Sunday, July 11, 2004

This is some of the most disturbing news ever - U.S. Mulling How to Delay Nov. Vote in Case of Attack. I've been telling foreign friends especially that one of my hopes for the November election is that we demonstrate to the world that while our democratic system is flawed, and sometimes elects fascists, we can also use democracy to vote them out of office. If there is an Al Quaeda attack around November election, I am packing my bag and moving to Canada while I still can, because it's going to bring the nightmare that is the Bush administration out of the dark and into the light. And unfortunately, for all us lefties, it's the right wing that has all the guns. 7:39:13 PM

It scared me for a moment, thinking I'd spent 47 minutes writing that, but it dawned on me that when I got up to try to intecept 18th Dye from kicking on in the next room, it took me a while to settle on Adrian Legg, and I brushed my teeth, drank water, made tea, and possibly puttered, but I don't remember the puttering. Which is why, I guess, it's puttering. 3:35:54 AM

I was also thinking tonight how strange it is, always in life, to have people generally enjoy my company, most times not really knowing why, but still getting beyond my quirks and wanting me to be included in their social circles, regardless of our different lives. That this Ben is somehow something that tastes good, or looks pretty, or sounds cool. I'm always flabbergasted when people from completely different worlds invite me to do things with them that are just completely outside my purview (which definitely helpts expand my purview) like I'm just one of the guys, or gals. I guess the thing that makes those in my closest closest circles, my few handfuls of folks that fit this category, is that they either offer something of sublime and enduring interest and challenge to me, or that they recognize, simply, or that I sense that they understand more specifically the characteristics make me someone to keep around, which helps me understand myself better as well, and be and work towards a better me. More specifically, it was strange being told to call around to make plans for breakfast tomorrow before the washer tournament. Most times that scenario would more be around getting up to go hiking, or get to some activist event, or go to Soulard Market, or watch the sunrise at Cahokia, or coordinate brunch that would involve reading the NYT's, or talking about politics or issues or physics. But this is a total guy, guy thing, except, being restaurant industry, it will probably involve really, really good food, (not that we don't slum it, but that's generally looking for something at the end of a night of drinking, just to either make the hangover less harsh, help provide flesher flavors for the puking, or that desperate hunger that comes after working really late, finally winding down, the body already tuned to the Tiffany's Diner dial) and I felt really hoosier suggesting Uncle Bills. Probably something like poached eggs with a bourbon hollaindaise and Uzbekestani paprika. That's something that's so comfortably dischordantly consistent with the entire food thing, and how it still ties into masculinity, that it becomes especially important, it seems, for straight guys who love the sensual realm to apply the same competitive framework for it that one might apply to cars, or sports teams - except with food, you can't avoid the communal. And that's something that is so different about eating with people who are around food for a living, at least those of us who actually love it - it's all about the wonder, and sometimes just the comfort, and sometimes about both, and the flavor of the moment, never so much about the ingredients, except as a common syntax for conversation. Meals cooked in households today sometimes become so much about the production, less about the consumption, and in our overstimulated world, we accept that as food reality, as if the latest cookbook or Food Network show, some new ingredient, is the territory of food. Good food, the best food, the flavor is itself a flavor, not so much the main event, but a sideline to the gathering. Even the experimentation with the cooks and the others who love to be around food is so tangibly different and more enjoyable than I think any of the most monumental complicated efforts of friend and family gourmands. I wish I understood more of the semantics around that very issue, so I could talk about it and offer a more useful critique of what I do or do not like about food - just that I know, or am getting to know, more of what it is that triggers the greatest enjoyment from food. And that's especially hard to explain to someone who has just read Elizabeth David's latest cookbook, or gotten Alton Browns latest take on custards. Those are maps to the territory, but not the territory, and I can attempt to show you, but I'm still like a modern man, with all my modern metrics, following the wisdom and paths of people who are like shamans of old. And, they know the math behind running a kitchen. Just not the sociability to treat guests as guests, not the barbarians at the gate, here for a good time, who will know they had a good meal (but not too challenging) just like the vast majority, I suspect (myself among them), who go to hear and see beautiful things but don't know why they are beautiful. That whole synthesis of the visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, spatial (which I feel occupies its own sense, the way we inhabit and experience space), temporal (which provides, to some degree, a built in meter and experiential staph on which to record my present moment) is something that makes believe it might be possible to kick that electron of being up to another ring with the right color, the right note, the right taste, the right sensation, the right "room," at the right moment.Sometimes I think it might be azure blue, a d-flat major, Steak and Shake Onion rings, aloeswood insence, head slightly cocked to hear the note more with the left ear than the right, the body slack, just as the sun is hitting the edge of the western horizon. Othertimes, I think it can never be something captured as easy as that, that you can't knowingly know the same location and speed of the electron, and that it comes in those moments we least expect, when our breath has taken in some volcanic ash floated up north from the Phillipines, and the air is crisp and cold, the wind quiet for a moment, and the crunch of snow underfoot the only sound. 3:30:43 AM

One of the things that fascinates me about the idea of achieving higher levels of conciousness, different planes of existence and awareness, is how analogous some of the thought is to the energy states of electrons and atoms. I wonder if our thoughts are the spin and strangeness that make the quarks, that makes the electrons, that circle the neutrons, why they circle the neutrons, I'll never know why. I guess it's Pi. It may be a sign of age, or just generally changing interests, but when I was young and imagined being invisibible, or being the only person left alive, I always imagined watching naked women, or going and raiding the adult sections of news racks. I still had no experience with sex, or even a real concept of it. I don't think I'd even figured out how to masturbate. But the idea of sex was something that I found titillating even in my threes and fours, as if hardwired for procreation, and heartache, especially that summer I learned that that 10 year old middlee girl, I can't remember her name, but I can picture her perfectly, even idealized now as a still transcendent beautiful woman, with her perfect little beauty mark, and golden brown wavy hair, only hung out with me because she thought I was a cute little three year old. That was the first of many years of heart break  at Camp Webb, watching beautiful older females pair off with boys I never understood as being bigger than me. I think if I'd been, or were now, a real fighter, I would have gotten my ass kicked a lot. As it was, growing up, I think the junior high kids would find my ferocity either amusing or psychotic enough to keep them at guard, or maybe just woke them up to whatever injustice they were committing that had me so enraged, or just got the attention of a teacher. But now, driving down Arsenal at night, looking in lit windows, not for fleshy curves, but hard corners and arches, looking for paint schemes, seeing that someone who recently bought a building is really loving the structure, wanting to wander around, unobserved, touching woodwork, and would, in that reality, could I float through walls, see what had been down with the infrastructure, the electrical. Looking for what the original floorplan may have looked like. 2:47:37 AM