Walking through the halls of Congress last week there was indeed a bounce in my step, a giddiness to my face. I’m in! I’m in! Here is where it happens! Or something like that. There was me, and to my right and left there were actual Representatives’ offices, their state shields, their signs that read “All Welcome,” and “Come on in!” Ledgers set atop pedestals outside the front doors—I could even sign in! little me, five foot four-and-a-half inches high and once from the almost as tiny state of Connecticut…but there my name would be! there on that ledger! for days, for maybe weeks!—young, earnest interns in suits and skirts and ties, there was my government going on, to my right and to my left there went my government in action. The hallways were long and tall and marbled with grandeur. And everything that was not marbled was wood, and everything that was not wood and marble was polished brass. Architecture the way it was meant to be. Buildings meant to inspire.

But I wasn’t inspired. It was something lighter than that, brighter than that, it was something not really to be taken seriously. Like I was getting away with something. Like I was breaking the rules.

It seems appropriate right now to point out that I went to boarding school. Two Connecticut prep schools with rules and endless and creaky histories meant to strike the fear of something or other in us but really all they did, those rules and those histories, was add to the excitement of getting away with whatever it was we were at that moment trying to get away with. The rules, you see, courted their own fracture. All the grand halls and all that aged oak just begged, we were convinced at the time, to be besmirched.

So there is that penchant in me, that streak of mischeviousness, ironically encouraged, but to be honest it was more than that, walking through those halls of Congress. It was more than just juvenile evasions and the wonder of undetected, vaguely illicit behavior. And it wasn’t just that I was not, in fact, getting away with something (they had checked me too thoroughly at the metal detector, after all, they made certain I wasn’t getting away with anything). It was something more, and it was indeed something darker. The sense that, truly, I should not be there. The sense that the halls of Congress are really not meant for us, and when by some begrudging allowance they are opened to us, it must all only be window dressing, a farce. And so there I was coyly laughing.

Because I’ve read Kafka, and I guess I took him seriously. You know The Trial? Specifically its only anthologized chapter, “Before the Law”? “Before the law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the country who asks to gain entry into the law”—this is how it begins, and if any of you have spent one hour at all even in the foyer of Kafka’s writings you know immediately how it will end: an elapsed lifetime later, this life spent waiting, the waiting in earnest, the earnestness respectful, the desire beneath everything honest and profound—and of course he dies in the end, having waited, having never gotten in. At the end of the story, at the end of this man’s life, the following exchange takes place:

“Everyone strives after the law,” says the man, “so how is it that in these many years no one except me has requested entry?” The gatekeeper sees that the man is already dying and, in order to reach his diminishing sense of hearing, he shouts at him, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.”

Classic Kafka. Emphatic and utter futility.

So of course I thought I would never get in to see my Law, either, of course I thought that’s how it all always went: the Law is only there to be looked at, the Law is only there to be guarded; no one gets in, no one is turned away; the Law and power and our collective human fate are guarded from us, there only to be looked at.

Not that I want to turn this into a philosophy lesson. Nor do I think I am paranoid, overly analytic, overwrought. Rather, I want merely to make a statement, one I think is made far too seldom these days. I mentioned the metal detectors, and I alluded to the guards, but I forgot to point out the automatic rifles, and the prohibition, in the House and Senate galleries, against, pens, pencils, notebooks and writing, and I have held back until now pointing out—or reminding—the millions (and billions) of dollars that go into lobbying, and I have held back until this paragraph bringing up that only one senator, yes just one, is not a millionaire, yes not a millionaire. Lobbyists of course do not sit in the galleries. And the only people not allowed to report on what is happening are the citizens. “What do you still want to know, then?” the gatekeeper asks the poor, now old and dying man from the country. “You are insatiable,” he tells him, his voice dripping with the kind of disdain we just might do well to remember is not limited to only German, pre-Modernist fiction.

______________________________

“You see, boys forget what their country means by just reading The Land of the Free in history books. When they get to be men they forget even more. Liberty's too precious a thing to be buried in books, Miss Saunders. Men should hold it up in front of them every single day of their lives and say: I'm free to think and to speak. My ancestors couldn't, I can, and my children will. Boys ought to grow up remembering that.”

—Mr Smith Goes to Washington

______________________________

You probably remember last week’s post, the one about patriotism, and yes I just quoted a Frank Capra movie, and yes it was Mr Smith goes to Washington, but no there’s no reason to worry, I have neither gone insane nor been kidnapped, and no one has stolen my computer. It’s just that there are these things.

Look up above, at that quote again. Forget that Jimmy Stewart is the one speaking it. When they get to be men they forget even more. We should hold it up every single day, we should hold it in front of us. We should go to the House of Representatives and see if they let us in, we should go to the Senate, we should pick up the paper and go to class, we should read and speak aloud, we should write it down. We should say things that no one wants to hear, but most important of all we should say things that everyone wants to hear but cannot figure out how to say, cannot find eloquent enough language, cannot find the strength or the way to say it. We should speak out against tyranny; we should stand in front of tanks. And we should protect that speech, and we should protect that right to stand, indeed we should never let it get to that point, we should never let the tanks roll in in the first place, we should never find ourselves camped in a square for weeks in order for just one of us to speak. We should hold it up every single day, we should hold it up in front of us and the tanks and the people who send those tanks. Especially the people who have the power to send those tanks.

Oddly enough, when Stewart’s Smith says that Liberty’s too precious a thing to be buried in books, he really means that it must never stray too far from them. Trust me on this. It cannot be otherwise, it must not be otherwise, and he said it himself when he went on to define Liberty as being free to think and speak, having the good fortune of being guaranteed this, having the yes solemn responsibility of being guarantors. Because what is thought, and what is speech, without the guarantee of writing? Thought and speech are evanescent, they are fleeting, video and radio try to save it now but they perform only part of the trick, the sound of King’s “I have a dream” sends chills, but it does not legislate, deep, baritone echoes on the Mall compel consciences, but they do not similarly impel bodies, they do not make every body and mind and will in the country compliant, they do not safeguard liberties in every state, for every generation to come. Without King’s speech, there might not have been Johnson’s dignified act, but with only King’s speech there might still be two water fountains, there might still not be counter service for all, there might still be legislatively acceptable ignorance. Words fixed and frozen on a page, and not hanging with eloquence in the air, are what circumscribe our lives, are what make our country our country.

The guns and the metal detectors irked me, but to a certain extent I’ve accepted them as part of today’s society; this country is much bigger, this world is much bigger, there are people who would do harm, there are people who would take away. In order to be safe…or something like that. No, what irked me most of all was not even the obious collusion, coursing through those hallways marbled with ties and Italian shoes, of power and money, what irked me most of all was their taking away my books, and my pens. To what end? Why, when I sit watching my own government, the people elected by me, to serve me, why was I barred from writing down what I see, what was I prohibited from more fully bearing witness? There’s something not right there, and as if in an act of obvious and uncomfortably ironic defiance, I found the perfect argument against this rule inscribed on the first wall I saw upone entering the House.

“The greatest dangers to Liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal well-meaning but without understanding.”

Louis Brandeis said that, apparently in 1928, and this quite obviously resonated with me having just come from youknowwhere, and it would only resonate more in the coming moments, when I was asked to give up my books and my pens, when I was kept through rules too heartbreakingly hypocritical for me to want to comprehend to come in the way of myself and my understanding. All those flags everywhere, all those guns, all that uncomfortable patriotism that borders, yes on jingoism—in short, all that brandished zeal…and there my government was, promoting that zeal, but not that understanding.

I went to Liberty yesterday...

I’ll begin with the flyer. Which, in the spirit of due diligence, I’ll transcribe word for idiosyncratically capitalized word:

Jewish-Christian

National Committee

AMERICA’S

NEW

Party Needs YOU

to Run for Office!

Stay in School.

We’ll Run Your

Campaign for You.

CALL NOW!

(434) 258-5254

Equal opportunity! Women & Minorities Welcome!

JNC…America’s NEW Biblical values party.

“Pro-Life, Pro-Religious Freedom, Pro-Israel”

What I couldn’t fit in, what was off to the left of every line from “AMERICA’S” to “Stay in School” was the founder’s picture, name, and, I suppose, motto. The picture was that of a gamely, possibly latina blonde's smiling visage, her name is Ishah Wright, and what I take to be her motto reads as follows:

“Supporting

candidates with a

Judeao[probably sic]-Christian

platform is

Constitutional.”

As some of you may or may not be aware, I was at Liberty University yesterday. Western, though not to say, West, Virginia, the semi-rural Blue Hill Mountain town of Lynchburg to be precise. Verdant and vaguely vertiginous, with a Wal-mart and a Falwell airport and a [Tim, one presumes] LaHaye Ice Rink splayed out over the flat parts. A rainy, early spring day.

The event was to start at 10, which it didn’t because nothing happens on that campus between 10 and 11, there isn’t even coffee sold, the vending machines work I suppose but nothing else, nothing manned by men and women at any rate, nothing personelled. Book stores and newspaper stands, formerly echoing hallways and every single lit and unlit classroom. An eclipse of campus life in the middle of the day, a momentary moon passing in front of the chatter and smatter and everyday thrum of a campus life, how odd, how peculiar, why was this happening. Chapel. Although I still don’t know what goes on at a Liberty Chapel--is it all god/bible, is it all chapter:verses, is there some speechifying, does Falwell take matters into his own hands, are there also school matters, does someone stand up to make announcements—all a mystery to me, still, and unless I go out of my way it will always be, so just suffice it to say for now, for all of us: Chapel from 10 to 11, attendance required, to further discourage you from truancy you can't even buy coffee, not if Liberty has anything to say about it (though they can’t stop you from getting a Coke).

So. So this odd quiet—(moon of something passing in front of the source of light)—there we were milling around amidst this odd quiet. Tables carried inside the building, chairs and electronic equipment, boxes of sponsor-embossed books and highlighters (our assorted accoutrements of the shill), power cords and paper, our black table cloths, our still-intact blears. We arrived at 9:20 and finished setting up just before 10, I walked back inside the bustling building and the bustling building was still. Natalie, the newcomer, was walking towards us saying something about not being able to buy coffee, there being a rule. I thought I heard the word “chapel.” The bustling building was still. The hallway lights were on, but every other light was off. Come to think of it, she really did say the word “chapel.”

This was the second school we’ve been to where they actually had something called chapel that people actually were required to go to. But this was so emphatic. There really was something like a silence.

I wandered around. Up and down hallways a little, you might call it poking, I went poking around. There were classrooms to peer into, bulletin boards to examine, I had an hour to kill after all, I didn’t feel like looking at glass-encased pictures of Jerry Falwell with various caucasian dignitaries of the late-twentieth century. Some of the things were interesting, but not as interesting as what I’ve given you above. (I took it with me after all; mostly, though, I think I was attracted to the marriage [of convenience] of “Christian” and “Jewish.”^) Ishah Wright and her “Judeao-Christian” dream. The United States as the purview if not provenance of JC. And isn’t it funny how many things those initials can stand for. Or maybe they always only stand for one, depending on whom you ask.

As promised, at 11 the hallways again sprang to life, various interior lights were turned on, coffee was again sold. [Author’s Note: the line, within minutes, was over 20-feet long.] I bought coffee for myself and Natalie and began my day making business cards for Liberty University students, and without further ado I’ll write here in this initial, action-filled sentence that sometime between noon and 1 pm, after making around 15 or so sets of cards, I look over the shoulder of the next student-guest filling in boxes and see that the name she has typed into the “First Name” box is “Ishah” and into the “Last Name” box she has typed the word “Wright.” Lo, and behold.

An opportunity. (Though I did not know then for whom.)

I asked her where she was from, she asked me if I was a Christian. Not quite like that, I mean she answered my question and there followed at least a touch of conversation, I mean it wasn’t quite like wham-bam-mayIprayforyou, but truth be told there was quite a bit less time than I would have preferred between the two inquiries. In fact to take the wham-bam motif and run with it a little further it really was like she was trying to get into my eschatological pants, a Don Juan for Jesus I guess, My, I hardly even knew her. But there she was, reaching for my belt. Unbuckling. Sadly shaking her head as she looked down and saw my agnostic.

Things didn’t exactly evolve from there. We got into it. I told her I found the question unanswerable, proof, empiricism, et al, my five senses, et al, she asked if Jesus revealed himself to me through a miracle would I accept him, I said of course I’d love to see it. (In my mind: Jesus descending in a canted shower of light, were those flower petals trailing behind him, no but seriously such is the sophomoric level of my knowledge of religion, I know miracles come in other forms, highway underpass approximations of the visage of Mary, that sort of thing, but I swear to you those flowers and that rain of light are what descended through my mind.) I said of course, doubting I ever would, she asked if she could pray for me, for this to happen, I told her it was a free country. She bowed her head and began praying. Right there. Out loud and in the middle of the hallway, people walking by, young men and women standing in line to fill out business cards. And yes it felt like she was forcing herself on me, yes she had spiritually mounted me, she was up there suddenly riding. Riding my tiny agnostic.

Obviously, I was a little taken aback. Not to sound like the pith-helmeted San Franciscan astounded in the Blue Hills of Virginia, but…I really didn’t know what to do. I stood there wearing a visible “uh.” Do I bow my head concurrently, out of something like respect? Do I wait silently, patiently? Go on about my business and my day, leaning and assisting the next form-filling-out student until she was done, which I would know through aural evidence because she would stop addressing god and again start addressing me? Ought I to have politely asked her to engage in this sort of activity alone, or in those places which have been socially designated?

I won’t bore you with the rest of the details. She finished, we finished, she went on her way…and another rose to take her place.

As this is the thing about Liberty. An evangelical school…well, an evangelical school—they are there to evangelize, or because their parents want them to (and most likely do so themselves), and so this is the thing about Liberty: there will usually be someone there to take the last person’s place. As there was yesterday for me.

Krystle was her name, and no I won’t bore you with all the striking details, I won’t bore you with any of them this time and instead I will cut to the striking chase: as a result of this second proselytic^^ conversation I realized that I am a patriot, that I love and am thankful for Jefferson’s United States of America.

No I am not talking about someone having the freedom to stand and talk to god in a once more bustling Virginia hallway while I have the freedom to lean towards a computer and ignore her, and no I’m not talking about my being able to drive around the country claiming San Franciscaness, no I’m not talking about voting, no I’m not talking about rockets and red glares. And no I’m not joking. I’m being serious. And I want all of you who think as I do to take a moment to consider.

You see I told this young woman named Krystle that I didn’t need a god to tell me to be a good person, that I could figure out for myself that killing people, for instance, was wrong, that on my own--or, at any rate, through my own use of reason--I came to the conclusion that helping people and making them feel good and seeking justice for all involved felt, in turn, good to me. That acting in such a way and seeking to legislate at least a similar disposition could only be good for a society, a culture, a civilization, that this made sense to me, that this was the only way to ensure happiness for one and for all. I told this young woman that at some point in adolescence I found two things to be true: that everyone has a right to determine her or his own future, unless these determinations impinge upon the rights of others to do so; and that it is good (and right and proper) to act justly towards others, ideally with kindness. I told her I came to these notions because they made sense to me, and because—though I didn’t know this concept at the time—if I put them to the test of the categorical imperative they passed--that is, if they became the rule of law and action for everyone, everyone would be happy, and everyone would have the opportunity to be happy.

She told me that I couldn’t possibly know this on my own. She told me that humans are inherently wicked and sinful, and that if we didn’t have someone (someOne) telling us to do otherwise, and if we didn’t have the fear of that someOne in us to make us obey, there would be no goodness, there would be no society, there would be no civility. She told me that we as a society needed an otherworldly guidance in order to not, and here yes I’m putting words into her mouth, tear each other to pieces.

I told her I didn’t think this was true, I told her that in fact I know it not to be true because history has been nothing if not an inexorable march towards finding enlightenment closer and closer to home, that, in fact, the very country we were standing in, the very nation her college seeks to extol at nearly deafening levels, is indeed the perfect love-child of the Enlightenment and the belief that humans need no kings, thorny or otherwise, to tell us that justice is good, and that the Good is to be sought.

Let me write that again. Because this is what I am getting at.

The United States of America, this country we live in, conceived by 18th-century exemplars of the Enlightenment, that epochal acme of the inexorable march of reason and rationality against the darkling forces of myth and superstition, is the greatest proof yet offered by homo sapiens that we need no kings, thorny or otherwise, that we need not invisible or omnipotent Unmoved Movers to tell us what reason itself dictates: that self-determination and the categorical imperative lead to justice, that justice and the categorical imperative call for self-determination.

Call this a white paper if you want, call this an apologia if you want, call this a line in the sand if you want, but here is what this is to me: Jefferson’s America is proof of the rightness and inevitability of the Enlightenment, and I will not let them take it from me. And I challenge all of you reading this now: See America for the bastion of Reason it was meant to be, and recognize that there are those who would rapturously take it away, that they are working to do so right now, that something needs to be done about it before the sky begins to darken, before the eclipses begin to stay….

^I am, of course and in the interests of full disclosure, the product of a marriage—though not one of convenience—between a Christian and a Jew. But for the life of me I don’t think this has anything to do with the present fascination.

^^ sp., I know, but I’m coining it and you can figure it out.

You've Heard of the Terrible Twos...

how about the Sparring Sixes? Nono, I can do better than that--oh no shit I can't.

Just a little FYI in/re: an OMG!/WTF? bit of news from Florida related by Herbert in yesterday's Times. (Which, apparently, you can only find on Blogger, but that's another point entirely.) Not sure what this says about our society--or can I call it theirs? is this a Southern thing do you think?--but it says something. Arresting 6-year-olds, and throwing the book at them. This, in a society that does its best to teach us to avoid responsibility, Gonzales doing us the solid of noting that "mistakes were made" [oh but by whom? or did the mistakes make themselves, a something from nothing, proof of god!], a president who needs six years of thinking to come up with something he, maybe, wasn't right about, a society that uses the lawsuit as a first and often final means of deciding whose responsibility, exactly, it was to make it safely up the icy stairs (I'm talking to you John Edwards, you and your 11-bathroom mansion by the way].

Okay enough for now. I just wanted to make sure everyone out there was aware that in FL they're arresting 6-year-olds.

This Time of Social Rest

Listening to NPR the other day, it was bright and warm and we were parked beneath the sun across the street from the Lowe’s Motor Speedway. Charlotte, North Carolina, another empty RV park, this one with poorer showers but a nearby Coke machine, 60 cents for a can, somehow the quality of the bathing facility seemed a little less important. So. Mike and I were both inside the RV, occupying separate corners, doing our separate things—a little work, a little idle, but always through the use of some form of technology or other. The day was passing, with deliberation, punctuated by bird calls and the distant engine roars of practice laps, heated by sun and southern languor and with all deliberation, the day was passing. North Carolina, the United States. Another American day in another American year.

News, of course, that’s why I turned on NPR, mornings and evenings making me think of catching up with the world, or maybe it’s just a matter of passively segueing in to and out of the quieter hours. I sit and listen, do not move, and the world comes to me. And through the radio it seems to take more time, somehow it feels more like watching it stroll towards me on the horizon. It’s nicer this way, none of that visual abuse so often caterwauling out of the television, the clashing graphics so violent these days, Nancy Grace’s face. Nora Roberts, Ann Taylor, Cory Flintoff, your voices are like ribbons of chocolate falling, even you Lakshmi Singh, even you Terry Gross, both of you are still the opposite of FOX. Meaning, oddly enough, the perfect accompaniment to a quiet RV park day is not FOX, but NPR.

The sun beginning to gather its belongings, gesturing towards its door, the air still warm like breath, another American day in another American year.

It was either Nora Roberts or Ann Taylor who said it. A report from Baghdad, another bomb, another explosion, more death, more violence between strangers, a phrase she spoke into her studio microphone, “the wounded and the witnesses.” Look at it again, say it aloud to yourself: “the wounded and the witnesses.” Or try it like this:

“the wounded and the witnesses.”

The first thing to catch my ear, yes, the alliteration, but then the more I thought about it…. The alliteration, yes, at first, but then as I thought about it the meaning. First came the images, blood and flowing robes, hot sand swept by the dry air, exploding human violence in a Middle Eastern country. For some reason all the blood I saw was in spatters, not soaked, flung almost artfully across faces, faces contorted in pain, a loved one or maybe just the state of their country lying wounded and helpless in their arms. Tears, cries. Wails, the ringing of concussed ears. Sand still infusing into all that hot wind. The word ‘aftermath’ all over the background, people’s lives changed irrevocably, one rememberer at a time.

Then came the thought, damning: we are all witnesses. Then the thought that we were all just standing idly by, wanting to go about our own lives, we were on our way to market, we were studying at school, we were trying to earn a living, we were writing, we were reading—and then this. And then this war, and then the genocide in Rwanda, and then Abu Ghraib, and then Chechnya, and then the tsunami, and then a thousand dead Indians on a train, and then a hundred thousand Brazilians in a slum, and then Katrina, and then Darfur, and then the World Trade Center, and then the winter he never came home. We were doing something else. We were merely on our way. We were just trying to get by.

Innocent, we were, but condemned we have become. As long as we remain standing idly by, as long as we want only to go about our own lives, as long as keep traveling only to and from the market and never to Washington, and never in letters to elected officials, and never, having taken to the streets, to the square to join a protest or a parade, to speak out, either for our against. Innocent we once were until we first saw, or heard, until we first took it upon ourselves to find and know this world. We witnesses to the wounded, the wounded who pile up every day, and what do they have to show for this lived life, as they lie departing in our arms, as their blood streaks our faces, what do they have to show for it all, for their winnowed breathing? What reassurance do they have from us that this at least might not happen again? What reassurance do they have that, at the very least—at the embarrassing minimum—this won’t happen again tomorrow, that this death and intransigence won’t slip by unindicted even later that afternoon?

I know how much glass is in this house from which I throw stones. Even my fixtures are clear and brittle, even my mortar and nails. But. Or particularly—why is it all so complacent? Why does our society say that they care, but act like they don’t, why all the supporting of our troops with car magnets, but their denigration when it comes time to vote, when we kept in office those who would put them, without enough armaments and with lower salaries than the private sector mercenaries, into harm’s way? Why do we young, we educated, we energetic, why do we who have been followed by such incessantly smiling fortune—why do we who should, and worst of all do know better—how is it that we go about our lives, having witnessed, holding close and not flinging far this testimony? Are we really so fat and is the hog really so high? Is there really that much soma in the air? Are the iPods too often in our ears, is the internet almost always on in front of us, are we really that busy writing emails, and buying drinks, do we not recognize the wounded in our arms, the criminals who have put them there? Are we really so safe and opiated that we have not even spoken out once?

Are those bastards really so untouchable? Is it really so easy for them to ruin the world? Is it really just a matter of crafting highly pixelated distractions?

By the way...

The only thing that could get me to leave the Bay area...

Silly Rabbit, Guns Are for Kids

Not sure about the logic here. A little help?

From the "Camping Reminders" guidelines of the Fleetwood RV Camping Resort, across the street from the Lowe's Motor Speedway in Charlotte, NC. (The belly of the beast! I'm in the belly of the beast!)

FIREWORKS/FIREARMS: For the safety of our guests, fireworks and firearms are strictly prohibited. Fireworks and firearms will be confiscated and can result in expulsion from the park without refund and/or prosecution.

ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES: Fleetwood RV Camping Resort is a family-oriented resort, as such the use of alcohol in open containers is prohibited. Please contain alcoholic beverages in non-distinguishable containers. Excessive drunkenness will result in expulsion from the park without refund and/or prosecution.

So let me get this straight: they catch you packing heat...maybe maybe not they kick you out of the park ("can result in expulsion"). They catch you wasted: you're out ("will result in expulsion").

Dude--what the fuck is wrong with these people??

Because there are at least two major things wrong with this policy. First and foremost, it being an RV park, i.e., a place where people park the motor vehicles to which they are wedded/attached, if you kick someone out for being drunk they will have to get in their RV and drive it somewhere. As in, you're telling people who are excessively drunk that, because they are excessively drunk, they're going to have to get in their vehicle and drive away. (What the fuck is wrong with these people??) The second major thing wrong with this policy is that while they're busy making their establishment safe from slurry speech and potential public urination, they give far less of shit if someone pulls out a, um, different kind of weapon [sorry about that], effectively saying that alcohol is more dangerous to the peace and welfare of their little makeshift community than is a dischargeable weapon.

But you know what might be worst of all? I expected this. What's worst of all is that when I came across this only part of me was flabbergasted; the rest of me just kind of mentally shrugged, the silent voice inside my head saying, Of course.

Of course this bible belt business would be more concerned with, I don't know...god! what the fuck are they concerned about? (Apparently I do need a little help here.) Is it people pulling out their peckers and making little smiley faces in the sand by their site? Is it the afore-mentioned slurriness? Is what they're afraid of a night full of catcalls and Rebel Yells, an endless string of Git 'er Dun's? If so, why the edict that booze needs to be in "non-distinguishable" containers, and why the mention of Fleetwood being a "family-oriented" resort? And why, for the love of a dead christ, is this preamble of family orientation not a part of the gun rule???

Who are these people? And why are they voting in my elections? And what is their conception of the world, that they can love one of history's most flaming pacifists on Sunday, then make love to their guns on Monday? He turned the fuckin water into wine, dickheads, not bullets.

I really need to get out of the South.

I'd ask for an extension,

except I'm the one who's giving it. So okay I can have one. One day? Two? Something along those lines...

And you thought you knew.

Stumbled across this--

O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything and yet nothing at all--what is it?

And where did it come from?

And why?

--and now here I am. Sitting in an RV by a lake in the northwest corner of South Carolina. Speaking to myself through words I want to soon write down. The words bubbling, surfacing, wicked away by my mind, caught by my fingertips. There is the me that is typing, and there is the me that is dictating what to type. Which is the one doing the writing? Is there a difference? Or is there not?

The excerpt above comes from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. The person who wrote it was Julian Jaynes, and his idea was that humans were not always conscious, that we only acquired C around 3000 years ago, and the reason we acquired it is because we stopped listening to ourselves. Let me clarify. We stopped perceiving the voices in our heads as somehow Other, and began to acknowledge them as part of ourselves. That is, what was once a call-and-response became then a monologue, a soliloquy.

That is, I am doing the dictating, and I am doing the writing, and I am doing the bubbling, and I am doing the typing. It is all one, and there is no separation.

This came up in the Times Magazine article on voices in the head, specifically in/re: that theory which posits that the condition of hearing voices in one's head is merely a matter of displaced sensory perception, or "source monitoring": the brain interprets the inner monologue as not its own--a precognitive, preemptive disavowal, if you will. That is, there's nothing wrong with them beyond the fact that they've lost the biological capacity to conceive of two as one (to put it a bit crudely)...oh fuck it; just read what the Times piece had to say about it:

In his 2003 book, “Madness Explained,” [University of Manchester professor of psychology Richard] Bentall draws on the theory that auditory hallucinations may have their roots in what psychologists call “inner speech.” All of us, every day, produce a steady stream of silent, inward-directed speech: plans, thoughts, quotations, memories. People hear voices, Bentall argues, when they make faulty judgments about whether this inner speech is the product of their own consciousness or of something alien to their consciousness. Lapses in what researchers call “source monitoring” may occur for a number of reasons...

[Editor's note: Forgive the author his argumentative clunkiness; he is just now beginning to work through the problem in his mind, and anyway this is not a Thursday, don't expect too much.]

My point is this: Just the other day I was thinking about what it meant to be conscious, whether animals were, what separated us, and now this. My contention I believe--made to myself--was that animals couldn't step outside themselves, they acted and willed, sure, but they could in no way analyze those acts, that will. And it isn't merely because they don't have the power of analysis. Rather, it is because they cannot separate, animals cannot see their selves as selves. If that makes any sense.

[Editor's note: ibid.]

I'll get to the bottom of this in a few weeks. And trust me: it matters.

The dogwoods are in bloom, and that spells trouble for me.

Here in Atlanta spring arrives, apparently, roughly a week after it does in New Orleans. Like a deliberate mother waking up every one of her thousands of kids, bed by bed tapping them each awake, sitting maybe for a moment, stroking hair. She will make her way slowly up the coast, slowly up the Mississippi, all the way past our borders into Canada (circa July sometime, I believe), all the way even farther north. Bed by bed, state by state, tree by pollen-spewing fucking tree.

Or, like a slow hurricane of pollinated asphyxiation for people like your correspondent. Jesus what a nightmare this renaissance business is, this rejuvenation. I can't see it, can't hear it, I suppose I can smell it, though, and I really ought to be able to taste it because those are the two places it goes, delivering its gagging life: my nose and my mouth. This hemisphere of ours leans back towards the sun and the air warms up and dogwoods and all the other trees take notice, stir, send leaves and seed out of their branches. The air becomes drunk with the stuff, saturated. We live for a time in one of those shakeable snow globes except instead of snow it is pollen, and instead of seeing it you only know it's there because of miserable wretches like myself, awake and wheezing at 3 am, awake and wheezing with eyes glued shut at 4, awake and mucous pouring out of my nose when I sit up at 5, eyes again stuck shut, the wheezing not for one moment abating. Awake and wheezing, awake and gasping for air.

It appears as though I'm allergic to spring. So. Actually this is something I've known for some time, it all started when I was 20, but since moving out to the Bay I've forgotten this, there being nothing out there for me to choke on. It all starts with a few straight days of warm weather. Snow, if it's still around, melts. The ground thaws, giving up its goddam beautiful smell, its smell that for the life of me is the second most beautiful thing I've ever known. Crocuses bloom. Young people and old people and middle-aged people everywhere start spending a little more time outside, start smiling a little more easily, start looking around themselves, start lightening up. And then the trees and the bushes bloom, the leaves come out, and all that pollen springs into the air, if our vision were strong enough we would see it glistening green with seed, if our hearing were good enough we would hear it crackle. Zing! Whick! Tsussse! Things! Coming! To Life! Everywhere!

Hurrah, the return of spring!

Hurrah, the return of life!

Hurrah Rejuvenation! Hurrah Hope!

And it's always right around this moment that I start to choke. I gasp I wheeze, it all becomes too much for me, my body seizes itself, I swell and leak. Either I can't take spring or spring can't take me, either way there isn't enough room in the air for the both of us, it seems, the pollen has pushed me out. I go inside, sit in movie theatres or libraries or malls for hours at a time, I close all my windows, I shut all my doors. I will keep all that pollen away, I will keep all that life very far from me, I don't care what it proves, winter's verdant jettisoning is too much for me. At moments, during certain early morning hours when I'm sitting up dripping snot wheezing for 1/3 the oxygen I normally get, at moments like these I think that it is life itself that's too much for me. I think that it is entirely too fitting and discomfitingly allegorical that it is this season, the season of life and rejuvenation, that almost kills me.

As personal allegories are never lost on me. I believe that it's because I'm a writer--or I'm a writer because of it--that I always see the metaphorical in the actual, always read the lesson in the tea leaves of the day's events. Things happen, friends of mine say things, loved ones do or do not, and I think: It is all so obvious. Because I am thinking: If I were writing this in a character, I would write exactly what she said, precisely what he did, I would create the scene--almost to the gesture--of what just happened to me. Everything has a Meaning. We all do things and want things and ruin things because we have Reasons. We are all perfect caricatures of ourselves. If only we'd sit down with a pen and paper for fifteen years inside of 700 different coffee shops, if only we'd look and look.

Of course my body rejects spring, spring is rejuvenation, the earth's and because the earth is the known universe the universe's annual vernal argument against death, against hopelessness. Spring is resilience, spring is bouncing back. Spring is the crocus pushing once again out of the unfrozen land, yellow and white, tiny, the first alive thing in months, spring is this happening not just once, but indeed every year. Spring is, in this sense, its own recurrence. Spring is repetition.

All of which--nice, quaint--I do not believe, none of these I have the innate capacity to yield. I am neither crocus nor the fodder for them. I am a depressive, I have been a depressive all my adult life and even before then, as a child when I would bike to a creek not far away from my house but removed, even then, when I would sit as an eight-year-old and be sullen, and mope. I am a depressive and depressives have no resilience, all is already lost, and if we are lucky/unlucky enough to have ever been given a valuable thing, all is soon to be lost, making, of course, it all that much, the losing having not yet happened. My nickname in 6th grade was Mister Negative, I dropped the block on Joey Eliazarov's foot because there was no hope that day of me being good, no hope at all so I might as well keep being bad, that day was in Kindergarten. I was reduced, by a spilt glass of juice, to tears one night after study hall my freshman year at Choate; everyone was outside having fun but I had to be inside cleaning up the mess, the mess which would take two minutes to clean up if I would just do it, clean it up, which I could not. A fracture begets the fall. Possession begets loss. Love, eventually, begets fear.

Spring with its life begets a choking sound and gasps as my body swells shut, as my body seeks to reject it. It is too much for me. I am autumn clinging always and only to the last leaf. The wind is blowing. The leaf is about to blow. November, with its ten-times decimation, is the most humane month, coming as it does with its certainty. The cold sets in. You can no longer break open the earth. You would be a fool to believe anything will come back. April housing the cruelty. April with its giving what November will take away.

Spring

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

the Big Easy

45 murdered so far this year, just now within spitting distance of March's ides. The population these days swelling (like a bruise) back up about 250,000, maybe a few thousand fewer. Which is to say--20% of the way through the year, 45x5--the Crescent City is on pace to cudgel its former high of 85 murdered per 100,000 residents, by my math on pace to make it all the way up to a clean 100.

Horrifying, we're told, national highs we can verify for ourselves...--but they seem like such small numbers, no? I mean, 1% of every 100,000 residents would be 1000, which gives you less than .1% chance of getting killed. And that's if we fool ourselves and try to say that every race, every level of education, every economic disposition, every man, woman and child regardless of these material assignations is equally likely to find his or her way to a bullet or a knife in the coming months....

And yet. And yet perfectly rational people when contemplating visiting this ruined and unforgiven city balk, pause, avert full of fear. And yet there it is in the national psyche: New Orleans as the Lower 9th Ward of the country that never made it out from under all the water and all the Martial Law, the town people are leaving, the people who are leaving being written about in national papers, the national papers read by you, me, and plenty of other educated and otherwise rational people in the living rooms of the world. And yet famous couples who adopt babies from war-torn African countries are adopting houses in the French Quarter, too. And yet there I am, every day after dark, walking that last stretch of unpopulated pavement before I get to my RV park, wondering if I'll get to keep the computer I carry in my hands, the blood I carry inside my veins.

On pace to hit 225, maybe 250 if the summer's heat does its violence-inducing thing; on pace to make it a clean 100 per 100,000 residents. Leaving the rest of the country behind in its dust.

And yet.
____________________________

This is of course nothing new to me. I have over the past few years--the past several months in particular--had occasion to consider the violence in inner city America, the disquieting lack of empathy in the communities that have been left, for all intents and purposes, behind. And without meaning to excuse their actions--agency and responsibility being two ropes in human society one ought not fray with too much abandon--I have never been able to wholly begrudge these ghetto thugs their behavior. Their schools are far, far--far--cries from what is generally accepted as acceptable in the rest of America, staffed by teachers who may or may not care, but there is only so much one can do when there is a textbook for every 2 or 7 children, when the heat won't last through the winter, when there may or may not be cess gurgling from the playground, when the number of viable rooms in the school building forces two, three grades per classroom. When so many of these children go home to parents who are either not there, or else, if there, do more harm by their presence than their absence. When they walk through neighborhoods with 10%, 20% unemployment, and when those who are employed are paid $5 and 15 or 20 cents an hour, unable to live on that in America even if they're careful because who could, people could barely live off that when Congress passed that in 1994. When they see the government's response to a devastated poor and black city, a response that--well, we won't even begin to compare it to other recent instances of mass and immediate ruination. When the only stores in the neighborhood sell lottery tickets and liquor, and the nearest grocery store offers moldy and dying produce, and a cornucopia of Frito-Lay products. When the table of media culture is replete with offerings that laud the gangbanger, vilify the snitch. When speaking correct English is 'talking white,' getting uppity.

Now again--mind you--I do not seek here to eradicate responsibility, to say that the effective underwriting of the Frito-Lay Corp. is not the community's fault, that the bad parenting is not the community's fault, that the racist prohibition on speaking correct grammar--indeed, on valuing education at all--is not the community's fault. But--and I ask you to consider this with sincerity--how much can an 8-year-old be blamed for taking part in these actions? How much can a 9-year-old be blamed? And what about a 10-year-old? And an 11-year-old? And if perhaps you are inclined to aver that at, say, 12 people should begin to think for themselves--or maybe you draw that line at 13, 14, or 15--then how is this young man or young woman supposed to suddenly, apropos of so very little in their immediate environment and contrary to all they've taught and learned and whom so many of their elders have sought for them to become...become something different? If you don't blame the 8- or 9- or 10-year-old, why is all of a sudden the 11-year-old worthy of blame for not being a certain way? When for the other 10 years of his or her life you found it perfectly normal to expect something different....
____________________________

In the Times Magazine this Sunday in case you missed it was the story of Herbert Weinstein. Aged 65 and an ad executive living in Manhattan at the time, nary an instance, legal or otherwise, of violence in all of his life, he strangled his wife and then, in order to make it look like a suicide, threw her out the window of their 12th-floor apartment on the Upper East Side (making it look thoroughly
worse). Odd, and like a John Cheever story gone way, way awry. Maybe he had been under so much stress for so long, yadda yadda yadda, went postal. Maybe she was nagging him about upkeep on the house in Connecticut and finally--at long last--he showed her. Maybe it was actually that they were into kink, and still, to this, day, he can't admit it. Or maybe the cyst that was growing in his brain near his amygdalae had been pushing in the right place, finally had bored close enough onto the very neurons in his brain responsible for sending and receiving those pulses of electricity that cause us to conceive of other people as human, needing of our care. Murder lost its meaning, or no--he lost, physically, his ability to understand what it meant.

In any event, she died, he went to prison, and since this early-90's trial there has been a slow but inexorable movement in American jurisprudence to incorporate the latest lessons from neuroscience into our courts of law. Lie detector tests that focus on which areas of the brain light up with electrical activity when we say something we know is true, as opposed to when we say something we know is false. Interrogations undertaken with the aid of electrodes, at the interrogator's side a map of the brain showing which areas light up when we remember something seen as opposed to those areas that jump alive when we recall an act we ourselves performed. Courtrooms and attorneys' offices and police precincts all suffused with the latest research on which areas of our brain are related to anger, which to regret, which to retribution, which to fear. Ways we could then start picking jurors because of all this. Methods to mitigate--perhaps with surgical or very specific rehabilitative caveats--the punishment meted out by the state.

All very complicated and murky issues--and this being the tip of the proverbial sharp and craggy floating ice--but ones which nonetheless all hinge on just how [philosophically] materialist we want to be in our collective social and legal metaphysics. That is, do we cause our actions, or do our brains? And is there a difference? And if there is, then I can go ahead and pinpoint where the brain is, but can you please tell me where the "we" is? Because I can't seem to find it at the moment. It's kind of eluding me. And law, as we all know--some of us here more intimately than others--is a real stickler for details.

Here--let's try a thought experiment. See how you react to each of the following two quotes (the first by Joshua Greene, assistant professor of psychology at Harvard; the second by Stephen Morse, professor of law and psychiatry at UPenn):

"To a neuroscientist, you are your brain; nothing causes your behavior other than the operations of your brain."

"brains do not commit crimes; people commit crimes..."

So? Which side are you on? If you agree with one, you're more of a Materialist than what I'm going to go ahead and call a Noumenonist--one who believes there are things we can't see/touch/smell/hear, but that exist anyway. [For my etymological reasoning for the derivation of this term, Kant's wiki entry is a good place to start, though if you want to skip right to the chase then just go here.] If you're the former, you're more likely to be an agnostic/atheist, and if you find yourself in the latter group you probably have some answering to do if you don't explicitly believe in god (or a kind of god). In any event, the point still remains: either you believe that we as individuals--as persons, as selves, as unique and singular individuals--are responsible for our actions, or you believe that we are all just products of our brains, our brains which can be altered, altered sometimes by our own actions, sometimes by our environments, sometimes by cysts growing inside them, pushing up against the wrong regions....

I, for one, am in the former group, and I certainly agree with the former quotation, though this could be almost exclusively because the latter is inherently flawed (i.e., there is no way to define "people" without at some point, and probably ultimately, getting to "brain" [or at least the less materialist nomenclature "mind"]). Not that I want to exculpate all criminals and all crimes; to the contrary, I'm opting instead not to stop looking for answers, I'm opting to dig deeper, to find the point which is as close to the first cause as possible. I am not, like some Noumenonists out there and like so many Religionists in this country, interested only in dividing matters and societies into two halves, the good and the bad, the rightfully acting (insofar as we know, at any rate), and those whose actions are not rightful. The world is more complicated than that, and it seems that every time we find something new we are forced to say, It is only now that we have begun looking.

Foreign Policy Negotiations

(I know I said I wouldn't post until Thursday, and no this is not what I have been preparing, but with this I couldn't resist, and also allow me, oh silent, invisible, non-existent masses, to make one more scheduling emendation: every Thursday will be a big(ger) post, with smaller things like this in between.)

Note to All Those Who Are Probably Not Reading Anyway, but Just in Case You Are

I've decided, for everyone's sake, and because it seems something like fitting given the title, to post only on Thursdays. This way you all will no longer be forced to come back here with heavy fingertips wondering Did he post last night? and Did he post last night?, losing faith and interest by the day, neglecting to come by for days and then weeks at a time, taking it out of your sacred schedule of online rituals. And I will no longer feel guilty about missing so many straight days for no good reason other than the drunken entreaties of the Vieux Carre. And--like I said--this title will finally have meaning.

So look for me on Thursday morning. I've already got a post several days in the works.

In the meantime, try out this thought experiment: irrefutable proof of karma or at least a worthwhile god would be a naked human pile/triangle of

BUSH
CONDY GINGRICH
CHENEY GONZALEZ RUMSFELD


with James Dobson, honestly one of the worst people to currently walk this earth, performing on all of them acts which will remain nameless because of the mixed crowd sitting at my digital knee here.


Anyway, yeah--Thursday. Thanks for tuning in.

or, as Ms. Didion wrote in about a thousand fewer words,

("We must be aware of the dangers which lie in our most generous wishes," Lionel Trilling once wrote. "Some paradox of our nature leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.") That the ethic of conscience is intrinsically insidious seems scarcely a revelatory point, but it is one raised with increasing infrequency; even those who do raise it tend to segue with troubling readiness into the quite contradictory position that the ethic of conscience is dangerous when it is "wrong," and admirable when it is "right."

You see, I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing--beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code--what is "right" and what is "wrong," what is "good" and what is "evil." ... Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.

--"On Morality"; Slouching Towards Bethlehem

little did we know, "other people" is French for "Texas"

I don't remember if it came before or after, but this titular thought is tied in my mind to the following moment of two nights ago: crossing a street with the signal (as I am still amazed there even was one), my progress forced a pickup truck to pause mid-turn, which semi-prolonged pause clearly incensed whomever was steering said large vehicle because the moment I was no longer in his way--and several moments before I stepped onto the curb--the tires screeched/peeled/burnt their rubber as he pulled away, 0-60. Eat his dust, I did. And his smoke and exhaust and rubber as well.

So. Welcome to Texas, it felt a lot like, or Don't Forget (Ferget) You're (Yer) in It (init). Pedestrians are not welcome, perfect and abundant evidence of which is in inverse relation to the square footage of sidewalks in the state. Indeed, not only was I informed by an urban planning student at Texas State-San Marcos that SM has a) almost none of this kind of [foreign] surface throughout its city limits, and b) no plans, according to the city council, to remedy this problem (i.e., not a "problem," no "remedy" needed), but the area directly around this RV park [South Side, I guess, of Austin] is exemplary of this, as well: in order to get from A (RV park) to B (nearest place to purchase a cup of coffee (Exxon)), I have to walk roughly 200 yards, 30 of which are on a sidewalk.

Notable Interlude: And where, exactly, is this sidewalk located? Along an auto dealership lot, of course, so that one can walk and look at the fronts of the cars, of course. As in: the only time a Texan would want to walk is in order to survey vehicles, the point of which survey is, we presume, to indeed fix the problem that has put you on the sidewalk in the first place.

The coffee is of course adequate (though it should be noted that your correspondent is notoriously permissive in his caffeine-related gustation), providing flavors like "Buttered French Toast" are avoided, and it is also worth noting that, at this particular gas station coffee station at any rate, each stirrer is individually wrapped. As in, in paper. As in, like a straw.

A (quick) note about another street crossing, specifically, the boulevard I must cross in order to reach this coffee. Crossing of course not at the intersection as it is too busy and maddening, I stroll/lollygag as ungayly--not mis-spelled: this is Texas after all, and I have had hecklers in the past--as possible through the interstices in the traffic. During one such strololly I noticed a police cruiser cruising on the other side of the street and panged a wonder: would he cite me for jaywalking? A moment later I had my answer: no. A few moments after that I had the thought: of course not! Because there are no crosswalks in Texas, because there are no sidewalks leading up to them! Small, hidden benefit I in truth would rather not have.

____________________

So. So I have been doing some thinking and wondering aloud as to why, indeed, Texas is my and JPS's hell. For it is more than just the peeling pickups and wide boulevards and individually wrapped stirrers, it is more than the seemingly ever-present danger of being called a faggot, it is more than nearly unblemished landscape of fast food options and strip malls and parking lots, it is more than the existence of "America's Ketchup," the only explanation for the existence of which, Mike has surmised, is to be a gob of sophomoric spit in the face of the Heinz ketchup and its unofficial sponsoring of the Democrats' latest offering to keep W from this nation's console. Yes it is more than that, or rather it is the way in which all of these woefully deleterious predilections (culturally deleterious, environmentally deleterious) are implemented: with glee.

Or should I say, as a teenager would. Because this is what I mean, and this is what it feels like: as though I am surrounded by the kind of arrogance that so often comes from underdeveloped awareness of the effects of one's actions in the world. I'll drive my truck and you cain't stop me. I'll eat my fast food, and make it Texas-sized, too. Walkin's for sissies. There's a battle of Good versus Evil in the world, and we're the only ones strong enough to fight it. The world is their domain, god gave them the animals to husband, et cetera et cetera and all that other Baconian jazz. They eat their meat, and they'll have it with a meat and cheese topping, and they'll drive their 'rigs' to get to it, and they'll drive their 'rigs' back. Rigs and guns and 20 oz. steaks, and no one can tell them any different, cause that's the way it is, that's the way the world works.

It is worth noting that I have on this trip missed dearly the Bay area. I see ads on the internet for the movie Zodiac--which takes place, of course, in San Francisco--and in case you don't know these ads all have the same picture: a night shot looking down from a tower of the Golden Gate Bridge, foreground fog that swallows the descending slope of the suspension cables, the city's lights aglitter in the distance. It is a shot that beckons, or at least one that beckons me, and whenever I see it I think fondly even of the two things that when I'm home I dislike--the summer chill and the rarity of heat--and of course become at once wrapped in the thrall of all that I love--the hills, the urban beauty that at moments approaches the sublime, the diversity, the food, the people who are sometimes too relaxed, the sense that this is, to my thinking at any rate, how life should be.

Which is of course the beginnings of the rub: If Texas is my hell, the Bay area is my heaven. The middle of the rub being: If Texas is the heaven of Texan's, the San Francisco Bay area must surely be their hell. (Think of it: not enough parking for their big rigs, often narrow streets impeding same, homeless everywhere reminding them of their (Texas-sized) plenitude, an even greater preponderance of non-white and more than occasionally illegal immigrants, a godless heathen on every third corner calling for George Bush's ouster, nary an anti-choice protester in sight [yes I choose that compound word after much thought; those of us who want to keep abortion legal are rarely actually pro its use], a metro area noted for its rabid, yes rabid pacifism. There are no shotgun racks, nor are there many pickup trucks in which to put them (pickup trucks that surely would not peel away for want of unbesmirched forward progress through an intersection). Vegetarianism and shoelessness and unceasing growth and study are in many corners of the city the norm. The "price of freedom" is not known or, if known, is presumed to be vastly inflated.

And yet. And yet there are similarities, quite eerie similarities, between the two. Or maybe there is just one: the teenaged gleefulness.

As I would of course be remiss in not noting that the average Bay area denizen can be quite obtuse and obnoxious in her or his held values. Case in point is a banner I saw unfurled in Union Square sometime last fall. It read: Abortion Doctors Are Heroes. Now, regardless of the feasibility of any sound argumentation that could get them there--the echo of Slepian's demise casting a vaguely lethal pall over the practices of the profession--it is indisputable that this is an incendiary banner, one that was not meant to proffer an argument, but rather poke in the eye. What's more, this is by no means an aberration for this town; I was on another occasion called a Nazi for not wanting to impeach George Bush. All I wanted to do was cross the street. The slinger of the aspersion was nonplussed by my telling him that, being of semi-Jewish descent, I hardly thought a comparison of myself to a Nazi accurate. So.

So what I mean to say is this: I guess I can't rightly call this Texas-sized state hell, while still calling home heaven. There are problems with both, problems that could be most readily ameliorated through the consideration of other points of view, the acknowledgement that others of us have just as much right to vote and act like assholes as do we. Without doubt, it is more enlightened to avoid using egregious amounts of a limited energy source, and to understand one of the most basic concepts of physics: for every action (bomb, bullet), there is an equal and opposite reaction (bomb, bullet). To name just a few things.

____________________

At any rate, I'm leaving soon enough. Come Monday night, it is onward and eastward and slightly southward to a city this state's former governor allowed to languish for a very unchristian three or four days before deigning to do anything about. There, particularly now, I will be able to see some very unTexas-sized things. Including a population that knows, now better than all of us--even we San Franciscans--that there are limits to how much we can exert our will on the world.

by the way Good God I'm Surrounded by Texas.

(They're going to find me! They're going to find me!)
(Someone please help!)

Some of you are probably wondering where I am.

Some of you may also be wondering if this will be at all funny, if I will at all display here any of the wit and humor you have come to expect from me, if, indeed, I will use this exact forum to gripe and kvetch about this fucking ridiculous job I've happened upon, this job for which I haven't yet technically been paid, this job that, as some of you already know too well, offers much about which to gripe. Which is fine. Which you should be. The last thing any of us needs being another meta-whimsical blowhard speaking speciously of self-deception in his opening post. The last thing any one of us needs.

I am in Waco, of course, the smoke having just cleared a fortnight ago. Wokka. On the way in, though, I did check Wikipedia to see if W. was governor at that time, wondering first to myself then aloud to Mike whether he maybe should have gotten a little Republican heat for this kind of debacle under that kind of reign. Alas, the gentleman from Connecticut (whose carpeted ranch is of course twenty miles thataway) was not yet in a position of responsibility. Although of course as I write that last phrase....

So I am in Waco presently, at another RV resort/highway sound vista along I-35, I think it is. The cars go whizzing by. Ibid the trucks. All night long. Last night in Austin--pretty much the exact same 100-yard distance from the highway but about 150 miles south of here--I sat outside for several moments listening to the cars, comparing it all to Williamstown, wondering why it wasn't beautiful. Because it could be. And there's no reason why mountains and foliage and summer fog should have a monopoly on the 'beautiful', or the 'sublime'.

So I am in Waco presently. Baylor University tomorrow, another Christian university where the students are almost certain to be more earnest than the snark machines that seem, on certain campuses, to overrun the sidewalks and breezeways. For all their future work against just about everything I believe in at least I can be thankful to them for this. A little polite banter going, at least from 11 until 4 tomorrow, a long way.

It seems appropriate, just now.

and another thing Didion wrote.

Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself. (Slouching Towards Bethlehem)

I'll get this out of the way first: I love her for the well-lit back alley. If for no other thing that she has ever written, if she never writes again--for the well-lit back alley I am thankful. Behind our restaurants, behind our kitchens, just outside the back doors of our theaters, we step out for some peace and in our hope to get away and as soon as we open the door there is always all that light.

But: I don't find this. Maybe I am particularly good at this, maybe I am, for all my introspective bluster, particularly obtuse when it comes to seeing myself, maybe I have become too good at playing the ostrich, maybe I am too fearful and cannot look. I'm not sure I see the difference, or, if seen, I'm not sure it matters to me. The point remains: I don't find self-deception very hard at all. I see the world the way I want to see it, and unless someone hits me somewhere on my body and/or yells in my ear, I will go on seeing it that way. And even after these events. Someone I refuse to stop being in love with is about to send me a letter, will messenger it to me later this week while she is in the very same Texas city I will be in later this week because, I can only presume, she does not want to see me, this is all about to happen, and yet. And yet.

I don't find self-deception very hard at all, to be honest. To be perfectly honest. I see the world the way I want to see it because it is the only way that I possibly can. And besides, which way would I see it if I weren't to self-deceive? Which point of view out there fails this test? Or passes it, however you want to look at it. It being, after all, up to you....

And another thing she wrote.

I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be...

Because it is funny, every time I look in the mirror I see the same person I've seen for over fifteen years. This being how it seems to me.