November - December 2004

I've always been ambivalent about ordinary reality. Sometimes I want to embrace it, get down to earth, away from all the phoniness. Other times I think, this is boring.

Cold, gray and raining, the kind of day that feels like a funeral. Stayed up late last night reading a nasty crime novel, didn't get up until around 3 in the afternoon. Walked down to the local convenience store to get a paper in a real bad, post-political mood, telling myself stop, just stop. No way to win at this stupid game. Got the paper anyway.

There should be a 12 step program for poor people. "Hi, my name is George and I'm poor." The first step should be to make everyone else uncomfortable. Forget the other 11 steps.

Every year in December I think, I'll just go to bed and wake up in the spring.

I've been rereading an interview I did with my mother in 1985, six years before she died, about her life. Interesting. I'm glad I did it. This struck me as relevant to my life, about the period around 1931, when my parents were married:

Q: Did you talk over plans about what you were going to do and how you were going to live and stuff?
A: Oh no, we just drifted. Whatever seemed to be a good idea at the moment, that's what we did.

This also was interesting, from a 73 year-old woman:

Q: How is life different now, how is this country different from the way it was when you were young?
A: People don't attach as much importance to their family now as they used to. Or their friends. They don't have friends that they go visit and get together with and go on picnics and stuff like that they way they used to. And well, just get the family together the way they used to.

I figure one benefit of being 64 is that I no longer have to pretend I know what's going on.

Doctors aren't interested in the little stuff, like dry irritated skin. For the little stuff I guess you're supposed to go to the drugstore and keep buying over-the-counter meds until something works. Or not. Every box of OTC is now about $3-$6, so you can run up a bill fast.

I find myself looking for the story in everything. And most of the time there isn't one.

Someone said that life is mostly showing up. For me it's mostly getting up.

He was too sarcastic maybe, too studied. He was always measuring his life instead of living it. Actors called it being in the moment. Henry was usually in two moments at once, which meant not being in either. -- David Freeman, It's All True

It's not easy, being seen.

When you get older you really need to have a cave. Doesn't have to be very big....

I just told the ants around my microwave, "You guys are gross."

I am troubled by vast, indigestible amounts of information.

... that sense of confinement so pervasive in modern America. -- Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent, 2003

Dreams

I told my friend H in a dream that "Appliances can be neither created nor destroyed."

I've been sick with a chronic headache, feeling weak, hard to focus my mind, sitting up in bed sleeping.

Working at my computer, curtains open, looking out the window, sunny day. Pickup camper keeps pulling in and out of parking space in front. I'm thinking, why aren't I out walking?

I think the camper is about wanting to go somewhere, drift. No way to do that physically, wrong time of year, no wheels. Too sick. Hopefully it will pass. Went to the doctor and got a prescription to reduce inflammation in my sinuses. Got to get back to eating right, drinking fluids. [Later turned out to be migraines.]

Feels like everything is on hold, and I'm stuck inside.

I'm involved in an indoor marijuana growing operation. We deliver our crop to some gang that distributes it, and they have some complaint, so this time they've sent a boisterous group of young men, all "freaks" in the 1960s sense, to "help" us. These guys are completely out of control, attracting attention from the cops, and I'm afraid they're going to get us busted.

Well. I guess that's what I get for trying to sleep in the middle of the day, the feeling that things are out of control. I've been sick recently, trying to recover, taking prescription medicine that for some reason is supposed to be taken before 9 a.m. So I set my alarm for 8, took the medicine with breakfast and went back to bed. I'm completely off schedule, even for a retired man, and there are basic maintenance things I have to get done, groceries, laundry, pay a bill.

I did grow pot a long time ago, got busted and had to quit, probably just as well. It frees you from wage slavery, but it's living on the edge.

Sickness also has that effect. All of the sudden you can't depend on your own body.

Politics likewise. As the Internet hums with charges of election fraud, and the big news media try to explain it away -- bad exit polls, bad! -- the country feels out of control.

And in January the state legislature will again be in session, ready to cut more budgets. Poor people, run for your lives!

Humans and insects had learned to communicate. Insects were intelligent. The main problem with human/insect relations was the difference in physical scale. I was thinking we could make humans insect size, so we'd all be on the same plane. Date with a butterfly.

A date with beauty. But I need to downscale.

P and I are still in school, but not long to go. I was thinking that we needed to talk about our future.

Which makes me think, do I have a future? Or is old age just a slow retreat? If I do, what do I want to do with it? Not what I've been doing.

Outdoor literary readings. I was flying several feet off the ground, feeling confident, when the land suddenly dropped away in front of me to enormous depths, probably miles. Decided it was too scary for me, that height, so I turned back just before the cliff.

Art has unexpected depths. Never fly higher than you're willing to fall.

I always imagine the dream world as being dark. Like those crime movies of the 1950s.

Trying to clean up a house. My older sister (dead) trying to tell me how to do it. Getting irritated, yelling at her that I know how to clean a house.

In which case I really should clean my apartment.

I had moved back to some small city in southern California. Dry country, river, sun. I was thinking, I always knew I'd be back!

Yes, I would like to go back, but I don't know where. Both my sister and I, in our early sixties, are feeling the itch to complete the circle by visiting a place where we lived when we were young. She would like to live there for a while. Small college town in the east.

Politics

India's poorest people are the untouchables. America's poor are the unmentionables.

Politicians fuck with people. That's what they do. Every day, they get up and wonder who they're gonna fuck with that day. They they go and do it. -- John Sandford, The Hanged Man's Song

I'm still doing a little work on small political projects, but after the end of the Nader campaign, with a whopping three tenths of one percent of the vote, it feels to me like politics is dead. The American left is entombed in the Democratic party, where it is completely ineffectual, and will not get out, no matter what. With the Kerry campaign, the left was reduced to supporting a warmonger.

I would be surprised if the Democrats get back in power any time soon. The dominant American politics is one of piggy selfishness, and the Republicans do that a little better than the Democrats. Why accept anything less?

Democrats are always trying to be invisible. Makes for some strange campaigns. They plaster that stupid smile on their faces and try to avoid saying anything. The Democratic party, our leading example of self-castration.

We are the only industrialized country besides South Africa that does not have universal health care....

... being poor at any time in any place is bad for your health.... -- James Nora, What every Senior Needs to Know About Health Care

Americans only feel safe if they imagine themselves in the majority.

Progressives, so troubled by violence and conflict, never liked the term revolution. -- Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent, 2003

Yet American liberals have always been destroyed by their appetite for war. War is respectable; revolution is not.

... perfectly rational human beings could make themselves behave as though they were oblivious to the consequences of their actions, even when they weren't. -- Robert Hunter, Thermageddon, 2003