Dream: Woman on a bus taking a survey. I tell her she
can put me in the category “rootless.” Then I add that I’ve been in
Portland for six years.
“I lived with the poor, and for the first time I saw
their miserable, barren, hampered, dehumanized lives.” – Bruce Sterling,
The Artificial Kid
Excuse me? If you want to see “barren,” look at the
middle class, all that buying and selling, that enslavement to their
jobs.
The middle class is very big on attitude. They think
with the right attitude they won’t get cancer. As near as I can figure
it out, “attitude” means fitting in, having the same opinions as everyone
else, being cheerful no matter what, and ignoring the fact that you’re
being exploited. Attitude is willful blindness. Attitude is personality.
There was an article in Salon.com about a woman who
shaved her pubic hair to protest the election of George Bush. As I get
older, there are things like that I don’t want to know.
Freud, referring to dream symbolism, said sometimes
a cigar is just a cigar. Unless, as someone recently pointed out, it’s
Bill Clinton’s cigar.
His presidential legacy.
He didn’t actually do much for eight years except screw
people.
I wonder if the Democrats will roll over and play dead
for Bush the way they did for Ronald Reagan.
I told my friend D about feeling intimidated by help
wanted ads for “enthusiastic, energetic, outgoing person to multitask
in fast-paced environment.” She said, “Oh that probably just means they
don’t want you to nod off.”
Marijuana helped me to see the absurdity of things
when I was young. Now the insight stays with me, even without the drug.
When I can reach that mental place, which is fairly often if I’m not
too stressed, I’ll start laughing.
There is always such a gap between what we’re supposed
to believe and reality, and that’s funny.
The Gorebot, for example.
The talking Bush. Or Shrub, as they call him in Texas.
Marijuana is the poor man’s meditation. For those who
have no patience.
Neither Gore nor Bush are real. Nor was the contest
between them. Do you really care which faction of the rich rule us?
I seem to get screwed equally in both Democratic and Republican administrations.
Intoxication is not merely chemical, it requires the
right state of mind. Sometimes alcohol gets me high, sometimes it just
makes me groggy. Thirty years ago I read a book about LSD that discussed
the importance of set and setting – your mental state and what is going
on around you.
Getting high is an innate mental capacity, and the
chemical is only an aid. So if you really want to repress “drugs” you’ll
have to do something about the human brain.
Bumper sticker wise, we’re moving from “Question authority”
to “question reality.” Authoritarian power depends on preserving a mass
false notion of reality.
I’m unemployed. Job interview today at a company that
distributes videos. They want someone who is “detail oriented and quick.”
I’m not sure about the “quick.” Why must we always move fast? Is it
so other people will make more money? Does “quick” come naturally to
some people, and isn’t a strain?
Job interviews are always difficult. Doing what doesn’t
come naturally, putting on an act for an hour.
Out of perhaps a dozen resumes I’ve sent out, I’ve
had two interviews, one by phone and one in person. Which tells me that there is a lot of competition
for office jobs.
At almost 61, the amount of energy expended in working
seems inordinate. Just getting my body on a bus and clear across town
and back, not to mention the eight hours in between.
A 70 year old man I know told me he retired at 62.
He worked in a warehouse, and he just wasn’t physically up to it anymore.
That’s something people in Congress forgot, when they pushed the Social
Security retirement age up to save money. You can retire at 62, but
you don’t get nearly as much money. To get full Social Security benefits
I have to retire at 65 and a half. For younger people it can be as high
as 67. We’re extending wage slavery further into old age. A gift from
Democrats and Republicans in the Reagan years. Don’t you just love bipartisanship?
They extended the retirement age to “save” Social Security.
Which reminds me of the famous quote from an American officer in Vietnam
who said, “It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save
it.”
My experience with the gradual wearing out of early
old age is that it has a lot to do with sleep. At 5:00 in the morning
I’m sitting up in bed rereading Natalie Goldberg’s book about writing,
Writing Down the Bones. Still as good as it was ten years ago.
And writing. Because I can’t sleep. Most nights I wake up sometime between
3 and 5, and it can take an hour to get back to sleep.
It was always hard for me to stay on a schedule; now
it’s harder. I can’t ever be sure that I can sleep when I want to, need
to. I’ve read that this is common: somewhere around age 60 sleep becomes
unreliable for many people.
So then try dragging a tired body across town, etc.,
etc.
What I want is to sit at home and think, and get paid
for it.
An ambition of working-class parents used to be that
their children “would not have to work with their hands.”
Dream: I went to Ireland, walked around. Green countryside,
exciting.
After several years of living in a one bedroom apartment
I’ve moved into an old two story house in southeast Portland. Share
the house with three other people.
Dream, first night in new house: Earthquake causing
great landslides of mountains down into Los Angeles basin, which is
like a valley in the dream. Fleeing with other people.
“It strikes her that Belle is not cut out, somehow,
for literature. It is not forthright enough for her, it insinuates too
much and declares too little. All those stratagems by which novels seek
to arrive at truth: how can Belle possibly be expected to tolerate such
subterfuge?” – Evelyn Toynton, Modern Art
This novel is loosely based on the life of the wife
of artist Jackson Pollock. It says that in the 1940s art was regarded,
at least among artists, as a sort of “secular religion.”
Unemployment: a tense timeout, spent avoiding job-hunting
– a therapist friend tells me that’s normal – and learning more computer
shit.
In my early 60s, I feel like I’m already nine-tenths
memory.
Life is more real if you write it down. Otherwise,
who knows what happened?
Days pass without much to remember about any of them,
which is why so many years seem to pass so quickly, especially as you
get older and become prerecorded, do the same thing over and over, resist
change.
If you write it down it stays around longer.
It is actually possible, through writing, to slow down
time….
I want my glow in the dark laptop back. Too much trouble
to turn on the light, put on glasses….
Actually I don’t know if we become more habitual as
we get older. I may have always been this way.
I told M about some of the unwise things I said during
a recent job interview: “I’m not a morning person, although I can be
with enough caffeine.” She suggested I didn’t want the job. “Maybe you
had on your Freudian slippers.”
I just saw Clint Eastwood in a boring TV movie. At
least he knows how to make old look tough. I wonder how long he can
keep that up?
A woman I used to know liked to tell long rambling
stories. Men would get exasperated and say, “Would you get to the point!”
Well isn’t that what we all want, to somehow get to
the point?
Difficult to do in a society where most of us spend
our whole lives doing what we have to do, what we’re told to do.
If you could stop doing that, what would be the point?
Wait, I’ve got to get this down….
It’s always possible that what is actually happening
is better than anything I might have planned.
Reality is its own reward.
Yes, but is it reality, or just business?
I tried to watch Survivor II but it seemed like a rerun.
Eating bugs. Been there.
Soon I’ll be 61. It feels like a countdown.
I don’t think I ever really had goals. I had fantasies.
Fantasies are what people with imagination have instead of goals.
Something about this culture, and the way I relate
to it, makes me feel that goals are impossible.
In a recent job interview a man asked me what my goals
are for the next two to five years.
“Well,” I said, “in five years I hope to be retired.”
Remember: Never tell anyone what they expect to hear.
I always want to know what people are reading.
At a Unitarian church meeting tonight on Habitat for
Humanity, a group that builds houses for poor people, I found out that
the average rent for a two bedroom apartment in Portland is $800 a month.
I noticed a difference between this meeting and political
meetings I go to, more feel-good, less tension.
How do you diagnose social illnesses? At what point,
for example, does speed become dysfunctional? Also, how do you measure
it?
I may already be living the life I’m living.
Some things are clearer to me than they used to be,
others remain a mystery: how to live without too much aggravation.
Try to avoid bad jobs, when I have a choice. Improve
skills. Work part-time if possible. Try not to spend money. Save. Any
degree of security helps to reduce the pain. Don’t get too wrapped up
in technology, it doesn’t return as much as it takes. Walk. Maintain
friendships. They are more dependable than love affairs. Put limits
on politics. Take time. Rise above it.
The funny thing about aging is that it doesn’t
feel natural. It feels like something is wrong.
Static electricity
Flashes of lightening
Under the covers
“In addition to the Windows ME ‘Getting Things Done’
online guide, you can use other resources available on Microsoft Help
and Support to find help for your issues.” – Microsoft WME Quick Start
Guide
My “issues.” Well now….
M says men want freedom, women want security.
In my rented room
In M’s house
I dream of getting smaller
Old dream
Camping trailer in rented driveway
Low rent, Social Security at 62
Qualify for Oregon Health Plan
Maybe men and women define “security” differently.
I define it as getting expenses as low as possible. Because I can’t
depend on income. Working-class people, like soldiers, are expendable.
We’ve long since reached the point where the work most
of us do doesn’t make sense. Because it isn’t about survival or anything
else rational. We do what we do because someone is willing to pay us
to do it. We’re all busting a gut trying to scratch out a living selling
things to each other that we don’t really need. It’s a system with its
own twisted logic: it runs because it runs.
I’ve recently started two part-time office jobs and
they’re both driving me crazy. The two women I work for don’t seem to
know how to use an employee. One of them can’t keep her mind on the
same track for more than a few minutes. She calls it “multitasking,”
a computer buzzword originally, that means running more than one program
at the same time. I call it disorganization.
Is this a female style, or do male employers do it
too? I see a lot of ads for office workers which say “must be capable
of multitasking.” Do we have a whole generation of managers who are
so busy and fragmented that they can’t stay on the same track for very
long?
Sometimes I’ll be at political meetings where things
come together, in a fuzzy way, and we achieve critical mass and move
forward in the general direction of wherever we’re going, together.
Other times we’re all retreating, trying to get through the meeting
without volunteering for anything.
The debate on medical marijuana has carefully missed
the mark. When you’re sick and feeling rotten, that’s when you most
need to get high.
People use mind-altering drugs to keep their minds
flexible.
I wonder if this is how artists feel, all the time?
Loose Change
I’m convinced that I’m tired all the time because I
go to bed late. Well duh! But
what can I do? If you work, when are you supposed to get your reading
done?
Reading a short story about a nun, I realized that
I live like a monk. A member of the Holy Order of Political Activists.
Funny, I don’t remember taking vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.
I must have gotten drunk and signed up.
I’ve always had a low tolerance for death.
She’s not coming back, is she?
he said.
I thought about it.
No, I answered him, I don’t
expect she is.
We looked out in the same direction,
out just beyond where our eyes could see, right behind the blue line
of sky meeting water was the place where they’d all gone. All the people
who weren’t coming back. They were full of the grace of their various
abandonments, they were far more beautiful than we were. I asked him
to please drive me home.
– Emily Carter, Glory Goes
and Gets Some
Drift is like two people sitting in a living room reading,
my idea of marriage, and every now and then one of them looks up and
says, “Hey, listen to this.”
I’m living on remembered intellectual scraps, busy
studying computer crap and trying to raise the money to pay for my medical
insurance.
I won’t do anything they don’t make me do.
I will complain.
Better yet, I will go to sleep early and try to restore
my nervous system.
Tomorrow I must go to work and pretend to be normal.
America does not know what to do with protest. On the
one hand, protest relieves its boredom. Ah, something to watch. Maybe
the police will get out of line and beat up people. On the other hand,
America feels hurt that anyone could be mad at it, that anyone could
doubt its innate goodness.
In regards to medical care, America has arrived at
the following capitalist logic: Those who need more medical care, the
older, the sick, should pay more for it. A lot more.
So that America’s insurance rates don’t go up.
Part of the middle-class effort to hang onto their
status by keeping their eyes closed.
We can only live by disconnection.
Do most of us secretly hate business, or is
it just me? Business seems like such a total disconnect from being human.
We do business then try to relate to each other, and we don’t know how.
It becomes more business: if I give you this what will you give me?
I’m going to break down and buy a good pen. I can no
longer stand the slow stubbornness of a ballpoint.
A relatively dry winter is shading into spring. Roses
are starting to grow. I can feel the lymph node behind my right ear,
not a good sign. The first symptom that my leukemia is coming back.
I think employers are perpetually annoyed that employees
don’t care about the business.
Have you noticed that everyday writing, even business
writing, is growing more eccentric? A whole generation of English teachers
seems to be missing in action.
Or maybe it’s speed.
I hear that retired people have trouble thinking of
things to do. Why do anything if you don’t have to?
I hate McDonalds because of the constant high-pitched
beep-beep-beep-beep of the alarms that tell them, I think, to take the
over-cooked fries out of the hot grease. They must be understaffed.
Every business owner’s dream: get by with fewer employees. Every worker’s
nightmare.
I go there because I’m hustling to make money – I’ve
spent all weekend on the computer – and I have no time to grocery shop.
When I’m retired, no more fast food. No more fast anything.
Lately I’ve been losing things in dreams. Or they’re
being stolen. I leave something somewhere, go back later to get it and
it’s gone. Last night I lost a motorcycle.
This feels like a successor to the dreams where it’s
dark, I’m trying to turn on a lamp and it won’t turn on.
Pollock – Interesting to see Ed Harris play this dazed, childlike
man who seems perpetually hungover. In a radio interview, Harris said
that Jackson Pollock was “excruciatingly shy,” a severe alcoholic and
“probably manic-depressive.” Also,
they say, a genius.
I’ve always had trouble relating to abstract art, but
the movie, also directed by Harris,
gave me some idea what it’s about. Imagine a picture of an energy
field….
In Pollock a reporter asks, “How do you know
when a painting is finished?” He says, “How do you know when you’ve
finished making love?”
All the attention that success and fame brings Pollock
makes him feel like a fake. Everyone is watching. He can’t just paint,
he must invent a role.
According to a review of Pollock, all the paintings
in the movie were done by students. “There isn’t an original in the
whole movie.” Kind of an interesting joke.
I’ve been thinking about doing totally anonymous art.
It just appears, no source. No image to maintain, good or bad. Artists
like Pollock and writers like Jack Kerouac, both shy men, seem to have
had a problem with the contradiction between their art and their image,
one having nothing to do with the other. The image is about selling.
Better to say what you have to say and disappear. Write
in disappearing ink so the words disappear too, after they’re read.
Or they flash into existence at random intervals. Messages in bottles
thrown into the ocean. The whole process essentially random.
Art has to be an act of aggression: you’re pushing
against people’s expectations.
Consuming art turns it into a product, when it is really
a process.
Cyberspace is about getting rid of the solid object,
the real thing.
Turning everything into information.
Going mental.
We’re slowly migrating into the non-physical.
I picture all this living on after my death, if someone
will pay the bill. $120 per
year. I’ll start a foundation for the propagation of Drift.
Or perhaps software robots which could take bits of
Drift and deposit them on other websites. Keep it going forever.
A Drift virus. (“Language is a virus from outer space.” – William
Burroughs) Or lie low on other people’s computers and insert bits into
their emails.
Art viruses.
An infected culture.
I wonder if working-class people would really object
to criminals, if they only preyed on the middle and upper classes. We
don’t have much worth stealing.
In Oakland someone told me that the most dangerous
place to live was the “nice” section on the border between Oakland and
Berkeley. That’s where all the loot was. “It looks great,” she
said.
I lived in a large old Victorian house in a black slum,
with other white people, where the slanting summer sun made the street
look like a watercolor.
It occurs to me that readers will not know if this
is fact or fiction. Perhaps I won’t know either. Maybe I’ll finally
slip over the border.
Dream, March 23:
P had a flying machine, about the size of a small room,
made of heavy cardboard. She was flying it around with another woman
who wore a bright yellow wig. P was the pilot. I don’t know how the
aircraft was powered, but it took off and landed straight up and down.
When it took off it stirred up a bunch of Bakelite
from a construction site, which floated in the sky as if on water. Coming
back down the aircraft went through this Bakelite cloud and seemed to
lose control, but landed safely. I was impressed with the aircraft.
Bakelite was, I believe, the first plastic in
commercial use. Cheap looking brown stuff. Radios, combs. 1950s I think.
I feel like I’m being hypnotized: “You are getting
older, much older.”
“… he’d answered my ad out of sheer desperation, which,
out of all human motivations, is, in my opinion, the only one you can
absolutely trust.” – Emily Carter, Glory Goes and Gets Some
I really like her style. Funny/tragic, hopeful without
being dumb, beautiful language.
“The store windows will catch the blue evening light
and shine like eyes filled with religion.” – Carter
The young woman on Channel 4, after Sheena, tells us,
with sexy moves, that a storm is coming in. “There are pros and cons,”
she says. The Northwest is in a drought, old stumps showing in low reservoirs,
not enough water for Columbia River hydroelectric power, or for hatched
spring salmon to find their way past the dams to the sea.
We’ve all made mistakes, times when we focused only
on our needs, but we should also be given credit for the times when
we’ve acted from love.
“What I meant was at some point in our lives we have
to be crazy, we have to lose control, step out of our ordinary way of
seeing, and learn that the world is not the way we think it is, that
it isn’t solid, structured, and forever. We are going to die someday,
and nothing can control it.” – Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the
Bones
The world will always try to squeeze you into a smaller
space. Resist.
This military culture keeps us always standing at attention,
will not let us Drift.
What I want is constructive wildness.
March 28: My second dream where rain is coming through
the ceiling. Place all torn up. Big old place. Later fixed but changed,
walking around trying to figure it out, see if I still have a place
to live. I tell J that my mind is prone to go off on tangents, and then
(in the dream) I have some kind of psychedelic experience.
Daydreaming about traveling. I wonder if anything is
left of the East or if it’s totally overrun with people.
Somewhere I read that only business people and intellectuals
like cities.
Animals love, but people remember.
In my dreams the world is rough, unfinished. A working-class
world. Our lives are the same.
Every five year-old girl should have her own website.
No, this isn’t one of them.
But thanks.
Loss is a part of every life, and it’s hard to stay
on top of it. I’ve read that no one ever fully recovers from the death
of someone close to them.
I would stay up late
For a few good words
The Web has made it easier to get our words out, although
no easier perhaps to get read, and to combine images with words. Especially
color images. And you can use movement if you learn how. I wonder though
how much color printing I could buy for the $120 a year it costs for
a website.
Never mind.
The point is, what do I have to say?
Something about dreams and life, and the way things
shift.
Employers are a lower form of life, the natural enemies
of working-class people.
Boy am I angry. Something about struggling to
survive that does that to me. Too
much unemployment and bad jobs this year.
Too little money.
Criticism is like acid, it eats away at any relationship.
Not a good way to get what you want.
Remembering the past, the kind of remembering where
you can see yourself there, is like looking through both ends of a telescope
at the same time. You’re back in the past looking forward, and in the
present looking back, at the same time.
The main thing I’ve learned about photographing women:
don’t make them look fat.
Dreams have a raw feeling to them. They haven’t been
processed by our conscious, hey I can explain everything, mind.
Pornography has its place, but the only interesting
women are real ones.
I’ve been thinking: I must write letters. I have
to write letters.
The Ninth Gate: A slow supernatural thriller starring Johnny
Depp. Not much supernatural happens, not very scary, one good sex scene,
don’t bother.
“All art forms are merging into one,” the young man
on the bus said excitedly, “Everything is becoming totally tribal.”
One 12 hour shift at the printing plant I remember
singing all night, every song I could remember, to keep from going crazy
with boredom.
Civilization is a box. We do live longer. In the 1930s,
when Social Security was invented, they didn’t see any problem paying
for it, because most people didn’t live much beyond 65. Around 1900,
in the U.S., life expectancy was 49. In hunter-gatherer tribes, I’ve
read, most people died in their 20s.
But animals live longer in zoos too. And it seems even
longer, looking out through the bars of your cage….
The problem with liberals is that they’re not driven
by necessity. They’re not real.
Nature did not actually intend for me to be
an administrative assistant. It was all a mistake.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer – I sort of identify with
Spike, the vampire with the chip in his head.
Dream: Saw myself in high school. I was there as an
adult, probably present age, watching my younger self, fascinated. Later,
in another dream, I tried to tell someone about this dream.
Never trust anyone who makes over $30,000.
As an employee I identify with wolves. I’ve read that
wolves don’t make good pets, because they don’t care what you want.
Dream: An outdoor faire. I sang “Geordie” spontaneously,
not as a performance. People applauded.
To find yourself you have to break rules.
My experience is that creativity comes from moving
slow, allowing my mind to wander.
This idea in American culture that we’re all going
to go as fast as we can seems self-destructive to me. Especially as
we get older. I’m 61 and I need to slow down.
In recent years I’ve heard a lot about “sustainability,”
the idea that the American way of life is using up materials, energy
and the environment at a rate that can’t be sustained. What about people?
We’re also using up people, running them faster and faster until they’re
exhausted. Is it worth it?
All I want to do is stay home and sing.
Drift