Thursday, July 01, 2004 :::
 

Presidental Goofs
Reagan gave oodles and oodles of money to the rich and to corporations. He told the grimy masses-the middle class and the poor- don't worry, this is the trickle-down effect, soon you will get yours too. Some folks are STILL waiting for that trickle.
The WORST thing he did was, in a time of great greed and money, to no longer require an actual vegetable on school lunches. He declared ketchup a vegetable. Shame on him.
Clinton's flaw was his taste for homely women and for starting that open-door policy with Mexico. Come and get it.
Bush, the fake president that started a fake war, is scary.
And the main reason I won't vote for him is this: Any government that discourages open opinions and says that to say anything against the government's policy is unAmerican is unAmerican itself. That is how dictatorships are run. Now that is the most frightening goof of all.

::: posted by bite me, kick me, make me scream at 8:32 PM

 

Presidental Goofs
Reagan gave oodles and oodles of money to the rich and to corporations. He told the grimy masses-the middle class and the poor- don't worry, this is the trickle-down effect, soon you will get yours too. Some folks are STILL waiting for that trickle.
The WORST thing he did was, in a time of great greed and money, to no longer require an actual vegetable on school lunches. He declared ketchup a vegetable. Shame on him.
Clinton's flaw was his taste for homely women and for starting that open-door policy with Mexico. Come and get it.
Bush, the fake president that started a fake war, is scary.
And the main reason I won't vote for him is this: Any government that discourages open opinions and says that to say anything against the government's policy is unAmerican is unAmerican itself. That is how dictatorships are run. Now that is the most frightening goof of all.

::: posted by bite me, kick me, make me scream at 8:32 PM

 

Scientists have studied children to see why they are entering puberty earlier than normal. It seems that they lack the required amount of melatonin. You get melatonin from the sun, so if you stay indoors all of the time strapped to a 1984-monitor doing video games or watching teevee you don't get the sunshine that caveman did.
It appears that living by the sun, rising at dawn, hunting and gathering, then going to sleep when the sun set was a good idea.
I wonder if this correlates to why cubesters look and act old? Ghostskin is scary.

::: posted by bite me, kick me, make me scream at 8:32 PM

Monday, June 28, 2004 :::
 

I just finished Tristessa. Jack Kerouac's book about a young hooker living in Mexico in the mid 50s. He describes her as beautiful although she is a "morfina" addict full of cysts with a head swathed in dirty bandages from bouncing into walls and furniture when she goes into convulsions and lives in squalor with animals and 2' of crap on the floor. It seemed like he was attracted to her exoticness, otherness, kinda like gawking at a train wreck, feeling empathy and wanting to help the damaged but not sure how to do it since it is so far from his experience, yet he wants to be the hero.
In the end he just goes home leaving her with Bull, an old American junkie. "For only a junkie can be with another junkie." Old Bull and Tristessa tell Jack.
The book is short, done in Jack's spontaneous bop proseity.

::: posted by bite me, kick me, make me scream at 6:57 PM

 

Jack Kerouac’s been good to me. Whenever I need some cash I do a painting of him and sell it and get some much-needed moolah. Jack “I’m just a bum, a dharma bum.” would appreciate my efforts.
To do a portrait I need to look at a picture of the person. So I grabbed a book, “Door Wide Open” out of my to-read stack and used the picture on the cover as my model. It turned out okay. Half of his face is in shadow; the other half in the brilliant fluorescent light of an all-night café.
Later in the week when I finished the painting, the book was still lying on the couch so it was a choice of teevee or book. I chose the book.
I liked it very much because it is an exchange of letters between Jack and Joyce Glassman his part-time year-and-a-half girlfriend 1957-58. She was a New Yorker, 21, who worked as a secretary at a publishing house. Her curious streak lead her to the all-night cafes and what would become called The Beat Generation. She met him right before “On the Road” was published and functioned as “my little secretary in black stockings.”
Allen Ginsberg, a lover of her friend Elise Gowen, introduced her to Jack out of more of a need to find a place to crash than a romantic liaison although it did become that…she swooned at the thought of meeting this mythic figure named Jack Kerouac, a literary badboy, with dark skin, black hair and the bluest of eyes.
I like private correspondence (have a site on just that subject myself although I never put up the lover’s letters as a sort of protection) and through the letters you really get a feel for the constrictiveness of the conservative 50s. Men had a defined role to play out and woman had a much more corseted path.
Jack wrote like he talked (if you like an author try to get some of their spoken-word stuff,, you will be able to reproduce the rhythm and cadence and inflections when you read and heighten your experience.) using lots of dashes and spelling things phonetically and getting the beat in there.
When I finished I was telling a friend about the book and he handed me a 1980 copy of “Minor Characters” by the same author. This was the same territory covered in-depth as a coming-of-age novel. It blew my mind. It was about New York (the Village), the 50s, Mexico (dysentery & no money), San Francisco (“Howl” was just banned), beats & fake beatniks and beatnik parties, and the action art movement, and about drugs and road trips and Memere (Jack’s mother) all in a very detailed way.
Here are some things I found interesting or profound or just goofy:
“Self-destruction can be viewed as the opposite of apathy, the final proof that one can function.”
“Real Life was sexual. Or rather it seemed to take the form of sex. This was the area of ultimate adventure, where you would dare or not dare. It was much less a question of desire.”
Jack Kerouac did not drive. He didn’t know how and was afraid to do it. He took buses and planes. Crazy!

::: posted by bite me, kick me, make me scream at 6:52 PM

 

After the Gay Pride Parade (Whoohoo!) yesterday we all went over to J's for a cookout. I met a man that recently went through military survival training and he told me some cool updates to the whole tick dilemma.
First ticks can only survive in moist environments like forests. When they go into sunny areas they dry out and die midstep.
And here's the BIG BIG BIG secret...VASELINE! Instead of tweezering the tick out of you, you just pile a huge glob of Vaseline on the tick. It suffocates and falls off. He said this works for wood ticks as well as deer ticks. So basically if you have a dark dot on your skin, dab it. Why take a chance?
I think it would be fascinating to go through survival training just to learn all of that cool stuff, but I'm not willing to do it. They would kick me out on day one because I don't like people telling me what to do when. I don't jump.

::: posted by bite me, kick me, make me scream at 8:37 AM