The last day.
Spent part of today hanging out, part of today updating the church's website, part of the day screwing around, and part of the day reflecting.
Did some laundry, shipped out a package, did a little organizing. All in all, not the work day that I was expecting to have, but it is okay.
Things I've noticed about myself in the last few days..
First, I am sick to death of people who are utterly disengaged with the rest of the world; people who call and aren't even aware that someone else is on the call unless you utterly cease talking. People who aren't engaged in a conversation, but a monologue. Taking into account that people are mirrors for elements in our own personalities, I have to ask myself - am I someone who is utterly unaware and disinterested in the feelings and goings-on of other people? Or, am I so working to attune myself to other people that I wish to purge all of that from my psyche?
Secondly, taking my two dogs are mirrors, Barney has many of the qualities that I describe in the above paragraph. He's utterly unconcerned about anyone else than himself - everything is about him. Today, he had a banner day - he ate his food, he ate Jackie's food, he was crying and screaming by 7:30 this morning, and he peed on the kitchen floor. Me, me, me, me, me, me. Pay attention to ME dammit. He is also one who creates a mess just to get attention. That part of myself, I can see. I'm leaving it behind, though.
So, he's anxious about everything, and always getting into the way and creating a mess for someone else to clean up in order to gain attention. He feels he's been ignored or pushed away, so he uses these techniques to get attention.
I know that I've been pushing these elements of my personality out, and perhaps that's why he''s more irritating than ever.
Last night, I had another WTF dream - the third one in a week where I was doing complex, intellectual work for someone (this time, for my former uncle by marriage the insurance multi-millionaire) who decided after I did the work to not pay me and offer excuses. I woke up just ANGRY. I decided that it's time for that expectation of self to leave. In 2006, I am only going to get PAID in full, and I'm going to charge what the market will bear for my substantial skill and knowledge base.
My entire work history since law school has been filled with these events; people who need my help and then can't or won't pay; people who need help with a mortgage, and then can't get the deal done, or leave for a few dollars offered somewhere else.
Let's not even get into a conversation about the men I've found appealing.
I have been reflecting on some of the things in my life that I have been so passionate about - Continental Airlines, Jarred the bartender .. they TAKE CARE OF ME. They pay attention to me, and anticipate how to treat me well. And, I am quick to anger with companies or persons who deliver poor service or ignore me. I won't deal with them any further.
Taking again that life is a mirror, am I a person who ignored or delivers poor service? Sometimes, perhaps. I hate that in myself. I'm trying to create a business to deliver exceptional service. I'm creating a church that delivers just what people need and is attentive and free of drama and machinations that usually create division and strip away a sense of safety.
Next year - in fewer than six hours - things will go much differently. More consciousness. More effectiveness. More productivity. More of a mark on the world.
DJHJD
Saturday, December 31, 2005
Friday, December 30, 2005
What I meant was
I had another coke addled, self inflated, non-working man working me over like the last piece of beef jerky before two hundred miles of desert, and YOU were at risk of being replaced.
It was a joke.
Of course, you thought it was about YOU. Far from it, it was intended to convey that you were the antithesis of unique; there's a parade of young men who live to enlist the aid of others to support themselves continuing their thirteen year old focus. Bus loads. Many who are much cuter, and whom are less mercinary. They're very clear - they just want cash and are willing to exchange a modicum of attention for it.
You have priced yourself out of the marketplace, as you offer nothing, deliver nothing and expect everything.
The joke is, therefore, on you.
It was a joke.
Of course, you thought it was about YOU. Far from it, it was intended to convey that you were the antithesis of unique; there's a parade of young men who live to enlist the aid of others to support themselves continuing their thirteen year old focus. Bus loads. Many who are much cuter, and whom are less mercinary. They're very clear - they just want cash and are willing to exchange a modicum of attention for it.
You have priced yourself out of the marketplace, as you offer nothing, deliver nothing and expect everything.
The joke is, therefore, on you.
The last Friday for 2005
Waiting for Mikey to come by - he's coming to meet me for a Whores of Baghdad meeting at EJ's.
Lunch with Lance today seemed strained. Don't know what's going on there.
While I was at lunch, I happened to run into John, the neighborbood mechanic - I asked him to check out my tie rod ends, since I had been told that they were in need of replacement. Uh, seems not so much. Tie rod ends are in great shape. Control arm bushings are a bit weak, but it's not a matter of them needing replacement. They're just getting old. Seems that the lack of grease fittings on modern suspension components leads to the creaking noises. It doesn't mean the parts are bad, but the noise leads car owners to think that there is a problem, which allows the repair shops to sell repairs that aren't needed.
Another piece to the puzzle.
Watching "Punch Drunk Love." Interesting movie. Very interesting.
Tomorrow will be all about getting ready for Sunday. And catching up on some personal work that needs doing.
I've been having some seriously strange dreams lately. Several that I can't write about here without offending sensibilities. But, suffice it to say that they have been WEIRD.
Heard from PJ today. He says he's coming to Houston. Whether that means he wants me to pay for the trip or not has not yet been revealed. However, as I was hanging up my dry cleaning today, I was thinking "I am SO glad that I have my apartment to myself again." Somehow, I have to keep that feeling alive going forward. Reading his blog, I wonder what that's all about. Self-promotion? Where's the profundity? Where's the content? I thought he was changing the world.
Maybe it's just one drink at a time.
This movie is REALLY weird. Unusual, though. Adam Sandler is very interesting.
Almost time to go see Jarred the non-responsive South African bartender. And to see if the boi is going to talk to me again tonight. What to wear?
Lunch with Lance today seemed strained. Don't know what's going on there.
While I was at lunch, I happened to run into John, the neighborbood mechanic - I asked him to check out my tie rod ends, since I had been told that they were in need of replacement. Uh, seems not so much. Tie rod ends are in great shape. Control arm bushings are a bit weak, but it's not a matter of them needing replacement. They're just getting old. Seems that the lack of grease fittings on modern suspension components leads to the creaking noises. It doesn't mean the parts are bad, but the noise leads car owners to think that there is a problem, which allows the repair shops to sell repairs that aren't needed.
Another piece to the puzzle.
Watching "Punch Drunk Love." Interesting movie. Very interesting.
Tomorrow will be all about getting ready for Sunday. And catching up on some personal work that needs doing.
I've been having some seriously strange dreams lately. Several that I can't write about here without offending sensibilities. But, suffice it to say that they have been WEIRD.
Heard from PJ today. He says he's coming to Houston. Whether that means he wants me to pay for the trip or not has not yet been revealed. However, as I was hanging up my dry cleaning today, I was thinking "I am SO glad that I have my apartment to myself again." Somehow, I have to keep that feeling alive going forward. Reading his blog, I wonder what that's all about. Self-promotion? Where's the profundity? Where's the content? I thought he was changing the world.
Maybe it's just one drink at a time.
This movie is REALLY weird. Unusual, though. Adam Sandler is very interesting.
Almost time to go see Jarred the non-responsive South African bartender. And to see if the boi is going to talk to me again tonight. What to wear?
Thursday, December 29, 2005
Final Thursday
Ah, a morning of car drama, followed by an afternoon of cleaning up. Ruby had a flat tire yesterday. This morning, I picked up my check, went to Sam's, bought a tire, blah, blah. Got back here, and still had hours worth of clean up and such to get done. Work? Oh, that?
Waiting for Travis the Chiropractor - I need my head rotated in the WORST way. He's called in range.
After he's done aligning the chassis, I am going to finish my movie from last night.
Only one weekend to go before it's 2006. I have a bunch of work to do this weekend. I want to start 2006 with NOTHING dragging over my shoulder. Except unpaid bills (due me) and vice-versa.
Waiting for Travis the Chiropractor - I need my head rotated in the WORST way. He's called in range.
After he's done aligning the chassis, I am going to finish my movie from last night.
Only one weekend to go before it's 2006. I have a bunch of work to do this weekend. I want to start 2006 with NOTHING dragging over my shoulder. Except unpaid bills (due me) and vice-versa.
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
Last Humping Day before 2006
I've had an interesting thought today - we have these behavioral and belief patterns in us that are fundamental - they define who we know ourselves to be. We (those of us who seek improvement and change) are out to root out the causes of these patterns and interrupt them, so as to produce a possibility of choice.
I've been working very hard at deep-seated and fundamental patterns about myself. In so doing, I've been bringing up deep anger and fear that I never would have guessed was there - such as the fear of someone coming into my apartment when I'm sleeping without the alarm set.
Over the last few days, my motivation - which ebbs and flows more strongly than the tides - has been utterly absent. My imagination, about business concepts, about planning, to-do lists and so on, is more productive than ever. But, in execution, I have fallen apart.
Today, I was thinking - what if this is a manner by which my fundamental self-definition can distract me from trying to further root it out? If I lay about doing little or nothing, financial crisis predictably follows in a matter of days or weeks. Success never comes. It DISTRACTS me from looking at anything deeper or as yet undiscovered.
Could this fundamental self-definition be that crafty? I think it could. To preserve itself by throwing out distractions just as the Bush administration points to terrorist boogeymen and then slams through another action to benefit their cronies suggests that it is truly threatened, this fundamental self-definition.
So, what powerful attack my self belief must be feeling to raise such a defense.
Met with Ben and his boyfriend tonight; Ben is going to help me with a visual rendering of the Fabulair flightie costume. Then, Robyn can make one for me. And then, I can have someone (William? Marc?) photographed in it. Or, I could have her make me two, and photograph both of them in it.
I have to speak the next four Sundays on the Science of Mind, and how it works. I've started to put my talk together for this Sunday.
I'm watching "Judgment at Nurenburg." FABULOUS movie.
I've been working very hard at deep-seated and fundamental patterns about myself. In so doing, I've been bringing up deep anger and fear that I never would have guessed was there - such as the fear of someone coming into my apartment when I'm sleeping without the alarm set.
Over the last few days, my motivation - which ebbs and flows more strongly than the tides - has been utterly absent. My imagination, about business concepts, about planning, to-do lists and so on, is more productive than ever. But, in execution, I have fallen apart.
Today, I was thinking - what if this is a manner by which my fundamental self-definition can distract me from trying to further root it out? If I lay about doing little or nothing, financial crisis predictably follows in a matter of days or weeks. Success never comes. It DISTRACTS me from looking at anything deeper or as yet undiscovered.
Could this fundamental self-definition be that crafty? I think it could. To preserve itself by throwing out distractions just as the Bush administration points to terrorist boogeymen and then slams through another action to benefit their cronies suggests that it is truly threatened, this fundamental self-definition.
So, what powerful attack my self belief must be feeling to raise such a defense.
Met with Ben and his boyfriend tonight; Ben is going to help me with a visual rendering of the Fabulair flightie costume. Then, Robyn can make one for me. And then, I can have someone (William? Marc?) photographed in it. Or, I could have her make me two, and photograph both of them in it.
I have to speak the next four Sundays on the Science of Mind, and how it works. I've started to put my talk together for this Sunday.
I'm watching "Judgment at Nurenburg." FABULOUS movie.
Tuesday, December 27, 2005
It's finally pushed out!
After years of accumulation and nearly a year of effort, the drdivo.com website is FINALLY pushed out to the server. It's rough, to be sure, and there are lots of editing issues, but it's about 80% there!!! I'm so HAPPY!
Check it out!
If you want some REALLY fun stuff, check out the Grand Opera of the Clinton Years (written by an anonymous staffer at HGO, not by me) at this link. The complete residential history of the Casita de divo can be found there.
A great deal more content needs be written and pushed out, and a weekend of scanning pictures is coming soon, but WHOOP!
This makes me happy.
Check it out!
If you want some REALLY fun stuff, check out the Grand Opera of the Clinton Years (written by an anonymous staffer at HGO, not by me) at this link. The complete residential history of the Casita de divo can be found there.
A great deal more content needs be written and pushed out, and a weekend of scanning pictures is coming soon, but WHOOP!
This makes me happy.
A Tuesday that feels like Monday in June
It's HOT! Today, we're supposed to reach 79F; a cool front comes in tomorrow.
I'm wearing a shirt and tie today (who would have guessed?) I have more work to do this morning, and a closing that should occupy the entire afternoon.
I used the alarm this morning for the first morning since before Nick's visit over Hallowe'en.
Speaking of alarms, since Nick left (and more since Michael went to North Carolina,) I don't sleep well at night unless I arm the alarm system in the house. If I don't set it, I wake up in the middle of the night, hearing people come into the apartment. Weird.
Called the auto repair place about tie rod ends for Ruby and the missing trim piece that broke off when T and Matticia were in heat back in October. The service advisor at the auto place isn't the best about follow-up. Okay, that was polite. HE SUCKS at follow up.
Time to check on RAM for the computer here while I wait for a fax from the title company about my closing, which takes place in TWO hours. They're just trying to make me crazy, aren't they?
I'm wearing a shirt and tie today (who would have guessed?) I have more work to do this morning, and a closing that should occupy the entire afternoon.
I used the alarm this morning for the first morning since before Nick's visit over Hallowe'en.
Speaking of alarms, since Nick left (and more since Michael went to North Carolina,) I don't sleep well at night unless I arm the alarm system in the house. If I don't set it, I wake up in the middle of the night, hearing people come into the apartment. Weird.
Called the auto repair place about tie rod ends for Ruby and the missing trim piece that broke off when T and Matticia were in heat back in October. The service advisor at the auto place isn't the best about follow-up. Okay, that was polite. HE SUCKS at follow up.
Time to check on RAM for the computer here while I wait for a fax from the title company about my closing, which takes place in TWO hours. They're just trying to make me crazy, aren't they?
Monday, December 26, 2005
Monday, Monday ver .. I don't remember
So, I did get the drdivo.com website content finished! Oh my! Mikey will put it together, and later this week, we'll push it out - sucking up all of the content on the internet. WOW. It's been a long time coming.
Watched two more episodes of Angel Season One tonight - I do really love that show. I am taking a break from heavy reading; I have started reading a collection of gay male erotic fiction that's REALLY good. It has that certain quality of disconnect and disassociation that comes with some unexpected sexual interactions. I had forgotten that I had this book.
Mikey is overwhelmed with the volume of material for the website. HAH! Just wait until he learned about the complete re-write of the business website! He'll panic. I have to have that deployed by about January 20, though.
Today was rather lazier than I had originally planned. But, it was relaxing.
Talked to two different guys about self-destructive issues today - and I can't find where I put my baseball bat. They both need a knock to the head.
Tomorrow, have a BUSY morning starting with a doctor's appointment at 9:00. Then, have to close a client's loan at 1:00 p.m., and I have to make sure that his closing documents are sent out by the second lender in time for 1:00. Urk. This holiday bullshit is irritating.
My friend Elaine called me tonight and invited me to her place for New Year's Eve! How fun! That will be pleasant and low-impact. I wonder who all is coming.
Time to consider what comes next tonight ..
Watched two more episodes of Angel Season One tonight - I do really love that show. I am taking a break from heavy reading; I have started reading a collection of gay male erotic fiction that's REALLY good. It has that certain quality of disconnect and disassociation that comes with some unexpected sexual interactions. I had forgotten that I had this book.
Mikey is overwhelmed with the volume of material for the website. HAH! Just wait until he learned about the complete re-write of the business website! He'll panic. I have to have that deployed by about January 20, though.
Today was rather lazier than I had originally planned. But, it was relaxing.
Talked to two different guys about self-destructive issues today - and I can't find where I put my baseball bat. They both need a knock to the head.
Tomorrow, have a BUSY morning starting with a doctor's appointment at 9:00. Then, have to close a client's loan at 1:00 p.m., and I have to make sure that his closing documents are sent out by the second lender in time for 1:00. Urk. This holiday bullshit is irritating.
My friend Elaine called me tonight and invited me to her place for New Year's Eve! How fun! That will be pleasant and low-impact. I wonder who all is coming.
Time to consider what comes next tonight ..
Sunday, December 25, 2005
Merry Christmanukkwanza (MCMKWz)
Nearly the end of the day - dinner at Nicole's was lovely last night. She sent me home with leftovers, which I had tonight. YUMMY! She made "decaf" last night, which seems NOT to have been decaf, as I was up until about 3:30 this morning.
We had five people come to church this morning; we didn't do church, we just made coffee, ate kolaches and gossiped about Victoria Osteen. At noon, we quickly moved the television and stereo equipment around, and it's MUCH better.
Came home around 1:30, and took a big nap. Hung out this afternoon with Fabio for a while; he's a neat guy. I've never really talked with someone from Italy before.
Watching "kindertransport" about the exodus of Jewish children from Nazi Germany during 1938 and 1989.
Nick seems to be coming back in a few days. He's been on my mind today - and yesterday. He's very happy; he seems to have had a great day today. The thing that I can't get out of my mind is him using my garden tub and wanting to talk to me while he showered.
Started writing content for the drdivo website today. I'm going to finish that project tomorrow, and see if I can get Mikey to upload the project tomorrow. I also have to write a term paper, something for a mortgage course book, and my 2006 vision poster tomorrow. Busy day.
Talked to most everyone today; except for Dad. His phone was busy every time I called. Of course, he is consumed with Mary's brood occupying their home.
It was a great weekend. Peaceful, quiet, full of "me" time. The house is relatively clean, the laundry is done, only a few more things to put away here.
Dreamt about Philip this afternoon; well, dreamt of instant messaging with him. And, my sister. Dreamt about Richard and Rick two days ago - such a strange dream. I was to attend a party with them. I showed up, but they had made other plans (without informating me.) Somehow, they had taken advantage of me financially in this process, and then John (whom I used to work for) entered the dream. And more money dishonesty or dissemblement. Strange. I woke up thinking "what the HECK was that about?"
I watch this movie, about how the Germans turned on the Jews nearly IMMEDIATELY after Hitler came to power; the Jewish children were ostracized within days of his March 1933 election as chancellor. I watch this, and I think "that could happen here in the US so easily."
I have so many projects to complete - marks to make. This week I intend to timeline those projects out, and create the component breakdowns so I can get started in an organized manner. Some of it will require assistance. Some of it will just require a great deal of organized effort.
Me and my to do list are going to be even more close than we were before.
We had five people come to church this morning; we didn't do church, we just made coffee, ate kolaches and gossiped about Victoria Osteen. At noon, we quickly moved the television and stereo equipment around, and it's MUCH better.
Came home around 1:30, and took a big nap. Hung out this afternoon with Fabio for a while; he's a neat guy. I've never really talked with someone from Italy before.
Watching "kindertransport" about the exodus of Jewish children from Nazi Germany during 1938 and 1989.
Nick seems to be coming back in a few days. He's been on my mind today - and yesterday. He's very happy; he seems to have had a great day today. The thing that I can't get out of my mind is him using my garden tub and wanting to talk to me while he showered.
Started writing content for the drdivo website today. I'm going to finish that project tomorrow, and see if I can get Mikey to upload the project tomorrow. I also have to write a term paper, something for a mortgage course book, and my 2006 vision poster tomorrow. Busy day.
Talked to most everyone today; except for Dad. His phone was busy every time I called. Of course, he is consumed with Mary's brood occupying their home.
It was a great weekend. Peaceful, quiet, full of "me" time. The house is relatively clean, the laundry is done, only a few more things to put away here.
Dreamt about Philip this afternoon; well, dreamt of instant messaging with him. And, my sister. Dreamt about Richard and Rick two days ago - such a strange dream. I was to attend a party with them. I showed up, but they had made other plans (without informating me.) Somehow, they had taken advantage of me financially in this process, and then John (whom I used to work for) entered the dream. And more money dishonesty or dissemblement. Strange. I woke up thinking "what the HECK was that about?"
I watch this movie, about how the Germans turned on the Jews nearly IMMEDIATELY after Hitler came to power; the Jewish children were ostracized within days of his March 1933 election as chancellor. I watch this, and I think "that could happen here in the US so easily."
I have so many projects to complete - marks to make. This week I intend to timeline those projects out, and create the component breakdowns so I can get started in an organized manner. Some of it will require assistance. Some of it will just require a great deal of organized effort.
Me and my to do list are going to be even more close than we were before.
Saturday, December 24, 2005
'Twas the Night Before Christmas ...
And I don't have a thing to say. I had thought to write a witty takeoff on the Christmas Story - the dogs upstairs were quiet, the bois were all kicked out and living off of someone else. But, I'm tired and it's not worth the effort.
More tomorrow.
More tomorrow.
Thursday, December 22, 2005
The last business day before Christmas
'cause tomorrow, the 23rd, I can promise NOTHING is getting done.
Mikey now asks each new communication how the bitterness factor is going. Interesting that the more I reject situations that aren't fair to me, I'm being more and more bitter.
Of course, I know he just likes needling me about being bitter. His "older, eviler, bitterer sister."
Today, if one recalls, I'm to do something "unusual." So I think that's going to be me logging off the computer, reading a book and putting up the Christmas tree. Staying away from the computer for at least six hours. Or until tomorrow.
Mikey now asks each new communication how the bitterness factor is going. Interesting that the more I reject situations that aren't fair to me, I'm being more and more bitter.
Of course, I know he just likes needling me about being bitter. His "older, eviler, bitterer sister."
Today, if one recalls, I'm to do something "unusual." So I think that's going to be me logging off the computer, reading a book and putting up the Christmas tree. Staying away from the computer for at least six hours. Or until tomorrow.
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
Hump Day Madness
What a weird day. Everything seemed to start out okay; it went along just fine, and then ended with a bang.
At least I have business closing between now and the 10th of January. That's going to help. I was reading an email that I received today, which postulated "why DO you need investors?" Well, why do I?
I don't think that, necessarily, I do.
A day without Lisa ... is a day without having your ass kicked to a new plane.
Lunch with Kurtis, his mother has a brain tumor AND lung cancer. He's either very well adjusted to the concept, or he's even better at concealing his feelings than I've known him to be over the last 24 years, and that's pretty damned impressive. He'll be spending more and more of his time here over the next couple of weeks. It was nice to see him at least. While at lunch with him, the guy from the VW store called; the PERFECT perfect Phaeton is still available for sale. He found the one I saw online in Austin, and we talked about it. He's a nice guy, and very excited. I can hear in his voice that he knows that this is going to happen.
The next two days - two and a half days - should be VERY interesting. Most of my friends, live or memorex, will be gone. I have all that time to focus on .. well, whatever. Cleaning? I don't think that's really needed. More organizing? I have to work on my business website, and see about getting some brochures published in advance of tax season. I also need to order more business cards. Perhaps I should make a list, and check it twice. I have the possibility of outlining some more mortgage courses, I suppose. I've been putting that off, and that would be an outstanding Christmas gift to myself.
I submitted a number of writing job bids online today; I'm expecting to get hired for at least two of them for some reason. That will make January both busy and financially even happier.
My Chinese fortune cookie today at lunch with Kurtis said "do something unusual tomorrow." That would be .. Thursday. So, what? I've done enough crazy shit before to make headlines. Date a woman? Done that, but it would be quite unusual. Meditate all day? Now THAT would be unusual. Perhaps after I fax off my mortgage file updates in the morning, I could do that. All day. Hm. Journal, meditate, tap, journal, meditate, tap.
I don't know why I've been such a night owl lately. It usually goes hand in hand with the blood sugar thing. I'm just wide awake, and not tired to speak of, but during the day, I'm dragging ass, big time.
Watched another crapola movie tonight. This was with Dennis Quaid, airplane crashes in desert, stranded survivors piece together smaller plane-lette from crashed airplane. Bad acting, bad script, bad, bad, bad. Cool special effects. Wildly unbelieveable airplane crash sequence. Mikey kept telling me to cut it off.
It's December, and my air conditioner is running at 01:00 a.m. It hasn't run all day, though, I don't think. This is the time of year when the air is so stale inside that it hardly moves. I opened the windows today, which was nice.
Talked to Chuck tonight for a while; he seems to have been offered a job back in Houston doing what he does best for a downtown firm at a decent rate of pay. That's really great. He's not going to be home in time for Christmas, and it looks as if he's not going to be in time to work with me on Fabulair either.
Why should I be surprised that I'm on my own vis a vis Fabulair, huh? I have to give that line of thinking up. I've now asked TWO different friends to work on the calendar, and given them a pay rate, and asked them to track their hours - and .. drum roll, please .. NOTHING. Perhaps I'll just need to start doing THAT too.
How does anything get done in this country? I guess if you can't put the fear of withholding wages from someone, that results in a fear of being homeless, toothless and alone, they won't do a damned thing.
If I could figure out a way that someone could meet cute guys and randomly get LAID researching my calendar for me, I'm sure it would be populated out the wazoo by now.
Just stupid.
Okay, it's almost that time. I guess I'll pry the contacts out, shut down, push this content out and hit the sack.
At least I have business closing between now and the 10th of January. That's going to help. I was reading an email that I received today, which postulated "why DO you need investors?" Well, why do I?
I don't think that, necessarily, I do.
A day without Lisa ... is a day without having your ass kicked to a new plane.
Lunch with Kurtis, his mother has a brain tumor AND lung cancer. He's either very well adjusted to the concept, or he's even better at concealing his feelings than I've known him to be over the last 24 years, and that's pretty damned impressive. He'll be spending more and more of his time here over the next couple of weeks. It was nice to see him at least. While at lunch with him, the guy from the VW store called; the PERFECT perfect Phaeton is still available for sale. He found the one I saw online in Austin, and we talked about it. He's a nice guy, and very excited. I can hear in his voice that he knows that this is going to happen.
The next two days - two and a half days - should be VERY interesting. Most of my friends, live or memorex, will be gone. I have all that time to focus on .. well, whatever. Cleaning? I don't think that's really needed. More organizing? I have to work on my business website, and see about getting some brochures published in advance of tax season. I also need to order more business cards. Perhaps I should make a list, and check it twice. I have the possibility of outlining some more mortgage courses, I suppose. I've been putting that off, and that would be an outstanding Christmas gift to myself.
I submitted a number of writing job bids online today; I'm expecting to get hired for at least two of them for some reason. That will make January both busy and financially even happier.
My Chinese fortune cookie today at lunch with Kurtis said "do something unusual tomorrow." That would be .. Thursday. So, what? I've done enough crazy shit before to make headlines. Date a woman? Done that, but it would be quite unusual. Meditate all day? Now THAT would be unusual. Perhaps after I fax off my mortgage file updates in the morning, I could do that. All day. Hm. Journal, meditate, tap, journal, meditate, tap.
I don't know why I've been such a night owl lately. It usually goes hand in hand with the blood sugar thing. I'm just wide awake, and not tired to speak of, but during the day, I'm dragging ass, big time.
Watched another crapola movie tonight. This was with Dennis Quaid, airplane crashes in desert, stranded survivors piece together smaller plane-lette from crashed airplane. Bad acting, bad script, bad, bad, bad. Cool special effects. Wildly unbelieveable airplane crash sequence. Mikey kept telling me to cut it off.
It's December, and my air conditioner is running at 01:00 a.m. It hasn't run all day, though, I don't think. This is the time of year when the air is so stale inside that it hardly moves. I opened the windows today, which was nice.
Talked to Chuck tonight for a while; he seems to have been offered a job back in Houston doing what he does best for a downtown firm at a decent rate of pay. That's really great. He's not going to be home in time for Christmas, and it looks as if he's not going to be in time to work with me on Fabulair either.
Why should I be surprised that I'm on my own vis a vis Fabulair, huh? I have to give that line of thinking up. I've now asked TWO different friends to work on the calendar, and given them a pay rate, and asked them to track their hours - and .. drum roll, please .. NOTHING. Perhaps I'll just need to start doing THAT too.
How does anything get done in this country? I guess if you can't put the fear of withholding wages from someone, that results in a fear of being homeless, toothless and alone, they won't do a damned thing.
If I could figure out a way that someone could meet cute guys and randomly get LAID researching my calendar for me, I'm sure it would be populated out the wazoo by now.
Just stupid.
Okay, it's almost that time. I guess I'll pry the contacts out, shut down, push this content out and hit the sack.
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
Tuesday evening
Watching the movie "The Professional." Another crappy movie. Seems to be a theme this week. It's almost over, and then I'm going to watch Angel Season One, disc one. Again.
At least that's something I know I'll like.
Guy came over for divoghetti tonight. That was pleasant enough. I still have to clean the kitchen. And dust. Sometime.
I think I'll have some more nog.
Working up some special Christmas prezzies for the "boys" that were in my life during 2005. heh heh heh.
At least that's something I know I'll like.
Guy came over for divoghetti tonight. That was pleasant enough. I still have to clean the kitchen. And dust. Sometime.
I think I'll have some more nog.
Working up some special Christmas prezzies for the "boys" that were in my life during 2005. heh heh heh.
Monday, December 19, 2005
Monday late
So. The movie "Alexander." Colin Ferell's butt. Who cares? Lots of bizarre plot hither and thithers, weird stuff, lots of gore - sort of like "Troy" with Colin Ferell's butt in it. And longer. And less relevant.
Chuck is suddenly single.
The upstairs neighbors were at it again tonight while I was watching "Alexander." The whole apartment rattles.
Reading about EFT and losing weight.
Nary a peep out of the twisted sisters; they must have kissed and made up again. Ver. 615.01.
Almost time to hit the sack.
Chuck is suddenly single.
The upstairs neighbors were at it again tonight while I was watching "Alexander." The whole apartment rattles.
Reading about EFT and losing weight.
Nary a peep out of the twisted sisters; they must have kissed and made up again. Ver. 615.01.
Almost time to hit the sack.
Monday, Monday ver. 654.01
Just haven't felt much like blogging lately. Lots going on in my head. Today, I'm cleaning up around the apartment and waiting. Waiting for title commitments, underwriting responses, surveys, appraisals, whatever.
Have a few more packages to put together and mail out. I should jet over to the post office and pick up a flat rate box; maybe I'll do that later when I have dinner with Guy.
I think tonight's movie feature will be "Alexander." Two hours - ish.
Time to do some more file work and put more things in boxes. I think that my next trick will be to put up all the sheet music in some semblance of order.
Have a few more packages to put together and mail out. I should jet over to the post office and pick up a flat rate box; maybe I'll do that later when I have dinner with Guy.
I think tonight's movie feature will be "Alexander." Two hours - ish.
Time to do some more file work and put more things in boxes. I think that my next trick will be to put up all the sheet music in some semblance of order.
Friday, December 16, 2005
Im not a babysitter
I’m not a babysitter
Yep. I’m not. That’s what the apartment manager said to me. That I needed to work things out with the upstairs neighbors who make so much noise that one cannot carry on a conversation here in my unit. She basically said that she doesn’t want to hear about this any further unless I can invite her into my unit to hear the noise herself.
There being more than one way to skin a cat; I’ll politely whip the shit out of them using their lease agreement, community rules, and sound recordings. We have the technology; we have the training.
I’m about to start baking a pumpkin pie for tonight’s NV party. I’m waiting for documents to send in to the lender on a file that’s scheduled to close on Tuesday – since the seller is out of town, and we can’t get a survey or anything out of them, it will be Wednesday, probably.
Trying to move two other files forward also – I have to do some work for them. Can’t get CP to call me back to save my life. Rather like calling Santa’s hotline – there’s a placebo effect, but no results.
Just found out that a lender sent me a loan approval on October 24 – and it went to CP’s fax number, but he NEVER told me about it – just lamented that nothing had happened with that loan.
A bit later
Baking pumpkin pies for tonight’s party – it smells fabulous. It looks perfect. Two hours to cool, and then around 6:30, we’ll be off for the party.
I think I’ll defer working on these two loans until tomorrow morning. Nothing is going to happen with them until Monday morning, anyway.
Mikey came over at lunch and brought me a christmas prezzie – a tea light potpourri burner. Funny, I had been WANTING one. Having this in the den scents the whole house. I love my lamberger, but it’s so DAMNED expensive to feed, and it’s fussy. If I don’t burn it all the time, it gets cranky.
So, this is great. Mikey’s going to also help me figure out the software/hardware necessary to get three months’ free rent out of these people for the noise upstairs. I need to ask E about a software package though – he’ll know just what to find.
I think a nap is in order here. And more tapping. Where’s Lisa when I need her?
Yep. I’m not. That’s what the apartment manager said to me. That I needed to work things out with the upstairs neighbors who make so much noise that one cannot carry on a conversation here in my unit. She basically said that she doesn’t want to hear about this any further unless I can invite her into my unit to hear the noise herself.
There being more than one way to skin a cat; I’ll politely whip the shit out of them using their lease agreement, community rules, and sound recordings. We have the technology; we have the training.
I’m about to start baking a pumpkin pie for tonight’s NV party. I’m waiting for documents to send in to the lender on a file that’s scheduled to close on Tuesday – since the seller is out of town, and we can’t get a survey or anything out of them, it will be Wednesday, probably.
Trying to move two other files forward also – I have to do some work for them. Can’t get CP to call me back to save my life. Rather like calling Santa’s hotline – there’s a placebo effect, but no results.
Just found out that a lender sent me a loan approval on October 24 – and it went to CP’s fax number, but he NEVER told me about it – just lamented that nothing had happened with that loan.
A bit later
Baking pumpkin pies for tonight’s party – it smells fabulous. It looks perfect. Two hours to cool, and then around 6:30, we’ll be off for the party.
I think I’ll defer working on these two loans until tomorrow morning. Nothing is going to happen with them until Monday morning, anyway.
Mikey came over at lunch and brought me a christmas prezzie – a tea light potpourri burner. Funny, I had been WANTING one. Having this in the den scents the whole house. I love my lamberger, but it’s so DAMNED expensive to feed, and it’s fussy. If I don’t burn it all the time, it gets cranky.
So, this is great. Mikey’s going to also help me figure out the software/hardware necessary to get three months’ free rent out of these people for the noise upstairs. I need to ask E about a software package though – he’ll know just what to find.
I think a nap is in order here. And more tapping. Where’s Lisa when I need her?
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Hump Day Thundershowers
Whew! Another 36 cards mailed out today, plus my regular work. Had BuhZilly and Guy over tonight to watch a DVD and have pizza.
I think it's pretty clear to me that I need to stay put for Christmas. I have one more loan to crank out this year, and if I leave, that won't happen. Also, there's the cost - another $1,000. And, everything else.
Tomorrow, there are only fifteen more days of this year. Amazing.
I was talking with Chuck today about getting a townhouse together in a few weeks, but then, I look around this apartment (especially now that I'm the only one with a key) and I think - I really love this place. (sigh)
Nary a word out of Michael the Hooker - apparently, he read my email telling him that I was through with him after learning that he'd been taking my car without permission.
Dinner with Tom last night was VERY nice. We had a very good time just hanging out and talking. Then, he went home to his house, and I hung out and went to bed. I'm going to ask him out again tomorrow when I see him.
I have to be up and out early tomorrow; have to go to the comptroller's office, finish some loan documents, order closing papers and a survey, and do my homework and take-home test for tomorrow night's class. Oof. What a day.
Okay, time to be sleepy, even though I'm not.
I think it's pretty clear to me that I need to stay put for Christmas. I have one more loan to crank out this year, and if I leave, that won't happen. Also, there's the cost - another $1,000. And, everything else.
Tomorrow, there are only fifteen more days of this year. Amazing.
I was talking with Chuck today about getting a townhouse together in a few weeks, but then, I look around this apartment (especially now that I'm the only one with a key) and I think - I really love this place. (sigh)
Nary a word out of Michael the Hooker - apparently, he read my email telling him that I was through with him after learning that he'd been taking my car without permission.
Dinner with Tom last night was VERY nice. We had a very good time just hanging out and talking. Then, he went home to his house, and I hung out and went to bed. I'm going to ask him out again tomorrow when I see him.
I have to be up and out early tomorrow; have to go to the comptroller's office, finish some loan documents, order closing papers and a survey, and do my homework and take-home test for tomorrow night's class. Oof. What a day.
Okay, time to be sleepy, even though I'm not.
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Things Im done with
Things I’m done with (no, really)
Adult males that require someone to pick up after them
Yeah, go ahead – think I’m bitter. You can find someone else to buy your cigarettes.
Adult males that require someone to pick up after them
Adult males that cannot support themselves
Being awakened by someone so unable to focus their lives that they must pursue being validated sexually at all hours of the night
Cleaning the apartment after someone else made a mess of it
Supporting someone else’s life
Giving away any of my learned skills or knowledge without being fully compensated in advance
Listening to someone else’s anxiety or ongoing drama when they have no interest in my life and what I’m doing
Entertaining someone else’s sexual needs on their schedule only
Letting anyone through my front door that isn’t going to go right back out that door in an hour or two
Ignoring my own warning signs about people who don’t work, and have only sob stories of how they’ve been done wrong as an excuse
Anyone who wants to alter my environment to meet their preferences
Ignoring my own warning signs about people who don't work, live with their parents (especially in garages or basements), carry around a backpack and/or work behind a bar and have only sob stories of how they've been done wrong as an excuse
Being blamed for anything by someone unable to take any personal responsibility
Anyone who spends more than an hour a day online outside of their workplace
Anyone who logs into gay chats AT their workplace
Adults who watch the cartoon network when they should be looking for work
Long winded stories that defy reality - no matter how entertaining
and just to repeat: Entertaining someone else's sexual needs on their schedule only
Yeah, go ahead – think I’m bitter. You can find someone else to buy your cigarettes.
For Carlos and Nick
Gee, was this written for someone who recently lived in my apartment? Too bad his ex- on again/off again boyfriend doesn’t have balls like this.
http://www.snopes.com/embarrass/email/breakup.asp
Brad,
It would be difficult for me to be any more miserable right now, I feel like the worst person ever. First, let me start by saying that I am truly truly sorry, and I hate myself for hurting you. Of all the people in the whole entire world, you were honestly the last person that I would ever want to wrong in any way.
There is no excuse at all or anything that happened, so I won't even try other than to say all of us had WAY too much to drink, and I did a stupid thing. I can handle you being pissed at me, I absolutely deserve it, I can even handle the ugly words that were exchanged between us, what I can't handle is thinking that you see me as a different person. It is weird, I feel like I just went through a horrible break up or something.
The world looked funny yesterday, I couldn't crack a smile if you paid me, there are songs I can't listen to, and I just feel beyond crushed. I don't know if you meant everything you said to me, and I am hoping that you didn't. I know that I was wrong on many levels, but I am also hoping that this is something that we can deal with. I know it sounds totally crazy and stupid, but you have come to play such a significant role in my life, I can't imagine my days without you. It is totally strange and weird to say that, and you could say that my behavior didn't reflect that, and you would be correct. I hate feeling like you hate me, and I hate feeling like all of your friends think I am a terrible person, because I am not.
I know there is nothing I can say or do to take back what happened, but I just want you to know that fighting with you was just about the worst thing I could have ever imagined. It was right up there with one of the ugliest nights of my life, and I would give anything in the world to rewind and fix it. I am not sure if you will respond to this, part of me thinks that you won't. If not today, then maybe some other time. Also, thanks for getting my stuff together, although I think my sunglasses are still at your house, if you could keep your eyes peeled for them that would be great.
I can't even focus or work today, I can't eat, I seriously feel like it was an ugly break up, and I am hoping against hopes that it was not that and you are not done with me. Please don't cut me off, I really don't think I can handle that. I am so sorry. Elizabeth
(image placeholder)
Dear Elizabeth, Thank you for your concern. I'll be sure to file it away under "L" for "Long-winded diatribes from drunken whores I couldn't care less about". You did a stupid thing huh? No...doing long division and forgetting to carry the one is "a stupid thing"; Mixing in a red sock with a load whites is "a stupid thing"; Blowing some guy in a bathroom for 45 minutes while I sit at the bar wondering if you're taking so long because you ate too much bran that morning isn't as much a "Stupid thing" as it is grounds for permanent removal from my social calendar.
To be honest, I'm not sure if it was more amusing that you went and degraded yourself in a public toilet not once but twice in a 2 hour span, or that you seemed to think that by saying "Well, I didn't F**k him" somehow gave you a clean slate. So forgive me if I couldn't care less if the world "looked funny" to you yesterday.
Since your world revolves around blow dryers, golden retrievers, Prada Bags and Jelly Beans, I'm sure it must have been most unsettling to actually have to consider someone else's feelings for 24 hours straight. The good news for you is that my friends don't think you're a terrible person, they just think you're the average run of the mill cum-guzzling blond who commands about as much respect as your average child porn collector. I could be wrong but, it's pretty hard to respect some B&T chick who comes out to spend the night at my place even though she's seeing someone else in New jersey and winds up tongue-bathing the taint of anyone who decides 30 minutes of droning commentary on Colin Farrell's new haircut is worth putting up with for a hand job in the men's room.
The good thing about being a guy is that when I eventually bump into the young lad who finger-blasted you on top of a towel dispenser last Saturday, we'll have a shot and laugh our heads off about the time it happened. By the way, for the amount of time you claim to spend in spin class you really must be doing something wrong to sport the thunder thighs you do. Watching you parade around my bedroom in a thong was a little like watching sea lions mate. Thought you might like to know.
PS. I BCC'd about 100 people on this email.
Talk to you never,Brad
http://www.snopes.com/embarrass/email/breakup.asp
Brad,
It would be difficult for me to be any more miserable right now, I feel like the worst person ever. First, let me start by saying that I am truly truly sorry, and I hate myself for hurting you. Of all the people in the whole entire world, you were honestly the last person that I would ever want to wrong in any way.
There is no excuse at all or anything that happened, so I won't even try other than to say all of us had WAY too much to drink, and I did a stupid thing. I can handle you being pissed at me, I absolutely deserve it, I can even handle the ugly words that were exchanged between us, what I can't handle is thinking that you see me as a different person. It is weird, I feel like I just went through a horrible break up or something.
The world looked funny yesterday, I couldn't crack a smile if you paid me, there are songs I can't listen to, and I just feel beyond crushed. I don't know if you meant everything you said to me, and I am hoping that you didn't. I know that I was wrong on many levels, but I am also hoping that this is something that we can deal with. I know it sounds totally crazy and stupid, but you have come to play such a significant role in my life, I can't imagine my days without you. It is totally strange and weird to say that, and you could say that my behavior didn't reflect that, and you would be correct. I hate feeling like you hate me, and I hate feeling like all of your friends think I am a terrible person, because I am not.
I know there is nothing I can say or do to take back what happened, but I just want you to know that fighting with you was just about the worst thing I could have ever imagined. It was right up there with one of the ugliest nights of my life, and I would give anything in the world to rewind and fix it. I am not sure if you will respond to this, part of me thinks that you won't. If not today, then maybe some other time. Also, thanks for getting my stuff together, although I think my sunglasses are still at your house, if you could keep your eyes peeled for them that would be great.
I can't even focus or work today, I can't eat, I seriously feel like it was an ugly break up, and I am hoping against hopes that it was not that and you are not done with me. Please don't cut me off, I really don't think I can handle that. I am so sorry. Elizabeth
(image placeholder)
Dear Elizabeth, Thank you for your concern. I'll be sure to file it away under "L" for "Long-winded diatribes from drunken whores I couldn't care less about". You did a stupid thing huh? No...doing long division and forgetting to carry the one is "a stupid thing"; Mixing in a red sock with a load whites is "a stupid thing"; Blowing some guy in a bathroom for 45 minutes while I sit at the bar wondering if you're taking so long because you ate too much bran that morning isn't as much a "Stupid thing" as it is grounds for permanent removal from my social calendar.
To be honest, I'm not sure if it was more amusing that you went and degraded yourself in a public toilet not once but twice in a 2 hour span, or that you seemed to think that by saying "Well, I didn't F**k him" somehow gave you a clean slate. So forgive me if I couldn't care less if the world "looked funny" to you yesterday.
Since your world revolves around blow dryers, golden retrievers, Prada Bags and Jelly Beans, I'm sure it must have been most unsettling to actually have to consider someone else's feelings for 24 hours straight. The good news for you is that my friends don't think you're a terrible person, they just think you're the average run of the mill cum-guzzling blond who commands about as much respect as your average child porn collector. I could be wrong but, it's pretty hard to respect some B&T chick who comes out to spend the night at my place even though she's seeing someone else in New jersey and winds up tongue-bathing the taint of anyone who decides 30 minutes of droning commentary on Colin Farrell's new haircut is worth putting up with for a hand job in the men's room.
The good thing about being a guy is that when I eventually bump into the young lad who finger-blasted you on top of a towel dispenser last Saturday, we'll have a shot and laugh our heads off about the time it happened. By the way, for the amount of time you claim to spend in spin class you really must be doing something wrong to sport the thunder thighs you do. Watching you parade around my bedroom in a thong was a little like watching sea lions mate. Thought you might like to know.
PS. I BCC'd about 100 people on this email.
Talk to you never,Brad
Sunday, December 11, 2005
Oklahoma Farmers Advice
An Oklahoma Farmer's Advice: * Your fences need to be horse-high, pig-tight and bull-strong. * Keep skunks and bankers and lawyers at a distance. * Life is simpler when you plow around the stump. * A bumble bee is considerably faster than a John Deere tractor. * Words that soak into your ears are whispered...not yelled. * Meanness don't jes' happen overnight. * Forgive your enemies. It messes up their heads. * Do not corner something that you know is meaner than you. * It don't take a very big person to carry a grudge. * You cannot unsay a cruel word. * Every path has a few puddles. * When you wallow with pigs, expect to get dirty. * The best sermons are lived, not preached. * Most of the stuff people worry about ain't never gonna happen anyway. * Don't judge folks by their relatives. * Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer. * Live a good, honorable life. Then when you get older and think back, you'll enjoy it a second time. * Don't interfere with somethin' that ain't botherin' you none. * Timing has a lot to do with the outcome of a rain dance. * If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop diggin'. * Sometimes you get, and sometimes you get got. * The biggest troublemaker you'll probably ever have to deal with, watches you from the mirror every mornin'. * Always drink upstream from the herd. * Good judgment comes from experience, and a lotta that comes from bad judgment. * Lettin' the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier than puttin' it back in. * If you get to thinkin' you're a person of some influence, try orderin' somebody else's dog around. * Live simply. Love generously. Care deeply. Speak kindly. Leave the rest to God.
The Nobel Lecture
The Nobel Lecture: Art, Truth and Politics By Harold Pinter The Guardian UK
Wednesday 07 December 2005
This is the text of the lecture to be given by Harold Pinter when he receives the 2005 Nobel prize for literature on Saturday. Forbidden by doctors from going to Stockholm to receive the £720,000 prize, the ailing playwright and poet has delivered his speech by video
In 1958 I wrote the following:
'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.'
I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?
Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.
I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did.
Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or an image. The given word is often shortly followed by the image. I shall give two examples of two lines which came right out of the blue into my head, followed by an image, followed by me.
The plays are The Homecoming and Old Times. The first line of The Homecoming is 'What have you done with the scissors?' The first line of Old Times is 'Dark.'
In each case I had no further information.
In the first case someone was obviously looking for a pair of scissors and was demanding their whereabouts of someone else he suspected had probably stolen them. But I somehow knew that the person addressed didn't give a damn about the scissors or about the questioner either, for that matter.
'Dark' I took to be a description of someone's hair, the hair of a woman, and was the answer to a question. In each case I found myself compelled to pursue the matter. This happened visually, a very slow fade, through shadow into light.
I always start a play by calling the characters A, B and C.
In the play that became The Homecoming I saw a man enter a stark room and ask his question of a younger man sitting on an ugly sofa reading a racing paper. I somehow suspected that A was a father and that B was his son, but I had no proof. This was however confirmed a short time later when B (later to become Lenny) says to A (later to become Max), 'Dad, do you mind if I change the subject? I want to ask you something. The dinner we had before, what was the name of it? What do you call it? Why don't you buy a dog? You're a dog cook. Honest. You think you're cooking for a lot of dogs.' So since B calls A 'Dad' it seemed to me reasonable to assume that they were father and son. A was also clearly the cook and his cooking did not seem to be held in high regard. Did this mean that there was no mother? I didn't know. But, as I told myself at the time, our beginnings never know our ends.
'Dark.' A large window. Evening sky. A man, A (later to become Deeley), and a woman, B (later to become Kate), sitting with drinks. 'Fat or thin?' the man asks. Who are they talking about? But I then see, standing at the window, a woman, C (later to become Anna), in another condition of light, her back to them, her hair dark.
It's a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author's position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they are impossible to define. You certainly can't dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man's buff, hide and seek. But finally you find that you have people of flesh and blood on your hands, people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort.
So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time.
But as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot.
Political theatre presents an entirely different set of problems. Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or prejudice. He must be prepared to approach them from a variety of angles, from a full and uninhibited range of perspectives, take them by surprise, perhaps, occasionally, but nevertheless give them the freedom to go which way they will. This does not always work. And political satire, of course, adheres to none of these precepts, in fact does precisely the opposite, which is its proper function.
In my play The Birthday Party I think I allow a whole range of options to operate in a dense forest of possibility before finally focussing on an act of subjugation.
Mountain Language pretends to no such range of operation. It remains brutal, short and ugly. But the soldiers in the play do get some fun out of it. One sometimes forgets that torturers become easily bored. They need a bit of a laugh to keep their spirits up. This has been confirmed of course by the events at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad. Mountain Language lasts only 20 minutes, but it could go on for hour after hour, on and on and on, the same pattern repeated over and over again, on and on, hour after hour.
Ashes to Ashes, on the other hand, seems to me to be taking place under water. A drowning woman, her hand reaching up through the waves, dropping down out of sight, reaching for others, but finding nobody there, either above or under the water, finding only shadows, reflections, floating; the woman a lost figure in a drowning landscape, a woman unable to escape the doom that seemed to belong only to others.
But as they died, she must die too.
Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.
As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true.
The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.
But before I come back to the present I would like to look at the recent past, by which I mean United States foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. I believe it is obligatory upon us to subject this period to at least some kind of even limited scrutiny, which is all that time will allow here.
Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.
But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now. Although constrained, to a certain extent, by the existence of the Soviet Union, the United States' actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked.
Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America's favoured method. In the main, it has preferred what it has described as 'low intensity conflict'. Low intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued - or beaten to death - the same thing - and your own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in US foreign policy in the years to which I refer.
The tragedy of Nicaragua was a highly significant case. I choose to offer it here as a potent example of America's view of its role in the world, both then and now.
I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.
The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: 'Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.'
Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. 'Father,' he said, 'let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.' There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.
Innocent people, indeed, always suffer.
Finally somebody said: 'But in this case "innocent people" were the victims of a gruesome atrocity subsidised by your government, one among many. If Congress allows the Contras more money further atrocities of this kind will take place. Is this not the case? Is your government not therefore guilty of supporting acts of murder and destruction upon the citizens of a sovereign state?'
Seitz was imperturbable. 'I don't agree that the facts as presented support your assertions,' he said.
As we were leaving the Embassy a US aide told me that he enjoyed my plays. I did not reply.
I should remind you that at the time President Reagan made the following statement: 'The Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.'
The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for over 40 years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular revolution.
The Sandinistas weren't perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilised. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated.
The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of health care and education and achieve social unity and national self respect, neighbouring countries would ask the same questions and do the same things. There was of course at the time fierce resistance to the status quo in El Salvador.
I spoke earlier about 'a tapestry of lies' which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a 'totalitarian dungeon'. This was taken generally by the media, and certainly by the British government, as accurate and fair comment. But there was in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of systematic or official military brutality. No priests were ever murdered in Nicaragua. There were in fact three priests in the government, two Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary. The totalitarian dungeons were actually next door, in El Salvador and Guatemala. The United States had brought down the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been victims of successive military dictatorships.
Six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world were viciously murdered at the Central American University in San Salvador in 1989 by a battalion of the Alcatl regiment trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA. That extremely brave man Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying mass. It is estimated that 75,000 people died. Why were they killed? They were killed because they believed a better life was possible and should be achieved. That belief immediately qualified them as communists. They died because they dared to question the status quo, the endless plateau of poverty, disease, degradation and oppression, which had been their birthright.
The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance. 'Democracy' had prevailed.
But this 'policy' was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened.
The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.
Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it.
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.'
It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.
The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn't give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.
What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days - conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead? Look at Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about by what's called the 'international community'. This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to be 'the leader of the free world'. Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally - a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man's land from which indeed they may never return. At present many are on hunger strike, being force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anaesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture. What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not? Because the United States has said: to criticise our conduct in Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You're either with us or against us. So Blair shuts up.
The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading - as a last resort - all other justifications having failed to justify themselves - as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.
We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East'.
How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice. Therefore if any American soldier or for that matter politician finds himself in the dock Bush has warned that he will send in the marines. But Tony Blair has ratified the Court and is therefore available for prosecution. We can let the Court have his address if they're interested. It is Number 10, Downing Street, London.
Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don't exist. They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead. 'We don't do body counts,' said the American general Tommy Franks.
Early in the invasion there was a photograph published on the front page of British newspapers of Tony Blair kissing the cheek of a little Iraqi boy. 'A grateful child,' said the caption. A few days later there was a story and photograph, on an inside page, of another four-year-old boy with no arms. His family had been blown up by a missile. He was the only survivor. 'When do I get my arms back?' he asked. The story was dropped. Well, Tony Blair wasn't holding him in his arms, nor the body of any other mutilated child, nor the body of any bloody corpse. Blood is dirty. It dirties your shirt and tie when you're making a sincere speech on television.
The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of harm's way. The mutilated rot in their beds, some for the rest of their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both rot, in different kinds of graves.
Here is an extract from a poem by Pablo Neruda, 'I'm Explaining a Few Things':
And one morning all that was burning, one morning the bonfires leapt out of the earth devouring human beings and from then on fire, gunpowder from then on, and from then on blood. Bandits with planes and Moors, bandits with finger-rings and duchesses, bandits with black friars spattering blessings came through the sky to kill children and the blood of children ran through the streets without fuss, like children's blood.
Jackals that the jackals would despise stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out, vipers that the vipers would abominate.
Face to face with you I have seen the blood of Spain tower like a tide to drown you in one wave of pride and knives.
Treacherous generals: see my dead house, look at broken Spain: from every house burning metal flows instead of flowers from every socket of Spain Spain emerges and from every dead child a rifle with eyes and from every crime bullets are born which will one day find the bull's eye of your hearts.
And you will ask: why doesn't his poetry speak of dreams and leaves and the great volcanoes of his native land.
Come and see the blood in the streets. Come and see the blood in the streets. Come and see the blood in the streets! *
Let me make it quite clear that in quoting from Neruda's poem I am in no way comparing Republican Spain to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. I quote Neruda because nowhere in contemporary poetry have I read such a powerful visceral description of the bombing of civilians.
I have said earlier that the United States is now totally frank about putting its cards on the table. That is the case. Its official declared policy is now defined as 'full spectrum dominance'. That is not my term, it is theirs. 'Full spectrum dominance' means control of land, sea, air and space and all attendant resources.
The United States now occupies 702 military installations throughout the world in 132 countries, with the honourable exception of Sweden, of course. We don't quite know how they got there but they are there all right.
The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning. It is developing new systems of nuclear force, known as bunker busters. The British, ever cooperative, are intending to replace their own nuclear missile, Trident. Who, I wonder, are they aiming at? Osama bin Laden? You? Me? Joe Dokes? China? Paris? Who knows? What we do know is that this infantile insanity - the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons - is at the heart of present American political philosophy. We must remind ourselves that the United States is on a permanent military footing and shows no sign of relaxing it.
Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government's actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force - yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish.
I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers but I would like to volunteer for the job myself. I propose the following short address which he can make on television to the nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious, winning, sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile, curiously attractive, a man's man.
'God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden's God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam's God was bad, except he didn't have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don't chop people's heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don't you forget it.'
A writer's life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don't have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection - unless you lie - in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.
I have referred to death quite a few times this evening. I shall now quote a poem of my own called 'Death'.
Where was the dead body found? Who found the dead body? Was the dead body dead when found? How was the dead body found?
Who was the dead body?
Who was the father or daughter or brother Or uncle or sister or mother or son Of the dead and abandoned body?
Was the body dead when abandoned? Was the body abandoned? By whom had it been abandoned?
Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey?
What made you declare the dead body dead? Did you declare the dead body dead? How well did you know the dead body? How did you know the dead body was dead?
Did you wash the dead body Did you close both its eyes Did you bury the body Did you leave it abandoned Did you kiss the dead body
When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror - for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.
I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.
If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us - the dignity of man.
Wednesday 07 December 2005
This is the text of the lecture to be given by Harold Pinter when he receives the 2005 Nobel prize for literature on Saturday. Forbidden by doctors from going to Stockholm to receive the £720,000 prize, the ailing playwright and poet has delivered his speech by video
In 1958 I wrote the following:
'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.'
I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?
Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.
I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did.
Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or an image. The given word is often shortly followed by the image. I shall give two examples of two lines which came right out of the blue into my head, followed by an image, followed by me.
The plays are The Homecoming and Old Times. The first line of The Homecoming is 'What have you done with the scissors?' The first line of Old Times is 'Dark.'
In each case I had no further information.
In the first case someone was obviously looking for a pair of scissors and was demanding their whereabouts of someone else he suspected had probably stolen them. But I somehow knew that the person addressed didn't give a damn about the scissors or about the questioner either, for that matter.
'Dark' I took to be a description of someone's hair, the hair of a woman, and was the answer to a question. In each case I found myself compelled to pursue the matter. This happened visually, a very slow fade, through shadow into light.
I always start a play by calling the characters A, B and C.
In the play that became The Homecoming I saw a man enter a stark room and ask his question of a younger man sitting on an ugly sofa reading a racing paper. I somehow suspected that A was a father and that B was his son, but I had no proof. This was however confirmed a short time later when B (later to become Lenny) says to A (later to become Max), 'Dad, do you mind if I change the subject? I want to ask you something. The dinner we had before, what was the name of it? What do you call it? Why don't you buy a dog? You're a dog cook. Honest. You think you're cooking for a lot of dogs.' So since B calls A 'Dad' it seemed to me reasonable to assume that they were father and son. A was also clearly the cook and his cooking did not seem to be held in high regard. Did this mean that there was no mother? I didn't know. But, as I told myself at the time, our beginnings never know our ends.
'Dark.' A large window. Evening sky. A man, A (later to become Deeley), and a woman, B (later to become Kate), sitting with drinks. 'Fat or thin?' the man asks. Who are they talking about? But I then see, standing at the window, a woman, C (later to become Anna), in another condition of light, her back to them, her hair dark.
It's a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author's position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they are impossible to define. You certainly can't dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man's buff, hide and seek. But finally you find that you have people of flesh and blood on your hands, people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort.
So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time.
But as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot.
Political theatre presents an entirely different set of problems. Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or prejudice. He must be prepared to approach them from a variety of angles, from a full and uninhibited range of perspectives, take them by surprise, perhaps, occasionally, but nevertheless give them the freedom to go which way they will. This does not always work. And political satire, of course, adheres to none of these precepts, in fact does precisely the opposite, which is its proper function.
In my play The Birthday Party I think I allow a whole range of options to operate in a dense forest of possibility before finally focussing on an act of subjugation.
Mountain Language pretends to no such range of operation. It remains brutal, short and ugly. But the soldiers in the play do get some fun out of it. One sometimes forgets that torturers become easily bored. They need a bit of a laugh to keep their spirits up. This has been confirmed of course by the events at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad. Mountain Language lasts only 20 minutes, but it could go on for hour after hour, on and on and on, the same pattern repeated over and over again, on and on, hour after hour.
Ashes to Ashes, on the other hand, seems to me to be taking place under water. A drowning woman, her hand reaching up through the waves, dropping down out of sight, reaching for others, but finding nobody there, either above or under the water, finding only shadows, reflections, floating; the woman a lost figure in a drowning landscape, a woman unable to escape the doom that seemed to belong only to others.
But as they died, she must die too.
Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.
As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true.
The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.
But before I come back to the present I would like to look at the recent past, by which I mean United States foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. I believe it is obligatory upon us to subject this period to at least some kind of even limited scrutiny, which is all that time will allow here.
Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.
But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now. Although constrained, to a certain extent, by the existence of the Soviet Union, the United States' actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked.
Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America's favoured method. In the main, it has preferred what it has described as 'low intensity conflict'. Low intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued - or beaten to death - the same thing - and your own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in US foreign policy in the years to which I refer.
The tragedy of Nicaragua was a highly significant case. I choose to offer it here as a potent example of America's view of its role in the world, both then and now.
I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.
The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: 'Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.'
Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. 'Father,' he said, 'let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.' There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.
Innocent people, indeed, always suffer.
Finally somebody said: 'But in this case "innocent people" were the victims of a gruesome atrocity subsidised by your government, one among many. If Congress allows the Contras more money further atrocities of this kind will take place. Is this not the case? Is your government not therefore guilty of supporting acts of murder and destruction upon the citizens of a sovereign state?'
Seitz was imperturbable. 'I don't agree that the facts as presented support your assertions,' he said.
As we were leaving the Embassy a US aide told me that he enjoyed my plays. I did not reply.
I should remind you that at the time President Reagan made the following statement: 'The Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.'
The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for over 40 years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular revolution.
The Sandinistas weren't perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilised. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated.
The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of health care and education and achieve social unity and national self respect, neighbouring countries would ask the same questions and do the same things. There was of course at the time fierce resistance to the status quo in El Salvador.
I spoke earlier about 'a tapestry of lies' which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a 'totalitarian dungeon'. This was taken generally by the media, and certainly by the British government, as accurate and fair comment. But there was in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of systematic or official military brutality. No priests were ever murdered in Nicaragua. There were in fact three priests in the government, two Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary. The totalitarian dungeons were actually next door, in El Salvador and Guatemala. The United States had brought down the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been victims of successive military dictatorships.
Six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world were viciously murdered at the Central American University in San Salvador in 1989 by a battalion of the Alcatl regiment trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA. That extremely brave man Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying mass. It is estimated that 75,000 people died. Why were they killed? They were killed because they believed a better life was possible and should be achieved. That belief immediately qualified them as communists. They died because they dared to question the status quo, the endless plateau of poverty, disease, degradation and oppression, which had been their birthright.
The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance. 'Democracy' had prevailed.
But this 'policy' was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened.
The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.
Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it.
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.'
It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.
The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn't give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.
What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days - conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead? Look at Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about by what's called the 'international community'. This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to be 'the leader of the free world'. Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally - a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man's land from which indeed they may never return. At present many are on hunger strike, being force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anaesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture. What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not? Because the United States has said: to criticise our conduct in Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You're either with us or against us. So Blair shuts up.
The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading - as a last resort - all other justifications having failed to justify themselves - as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.
We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East'.
How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice. Therefore if any American soldier or for that matter politician finds himself in the dock Bush has warned that he will send in the marines. But Tony Blair has ratified the Court and is therefore available for prosecution. We can let the Court have his address if they're interested. It is Number 10, Downing Street, London.
Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don't exist. They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead. 'We don't do body counts,' said the American general Tommy Franks.
Early in the invasion there was a photograph published on the front page of British newspapers of Tony Blair kissing the cheek of a little Iraqi boy. 'A grateful child,' said the caption. A few days later there was a story and photograph, on an inside page, of another four-year-old boy with no arms. His family had been blown up by a missile. He was the only survivor. 'When do I get my arms back?' he asked. The story was dropped. Well, Tony Blair wasn't holding him in his arms, nor the body of any other mutilated child, nor the body of any bloody corpse. Blood is dirty. It dirties your shirt and tie when you're making a sincere speech on television.
The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of harm's way. The mutilated rot in their beds, some for the rest of their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both rot, in different kinds of graves.
Here is an extract from a poem by Pablo Neruda, 'I'm Explaining a Few Things':
And one morning all that was burning, one morning the bonfires leapt out of the earth devouring human beings and from then on fire, gunpowder from then on, and from then on blood. Bandits with planes and Moors, bandits with finger-rings and duchesses, bandits with black friars spattering blessings came through the sky to kill children and the blood of children ran through the streets without fuss, like children's blood.
Jackals that the jackals would despise stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out, vipers that the vipers would abominate.
Face to face with you I have seen the blood of Spain tower like a tide to drown you in one wave of pride and knives.
Treacherous generals: see my dead house, look at broken Spain: from every house burning metal flows instead of flowers from every socket of Spain Spain emerges and from every dead child a rifle with eyes and from every crime bullets are born which will one day find the bull's eye of your hearts.
And you will ask: why doesn't his poetry speak of dreams and leaves and the great volcanoes of his native land.
Come and see the blood in the streets. Come and see the blood in the streets. Come and see the blood in the streets! *
Let me make it quite clear that in quoting from Neruda's poem I am in no way comparing Republican Spain to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. I quote Neruda because nowhere in contemporary poetry have I read such a powerful visceral description of the bombing of civilians.
I have said earlier that the United States is now totally frank about putting its cards on the table. That is the case. Its official declared policy is now defined as 'full spectrum dominance'. That is not my term, it is theirs. 'Full spectrum dominance' means control of land, sea, air and space and all attendant resources.
The United States now occupies 702 military installations throughout the world in 132 countries, with the honourable exception of Sweden, of course. We don't quite know how they got there but they are there all right.
The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning. It is developing new systems of nuclear force, known as bunker busters. The British, ever cooperative, are intending to replace their own nuclear missile, Trident. Who, I wonder, are they aiming at? Osama bin Laden? You? Me? Joe Dokes? China? Paris? Who knows? What we do know is that this infantile insanity - the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons - is at the heart of present American political philosophy. We must remind ourselves that the United States is on a permanent military footing and shows no sign of relaxing it.
Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government's actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force - yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish.
I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers but I would like to volunteer for the job myself. I propose the following short address which he can make on television to the nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious, winning, sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile, curiously attractive, a man's man.
'God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden's God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam's God was bad, except he didn't have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don't chop people's heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don't you forget it.'
A writer's life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don't have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection - unless you lie - in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.
I have referred to death quite a few times this evening. I shall now quote a poem of my own called 'Death'.
Where was the dead body found? Who found the dead body? Was the dead body dead when found? How was the dead body found?
Who was the dead body?
Who was the father or daughter or brother Or uncle or sister or mother or son Of the dead and abandoned body?
Was the body dead when abandoned? Was the body abandoned? By whom had it been abandoned?
Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey?
What made you declare the dead body dead? Did you declare the dead body dead? How well did you know the dead body? How did you know the dead body was dead?
Did you wash the dead body Did you close both its eyes Did you bury the body Did you leave it abandoned Did you kiss the dead body
When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror - for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.
I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.
If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us - the dignity of man.
Saturday, December 10, 2005
Saturday evening -
What a peaceful day this has been. I still need to clean the apartment, and pack up more Christmas presents, but overall it's been very nice.
I'm still trying to train myself how to use this Time Warner DVR. I know that there's a way to have it record ALL of the HBO shows that I want to see. However, I haven't quite figured that out yet. Still I can watch these two that have been recorded, which is great!
I didn't realize this morning that I had had two phone calls at around 02:00 this morning. One from Nick, and one from Carlos. Short version: big gay drama, Nick was angry with me that I wasn't answering the phone at two in the morning to LISTEN to said big gay drama again, and Carlos was calling to vent.
Observation from a safe distance. Yep. Safe distance.
Still no word from Michael, which is dandy. He leaves for Norfolk in two days, and then, my man diet starts. No more men in my house or in my life until June 6.
And, maybe not then, either.
I heard from Janice today - that was good - I was starting to worry about her.
I spent some time today visualizing how I want this year to end. The mental equivalent is challenging, but I'm going to work on it some more tonight.
More work with Lisa tomorrow, and then more meditation. And cleaning. It just shouldn't take that long to scrub the place down. Again.
Next week, I am focusing on finishing all the work that I've been putting off, of any nature. By next week, I'll have everything, and I do mean EVERYTHING caught up.
I think I will ask Carol to index my CDs, vinyl albums and books. She needs some work, and she'll actually do the work. I also have to talk to her about her being here for Christmas to watch the mutts.
I'm still trying to train myself how to use this Time Warner DVR. I know that there's a way to have it record ALL of the HBO shows that I want to see. However, I haven't quite figured that out yet. Still I can watch these two that have been recorded, which is great!
I didn't realize this morning that I had had two phone calls at around 02:00 this morning. One from Nick, and one from Carlos. Short version: big gay drama, Nick was angry with me that I wasn't answering the phone at two in the morning to LISTEN to said big gay drama again, and Carlos was calling to vent.
Observation from a safe distance. Yep. Safe distance.
Still no word from Michael, which is dandy. He leaves for Norfolk in two days, and then, my man diet starts. No more men in my house or in my life until June 6.
And, maybe not then, either.
I heard from Janice today - that was good - I was starting to worry about her.
I spent some time today visualizing how I want this year to end. The mental equivalent is challenging, but I'm going to work on it some more tonight.
More work with Lisa tomorrow, and then more meditation. And cleaning. It just shouldn't take that long to scrub the place down. Again.
Next week, I am focusing on finishing all the work that I've been putting off, of any nature. By next week, I'll have everything, and I do mean EVERYTHING caught up.
I think I will ask Carol to index my CDs, vinyl albums and books. She needs some work, and she'll actually do the work. I also have to talk to her about her being here for Christmas to watch the mutts.
Holiday spirit
Holiday spirit
Shipped out the Christmas cards today, and realized I need to buy about twenty more. Also sent out a response to the State of Texas that had to be postmarked today – that cost eight bucks. I’ve realized that my CD collection is totally catawampus, and needs to be sorted through – figure out what’s where, and get it all back where it’s supposed to be.
I need to vote in today’s run-off election.
We’re getting down to the wire for the end of the year. Only a few more days to make ANYTHING happen.
The guy in New York is writing to ask if I still want the Phaeton. Uh, yeah. I do. I just haven’t quite identified the money yet to wire to you to allow me to come pick it up.
The mailbox gets more and more full each day. Blarg. Thank God I bought this industrial strength shredder – I can run nearly anything through it. It just fills up so DAMNED fast.
My blood sugar was catawampus again today – probably from eating junk food at these two holiday parties last night. What a weird night that was. Mikey and I thought we could restore normalcy to the evening by going to EJ’s, and THAT was odd. The boi was there, looking handsome, but assiduously ignoring me (ooooh, hurt me, crack baby!) We had one drink and left.
Came home, and Michael wasn’t here. Checked email, and he came in. Got up this morning, and he was gone again. He needs to just BE gone and STAY gone, which I intend to accomplish today, if he checks in or shows up.
Nick’s angry with me. He thinks I’m telling Carlos information about him. I just listen to each of them; it’s something that is best observed from a distance. Of course, Carlos is talking to many men that Nick is also talking to – it’s the triangulation triathelon.
I just figured out that Tom DeLay re-districted ME from Sheila Jackson Lee’s district into John Culberson. That’s sort of like being represented by Tom DeLay himself. Thus, I feel I am utterly unrepresented in Washington, given that Clone 1 and 2 are in the Senate, and Clone 3 is in the House. Great.
Okay, time to do some more laundry and think about whether I have enough holiday spirit to decorate the house. More later.
Shipped out the Christmas cards today, and realized I need to buy about twenty more. Also sent out a response to the State of Texas that had to be postmarked today – that cost eight bucks. I’ve realized that my CD collection is totally catawampus, and needs to be sorted through – figure out what’s where, and get it all back where it’s supposed to be.
I need to vote in today’s run-off election.
We’re getting down to the wire for the end of the year. Only a few more days to make ANYTHING happen.
The guy in New York is writing to ask if I still want the Phaeton. Uh, yeah. I do. I just haven’t quite identified the money yet to wire to you to allow me to come pick it up.
The mailbox gets more and more full each day. Blarg. Thank God I bought this industrial strength shredder – I can run nearly anything through it. It just fills up so DAMNED fast.
My blood sugar was catawampus again today – probably from eating junk food at these two holiday parties last night. What a weird night that was. Mikey and I thought we could restore normalcy to the evening by going to EJ’s, and THAT was odd. The boi was there, looking handsome, but assiduously ignoring me (ooooh, hurt me, crack baby!) We had one drink and left.
Came home, and Michael wasn’t here. Checked email, and he came in. Got up this morning, and he was gone again. He needs to just BE gone and STAY gone, which I intend to accomplish today, if he checks in or shows up.
Nick’s angry with me. He thinks I’m telling Carlos information about him. I just listen to each of them; it’s something that is best observed from a distance. Of course, Carlos is talking to many men that Nick is also talking to – it’s the triangulation triathelon.
I just figured out that Tom DeLay re-districted ME from Sheila Jackson Lee’s district into John Culberson. That’s sort of like being represented by Tom DeLay himself. Thus, I feel I am utterly unrepresented in Washington, given that Clone 1 and 2 are in the Senate, and Clone 3 is in the House. Great.
Okay, time to do some more laundry and think about whether I have enough holiday spirit to decorate the house. More later.
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
Humpday silliness
Humpday silliness
One of the convenient things about being very well connected and congenial is that EVERYONE talks to me, even Carlos. So, I’m hearing a totally different side of things from him than I did from Nick, who called earlier today with the introductory remark “I know you’re going to tell me ‘I told you so.’”
It’s rather like hearing stories from two unrelated people who happened to live in the same city.
What a gloomy day it has been. Still, I have the desk cleared off, and am working on my Christmas card list. I have twenty-eight to send, unless I buy more from New Vision and send those. That may be a good idea.
Tonight is the monthly New Vision meeting, and then a little work with Lisa. I have a TON of work to accomplish tomorrow, not the least of which is getting my homework done for tomorrow night’s class.
Mikey and I were in TXT magazine last weekend!! I have to go see if I can pick one up on my way to Clear Lake tonight!
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/120705O.shtml
Goodbye, New Orleans: It's Time We Stopped Pretending By Mike Tidwell Orion Online
December 2005 Issue
As we reach the 90-day mark since Katrina hit, it's time we ended our national state of denial. Turns out House Speaker Dennis Hastert had it right all along, though his reasons were flawed. We should call it quits in New Orleans not because the city can't be made relatively safe from hurricanes. It can be. And not because to do so is more trouble than it's worth. It's not. But because the Bush Administration has already given New Orleans a quiet kiss of death now that the story has run its news cycle.
As someone who dearly loves New Orleans and has experienced many of her charms, it pains me immeasurably to call for this retreat. This is not a rhetorical stunt or a shock argument meant to invite compromise talks. I mean what I say: Shut the city down and board it up before thousands more lives are lost.
In the weeks after Katrina, the American media somehow portrayed the catastrophe as a matter of failed levees and flawed evacuation plans. The "What went wrong?" coverage involved autopsies of every breached dike and a witch hunt for those responsible for the Superdome and Convention Center fiascos. But these were just horrifying symptoms of a much larger disease.
Katrina destroyed the Big Easy-and future Katrinas will do the same-not because of engineering failures but because one million acres of coastal islands and marshland have vanished in Louisiana in the last century due to human interference. These land forms served as natural "speed bumps," reducing the lethal surge tide of past hurricanes and making New Orleans habitable in the first place.
But while encouraging city residents to return home and declaring for the media audience that "we will do whatever it takes" to save the city, the President earlier this month formally refused the one thing New Orleans simply cannot live without: A restored network of barrier islands and coastal wetlands.
Tens of billions of dollars have been authorized to treat the symptoms-broken levees, insufficient emergency resources, destroyed roads and bridges-but next to nothing for the disease itself, that of disappeared land, which ushered the ocean into the city to begin with. No amount of levee building or stockpiling of bottled water will ever save New Orleans until the state's barrier shoreline is restored.
Just since World War II an area of land the size of Rhode Island has turned to water between New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico, most of it former marshland. And every 2.7 miles of marshland reduces a hurricane surge tide by a foot, dispersing the storm's power. Simply put, had Katrina struck in 1945 instead of 2005, the surge that reached New Orleans would have been as much as 5-10 feet less than it was.
These marshes, as well as the barrier islands, were created by the sediment-rich flood waters of the Mississippi River deposited over thousands of years. But modern levees have prevented this natural flooding, and the existing wetlands, starved for new sediments and nutrients, have eroded and "subsided" and just washed away. Every ten months, even without hurricanes, an area of Louisiana land equal to Manhattan turns to water. That's 50 acres a day. A football field every 30 minutes!
A $14 billion plan to fix this problem-a plan widely viewed as technically sound and supported by environmentalists, oil companies, and fishermen alike-has been on the table for years and was pushed forward with greater urgency after Katrina hit. But for reasons hard to fathom, yet utterly lethal in their effect, the administration has turned its back on this plan. Instead of investing the equivalent of six weeks of spending in Iraq, or the cost of the Big Dig in Boston, we must now prepare to pay for another inevitable $200 billion hurricane just around the corner in Louisiana.
The grand plan to change all this, commonly known as the Coast 2050 plan, would use massive pipelines and pumps and surgically designed canals to guide a portion of the river's sediment-thick water back toward the coastal buffer zone without destroying existing infrastructure or communities. This would rebuild hundreds of thousands of acres of wetlands over time and reconstruct entire barrier islands in as little as 12 months. (It is estimated that the government's plan to rebuild the levees could take decades.) Everyone agrees the plan will work. The National Academy of Sciences confirmed the soundness of the approach just last week and urged quick action.
Yet in its second and final post-Katrina emergency spending package sent to Congress on November 8th, the White House dismissed the rescue plan with a shockingly small $250 million proposed authorization instead of the $14 billion requested.
How could this administration, found totally unprepared for the first Katrina, not see the obvious action needed to prevent the next one? My theory is that Bush hears "wetlands" and retreats to a blind, ideological aversion to all things "environmental." Which perhaps explains why in multiple speeches given during six photo-op trips to the Gulf since Katrina hit, the President has not one time mentioned the words barrier islands or wetlands. Not once.
"Either they don't get it or they just don't care," said Mark Davis, director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana. "But the results are the same: more disaster."
So stop the repairs; put the brooms and chain saws away. Close the few businesses that have re-opened. Leave the levees in their tattered state and get out. Right now. Everybody. It's utterly unsafe to live there.
To encourage people to return to New Orleans, as Bush is doing, without funding the only plan that can save the city from the next Big One, is to commit an act of mass homicide. If, after all the human suffering and expense of this national ordeal, the federal government can't be bothered to spend the cost of a tunnel from Logan Airport to downtown Boston, then the game is truly over.
Anyone who doesn't like this news-farmers who export grain through the port of New Orleans, New Englanders who heat their homes with natural gas from the Gulf, cultural enthusiasts who like their gumbo in the French Quarter-should all direct their comments straight to the White House. But don't wait around for a response.
One of the convenient things about being very well connected and congenial is that EVERYONE talks to me, even Carlos. So, I’m hearing a totally different side of things from him than I did from Nick, who called earlier today with the introductory remark “I know you’re going to tell me ‘I told you so.’”
It’s rather like hearing stories from two unrelated people who happened to live in the same city.
What a gloomy day it has been. Still, I have the desk cleared off, and am working on my Christmas card list. I have twenty-eight to send, unless I buy more from New Vision and send those. That may be a good idea.
Tonight is the monthly New Vision meeting, and then a little work with Lisa. I have a TON of work to accomplish tomorrow, not the least of which is getting my homework done for tomorrow night’s class.
Mikey and I were in TXT magazine last weekend!! I have to go see if I can pick one up on my way to Clear Lake tonight!
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/120705O.shtml
Goodbye, New Orleans: It's Time We Stopped Pretending By Mike Tidwell Orion Online
December 2005 Issue
As we reach the 90-day mark since Katrina hit, it's time we ended our national state of denial. Turns out House Speaker Dennis Hastert had it right all along, though his reasons were flawed. We should call it quits in New Orleans not because the city can't be made relatively safe from hurricanes. It can be. And not because to do so is more trouble than it's worth. It's not. But because the Bush Administration has already given New Orleans a quiet kiss of death now that the story has run its news cycle.
As someone who dearly loves New Orleans and has experienced many of her charms, it pains me immeasurably to call for this retreat. This is not a rhetorical stunt or a shock argument meant to invite compromise talks. I mean what I say: Shut the city down and board it up before thousands more lives are lost.
In the weeks after Katrina, the American media somehow portrayed the catastrophe as a matter of failed levees and flawed evacuation plans. The "What went wrong?" coverage involved autopsies of every breached dike and a witch hunt for those responsible for the Superdome and Convention Center fiascos. But these were just horrifying symptoms of a much larger disease.
Katrina destroyed the Big Easy-and future Katrinas will do the same-not because of engineering failures but because one million acres of coastal islands and marshland have vanished in Louisiana in the last century due to human interference. These land forms served as natural "speed bumps," reducing the lethal surge tide of past hurricanes and making New Orleans habitable in the first place.
But while encouraging city residents to return home and declaring for the media audience that "we will do whatever it takes" to save the city, the President earlier this month formally refused the one thing New Orleans simply cannot live without: A restored network of barrier islands and coastal wetlands.
Tens of billions of dollars have been authorized to treat the symptoms-broken levees, insufficient emergency resources, destroyed roads and bridges-but next to nothing for the disease itself, that of disappeared land, which ushered the ocean into the city to begin with. No amount of levee building or stockpiling of bottled water will ever save New Orleans until the state's barrier shoreline is restored.
Just since World War II an area of land the size of Rhode Island has turned to water between New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico, most of it former marshland. And every 2.7 miles of marshland reduces a hurricane surge tide by a foot, dispersing the storm's power. Simply put, had Katrina struck in 1945 instead of 2005, the surge that reached New Orleans would have been as much as 5-10 feet less than it was.
These marshes, as well as the barrier islands, were created by the sediment-rich flood waters of the Mississippi River deposited over thousands of years. But modern levees have prevented this natural flooding, and the existing wetlands, starved for new sediments and nutrients, have eroded and "subsided" and just washed away. Every ten months, even without hurricanes, an area of Louisiana land equal to Manhattan turns to water. That's 50 acres a day. A football field every 30 minutes!
A $14 billion plan to fix this problem-a plan widely viewed as technically sound and supported by environmentalists, oil companies, and fishermen alike-has been on the table for years and was pushed forward with greater urgency after Katrina hit. But for reasons hard to fathom, yet utterly lethal in their effect, the administration has turned its back on this plan. Instead of investing the equivalent of six weeks of spending in Iraq, or the cost of the Big Dig in Boston, we must now prepare to pay for another inevitable $200 billion hurricane just around the corner in Louisiana.
The grand plan to change all this, commonly known as the Coast 2050 plan, would use massive pipelines and pumps and surgically designed canals to guide a portion of the river's sediment-thick water back toward the coastal buffer zone without destroying existing infrastructure or communities. This would rebuild hundreds of thousands of acres of wetlands over time and reconstruct entire barrier islands in as little as 12 months. (It is estimated that the government's plan to rebuild the levees could take decades.) Everyone agrees the plan will work. The National Academy of Sciences confirmed the soundness of the approach just last week and urged quick action.
Yet in its second and final post-Katrina emergency spending package sent to Congress on November 8th, the White House dismissed the rescue plan with a shockingly small $250 million proposed authorization instead of the $14 billion requested.
How could this administration, found totally unprepared for the first Katrina, not see the obvious action needed to prevent the next one? My theory is that Bush hears "wetlands" and retreats to a blind, ideological aversion to all things "environmental." Which perhaps explains why in multiple speeches given during six photo-op trips to the Gulf since Katrina hit, the President has not one time mentioned the words barrier islands or wetlands. Not once.
"Either they don't get it or they just don't care," said Mark Davis, director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana. "But the results are the same: more disaster."
So stop the repairs; put the brooms and chain saws away. Close the few businesses that have re-opened. Leave the levees in their tattered state and get out. Right now. Everybody. It's utterly unsafe to live there.
To encourage people to return to New Orleans, as Bush is doing, without funding the only plan that can save the city from the next Big One, is to commit an act of mass homicide. If, after all the human suffering and expense of this national ordeal, the federal government can't be bothered to spend the cost of a tunnel from Logan Airport to downtown Boston, then the game is truly over.
Anyone who doesn't like this news-farmers who export grain through the port of New Orleans, New Englanders who heat their homes with natural gas from the Gulf, cultural enthusiasts who like their gumbo in the French Quarter-should all direct their comments straight to the White House. But don't wait around for a response.
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
Welcome to Tuesday
Welcome to Tuesday – the day of unbridled anxiety
Well, it’s Anxiety Tuesday, as evidenced by Michael’s bizarre phone call, pestering me about helping him buy an airline ticket home (he has money) about whether or not I wanted to talk to him any more, blah, blah, blah. Barney’s been pretty anxiety free today, but sheesh! Michael is just the neediest man I’ve met in ages.
Had some pretty wild realizations about myself this morning, all of which, of course, center on anxiety and a lack of certainty.
I, for myself, did a lot of thinking and talking about this anxiety and where it stems from, but didn’t do a lot about managing or rooting out said anxiety. I spent several hours this afternoon working on errands that needed doing, including sending out eBay packages, Christmas packages and such. I have a TON of work to accomplish tomorrow, and meetings from 5:00 onward tomorrow night. It needs to be a manic day tomorrow, that’s for sure.
I sent N8 a birthday card, for which he thanked me today. Another “fart in the wind,” as Mikey put it tonight. That is an element of Nick’s gay.com profile, which I didn’t understand until Mikey explained it to me tonight. Interesting.
Nick, speaking of, has been silent since yesterday around noon. Strange.
I went through my PCS bill, and .. urk .. another month with nearly $100 in excess useage charges. That’s all done, though. My bill for December will be less than $200.00.
Tomorrow is the renewal day on my cable bill – and, instead of paying another month for a service I won’t watch or use, I’ll stroll over to the Time Warner store a block away and deliver up my DVR and remote control and pay up my bill. Another $150 invested in nothingness. Ah, well.
I found the PERFECT Phaeton last night around 11:00 – it’s in New York, it’s at a VW dealer, which means it’s certified, pre-owned, it only has 18,000 miles and it’s cheap. The color and all the equipment that I want, except for the rear console, which I can live without. I’ll post some pictures of it here in a second.
Lisa was reminding me to de-couple from the how and focus on the outcome. Yeah, yeah. Practice what I preach? Walk the talk? Pffffffffffffft.
I need to fold up the laundry that I did earlier, and make up the bed, which also got laundered.
Michael, the king of anxiety and false affections, returned this evening unannounced. Drunk. Wanting me to ‘hang out’ with him. Since he got himself dropped off, I guess tomorrow I’ll have to explain to him that he needs to go back to Pasadena and stay there until he leaves for home for Christmas. Which is a week from today. I have too much to get done.
And, since he’s here, I’ll utilize his slave labor to put out the Christmas lights, clean up the house (the non-breakable parts,) clean the dogs (again) and such. Hopefully, that will keep him busy enough that he won’t pester me while I work on loans, tax returns and other such.
Okay, it’s time to fold, staple and spindle. In that order, of course.
Well, it’s Anxiety Tuesday, as evidenced by Michael’s bizarre phone call, pestering me about helping him buy an airline ticket home (he has money) about whether or not I wanted to talk to him any more, blah, blah, blah. Barney’s been pretty anxiety free today, but sheesh! Michael is just the neediest man I’ve met in ages.
Had some pretty wild realizations about myself this morning, all of which, of course, center on anxiety and a lack of certainty.
I, for myself, did a lot of thinking and talking about this anxiety and where it stems from, but didn’t do a lot about managing or rooting out said anxiety. I spent several hours this afternoon working on errands that needed doing, including sending out eBay packages, Christmas packages and such. I have a TON of work to accomplish tomorrow, and meetings from 5:00 onward tomorrow night. It needs to be a manic day tomorrow, that’s for sure.
I sent N8 a birthday card, for which he thanked me today. Another “fart in the wind,” as Mikey put it tonight. That is an element of Nick’s gay.com profile, which I didn’t understand until Mikey explained it to me tonight. Interesting.
Nick, speaking of, has been silent since yesterday around noon. Strange.
I went through my PCS bill, and .. urk .. another month with nearly $100 in excess useage charges. That’s all done, though. My bill for December will be less than $200.00.
Tomorrow is the renewal day on my cable bill – and, instead of paying another month for a service I won’t watch or use, I’ll stroll over to the Time Warner store a block away and deliver up my DVR and remote control and pay up my bill. Another $150 invested in nothingness. Ah, well.
I found the PERFECT Phaeton last night around 11:00 – it’s in New York, it’s at a VW dealer, which means it’s certified, pre-owned, it only has 18,000 miles and it’s cheap. The color and all the equipment that I want, except for the rear console, which I can live without. I’ll post some pictures of it here in a second.
Lisa was reminding me to de-couple from the how and focus on the outcome. Yeah, yeah. Practice what I preach? Walk the talk? Pffffffffffffft.
I need to fold up the laundry that I did earlier, and make up the bed, which also got laundered.
Michael, the king of anxiety and false affections, returned this evening unannounced. Drunk. Wanting me to ‘hang out’ with him. Since he got himself dropped off, I guess tomorrow I’ll have to explain to him that he needs to go back to Pasadena and stay there until he leaves for home for Christmas. Which is a week from today. I have too much to get done.
And, since he’s here, I’ll utilize his slave labor to put out the Christmas lights, clean up the house (the non-breakable parts,) clean the dogs (again) and such. Hopefully, that will keep him busy enough that he won’t pester me while I work on loans, tax returns and other such.
Okay, it’s time to fold, staple and spindle. In that order, of course.
Monday, December 05, 2005
Monday post #2
Spent most of my day with Lance, which was great. He bought a new computer, which he is very excited about. He and Steve took me to dinner and that was fun, too.
We started to talk about some of the things I've been pulling out of the dirty diaper pail and disposing of, but I don't feel like we're enough on the same page to productively discuss a lot of these things.
I want ice cream. I don't want ice cream. But, I want ice cream.
Barney's anxiety today has risen and fallen with my own, which has been driving me crazy. He's been pinging around the kitchen, knocking his e-collar into the walls and appliances over and over and over, then digging and scratching, then more knocking into things, then pathetically lapping at the water dish, then more ping-ponging around, then more scratching, then more...
Now, I'm watching a DVD - Green Plaid Shirt - another gay themed movie. It remains to be seen if it's a good movie or a bad movie.
Should I decorate for Christmas? Should I FULLY decorate for Christmas? What happened to Jarred and his girlfriend and our dinner this week? Every other night is jam packed.
I have really been seeing how BAD my choices in men have been in my life. Like, Michael - I thought he was SO hot - and now, I find that he's unable to carry on a conversation about anything that I have an interest in. If he does insist that I talk to him about anything, and I start talking about anything I *am* interested in, he drifts out of the conversation in a heartbeat. Mostly, he wants to talk about silly, junior high school goofy shit, and drama. And, chase any attention he can find.
He's not the sole example - all of these guys I've ever brought into my space have been self-focused and many of them too dumb to evaluate a decent conversation or to know that one was going on.
Last night, I went to see my OTHER massage guy, Tom. We talked about peak oil, about social logistics in different countries, about politics, about the economy, about all kinds of things that required higher brain function. And, it was just a CASUAL conversation.
Why have I kept picking up the street rescues and then wondering why they're totally disinterested in me? How could they be? I must be like a space alien to them. Amazing that I was ever critical about myself for these relationships. I've only brought in men that I couldn't relate to, that had issues so self-consuming that they needed a safe space to indulge themselves, and that were willing to take whatever came their way in order to keep going.
And, the whole time, I've felt like there was something wrong with me on a fundamental basis. How do I change from being attracted to these blue collar, mechanic train wrecks to someone who's got a brain and a heart?
Will one of them be attracted to me?
I could practically go to bed right now - three vodka cocktails and three margaritas later. I spent so much of today with the monkey chatter in my head running the show that I guess it's only natural that I be worn out. I did spend most of the time not trying to negate or override the monkey chatter, and instead trying to evaluate why I was afraid. All I could come up with was something VERY old, very non-verbal and running around with its hair on fire.
This movie is NOT the most amazing thing I've ever seen.
We started to talk about some of the things I've been pulling out of the dirty diaper pail and disposing of, but I don't feel like we're enough on the same page to productively discuss a lot of these things.
I want ice cream. I don't want ice cream. But, I want ice cream.
Barney's anxiety today has risen and fallen with my own, which has been driving me crazy. He's been pinging around the kitchen, knocking his e-collar into the walls and appliances over and over and over, then digging and scratching, then more knocking into things, then pathetically lapping at the water dish, then more ping-ponging around, then more scratching, then more...
Now, I'm watching a DVD - Green Plaid Shirt - another gay themed movie. It remains to be seen if it's a good movie or a bad movie.
Should I decorate for Christmas? Should I FULLY decorate for Christmas? What happened to Jarred and his girlfriend and our dinner this week? Every other night is jam packed.
I have really been seeing how BAD my choices in men have been in my life. Like, Michael - I thought he was SO hot - and now, I find that he's unable to carry on a conversation about anything that I have an interest in. If he does insist that I talk to him about anything, and I start talking about anything I *am* interested in, he drifts out of the conversation in a heartbeat. Mostly, he wants to talk about silly, junior high school goofy shit, and drama. And, chase any attention he can find.
He's not the sole example - all of these guys I've ever brought into my space have been self-focused and many of them too dumb to evaluate a decent conversation or to know that one was going on.
Last night, I went to see my OTHER massage guy, Tom. We talked about peak oil, about social logistics in different countries, about politics, about the economy, about all kinds of things that required higher brain function. And, it was just a CASUAL conversation.
Why have I kept picking up the street rescues and then wondering why they're totally disinterested in me? How could they be? I must be like a space alien to them. Amazing that I was ever critical about myself for these relationships. I've only brought in men that I couldn't relate to, that had issues so self-consuming that they needed a safe space to indulge themselves, and that were willing to take whatever came their way in order to keep going.
And, the whole time, I've felt like there was something wrong with me on a fundamental basis. How do I change from being attracted to these blue collar, mechanic train wrecks to someone who's got a brain and a heart?
Will one of them be attracted to me?
I could practically go to bed right now - three vodka cocktails and three margaritas later. I spent so much of today with the monkey chatter in my head running the show that I guess it's only natural that I be worn out. I did spend most of the time not trying to negate or override the monkey chatter, and instead trying to evaluate why I was afraid. All I could come up with was something VERY old, very non-verbal and running around with its hair on fire.
This movie is NOT the most amazing thing I've ever seen.
Monday, Monday ver. 653.01
A glorious, sunny day. Lunch with Lance in a few minutes -
This afternoon, I have two loans to work on and get submitted somewhere. Should be meeting up with my client John later tonight, I think. Have some Fabulair work to do today.
I'm just wiped out - I look tired. This last month has been draining. I need to recooperate in December and get ready for the new year.
This afternoon, I have two loans to work on and get submitted somewhere. Should be meeting up with my client John later tonight, I think. Have some Fabulair work to do today.
I'm just wiped out - I look tired. This last month has been draining. I need to recooperate in December and get ready for the new year.
Saturday, December 03, 2005
Christmas list
What I want for Christmas
My Christmas wish is pretty straight forward. I start with taking Jackie the dog to the groomer and having her made gorgeous. Then, I want to put here into a little dog carrier, and fly with her to Philadelphia (first class, of course) and pick up a used Phaeton from a dealer there. Then, I want to drive to my sister’s in Albany and spend about a week there. While there, I’d read some of my spiritual books that I feel would be helpful and just decompress. Jackie would sleep in the bedroom with me, and we’d go outside and walk in the snow.
My sister would have her house decorated like a Hallmark advertisement, with a huge live tree, presents spilling out into the hallway. It would be cold and snowy, and dry. We’d go see movies, snuggle up on the sofa under her throws and watch DVDs. We’d go to the museum and see the Christmas tree exhibit, and go shopping.
Around the 27th, we’d get into the Phaeton, and drive home. All of the bills at home are paid, all the expenses of the trip and spending money are in hand, and everything is comfortable and loving.
My Christmas wish is pretty straight forward. I start with taking Jackie the dog to the groomer and having her made gorgeous. Then, I want to put here into a little dog carrier, and fly with her to Philadelphia (first class, of course) and pick up a used Phaeton from a dealer there. Then, I want to drive to my sister’s in Albany and spend about a week there. While there, I’d read some of my spiritual books that I feel would be helpful and just decompress. Jackie would sleep in the bedroom with me, and we’d go outside and walk in the snow.
My sister would have her house decorated like a Hallmark advertisement, with a huge live tree, presents spilling out into the hallway. It would be cold and snowy, and dry. We’d go see movies, snuggle up on the sofa under her throws and watch DVDs. We’d go to the museum and see the Christmas tree exhibit, and go shopping.
Around the 27th, we’d get into the Phaeton, and drive home. All of the bills at home are paid, all the expenses of the trip and spending money are in hand, and everything is comfortable and loving.
Saturday sell-off
Lisa has me nearly convinced to sell the train plates, the zinc train miniatures, the danbury mint cars and the 20th Century limited stuff. And, maybe more than that. I'm thinking that it could be a good thing, but .. who knows? I'm weighing whether I get more than the couple of hundred dollars of enjoyment out of HAVING them.
We'll see.
We'll see.
Friday, December 02, 2005
Friday - still empowered
Listed my bicycle (had it for eight years and ridden it twice,) the DVR I bought for Philip (and never hooked up) the Rhode Gear bike rack I bought for the bicycle and my damaged subwoofer on Craigs List today, and seem to have already attracted buying attention for each. Wow. Will these people show up with the cash?
Also started listing things on eBay - screw EZlister - it's so hard to figure out, it was just faster to work directly with eBay and pay the slightly higher listing fees.
Michael has been sorting through all of the sheet music and he's bellowing out "this one HAS to be worth some money" all afternoon. Kind of fun.
Getting in a loan application by fax. That's two this week. All on my own, without any marketing or any other support. I have to work them up, and get them going ASAP; both should close in two weeks.
And, I responded to a BUNCH of stuff on guru.com today. And posted ads to do tutoring and tax catch up. Something will come through somewhere.
Heard from Nick today. That was very nice. It made me cry.
Also started listing things on eBay - screw EZlister - it's so hard to figure out, it was just faster to work directly with eBay and pay the slightly higher listing fees.
Michael has been sorting through all of the sheet music and he's bellowing out "this one HAS to be worth some money" all afternoon. Kind of fun.
Getting in a loan application by fax. That's two this week. All on my own, without any marketing or any other support. I have to work them up, and get them going ASAP; both should close in two weeks.
And, I responded to a BUNCH of stuff on guru.com today. And posted ads to do tutoring and tax catch up. Something will come through somewhere.
Heard from Nick today. That was very nice. It made me cry.
Friday - let's be powered
Started the day by pushing out listings for a bunch of stuff that Nick just didn't seem to have an interest in working on. Gee- it took less than 15 minutes, including uploading pictures. How hard was that?
And, I think I sold the Dish Network DVR in about an hour. Yeah, that was worth packing up your car, moving down here, sitting on the sofa looking for a hookup in between fighting with your boyfriend and no doing anything. I can see why you resisted.
But, enough bitterness for this morning. I'm clearing out the den this morning. I've already made a ton of progress. I'm about to list the bicycle for sale, and the bike rack for the car.
Later
Okay, so the den is all cleaned up, we're about to start taking pictures and I've answered all of the emails. YAY! Now, time to clean up the bedroom and take a break for a while.
And, I think I sold the Dish Network DVR in about an hour. Yeah, that was worth packing up your car, moving down here, sitting on the sofa looking for a hookup in between fighting with your boyfriend and no doing anything. I can see why you resisted.
But, enough bitterness for this morning. I'm clearing out the den this morning. I've already made a ton of progress. I'm about to list the bicycle for sale, and the bike rack for the car.
Later
Okay, so the den is all cleaned up, we're about to start taking pictures and I've answered all of the emails. YAY! Now, time to clean up the bedroom and take a break for a while.
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