Almost there

I'm down in the desert of southern California, near the town of 29 Palms, visiting my good friend Christine. I went out of town to finish my novel.

Christine, who was my lover long ago, moved down to the middle of nowhere -- otherwise known as Wonder Valley, an unincorporated area that is the last scattering of houses and shacks before 50 miles of moonscape before you get, by a back road, to old Route 66 -- about eight years ago. Since then, not only have several of her friends moved down here, but so have a number of other artists, including Deborah Iyall, a painter who is the former lead singer of the New Wave band Romeo Void ("Never Say Never," the song that goes "I might like you better if we slept together"). I keep meaning to buy a place here as well -- it's probably the cheapest real estate in California -- but in the meantime I satisfy my desert longings with frequent visits.

I knew the solitude and space, far from the business of keeping hearth and home together in San Francisco, would help my writing and allow me to put together the several-day-long push needed to complete my first draft. Dec. 31 was my self-imposed deadline, but due to various hangups back in San Francisco, and the storms that hit the Bay Area three days after Xmas, I got down here a day late. But I did get right down to work.

So today I can report that I wrote 2750 words yesterday and 5000 words today and have but two scenes left to go, which I will happily complete tomorrow, the first day of the new year. And that will be the complete first draft of the novel I've been working on since November of 1997. Stay tuned for that announcement.

Schadenfreude

Had enough holiday ho-ho? Then this story about a "family values" pastor who was caught with his pants down ought to cheer you up. Or try this excellent murder, also from the L.A. Times, as is this long story about the C-level celebrity crash-and-burn Blake murder.

Or if you want endless, fun, you can always go to BoingBoing, which day after day has the most interesting links on the web.

We're in Xmas cool-down here. Except for me going to church earlier today, it's been a day of hanging around, wrapping a few spare presents for people we haven't seen yet, adding up the checkbook to see if we have any money left after the holiday (having done our part for the economy once again) and watching the idiotic, condescending, off-putting and completely wrong 1965 teen movie, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, which, despite a great cast of Buster Keaton (!!), Mickey Rooney and others, manages to show exactly why the British Invasion of youth culture completely killed what Hollywood was pandering to American youth in those days. [ IMDB link | other link ]

Every day's a holiday when you're unemployed

I went last night to Jenny's house, not for a holiday party but for a birthday party. Jenny is someone I've known for ten years, since meeting her at Sybase, so she's a friend, but she's also a former co-worker and minion; I hired her at BEA and assigned her to a difficult, laborious, technically challenging but rewarding project. When I got laid off in October, she stayed, of course. I overheard her last night complaining that she would have to work over the holidays -- BEA forces people to use up their vacation at the end of the year, an increasingly widespread corporate practice -- to finish her project. I wanted to make a joke about having assigned her the project so she had to do a lot of work, whereas now I don't have to do beans, since I don't even have a job. But I couldn't think of a funny way to say it. And actually there's no joke there. It's just extremely thin irony, I think.

Anyway. I got an early Xmas present yesterday by getting two, count 'em, two pieces of fan mail in one day. Both had just read my book How I Adore You. An advertisement for the book, citing this review, just came out in Skin Two; I wonder if the ad had anything to do with the sudden fan mail. I hope so; I paid for the ad.

One more alternative dies

Rachel Pepper's Bernal Books, a tiny but splendid independent bookstore on Cortland St. in downtown Bernal Heights (a San Francisco neighborhood that is a bit of SF's version of Park Slope), is closing. I discovered this today as we were finishing up our Xmas shopping. Bernal Books is where I had my first-ever reading for my first-ever book. Rachel was a cheerful supporter of local authors, one of whom, Michelle Tea, worked there on and off for a long time. I always took care to order books from Rachel instead of Amazon.com, and it was always a pleasure to to by there and spend a few bucks.

While we were in there, people kept coming in to express their dismay at the closing. They kept saying how sorry they were and what a shame it was, which only seemed to make Rachel sound guilty as she explained why the place was closing -- because the lease is up and renewing it would be much more expensive, and because she was tired of simply scraping by year after year. So when it came time for Cris and I to make our final purchase, I just thanked her for being there all these years.

Biting through in your area

Day 8 of the suddenly extreme winter storm cycle had me running errands, having lunch with former minions Jenny and Brad and hearing some delicious gissip from my former workplace, and grinding out another 1600 words in my novel. I now have only about five scenes left to write. I may not quite finish the first draft by Xmas, but definitely by year's end.

Our kitchen work is done. Now all we have to do is put everything back. If you imagine taking everything out of your kitchen that could possibly be carried out of it, and putting it all in the dining room -- well, tomorrow we have to put it all back. And shop for a new glass kitchen tabletop.

The kitchen floor is now a black and white checkerboard. Cris's idea of fun: "Now we should use it as a game board somehow involving the cats."

Holiday frolic

In Catalonia, tradition dictates that Nativity scenes -- those dioramas you set up on the mantel or beneath the tree with little figures showing the birth of Christ in a stable, complete with shepherds, animals, angels and the three kings -- are not complete without the addition of a Caganer -- a little man in a red beret hidden in the background, looking on as he squats and takes a dump. (link courtesy Abracapocus)

At this Catholic church in Hilo, Hawaii, the now-retired "Father George has been known to invite non-Catholics to the church, to allow them to participate in the eucharist, to support the movement to ordain women priests, to encourage distribution of food bank supplies to anyone, including non-Catholics, to sing hymns in the Hawaiian language, to allow the hula to celebrate God's presence, to suggest that God loves everyone, regardless of sexual orientation, and to speak out against the impending War with Iraq." Yes, that's right -- liturgical hula. We'll miss you, Father George.

Today's best pickup line, courtesy of the utterly unknown Kambri Crews: "I mean, woah, look at you. Your thighs are beautiful. Your ass is beautiful. You breasts are beautiful. Your lips are beautiful. And your eyes, man! Your eyes are wonderful. But I'm not hitting on you."

Corporate mores through humor

This joke is from http://ph8.blogspot.com, which features several jokes with corporate-speak morals at the end. Here's the best one. I usually don't do things like reprint jokes, but there's precious little humor in the world on this particular day, so I think it's worth it.

A man is getting into the shower just as his wife is finishing up her shower when the doorbell rings. After a few seconds of arguing over which one should go and answer the doorbell, the wife gives up, quickly wraps herself up in a towel and runs downstairs.

When she opens the door, there stands Bob, the next door neighbor. Before she says a word, Bob says "I'll give you 800 dollars to drop that towel that you have on." After thinking for a moment, the woman drops her towel and stands naked in front of Bob. After a few seconds, Bob hands her 800 dollars and leaves.

Confused, but excited about her good fortune, the woman wraps back up in the towel and goes back upstairs. When she gets back to the bathroom, her husband asks from the shower, "Who was that?"

"It was Bob the next door neighbor," she replies.

"Great," the husband says, "did he say anything about the 800 dollars he owes me?"

Moral of the story: If you share critical information pertaining to credit and risk in time with your stakeholders, you may be in a position to prevent avoidable exposure.

Cris's comment: If it was me, I would have answered my husband: "No -- what 800 dollars?"

Flying the coop

I'm back home, still living with the kitchen remodel project. The rain's stopped and I walked over to 24th St. for a slice of pizza for brunch. There's this pizza place on 24th and Shotwell called Mr. Pizza Man, run by Brazilians; they've opened other branches around the city now. A gigantic slice with four topings will run about $3.50 -- expensive for a "slice" of pizza, but actually equivalent to a small pizza you might order at a national chain. The post-storm sky was a brilliant mix of soft blue and blindingly white clouds. A squall still blows over from time to time.

I meant to go away for a few more days this week, but I'm staying home to help out around here. At least Cris has actually gone in to work today -- a rare occurrence, she telecommutes 9/10th of the time. So I have the house to myself, except for the carpenters, and they're shut off in the kitchen, much to the dismay of the cats, who are afraid of but also curious about what's going on in there.

Link of the day: some pretty pictures by Tim Davis. (link courtesy randomwalks)

Speaking of carpenters: In my slovenly laid-off state I was watching "Today" this morning, and they had a segment on some advertisements that neo-liberal columnist Arianna Huffington has produced for television. Huffington is worthy of her own biopic; she's sort of the Tammy Faye Bakker of the political right. The ex-wife of a formerly prominent Republican politician, she's reinvented herself after that politician -- a former candidate for California governor who was defeated in 1996 -- came out as gay and dropped from sight. Before then, she was a sort of Ann Coulter figure, if older and heavier -- a lacerating conservative macher who used her wealth and connections to influence national policy. Since then she's turned around and become a neo-liberal. So her latest thing is a series of television advertisements alleging that driving an SUV supports terrorism -- the same logic used by the government's anti-drug commercials. On "Today" she debated against the editor of "Car and Driver" magazine, who quipped, "Never mind those ads [not the same as Arianna's ads, by the way] that say 'Jesus wouldn't drive an SUV' -- Jesus was a carpenter, and if he were alive today, he'd probably be driving the biggest pickup truck he could find!"

Buckets of rain

Here's an update from the writing front. In our last episode, I had two chapters to go before finishing the first draft of my novel. Well, I wrote a whole chapter in the last few days... and I still have two chapters to go.

This is typical of what happens when I'm not sure of the outline of a section I'm about to work on. I write through the problem without locking up, but it always takes me twice as many scenes to resolve the problem I thought I started out with. So I still have two chapters to go, but less to put in them than I did at the start of the week. I hope that makes sense.

Meanwhile winter has blown in with a vengance. Up in the Russian River area where I've been for the last few days, it's been raining since Friday morning. I think they got about six inches total. Today I drove back to San Francisco through some of the heaviest rain I've ever driven in; but either everyone was already at the mall or they were scared off the road by the weather, for I drove all the way from Healdsburg to the Golden Gate Bridge in 90 minutes. Then, of course, it took me another half hour to drive across the city.

I came back for the 50th birthday party of Sara, my writing coach and friend. I just had to stop and get her something, even though we're not supposed to bring presents; I got her a big red cushion for her butt.

And then I'm going back to Healdsburg tonight; I have to be back at the retreat center by 7:00 a.m. to lead the Matins service. The rain seems to have stopped for the moment, but I'm not betting on that being the case by the time I have to drive back.

Retreat

I’m off today for Healdsburg, a picturesque northern California town in the Russian River valley where the Episcopal Church has a retreat center. I’ll work on my book and attend a weekend of Benedictine prayer. I have only two chapters left to do on this draft, and I have hopes of finishing the penultimate one this week.

We had a nice soaking rain that lasted about 12 hours longer than forecast -- the first rain we’ve had since the beginning of November and only the second of the season. It depressed me briefly yesterday while I was downtown shopping, but in the evening hours it was comforting.

In fact the real reason I was depressed is that I was shopping for a sportscoat and had to deal with how fat I’ve gotten. Even though I’m regularly using the treadmill, I haven’t lost any weight, and I’m afraid Cris is going to make me to go Weight Watchers. I hope to avoid that indignity but looking at myself in a three-way mirror at the Men’s Warehouse was undignified enough.

My friend Sara is back from a vacation in Ghana. She brought me a couple of booklets that are part erotica, part sex manual, and part sex education. There is a long section in one, for example, about how women may avoid and treat yeast infections. The drawings look like they were done by a high school freshman, and the whole effect is rather sweet. She also brought back a garish rendering of the Holy Family, a gift to her church from the Episcopal bishop of Accra. It’s done using lots of colored glitter and is really something.

Progress is our most important product

For most of last week I made little progress on my book. The work on the kitchen -- which was supposed to be finished by Friday but which, of course, continues -- and especially the effects of the work, namely the dust and disruption and its affect on me, Cris, and the cats -- occupied much of my time and attention. Actually I spent much of each day I wasn't able to work sitting at the dining room table listlessly surfing the web, or watching television, so that I could babysit our handyman -- to call him a contractor would be an insult to contractors -- and the cats, which were contaminated with dust and soot along with most of the rest of the house. One of the cats got so sick that Friday was taken up largely with two trips to the vet out on Taraval St.

Finally Saturday loomed as the first day I could possibly get any work done, and even then, I didn't get a chance to leave the house until after 2:00 pm. When I finally got away, I went straight to a movie in order to wash my mind of all the house-related thoughts and feelings. I saw War Photographer, a documentary about American war photojournalist Jim Nachtwey, who is apparently well known for his fearless descents into hellish, dangerous conditions. The film gives us plenty of these, as well as a few tributes from colleagues. Seeing the film certainly served the purpose of getting my mind off my own insignificant problems.

After that I was ready to go do my own work, and after eating some dinner I finally sat down a little before 6 pm. But I did 1500 words very quickly and fruitfully, finishing chapter 26. There are only two chapters to write now, and though they will be difficult because they will contain all the climactic stuff and all the loose ends typing-up, I feel I can say I'm truly in the home stretch.

My 1500 words took me over 150,000 words for the first draft. So finishing the last two chapters is just the end of the beginning of working on my book. I'll have to shape, cut, consolidate, cut, reshape, and cut some more in the coming months.

Holiday greetings

Two weeks ago the Detroit Free Press published a profile of a sleazy character who had become a millionaire through operating email spamming services. The unrepentant, arrogant shit even bragged about how much more spam he would send out in coming years. Well, now he's getting a taste of his own medicine, as disgusted computer users route thousands of catalogs and other "snail mail spam" to his McMansion.

In other news, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has resigned. O'Neill, in the tradition of Republicans making fantastically absurd statements, once said "If you set aside Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the safety record of nuclear (power) is really very good."

Some news

California now has five queer state legislators, the makings of the first lesbian/gay caucus on the state level, says this chatty and informative SJ Mercury News story.

Unionized dancers at the Lusty Lady Theater in San Francisco picketed the theater Tuesday to protest wage cuts and working conditions. Their contract's up in January.

There's lots of literary stuff at Alt-X, including this amazing Kathy Acker interview. (The fifth anniversary of Acker's death just passed; she died on Nov. 30, 1997.)

Today's link from BoingBoing, the best place for interesting links: a large gallery of weird LP covers.

Here at home, we're having done what we thought was a minor remodeling job. Of course, there is no such thing as a minor remodeling job. Removing a wall and obsolete stove pipe in the kitchen, workers discovered evidence of an ancient stove fire and managed to get fifty-year-old soot all over the place. Carcinogenic? You bet!

That great big jackpot

Most people have received at least one version of the Nigerian scam email that is some of the most entertaining form of spam (if any spam can be said to be entertaining). I get at least one a day, and they're all a little different. Today's was a big variation on the usual message having to do with relatives of former African leaders and the difficulty of getting all their stolen money out of the country. It contained the story, supposedly related by a doctor, of a German businessman who had just deposited millions of dollars in a Nigerian bank and who then "unfortunately" died. (This phrase "But as I said above, he unfortunately died" is used as a sort of refrain throughout the message.) The "Specialist Doctor" asks the recipient's help in scamming all the money from the unfortunately dead German's accounts. It's almost like a Graham Greene story.

I deleted it before I thought to save it, but no matter, there'll be another one tomorrow.

Pluggin' away

I finished chapter 25, for the most part, on the 30th, doing about 2000 words all told. Then yesterday I spent the day at the library, reading the L.A. Times for the period leading up to and including the Democratic Convention in 1960. There were a number of details I needed. It was tedious, and I felt at the end of the day that I hadn’t found out that much. But writing today on 26a and 26b, I put in little bits I’d found out, so it was valuable to do. I hadn’t done much research on the convention and here I was writing about it for the last week.

Today I’m writing another one of my long-awaited scenes, the one where Bobby and Peter go to the Mississippi delegation to try to talk them into supporting Kennedy, even though they were the ones booing Sammy on the first night of the convention. (It used to be Alabama, but I found that more sources said it was the Mississippi delegation. The L.A. Times didn’t mention the incident at all, that I could see. But I’m going with Mississippi.) I did more than 1400 words today, not only in ch. 26 but by putting in words here and there in the previous two chapters as well.

The writing is coming pretty easily. There’s little to worry about in terms of plot points in these chapters. The next ones will be tougher.

And I’m also conscious of the need to go back and rewrite like the whole of Part 2 -- smoothing it out and making it seem less aimless, while at the same time putting in more details of setting and characterization. I almost don’t want to show it to Sara in its present state even when I finish the first draft, because I’m am so conscious of what needs to be done next. But I’ll print it out and give it to her anyway. Her and Katia and Christine and Cris, my readers.

Live Nude Girls Unite!

Dancers at the Lusty Lady Theater -- the only unionized strip club in San Francisco -- are picketing the club today to protest a wage cut. I'm going down there to lend my support!

In other news, the Supreme Court has agreed to rule on whether states may declare private homosexual conduct between consenting individuals illegal. Geez, do you think it has anything to do with the pursuit of happiness? That little phrase from the Declaration of Independence is much overlooked these days, when happiness is equated with the ability to choose between 57 kinds of cars or 137 different kinds of breakfast cereal.

And finally: though it reads like it, this story is not from The Onion: Tampa Men say Starbucks is 'Nothing Unique'

Blogger of the month

From talula.net, a blog I happened on randomly. The only thing that kept me from posting things like this when I was a teenager is, there was no internet yet, much less blogging. But now we can all be voyeurs as some drunken teen confesses all:

Aaaaah! I'm so excited! Amy and I are going to see Imperial Teen tonight in SF. I haven't been to a show in AGES. I think a guy from Redd Kross is opening for them. But you know, I secretly know that Jon is going to be working at the merchandise booth for a while. So I am going to dress up to look extra-extra-extra hot, and then totally ignore him. I will flirt with lots of guys right near the booth but pretend I don't even see him. You know he hasn't called or emailed me since we spent that night together? Of all the nerve. I guess I could have called or emailed him, but whenever I do that boys think I am in love with them or something and they freak out. So this time I am playing it cool but I still think what the fuck? Oh well, I have to get going to I have time to get dressed. I will report back later. I am glad Amy has a car! She'd better not get drunk though. I am the only one who's allowed to get drunk.

Then:

Dear World, Yes, it's after 5 am and I am just getting home. You will not believe the shocking adventures I had tonight! Oh. My. God. I am still a little bit drunk so I will try to be coherent. By the way, Amy did get drunk too which means she drove us home drunk, which is ILLEGAL!!! She should not have done that and I am going to use it against her if I decide to be mad at her. But I might not decide that. So you want to know what happened? Well. As I said I was going to, I dressed up all hot and when Amy picked me up I saw that she was looking all hot too, which immediately seemed suspicious. Then we went there and we got some beer and we had about two beers each while the opening band was playing and then Amy said "Let's go see if we can buy a t-shirt!" and dragged me over to the merchandise booth. That pretty much foiled my plan of ignoring Jon right there. I decided to play it really cool anyway. So we got up to the booth and I kind of hid behind Amy while she went up there to ask for a shirt and Jon said "Oh! Hey, Amy!" and I was shocked! I didn't know that they knew each other! So I showed myself and he said "Hi Talula..." and then he started looking awkward. He said "I didn't know you guys knew each other!" and I said "I didn't know you guys knew each other" and Amy said "I didn't know you guys knew each other!" and we all just looked at each other for a second and then I grabbed Amy's hand and dragged her off and into the bathroom. This is how I found out that Amy had also slept with Jon and he had also not called her afterward. So guess what, we decided that it's so typical of women to get mad at each other over a guy and that is dumb, so we decided to be clever and torture Jon! We decided that from now on it is our mission to torment and confuse him. Our first action would be to force him to get an embarrassing erection in the merchandise booth. Maybe we could even make him screw up while counting change and get him in trouble!!! So we went back there but we totally pretended to ignore him and we got more beer but only one cup and we shared it, and we got all slinky-sexy on each other. We whispered and giggled and acted like girlfriends so he would think we were sleeping together. I glanced over at him and his face was turning red as he was trying to help a customer. Hee hee hee!!! Then the real band came on and we went in to see the show and we danced sexy together just in case he was watching. Then afterwards we left holding hands and we said "Bye, Jon!" and walked out. I bummed a cigarette from Amy and we smoked before we went to her car because she was still drunk. All the people came out and then Jon came out too and he came up to us and said "Hey, you guys" and we just acted like we only knew him casually. "Hey," we said. "Well ok, see ya," he said and then he went away. We were giggling unstoppably and we went to find her car which took a really long time because we forgot to pay attention to where we parked it but that was good because Amy got to walk off some of the alcohol but she still had a buzz when we were driving home and we are lucky that we are not both dead tonight!

It's like reading a blog that the blond girl in Ghost World might have posted, only her friend sounds equally vapid and silly. Enid from Ghost World would never have slept with Jon, I'm sure.

I don't post nearly enough stuff like this. Let's give it a try:

Dear World, Ahhhhhh! I can't believe it! We still have cheesecake left over from Thanksgiving. I am going to dress extra sexy and eat a big slice, and I'm going to eat it in front of Cris.

No, that's not right at all. Let's try again.

Dear World, ohmigod, I went out in the car, and, like, I parked on Church St. and I went into the crepe place and ordered scrambled eggs, and I saw out of the corner of my eye this hot girl leaving, but she didn't see me! And then I went into Muddy Waters nearby and that skinny Arab girl was playing her weird Arab-pop, and I wanted to ask her, you know, like, are you playing that ironically or are you playing it for real, because if its' for real, I think you really need to look at yourself and your tastes. But I didn't say that. Then I went over to the church and worked on my novel, taking a nap inbetween two scenes I worked on. I was like, two scenes! Two thousand words! Right on!

Just in case your holiday isn't ruined yet

This article on law.com speculates that Supreme Court Justine Antonin Scalia, the court's most ascerbic and conservative member, is a good bet for Chief justice when present Chief Justice William Rehnquist retires. Just in case you forgot that there is a difference between Democrats and Republicans and that it does matter that the former are elected rather than the latter. And while I'm thnking of it, here's a big UP YOURS to those Florida voters for Ralph Nader. I'd wish them worse, but living in Florida must be its own punishment.

My Thanksgiving was unremarkable. I mean, the meal prepared entirely by Cris was terrific, and we had a nice time, but nothing untoward or unusual happened. Tomorrow (Saturday) I should get back to work on my book.

Five a.m. looms

Today was a good day: I wrote two scenes for a total of 1250 words, and did my four miles on the treadmill. I'm over the cold I had a week ago, and tomorrow, if we don't spend too much time at the store shopping for Thanskgiving dinner, I should get another scene done. Thinking of Sunday as the last day of a work week -- as I do now that the American work week has settled deeply into my mind, despite my current unemployment -- I had a terrific week. I wrote more than 5000 words, polished off several scenes in my novel... and went to the zendo only once.

It started last Monday when I was sick; I decided to sleep in, and I was glad I did. So the next day I went to meditate, getting up at 5:20 a.m., and man, did I feel it the rest of the day. So I fucked off all week long, and I felt much better. The one day I did go, Y. was back to his tricks, blathering something during zazen. It sounded like a poem this time, and not just some stupid aphorism, and it didn't bug me quite as much as it did when he showed up for the first time in... September, was it? and started off with his yapping during zazen. But it was still a distraction.

So now I'm well, and I guess I can go back to sitting, but I'm really wondering whether it's worth getting up at 5:00 a.m. anymore if I'm going to feel tired all day. What the fuck, why should I feel tired all day? And to tell you the truth, my meditation hasn't been going that great. I haven't centered on my breathing in a few weeks, and my mind wanders like crazy. I come back to my breath for about one breath, then it's off to the races again. Plus this fellow Y. bugs me. So I'm not getting a lot out of it.

The funny thing is that it took me until I'm unemployed and don't have to stay awake all day long to get to this point. When I was working, I would take naps on the floor of my office. Now I can take naps whenever I want and I actually take fewer naps.

Well, I guess I"ll set the clock for 5:00 and decide then whether to get up or not. I sure have been enjoying my sleep, though.

Who did you expect, Tinkerbell?

Who's behind all that spam in your email inbox? Just the kind of sleazebag you'd expect.

Let's review

It's sometimes hard to remember, given the amount of daily news and the way it pours in (pick your metaphor: onslaught, avalanche, firehose), just what we're fighting for. Of course, we all remember that we're anti-gun, anti-war, pro-civil rights for women and queers, and pro-choice. (Or, let's call it what the other side calls it: pro-abortion. Because abortion itself really is the core issue we're fighting over when it comes to (what our side calls) reproductive rights. Yes, we can fight over details of parental notification and sex education and the distribution of condoms and so forth, but all those are side issues compared to the big one: Can you or can't you get an abortion when you want one?)

My stand, our stand -- at least, given what I know about the eight or so people who even read this weblog -- on these issues, taken together, form what would be called (by us) a progressive agenda or (by the other side) an ultra-liberal agenda. Yes, I'm conscious of using the right words for things, saying "I'm pro-choice" or "reproductive rights," but I'm also conscious of what the other side calls things. They'd say "pro-abortion" and "the right to kill your baby." I know this because I listen, partly for entertainment and partly because I want to know what the other side is thinking, to right-wing Christian radio, and I have for a long time. Over the past twenty years I've witnessed the programming on right-wing Christian radio stations becoming more and more sophisticated, as right-wingers start to understand that nowadays they have to put an educated gloss on what even they admit are views that are out of the mainstream. The never-say-die campaign by the Christian right against the theory of evolution, for example, now uses a collection of arguments collected under the rubric "Creation Science." Of course, it isn't real science, any more than Scientology is, but if you call something a science and you have Ph.D.s making proclamations on its behalf, then it sounds more credible. The Nazis understood this, and the Christian Right does, too.

(That was a cheap shot. The Nazis also understood that the Volkswagen was a good, dependable car, and that doesn't make everyone who drives one an anti-Semite. I know when I'm taking cheap shots, just like I know what I'm doing when I watch pornography. But it doesn't stop me from doing it.) (You'll notice a plethora of parentheses. This is the way I think. I make one statement and then I also think of what somebody might think of it, or I think what somebody on the other side might say. This deep-seated ambivalance about language, this recognition of how maleable it is, is what keeps me from being an effective essayist.)

So we've got these "progressive" political stances. But the point I was going to make is, do we all remember why we have them? Let's review.

The top priority for all the threatened white men is to take away abortion rights, and then birth control. The reason is utterly simple -- they want women burdened down with children and out of the workplace. For the same reason, they'll work to reverse other advances that have torn down the patriarchal edifice: domestic partners' laws, for example, not to mention the right of queers to marry (not that we're there yet) and thus gain access to all the marriage-related property and tax rights. And they'll fight against the recognition of queers as persons and queer sexuality as acceptable, because recognition that queers exist and are entitled to human rights also threatens the white-male dominated workplace.

The next priority for the threatened white men is to keep non-white people at each other's throats. That's why they fight so hard against the legalization of drugs: because the bigger the drug trade, the more blacks and latinos kill each other trying to control it. The huge amount of money generated ("wasted," according to the right-wing pundits, and it is a waste, though they don't really believe this) by the prison system, the anti-immigrant system and the police system goes mainly to this threatened white group, but more importantly, keeping drugs illegal keeps minorities in poverty by undercutting the economic and social health of their communities. Then they make sure guns are widely available by working to defeat gun control laws.

The next priority, and here the Bush administration is making a lot of progress (from their perspective), is to roll back environmental protections so they can make absolutely as much money as fast as possible from raping the earth. Similarly, the vast fast-food economy which dominates the diets of everyone in the U.S. and which is being pushed into other countries as fast as possible, plus the tobacco economy, is designed to exploit (and incidentally destroy) human ecosystems as surely as oil, gas, automobile and construction companies destroy geophraphical ecosystems.

You get the picture. I'm not saying there's a vast right-wing conspiracy by big blue meanies to destroy the world and control everybody; I'm saying that the right wing's intentions are purely economic. For example, though a huge Christian Right system exists to push the "pro-life" agenda under the name of religion, the fact is that the rich white men funding the system don't give a shit about religion or "saving babies" or saving anyone's souls. They just want women out of the workplace. That's all it's about.

You could put your eye out

What happens to all those 4" Swiss Army knives confiscated at airport security checkpoints? This page answers the question for the Sacramento area. (Link courtesy BoingBoing.)

Memories of bullies

Today's front page Wall Street Journal feature is a riveting account of a typical school bully and his surprising (and, to me, satisfying) end. Upon being informed through his family that the schoolmate who had inflicted endless torture on him during the second through fifth grades had died of AIDS, reporter Jonathan Eng went back and discovered the truth about his former classmate's violent family life and the aggressive lifestyle that led to his demise. Definitely worth reading, and do it today, while it's still free.

I too had a bully who made my life miserable during grade school. I was the smallest kid in the class and he was the biggest. From the third grade to the seventh, I was oppressed by a boy named Bruce H_______. There was little actual pounding, more chasing (I got to be surprisingly fast for my size) and intimidation. Recognizing the odds -- by fourth grade, he was as big as some of the seventh graders -- I almost never fought back, except for once or twice when I was completely enraged. And although we attended a parochial (Lutheran) school, neither the teachers nor my parents did anything about the incessant bullying. Only last year -- approximately 35 years after the fact -- did my mother reveal an extremely pertinent fact: Bruce's father was the president of the congregation that ran the school and of which our parents were all members, and he ran it with an iron hand. My parents were afraid of social retaliation if they went to the H_______s with any complaints. So they left me and Bruce to work it out together.

We didn't work it out. He finally grew out of it somewhat, and then in the middle of the eighth grade (the school was K-8), my family moved away and I never saw him again. But I still have fantasies about showing up at his front door and wreaking revenge. A web search shows he lives in suburban St. Louis and is part of a Christian businessman's group. I suppose that's no more pathetic than some of the organizations I've been part of. But I would have been much more satisfied if I'd found, like the author of the WSJ article, that Bruce had died penniless of a hideous disease. That's where my sense of compassion and my maturity end.

Interesting things

Middle-class Jews from Buenos Aires have begun to emigrate to Montreal, fleeing Argentina's economic crisis, says this article from the 18 Nov 02 Toronto Globe and Mail (link courtesy BoingBoing). They were invited by representatives from Montreal's Jewish community eager to replenish their shrinking numbers, the story says. So in a few years you'll be able to go to Montreal and dance the tango with a bunch of immigrant Argentinians. Cool.

This piece by Laura Miller in Sunday's NYT Magazine is an amusing and insightful piece on the spreading use of "meta," or self-referential strategies, in popular culture. And speaking of Salon -- where Miller built a steady following before becoming my San Francisco generation's leading literary arbiter -- a similar figure from the previous generation, Greil Marcus, is still holding forth, and always worth reading. Marcus refuses to confine himself to jazz and pop (or pazz and jop, as Marcus' longtime employer the Village Voice has it); his "Real Life Top 10" are ten experiences, not records. He may be old, but he still has ears for things like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Downtime

I caught a cold, something I'd been avoiding for the past two months while everyone around me, it seemed, was getting it. So far it's very minor, just a bit of fever and sniffling, but I'm spending Sunday at home and trying not to do much. It's another absolutely spendid fall day in San Francisco -- quite cool in the morning, sunny all day. Too bad I'm "wasting" the beautiful weather by staying inside, but I know from experience that if I rest on the first real day of a cold, I'm much happier for the following week.

What's sicker is my laptop. Two years ago I got a Gateway laptop with Windows ME and it's worked great until about a month ago, when the hard disk started acting up. It makes a clacking sound, has boot errors from time to time, and once in a while simply crashes. I called Gateway and they had me download a utility that would supposedly scan and repair the disk. But the utility didn't find any disk errors, while the problems continue. I guess the only real solution is to replace the hard drive while backing up my work at the end of every work session. I've been doing the latter, and sometimes I back up files to a floppy during a work session, so I won't lose even an hour's worth of work.

Even so, yesterday the only work I did on my book was on the outline. Thought I "completed" the outline of the final chapters for the first time a couple of weeks ago, I always knew it was subject to change, and yesterday I realized I'm going to have to give a little more weight to the B story as the climax approaches. However, I'll spare readers any extended notes like the ones I quoted in my entry of the 14th. I just wanted people to get an idea of how I work. Those notes are from a file which is half as long as the book itself -- it documents the creation of the book and is, itself, sort of a shadow of the book, or a meta-book. It contains not only the characters and plot lines that actually go into the book, but all the alternatives I reject along the way. The contents are, of course, only of interest to me, but the technique may be of interest to other writers.

Novelist sighting

Last night I went to a reception, hosted by WIRED Managing Editor Martha Baer, for author Frederic Tuten. Tuten was Martha's old prof and mentor in New York, and she invited a passel of writers and journalists over to her Mission District digs to meet him. Tuten's new novel The Green Hour, garnered a review by John Updike in the Nov. 11, 2002 New Yorker. I read the book in preparation for meeting him. His writing is casually elegant, beautifully paced, and he's not afraid to be romantic. (The NYT Book Review even said the characters belonged in a romance novel, which I think is way overdoing it.) Tuten himself was warm, generous, and cheerfully energized by the crowd of youthful admirers. Martha said she told him all about the "Joey Bishop novel" I'm working on, which was a nice introduction to give me.

Looking at her collection of Tuten's novels, I noticed with amusement that his first book, The Adventures of Mao on the Long March, was "A Richard Kasak Book." As Kasak was my first publisher, I went to Tuten to compare notes. He told an amusing anecdote about a disagreement he'd later had with Kasak -- a figure in New York publishing for many years -- who bragged about low-balling young naive authors who were so eager to get their first book published that they'd accept pitifully small advances. "They'd even pay me!" Kasak reportedly said. This was especially humorous in light of the experience of my friend Marilyn, who has had dealings with Kasak on and off for several years; he published her first book too. Recently he's started a new venture of bringing out "Erotic Romance" books, reportedly offering ridiculously low pay.

It's just Tourette's

Props to WilliamTed for this blog entry showing a slice of San Francisco life. The "Shouting Man" whom he profiles has been there a lot longer than the seven years he's seen him, though. He was there in the early 1980s when I had a long-running temp job in that district. One thing WilliamTed doesn't seem to realize is that the "Shouting Man" isn't really a colorful San Francisco character -- like Mr. Lee, the Chinese guy who walks up and down the Financial District carrying a sign with a delusional screed about "12 Galaxies" and various names from presidential history. The "Shouting Man" merely has Tourette's Syndrome.

Flesh for peace

As if Nancy Pelosi becoming House Minority Leader weren't enough, these women from Marin County have upheld the fine tradition of northern California women working for the cause of peace. (Link courtesy randomwalks.)

Small road trip

I've been working on my book almost every weekday for the last two weeks; yesterday I managed to finish another chapter, and according to the outline, there are only five chapters left. Slowly I'm whittling them down.

This morning I skipped zazen and slept in. I then spent the morning puttering around the house and exercising; I've recently upped my daily mileage on the treadmill to at least four miles a day. So I didn't even get a chance to get down to work until mid-afternoon, and I found I could hardly even look at my notes, much less write anything. I packed up and went on a drive instead. I drove down highway 1 a little ways to Half Moon Bay. It had been two years since I last drove through Devils' Slide, a treacherous five miles of coastal road south of the city. The last time, I was driving with my friend Katia, and we nearly got creamed by a car coming the other way. The guy went into a curve too fast, came out of it and almost creamed us, lost control and got the guy 50 yards behind us instead. It wasn't a terribly serious accident for a head-on crash, but it was bad enough. I got out and stopped traffic and then ran to an emergency phone. As we resumed our drive back to the city, Katia said that the fact we'd avoided a crash meant that our new relationship wasn't going to be a metaphorical car wreck. I thought this was a very poetic way to look at it. Katia's a novelist.

Today's auto tour aside, I'm really working hard to finish this book. That means this blog is going to get kind of boring. About all I can say is, I went to zazen, I exercised, I worked on my book.

Oh, I know what happened. I got my first unemployment check today.

Sample notes:

Then I thought of bringing in Lucy. Bobby’s old girlfriend whom we spent parts of two chapters on several chapters ago. I had the idea a while back to actually bring her forth during the convention sequence in order to further humiliate Bobby. It will turn out that one of the things Bobby has to do for Frank (and thus for JFK) is to beard Lucy for JFK. In other words, Bobby has to accompany her to an event as her date but the real purpose is to provide a way for her to get past all the reporters and into a private clinch with JFK. (I haven’t answered the question of how Frank notices her or procures her for this purpose, but I’m not too worried about handling that.) Now I’m thinking it might work to bring her in now. Is it too early, or will it be effective to introduce her now and give Bobby a chance to react to the whole situation?

However, she couldn’t come as Giancana’s date, for the same reasons as Campbell couldn’t. Therefore if she’s going to be in 23d she has to come with Bobby, so he beards her on this occasion.

Q. What are the advantages of that?

A. It creates more tension in the scene, where now there is none; all I have now is to make it a farce. Also there’s no real reason for Bobby to even be present at the dinner, unless he serves some purpose for Frank and/or JFK. Thirdly, it creates tension for the reader to anticipate the convention.

5:00 pm -- I didn’t do that after all. I did rewrite the first part of 23d, but instead of having Bobby pick up Lucy, I had him pick up just an ordinary political groupie. This introduces the whole idea of bearding someone, so I can just have the Lucy thing happen in the next chapter (or wherever it comes) without any explanation. Also I put a few words into ch. 20 to prepare for it. Then I wrote 970 words for the first part of 23d, and had Sammy drop the bomb that Frank won’t let him get married to May Britt until after the election. This speaks volumes about the social politics of the time (and is also what actually happened). This lends the requisite tension to the scene and saves the Lucy bombshell for closer to the climax. So I feel satisfied with my two day’s work even though I haven’t made much progress. Tomorrow, back to it.

Pleasant dreams

I awakened this morning with an optomistic attitude about finishing my current chapter and the book itself. I had peaceful dreams both during the night and during a nap I took from 8:00 to 9:30, after falling asleep in the bed while reading the morning paper with Cris. The dream during the nap involved being on the edge of a cliff over a dark ocean, but no fear whatsoever; I felt complete confidence that I could, and just might, float down to the water or to a ledge just above the water. It was nearly a flying dream, for me. I don’t have flying dreams where I’m flying like a bird; mine involve taking fifty-yard strides, or being able to fly at only 5 feet above the ground, or being able only to float down from a great height rather than falling uncontrollably fast. But even though it might seem as if there’s a lack of exaltation in these dreams, they’re always pleasurable and leave me with a feeling of blissful contentment.

Cris and I spent much of the morning hassling with a credit card bill. I sent them what we had left from my severance check. Turned out the bill was largely for the computer system and office furniture we bought in September right before I got laid off.

Cris happened to talk to Carl, whose house we visited ten days ago. He heard of a pubs manager job for me at a software company in Richmond, an industrial city north of Berkeley. Not such a great location, but I will need to get another job eventually, and, as Cris said, the way things work these days it will probably be until February before I would actually start. She also reminded me there was only a small chance I would actually get the job. I have ambivalent feelings. In a way it would be nice to be wanted, and it would be nice to make money. But part of me is almost annoyed; I didn’t want to start thinking yet about finding a new job, and I’d been half-hoping I’d never have to get another software job again.

Various forms of prayer

I’m going to apply for a residency at Headlands Center for the Arts. But the application deadline for 2003 is long past, so any application I make will be for 2004, when I’m bound to have another full time job again. So I’m applying for a “live-out” residency, where you get a studio to work in, but you don’t get a living space.

I went last night to lectio divina -- just me and Michael, as usual, but I think he enjoys it and finds it fulfilling as much as I do -- and after that I went to the zen center for a “practice meeting.” This is an event they used to have to discuss details of practice -- i.e. when and how to do various things, like bowing -- and decided to renew, perhaps to remove discussions of such details from the board meeting. We went through all the details of what people do in the evening. There were a few people I hadn’t seen before, which is comforting in a way, as the total number of people involved on a regular basis seems to be small indeed. I suppose they attend in the evening and never in the morning, as I come in the morning and never in the evening. Y. was a little less passive-aggressive than usual. Not that much, but he didn’t seem as much of a loser as he did the first time I met him, at that dinner several weeks ago. And he seems to want the right thing, which is residents who are really serious about their practice and put it first in their lives. Which would be a contrast to at least three of the four residents that are there now. As for Z., his factotum, she has apparently decided to be very friendly and encouraging to me. She praised me for coming so dependably in the mornings. In fact, I’ve missed at least one day a week for almost all of the last eight weeks or so, since coming back from New York in September.

Last night it rained heavily, cleared up for much of the day, then at 3:00 started again. At 3:30 it was really dark out, I had to turn on the lights in the church office as I wrote.

This morning I drove down to Redwood City and got rid of the scanner that’s been taking up space in the office for years. We got it a long time ago from SFSI -- someone had donated it to them, and we bought it by way of making a donation. Finally I sold it for $15 on eBay to a guy at a little aviation newsletter. He seemed really happy to get it, and I would be too, for $15. I found myself thinking I should have charged more, but then he was the only bidder and getting rid of it was the most important thing. I also sold a few books at a used bookstore and got $13. I celebrated and had a fancy seven dollar hamburger at the new place adjacent to the church, on my way in to write.

I got 1500 words done today, part of a long scene, the “cat disaster” scene I’ve been planning all year to write. I think I need to write more on it, though, so I can’t say the scene is done.

A suitable spot for Salvadoreans

Ahh, the rains started last night. Cris and I had gone out to Mount Tam earlier in the day to scout out locations for the scattering of her mother's ashes. I pointed out a majestic hilltop with a gorgeous view of the city, but she seemed to favor a wooded path. "Cool, dark woods," Cris said. "Anybody from El Salvador would like to be in here, under the trees."

"Really?" I asked.

"Oh yeah. Ask anybody from down there. They hate the heat. This would be like heaven." One of the requirements for a site, however, is a spot reachable by Cris's elderly aunt and by her mother's former caretaker, Francisca. Also, it's going to be wet out there from now on. We're not doing it for at least another week, though, so maybe we'll hit a nice day.

It was nice to be in the woods. We took a short hike, but I had already done my 3 miles on the treadmill in the basement, so I didn't want to go too far. Seven or eight years ago I made it a point to go hiking out there several times a month during the summer; yesterday was the first time I've been out there all year, and maybe the last, given the start of the rains.

No strings attached

Since Nancy installed our wireless network in the house, I've had fun roaming the place with my laptop -- I'm writing this sitting up in bed, in fact. (Here's a good article in today's today's SF Chronicle.) And like all new owners of wireless network cards, I've discovered that many owners of home wireless networks don't protect the signal, so that you can pull your car up somewhere near their house and check your email right there. I found a page that lists a few wireless access points in the area, but merely by driving up Noe St. on Saturday I found that I was able to access a connection at the corners of 15th and Noe, and also at 19th, 21st, 23rd and 25th. (That's an affluent neighborhood so I'm not surprised there are so many wireless networks.) And today this NYT article predicts wireless networks with up to ten times the range of current ones. That means that the affluent neighborhoods of a city like San Francisco will be essentially blanketed by wireless networks.

Of course, if you don't have a laptop with a wireless (or "WiFi") network card, you can always get a messaging device like a Blackberry. Yesterday morning I saw a woman -- the president of the congregation, no less -- using one to check email during the slack moments after she had taken communion. (Offically they are not slack moments, but devotional moments. But few are the people who can sustain a meditative state after having eaten and drunk something. And yesterday the sermon was particularly long.) I've resisted the Blackberry so far, but I'll probably get a Handspring with messaging in a couple of years when the price comes down some more.

Today Cris and I will go for a little hike on Mt. Tamalpais to celebrate her brithday and also to scout ash-scattering sites. The weather is supposed to hold until the end of the week, when the rain is supposed to finally start.

Drunken louts rout partiers

Halloween in the Castro did not go smoothly, the local paper reported today, 36 hours after the event. As usual, drunken louts outnumbered costumed revellers by about 11:00 p.m., and things got ugly. This is nothing new. Eight and nine years ago when I was in the Street Patrol, we walked the Castro for hours, from about 8:00 pm to 3:00 a.m., on party nights leading up to Halloween. (Depending on what day of the week Haloween falls, people sometimes fill the streets up to two days in advance.) Every time, all the fun costumed people went home by 10:00 or 11:00, while beer-filled youths from the suburbs -- attracted by television news reports showing a fun party -- stream into the district. By midnight the crowd is just as large as it was at 8:00, but now 90% of it is straight and 100% of it is drunk. And of course they get in stupid macho street tussles.

This time four people were stabbed, one's in critical condition. Nobody is saying, at least yet, that the violence was gay bashing. I'll wager it was just dumb drunks. Nobody is more stupid or boring than an aggressive drunk. I really got my fill of them on those patrols.

Look at that one!

I was never much for dressing up in costumes, a social talent which is pretty much mandatory in San Francisco. For years I felt guilty and stupid that I wasn't able to get in the swing of things and have fun, but I finally decided, fuck it, I just don't like to. I don't like to play golf, do automobile maintenance, or get drunk either, and I can safely choose not to do those things without suffering people's disapproval. Finally, I have reached an age where no one is pressuring me to go to a costume party, thank goodness.

But that's not to say that a gathering of thousands of queers, all in fabulous costumes, is not a splendid sight. It's just that the huge Halloween street party in the Castro District got way out of control about 12 years ago, and now the crowd is at least 80% straight and 75% non-costumed. The adjective generally used to describe last night's event is "shoulder-to-shoulder," and frankly, I'm too old for that, too.

This year, I was able to witness a smidgen of it without getting my toes stepped on or witnessing much drunken behavior. My elderly mother and her husband came through town, and we had dinner at a hotel on Market St. where the dining room windows looked directly out onto the sidewalk. Scores of costumed people streamed past, a real treat for the senior citizens. My mother's husband Tom actually pointed out the window and cried, "Gladys, look at that one!" -- not once but several times. After about two hundred people had gone past, they were sufficiently puzzled to ask what was going on, and I told them there was a huge street party every year -- more than a mile away. They were amused and very surprised that so many adults actually go to the trouble. I told them that things like this were the reason a lot of people are in San Francisco in the first place, and with the evidence in front of them, they seemed to understand at least a little.

Of course it's utterly impossible for anyone in their 80s who did not spend their lives someplace like Greenwich Village to understand modern urban culture, much less queer culture. My mother lived a particularly sheltered life in the Midwest, with a blissful ignorance of events in pop culture. The most mainstream stuff failed to penetrate her awareness. About ten years ago, we went to see a touring production of "A Chorus Line," which features a song, "Dance Ten, Looks Three," in which the phrase "tits and ass" is repeated several times. Vulgarities such as these utterly shocked my mother, even though the musical itself had come out approximately 20 years before -- she had had no idea of the depths to which American culture had sunk.

Darkness and light

The end of Daylight Savings Time coincides generally with a real change in the weather in SF from the last gasps of summerlike weather to the definitely cooler and wetter days of fall and winter. The time change also produces a number of pleasant lighting effects, as yesterday evening I gathered with others at St. Gregory's for their Taizé service and the new evening darkness at 5:30 made the candles look just beautiful. The small room we meet in becomes more womb-like and intimate. In the morning, on the other hand, the sky is already indigo just before 6:00 a.m. as I stretch in the street, and sunlight is suddenly blazing as I walk out of the zendo at 7:00. I think this whole Daylight Savings Time program is worthwhile just for these effects, not to mention that extra hour of sleep you get once a year -- an event I missed this year, since I was in Arizona last weekend and they don't do DLT.

Speaking of dawn, the issue at HSZC over when to start the one-day sits has bloomed into a real controversy. The residents have closed ranks behind Y., who becomes the resident practice leader this week, while some members say they'll come sit with me at 5:00 a.m. on Saturday. It's a tempest in a teapot, to be sure. But it also demonstrates Y.'s awkwardness in dealing with people and his ignorance of how to lead a group without part of it rebelling.

Even I'm not that lazy

Coming up this Saturday is the usual all-day sit -- from 5:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. -- at the zen center I go to -- or so I thought. This morning after zazen there was a conversation in which I learned that Y. wants to cut the length of the event to 9:00 to 5:00 because he thinks the thirteen-hour schedule is too intimidating to newcomers. This shocked me, frankly. Francois, one of the residents, included me in the email thread later this morning, and I posted something to the effect that sitting at dawn is pretty basic to a meditation practice as far as I was concerned. I was gratified to see that some of the other lay members on the thread backed me up.

Actually I can't even do all day this time around, because on Saturday I have to prepare the house for Cris's birthday party that evening, and besides, my great friend Christine will be in town. But I did want to go at 5:00 for the first three sessions. So far it looks like it will be me and a few other people -- which is no different from most first Saturdays.

In other news, I was listening in my car today, as I do from time to time, to the local right-wing Christian radio station. And I heard two interesting things.

One was a little feature on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German anti-fascist pastor who was involved in plots to assassinate Hitler. The feature was a fairly straightforward recounting of his moral struggle to justify the use of violence (i.e. in killing Hitler) for a greater good (ending the war and Nazi tyranny). I thought to myself, "Uh oh, I can see what's coming." Sure enough, the moral of the story, as presented on the right-wing Christian radio station, was that war on Iraq was justified. So typical.

Hearing that didn't surprise me, but the next thing I heard did. The host of the evening live show, Craig Roberts, launched into an aggressive attack on Fred Phelps. The virulent anti-gay "preacher" is reportedly still planning to visit the Bay Area. Instead of picketing the funeral of Eddie Arajo Jr. -- a transgendered youth who was murdered early this month -- Phelps has decided to picket several conservative East Bay churches that released a statement condemning Arajo's murder as well as the local high school, which is presenting "The Laramie Project." Uncharacteristically, the conservative talk show host strongly attacked Phelps, his tactics, his message and his entire enterprise.

I had wondered for a long time where, if anywhere, that radio station would draw the line, and now I know. There are right-wingers that even the right-wingers can't stand. At least we can agree on the most extreme bigots. It's not much, but it's something.

Aww, the sad clown

I saw the Jerry Seinfeld documentary Comedian today, and greatly enjoyed its inside view of the life of a performer. The film shows J.S. as he "starts from scratch" with all new material -- though he travels to gigs by private jet and stays in five-star hotel suites -- and contrasts his angst with the positively maniacal anhedonia of an up-and-coming comic named Orny Adams. It's a wonderful backstage view of the neuroses of performers in this age of saturation media.

However, looking for references on the web, I spotted this capsule review (bottom of page) by Dennis Lim in the Village Voice, and found myself agreeing with every word, including the bit about "the redeptive ending that Seinfeld would have mocked." I also found, for the first time, the Metacritic website, which is a wonderful resource.

Liberals minus 1

I was in a taxi on the way to the airport when Cris rang with the news that Sen. Paul Wellstone was killed in a plane crash this morning. Bloody hell. It's already all over the news, of course, so I won't even post a link. That's one less voice of reason in the Senate -- here's hoping Jesse Ventura, governor of Minnesota, has enough sense to... oh, jeez, this doesn't look good at all.

Closer to home, the funeral for murdered tranny Eddie Arajo, Jr. is expected to attract not only hundreds of friends and mourners, but also the inimitable and revolting Fred Phelps et al. from Topeka, the group that makes Jerry Falwell look like a fag-lover. This blogger, WilliamTed, has "plans." No good can come of that, I'm afraid.

Update: The funeral came off without a visit from the hateful Kansans.

Who preaches, who gets preached to

Reminder: there will be big anti-war protests on Saturday in San Francisco and Washington DC.

I can't go -- I'll be in Phoenix, visiting family. But if I were there, I would bring several CDs and just stand in the crowd listening to them. Whatever is said at these events is of absolutely no import to anybody. Everyone who's there already is against the war, and short of being whipped into a frenzy and going in to sack City Hall, there is nothing whatsoever anybody can say that would spur any kind of meaningful action. (Sacking City Hall would not even be meaningful.) In fact, I would be tempted to bring a huge sign that said nothing but CHOIR, and stand in the middle of the crowd. Going to huge protests is a waste of time in most senses, of course, except for the fact that the entire message of the protest is in the simple count of bodies. If there are only ten thousand people there, Bush shrugs. If there are 200,000 people there, it might get a wee bit more attention. That's the only reason to go. So go.

 

This week's pathetic losers

The winner of this week's award for the most pathetic losers -- an award that has never been awarded before and may never be awarded again, despite the plethora of nominees screaming for attention -- is Two Towers Protest, dedicated to the idea that the title of the upcoming film "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers" is "hate speech" because people might get it confused with those other two towers, and that would be "insensitive."

I'm too tired to list all the other losers -- last night was another family-related late night. We took Cris's aunt to the airport and didn't get back until 12:30 in the morning. Then I would have slept in, but I had agreed to go to my friend Sara's house "on my way to zazen" at 5:40 a.m. to get a key. So I woke up just for that, went home and got back into bed, and slept til 10:00 a.m. It's a wonder I'm getting any meditation in at all this week.

Drizzle

Horrible drizzly weather for the last couple of days. The San Francisco summer drought isn't supposed to end like this, with weather that's more likely in July. It's supposed to end with a big rainstorm after a single hazy day.

This morning while sitting zazen, for some reason I got the idea to leave after the bell and before the "service" of prostrations and chanting -- something which is permitted but which I've never done. I tend to think that if you're going to be there and sit, you should join in the whole thing, including the work period afterward. But when the bell rang I got up and quickly booked on out of there. I had breakfast and read the paper, and after the phone woke Cris up, I went in to read the morning paper with her in bed. Then I got sleepy and took a delicious nap -- if you call sleeping from 8:30 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. a nap. Then I stayed home and worked on my novel. Cris was gardening and the cats hung out with her and didn't bother me, so I got another 1000 words done.

I just finished watching the end of game 4 of the World Series. I haven't seen a single game in its entirety.

End of an Eva

Sunday night at 11:15, I was just getting into bed, trying to calculate how tired I'd be the next morning having gotten up at 5:00 to do zazen. I was just starting to fall asleep when the phone rang. It was the Alzheimer's care facility in suburban Fairfield where Cris put her mother two and a half years ago. Cris's mother Eva, 79, had just died in her sleep.

I got up and dressed while Cris called her sisters who live in Oakland and suburban Walnut Creek, and the four of us went out to Fairfield, about sixty miles from San Francisco. We got there a little before 2:00 a.m. Of course the streets near the "home" were utterly quiet, so when we came into the facility we startled by the sight of a dozen elderly residents cheerfully milling about the lobby. "Why aren't they in bed?" exclaimed one of Cris's sisters. Cris said that staying up all night and walking around is a typical stage Alzherimer's patients go through; indeed, her own mother had gone through this phase during most of the first half of the 1990s.

We were led to the sparely furnished but comfortable room where Eva lay in bed on her back. Her mouth was open and her eyes were half open, giving her a pitiful countenance, a sight made even more pitiful when the covers were pulled back to reveal her emaciated body. Like many late-stage Alzheimer's patients, Eva had more or less starved to death as her ability to swallow had been erased by the advancing deterioration of her brain; her way was eased by hospice care and morphine for the last two months.

There was little for us to do but wait for the undertaker's van and sign a paper, but while we waited through the night for this simple act, we held vigil by Eva's body, talking alternately about the 15 years of her illness and what it had put us all through, and also about our own busy lives. Finally the man came and the sisters said their final goodbye, and we drove back, dropping the sisters off as we'd picked them up, and arriving home a little after 5:30 -- just about the time I would be going off to zazen. I didn't go off to zazen, though -- we both went right to bed, tuckered out.

So. Man. It's the end of an era that saw Cris and I, as well as her sisters, contributing enormous time and money to Eva's care, through a succession of housekeepers, live-in caregivers, and care facilities. Eva's illness had a huge effect on our lives -- as any serious long-term illness does on the lives of the family it strikes. First among these effects is probably the imperative for both Cris and I to stay in full-time jobs throughout the fourteen years since we returned from teaching in Japan, since we needed the money for Eva's care. This, and the need to stay close to the Bay Area, limited our mobility; we couldn't move to New York or Buenos Aires even if we could afford it (which, in the last couple of years, we could. Paradoxically, the worse Eva's illness got, the less it cost us, since it cost a lot less to keep her in care facilities than to employ full-time caregivers).

It's impossible to say how our lives might change now. We'll save the several hundred dollars a month we were still contributing to her care, but we'll still have to stay close to the Bay Area, for Cris still has an elderly aunt in San Francisco. So I don't expect any big lifestyle changes. But psychologically, it's a real high-water mark in our lives.

Weekend

Sitting here watching the uterly wacky second game of the World Series between the Giants and the Angels. There have been about ten home runs in the first three innings, plus a one-in-a-million play in which Giants pitcher Russ Ortiz accidentally hit the bat of the Angels batter on his shoulder as he ducked away from the pitch, with the ball dribbling fair, leading to a put-out at first. That was wild. Now they're in the 5th, and things have calmed down a little.

Jenny's performance Friday night was swell, and so was the showing of The Hidden Fortress at the Castro. I'd never seen it in a theater, and didn't even know it was wide screen. Wow! I also had the pleasure of introducing Dina, up from L.A., to the film.

I'm getting pretty good at telling people about losing my job, why that isn't a bad thing, how I'm making progress on my novel, and how we think we can handle the layoff for several months, giving me a chance to finish the book. It's a happy story so I don't mind saying it over and over.

Things to do and see

My friend Jenny Schaffer is among the performers in the All Women, All Improv show at 848 performance space in San Francisco at 8:00 pm tonight. Jenny is a talented physical performer with an amazing voice, when she cuts loose. She may well do so tonight.

The Castro Theater is in the middle of the same Kurosawa/Mifune film festival that was playing last month at the Film Forum in New York, and tomorrow they're showing one of my favorite films of all time, The Hidden Fortress. This film not only has everything -- comedy, drama, pathos, great samurai fights, singing and dancing -- but it was one of the main influences of the film Star Wars. I can't say enough about this great movie -- go see it!

Poet Kim Addonizio, a National Book Award finalist a couple years ago and a former regular contributor to my zine Frighten the Horses, is one of the folks producing and reading at a book party for Dorothy Parker's Elbow, a collection of literary work about tattoos. That's at 8:00 pm Saturday at the Edinburgh Castle Pub, 950 Geary St. near Polk, in San Francisco.

Finally, check out A Day in the Life of Africa (link courtesy of the highly useful and amusing Boing Boing.)

Correction

Yesterday I had the honor of hearing from Uberchick, who I mentioned in my entry on Sep. 24. She told me she was not the "gorgeous" but "boring straight girl" depicted in a set of posted photographs of some party she attended. There were two Asian females at that party, she informs me, and besides, she's not even straight. However, she did not point me to a picture that was of her, so she continues to be a woman of mystery to me and the rest of her readers, which is no doubt how she wants it. Hi Uberchick! Thanks for reading my blog, which is more boring than your blog.

I had a thought this morning about this blog. Like a huge number of other bloggers, I am now unemployed after laboring for some time in the high tech industry. Maybe I labored longer than most of them -- since 1993, when a lot of them were probably in the 10th grade -- but I'm pretty much in the same boat, except that they're all 26 and I'm 46.

Did you know that, if you're over 40 and you get laid off, they have to give you a sheet that shows the breakdown by job title and age of everyone who got hit in the same layoff and everyone who survived? So now I have this list that shows that, of the three people who got laid off in my department, two are over 40 (including me), two are female (not including me), and one is a manager (me). What this tiny sample shows, I don't know, except that everyone they laid off wasn't over 40 or female, in which case they probably would have been in trouble. What it doesn't show is that, of the three people laid off, two of them (including me) had high salaries. I know becase the other two people reported to me.

Anyway, on with my new life. What I was going to say, before that tangent, is that I had a thought, to wit: my blog is going to get a little repetitive now. Before, I could talk a little about work, and about writing my novel, and about being downtown, and about the trips I took for business, and about zazen. Now I can't write about any of those things except writing my novel and zazen. So bear with me. I'll try to find something to write about.

By the way, the title is 'Make Nice'

It's official: I'm not getting that job I interviewed for last week. The woman called today and we had a nice face-saving conversation all around. Which is so important in business.

That means I'm free for the rest of the year to finish my book. That makes me so happy. I've never had this kind of freedom in my life -- several weeks of severance, followed by months of unemployment. I feel like I won the lottery. I know that's not the way you're supposed to feel when you lose your job. Indeed, everyone I tell about the layoff has been perfectly willing to commiserate with me, until I tell them I look on it as a good thing. And maybe I won't feel this way for long. If Cris were to lose her job, that would certainly change my tune. But til then, you're looking at the latest and most grateful recipient of the Tech Bust Literary Prize for Halfway-Finished Novels.

TV land

I noticed Monday that one of the news channels, I forget whether it was MSNBC or Fox News, now has a slogan, or perhaps it's the title of their coverage of Bush's warmongering: "Countdown to Iraq." But maybe I'm just not very observant. I see a Google search on the phrase "Countdown to Iraq" gets a number of articles returned, most of them about Bush's speech to the UN in September, like this piece from the Guardian (U.K.).

I don't want anyone to think I'm just sitting around watching TV. I wrote another 750 words today, i.e. scene 21b, sitting in a cafe on Church St. Then I came back and exercized, and now I'm watching the ballgame.

Sunday night my friend Jenny, who is also one of the tech writers on the team I was just managing before I got laid off, and two of the other writers took me out to dinner. That was awful nice of them. Thanks guys! I'll miss you.

Please stand by

I don't know why, but sometimes when I edit an existing entry (to fix spelling errors, for instance), Blogger gets it mixed up with the previous entry. So now my entry titled "Whatever works" has been concatenated with the entry I did the day before. At least this snafu didn't make today's entry completely incomprehensible. I'm not going to try to fix it, either -- I've learned from experience that that just makes things worse.

Whatever works

To the list of unlikely images that help my meditation, add the sound of Kenny Lofton's single in the Giants' pennant-winning victory last night over the St. Louis Cardinals. This sound -- specifically, the replay of Jon Miller's call on KNBR, beginning in pleasureable anticipation, becoming sharp through the pitch and the batter's swing, then a rising tone recounting the hit that reaches right field, and finally a positively hysterical jumble of voices as David Bell scores the winning run from second -- I heard on the radio in the car on the way to zazen at 5:45 a.m. And far from exciting me or creating a distraction, it formed the calm foundation of one of the best 40 minutes of meditation I've had in weeks.

It's not like I sat there replaying the call in my head. Instead, I understood the essence of Miller's ability to form a clear, coherent narration of the events as they rapidly unfolded second-by-second. This ability -- man, it's not easy -- is rooted in a complete, alive attentiveness to the moment, as well as in a deep knowledge of the game which allows the announcer to anticipate, if only intuitively, what might happen. The announcer waits calmly, discerning what's happening in the relationship between pitcher and batter, baserunners and fielders, even when pitch after pitch it seems like nothing's happening. Then a ball is hit and action explodes and the good announcer is completely on top of the play. He doesn't freeze on the baserunner's name, he doesn't forget the terms that apply to the play-- like "line drive" or "the third base line" -- and injects precisely the amount of excitement appropriate to the moment.

Contrast this fluency with a Cubs color announcer I heard once while driving through Illinois. The Cubs pitcher struck out a batter at a dramatic moment, and instead of being able to describe what the pitcher had done to hoodwink the batter, the announcer merely exclaimed, "Man, what a pitch!" This on radio -- how opaque can you get?

So when I arrived at the zendo and sat down, I tried to sit with the baseball announcer's calm attentiveness. And it really worked. Railroad crossing signal, baseball announcer --whatever works.

Anti-war action opportunity

Much to my embarrassment, several large anti-war demonstrations have come and gone here in San Francisco, without me even being aware of them until they're on the evening news. Friday was the latest, when several hundred people blockaded, or attempted to blockade, the Federal Building. (SF Gate news story) That brought me fond memories of winter 1991, when me and about 300 other Queer Nation demonstrators filled out a whole side of the building in the demonstration to mark the beginning of the Gulf War. (Are we going to have to start calling it the First Gulf War, or Gulf War I?)

Now I've found a site with information on the next big demo, to take place Oct. 26. I'll hate to miss it, too -- I'm going to be out of town that day.

Don't piss them off

Jerry Falwell, the clown prince of the religious right, apologized yesterday, six days after "60 Minutes" broadcast Falwell's assertion that the prophet Muhammed was "a terrorist... a violent man, a man of war." After his comments led to fatal riots and a death decree for Falwell himself, the Baptist preacher retracted his remarks.

Of course he'll say anything -- it's his stock in trade, it made him famous, why should he stop now? It would be like expecting Darryl Strawberry to quit drugs and start a soup kitchen. What I want to know is, how can anybody take this guy seriously enough even to put him on television? Do the producers of "60 Minutes" really think he represents anybody but the most ignorant yahoos? Just look at him.

Progress report

I usually can't work at home. The cats demand too much attention, and it's hard to concentrate if Cris is also in the house. But this morning she left to visit her mother in Fairfield, and the cats were reasonably self-sufficient. So I got 1600 words done, the beginning of chapter 21. That feels great.

Now I'm off to HSZC to help with a garage sale. Yes, the zen center has garage sales too.

Sit still like a railroad crossing signal

Now that I'm unemployed -- here it is the end of the week, and I haven't heard back about that other job at the company, so I am assuming that job is not going to happen -- I have more time to do all those things I've been meaning to do. Fix the car, exercise, and work on my novel, for example. And, of course, to watch TV.

You know how there are certain things from your childhood that you remember incompletely? A vivid but partial memory of a song, a movie, a TV show, or maybe a place you visited. You saw it once and you remember some things clearly, but the context and especially the title are gone. I have a bunch of orphaned memories like this. Yesterday, through the magic of daytime cable TV, I cleared one of them up. I was dialing around on cable when I hit upon a movie called Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows (1968) -- an unremarkable light comedy about a bunch of nuns and their schoolgirl charges. The sequel to the 1966 hit "The Trouble with Angels," WAGTF is about several nuns taking a couple dozen hyperactive teenage girls across the country to a some religious conference in California. (In the 1960s most of the people in the U.S. still lived east of the Mississippi and thought of California as a strange, distant land, usually reached only by a long road trip. And you could still make a movie about nuns running a Catholic boarding school.) This is the kind of movie I used to go see as a little kid in Edwardsville, Ill., where we'd go see whatever was playing in the town's one movie theater.

Two scenes from this movie, the title and premise of which I otherwise forgot completely for decades, stuck in my mind my whole life. In one, Stella Stevens, who plays the young Vatican II-hip nun, faces down a not-very-menacing gang of bikers. And in the other, the bus nearly gets stuck on a railroad grade crossing as a train approaches.

The latter scene, for some reason, was particularly memorable for me. In this scene, the estrogen-laden bus approaches a rural grade crossing at night. All is completely quiet and peaceful. The driver -- the stereotyped batty, slightly masculine nun -- stops and looks both ways. Nothing's coming, so they start across. As they're right in the middle of the tracks, the warning signals suddenly start clanging and flashing, and the started driver jams on the brakes and the bus stalls out. Then we have the overly drawn-out scene where all the girls and nuns, except for the driver, evacuate the bus before the onrushing train reaches them, and the driver manages to get the bus started at the last moment, of course, and makes it across.

It was the beginning of the scene that stuck in my mind -- the utter quiet except for the bus gently stopping and then starting again, and then the startled reaction as the signals began blaring. And for more than thirty years I remembered that, whenever I drove across a railroad track, but forgot the whole rest of the movie.

So that was yesterday. This morning I was having a typically bad time sitting zazen, with a painful back and wandering attention and the usual drowsiness. Then just before the end, I remembered that scene from the movie: the peaceful rural grade crossing at night, a silent warning signal in the foreground of the frame. And -- it sounds funny --suddenly I realized the pacefulness and alertness of that signal, standing straight and tall, just watching and waiting for the moment it has to fulfill its purpose and warn of an approaching train. Then all my drowsiness left me and I sat straight and tall and attentively, just like that signal. I suddenly was able to do what I haven't been able to do well for a couple of weeks, focus on my breath.

For three breaths. Then the bell rang.

As if the war weren't enough

Aileen Wuornos, whose story has been told in countless articles as well as a documentary film and even an opera, was executed today by the state of Florida.

Wuornos became a symbol of many things for many people in the early 1990s. A white trash dyke who turned to truck stop prostitution and killed the johns whom (she said) abused her, Wuornos represented everything from justifiable female rage (to lesbian and anti-abuse activists) to "the first female serial killer" (to tabloid journalists).

Links:
- page on prisonactivist.org
- she gives up appeals, wants execution
- Wuornos is found competent to be executed
- a timeline from Orlando Sentinel

Death of a hummingbird

I went this morning for my one and only job interview, in this my new period of unemployment. My (now former) boss had steered me to this opening elsewhere in the company, and at first it sounded perfect for me. But by the time the interview ended I think the (putative) boss had decided otherwise. She was concerned that a job where I wasn't a manager would be a come-down for me. I wasn't very concerned about that, and tried to convince her of it; but I was also concerned that the job might have a technical component I couldn't handle.

In any case, walking out to my car I felt rather relieved. I thought, Whoopee, now I can work on my book for the rest of the year! All we have to do is watch our finances. I drove home along 101, noticing the layer of smog that had settled on the bay in the third day of this heat wave, and when I got to my block parked across the street. An hour later I got a parking ticket for parking during street cleaning. Got to watch those finances, yeah.

I was looking at the online form to file for unemployment when I wandered into the kitchen to get something to drink. There I noticed a mass of what looked like tiny dark shards on the floor, and in their midst, the carcass of what was clearly a hummingbird. Now an ex-hummingbird. What looked like shards of plastic were actually its tiny dark feathers. It must have mistakenly flown in the window and been snagged by one of our cats. Cris examined the carcass more carefully and declared the bird's neck had not been broken, and that the cat killed it by biting into its heart, the bloodthirsty little thing. That's her first bird kill, at least inside the house -- goodness knows how many she's snagged out there in the garden.

I felt bad for the hummingbird, as one is bound to -- they are such beautiful, useful creatures. But one can't blame the cat either -- in fact, I felt compelled to praise her. She was only fulfilling her role. It reminded me of the cat -- hardly more than a kitten -- belonging to an old girlfriend. One day it brought in a dead mouse and stood over it proudly. We duly praised the mighty hunter. Next day, another mouse -- not the same one, either. More praise. Next morning, having apparantly rousted all the mice, it showed up and presented us with a Snickers wrapper. What could we do but give the cat more praise -- which it accepted with pride and then went off and took a nap in the sunlight.