words, words, words
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If I begin to detail myself here, will you understand?
P. I am me
Q. I don't always know exactly who that is
R. I am Quaker
S. I like words and playing with them
T. I like genmaicha tea
U. I like the word napkin more than most others
V. I spend time walking my neighborhood
W. I cook rice often
X. I sleep well most every night
Y. I eat large amounts of fruit and vegetables
Z. I munch, sleep, write, create, cook, bike, watch, walk, listen, hope, learn, drink, live, breathe, touch, know, question, taste, copy, read, stare, carry, talk, dance, finger, try.
raisin@gmail.com
albums:
Magnetic Fields: 69 Love Songs
Erasure: I Say, I Say, I Say
Depeche Mode: Black Celebration
The Beach Boys: Pet Sounds
Marvin Gaye: What's Going On?
David Bowie: Hunky Dory
George Michael: Listen without Prejudice
George Gershwin: Porgy and Bess
Yo La Tengo: And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out
songs:
Wild is the Wind: Nina Simone
Come Undone: Duran Duran
Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini: Rachmaninov
My Funny Valentine: Chet Baker
Feeling Yourself Disintegrate: The Flaming Lips
This Must Be the Place: The Talking Heads
Hyperballad: Bjork
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Saturday, January 31, 2004
by the way, after quite a search, i found that the version of leonard Cohen's "hallelujah" I love is by John Cale (not by Cat Stevens which was my first guess), or Rufus Wainwright. Rufus' terrible, heartless (which is how i feel about most of his music) version of the song is on the soundtrack of Shrek even though the movie uses Cale's version. weird stuff. but Cale's version is incredible, as is Jeff Buckley's, who i found on accident.
12:52 PM
It's amazing how quickly dust and dirt pile up. you don't pay attention for a few days and you have all these contradicting thoughts mulling up your head so that you can't really think. you have to pull out your broom and sweep all the fallen hairs, the dirt from outside, the nameless tiny stuff all over the walls of your mind. i can feel it there, like something stuck in my teeth after a meal, clogging up more important ideas. it's the tasks i have yet to do, or done only halfway; it's the fear about work; it's the snow and salt outside; it's the anger and resentment in people I know; the spoon from my breakfast cereal. All this clutter and dirt and dust. i wish i were disembodied, could spend in my life in my brain and no more. but of course, i'd miss the cranberry sauce, the snow crunching under my shoes, the hug telling a co-worker goodbye. i guess i'll sweep up then, spend some time on those ideas.
10:33 AM
Thursday, January 29, 2004
Yes, it's been a week since i last wrote. I won't offer any details, but there's this guy . . . so my thoughts have been more occupied with him than with, well, anything else.
Politics aren't so antagonizing; I'm sad for Dean, but Kerry is better than Bush. I like this preoccupation.
Still, i have been working on a small project - remember spam haikus? things like:
pink, beefy temptress,
I can no longer remain
vegetarian.
yes, good. but when i mentioned the subject to Joe, he thought maybe I meant spam as in the email problem of unsolicited advertisements. hmmm, good idea!
I wrote a few of my own, but i will share them later. you'll have to write some and send them to me! ok, i'll share one. well, they're all bad. but oh well. i'll keep trying:
My sweet Gretchen at
unpronouncable dot com,
How big are your breasts?
see, i need help. send some!
10:53 AM
Thursday, January 22, 2004
The Log Cabin Republicans have finally broken with the president. After his State of the Union speech on Tuesday, Guerriero, president of the LCR, said he strongly opposed Bush's comparison of gays and lesbians to terrorism and drug thugs.
There are still gay groups out there who will support Bush, but the major one no longer supports him. Does that mean they'll vote with us, or will they just vote for some random Republican (are there any running?)? I don't know, but it's nice to see them refsue to throw their support behind someone who will support a constitutional amendment against them. Perhaps this move will alienate some others from Bush as well.
10:47 AM
Sunday, January 18, 2004
I posted a piece about one of the best articles I've seen yet on queerday today. Tomorrow is the celebration of Martin Luther King's life and accomplishments. How do we as gays and lesbians fit into his dream? for most of us, it's clear that civil rights means that we are included as well, that discrimination against a black man is discrimination against a lesbian is an injustice for all of us. We cannot fight one battle and ignore another. I cannot leave the Air Force as a conscientious objector and not work for justice and peace around the world. My mother said it even, what you going to do to stop Hussein, march around protesting his policies? You can't just do that, you can't just not fight, give in and hope that things will work out best if you don't complain too much. sure, you're not killing anyone that way, you're not contributing to discrimination, but to stand up against it means to do something about it.
it's all connected, the hunger of poor people, the discrimination of gays and lesbians, the persecution of political enemies, the threat of AIDS, the tolerance and love of all people, of all of us. I see King as someone who understood that, who argued that if he stood up for African American civil rights, he had to stand against the Vietnam War. I grew up being taught he was a bad man, unworthy of the nation's respect, but I've since learned that he is one of America's greatest heroes, one who fought against hatred and fear, one who fought using the crazy ideals of peace and love but whose creative methods started a great force of people working together and accomplishing change.
2:03 PM
Friday, January 16, 2004
I just don't blog enough lately. of course, that's partly because I don't have a job where i get to sit doing nothing on the computer all day. i have to use my free time to sit at the computer and do nothing all day. not that i'm too opposed to that. well, i'm supposed to be; i'm trying to spend less time at the computer, but it's not really working. especially when i feel guilty for not writing anything to my blog for five days. i'm very much into circlular logic today.
oh, and courtesy of rob, I'm introducing paragraphs. i had forgotten about those useful dividers of thoughts. in my attempt to be faulknerian and difficult, I run my thoughts together like my mind runs the world together, building connections between this and that, loving to find the thread of life between them. even jeff noticed quite a while ago, when looking at my paper notebook, that I don't use paragraphs. i honestly don't like them because i want everything to stay together, unlike my family and all my friends in my life who have separated and disappeared. but i know they make things easier to read. they are good form, like manners, and i love good manners.
come to think of it, i run my sentences together too, adding commas and semicolons to separate thoughts, never wanting to actually use that period which might cut one sentence off from another, might prove that the two thoughts really have nothing to do with each other, and i'm just a crazy mad scientist trying to splice the world together based on an assumption that we all come from one creature, be it Adam or a monkey, so that we are all related and should love one another accordingly.
see, if i use paragraphs, i just end up with one sentence per paragraph. but i'm doing this on purpose. it seems to me, if you run your sentences together, and then strike one short one off, you've made a bigger impression than sentences that are all roughly of the same lenghth. or maybe it's just confusing. life is confusing though, and i do my best to intimidate life. no, that's imitate; i'm not very intimidating. well, some people think i am, but it's a joke, and i've always been quite a push-over. the past couple of years have taught me that might be a better quality than i had imagined. it needs more crafting though; someday i'll have the perfect personality, if i live a few hundred years more.
look at that, another paragraph. who would have thought? and short sentences. fragments, even. i love writing.
11:26 AM
People are coming out of the strangest places lately to criticize President Bush. I don't know why they waited this long, but I'm glad they're taking the chance to voice their opinions. In this case, several military lawyers have filed a brief with the Supreme Court arguing that the White Houses refusal to allow the Guantanamo detainees any access to civilian courts is reprehensible and challenges of the rule of law in our country. Other nations have been arguing this for a year now, but rarely does criticism of the commander-in-chief come from military subordinates. These lawyers are trying to best represent their clients; but in truth, they are representing all of us who fear being detained indefinately, told nothing of our crimes, and ignored by the court system.
10:39 AM
Monday, January 12, 2004
Almost 500 U.S. soldiers dead in Iraq. We're not counting Iraqi civilians or adding to the tally, soldiers of other countries who have died.
It doesn't take much to kill one of us; we're pretty frail. I'm not going to use the number of the dead to explain why we shouldn't have gone to Iraq, or why we should stop what we're doing there. I don't want to use their deaths for any reason. I just want to lament their loss.
I always had trouble liking the military people I worked with. Most were crude and conservative, uncaring and overly macho. But they had a strange seriousness to them that I respected. They thought they were doing something right, and though it gave them a bit of a chip on their shoulders, it also gave weight to their lives. They weren't drifting through life, they were trying to be better people, hoping to be able to give something. Strangely, many of them were small and weak, surprisingly so. working in the communications field, you get higher brain capacity than muscle capacity. But we're all small and weak, compared to the gigantic power of war, no matter how mighty a military machine we have built. we still can't prevent death.
So when I think about 500 dead, I hope i don't think about the political advantage to beating the President that fact might give us. It isn't worth it. I'd rather have them all alive and get another four years of his rule. They are dead, and no election can bring them back. Mourning them, I will think about the thousands who are still alive, and hope their lives won't be so short.
10:21 AM
Sunday, January 11, 2004
I've always had something to look forward to, some life-changing event, some exciting future. getting to high school, graduating from high school, graduating from college, leaving the Air Force. what now? I'm no longer competing in triathlons; I'm not studying; I'm not sure enough about my future to say I'm leaving St Louis soon or to know what I'm going to start doing. do I need something to look forward to? isn't there something more wonderful to simply enjoying exactly what I have now? I was trying to do that while in the Air Force, and strangely, now that I don't have to work as hard at being happy, I dont' feel quite as happy. Perhaps for the past year, I felt like i was doing something, standing up to the giant, making a place for myself. now, am i just hiding, or am i resting?
or perhaps I'm dramatizing my situation. What I need to get used to is that I probably won't have big things to look forward to, even if I start graduate school, finishing those studies won't be much more than a feeling of accomplishment. so this is new, and it's taking me a while to adjust. I need to remember how to observe around me, see what's going on, feel what's in me, and enjoy the examination of it, not expecting major discoveries and yet aware that i can learn so much.
4:00 PM
Friday, January 09, 2004
I've talked about adult men and teenage boys before, and this article in our local St Louis paper reminds me of who i was at fourteen. In no way was I searching for sex like this boy was, but had I been, i certainly would have gone for guys in college or older and would have disdained to do anything with the tiny guys my age. See, I was pretty big for fourteen. In fact, I haven't grown much since then. At fourteen, I was six feet two, almost two hundred pounds, and bench pressing 300 pounds. I looked nothing like a high schooler, much less a freshman, and people commonly mistook me for a college student, or even a lawyer when i worked in my mother's law office.
I don't condone men having sex with fourteen year olds - i know i could never have handled it - but i am aware that the boy discussed in the article could easily have been the predator. In all three cases, he petitioned the men to have sex with him, and if he looked anything like I did, they probably hardly doubted he was over 18. What should the law do in such a case? it's geared so narrowly that it doesn't count for the misguided fourteen year old who abuses his size. societies for thousands of years have actually pushed sex between young men and adult men. I don't know that's right either, but i hope the law has compassion on these men who may not have done anything wrong had the truth been more clear to them.
9:56 AM
Thursday, January 08, 2004
I thought we had won one for the troops, when U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered a halt on anthrax immunizations. He agreed with the six plaintiffs and the hundreds of people disciplined and kicked out of the service that the vaccination was not safe for its intended use and was inherently an experimental drug. I've been following this fight for several years, when the military started issuing the drugs to people. I can't say much about it myself, except for that very principled people have tried to stand up against it and have succumbed.
the military has a bad history with experimental drugs, and there's a poignantly bad feeling of commonly receiving shots from health technicians who won't even tell you what you're getting. I'm not one to worry about such things, but it made me feel like cattle when the military simply shoved things inside me because they knew better than I did. The anthrax vaccine has caused many problems, but unfortunately, not enough doctors have documented it, and not enough military members have stood up for themselves, afraid of the discipline so many others have received.
Finally, Sullivan stepped in and said, enough, no more vaccinations. Six days later, the FDA approved the drug for the military's use (it was originally approved for anthrax absorbed through the skin but not through inhalation, the primary worry of the military). Sullivan, in a statement this week, said he was highly suspicious of the FDA's timing and the plaintiff's lawyers are questioning what kind of pull the Defense Department has over the FDA.
10:30 AM
Monday, January 05, 2004
i've been absent for a bit, concentrating on having fun with a visiting friend. and it was fun. so much fun, and so much of what i needed. i've had so many thoughts though, during her trip, and since then. ideas of resolutions, top ten music lists of last year, ways to become more creative and waste less time, ways to involve myself in more life. all those tasks you have to push yourself to do. unfortunately, every choice to do leaves a hundred things undone. it is a curse perhaps, that we can't do it all, and yet have the vision to see what we're missing. or maybe just a reminder to do all the things we want to because there are so many.
what would i like to do this year?
start to feel even remotely competent with a paintbrush
work on my writing, actually getting competent stuff down, instead of this off-the-cuff writing i've been doing for five years
figure out a few plans for my life, where to go, what to do
solve some of my basic loneliness by relying on the wonderful friends i have
see the horseradish festival
settle some of my nerves
but then, these are goals i've had for a month or two. i'll keep working on them. and i will have much to say this year.
9:38 AM
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