The days are getting shorter and the light is not an issue any longer. Today it is making orange quavers full across the office and living room, and on the fireplace all the way over there. It gets me to thinking that I likely will not be here in this place next year, and in that I will not be here during this time, I will never see light quite like this again. I try to enjoy it for today. Try to take a picture, but although photos are really made of light, they never quite do it justice. The way in which you experience it in person cannot be captured. I am not sure whether that is good or bad. I would like to keep a little of this orange light today in a bottle to bring out and remember this place on days like this, in the early fall.
I am house hunting and will be gone within months if not sooner, and that new place will not sit on top of this hill just so, at just this angle, with those trees just there. Everything will be different, the light, my likely preoccupations, me in general.
I will have to see what the summer is like in this city from that place. Let this one be all those memories, mostly good. Remember this light; close eyes now.
Yesterday was the last for most MLB teams. Regular season is over, I've turned the air conditioner off. It's over.
]]>Today, he wants me to kiss his ass though, and I am not married to her, so I refuse. He wants everyone to bow down to the holy Clower ass, and we all rise up, and say no. Each and every one of us.
I am so sorry to you, dear readers, but not to him. He's an asshole and I just want all of you to know that.
]]>My name is Moses Clower, or Mo as I like to be called - gets past the biblical implications which I have come to find problematic, and once made for an immediate launch in to the realm of the "academically gifted" as a child when I became the first in my class to know how to spell his name. I have been divorced for four years, six months ago I jumped from the sinking ship of newspapers (my passion; my blood - I thought) to a job in online journalism for a major 24-hour news network. I am 37 years old and have no dog, no children, and I do have a retirement portfolio that would turn no heads: women at the bar, financial advisers.
That weekend, as the storm approached, Labor Day weekend, I spent in NYC feeling like a kid again. It's okay to say kid from this vantage point, because that is where the longing is - to be a kid again - but, what I really felt was like a young adult again (freedoms of an adult, no adult responsibilities) - what I would of called when I was actually a kid "an adult," or simply "old" which makes me wonder what I would have thought as a kid of myself now. But that's neither here nor there, or perhaps it is one or the other, but either way I was in NYC feeling like a "kid," drinking with old college friends who I felt had somehow found the holy grail, but, as it turns out, were in similar positions as myself and my non-NYC friends, and it made the city seem smaller. And in making the city seem smaller, it made it more appealing to me, as I had long given up on the notion of making it there, and through giving up on the notion, had soon given up on the desire. A NYC that was not so overwhelming, didn't feel like it could crush a person, alighted new fires of yearning in me - and those drinks, and those walks, and those views from that hotel room, and those women, all those different women, after these lonely past four years, seemed to sound the siren's call.
]]>Take my fucking house, but you'll have to do it out from under my feet. I deny God. Been twelve years without church and don't know that I miss it. European friends think I'm an ass for even considering. That's right, European friends.
I got this house, and I got my dog, and I got my testicles and my dog has his too; fuck Bob Barker. Fucker lives in Burbank or somewhere and spent too much time with artificially colored hair to be trusted.
]]> Just worried about the one slug hole in the roof. Might pour down right on my diploma. That's right. Don't ask. I got it.Take the DVD player. Take my fucking wife. Oh, that's right, he's already done that, so take his house, my chldren - just leave me the fuck alone. I mean it this time.
I got my bread and my vienna sausages. I got cigarettes again after 15 years. I got a pistol and I'm pissed off. I got love in my heart, but no one's gonna get at it for a long time.
This storm. This storm. Take from me, like fucking Braveheart, my property, but not everything else.
I just wanted to say one more thing: fuck you. That's what I think of you, and the weather man.
Come get me.
]]>Ashley left him back in the spring, long before hurricane season. His heart has never been the same, as anyone that knew the two of them would suspect. He has been obsessed with the things that he really cannot control since then, but they are all things that he thinks, through a more perfect understanding, he will be able to control. For him, it is not turning on and off the light switch an odd number of times, that's too easy. It's these weather phenomenon, and when a storm of this size and shape is on the loose, he is in his heyday.
Ashley left with the guy who designs the charts and graphs, the best he can figure, down at Channel 2. Said he's hung like a horse. Tells Richard, on the night that she walks out, that he never did shit for her in the sack. He always felt like he was attentive, if not overly so.
]]> The approaching storm is hesitantly welcome. He misses her kisses. Her orgasms, or feigned ones, or half-hearted attempts at them. The one mutual friend says that Ashley always said that he took care of her, but he's not so sure. He feels like an ass.If the house were washed away tonight when the storm hits, it wouldn't be soon enough. Insurance would cover the cost of another move, and a move is what he needs. Throw the typewriter in the river. Don't write the love notes any longer. All of the songs that could be given have already been said. Live it up. Live it in. Put a bow on this, and get on with life.
For the sake of dialogue, back then they said things like:
"Why don't you stop drinking so much?"
"Why don't you stop sweating me?"
"I would love you more if the night weren't like this."
"Piss off."
"Fuck off."
"No, fuck you."
'No, Dick, you can eat a bag of dicks."
"Oh, please, I will, but don't bother coming."
And that's where it would end. And full-stop. She couldn't bear not being in that bed one night. The cursing and drinking was gamesmanship. Her reality was impossible to comprehend. To all outsiders, it's no wonder she walked away, and a mystery that it was not sooner.
Storms have the capability to take away, but also wash things clean. There was one approaching that Richard knew was more than what he, or this house, could take, but he stayed. In his mind, storms could be the thing that righted wrongs as well. Could rectify karma, and, in the best instances, wash the world clean. Could give hope to the hopeless. The last will be first. The meek will inherit the earth.
Sitting in that living room, there was a sprawl of remote controls, beer bottles and various pieces of paper around him. On each piece of paper was written one aspect of the storm: wind velocity, historical barometric pressure, crude drawings of the hurricane path.
In the damp moisture of the approach, he felt whiskey going down, the feeling of first love, the desire to settle, first marriage, and the want, as he had always felt, for it to last.
It's the smell of the cigarettes that remind her of him, and thinking of him, and the smell of the cigarettes, makes her want to smoke - but mostly she wants to smoke with him, or be with him, and that's not a possibilty, so she wishes that she had picked up a pack on the way home from the kennel, before the storm clouds started churning too much, so at least she could smoke, even in the cedar closet. It would make her feel close to him. It looked like the storm would be long and powerful this time.
She didn't know why he lied to her, and about such easy things. She didn't know if he was dead, it was just easier to think of him in that way. The military jacket he had worn during the war still hung overhead in the cedar closet, so there was always a possibility. When she thought of the jacket she thought it might be nice if he were not dead, because the jacket was possibility and death was not. She had once decided to live and not the other. It wasn't taken for granted. The jacket. The cigarette smell. She hadn't felt this way in a while. If he were dead, surely his ghost was there in the closet. If not, she like to think of him as dead so his ghost could possibly be there in the closet with her.
There was one other storm. It came toward the end. She hid in the closet during that one too. He sat in the living room watching the TV and drinking until the power went out. Then he listened to the emergency radio, the one with the hand crank, and drank until he could not crank the radio. Then he started throwing dishes across the kitchen and yelling his mother's name. His mother had died the previous spring. His father was dead, or at least dead in the way that he was now dead to her, for many years. The father's name never crossed the mind. He thought of himself as an immaculate conception. He prayed at night, but the storm still came. His mother's ghost seem to live with him.
]]> After that storm, she swept the kitchen and waited for him to come back home, and he did, but he didn't. Lost in the storm along with the neighbors chimney, the neighbor girl's tricycle, and the sign at the supermarket, was something inside of him that had come loose long before the storm, but untethered itself that night and was blown away in the wind, washed away in the flood.Last she would see him he was walking on the tracks, and her father had always told her as a girl to be wary of the men who walked the tracks. That was when the train still ran those tracks. Within a couple of weeks the line would be abandoned and she imagined that if he walked far enough, there would be nothing that could bring him back. The storm had washed away a part of her too, the part that wanted him there, and seeing him on those tracks, not knowing if he could find his way back, did not hurt then like it does now. It had become a sunset and a silhouette, when it was cloudy and he looked like a hobo.
She thinks that if she had just made him get in the cedar closet with her, made him turn off the TV, that she could have saved him - all of him - and then she could've gone on loving him as always, because it was all of him that she had loved, and part neer seemed enough. They both had died a little, for him, possibly totally.
Sitting in the cedar closet during this storm, she thought, a part would be enough. She had known alone would follow, and some lonely, but never imagined lonely like this. Waiting in the closet for the storm of the century, or so they say, just a portion would do. The smell of sweat on him. Faint aftershave. The feel of stubble on the cheek. Hands on breasts. Lips. Head on shoulder. Tears. Mother's name, and hers.
]]>At work tonight, covering the convention while watching baseball, I decided to delve into my daily reading for a respite and uncovered this article that has my head all afire right now. This is a fascinating article about a "radical" traffic engineer that decided that the best traffic controls were as little controls as possible. People would generally act more cautiously and intelligently if they were required to do so, and that structurally we can create situations in which people have to act in a better fashion by not prescribing the appropriate behavior in all situation, or as he states it, ""When you treat people like idiots, they'll behave like idiots."
Today, as I have been for many in the last few weeks, I have been working on an electoral college speculator map. In a presentation of the map I did today, I was asked to make sure we spell out exactly how the user should interact with the map. I think in doing that we fail or users or we fail in our efforts to do effective design, one or the other. I think if you let the purpose of the map be known, users will figure out how to use it, just as you don't need speed bumps or speed limit signs if the environment is designed in such a way that drivers can figure out the proper behavior.
]]>Then I come home. Down the highway and the parkway, through the detour, and into my driveway. Coming up the steps and along the walk that borders the front corner of the house, right before the dogleg, hidden by those unruly shrubs, I find a man-sized pile of shit: first the smell, then the flies, then the visual. It's either from a man, a bear or a great dane, and I'm betting on a man. There aren't that many bear sightings in my neighborhood, and why would a dog find its way to that hidden spot when in my experience they would rather do it in grass where they can scratch? Dogs don't ever seem to have issues squatting and doing the deed right in front of god and the whole world.
The pile is right up close to the exterior wall of my house. Just where a man could've squatted and rested his back against the bricks, extending his legs out far enough so as not to get it on his trousers. I have shat in the outdoors before, just not on someone's sidewalk.
So if it is a man, I think, why would they do it there? Perhaps they are homeless and have nowhere to do it. Perhaps it's Leroy and he's mad at me for some reason.
I guess it doesn't really matter. It appears a man decided to come and shit on my sidewalk and now I have to fight the flies and the stench and go clean it up.
]]>There's the one friend whose love of his life is leaving him, and another that just wishes that he had such a love of his life.
It's early and the morning birds are singing and my tongue is tired.
Okay, this one is not like reading either, but like intake, but listening to Tom Waits is like reading, if your really listen, right? THis is the July 5 concert that I went to here in Atlanta. So excited to find the document. Read it. Love it. If not... you call yourself MY friend?
]]>We've got two weeks left of this experiment that we started three years ago: three more weeks of therapy and then I got to do something else. He says he thinks it might be good to pursue a woman therapist since that's where my problems lie, with women, and that she may teach me how to trust the universal her.
We talk lots of how I am feeling. I guess that's what therapy is. We have been especially keying in on how I feel about the separation. He asks if I feel anger, and I guess I do. The adult part of me understands the state of things, the child feels abandoned - the worst and constant fear. I cannot talk to him about it until he tells me to talk to a third person in the room that is not him.
I tend to cry a lot during these recent sessions.
]]> I guess I feel the whole bundle of emotions that are going on. I guess I am angry on a level. I guess I do feel abandoned just like I have so many times. I guess I want to scream on a certain level, but I guess there's a certain level that I feel like I am worried about a friend. (I am worried about so many of them.)It's the most fucked up of friendships though. He knows everything about me, I know so little of him. He raises money for the Special Olympics and is from New York, but I learned that from my psychiatrist (not exactly a therapist - always a chemical solution - and my therapist's friend for the last 30 years.)
If I knew he were just retiring, I would be fine, or at least okay. As much as I wonder what becomes of me after this all ends, I wonder what becomes of him. I know when one signs up for the psychology route you are signing up to eat everyone else's cancer, but I wish I could eat his now. I am not sure what that means for me, and my therapy, and my relationship with Stephen (likely Yankees fan that gets the baseball references that I was not so sure of), but I wish tonight that I could eat his. Make it all go away. Make sure that he lives for tomorrow, and next year, and the next, and so forth. Please?
]]>This piece, apparently written for on-air delivery, is pretty hilarious. As one, like many of us, who has spent days upon days listening to the chipper clichés of managers and the like (remember the days of "synergy" and "out-of-the-box thinking"), it led me to believe that all that an MBA granted you was the ability to use, misuse, coin and abuse such hackneyed tropes.
This article is a grand skewering of such business speak and a fine critique of modern business languages inability to really say anything at all.
Favorite excerpt:
If love has no place in the language of business, neither does passion. Passion, says the dictionary, means a strong sexual desire or the suffering of Christ at the crucifixion. In other words it doesn't really have an awful lot to do with a typical day in the office - unless things have gone very wrong indeed.]]>
This only marginally qualifies as reading since it is a photo slideshow with brief captions. It's fascinating to see the families in their homes with food piled all around. It's also interesting to llok at the facial expressions of the people. It's also amazing to see the differential in the amount of packaged foods from family to family, and how it relates to monetary food expenditure.
In the Sicily photo, I am not sure if the husband knows it, but those three kids are not all his.
The older man in the Konstancin-Jeziorna photo is not so happy his wife hoodwinked him into participating in this project.
For the Melander family of Bargteheide, I have a suggestion: family counseling. Dad has a drinking problem and no one in the famuly is very happy about it.
This article in this week's New Yorker is simply fascinating; the stuff of which movies are made. Don't want to ruing the plot for you, but be prepared for several twists and turns.
The most fascinating thing about the whole plot to me is how persistent the guy has been, even after serving time in an American prison, he returned to the same behavior when he got back to France. His insistence that he was always looking for love and a family is supported by his troublesome relationship with his blood family.
There are times when I am depressed that I will look upon children jealously, seeing a simplicity to their lives (that may be an illusion) that do not feel in my adult existence. I don't think I am alone in this feeling: it's been written about time and time again. How many books are filled with longings for childhood, to be like a child?
Bourdin's inhibitions just were not great enough to stop him from taking the next step that at least I know I have pondered before: time machines, magic potions, Tom Hanks in Big.
I can't really put my fingers completely on why the story touched me so much. There are plenty of reasons not to desire a return to chidlhood, or to being a child, I guess that's what keeps me sane, but if the genie granted me one wish...
Throughout my life, I have been surrounded by one form of worry wart or another. It's very entertaining most of the time, but when it boils down to being told what vessels to drink my water out of, and where I should carry my iPhone, it is going too far. I have planned many times to do hours of scientific research to debunk the worries of my wartish friends, but like so many things (like taking out the trash and washing all of my dirty clothes) I just can't find the time or energy.
Lo! Today I see this article on NYTimes.com. A lot of my legwork has been done for me, and in a very few, short paragraphs too. Now I don't have to worry about compiling this list anymore.
My favorite quote (and this one is for my old boss):
Nalgene has already announced that it will take BPA out of its wonderfully sturdy water bottles. Given the publicity, the company probably had no choice. But my old blue-capped Nalgene bottle, the one with BPA that survived glaciers, jungles and deserts, is still sitting right next to me, filled with drinking water. If they ever try recalling it, they'll have to pry it from my cold dead fingers.
Now I need to go refill my bottle that I keep on my desk, that I will never take camping.