I like who I come from. My grandfather was smart and made little puzzles out of nails. He could also drive a nail in with one swing of a hammer. My grandmother was sturdy and generous and humble. My other grandfather was an ornery son of a bitch who found pens on the street instead of buying them. He was in WWII. He was a machinist and later a civil servant. I have a bunch of his clothes that he never wore. My other grandmother is sweet, sarcastic, outgoing, kind. She says she'll go when God tells her it's time. She won't make that decision herself, she says. I don't know why I'm talking about this, she says. Shame on me. There's no shame, I tell her. We're drinking coffee. All three of her daughters are here, plus one of their husbands, and me and my wife and my almost-one-year-old daughter. My grandmother's great-granddaughter. Who screams just then, and then laughs, pumps her legs and claps her hands and everybody loves it. I love it. And I'm always so afraid of people whose best loved ones just died. I'm always so afraid they'll be aliens now, by pain transformed into something I don't know and that doesn't know me, so that if I try to say something it'll come out wrong, I'll be something hurtful to them because we're aliens to each other now. But you know what? We're not. We're anything but. It's easy. You bring your wife and daughter. Or whoever you've got. You come. You have some coffee. Maybe a brownie or a cookie. Your daughter can make a mess of crumbs on the floor. You can take some of your grandfather's old clothes. They fit. I'll use these, you can say, and you can mean it. Thank god. It's still okay. You're not an alien after all. 7/10/03 Make the links semantic) * one day she left a message. (i wish i could have gotten a hold of you.... Call me at mom & dad's.) I called and her dad said she had gone to give blood. I knew of course this meant she had gone to see her phlebotomist boyfriend at the hospital. he makes an incision into her vein to release blood as a therapeutic treatment. 7/12/03 It's not that people who don't care about other people are inherently stronger (though they may be better organized), it's that there are so many of them. The gathering tyranny is not only Bush's fault but also the fault of everyone who remains complicitous in his reign. * "Scientist" is a job title, not a mandate. No one type of person can be singularly chosen to be the type of person who thinks up important stuff. Anyone can think up stuff. 7/13/03 Maybe I'm cruel, vindicive, a gemini. All I know is, I still want Katy and I wish I had taken more pictures of Ann when she was pregnant. Well, at least for that I'll probably have another chance. * Pretty soon I'm going to go back downstairs. I hope she's still making the carrot cake. I hope Megan is peaceful. I'll go down around my wife's feet and swim about like a lustful, obsequious fish. * You know, I think if Kate had really honestly wanted me back she could have had me. I don't know whether or not I sensed she didn't. 7/16/03 Whitman is like acid; it's such concentrated stuff! I can take only a few drops of it at a time, then I'm off on flights of fancy, fancying myself a poet and a freedom fighter! inhaling great draughts of air! and then the shock: how? Simply, how do I get free? Is it difficult? Is it so easy I'm missing it? Why this earthen, road-bound ache in my salty soul? Why the pine smell and lichen dust calling so fiercely to me if I am not equipped to answer? * Just thought I'd check in. Ann says she's pregnant again. Dexter scratched Megan's face. My stomach is a blur. I'm going to go to Capoeira now, and be sub-par. Hey, dig it, cool, freak out daddy O. What? What is that? What is that smell I smelled in the locker room{fresh spice * that girl that speaks portugese and (more important) sings it glided into my peripheral vision. I knew it was her before I knew it was her. She touched me on the shoulder. (After class last time, when I was still a little stoned, I told her she should sing more, she has a nice voice. Now, "sober" as they jokingly call it, will I be able to live up to last week's openness? And so?) When the alien fish head takes over your body, or really more like borrows it while you're away, you get to come home to all it did as you while you were gone. Bruised noses? 7/17/03 Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, smoke.... I'm at the UWM Union, in one of the of course designated smoking areas. It's lamentably underpopulated today. Summer. Although I did see several people out and about on campus. Anyway, they clearly weren't headed here. They were probably going to their new, fresh-smelling, invigorating, raw, exciting young lives. Not here. (But at least I have smoke.) 7/18/03 Nwq list of thins to make aperfectly full sday: 1, one entry at least per day. 2. exercose everu dau/ 3. ,aler spetjomg )cersis tjhe im,aler o ,eam_ * bisexual girlboy grownup seeks ghost of a man while having sex with cute girl friend (wife) on thursdays * Jennifer said: "being willing to face one's own true feelings, which with or without guidance, is a solitary pursuit. You must make the effort to try to face yourself, and NEVER GIVE UP. Only you can ever really know you...though others can often act as mirrors if you are too close to your issues to see them directly. The key to success in self knowledge is to pursue it." 7/21/03 A mourning dove impersonates an owl not far from here. Rain remains miles away; it's been teasing all afternoon. Pray for the afternoon to turn evening, for the evening to turn to night, for the night to wash away everything. A tiny human soul howls out in so much sadness it makes the heart want to burst. This is alive time. Someday you'll wake up from this dream too, shrug your shoulders, look at your mug while you're brushing your teeth and think, "That was weird...." Please, waking-up me, don't forget about still-dreaming me. Come back and collect me. Come share your life with ours, yours and my odd little family, and let's go back and forth between the worlds at random. Please. (Mama robin is still in the nest in the corner of the front porch. Rain rain rain rain rain.) * I read that Leonardo da Vinci said something along the lines of "it is a poor pupil who does not surpass his master." Are we largely then a race of poor pupils? Because if we weren't, wouldn't our progress toward perfection have skyrocketed by now? If everyone always got better as the generations wore on, we should be enlightened, beautiful, sublime, war-hunger-poverty-hate-free by now, shouldn't we? Yet progress it seems is the exception, not the rule. Take something as low-level and basic as, say, just out of the blue, parenting. Do we not learn from our mistakes? Are we not destined to be better parents than our parents? Are we not instilling in our kids the nascent ability to outdo us, when they have theirs? Keep in mind, I'm musing on all this from the perspective of one who still can't fully comprehend the fact that he is in fact a parent. I mean, shit. Just the other day I was a fresh-faced baby, barely out of college and flirting with the real world! Just the other day I was a scrawny teen with his own (gasp) apartment and a motor scooter. And now I'm daddy, and another one's on the way. What the fuck! This world is so bi-fucking-zarre! It's funny, it really is. I have to give up and be a character in a book. It's up to me whether I want to keep reading or not. Do something! I say to myself, do something to make me want to turn the next page! Say something outrageous NOW or else I'm slapping this bitch spine-up on the coffee table and going to turn on the TV or check out some other weird primates' journals on the friggin internet. It's funny. It really is. * I'm getting quickly but surely drunk on bloody marys. 7/22/03 I said goodbye to Hazel in a dream the other night. It was weird, cuz at first recollection I thought the dream had been one primarily of longing after something missing, namely, her. But as I sat with it a little longer, I realized the whole scenario had been shot through with anger, not jealous pettiness but a righteous kind of noble anger at the constancy of the feeling that no matter what mood she's in, no matter what she may gush at any given moment, I never knew and never would know that she was really there for me. And in the dream, I was sad, it was a sad thing but I said goodbye to her. I said goodbye. * And of course, due to the general weirdness of things, not long after typing the above, I got an email from her, breaking this latest long silence. Nothing much, just an item on eBay she wanted to show, me, but as always, she appears right when I say I'm ready for her to be gone. Heh heh. Chuckle chuckle. 7/23/03 So I post my journal to a journaling website. I look at it, therefore, in light of other people looking at it, which is to say I imagine myself someone else who doesn't know me, looking at my journal. And you know what? It's only marginally interesting, as are ALL the ones I've looked at on this site. Any one of them is interesting primarily as a specimen of a larger phenomenon, not so much for its own specific content. And this is okay, but then when I go read something truly engaging like Cohen's Coherence Engine blog ( HYPERLINK "http://www.coherenceengine.com/blog/index.html" http://www.coherenceengine.com/blog/index.html ), I think, gee it sure would be neat to make something interesting like this! I feel myself succumbing to the human failing of desiring to create something useful or beautiful to others! Hmm.... What could it be...? * And what IS the "larger phenomenon?" Why, the constant public visibility of private inanity. Currently mostly voluntary (blogs) or stylized (reality TV), soon to be enforced and tyrannous ("homeland security"). * Yeah, so that Jen girl (Gin?), the blonde with the round face, soft belly and big round blue eyes, from Capoeira class--I guess I have to admit she's pretty hot. She's been coming to class like a quarter of the time I have, and already she's teaching me stuff. And she can do the samba like nobody's bidness, moving those thirsty hips au naturel. She's got that non-girly-girl attitude that I always get so drawn to. Ah! The tough soft ones! The macho-femmes! How I love them! * Geoff Cohen points out in Coherence Engine: "A Hero's Journey, according to Campbell, involves crossing a threshold. That threshold is the barrier between the ordinary, home, the village, the safe and understood; and the unknown, the realm of the gods or of the dead, where rules are not understood. This is an important tautology. If the rules were understood, it would be home and there wouldn't be a threshold. The Journey involves spending time in that realm, facing the ultimate tests and thus achieving understanding. And with that understanding -- the "boon" -- the hero is now capable of returning to the home realm, but now as a warrior, capable of doing whatever it takes to save the village or impart his new wisdom.... "Can you only go on a Hero's Journey once? Once a year? Once a week?" Well, let me see if I can answer that for myself, after coming home from Capoeria and once again "not quite getting it." Opportunities for making that journey enrich virtually every moment! And particularly those moments when I have 1) shown up for class, 2) tried a little, but 3) not quite tried with full force, full gusto. When I give in, play, look stupid, then I know I have crossed the threshold and I go home with the music cranked inside my head and a spring in my jump. I wrestle with the dogs. I hug my wife and daughter. I feel alive. This is a microcosmic hero's journey. It can be repeated with no loss of signal. And it is so much easier not to do it, to remain empty and halfway. Because every time I go to class I come up against the spectre of the ordinary, the comfortable invisibility I learned in junior high gym class. There will be no Capoeira without music, and there will be no grown-up, free Mat without pushing that limit voluntarily, vulnerably, dangerously. It's your dream, Mat. Wake up. Or else just sit here and type away like any other fucking bonehead on the web. 7/24/03 Granted, "reality" is simply the most popular metaphor (just as "politics" is the most popular soap opera), but for what? Isn't the notion of metaphor meaningless in a reality-less system? Maybe it's unavoidable due to the construction of the human brain and/or society. Maybe I just shouldn't worry about it. 7/26/03 Yeah. Maybe. This day started out so well. Waking from dreams—hey! I fine-tuned the dream-catcher, finally! One of those things he accomplishes only when she's gone, or something. Working the split shift today. Got in a small workout. Going to get things taken care of. So why still the nagging pull of guilt? Afraid of being found out? For doing what? Afraid it's going to get too late? For what? whilst brass and iron, steam & sky, in harmony sing, repent! Going to succumb to smoke now. (!) And even read the paper a little bit. I'm a fucking homo, that's what it is. How long am I going to refuse the call of this ridiculous, mundane hero's journey? It's not the adventure I'm afraid of, nor even the unknown or the weirdness or even getting beat up or worse, made fun of. No, what I'm afraid of is Ann hating me, my kids shunning me, my family's disappointment, all that crap. All that monkey crap. God damn it. So I've been riding like this tightrope thingy. Like, is it worth it. Which is worse? That inner unrest, that constant low drone of longing and feeling out of place? Or risking the disruption of my familial situation? Cuz I gotta tell you, family is important to me. I can handle being lonely. I just don't want to be lonely. And yet, my artistic and/or poetic soul is important to me too. I am so so so tired of waking up dead. It could be considered a question of my gratification versus sacrifice for the benefit of my kids, etc. But that demands the question--are they better off with my sacrifice? And of course the more sinister question, if I could definitively answer that first question yes, then would I/could I still make the sacrifice? Probably. Or else I'd end up really dead sooner than planned. * SO let's see.... we have Edna Cholula Esriel Cunnyhol Giryl Sialia Hazel Mike & Pat Olivia Sruky (and all the rest) * simple rumple crumple people. My shit doesn't mean anything (and that's the way I like it)