The title about says it all. Nothing deep (except a track, maybe) or insightful. Just wishing everyone a safe and sane night.
If this year was shit, may next year be better. If this year kicked ass, may next year be better still. If anyone is bored, I'll be behind the bar at Shooters from about 10 o' clock on. See you then, or see you next year.
Reaching back to move forward, stay gold.
Friday, December 31, 2010
Thursday, December 30, 2010
A few people...
I haven't seen in a long, long time.
When my father died, there were three things that I made a point of taking.
There was a small framed tapestry that had once belonged to his father. My father kicked the living shit out of me, once, after I'd been fucking around in the house with a BB gun and cracked the glass on it.
There was a small framed print. In the print, a decrepit old king sat upon a throne. Bottles by his side. Head wrapped in wraiths made of smoke from his hookah, as the imps and demons danced around him. The caption read a slightly non-standard version of Proverbs 1:22 - "How long, O' Foolish One, will you love your foolish ways." My father had given it to his father one of the times that his father had gone through rehab. Rehab never quite stuck with my father. If I'd ever gotten a tattoo, I think that this would be the image. I'm told that there's a bit too much light-work in it to do it without completely blowing it up, though.
And the last was a copy of Micah's senior picture. Not the graduation picture here, but the senior head shot. Ended up in a pretty large argument with my mother about that. My mother insisted that as he was her son, any pictures of my brother were hers and hers alone. Which is about as it ever was. Of the three, this is one that may still have made the moves.
He'd have turned 38 today.
's all a dream we dreamed one afternoon, long ago.
When my father died, there were three things that I made a point of taking.
There was a small framed tapestry that had once belonged to his father. My father kicked the living shit out of me, once, after I'd been fucking around in the house with a BB gun and cracked the glass on it.
There was a small framed print. In the print, a decrepit old king sat upon a throne. Bottles by his side. Head wrapped in wraiths made of smoke from his hookah, as the imps and demons danced around him. The caption read a slightly non-standard version of Proverbs 1:22 - "How long, O' Foolish One, will you love your foolish ways." My father had given it to his father one of the times that his father had gone through rehab. Rehab never quite stuck with my father. If I'd ever gotten a tattoo, I think that this would be the image. I'm told that there's a bit too much light-work in it to do it without completely blowing it up, though.
And the last was a copy of Micah's senior picture. Not the graduation picture here, but the senior head shot. Ended up in a pretty large argument with my mother about that. My mother insisted that as he was her son, any pictures of my brother were hers and hers alone. Which is about as it ever was. Of the three, this is one that may still have made the moves.
He'd have turned 38 today.
's all a dream we dreamed one afternoon, long ago.
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
December.
Kind of a "meh" month all around. Lots of rain. Quite a few holidays that don't seem to mean much at all. It's been a long December. Been a pretty long year. Can't say I'll be too unhappy to see any of it go...
It's been about 14 years since I moved to California, now. I think I ended up in San Francisco the second week of December in '96. If I recall correctly, that was a pretty wet year, too. That winter was the highest recorded rainfall in San Francisco. It was quite an introduction to the city.
I got off the bus at 4th and Market, checked into the first hotel I saw. Decided to take a walk. And promptly got lost in the Tenderloin. It was a bit of an eye-opener for a 20 year old from Pennsylvania.
I'd spent a couple of weeks before moving to San Francisco crashing out on a friend's floor at his dorm at George Washington University in D.C. Don't really recall much of those two weeks.Sitting at a Barnes & Noble and being exposed to Jean Genet for the first time (another eye-opener). Hanging in Rich's dorm room and reading his syllabus for his Russian Lit. class. Being dumbfounded that a city as large as D.C. effectively became a ghost town at 8pm. Wandering through Georgetown and watching a small windstorm hold a plastic bag aloft in a flurry of leaves for five minutes and just watching in awe as it spun around and around.
It's been an odd decade and a half, to say the least.
One thing I do remember about that two weeks... The Counting Crows had just released their second album, Recovering the Satellites, a month or two before. We listened to that disc endlessly. Can't say I've spent much time revisiting that in the past ten years. At the time, it was a perfect fit.
I was recently tagged in one of those FaceBook notes, asking to list my 50 favorite tracks from 2010. I'm not sure I could list five and know that they're from this year. Music doesn't seem nearly as vital as it once did. A lot of things don't. I've been looking through a lot of the year end lists since then. It seems that I'm not as far out of the loop as I'd assumed. It just doesn't seem that any of it particularly resonated.
As I said, it's been "A Long December."
Maybe next year will be better than the last.
It's been about 14 years since I moved to California, now. I think I ended up in San Francisco the second week of December in '96. If I recall correctly, that was a pretty wet year, too. That winter was the highest recorded rainfall in San Francisco. It was quite an introduction to the city.
I got off the bus at 4th and Market, checked into the first hotel I saw. Decided to take a walk. And promptly got lost in the Tenderloin. It was a bit of an eye-opener for a 20 year old from Pennsylvania.
I'd spent a couple of weeks before moving to San Francisco crashing out on a friend's floor at his dorm at George Washington University in D.C. Don't really recall much of those two weeks.Sitting at a Barnes & Noble and being exposed to Jean Genet for the first time (another eye-opener). Hanging in Rich's dorm room and reading his syllabus for his Russian Lit. class. Being dumbfounded that a city as large as D.C. effectively became a ghost town at 8pm. Wandering through Georgetown and watching a small windstorm hold a plastic bag aloft in a flurry of leaves for five minutes and just watching in awe as it spun around and around.
It's been an odd decade and a half, to say the least.
One thing I do remember about that two weeks... The Counting Crows had just released their second album, Recovering the Satellites, a month or two before. We listened to that disc endlessly. Can't say I've spent much time revisiting that in the past ten years. At the time, it was a perfect fit.
I was recently tagged in one of those FaceBook notes, asking to list my 50 favorite tracks from 2010. I'm not sure I could list five and know that they're from this year. Music doesn't seem nearly as vital as it once did. A lot of things don't. I've been looking through a lot of the year end lists since then. It seems that I'm not as far out of the loop as I'd assumed. It just doesn't seem that any of it particularly resonated.
As I said, it's been "A Long December."
Maybe next year will be better than the last.
Monday, December 27, 2010
A question.
Do dishonest people know how transparent their dishonesty is? Do they even care? Is this some sort of M.C. Escher conversation about varying levels of consciousness?
This is actually a pretty serious question for me. Is the basic impetus behind lying that the people that you lie to are idiots that won't understand that they're being lied to? Or is it some idea that one can just wash one's hands and walk away if the lie doesn't work out?
I'm not sure how to phrase this any more concisely, but it's something that trips me up quite frequently. I guess it kind of goes back to the story I'd related before about the coworker that fancied himself a player. But talking to people often leads me to stare at the person I'm talking with and sit and think to myself - "Wow, you just managed to completely contradict yourself in the span of three minutes."
One of my favorite examples of this came from someone I was once pretty good friends with (or had thought at the time), though it took a bit longer than three minutes for his idiocy to be apparent. I'd given this guy some ballet tickets and the keys to my house while I was in someone else's wedding rehearsal.
The guy had been acting pretty shady about who he'd be going with. Evasive and dodgy and sketchy as all hell. On the day of the wedding, as he made his way to the wedding, I'd asked him how he'd enjoyed the ballet the night before. He told me it was great. I asked him who he'd ended up going with. "You don't want to know," he told me.
At which point I named the person he'd gone with, told him that I had no problems with him having gone with this person, and said that the fact that he'd lied to me about whom he was going with was more offensive than anything else.
Over a good chunk of time, he's offered any number of reasons behind his behavior. Quite a few of you have heard this one before, but it's still something that completely baffles me.
He hadn't lied to me, he said, he just didn't tell me the truth. And really, he didn't tell me the truth because he didn't want to hurt me. And besides, he said, there was no way he could have know that what he was doing would be hurtful. And anyway, he said, I couldn't be upset with him as I'd lied to him first. (Mind you, there were a couple of interludes along the way here where he called me an asshole by way of apology.)
When asked what lie I had supposedly told him, I was informed that I had lied about being in the friend's wedding (another thing that really doesn't make sense to me. Why would I lie to someone about the fact that I was in a wedding that they'd be attending? What would be the point of doing that? It doesn't even seem to be a lie that would be particularly effective. The wedding the next day kind of makes it obvious whether I'm lying or not.)
When it was pointed out that he'd been given the keys to my house and ballet tickets to use while I attended the rehearsal dinner and that I'd asked him to come with me to pick up my tux, he then told me I had lied to him about the part that I was to play in the wedding (and given that I had no idea what part I was playing in the wedding and told him so, I don't see how that qualifies as a lie.) But it basically seems that I was offered everything but the kitchen sink as a reason why he was a dishonest pile. And I'm sure that if I'd continued the conversation, I would have gotten yet another excuse/reason.
My cousin and I normally shorten the conversation to "I never lied to you, and besides you lied to me first."
This is what I don't get, though. At what level does even attempting any of that even make sense?
This is actually a pretty serious question for me. Is the basic impetus behind lying that the people that you lie to are idiots that won't understand that they're being lied to? Or is it some idea that one can just wash one's hands and walk away if the lie doesn't work out?
I'm not sure how to phrase this any more concisely, but it's something that trips me up quite frequently. I guess it kind of goes back to the story I'd related before about the coworker that fancied himself a player. But talking to people often leads me to stare at the person I'm talking with and sit and think to myself - "Wow, you just managed to completely contradict yourself in the span of three minutes."
One of my favorite examples of this came from someone I was once pretty good friends with (or had thought at the time), though it took a bit longer than three minutes for his idiocy to be apparent. I'd given this guy some ballet tickets and the keys to my house while I was in someone else's wedding rehearsal.
The guy had been acting pretty shady about who he'd be going with. Evasive and dodgy and sketchy as all hell. On the day of the wedding, as he made his way to the wedding, I'd asked him how he'd enjoyed the ballet the night before. He told me it was great. I asked him who he'd ended up going with. "You don't want to know," he told me.
At which point I named the person he'd gone with, told him that I had no problems with him having gone with this person, and said that the fact that he'd lied to me about whom he was going with was more offensive than anything else.
Over a good chunk of time, he's offered any number of reasons behind his behavior. Quite a few of you have heard this one before, but it's still something that completely baffles me.
He hadn't lied to me, he said, he just didn't tell me the truth. And really, he didn't tell me the truth because he didn't want to hurt me. And besides, he said, there was no way he could have know that what he was doing would be hurtful. And anyway, he said, I couldn't be upset with him as I'd lied to him first. (Mind you, there were a couple of interludes along the way here where he called me an asshole by way of apology.)
When asked what lie I had supposedly told him, I was informed that I had lied about being in the friend's wedding (another thing that really doesn't make sense to me. Why would I lie to someone about the fact that I was in a wedding that they'd be attending? What would be the point of doing that? It doesn't even seem to be a lie that would be particularly effective. The wedding the next day kind of makes it obvious whether I'm lying or not.)
When it was pointed out that he'd been given the keys to my house and ballet tickets to use while I attended the rehearsal dinner and that I'd asked him to come with me to pick up my tux, he then told me I had lied to him about the part that I was to play in the wedding (and given that I had no idea what part I was playing in the wedding and told him so, I don't see how that qualifies as a lie.) But it basically seems that I was offered everything but the kitchen sink as a reason why he was a dishonest pile. And I'm sure that if I'd continued the conversation, I would have gotten yet another excuse/reason.
My cousin and I normally shorten the conversation to "I never lied to you, and besides you lied to me first."
This is what I don't get, though. At what level does even attempting any of that even make sense?
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