I have been made to create a blog on blogspot.com in order to be allowed to comment on the blog of a longtime friend.
Here it is.
Personally, I was happy with my old blog www.celebrateyourtomness.com but it's gone the way of an unlucky dodo.
I hope you like this one in addition to Fucking Myspace and Bloody Livejournal
1/30/2007
1/21/2007
The Pigs Have Won Tonight
We have these adages. These base concepts that pervade our culture, our thinking and our understanding. I don't mean those penny wisdoms, those maxims that we pass out casually in the words of our day to day: birds of a feather, a penny saved, early to bed and early to rise, idle hands, if you aim at nothing and never judge a book. No, I mean those ideas that underly our mythology. I mean the things that we consider to be fundamental truths. I mean the things that go beyond what we take for granted and that become what we take to be indispensable to our moral conceptions, the substrata of our collective lives.
Though, I wonder sometimes whether or not these things are true or whether we simply choose to believe them because because some cardinal part of our aggregate psyche needs to believe them in order to make sense of a senseless world. These are the morals of our fairy tales, the common assumptions that underly our movies. They are the things that we consider so deep seated that we are likely to forget them and often need to be reminded through apologue. Why do we never seem to question these ideas?
Are children really innocent? Does faith trump cynicism? Is balance and moderation really the path to wisdom? Is family as important as we pretend? Is honesty truly the best policy? I'm convinced that good stands, at best, an even chance against evil no matter what the storybooks say. Does human life really have intrinsic value or do we just convince ourselves that it does because the alternative is too uncomfortable or too inconvenient?
I don't know the answers and I can't pretend to but I'm inclined to think that anything believed by a large enough people cannot have been adequately unpacked. I wonder if these very ideas of family, honesty, good, evil moderation and faith have any value on which to pin these axioms. It pains me that we may all be, in some small way, deluding ourselves.
I'm no nihilist. I'm just choosy about where I pin my heart.
Though, I wonder sometimes whether or not these things are true or whether we simply choose to believe them because because some cardinal part of our aggregate psyche needs to believe them in order to make sense of a senseless world. These are the morals of our fairy tales, the common assumptions that underly our movies. They are the things that we consider so deep seated that we are likely to forget them and often need to be reminded through apologue. Why do we never seem to question these ideas?
Are children really innocent? Does faith trump cynicism? Is balance and moderation really the path to wisdom? Is family as important as we pretend? Is honesty truly the best policy? I'm convinced that good stands, at best, an even chance against evil no matter what the storybooks say. Does human life really have intrinsic value or do we just convince ourselves that it does because the alternative is too uncomfortable or too inconvenient?
I don't know the answers and I can't pretend to but I'm inclined to think that anything believed by a large enough people cannot have been adequately unpacked. I wonder if these very ideas of family, honesty, good, evil moderation and faith have any value on which to pin these axioms. It pains me that we may all be, in some small way, deluding ourselves.
I'm no nihilist. I'm just choosy about where I pin my heart.
1/14/2007
Wait & Bleed
This is the true story of the one and only act of deliberate brutality I have ever committed.
When I was growing up in the sprawling village of Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, I lived down the block from an overgrown tyrant of a boy one year my senior who entertained himself by abusing the smaller of his neighbors. Approaching two decades on, I find I can't remember his name. It might have been Randal, Randy but I'm really not sure anymore. It's hardly important.
I need to qualify that he never beat me up, per se. He would push and shove. He would wait in the bushes until you had buried yourself in a pile of fall leaves and then sit on you until you begged for air. He would demolish snowmen. He would pelt stones at smaller children on bicycles hoping to see them fall. He would steal school books or trinkets and dare his quarry to report him to their mother or to his, knowing that most would not. If he were, in fact, tattled upon, he would unceremoniously dispose of, typically via storm drain, the burgled item.
Telling parents was no use with Randal. He was a latchkey kid with a mother so guilty about her own perpetual absence from his life that she would never believe the reports of other parents or, if she did believe them, she was so desperate to keep her son's favor that she wouldn't dare punish him. And so the taunting and the vandalism and the thousands of repetitions of "Why are you hitting yourself?" and such dragged on for much of my time in second and third grade.
The summer I turned nine I was given a basic carpenter's set. I briefly thought that I might want to be a carpenter and build houses or to be a puppeteer and sculpt wooden effigies the way my father had. I was also in scouts and, devoid a conventional father figure, not performing well in sports, outdoorsmanship or crafts. Thus the tools were of great concern to me.
I had been building something on the back patio, perhaps a birdhouse. Like Randal's real name, the object is not really relevant. I had been working at it for most of the morning when Randal came past, knocked my work to the ground and crushed it underfoot, laughing all the time. He saw me with the hammer and was fearless, knowing well that I, like the rest of the neighborhood children, was afraid to strike him. To show his confidence he put his hand, palm down, on the saw horse and dared me, "Come on, hit me with the hammer," he repeated a half dozen times in the sickly nasal voice he favored when taunting. Mocking my rage with pouting lips and smug satisfaction he chided me again and again to crush his fingers with the hammer.
Which I didn't do.
I did, however, have a nail in my left hand, a long roofer's nail with a head the size of a dime that I had been about to drive into my project before Randal destroyed it. With one swift stroke I poised the nail over the back of his hand and drove it clean through and into the wood below, sticking him to it. Randal didn't cry out. He didn't curse or cry. He just stood there with a face full of disbelief as I took a second nail from the box and calmly drove it in beside the first, nailing him twice over to my grandfather's weathered sawhorse.
I didn't gloat or taunt or wait for a response. I went into the house and drank a glass of juice, which seemed perfectly reasonable at the time. I then dug in the basement for three or four minutes for a pair of heavy wire snips. Returning to the back yard I found Randal, still speechless, nailed where I had left him, looking like he was just short of crying from pain or at the knowledge that if he were to call for help he was unlikely to receive it. I clipped the heads off the nails. With an audible gasp from Randal, I pulled his hand up and off. I then gathered my tools into my grown - up sized toolbox of which I was so proud and picked up the carcass of my carpentry endeavor, which I dropped in the patio trash bin. I went back in the house without another word. Neither I nor anyone in my small circle of friends was bothered by Randal again.
I don't know what he told his mother. Perhaps he made up a story as to how he injured his hand. Perhaps he tattled on me and she didn't believe him. Perhaps she had a row with my mother who never told or punished me because she was secretly proud of me for confronting him so decisively. I don't suppose it matters anymore. I do remember that I saw him the day before my family moved away, some two and a half years later and he still sported a nasty pair of scars. I imagine he has them still and I wonder what kind of person twenty seven year old Randal might be compared to the ten year old I feared.
On very rare occasions, violence is the answer.
When I was growing up in the sprawling village of Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, I lived down the block from an overgrown tyrant of a boy one year my senior who entertained himself by abusing the smaller of his neighbors. Approaching two decades on, I find I can't remember his name. It might have been Randal, Randy but I'm really not sure anymore. It's hardly important.
I need to qualify that he never beat me up, per se. He would push and shove. He would wait in the bushes until you had buried yourself in a pile of fall leaves and then sit on you until you begged for air. He would demolish snowmen. He would pelt stones at smaller children on bicycles hoping to see them fall. He would steal school books or trinkets and dare his quarry to report him to their mother or to his, knowing that most would not. If he were, in fact, tattled upon, he would unceremoniously dispose of, typically via storm drain, the burgled item.
Telling parents was no use with Randal. He was a latchkey kid with a mother so guilty about her own perpetual absence from his life that she would never believe the reports of other parents or, if she did believe them, she was so desperate to keep her son's favor that she wouldn't dare punish him. And so the taunting and the vandalism and the thousands of repetitions of "Why are you hitting yourself?" and such dragged on for much of my time in second and third grade.
The summer I turned nine I was given a basic carpenter's set. I briefly thought that I might want to be a carpenter and build houses or to be a puppeteer and sculpt wooden effigies the way my father had. I was also in scouts and, devoid a conventional father figure, not performing well in sports, outdoorsmanship or crafts. Thus the tools were of great concern to me.
I had been building something on the back patio, perhaps a birdhouse. Like Randal's real name, the object is not really relevant. I had been working at it for most of the morning when Randal came past, knocked my work to the ground and crushed it underfoot, laughing all the time. He saw me with the hammer and was fearless, knowing well that I, like the rest of the neighborhood children, was afraid to strike him. To show his confidence he put his hand, palm down, on the saw horse and dared me, "Come on, hit me with the hammer," he repeated a half dozen times in the sickly nasal voice he favored when taunting. Mocking my rage with pouting lips and smug satisfaction he chided me again and again to crush his fingers with the hammer.
Which I didn't do.
I did, however, have a nail in my left hand, a long roofer's nail with a head the size of a dime that I had been about to drive into my project before Randal destroyed it. With one swift stroke I poised the nail over the back of his hand and drove it clean through and into the wood below, sticking him to it. Randal didn't cry out. He didn't curse or cry. He just stood there with a face full of disbelief as I took a second nail from the box and calmly drove it in beside the first, nailing him twice over to my grandfather's weathered sawhorse.
I didn't gloat or taunt or wait for a response. I went into the house and drank a glass of juice, which seemed perfectly reasonable at the time. I then dug in the basement for three or four minutes for a pair of heavy wire snips. Returning to the back yard I found Randal, still speechless, nailed where I had left him, looking like he was just short of crying from pain or at the knowledge that if he were to call for help he was unlikely to receive it. I clipped the heads off the nails. With an audible gasp from Randal, I pulled his hand up and off. I then gathered my tools into my grown - up sized toolbox of which I was so proud and picked up the carcass of my carpentry endeavor, which I dropped in the patio trash bin. I went back in the house without another word. Neither I nor anyone in my small circle of friends was bothered by Randal again.
I don't know what he told his mother. Perhaps he made up a story as to how he injured his hand. Perhaps he tattled on me and she didn't believe him. Perhaps she had a row with my mother who never told or punished me because she was secretly proud of me for confronting him so decisively. I don't suppose it matters anymore. I do remember that I saw him the day before my family moved away, some two and a half years later and he still sported a nasty pair of scars. I imagine he has them still and I wonder what kind of person twenty seven year old Randal might be compared to the ten year old I feared.
On very rare occasions, violence is the answer.
1/03/2007
Why Do You Want to Do This?
She keeps asking me, my Aunt. She is a deeply loving but deeply disappointed person. She spent as long in art school as I did in film school and, poised to retire, she has never gotten to be the artist she wanted to be. Because she loves me, she keeps asking, “Why do you want to make movies?”
The answer is simple, “I don’t.”
What I want is to be a spy. I want to save the world through guile and guts. I want to be a gangster, a Mafioso, a keeper of a criminal code and underworld ideology as seductive as sin, itself. I want to be a vigilante and dispense justice on my own terms. I want to die and talk to the living. I want to travel in space, to see things that others have scarcely imagined. I want to overcome a disability so debilitating that others had always assumed I could never be anything but a burden to society. I want to lead a revolution. I want to be a Kung Fu master. I want to be arrested for a crime I didn’t commit and lead a jailbreak so daring it will never be forgotten. I want to be a cop that was sold out by his own people and go outside the system to avenge the death of my partner. I want to be the most inspiring English teacher in the world. I want to be a war hero, a sports hero and an antihero. I want to hunt zombies. I want to rescue the princess. I want to die slowly of a degenerative illness and change everyone else’s outlook on the world in the doing of it. I want to dodge bullets with grace and ease. I want to get the girl. I want to win the game or diffuse the bomb with one second to spare. I want to have subtitles.
At one time or another I have said to myself that I want to do each of these things, and many others and I want to do them because I saw each in a movie. When I was a lonely little boy in suburban Milwaukee I would waste my Saturdays hopping theatres in the Marcus Cinemas at the end of my block. It was there that my dreams were born, on a yellowing screen, at the rate of twenty-four frames per second, in the twilight of Plato’s cave reborn. I will never get to be a spy and I will never get to be a Kung Fu master. I will never go into space and I will never get to hunt zombies but I can help make dreams for some other lonely little boy.
11/21/2006
I Don't Mean to Be Really Boring Here..
But I was reading an article out of Money Magazine that stated, "Spend no more than 2 1/2 times your income on a home."
How fucking ridiculous. Do they know where I live? Who is this article supposed to be for? Now, by virtue of my profession my income is unsteady (something that makes buying property all the more difficult) but according to my tax records, I've made between twenty-five and thirty-five thousand dollars each of the last three years. My most successful friend only makes a bit more than twice that and he is considered, by the standards of our generation, quite well off. Presuming that these are representative of people of our age, the very age at which one begins thinking of things like starting a nest egg and buying a home, who the hell is finding houses in the 65k - 150k ranges? Provided I am unwilling to live somewhere that I am likely to get shot simply for being outdoors, where in greater Atlanta can I find a house for that much?
I have one friend that recently bought a two bedroom bungalow in town for 180k. I had another who sold his two bedroom fixer - upper with no yard in one of the aforementioned common gunfire neighborhoods and got something like 120k. Even my parents' post-war era, 3 bedroom ranch house in Marietta would fetch close to a quarter million on the open market and the house is nearly sixty years old.
Am I actually living in poverty and don't realize it? Are property values in Atlanta inflated or wages suppressed by something like four times what is reasonable? According the the last census I'm at precisely the median income for a man of my age and education so am I being bamboozled? Is there some repository of cheap property that everyone else knows about but me? Or, are the professional investors and moneymen that write Money Magazine totally out of touch with the real world?
How fucking ridiculous. Do they know where I live? Who is this article supposed to be for? Now, by virtue of my profession my income is unsteady (something that makes buying property all the more difficult) but according to my tax records, I've made between twenty-five and thirty-five thousand dollars each of the last three years. My most successful friend only makes a bit more than twice that and he is considered, by the standards of our generation, quite well off. Presuming that these are representative of people of our age, the very age at which one begins thinking of things like starting a nest egg and buying a home, who the hell is finding houses in the 65k - 150k ranges? Provided I am unwilling to live somewhere that I am likely to get shot simply for being outdoors, where in greater Atlanta can I find a house for that much?
I have one friend that recently bought a two bedroom bungalow in town for 180k. I had another who sold his two bedroom fixer - upper with no yard in one of the aforementioned common gunfire neighborhoods and got something like 120k. Even my parents' post-war era, 3 bedroom ranch house in Marietta would fetch close to a quarter million on the open market and the house is nearly sixty years old.
Am I actually living in poverty and don't realize it? Are property values in Atlanta inflated or wages suppressed by something like four times what is reasonable? According the the last census I'm at precisely the median income for a man of my age and education so am I being bamboozled? Is there some repository of cheap property that everyone else knows about but me? Or, are the professional investors and moneymen that write Money Magazine totally out of touch with the real world?
10/22/2006
She Asked me if I was Happy...
I don't think anyone has asked me that question since I was barely more than a toddler and back then I didn't comprehend the question. She said that the things I write and the way I carry myself say to her that I am, at my deepest, very sad. I don't know about that but she is right insomuch as I am certainly not happy but what she didn't seem to understand is that unhappiness is sometimes by design.
Happy is what you get when you have nothing to struggle over. Happy is the way one can only be with one's eyes closed. Happiness is ignorance, feeling safe in a world that offers no safety. People's lives wither in the pursuit of happiness. Happy people have nothing to fight for, nothing to strive towards, no seed of discontent to drive them forward. All the greatest people have been, at their deepest, incomplete. Alexander the Great, Socrates, Napoleon, Mark Twain, Ayn Rand, Martin Luther King Jr., Van Gogh, Nietzsche, Marconi, Einstein, Marx, the Wright Brothers, Neil Armstrong, Lance Armstrong, Muhammad Ali, Emile Durkheim, Orson Welles, Susan B. Anthony, Christopher Columbus, Thomas Aquinas, all had an axe to grind. There is something innately pathological about greatness. None of the people behind the engine of history have been, at their core, happy. Indeed, they may not have been capable of the emotion. It may not have been part of their being and this is part of why they fought and strove and risked and made a part of the world over in their image.
I am not so much of an egomaniac as to suggest that I am on the level of any of these people but I do know that I am not fodder and that I will never be content to be part of the vulgar mass. In the words of Bob Fosse "My friends know that to me happiness is when I am merely miserable and not suicidal." Happiness is settling. Happiness is blindness, powerlessness, hopelessness. Happiness is mediocrity. Happiness is surrender. No, I'm not happy and I don't ever want to be.
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