Last Day

No one respects or fears me.  Otherwise the fact that I don't have a 2012 calendar on my wall would inspire fear of the world ending this very night.  It seems like everyone thinks that the world is going to continue, and it is just a matter of me not being diligent enough to buy a new calendar before December 31st.  I'm just one man. Not so in the case of the Mayans who, sort of like the early DOS developers who thought 640K was more than enough, failed to keep supplying us with dates so we would know what to do.

I have my own theory regarding people who have nothing more to worry about than the real cause of the twin tower collapse and the moon landing hoax and this latest iteration of the end of the world thing: their lives must be pretty spiffy and squared away as it appears they have nothing left to do.  They probably already have their Christmas lights taken down and put away in the basement. Personally, if I thought the end of the world was nigh, I would leave the lights up.  Perhaps as a beacon.  You never know.

At any rate I felt compelled to post something, one last thing, in 2011. Too bad I seem to have deleted my prior blog so I can't really recall that many specific details from January, 2011 to May, 2011 when this blog started. Not that my posts were comprehensive at all.  As I thought of that this morning while still considering the ramifications of getting out of bed, I was kind of dismayed at how little I could actually recall of the personal events in my life this year.  Perhaps not coincidentally, they are like old jokes--you can't just sit there and remember them when you want to, but they are still in there and come to mind when needed to add hilarity to any gathering.

Except that joke about the camels and the watering hole.  That's just not that funny anymore.   But I digress.

Here is a blog post from 2004, about as far back as I can find something on my hard drive. It still makes sense to me today, so there's something . . . 

The sun is shining.  I have always liked that expression, the sun is shining. It sounds like it could be a line in a Kindergarten rhyme. Up on the wall above the chalkboard there would be a cheerful yellow circle made of construction paper, perhaps with a smile drawn on it, and sunglasses, and wavy yellow rays emanating from it. All because far out in the blackness of space there spins an enormous, raging, perpetual hydrogen and helium explosion creating unimaginable planet-vaporizing temperatures --temperatures so hot that even on a cold winter day 93,000,000 miles away, a little upturned Kindergarten face will be warmed by its rays.

God is an old man with a long white beard and fierce eyes.  God's girlfriend is a warm blanket. If you pray to the wrong one, it will wind up doing you no good whatsoever.

You Say You Want a Revolution

Something happened and now I seem to think of the winter solstice as the marker of a new year, rather than the round number calendar date previously used.  Christmas seemed anti-climactic, not surprising given my advanced age and level of cynicism combined with a modest but adequate amount of buying power--witness the two motorcycles--but hopefully I haven't gone off the deep end yet.

No resolutions.  At least, not the formal kind where you announce them, take credit, then go on as if nothing happened.  A couple of things are actually changing for me, but it's hard to tell because it is sort of a dynamic process involving no one event. I suspect the lack of resolutions might actually be serving to keep the way clear for the real changes that are coming.  You can build a levee to stem the tide, but in the end, the sea will win. It always does.

And speaking of dynamic, I did play around the Google's "dynamic" views but, wow, talk about over-eager development and premature release.  If the steam powered locomotive was introduced while the technology was in its explosive infancy, we would all be going to Chicago on donkey carts and stuff at this point. Google--wait until it actually works before releasing it.  No, not everyone wants to be a beta-tester.  I allude to a variety of mixed metaphors, for which I apologize.

I am driving to south Missouri today to look at a motorcycle. It is a Moto Guzzi.  I am attracted to the idea of owning one since I am in part, after all, of southern European ethnic extraction.  I live in North America, so this would make me molto internazionale!  By the way, in my research, I stumbled across an Internet forum argument concerning the proper pronunciation of the name, Moto Guzzi.  I understand Moto is going to roll of the American tongue as, "moh doe" but Guzzi is another matter, as we already have a handy reference point in the word, pizza.  All of this said, "moh toe GOOTS tsee" kind of sounds affected.  As I am going to be in south Missouri, I will of course be careful how I pronounce those eye-talian names so as not to draw undue attention to myself and get beat up. I kid the southern Missourians.  They are actually a pretty sophisticated bunch, and quite easy to get along with. As long as you're not from Kansas, which I am but I don't tell them. As Steinbeck points out, I and the boys always throw an old shop rag over the license plate . . .

This Just In

During his Christmas Eve appearance, the Pope cautions us to look beyond "the superficial glitter" that surrounds us. You don't need me here.  Some things are just their own punch line. 

Happy Holidays.

OK OK

So I could have just done what I always do which is to ignore the blog and come back and post something when I'm ready, like everyone else does (some to a great degree, and you know who you are) but, you know, not dramatic enough. And I'm all about drama even though you wouldn't know that if you observed my life, but you would not be looking into my head, which is where all the action is.

I'm not finished refurbishing my psyche, and probably won't be until well after "the holidays" but I got some kind of break.  Part of the problem is that I had a reunion of sorts with an old friend who goes back to my college days, and the brush with my past left me agitated and a bit worn out, to be honest.  No matter what we think, there is a clash, a dissonance, in encountering our past, because it seems like we do change, for all that we say we don't, and it's difficult for our current self and our old self to be present simultaneously.

Right now I should correct that statement to add: in my case.  I make the assumption that we are all basically alike.  I could be wrong, but I don't think so.

There is still in me the 1959 science fiction boy so I liken this to the time travel paradox where if you meet yourself in the past, you take the risk of irreversibly changing history and therefore the present and therefore your present self. You don't really want to know what would happen if you knew then what you know now. And the path to enlightenment is strewn with . . . well, everything, eventually.

Time To Go

I'm wishing everyone a fine, happy Christmas time, insert usual politically correct caveats here, and/or an uplifting and/or inspirational winter solstice and/or angst free resolution season and remember chocolate is still a fairly complex carbohydrate so don't do anything drastic. 

For my own personal sanity and/or to afford myself some sort of rejuvenation I am going to close up shop, probably just briefly but who, as they say, knows?  

I leave you with a picture I stole from somewhere on the Internet, lest we forget what we were thinking back there in the first grade when we were told "the sun is just a star."  

Last Tolerably Warm Day

I went for a motorcycle ride today for no real reason except that I could. This will hold me over for the next week or so as we plummet toward winter solstice and the days grow shorter and the nights longer and blacker. I guess I'll see you on the other side.

You know, I have decided that the beauty 

of these things is that you can see how 

they work. Everything else seems to be 

such a Goddamn mystery. 

The. Best. Title.

A book about zombies, entitled World War Z.  Brilliant.   Don't even need to read it. Great title, though.

This is the third post I have started this morning.  The first two didn't get off the ground because I didn't know what I was talking about. Now this is a testimony to your own intelligence and high standards, because if you didn't have that, I would have tried to get away with it anyway.  However, I am stubborn, so here are the conclusions, in each case, which I would have tried to reach had I done so. 

Art is a simplification and a smoothing of real life. It has ups and downs, but not as steep, and not as high nor low. Art is the rolling hills of Sicily, real-life is the Rocky Mountains. This doesn't always seem to be the case, and I guess it stands to reason that a representation of something is usually going to be smaller, simpler, have less elements in it, and more non-essential elements removed from it, just due to the human limitations during the creation of the art in the first place.  Like I said, I don't know what I'm talking about.  The musical scale, though, is very small and manageable compared to the range of sounds we normally hear, from normal human speech to crashing waves.  Music is a very simple representation of life and seems to be more about capturing only the feeling of something, rather than the creation of an historical document of sound waves.  Music is quieter than the world*.

Things with a single purpose are more aesthetically pleasing than things with multiple purposes. This was pointed out to me by my friend during a texted discussion last week. A motorcycle designed strictly for off-road use is more visually and aesthetically appealing, usually, than one designed for multiple purposes.  Of course. It's simpler. Consider most SUVs, or, say, "crew cab" pick up trucks. Ugly.  Now think of an old flat-bed truck.  Elegant.

A poem about one thing, of course would demonstrate both things.

Just wanted to get that off my chest.  If I write any more about either of those things, however, I will start to sound stupid, (considering that I am at my smartest when I keep my mouth shut.) 

*OK. Not Blue Cheer although I worked on the printing press for a newspaper once and it was fricking loud. 

ugh

Keee-rap I am off kilter today.  I ran out of fake grocery store Claritin ® four days ago and haven't bothered to go get some more, and I drank beer last night. Then right before I went to bed I ate a couple of cookies which seem to have kept me up all night.  No, they were not Dutch Windmill cookies, though those have been known to upset the brain's chemical infrastructure, besides the fact that when you dunk them, they don't seem to absorb any milk. (or whatever)  When I did manage to sleep, I not only dreamt of work, but of working in Oklahoma.  This is the newest twist on my nightmarish ex-work dreams.  Now I am up, but my eyes are burning.

There.  I have shoved this off into the cyber-ether(net) also known as cosmic griping, or e-whine. Please absorb it, shake it off, pity me. Going out to breakfast now, which is something. I'll be back.