Jealously, Amazing Breasts, and Lesbian Street Fighting

If there's one thing I've learned over the years, it's to not be so darn jealous. Of women, particularly. If you read no further, male reader who loves women, at least know this: We have no control over a woman's body, it does not belong to us (though we often think or wish it did), and the big secret I'm here to tell you is that a woman's body lives a life quite independent of our own sexual desires. This would seem to be obvious, but the often most obvious things, like a clear sliding glass door, become apparent only after we crash through it and get sliced to pieces.

I learned all this the hard way, but I've always done things the hard way. If the shortest distance betwen two points is a straight line, my Dad used to say, I've got a genetic oddity (from my mother's side, of course) that sends me spinning in circles between those two points, and maybe, if I'm lucky, eventually I bump into one of them.

(more to come...WIP)

Anyone who say "Been there, done that" should be slapped.

Carter Family

Currently reading a biography of perhaps one of the greatest American groups of all time, the Original Carter Family. Book is called Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone, named after their first recorded song.

For those of you not familiar with them, they virutally invented country music (along with Jimmie Rogers) and wrote such famous tunes as "Can the Circle Be Unbroken"; "Wildwood Flower"; "Hello Stranger"; "Keep On The Sunny Side"; "You Are My Flower"; "My Dixie Darlin"; "Lonesome Valley" to name a few.

Modern country is heresy compared to this music. The biography is very good.

One of my worst sentences ever.

I cannot believe I actually wrote this, but it's so bad, I'm almost proud of it. It was in the documentation I wrote for the product of the company I work for.

"Deleting a Project Template if you no longer want the template to be available anymore."

OUCH! So bad it's almost poetic.

Caucasion Trash Rememberance #80

It's difficult to remember second grade, it was so long ago, but I do remember little snippets of my White Trash life as a child.

Much Deserved Smacks
When I was in second grade, I used to get called into the principal's office and get swatted with big wooden paddles, back when "corporal" punishment was allowed, with parental consent. They would have to call my Dad, and he would say, "Sure. Go ahead." Apparently, I needed it.

1st Kiss
When I started first grade, I remember liking a girl in the class. When the teacher left the room, I ran over to this her and tried to kiss her. She had long blond hair and wore a white poncho. She covered her head in resistance to my rain of kisses. I remembered thinking, you're not kissing her, you're kissing her poncho, dummy. Then the teacher walked back in. I was grabbed by the arm and shoved outside for being a pervert. I got sick and started walking to the nurses office, then threw up on the side walk. No one was around to see my delivery. I walked back to the classroom, and the teacher was outside looking at me. She saw I looked bad, then sent me back to the nurse's office, where I laid down for a while on the blue vinal beds they had there.

Lunch in a Hat
In second grade, I had gotten a bad haircut from my Mom, a really short buzz job, and so after crying for five hours, I decided to wear a green beanie cap on my head, the stretchy kind to school. Somehow I got in a fight, probably after being teased about the haircut, and some kid kicked my bag lunch down the hallway, shooting my lunch contents all over the cement. I scrambled to pick up my lunch pieces and put all the stuff in my hat. Everyone laughed when they saw my hair, and my pathetic little lunch in a hat. I put my hat lunch on the cupboard where all the other little brown bags were, and was embarrassed the rest of the day.

Pennies in the Pool
Once, I threw some pennies and rocks over the fence which surrounded the perimeter of our school into a man's swimming pool. He saw me, jumped the wall, and took me to the principal's office. I got swatted.

Father Rescues Daughter
Once during a recess in the second grade, we teased this girl named Stacy, who had big curly blond hair. We yelled and teased her till she cried. She didn't hold up well under pressure. This happened near the fence that surrounded our campus, and her father (they lived against the school fence) jumped over and picked her up. He then handed her over the fence, and jumped back himself, thus sucessfully rescuing his daughter. I saw her the next day and no one said anything, though some kids giggled at her.

Later in the year, during a night at the roller rink with our class, I held her hand as we roller skated around the rink and blew bubbles that would pop in our faces. Holding someone's hand while you skated meant you liked each other. Next time our class went to the roller rink, I asked again if she would skate with me and she said no, and that I shouldn't be a cry baby about it.

2nd Grade Fight Club
In my second grade class, there was this big fat kid who wore a watch. I remember that because no kids I knew wore a watch. It was a man's watch, and he had arms and hands that looks thick like a man's. He and I used to fight every recess, like it was a job we were clocking in to. We mostly wrestled, but sometimes he would punch me, and I'd punch him back as hard as I could. But because he was fat, my punches didn’t seem to do much, other than sort of thud softly into his body like I was hitting a matress. During class, he'd look at me from a cross the room, hold up his fat fist with the watch on on his wrist. This meant we were going to fight at recess. For some reason, no one ever stopped us, not even the "Yard Duties" - the fat ladies in polyester pants who watched us during recess.

Moving On Up
One day, before going to school during my second grade, I had cried to my mother to put me in another class. When I was in class that day, the principal (the guy who was familiar with my little white trash ass from swatting it so many times) came into the classroom, told me to get my stuff from my desk, and follow him. We walked to another class and it was a third grade class. I was afraid, yet later that day, I was ok. I had been moved up a grade.

Close Call
Once, at the end of recess during second grade, I kicked a soccer ball WAY up into the air as high as I could. Everything was in slow motion. As the ball went up, I watched it slowly fall down, headed right for one of the meanest, oldest Yard Duties on campus. She never knew what hit her. It bonked her on the head with a loud smack. She put her hand to her head and closed her eye and stood there frozen like a statue as all the little kids ran around past her to class. I stood watching her. Slowly, she fell to the ground. She was out. Later, in class, we heard the ambulance and it was a big to do. The next week, she was back, and I went up to her and asked her what happened. "Oh, some little boy hit me in the head with a ball." "On purpose?" I said, "I don't know she said." She never knew it was me, and I never told her.

Caucasion Trash Rememberance #101

I never got into a fight when I lived in Apple Valley, in the Mojave Desert, but I came close many times. Twice I almost fought Kelly Tyner, a guy who later became my friend when we both got into punk rock, but later became enemies again when I heard he didn't like me, and I had said if he ever came at me I'd hit him with a baseball bat. Kelly didn't like that.

I used to have to ride the bus to school, and because the desert is so big and we lived very far away from school, it took around 40 minutes to get to school. In high school I had made "sort of" friends with a biker kind of guy, Vince, who rode the bus with me and bragged about how he could get pot. He said he lived with his parents, but when I visited his house, it was always completely empty. And he never produced any pot.

One day, after riding home from school, Kelly was waiting at my bus stop, to fight me. Previously, I had asked a big friend of mine to harass Kelly because Kelly had cut in front of me in a water fountain line, and also gave shit to my American Indian friend, Clyde. Kelly never forgot that.

So Kelly was there waiting for me, saying he wanted to fight. I was afraid. Kelly was bigger than me, and still hadn't turned punk. He wore checker board slip-on Vans, O.P. pants, and a terry cloth shirt. Vince was with me. Vince was a biker guy, seemed tough, and was bigger than me. Vince wore a baseball T shirt, jeans, and boots. His wallet had a chain holding it to his pants.I forget what I was wearing, other than fear. Vince was smiling all the time at Kelly, punching his hands into his fist like he was excited there would be a fight. I was a smooth, fast talker back then and said I wanted no fight and that Kelly would kill me and I give up. I always wondered if Vince was on my side, and was perhaps going to jump Kelly if Kelly hit me. I lucked out, and Kelly let me go, after calling me the biggest pussy on the planet. I was ready to accept this designation.

Later, as I walked home from the bus stop, maybe a few days later, I felt things, little rocks or something, hit my legs as I walked. It stung. I didn't know what it was but then I realized something was flying at me from a house across the field which I had to walk by to get home. A few days later, I ventured out toward that house, with my big stick, and walked slowly. The little rocks would hit me, and I would stop, then continue walking. I eventually got close to the house and the rocks turned out to be BB's or some sort of ammo from a low powered gun. Kelly was there with his friend. They asked me, 'what are you going to do, hit us with your stick? We have a gun.'

I was scared, but turned my back and slowly started walking home. They stopped firing. Later, when punk rock became popular and I started a punk band, Kelly became my friend. I saw him get into many fights. We used to party together. Later we had a falling out, and I had to talk my way out of yet another fight with him. "But Kelly, we're friends! We don't need to fight. You'll kill me anyway."

Caucasion Trash Rememberance #81

The local kids in our neighborhood (we lived exactly on a U shaped street, exactly at the top of the U, which some say is bad Feng Shui) for some reason liked to hang out in front of our house, near the planter where there were some dark green shrubs. They smoked and just hung out there at night, dark figures in the night talking, occasionally laughing. "Hahahahahahaha" went the group. One of these kids names was Sundance. who later we had heard was killed when he fell out of a truck, like a frog exploded on the street. He was red-haired, chubby, sinister.

One night, someone in the group lit our shrubs on fire. My Dad called the cops. Later, a few days maybe, it became clear this was not a good thing to do. Sundance saw me on the street one day as I rode my bike. He ran up to me and held my handle bars and looked at me. "Why did your Dad call the cops on us? That's not right." I though he was going to hit me.

It wasn't long after the burning bush episode that my Dad began looking for a house in the Desert, far away from Rialto and San Bernardino, which is where we lived at the time. Eventually we did move to the Mojave Desert. There were very few houses when we moved there, just a lot of fields with tumble weeds, and definitely no one out side hanging around. Street blocks were around three to four times those in Rialto, and only had around 3 houses on them, if that. There were lots of dogs running around. I was afraid to go out in the Desert exploring, because when you got near a house, big packs of dogs would come out running and barking. Some dogs were wild. I began walking with a big stick.

Caucasion Trash Rememberance #65

Fireworks and the such were popular on the street I grew up on as a kid. Once, some of the local lads put a big firecracker in a frog, and blew it up, splaying the guts out all over the street. We were younger than the kids who did it, so we waited till everything had died down, and then walked over to examine the explosion. You could still see the general "frogness" of the frog, its shape, legs, big blown open belly. No one ever cleaned it up, and eventually as cars drove over it, there was a thin frog shape in the road for a while, until eventually flies and ants ate it up. Then the whole frog episode was officially over.

Caucasion Trash Rememberance #12

The people behind our house would, from time to time, have a huge barbeque with tons of people, a lot them who had arrived on motorcycles, did not wear shirts, had big bellies, and held cans of beer in their hands. The barbeque was in a huge pit in the ground, and often it was a pig being roasted. We could see this all happening from our backyard, at night, and my parents told us to stay inside when these events were happening.

The house we lived in had very dark, flimsy wood paneling.

Caucasion Trash Rememberance #45

When I was growing up, I remember a few things about the poor white trash neighborhood I grew up in.

Next door to us, one day while I was outside, I saw a little baby, in diapers, rummaging through the garbage can that had been knocked over, and upon finding a watermelon rind with a little of the red fruit left on it, began chowing down. He seemed quite nonchalant about the whole thing. Even though I was really young, it was at that point I thought, we live in a poor neighborhood.

Later some new people moved into that house and little watermelon trash baby was gone. It was a Mexican family, and this one guy from time to time would ask me and my brother in a Speedy Gonzales voice, "Hey, is your Daddy a preacher? He got the little dog in the back of his car with the little head that goes up and down? Is your Daddy a preacher?"

I never knew what the hell he meant or why he asked. Though, my brother and I would perfect imitating his accent and ask ourselves this same question from time to time: "Your daddy a preacher??"

Caucasian Refuse Lad

I have been wondering a lot lately if I am White Trash or not. I am not ever sure what that term really means, but it's like some bad art: you know it when you see it, but it's hard to explain why or what it is. White Trash just is.

Courtney Love is white trash, but I don't think Brittany Spears is. Christina Aquilera is Trash, but she's not 100% white. She's more like trashy Latina tart. Would Sheryl Crow be white trash? I like her a lot, but I'm afraid she is. Rosie O' Donnel? Lesbian White trash. Eminem? Oh yes.

(In defense of Sheryl, whom I love, which makes me a Caucasian refuse lad, she does manage to represent pretty accurately a White Trash sensibility, in an artistic form, which transcends White Trash-ess. John Cougar Mellencamp? He sentimentalizes, glorifies, romanticizes White Trash, and he of course, is White Trash.)

Going by this, then we could say white Trash has to do with being dirty or gaudy, in bad tastes, and not caring, or thinking it marks you as unique and interesting.

I have been hunting for apartments lately, and though I resisted, I have looked at some places that are in those large apartment rows where hundreds of complexes sit side by side. It's depressing. A lot of White Trash out there. I admit, I am afraid that if I rent there, then I become White Trash again - if I ever was White Trash. I walk through these places internally thinking, people must look at this man and think, ah, yes, he is one of us.

Some White Trash characteristics:

+ Not wealthy, though some people with money are White Trash, if they have a motor boat they hitch up to their truck and put a master craft sticker on their back windshield and drive to rivers or deltas to "party" all weekend then come home all sunburned, hung over, and maybe with a black eye or some new venereal disease.

+ Lives in an apartment in a large complex.

+ Loud in public places. I mean loud as in, they make enough noise so other people can hear them, so they intrude on the sound space of those around them, and look at the people they know they are disturbing to see if they are being noticed. This applied also to clothing, cars, anything that makes a lot of noise because the Trash Person wants to be noticed, even if it is with scorn.

+ Men: Walk around the neighborhood by their house without a shirt, perhaps no shoes, maybe holding a can of beer.

+ Women: Wear short shorts (regardless of weight) and tube tops and blue eye liner.

+ Has or attends a lot of barbeques.

+ Has cable TV and really, really is considering getting satellite or digital cable.

+ Listens to, likes, and buys CD's of modern pop-country music.

+ Has a great number of clever stickers on their car.

Next Post: More on why I might be pure White Trash.

Sexuality, Gender, and Story Structure
(Or, I don't mean to get all Freudian on ya.)

There are many who would say that the structure of story (and art for that mater) is not organic; rather, like all social entitites, it is constructured, not natural, not essential, but artificial (artifice) and bears the ideological/political/religious imprint of its creator.

But is not the basic structure of story organic in the sense that it imitates not only the "structure" of our life (that is, a beginning, middle, and and end) but also perhaps our sexuality, and I mean sexuality from a rather crude, reproductive sense. It could be argued (notice the passive tense here because I'm not sure if I buy this - yet) that the way we have traditionaly thought of story structure is really bases upon the male orgasm.

I'm sure some feminist theory has pointed this out. And, it's not too far from Derrida's "phallogocentricism." Which writer of fiction hasn't seen one of those diagrams of fiction which charts the "rising action" and "climax" and "denoument"?

Two women overheard:
"Well, do you like him?"
"I don't know."
"C'mon, what do you mean you don't know."
"I don't know, he's kind of cute."
"And?"
"We'll, he makes pretty good money."
"Yeah, go on."
"He's pretty intertextual."
"Oh? really?
"Last night, I mean, he showed me, we ... Well, let's just say he's very phallocentric."
"Does he have a friend?"
"Best ding an sich I've ever seen.And he knows how to use it."
"Ohhhh. He can deconstruct me ANY time."

Simple/Simplistic Story Formulas in Media

I've been thinking how simple of a formula, a structure, you see in some TV shows.

In VH1's "Behind the Music," the structure is very basic:
+ Hardworking talented youth with lot's of drive, and gumption.
+ Rise to stardom after working hard.
+ Lot's of fame and money and fast life
+ Drugs, Emotional Problems
+ Hitting Bottom (sometimes more than once, sometimes results in death)
+ Rehab
+ Dealing with life in the aftermath

It migth even be simpler than that:
+ Rise
+ Fall
+ Wisened but Damaged Redemption

Another reality show that features violent, horrible disasters and crashes:
+ Wild behavior (diving, driving, parachuting, motorcycles, partying, etc)
+ Violent, horrible crash where a body is maimed and flung and thrased like a rag doll, caught on tape
+ Person lives to tell about it - changed person. Person never dies - too bleak!

Skyline to Sea 50K

I am happy to report that I survived the Skyline to the Sea Ultra Marathon: 50K, or 31 miles, 5800 feet of vertical ascent. I made the run in 6 hours and 6 minutes. It was a very hard run. But, I jumped the hurdle of running farther than a marathon. Before you run a marathon, you have the hurdle of running over 20 miles. After you run a marathon, everything past 26.2 miles is unknown territory, terra incognita. So the way to reach new levels is to gain new perspective by doing longer distances. After you run 31 miles, then 26 does not seem so long. Just like how, after you run 13 miles, 6 miles seems like a warm up.

Things I learned from running this race:
+ Never draw conclusions. Once you draw a conclusion about your abilities, or the future for that matter, you body will follow suit. For example, if you think you are done and can't run further, then you body will stop moving. If you think 31 miles is too far, then it IS too far. If you think it's do-able, then it is. This is called re-thinking pain and suffering.

+ The longer the race, the slower you should start. The rule is, the first third should be slower than the second third, and the second third should be slower than the third third. The last third you go all out. If you go out too hard in the first third, then the second and third thirds are pure suffering. Once you spend your reserves, your legs no longer work. I hit my wall at mile 12, and still has 18 more miles and around 3000ft of climb to go. I definitely hallucinated, but not too much. Just your usual 'every stick looks like s snake, every stump looks like a human' type hallucinations.

+ In other words, I went out way too fast on this race. My last 15 miles was hell, but a hell I endured.

As Virgil says in The Aenid:
"The descent to Avernus is easy; the gates of Pluto stands open night and day; but to retrace one's steps and return to the upper air, that is the toil, that is the difficulty."

Knowing this is one thing; actually following this advice is an entirely different story. "Controlled disclosure" is a rule for writing fiction as well as endurance running, but a difficult principle to put into practice.

+ Ultra marathoners are a different breed than regular marathoners. Regular marathoners are all worried about time and pace and what their final "score" will be. The competition is overt, egotistical, palpable. Ultra marathoners are in it for the beauty, the endurance, the race against the trail rather than other runners. I was amazed at how nice and encouraging all the runners were at this race. As I passed people heading back after a turn around, almost every single runner said a kind word to me, like "Good Job," or "Way to go." It felt very positive and communal, perhaps because this kind of racing requires a lot of effort and mental courage, and people in the races know that "human spirit" counts for a lot.

+ A 50K is to ultra marathons what a 10K is to a regular marathon. What this means is that, the 50K, though it sounds really hard (and is really hard) it's the bottom of the "Ultra" category. After the 50K, there is the 50 miler, then the 100 miler. Unfathomable distances, yet, distance and endurance is quite relative. Success depends on how you conserve energy.

+ Endurance running is a marriage of physical stamina, mental discipline, and energy conservation.

+ Every race is, at the end of the day, a race against yourself. When you run against others, all your training and wisdom goes out the door. You worry about how "good" other runners are, whether or not you can "beat" (ouch) other people. When you run against yourself, you leave your ego behind and enjoy yourself. When you are less concerned about the person next to you, you can begin to experience what it means to compete against your desire to beat other people.

(Of course, I only know this know because it's exactly what I did NOT do on Saturday.)

I am not sure why exactly, but when ever I hear some work, some film, book, story, etc., praised as championing the "human spirit," I bristle.
What it is, I do not know, but this human spirit seems like a cheap proxy for God. Modern humanism, in its secular wisdom, is afraid to speak of God and instead, invents some special force inside us all, that is the human spirit. Western invidualism at its worst and finest.

Finger Buffer: Worries of a High tech Worker

I don't know if this ever happens to you, but it worries me a little.

Often when I am writing on the computer, I will select text, and press CTRL + C to copy the text.

This is OK, so far.

But then, if I don't paste that text right away (CTRL + V), it feels like whatever it was I copied is still in my hand somehow, maybe in my finger. If I walk away from my desk, it's a if I am taking that text with me, in some mysterious "finger buffer." My finger wants to paste the text, does not like having to hold this data for too long.

We are becoming androids, and we dream of electric ladies.

Il faut que changer la ville

Just when things seem to be normal, at the moment when life seems to have taken a recognizable form, when all our mundane patterns of behavior, daily rituals, commplance habits and bland routines seem to have settled into relative normalcy, disaster will strike. It pays to be cautious when the calm of everyday life washes over us like waters from the river Lethe, carrying us away into reassurance that Ah, things have finally settled. Just when you think you got things down, things figured out, life managed and under control, the world is preparing to shake you up.

Just finished Paul Auster's City of Glass. I have to say this is a book that has rearranged my brain and made me rethink fiction. It's story, but it's more than story - boundaries of author and character have blurred, narrative is not necessarily concerned with verisimilitude. It's the sort of book that enters your head, your dreams, but not pleasantly, like a Disney "triumph of the innocent human spirit" movie. So different is the way of looking at the world and representing it that the way I think becomes jarred open, my habits of thoughts and the way I see the world has been disturbed. He has dared to disturbed the universe, and given me new hope in the power of writing to create and change a world.