what I tell myself is, all these people, they live in queens, or the san fernando valley, or whatever, and they tell themselves, they couldn’t stand to live as far from the ocean as all that, but when you look at the quality of life that they actually have, going to work at the dry cleaners, or stuck in traffic on the lie for most of their existence, and maybe they get out to the beach a couple of times a year, that would be good.
no question, there are many lives being lived in this country that pretty much suck. many of them in or near urban centers, lives so abysmal, that people who live in the country — even poor people who live in the country — just couldn’t comprehend. I suspect there’s different kinds of misery out there, but given a halfway decent family life, and the truth is, you don’t need lots of people to have a good life, just a few friends, a bit of family, and just one lover. that’s all you need. that’s the way its supposed to be. and people say they need the city life, but the older I get, the less I need. and the changing times have only helped — with the internet, and satellite tv, and all the crazy communications technology we’ve got working for us, if you want to really get out there, you can.
but the complexity of my inner workings, its like the intricate gearworks of a fine watch — a watch that not only tells the time, but rather, how much better it would be if the time were actually something other than it is.
and then I give the lie to myself, and I am that person, on lamar boulevard, stuck in traffic, asking myself, “what the hell am I doing HERE?”, but in the scheme of things, that rarely happens. you spend the vast majority of your time in certain circles, and mine revolve around the short drive through suburban neighborhoods past my kids’ school, to work, to the park, to the lake. and other than the odd trip to town, to the hospital all too frequently, lately, to the airport for a business trip or vacation — that’s about it.
but then it comes back to me. why am I here? at first, I won’t lie to you, it was a stoner’s paradise. plain and simple. think about it, a university town, not a bad university, not that hard, not that challenging. on its own kind of hip circuit. and when you get out of town, we’ve got that kind of pure, western air, like you’ve seen in so many westerns, but this is real. and on top of that, the people are friendly, the girls are cute, and the dope is cheap, and plentiful. can you blame me?
ok, so there it is, there’s you’re fucking answer to the riddle. turns out, I’m a really lucky person, who stumbled onto something good, really good. my only regret, if I have any, is that I didn’t realize how good it was, and double down, you know? but, I came away from the table a winner. only you can’t always just come right out and tell that story the way it happened, now, can you?

I love to write. Its fun to imagine someone is interested in what I have to say.

its a peculiar irony that drugs such as lsd, heroin and cocaine were introduced into the anti-war community in the sixties as a form of “active measure” by the u.s. intelligence community specifically intended to disrupt their activities and discredit or otherwise inhibit the effectiveness of its leadership.
the results were overwhelmingly successful, but the “project” snowballed and got out of hand, creating a significant problem of its own as an unintended consequence.

martha wainwright has this song called “bloddy mother fucking asshole” which incorporates lyrics like “I will not put on a smile for you” which along with the title are repeated endlessly. ok, martha, let’s make a deal. you don’t put on a smile for me, and I won’t listen to you. ok?

outstanding! superb! fabulous! far and away, one of the best days of my life.
sunday and monday we were pretty socked in, and snow was falling around us, and we still had a grand time.
today, however, the sky cleared, and the sun shone warm and bright, swimming in a deep azure sea. the rocky crags to our east, invisible since saturday, outlined the feminine sky with masculine force. the peaks to our west, prepare to bear the scars of a thousand brightly colored skiiers and snowboarders.
I had a conference call scheduled for today, but last night I convinced myself that my attendance wasn’t necessary, and anyway, I’m on vacation. the situation is a little weird, the guy who scheduled the meeting didn’t check my schedule, or if he did, he decided it didn’t matter. I told him I would be out of town at this time, but whatever.
so I blew it off. it will be fine. I’ve been through this countless times. you’ll see.
now I know I made the right decision. determined to decouple my schedule from the kids, who asserted that they’d be delighted to sleep in a little bit, which to them meant probably 11 or 12, I set my mind to wake early. I examined the schedules, and learned the buses start at 8:00, and was reminded that the lifts open at 8:30. my plan was to be in line at 8:30, and head over peak 7, as I had been advised by a local. peak 7 is not acessible from any of the bases, and serves blue slopes only. this gives it a number of properties — you have to go out of your way to find it, and you have to be at least a marginally competent skiier just to get there.
this cuts out a lot of nonsense. the six seat lift runs super fast, hardly ever stops, and serves six or eight really fun slopes.
so I made a bee line over there, getting to the top of independence superchair before 9:00. there were only a handful of other lucky skiiers there with me. words cannot do justice to the view I beheld. It was similar to many views you can find around here, some of which we have photographed, but was unique in its freshness. the snow of the past few days made the slopes inviting and forgiving, and the groom lines from the night before gave the slopes a uniform appearance, like fresh bed linen or ice cream.
I flew down monte cristo I don’t know how many times, probably four or five, the first few runs, most of the time without a single other soul in sight, the tall snow crested firs to my right and left, the rocky crags in front of me, the crystal blue sky above, I simply cannot convey the joy I felt. I was getting more confident in my skills, “keeping my line tight” as they say, slaloming to control my speed, but trying to avoid that as much as possible, once I found myself familiar enough with each of these slopes in turn, I fairly flew straight down, as fast as I could, just holding the edge of my competence in front of me by a hair’s breadth.
the only sounds were the crunching snow under my skis, and their occasional flap-flap as I cut and turned.
later, lizzy would ask me how many runs I went down, and I truly couldn’t answer precisely, but it was a lot.
in the morning, I probably covered peak 7 completely, doing monte cristo 4 times, angels rest 4 times, and lincoln meadows and wirepatch once each.
at first, there were practically no waits. you’d just run down, and get back on the lift, and zoom up and do it again. it seemed to me I was going pretty fast, and each run was about 5 minutes, followed by maybe 5 minutes to get back up. [TBD href audio]
toward the end I started getting a little tired, and I think somehow my bindings got slightly loose. it seemed harder to lift my right ski to cut left. but just the right one. maybe it was just fatigue. this is what I was thinking when I decided to cut over to claimjumper and head back to the base of peak 8. halfway down my phone rang in my pocket. I don’t mind saying the combination of the surprise, the sound and maybe my fatigue, just then I cut into some fresh powder, and took a spill. nothing serious, though.
perhaps needless to say, I didn’t answer the phone. and of course it was anita. when I got to the bottom I called her back. she said she was already in line for the colorado superchair, on her way up to vista haus. so it was pretty good timing.
I met her quite promptly, and was happy to rest a little bit after more than 3 hours of pretty much solid skiing under pretty much perfect conditions. thank you Lord!
we enjoyed a wonderful lunch.

I was happy to learn the kids had skiied their bunny slopes all morning as well, and had a fine time too. all three rode rode down together.
afterward, I had an equally fine afternoon, doing northstar perhaps 4 times, zooming down and back up the rocky mountain superchair, which perhaps by an odd circumstance had really short lines. just zoom down and zip up, over and over. what a life!
when I felt like I had mastered northstar, and wanted something a little different, I took claimjumper once more, and before I knew it, it was 3 pm. so this time I zipped across to the colorado superchair, and like lots of other folks it turned out, chose to take the four o’clock down right around 4 o’clock. what a ride that was. it was a moderately challenging blue at the top, and turned into a moderate green at the bottom, but there were more folks on this run than any other I had taken today. a lot of them, likely more tired than me, taking spills here and there, so it was kind of like an obstacle course, even the green part of the slope was pretty challenging. and a number of us were trying to go fast once we cleared the caution zone.

Some weeks ago, I left work around noon to go to church for Ash Wednesday. It had been some years since I had done that, but it was a worthwhile experience. These bastards who put down the Catholic church don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. Its like New York City. There’s everything here, amazingly satisfactory emotional and aesthetic spritual experiences, as well as despotic pedophiliacs. If only we could get rid of the bastards, we’d really have something. Hmm…

You know, this is positively weird. Perhaps like many things, the product of a superstitious mind, or the power of suggestion. Perhaps the universe really is random — I often think of that — the idea that we can see patterns in clouds — you see a teacup, I see a puppy. Is there really a teacup floating, billowing up there in the blue sky? Clearly not, but we may see one there nonetheless, and so in fact the representation of a teacup does exist, if only in our minds. And our understanding of all this nonsense is still so limited, who is to say, definitively?
Maybe its that I’m wearing my lucky shirt. This shirt makes me lucky. Do you ever think things like that? I used to have a lucky rock. I lost it on what I call our great western expedition. That’s the trip we took out west to Carlsbad, Canyon de Chelly, and Bryce. We rented a R.V. and tooled on out there, west Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah.
That part of the country, my friend, is a special place. People say they like to be near the sea. And they think nothing interesting ever happens far from it. They are wrong. Of course the sea is interesting, beautiful, ancient, and ponderable. But there is something else out there, in the desert. A different kind of consciousness. It is beyond words, you have to experience it to know what I’m talking about. I know they felt it out there among the Anasazi, I suspect its releated to Abraham’s journey from Ur, and Moses’ forty years wandering.
I sometimes think my lucky rock decided to escape. I found it years ago, by the side of the little Colorado river. Another ancient place, where people had been living many, many centuries ago. And this rock spoke to me, as I let my dogs swim in the river. Dogs both now gone. They are gone and I am here. But not for long. Do you get my drift?
And I took this rock with me everywhere. I have no evidence that it really was lucky, I just had this idea. I used to think maybe it was an arrowhead, or more likely some kind of small tomahawk. It had an edge that might have been notched by one of our fellow human beings. There was a red blotch near the edge that I imagined might be blood. One side had been smoothed by perhaps centuries of Colorado river water. I used to rub my thumb along its smooth side when I was stressed out. It calmed me.
Once I had lost it for a whole year, and found it again on Christmas eve, because I had left it in my suit pocket the previous Christmas eve when we went to midnight Mass down there at St. Martin’s Lutheran.
And I imagined, when I realized it was lost after we returned from our trip out west, that it had intentionally lost itself, searching for its previous owner, perhaps, or its kin, among the Anasazi out there in places like Canyon de Chelly.
But never mind that. What I want to talk about is this weird feeling, like.
One day, several weeks ago, I came to the office, and I literally closed my door and knelt down to pray. I prayed God to make my way clear. My dad used to say “follow your heart,” but I have people depending on me, I can’t just do whatever the hell I want, even though my heart tells me to just fuck it all, and be an artist. That can’t be right. But if that’s what God wants me to do, I’ll do it. I’ll just put down my work right now and walk off and follow Him, if He actually presented Himself. I mean check out Deuteronomy 31:15 and 32:20. Where is he? “I will hide my face from them,” He said, “since they have provoked Me with their no-god, I will provoke them with a no-people;”
It might possibly explain why God doesn’t present Himself to us the way he apparently used to present Himself to the chosen people. But who knows? What do those verses even mean? But in any case, if its not for God’s sake that I do it, its just a bullshit ego trip, or worse, and I’m just imagining things.
You see, this is what happens when you spend too much time reading spiritual literature. If you ever actually think about it, pick any religion — any of the prophets, the gurus, the sages, they are subject to multiple intepretations. They could be transcendentally insightful, or they could just be kooks. Either interpretation is valid in certain contexts.
You know what I mean.
But I just don’t know what the deal is! This was my prayer: please, God, make Your will known to me. That’s what I always say: let God’s will, not mine, be done. But this day I prayed: I don’t know shit! Search my heart, Lord. You see in all secret places, you know me better than I know myself. You know my comings and my goings, Lord! Then you must also know that I am as dense and as dumb as ten sticks! You know You have to hit me over the head with it Lord! I beg you, make it plain. What the fuck do you want me to do?
And in the past few days, it seems, my prayer was answered.
Thank you, Lord!

my definition of love is simple. my happiness derives from yours. only if you are happy, I might be. but if you are not, then I cannot be.

Better late than never, I guess. This nyt editorial makes probably the most concise and compelling case for John Kerry that I have seen.
What I think happened is they got put on the White House shit list for some recent things, like the recent piece by ron suskind in the nytmag, and they decided they had nothing to lose by finally expressing an honest forthright opinion.
Where have they been the last three years?
There turns out to be this incestuous relationship between journalists who need this thing called “access” to government sources. This administration has been exceedingly disciplined about denying this essential stuff to those whom it hates.
In order to maintain what they thought was a competetive footing vis-a-vis other outlets like the post or (though they disdain to admit it, broadcast and cable tv networks), many journalists and editors compromised themselves, publishing mealy-mouthed half truths (pretty much anything safire or will and many others have written for the past decade) and sometimes even propagandistic falsehoods (e.g. julie miller’s phony reports from the “front”), in order to maintain at least a functioning relationship with their “sources”.
This, as it turns out is a doomed strategy, unless your intent is to forfeit all credibility as a journalist, and admit that you’re essentially a tool of the administration.
Now there is at least some hope that we won’t have to deal with this administration in the future, they are perhaps already trying to cultivate the next bunch as favored “sources” in the event they prevail on election day.
If Kerry does not unseat Bush (and most of us dare not allow ourselves to even contemplate that eventuality), can we expect this newspaper at least to assume a more openly antagonistic posture, or will it return to its role a priori of cowed supplicat?