Desert Sun

Been spending a week in Palm Desert, the low desert of Southern California, and the average temperature has been around 109-110, with some days hitting 115 F. But I am liking it, though it gets a little oppressive. Last night at 10:00 pm it was 94 degrees. Brings back the days of my youth growing up in the dry hot arid landscape of no green and all rocks and dirt.

Went on a nice hike syesterday with Sister Ruth and Tarah, a 6 hour round trip hike to the summit of Mount San Jacinto, which hits just over 10,000 feet. Took the crazy rotating Palm Springs Sky Tram that climbs almost vertically up the side of the mountain and plops you down at 8000 feet. First time hiking at that altitude, and i liked it. Would love to try running at high atlitudes, because it really makes your lungs work hard. You have to rest more often and eat and drink more, and gradully adjust to the thinner air. Past 9000 your head gets a little loopy.

Here's an idea of what the view looks like from the top.

My First Reply to My Web Log

Actual email from an actual reader! Yay!

"Does blog stand for 'pathetic narcissistic ramblings of a bad writer who can't get published anywhere else and so has to put up his own page?' Or maybe it just stands for 'do not read this, this is crap.' "

R. Ferrik

Thanks, Mr. Ferrik!

I'd probably go with answer B.

Life on 5th Street, #1

Living on 5th street was a time of stress for me, a dark period, but eventually became a time of liberation. It was a strange time. I had finally exhuasted my college career, had two degrees, and the fresh new assignment of becoming an adult and getting a job, something I had dreaded for a long time, as if it were death.

College, for all the fun, partying, girls and countless good times, was a life of stasis, an intellectual and social paralysis. Even though it was in many respects a "life of the mind" and intellectual stimulation, in retrospect, it was easy, a safety net that allowed me to prolong the inevitable move into adulthood. The cocoon-womb of college life, an extension of childhood. Moving to 5th street helped break the umblical chord that had been tightening around my neck for years.

So, I got an apartment downtown San Jose, on 5th Street, not even a block from where I was to teach, and where I had spent the last 7 years educating myself in English literature. Childhood and young adulthood were now both officially over.

Life downtown was always a daunting experience; it always made you confront life in the face, no hiding from anything. If you hid, life found you. Two times I helped disabled men in wheelchairs after they had fallen. One was a Chinese man who had been side-swiped by a car making a fast right turn. I was afraid to deal with it, having long had a fear of having to help at the scene of a traffic accident and have to see blood and body parts. But when this happened I was close and saw the whole thing and without thinking just ran out there to where he lay crying on the ground in the middle of the street. Another man helped me pick him up. We both picked up the fallen man's rubbery, stiff body and place it into his chair and then wheel him back to the sidewalk. I was still in school then. I got a court document in the mail asking me to describe what I saw and felt good writing how the driver was some idiot young guy driving too fast for the street corner.

The other time I helped a fallen man in a wheel chair was when I had graduated and was teaching. I had been seeing this American Indian man in a wheelchair who was always drunk and who stunk like the worst BO you could imagine, babbling for change as you passed by him. I saw him all over the place an avoided him, because the closer you got to him he would yell in a garbled, slowed down rant asking for money. Usually he held a beer in a brown bag, or some wine. Sometimes he grabbed out to clutch your arm if he could get it.

This time I was walking home from my office, and it was late in the day, and not many people were around. And there he was, this time out of his chair, pants down, genitals exposed, writhing on the ground, yelling something. His legs were paralyzed and he was blasted drunk, so he could not get up. His skin was blackened dirty. I was going to avoid him but could not walk away from this. I went to help him and just like last time, another man was there and assisted me. We held our noses and picked him up and put him back, tried without touching him too much, helped him get his pants back on. We got him situated best we could, and both of us pulled a few bucks from our pockets, and laid them down in his lap. We didn't look at each other. The Indian man's yelling had subsided to a sort of quiet moan. We both walked away in separate directions. I went back to my place on 5th street.

Pants on Fire

Let's see..which is worse: A president who fools around with a chubby intern in the oval office and lies about it? (Oh the horror!) Or a president who starts a war and ruins our nation's credibility and kills thousands of people and detablizes the world, and lies about the reason he started the war in the first place?

(From an article on CNN online by John Dean)

Readers may not recall exactly what President Bush said about weapons of mass destruction; I certainly didn't. Thus, I have compiled these statements below. In reviewing them, I saw that he had, indeed, been as explicit and declarative as I had recalled.

Bush's statements, in chronological order, were:

"Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons."

United Nations address, September 12, 2002

"Iraq has stockpiled biological and chemical weapons, and is rebuilding the facilities used to make more of those weapons."

"We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons -- the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have."

Radio address, October 5, 2002

"The Iraqi regime . . . possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons."

"We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas."

"We've also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVS for missions targeting the United States."

"The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his "nuclear mujahideen" -- his nuclear holy warriors. Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at sites that have been part of its nuclear program in the past. Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons."

Cincinnati, Ohio speech, October 7, 2002

"Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent."

State of the Union Address, January 28, 2003

"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."

Address to the nation, March 17, 2003

We Need More People in the World Like This

A few people I admire, because they do not fear criticizing the insane Bush regime:

Al Franken, who has just written a book that will refreshingly counter the right-wing dominated media, "LIES And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them...A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right."

Molly Ivans, becasue she too is one of the few out there who has the balls to criticize Bush in the mainstream media: Bushwhacked: Life in George Bush's America.

Natalie Maines: I love you, and not just because you are cute and a sexy country western singer, but because, YOU GOT BALLS BABE and you critcized Bush. I may even buy a CD of theirs, not for their music but just to support them.

Cintra Wilson Got Ball

Now here's a gal who tells it like it is and sometimes like it ain't. Cintra Wilson.

Problems with WhiteTrash Studies

The problem with writing about and studying white trash-ness & things that deal with poor, uneducated white people, is that people either think you're being boringly ironic, or unecessarily cruel. But, I refuse to let that stop me. I am earnest and sincere, and wish to know and study the thing I partly am. Critique of White Trash studies is in itself a haughty, classist pose; too, it is a rejection of intellectual, artistic inquiry. In fact, you will often find many people bristling when you endeavour to study anything, when you wish to analyze and discover and tear apart the layers of surfaces and discover the shapes of things. But this should not stop you. Keep going and persist in your follies and studies.

Fidelity To Fact in the Memoir: The Necessity of Reshaping Recollected Emotions

I'm concerned with the conflict between fidelity to the facts and fidelity to emotion when writing - emotions recollected in the *relative* tranquility of the present. How to balance these conflicting fidelities? Render as factual an account as posible of the facts? Or, be true to your emotional memory?. These two aims will fight each other, often without a winner, resulting in a bloody battle where everyone is ends up injured, a loser. In both cases, you are attempting in frustration and futility to capture the truth of something. You try so hard to find out what really happened and what you really felt at a given point in the past, and you find this is like trying to catch the wind or step on your own shadow.

In many cases it's OK and perhaps necessary to reshape facts and events, to give them some sort of form, maybe even mess with chronology (perhaps even impossible not to), if 1) this is acknowledged and the reader knows you may be playing with the truth, accepts the fact that a story is not the same thing as pure recounting of the facts and participates in a 'willing suspension of disbelief' ; and 2) it adds to the artistic design of your piece.

Often, the facts as they happen in the past are barely coherent because we are too much alive (or maybe unconscious) in them to be so reflective. When the "facts" occur we are in a sense part of that fact, inseparable from it. As we look at them now, we may not remember them exactly as they happened, and the way things really happened may not add to a particular truth we are trying to convey right now with our wiser self. These past events may have been chaotic, irrational, and may even lack the form needed to be understandable. The very process of remembering facts renders the actual events amorphous, inchoate. So, reshaping an account of the past to fit the current state of your own artistic imagination Now might not only be all right, but even necessary to achieve the truth of the memory. I don't mean lie, as we're used to thinking of the word as meaning a deceitful deception, but recreate the past in a way that leads to understanding. In a court of law, we may be guilty of perjury, but in the memoir, we might have found a deeper truth.

In this process, it might very well be necessary to fictionalize yourself, mythologize who you are. Not romanticize, mind you, but see yourself as a character. Your own face as you conceive of it is a mask, the mask of a character you can control. You see now the face of a young child you were in grade school, soft, pudgy, dirty, flittering a 100 different emotions in the course of an hour. You see the face of you as a teenager, a wife, a husband, a father, a teacher. A nearly endless gallery of masks to choose from. All yours, under your control, to use as you see necessary.

The Me I look back upont rarely resembles me now, so that self is already a fiction. When I write about him, he is a character. Often in journals I will use myself as a character and follow certain paths to their conclusion to imagine how I might have turned out had I made other choices. I may be teetering in the edge of fiction, but this power to create liberates him from his own fate.

Desire

Desire seems like a balloon filled with an endless supply of water and a 100 openings that are nearly impossible to close all at one time.

Men, Fish, Women, Bicycles

I always though Gloria Steinem came up with this quote, but apparently it was another women:
"A woman needs a fish like a fish needs a bicycle."

I always thought it was Gertrude Stein.