by j-a
January 2011
Stay away from people or you're going to catch something. And, for Christ's sake, wash your goddamn hands as often as you can and as soon as you get home; and meanwhile keep them as far away from your face as possible. My nephew Roy was sick on New Year's Day. Now I think I'm getting sick. Shit. (I wonder if I should tweet this?)
Life is always way too complex; Twitter makes it seem too simple, forcing over-condensation, which twittwats cheat with multiple posts, complicating the idea and negating the whole purpose. Or else they use lame cntrcshns w horrific shaky grammar 2 mak thr point w fwr ltrs, squeezing in more than the design's intent.
Not my kind of writing at all. I want the very best of both: brevity and complexity all wrapped up in tight poetics, a complex yet terse daily post. But I'd rather limit the lines; characters are too postmodern. And if I had a thorough choice, I'd limit syllables too.
Except that might be just too much. The whole point is, I'm quite anal; so formats are a big issue. Thus, the alternate format here. [Edit: It's no longer alternate. I changed it.] Just to see how it develops. This is the original idea, the context for this conception, I had at the end of last month:
Per my basic (genetic?) nature, I repeat things; and this piece is one of those things (i.e., I've written of this before, although in this case, unlike the previous time I wrote of this, I actually remember where it was that I wrote it--in my book, In Lieu of Identity); furthermore, more generally, I've written out this explanation about repeating myself in writing before, including the qualification that this can be normal human behavior, that a lot of people do it even without any genetic motivation to do so, although the fact that I write repetitively (because writing affords me a degree of separation) rather than act normally by merely repeating myself in multiple conversations like many of the more "normal" people do is motivated by my different genetic nature:
When I was over at my brother Royce's house on Christmas (this would be just this past Christmas, and not the previous one that I fictionalized in my latest book Drastic Changes), we were sitting in the living room watching tv after everyone else had gone to bed and the subject of a specific mp3 came up. I said I had a copy of it and I'd bring it over on New Year's Day. Royce said, "Who said you were invited over on New Year's Day?" I know he was just being funny, but my defenses went up anyway, because in fact this is exactly the kind of thing they (he and his wife) do to me a lot (this is the part that I wrote of before), they tell me I can do something and then turn around and criticize me for doing it, in this case, that I should just automatically come over on holidays, that I do not have to wait to be invited, that I have a standing invitation; and yet, when I state that I will be over on New Year's Day, Royce, trying to be funny, makes his remark, which, although it may or may not have had an underlying, perhaps unconscious, snarkiness to it, is definitely a form of unconscious manipulation, his way of keeping me off balance perhaps.
But in this case, unlike in many others, I am ready with a counter-manipulation, which rolls right off my tongue without my having to think about it. (I do still have my moments.) I say, "Kim did." Royce says, "Oh. Okay." And that was that, end of this particular repetition, and the end of this little vignette, except to mention that the net effect was that I ended up inviting myself over on New Year's Day--because I was lying. Kim said no such thing, although, had she thought of it, she would have, because she frequently does, so that she doesn't have to call me later and invite me over. But, I repeat, they've told me on numerous occasions that I am always invited over on holidays, so my lie served their agenda of wanting me to come over automatically, without having to be invited. I find it interesting and entertaining that I was, on the spur of the moment, able to turn the "joke" around on Royce and counteract it with a lie. That's more of the old me, the person I used to be way back when I was far more defensive and far more quick-witted and deceptive in my defense as well.
Another repetition I engage in (and the whole point here) is how I am fond of writing episodically, how I started out so long ago writing that way and, as I developed my "style", abandoned it favor of my more transitional practices. I would rather write out episodes and leave them at just that, a collection of unrelated, single or simple issue short essays about...whatever, my life and experiences, my dreams and fantasies, or simply my ideas and beliefs; but something compels me to stitch them together into longer, more "literary" fabrics, which I lovingly label my postmodern (or pomo) style. But I have not given up on the idea of going back to the episodic nature of my writing, allowing it to exist as discrete pieces instead of trying to artificially tie it all together. I'm still looking for a mechanism or a format that will allow me to collect my journal entries in this way. Maintaining simple blogs would probably suffice, but I can't seem to shake the retro modernist idea that writing in a blog format is a somewhat less than literary endeavor. I know that being "literary" is an artificial conceit that really doesn't mean anything any more (probably never really did, apart from a way to maintain one's snobbery), but there's also the idea of packaging my written "art" into books; although, I guess I could just as well package blog entries into books. I don't know. Maybe.
[It's also interesting that a modernist "sensibility" can inform a postmodern style, as it seems to do when I try to justify my pomo transitioning with the modernist ideas of thematic unity and an ongoing narrative line (which I will nevertheless break apart and label as non- or semi-linear, non- or semi-narrative) in my attempt to include all of the odds and ends that are lying around in my journals, so that I can permanently set each month's journal aside, being done with it. In other words, I create a jumbled mess that I disguise with a modernist rationale; but the whole point is: I like it, the style--or anti-style, if you prefer; or even if you don't.]
So here we go with yet another experiment, because words are such an imperfect way to try to express one's universal self, which is what I really want to do; but I just don't quite yet know how to go about it.
[Actually, with my change of intent about the alternate format, this becomes, not a new experiment, but the way I used to publish this site years ago.]
A spam filter (such as the one that Yahoo provides on its webmail service) is of no use if you can't rely on it to filter only what you choose to be filtered. If it also filters messages that Yahoo (or whoever) suspects might be spam, then you have to keep checking it anyway, just to make sure you didn't miss any legitimate mail that lame Yahoo (or whoever) classifies incorrectly.
I keep flagging certain sources as "not spam" and Yahoo treats them that way for a while and then reverts them back to spam again. I want to know that what I say is spam remains spam and what I say is not remains not. I want to feel confident that I can empty the spam folder without looking into it; otherwise, why have it at all?
Susan Swain (on her website or in an internet-published interview, I can't remember which and I failed to copy down the source) talked about working at what makes you happy, a "do what you love and the money will follow" philosophy. Working just for a paycheck, she says (I'm severely paraphrasing here), is a compromise that you should not make, given the amount of time and energy that we devote to our careers. That compromise (this is me talking now) is what drains us of energy, whereas doing what you're happy doing energizes you.
That, for me, is a life that I would have wanted, had I known early enough on what it was that I wanted. (I did however feel what I wanted, but could find no practical, sociable way to it.) But it was a life that escaped me, because, apart from knowing of no place where I might fit into society, I didn't have the genetic make-up nor did I develop the skills to set about to schmooze my way into any kind of job I would have been happy to work at. I was happy and considered myself lucky just to find any kind of job at all and I always took the first one that came along, just to relieve the anxiety of job hunting; and, in any case, I doubt that anyone would pay me to do what it is that fulfills me, what I'm doing now, which is more a matter of self-sufficiency than social activity.
This is a flaw in the social contract: It demands, not self-fulfillment, but groupthink. If it so happens that the means to what fulfills you and makes you happy exists out there, somewhere, though you may have to go to a lot of trouble to seek it out, that's great. But what about those of us who for genetic reasons just do not "fit in"? It's all fine and good if a social being like Susan Swain can find her calling within a social institution; but what about those of us who live to exist as far as possible beyond social organization? There ought to be places in the social world where we too can find fulfillment in our employment.
Okay, so this is my autism showing through once again. So what did you expect? And my attitude is being further influenced by all of this severe winter weather. My "ideal" job would have to be somewhere warm, Southern California, maybe; or the Amazon rain forest.
The following analysis of my ideal (self) "employment" applies to my summer mentality, not the winter one, which is a whole different thing (I've written of this so many times before, and I'll write of it again and again, I'm sure, until I understand it completely and become fully adjusted to it and accepting of what it means in/to my life):
If I write, for whatever token amount of time and volume, in the "morning" (when I first arise), and then I go out into the gardens and do (at least) one token task, and then I settle down on the porch and read until dinner, then my "life" is justified; I've done what it is I do.
After dinner, then, settled into my bedroom, I can relax, listen to or practice music, watch tv, whatever, with the knowledge and satisfaction that I've put in at least a token's day's work. [In the winter, I consider myself productive if I manage just to get out of bed for a few hours.
[Not that I don't do anything when I'm in bed. I write. And dream (up new ideas).] Contrast all of that with coming home from a job five or six days a week, drained of energy, doing the least amount of home maintenance possible to maintain my "life", then vegging out until I fall asleep.
When what you do for money to survive is not what you are meant to do, your life is a sham; and, when the money you do it for is not enough to afford the "luxury" of a housewife (not that I feel women should be saddled with the role unwillingly, which is pretty much the same thing as I'm describing here; but if it makes them happy, if it gives their lives a purpose or a justification...) or a maid, yard care services, auto mechanics, etc. (so that you have to do that stuff yourself or else live in a disorganized, unkempt, and/or slipshod manner), then "society" (read employers) are ripping you off. A fulfilling life is not, even in these latter days of affluence and greed, an easy accomplishment.
As I've just alluded to above, winter is beginning to take its usual toll, taxing my resolve and patience. I've been successfully resisting the winter for a long time now, but yesterday I finally gave in and started fucking off. The cold has been after me and after me, unrelenting, until I finally decided, fuck it. I ain't doin' nothin' 'cept readin' and sleepin' (and eatin') till the craziness lets up. This weather is worse than a nagging wife. I hide out from her in the bedroom, and she tries to get in through the doors and windows; but, armed with my trusty space heater, I won't let her. Yet she still nags at me through the door and walls. I play the tv loud or listen to my mp3 player, but every time I feel like I want some silence, there she is again, banging and shouting, with the unwanted hum of the space heater unable to drown out her raspy, irritable voice.
When I manage to get to sleep, at any odd hour, I dream about the winter of my life, the times when I was not so well in control, way back when, fantastic dreams that I would like to remember, to analyze, but just don't have the gumption to do it, and they begin to fade away after several days as the mental list grows longer:
my sister and I in the attic after mom and dad have moved out of the house at 1728 (moved out = died? the house = our lives now? the attic = an area of the house where we have never lived before?);
the backyard of the same house where many people who never lived there with us, though not unwelcome by me, are digging up the yard and planting vegetable gardens, turning it into first a commune atmosphere and then a rock concert where we stake out our seating arrangements and I sit next to a girl I don't know who is too shy to talk to me (and vice versa?) and we, the group, sing an old song. I forget the words now. I claim the band's name is Churcher and one of the girls says she remembers them as Sticks [not Styx; I saw the spelling in the dream], and I claim that only in California were they called Churcher; in the rest of the country, they were known as Sticks, even as I'm saying this knowing damn well I'm making it up;
kids sitting on the 640 front deck playing, and I awaken from an afternoon nap and go out and try to encourage them to leave because I don't want any parents getting any ideas about what they're doing here or any possible liabilities should they get hurt, and I notice that the dog has been eating things they've fed him and starts to throw up, and ends up impossibly throwing up over twenty baseballs, softballs, and other assorted items.
That's it. The rest of the dreams have already disappeared off the list like a picture of Marty McFly changing his past.
Last night, as I was falling asleep, trying to remember more dreams that I might document, I came up with the idea of "autistic art". Immediately upon awakening later, I did a goggle search of this because I thought that someone has surely already thought of this; but all of the references--and I looked at a whole lot of sites--were concerned, not with the nature of the art itself so much as with that of the person doing the art, the artist; and the nature of their art seemed to me to be not, as many definitions claimed, representations of an autistic state so much as it was an attempt to communicate with a non-autistic world, in much the same way as many abstract artists have done. In fact, one might suspect that the secret or unknown nature of many abstract artists is autism. Why else would such idiosyncratic images be generated? (But, of course, being autistic myself, I may be biased.)
It is my contention that "autistic art" is done not at all for commercial reasons, nor even so much for communicative ones, and not even (necessarily) for anyone other than the autiste him or herself. In fact, if you share the art, you diminish its autistic nature (though you do not negate it, because autism exists across a broad range of degrees of sharing). Emily Dickinson did autistic art. Most artists do not simply because most artists create art as a communicative mechanism. They may also be autistic, but if they are, their art is not so much an attempt to express their autism as it is to bridge the gap between themselves and the society that doesn't understand them very well; autistic art, rather, as I define it, stands for itself, by itself, without any need of an audience. It is a thing apart. (Should I call it simply "aut"? Hmm. Maybe not.)
[Sometimes I allow my posted material to predict the future, usually when I am running far behind in processing my raw journals. This next section is from my February journal, but it begs to be included here as a refinement of my definiiton of autistic art:
Most of my art thus far has been of the autistic variety. I do not share it much, am hesitant to do so, and wonder if I ever should, if my marketing plans are an ill-founded idea. Autistic art is pure art, uncontaminated by the capitalist (or even socialist) business model. How is this all relevant to my original thesis? The winter is an autistic season, and dreams are an autistic state of existence.Autistic Art v. Artistic Aut Artistic aut is the art that autistic people create and put out for public consumption; autistic art (as I described earlier) is done for one's own (autistic) self, not to be shared, or to be shared among a very limited number of people. I divide my writing and art into two different categories: 1) intended for public consumption; 2) my private stock, a cache to be made public after I am "gone", or maybe just before that, while I am still around but more or less impervious to social/legal consequences, pieces derived from experiences with/of real people (as opposed to imagined, even if that imagination is based on them), how I interpret/change their content (it's not really their content; if I perceive it, then it's my own, although society may have different ideas about that), such as altered images and stories in which I use those people in a direct as opposed to a fictive fashion that makes them more or less identifiable, but yet legally used. Obviously, what I mean by autistic art would be the second category above, the first being social art done by autistes.
There are lots of things that can be done, lots of changes that could be made; but we (Americans and citizens of many other nations) choose not to do or make them. We are so lame to complain, or pray.
Something has to change. Fuck this government and its corporate governors. Yesterday, I renewed my IRA CDs; at 1%. 1%! And I could have gotten a whole 2% if I had taken them out for four years.
And food prices! Prices in general. Fuck all you corporations and your de facto employees in the government who manipulate the money supply and inflation rates to prevent deflation. What free market?
[Despite all the naysaying Keynesians, Japan is dealing quite well with deflation. They've taken, not a typical (Western) stance against it, but are embracing it creatively, to the immense benefit of average consumers, which is why America and her European financial stooges stand firmly against such "radical" thinking: It benefits consumers at the expense of (the stupider, non-resiliant) corporations that strive, always, to disproportionately increase profits, government controlled inflation being one of the primary weapons they use to that end, because corporations (and the rich) can weather increased costs better than average consumers can and thus money flows from poor to rich.]
But it's all just me. Isn't it? Little annoyances threaten to disrupt the peace of mind I cultivated this morning just before I went to bed: Can't adjust the tv antenna to pick up channel 2, and the Steeler game is only two hours away. Want to watch a movie meanwhile, but can't get channel 22 either. My ISP software is acting up, making net surfing (extra) slow and difficult. Andnowthespacebaronmylaptopisn'tworking.
[I managed to fix the space ar y prying up on it with a knife (I was going to remove it, ut I noticed on the screen while I was futzing with it that it started working again), ut now the letter ' ' isn't working. I must have dislodged something eneath the space ar that was preventing it from making contact, probably a crum from the peanut utter crackers I was eating while I was typing. So I start to pry up on the ' ' and it's workin now, but the ' ' isn't. Open the pod bay doors, HAL. Test: g g gg g ggg ggggggggggggggg. Okay. Everything's back to normal again. Well, as normal as it ever gets around here.]
And Sarah Palin's mug is showing up all over the place again. You think this bumbling xenophobe hasn't got a chance at the presidency because she will self-destruct? Don't overestimate the self-destructive will of the American electorate. We're the ones who elected W.
Got to wait out this discontentment of my molasses life. The internal weather has got to shift around soon. The frozen streets mock me every time I look out the front window of my fevered cabin. December's moping decline of daylight has transitioned into January's crawling struggle to start back up again like some old car with a dying battery. I hate this section of this season, almost as much as I hate society. At least nature has an excuse: It's just the way it is. We could say that of human nature as well, but it wouldn't be quite as true, because we (supposedly) have free will and can choose our destiny. (Ignore for the time being that that's just not true; it's how we live our lives of denial, after all.) We're self-conscious beings, so we have the option of changing both ourselves and our environmental and social situations, so the fact that we choose to live the way we do is rather revealing, don't you think?
When I was a kid, society was all about adults. When I became an adult, society was all about the wisdom of age. Now that I am aging, society is all about the worship of youth. I am out-of-sync with my society. (Actually, it's not really mine.) This is not a new revelation, of course; It's always been this way. But stay tuned. I have some surprises for you fickle socialites. They're a long time coming and still a far way off, but...wait. [No. I'm not going to gun anyone down in the street or anything. I don't believe in violence of any kind, any time, any place. So all you government agents surveilling the net can just back off.]
It is bad enough that I sincerely hate society so damn much, but I hate even worse the fact that I am so dependent upon it. I am not Jeremiah Johnson. I had a chance at that kind of life once, a long time back, but I reneged when society grabbed hold of me. Yeah, it was my (semi-conscious, uninformed) choice. So what? We all have our own issues to deal with. I choose to deal with mine. I don't relegate them to superstition and try to pray them away.
I'm at the grocery store the other day, out stocking up while the weather is still semi-reasonable, before the winter storm that's heading our way arrives. So I'm in the checkout aisle and the guy who's ringing up my purchases (who also happens to be the manager) finishes up, pushes aside the cart he loaded the stuff into, and says something like, "You wanna push that cart around here?" He means the cart I had been using that according to the standard protocol of this chain of stores becomes the cart that the next customer gets his or her purchases loaded into.
Now it just so happens that immediately before he said this, I was thinking exactly that same thing and just about to act on it. But I was moving kind of slowly this day and, had I been at home and had to make this decision to act, I might have stood in place for who knows how long, pondering my next move; but being out in society prompts me to act when otherwise I might not, just yet. In other words, I have this (autistic) tendency to freeze in place, which, being high-functioning, I can easily overcome with an act of will, but usually don't bother unless circumstances demand it.
[It will occur to me later that this seems to be pretty much the same thing (same motivation, or rather, the lack of it) as what I recognize as (a form of) anxiety when anticipating social interaction: I'm fine once I cross that "line" that separates me from "society". For the most part, interaction is not the problem (there are exceptions; awkwardness in certain situations, etc.). Initializing interaction is the problem; or, rather, the lead up to it, the anxiety experienced in anticipation. I've read in some blogs by people who are far more autistic than I that crossing "lines" (both literal lines such as doorways, carpeting onto wood floor, etc. and psychological lines such as speaking after not having spoken for a while) can cause them to freeze in place, physically and/or mentally. I'm discovering that a lot of what severely autistic people write about, I recognize in myself in far subtler, less debilitating forms.]
The guy in the grocery store did not say what he said in any kind of nasty way. He was quite polite. But it nevertheless struck me as being a bit rude and disrespectful since I was about to do it anyway so I felt there was no need to point out the obvious to me. I recognized in his words (perhaps hiding a subtext of impatience) a standard social prejudice: Some people do who not act as quickly as others will be seen as...whatever, slow, noncompliant, rebellious, disconsiderate. The guy expects his customers to "jump to it," just like the way I always see him acting, getting it done, conducting his business and expecting the same type of behavior from all of his employees, which he automatically, without thinking about it, generalizes to include his customers. I am not "allowed" to act in my own peculiar time and way, according to my own genetics or psychology; I must conform. The customer is (not) always right.
The guy is a nice guy, always pleasant in his business-like manner, so I don't feel as discriminated against as I might if a nasty little prick of an employee in a less conscientiously managed store had treated me in what I consider to be a less than understanding way. Sometimes, when I'm out in public of necessity though I would rather not be (I try to stay at home and postpone my outings for when I am at my most gregarious), I tend to move slowly, as much intentionally to avoid becoming overly rattled by overwhelming input as unconsciously spaced-out. If you can't deal with me when I am this way, that's fine. Just ignore me, unless...you happen to be working in a service industry.
I have my expectations too, just as you do. I expect to be treated with consideration and understanding. If your (unconscious, more social or "sociable") expectations conflict with mine, then, being in service, you have the (social as well as business) obligation to set your expectations aside and defer to mine; and the fact that your expectations may be unconscious does not relieve you of this responsibility. Expand your horizons. Learn about people who are different from you. That is something I have been forced to do all my life, so why shouldn't you have to also? Just because you are mainstream doesn't absolve you of your social responsibility; in fact, if you do not work to understand people who are different from the social mainstream, then you are not so "sociable" as you pretend to be. Truly sociable people are sociable with everyone. Supposedly sociable people who reserve their best behavior for an in-group, however large or small, are acting hypocritically, defying the basic definition of what it means to be a social person.
I'm feeling ambitious, distracted, and overloaded, all at the same time. Lots of things I want to get done. No practical plan for doing them. So I make a plan: daily, for the next few days or weeks: Dress warmly > shovel snow > get the mail, a beer from the basement, wood from the shed > build a fire in the wood stove or go back to bed and work under covers in space-heated comfort. Not much of a plan, but more a complex existence can wait until spring.
I shoveled the entire driveway this morning at five a.m., six inches more snow expected this weekend. Here we go again. Now I'm too cold and exhausted to do all of the other things I wanted to do. Back to bed, to try to dream up a different, more user-friendly kind of world.
Woke up amused by a movie trailer I dreamed up:
Jennifer Aniston and Jennifer Hudson in Half Black. A scene:
Hudson confronts Aniston with the information that she's her half-sister. Aniston says, "You mean I'm half black?"
Hudson replies, "No, honey. Your white father screwed my black mother. I'm half black. You couldn't be more white."
I get up and brave the cold floor as I hunt for my wayward clogs, which I wear around the house as slippers. I remember when I was over at Royce's place earlier in the month, Randy commented on my shoes (the Spaldings). [I wonder now if he was thinking they were old and out-of-style; but, no matter.] I told him that I only wore them when I went out. He asked what I wore at home and I told him I had a pair of Crocs. Well, not real Crocs, I explained, but Big Lot rip-offs. He asked me if I wore socks with them, and I said yes, then qualified by telling him that I actually have two pair, one for in the house that I wear like slippers and one for working in the gardens that I wear without socks, because the socks get dirty through the openings in the shoes.
It occurs to me now that he asked about the socks because his mother wears the same cheap clogs without socks, and she wears them out in public, even to her job! I would never wear my clogs in public, just as I would never dress in sweats, even designer ones. (Actually, I'd never wear designer sweats at all. I'm just not that kind of silly person.) So Randy asks me why I don't wear the clogs when I go out. I explain that I'd never want anyone to see me looking like that. So he says that they'll see me if they come to visit. I explain that, if someone visits me at home, they get to see me in whatever way I choose to be, how I really am; but when I'm out, I dress for effect. I feel I have a duty to present an image when I go out in public, but if the public comes to me, then they get what they get.
I feel that I have no social duty to maintain an appearance in my own personal space; and that includes, not only my personal appearance, but my living space as well. The outside appearance of my house should conform somewhat (more or less) to social standards, but the inside of my house is nobody's business but my own. So if anyone ever decides to entertain the idea that I might need an intervention to clean and organize this damn place, they better be bringing a gun with them and they better be prepared to use it because that's what such an action will require.
Like the artist who produces beautiful works in a disastrously disarrayed studio, I produce my art (pastiches, books, and also my social appearance1) out of my disarray of a house (which essentially is my studio). Not that my work is beautiful, that's not quite what I meant; but...well, I'm not the one to decide that in any case. I'd say that I produce ordered works out of chaos, but I'm not too sure that's true either. To me they're ordered. They all have an internal logic that derives from my own sense of style. But others may have other ideas. As well they should.
I'm making great progress (I guess), pulling together lots of content into several books, the result of a full year (and then some, piecemeal farther on back) working bit by bit, day by day on books that are all finishing up at the same time; and I'm producing some net content besides.
A friend reads some of the recent content that I'm preparing to post to one of my blogs and asks, somewhat incredulously: "Aren't you proud to be an American?" My answer is a bit long-winded and tends to cause her to start to lose interest. But, essentially, this is what I told her, reconstructed from memory:
"Depends on what you mean. I'm proud to have the American Revolution as my heritage. I'm not so proud of what happened after that, especially around the turn of the previous century when corporation law was established and the practice of corporate capitalism set the American business community on its ear. And I'm certainly not proud of what's going on today with the corporations and they're government stooges greedily grabbing up every micro-cent they possibly can using whatever illegal or quasi-legal means at their disposal, which they continue to try to legalize with whatever chicanery of corruption they can manage; not to mention how they're bombing the shit out of everybody and..." responding to her rolling eyes and turning head, "...yes, it is the corporations that are doing the bombing, so don't try to pretend that they're so innocent. Am I proud of the way America is today? Hell no. I think America is disgusting. We need another revolution. And I don't mean a revolution of backwoods militia that want to install a radical right-wing government. I'm talking about a progressive revolution like the first one, a revolution of, by, and for the people, not the corporations, the gun-toting crazies, or the corporate board men (and, now, women)."
At first, upon rereading it, I think I might want to post this piece to my blogger blog, but then I decide to post it here instead, mostly because it sort of fits as a part of the ongoing minor drama of my life. If she hadn't said a word to me about this content, then it would have ended up on that other site instead. This is an example of the process by which I choose what goes where. For the most part, the choice is rather capricious, and often difficult to make, causing me to pass over journal pieces as I ruminate for days before finding the required little bit of "logic" that will precipitate a decision. It's not unlike how I will "freeze" in place while I wait for an action to rise to the surface, or an absent memory to take hold, maybe even one as simple as, "Now what was it I was going to do?"
Oh. Yeah. Right. Post this pastiche to my website. Like I've done so many, many times before. SOS. I guess the format/style of this pastiche hasn't turned out to be so different after all.