Sunday, October 31, 2004
Thursday, October 21, 2004
Sunday, October 17, 2004
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?
Sunday, October 10, 2004
Monday, September 27, 2004
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.
Sunday, September 26, 2004
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.
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.
Monday, August 30, 2004
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.
Friday, July 16, 2004
Tuesday, June 15, 2004
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!]
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!]
Friday, June 11, 2004
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...
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...
Sunday, June 06, 2004
Friday, May 14, 2004
Saturday, May 08, 2004
OK OK. Don't start worrying about me. Those last 2 entries are way too macro for this gal. Don't succumb to the fear that I'm going to go all political or big-picture on you. This journal is about 3 things: Me, me and me! Don't worry that this disposable bit of fluff is going to boil down to an icy rock of vitriolic lead. Me and my double D's is on the case. However, we reserve the right to bitch about the Machiavellian among us... ...Two days ago I went shopping for panties. It was a glorious orgy of panty acquisition. Seriously, I filled the basket at TJ Maxx with a vertable crayon box of panty selection. Woohoo. New drawers are a thing of wonder and beauty-they make one feel all swishy-sassy. Then I wended my way over to the shoe aisle, and found a Spanish sandal I rilly rilly loved. I bought 4 pairs of identical sandals (different colors) and about a dozen panties. I'm channeling Imelda Marcos. Peel me another grape, Ferdinand. Let them eat cack.
My response to a chain-letter email I received trying to drum up support for Michael Moore:
I remember hearing a story on the news telling of Michael Moore's hoax to stir up publicity by decrying Disney, so when I received your email about poor little Michael Moore vs Goliath Disney, I googed "michael moore disney hoax," and I have quoted below the link some info from the article which sheds light on Moore's methods. Michael Moore lives in a $4 million dollar Manhattan pad, and it's a little fatuous for him to pretend to keep playing the "little guy" a la Roger & Me. He has integrity issues of his own. Perhaps I could have a fabulous Manhattan pad and all the best and finest for my kith and kin if I did a documentary exposing his specious tactics and flagrant dishonesties. Fact is, he couldn't stand up to the brand of stacked-deck scrutiny he deals out. Hope you find it educational.
http://www.antimusic.com/news/04/may/item20.shtml
Update: Michael Moore made a big stink earlier this week when he accused Disney of pulling the plug on his latest film, “Fahrenheit 911”. He decried Disney’s decision not to distribute the film as politically motivate censorship. However, Moore was crying wolf. He admitted in a CNN interview that he knew almost a year ago that Disney would not distribute the film, according to a report from independent.co.uk.
Moore told CNN, "Almost a year ago, after we'd started making the film, the chairman of Disney, Michael Eisner, told my agent he was upset Miramax had made the film and he will not distribute it."
I remember hearing a story on the news telling of Michael Moore's hoax to stir up publicity by decrying Disney, so when I received your email about poor little Michael Moore vs Goliath Disney, I googed "michael moore disney hoax," and I have quoted below the link some info from the article which sheds light on Moore's methods. Michael Moore lives in a $4 million dollar Manhattan pad, and it's a little fatuous for him to pretend to keep playing the "little guy" a la Roger & Me. He has integrity issues of his own. Perhaps I could have a fabulous Manhattan pad and all the best and finest for my kith and kin if I did a documentary exposing his specious tactics and flagrant dishonesties. Fact is, he couldn't stand up to the brand of stacked-deck scrutiny he deals out. Hope you find it educational.
http://www.antimusic.com/news/04/may/item20.shtml
Update: Michael Moore made a big stink earlier this week when he accused Disney of pulling the plug on his latest film, “Fahrenheit 911”. He decried Disney’s decision not to distribute the film as politically motivate censorship. However, Moore was crying wolf. He admitted in a CNN interview that he knew almost a year ago that Disney would not distribute the film, according to a report from independent.co.uk.
Moore told CNN, "Almost a year ago, after we'd started making the film, the chairman of Disney, Michael Eisner, told my agent he was upset Miramax had made the film and he will not distribute it."
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