March | 2003 | Letter Never Sent

Personal — Comments Off
10
Mar 03

The Man

The man pictured above, in the banner, is Toshiro Mifune. It didn’t occur to me when I changed it that some people wouldn’t recognize who that was. At various times, I have built shrines to great men. Men I admire yet identify with and aspire to. My idols. My pantheon. The embodiment of the qualities I desire for my ideal self. Individuality, depth of emotion, strength, intelligence, intensity, sensitivity, humor, rebelliousness, and beauty. My religion is the worship of humanity in general and the worship of individual men and women.

Here are a sampling just off the top of my head. They should possess all of these qualities in varying degrees:

John Brown, Havelock Ellis, Voltaire, Bruce Lee, Paul Newman, Morrissey, Jesus (my idea of him), Marcus Aurelius, Kurt Vonnegut, Che Guevara, John Lennon, Marlon Brando, Albert Einstein, Toshiro Mifune, Charlie Chaplin, Wilhelm Reich, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Carl Jung, Mark Twain, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Clarence Darrow.

What piece of work is a man
How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form
And moving how express and admirable, in action
How like an angel, in apprehension how like a god :
The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals

Hamlet (Act II, scene 2, 303-307)

Personal — 4 Comments
10
Mar 03

The Fray

Last night after I got home from work and conked out in a brief nap with all my clothes and even my shoes on in the style of Marty McFly at the close of Back to the Future, I went to the Mercury Lounge down on sixth street to attend this open mic thing George had suggested. It was nice to get out and do something I wouldn’t normally do. Much of it was entertaining, but I’m afraid I wasn’t in the highest of spirits. I was simultaneously indulging in and fighting one of those black moods I’m prone to. I got to meet Prentice Riddle, a guy who has one of those nice eclectic blogs I enjoy, but I faltered and unloaded my black mood in the form of a petulant, cynical opinion or two lobbed into a conversation on Afghanistan I had not even been a part of. It’s almost as if I impulsively decided at that moment to externalize my bad feeling and to recklessly violate rules of propriety with people I barely knew. This would have been sufficient to make me feel out of control and shitty, but then it just reminded me of how far I have to go and how I seem to be repeating myself and never learning from past mistakes.

I’m reminded of one of my favorite writers from history, Michel De Montaigne. One of those with the stoic, prudent, and composed attitude I admire and envy. In this essay he captures that feeling, the surprise and familiarity you experience when you behave in those ways you hate yet are prone to.

‘Tis wonderful from how many idle beginnings and frivolous causes such famous impressions commonly, proceed. This it is that obstructs information; for whilst we seek out causes and solid and weighty ends, worthy of so great a name, we lose the true ones; they escape our sight by their littleness. And, in truth, a very prudent, diligent, and subtle inquisition is required in such searches, indifferent, and not prepossessed. To this very hour, all these miracles and strange events have concealed themselves from me: I have never seen greater monster or miracle in the world than myself: one grows familiar with all strange things by time and custom, but the more I frequent and the better I know myself, the more does my own deformity astonish me, the less I understand myself.“

On the way back to my car I argued with someone very close and special to me on the phone, someone I punish for caring about me, only adding more and more and reminding me of my crimes and misdeeds and selfishness and the way I’ve involved unsuspecting people in my problems. The word for the day, for the year, is opprobrium.

General — 1 Comment
09
Mar 03

The J-man

Jesus was gother than you. Jesus was way cool. Jesus was a feminist. Jesus was a vegetarian. Jesus was a false prophet. Jesus was a terrorist. Jesus was a gook. Jesus was an anarchist. Jesus was a Jew. Jesus was not a Jew. Jesus was left-handed. Jesus was a stoner. Jesus was your substitute. Jesus was no sissy. Jesus was hung in a tree, not on a cross. Jesus was gay. Jesus was a bear. Jesus was asylum seeker. Jesus was a heretic. Jesus was an alien. Jesus was an omnivore. Jesus was an idiot. Jesus was my girl. Jesus was a capricorn. Jesus was not God. Jesus was a counsellor. Jesus was a known drug dealer. Jesus was a country preacher. Jesus was the perfect life-coach. Jesus was pro-choice. Jesus was an immortalist. Jesus was a better carpenter. Jesus was a stepchild. Jesus was a loser and a coward. Jesus was a cross maker. Jesus was an analog man in a digital age. Jesus was a revolutionary. Jesus was the Dalai Lama. Jesus was indignant. Jesus was sane. Jesus was a killer whale. Jesus was not a historical figure. Jesus was homeless too. Jesus was a b-boy. Jesus was my feet. Jesus was the beast. Jesus was a sinner. Jesus was sinless.
Jesus was holding me. Jesus was a sailor. Jesus was a street ballah. Jesus was a bastard. Jesus was wealthy, lived in a mansion
and wore designer clothes. Jesus was not poor. Jesus was not a nazi.

Jesus was there. Jesus was here.

General — 1 Comment
08
Mar 03

Some of my current favorite adjectives

licentious
corrupt
libertine
profligate
salacious
debauched
lascivious

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08
Mar 03

Hanging with friends

Last night after hanging out with my friend, Sara, we went down and met with Dru and George at a free talk by Richard Stallman (of GNU Linux fame) for the SXSW interactive thing. That was pretty neat. I wish I had the speech in text because he brought up some points I had missed. He did a good job explaining the problems of copyright.

After that we all piled into my car and met Dru’s friend, Kate (who is really, totally cool), for coffee and some food. I disclosed way too much personal info last night. Regret, regret. It was really cool to finally meet George since I wasn’t able to meet up with him when I was out in Walnut Creek. He is a really cool guy with a wicked (and occasionally scandalous) sense of humor.

General — Comments Off
06
Mar 03

Der Fuehrer

I saw Der Fuehrer in his televised ‘news conference’ tonight. This guy is the biggest stooge. In a strange news item FoxNews reports that Iraq is trying to acquire British and American military uniforms so war atrocities can be pinned on the United States. I’m sorry, but this sounds like the biggest load of crap and obviously is some small attempt by government propagandists to prepare for any murder and genocide and mass destruction committed by the American military while we ‘shock and awe’ Baghdad and destroy a nation.

General — 4 Comments
06
Mar 03

JAMES JOYCE’ DIRTY LETTERS

These are worth reading. Get some ideas and write an email to your spouse or girlfriend or boyfriend or partner.

Dublin 2 December 1909
To Nora,

…

My love for you allows me to pray to the spirit of eternal beauty and tenderness mirrored in your eyes or fling you down under me on that softy belly of yours and fuck you up behind, like a hog riding a sow, glorying in the very stink and sweat that rises from your arse, glorying in the open shape of your upturned dress and white girlish drawers and in the confusion of your flushed cheeks and tangled hair. It allows me to burst into tears of pity and love at some slight word, to tremble with love for you at the sounding of some chord or cadence of music or to lie heads and tails with you feeling your fingers fondling and tickling my ballocks or stuck up in me behind and your hot lips sucking off my cock while my head is wedged in between your fat thighs, my hands clutching the round cushions of your bum and my tongue licking ravenously up your rank red cunt. I have taught you almost to swoon at the hearing of my voice singing or murmuring to your soul the passion and sorrow and mystery of life and at the same time have taught you to make filthy signs to me with your lips and tongue, to provoke me by obscene touches and noises, and even to do in my presence the most shameful and filthy act of the body. You remember the day you pulled up your clothes and let me lie under you looking up at you while you did it? Then you were ashamed even to meet my eyes.

You are mine, darling, mine! I love you. All I have written above is only a moment or two of brutal madness. The last drop of seed has hardly been squirted up your cunt before it is over and my true love for you, the love of my verses, the love of my eyes for your strange luring eyes, comes blowing over my soul like a wind of spices. My prick is still hot and stiff and quivering from the last brutal drive it has given you when a faint hymn is heard rising in tender pitiful worship of you from the dim cloisters of my heart.

Nora, my faithful darling, my seet-eyed blackguard schoolgirl, be my whore, my mistress, as much as you like (my little frigging mistress! My little fucking whore!) you are always my beautiful wild flower of the hedges, my dark-blue rain-drenched flower.

JIM

Military and defense — Comments Off
05
Mar 03

The evil that men do

According to most sources around 185 million people (185,000,000) died in all the wars, massacres, slaughters and oppressions of the Twentieth Century. Using this equation, that’s 573.5 million pounds of brain matter, 231 million gallons of blood, 14 million tons of bone and flesh, 8.5 billion years of life that will never be lived, and untold millions who will never be born. The cost to human civilization and progress due to war is too high to pay. We cannot stand by quietly while those who purport to speak in our name and with our voice gird themselves to spill more innocent blood and prepare to wreak more havoc and more man-made armageddon against their fellow men. It’s sickening and I dare anyone to justify any of it.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron. – Dwight Eisenhower

General — 2 Comments
05
Mar 03

Amnesty International accuses US of practicing torture

CNN: Amnesty International criticizes U.S. handling of terror suspects:

Military coroners ruled that two detainees in U.S. custody in Afghanistan were homicide cases in December, but a military source said it was not clear whether anyone would be charged. (Full story)

One senior military official said, “This investigation may not go well for us.”

Both men died at Bagram air base shortly after their arrival. The first man died December 3 of a pulmonary embolism and the second one December 10 of a heart attack. Autopsies found that “blunt force trauma” was a contributing factor in both cases, military sources said.

This is even more proof that our government and its agents commit cold-blooded murder as well as the more routine torture, maiming, and killing under the umbrella of ‘just war’.

General — Comments Off
05
Mar 03

In these troubling times…

Here are some interesting bits lifted from various places:

FoxNews: Senator Wants ‘Human Shields’ Punished
Big Brother taping and archiving peace protests: Coulter, a veteran activist and no rookie at demonstrating, said she asked the identification technician why police were taping the crowd. “She told me: ‘This is a crime scene,’ ” Coulter recounted. “Since when is people exercising their right of speech and assembly a crime? Now democracy is a crime?”
LA Times: U.S. Expands Clandestine Surveillance Operations: The number of secret searches approved by Ashcroft since the 9/11 attacks is triple those authorized in the previous 20 years.
Pentagon, media agree on Iraq war censorship: Reporters to be “embedded” in military Another clause states that all interviews with military personnel should be on the record—an attempt to prevent the leaks that occurred during the Vietnam War, when servicemen anonymously divulged damaging information or expressed disgust about the conduct of the war. In the Iraq war, military staff will face disciplinary action for saying too much.
CNN imposes new “script control”: CNN became notorious after it revealed following the 1991 Gulf War that it had allowed Pentagon “trainees” into the CNN newsroom in Atlanta. According to Fisk, however, CNN “is not alone in this paranoid form of reporting. Other US networks operate equally anti-journalistic systems.”
There is ample evidence for this assertion. During the Gulf War, NBC’s Tom Brokaw echoed the White House and the dominant media mantra when he told viewers that the US was not responsible for civilian casualties. “We must point out again and again that it is Saddam Hussein who put these innocents in harm’s way,” he said.

Today, in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, the media routinely presents unadulterated pro-administration propaganda as news, citing sources such as “senior defense officials,” “administration officials,” “some American intelligence officials,” “military officials” and “defense officials.”

Letter Never Sent Tell me when to go.

Monthly Archives: March 2003