Are People Crazy?

Sixty-nine percent of people answering a CBS5 poll think its a bad idea to use South Bay Santa Clara County public funds to throw in 10% of a $900 million project to build a stadium for the San Francisco 49ers. These people and an area citizens' group, stuck up to their knees with the rest of us in this frightening state of financial affairs (in one month and 27 days, the State goes into the red by $300 million, over $1 billion red two days later - is this even comprehensible?), they hold the postion that it is a bad idea to contribute, from enterprise funds and hotel taxes, to the transformation of an enormous field of asphalt into an instant job machine that, once finished, continues providing jobs onsite while luring money into the restaurants, gas stations, hotels, banks of the surrounding area. A county official insists that the NFL franchise respect the county's proposed contribution. He says, "Its a lot of money to spend on a team that won't even change it's name."

Before I can finish sharing that with you, the next "story" tells me that we're in cyber worlds buying imaginery things as gifts to build relationships, getting friends with points, because its a recession you know, and you can get 2000 of them for $2.00.

The Bermuda-fucking-Triangle is a state of mind, a pandemic mental disease; the prevailing symptom is a semi-frantic concern for having symptoms, that are themselves sluts, who slip in and out of syndromes until their legs get restless and they leave you in front of the slot machine without your life savings.* If you have to ask whether or not you are sick, the answer is now definitively Yes.


*As evidenced by a class action law suit, compulsive gambling has been linked to the drug you were emplored to ask your doctor about for relief before you even knew that an FDA-approved name existed for your Restless Leg Syndrome. Unlike disease - humor, irony, general wtf, cannot be fabricated.

Washed in Sin

For the first time since August, I take my landlord up on the laundry agreement. Eight dollars. Only I ask if he'll take eleven because I don't have detergent and I don't have the car. He acquiesces. I'm nodding at the run-down of laundry room pitfalls when he says, "And watch this step outside here. It's not a normal step. I know you're a pretty athletic person, but watch out with the rain and everything." Hmmm. And how would he know of my abilities? Unless, since my bedroom is directly beneath his, he has heard my extracirriculars and deduced stamina from duration, taken what flexibility must sound like for athleticism. Fan. Taaaaaaaaaastic.

(I could also be paranoid and overly self conscious, but I can hear him cough, so...)

Who Needs Fiction

Noon light through the window at a free fall, one day of procrastination and pizza and Cheetos already under the belt, I sit at my computer. The drum circle upstairs, though empowering, has thankfully finished - I can get down to work. After these emails. And someone has replied to a thread I replied to on Facebook and I have to peek, and geez that picture is starting to make me look like a horse, I need a new one, but I dont have a new one, I'll just send my buddy a message about it on Facebook. For help, see, I need help, and it's a way to communicate.

Oh! I didn't mention I had left the computer on - Sorry Earth (I swear I usually unplug and everything). There is a Word document open, along with a browser, they have been up all night.

So I finish the message and hit send while I'm thinking I don't want to do this: get sucked into another day of not doing what really needs to be done while I'm calm - why must I MAKE myself crazy pushing all 40 pages into 4 days of manic depression?? The page refreshes confirming my sent message and the mouse clicks without my direction. There's another, and another, 4 tabs open now, and another, more opening, and more - in the time it takes me act 20 new Facebook tabs have popped up - I stab at the X in the top right corner, it takes a second to respond and I keep stabbing, frightened now for a reason I can't name. "Do you want to close all tabs?" finally and mercifully appears. The tabs, their growth frozen, bleed off the screen in orange double arrows, I wonder how many there are now, and click Yes. Hell Yes.

wtf. I'm rebooting this whole machine. Close all this mess. Whatever that was has me thinking of calling my asshole cousin I havent spoken to without force in six months, but shit he knows computers. I close the Word document I had opened the night before to check my spelling in a Facebook comment, the word I wasn't sure of? Leprechaun.

I want to say this to a guy in my fiction class

worse than coincidence you believe no meaning in actions taken, choices made by your fellow craftsmen. and I think that absurd. for if you are to write and have any reason for it, deserve or demand any audience, each action, each choice is purposeful; for author is creator of the book’s world, indeed the world one enters as reader, whose world, in fact, is changed by this entry, this visit to a created possibility, a reflected truth; and as they say of God, he didn’t make no mistakes. thus your flippancy, your dismissive throw of head and toss of hand, I think as absurd as you apparently think my question.

Connective Tissues

I am coming ot think of cigarettes like methamphetamine. All love to my compatriots battling or embattled by, or having whethered the battle of, both. I called the one sudafed and drano, but the other, my word, is the same. A concoction of chemicals vile to the body. The high is unmanageable. And the effect progressively masked by what delivers it. All this fuss over legalizing marijuana and we tax and thus condone poisoning. This undoubtedly made easier by the internal explosion (rather than propencity toward physical combustion of structures) and subsequent length of time the vileness takes to become visible.

While Driving I Figured Out

Fish are slippery
and fight ferociously
when caught though they're
often only hooked by the lip

Death Can be Beautiful

Tiny pink flowers sprout from each quarter inch of the branches by the driveway. A little further up the street, another tree displays a white dress, and looks to be covered in lace. It is beautiful and tugs a smile from my mouth whether I am going out or coming home. Spring! it says.

But it is February Fourth. Not Spring, not close.

The catepillars that eat Spring leaves, and the baby birds that depend on their plump bodies, are not yet born, and will miss their feast. Their life cycles are farther removed from the weather: the trees feel the unseasonably warm winter and get confused, or are powerless to slow their response; the bugs and the birds cannot fuck any faster nor speed up gestation to catch the warm wind. The changes are making the bees so crazy, that, worldwide, they are just giving up. Vanishing.

Beauty is fleeting, they say. Indeed.

Damn do they gotta say it like that?

The next 12 weeks of my life on two pages. Listed as articles, semicoloned excerpts, as if it has passed, static, and over. I must wait, though I dare not blink, to see if profundity exists among these lines. How I will affect and be affected by this typeset that, nearly absently, has compressed time.

You don't miss the forest 'til the trees are gone

by July we’ll have once-a-week shower mandates
neighborhood water watch
environmentalism McCarthy-style

what we need is a toilet overhaul. 500 million-jillion new toilets. With the $4 seats - they hold up better than the $10,000 variety. (assholes)

5 gallons each time someone flushes a toilet in the mall, or the office building, or the coffee shop. 5 gallons gone each time. Or an airport bathroom, or a bus station, or plaza on the turnpike. It’s more than each person in each city and town, you have to add on the people that come from other cities and towns to visit. we’re flushing our showers. and we’re gonna smell like shit come summer.