Latest Read...

Amongst the books I picked up at the library the other day was Mr. Midshipman Hornblower, by C.S. Forester.  My father, when I was growing up, had something of a fetish for maritime museums and adventures.  Patrick O'Brien, C.S. Forester, the U.S.S. Constellation at Baltimore's Inner Harbor.  The sea and its lore were pretty much the bane of my childhood existence.  I can't tell you how many times we were drug aboard some ship to satisfy my father's penchant for all things nautical.

When I first bought the book, I wasn't sure if it were something I'd read before.  After finishing it, I'm pretty sure I haven't.  All in all, it's a pretty passable book.  Pretty formulaic.  Nothing too exciting (or mayhap I'm simply past the age when I find such stories exciting.)  Which may be funny, as I still take the time to reread Latham's Carry On, Mr. Bowditch at least once a year.  It could be argued, though, that neither of these stories are really books about the sea.  That's just the setting.  Forester's Hornblower is all about pluck, courage, and duty, Bowditch is about perseverance and the integrity to follow up on what is correct.

Reading this book reminds me of my time working at an estate auction company growing up.  We used to go and clean out houses in Southeast Pennsylvania after the owners had died and sell the contents at auction.  A lot of my early exposure to reading came from box lots of books that I'd pick up for a dollar or two a pop.  That tended to be a lot of Irving Stone, Herman Wouk, Michener, and Reader's Digest condensed classics (and you could probably do some sort of anthropological survey based solely on the 20-50 books that your average suburban household in the U.S. carries.  I can't begin to tell you how much overlap there was between a lot of those bookshelves.  How many copies of How to Win Friends and Influence People or The Power of Positive Thinking do you think have ended up in landfills in Southeast PA over the past 20 years?)

While the book is the first book chronologically in the series, it's the sixth published.  As it is, I'm not sure I have much desire to follow it through.  Then again, for a book that took me four hours to read, it probably wouldn't take much to breeze through the rest.

Gothise?!?!

According to the stats tracker on my blog, quite a bit of my traffic (really, a rather large portion of it) comes from Gothise, a social networking site for "alternative-people."  Which kind of makes me scratch my head and say "huh?"  I'm no stranger to trying new things.  And have often gone out of my way to do much the same.  But part of me still wonders how that came to be...

Anyone want to step up and claim responsibility for the links?

See if I can get back into the swing of things...

So I've not been posting much, mainly because I've not felt I've had much to say.  I'll see if I can get back into the groove, here.  Though I'll be taking a much more low-key approach to the blog from here on out.  I figure if anyone wants to read it, they'll find it.  I won't be pushing it.

In the same spirit, I'm trying to get back into the swing of reading.  As I mentioned in a previous post, my reading activity has declined greatly over the past few years.  In 2007, when I first moved to SoCal, I'd read about 45 books by the month of July (when I moved to the area.)  As it is, I'm not sure I've read 25 books this year...

I'm sure I could check my library on my profile at LibraryThing to see how many books I've put in this year, but I don't think I even want to bother.  Instead, I went to the public library yesterday and picked up about 20 books from the Friends of the Library Bookstore.  A mix of classics, books I've read and enjoyed in the past, books I've heard good things about, and authors that I want to check.  Mostly on the lighter side, as I haven't had the attention span or concentration to keep focus.

Last night, I reread The Return of Sherlock Holmes.  A pretty light, quick read.  I'd received the complete Sherlock Holmes as a birthday or Christmas present when I was 11 or so.  Used to love the stories.  They don't hold up nearly as well as I would have liked.  Formulaic isn't quite the word I'd use, but they telegraph their intent much too easily.  I get the same feeling reading these stories now as I did when I tried reading Encyclopedia Brown when I was 11.  Everything just glares from the page.  I do wonder, however, if Holmes would be considered autistic nowadays.   ;)

Still pretty enjoyable, nonetheless.  And fun to revisit some favorite characters from my youth.  I'm not sure I'll end up digging any deeper, though.

Not sure what comes off the To Be Read stack next, though.

We'll see.

Memorial Day Mix.

So, not the perfect mix...

There are a few tracks that just weren't there.  The Brickell should probably really either be "Cassidy" or "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall."  Jane's Addiction should definitely be "Had a Dad."  And that's just about the last Kravitz track I would have picked, but about the only one they had.  And so on...

All in all, there's nothing all that new.  But that's sort of the point...

Here you are...

Hope everyone has a safe, sane holiday.

Getting my thoughts in order...

Just has not been working out.  Hence, no posts. 

Read War & Peace, though. 

And a nice quote forwarded from a friend.

Sometimes we expect more from others, because we’d be willing to do much more for them; and as we grow older we don’t lose friends, we just learn who the real ones are.

Not always the most fun of processes.  But so it goes...

Martini Mix...

Here you go, Martin.  It's alphabetised (though that seems to have worked out relatively well for flow) because the sort feature on the site is a bit screwy.  Hope there are a couple of things in there that are new to you.   I know the whole thing's a bit all over the place.

The Martin(i) Mix.

Another playlist.

This one wasn't made by me.  An LT acquaintance threw it together for me...  Some new stuff on here.  And some new to me stuff.  And some stuff I've heard before. 

I love this shit.  Just swapping tracks.  Saying give me something you love.  Haven't made it through the whole thing yet, because I keep completely geeking out to the Hot Chip track.  And then, when it's over, the McCartney track starts and I hit a wall and hit rewind.

Thanks for the mix, Martin.

Mutter, mutter...

It's been that sort of few days.  Not so sure what to be saying, but feel the need to be trying to get something out there, nonetheless.  Spending a lot of time just time trying to keep my head straight and wondering "What the fuck?"

I had a conversation the other night that sums a lot of it up for me.  At the bar, there was one bartender from a while back that was just insane.   Pretty much just kinda nuts.  I eventually lost some shifts because I'd refused to work with her any more.  It had gotten to the point where I'd literally be picking her up off the floor at the end of the night.

She'd hit me up for some meth one night.  I explained to her that I didn't have any.  Didn't know where to find any.  Didn't want to know.  Been there.  Done that.  Wouldn't mind having the tooth back.  She told me that I was full of shit and called me a lying tweaker.  I'd gotten fed up past a certain point and said "Listen, bitch, I'm telling you right now, I can't help you with your habit.  You're going to have to talk to someone else."

She got a bit pissed at me for calling her bitch.  Told me that I wasn't allowed to speak to her that way, as she tipped me out every night.  I tossed her money back on the bar and said "I'll be doing the closing duties if you need me, bitch."

That was the last night we'd worked together.

She stabbed her husband in the back (literally) a few months later and has taken some time off.  She'll be getting out next month, from what I hear.

Her sister was in the other night.  I ended up having another one of those WTF conversations with her sister.  Sister seems to think that the whole stabbing thing was overblown.  Feels that if big sis had really meant to stab her husband, he wouldn't be walking around today.  The whole thing was just a joke gone bad.  A little mistake blown out of proportion.

I'd just like to know how that one works.  The blade only went in an inch and a half, so it doesn't really count?  I think I might need to try that line on my next girlfriend.  Not my kid, it didn't go all the way in.

People astound me.

Happy New Years.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Being Strong-Willed.

I'd had a conversation a few months back with an acquaintance about another mutual acquaintance.  We were discussing the second person's priorities in choosing whom to date.  It seems that this woman is pretty driven.  She'd gone on a couple of dates with a guy that did social service work.  Didn't really think that anything would come of it, but decided to give the guy a chance anyway.   Or something like that.  The way it was explained to me, this woman was much more likely to date a guy that headed charities than to be with someone that worked for them.

As I said, this woman is pretty driven.  It was said that she was such a strong-willed, motivated person that she needs to find a mirror in the guy she's with.  She's afraid that if she dates someone who isn't a match for her will, she'd just end up walking all over him.

Which strikes me as a load of bullshit.

Any woman that would be that strong-willed surely wouldn't need a guy to keep her in check, no?  If this person were as strong-willed and motivated as she's said to be, one would have to assume that the discipline and motivation to treat others well would come from within her.  Obviously, this isn't the case.

Kind of seems that either she's really not that concerned with treating others well or she's really not that strong-willed.  The two things don't seem to work in conjunction, though.

And the whole going on a couple of dates with someone that you know you don't see yourself with?  Kind of asinine.  I'm sure you'd get some story about how she was giving the guy a chance.  Doesn't sound like much of a chance at all.  Letting him down easy?  Sounds more like getting someone's hopes up before you let them fall.  The guy asks for a chance and gets pity instead.  Doesn't seem to be much kind about that.

I was waiting on a twelve top once in San Francisco.  It was a birthday party for a woman at the table.   One of her friends started talking about a guy that had asked her out a couple of times.  She'd explained to him that she was going on vacation and wouldn't be around for a couple of months.  She hoped, she said, that he'd have move on by the time she came back.

If I were that guy, I'd probably spend a couple of months looking forward to a chance to spend time with someone I dug.  I mentioned that to her.  Received a couple of sighs from the table.  And then the woman told me that she didn't want the guy to think she was a bitch.   Something tells me that that won't work too well.  There's nothing polite about offering things you have no intention of proffering.

That's not politeness.

It's just passive-aggression.

Superficial.

Bougie Souliterre's "Superficial."

Naked Music's Nude Dimensions (Vol.'s 1 and 2 trump the 3rd, by far) series was the soundtrack to quite a bit of my earlier life.  This song fits me perfectly.

I once, when living in North Beach, asked someone I'd known for about seven years what he liked about living in the area.  He liked, he explained to me, being able to walk down the street and see forty people he knew.  He liked being able to walk into the local cafe and have his order started without being able to ask for it.  He liked the fact that everyone knew his name.  He liked, he said, the "illusion of having all of these friends."

"Walter," I asked, "does it bother you at all that you're talking about the illusion of friendship?"

"No," he said, "at least I'm smart enough to realise that these people really aren't my friends."

"Tell me, Walter," I said, "Are we friends or is that just an illusion?"

He was pretty mad that I would ask the question.  I'm not sure I've bumped into or talked to Walter since that conversation.  I doubt that Walter and I would end up having a conversation if we didn't bump into each other.  I'm not sure there's a conversation that sums my time in North Beach better.  (Though there might be a couple of close contenders.)

The illusion of friendship?  Not so much.  Don't really need it.  Doesn't do much for me.  Didn't feed me when I was broke.  Never offered me solace when I was in grief.

Superficial?  Can't say I really have much time for you.  I'm not big on superficial.  I'd much prefer deep.

Deep house.  Deep conversation.  Deep Friendship.  Deep love.  If I'm in the hand, odds are I'm looking for a piece of the board that's large enough to take down the whole pot.

I was talking to an acquaintance about some of this.  We were discussing books and literary theory.  She's been diagnosed with one of the anti-social personality disorders, if I recall correctly.  She's actually an extremely personable person.  She just doesn't do much with phatic communication.  She doesn't see much point.  Want to talk about the weather?  Might as well go somewhere else.  If you want to have a meaningful conversation, though, she's a wonderful person to talk to.  Engage her on a level that scratches the surface and delves into something deeper than social niceties and there's a beautiful mind to connect with. 

Superficial, though?

Not so much.

Gratitude.

I was talking to a friend of mine recently.  She'd been going through some rough times. Has struggled quite a bit for the past few years.  Has struggled quite a bit over many years.  She'd been out of work on disability for about a year as she struggled with some health issues relating to anxiety and depression and was having trouble making ends meet.

Her mother suggested that she come try to contact her father and ask for some help.  J. hadn't spoken to her father in about a decade.  He'd never been around much at all.  Left when she was four or five, I think.

She'd eventually given him a call.  Or he called her.  I forget how it went down, exactly.  Her mother put her in touch with her father.

He asked how she'd been.  When she started telling him, he asked her about her faith in God.  He expressed some surprise that she didn't believe in God and started telling her about the importance of faith.  I think this irked her a bit.  He also expressed some surprise that she'd been dealing with depression and anxiety issues.

"I guess if I'd called at some point," he said...

I think he ended up sending her a check for a hundred dollars.

I'd been talking to her mother about it a few months after.  Her mother thought that she was being most ungracious in accepting his help.  "She has to realise that he's trying," she said.

J. thinks that $100 is a pretty shitty take for 26 years.  I pretty much have to agree with her.

A lot of what people expect others to express gratitude for strikes me as behavior that's so baseline (or even so far below the baseline) that to expect to be thanked for it seems to be kind of nuts. 

Trying? Gratitude?  That's laughable.

A Playlist.

An acquaintance recently asked for some music suggestions.  Rather than throw up a track or two, I decided to play around a bit and throw together a full mix.  It's definitely not a complete success.  The site that I put it together on didn't have everything that I wanted to get on there.  It's a bit heavy on covers.  And it moves rather abruptly at times.  But I'll throw it out there anyway...

Here's a good chunk of what I'm listening to.

Anyone up for throwing up a playlist in response?

Scenes, Pt. II - Painted Birds

I used to pride myself on being the sort of people that would show up pretty much anywhere.  You know, just be willing to take people on their own terms.  Show up, respect the scene, take a look around, expand my own horizons.

When I was younger and living in San Francisco, I seemed to know a disproportionate number of people that were involved in San Francisco's goth scene (and for some odd reason, a disproportionate number of them seemed to be from Minneapolis).  My roommate at one point was the brother of the guy that started Information Society (and a touring member of the band), who was pretty heavy into the whole thing.  Leather boots, piercings, dyed dreads.  Kris was a pretty cool fucking guy. 

It's a sensibility I can definitely understand.  Jerzy Kosinski, in The Painted Bird, offers a wonderful metaphor for what it means to be an outsider.

Sometimes days passed and Stupid Ludmila did not appear in the forest. Lekh would become possessed by a silent rage. He would stare solemnly at the birds in the cages, mumbling something to himself. Finally, after prolonged scrutiny, he would choose the strongest bird, tie it to his wrist and prepare stinking paints of different colors which he mixed together from the most varied components. When the colors satisfied him, Lekh would turn the bird over and paint its wings, head, and breast in rainbow hues until it became more dappled and vivid than a bouquet of wildflowers.
     Then he would go into the thick of the forest. There Lekh took out the painted bird and ordered me to hold it in my hand and squeeze it lightly. The bird would begin to twitter and attract a flock of the same species which would fly nervously over our heads. Our prisoner, hearing them, strained toward them, warbling more loudly, its little heart, locked in its freshly painted breast, beating violently.
     When a sufficient number of birds gathered above our heads, Lekh would give me a sign to release the prisoner. It would soar, happy and free, a spot of rainbow against the backdrop of clouds, and then plunge into the waiting grown flock. For an instant the birds were confounded. The painted bird circled from one end of the flock to the other, vainly trying to convince its kin that it was one of them. But, dazzled by its brilliant colors, they flew around it unconvinced. The painted bird would be forced farther and farther away as it zealously tried to enter the ranks of the flock. We saw soon afterwards how one bird after another would peel off in a fierce attack. Shortly the many-hued shape lost its place in the sky and dropped to the ground. These incidents happened often. When we finally found the painted birds they were usually dead. Lekh keenly examined the number of blows which the birds had received. Blood seeped through their colored wings, diluting the paint and soiling Lekh's hands.

One is attacked for one's differences.  There are quite a few reactionary movements predicated on flaunting one's difference.  Siouxsie and the Banshees offer the concept as an anthem for a movement.  As a way of understanding the goth subculture, it's pretty spot on.  You want to judge us for our differences?  We will flaunt them.  We'll take everything that you say is freakish and carry it to an extreme.

As much as I knew a lot of goths in San Francisco, I never really spent that much time hanging around their scene.  I came to an enjoyment of industrial and post-punk later.  I did try popping my head in once or twice, just to look around.  One of the funnier times was the one where I stopped by Bondage-A-Go-Go once to visit an acquaintance that headed security for the club.

It was an interesting experience.  Some pretty cool music.  Lots of cute goth women dressed in black.  It was funny, though.  I, being me, pretty much just wore what I would have worn anywhere at the time.  I think it was a pair of Gap Khakis and a cashmere sweater.  Baby blue?  Black?  I don't specifically remember.

I was a pariah.  In the two hours I sat in the club, my friend Frances was the only person that even bothered to speak to me (or acknowledge my presence) aside from a bartender.  As a reaction to attacks for being different, I can definitely understand the idea of banding together with like-minded people.  Oddly enough, though, if you throw a bunch of painted birds together, it's just another flock.  I wasn't welcome in their scene, because I didn't do enough to blend in.

Welcome to the scene.

Counter-culture?  Sounds like just another culture.

Honesty. Or why I'm an asshole...

I've mentioned elsewhere that my philosophy may best be summed between two complementary ideas.  One, the idea that "Voices Carry."  The other, Audre Lorde's assertion that "Your silence does not protect you."

The essay that has done more to inform this sensibility than any other is feminist poet Adrienne Rich's "Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying."  It's ostensibly a piece that talks of the role of honesty as it pertains to women, but I believe that the central message, as with most ideas worth examining, carries much broader implications.  Voices carry.

Rich grounds the piece in her own experience.  Which is obviously that of a woman.  As I noted above, I believe the piece can be read with much broader implications.  It's a melange of epigrams (Hello, Mr. Markson.)  Some of those strike me as more cogent or forceful than others.  I'd like to run through some of my favorites...

To discover that one has been lied to in a personal relationship, however, leads one to feel a little crazy.

While I know the feeling, I'd actually argue that Ms. Rich doesn't take this quite far enough.  To lie to someone is to make them a little crazy.  It doesn't matter whether we speak of a subjective reality or an objective reality in this case.  If I tell you that a red light means that you should go forward, you'll have quite a bit of trouble functioning in the world as we shape it.  If I tell you that the sky is green and you believe me, this is insanity.  If your beliefs do not pertain to reality, you are considered psychotic.  To lie to someone is an act of violence.

Lying is done with words, and also with silence.

Silence is complicity.  If one does not offer one's voice as a corrective to a lie, one is an accomplice to the act.

In the struggle for survival we tell lies. To bosses, to prison guards, the police, men who have power over us, who legally own us and our children, lovers who need us as proof of their manhood.

Whether you're a woman or not, allowing someone else to define reality according to the prerogatives of power is to acquiesce to a lie.  Again, silence is a form of lying.  Assenting to a lie, whether by remaining silent or concurring with it vocally is an act of violence.

We take so much of the universe on trust. You tell me: "In 1950 I lived on the north side of Beacon Street in Somerville." You tell me: "She and I were lovers, but for months now we have only been good friends." You tell me: "It is sevent...y degrees outside and the sun is shining." Because I love you, because there is not even a question of lying between us, I take these accounts of the universe on trust: your address twenty-five years ago, your relationship with someone I know only by sight, this morning's weather. I fling unconscious tendrils of belief, like slender green threads, across statements such as these, statements made so unequivocally, which have no tone or shadow of tentativeness. I build them into the mosaic of my world. I allow my universe to change in minute, significant ways, on the basis of things you have said to me, of my trust in you.

Does it matter whether we speak of personal relationships or otherwise?  Is any act of speech private?  Speech is public.  Speech is meant, explicitly, to move beyond the individual.  All speech is a public act.  And if silence, too, is a form of communication (if we are complicit in lies by refusing to speak against them), then is not silence a public act also?

When we discover that someone we trusted can be trusted no longer, it forces us to reexamine the universe, to question the whole instinct and concept of trust. For a while, we are thrust back onto some bleak, jutting ledge, in a dark pierced by sheets of fire, swept by sheets of rain, in a world before kinship, or naming, or tenderness exist; we are brought close to formlessness.

 Again, to lie is an act of violence.

She may say, I didn't want to cause pain. What she really did not want is to have to deal with the other's pain. The lie is a short-cut through another's personality.

 I'm reminded of Billy Bragg's line from "New England"...

I don't feel bad about letting you go, I just feel sad about letting you know.

Bragg's quote is an interesting one.  Bragg's narrator doesn't express concern for the feelings of the person he's addressing.  He is only concerned with the discomfort that the action causes in himself.  It's an entirely selfish viewpoint. When I was in my early twenties, I'd tried dating a woman.  She led me on for six months.  Told me to call her if I needed to talk when my father died.  I spent two weeks calling her.  She answered her phone and told me never to call her again.  I asked her why she'd spent six months leading me on.  "I didn't want to seem like a bitch," she said.

Again, it's an entirely narcissistic worldview.  I lied so you would think me better than I am.  I don't take into account your feelings.  I'm only concerned with how I come off.  Oddly enough, lying didn't make her seem any less of a bitch.  It just made her seem a lying bitch.

And (s)he may also tell herself a lie: that she is concerned with the other's feelings, not with her own.

I throw the ()'s around that, again, because I don't think the trope is limited specifically to women. I think the idea that we lie to someone to spare their feelings is in and of itself a lie.  If my zipper's down, you can feel free to let me know.  I'd rather have the ability to correct that than roam around embarrassing myself in a state of ignorance.  I'd rather hear a truth, no matter how painful, than be misled with a lie.  You tell me any sort of lie, you're leading me astray.  You're not sparing my feelings, you're letting me dig myself deeper.

Here's the thing.  A lot of people tell me that I'm an asshole.  You know what?  I don't really care.  I'm not big on politeness.  I value kindness.  The two things are not equivalent in any sense.  A friend of mine was recently bemoaning the fact that too many people would be kind to his face (polite) and then talk shit behind his back.

That's not me at all.  I can mislead you with politeness.  As far as I can tell, that's just being passive aggressive, though.  It's refusing to take responsibility for what one truly feels. It's no less aggressive or offensive than being direct with you.  It's not being kind, it's hiding one's unkindness behind a veneer.

If I think you're being a jackass, odds are I'll let you know.  That's either respect or disrespect.  Either way, though, you have the information to make that choice yourself.  If that makes me an asshole in your eyes, that's your decision, too.

As far as I can tell, if I have to lie to you for me to like me, you don't like me.  You like a lie.

If I have to lie to you for you to think I'm a kind person, that just means that the idea that I'm a kind person is a lie. Am I going to be "nice" because I feel sorry for you?  No, pity is just condescension.  And I'm not that arrogant that I think you deserve my pity.

You may think that this makes me an asshole.  As far as I can tell, it's just respect.

For the both of us.

If you want to check out Rich's essay, you can find it contained here.

I definitely recommend it.

Pretty much.

Absolutely nothing to say at the moment.  Just sitting around trying to finally kick this cold and running to Hawaiian Gardens to play some cards.   If nothing else, I get cheap food at a decent price.  Yesterday wasn't all that great, money-wise. 

I pretty much sat and treaded water for six hours.  Never had the hammer hand.  And was pretty much card dead the whole way through.  I finished up.  Not by much though.  Basically enough to cover the travel and the food.  I think in the whole time I was there, I pulled one nut hand.  And maybe had face pairs twice.  It was a slow day.  Definitely not like going in the other day and pulling nine buy-ins out after four hours. 

There's a discount buy-in on a Saturday tourney with enough hours of table play, so at least I've got that under the belt.  And winning small is definitely better than losing at all.

I've watched a lot of dumbfoundingly bad play over the past 15 hours in the room, though.  People calling even odds with a 10% chance of taking down a pot.  Flushes betting into blatant boats (two pair on board and two other people in the hand) .  Low pairs calling obvious overs.  Trips betting into four-flushes.  Makes one sit and go, "huh?"  People astound me in their ability to assume that they're better than they are.

Words.

As I've noted before, some days words come more easily than others.  Today is another one of the other days.  But I'm going to force myself to sit and put something in, if only for the formation of the habit. 

It's kind of hard to express what I feel on days like today.  It's not a complete aphasia.  It's more like being lost in a sea of words.  As if all of the options are too much and it's impossible to find one's way amongst them.  Talk about this?  Talk about that?  Does this tie in here?  Or over there? 

When I was in my early teens, I'd been sitting at an Uncle's house watching the news with a couple of my cousins.  The weatherman had just announced that there was a 50% chance of snow the next day.  Two of my cousins started to argue about whether or not it would snow.  After a few minutes they turned to me and asked my opinion.  I just sort of shrugged. 

They didn't get that at all.  Told me that it was ridiculous to not have an opinion on the matter.  I still don't get their side of it.  How would I know?  Maybe it will snow.  Maybe it won't.  Why would I have an opinion on the matter?

Words can be like that for me.  Maybe.  Maybe not?  Who knows. 

I'm always kind of dumbfounded by how little of life we know.  And concurrently, how much of it passes us by in only the most glancing fashion.  You know, like that girl that you dated that one summer when your family went to the shore for the summer.  Or the person in college that you thought you'd be friends with forever.  Think of all of the books you've read.  All of the songs you've ever heard.  All of the movies you've ever seen.  All of the passing acquaintances that you've ever made.  All of the shit that you haven't even realised you'd forgotten about (a friend pointed me to some music that he'd put together with some others in the mid-90's.  Their band was called Green Lane.  I really don't think I've thought of Green Lane Reservoir Park in about a decade.  To the point that I didn't even realise that I hadn't thought about it in a decade.)

And then think of how small that is in comparison to what is out there. 

Everyone always likes to check their tastes and knowledge against those Top 100 lists.  Top 100 albums of all time.  The Greatest 100 books of the 20th century.  I normally post above average on those sorts of things.  But that's not even remotely close to touching the tip of the iceberg.  It's kind of dumbfounding how small we are in comparison to the world around us.  And the funny thing about those lists?  Almost no two of them will ever be the same.  You could probably get the same group of people to make the same list five years running, and have them change their minds.  I know any time I encounter one of those "notes" on FaceBook, it's a different list each time.  And not necessarily because we've decided that a new idea has knocked an old favorite off.

It's kind of funny to suppose that we know the world around us.  Very often, I'm not even sure I know myself.

Who knows?