What I want

The last few weeks have been filled with navel gazing solipsism, so excuse my tone if it seems too pedantically morose. My trip to Kona became my great idea became my nightmare and is becoming some other phantasmagoria of doubt and possibility. WTF. I have known for some time that I have lost sight of the person I was and now it seems really likely that I don't have a frigging clue where to look for what I was. I guess this could be a good thing: redesigning an obsolete prototype that barely ever took flight might be a good thing. So I'll speak in parables and hope that it helps me to figure out what to do next 'cause if I don't figure something out soon my world very likely will just rearrange itself and my perspective. At the point of a shotgun.

If you have a dream and your partner doesn't share in it, what do you do about that? Since most of my dreams either involve felonies or explosives, I can't blame anyone for not wanting to go down that path with me. But one thing that can be said for me, I've been consistent. Oh, maybe the only thing that I have been consistent with is inconsistency, but let's not split hairs. I have always wanted, I think I remember this, that I wanted not to want what everyone else wanted. I wanted to try to be part of the solution and not simply be a tool for the occupation. We are living in a very fucked up world and as I remember from my high school days, "to be considered normal in an insane world makes you insane." Behaviour-wise I seem normal. I don't feel dirty. But there have been some negative reports filtering in. The corporation is having some issues with my "unusual management style." Honesty and directness are fine, as long as you don't have a brain in your head. My bad.

So as I enter the end of the reproductive gulag, and the offspring make their choices as to what kind of prison they are tending toward choosing, I get to ask the question: what the fuck is next? My job is boring and banal, even thought its unique and low stress. I cannot fathom doing it for another day let alone another 10 years, but that would be the smart thing to do. I really wonder if I will live that long if I continue to punch this desultory clock. If it wasn't for my second job, which does allow me to display my actual personality and provides me with a fair amount of strokes, I would go freaking nuts. More freaking nuts.

As there is only one person who reads this blog, I apologize for this long-winded drama show of woe is me. Its actually kinda funny. I am reminded of a comment my one reader made: the answer to the question of whether the glass is half full or half empty is that its half full of urine. Something like that. I had another friend bitch me out because I wasn't being positive enough. But he just had babies and doesn't have a clue what he is in for. He will have long forgotten me by the time his divorce papers become final. Either that, or he will teach kids how to dream in black and white. (Hey, maybe not, maybe he'll just keep going to Mexico to remember how to dream, I haven't been in a while, that might be an easy fix . . .)

Maybe the whole problem boils down to me almost always having to initiate in the bedroom, but that would be a problem that I am supposed to weather with a stiff-upper lip, amongst other things. I love my wife, I love my kids, I kinda like my house (and often hate it) I like at least some of my friends, and I am not completely broke. Life is good, no? No? What I want is for someone to share my dreams with, and someone who wants what I want. I am completely insane for saying this here but she didn't pick up the phone.

Somewhere I lost the ability to say what I really want to people. I got the weird look from too many strangers and "good friends," got told not to be too negative, got asked why I wasn't negative enough about what I was supposed to be negative about, got told to count my blessings when I really wanted to burn them. My mom, god rest her soul, when I got like this used to tell me to "count my blessings" and I actually would. Through gritted teeth and a rage that still haunts me, I would try to enumerate all the "good luck" I had. Have. Had. Fuck if I know anymore. Isn't that a pretty sunset? Took the picture myself!

"Excuse me while I set myself on fire"

I quote Katha Pollitt from The Nation magazine entitling this missive. Her piece is about a particular Harvard prof who argued for going to war and now has published a half-assed self-serving mea culpa about getting it wrong. Like Pollitt, I was not against the war from the beginning simply for "ideological" reasons (like we are a dirty fucked up selfish nation full of racial bias and whining fear-mongering who like to kill people to mollify our night tremors) but was against the war because as a historian I pay attention to evidence. And there wasn't any evidence good enough to go to war on. The WMD strawman fallacy or whatever you want to call it was crap and if you had a decent ear you could tell that this shithead couldn't sing a clear note. I suggest, modestly, that assholes like Michael Ignatieff should be force to ride in a Humvee though the streets of Baghdad, naked and straped to the hood until that time they have the joy of being hit by an IED. If they survive, then they can have their dignity and gravitas back.

I picked up a Time magazine while waiting for my kids orthrodontist and read the editor's note about why they went back to New Orleans to see what's going on there two years down the road. And that fucker, Stenger or something like that, said that he was surprised to find that his previous position of having "Katrina fatigue" was replaced after actually visiting the area with a new appreciation of what is wrong with America. Strap him to a building in the Ninth Ward, light it on fire and give 100 of his closest friends the opportunity to save him by pissing on the conflagration. If he lives, make him edit a local New Orleans obituary column for a year and then tar and feather him. That might make it about even. Fuck mainstream media. And fuck the experts of the meaning of 911 who what completely failed to make a difference in the way this nation does business.