Recently on the news I heard a man home on furlough from Iraq. He said the trials and pressures of everyday life now seem so trivial, and that he was eager to be back there, fighting with his fellow soldiers. There is nothing new under the sun.

Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial, fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmixed with baser matter.
Hamlet ACT II, SCENE 5

Latonia was in town debuting as Micaela in Carmen last week at the Dallas Opera. I think she debuts as Mimi next season at the Met. Her voice is more spectacular than ever - much prettier than I even remembered it,and the crowd cheered more for her than for the other stars. We went to lunch a couple times, and she kept saying that I need to pursue my singing. I admit I feel wistful and heartsick about opera. It generally makes me blue to go see one. She told me something I remember hearing a long time ago, which is that you don't see singers of my voice type really working before they are 40 anyway, because opera companies don't like to hire a Queen of the Night(magic flute) or Constanze(seraglio) with young chops - dense orchestration with tattoo-needle stratospheric vocals - a young voice doesn't have the steel to cut through it all. My coloratura still works well, and obviously I still have a powerful hankering to do it...

In retrospect, the electronica on the radio in the early 1980s was brilliantly prescient. Gary Numan's "Cars" is simply a great song, its iced-laser symmetry of tones and beats a primer for the dawn of an age of wires and wirelessness. Here in the 21st century, we're not all dressed like Spock or Seven of Nine, but our lifelines are comingled with machinery in ways only Sci-fi ever anticipated. One of the great things about leaving one's home used to be getting away from the telephone. That is now an obsolete mindset with the advent of cellular technology. Caller I.D. is the ultimate in passive agressiveness - we always look before we answer, don't we? We feel we've lost our tether if we drive away from home and leave the cell phone on the desk or in the bathroom. We rushed headlong to meld with our machines. And it's no wonder--people feel alienated from those around them - via the internet, there is some hope of finding one's tribe. Ah, blessed be.

"Here in my car
I feel safest of all
I can lock all my doors
It's the only way to live
In cars..."

If mediocrity is one's only option, best do nothing.

Ponder the popping weasel.

Coming home from dinner Friday night I sat at a red light, watching the convo between the skinhead in the vehicle ahead of me and his date. He was speaking in an animated manner, maybe trying a little too hard, and she had sorority girl hair--wondered how on earth these two hooked up. Then I noticed the bumper sticker on his vehicle: 'Join the Army. Travel the world. See exotic places. Meet unusual people, then kill them.' He was driving a Jeep. Irony, anyone?

I can now say I have sat in my pajamas, bowl of oatmeal in hand, watching dawn spreading across quaking Mount St Helens, updated every five minutes, all from in the cozy confines of my studio. The internet and webcams: good shit.

When times are good it is easy to be blissfully ignorant and casual about life and not tally the moments our daily joys string together like a garland of flowers. It is when things seem bleakest that time leaps at us in bold relief and each tick of the clock holds censure and menace. At those moments, the triumphs of life seem as remote as light seen from the bottom of a well, its impassable curve shooting upward toward an arctic pinprick of light, tauntingly hinting of illumination no longer attainable, of sun that will never again warm the chill of bones who understand the grief of living. Grace is easy when things are good, but perhaps the only moments of true grace and nobility are times that seem bleakest. Much of life is mundanaity punctuated by brilliant highs and stultifying lows. Maybe the trick is splitting the difference - limning our agonies and joys with the knowlege that most will balance out, and appreciating that giddy pleasures can only be fleeting. I fritter much of my time, but my mind is always working, shuttling the warp and weft of ideas and seeking patterns to explain all. The one assured pattern I have discovered is this: though we may crave the daylight, we would never see the stars if not for the blackness that night affords.

Time (Mason, Waters, Wright, Gilmour)
Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way.

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain.
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.

So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again.
The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older,
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.

Every year is getting shorter never seem to find the time.
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over,
Thought I'd something more to say.

Breathe (reprise)
Home, home again. I like to be here when I can.
When I come home cold and tired
It's good to warm my bones beside the fire.
Far away across the field
The tolling of the iron bell
Calls the faithful to their knees
To hear the softly spoken magic spells.

Gawd, has it been that long? This, then is my August post. Hectic, no time, summer primarily spent getting about the serious business of lolling in my swimming pool in the house I just bought. On my deathbed will I say "I should have spent less time in the pool and more time cleaning/unpacking?" Naaah.

The witty woman is a tragic figure in American life. Wit destroys eroticism and eroticism destroys wit, so women must choose between taking lovers and taking no prisoners.
Florence King

From 3AM girls in the British tabloid Mirror.co.uk--

BEN Affleck has told how he felt when he found out ex-fiancee J-Lo had married crooner Marc Anthony.

The 31-year-old actor - who split from Jen in January - told Radio 1: "It's the sort of vague calm you get after vomiting, when the unpleasant bit is over and you get a kind of strange peace."

[I'll bet. What a purge that must have been!]

Semi-workie/neighborhood weird occurence alert. This is creepy shit.

I lived in a building in South Dallas for about 6 years in my early to late twenties. I loved the building and only moved when I was about to get married and had some hare-brained notion that I wanted to check out neighborhood living. Eleven years later and I'm back in a loft in South Dallas. *ahem*
anyway. The building had 13 units and was about 100 years old with giant sliding freight doors that residents would padlock from the inside or outside. There were weird acoustics in the building and sometimes inside my loft you could hear a cute girl up the hall named Ginger having knock-down drag-outs with her girlfriend. Sometimes the girlfriend would take all the telephones from the apartment and padlock the door from the outside and leave Ginger locked up for a cooling-off period. Sometimes the police came. It was very strange. I'm sure this acoustic phenomenon must have worked in reverse, although I'm sure I never gave anything so interesting to listen to as pugilistic lesbian antics.
The apartment I lived in last was #13. It was a strange apartment, but had a large basement room that stayed cool in summer and warm in winter. I think of golden times in that space--my sister and I lived there together-- I would get home from the graveyard tour at work as the sun was coming up, and we'd space out and watch the light shift and warm the space while we listened to gorgeous music--the splendors of the new day dawning and anticipating the languorous naps that lay ahead. The upstairs space was painted a wonderful mottled olive-to-dark green color by the previous occupant, and I loved the feel of the room--its high ceilings and tall windows. The basement antechamber was a boiler room(my sister's bedroom), but had some windows and natural light. The main basement room(my bedroom), however, was a concrete bunker and had the makings (unrealized during my occupancy) of a bona fide sex pit. Very dungeons & dragoons. Meow.
I remained loosely in touch with two neighbors from the building - one who is in Houston now and another who manages a restaurant in London. I knew from them that an architect moved into my space when I moved out, and years later someone told me the architect still occupied that space.
Flash forward these eleven years, and the little job I am working has put me in close proximity with that architect. His name is Larry. Larry has been doing some work for my boss, who is planning some townhomes in the neighborhood. I began seeing his name in paperwork early in the days I began working this job, and someone mentioned he lived on Harwood street, and I finally realized that he was the man living in my old space. I was eager to know of the old place and if any of the old-timers were still around there, and though he was generally not talkative to me (more on that in a second), one day he was waiting for the company head to arrive and I asked about the apartment. He told me a Cliff notes version of how the building's community had evolved, and I was pleased to hear news of it. Still, even after that conversation Larry never seemed to warm up to me, which was a trifle offputting. I did admire Larry's energy and passion for Dallas - he was very involved in local urban planning, and maybe his veneer of arrogance sprang from a feeling of self-importance--moving all the little people around like pieces on a chess board. Nice of us all to show up and give him an occupation.

I didn't look at Larry and immediately think he was a gay man, but I came to recognize he had a certain air of a very loathesome stripe of man: The flip side of the coin that says "women are only for fucking" which is the side that says "women only exist to make more gay men for me to fuck." He wasn't a snide or preening ponce in that way--just icily indifferent--no use for women, really, and no need to stoop to petty niceties such as greeting the other human in the room you have just entered if that human is female. He may have been a great guy, but I never saw that. Oddly enough, icily indifferent is how the company head could be described 4 out of 5 days, I'd say. I saw Larry at the office on Friday and it was as if we had never spoken--as if he were following the golden rule of subways the world over: "thou shalt not make eye contact." I shrugged it off, as ever, not taking it personally. After all--was I given the opportunity to choose my gender?

Sunday night my dad called me up and asked if I knew a guy named Wheat from my old building. I said yes, and he said he was talking on the phone when he saw my old building on the news, and that some guy named Wheat was beaten to death in his apartment late Saturday night. Dad said he knew that was our old space they were talking about. Neighbors saw Larry enter the apartment with another man, apparently calmly as if nothing untoward was going on. Then they heard a commotion from within the space and Larry screaming for help. The visitor left the apartment smoking a cigarette, and the neighbors had called police already. Apparently Larry was dying of a head wound even as the ambulance arrived.

There is talk and speculation, gossip and paranoia. Nests of yupstarts and artists dotted about this rough transitional tract of town are roiling with the intrigue and despair of tragedy our gated communities always seemed to insulate us from. Sure, people are living and dying of drugs and cruelty just beyond our cloistered existence, but our usefulness to society is an insulating factor. Having escorted the man into his home, the obvious thing to think is that Larry picked the guy up for a quick piece of tail, and things went horribly awry, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, etc. It's a tough old world to be a horny single person on the make. Neighbors got a good gander at the murderer, and hopefully that will be his undoing.

Monday at work I came across an invoice from Larry to my company, and thought of the nearness of it all. I thought of that beautiful place so dear to my heart and the unspeakable horror that happened there. I thought again of the warm glorious mornings there, of the concrete floor where my doggie puked up the half-pound of butter she gobbled while I was bringing in the rest of the groceries (butter puddles are a bitch to clean). I thought of evenings sitting on the sofa or in the courtyard talking to my beau - now husband - and thinking I could move on in the world and move forward with him. I thought of guests and dinner parties and sparkling moments that in no way foreshadowed what would happen there.

It's chilling to think of the murderer going about his life--be it in a home or on the street--inwardly giddy from the shocking thrill of killing someone. It's difficult to conceive of how someone can commit such an act to begin with, let alone stand himself after the fact. In his heart bloom the flowers of evil, fragrant with the stench of a powerful secret. I'm abivalent about the death penalty, but in cases like this, I'll be ok with the chair. I hope they catch the bastard and make him a crispy critter.

The composite sketch of the perp shows a bowl-cut time-warped from a Three Stooges film, rendering a sublimely ridiculous aspect to the unbelieveably tragic. Imagine the bizarre breach of taste that wrought this double-standard: He couldn't deign to talk to females, but would take his chances with a Moe Howard-pated homicidal maniac. But that is unfair of me, isn't it? Larry probably only wanted to show the guy his etchings...

"Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes." Walt Whitman