ventured into the world of DIY publishing. I used to write a zine called Musings from a Post St. Apt. Pounded out something like eight issues in eight months on an old HP 386/25 with a 40MB hard drive and 8MB of RAM (for the geeks out there who need to know such things). Twelve pages of drunken rants and unpublished short stories. I even had a few guest writers. Well, one, actually -- my old drinking buddy, Ozzie. Last I heard, he was working as an architect somewhere in the East Bay. Back then, we were a couple of drunks with nothing better to do on a Friday night than sit around my tiny 10x12 apartment, drinking cheap red wine, chain-smoking Marlboro's or puffing away on cheap cigars, trying to appreciate free-form jazz and classical music, acting as philosophers on the brink of some great existential discovery, planning future articles for my zine. But mostly we just got drunk.
Outside of picking up an occasional copy of the Factsheet 5 at the old Harold's Newspapers on Geary and Jones every now and again, I was mostly oblivious to the various happenings in the zining community, unfamiliar with the seemingly alien protocols of letter-writing and trading stamps, reading obscure reviews and sending disguised $1 bills like ransom payments to strangers I only knew through a P.O. box. I didn't realize how big this community was until I got onto the Internet a few years later (almost ten years later) and discovered all the really cool stuff that people had been doing all along.
A girlfriend of mine at the time would leave copies of my zine in the cafes around the neighborhood. Whenever I tried to leave copies personally at one place, the Iranian shop-owners would shake their heads with disgust. "No!" was always their reply when I asked if I could leave a few on one of the newspaper racks. But they smiled and cooed when Elisa delivered them. I even left copies in a few randomly selected kiosks that housed the more professionally done Bay Guardian and SF Weekly papers.
Then I began receiving fan mail -- packets of oatmeal from one gal whose return address appeared to be a women's prison somewhere in Washington and $5 bills from another. Ahh, fame...I'll take it wherever I find it. Even if it came in a schizoid, loner kind of way, I was still digging it.
Lonesome crazy days back then, sunlight creeping over the rooftop tenements on a Saturday afternoon in that rundown Tenderloin neighborhood, drinking and fucking and not seeing or speaking to very many people, hardly anyone at all, in fact; spending most of my time brooding; on the weekends walking around that gray zone area of poor immigrants and poor transvestites, drug-addled runaways and homeless alcoholics, an area bordered by Van Ness, California, Jones, and Geary, or, as I had it picured in my mind, Around the World Books, Circuit City, Union Square, and the main library. The flea market that used to happen in an old parking lot near South Van Ness might as well have been an island off the coast of Florida. Roaming anonymously through the crowds, secretly despising them -- it wasn't so much an attitude as it was a philosophy. If I saw any family at all, it was during Christmas usually for a day or two, then I was back to my little room in the city where I could again be alone and think and read and brood. Grunge hadn't yet shot itself in the head. O.J. Simpson was still a wife-killing asshole who hadn't yet been acquitted. Rent for my "efficiency" studio in the Tenderloin was $365 a month, which was considered even back then to be a cheapo embarrassment. When people at work asked where I lived, I used the euphemistic "lower Nob Hill." But hey, it was my own place, my first place, and I could eat, shit, and sleep in whatever order and at whatever time I wanted. It barely provided enough room for me to cut my toenails much less house a double bed, a corner desk, a computer, and a small 14-inch t.v. In all this cramped mess, there was just enough carpet space to walk. If you wanted to use the bathroom, you had to move the desk chair out of the way. The bathroom door couldn't shut all the way due to all the years of layering on the cheap white paint without first stripping the previous layer underneath it. The stuff was literally caked on like frosting and looked it. And when the door was swung open, it'd hit the bottom edge of the bed. So if you had guests in quarters as close and cramped as those, you'd better be pretty damn comfortable with them that you wouldn't mind hearing the toilet splash as each turd hit the water.
But things changed before I realized things were changing. Life began to move in a different direction. I began working as a paralegal and for the next two years, I was consumed with other people's problems -- $10 million lawsuit kind of problems, sexual harrassment kind of problems, wrongful termination kind of problems -- going to court, working into the wee hours of the night doing trial prep, discovery, coding documents -- all kinds of pointless law firm-related bullshit that eventually crowded out the more important things in my life, like being left to myself, like writing, like wandering around aimlessly downtown for the sake of wandering around aimlessly downtown. I worked with lawyers who, at the end of each evening, hopped into their BMWs or Mercedes and drove back to their estates down the peninsula or out in the Oakland hills. Me, I hoofed it back to my hovel in the Tenderloin with my $2 Goodwill tie, $3 shirt, and my freshly-pressed Mervyn's slacks -- a fifteen-minute commute on foot, down the hill through the Chinatown gates, through Union Square, then a straight shot down Post Street into the Tenderloin, er, "lower Nob Hill."
But that's all in the past now. Ten years have passed in the blink of an eye of a blue-eyed girl who was here one day and gone the next. I changed careers and went into the tech industry, and with all the money I started making, I wandered into those dive bars and drank as recklessly and ruthlessly as any Bukowski short story, pissing it all down those dank, vomited-in toilets, between those homophobic graffitied walls, swearing and shooting pool, playing for drinks, drunken rambling, joining wide-eyed tourists attempting to be part of the scene and alcoholic regulars, bitter, contemptuous and full of the usual barroom bullshit, Korean drunkards, Chinese drunkards, Mexican just-snuck-across-the-border-and-working-under-the-table drunkards, Muni bus-driving drunkards. Then home to crash and then off to work late as usual the next morning to make more of that easy tech money. Then back to the bars in the evening, but wait until at least 7pm. Try not to make it too obvious that you've become an alcoholic barfly. Everything clearcut down to the bone. Life crystallized down to its most basic necessities -- drinking, fucking, and making more money so you could do more drinking and fucking. Dinner was often fried squid or a plateful of peanuts served up by some Korean barmaid who barely spoke English but knew how to wiggle those assets and swindle cash and other favors out of desperate old men, and young men, too. Nothing else mattered.
Except the writing. And the writing suffered. I was too busy living those years. No time to write. A few scribbled notes here, a couple unfinished short stories there, half-filled notebooks with ideas and sketches, half-assed poetry, drunken thoughts. I'll come back to it later.
Years later.
One morning in 1999, while I sat drinking my coffee and dragging on a cigarette, ten minutes before leaving for a new job, another tech gig in the financial district, watching my new wife sleeping who was pregnant with Sara, in that gloomy Victorian studio with 12-foot ceilings, I began scribbling the first lines of a book that I'm still writing today. I've drifted in and out of it since then, like a recurring dream. In between the dry spells, the blocked episodes, the long painful droughts of uninspired frustration, I scribbled notes, ideas, musings and ramblings. What you hold in your hands is an attempt at putting some of these six years of writerly distraction into some kind of order, expanded upon, refocused and repackaged in zine format. I don't know if I've succeeded. It might not even work, but it doesn't really matter. The words are there, laying on the vacant page, waiting for me to do something with them. Why not send them off into the wild and see what happens?
Enjoy.
I don't need a computer. I don't need a connnection to the Internet. I don't need e-mail accounts or membership to mailing lists or Yahoo Groups, nor do I need to be a part of the Usenet community.
I need to write.
The merlot I drank earlier is starting to feel like medicine on my brain.
I must write every day. If not on the train on the way to work, if not in my truck during my lunch break, if not in the office while sitting through yet another status meeting, if not at home after I've showered and eaten dinner, if not on the weekends while watching Sara playing at the park, if not on a scrap of paper while I'm sitting on the toilet....THEN WHEN?
But it isn't enough just to write randomly and with abandon. Think. Expand and develop all the ideas that I have floating around in my head. Thoughts become ideas. Ideas spawn images and further thought processes.
Stop the bullshit and all the tippy-toeing.
Why am I writing this with a Royal manual typewriter? Am I trying to be retro-chic? Am I trying to be hip-cool like other trendy zinesters? Not really. I use this old typewriter because I spend most of my day typing on a computer keyboard, and it has only worsened the tendonitis/carpal tunnel syndrome that begins to annoy the hell outta me when I spend too many long hours typing away on those plastic pieces of shit. I need to write. Anything. Any time. Anywhere. I cannot let a bit of physical pain stop me from this compulsion. I need to write. Sure, I could write out these missives in longhand using only a pen and a pad of paper, and I do, but even I have a difficult time deciphering my own penmanship days after the fact. This old typewriter, and the few others that I've picked up at thrift stores and flea markets over the years were the logical compromise between efficiency and physical pain.
There are no distractions when I'm writing on a manual typewriter. I'm not able to minimize any windows and open up Internet Explorer. I don't hve the ability to lose myself for hours searching for pirated music on the IMesh network or Gnutella. There is nothing between my thoughts and the blank page except my fingers and the typewriter keys. I need for things to be this way. Writing requires that you eliminate as many of the middle-man distractions as you can.
I wear three masks. Each has a separate life of its own, completely separate from the rest. Husband/father, writer, and corporate lackey.
None of them willingly cede time or energies to any of the others. Each are selfish and demand to be worn 24 hours a day.
But I have only one face, and my time on this earth is severely limited.
Sara has seven cousins, all born within a few years of each other 2000 - 2003, and one half brother whom she has yet to meet, whom I've not seen since the day he was born thirteen years ago. His mother was a brown-haired blue-eyed girl who moved out from Colorado to be a part of the San Francisco flower child scene, some kind of punk rock version of Meg Ryan, who didn't realize she arrived a few decades too late, but such naivete can be expected from a nineteen-year-old whose father was an abusive Bible-thumping, borderline (if not all-out) fanatic Christian preacher.
I was a loner and figured it to mean I had but one choice, which was to move into a rundown efficiency studio in the middle of San Francisco's Tenderloin district and become a writer. I didn't expect to make any friends or meet any attractive young women, much less fall for one. I had my own naivete about me -- I was figuring I'd live the life of a recluse, right there in the middle of downtown San Francisco, alone with my books and my own private thoughts like some monk holed up in a tower somewhere. That lasted for about six months, and somewhere between eating three-dollar packs of frozen burritos for weeks on end and staggering down Geary Blvd. drunk at two in the morning, throwing up in the bushes, holding myself up against the wall while cops flashed me with their spotlight, my writing efforts fell by the wayside. My most productive time during that period was between 1993 to 1994. I was writing one short story a week and publishing a zine called Musings from a Post St. Apt.
I am my own ghost looking down from above upon my life here on this earth, and this is what I've seen so far. Trying to determine the things that matter, trying to figure out what I need to become in order to do the things that matter, how I need to grow and develop as a human being, as a soul, nevermind as a writer or worse, that pointless and misleading struggle for "professional" development. Sometimes I feel like a meandering vine growing up the wrong side of a building in another part of town. The roadmap to my life is something that I'm making up as I go along, and I'm wondering if that's the wrong way to go.
I am a husband and father now. More masks for me to wear.
I made a quiet decision early on that I didn't want a career. I'd barely made it out of high school. Going to college was for me a sad, unfunny joke -- no money, low SATs, no interest whatsoever. If I didn't know what I wanted to do, why should I pay for schooling to learn how to do it? I had in mind only to drift for a while, float, do nothing. I was in no hurry to have any labels slapped onto my forehead -- "lawyer," "dishwasher," "engineer," "paralegal," "electrician," "lumberjack." Wage slaves, all of them. I knew I wanted to write, but beyond putting words down on a blank page, I had no idea how to make a living out of it. Still don't, in fact.
Not that I didn't want to work. It's good to keep busy, provided it's a healthy kind of busy and not the kind of busy-ness where assholes are nitpicking at you all day, buzzing around, rushing you, hounding you, while the work is comprised of the pettiest, the most pointless of tasks, which in itself isn't so bad if each task wasn't elevated to such absurd heights of importance to the point where you're pressured into believing that any mistake you make will cause the world to implode on itself; or cause the third world war; or bring about another ice age; small rodents will rise up from their burrows and begin gnawing on your ankles; celebrities will be talking about you behind your back and pointing fingers, laughing at you.
But still, it's nice having enough cash leftover after each paycheck to buy new underwear or maybe fry some steak for dinner instead of heating up that can of pork 'n beans. As long as I didn't have that label stuck on my forehead, which is what inevitably happens when you sign on to work for Company XYZ. The danger in this lies in the possibility that you might actually start believing those labels that have been stamped onto your forehead. "You're a monkey. You must dance like one for the rest of your life. Please sign on the dotted line."
The brain-washing and the transformation begins your first day of employment. Your own motives and desires are usurped by the Company's motives and desires. It's too easy to slip into that groove which soon becomes a rut and then a deep chasm from which no employee can ever hope to escape. You lose your wings. Your eyesight weakens until you can no longer see beyond that horizon of rotting flesh on which you feed. You become a squirming flesh maggot, writhing, seething, a parasite that can no longer exist without its host. When your time is done, you are churned and absorbed, regurgitated to feed the new parasites that have rushed in to take your place. And you thought you were getting a good deal with two weeks' vacation and a 401k plan.
I wanted to be left to myself and my own devices, like a pool of still water, clear glass surface, untouched by thrown rocks or stirring sticks or ducks waddling into me, left alone to ponder my own thoughts, nobody pushing me this way or that way, my own mind moving me along at a slow leisurely pace, meandering, curious, lackadaisical. Why the rush? Why that damned go-getter attitude? Why this need to race to stop signs and this need to rush to work? Hurry up, buy a house and get tied into a 30-year mortgage with $2,000 a month payments -- quick before interest rates rise, before all the good properties are bought out by all the Indians and Chinese. Why? Why are these idiots in a race to get to jobs that most of them despise and buy houses hardly any of them can actually afford? Me, I take the backroads and want to live in a shipping container (but more on that later).
I wanted to live as Thoreau did and build my one-room shack in the middle of downtown San Francisco, however naive and ignorant that notion might have been. For sustenance, I would make copies, or file papers, or maintain computer networks, or code automated test scripts using TCL/Expect or Python. What the hell? To me, there is no difference. The face remains the same though the scenery might change. One can choose to grow like a weed, a vine, or a Christmas tree, all decked out and prettied out only to get chopped down in cold blood, a drying, rotting corpse on display in some heretic household. 'Tis the season, my brother. How deep do your roots grow?
"Where do you see yourself in five years?" Yet another pointless, useless question. How the hell should I know? I don't even know what I'll be doing six months from now or next week, even. And even if I thought I knew, I'd probably change my mind. Why? Because sometimes it depends on the weather. Sometimes it depends on my mood. Sometimes it depends on my reaction to other people's moods. Sometimes I'll read something in the newspaper or come across a passage in a book that inspires me to move in a slightly different direction. Some day I might decide to go wandering down the road, never to be seen or heard from again. Forgive me for not submitting my two-week notice -- better to leave now than be laid off twenty years down the road, a forgotten face in a sea of obsolete wage slaves, primping and preening for their bosses, sad and pathetic like a wrinkled, sagging call girl years past her prime.
The point is, our time here is limited -- nothing is permanent -- all life is fleeting and temporary. Or so say the Buddhists, and I happen to agree. Why walk around with concrete boots with your big toe nailed to the floor? Why spend years out of your life trying to please others? I'm not looking for "career opportunities." You can take that damned meaningless buzzword and flush it down the toilet along with "team player," "hard worker," "fast learner," "challenging position," "dynamic environment," "growth oriented," -- take all that shit and throw it out the window. It means nothing. I'm looking for opportunity, period. I'm looking for any opportunity that doesn't involve having to show up every morning, same Bat-time, same Bat-channel. I don't want to get tricked into thinking I have to spend the rest of my life doing something, the same thing, over and over again just because I happen to be doing it now. My real goal is to find some kind of job that is just that -- a job. When I leave work, I leave everything there with it. There are no assumed or hidden impositions on my time or my psyche. When I come home, I come home, and my day at work is as if it never happened at all.
I've seen that a lot -- people not being themselves but being their job titles. Lawyer, software engineer, manager, paralegal, file clerk, coffee-counter skank with an attitude. Their personalities molded to fit their resumes. They can't all be sheep. But time and again I see people failing to consider the possibility of becoming something other than what their jobs have defined them to be. If you get fired or laid off, what are you then? What happens when you awake one day to discover that you no longer have a job title? Who are you? A lot of guys would have a nervous breakdown. You see it in the papers. Some guys go home and slaughter their entire families. Japanese businessmen -- company men, as they call them -- jump out of highrise windows. No job? No job title? Status reduced to nil? Ah, life isn't worth living. Kill yourself. The result of years of wearing corporate blinders. You've forgotten who you really are and can only identify yourself in terms of the Corporation. You are a bank account, a social security number, an employee ID, so-and-so who sits in cubicle 21-3-c, team lead of that, reporting to this, email address at-something-dot-com. You are a three-dimensional business card in the flesh.
I didn't want a career, but now more than a decade later and well into my thirties, I find myself trying to hang on to the pathetic semblance of one. Worrying about health benefits, dental plans, vacation time, sick time. Got to pay the rent, the truck payment, the credit cards, cell phone bills, electricity...and on and on and on. Why all the worry and anxiety? I have a kid and a wife to support now, but why should that change anything? My philosophies have remained the same. All I know is that I need to get out. Get out of that cycle. I hesitate to even call it a rat race. Rats are smarter than that. It's more like what happens to cheese when it's been left in the fridge for too long -- it's a kind of mold that rots the brain, makes you forget who you are or why you are. Never was interested in climbing the corporate ladder, and yet I find myself clinging to the lower rungs time and time again, but I am content to sit there and be left alone. I'm just here to pay the rent and survive another day without starving. Not interested in the political intrigue and gossip of who's fucking whom and who's trying to claw, fight, kiss ass, or cheat their way up, bent over, puckered bunghole spread wide for the taking. I find myself surrounded by self-serving, glory-holed glory hounds. My motivation, on the other hand, is to FIND A WAY OUT. Go ahead, please, cut in line to become project lead, team lead, assistant manager. Curry favor with the boss's boss. Fight and demand recognition for your half-witted contributions to the Company's bottom line, as if anyone gives a shit. If those are your only goals in life, I pity you, indeed.
One of the coolest jobs I ever had was working as a mailroom clerk/copy machine guy in one of the downtown law firms. Free copies, free stamps, just do your thing and nobody bothers you. Made just enough money to pay rent $365 a month and buy a pack of frozen burritos and tortilla chips every week for groceries. Content to be suriving. Then came the blue-eyed girl from Colorado and changed everything. But that's another story.
This is a fuck you all to all you fuckers who require good credit, you pansy-assed motherfuckers who expect stable work histories, you clammy-skinned cunt-swagglers who demand co-signers, down payments, and reference checks. Fuck you all!
If this needs to be a cash-only operation, then fuck you, too! I'll make it a cash-only operation! You can stick your fucking credit checks up your stinking credit-checking asses!
I don't need your money, thank you very much. I'll get by without it! Fuck you, Mr. Mobile Home Park Owner/Manager. Fuck you, Ms. Real Estate Agent. Fuck you, Mr. Home Loan Lender. Fuckers. You can jack each other off and slurp each others' turds for all I fucking care. Some day I will be rich. Some day I will be famous. You will want to pay me to sniff that Nacho cheese smelling crud that collects between my toes.
Go ahead, laugh. You think it's funny now. You will come home one evening to find me cramming my foot up your wife's bunghole while she moans in delight, like a dying sea cow. Stupid dumbfuck. You will wish it was you instead of your wife, you sick fuck of an ass-kissing dog-fucker.
But anyway...
Snippets of dialogue. Flashes of imagery. Something here, something there. Weave it all together and make a nice cozy blanket in which to wrap the reader, then WHAM! -- cold water down the shorts, ice-pick to the back of the head. A kick in the gut. Wake the motherfucker up. Wake up the motherfucker. Wake up, motherfucker. Gonna bash you over the head with this lamp post. Your blood spills over the words which spilled from my own veins.
John Lennon once told an interviewer (and I'm paraphrasing): Once you start writing a song, it's best to finish it in the same sitting because if you set it down and try to come back to it later, you'll be in a completely different mindset and will not remember what inspired you to start writing the song in the first place.
The same could be said for short stories, poems. I've got reams of the stuff that I'll probably never complete because I no longer feel the spark that caused me to begin those efforts in the first place. It's like going back to a place for which you have fond memories and then realizing that place has no memory of you. It's not the same, and whatever imprint you thought you had left is gone as easily as all the others who came before and after. Wiped clean. A passing breeze and nothing more.
Some of this, maybe all of this, or perhaps none of it should appear bundled up, expanded upon, included in an issue of the zine I've yet to publish. Who knows.
I dig the pounding away at this old typewriter and seeing the mess of words that is left behind on the once-empty page. I don't get the same feeling writing on a computer. Things seem too fluid, too eraseable. It's like what you put there isn't going to last, so why bother putting it there in the first place?
Here's where I belong. Here, right here. On the blank page, filling it with streams of words. No one telling me what I should be doing or not doing. Too much thinking and a whole lot of unnecessary stress. It's difficult enough finding the time to write when other areas of my life are sailing along.
Silence. Easier to think when there is silence. All that external traffic, all that external noise.
I was angry with God these past few days, but a lot of that was misdirected. Why blame God for the stupidity of one man, or even millions of them? He created the bed; we pissed in it. I was angry with myself for having gotten into all of these predicaments, all this bad karma, these resentments, these regrets, stuff that really bugs the fuck out of me and keeps me from moving forward. Can't make any forward progress at the moment; I'm chained to too many things -- responsibilities and obligations. I was feeling tired, tired, angry, and exhausted, spent and burned out. Beat. I'm experiencing my own personal Beat Generation.
Fast approaching my mid-thirties. Soon I will be old.
It's the same process, really. The process hasn't changed. My habits have remained the same. In the evenings, I'm in front of the computer or sitting with a book or writing. Sara comes and sits next to me with her own pen and writing pad. Nadjet calls from the kitchen. Dinner's ready. The television on in the background; no one's watching.
When you're spending so much time struggling and worrying about survival, paying the bills, always those goddamned bills, trying not to get fired or laid off, it's difficult to refocus and start thinking about other stuff -- writing, philosophy, reading about new religions, which are just the same old ones you hadn't yet discovered. When you spend all your time fighting and reacting like an animal, your mind reverts back to those baser animalistic instincts. Like people living in the ghettos, the outskirts of what most of us recognize as civilization, they don't have time to discuss reasons for existence or how various modes of thought might apply to their own lives. They're just trying to make it to the next day, another day above ground -- paying the rent, putting food on the table, getting to bed in time in order to get up early enough to get to work on time. Everything in Time, on Time, victimized by Time. Time is cruelest to those at the bottom, it seems.
"Don't have time." "Need more time." "Couldn't find the time." "Couldn't make the time."
But Time is not ours to possess, nor is it some commodity on which we can trade. It is immobile, unmovable yet constantly moving. We have this concept of a past and a future, but there is only a continuous movement through the present. We're trying to catch something that can never be caught.
The future looks bleak with old age and death. But for now, I'll just keep moving through that process and not let it get to me. My thinking outpaces Time even if my body cannot. That's good enough for me.
"The old and infirm and the timid, of whatever age or sex, thought most of sickness, and sudden accident and death; to them life seemed full of danger -- what danger is there if you don't think of any?"
-- Henry David Thoreau, "Walden", pg. 127
"...[A] man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong -- acting the part of a good man or of a bad."
-- Plato's "Apology"
There is a ghost of an old man standing behind me, always looking over my shoulder, witnessing my every move. This is the ghost of me thirty or forty years from now. Thought waves reflecting back through time, trying to lend a helping hand to my younger self. Sometimes I hear it, sometimes I don't.
Came across a dead seal on the beach tucked away near the jutting rocks. Its head was missing. There were two gaping holes in its body that looked like the spot where birds had been picking away at it. I peered into one of the holes and saw a squirming mass of maggots. The Universe at work.
Later, two men arrive. An older gay couple. One of them goes wading into the water neck high. He's swimming. He's brave. This is Northern California. The water temperature rarely goes over 54-55 degrees in the summer. The waves are dark and breaking hard on the shore. There's got to be a strong undertow. People have drowned out here, thinking it's going to be like a calm pond-like experience, like Miami Beach, where you can walk a hundred yards out and the water barely reaches your chest. Fools.
Not more than twenty yards away, two seals watch him, slick smooth heads bobbing just above the surface. Is it uncommon for a seal to attack a man? I thought for sure they would have dragged him into the deep and drowned him.
It's how you look at things. Driving across the San Mateo Bridge, Mission Peak is just another blip along the stretch of foothills that line the East Bay, barely noticeable. But driving down Paseo Padre in Fremont, heading straight towards it, you'd think it's the one and only greatest damn mountain in the whole area.
I mentioned this to Nadjet yesterday on the way home from Half Moon Bay, but she was too tired to care.
Walking to the train station from work this afternoon, I saw a dead bird fall out of a tree. It came tumbling through the leaves and branches, a huddled clump of dark gray feathers. It sort of bounced when it hit the ground, like a soggy rolled up newspaper. Another bird flew away as the dead bird fell. Perhaps it was its mate. I mourned for it silently the rest of the way to the train station.
In 1996, I had no idea that I'd be buying a new GMC Sonoma pickup seven years later in 2003. I wasn't interested in owning stuff. I didn't consider myself a part of what George Bush today is calling an "ownership society." Quite the opposite, in fact -- I wanted to get rid of everything I owned. Release it all into the wild. Leave it all in the apartment lobby, free for the taking. Or some Goodwill donation bin. All I planned to keep was an old army duffel bag to lug around the essentials -- some clothes, notebooks, portable typewriter. Anything else I figured I could always buy again. Didn't feel driven to own a car or a house. Still don't.
I half expected I'd own a car (or truck) again some day, simply out of necessity, but after putzing around town in a '67 Mustang in high school with a broken gas gauge, drum brakes that were always overheating, an engine that leaked so much oil that it never needed an oil change because I was pouring in a fresh quart every few days, anyway, and windows that never really rolled up all the way, I wasn't in any rush to be the owner of another one of those money-sucking, gas-guzzling, bolt-rattling deathtraps. My commute to work was a short 15-minute walk through Union Square, and I had no reason to believe that I'd be needing anything other than my own two feet to happily get me where I needed to go. The grocery store/deli market was across the street. Dive bars beckoned from around every corner. Thai food, Chinese, pizza, Japanese cuisine could all be found within a five-block radius. Anything farther couldn't be more than a $20 cab ride. Beyond that wasn't worth visiting unless I bought plane tickets and took a two-vacation.
In 1996, I had no clue that seven years later, I would be riding the train every day from Milpitas to south San Jose, a 45-minute stop-and-go ride through a suburban wasteland, just another suburban bastard meandering through that ghosttown of a downtown San Jose, then down the center of Highways 85 and 87, smack dab into the heart of sleepy suburbia with its soccer moms, SUVs, and hip-hop kids with their daddy-bought rice rockets and faux ghetto-speak. Whazzup whazzup, yo! Whiggas from da bedroom communa-TEE in da house, BOI!
I was a city snob. People in the suburbs were inbred freaks or programmed clones or sheep on two legs. Indian and Chinese immigrants arrived in droves like bits and bytes downloaded through a high-speed wireless connection, all too willing to be part of that bland, lifeless existence, convinced that living in overpriced cardboard boxes is proof enough that the American Dream is as alive and well as any zombie stalking out of some B-movie horror flick. Car payments and property taxes is all the proof you need to show your relatives back home that, yes, you have arrived. You are an American success story. "Oh say, can you see -- I pledge allegiance to the -- uh, how'd that go again? It doesn't matter. Where's my green card, my H1B visa, my Starbuck's coffee card and my American Express corporate account?" Why why why? Ditch their former cultures for one that is as homogenized as the milk that's poured into their grande no-whip lattes. Who cares? We can afford hookers and lap dances from fake blondes with fake tits! America welcomes you with a porno movie money-shot right between the eyes.
Urban sprawl is what's killing America! I bitched and moaned without knowing a thing about urban planning or civil/social engineering, but that's okay. You don't need to be an idiot to recognize idiocy, and yet, having grown up in the relatively harmless suburb of Newark, California, I too preferred the convenience of cloned strip malls and wide open streets with plenty of room for parking, albeit covertly and with a shamed hypocrisy. I pretended to suffer the intellectual equivalent of bile bubbling to the frontal lobe of my brain whenever I came across yet another strip mall with yet another Starbuck's and Wal-Mart and Barnes & Noble or Border's bookstores/cafes. Can't leave out that cafe. Can't have bookstores without cafes. People in the suburbs can't read their hi-tech how-tos or SAT prep guides unless they can order that cup of cappucino to go with it and sit around looking all intellectual-like and studious, glancing over the rims of their cups as they secretly spy each other, wondering what the hell they're all doing there, anyway. Too much of a good thing makes for crowds and long lines, and then it just sucks. Like being two hours early for a flight that's two hours delayed. Like spending the night in the city jail at 850 Bryant. Standing around looking at people staring back at me. I've become one of the sheeple -- part man, part sheep! Baa-aa-aa...aw, fuck.
I didn't realize how normal life would be in the years immediately following the new millenium. I half-believed all those doomsday predictions that the mechanisms of society would all come to a grinding halt and the world as we knew it would come to an end. I was looking forward to it. I, too, wanted it all to end. Then came September 11th, and now we have another George Bush in office and right-wing Christian fanatics forcing their crackpot agendas upon the rest of the nation, a group of people who believe in Christianity in the same way that zombies believe in life after death -- retarded, half-baked, and completely missing the point.
In 1999, I had grown tired and annoyed with the johnny-come-lately dot-com poseurs flashing their cash and bragging about their soon-to-be-worthless stock options. Sure, I was one of them, but I was trying to get the hell out. I had plans to ditch this existence for another somewhere on the other side of the globe. Or so I thought. People flew into town with greed in their eyes and itchy clicking mouse fingers. The land of opportunity, pornstars, and fresh sushi. I was tired of the folks moving in from the Midwest or the Far East, crowding up the city, causing apartment rents to rise. Too many damn people all at once. All sleepwalking in the same damned dream. All of them wanting the exact same thing. Dressing alike, thinking alike, moving in hypnotic unison down Market Street, first one way in the morning, then the opposite direction in the evening. Wanting to live in the same neighborhoods. Wanting to hang out in the same bars, the same restaurants. Dot-com this, dot-com that. It all seemed cool until you realized most of it was bullshit. All fake smiles, feigned interest while looking for a better deal across the room, the khaki-wearing crowd standing around sniffing each other's bungholes, stepping over the homeless as they made their way in. This was no glory age by any means. It was all stupidity. Idiocy. Hype for hype's sake. Bellybutton contemplation taken to its extreme. I hate to be such a naysayer, but it's true. Everything sucked. I know. I was there.
But who was doing the real work? What companies were actually making something? Anything? What people were doing shit that actually mattered? Everything was words and pictures on a blank screen. Or some kind of information, conveying information, moving information, fusing information, selling information, most of it pointless, unnecessary. Well, fuck information! We needed something to bomb us back to the Stone Age, something to make us take a step back and realize all this technology and stock options and web release parties and Java-based inanities didn't matter. It only served to create a lot of inflated job titles and meaningless job descriptions where none had previously existed. Many of these losers are the same ones now writing angry messages on Craigslist and other message boards across the Internet, flaming those who still have jobs and weren't dumb enough to get distracted by the hype and bullshit. The Indians and Chinese were learning the real skills and doing the real work. Guess who's still gainfully employed today?
How quickly things have changed in seven years. Here I am, riding the train into work. I have a five-year-old daughter who just started kindergarten earlier this month, and I have a beautiful wife with the soul of an angel who provides a haven for us to retreat to at the end of the day.
In 1996, I had no idea that this solo act would soon become a team effort.
In 2004, the world certainly hasn't ended, and I am the new me.
Riding the train down North First Street in San Jose. Rows and rows of empty parking spaces. One car for every ten or twenty spaces, like missing keys on a broken down piano. Vacant cubicles in vacant buildings. "For Lease" signs everywhere. These are modern-day ghost towns, not quite dead yet, in near-vegetative states. Silent testament to what happens when you overhype bullshit, variations on themes that failed. Copycats die off quicker than the real thing. Look at what became of Dolly the Cloned Sheep. Looked just like a real sheep, and yet, something wasn't quite...right.
P2P, broadband, 802.11a/b/g, voice over IP.
Companies might have a use for some of that stuff, but do people really need it?
Sex and real estate are the only industries still making money in this town.
"As the Mongol government grew weaker, the power of the landed class grew stronger, until oppression of the rural masses exploded in a series of popular uprisings of a kind which in the long history of China presage a violent change of dynasty.
"The first revolts broke out as early as 1325, and were led by leaders thrown up by the lower classes, such as peasants, fishermen and artisans; they represented a rising of the poor against the rich, rather than a patriotic protest against foreign domination, and they spread through the towns and villages of central China. The government was unable to check the growing anarchy; there was no strong hand at the helm, the seasoned warriors of imperial days had died out and been replaced by young troops with no experience of war; a regular army was as usual at a disadvantage in a struggle with running guerillas, and a thousand men were often incapable of flushing out from the hills and woods a band of fifty."
-- from "The History of the Mongol Conquests" by J.J. Saunders, page 150
"It is the people with secret attractions to various temptations who busy themselves with removing these temptations from other people; really they are defending themselves under the pretext of defending others, because at heart they fear their own weakness."
-- Henry Miller on Writing, page 178, "Obscenity and the Law of Reflection," quoting a Dr. Ernst Jones
Despite the clouds like armies charging through a darkened sky, in the dim blue mist of morning, the foothills and mountains in the distance take on the appearance of a Chinese watercolor. Calm, serene, enlightened. I get a sense of the peace that is within reach.
"Beat doesn't mean tired, or bushed, so much as it means beato, the Italian for beatific: to be in a state of beatitude like St. Francis, trying to love all life, trying to be utterly sincere with everyone, practicing endurance, kindness, cultivating joy of heart. How can this be done in our mad modern world of multiplicities and millions? By practicing a little solitude, going off by yourself once in a while to store up that most precious of golds: the vibrations of sincerity.
"Being bugged is not being beat. You may be withdrawn, but you don't have to be mean about it. Beatness is not a form of tired old criticism. It is a form of spontaneous affirmation. What kinda culture you gonna have with everybody's gray faces saying 'I don't think that's quite correct'?"
-- Jack Kerouac, essays on the Beat Generation, "Lamb, No Lion," from the book "Good Blonde & Others"
Three weird dreams last night.
First, we're all at Grandma's house on 40227 Blacow Rd. It's evening. Then we hear this boy calling for his mom in the backyard. Nadjet gets all excited. Everyone starts looking through the windows to see who it might be. I walk through the garage to the side of the house out back and see this blonde boy scared and teary-eyed. Says he got lost. I ask him how he got there, and he takes me to the back fence in the yard, except there isn't a back fence there. It's a slight uphill slope that leads to large grassy field, like one of those places where you'd go dayhiking on the weekends. Then his mom (or his sister) walks over -- the boy lives with his family a few houses down -- his sister is leading this creature that looks like a llama but it has a round face almost like a monkey. She's holding it by its leash, but it keeps hissing and wanting to attack me. I step back, hesitant. But the boy's okay now, and back in the kitchen where the rest of the family was watching, I try to explain about the llama/monkey creature, and I ask "Where's Justin?" thinking he's still a ten-year-old little boy, and someone says "He's still at work." and then I realize that Justin is grown now. Old enough to work fulltime and pay the rent.
Next, Andre and Jessica and Dad, Cora, and Elaine and Evelyn are all living with us in our two-bedroom apartment. We have two computers, both sitting out on the table in the diningroom where my one computer sits now. Nadjet and I return from somewhere, and we discover that Andre has tried redecorating our apartment and has moved the two computers back into the second bedroom, like how they used to be. But when I go to lift one of the monitors, I hear shards of glass shifting around on the inside, and I realize that he actually damaged it while trying to move everything. I get all enraged and angry and hurtful and mean again, like how I get in waking times with Nadjet and Sara. I begin to insult Andre and Dad for being losers and not being able to afford their own places. I try really hard to make them feel humiliated, which they do. Then I take out a cigarette, light it up and start smoking again. Nadjet is surprised. "Why are you smoking again?" she asks me. Yes, I say, and I will quit when those two losers and everyone else gets the hell out of our apartment. While everyone is leaving, I continue my rant: I never hope to see any one of them ever again. I don't need them. Don't care for them.
This last dream is a little happier: We're all riding our bikes -- me, Nadjet and Sara. I'm on one bike, and Nadjet and Sara are riding on another. We're riding south through a city, which is San Francisco's Tenderloin district, except in my dream world this part of the city looks completely different -- the City Hall area has a lot of grass and open space and weird grassy path patterns in the walkways, like curly-Qs. We're all riding south through this area of the city, and there's this uphill part where I challenge Nadjet all in good fun to see who can get to the top first. I'm ahead, and I can hear Nadjet and Sara laughing behind me. We're happy and having fun. I charge up the hill and make it to the second ledge before the top, then I keel over voluntarily and fall on my back, huffing and puffing. I hear Sara down below: "Daddy made it! Daddy made it!" Nadjet takes an easier path to the top and meets me up there. I realize that what I thought was the second ledge before the top is actually the top of the hill. We're happy and having fun, though, like when we go to Half Moon Bay during waking hours and play together in the sand, Nadjet and Sara chasing me down the beach. Another man in full cycling regalia comes riding up behind us and off to the side. He sees us having fun, but he keeps riding his own way and doesn't say anything. Not sure how he relates to everything else in the dream. Maybe he's just background scenery, or maybe he's my guardian angel or God watching over us.
In San Francisco at a T-intersection at the bottom of a hill near a bus stop. Michelle and Grandma are with me, and Grandma's looking very frail. I remember that there is an empty lot up at the top of the hill with very good dirt; it's the same dirty used for gardening. I remember planting vegetable seeds up there a year ago, I tell them. I ask if Grandma wants to walk with me, but she says, I'll meet you up there. So I head up the hill by myself. I see people standing in line to buy something, and I see that the spots where I'd planted seeds a year ago have all bloomed and are looking nice and healthy. I have a plastic bag with me; there was something else I was carrying (I think it was my writing) -- I begin pulling out the short fat carrots, nice and healthy, then I pick out some of the tomatos. I head back down the hill and show Michelle and Grandma. I forgot to get some of the corn, I tell them. There were too many people standing around that section of the lot.
I overhear Michelle explain to someone about me, "He's bald." And I suddenly become aware of how I've aged. I'm getting chubbier, bald, and somehow my complexion isn't as clear as Michelle's when I look at her.
Met Brad Pitt at a local McDonald's. Had to wait forever for my Big Mac order, and even then the old lady had prepared it differently. It was more like a $10 restaurant burger.
Ants moving as one single unit all over the carpet of an apartment I was renting and working in at Cisco. There were so many that their trails were wearing away the carpet. The move together like a giant black beetle, then scatter as I move in to squash them. Many were carrying egg sacks.
In class at Cisco. Upper management stopping at each desk and asking us if they know what our score is. I ask the Indian guy in front of me what they're talking about. He says it's your self-study score. You're supposed to complete a certain amount of self-study each year. He's proud of his score. I have no idea what mine is or that I was even supposed to be studying.
Back to Brad Pitt at McDonald's. He's joined by Keifer Sutherland. I sit next to them and start eating my weird Big Mac. Brad asks Keifer where the party is tonight. He's looking for some hoochies or something. They glance sidelong at me. They're yanking my chain. It was a test. Brad was trying to see if I was a spy for one of the tabloids. I pretend I didn't hear and continue eating my burger.
Sometimes it's nice to just pound away at the old typewriter. Very Bukowskiesque, I know, but sometimes effective. People, writers, ape Bukowski's style. I did the same in my early twenties. Then I decided to just live my own life and do my own thing. Bukowski became repetitive in the later years of his writing life. It's painfully evident in his books that his wife published posthumously. Becomes a bit tiresome reading about drinking and slugging it out in back alley brawls, over and over again -- thirty, forty years later...still talking about it. Give it a rest, man. What else is new? He never really grew as a writer. He reached a state of artistic maturity but never really grew beyond that. Many writers, who are artists and not just hacks, evolve and experiment with their craft. Bukowski only had one story to tell, but he was good at telling it over and over again.
Kerouac, on the other hand, experimented to the point where he became indecipherable, the words on the page like nothing more than mindless babbling interspersed with a few lucid moments. I've read that he didn't believe in rewriting. Maybe he should have.
But it's real easy being the critic, a smalltime mortal stabbing a finger up toward the sky, berating the gods. Another thing entirely creating one of your own -- a novel, a short story, string those words along into something meaningful, effective, the words on the page forming like some imaginary fist punching the reader in the gut, knocking the wind out of him.
It ain't easy trying to make something outta nothing. But you gotta try.
Sara's first pet is an injured pigeon. Nadjet and Sara saw it earlier in the day, hobbling around outside the laundry room. For some reason, it couldn't fly. Sara dragged me out to go looking for it when I arrived home later that afternoon. I armed myself with an old sheet to use as a makeshift net and as a possible defensive shield in case the bird turned violent and decided to attack. I'd seen enough disturbing animal home videos on Animal Planet to know these things can happen. The producers of those shows always play some canned laughter in the background to let viewers know that it's all in fun and jest, but I'm not buying it -- I see how close some of the folks in those videos come to losing an eye or getting decapitated. No canned laughter leftover from some forgotten 70s sitcom is going to fool me into believing otherwise.
Sara's four-year-old neighbor friend, Cathy, and her mom were out there, following us around out of bored curiosity. Cathy's little brother, Josh, hung in his mother's arms as always. The apartment parking lot is the front yard, backyard, and playground for all the kids in the complex, and Cathy's mom and her two kids are hardcore regulars. They're out there every day. The dad is usually missing in action. Nadjet tells me he's part owner of a used car lot down the street. He leaves Cathy's mom to do the shopping, the cleaning, the cooking, taking Cathy to school, checking Cathy's homework, taking them to the park, the mall, over to Costco to buy those five-pound bags of rice and two-thousand square foot rolls of Sara Wrap that she always brings us. And she does all of this with Josh hanging in one arm while holding Cathy's hand with the other. Dad the used-car lot owner is never around. Sometimes Nadjet will see Cathy's mom struggling to move the bags of groceries out of her car and into the apartment, and Nadjet will go down there to help her out. The dad's away at work as usual and probably won't be home until 10 or 11 at night, every day, weekends included.
He's Chinese. Cathy's mom is Vietnamese, and they only communicate in English, which is a newly-learned second language for the both of them. Strangely enough, little Cathy speaks perfect English. Her little brother Josh, however, at 18 months can only grunt and whine. His mother grunts back and doesn't seem too interested in teaching him any words. He's like an animal, a dog-boy being raised by wolves or something. His mother doesn't seem to mind. She's burned out raising two kids by herself.
I think the her name is Tina, but we always refer to her as "Cathy's mom," just as all the kids in the complex refer to me as "Sara's dad" -- not worthy of a name in their eyes, only known in reference through my offspring.
"What you guys looking for?" says Cathy.
"A bird."
"What you guys looking for?" she says again.
"A bird."
"Ooh! I want a bird! Where's the bird?" she says.
"No, Cathy!" says Sara. "I saw it first!"
We returned empty-handed after a fruitless few minutes of searching the grounds of the apartment complex. A short while later, we heard Cathy outside yelling excitedly, "Sara, I got the bird! Sara, I got the bird!"
They had captured it between two small laundry baskets and brought it to over to show us. They displayed it like a caged lion, as if they had gone into the jungle and caught it bare-handed. I could see its wings flapping hysterically. "Damn, these assholes are going to eat me," it was probably thinking.
Then came the tears, the crying and the tragedy of the situation. Sara crying, saying it wasn't fair. She saw the bird first, and it was her idea to catch it. Then Cathy crying when her mom made her give the bird to Sara. The bird in the meantime fluttering its wings in a panic in that little makeshift cage. "Damn," it must have been thinking, "these assholes are fighting over who gets to eat me." I told Cathy to keep it. She found it, she caught it -- it's hers fair and square. But the bird is sitting on our balcony now, roaming free and quite able to hop over the balcony fence if it wanted to, thanks to the graciousness of Cathy's mom who didn't want to care for a crippled, sick looking pigeon.
Later that evening, the bird (the "dumb bird," as I had started calling it) stationed itself in front of the sliding glass door, peering into the livingroom, watching us watching it back, while Nadjet prepared the barbecue, the bird moving from under foot as Nadjet went back and forth, loading up the grill with steak and chicken, which Nadjet later fed to it in small strips. "You're turning it into a cannibal." I warned.
It seemed to have an injured wing and a slight limp to its gait. I'm guessing one of the neighborhood cats tried to turn it into a meal, or maybe it got side-swiped by a passing car while it was pecking at something in the middle of the road.
Presently, it stood pecking at some fishbowl rocks that were lying discarded along the guide rail of the sliding door, silent testament to an earlier failed pet experiment a few years back. Sara and I fed it some Ritz crackers. It didn't appear to be afraid of us. The only time it seemed to frighten was when I took one of the beach towels that Nadjet had set out to dry and held it spread out with both hands. Then it started flapping its wings all crazy and flying into the sliding glass door. "Dumb bird," I muttered. I was only trying to make a cozy bed for it on the balcony floor, forgetting that, much unlike cats and dogs, birds prefer to roost on higher ground, on narrow ledges out of reach from predators, which became evident to me when it chose to settle on the ledge of the air conditioning unit sticking out of the wall.
Contrary to popular and somewhat lowly opinions of Columba livia, the scientific name for this species of bird more commonly known as the rock dove or city pigeon, this is no mere rat with wings. Its ancestors were second cousins twice-removed to T. Rex, dominating the earth more than 65 million years ago when man (or what would some day become man) was little more than a rat himself. When you see a pigeon, or any bird for that matter, you're basically looking at a living dinosaur -- hollow-boned, warm-blooded, skeletal structure nearly identical to carnivorous bipedal dinosaurs otherwise known as theropods. The nearest place you'd find animals of this sort, besides other birds, is in the fossil record.
But Nadjet was having none of it. She called me at work the next morning. "I think we need to get rid of the bird."
"Why?"
"It's shitting all over the place. It shit on my chair this morning. The balcony's a mess."
I convinced her to let us keep it for another few days or whenever it decided to fly off and away of its own accord.
We didn't have to wait long. The pigeon checked out the next day never to return. The thankless rat. Sure, it wasn't as majestic as an eagle or as glamorous as a peregrine falcon, but I thought it was pretty cool having a wild bird roosting on our balcony, even if it was just a lowly common pigeon. The things can fly, something us earthbound humans will never be able to do. Sara had already grown bored with idea of a bird living on the balcony. "You can't pet it. You can't cuddle it. And it looks kinda dirty." she reasoned.
Nadjet picked up a pair of hamsters the next day. "The pet store was giving them away for free." she said. "Putting them up for adoption. I just had to buy the cage, the water bottle, the bedding, the food, and the little wheel."
"And how much was all of that?" I asked.
"About fifty bucks."
Think I'll buy a bird-feeder and try to lure in a few more of those dinosaurs with wings.
"For hours at a stretch I would lie in the sun doing nothing, thinking of nothing. To keep the mind empty is a feat, a very healthy feat too. To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself."
-- Henry Miller, "The Colossus of Maroussi"
Changing behavior and habits require much conscious effort. It's like redirecting the flow of traffic by repaving the road with traffic still flowing over it.
For the last six years, the first thing I would do when I awoke in the morning was to power on the computer and see what was happening on that vast expanse of misinformation otherwise known as the Internet. Actually, during my days as a pack-a-day chain-smoker, the computer was the second thing I went to after sucking two, three cigarettes down to the filter.
That was always a good hour or two wasted every day, an hour or two where I could have otherwise been writing -- my book, short stories, articles for this zine. I've recently started reading up on Buddhism and decided I'd make an effort at employing the Buddhist concept of right-mindedness, right-effort. Repave the road while the traffic was still flowing. Rid myself of these pointless distractions -- t.v., newspapers, Internet. Hours are killed every day. Irretrievable time lost to lazy habits and unthinking behavior. Days and years of my life slip by unknowingly, unawares -- while I busy myself in watching other people living their lives on t.v. or read about them on the Internet, not just celebrities, but anybody, all under the guise of obtaining more information, striving to obtain knowledge that I probably don't need and will likely never use.
I am only a man, a single person -- lowly, weak, and unworthy, as Edgar Cayce once put it while describing a typical soul searching for a way out. I can't change the world -- my best bet, my only hope, is changing myself.
I don't need information, at least not to the extent or degree that I was finding it online -- don't need pornography, don't need the daily news (much less the hourly, constant and instantaneous media spin found online) -- don't need streaming video, live audio, or realtime chat with customer support. What's all that stuff supposed to do for me, anyway?
Well, sir, we hope to enhance your online experience. Our corporate mission is to --
Well, fuck you and your online experience! Don't need it, don't want it! Does nothing for me in real life!
Online life was taking up too much time in real life. I came across a report a while back (online, of course) which said that spending too much time on the Internet had the same effect as smoking too much pot.
Hah! No wonder I was beginning to feel a lot like I did when I was in high school. What began innocently enough as something cool to do had become yet another counterproductive habit, like masturbation, like sniffing peeled toenails, like brushing your teeth so hard that it begins to wear down the gum line -- like, well, smoking pot or dropping acid (admittedly, both substances seemed to cure me of a nagging stuttering problem I'd been suffering from since the third grade). The body wasn't built to withstand such robotic, obsessive-compulsive abuse. Nevermind what your mind looks like on drugs. This is what it looks like when you're on the Internet. Too much fucking information.
So time to change. Go offline and become informationless. Disconnect from the stream in order to refill my own reservoirs. Employ Buddhist right-consciousness and right-mindedness. Change the flow of bad habits and counterproductive behavior. Start with the fact that I'm spending way too much time online.
Indeed, the Internet is just a tool, and I was bashing myself over the head until I was senseless with it, dulled, intellectually lethargic, like I'd been taking long drawn-out bong hits every afternoon for the last five years, spending all my free time reading other people's writing and churning out none of my own. The Internet is crack for the curious mind. Curiouser and curiouser I had become until I was a junkie, one of millions, staring blankly at the flashing screen, hitting the refresh button, scouring around for blog updates and new postings to message boards.
Every once in a while I'll bump into someone I haven't seen in five or six years.
"Haven't seen you in a while," they'll say, "Where've you been?"
"Online." I tell them.
But I haven't completely disconnected. I'm not sure that's even possible these days when everything's going (or has already gone) digital. I bank online. Every job I've had (all six of them) for the past eight years was found through an online job search. I book travel and car rental reservations online. It's just so much easier.
Well, no shit. Everyone knows that, right? It's common knowledge. Yeah, I know, but you've got to draw the line. It's like a giant fucking vacuum of time and effort if you're not careful about it.
Human nature yearns to be connected and to stay connected, and short of reading thought waves coming in across the ether, the Internet is the next best thing we've got.
One moment you're flowing in the stream, moving merrily along. Then suddenly you awake years later and realize you've sunk to the bottom. You've become part of the creekbed. The stream is moving over you now, through you.
If you're halfway sentient, you might ask yourself upon waking, "How the hell did this happen?"
You glance around and see the thousands upon thousands of people just like you, stuck in ruts at the bottom of the creekbed. Blank stares, dumbstruck, some drooling, others twitching uncontrollably. They've long since lost the faculty to ask questions that go any deeper than "How much for a gallon of gas?" -- "Where's the nearest Wal-Mart?" -- "What time's the game on?"
Anything beyond that warrants nothing more than animalistic, knee-jerk responses. "All Arabs are terrorists." -- "Breast implants make me beautiful." You do this to me; I'll do that to you. You make me unhappy; I'll make you unhappy.
All or nothing. Black or white. If I don't like this, you mustn't like it, either. If you're not a Christian, then Jesus doesn't love you.
It's a strictly binary world for lazy, dumbed-down minds. No room for interpreting the gray areas -- that would require too much effort and finesse. We'll just vote for George Dubya because we like our monkey president and the way he reduces everything down to simple childlike equations that even the dullest trailer-dwelling redneck can understand: "If you're not with us, you're against us."
Who did he mean when he said that?
Rich, white Christian Republicans?
The poor blacks living in squalor in downtown Atlantean New Orleans?
People who own the homes in which they live, or renters who can't get a foot in the door of the overpriced housing market?
Maybe he meant the homeless or the drug-addled schizoids wandering the streets with no health benefits and nowhere to sleep at night? Might as well go wander downtown and stab a stranger in the face.
Maybe he meant the teachers who can barely afford to live in the communities in which they teach? In Palo Alto, California, teachers make more money quitting their chosen careers and whoring themselves out as nannies to the rich and privileged.
Or was he talking about all the teenaged runaways who ran away from Dad the molester or Mom the abusive alcoholic, kids who are learning to stick needles in their arms to numb the pain and tattooing their asses?
Or maybe he meant all the nineteen-year-old kids he sent over to Iraq to die in a war that he created?
Whatever the reason, time to disconnect. Unplug and retreat inward. There's nothing I can do that would change any of it. All the voices, the chatter, pointless opinions crowding out my own.
To be still. Be silent and listen. Everything else doesn't really matter. Look inward to churn out these words. Inward lies nirvana. Inward lies the answer.
Or madness.
Leave it to the asshole to make an ass out of himself.
From Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th ed.:
Something never felt quite
right.
I thought it was just me
the entire time,
and I was right.
It was just me
the entire time.
Sara's 1st grade teacher invited Nadjet to speak to the class about Ramadan and what it means for Muslims. Ramadan is the religious practice where Muslims fast for thirty days every year. During this time, they cannot eat or drink anything from sun up to sundown. Kind of funny, since Nadjet isn't a practicing Muslim. She smokes, drinks wine, eats bacon regularly, likes to celebrate Christmas with the tree and lights and gift-giving. She's about as Muslim as I am Catholic.
So she printed out a few pages she came across on the Internet and brought some cookies she picked up from the Afghan grocery store down the street. That's one good thing about living in the Bay Area. You can usually find most varieties of ethnic food and restaurants within a five-mile radius.
She sat herself on a chair in the middle of the Sara's class, and all the kids sat in a circle around her. Nadjet gave her talk, and when she was finished, the teacher asked if anyone had questions for Nadjet.
After a few moments of silence, one boy raised his hand. "I can spell my name."
Another girl raise her hand. "I can spell my name, too!"
A boy sitting near the back held up a necklace he was wearing. "See this? It means I'm Indian."
So the teacher brought the kids outside to eat the cookies and juice that Nadjet had brought.