It was a nasty winter, cold, wet, rigid, fevered. Now, in the middle of April, a soft spring. Multicolor mounds of flowers on the branches of the ornamental fruit trees.

 

I’m thinking that as the world becomes more obscure, harder for the average person to explain or control, I should do likewise.

 

OHSU's Montanaro said studies have shown that for unknown reasons nasal allergies have risen dramatically in school-age children. Two decades ago, he said, 6 percent to 7 percent of children had nasal allergies. Now, he said, studies show about 40 percent.  Cases of asthma also are increasing rapidly, he said. – Oregonian, April 14, 2004

 

 

Stoned

 

My right mind is not worried.

 

This is crazy, I only have one fork.

 

Time sense distorted, trying to guess how long the tea bag has been in the cup, while I’ve been writing. Decided it would be as long as that would have taken in the real world.

Yes, short periods of time are going by slowly. Usually that’s a good thing.

This is the first time I’ve been successfully stoned in maybe months. Not for lack of trying. I think my brain was simply too soggy. So what has changed? Spring. Started taking fish oil capsules but I’ve read that takes a long time to affect the brain.

I think I just drank a cup and a half of real tea. Not a good idea at 12:31 a.m.

We used to say “righteously stoned,” but I don’t remember why.

 

Holland – is the whole country below sea level or just some of its coasts? An odd concept, to live below sea level. What does that do to your consciousness?

 

We have two rovers on Mars!

 

The 60s are back again, that brilliantly awful period from about 1966 to 1974, when Nixon left the White House in a helicopter. Time again to be creatively psychotic. There’s an edge to everything, a flickering strobe light on reality. You hear us coming.

 

I’ll do all my writing in the dark.

If my writing comes unglued, I don’t have to. I send my alter ego out to forage.

That’s probably why no one answers my letters.

“We are all alone here, and we are all dead.” – Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

We are all hallucinating.

“I really can’t stay….”

Or maybe it’s that for most people the average hallucination doesn’t last long enough to support a letter. While I pour on unchecked, running downhill in the dark, gathering up all the bits and pieces. Sanitation.

 

When the social, political world reaches a certain degree of craziness you have to become crazy too, to stand up to it. Or you become just another drooling idiot, voting for Democrats.

Cultural craziness is contagious, attractive to youth, can be used as a weapon.

 

The Net is cool, but I think the best way to communicate is through posters tacked onto telephone poles. Walls.  A friend says they used to be called “broadsheets.” That’s how newspapers, she says, were originally published.

Yes it makes a mess, but life is a mess. Wait until your digestive system rebels and you spend all day farting.

 

Any questions?

 

 

Books

 

I’m reading William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition, 2003. He is known as a science fiction writer but this one is set in the present, or at least his present, which still seems to have a science fiction sheen to it.

Gibson is very interested in the surface of things, how everything looks, but also how each object fits into the meaning of the whole. What it means to us.

He is also interested in cities, their style, how they feel.

I would like to be as observant as Gibson. Like so many novelists, he seems to see and remember everything. Unless he’s making it all up. I might not know the difference.

I like his science fiction better. I need my “miracles and wonders” (Paul Simon, Graceland).

 

Homo sapiens is about pattern recognition…. Both a gift and a trap.

 

“Now we say that everything Lenin taught us of communism was false, and everything he taught us of capitalism, true.”

 

“It’s more the way it is now than it’s ever been,” Cayce replies, a line of Dwight David Eisenhower’s that she sometimes resorts to when she has nothing whatever to offer. – Gibson

 

I don’t understand people who can live without fiction.

Books being, after politics, my reality. If you can call politics reality.

 

My friends’ pasts are vague to me and to each other also, any one of us could have amnesia for years and the others wouldn’t notice.

 

A divorce is like an amputation, you survive but there’s less of you. – Margaret Atwood, Surfacing, 1972

 

This is a fairly icy book. The main character, a woman who sounds like she might be in her 30s, is very detached. Detached characters can be interesting. As outsiders they may see things more clearly, or at least from a different angle.

Atwood has a sharp wit. As a child her character learned religion from other children in the schoolyard. Which scared her. “I retaliated by explaining where babies came from.”

 

The bad [words] in French were the religious ones, the worst ones in any language were what they were most afraid of and in English it was the body, that was even scarier than God.

 

Maybe in our culture sex and God are the same. We make sex more interesting by sacralizing it, surrounding it with taboos. Fewer but more intense orgasms.

 

… if the head is detached from the body both of them will die.

 

Love without fear, sex without risk, that’s what they wanted to be true….

 

It wasn’t that I didn’t suffer. I was conscientious about that….

 

… madness is only an amplification of what you already are.

 

This novel is 32 years old, but nothing about the characters seems dated. Then as now, love is a big problem. People are brittle and don’t connect. Quiet despair.

I’m noticing how the men in this book appear to women: slow, socially awkward, not to be trusted. Silly hobbies. Like children. Of course they’re both college professors. Don’t women ever meet professors they like? I’ve gotten the impression that intellectual men seem unreal to women. We live in our heads and don’t connect with them.

I don’t believe the young woman in Surfacing is ever named. The other characters, all named, never call her by name.

Her problem is that she doesn’t feel much of  any emotion, so doesn’t feel alive. Something happened – when? – and cut her off from her feelings.

 

I tried for all those years to be civilized but I’m not and I’m through pretending.

 

1972 was a time when people were trying to break out of old patterns, especially women. I wonder if they made it.

 

 

Aging

 

Aging is an energy battle. Energy level determines age at any given moment.

 

Aging is like slowly being screwed into the floor.

 

The function of old people is to tell young people all the things they should be worried about.

 

The aging human mind consists of thin skin stretched over old wounds.

 

I’m afraid as I’m getting older I’m becoming less tolerant of other people. I had thought it would go the other way. I feel like I just don’t have the time or energy to put up with someone else’s bullshit.

Part of it is that aging means less strength and energy, so everything is more trouble. I’m more likely to get tired, stressed and irritable. It’s true I don’t have to work, but still the pressure doesn’t stop, mainly from poverty. Right now I’m trying to figure out how to save enough money to get dental work done.

Not getting enough sleep, typical of stressed Americans but also, I’ve read, of people over 60, makes it all worse.

 

“It ain’t dark yet, but it’s getting’ there.” – Bob Dylan

 

It’s failure that gives us freedom. We no longer have a function. Especially after retirement, when we have officially given up. Oh I might do this or that, I tell people, or they tell me, but really I won’t. It’s too much trouble.

 

One of the benefits of getting older is that we’ll never be that weird again.

At least I don’t think so.

Now I’m worried.

There have been recent incidents….

 

Amazing how I can be so old in the morning and so young at night.

 

 

Dreams

 

Drifting towards sleep, the voice in my head said, “We all get inside that train.”

 

“We’ve just come off some kind of public transportation, on our way to a movie, climbing down stairs in the dark toward a junky place. I’m worried about danger for her, being in a place like this, although I tell her I often come here and sleep all night on a mattress, anything could happen.”

 

Dreams are sleep fiction. Without them we’d go crazy, lost in the dark.

 

When I was quite a bit younger I thought dreams were in a  symbolic code. Now I notice simple things, like how often in dreams I have some kind of lower class job.

 

Nightmare: “Sleeping outside at night, hear noises that scare me, trying to sit up and look around but my body feels weak, can’t move, straining. Wake propped up on my elbow.”

I believe that was one of a series of dreams last night with a common theme. In the last one I was talking to someone, a man I think. I told him I had been going out at night walking in the area at the edge of the city where it met the mountains (felt like maybe southern California, L.A.), sometimes sleeping outside. He said it was dangerous to be in that part of the city at night and that I shouldn’t do it. I tried to explain why I was doing it, something about needing to get out of  my safe cocoon.

 

 

Movies

 

Animatrix: Japanese animated takeoff on the Matrix movies. A collection of short stories, most of which left me with an “umm” feeling, but tripy, great visual imagination, worth watching for that. Art that moves.

 

Masked and Anonymous is a strange movie with Bob Dylan playing, minimalist style, a musician named Jack Fate, apparently (?) the son of a dying dictator in some unnamed South American country. Kind of clunky in the story telling department, but interesting in flashes. Fate is so taciturn that most of Dylan’s dialogue is voiceovers where he explains his philosophy – “I gave up a long time ago trying to figure things out.”

I liked it, sort of, not sure why. Dylan didn’t write it, but it suits his enigmatic coming-from-a-strange-direction personality.  Impassive, impervious, looking more like a block of wood than a man, old, worn down, fatalistic, still clever after all these years.

Mainly I liked his singing. Someone told me they had seen him perform recently and his voice was gone, but he sounds good in this movie, an old voice but with so much art in it.

 

 

Mind

 

Human beings are not machines. We’re quirky and do odd things that don’t make any sense, just because we feel like it. Sometimes even self-destructive things. Often we can’t explain why we do things. If you expect anyone to always make sense you will often be disappointed.

The trick is to keep our irrationality within reasonable limits.

Where I draw the line is when someone else’s irrationality gets projected onto me, and somehow it’s all my fault. That’s when I say, I’ll see you later. Or maybe not.

I don’t see any good evidence, from the people I know, that women are any more irrational than men. Sometimes it’s the other way.

 

I’m taking a class on complexity, the science of complex systems. We discussed a Darwin quote about how in his youth he enjoyed literature but his analytical efforts had destroyed his taste for any kind of art.

The instructor, Alder Fuller, says the quote “resonated” with him. He wants to blend art and science to restore a sense of wonder. For him, the study of complexity brings back some magic.

Complexity, “the science of the 21^st century,” is a study of whole systems, which are more than the sum of their parts. A pendulum swing away from the mechanistic, reductionistic “modern science” of the last 300 years.

Magic and a sense of wonder are suppressed by any kind of reductionism, our instructor says. The main way I see this happening in our society is by reducing everything to money.

 

Alder tells us that the earth has gone into and out of ice ages in less than a decade, maybe two years. (Temperature-wise, longer for the ice to form or melt.) Scientists think we started back into an ice age about 600 years ago, near the end of the medieval period. It was reversed by global warming, as people burned fossil fuels, producing greenhouse gases.

 

In college a young woman told me she had trouble listening to lectures because she could think faster than a professor could talk. I suspect another part of her problem, and mine, is that she couldn’t stay focused that long on one train of thought. I’m presently having a lot of trouble keeping my mind focused on serious nonfiction books long enough to get through them. I keep bouncing off, jumping up to do things.

Likewise with writing, probably the main reason I don’t write essays. Can’t stay on track past a few paragraphs. A friend says that’s why she writes poems instead of short stories.

In high school it took me hours every night to do my homework because I couldn’t keep my mind on it.

I’ve heard that poor concentration is one symptom of chronic anxiety. I wonder if those of us who thought we had ADD were just wired.

The way my mind works, or doesn’t work, forces me to be concise.

 

… in actual brains there are no rules…. – Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life

 

I don’t like change. I want everything to stay the same. And if it did I would be bored.

 

I like the word “melancholy” better than “depressed.”  More poetic, less clinical.

 

 

TV

 

Well, tonight Nick (The Guardian) got fired from his law firm, finished his community service at the poverty law clinic, and one of his clients killed another. There are rumors that this program may be gone soon.  I hope not. I think it’s the most adult thing on TV.

“Adult” isn’t (necessarily) sex, it’s realistic complexity.

Not that many of us are hotshot lawyers, including the lawyers I’ve known and worked for as a secretary. One was a criminal lawyer who defended murderers and was a character, but working in his office was nothing like The Guardian. No stories. Maybe I just wasn’t interested. I had long since decided that I didn’t like work, and did it under sometimes visible protest.

Jake is on real thin ice with his fiancée, an impressive woman who is beginning to suspect that Jake is bisexual. Or is he gay and just trying to marry money?

Many of the characters on The Guardian, including the main one, are gifted but have some flaw that often pulls them down. Their lives are a constant balancing act.

 

 

Politics

 

If radicalism causes you pain, I suggest not reading this.

 

I’m still fighting. The liberal Democrats are trying to crush the Naderite radicals by smothering us with disapproval. It’s their arrogant assumption that they own us that pisses me off. They’re parental: “How could you do this to us?” I don’t know, mom. I just had this sudden impulse to hold up a store and shoot a cop.

I guess I believe in blowing things up.

Better that than this endless slow decline.

 

The primary mistake Americans make is in putting their trust in those who have power.

There are no effective limits on power in the U.S. Our government was constructed on the basis of checks and balances, to limit power. The founding fathers didn’t foresee the concentration of economic power in corporations, or the takeover of government by that power. One definition of fascism is the merger of corporate and governmental power.

 

Tonight I went to the Nader nominating convention in Portland. We needed 1,000 registered voters present to put Nader on the November ballot. We came up about 100 short. So the left will have no serious representation in the presidential race, at least not in Oregon. As long as leftists keep voting for Democrats they will have no political power. I understand ABB – anybody but Bush – but that will always be the argument. The left is not willing to leave its cage.

The Democrat pickets outside the Nader convention reminded me of Christian fundamentalists – the same dumb defense of dysfunctional tradition, trying to stop change. But change will have to come, because their world doesn’t work anymore. Too many people don’t have jobs or money.

In his speech at the convention, Nader said that 40 percent of U.S. households make less than $35,000 a year, the income needed to support a family of four.

 

I’m angry at the Greens for not supporting Nader, and thinking of changing my registration to independent. The fastest growing nonparty. The Greens seem to live in some kind of Political Science 101 fairy garden, where it is not necessary to fight the Democrats or exercise power. In Oregon at least, they’re the invisible party.

 

You cannot let politics, the apparent futility of it, scramble your brain.

 

Is there any room for progressives in American politics?

Progressives are leftists. We occupy the political space between Clinton/Gore/Kerry Democrats on the right and socialists on the left. Our main issues are economics and war. We are willing to support a mixed capitalist/socialist economy, which is what the U.S. has always had, but only if capitalism is regulated so that it doesn’t destroy working-class people, as it has been for the last 30 years.

Progressives would, given a free politics, be Kucinich or Nader voters. But politics this year (any year) is not free. Enormous pressure is being applied to the progressive left to drop Nader and support Kerry. The issue is whether we’re going to be allowed to participate in American electoral politics at all. The message I’m hearing, loud and clear, is “shut up and go away.”

 

The main issue in America is not the war in Iraq, as huge as that issue is, but the corporate war on working-class citizens which is forcing down our wages, cutting benefits, making our jobs insecure, making us work part-time or intermittently as temps, making us second-class citizens. And we’re at least 25 percent of the working population (below federal poverty level for a family of four) and possibly 40 percent (less than a family-supporting wage). Who speaks for us in American politics?

 

When was the last time a union actually won a strike?

 

Funny, what we did with managed care was to try to control the patients. As if they were the problem. Instead of controlling the medical corporations.

 

I respect Kucinich, but his role in this election seems to be that of the good son: a brief rebellion and then goes into the family business. Howard Dean too. “These guys all voted for the war.” All the Democrats are good sons, even the women.

So now we have a Democratic nominee, John Kerry, who is not from “the Democratic wing of the Democratic party” (Dean). Forget all that, didn’t happen.

Many have written that we are politically amnesiac in this country. It’s because we don’t pay attention. For years I didn’t, long periods when I just gave up. I’ve had to read history books to find out what really went wrong, policy-wise, in the Clinton years.

 

I have this fantasy of the Democrats with their faces squished up against a thick glass plate, between them and me, and the glass is so thick that I can’t hear a word they’re yelling at me.

Goes the other way too. Someone write that the Democrats were like children with fingers in their ears, chanting “Nyah, nyah, nyah, I can’t hear you!”

 

If you always vote for the lesser of two evils, evil is all you’ll ever get.

 

Why is it that recessions happen during Republican administrations and expansions in Democratic ones? I think it’s a coincidence. They just got on the same cycle as the economy.

 

The same suspicion that sunk Al Gore is being hung on John Kerry: he’s not real.

 

Sometimes I can only contemplate American politics when drunk.