this happiness thing is nice.
I think I can safely say, for all y'all who've been bugging me about New Year's resolutions, that I resolve to be happier in 2004.

The Baba Yaga waited awhile; then she came to the window and asked, "Are you weaving, niece? Are you weaving, my dear?"

"Oh yes, dear aunt, I'm weaving."

So the Baba Yaga went away again, and the girl gave the cat a piece of bacon, and asked, "Is there no way of escaping from here?"

"Here's a comb for you and a towel," said the cat; "take them, and be off. The Baba Yaga will pursue you, but you must lay your ear on the ground, and when you hear that she is close at hand, first of all, throw down the towel. It will become a wide, wide river. And if the Baba Yaga gets across the river, and tries to catch you, then you must lay your ear on the ground again, and when you hear that she is close at hand, throw down the comb. It will become a dense, dense forest; through that she won't be able to force her way anyhow."

The girl took the towel and the comb and fled. The dogs would have rent her, but she threw them the rolls, and they let her go by; the doors would have begun to bang, but she poured oil on their hinges, and they let her pass through; the birch tree would have poked her eyes out, but she tied the ribbon around it, and it let her pass on. And the cat sat down to the loom, and worked away; muddled everything about, if it didn't do much weaving.

Up came the Baba Yaga to the window, and asked, "Are you weaving, niece? Are you weaving, my dear?"

"I'm weaving, dear aunt, I'm weaving," gruffly replied the cat.

from here

Samuel Beckett
Cascando

1

why not merely the despaired of
occasion of
wordshed

is it not better abort than be barren


the hours after you are gone are so leaden
they will always start dragging too soon
the grapples clawing blindly the bed of want
bringing up the bones the old loves
sockets filled once with eyes like yours
all always is it better too soon than never
the black want splashing their faces
saying again nine days never floated the loved
nor nine months
nor nine lives

2

saying again
if you do not teach me I shall not learn
saying again there is a last
even of last times
last times of begging
last times of loving
of knowing not knowing pretending
a last even of last times of saying
if you do not love me I shall not be loved
if I do not love you I shall not love

the churn of stale words in the heart again
love love love thud of the old plunger
pestling the unalterable
whey of words

terrified again
of not loving
of loving and not you
of being loved and not by you
of knowing not knowing pretending
pretending

I and all the others that will love you
if they love you

3

unless they love you

(1936)

my heart is getting a bigger workout that it's used to.
I guess I haven't been stretching it much.
I feel dizzy.
this is not a bad thing.

This morning I got the best gift I could ever have hoped for: a half hour phone call with a Peace Corps Volunteer in a small village in Kyrgyzstan- my sister Erika. Bless Mr. Bell. The miracle of the telephone is something I'll never, for the rest of my life, be able to take for granted. Email is great, but can't quite replace the sound of someone's voice, thousands of miles away.

Peet's Coffee is giving away cups of regular coffee for free today, and the employees are donating all their tips to Walden House. Go fill up the tip jar (dollars, people, not nickels), but remember to go back on Friday and stuff a couple more dollars in, when they're actually keeping it.


Eli sent me a link to Jon Carroll's column from yesterday's paper. (If Eli didn't send me stuff, I'd never have much to blog about...)

"Take your self and your 20s down to any area of town where people might ask you for money. (If you don't know any, San Francisco's Market Street is always reliable, and it's easily accessible by public transportation.)

Walk along. Hand a $20 bill to any person who asks for money. Repeat until you are out of money. Congratulations: You have become an Untied Way volunteer. You will not get a T-shirt.

It is true that some of your recipients may use the money for self- destructive purposes. That is not ideal, but neither was it ideal when you used your money for self-destructive purposes. We're all just trying to figure it out as we go along, and your fine home or apartment does not place you closer to enlightenment.

We're all experts in how other people should get their lives together. There are the worthy homeless and the unworthy homeless. You may concentrate on the adjective, or you may concentrate on the noun. I'm a noun guy.

You may be sure that people who get your money have been punished worse for their sins than any penalty you or society could devise. They are not having fun. They almost certainly will have even less fun tomorrow. Some of your Untied Way clients may not show gratitude for your gift, while others may show too much gratitude. Some of them may do something embarrassing, like praying loudly or complaining about malign energy rays. What they're really saying is 'Thank you,' and what you're really saying is 'You're welcome.'"

earthquake!
so far away, yet my office building, which is in a renovated pier on the waterfront, swayed, heavily, for a good 20 seconds.
and now I'm shaking.
whee!

(earthquake drill!)

“May Santa bring you the clarity of spirit to behold your blessings, and rejoice in them.”

Solstice

"What is the use of a violent kind of delightfulness if there is no pleasure in not getting tired of it?"
-Gertrude Stein

everything looks shiny.

I think I'm speechless today.

and I feel a little like this, only not three:

lulu eightball

why it didn't work out
in the home of Siegfried and Roy
halloween options for baby owners
do you have seasonal affective disorder?

and my favorite:
schools of hard knocks

listen to Matt's concession speech here...

Thanks to my bro for sending me this article in the Philadelphia Weekly about the coffee scene in Philadelphia. (there's a photo of Chris at the very bottom, roasting coffee in what is clearly a masterful way.) It gives me a teeny tiny bit of hope, and it makes me think of our mayoral election of yesterday, and how, as Matt Gonzalez put it, even though we didn't win, we didn't lose, either.

Just in case the Starbucks people would like to know why I am so offended by them, I offer this as an example:

Schultz began changing the corporate culture at Starbucks, replacing post-hippie coffee evangelists with chain franchise business experts cherrypicked from McDonald's, KFC, Taco Bell and Pepsi. An elaborate corporate infrastructure was put into place to ensure the perfect mass replication of the Starbucks brand.

mass replication?

With little paid advertising, Starbucks managed to garner household-name status by spinning off its brand into supermarket drinks, CDs, websites, a magazine, airlines, rest stops, and hotel and bookstore chains. They call it viral marketing. At the same time new Starbucks stores kept opening at a dizzying pace.

viral marketing?

I was at Gonzalez headquarters last night with Daphne and Eli; we headed over there after fortifying ourselves with food and alcohol, and arrived in time to hear Peter Camejo, Art Agnos, Jeff Adachi and others speak, before Gonzalez himself made his concession speech. It was heartbreaking, and yet, the truth is- we didn't quite lose. 4 million dollars vs. 400,000 dollars, and Newsom only won by a few hairs? I was grateful for Gonzalez's tact and composure- it was a good speech, and it made me incredibly proud to have voted for him in this run-off. I can only hope people were actually listening when he spoke about how important smaller elections are. This process is all about taking steps and hanging in there for the long haul. And toothsome Newsom may have won this election, but as The Chronicle pointed out, he does still have to work with Gonzalez the board president, as well as "a prickly Board of Supervisors that hasn't been any too eager to support him in the past".
And as Matt put it:
"The campaign is bigger than one person. It doesn't matter whether we win in one particular race. What matters is, when Mayor Newsom is wrong, we're there to oppose him.''

There are 67 Starbucks in Philadelphia, but Old City Coffee and other small, independent coffee places are still doing fine- for the time being, at least. And that's something to hold on to.

All we have to do is continue to fight the virus, and never ever stop fighting.

we already knew she rocked, part 46: my friend Daphne's book, Final Girl, makes the Village Voice's top 25 list.

The Village Voice: Our 25 Favorite Books of 2003:

"In this topsy-turvy de-con of the splatter-flick ethos, slam poet Gottlieb pegs familiar feminist themes on an inspired B-movie framework. Taking her title from an influential essay by film theorist Carol J. Clover, Gottlieb posits an ambivalent frenzy that infects all human intimacy, and whose violence informs sexual identity even while negating it. Evoking such disparate characters as colonial American exile Anne Hutchinson and celluloid über-stalker Freddy Krueger, Gottlieb underscores the threat inherent in female representation. It's a heart-wrenching reckoning with carnality. "

No matter how you feel about Kucinich, please watch this.

Matt Gonzalez for Mayor



please vote.

do you believe in fairies?

It's almost as good as Mad Magazine, but without the illustrations:

Governor abandons groping inquiry

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who promised after his election to seek an independent investigation into allegations that he groped or harassed women during his acting career, has changed his mind, an aide to the governor said Monday.

"After consulting with legal counsel and advisors, the governor has concluded that given the political nature of the allegations, an investigation would only provide more fodder for his political opponents,'' said Schwarzenegger spokesman Rob Stutzman.


and in an another story, a heartbreaking quote:

"How can they ignore the law and everything?'' asked Willie Porter, 32, whose mother and four other relatives were among those killed when a faulty heater sparked a fire in apartments where the Housing Authority had failed to install smoke detectors.

did I mention that I went to vote yesterday?
fun!
from now on, I'm always going to vote on Sunday afternoons, and have a bloody mary afterwards. it's the only civilized way to do it.

the miracles of #@!&%! technology:
for four days, my airport base station hasn't been working. I dicked around, enlisted my roomie the superman to help me, did factory resets, got software upgrades, all to no avail.
I called around, and every mac shop told me that they're not fix-able, that I should just go buy a new one.
so, I went and bought a new one. a fancy-ass "extreme" one. more than I wanted to be spending, but it's the only way to get the DSL in my room without a million-foot cable.
it's sitting here on the table, in its box. I got home and tried the old one just one more time- and it works. perfectly. what the hell.

okay, and I do realize that I sound like a spoiled rotten yuppie-ass hipster, and I should shut up and be glad I have running water, but man, it still pisses me off.

yay for bad kids

Meet Me On Joey Ramone Place... I Like the Ring of It

by Choire Sicha

and as if we needed it, even more proof that cell phones are evil:
Kari just called me at work- from a beach in Hawaii.
I could hear the wind.

woo!
my friend Daphne got reviewed in the Village Voice.
(and yeah, I'm lurking in the background of the photo...)

I am continually astounded by the idiocy of people who insist on forcefully pushing their way past me so they can get to the escalator first, only to stand the whole way up.

Good grief, I haven't even managed to finish the Amis book, and now I see that Peter Carey has written another one:
My Life as a Fake.
Terrence Rafferty of the New York Times says:
This is an extremely unusual novel, even by Carey's lofty standards of unusualness. ''My Life as a Fake,'' with its ornate metafictional superstructure, begs for exegesis, deconstruction, semiotic operations of the most exquisite complexity, to be performed by specialists flown in from Paris and New Haven. But, to paraphrase the old gag, the operation could be a success and the patient might die. The wonderful, perverse joke of ''My Life as a Fake'' is that it is a fake novel of ideas: not a parody, just a fancy, near-impenetrable disguise for the deeply peculiar thing that this novel really is -- a ripping yarn about poets and their readers, all chasing an ideal like Indiana Jones on the Last Crusade.

yummy.