Secrets of the able man

I don't know if I can be considered an able man, but I have had at least one alway sneaking around behind me lately.

--

Incidentally, the saddest scene ever recorded in American cinema would have been the one where Chewbacca gets thrown into his prison cell at Cloud City, when Han had been hauled off by the empire, and Chewbacca had been powerless to do anything. And he sputtered his growls of desperation up into the dim light shining into his prison, and finally gave up, sat down amidst his world-weary sighs and grunts, and picked up the disemboweled pieces of CP30, wondering how anything would ever go back together again.

But then he puts CP30's head on backwards and turns him on. Goofiness ensues, and this touching moment is not to be....

Oh, CHEWY! You silly wookie!

Weekends with Ixtab

If I could make my decision over again, I probably would not make a decision.

If I must stagnate somewhere, I'd rather it was Burlington, which is a very small city in Vermont. I lived there once. I like to say "I lived there, once. Burlington, I mean. In Vermont. So what if I already told you?"

Everybody is so busy working. We might as well be dead.

I think things will be better once I move into my apartment. I have a fireplace and a hearth. What an amenity!

I am anticipating those chilly July Florida evenings, where I will throw a few chunks of wood into the fireplace.

Anyway, I am just very sick of this hotel room. I have lived in this hotel room since January 14th, or something. It's a tragedy.

I almost missed any snow whatsoever this year. This year was the least cumulative amount of snow I have ever been a part of in a season. It's certainly tragic. I don't think I survive correctly without the appropriate winter dosage.

I mean, I am from somewhere near Buffalo, for goodnesses sakes. I like to say "I grew up there. Near Buffalo. In Western New York. So what if you already know, I'm telling you again, fucker."

The point is, I need winterishness. I need to spend at least three hundred hours per year wearing a coat, or my skin becomes grotesquely tannish. It's a tragedy.

Last weekend was when Lisa & Matt came to visit. We ate, drank, fake skydove, swam, canoed, miniaturegolfed, visited grandparents, and sang george thoroughlygood songs. It was fastpaced and good. Full of goodness. I needed the vacation from myself, because I am poor company.

I was down last week, because all of my human reaching had crashed in shambles of tatters. My presence has gone ignored and unsought, and so my esteem suffered! OH, the Tragedy! So this is also why the incoming vacation was a necessary lapse of centered attentions. Streuth!

Being isolated makes me feel like I am on my own. When I am on my own for much, I get way into woe. When I am way into WOE, well I just don't know.

I am into open G. I content myself with evening and weekend hobbies. I will get better at being more like Phil Elvrum. I will get worse at being like Jonathan Safran Foer, but I will get better at envying him. Greenly.

I would like to read my book, on that park bench at the side of the lake. I would like to be a limited-edition human being.

If I watched television at all, it would just be the Daily Show and reruns of Cheers.

Will we be our own psychopomps?

Who will record the crickets of Thursday night the 21st, to audio tape?

Ratzinger Pants

The Catholic Church would like to apologize for the seventeen-day lapse in adequate repression.

Things shall now be returning to normal, AND THEN SOME!

wOOt!

We, the swimmerers, canoers, drinkers, diners, and flyable citizens

I am tired and so should we all be.

The Defense Will Rest, Very Shortly

Frances Farmer will have her revenge on Seattle.

God Dies! (1931)
By Frances Farmer
West Seattle High School, Seattle, Washington
First Prize, Familiar Essay Division, Scholastic Awards
Teacher: Miss Belle McKenzie

"No one ever came to me and said, "You're a fool. There isn't such a thing as God. Somebody's been stuffing you." It wasn't murder. I think God just died of old age. And, when I realized that he wasn't any more, it didn't shock me. It seemed natural and right!

Maybe it was because I was never properly impressed with a religion. I went to Sunday School and liked the stories about Christ and the Christmas star. They were beautiful. They made you warm and happy to think about. But I didn't believe them. The Sunday School teacher talked too much in the way our grade school teacher used to when she told us about George Washington. Pleasant, pretty stories, but not true.

Religion was too vague. God was different. He was something real, something I could feel. But there were only certain times when I could feel it. I used to lie between cool, clean sheets at night after I'd had a bath, after I had washed my hair and scrubbed my knuckles and finger-nails and teeth. Then I could lie quite still in the dark with my face to the window with the trees in it, and talk to God. "I am clean, now. I've never been as clean. I'll never be cleaner." And somehow, it was God. I wasn't sure that it was ..... just something cool and dark and clean.

That wasn't religion, though. There was too much of the physical about it. I couldn't get that same feeling during the day, with my hands in dirty dish water and the hard sun showing up the dirtiness on the roof tops. And after a time, even at night, the feeling of God didn't last. I began to wonder what the minister meant when he said, "God, the father, sees even the smallest sparrow fall. He watches over all his children." That jumbled it all up for me. But I was sure of one thing. If God were a father, with children, that cleanliness I had been feeling wasn't God. So at night, when I went to bed, I would think, "I am clean. I am sleepy." And then I went to sleep. It didn't keep me from enjoying the cleaness any less. I just knew that God wasn't there. He was a man on a throne in Heaven, so he was easy to forget.

Sometimes I found he was useful to remember; especially when I lost things that were important. After slamming through the house, panicky and breathless from searching, I could stop in the middle of a room and shut my eyes. "Please God, let me find my red hat with the blue trimmings." It usually worked. God became a superfather that couldn't spank me. But if I wanted a thing badly enough, he arranged it.

That satisfied me until I began to figure that if God loved all his children equally, why did he bother about my red hat and let other people lose their fathers and mothers for always? I began to see that he didn't have much to do about hats or people dying or anything. They happened whether he wanted them to or not, and he stayed in Heaven and pretended not to notice. I wondered a little why God was such a useless thing. It seemed a waste of time to have him. After that he became less and less, until he was ..... nothingness.

I felt rather proud to think that I had found the truth myself, without help from anyone. It puzzled me that other people hadn't found out, too. God was gone. We were younger. We had reached past him. Why couldn't they see it? It still puzzles me."

Wildlife of the Well Hewn Botanical Gardens

I think that this weekend should classify as a surreal weekend.

So I am hiking with this dude in one of the state parks outside Orlando, and about a mile into it he says "Hey, mind if I get naked?"

I wasn't completely taken aback, because we both knew that the guy was a nudist. But I seem to remember that my contingency had been "run of the mill" hiking. But whatev, you know.

I was hoping I would never, ever ever have to see another guy's naked dumb body (OH! the humanity!) but it's not like he was going to attack me with it, or anything.

So I said something like "Whatever knocks your literal socks off, man" except that I didn't literally say that.

And so I suddenly find myself hiking through the wilderness with this guy who is naked except for his hat and sneakers. It's the sort of stuff that happens everyday to everyone else except me.

I concentrated my sight ferociously upon the surrounding trees and plantlife and distant objects, and very much away from dat ass.

He said that he hikes nude all the time. As for other hikers, he said that he can usually hear them coming, and quickly hides or throws his short-shorts back on. I asked him how many times people had caught him, and he said two.

After the bicyclers rode by, I asked him if that counted as three and four. He said yes.

He said that it was more comfortable to be naked, and that clothing is much too restraining. I beg to differ, and I think that clothing may very well be humanity's greatest gift from God, or whoever invented clothes. Clothes on people is something I appreciate the hell out of, because unless we are the 0.003% of the population who are models, we should make all efforts to be naked as seldom as possible.

Just get your showers and your sex out of the way, and get those damned drawers back on, okay?

I think it's more of an attention-wanting thing. But that's just my uninformed, fetuslike opinion. That or else a thrill thing. Like he half-wanted to get caught naked on a hiking trail in a state park.

Me, I would not find that so thrilling.

Anyway. Despite these things that may happen, I am infact startlingly heterosexual. You would be amazed at how heterosexual I am.

After the hike went awry, I was supposed to meet up with some anonymous folks who wanted to watch films and then discuss them in detail over coffee. This had sounded like it could be unbearably pretentious, so I was very keen on partaking. But then I got lazy and Adam called about his new house and so I stood them up and I didn't feel bad about it.

The rest of my time was spent torturing my MicroKorg, or else manipulating it into uttering frighteningly strange sounds.

Tonight, this Elisabeth girl is supposed to be coming into town, and we are supposed to find something to do. From our discourse and communications, she seems like a very normal person, which is something that I can truly appreciate after this weekend. Elisabeth is the one which the Constituency has decided should be my new girlfriend, but I'm not so sure that's a good idea.

Anyway, I want to eat wings and drink beers and then do the skydiving simulator, but I'm willing to bet she won't be as excited about all that as I am.

There is always Medieval Times. They have the most fabulous paper crowns around.

My armpits are partial to not only one brand of deodorant, but also one flavor. It must be Old Spice "classic", or these pits will cry all day long. It's strange, isnt it?