this is charley the new dog in the building. she's looking at lulu, quivering. i hope lulu could be calm enough to meet on the ground soon. maybe i will get to walk charley. she's an australian sheepdog and poodle. swoon.

there's so much going on my head gets so crowded with thoughts and it just empties out. r. reminded me helen reddy died and i just a while ago was singing i am woman to lulu in the nature area and she was looking up at me like oh, i love that song, and that's what r. said i love that song. thanks for singing it. when i sing it i feel like i am woman too, and thankful, and that's the power of a song and an anthem of freedom. it makes you want to be a woman, or whatever you really are or want to be.

violence is pandemic and the trump's simply the most virulent super-spreader event. he'll burn himself and he'll lose but he's a terrible loser and he'll burn everyone he can as he crashes. 

i met a golden retriever fellow from the old pebble beach days, which were not long ago, but seem long ago since mister died. he does violence prevention work and noted the idea of violence as epidemic, and we talked of how the pandemic is expressed in every way now, every facet of life. 

oops, the golden fellow i gave the blog address to is a faith based initiative fellow. he's not going to like this.

 

one says stand back and stand by and the other says aw, shut up, man. and this is the debate in a debased land where

pandemic democrisy descends in a breathless pandemic of chaos, fire tornadoes, clouds of toxic ash and eye searing wind. 
 

i'm up at 4:20 thinking of the dismal and deranged prospect of life in the imperially insane carceral state after the freak spectacle of tonights unprecedentedly squalid, vapid presidential debate. thinking of that, precisely naught, insanely wrought, that sucking spirit vacuum, that unaccountably charged, negated, isolated, lonely and inane failed state.

i'm up at 4:26 bathed in the light of a full moon floating above the city and two calm and comforting cats. 

i may have alienated people in my life and i may have alienated myself, but i'm still here, and i want to be here where i am and as i am, inalienable, in fond, in this time and space, with r. and our two kid cats, come what may.

 what a pathetic charade, this debate! i can't believe this shit, this country is a joke. i'm out.

me and lulu, or lulu and i, took a big loopy walk cross the midway and down blackstone east on 63rd to the halted-half-way running track where obama's folly still threatens to be built. the first thing i see is the fence mask is disintegrating so you can see how far the illegal construction went and on the fence a preying/praying mantis was looking at me. i thought that was good luck and also symbolic of the obama fundation in a way, like he's preying on the land and folks about to get displaced and lose their park are praying for for his defeat. there's something intractable about the expotus's plans, everybody knows. the weed and gravel abandoned running track is run by ghosts.

i've always sort of cultivated the minimum except with certain substances and objects and periodic physical passions. i was or am something of a collector and exhibit some tendencies and behaviors that are considered addictive and hardly minimalist. that being said i've always thought small and not grand. though i have had notions that may be considered grandiose by some or many. i was going to add that i might say in a more gentle mode that my aspirations have been generally quite modest though secretly i've thought about having my own island, or forest, or meadow but with a humble shelter with a gentle love gardener, but not even a house. i once had a brief ambition of entering the art world but stalled in the art market even though my aspiration was humble, just maybe rent and food and beer at the time. before that time a passing partner asked where i saw myself in five years and i gulped with some shame and indignity and fear, i knew that was the sound of the death knell. yet many years later, after my brief attempts to gain credence and a few jacksons in the art world, and after mutual rejection, i think i was right, at least for me, and i don't miss the market one whit, nor one jackson. which is what i get for one standard doug dog walk. i have changed in some ways hard to quantify, and impossible i would imagine to the one who asked that blunt question so long ago for which i still have no answer.

i don't know why i say these things here and now but it occurs to me maybe this is the answer i'd like to give in that mute space following that airlocked question i was never ready for at the time.

 

what we say is always a selection, and no matter how loudly we speak, the things we conceal quietly persist in their concealed existence.

it's a question of what need not, or cannot, be said. the part that isn't told takes on great power, if you look at the story from the right perspective, often even greater power than the part that's revealed.

 

jenny erpenbeck                                                                                                                                                on "the old child"                                                                                                                                            not a novel, a memoir in pieces

is it going to continue to be full on, lock em up, balls to the wall, divide and conquer for the love of money fascist terrorism?

there won't be a transfer, frankly, there will be a continuation. -the sick fuck in the white house.

what about fear? where does it come from, what is it about? nebulous but impactful, real as a climate and as brutal and diffuse. it can be about anything that comes with the prevailing wind.

this book true story is all about fear i think, how it grabs you and how you spend the rest of your time trying to grab it. in the long run it's all about time management, waste of time savings, time fear, fear defending the insinuation of fear, the influence flu, at large, epidemic influx, climate fear, state of organized fear pandemic. 

clearly you can't go back to childhood, man, you never left, in a sense, that's where you go when you zone out. it's not just fear, it's what is held in suspense, inhered, feared.

                                                                                   +++

it starts with identifying your fear. fear is constantly rationalizing itself. fear doesn't want to leave. it tries to convince us that we need it. it tries to convince us that, if we let down our guard, something horrible will happen. yes, giving up fear is actually another thing we are afraid of! stupid, right?

TRUE STORY                                                                                                                                                                                             kate reed petty

by the end i was annoyed by true story though.

 

 

wish i knew how it would feel to be free  

i wish i could break all the chains still binding me 

i wish i could say all the things that i can say when i'm relaxed i'd be starting anew

i wish i could be like a bird in the sky (don't leave me) how sweet it would be to find that i could fly i'd soar to the sun and look down at the sea then i'd sing cause i know how it feels to be free then i'd sing cause i know how it feels to be free 

i wish i could share all the love that's in my heart  

wish i could break all things that bind us apart  

wish you could know what it means to be me and you'd see, you'd agree everybody should be free (cause if we ain't we're murderous)  

i wish i could be like a bird in the sky how sweet it would be if i could find that i could fly i'd soar to the sun, look down at the sea, man, i know, yes i know, oh yeah, the spirit's moving now, i know, got news for you, i already know, jonathan livingston seagull ain't got nothing on me, free, free, free, free, i'm free, and i know it, don't wanna be a, and i show it, but i'm still free and believe in me, it's alright, and i'd sing, sing, sing, cause i would know, i already know, i already know, i found out how it feels, not to be chained to anything ,to any race, to any faith, to anybody to any creed, to any hopes, to any-anything, i know how it feels to be free 

nina simone 

 

 

how do we know what is supposed to happen in the midst of what's happening? we always think bad stuff is what happens when good stuff is prevented and bad stuff is hopefully relegated to the struggle for freedom and consigned soon hopefully to the past and we wonder what is really happening versus what is really supposed to be. happening. while we seem to be while acting or watching really waiting to see what will happen like it's fate.

 i stayed up reading True Story all night into the morning. lucky i have only lulu today and she's here in the building. the cats sleep with me or try to squinting in the light and curling their tails over their faces. jasper wants full body contact and he murmurs pressing into my side. true story is a page turner though it starts slowly. it makes you think about what a true story is. many stories are true and some are illusions or lies. all of the stories we note are part of the true story but the true story may never be told.

    the democratic party’s abandonment of the working class to globalization, austerity and pauperization, paved the way for trumpism. the democrats will not change, cannot change, and exist these days mostly to co-opt movements and then kill them. the only way that the working class is going to find a way out of being held hostage to the democrats is to begin learning how to organize as a class and act like a class that is independent of the capitalist political parties. 

larry holmes, workers world

 

 

 

visit with comet. feels so good to hold him, though he squirms. finding bear after mister died and the pointers went into quarantine was a cosmic wave of luck for me. i hope for the bear too.

we may not get back but we can visit. in the blue grill now i find a bag of apples instead of the retainer. i'm happy with apples and warm embraces.

the water was 62 degrees, down 2 from yesterday, and i swam pretty far for me, though someone swam to the first pier and thought of the second pier—so far. i turned around halfway to the first and i felt fine. i don't have enough layers. jen got an orca suit and looked sleek and happy. fabio said everybody's getting suited up this year and i think i mo join the pod.

 visit with hilde. she's getting on. feels so good to hold her. everything is different. i think i know how the dogs feel, at least about the difference and us.

all i wanted was to think and see and transmit what i couldn't describe and to not be trapped inside. i don't know who is saying what i'm saying sometimes and if it matters and why.

 i wanted to do something with my life, though i never knew what i wanted to do, i still do. and then that becomes a life, one's life, your life, what you wanted to do.

 what america did to the world america did to itself.

you know what matters, don't pretend, you know it's the story, not the narrative,

you know the story from the inside out. tell the story again.
 

i wanna die happy, sufjan is singing from the catskills, that's the whole self-made song, and he's in a good place it sounds. this is a culture of death reaching everywhere. you can hear it in the music, even the celebration a dirge. we have to cherish life to cherish life we have to honor the dead to honor our life to honor life.

finished red pill last night before dawn. it ends with trumps election, the last one. could it be the last election? there will be revolution of some sort. there may be great, greater violence. that's the only promise of the final trump. the judge in the assange hearing says

It seems unlikely for you to make a judgement before Nov. 3 and you would have to bear in mind that the future is uncertain. Much of what we say about Trump is because this proceeding was initiated by Trump,….and some elements of the case would be worse if Trump were there [re-elected].

it seems there is no accounting for human nature in the aggregate. we can only have faith in love. there's nothing else to save us.

do you feel a stranger in your own life? do you feel part of an invasion? tell me how you feel, you don't have to say it aloud.

 what do you think of the temporal government of providence? right. that's what i thought too.

 in 1801, at the age of twenty-three, kleist had a crisis, brought about by reading kant, who taught that the human senses are unreliable, and so we are unable to apprehend the truth that lies beneath the surface of things, the "Thing in Itself." this was a huge blow to kleist, who was planning to gather as much truth as he could while on earth, then transmit his accumulated wisdom to future versions of himself, living "on other stars," eventually producing a perfect and complete man. the discovery that he was probably not even seeing the world correctly, let alone collecting points towards cosmic gnosis, led him into a deep depression. 

hari kunzru                                                                                                                                                      red tears

the sad thing is the system failed. it failed people and everything every system depends upon to survive. it failed by design.