January 2003

There are some rays of light out there. Michael Moore’s strong leftist documentary on gun violence Bowling for Columbine is showing in mainstream movie theaters. His book Stupid White Men has been on a bestseller list for a long time. Even Noam Chomsky’s book 9-11 sold well. Something is happening.

My sister asked why she would want to watch Bowling for Columbine. Because it’s interesting, entertaining and has lessons to teach. Moore is trying to figure out why the U.S. has such a high rate of gun violence, much higher than countries like Canada which have just as many guns. He doesn’t arrive at a sure answer, but suggests it might be the high level of fear in our culture, encouraged by TV news. People in Canada, he found out, don’t lock their doors. To confirm this he wandered around a neighborhood opening doors. Where does he get all that nerve?

Good article in the November 2002 National Geographic on weapons of mass destruction (WMD). This is not our parents’ National Geographic, which used to be famous for pictures of bare-breasted African women.

Iraq:

The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. – George W. Bush

W. has done more for political humor than anyone since Dan Quayle, in spite of the fact that he’s not funny.

I have a fantasy of someday having a different interface for Drift, where people could type in a keyword and it would search for material with that word in it. A free-text database.  I think they exist.

Then I would like to install it in a robot which would wander around town like a schizophrenic babbling random selections. Or perhaps picking up on words spoken by people around it and searching on those. 

Every so often it would shake its fists at the sky and scream.  Occasionally it would sit down on a bench, disassemble and reassemble itself, talking all the while.

When I first came up with this fantasy, about 20 years ago, I pictured the robot as serving drinks at a party while talking to itself.

I’ve never done it because I don’t think I have the technical skill.  The free-text database and speech-to-text might be doable, but I don’t know where to start.

I’m into functional absurdity, things that don’t work in interesting ways.

In writing, I basically channel myself.

American culture tends to contract to work and TV. People can’t live on that.

Having a warm body beside you when you’re sleeping replaces all theory. I should be so lucky.

There’s a great line in Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer, a confession of love from an old man to an old woman, something like, “He decided to throw himself entirely on her mercy.”

I’m always thinking I should be more this or that. It’s the best way we have to drive ourselves crazy.

American culture is oblique, like space bending around the sun. At the center is love, but we avoid it at all costs.

I’m about as smart as the last book I’ve read.

Some people should have stayed young forever: Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Jack Kerouac, Elvis Presley, me.

I’m always amazed to see things growing this time of year. Possibly because I grew up in the snowy east. Some things never get old.

Culture isn’t something preserved from the past. It’s something we constantly create, from whatever happens to be lying around. Culture is about imagination and meaning. It’s the background to our everyday lives.

Whenever I read a “serious” book I’m proud of myself. It requires a certain level of energy. A surplus.

North Korea is believed to have one or two nuclear bombs. That means it may be the first very small country in a position to defy the U.S. (Israel doesn’t count because it’s a U.S. client state.)

One-third of all American children are born without benefit of marriage…. – Jane Eisner, The Oregonian

Possibly because there is no point in marrying a man if he’s financially incapable of supporting a family.

We could change the rules so that employers have to pay working-class people higher wages. Or we could just bitch about poor people not having good “family values.”

I haven’t evolved. 62 and I still have to occasionally tell someone to fuck off. Because otherwise someone even less evolved will try to stick their stupid gooey paws into my brain.

Sometimes I think failure is the best revenge.

The whole idea of “success” is a kind of cruelty which sets my teeth on edge, because most of us will never get there. And those who have are so smug about it.

Depression and heart disease coexist, rising and falling in tandem in study after study and in countries around the world. – Andrew Stoll, The Omega-3 Connection

Stoll’s theory is that both depression and heart disease are related to a diet deficiency of Omega-3 fatty acids, found in fish and flax seed oils, leading to inflammation. He also believes such a deficiency could contribute to diabetes and autoimmune diseases such as arthritis and lupus.

Another theory might be that depression causes heart disease.

… enlightenment, which is nothing less than ego’s great disappointment. Awakening does not feed ego’s needs and desires; it pulverizes the self. – Natalie Goldberg, Thunder and Lightening

A lot of ego in religion – the desire to make everyone like yourself.

I’m sitting at our kitchen table eating rice and fantasizing about pastries and alcohol. I’m tired of being good.

Oregon is in a severe state budget crisis. State legislators are waging class warfare, cutting programs for poor people. I can read the news and get angry, or cut myself off from it, or try to do something about it. “Dear legislator, You asshole!”

I believe that what goes around comes around, but this may just be wishful thinking.

Writing is better than thinking because thinking leaves nothing behind.

Our culture encourages us to treat people as commodities, as if they exist to give us pleasure, provide us with entertainment. Men lose out because most of us are not very entertaining. We thought our purpose was to get something done.

Drift is distributed on an as-is basis. There will be no refunds.

How to prevent wrinkles as you age: eat a lot.

She doesn’t read her email for days, she says, to avoid the “white noise.” Yes, I’m tired of being a puppet of the times.

… laziness is fear masked as inertia. – Goldberg

What scares me about Oregon politics is that I’ve become dependant on the state for medical care and I think the voters want to dump me. I’m 62. I doubt that I could hold down a full-time job, or that anyone would hire me. If I made enough money to live on I would lose the Oregon Health Plan, our version of Medicaid. The kind of job I might get, if I could get any, probably wouldn’t provide medical insurance or pay enough to buy my own – probably over $400 a month, and rising.

Besides, I don’t want to. Fuck work.

What I can do is disengage more, spend even less, if I could find alternate satisfactions to replace those I buy. Something better than a paperback crime novel and a bottle of wine.

I always wanted to escape from normalcy.

Beyond the trees, the heat lay like melting wax on the empty fields. – Kenneth Abel, The Burying Field

We all have to constantly break out of whatever container our minds are stored in. Hence my interest in robots.

A writer is a great seducer…. – Goldberg

I’m retired and out of the workforce, thank God. But most of my friends are still in it and struggling, with Oregon once more first in unemployment. It’s not just being unemployed, it’s having their hours cut back or, if they’re self-employed, not enough clients. So I’m still in it. Instead of worrying about myself, now I worry about my friends.

The important thing is to keep worrying.

Also, I’m not immune. Oregon’s shitty economy has cut tax receipts, creating a state budget crisis, leading to social services cuts, including reduced benefits for the Oregon Health Plan (Medicaid), which I’m on.

I can’t decide whether I’m nervous or just very alert.

I’m practicing wine therapy every evening. Sleep therapy, staying unconscious as much as possible.

I don’t live here.

Truth and writing are two different things.

I’m reading The Hook by Donald Westlake, a crime novel about one writer hiring another writer to kill his wife. Lots of stuff about novel writing. It seems a novel must be logical. The story must make sense. News to me.

I analyze a political situation as if it were a story. What is the plot here, the basic issue, the heart of the matter. What everyone is avoiding. How can I bring it up in public and make them talk about it?

Something becomes a public issue through repetition.

For years, Oregon politics has been a debate between the politicians arguing that we shouldn’t do anything and the politicians arguing that we couldn’t do anything. – David Sarasohn, The Oregonian

That would be, respectively, the Republicans and the Democrats.

It’s not a question of whether the glass is half full or half empty. The question is, what have they done with the glass?

We’ve reached the bizarre political point in this country where the only people speaking about “class warfare” are the Republicans.

Wildly Uneven

It seemed perfectly logical at the time.

I picture my parents sitting around a radio in a dim living room listening to WWII news. I don’t know that they did this, I just picture it.

This is the little notebook school of writing.

Creative people have runaway minds. And the stress that goes with it.

Manic Phase

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I’m afraid the train has completely left the track.

I do have standards.

Apparently the human mind is a lot more flexible than I thought.

Things I can do when I’m dreaming others can do when they’re awake. Like talking to dead people.

Images of wolves sliding through the woods like ghosts.

Throwing off sparks….

At last I’m free of historical accuracy.

We’ve all been on the wrong track all these years, seeking the truth, when what we really needed is a good story.

What’s wrong with America: bad stories.

In the beginning was the word.

I wonder if animals can learn a different language?

Americans only pretend to have fun.

Stoned … okay just admit it, the pillowcase is inside out.

Humans are just a hallway of mirrors. You can go back and back and back and never reach the end, never come to a solid place. – Kathleen Ann Goonan, Light Music

Oregon is going into meltdown. The horror is coming.

A writer wrote that publishing your work is like putting a note in a bottle and throwing it into the ocean. If it weren’t like that, she said, writers couldn’t write.

Yes, I think you need that protective distance from the reader. If you write anything serious someone is going to hate it, because it steps on their notion of reality. Which isn’t real.

Sorry to be the one to tell you.

In the U.S. the only way most of us can function is to pretend.

One of the Beats wrote, “Against the terror of life the creative act is the only defense.” I write as a way of dealing with the terror.

During the dark months the terror piles up.

There is something about our culture that leaves most of us encapsulated, isolated from each other, unable to trust. Quite a while back someone wrote, in a book on marriage and its problems, that we’ve entered an emotional ice age

I plan to die in a bad mood.

It’s not that I’m trying to be obscure, it’s that I am obscure.

We write memoir to free ourselves. – Goldberg

In a writing class about 20 years ago, a woman wrote about going out on dates with her husband, their way of keeping the marriage alive.

U.S. foreign policy: Supposing you met a man who constantly felt the need to prove his superiority over other men. What would you guess about that man’s feeling of self-worth?

I can’t prove that the rate of cultural change has accelerated – how would you measure it? – but I think we all feel it. TV commercials for Viagra, public acknowledgement of a male medical problem that would have been unmentionable when I was young. When and how did we cross that line?

And I am old enough that I will never get used to it. Age is slowly moving me into an alien culture.

More alien. America has always been an alien culture to me. Or perhaps the reverse: I’m the alien.

Drift is just a theory.

I’m better read than dead.

I’m always disappearing down the habit hole.

The Hobbitses has my precious.

In this country you have to be either offensive or defensive.  They will not simply leave you alone.

Maybe the problem with love in this country is simply that love takes a lot of time to ripen, and most of us don’t have the time. We try to rush it, invent it, which leaves us with superficial relationships that don’t last.

One of the difficulties of being an organizer is that we do it partly to feel important. Something everyone wants, but it can get in the way. A good organizer knows when to get off the stage and fade into the background.

Suppose it were not important to feel important?

Of course I’ve always wanted to disappear anyway, so maybe I’m once more making a virtue out of necessity.

John C. Lilly, Simulations of God – work, information technology as gods.

Drift is a state of nonattachment. Not to be confused with “slack.”

Humor and art are both surprising.

Sometimes marijuana helps me to reach a state of pure curiosity.

Bad News

Grief: We encapsulate it and then much later it breaks out. I was just playing my guitar and singing Danny Boy, a beautiful song full of soul. I got to the line about “the place where I am lying” and lost it.

Part of our identity is the people we’re close to. As we gradually lose them we lose parts of ourselves.

When our mother died my older sister said that Mother had been the only one left with whom my sister shared all of her memories.

A friend told me about her experiences “channeling” her ex-boyfriend who recently committed suicide. Channeling strikes me as a mystical form of grieving. She says he’s watching TV. I have no frame of reference to fit this into, so am trying to make no judgments about it.

It’s hard for me to be mystical. I keep wanting to know, have there been any controlled studies?

Sometimes I get it. Oblique, like poetry.

Most of what I get, probably, is the philosophical part, which comes right before you step off into another world.

Yes, I would like to.  I’ve worn this one out.

Maybe it’s the gap, the feeling that someone isn’t listening, doesn’t get it, had half heard us, that compels us to write and explain.  – Goldberg

Someone said in a recent email, “At least we’re not bored.”

Part of what is funny to me in writing is the process of writing itself, of thinking, of the way the mind is constantly disappearing around the bend.

What do I think about sex?

I’m in favor of it.  I think it can be very beneficial as part of a comprehensive program of oral hygiene.