The Futility of Trying to Escape Las Vegas....Ray's Mutation Worsens

Some of my favorite crew folk drug me forcibly back to Sodom and Gomorra for a shoot that in reality was about 12 minutes long.  The staggering faux opulence, the frantic, desperate yearning for entertainment and carnal release on the part of the great sea of sweaty masses is frightening to the rotting stew of my moral compass.   And apparently Ray's ear mutated in front of the Belaggio.

The carrots from our Garden

The carrots from our garden are small and stunted and look like something from Dr. Suess. That is all.  No apocalyptic ramblings, not nihilistic commentary about the Trump administration. Just our carrots looked kind of weird but we ate them anyway.


Also, my job takes me to strange places and I do odd things. Here I walked around the new billion dollar Expedia campus with a small crew, then interviewed nice humans about how cool it was going to be.  Enjoyably, I was not the sound guy on this shoot, just a lowly grip. It is great to watch another audio person work and see where I am lacking. Eric, the other audio guy is very funny and a swell guy to talk to. All his methods are known to me but of course, slightly different.  His gear is shiny and newer than mine, but substantially the same.


It is also great to just be responsible for c-stands and the moving of heavy objects. I seriously doubt many people want to be a grip in their declining years. It is sometimes physical work that takes mental concentration for short bursts followed by what seems like endless "standing by". I gripped in my youth, and while I list myself as an " Audio/Grip " for small crew application, my heart is not in it.






Oh, yeah, I also started the burning elf head. When doing paper mache from flour and water I am always disgusted by how goopy, sticky and strong flour and water are. It is like fix-all that you can technically eat. People who are Gluten adverse are really just smart: what must this glop do to our insides? I never want pancakes after I work on one of these heads. It is a stupid process but one that I enjoy.

Beacon Hill Girl.

She is sick. Brain tumors have robbed her of her future, and a stroke has taken her ability to move and speak. She now resides in a skilled nursing facility. She is only a few years older than me.

IT IS UNFAIR. IT IS UNREAL. IT IS WRONG

The spark in her eyes remains and I can tell she is still in there. Her husband is holding it together and never leaves her side for very long. I want to help but can't find the right words or right thing to do, so I did this.

Day of the Locust

Another brief but poignant material object purchase is a 1953 Bantam Paperback first issue of the 1939 Nathanael West novel "Day of the Locust"- one of my favorite American novels.  I like the paperback because of it's lurid and strange cover, and still being a well written book. This story really transports me to another place and time while speaking to universal glitches in the matrix.

Broken World

Its falling apart faster than I could have ever imagined. Watching the gears and wheels fly off the mechanism is no longer fascinating or terrifying, it is merely kind of sad.

Summer is almost over.

How many summers do I have left? (Tom Waits asks that in the Francis For Coppola movie"The Outsiders") As I become increasingly obsessed with the passage of time, why is it that I can't see anything positive?  What the fuck is happening in this country? The burden of Summer is that it is the time when you are supposed to have fun and enjoy yourself, but there is an obvious time limit, so you better make the most of it, because the looming dread of Winter quickly approaches.  Hurry up and  fucking make something of the beautiful damn weather you fucking putz!  Run outside and FUCKING BE HAPPY! What do you do if you can't see anything ahead that is even remotely enjoyable? What do you do then?

Friends are dying. I can't go see them or I will self destruct. My mother is old and seeing her makes me sad. I fear my bad mood has infected my loved ones.

Doug Henning says it's all an illusion.

Vampire Capitalism Unleashed and Unbent.

The vampire is an over used metaphor, but when the bloodsucking shoe fits, it must be worn. The evil is so large and proud of itself it doesn't need to hide anymore. The people of the United States are a heard of cattle, kept in a veal pen for the rich to drink our blood and slowly shrivel us into poverty. The people I am concerned about are the vampire gangster capitalists who are recreating the European aristocracy, to whom the goal is not just to amass an unbelievable fortune but it is imperative that some one lose in the process: the misery of others is just as important as the wealth you have. How else can you explain the Trump junta's policy of creating demonic mischief that succeeds only when people are made more uncomfortable and threatened? Betsy DeVos is ruining education in favor of for profit loan and schooling institutions, her BROTHER Erik Prince runs Blackwater who wants to privatize the war in Afghanistan for profit, together they make money on the caged children of legal asylum seekers. Stephen Miller, when not killing and eating co-eds in the basement of his Georgetown bachelor pad, invents new misery for legal immigrants. Worst of all is the wanton disregard for the destruction of the very planet we all share. As I write this, our air is worse than Bejing's, California is suffering from fucking FIRE TORNADOES. The administration told us today we  no longer have to conserve gasoline". It is not enough that they have the money- they need you to be destroyed  in the process. This can be applied again and again; to healthcare, to big pharma, to the drug crisis and the homelessness epidemic. The Flint water crisis? Really we couldn't fix that one? And that was Obama...I can see a future in which a company will buy your suffrage rights and vote for you in return for relief from the horror that they can inflict on you or your family. Of course there are good rich people- who care and want to do good. Bill Gates for one, but they are out numbered by those that have become something else.  Bill Gates sees it as his job to give it away. It remains to be seen if he can make a dent in the growing evil that infects the land. We might not need a blue wave in 2018, we may need an exorcist.

Yet another apocalyptic thought upon falling asleep...

Strangely it occurred to me as I was falling asleep last night, what if the rapture already happened and God only saw fit to take Mr. Rogers, because none of the rest of us could measure up? I guess I am okay with that.

Maybe we were expecting there would be fireworks?

This is not a real belief. This is not something that I subscribe to. This is a theory. I call this the Nacime Theorem, after the cameraman who first brought it up to me. He doesn't actually believe it either, at least I don't think he does. Nacime is a very normal, college educated, talented camera man, well known and liked in our community. It was probably a random thought fired off from a creative mind engaged a very usual day's work. He  and I were working on set, on a elaborate corporate talking head set up. It is remarkably manual labor, done mostly by people with too much education, and the discussions are frequently quite interesting. Sometimes they verge on the type that were popular in freshman dorm rooms, whilst clustered around a bong shaped like a hobbit or something. On this particular day, discussing the destructive and surreal turn of American politics, Nacime postulated the following, which he claimed to have previously heard someplace and it was this:

The Mayans had been right- the world really had ended in 2012, and what we are now experiencing was the residual consciousness of a dead world unable to fully grasp it's fate. 

It honestly seems to be almost as good an explanation as I have for the world at this time. This would mean that somehow we now find ourselves in a sort of world wide episode of "Lost", with guest star Donald J Trump as the Joker. It is tempting to believe, in order to relieve one of the burden of collaboration in the grand scheme of things to say that it's all a fever dream and we will wake up, or in this case accept our demise. We can chuckle at the dark humor of it, trying to forget the way the earth is heating up, and nationalism is running rampant and that we have begun to see how we could exterminate ourselves with out ever even intending to do it. I remember December 21, 2012, the day the Mayan long count calendar was set to end, very well- I totalled my wife's Honda Fit on a corner three blocks from home. Maybe, the jarring impact and inflating airbags were my sign that the end had come. Could Brexit, Russian meddling, the second term of Obama and most importantly the rise of the twitter demon Trump be just a sad misfiring consciousness leftover? Could all my personal depression and anxiety be the gasping last thoughts of a drowning soul? Are we all on this sinking ship?

I don't really believe this, but it feels shockingly right to me some days.

Redux, And Beyond.

We are still in here someplace. Under the gray hair, the glasses and the aches and pains these two people are still here, just in case anyone was wondering.

It's an incredible gift to have some one to love for over thirty years that you still are excited about. I am the luckiest man in the universe.

We went to Montreal for our 30th anniversary on July 23rd, a city we had never been to before. It was beautiful.

More Endings, Beginnings and Hope.

Behold: our beloved son and heir, Thomas, named for the apostle that questioned, like any normal human might, but was loved anyway. His has finished eighth grade and now can put the social cannibalism of Middle School behind him. As our youngest it is hard not to want to hold on and wish that they could be ours forever, but we now start to let go. He is sometimes a challenge to be around and difficult for his increasingly elderly parents to understand, but he is the beginning of a fine person, who I am very proud of. We have tough years ahead, but God willing it will be okay.

Thanks for being a good kid Tom.

The End of America, Sadly and with thought...

Because no one reads this-

It is horrifyingly easy to be negative now: it feels that our time as a democracy is very short.  Our change will not be painless but it will be unnoticed by millions who can not look up from their devices. Unless a particularly poignant meme is created, the lights will go out in our republic without a peep from the the electorate. We are being destroyed by a narcissistic monster on a leash from the Kremlin. Soon it will be over, this grand social experiment, where it was attempted to break the power of the aristocracy and money elites, if even just in name only, but they are back and the alpha beasts will be forever in charge of the serfs. The monster can pardon himself (he can't) - He calls the shots on trade wars and tariffs (he isolates America)  and he generally brings a great nation to its knees (not in a good way) to his toddler like will of the moment. Like a indulged child, he is never wrong, but instead insists that he has been wronged. This is not normal, but will be accepted because he has no shame. The phrase "children in cages" should send chills into every person, but because we don't really give a shit about anything but our social media presence we will tolerate it. Resistance,  at best consists of awarding political FB posts with frowny faces. It is the very epitome of evil. Fuck you Donald J. Trump and all you hold dear. May you rot in hell. The crime is that christians (I still consider myself one) have been seduced by the anti christ, elected him and now can not avert their gaze from him. It is over.

Sweet old Dutch guy.

My wife's father, Jules, died yesterday morning.   It was not unexpected or actually unwelcome- his suffering and incapacitation are now over. He was a serious man who was kind and thoughtful. His laugh, when you earned it was genuine.  He wasn't perfect but he was amiable and easy to be with. I felt very lucky to be allowed into his family, and the world is diminished without him. He was 91, which is a long life by all standards but he is still missed.  It's a road we all walk, and a destination for which we are all have advance reservations. Some times it feels futile, but if you have people who love you it doesn't have to be a lonely walk. Thanks Dad. I hope it wasn't difficult, that all the love outweighed the pain.

America is Drunk on Guns

Like most American men of my age, I was raised on TV westerns, cop shows and WWII action movies. Guns were ubiquitous, and their status as a masculine totem of potentness were omnipresent.  My dad had guns on the wall of the rec room and so it wasn't just imposed on me by the Magnavox.  I naturally owned guns when I became an adult. My brothers- one politically right wing, one left wing both enjoyed guns as gonzo 1970's fun. It didn't seem very controversial: the tin cans and bottles did not complain.  That was before the NRA became the third rail of American politics. It was obvious that guns became one of the connections of the evangelical right to the Republican party. The outright purchase of the US public opinion was a bargain when it could optimally exploit an unrealistic passion like gun ownership and it's tenuous relationship to American liberty on the part of a uneasy populace. Guns as metaphor are a narcotic, or more like alcohol. They seem to occupy a part of our minds that entertains us or make us feel safe, some kind of pleasure center, even if that is imagined or hallucinatory.  Like an alcoholic we are obsessed by our buzz, even when it is making us sick and will eventually kill us. We make excuses and look the other way at excesses.  As the NRA grew in power and more and more heavy firepower was dumped into the US bloodstream we became more unreasonable and  started making worse choices. We are now fully inebriated,and incapable of normal behavior, yet we have been given the keys to the bus carrying school kids on the interstate. We have to sober up.

I own guns. I guess I am scared and uncomfortable enough to own them.  One of the guns I own is an "assault rifle" (actually just a "rifle", but I don't want to engage in that long ultimately religious argument). I really don't know what to do with  it. During the Bush administration, I bought it because I actually thought the right was going to clamp down on the left (me) and I would need it. It sounds like a science fiction now. I hot rodded the gun, a clunky Yugoslavian SKS- the cranky grandfather of the AK-47, and have turned it into a much more lethal device, with 20 round magazines and a scope. It was fun- like building a guitar, or making a model railroad.  It is most like my customizing my giant automotive appendage, my 1981 Chevy El Camino: a hobby centered around a gas guzzler, ecologic disaster-mobile that is non-the-less a super cool teenaged dream- an irrational love that I can not quit because it helps define me. My affection for my El Camino is immature, and unsustainable but very, very real. Guns are  similar and not easily excised. I know most other countries have removed them like an inflamed appendix but, the USA is a perennial teenager. When you own a gun, you feel ultimately "in-control", when in reality you are no more in control than when you didn't have one, and sadly much more prone to making irreversible mistakes in judgement. My SKS is a "just a hobby" but it is in fact a killing machine, designed by the military,  and all the cardboard targets I have shot with it doesn't make it a model train.  As a decent man my enslavement to my gun is a millstone weight around my neck. I do not feel that the God approves. This is a sad topic of my sleepless nights. I can see myself taking it to the local police precinct and giving it away, thinking of the concert goers in Las Vegas or the kids at the Broward County FL high school. ....But it is so damn cool. And I like the buzz, and I can quit whenever I want, right? And I don't have a problem. Do I?

It is clear to me that there needs to be an equivalent of AA for gun owners.

Message from the other side, or something I ate?

Okay. Like everybody, I dream at night. The dreams have been fairly vivd lately. Recently, I had a dream and was sent back to consciousness with a clear message statement, that I memorized verbatim:

"A natural death is the end of the third knowledge."

What the fuck? I really have no idea what that is supposed to mean. I probably subconsciously read it off a box of Yogi tea. It was unambiguous in my dream but completely open to interpretation back in reality. I am not a new age crystal hugger. I used to keep a very detailed dream journal but fell out of the habit ten years ago. I still find my journals around and get a laugh out of them. Some have come amazingly close to coming true in my everyday life, which is not terribly surprising, considering they were fairly mundane. This is pretty rare to get something so specific. I hope I am getting a passing grade in the 3rd knowledge.

Elevator only goes down in 2018

As the inventory of minor annoyances, personal inconveniences and the downright global tragedies that are building on us all become clearer, I can't help it: I think about the future and nothing is very positive. It may just be my time of life- people I love are coming to their end, parents, friends are seeing the void, and that leads to introspection from everyone effected.  It could be that my work has been slow and I have been alone with my thoughts too much, and I am too willing to see the interconnectedness of insignificant failures. The planet is heating up. Humans are addicted to small screens and behaving like the last act of Wim Wenders' "Until The End Of The World". The light in my kitchen over the microwave flickers. Things break. Miscommunication. My brother's heart tries to kill him. My sons seem withdrawn and alone in the world.  It all adds up like a debit column. Nothing much feels comfortable. I have been reading "Fire and Fury" about the shameless head of the American nation and I am disquieted. Even accounting for the tabloid, gossipy nature of the book, if one third of what Wolfe says is true, we are screwed; the worst of our projected ego are "in charge" and the piper will be paid. There is no free lunch. One of the camera guys on a shoot earlier this month had a theory: what if the Mayans were right and the world did end in 2012, and we all just can't give it up and the warped reality that becomes more in focus everyday is the passing dream of a dead world? It's as plausible an idea as any.

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The Womxn's march last Saturday was great and did make me feel better, and maybe the resistance to the orange tiny hand shitstain is the chemotherapy the country needs. Eventually the stupidity may be bred out of the species...if we are still here to pick up the pieces.