My child helping me recall my childhood

My daughter has taken possession of my iPhone to watch Sesame Street videos and one had a clip of this 'Mad Painter' character in it. It reminded me that this guy was my absolute favorite Sesame Street character when I was a kid. I suspect it's because of the subversive nature of the character. I looked the actor up on the Internets and was saddened to learn he died in 2008.

Watching my daughter grow and develop her personality I find myself recalling memories from my own childhood that I have not thought of in years and years.  I see her engaging in behaviors that tickle memories of my younger self doing the same when I was tiny. 

Ow

 I made four more arrowheads today and yesterday.  My hands are raw with micro cuts from the glass and my fingers are sore to the bone from the immense pressure required to do the fine flaking. I need to give myself a rest now.

Once I started it was like I was starved from not engaging in creative pursuits for the past few years.  I still want to go back out there and make some more.  I can't, I simply don't have the strength left in my fingers.

Still got it

I apparently still have my flintknapping skills.  I made a 1.5” arrowhead from scratch (i.e. a raw chip) this afternoon for the first time in almost four years.  My grandfather had a stash of them I made for him and my grandmother when I was in high school but apparently he has been giving them away or selling them to gullible tourists.  He asked if I had any more last time we talked on the phone.  I finally got around to digging out my toolbox where I keep my collection of authentic stone age style tools and the points I have in various stages of completion.  I mailed him the finished and near finished points I had at the start of the week.

Looking through my tools got me thinking about why I had stopped flintknapping.  I traced it back to my sister’s death.  The last point I made was in Canehill in the weeks before her suicide.  It was a pink glass point as well.  I made it and left it on the kitchen table and I had thought I had lost it for a while.  I found it on my sister’s knickknack shelf in her bedroom after.  I just haven’t been able to talk myself in to picking up my hammer stone and my antler tines since.  I convinced myself it was because I had warn out my leather hand protector used to keep from driving shards into my palm while pressure flaking the edge of a point.  In reality it was just an excuse. 

After I mailed my grandfather the points from my tool box I went online and found a Tandy’s Leather Goods and ordered a bag of leather scraps.  They arrived this afternoon and I spent an hour on the back deck flaking away at a piece of glass.  It was real satisfying to see that familiar shape taking over that piece of glass.  It brought back a lot of memories.

Photographs

I have been working my way through my archive of photographs from the past nine years and appending metadata with locations and keywords.  My goal is to make my collection more easily searchable and to encode some kind of information with the photos for anyone who looks at them without me.  So far I have only gotten to 2006.  I have tens of thousands of photographs.  At least when I get up past 2009 it will speed up as I haven’t been taking photos in recent years.  I’ve been too busy making a living.  It’s kind of sad I have to give up something I love doing but could never make a dime from to do something I hate but that pays my mortgage.  Life is fucked up.

In going through the 2006 photos I found myself having mild anxiety attacks.  I didn’t realize what was causing it until I got to the end of June 2006 and started seeing photographs of my baby sister Miriam.  We took a trip to Seattle Washington that year to visit our sister Rachael and her husband.  It was really a trip for Miriam to visit Rachael but I was asked to tag along ( I suspect mostly because I was Miriam’s ride to and from the airport).  We went to the Japanese gardens and to a state park while we were there.  Seeing her ghost in those photos brought all the emotions back up to the surface, still as strong as they were in February of 2007 when she killed herself.

My anxiety was caused by the shallow subconscious knowledge that I was going to start seeing her in photographs and with each month I worked through I was coming closer to the end.  To this day I do not understand her actions and I know I never will.  I wrote all my thoughts and feeling down at the time in a black book that hasn’t been opened since.  I poured out all the sorrow and confusion and asked all my questions over and over on the pages of that book.  I know I’ll never get any answers but putting the questions on paper allowed me to stop tormenting myself with them.

Every once in a while in moments of weakness or darkness I find myself imagining I can talk to her.  If I allow this self-indulgence  in my imaginings I will try to talk her out of killing herself.  Sometimes I imagine I rushed out to Canehill after I spoke with her that night and in my imagination I arrive in time to talk her out of her final act.  Or I play “what if” games where I didn’t go to that damned super bowl party and stayed in Canehill that night instead of leaving her alone in that cabin, in the dark Arkansas woods, with that loaded gun.  Other times I have a conversation with the phantom she left in my memory trying in vain to wheedle out some glimmer of understanding of her motives.  All this serves no purpose and I try to avoid such activity when I catch myself at it.

In the end I will never understand.

Leave your shoes at the door please.

The urinals in a typical public toilet for men are a nice little example of a positive feedback phenomenon.  Let’s take the toilet in the morning fresh from the janitor’s grudging mop strokes.  The first patron of the facility will walk boldly up the porcelain receptacle hanging on the tiled wall proceed to relieve himself.  In the process he will drip a single drop of urine on the floor under the urinal.  The next man to use the facilities will see that single drop of piss on the floor and stand a full step back from the urinal to ensure he doesn’t step in another man’s pee.  The result of this precautionary measure on the part of the second man will be more urine on the floor under and around the urinal.

This process will repeat itself throughout the day until patrons of the toilet will be found with their backs against the wall opposite the urinals attempting to reach the target via indirect fire arced over the glistening Urine Sea that now separates them from the equipment on the wall of the facility. 

So, please, take your shoes off at the door.

The deep-red lettuce growing in my garden.

My Deck

The people who owned this house before me neglected it.  The deck (pictured at left) is coated in a thick film of mold, mildew and other crap.  It is taking me forever to clean it all off using a pressure washer.  I have to clean it off so I can reseal the damn thing.  If I don’t we’ll lose the deck to rot.  I never knew how much of a flaming pain-in-the-ass it was being a homeowner before I became one.  The gutters are falling off and need to be resealed.  The siding is growing mildew.  The lawns are mostly weeds and crabgrass.  The sidewalks and patios are subsiding allowing water to pool next to the foundation.  The windows are all crap and the whole thing is poorly insulated. The roof is also in need of replacement.

Must be an East Coast Thing

In the past six months I have had the misfortune of seeing two different grown men in the toilet pissing with their pants and underwear down around their ankles. The only other place I have ever seen anything like it was the character Butters in Southpark.

Is this typical on the east coast? Is it a behavior that is limited to Washington DC? Or is it that my coworkers are a rarified sample of the nerdiest of the nerds? Any one who has been inside a mens' public toilet will know they don't make us certify in marksmanship, but if your skill is so poor you feel the need to take off both your pants and your underwear to take a piss at least go into one of the stalls and close the damn door!

Weiner’s wiener

Politics as a career appeals to individuals of a particular character.  We know this and yet we continue to act shocked and chagrined when they behave (or misbehave) in the way Anthony Weiner did.   At this point we should hold politicians as guilty until proven innocent when it comes to sexual misdeeds.  It doesn’t matter if they are caught tapping coded messages soliciting gay sex in an airport mensroom or sending inappropriate text messages to young pages or tweeting pictures of the cocks to strangers.  They all do it, some are just better at not getting caught than others.  Stop acting surprised people!  They ALL do it!

The fact that this story and others like it are top of the news headlines is fucking disgraceful. The so called news media is fixated on the sexual misdeeds of these politicians. Our country is suffering from a huge unemployment problem.  We have banks foreclosing on houses they don’t even hold a mortgage on. Republican governors around the country are trying to destroy the merger social safety nets we have managed to put in place at the worst possible time. We are being lied to about the national debt and we are still involved in two wars openly and at least one on the sly!  These are just the domestic issues being pushed from the spotlight by Weiner’s wiener.  Japan is still having massive troubles from the aftermath of the tsunami.  People in Haiti are still living in tents and dying of cholera! Anybody hear anything about the continued systematic rape taking place in the Congo?  It’s disgusting what these news media fools choose to cover and choose to ignore. 

Rusty

I’m finding it difficult to find my voice.  It’s been so long since I wrote anything of the nature of a blog or an essay.  I’m Rusty at the composition which is inhibiting what I write.  I am also feeling pangs of doubt and misgivings about the content of what I put here.  Since I last maintained a blog I have graduated and gotten a job so I’m concerned that what I write here may in some way get me burnt at work.  This is having a chilling effect on what I write.  Since my last blog I have also gained a wife and a daughter.  It is a very real possibility my wife might read this at some point which is also making me think twice about what I put down in writing.  I am very annoyed with myself for allowing these concerns to dampen my expression of my thoughts.

Autoeroticism was a balls-to-the-wall no holds barred stream of conscious and profanity.  It was glorious both to behold and to create.  I want that back but I’m grown old and timid.  I need to tap that vein of pure rage and disdain for all concerns again.  I need to get my head on straight!  I’m not old enough to be pining for my younger days damnit!

Publish Post

Cognitive dissonance

I am a liberal.  I believe society should provide a minimum standard of living to all people.  I believe we should not engage in wars of aggression against other peoples or nations.  I believe the government needs to be barred from interfering in the lives of citizens.  I think any legislation that is intended to make the job of law enforcement officials “easier” is wrong.  I believe unfettered capitalism is as destructive an ideology as any our species has ever developed.  I believe in a secular society with a strong prohibition against the meddling of theocrats in the policies enacted by our government.  This last includes the references to “God” on our currency and the asinine pledge of allegiance.  I believe we need to have a strong public education system that is the envy of the world.  I am as libby-lib as they come and I am not ashamed of it in the least.  For some reason this is disconcerting for some of the people I work with.  They think I should cover my mouth and whisper quietly into my shirt front when I admit to being a liberal.
 

What really bothers me about these people I am referring to is the fact that their conservative ideas don’t fit them.  They are all younger people in their early and mid-twenties.  They are all university educated. And they are all crazy neo-conservatives.   At least that’s what they appear to be.  But their ideas are very clearly not the product of thought and self-reflection.  Their ideas appear to belong to someone else; they appear is if they were placed in to their heads.  I suspect it is similar to how religious ideas are passed from person to person.  It is most startling when they discuss the government using the neo-con bullshit talking points.  They all want smaller government and to cut the federal budget…and they all WORK FOR THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT!  Hello?  Cognitive dissonance people?

Manifesto of sorts

It came to my attention a few years ago that the World Wide Web is the largest collection of insipidness that the human race has ever seen. Of course, I wanted to get in on the fun and add my crap to the pile. I designed a website to be as simple as possible, no bells, no whistles, no fucking ads. The material posted there was a type of diary/log/journal/rant in the form of a list. Please pick the appropriate term from the proceeding list that you feel best reflects my gender/sexual- orientation/culture.  I would post entries several times a week ideally, or as time allowed. The entries were things I wrote, photos I took, things I drew, and things I found interesting.

If I lasted to the end of the year I would archive the old list and start over at zero. Why would anybody care to read my ramblings or look at my endeavors in the realm of visual art? Hell, I had no clue. How I chose to waste my time was and is entirely up to me. Conversely, how you piss away your life is solely for you to decide. I called my website/blog Autoeroticism because it was a one-sided activity. 

I lost the thread of the website in 2004 and never managed to pick it back up.  I spent some time on the Live Journal site under the user name Chainrule but I lost that thread too. I find I have a need to write my thoughts down and lately I’ve been using physical paper notebooks to catch those thoughts.  I find this limiting in that I am unable to include photographs or video in physical notebooks.

As stated above in the mission description cribbed from my Autoeroticism website I plan to recreate my old blog here.  I will post my thoughts, my photographs, and possibly my videos.  I chose not to call this blog “Autoeroticism” because it has a comments feature which gives it more of a potential for interaction between me and anybody reading it.