December 2002

On the first day of December, the sky is gray. In the kitchen I found a mouse in the trash, let it go outside. Up at 10, still sleepy at 1, in spite of two cups of tea. Can’t tolerate coffee any more. Should wake up in about one more hour. And my point is?

It’s not fair….

My housemate’s turkey, thawing in the refrigerator, looks like a huge yellow fruit with a net around it.

The current recession and the last two have occurred during the first part of a decade.  Are we going to have a recession every 10 years?

Why does nose hair grow faster as we get older? I don’t recall ever feeling the need to trim it before middle age.

As Americans move like mannequins on an escalator towards the most talked-about and least imaginable war in our history…. – Salon.com

Lately I feel fiction seeping in. Why can’t I just make it up? No one will know the difference.

All right, the dragon was there when I woke up. It’s always there….

On some level this isn’t real anyway. I went to sleep sometime in the late 60s and forgot to wake up. Which is why I keep having examination dreams. My God, I’m still in college!

Still working on my writing persona. George needs some fine tuning. I’ve got him disassembled, motors and gears all over the carpet.

How you suffered for your sanity….

Am I the only one who is disappointed in the terrorists, that they haven’t done a better job of shaking up complacent America? No encore.

I’ve read that jazz has a structure with spaces for improvisation. My idea for writing was to get rid of the structure.

It’s very easy to fall into the pajama lifestyle…. – Mike Heppner, The Egg Code

I have no schedule, I’m wandering, I’ll try to sound reasonable.

The whole point is to make people think. There’s too much blind faith in this country. Even our paranoia’s way off-base. We’re paranoid about the wrong things. We should be paranoid about ourselves. – Heppner

Heppner is hard to keep up with, multiple characters with multiple relationships between them, jumps back and forth in time. If I were starting the book again I would diagram it. But he’s a good trickster.

I try to detach from what I think someone else should do. Instead I ask them what they want to do. Our whole lives everyone tells us what to do. Try being the one who doesn’t.

The plans I make for other people never work out.

I will actually be better for you if I don’t pay any attention to who you want me to be.

In America, audiences are hard to come by. We are all stretched thin.

This is my reality on drugs. Much better, thank you. But now I’m all out.

Drinking, like love, is the triumph of hope over experience.

Fairbanks red port, $5 a bottle, 18% alcohol, no saturated fat.

I know I’m better when I start giggling.

I’m trying to get lost in space. First I have to find space.

Sometimes I have interesting imaginary conversations with people I know.

… real wages of Oregonians in 2000 were lower than their wages in 1979 by as much as 19 percent in some parts of the state. – street roots

Street Roots is a monthly newspaper written (at least partly) by and for the homeless, sold on the street for a buck by homeless vendors who get 75 cents out of each dollar. This is ground floor economics, and it applies to a lot more of us than the homeless. If you live in Portland, look for a vendor and buy it.

Most of the time people are thinking about something else.

A couple of people have asked me why they should pay to provide others with medical care. My answer is that medical care is a right, and if that means they have to pay more taxes so be it.

Survival is a right. Everyone is entitled to at least what they need to survive.

Civilizations collapse because people don’t share.

When I see teenagers actually talk to their parents, I know the parents have done something right.

In college I was always apologizing for being too intense. – Leanne Grabel

Grabel is a live one. She does prose poetry in the Beat style, with a musical background, very clever.

Good Fat, Bad Fat, by William Castelli and Glen Griffin, recommends keeping “bad fat” to 20 grams per day for most people, 10 grams for those of us with heart disease risk factors. I’ve found that easy to do as long as I avoid goodies such as chocolate candy.

Bad fat is:

1.      Saturated fat. The amount is listed on food labels.

2.      Trans fatty acids. If the contents include the word “hydrogenated,” the food contains transfat. The amount of transfat isn’t listed on the label. It will be roughly the same as the amount of saturated fat.

Good fat:

Omega-3 fatty acids seem to increase cells’ ability to take in serotonin. Low levels of this neurotransmitter are associated with depression and aggression. – Discover, Nov. 2002

Most people blame themselves for being depressed. Family and friends may blame the person as well … the chance that a person with recurrent episodes of major depression will commit suicide is somewhere between 10 and 15 percent  … the human brain is some 10 percent smaller than it was just a century ago. – Andrew Stoll, The Omega-3 Connection

Stoll blames depression on a lack of Omega-3 fatty acids in our diet. He says depression and heart disease, as well as other ailments, are increasing, and are more common in countries where the diet is low in Omega-3 fat, mainly found in fatty fish such as salmon, mackerel, sardines and tuna. The hunter-gatherer diet humans evolved on was rich in these oils, he says, and our bodies cannot be healthy without them.

The research evidence to support this, he says, is strongest for heart disease and manic-depression, sketchier for other diseases, with more research in progress.

A friend’s exboyfriend, manic-depressive, just committed suicide. I used to have a manic-depressive girlfriend who at times felt suicidal. Anyone who is so depressed they’re thinking about suicide needs close supervision. They need some institution they can check into until the feeling goes away.

Someone said that suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

I have not seen writing lead to happiness in my friends’ lives…. Art leads to suffering. – Natalie Goldberg, Thunder and Lightening

Depression is imagination turned inward, eating the self alive. The answer is to channel that energy outward, which is why art helps. It’s not so much that artists suffer, as that those who suffer benefit by doing art.

The simplest explanation I can think of for the acceleration of subjective time as we get older: As the length of our past increases, any given amount of time, such as the past year, is a smaller fraction of our past. So it feels smaller.

To do politics you take an issue and constantly inflate it in the public mind until the authorities have to deal with it. Americans don’t want to do that, because it requires being publicly political and losing some of their privacy. People want to hide, so they lose. Maybe it’s part of middle-class culture, this “oh dear I don’t want to make a fuss” business. Maybe they can afford it.

The key to getting anything done is stubbornness. There will always be some reason not to do it.

Know that you will eventually have to leave everything behind. – Goldberg

I’m afraid I’ve always done that.

I was a science fiction fan in my teens. My culture was invented in the future, and transmitted backwards.

I’m in my post-career phase.  This is surprisingly difficult to explain to people who are still immersed in the working world, still trying to get somewhere.  For me, there is no longer anywhere to get.

In a novel, Jonathan Raban wrote about a man sailing in his boat away from an English port, out past the continental shelf until the world dropped away beneath him. Retirement is like that.

In Eugene 20 years ago I remember an improv acting teacher saying there were a lot of people going around Eugene, “taking a bite out of this and a bite out of that.”

A line I identify with from a novel: “He died as he had lived, faintly puzzled.”

Something I read: An older man said sex now takes longer, “but I don’t begrudge the time.”

All my theories are collapsing. Or maybe I’m just tired.

Rule of thumb: If I think I’ll get to something later, I won’t.

I’m writing in the present and editing in the past. Parallel tracks.

In a recent talk I heard on anticapitalism, the speaker said that paganism is associated in America with the left, but in Europe with fascism. The Nazis were into paganism.

I wonder why the expectations we have of each other so often turn out to be suffocating?

An unpleasant email recently, saying that marijuana has robbed me of spiritual understanding.  Well, what a narrow escape. I must smoke a lot more.

Sometimes people want to cast me as a character in their melodrama, usually the bad guy. It’s a way for them to externalize an argument they should be having with themselves.

I recently told a friend about a personal ad I’ve been writing in which I used the word “frugal.” She said that sounds like I’m a “tightwad.” I am. I have to be. Women need to know that up front. I don’t want to waste time talking to women who feel the need to go to restaurants a lot. It’s a virtue, if un-American, to live within your means.

People with a household income of $70,000 a year seem well off to me. “Oh,” said a woman I know, “but they have expenses.” Yeah, me too.

A science fiction book says that as population density increases, so does the potential for plagues.

Interesting, since humans make such a big deal about size, that the only predators that can stand against us are microscopic.

I’ve read recently, though, that the rate of population increase in developing countries is slowing. People are having fewer kids, due to increasing use of birth control. Apparently most women never wanted to be breeders.

“In a deep and dark December….”  This time of year I just need to get over the notion that I’m going to accomplish much. That dog isn’t running.

In December all this emotional sludge piles up. We feel uncomfortable, and that’s got to be someone’s fault, right? So people start dumping on each other, creating more sludge. I think I’ll buy a bottle of wine and barricade myself in my room. “I’ve got my books….”