26.2 on Sunday
 
SF Chronicle Marathon on Sunday. Will run with Mimi and Berta, aka, Meems and Berta Head. Ran this one two years ago as my first, and it was pretty cool. Ran with Tom Miller, who I never see any more. We ran a 8:30 pace most of the way and made it in 3:38.  It's been a while since I've run 26.2 - the farthest distance I've gone this year has been 21. Recently, running my LSD at around 15-18. But, I have a good base of around 50 a week. M and B want to run at 9:00, just for the discipline of it all, which is a really good idea. The biggest problem in any long distance race is going out too fast, not conserving, and losing your energy. So, by running slow at 9's (a 4 hour marathon), we'll practice the discipline of saving ourselves, conserving energy, and enjoying the distance without the "I must run fast" mentality - which can ruin any race.  I plan to run with the girls and will see how I feel at around 18-20, which is around Haight Street, after a gradual climb thru Golden Gate Park. If I feel good then, I will move faster and speed up for a better time.

Addicted to the Afterlife

It is the nature of addiction (or at least the mind-forged manacles variety I am familiar with) for the addictee to desire a reward: you suffer, and the only way you move beyond the suffering (present moment) is to imagine a reward that will make the suffering go away. In other words, while you suffer you imagine some thing or experience that will give you pleasure in the future. The problem is that you imagine pain to be eternal and unending and wish that pleasure could be the same, but you fail to realize that both pain and suffering are temporal. Because of this, the twin desire to both escape pain and to seek pleasure is futile and can only end in disappointment because the goal will never ultimately be attained.

The way a pleasure reward becomes an addiction is when, through some sort of mental self trickery, you convince yourself (your mind convinces itself) that the only way to endure pain is through the belief - indeed, faith - that you will get a reward when the suffering is over.

For example, when I run these days, I have a nice little addiction to sports drinks - Gatorade usually, but it could be any number of sugared-out sports drinks packed with sugars and potassium and electrolytes (salts). True, for the amount of running I do (50+ miles a week) I need physically these drinks to rehydrate. But, mentally - and long distance running is as much about mental discipline as it is physical conditioning - I have told myself that I deserve a sports drink when I am done. I deserve it - it is my due, I have suffered and now I get my reward for being a good doggy. As I run, I continually imagine how good the drink will taste and because is it in fact an intense pleasure to drink a bottle of Gatorade after a long run, I spend a good time of my run wishing it was over so I could get to that pleasure experience at the end.

So too, I believe, does a person who sees this life as suffering and painful and hard create a similar attachment to the afterlife - Heaven, in other words. The relgionist who believes that all this world is a fallen, damaged sham ruined by our inherent sinful nature, uses the promise of the afterlife to endure and suffer through this world. Heaven is the reward at the end of suffering, due recompense for time served, the end reward for making it through the test of living through this mortal coil we know as life on earth. So, all experiences and feelings and goals and disappointments here and now are not fully, consciously experienced because we are in a hurry to get them over with so we can get on to the bliss of Heaven,

Thus a person can become addicted to the afterlife, thinking and speaking and dreaming about notions and visions of heaven (which is hard to imagine physically), a blissed out state where there is no suffering, no pain, no hardship - only the Glory of God making everything alright, like it was perhaps in the womb, or even that moment of time (eternity in an hour?) just before the sperm hit the egg and found its purchase, before little zygotes did their job, before cell division and all that scientific mumbo jumbo - it is possible this person I call me had an existence and state of being then? In the end, as Eliot said, is our beginning. Thoughts of the afterlife become a drug when it is used to blot out the naked lunch of existence that is right there before us everyday: the snapshot of reality as it simulteneously grows and decays before our very eyes, including this body we inhabit.

Dystopian Dream #34: Job Police Control Your Career

It was one of those dreams where you aren't so much there as you are there watching, like being at a movie, or at least on the set during filming as the action unfolds. Some dystopian future time, sci-fi, an older late middle aged woman with a thin face and medium length black hair safe and happy in her career (doctor?) a job she loved and was comfortable in and proud of - then in come the Police, perhaps the Job Police, the strong arm of the totalitarian state/regime, these police quite casually and cruelly inform her that her career is over - and so they throw her out of her current occupation, yank her out, and transform her through some unknown power or technology into some highly specialized futuristic hooker. I remember her face, the depressing look of shock and disappointment and dread - a film extreme close up and freeze on her face.  Her new career require that she serve as prostitute for a priest, though the fat, well manicured and short haired chubby priest is fully clothed. She wears seductive clothes and on her left hand she wears a huge over size stiff black plastic glove - perhaps the size of her head. She must get as close as she can to touching him but must not, and all the while the priest giggles and gasps distgustingly as he is titillated.  We can see by her face she knows what she must do but is clearly unhappy.

Caucasian Trash Remembrance #89: A Young Thug's Life

When I had been moved up to the 3rd grade at Preston Elementary School in Rialto, CA, I was still younger than everyone else but somehow large enough to be accepted by my peers. Preston was not an easy school, though at the time it seemed normal enough. Fights were routine. I was constantly in little schoolyard brawls. I once saw a tall black girl beat the shit out of some white kid who thought he could boss her around and steal a game of tether ball from her. She whacked him so hard his little white faced turned red, and blood poured from his nose. The lanky strong black girly barely broke a sweat. Fights at Preston didn't discriminate between races or genders. Everyone was game, everyone was involved. 

When I started the 4th grade I had become good friends with a boy named Charles, a smooth talking and sharp dressing black kid. I recall he used to wear a colorful, florid looking paisly dress shirt and purple velvetly pants, like some toddler version of Jimi Hendrix. His appearance was a vivid contrast to mine: torn T shirt and green toughskin pants with the knees torn out and patched over with those cheap, iron-on patches. But I'd rip through those, and my mom would iron on another patch, so the knees of my pants were this stacked layer of torn pathches, my own white knees poking through.

Charles took me under his wings for some reason, and gave me schoolyard cred so I generally avioded getting whacked by other kids.  For some reason I tried to test Charles and got too big for my torn britches when I tried to scuffle with him, just to see who was tougher. He nonchalantly gave me a hard smack to the nose to let me know he was tougher than me. Bleeding from the nose like that taught me my lesson, established the hierarchy, and we we're cool. After that minor miscalculation, he would watch out for me, and if he needed backup, I'd come a running, ready to brawl.

It was this period of my childhood that I became a small time criminal, a scrappy young thug. It was during this time I first saw a picture of a naked lady, in a dirty torn up collection of Playboys and Penthouses Charles had shown me hidden out in the back yard of his uncles house. It was undescribably exciting to see those adult breasts, sensing somehow that these naked white pear shapes on an adult woman's chest were promise of greater things to come in life. But I really had no idea what the hell it was all for, other than it made me excited.

This was also the time in my young thug's life that I began to shoplift and smoke. For reasons unknown, we started a stealing cigarettes, dirty magazines, candy, even cigars and hiding them in a wood pile behind this State Farm Insurance company, which was located on the edge of a large open field a few miles from my house. After school we'd go to the 7-11 and steal cigs and try smoking them. I remember once putting pipe tobacco in my mouth thinking it was chewing tobacco and gagging. We smoked for weeks until the man who worked in the State Farm office discovered us out and told us "The shows over; get out of here." Our huge pile of stolen cigarettes was gone for good.

That's when we moved on from lifting small potatoes like cigarettes to stealing spray paint. We'd get the paint cans and head out behind building in the shopping center and spray paint our names and every dirty word we could think of: fuck, shit, pussy, asshole, and so on. Charles knew most of the words; I had heard of some. We also began stealing glue for model airplanes and tried sniffing that. Open the tube of glue, squeeze some out, put it into a paper bag, squeeze the tube some more and then hold the bag to your nose. This was much better than smoking, though it gave us a headache.

As the days of crime went on, I eventually fell out of grace with Charles for some reason I can't remember and I was somehow no longer part of his crew. I can't really remember but it might have been the fact that I had gotten in a fight with a friend of his and Charles didn't like that. We were still friends, but at a distance. I remained friends with a few other boys from the original crew and we continued to steal gum, candy, and sometimes cigarettes, sometimes more glue.

The moment of reckoning came when I was driving with my family one weekend and for some reason my Dad chose to drive behind the buildings where months ago I had spray painted my name on the wall. I was mortified and terrified they would all see my name. As we approached the walls where I had painted my name, I began to brace myself for the discovery and began working up an excuse. My mind froze and I imagined myself being sent to jail or something like juvenile hall. But for some reason, the paint had faded, my name was barely visible, and though you could make out the bad words like pussy and fuck and asshole, my name was no longer clear. Perhaps someone else had painted over it. I was so relieved and happy that I reounced any future life or crime.

So I stopped stealing and smoking, and just went onto other things, like playing soccer and trying  to kiss girls or lift their skirts - or look under them. I still got in fights, but somehow I was losing my edge and becoming more serious and started avoiding fights altogether. I played soccer and began to do better in my classes. I even started liking one of my teachers. I began to soften and lost many fights and started playing more sports. I was a changed boy.

Long Day's Journey into the Past
 
 
I am still kind of tripping and feeling apprehensive about my High School Reunion (21 year), but I suppose it's an important rite of passage. Why the hell does that one place in time have to have so much of an influence upon a person's entire life?? Those years and the memories of them lurk around, hover and brood like some rough beast in the back of the mind, trying forever to influence my identity - grand mal delusions of a partying, rock star, drug taking hedonist, a la wanna be Lizard King. In truth, I was more like a white trash, low rent idealistic infant with tendencies toward anarchy and nihilism. Was it the desert itself? The bleak hot landscape and open skies and dirt and partying and desperate hormones driving me towards self annihilation? Everything so melodramatic and maudlin, so out of proportion, every day so vivid and meaningful and serious and exaggerated.
 
It's like they say, when we are super young, maybe two or so, much of the personality is formed by the earliest of impressions: the parents, the room you lay in with your crib, the food, the sound your parents make, the relative calm and attention (or lack of) they give you, the quality of life and care and attention, etc. This forms the little mind, the little babe's ego, sense of self, personality. I believe High School is the second major Ego crucible, where upon this budding consciousness busts out its own mother-father cocoon and finally sees itself, and for the first time realize we are on a stage, strutting and fretting our stuff, realizing we indeed inhabit a character and a role and it's fun and wild, though often a little embarrassing.
 
So, this reunion,this revisiting of the past is the Journey Into Hell myth, like Odysseus and Aeneas did (and to an extent, Orpheus too, thought slightly different): you go back to the past (Hell) and make peace with all the shades and phantasms (memories) and put them to rest because you realize how much they were intruding upon the present, as if - as if - these memories of who you were were actually real. Maybe then the Ego can go 'pop' a second time and adulthood can finally settle in. A new self can emerge, and the self from childhood slip down into Hell where it belongs.  The child dies off, and the larger Self burgeons.  Maybe the child is the father to man, but it's a child only in memory, long gone away.
 

What is the human spirit anyway?
 
I ask this question, yet I know I cannot fully answer this in Christian terms, which is my only religious tradition and background, me, permanently lapsed Catholic. One could explain the spirit of humans in Christian terms, the spark of divinity in us all that is our Soul, our alma that will outlast our mortal shells that temporarily house this soul until we die and crumble to earthy dust, food for worms. Too unbearable I think for the sad primitive psychology of humans, for the child, of the child part of us we retain, the memory of a more happy time in our childhood, the wish that our parents would never have to die, but then they do and we are left looking skyward, beyondward, for something more powerful than us that will somehow resolve the dilemma of the impending eternal darkness that awaits us upon death. We need hope, could not live without it, could not establish moral systems without a notion of the good, the ideal, a pure form. There must be something about all of this buzzing blooming mess we perceive through our conscious minds that we can call eternal, beyond just what we can see and measure, indeed, something we can have faith in. We are like children in this sense-conscious and aware but not really, in that we see limits, darkness beyond the curtains, serious unknowns, not only do we see as through a glass darkly, we know we have these limitations, so we cry out for something. Give us hope, because we don’t have it ourselves.

Unicators of the World, Unite

A term that I have been working with for the past few years is the verb "unicate" - a term I coined which describes a pernicious but omnipresent mode of verbal communication whereby one person talks incessantly without regard for the poor, hapless receptor of their verbal outpouring. In other words, 'to unicate' means to talk AT someone rather than WITH someone. Whereas in COMMunication there is a passing back and forth of some kind of meaningful exchange, in UNIcation one person unloads word after word after sentence after paragraph of language without letting the other person respond.

The Unicator employs language as a unidirectional spewing forth of sounds that aren't meant for reponse or reflexion or give and take but rather force the listener to sit there and be assaulted by a barrage of words. The person who listens to a Unicator functions like a sidewalk upon which a bird drops its areal steamy dung. Any sort of attempt to circumvent or stop the assault is simply ignored, while the Unicator keeps on talking. When the listener tries to interrupt, the Unicator just keeps on plowing over with Words, Words, Words, Words...

My earliest memories of unication come from my father, a unicator exemplar, perhaps unmatched in his powerhouse unicatory skills. I remember waking up as a child to a sound, a loud, booming, muffled sound from beyond my bedroom walls, pounding the atmosphere, reveberating the walls - this sound was the voice of my father: loud, unceasing, talking talking talking, my mom there listening, and to what? Conversations with my father had been and still are an act of listening. You listen to what the Unicator says, and he has a lot to say. You listen to long explanations of usually unsolicited information, details about technology, history, inane news stories, stories of the Unicator's past, societal explanations, complaints, arguments, rants, and so on.

Unicating is an act of self absorption, a sounding out of one's own ideas on some unsuspecting sap, a taking hostage of some innocent that is made to listen to whatever happens to be rolling around in the Unicator's head, a showing off, a means of taking control of a situation (a one on one, or a group) or exercising control to boost the Unicator's ego, or perhaps to sustain an outdated form of the Unicator's ego: the stories a unicator tells are a skipping record, a CD on infinite repeat, telling the same story wherein the unicator's ego takes center stage, while in the act of unicating and in the stories they tell.