Move away, from that.

I’m listening to Erin, a young woman, tell her story about being the daughter of a semi-famous media critic and crack addict father. It’s not relevant, but it’s better by distraction standards than what I’ve been pumping myself full of.

This is on the Fresh Air podcast. Lately I’ve been hearing ‘underwriting’ ads on this show that try to tell me what a green company Exxon is, those motherfuckers. I scream at the stream often enough.

I don’t hear that one now, but there’s an ad for a website company. It promises that with their service, ‘you’ will be able to tell your story exactly the way you want.

Another lie, almost as bad.

No website can do that for you, especially not one that comes in a can. You can’t buy a product that will magically make you able to tell your story, much less make it come out how you want.

As the weeks of freedom approach, I am so very doggedly ignoring the work I have to do to get over the hump to the promised land. I want it to be magically done. I want to feel the warm breeze of that freedom and to not have to work for it.

I haven’t filled up my tank with lies and death.

That is not definitive evidence of my nobility.

This morning I did a little math and realized that with overload, I’m making the most I ever have. It was shocking, because I’ve felt so broke for so many months in a row, due to fallout from the professional explosion, still having a mortgage on an empty house there that won’t sell and all.

It was also weirdly empowering. I felt a surge of worth. Which at the end of the day feels shallow and dumb, but I felt it anyway and I’ll take it gladly, depth or no.

I consider too that I’m making what I make in nine months of the year.

And also that the classes are pretty much written now, which means less weekly stress in future terms.

And also that the fucking pension continues to build.

So I think alright. Maybe it makes no sense to jump ship, even for six figures, given that I could theoretically monetize those summers somehow, even given the anxieties of being onstage ten hours a week. I could handle that better, couldn’t I?

Maybe.

I feel like the certs are a good idea either way. For testing the waters I would land in if I did jump. For making a credible case for myself as ‘a consultant’ of some nebulous kind, trying out ways to make the world a better place in the summertimes first.

I’m calmer for certain, though I still ache for finals to be done with and for the world to re-open up.

I’m beginning to remember how to listen to myself just in time.

There won’t be any need for the dormant downtime of a late may hibernation this year. I’m going to face the world and its unknowns instead of running from it.

Documentation to follow.

First I have to say why I did that. The truth isn’t pretty.

Mainly it’s because toward the end of it I sounded like a pussy. I use the word cynically. Not only do I have nothing against pussies, of the actual or metaphorical sort, I have a tendency to be awed by them. But I can’t bring myself to play one on TV just yet.

There should probably be a consideration here regarding theatrics and my relationship to the performing arts, but there isn’t, either. Just yet.

It occurred to me that I could give out the password to patrons-only, because anyone who cares enough about me to have donated already (I number you with gratitude on one hand) is not someone I have to worry about entrusting with my inconvenient truths. If you are one of those people and you want the password, just ask and it’s yours.

If you don’t or if you’re not, here’s the official story so far.

Nomine: Alex Vairtere
Age: formerly young
Gender: yeah boi
Race: human mostly
Religion/Politics: the green and the black

Address: Basin and Range; certain plateaux

Pre-Occupation: Belle-lettres. They may try to tell you that this is some subset of literature, perhaps calling it ‘lighter’ with a dismissive wave. They could not be more wrong. Literature is a given pile of words which academics are wont to study. Especially the ever-evolving Canon, but even comic books provided someone offers a class on studying them. So as Hemingway was writing The Old Man and The Sea, it was an act of belletrism. The same book, finished, published, syllabized, assigned, and studied, morphs into literature. Should you have been assigned to read this post, you have my apology. I never meant for things to turn out that way. I hope you can read it without studying it, and still get a decent number of points.

Occupation, aka the hardest part: In Flux. Libraries and the academy have been the basis for ‘decades’. At the outset of this project I am a lecturer in technologies. While my mind is mostly okay with this, except for the pitiful pay, my body hates lecturing passionately and is constantly sending pain to my head, trying to compel it to find something better. Which in turn leads to some alternative preoccupations, including the piling of specific certifications on top of the ponderous degrees.

And speaking of jobs, here is a piece of the protected post that is rated E as suitable for everyone, even enemies.

***

With yet another dream in my mind. What I knew was I’d gotten a new job; a library job like in the years straddling the millenium–my subconscious definitely thinks that the old solutions are the best solutions.

I walked in and there were no patrons. Maybe it was spring break. Instead, everyone who worked there, every one of my colleagues-to-be, were sitting calmly together around the huge spread of reference desks in the front. The lights were low, and they appeared to be meditating. There were a few welcoming smiles and a few meaningless words that made it apparent that they all knew I was the recent hire, but this was conveyed in a limited general murmur.

Standing there, I gathered my legs up under me into the lotus position and floated there before them, happy.

So this dream was a first cousin to a flying dream.

Were this to happen in the so-called real life, it would have been a brainfucking miracle performed before their eyes. Even I, let’s face it, would be challenged in my assumptions about the nature of the material world in an impossibly beautiful way.

That’s the point of it I think.

In the actual moment, they were certainly marvelling. Approving, impressed maybe. They didn’t act as though it were a miracle, though. More like it was an as-yet-unexplained … feat.

From my side I was thinking: Well alright, the job today is to meditate. I will create a good first impression by doing the job very well. Their approving/impressed reaction was exactly what I wanted it to be, exactly what it should be.

One lady took me down the deserted hall to fetch some paperwork related to the hire. We chatted in quite the normal way.

To the faithful in some short-term future. Another sermonette, about labels and audience, so meta and so central to what I think about here.

This morning I went over every post in the short collection so far and tweaked a few bits of syntax, cut a few chunks out altogether for publication purposes–adjusted my camo.

I carefully considered, and I left a lot more alone than I thought I would.

My name is Vairtere and I often wish that was all you knew.

I want my theater and my politics to be whatever the opposite of identity politics is.

I don’t want to act the part of writer or author or artist. I just want to write and be and create.

I don’t want an image and I don’t want a brand and I don’t want to market anything.

On the other hand I want intimacy with you. I want to be perfectly honest and naked and vulnerable. Such a freedom in that.

Maybe it’s true that those things are irreconcilable.

Let’s start here.

The host called the poet ‘he’, and the poet says the poet grew up as a young woman. Invent your own label for your own private use, and without judgment if possible; I know I did.

It was a week or so ago that I said that. Yesterday there was another trans poet on the air, a local one this time, talking about a project to put word art into bathrooms, and how s/he was getting paid a little for it, some grant, some breathing space in which to craft without thinking too hard about holding down scattered and marginal teaching jobs for money.

I have some compelling and even scientific lived reasons for rejecting vanilla notions of the gender binary. When we say he or she, it’s a convenience and a shortcut that glosses the truth. Usually. There are plenty of people that have no reason to care about that. The labels are close enough to their truth, and they assume that it’s the same for everyone around them, and this assumption is more often than not right, or right enough. For government work, for polite society, for the average use case.

To these people, on this subject, I have nothing really to say. Except this. As I spill, and as you are voluntarily wet by the spill, you will continue to make assumptions. These will be mostly right. You are allowed to point to the things that make them rational, as when I refer to myself in vaguely male terms, conveniently labeling my own self, shorthanding.

That’s all for now on that. Forgive me if I’m being baffling. Maybe the next example will help to clarify. It’s easier to work with in many ways.

Gender aside, you’ll not ever see me identify racially. Race is even more deeply mythical than gender. I won’t ever imply to you that I’m black or white. There won’t ever be anything here about my experience as a Chicana poet or a Latino writer. I am not Indigenous to anywhere, even if the juniper mountains speak to me like nowhere else does. An accident of birth may have led the authorities to consider me a natural citizen of the Empire, but that’s their problem. I don’t consider my genetics or my legal status germane.

Religion. Just no. Not Catholic not Protestant. Not Sunni or Shia. Not Confucian or Jain or Zoroastrian. Neither Buddhist nor Jew. Once in a while I’ll say atheist-sounding things. But even atheism implies an unwarranted certainty about things metaphysical.

Now my distraction-friend Lukens, who I mentioned once before, is a cultural Baptist without belief, and he would say that my position is that of a ‘bugman’. It’s a meme word, I think, in the worst sense. Maybe some truth in it even, but not enough to sway me, certainly not enough to make me start attending church for his pragmatical reasons of economy or even community. To hell with your inherited identities and your useful skypuppets; I walk alone.

Age. “I won’t be here for the endgame”. It scares me that people I like have kicked off suddenly in their sixties. And of course “decades” have gone by. Assuming I’m old is close enough. I’ll tell you what I tell all those random websites. My birthday is January 1 in whatever year will get me past your age restrictions. What do you want to hear? What will you choose to believe?

Politics. I told you I voted for Sanders and in my heart I did, but it was a lie. Now that I consider the actual facts, I would have had to register as a Democrat to do that, to vote in their primary. I didn’t. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t ever have voted for Hilary, much less the feeble-minded prick that beat her in the Super Bowl. Party labels are of no more use to me than any of the others. It might be that feeling so qualifies me as an anarchist. I’ll think on it.

Geography. The idea of the Southwest is a fiction too. What is it south and west of? Well, the financial and political heart of the Empire. It would make equal sense to tell you I am a Norteña, an inhabitant of the northern part of the empire that lost. I could tell you about Aztlan, or Deseret, embrace either of those notions too, but it wouldn’t be any more true. Maybe for Oscar Zeta Acosta. Maybe for Terry Tempest Williams. But not for the Alex that calls itself Vairtere and is still working on a resonant middle name.

It is true that these arid and more empty elevations suit me, feed me, speak to me. That certain ranges have saved my life. That the tree labeled genièvre grows here and that I am often glad of it to a depth that sometimes edges into a feeling like worship.

Finally.

The last label that has floated around me in these prologue posts concerns what I do for wage slavery, which currently is teach.

That’s going to have to wait a bit though. I’ve been at this entry all day and I saved the hardest for last.

Next time.

REM cycles all screwy and messed. Two hours the night before, then home and down early, but woke early too with a bodyfuck headache. Hot bath cold blue pills and down finally for three, woke at noon by the alarm talking.

In the last dream there was a wall of crates stacked six feet with shelter critters. A little orange she-kitten leapt out onto my shirt so I had to keep her.

In real life I suspect I’m done having pets though. As cramping to the style mainly; a drive across the country leaves an owner with few options and none of them good. There’s also the fact that there are a dozen within pretty easy reach, so I’m at the happy grand-parental stage when it comes to dependents of any sort.

In the meantime I’ve got five hours and eight subsections to write up, because it’s a tail-end school-year Wednesday.

Selah.

(Pete) Davidson said Staten Island hates him but adores (Colin) Jost. The reason for this? “You represent what they could be, the kid who got out–he went to Harvard!” Davidson said. “I represent what they are: a mentally ill community college dropout who got a Game of Thrones tattoo before watching the show.”

I don’t think I’ve ever been mentally ill, at least not to the point of it being a, er, part of my brand.

I am both a community college dropout and employee. I have no tats and I’ve never been to Staten Island and I don’t think I’m missing much, either on the crack and racist side or the I got out to Harvard and golf now side.

I don’t care specifically about Pete the celeb, or Pete the theatrical suicide candidate. I do like a cursory listening, because he started where I started in a kind of existential way. But he’s famous now. Dating pretty ones. Befriended by amiable altruists in his orbit, practicing experimentally at modern nurturing. Would I have been there if I’d been there? No. Because; not mental.

I think.

It was a place where the party just never stopped and never really started either. People drifted in and out but we just stayed and stayed. It was hard to know whether it was night or day.

Two brothers, half-Mexican on their mother’s side, owned the place and ostensibly it was a hairdressing shop and they were the hairdressers. But I never saw a client or so much as a trim. They inherited it from someone, a father maybe, and you could still see etched in the stonework that it used to be for carpentry.

I might have known them well, but there was no evidence of it. Brothers from another mother. My brothers were there too. Sisters.

Across the alley and over a fence there was a volleyball game going on. There were no teams, only sides. A girl dragged me over there for a while but I didn’t stay.

I saw Everett, talked to him, hugged him for the first time. His face lit up when I said that I was close to retiring. He said I’d probably be running an Uber. I realized that if that was his thought, he probably was doing it now, and ran some calculations in my head about whether it would be cheaper to let him drive me back and forth. It seemed like that would be unlikely.

I got hungry and ransacked the fridge. There was a spendy little meal in to-go packaging that wasn’t too old. No way to crack the crab claws (I guess since the folding pliers tool is no longer always in my pocket) but I took down the lettuce wraps anyway.

It had to be a bisbee but it wasn’t. In order for there to be that many concentrated idlers, and for other reasons, there had to be a college closer. Like Oxford in Ohio, the wrong Miami.

The only other thing I recall from the event was that there were bigger plans, something to do with moving and storing a large crop of furniture and other belongings. It makes sense that it could have been mine, but it could have been anybody’s.

I was cool in a hot way in those days. Full of opinions and always shooting them off like fireworks. Admired but feared by too many people. Not the thin poet who no one feared any longer. Purposeful yet gainfully employed.

To the extent that employment means any kind of gain at all, weighed off against the sold hours that you’ll never see again.

A random mantra, which I noticed on the way back out to the ranch tonight. It’s usually addressed to people coming up slow behind. Too slow. Often in the other lane bound in the same direction. C’mon dude. Don’t block me in.

This is crucial when the weather’s bad, because you don’t want to be anywhere near anybody. Even more than usual. But it’s always true, isn’t it? Yes it is.

Also when someone has the right of way, but isn’t using it. Don’t wave at me fucknozzle. Just go. Gahead.

That’s some pure spill ennit.

A droplet in the digital ocean will feature. This isn’t quite understanding everything before it even starts, but then again there’s time yet and maybe it will be so.

I worked hard and did a good job. Not perfect, but good.

It seems like the third to last week. The sweet heat break is coming up very fast.

Then I tried to go to bed early and it didn’t work out. This too is a symbol of something.

Too much bedding and time to strip the quilt, to cycle it properly through the cleaners for the first time in forever.

The robins have been sighted.

I want so very much to understand everything and all of it before it even starts.

The title is the native word for catshit coffee, or literally ‘coffee from the civet cat’.

It’s got almost nothing to do with what I’m thinking about. What the hell kind of distraction is this–good, bad, ugly, cold, dry?

The answer consists of a three syllable grunting song, a noise we make that replaces the words ‘i dun know’.

Say it with me: i’un’owh.

A part of English you won’t find in the dictionary.

The link goes to a site called NordicCoffeeCulture, which is even better than it sounds. It tells about why catshit coffee is even worse than it sounds. You should go read it, work through the distraction, and come back. I know I am.

When I set myself up on the periphery of a big town, the first thing I do is get a mailbox with a street address. In today’s terms I go find a ‘UPS store’ or something like it. The why is complex, and it’s not as useful as it used to be, but it’s still what I do and probably always will.

Then from there I set about locating the necessities. Where is the organic food, nearby? Where is the recycling, since the little towns never do it right … Where is the place to get a massage (this is a new one, born of the stresses I didn’t used to have).

In the current incarnation, I can find most of what I need on a milk run along a thirty-block strip of boulevard stretching west from the mailbox.

There’s one major exception. There is no perfect coffee shop along the lines of North End or Late for the Train or Wild Orchid or even the late great Martha’s Black Dog.

Instead what they’ve got is something rather more snooty and debased. This place has great java, but it’s spendy as hell, even if you’re never going to pay six hundred something a pound for catshit coffee, which I definitely won’t, but I theoretically could. They sell it. So sometimes as a convenience factor I get my coffee there, trading money for time. On yesterday’s run, a pound of Papua New Guinea, ground for french press, cost USD 25 more or less.

I had parked a little ways off in front of what turned out to be a store for walking shoes. They had my kind in the window and I went in and found them. Eighty dollars. I would have bought, but they were too busy to wait on me in a reasonable amount of time, so I just made a note to myself about it and took off. Really what I should do is figure out where the REI is and buy them there. Like the first time–the discovery of the perfect shoe.

This is the way I think during a resource run.

A similar thing happened regarding a bookstore. It used to be that I’d hit one every trip. That’s not so true anymore, mainly because I have too many damn books already, and the job now is to write them, not read them. But sometimes when I’m thinking hard I take advice from the shelves about whatever I am thinking hard about. Sometimes I buy, but really it’s a way to think, a way to be distracted that isn’t just good but almost necessary.

At yesterday’s big chain bookstore, they had an excellent collection, best I’ve seen since the old Page One, of technical books. (There is a sentence redacted here.)

In decades past … I’m still looking … always looking.

For so long I looked, and then for so long I didn’t, because I had done found. Then it all fell apart, and I fetal-positioned in such pain for far too long, and

Now I’m. Rethinking. Everything.

I want so badly to just viciously cut the cord to wage slavery now this minute.

I hate listening to rational prudence instead of to my gutful of seething desire.

But maybe I don’t hate it quite as much as I hated ducking the landlord on the first day of the month.

That fight inside tells you the most essential things about me.

I bore an idea yesterday about where things (that thing especially) could go with a consultancy. I think it’s a pretty good one. But before it could happen, there are three years left on the devil’s bargain, and there is I think whether I like it or not a matter of certifying once or twice or more.

And before that can happen either, it’s a windy Saturday in the middle of nowhere and I have certain chores of the virtuous-distraction type that need addressing; I’ve put them off far too long.

The earthling says hello, on the other side of eight hours of sweet deep roborative sleeping.

That fancy word comes from Stephen Maturin, a majestic fictional earthling.

In waking I was thinking about the way I’ve made plans over and over, and how life happened and made them violently change.

In decades past I cared about a few basic things. First on the list was “this” geography, the elevated Southwest above 5000 feet. I was new to it and I found it … roborative. The name Vairtere is mostly all about it in an elliptical way. Later in coming back to it the third time it saved my life or at least my mind.

I walked it and later I drove it and it spoke to me. So I came to care about having a vardo, a caravan, a bed and a kit that was mobile. A means of moving and hunting and gathering.

I cared about words and shaping them into art–belles lettres. I hope it’s obvious that I still do.

I cared about the glow of warm girls and cold women and the agony and ecstasy to be held in dwelling there.

In the meantime I had to eat.

So whether I cared about it or not, I set my brain to the problem of how to get the most return from hours sold to a bidder. And of course I wasn’t going to sell to anyone, any more. Fuck the deep fryers of fast food. Fuck taking a chain saw to the very juniper trees I loved. There had to be a better way.

Again and again I gravitated toward libraries and colleges. As a student, as a worker; as a theoretical means of ‘bettering’ my situation. More money per hour sold. Less brain damage, per hour lived.

I found random niches. At one point I could “work” fifteen-hour shifts alone in the deep downtown near the University of Colorado–there were only two or three hours of work to do, and the rest of it was being alone in a well-equipped communications lab. Computers. Color xerography. The Flatirons rising in the dawn as the day shift came on to set me free. It would have worked for a lot longer, but the pay was rightfully marginal, compared to the cost of living in that beautiful place, and the business itself was unprofitable for obvious reasons. They shut it down soon after I’d left trying to find a better calculus.

The teaching I do now is no different to me. It’s hours sold to someone else. The only real question is if the wage, and long-term the pension, is worth it, in context.

For a long time it was very much a yes. Then I went below five thousand feet for a year and the answer was Hell. No.

Now I’m back up the mountain and it’s okay, but I’m still looking. I’m always looking.

As the world has become more digitized, so have the opportunities. That’s the main reason I know so much about computing. Making myself, or the hours I have to sell, into a hotter commodity in the eyes of the buyers, the employers.

There’s more to say and thank the goddess.

But for now the point is: everything’s changed, but what’s important hasn’t.

It’s only a placeholder because the ditch deepened through the four days of the week. It’s over now, and I’m glad of it.

I think it would be okay if the Internet went away. In the last few days I’ve used very little of it, except for pulling down a few vids at work for offline watching at home. In the last city I used 100 gigs a month of bandwidth. Now I’ve only 20 and I hardly need that much.

It wouldn’t kill distractions, because some of the big ones are offline too.

Anyway. I shouldn’t let you see me like this, spent and twitchy, except that I have to, because it’s the nature of spilling. So; scattered. It’s the elemental truth. Sometimes it’s not belletristic or even art. It’s just consistency, not necessarily consistently good. You put ten thousand hours into something and you’re an expert at it. According to the meme, that poor debased word.

It was quite another slog, Wednesday. Home late. But I did hear three interesting minutes of radio on a break. Excerpts:

***

“Yanyi’s new book of poetry is called ‘The Year Of Blue Water’, and for National Poetry Month, he read us one of the untitled poems from his collection.

YANYI: (Reading) I’ve been writing to women, women of color, queers, genderqueers, spectra, crystals, animals. I want fame with you. I don’t want to be famous. Let’s redo what it means to be famous. I’m famous because I am in search like you. I have been writing for you. I’ve been writing for myself. I, too, want to be familiar. What else could famous mean?

YANYI: So this poem is me thinking …
of starting to become interested in one’s own life.

YANYI: The first reader who you have when you first write something is you … Especially growing up as a young woman, I felt as though … *

… creating a writing practice around my own desires and my own interests was crucial to me discovering what I desired about my gender and about my queerness that I eventually incorporated into my own life.”

–today’s All Things Considered

***

* The host called the poet ‘he’, and the poet says the poet grew up as a young woman. Invent your own label for your own private use, and without judgment if possible; I know I did.

So there’s a lot going on here. The language is captivating, and it’s hard to edit because the thoughts flow naturally from and to each other. I ask forgiveness for my awkwardness in doing it. Dig out the whole thing if you want. It’s available as text and audio, out there in what they now call the Cloud. (It will always be webs to me.)

The poem itself is pretty great. “I have been writing for you. I’ve been writing for myself.” I resonate with that.

He talks about fame but to my eye he’s really more talking about a relationship to and with an Audience. At least that’s the WAY i resonate with that.

Then: Creating a writing practice. You do it and you discover things inside. The act of discovery changes the insides. Per Heisenberg, all very scientistic.

As should be, I reckon.

Not all distraction is evil, not all distraction is necessary evil at best. For three minutes I was distracted and then later I spent another, oh, half hour. Contributing to the creation of a practice.

I think this is why it will be useful to set a timer on the obviously non-productive distractions. And to just let the productive ones have their way with me.

The productive ones. Like letting McKibben distract me for forty minutes last night and another twenty this morning. There is so much more to say about that, at length. But for now, let it be said that the notion I ascribed to him, about Central American refugees being driven north by climate change, wasn’t apparently his notion. It seems to have been more credible and, uh, data-driven, than notional at all. Ripped from today’s headlines, et cetera. I’m not going to track down the source, but it seems that sustained drought means nothing will grow there, and subsistence agriculture isn’t enough to live on anymore, and that this (on top of the gangs and the rest) is how we get the crisis du jour hooked up with the crisis that’s gonna kill us all.

In the meantime, I am in search like you.

The day began very early and very deep in the trenches.

I revised once and delivered twice the lecture on databases. The revision at home over coffee in the dawn. The deliveries at that place where they keep the classrooms. In between the two parts of the job, I dealt in a half-ass way with a third, which was addressing that fact that the assignment I’d passed to them from the big chief, in the other class, on fucking BorgOS, was broken and not able to be completed as planned. You get full points for trying, kids, literally, because the mess was our fault. Ultimately my fault, because it’s my classroom now.

All that done, I made the regular Tuesday stop for fresh burritos, but I was too late. The good ones, the breakfast kind, were all gone already. I got two of the ‘vegetable’ kind anyway. The coming weekend will be about sandwiches instead.

Then I parked, with a good view of the rain clouds coming over the mountain, and made a couple of long phone calls, the personal kind, that couldn’t wait any longer.

Home by dusk, with enough light left to put out all the trash for pickup in the morning.

After a day like that I’m honestly not good for much. If I’m good–I might be good–for a semi-coherent Spill. But before that: distraction. The cold wicked kind. Let’s see what’s on the podcatcher.

It seems … Bill McKibben has a new book out, so he’s on tour all over the place. If you don’t know the name, he was one of the earliest and still one the most sustained activists in the world on the subject of climate change.

I triangulated with his ideas in a paper I wrote for the degree in writing (wrote it twice in fact), a paper which is probably the ‘best’ thing I’ve ever written. A short book. I’ll post it here someday, when I build the infrastructure that allows you to download it for free, but contribute if you want to at the same time.

The narrative thrust of the McKibben parts of the paper was that the guy is a saint, but too much of an optimist, as activists must be, on climate change.

I believed when I wrote it, and believe now, that humanity has cornered itself and is doomed. Specifically that we made a huge and irreversible mistake when we chose to stop being hunters and start being farmers, and then opened shops, and then became professors and other kinds of clerks.

One of the other people I brought in as an evidentiary witness was Chomsky, who was of the opinion that yes, climate change would doom us, but only if a nuclear exchange didn’t first. He was already a professor, when I was still ducking and covering under my kindergarten desk, and I guess that had an effect on him.

I pulled the Fresh Air interview version of McKibben out of the podcatcher first, and listened to it while I terraformed the Planet and made war on the Manifold Usurpers in my haphazard xenophobic way.

It was a pretty surprising interview. His optimism was largely gone. He said, Look: shit’s happening already. There are large parts of the planet where it’s too hot to live now without refrigeration of several kinds. Soon even that won’t work. You might live in the dead zones, but you won’t spend any time outside. Already there’s been a ten percent reduction in the amount of time you can work in the out of doors, all over the planet. Soon that’ll be a thirty percent reduction. And then a hundred percent. The roofs will have to be replaced by robots, not undocumented workers.

(I’m distracted in this moment by thunder out in the dark, and that is the very best distraction of all.)

And speaking of the undocumented ‘crisis’, he continued, why do you think that the waves and the caravans are from central America now, instead of Mexicans? Sure, thug life has turned those countries into social shitholes. But the real reason (he proposed) is that those people are trapped on a narrow strip of land between two oceans. And oceans are taking the first big hits of the change in the climate. They’re warmer of course. They are thirty percent more acidic. They’re rising, as everyone knows. And they generate more catastrophic weather events like hurricanes now.

I don’t know if he’s right about that part; I’m not informed enough.

But I do know that it’s pretty ironic that the Denier-In-Chief, the man who thought the head of Exxon would be the perfect Secretary of State, the guy who put a fossil fuel lobbyist into position of the head of EPA today, has tried to demonize these migrants, when in fact he is now, incredibly enough, the leader of the great Satan itself. The capitalist machine that brought you Peeps, the Howdy Doody Show, and the climate event that will end the species as we know it. For certain. In my mind anyway. I won’t be here for the endgame, darlings, so I don’t have to be any good as a prophet. I just have to prophesy.

Anyway, McKibben is no optimist now either. We more or less agree on the scenario, if not the tactics.

On top of his signature issue, he brought up two more things that might play a serious part in ending us. Short version:

1) Easily available but expensive genetic engineering. Designer babies will write class warfare and income inequality into our genes, creating two separate and unequal kinds of humans in a few generations.

2) Artificial Intelligence. Maybe it’ll go wrong in the way the Terminator told us, like Steven Hawking also said before he died. Or maybe, said McKibben, you tell a machine that can learn that the only important thing is to efficiently and profitably manufacture paper clips. The first thing the machine learns is how to keep you from turning it off and getting in the way of its hard-coded reason for being. And you end up with a spinning blue and silver sphere in space, made up mainly of trillions of paperclips. And no biology at all.

He didn’t even get into the nuclear thing, being somewhat younger than Chomsky. But surely that still is a fourth way to go out as well.

So we’re fucked.

If you’d have taken my word for it, you’d be open to charges of fatalism and paranoia just like me. But you don’t have to. You can take Bill Mckibben’s word now. If he’s a pessimist, there really is no reason for rational hope.

The other part of my argument in the paper is about: Why? Why was it inevitable that once we stopped hunting and gathering, once we stopped moving, we were doomed? The simple answer is

Greed.

And I don’t mean the moustache-twirling Rex Tillerson kind of corporate greed. Not alone anyway. Yes, Exxon knew all about the end of days in the 1980s, and yes they and their fellow capitalists have been working for decades on manipulating the stupid to believe ridiculous things, and on protecting their own greedy interests while the species burns down around them.

But why did the average person become a farmer in the first place? Why did she stop moving and settle down? Why in a few generations after she settled, was she believing in the divine right of pharaohs and kings and scientist-priests and middle managers, and bowing down to them in an act of self-denial and worship?

Why, for that matter, do I still man the trenches in the dawn, and teach the children about databases even as all the databases and all the species are following the passenger pigeon into the eternal night?

Same answer.

A whiter shade of greed, but still greed.

Her greed to want a better life. For her children. A longer life, a healthier life, a more prosperous life. She sold her birthright of wild freedom for a mess of guaranteed pottage, doled out by her so-called betters.

I sold mine for the promise of a pretty shitty pension.

Not only are we all fucked, we’re all guilty.

The human experiment has failed, and it’s her fault and my fault and your fault. We goofed!

Anyway, after the piece on McKibben, Fresh Air had better news. A band I used to play on the late-night radio, the Mekons, is back and bold with a new album.

The music was pretty good, but the story behind it was better.

They were inspired back to creativity by this very desert that inspires me.

(That’s a bit glib. They recorded the new stuff down in the flat mojave with the joshua trees. I am recording this time in the rolling sonora with the wild pigs. But, poetic license, close enough.)

So there’s lovely haunting deserted femvox. The landscape, says that bandleader, was “inspirational to old pirate punk rockers”.

You know that I don’t play guitar, or play at that kind of identity politics. I’m not going to tell you that I’m a pirate, or a rocker anymore. Maybe a punk in some ways still.

But I listened carefully. They talked about Rimbaud the poet, in the Ethiopian desert in 1883. They reference Lawrence in the Arabian one with his piercing Irish blue eyes.

And in the pertinent words of the reviewer, the album ultimately

“coheres as a series of arguments for the value of restlessness, for ceaseless exploration” .

If only they’d recorded it ten thousand years ago at the dawn of the ‘agricultural revolution’, maybe it would have helped forestall the misstep we all made together at once, the first foot placed on the deadly road of what we so mildly think of as civilization.

It starts first thing in the morning which means with the last thing at night.

Thus drifting off with murmurs from headphones is permissible, but only if:

1) The listening is to a hard file and not a stream (so the connection isn’t up all night), and more importantly

2) It’s done on the new quiet machine so that the grinding fan of the old one doesn’t demand attention first thing in the morning.

Also, in terms of bedding down at a fair hour, new crucial rule. You play any game, good boy or bad boy, whenever you want just like always. But you have to set a timer. For an hour or for six if you think you can afford it. But how much time it ends up being, it’s decided beforehand.

***

Then the morning.

First piss, and make sure you are comfortable which means warm enough and cool enough. Second, begin boiling a quart of water and drop three scoops of arabica into the press. When it steams, you have four minutes. In those four minutes, sit. Do nothing but listen to who you are. Make notes or don’t. Come here with the notes, or not. But listen, listen. To who you are today and for as long as it takes to become coffee.

No waking the machine until then. That’s all. So far.

The hours that go by in idleness, pulled from a meaninglessness to an irrelevancy. And then, as pressure builds, throwing the self into the chores of hot water: launder, dish, bathe, floors. Suddenly it is time to go to work again, the largest chore of all, wage slavery. In spite of early rising, four in the afternoon before I get there, and after seven in the dark when I go.

Even there I have my pet views, my downloads to poach. Sure the work is done adequately and usually even well. But not without naproxen. Not without the balm de tigre, not without cost to my pained left shoulder. Not with efficiency.

Learning to live all over again, remembering to fight off the demon of consumption.

Finally at the very end it is almost all right. Shop. Eat. Drive. Fold. Square. Grade. Schedule.

And come to the place This Place to pour to spill. The faucet creaks spits sputters.

If I get up early I say. But that’s not the thing. I can give in to distraction just as easily over coffee. So I think again, over again–what happens as the day ends, and what happens as the day begins, these are the important things to focus on and watch.

Advise. Listen. Embrace.

I attempted to sell the real house to a guy who liked jumping up the walls in the big empty room. He was very gymnastic and could grab onto the slightest ledge and pull himself into the ceiling. I am a motivated seller.

Part of me thinks that it’s not selling because I don’t want to give it up, even though I have no use for it and it’s an albatross hung around the neck of my budget. I am not aware of my budget having committed a hunting crime.

Then we were all back in a mountain town setting up some kind of exhibition in the back of a public space. Everyone who had signed up to come had a book with their name inside waiting for them. But it was all rather rushed, because a splinter group would not be attending. Instead we were going up the mountain.

I know that we took at least one Subaru. There were amazing thick silver bridges in the snow. This detail put me in mind of the future real town–could the exhibition have been there? There’s not enough data and I remain dubious.

Once we got up, one guy took the stove and made breakfast, but just for himself. It looked really good (there were eggs), and people started to wonder who would use the stove next.

But there was work to do. The lines on the door of the cabin had to be counted precisely. I took on the job, with only the barest conception of why.

There is truth inside these scenes, but here too, I only have bare conceptions.

Back in allegedly waking life, the chill wind has finally died back. Yesterday was a distracted wasteland. Tomorrow is back to work in a tentative way. And so today is the middle ground in which I try to, as the saying goes, extract my head from a nether region. Clear the fog and the laundry basket. Put myself back up onto the rails, which allow for no distracted deviation in the pathway up the mountain, but at least there is forward motion and the dim suggestion of progress.

Amen.

Appendix: A spammer pushing something called tribal loans offers this offhanded gem.
“Loneliness seems to have become the great American disease.” The tribal loaner attributes it to “Jοhn Corry”. In searching it out there are many links to more spam. But there’s also a page that says: Not John Corry.

Rachel Corrie. Who was she?

It’s a shame that I didn’t remember immediately.

It raises a lot of political questions. I fall back instead to a philosophical one: does the road that the spammer sent me down constitute distraction, or is it a righteous part of the art?

I didn’t like that last post much, especially compared to say the first one on the third.

(‘The first one on the third’ is not clear communicative language. It’s poetical and insidery. More of that yes.)

I let myself be distracted by soaking up the Assange story, embracing the protagonist, and using the post to signal about my virtue and identity.

When what I should have dove into was that last little bit about my shakiness and claim of relief, which … was hollow. Properly this should be less about communicating clearly, and more about my own narcissistic stewing. I mean that ironically and yet I’m deadly serious too.

This question of distraction has been on my back for thirty years at least. I used to school myself about not listening to the radio too much–even reading, I would think. Stop that. Stop consuming. Produce.

The problem is much much worse today, because of the beautiful pandrabox of the WWW.

Listen, I can compare myself virtuously to the average inhabitant of the modern world. I don’t surf on my phone. I don’t own a television; I got no Face on the corporate Book. Yadda yadda, look at me, I’m wonderfully aloof and better than you. It’s mostly bullshit, but even if it were not, it’s entirely beside the point. Comparing myself to the average is very deeply and morally wrong.

Because I aspire to be a belletrist, at best, and at the least a content producer instead of a consumer.

Listen.

Sensing all of that with eyes half-open, I opened vairtere-dot-com-slash-spill to do my real job. Having got as far as opening it, I remembered Oh. Right. I haven’t set the timezone properly yet on the blog that isn’t a blog. I would have to do it manually for this new post. Or, I could just set it and not have to worry about it again. So I searched, without the G**gle (note my multilayered virtue signalling please goddammit), for a clue on where to tweak the setting. I found it fast.

But oh, linked at the bottom of the page was a story. It told all about how the good knight Mullenweg, founder of WordPress and genuinely good guy, had been taking those corporate bastards at Wix to task over stealing WordPress code and violating the GNU Public License. It was a great story and it was

… eminently distracting.

Completely irrelevant to what I’m trying to accomplish. Pulled me right in, cost me time; could have distracted me entirely from what I truly needed to do in this hour of this night.

A much bigger distraction typically is pulling down video from the YouTubes and indulging deeply in it. One of my favorites is a guy I’ll just call Lukens, for now. The other day he posted a long stream, and it was all about distractibility and the modern condition. I watched most of it and took it to heart in a tentative half-ass way. The flag-waving point of it was that most people can’t stand to be alone with their own thoughts any more. YEAH i thought, you BETCHA. Go Team Creativity. To hell with the unwashed masses.

It’s a fragile and pernicious place we find ourselves in.

Shakiness is not a very surprising by-product of living this way.

WASHINGTON — The WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested on Thursday in London to face a charge in the United States of conspiring to hack into a Pentagon computer network in 2010, bringing to an abrupt end a seven-year saga in which he had holed up in Ecuador’s embassy in Britain to avoid capture. —NYT

“WikiLeaks founder” is a neutral way of putting it, as befits the most mainstream of mainstream journalism. Assange was called a lot of other things today that were anything but neutral.

The main story I listened to today on the subject was voiced by David Folkenflik, media reporter for NPR. I usually like his stories. But he referred to Assange at one point as:

“basically an anarchist”

There wasn’t any apparent disdain in the comment. But it hit me wrong anyway, as being beside the point at least.

Generally speaking, I like the work that Wikileaks and its founder have done in making transparent what the Rulers would prefer to keep hidden.

Generally speaking, I am for “the absence of rulers”.

People often try to dismiss Assange by calling him an egomaniac. He well may be one, but that’s irrelevant to a rational discussion of what he’s accomplished (or perpetrated if you prefer).

So is painting him as an anarchist, and especially as ‘basically an anarchist’, whatever the fuck that means.

Perhaps the moral is that any exercise in opening oneself up to an audience is also going to be an exercise in opening yourself up to being labeled. People who don’t like you will apply icky ones. People who like you will try to find prettier ones. Everyone in the middle, or anyone aspiring to an elusive objectivity, like a ‘media reporter’ or a film critic, will throw up a bunch of word salad on deadline, and whether it makes any sense or not won’t affect how much or how little anyone is paid.

***

I didn’t think this is what I would spill today. It’s been a rough, shaky pair of midweek afternoons. I think mainly it was because an early morning meeting yesterday disrupted me far more than it should have. In any case it is now blessed Thursday night and I am home in the darkness. I stand relieved.

Speaking of comments, here are my first two, in this incarnation.

Hey! I know this is sort of off-topic but I had to ask. Does operating a well-established blog such as yours require a lot of work? I am completely new to blogging however I do write in my diary on a daily basis. I’d like to start a blog so I can share my experience and thoughts online. Please let me know if you have any suggestions or tips for new aspiring blog owners. Thankyou!

Hey I am so thrilled I found your weblog, I really found you by mistake, while I was looking on Yahoo for something else, Nonetheless I am here now and would just like to say thank you for a remarkable post and a all round enjoyable blog (I also love the theme/design), I don’t have time to look over it all at the moment but I have saved it and also added your RSS feeds, so when I have time I will be back to read more, Please do keep up the great jo.

Listen you crafty spammers. I just told you, this isn’t a goddamn blog, ‘kay?

Much less well-established, or a great jo, although … maybe that last one isn’t so far off. If I’m being honest.

Which I will try to be, in my tremulous way.

Also, here are my tips for new aspiring blog owners, since you asked, even dishonestly.

• Don’t think of it as a blog even if it is.
• Definitely don’t think of yourself as an owner, because Property Is Theft.
• Do have aspirations and make them irrationally high and then forget all about them. For example, I have chosen to aspire to belles lettres rather than literature, and it’s an important difference that I’ll beat to death some time.

Hope it helps, and that is a lie.

Allison: I’m in the midst of doing my thesis.
Alvy: On what?
Allison: Political commitment in twentieth century literature.
Alvy: You, you, you’re like New York, Jewish, left-wing, liberal, intellectual, Central Park West, Brandeis University, the socialist summer camps and the, the father with the Ben Shahn drawings, right, and the really, y’know, strike-oriented kind of, red diaper, stop me before I make a complete imbecile of myself.
Allison: No, that was wonderful. I love being reduced to a cultural stereotype.

–Annie Hall, the movie

She doesn’t love it of course. No one likes it and particularly not anyone smart enough to even understand the idea of a cultural stereotype in the first place.

His take on her is probably mostly true, but it reduces her. And it’s worse that he divined it all from a single clue, the topic of her thesis.

I don’t like passing out clues because it makes one vulnerable to this kind of imbecility, and it does not help that the imbecile confesses to his crime in this scene. The deed is done, and she has to live with that.

Is it really so bad?

Well, maybe. It poses a challenge to her. She has to deal with it, and maybe she’d rather deal with something else in the moment.

Social interaction is often pain for a lot of reasons. This is one.

When I was young I rejected the title of artist for myself, especially in public. Partly I felt it had to be earned, and I hadn’t earned it. Partly I felt it was reductive. Limiting.

I was very much concerned back then with the question of political commitment or lack thereof in literature, and I rejected it, too. (I argued back and forth with Sartre in my head.) Even now I don’t consider myself all that committed politically, not in any usual sense. I’m more committed to being unusual.

However, to a lot of the smart people I’ve met, that would not make a lot of sense. I do stand for things strongly when it’s safe to do so, by which I mean when I’m not at my day job, and even there I’ll make a stand pretty often as long as I can do it without being pigeonholed and thus reduced.

From a slightly different angle.

All of the art I’ve done shares a certain approach, a kind of uneasiness with the concept of audience. I don’t want direct contact with them, with you, but I very much do want indirect contact.

So the first time I was really much of an artist, my form was late-night free-form radio. The best thing was that I had a stage, 50000 watts worth of FM, millions of potential listeners even if most all of them were surely sleeping, and I could do very close to anything I wanted with the space and the time.

But they were limited, these listeners, in their ability to give me feedback in the moment, in their ability to affect my rhythm while I was performing. I couldn’t be heckled. I couldn’t be reduced.

Later on, it was the same on the Web, and that’s why it drew me as a medium. For the most part it was a one-way transmission, rather than a conversation.

Now, here and in this form, it’s the same. You can comment if you like. But very much after the fact, and I can decide about whether that commentary becomes a conversation or not. I have the artistic control I need, and I can’t be affected, or hurt, by what you think.

Also, that’s probably why I call this a spill, instead of art or a blog or a writer’s journal or anything else. Spill is my word. I decide what it means and there can’t be an argument about it.

I guess I need that.

Saying it out loud makes me feel fragile and precious.

But safely.

That’s not my name. My name is Vairtere.

But I voted for a Sanders in the last big one, which makes me a BernieBro by some people’s lights. I am neutral on the description. I don’t use it on myself. I don’t use very many labels of that kind on myself. But you can’t spill without spilling clues eventually.

(I redacted a paragraph here.)

I don’t want to tell you any of these things, but I can’t help it really. I can’t spill and not reflect by my own light what I see when I see my, what you call, self.

But the Sanders I was thinking about really was Larry, for reasons that can be divined from what came below, before.

Shandling played this Sanders, just as I play Vairtere on this show.

In addition to BernieBro, there’s another whizbang cultural vocabulary bit that applies here, and that is binge-watching. Now I don’t have cable or a TV or a Netflix account, so I can’t do it properly. But sometimes I do it improperly. You can go on YouTube and find almost every episode of WKRP in Cincinnati in a single playlist. I consumed that one time over winter break. As god is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.

This week I started doing the same with The Larry Sanders Show, even though it looks like less than half of it is available through my cheap-ass methods. Hey now.

Sometimes things are just way too hard. My webhost took days to give me rightful access to this place, and it took additional time for it to work right even after they did.

But then almost by accident tonight I figured out how to put my old WordPress theme back in place. It feels so much more like home now.

There is still so much to do with all the necessary pieces, from the laptop to the OS to the data; just little pieces that I know how to accomplish but take time.

Then there are the harder questions.

Is it worth taking the time to save all the posts as .txt files even if I just use this interface to write them? Fuck I’da know.

Should I link up or even import the first 3.5 years of this project, or just leave it to bitrot where it lays instead?

I think I do know the answer to that one, and it is: There’s no hurry. This needs to become its own thing in its own way first?

Then the truly existential things. Why do I need to consume other people’s shows in such quantity sometimes?

And I definitely do know the answer there. It’s a hedge against fear. And not the only crutch I use. There are all kinds of them. Way more video than I ever used to. Podcasts. URLs visited over and over, and things printed out too, from the digital space or not.

The important thing about spilling is that it’s the opposite of crutching like that.

This isn’t high art, even though it aspires and tries to be in fit sand starts. But it also isn’t dulling the senses and keeping myself doped with religion sex and TV either.

To spill is to create content instead of consuming it. The biggest existential question of all is: Is that better?

The answer is a scarcely qualified yes.

Howsoever.

Now that expressionist stage is dubiously set and the approval department is back from goddamn holiday, I can begin properly to spill detritus which includes clues. Not that it’s the point, but it makes things a little easier and less cramped.

Quite a while back there was a cartoon, a New Yorker one I think, that was of two Manhattanites talking, and one said to the other: I just wish my life was a little more like Sting’s.

Part of the joke was that in the spiritual sense, pining for a more Sting-like existence is not setting the bar very high. In my reading.

I might say without irony though that I wish my life was, had been, more like David Bowie’s, or Lou Reed’s.

My life is instead a lot like Tom Petty’s, except without the success. I never learned the guitar.

Or maybe his friend Shandling. Were this the old space, I would link the videos of Tom Petty and Gary Shandling speaking low and earnest. But just like the clues spilled along with the detritus are not the point now, so it is mostly with video. This is words spilled mostly, or at least spill of that which I mostly created mostly.

What I mean by that is that they both died at 66, and that scares me a little, and it’s still sometimes going to be a we’blog sometimes, though not mostly.

On Mondays for spring, I placed a class there, and it’s my favorite class.

However, it’s the first time I’ve taught it, and so that means that Sundays have to be taken up with prep, and my weekends are shorter than they should be.

Only another month or so of it though, and pinched between the lush urban massage and the devil to pay, Saturday was incredibly productive.

Partly how you already know. This domain was acquired. The other half is tangentially related to my favorite class, and to the mission statement with the catalyst in it.

I’m still in the dreamy tentative state of not wanting to reveal all my mysteries to you in a rush. So I won’t name the company and I won’t say the class, yet.

Know that I consider the concept of an operating system engaging, and the concept of freedom even more, so …

Brings us caught to today, oh yesterday all right.

To start at the end I have to tell you what my evil stepfather used to say:

“Either lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way.”

I have done my best ever since to get the hell out. To say the results have been mixed would be to mince words. I’ve failed, but often spectacularly.

Tonight I was watching a PowerPoint god help me, and the lady speaker brought up her company’s mission statement. The key word in it by her lights was ‘catalyst’.

The mission was to be–not a leader, follower, or even hermit monk–but a catalyst.

I thought that was pretty fine. Especially considering the context.

Today was most surely a catalytic day.

I bought the seventeenth domain and got it hosted. If you are reading this, then you know its name. My name, in context. I should say more, and I will, presently.

I had realized only a few days early that I didn’t need it, to start writing daily again. All I needed was a folder called 2019, and a directory inside it that said 4 for the month, and some files called by the day with a .txt extension.

Publishing could come later.

And now too it has.

Wail: o we say it is the fifth when it’s actually the sixth
and technically the seventh 15 minutes after midnight.

Calm, calm down down
You’ll be alright this time.

For an age I’ve lived in the little towns, because that’s where the tiny academies were, and the little schools paid me, well, enough.

Little means no organic coffee or even sometimes tomatoes. Sometimes no dry cleaning. No dealership oil changes, no bookstore, no mailbox place.

So for all that time, the weekend drives into the urban for supplies have been a part of it all.

(One of the first things I ever wrote was a memoir when I was five. It said I was born in an apartment in the avenues. My mother read it and said no, you were born in the hospital. She was right.)

Today was a Friday and the little schools mostly don’t work you on Fridays, so I made the milk run, though in actual fact I do not haul actual milk that far.

It’s 58 miles one way now and that is pretty short by historical standards.

The main thing to tell, if this was a journal, was that I got another massage. It was pretty good.

But it’s a spill.

So instead I’ll say that during first the one way and then the other back, I studied my own personal digital landscape. It’s been composed of sixteen domains, registered here and there, hosted hither and yon.

The conclusion I reached was that some of them could be let go, but that a seventeenth was necessary also.

For the purpose of publishing the contents of 2019/04/#.txt and beyond.

The first time was 3.5 years ago to the day.
I can only take full credit for about sixty percent of that time.
But anyway, now is all that matters and
this is where and when it begins again.

***

Last episode, it was the cover artist that mattered. This time, the original writer. I don’t care about Frank Sinatra or Doris Day. This time, it’s Cole Porter, and that other guy too. I’m so happy, now, and I’m sure somehow of this transformation:

Tell me why should it be you have the power to hypnotize me?

Let me live ‘neath your spell (and)
do do that voodoo that you do so well.

The oracle says that it was first performed on November 14, 1929, which would make the present year its 90th anniversary.

Or the very first day of something else.

***

Which as it happens is a Thursday, but my Friday, and so the very best part of the week. Normally I can leave before dusk, but there were grunting chores keeping me, and so not only did I depart in the dark, but there was no more long-form news on the radio. It had moved past the considering of all things, yea even past the maundering of the marketplace, and onto a programme called Swingin’ Down The Lane.

Guessing, that’s Memory Lane, with an additional reference to swing music. A form which, saith the oracle, “dominated in the 1930s and 1940s”, which explains the memory part. “The trend away from big band swing was accelerated by wartime conditions and royalty conflicts”.

War. War never changes.

Idly attributed to U.S. Grant, but covered by Fallout.

At any rate, yes, the show played Porter’s song as voiced by some songstress who wasn’t Doris Day. It’s very rare that I would be in a position to hear it. But very common for me to be thinking about hypnotic transformation, voodoo spells.

How much overlap is there between Porter’s feeling for such words and my own? There is no way to know, but his Parisian parties “were extravagant and scandalous, with ‘much gay and bisexual activity, Italian nobility, cross-dressing, international musicians and a large surplus of recreational drugs'”.

I’ve never been to Paris and as far as I can remember I’ve never held a party for anything. Poverty? Introversion. Probably a deficit in the required elegance too.

I haven’t held recreational drugs in quite awhile, mostly due to a lack of will to do what it takes interpersonally to access those marketplaces.

If I lived 15 miles east instead of 15 miles north, that would not be so. The man who poured my coffee today said that over there, a crackhead was arrested next door to him for trying to sell his girlfriend’s three-year-old car for USD $200, in order to buy a large surplus of recreational drugs.

The crack guy next door to the coffee guy is the opposite of Cole Porter, and maybe I am too.

The song ended as I was pulling into the driveway. The announcer gave no details, not even the name of the song, which is:

You Do Something To Me.

And it is so. Not that you hypnotize per se. But you are the audience, and I can’t help but be affected. Am I mystified? I don’t believe so, but I don’t know everything, and that should be made clear from the very, very restart, and my hope is that there will be no more need for restarts until such time as everything, everything never stops.

On the way out the door I put in my head to remember: Envy Taxes.

On the way back in just now two more things got added to the unwritten list.

That’s too many things so I wrote them:

1) Joni Mitchell saying so why should I feel sorry if
they just couldn’t understand the idiomatic logic
that went on in my head.

(JM sang them most famously but it was Annie Ross that wrote them in 1952.)

2) 2019/04/#.txt

That last part is of consequence here, more than envy massages or tax scanning or even recollected fragments of the canadian Queen of the Malibu Canyon.