April 2003

Sometimes I wonder if dreams are just another mind game we play to amuse ourselves. We have more freedom when we’re sleeping – our wish is our command – but less control. Everything just keeps building on what came before, until I’m trying to use a bathroom full of people who will not leave.

I’m reading Marya, a novel by Joyce Carol Oates, so far dark unrelieved misery. I like a little fun with my books.

A writer’s authentic self, she thought, lay in his writing and not in his life; it was the landscape of the imagination that endured, that was really real.

Maybe writing is more real than life because, once you get past the social prohibition against doing it, against saying anything everyone else isn’t saying, you have complete control. Writing is possible. There aren’t all the boundaries, limitations, strict limits I’ve always found in life. My experience of life is that most of the time there is no room. Life is a prison.

In life people are always saying no. I wonder sometimes if we’ve forgotten how to say yes. To put it another way, most of us are playing defense. Even with writing, people try to set limits. Ignore those people.

About 140 pages into the book I begin to take an interest in Marya, perhaps because she is now a young adult in college. I remember college.

… the reading she did late at night acquired an aura, a value, a mysterious sort of enchantment, that did not usually belong to daylight.

Or perhaps it’s being stoned that has turned off that voice saying, this book is a downer, isn’t anything good going to happen?

There are certain modes of unhappiness with far more style than happiness.

Sometimes I see disaster coming down the road and rouse myself to avoid it. Other times I just sit and wait, because it’s too much trouble to move. I can’t be bothered right now. I’ve moved enough.

Okay class, what have we learned so far?

It’s better to be a spectator.

Isn’t that what a lot of us want, just to get out of the game?

Maybe invent our own game.

Maybe not have a game.

I want to go somewhere and spend a weekend staring at the trees.

I read in Morris Berman’s The Twilight of American Culture that the first thing foreigners notice when they come to the U.S. is our energy. But he says it’s an “empty” energy, devoted to consumption. We are energetically running in circles.

I wonder what it would be like to live on a mountain peak.

I wonder if there are some things I shouldn’t know about people.  Spaulding Gray said that it was presumptuous of his fans to think they know him from his filmed monologues. His work, he said, is just the tip of the iceberg.

It may also be the only part that is interesting.

I have a little over $7 in the bank, enough to cover their fee when they subtract it, so they won’t charge me $32 for being overdrawn, and perhaps a few dollars in change. I haven’t been this broke in a long time.

In a few days my monthly Social Security payment will appear in my bank account. I’m going to need to make more or spend less.

I’ll worry about it tomorrow.

Fuck it, I’ll spend less.

Volunteer work is bad enough, I don’t want to add any real work to it.

Possessed by some evil spirit, I decided to count the change: $3.45, not counting pennies, which don’t count. Probably can’t.

Years ago a man told me about coming out of some gambling place in Los Vegas having lost all of his money except a little change, and throwing the change into a fountain.  I guess if you get that close to the edge you want to go over it.

Before she died my older sister, thinking that she had sold her house, sent me a check for $200. She thought that would help to lover my stress – it did – and possibly prevent a relapse of my illness. Thoughtful to the last.

There is something like a normal level of difficulty to life, what the human nervous system can reasonably accommodate, and that is what we expect. But life is always going outside those boundaries. Witness the Oregonians with sons dead in our invasion of Iraq.

Hard for all of us to move into worlds we weren’t born in. The average middle-class home feels a little strange to me. A lot of the stuff I can do without. I envy their security. As I imagine it. I don’t know if anyone actually is secure.

Romance wants to be spontaneous. Not thought out beforehand. But try not to think about it. The elephant in the living room.

Business is bad. People are feeling so vulnerable that they were willing to follow that maniac in the White House into his military adventure. Applying terror to the people of Iraq because their dictator dared to disrespect us, getting control. Don’t mess with us, we’re bad. Underneath all the violence, we’re a cartoon.

Most men, past their youth, have no talent for violence. As a teenager violence could get you hurt; as an adult it can get you killed. Subject of considerable anxiety. Reduced to enjoying violence vicariously, through books and movies.

Violence, like the rest of American culture, has been professionalized.  We’re just supposed to watch. Ah, but elect us to office, give us life or death power, and the shark rises to the top.

Religion always struck me as a theory, but I guess it’s supposed to be a relationship.

Politics will have to be forcibly inserted into the American mind. I just haven’t figured out through which orifice.

An “introverted” friend says that doesn’t mean she’s shy. It means she needs to spend a certain amount of time alone, because being with people too much drains her energy.

There is a conflict between art and trying to be good.

Shouldn’t “good” come more naturally?

Actually I think that’s the only way it comes.

Short Term Memory

No fun, no game.

Like a potato

He was always

Growing eyes

According to The Oregonian, per capita tobacco consumption in California “has declined by more than 60 percent from 2000 to 2002,” and “California smokers consume less than half the national average,” due to an antismoking advertising campaign.

I’ve been reading Jarhead by Anthony Swofford, about his experiences in the Marines and during the first Gulf War. One of those rare books I get immersed in, then surface feeling like I’ve been somewhere else. Even better than dreaming. Someone has been there before you, and prepared the way. What it means to read.

But also, not completely back, part of me still there, the rhythm of his sentences clinging to mine. When I come back, this life doesn’t seem like such a burden, seems almost optional. I could go grocery shopping, or not. Put it off until tomorrow. Spacey. Why not just stay this way? I’ve escaped.

A picture of a pretty 19 year-old woman in the paper, an American soldier wounded and captured in Iraq. I tell a woman friend, “No one who looks like that should go to war.” She laughs. To her a female life, even a pretty one, is no more valuable than a man’s. My gut tells me different.

I dated women like that in college, very young and innocent. One told me she was a “blank slate.” Another said, when I asked her on our second date if she would like to go steady, “No, I’m just out of my cocoon.”

… the men who go to war and live are spared for the single purpose of spreading bad news when they return…. – Swofford

And why is it that most of us refuse to get it? Some deep-seated need to have our enemies killed, even if they’re make believe enemies invented by gutless politicians who never went to war.

Swofford lives in Portland, teaches at Lewis and Clark College, has been reading at bookstores around town. At one reading I went to, someone asked him what he would say to a young man thinking about joining the Marines. He said he would suggest they read his book, then think about whether they wanted to live in that world.

Already there are local boys coming home dead.

Swofford’s mother said, “I lost my baby boy when you went to war. You were once so sweet and gentle and now you are an angry and unhappy man.”

It occurs to me that I could walk down 82^nd street to Safeway and buy a bottle of wine. Back in time for CSI. Why do I tell you these things? So that Drift will not seem totally disembodied.

I am moving through the world, collecting things as I go. I am right here in Portland, Oregon, in early April, gray sky and rainy but everything blooming, spring green trees, our yearly miracle. Broke, but plenty of books.

I’m invisible now, I’ve got nothing to conceal, tell me how does it feel…. – Bob Dylan

You won’t see me coming.

I feel best when I have no expectations, open my eyes and allow the world to come to me. Instead of desperately chasing after it. I’ll never catch up. It moves faster than I do.

I have this perverse streak, so when anyone tells me I should shut up about something I just talk about it more.

It blows my mind that the 60s, one of the most intensely political periods in U.S. history, managed to produce a crop of baby boomers who are profoundly ignorant of and disinterested in politics. Of course, most of them were that way then.

… that insistent American striving most of us feel on this side of the Atlantic. – Tricia Snell, The Oregonian

All that “don’t push the river it flows by itself” stuff is hard for an American, especially a man. How will anything ever happen if I don’t make it? That was my feeling about sex when I was dating in college. I assumed that nothing would happen if I left it up to the woman. Which probably got in the way of romance. Men tend to put the cart before the horse.

It bothers me that in Dilbert the secretary is even dumber than the engineers.

Morning is when I feel the oldest, my body slow and creaky, as if I were trying not just to wake up, but revive. Sleep is the normal human state. Being awake is an aberration.

I realize I’m part of the problem, although a rather small part, because that’s all I can afford to be. And I resent it.

Learning to cook: I’m getting so I don’t mind playing with my food.

The headline reads “Baghdad falls.” I am sooo disappointed. I was hoping for another Vietnam. I guess the lesson is that a small desert country with an unpopular government cannot stand up to the U.S. Dictatorships are so fragile. Including, I hope, our own.

Ageing, especially the mental part, is not strictly linear, although the general trend is … oh never mind.

Wisdom is knowing you don’t have to do what you’ve always done.

Love feels like gravity.

Sometimes when I’m getting to know a woman I’ll get frustrated because I can’t share my cosmic message with her. Then I’ll realize I don’t have a cosmic message.

Romance may be the slowest form of magic.

In America we load ourselves down with as much as we can carry, and stagger through our days. I’m trying to throw things away. Set limits. I refuse to be a stressed-to-the-max American. I want a divorce.

A perplexed college professor said to me, probably close to 40 years ago, “Gee you sound so reasonable.” Meaning, if you ignore the content.

Having a serious illness and being a criminal (after you’re caught) is similar. In both cases your life is suddenly under the control of a “professional” who thinks he’s better than you. I do prefer doctors to lawyers, but crime pays a lot better than being sick.

As the political war continues, most Americans are still sitting it out. They don’t think they have a dog in this fight.

I write because no one can interrupt me.

It’s difficult to have a conversation with an American because we are all so full of ourselves.

Who would have thought that “empire” would come back?

It’s spring. I feel like doing something crazy. I used to tell people, in the spring, that I was going to run away and join the circus. Now I think I should go to a public meeting and tell Gov. no-new-taxes Kulongoski to go fuck himself.

The old folks say, “It’s not how little we know that hurts so, but that so much of what we know ain’t so.” – Toni Cade Bambara, in The Writer on Her Work, ed. Janet Sternburg

Sometimes smaller lives are more manageable.

… anyone with a greater capacity for love than I is a valuable teacher. – Bambara

Perhaps some of us have defined “need” too broadly. Maybe we should reserve that for things necessary for survival.

Which actually lowers my stress level.

To help others who are freaking out, you need to be calmer than they are.

Yet only one-third of families eat together regularly. According to one study, household conversations – where talking is the primary activity – are almost nil. – The Oregonian

One nation, disconnected.

… depression being, to my mind, a form of collaboration. – Bambara

I’m liable to do anything, but I’m most likely to do whatever I’ve done before.

Do you have demon flybys?

Historically, a lot of people have made the mistake of thinking the shit will just blow on by them.

The neoliberal system [of dominance by corporations] therefore has an important and necessary byproduct – a depoliticized citizenry marked by apathy and cynicism. If electoral democracy affects little of social life, it is irrational to devote much attention to it…. – Robert W. McChesney, Introduction to Profit Over People by Noam Chomsky.

But that logic is circular: the withdrawal of popular interest in U.S. politics simply turns more of the process over to corporate dominance. And long-range, short-range for some of us, politics has a profound impact on social life.

I’m not an American. I’m a human being.

What is it about the word “relationship” that makes it sound like some exotic species? I think “relationship” is a creature of the ‘70s, when everyone decided that nothing good was going to happen after all.

I remain firm in my conviction that stoned is better than drunk.

It is essential to raise the warrior spirit.

I’m still mad about Iraq. Some Democratic candidates for president should be made to pay.

We’re polarizing between the communitarians and those who just want to keep their money.

In Oregon we say we’re having a political struggle between urban and rural, but it’s also between urban and suburban. People in suburbia want houses with big yards for the kids to play in, lots of wide streets, freeways and parking lots. Low density. They don’t want to live in a city. But cities have to either spread out or get denser. Denser is more interesting.

“Hi. You don’t know me, but I’ve got enough money to buy TV commercial time. Vote against this tax increase, or the government will come and kill your first-born child. Would someone who has this much money lie to you?”

I have reason to believe, we all will be received, in Graceland. – Paul Simon

The stories you tell new acquaintances, are they about being young?

Where would we be without the walk to the neighborhood store for a pastry and a beer? Some days I don’t ask for a lot. Something decent on TV. Other days I want a revolution.

Every time we send the wrecking crew to take over another country, thousands of people die. This is the price other countries pay for that American aggressiveness we’re so proud of.

Three decades ago the overall five-year cancer survival rate was less than 45 percent. Today it is 60 percent plus…. – The Oregonian

People who don’t listen have big control issues. Not listening is a way of controlling the situation, a defense mechanism. They won’t stop talking. What shall we do with controllers? Most of those I’ve met have been otherwise decent people, just that one fatal flaw.

Yes, writing may be the same thing, but no one has to read it.

It just seems like such a waste that generations spent their lives doing what they’re supposed to.

Seems like everyone is talking about that frog: the one that will sit there in the very slowly warming water until the heat kills it.

There must be a term for that, the snap point.

Snap Point

I get carried away. I see the bridge crumbling, the cars falling, through moonlight, into the dark river.

I’m afraid to start typing because I think there will be an awful lot of this.

What was it about making a living that left us with nothing to say?

Some of the products of the stoned world are silent outside of it. You have to be at a certain frequency or it doesn’t work. I do admire art that works on a broader frequency.

Writing is a way of having a conversation with yourself. What some schizophrenics do out loud on street corners.

I keep thinking I should do it some other way, and then I think, what for?

People who are totally into one thing amaze me.

Seems like the main theme of Buffy is people flipping back and forth between their light and dark sides. Everyone is doubled.

My path to wisdom: “Okay now, stop and think.” That and letting go.

Perhaps love is about letting go of the self. Or enlarging it to include other people.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence – as it saves most writers who live in “interesting” oppressive times and are not afflicted by personal immunity. – Alice Walker, in The Writer On Her Work, ed. Janet Sternburg

When American politics makes me feel like killing someone, I write instead. I do think we’re getting pushed to the breaking point. A man is brain dead in a Portland hospital because the state legislature cut off funds for his medications. I’m wondering why state legislators shouldn’t be tried for murder.

In classic habits of thinking, essence preceded existence: what one does follows from what one is. In America, however, the reverse seemed more likely, and more rewarding: what one is follows directly from what one does…. – Joyce Carol Oates, Marya

In America we are all lost, busy doing something, it doesn’t seem to matter what. If it did, we would quit doing it. Whatever it is.

We go to war as the only way to add drama, the illusion of meaning, to our meaningless lives. We stuff ourselves with the news, burp, feel queasy, lay off the news…. We know when we’ve ingested something that doesn’t agree with us. But what to do now?

We will retreat to the personal, write/paint/travel/read/love….

Please, no advice.

I’ve worn out my ability to listen.

… she supposed people mainly fought with whoever was close at hand. That was all they had, after all, wasn’t it? – Oates

Where is the culture of the 60s, now that the Empire is back? Where is Bob Dylan, now that we need him? I feel abandoned.

And the white knight’s talking backwards, and the red queen’s on her bed….

A friend asked about my history. Well, how do I know that I have any? I often feel just-arrived. Perhaps I was recently invented by some evil mastermind who turned me loose on an unsuspecting public. Bwa, ha, ha, ha!

Like Buffy’s teenage sister Dawn, the physical incarnation of “the key” to another dimension.

How long have I been alive?

Now honey, you remember….

How long!

Six months.

Also, possibly I invented myself. Don’t we all?

Let’s be real: I’m never going to be comfortable in this world. Never going to smile a lot and say wise things. Forget it.

I keep thinking I’ll just do a little politics, but that’s like eating one peanut. Or putting limits on drinking: I will never drink before 6 p.m.

For me politics is no longer about ethics, it’s about self-defense. I would argue that the same is true for you, but I realize you don’t see it that way. Yet.

The kids were out there riding their bikes on the freeway, the night the war started, to try to make you see it that way.

Prompting a massive police response leading to a very big overtime bill for Portland. Also police assaults on peaceful protestors, leading to court cases being filed for violation of civil rights, which could produce another big bill, when they finally come to trial some day. Police have decided they can use pepper spray, said to be very painful, to move people who are not threatening anyone. We’ll see.

Most of the protests have been peaceful. One police officer was hit with something. A McDonalds window was broken and windows of some business building were splashed with acid, so they’ll have to be replaced at considerable expense. I don’t think property destruction is smart, but I don’t feel bad about it either. There have to be penalties for invading other countries and killing their people. Portland got off light.

It was funny, that night while the kids were shutting down parts of the city by sitting in intersections, to watch it on TV and see the news people so not get it.  “Well don’t they know that this will just offend people….” Hey newsgeek, that’s the point. Business as usual not allowed.

So why wasn’t I out there? Well I’m 63, and I’ve been to jail and didn’t like it. But I was there in spirit.

Living at the heart of the American Empire is dividing us into opposing camps. Just like Vietnam. Now if only the culture would come back…. Perhaps it has and I just didn’t notice.

“Being” a writer is sort of like being the wind: more a process than an identity.

I guess I’m kind of the contents of my stomach too, but it’s just passing through.

We’re all surrounded by ghosts, which are other people’s conceptions of who we are.

I don’t plan to stay in one place for very long.

You can always count on at least one wild card in your life, at any given time. I seldom see it coming.

Oddly, when I think about the 50s and the 60s I remember very few books I read. And I was always reading. Mostly I remember songs.

In the end, we’ll find the universe is constructed entirely of illusion.

A friend believes that we have to have equal amounts of good and bad moods, and that people who appear happy all the time are faking it.

Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous. – The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. One, 1931-1934

Yeah, I could never get into it either. I kept thinking, it’s been done.

If you want to do it, feel free to go on without me.

Ghosts are incoherent memories, whatever didn’t die.

There are days when everything seems like too much trouble, when I don’t brush my teeth.

I feel sad that all my friends are struggling to make a living.

I suspect the reason I’ve never been able to understand the rules of romance is that there aren’t any.

Safety is always a matter of the odds. Sometimes they’re better than other times, but you really never know. The young man who coined the expression “Never trust anyone over 30” was killed jaywalking, still young.

Nothing is more destructive of the spirit and ultimately of creativity than false meekness, anger that does not know its own name. – Erica Jong, in Sternburg

And then, as Jong is quick to point out, you can’t let the anger take over the writing.

Jong asks what is the authentic voice of women writers:

The problem is, I suppose, that women have never been left alone to be themselves. Men need them so badly and are so terrified of losing them that they have used their power to imprison them.

…

Every poem, every page of fiction I have written, has been written with anxiety, occasionally panic, always uncertainty about its reception.

The more I care what a reader might think, the harder it is. When we think of writing it sounds like such a genteel activity, a cultural thing, but writing is dangerous.

Back when Drift was a printed publication, when I used my real name and mailed it to family and friends, I used to panic when I put the envelopes into the mailbox. I’ve had to harden my skin, develop an attitude. I don’t think this applies only to writers. It’s so easy to let other people shut you down.

When we can’t stand to know what is going on, we lose our souls.

America needs to deal with its need to kill.

Noncommercial websites are like tunnels underground. You might come across one through a search engine, or you might find it through a chain of links.

My goal is to tell the truth so fast that there is no defense against it.

I keep thinking about those “good” Germans in the 1950s movies about Germany after the war: “We knew nothing about that, we were not political.”

Why don’t I have anything good to read? “Good,” in this context, means entertaining.

According to Willamette Week ex Oregon senator Mark Hatfield, liberals’ favorite Republican, who opposed the Vietnam War, recently walked by an antiwar protestor at the Portland Art Museum and asked, “Why do you hate this country?” Then kept walking without waiting for an answer.

It would have been interesting if Hatfield had stuck around for an answer. I suspect the protestors, at least one of whom I know, would have said something like, “We don’t, we hate your violence and greed.”

But I think I do hate this country, and would have been better off if I’d left when I was young, maybe moved to Canada. I hate the way the U.S. uses its people, takes away what they need to live, and kills foreigners.

And really, why not hate it? Why is it considered such a bad thing to hate one’s own country, but all right to hate others?

I don’t think you can extend the tribe to a country the size of the U.S.

Is literary criticism all about how something is like something else? Is it about the connection between writing and life? Or just the quality of the invention?

Perhaps we have built a false concept of wholeness and, under the pressure of an artificial unity, people like June explode and fly in all directions….  Some day we may be reassembled into a more truthful whole.

…

If a person continues to see only giants, it means he is still looking at the world through the eyes of a child.

…

Again and again I have entered realism, and found it arid, limited. – Nin

As long as the alternative is invention, and not people lying to themselves.

Men feel like we have to constantly deal with reality, or it will defeat us. Women seem to have more leeway, but I don’t know how they do it.

If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, than I will never know happiness. – Nin

Sometimes romance seems like a hall of mirrors – where we go seeking ourselves in others.

The best part about having a party is that you don’t have to do it again for quite a while. Interesting, but intense. I think of it as an exercise in cross-pollination. Although I can see some combinations don’t work. It’s also a way to weave together the community.

The late ‘60s: music + marijuana = magic. Magic dissolved some of the hard edges around things. We were just as tense then as we are now.

It’s possible that people who know how to make a lot of money are in some ways superior to the rest of us. That doesn’t mean I want them running my life, for their profit.

In May we’ll be voting on a new Multnomah county income tax – because the state legislature can’t get its shit together – to raise money for schools, human services and “public safety.” If this doesn’t pass we’re in even worse trouble.

The campaign to pass it, well-financed by businesses embarrassed to see the state go down the drain, as featured on Doonsbury, has been almost invisible, apparently conducted entirely by phone. Trying to keep it off TV and not stir up the boobtubers. No way for the opposition to know, unless they do polls, how your campaign is doing. “Coming in under their radar.” [Later note: it passed. Some people were really pissed and wrote letters to the paper threatening to take their businesses out of the county. I hope they did.]

In Oregon raising taxes is considered radical. People think they’re taxpayers, not consumers of government services. Until the services disappear. Then schools cut days, inmates are let out of jail early (not necessarily a bad idea), and people die for lack of healthcare. We’re talking about kicking frail elderly people out of nursing homes.

Oregon’s per capita total state tax load is 46^th among the states. One conservative said, “Only four more to go.”

Reminds me of columnist Molly Ivins’ description of Texas as a “low tax low services” state.