Saturday, August 23, 2008

The Avett Brothers

Jayne and I went to see The Avett Brothers last night at the Knitting Factory. They were incredibly kick-ass; a lot better than I thought it would be, actually. I expected kind of a mellow, broken-hearted crooning set, lovely and calm. It wasn't what I expected, though. The best interpretation I could come up with was that these guys were rockers, not only at heart, but in attitude, stage presence, performing style - everything but their instruments. It was like someone handed them sheet music for "You Shook Me All Night Long", but gave them the string section from a Beethoven symphony. They were amazingly energetic.



http://www.youtube.com/v/ToxmNmWtZvw&amp

Friday, August 22, 2008

the choice is yours

They say that in a healthy brain, for the first 90 seconds of an emotional reaction to an event or situation, you are a victim of your own hormonal and chemical surges. You react without thinking; your brain sends signals, your heart rate increases, blood vessels do their thing, chemicals bathe your neurological pathways in goop that produces anger, happiness, shock, fear, whatev.

But that is only for a minute and a half. After that the flood subsides, and it's your choice how you feel. If you are harboring feelings you don't like, like jealousy, regret, etc., it really is a choice of yours.

Similarly, you can create your own happiness. Something might happen to make you feel good, but after 90 seconds, it's no longer "making" you feel good; you choose to feel good. And I like this feeling; I consider lying in bed and thinking about the one you love to be a wonderful, hedonistic, organic self-medication.

Monday, August 18, 2008

One Day = $720 million


We spend that much every day of the Iraq War. What useful projects could we put the money toward?

i love the smell of commerce in the morning

There really is nothing more inspiring than a coffee shop. Despite being charmingly ambient, you'll never miss the opportunity to overhear an entire conversation of a Bluetooth-wearing schmuck that thinks his conversation is more important, and ergo must be louder, than yours.

"What? Yeah, yeah Frank, ya know I have a 9 o'clock so this does actually need to be a good time for you. Yeah, no, I pulled the Johnson account. Yeah don't worry about that. What? Frank I can't hear you. Frank? FRANK are you there?! Okay, yeah. I lost you for a second. Ok, what I need from you is to let Jerry know..." And did you ever notice that they all have shmuck businessman names? Frank, Jerry, etc. and there is always a Bill thrown in there. I would say that 75% of self-important Blackberry conversations involve a Bill.

A lot of times they won't even have the decency to interrupt their "I'm an idiot because it looks like I'm talking to myself" conversation to even order coffee. The baristas put on a fake smile and roll their eyes at him when he digs into his fat wallet to drop $4.50 on a latte. Money that I cringe to put on the table, that's 10% more than I make an hour, or 20%, or 300%, since I don't have a job at all right now.

Saturday, August 16, 2008

edward abbey and my dad

Once as a matter of fact I did let Elaine bully me into attending a group encounter session. She believed in it (that season) and felt I needed the treatment. And why? What's my problem? Well, I have this queer thing about pretty girls: I like them. And this weird thing about steady jobs: I don't like them. I don't believe in doing work I don't want to do in order to live the way I don't want to live.

--From "The Fool's Progress", 1988

As I approach graduation and am faced with the what-are-you-going-to-do with your life questions, I seek solace in Edward Abbey. He was not a perfect man, however very inspirational, and not about to be pigeonholed into either of those categories. He actually reminds me a lot of my father. Didn't give a shit what other people thought of him, basked in his own human flaws and stark-faced self-acceptance of those flaws.

My dad has always said that time is more important than jobs, and I've taken that to heart. Of course, that's easy to say when you're living in the cush of post-high-school, pre-student loan repayment microcosm that is college and its surrounding years, but this is the only place I'm living in right now, and the only place I can live in, barring the life of some of my childhood friends who married the first person they dated, got two dogs and a mortgage, forever renouncing the drifter's life.

My dad lives alone at the top of a small hill in the foothills of eastern Oregon, and drives his old Dodge truck down to the Willowcreek Market for Hamm's beer, some smokes and a few rounds of Keno when his eyes aren't so bad. He lives frugally off of retirement money and Vietnam vetrans' benefits and grows his own weed for personal and slightly commerical use. An old hippie, still with deep-down, "don't trust anyone over 30" ideals, even though has been over 30 for most of his life. Hippie in his 1960's sex-drugs-rocknroll ideals, but without the pretense of so many Chaco-clad, bandanna-wearing, middle-class angsty 18-24 year-olds I know (and sometimes love). Not fiercely anti-government in the Anarchist, squatter, US version of ETA sort of sense, but distrustful at best. He doesn't believe we landed in the moon but that it was a staged scene in the deserts of New Mexico. He thinks the world is going to puke on December 28th, 2012, because that's when the Mayan calendar ends, and the whole world runs off of the Mayan calendar, you see?
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He left home at 12 to work for 5 years on a dairy farm before enlisting in the Navy at 17. He was a very good-looking man in his army photos: blonde, side-parted hair, piercing blue eyes, and a smirk that said "I'll play your game for a few years, but only so I can get out of Emmett fucking Idaho." I like better photos of him from our flowered family albums that smell like mothballs, where he has a beard nearly as long as his long blond hair, wearing cut-off 501's, riding our horse Job down by the canal. I can see why my mom fell in love with him, a free spirit to the point of self-alienation, and did I not have wariness for his type rubbed into my brain from my childhood, saying "this spells d-i-v-0-r-c-e", I would have fallen as hard as she did for him, or someone like him. Armed with this wariness, I still might.

He has almost no friends in conservative Willocreek, all the old hippies that used to live there having moved to California by now. We used to have parties for days at a time, he said, and smoke all kinds of things and eat rum-infused watermelon and play volleyball under the willow tree down by the pond. The stories he tells me make me laugh, about how he and Mom used to paint their free-running turkeys' nails red, white, and blue for a 4th of July and Thanksgiving celebration all in one, and how, to get rid of a litter of kittens one October, he put them in paper bags, poked air holes, stapled them shut and handed the kittens out as trick-or-treats. Stories that make me laugh and wish I had been born by then, but now as a self-reflective, world-understanding adult with my mom's own mothering neuroses, I can see how he drove her mad. He must have been entertaining, but I imagine being raised by him was like being raised by a kid. I don't know what happened between them, as I was 4 when they got divorced, but it must have been a long time coming. I don't try to understand it all, because it's a waste of my time and I have better things to do. But, oh, the stories they share! They are civil to each other, finally, after about 17 years, but of course maintain a cold distance. However, there are times when I'm talking with just one of them, when they'll begin a story about the farm in their old hippie days together, and I can see the glint, actually see that sparkle of fondness return to their eye. What's done is done and it could have ended better, but if the chief part of enjoyment in this life is re-living everthing through memory (and I think it is), then it's okay; all the good parts are still there.

Thursday, August 14, 2008

the good word

Why doesn't the human capacity to love extend beyond our own romantic interests and family? Is loving so hard? It comes easily to me, but maybe like a person is hesitant to love because they've been hurt before, humans are hesitant to love because the world hasn't been kind first.

It's a reciprocity sort of thing, that we expect something from the world before we will give of ourselves. Should we let our fear of reciprocity stop us from creating more good energy? I remember the first time that I, in my infinite five-year-old wisdom, reached out to a strange dog to pet it and it growled, barked and snapped at me. I was scared, I cried, but I didn't give up loving dogs.


From Belize 2008

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

la vie philosophique, goddamnit

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My new daily affirmation. Thanks to Katie for gleaning these words of wisdom from Ed Abbey.


"You heard me, Lightcap. Do you really want to be a professor of philosophy?"

"I certainly want to be a philosopher, sir, and to live la vie philosophique, goddamnit."

"Answer my question."

Henry reflected. A fork in his road of life had most suddenly appeard dead ahead. To the right, the right way, a broad and shining highway led upward beyond the master of arts toward the Ph.D.--the tenured leisurely life of overpaid, underworked professerhood. A respectable life. Anyone who is paid much for doing little is regarded with obligatory admiration.

To the left a dingy path littered with beer cans and used toilet paper led downward in darkness to a life of shame, of part time and seasonal work and unemployment compensation, of domestic strife, jug wine, uncertainty, shady deals, naive realism, stud poker, furtive philanderings, skeptical nominalism, pick-up trucks, a gross and unalembicated nineteenth-century eight-ball materialism.

He called his shot. I will not tell a lie. Looking at his three Inquisitors looking at him, he answered them collectively:

"Not really, he said."

What's Real?

"What's real?" asked the Rabbit one day. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you… you become Real."

"Does it hurt?"

"Sometimes." For he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at one, like being wound up, or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or who have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby."

-Margery Williams
"The Velveteen Rabbit"

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

and as we wind on down the road

if you're laying on the bow of a sailboat and looking sideways at the water, the earth looks not only flat, but vertical, up and down. You feel like you're headed straight downwards, and I feel like laughing a Captain Barbosa laugh as I intentionally capsize my ship and head to the end of the world, Pirates-of-the-Caribbean-style. But I keep it to myself and just laugh inwardly, or the others on the boat are going to think I'm talking in my sleep.

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I like listening to old, old Bob Marley tracks, Cream, and the Stones' earlier stuff when we're on the boat. And Stone Temple Pilots' "Pretty Penny". I like bracing myself against the guy wires when we make a sharp turn so I don't fall off the deck. I like having to duck under as we come about so the boom doesn't smack me in the back of the head. I like living in my bathing suit, making sandwiches at the breakfast bar, and not going outside until after noon every day.

This kind of lifestyle is hard to maintain, but while we're on vacation and ignorant of everyday duties (like working your ass off to afford a lakehouse such as this) I'm content to think of it as a just desert. Or, just an opportunity que he aprovechado.

Monday, August 11, 2008

I love the phrase "bitch please"


I have recently become obsessed with hulu.com, phonezoo.com, and all manners and sorts of photo-sharing websites. I am hopelessly late to everything, which my mom says means I value my time more than other people's. I love the phrase "bitch please," and try to use bro- puns whenever I can (e.g. broseph and brosephine, wolfgang amadeus brotzart, bilbro baggins, etc., thank you watsons) I love hotsprings and boats of all kinds, mostly self-propelled. I'm not lazy, I'm just efficient. I am self-conscious to write in blogs because I get so much satisfaction out of mocking them. Oh well. A little harmless hypocrisy is the spice of life. Complete self-righteousness is boring, no?

I've been having some really good conversations lately. I've realized that it's important to meet for coffee when a friend is in town, and make time for them; it's amazing how much lost time you can make up over a six-pack of Newcastle Brown Ale or an afternoon at Flying M.