April – June, 2001

Went to the woods today with a female friend.  Sat on folding chairs near a stream, had a long conversation about men and women.  In Portland it’s spring. In the mountains, the Oregon Cascades, the trees were still bare.

 

After I retire, I don’t want to ever be “busy” again.

I do want interesting things to do.

Just sitting would be interesting.  Trance.

Imagine not doing anything.

 

I wonder if modern people have become so good with words because we’re not allowed to touch?

 

I don’t trust liberalism because it’s not based on self-interest, and therefore likely to crumble at the slightest pressure.  Instead I think we need to tap into working-class self-interest.

 

People I know, a lot of them, seem to be under siege.

 

Sex: Young men need permission. Old men need encouragement and inspiration. Sexual sermons.

 

Isn’t music, at its base, mathematical?

 

Remember: People with fewer needs are harder to control.

 

I’ve decided that Buffy is actually a parable. The vampires are business people, who are trying to suck our blood.

Or the vampires are us, the consumers. I loved the vampires’ multi-level marketing scheme, with motivational speakers, in an episode of Angel.

 

A lot of people in our culture have never been socially potty trained. So they dump their pointless aggression on the rest of us.

 

The only thing that makes the world bearable is entertainment. Alcohol. Pot. Thus the number of people ruining their livers and gratefully accepting an early death.  Toxic society. We are killing people with pressure. We have piled so much crap on top of life that it cannot bear the weight.

 

Romance: When we were young we depended on physical attraction to light the fire. At least men did. When you’re old you can’t depend on that. I don’t know yet what takes its place.

 

“She, his hope amidst a culture in meltdown” – Marco Polio, The Hole

 

The mistake we make in our culture, over and over again, when we love, is expecting people to be machines. We’re not like that.  We’re not predictable. We do weird things, sometimes in rebellion against being forced to act like machines, to go against ourselves.

 

It is left to writers to say all the things we’re not supposed to say.  Our sacred duty.

 

What happened? Time happened. Time and a hostile culture about an inch deep.

 

I’ve been rethinking my position on sin. Original sin. The dark side. Which comes from our being predators. We are also pack animals, like wolves, communal. We need each other but can’t stop fighting, whether it’s necessary or not. Fighting destroys community. The two sides of our nature, always at war with each other.

 

When I’m sick my thoughts become simple: “Maybe I’ll have cabbage for dinner tonight. I like cabbage.”

 

When you look below the surface charm, Bill Clinton is the man who wasn’t there.

 

There used to be an expression, “Silence is golden.” In our noise-addicted, motormouth culture silence is rare. In silence we remember who we are.

 

When I move into a new place my stuff all lands somewhere – and stays wherever it landed for years, until I move somewhere else and the stuff all rearranges itself in a new pattern. Is there any significance to the pattern? Does it affect my life?

 

There is no such thing as too little work.

 

The downside of civilization, for men at least, is that we’re not allowed to kill our enemies.

 

I wonder if anyone keeps track of the number of people each U.S. president kills? What do you suppose Bill Clinton’s final score was? It’s a ritual for each new president: he has to kill some foreigners to prove how tough he is.  Then his ratings go up.  He may be a bastard but he’s our bastard.

 

Recently I looked at a used laptop computer, thinking I might buy it. I thought I’d do my recreational writing on the laptop instead of in a notebook, because I never seem to have the time to type my writing into my desktop computer. The laptop would sit on the table by my chair, always ready. I could take it to bed with me for those thoughts after the light goes out. I’ve done this before.

But I decided I didn’t want it. Too big and heavy. I think I’m too old. Not to use one – I work with computers just about every day – but to want one. That time is past, just as it’s past for a lot of other things. Like campers and motor homes, which used to represent romantic mobility to me, freedom, carefree traveling, take your home with you. Until I bought a mini-motorhome, which I lived in, and found out what it’s like to drag a small house down the freeway. And fix everything that breaks.

The laptop felt the same way. Not mobility, freedom, just a burden. One more thing to pay for, lug around, take care of.

The time is passing when I found technology exciting. It’s a stage, and I’ve moved on. Now I identify computers with the drudgery of work and constantly having to learn more technical details. So many details that there is no time to think.

Moving on, letting go.

 

I want to sit in the back yard and watch the squirrels play.

 

I don’t believe things are the answer. Haven’t we done that?

If things are the answer, what was the question?

 

I’m looking at the gray dead face of my TV set and wondering if I should turn it on.

 

When he read in Portland the science fiction writer Bruce Sterling said that eventually computers will become absorbed into our surroundings and become invisible and unremarkable. Doing a standup comedy routine, he leaned into the microphone and said, dramatically, “My god, there’s a transducer in here!”

And we will no longer have to take classes and study two inch thick manuals to use them.

I think it’s just as likely that we will lose interest in what computers now do for us – shuffle information. Suppose we got rid of a lot of the information?

Sterling, and other near-future SF writers, see artificial intelligence blended into our world, even nature. More intelligent trees, houses, clothes. Intelligent materials, produced by nanotechnology, made up of microscopic intelligent machines.

Could an intelligent physical world actually do anything for us that we want done? Or are we grasping at straws, trying to find a way to keep the game going?

 

My computer allows me to hear from friends I haven’t seen in years. It also allowed me, today, to get an email from an acquaintance who has gone crazy. I could have done without that.

 

Sanity depends on isolation.

 

Can you believe the Philip Morris TV ads congratulating themselves on their contributions to Kosovo relief efforts?

 

And don’t all cars look boring, or is that just another stage I’ve gone past? The love of machines.

 

It’s the same pattern with any addiction: eventually it doesn’t work.

I’m in thing withdrawal.

Thing withdrawal can last for years, even for poor people.

Especially if you keep buying.

 

I’ve read that some writers write about what they love, others about what they hate.

 

Crazy people, at least those I’ve known, are not crazy all the time. With or without medication, they can be fairly normal for long periods of time. Then they go off the deep end. One marker is irrational anger, directed at whoever is handy, usually friends, family, therapist or counselor. Because they’ve long since driven everyone else away.

Much as I would sometimes like to help, it’s best to stay away. Being a helper can bring you a lot of grief.

 

M says she loves her Equation Editor program. Funny, although I was interested for a long time, I never saw anything wonderful come out of a computer.

 

Work hollows out people, makes them puppets.

 

Maybe it really is true that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. The problem is, it takes so long that by the time we’re stronger we’re older.

 

Aging is one of those things that is obvious, completely unremarkable, boring even – unless it’s happening to you.

 

The American way of life is a forced march. We are constantly being pushed down a road we did not choose. What we want to do is squeezed out of our lives. No room. Keep moving.

It’s the hyperactive people who run things, people who like to move fast. And expect the rest of us to do likewise.

“Driving ahead of your lights” means driving so fast at night that your car’s stopping distance is greater than the reach of your headlights. I believe America is doing that. We have speeded up to the point that we cannot think ahead as fast as we are moving.

 

There is another reason we stay busy: fear. We are afraid of down time because we’re afraid to discover who we are. A meditation teacher once told me that we make our lives complex so we don’t have to experience what is really going on. When we live simply, we slow down and see and feel. This may be uncomfortable at times; we are quiet and mindful and see the pain, dissatisfaction, and wanting. We think we’re happy because we’re not paying attention. We’re so used to rushing through life on automatic pilot that we don’t take the time to get to know ourselves. When we rarely take the time to nurture ourselves, we can be pretty empty inside. -- Janet Luhrs, The Simple Living Guide

 

Dream: Talking to someone about “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.” Of the two, I joked, it’s more fun to afflict the comfortable.

 

It’s hard for real people to compete with fiction.

 

At night before bed I go to the bathroom, and the whole house is talking.

 

Work is the next best thing to being dead.

 

I’m interested in things that move. Static situations are no fun.

 

Aging, it’s partly an identity thing, right? A role we play?

I mean, aside from the fact that your body starts deteriorating and people you know start dying.

Right?

 

I’ve got a cold. I woke up this morning dreaming of liquid plastic, the kind that smells like poison.

 

All those things I think I should be doing, they feel like ants crawling all over me.

 

I was thinking about “angle of repose,” a geological term for the angle at which dirt falling down a slope comes to rest, used as the title for a novel by Wallace Stegner. His point was that people also finally come to rest at an angle to their lives.

And so do our household goods. The books end up in bookcases, gathering dust for ten years, papers filed away, never to be seen again, old clothes we never wear, hung up in the closet. All this stuff finds a resting place, where it won’t bother us.

 

And in conclusion, may I say that it’s really too bad decent dope costs $40 for an eighth of an ounce.

 

You can’t get high, with tomorrow coming.

 

Bosses: I think the men were better than the women.  Not as personal.

 

Somewhere, probably back in the 60s, I lost any sense of America as a country better than others. Now I wonder why I ever believed that.

 

I’m going for the ultimate hippie dropout, known as retirement.  And it’s legal.

 

This picture doesn’t need a frame.

 

See, he just got stoned and the writing started.

 

Politics: We ought to pick the people who make the rules more carefully. But we don’t, do we?  Too busy, too much input. Please don’t tell me anything more.

Also, we suspect the people who really make the rules are our bosses.

 

So, what have I learned this year from television?

Cleveland rocks.

Vampires burn if exposed to the sun.

Buffy is dead.

 

If we are all stories, someone must read us.

 

I will get right to the point.

 

Actually I’m a hobby.

 

My day job is being a machine.

 

Someone please kill the neighbor’s dog.

 

We need an archeology of the present – to somehow reconstruct this world from its pieces.

 

We are pregnant

With pauses

 

We are clever, but inarticulate.

 

I think the spirit is that part of a person that animates them, that makes them feel and seem alive and present. That is what gets suppressed on a daily basis by the way we live.

 

I remember after the movie Shine seeing a critical review of a CD by the main character, a classical pianist, a real person who is schizophrenic. I was disappointed because I wanted the guy to be great.

Brain diseases are as difficult as cancer. The drugs help them to maintain, but the disease doesn’t go away. Sooner or later they’ll go crazy, lose control, have irrational anger, say and do things they shouldn’t….

Of course at some point most of us do that.

 

When I told someone I was going to resurrect Drift and make it a website she asked if I were going to charge admission. I said no, no one would pay to read the kind of stuff I write.

“Then why do it?”

“Why paint a picture and hang it on the wall?”

“Oh, it’s like that huh?”

 

A long time ago I asked an artist friend what it would take for her to be able to do art. She said she would have to be somewhere where there was nothing else to do.

Sounds like retirement.

 

Excuse me, it’s late May, where I am, your time may differ, my room is hot, and I need to open a window.

 

There were long periods in my life in which nothing happened. I don’t think this is one of them.

 

I still can’t get used to seeing Viagra advertised on TV.  Is nothing sacred?

 

Who defines “inside” and “outside”?

 

“In today’s America, the many positive aspects of recreational drug use are too often ignored. The need to score gets the user out of his or her house and into the sunshine – out into the community and meeting people! Drugs are about networking!” – Rudy Rucker, The Hacker and the Ants

 

“Resistance to the treadmill of production therefore has to come mainly from the lower echelons of society, and from social movements rather than individuals. This can only occur, to quote the late German Green Party leader Petra Kelly, if ecological concerns are ‘tied to issues of economic justice – the exploitation of the poor by the rich.’” – John Bellamy Foster, in Corporations Are Gonna Get Your Mama, Kevin Danaher ed., 1996.

I would only add that the poor, and the working class, are also exploited by the middle class, especially the professional middle class.

 

Oh why must you go on so, my lord?

 

“Despite all the effort poured into cancer research, mortality rates have hardly budged. Higher five-year survival rates are misleading. Cancers are being detected earlier, which is probably why more people make the five-year mark. Looking at 10-, 15-, and 20-year survival rates, for most cancers there is really no difference.” – Judith Newman, Discover magazine, May 2001.

 

Work: it seems we’ve all become like sharks – we have to keep moving or we’re dead. Also, we’re all supposed to compete against each other for jobs, which makes us predatory.  Competition is destructive to community.

 

Funny how what really sticks in my mind is all the stories people have told me over the years, more than anything I’ve read in a book. Those quiet little stories that tell me what life is about.

 

One thing that Solomon's exhaustive and eloquent book makes abundantly clear is that, despite depression's well-to-do and lily-white public image, it's not true that serious depression is largely a province of the privileged. The rise of antidepressants may be a phenomenon of affluence, but depression itself is not. In fact, Solomon argues, since clinical depression is often the brain's response to trauma, physical hardship and a persistent lack of self-determination in one's everyday life, we shouldn't be surprised that poor people actually suffer from it more often than do the middle class and rich. The overwhelming obstacles encountered during a life spent in poverty can breed passivity, and passivity, or “learned helplessness,” is “a precursor state of depression.” “Checking for depression among the indigent,” as Solomon puts it, “is like checking for emphysema among coal miners.” … That's no doubt why welfare recipients have a rate of depression three times the national average, according to Solomon.

-- Maria Russo, Salon.com

 

The book referred to is The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon.

 

Things to do before I die:

1.     Build a robot.

2.     Write a book.

3.     Win.

 

“This uncle of yourn sounds like a man full of opinions.”

“That and nothing else. They aint a thing to him other than what he thinks about somebody else”

-- Melinda Haynes, Chalktown

 

I have never seen a squirrel fall.

 

It’s hard to start a business.  I can’t help thinking: it just means more work.

 

Eventually we all pull a disappearing act.  Aren’t we clever?

 

I’m

Still

Here

 

It seems strange to me that simply moving fast has become a virtue.  It’s like we’re all in Navy boot camp: “All right everyone, move your asses!”

 

Increasingly, things escape me.  Never mind.  Let them go.

It’s time for my thoughts to grow up and leave home. Let them move in with you.

If I forget enough, will my mind become clearer?

Finally, to know everything only by direct contact, no theory.

Roses in yards of old houses in southeast Portland in June.

Finally to be a simpleton.

 

I have so much to tell you.

 

I feel the most clear-minded when I’m not trying to make something happen.

 

It all comes out of silence.

 

Fiction: it may be easier to suspend disbelief if you don’t believe things are real in the first place.

 

Those businesses that proudly display signs about drug testing their employees, why don’t they just have a sign saying, “We are terribly anal.” Just publicly admit their psychic deformity.

 

Work is the root of all evil.

 

I picture writing as insects, chewing up everything in sight.

 

Reading William S. Burroughs’ The Wild Boys, it seems to me the key to his style is that while everything is being created it is also constantly dissolving.

 

The revolution can be neither created nor destroyed.

 

“They have destroyed and are destroying … and do not know it and do not want to know it,” James Baldwin wrote a few decades ago. He added: “But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” – Norman Solomon, The Portland Alliance

 

“Leave a mark on the world. Instead the world has left marks on us. We got older.” – Wallace Stegner, Crossing To Safety

 

Momento: a whole movie about short-term memory.

Considering how painful life is, why do we want to remember?

 

Suppose we had a society where every citizen was required to commit at least one murder during their lifetime?

 

“What the disorderly crave about everything is order, what the dislocated aspire to is location.” – Stegner

 

I remember when I was younger believing I would find the answer in reading. Now I read mainly for anesthesia.

 

“Order is indeed the dream of man, but chaos, which is another word for dumb, blind, witless chance, is still the law of nature.” – Stegner

 

Education: “After all, we had been programmed in the same system, stuffed like Strasbourg geese with the best that has been known and said in the world during man’s long struggle upward from spontaneity to cliché.” – Stegner

 

An essential quality in people is mouth control.

Much of what goes through any human mind is garbage. If you blurt it out you’ll hurt people and drive them away.

We will isolate you.

 

When I retire I’m going back into trance mode, and never come out.

 

“Four out of every nine households in the United States saved nothing in 1998.” -- Salon.com

 

American foreign policy has always been about protecting the access of large corporations to their investments, markets, resources and cheap labor in the poorer countries. Our government often uses some kind of smokescreen like anticommunism, stopping drugs, etc. But underneath it's about money. The U.S. is involved in Columbia because it's afraid the leftwing rebel movement might win. Then it might spread to other South American countries. And cost the corporations money. See Rogue States by Noam Chomsky, America's leading leftist intellectual.

Domestic policy has the same purpose. Prosperity spooks the rich because investors are afraid wages will rise, causing inflation which will reduce the value of their investments. So the Federal Reserve keeps raising interest rates to "cool off" the economy, until we get a recession and people like me can't find a job. Although seldom explicitly stated by those in power, the U.S., under both Democrats and Republicans, has a high unemployment, low wage policy. Working-class people in this country are like the peasants in Third World countries. They want to keep us in our place.

 

Check out Jim Hightower. I heard him speak in Portland. He's funny, has the common touch and is easy to follow.

 

“I have tasted fame – it is nothing,” he concluded. “I find my greatest happiness in being alone with my violin.” – Edgar Rice Burroughs, inventor of Tarzan, in an autobiographical parody, quoted by Bruce Watson in Smithsonian, March 2001. He didn’t play the violin, and had been a failure until he started writing pulp fiction, which made him rich.

 

Whatever happened to all those things we were not supposed to fold, spindle or mutilate?

 

The return on work, in both money and satisfaction, is so minimal for most of us that it doesn’t make sense to do any more of it than we have to.  Better to have the time.

 

I’ve been watching crazy people for awhile, because they keep wandering into my life.  I believe we all have crazy thoughts.  The difference is, most of us know these thoughts are crazy – usually the result of too much stress – and we do not act on them. We squash them like a bug.  But crazy people think their crazy thoughts are real. People are out to get them and they’ve got to fight.  Followed by a big anger dump on whoever is handy. I try not to be there.

 

I believe in being different for the sake of being different.

 

The mind is like a pyramid, not much happening on top. How do we get to the deeper levels? All this work-money-news-TV-what’s-for-dinner noise keeps us on the surface.

What works for me is a lot of free time.  That is, not working.

Natalie Goldberg – Writing Down the Bones and Wild Mind – says just write a lot.  Write down all the crap and whatever else comes to mind. Something worthwhile will surface.

 

Another one of those wandering around in a public place looking for a bathroom dreams.

 

Truths, self-evident:

There are no good jobs.

Just as there are no good diseases.

 

It’s so difficult to stop.  All our lives we’ve been told to move, to do something.

 

As we get older we become exaggerations of who we used to be.

 

Whenever I meet someone who is constantly busting a gut to be aggressive, I think they’re afraid of being something else.

 

WB – Buffy, Zena, Sheena – pretty women who kill.

 

It’s not that employers, as individuals, are necessarily bad people, although many are.  It’s that they have too much power over their employees, that power corrupts, and that their self-interests are very different from mine. We are members of two different classes, and therefore at war.

 

Even volunteer work can be damaging if it doesn’t express who we are and if we don’t really feel like doing it.

 

“Much of this theory has to do with changing how we look at work. We can bring to whatever work we do a sense of passion, purpose, and awareness. Rather than tuning out during our work day and operating on automatic pilot, we can instead be fully mindful and present with each task we do.” – Janet Luhrs, The Simple Living Guide

I hate this kind of professional middle-class mind-crap. Just change your attitude, they tell us, and you can make the unbearable lovely. Fine, let’s trade places and see how they like it.

Better yet, fuck them.

Let them type their own goddamned letters.

This reminds me of a newspaper article a few years back about some middle-class professional pursuing simplicity by trying to get his income and expenses down to $20,000 a year. An irate reader wrote a letter to the editor saying that a lot of us are trying to get our incomes up to $20,000 a year.

 

“Overwork has gotten so prevalent in our society that a new phrase has evolved to describe its effects: TINS stands for Two Incomes, No Sex.” – Luhrs

 

Maybe middle-class professionals are so out of touch with reality because they spend so much time working.

 

Am I envious? Well sure.

 

Funny how theological people are about temperature. As if the temperature they’re comfortable at is the one true temperature, and everyone else is just wrong.  Which leads to thermostat wars.

 

Living in America, like fiction, requires a suspension of disbelief. We have to pretend, for example, that working makes sense and that spending money will make us happy.  After all, what else is there?

Retirement must be the moment of truth.  What do you do when your work is gone and you can no longer afford to spend money?

 

Culture is a form of identity theft.

 

As far as intelligence goes, I’ve read that aging is a tradeoff: a slower brain and less efficient memory, but also a lot more stored information.  Much of it useless.

 

Something I’ve learned about medicine is that doctors don’t always know what is going on.  They say my sister may have had a small stroke.

 

Okay, some people truly are energetic, and need to do things.  Bless you, and may I please be excused?

 

Oakland, California, where I lived for four years, will always remind me of Gotham City.

 

Retirement must be the ultimate hippie dropout.  I picture old baby boomers with long hair in tie die shirts, sharing a joint and saying, “Far out, man!”

 

Creativity is what rushes in to fill a vacuum.

 

Job-hunting: my nerves are getting delicate.  Leave me alone.

Unemployment and working are pretty much the same situation: no peace.

 

I’ve been filing up notebooks for a long time.  My fear is that I’ll open one of my notebooks and find it’s all the same.  Like Jack Nicholas in The Shining.  Every day he worked at his typewriter, slowly going mad. When his wife looked at his writing she discovered he had typed, over and over, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

 

Why is it that our culture gets to define duty? To escape that you almost have to take your head in both hands and forcibly turn it to the side.

The purpose of subcultures, such as the 60s hippies, is to escape the dominant culture.

We didn’t quite make it.

We’re still here.

 

I’ll figure out what it means later.

 

The Beast is good television but bad news.  TV news people already think the news is about them, not about what is going on in the world. The Beast does nothing to help us understand complicated public issues, which is what news is supposed to be. News is not supposed to be entertainment.

Garrison Keelor wrote something like, “If you get your news from TV you know less about the world around you than if you drank gin straight from the bottle.”

Someone says on The Beast that it was TV that turned the U.S. against the Vietnam war, by showing us the reality of it, not complicated analysis.  Possibly.  I’d like to think the massive antiwar effort, by activists like me, had something to do with it. We stood outside supermarkets and handed people mimeographed sheets.

Some say what turned the public against the war was the number of body bags coming back to the states.

Maybe it was all of the above.

 

My ex-wife said my life before I met her wasn’t real to her. I said her life since our divorce wasn’t real to me. Reality is what we see, not what someone tells us about. If we don’t see it, hear it, touch it, it’s a story.

 

Some things I’ve only seen in dreams.

 

In small amounts alcohol is benign, if you aren’t driving, in large amounts dangerous. My 46 year-old nephew falling into a ditch, his liver exploding, dying in the ambulance. “Don’t worry mom, I’m not going to die, I’m tough.” No one is tough. We are fragile animals that can go out like a light at any second.

 

CSI – I like watching people think.

 

A while back, when I was disgusted with television, I asked a friend why she watched an interview with Monica Lewinsky. She said she wanted to know what the masses were thinking.

My friend was proud of Lewinsky for bringing down Clinton. She hated him for his foreign policy – which, like the foreign policies of all American presidents, consisted of killing foreigners. To protect the interests of corporations.

I said:

1.     That wasn’t the issue. Clinton should not be driven out of office over his sex life.

2.     Clinton hadn’t been brought down. He was still in office, still had the powers of the presidency, notably the veto, and was not going to resign.  No matter how many prissy editorial writers jumped up and down and screamed for him to begone in the name of decency.

3.     Lewinsky was more a victim than victor, a foolish young woman with a BA in psychology, known among her friends for fantasy, impressed, as so many stupid women are, by power. Since when is sucking the presidential penis the height of feminism?

She was used to saturate the news and bring national politics to a stop for over a year. Nothing could penetrate the curtain of sexual hysteria thrown up by news media people who must have some kind of serious problem. It was a national timeout in which nothing got done.  Of course, Clinton didn’t seem to want to do much of anything anyway.

 

The curse of civilization, with its emphasis on control, is that we end up feeling as if we’ve never lived at all.

So you either break the rules or die.

All right, I believe in some rules, such as not running red lights.  Common sense.

It’s just that in our culture authority, meaning power, is too much in the saddle, and too many of us are too close to being slaves.

 

I don’t share the American middle-class reverence for education. Most of it is a waste of time, just sitting there waiting for it to be over with. There are, sometimes, things worth learning, but usually you have to teach yourself.  Most people don’t know how to teach. They think talking is teaching.  We’ve had enough talking.

 

Somewhere in my genes is a village. I used to imagine it in my 20s, set off by itself in the middle of fields and forests, a place unto itself.

A friend writes of a small western town she lived in recently, “Everyone is someone.”

 

The main thing I want from retirement is to be undefined.

 

Spring is beautiful in Portland – until the neighbors break out their gasoline motor-driven power tools, their chainsaws, hedge trimmers, weedeaters, and I start praying for rain.

 

It’s scary to watch people I care about living beyond their means. The American middle class has a lifestyle they regard as normal, and it seems almost impossible to wean them off of it. Probably the only ones who make it are those who hate their jobs.

 

“An estimated 3.5 million people are homeless at some point each year in America.” – Salon.com

 

 The Democratic party has been drifting to the right for years. Bill Clinton and Al Gore made it their mission to pull the party to the right. The Democrats have abandoned their former working class and environmentalist voting base and now cater to the interests of the corporations and upper classes which finance their campaigns. The only people who don't seem to understand this change are the loyal liberal Democrats who get next to nothing from their party but still vote for its candidates. If you want to stop Democrats from selling out, stop voting for them.

“Literary fiction as a whole seems to be sliding into the kind of ghetto that poetry now occupies, a cultural economy in which writers vastly outnumber readers and nobody buys the books.” -- Laura Miller, Salon.com

 

I am not in denial.  I do recognize the existence of reality.  I just don’t know what to do with it.  How do you choose between a rock and a hard place?

 

Here’s the deal about smokers in old age: they keep at it until they’re past the point of no return, and then they see no reason to quit.

Old smokers never fade away, they just die.

 

I don’t want to work, I just want to sit around and write smart remarks.

As in, “That will be the last smart remark out of you, young man!”

Young man, old man, it don’t matter.  Long as you got smart remarks.

 

I’m having fun yet.

 

We shouldn’t expect the next generation to be better.  Their job is to go on being us.