caveat emptor

A Post, Like Others Before It

The world always makes more sense in the morning. By evening I'm usually wondering, "What the hell was all of that about?" In the morning, though, everything is good. The sun pours through the window and paints the top half of my computer screen as I type. In the bright illumination the dust on the screen is unmistakable. The bottom of the screen, shaded by the window sill, looks much cleaner. It's a lie in the dark, though. It's just as dirty as the top. I can see this because it's morning time. By tonight things won't be so clear. By tonight everything will unravel. It's okay, though. Nighttime is not for the sensible. Nighttime is for the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!” Do you know who said that last part? Do you know Jack?

I wanted to become a fan of humanity on Facebook, but humanity is not an organization, business or brand. Even if it were, I'm not an official representative of humanity. So, a page cannot be created and fandom cannot be declared. Not on Facebook anyway. Here at Caveat Emptor, though, you can be a fan of whatever you want. Here I'm a fan of humanity. And also of coffee. And also of you. I'm a fan of you. But not on Facebook. Everywhere else, but not Facebook.

When I was writing about morning and evening in the first paragraph (see above) I was reminded of Douglas Adams's thoughts about Sunday afternoon in the book Life, the Universe and Everything. He called it "the long dark tea-time of the soul," a play on "La noche oscura del alma" or "The Long Dark Night of the Soul", a theological treatise by the 16th-century Carmelite mystic, Saint John of the Cross. According to Adams, Wowbagger, the Infinitely Prolonged, was an immortal who hated immortality. To keep himself busy he set out on a project across space and time to insult everyone in the universe - in alphabetical order. Adams says of Wowbagger, "In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and that terrible listlessness that starts to set in about 2:55, when you know you've taken all the baths that you can usefully take that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the long dark tea-time of the soul." It's a funny thought, I think. It's like describing a sigh. Quite masterful, really.

At least it seems so this morning.

Hello, friends. How are you today?

Later. Love.

The dregs. There's not much more where this came from.

It's the day before tomorrow. Only one more day and then tomorrow will be here. Are you ready for it? Does it make sense, I wonder, to spend today preparing for tomorrow? What will you do tomorrow, then? Prepare for the next day? Is that what life is about?

Today I will prepare for yesterday. By the time today is over I'll be ready for yesterday to start. I may not get everything right. I may make some mistakes, but there's always tomorrow to prepare for today. I'll never catch up, it's true, but I'll never get behind either, right? I don't know. I've confused myself.

The cutest this about kittens is the way they look and the way they move around. The cutest thing about plumbers is the child-like innocence in their eyes. The cutest thing about cadavers is the little tag hanging from their toes. It's adorable.

Hello, friends. How are you today?

Later. Love.

On Blogging

This post today is about blogging. I will discuss the salient points of the current state of blogging as a medium of creative expression or interpersonal communication in society. Is blogging dead? Has its place been subsumed by micro-blogging? Will blogging usher in the end of times? Consider the following argument:

Once there was a man who lived alone with his wife and children. He would often lament his complete isolation from human warmth and companionship to his family at the dinner table. "I haven't seen another living soul for years," he would say to them, passing the potato casserole his wife often made, a favorite of his. "I thought when I was younger that I would settle down, marry, have children. I thought I'd be surrounded by love." "What happened, Father?" one of his children might ask. "I don't know," he would respond, patting the youngster on the head, tousling his or her hair. Late at night sometimes, alone in his bed, he would turn to his wife and whisper, "The long lonely nights are the worst." She would hold him and try to offer comfort him, but his loneliness was as impenetrable as madness.

Semioticians are always looking for signs, wondering what they mean. Some of them blog about it, even still.

Hello, friends. How are you today?

Later. Love.

Madness. Time. Mad Science.

Life makes a lot more sense, I think, if you go crazy. Suddenly everything comes into focus. Everything falls into place. When you're crazy things get very simple. Reasons abound. Questions vanish. I thought about going crazy, about really losing my mind. Call me insane, but I'd prefer to be the way I am. I'm only interested in the real answers these days, in the truth. Can the truth be known? Can you ever know that you know the answers? Maybe not, but I don't want to pretend. I'll visit crazy from time to time, to see some old friends, but I'm not going to move in over there. It's a madhouse, really. People over there aren't right in the head.

A few minutes ago is my least favorite time of day. I also don't like a few minutes from now, in the future I mean. I prefer now. I prefer here. It's a place I can relate to, a place I've been before. Some people look forward to the future. (Well, everyone does, I guess.) Me? I'd rather make camp right here in the now and relax for a while, maybe get a few things done. You could join me, my love. You could study for your class. I could do a little writing, or maybe draw a picture. We could make love at least once, maybe twice. I could cook us a nice dinner or plant a garden. You could finish a project or two. Wouldn't it be nice, just to linger for a while in the now, appointments and obligations suspended in frozen future, not being neglected but not getting any closer. Sure, we'd eventually want to get back to the normal flow of time. In a few hours. Maybe a week or two. Twenty years tops.

Mad scientists are inventing the future of crazy as we speak. They're not angry, mind you. They're mad, insane, nuts. How they ever managed to complete the schooling required to be scientists is beyond me. Nevertheless, they are busy in their laboratories crafting the crazy of tomorrow. They're making breakthroughs, proving and disproving mad theories. I'm terrified of these men, of the things they might be inventing. I wish there were sane scientists to counteract all the mad ones, but I've never heard of one. This is why I avoid science, because of the ubiquitous madness. I stay away from millinery for the same reason.

Hello, friends. How are you today?

Later. Love.

Character Intervention

Jack, you have a problem. Nothing ever lasts with you. I'm looking at you there, all excited with your new goose that lays golden eggs. You act as though it will change your life, but it's you that needs to change, Jack, not life. Remember the money you had once? The livestock? All of it? Remember? Gone, Jack. You squandered and lost it all. Then you just had the one cow. Remember the cow, Jack? You traded it for magic beans. Remember the beans, Jack? You lost them immediately, thrown out the window by your angry mother. Then there was that tall, amazing beanstalk. It was a miracle, Jack, that beanstalk. It was a wonder of the world. Where is it today, Jack? It's gone. You cut it down. You cut it down shortly after it grew. And the giant? Dead. Nothing lasts with you, Jack. And now you have this goose, this goose that lays golden eggs. It will be gone before the week is up. You'll roast it, or trade it to gypsies, or simply set it free. You never see anything through to the end, Jack. You never stick around to... Hey! Where did you go? Jack?

Hello, friends. How are you today?

Later. Love.

The Party

We were fancy that day, all dressed up for a posh party. She wore her flowing dress of uncontainable happiness and I was in my heaven suit with the shiny shoes, dressed to the nines as people rarely say these days. Outside the afternoon in the city gardens was warm and moist, with thunderheads roiling themselves into a frenzy overhead. It looked like there might be a wedding brewing in the east plaza. There was rumbling and electricity and the threat of roses in the sultry air. "I wonder if they do," she pondered aloud. "They said they did," I replied, remembering vows I'd heard. It was May or September and birds waited nervously for what came next, crouched like tigers on trees and trellises and gazebos. Somewhere not far away a photographer was surely loading or unloading equipment into or from a minivan or hatchback car, uncomfortable from being dressed inappropriately for hauling lights and tripods and camera bags, dressed instead for a party to which he or she wasn't really invited, not like a normal person might be invited. We were dressed fancy too, having left the house that morning to go to a party. She couldn't remember where the party might be and I couldn't recall the occasion. We sat on the park bench and enjoyed our detachment from the wedding of strangers. We didn't even rise to seek shelter when the rain finally started. I took off the shiny shoes and squished my toes in the new mud. Her dress hugged her wetly and wonderfully as we talked and laughed. Somewhere people may have been wondering where we were, but surely we weren't the guests of honor. Surely the party would go on without us. The party always goes on, after all.

Hello, friends. How are you today?

Later. Love.

Music Out of Place

Maybe I'm the only one, whenever I hear Bob Dylan's new music, who finds myself wondering when Bob Dylan died. I have to remind myself that Bob Dylan must still be alive since he's releasing new music. If you listen to it, though, it makes you wonder. What finally did him in? The drugs? The dot-com bubble? The Jonas Brothers? How did he die?

It's tough to be a banjo player trying to work your way up the synth-pop charts, but I'm giving it my all. Whenever I perform at synth-pop concerts people always scream profanity and throw empty hairspray cans at me. I barely get my stool positioned and pluck a few notes from Electric Dave the Synthesizer (that's what I call my banjo), and people begin to mutter and frown. No one seems to get my angle. No one can relate to my philosophy of synth-pop. "Surely," I'll try to say to them as they pelt me with empty hair gel tubes, "a banjo can be a synthesizer too." They never listen. Synth-pop fans are so full and anger and hatred and self-loathing that they have no generosity to spare for a free spirit like me, a pioneer of synth-pop trying to expand the genre.

I'm starting to think this thing is going to end just like my harmonica punk band. I don't think I can take another failure like that. What am I doing wrong?

Hello, friends. How are you today?

Later. Love.

Freddy and the Monsters (wouldn't that make a cool band name?)

The sunshine was sunny. And shiny. It was sunny and shiny sunshine, and it shone and shined all the live-long day. The angle of the sunshine on that bright day kept the abundance of it from making the day too hot, and the angle was a factor of the relative positions of the planet and the sun. What I'm trying to say is that it was winter. It was winter and it was sunny. Sunny and cold. Because of winter. Also it was daytime, which also has to do with the relative positions of the planet and the sun, but in a different way. See where I'm going with this? Neither do I.

Freddy was out playing in his yard. Freddy was a person, or possibly a panda bear, and he was either a little child or maybe a teen. I suppose I could make him an old man, but I'm not feeling that. He feels like a kid to me, what with the "Freddy" name thing. Oh! What if Freddy were a young girl? The name could be short for "Frederica" or something. YES! Freddy was a young girl and SHE was out playing in HER yard.

That's when the monsters arrived.

Setting that sentence apart by itself was supposed to have the effect of increased dramatic impact. It's a little trick writers employ sometimes when our narrative prowess does not suffice to supply the desired evocation of emotion and tension. Typically we don't explain the usage afterward in a meta-writing paragraph like this one, but we're free to do so if we so choose so. [That last "so" was neither correct nor necessary, but I had one left so I had to put it somewhere.] Now, about those monsters.

They were monstrous. Completely and perfectly monstrous in the monstrosity of their... well... monstrosity I suppose. They were horribly horrible and terribly terrible and frighteningly frightening. It was scary how scary they were, the kind of scary that would scare you were the type to be scared by such scariness. We're talking monsters here, people. Not your newfangled Disney movie monsters who, though they seem awful, are actually kind and have well-developed personalities and decency and character. These were shallow and violent monsters without good excuses for the awful things they did to children every single day. These were old-school monsters of the evil sort.

Having arrived, the monsters promptly ate Freddy the young panda bear girl for no good reason. Just ate her right there in the yard on that sunny winter day. BAM! Eaten. Just like that. Can you imagine? How awful. How completely awful.

Hello, friends. How are you today?

Later. Love.

P. S. - At The Collective today they're writing about ghost vampires. Why? Because I nagged them until they did it. Isn't that awesome? You know it is. I know a vampire cannot become a ghost (because of the immortality thing), but can a ghost become a vampire? Thanks for stopping by.

Yesterday Again

Today's song challenge: List any song you can think of with the first word "Yesterday."

• Yesterday, The Beatles
• In Between Days, The Cure
• ???

To be lectured by my own children about being open minded, about valuing creativity, about not judging people by their appearance makes me want to scream. "Who the hell do you think you are? Who do you think I am?" Where were they when I was growing up, from the time I was born until this very moment and on until I die? The open mindedness of youth is cheap and easy, having been given to them for free by their parents, having cost them nothing whatsoever. (You're welcome, by the way.)

All of our yesterdays were filled also with brooding, with a sense of being misunderstood, with the fear of being unimportant and insignificant, forgettable. This moody darkness is nothing new. Colors and fabrics change. Hair products change. Bands of different names mourn over the same minor chord progressions. Yet here we are again, where we've always been.

Yesterday I got so old I felt like I could die. Yesterday I got so old it made me want to cry. I believe in yesterday.

Hello, friends. How are you today?

Later. Love.

Friday is List Day. Hooray!

A list is like a stack of words. Numbered lists imply hierarchy, priority, precedence. Bulleted lists just group things. Speaking of lists, here's one.

Things Wrong/Right With the Universe

• Every time someone opens the door to this coffee shop murderous arctic winds blows in and kills me.
• The birds congregated on the power lines are all facing the same direction, except one.
• The woman screaming into her cell phone beside me is talking about quilting.
• The little boy in the red jacket, probably two-years-old, just screamed at his mother, "You're making me mad like an alligator."
• There are four hybrid cars parked outside. Mine is the most in need of washing.
• Litter is dancing a beautiful dance in the wind outside.
• Somewhere high above the clouds the sky whales moan their long, haunting songs as they float their ancient migrations through the atmosphere.
• There's a butcher shop in the same building as the downtown SPCA.
• The werewolves on my block installed a moon roof that doesn't comply with the neighborhood association standards and everyone is afraid to confront them about it.

Hello, friends. How are you today?

Later. Love.

grace

grace
like saplings in the wind
deceptively sure in bending
 so as not to break
you know, intuitively, a secret
 to survival in the bendy, windy world
there is a small that is not weak
 a big that is not strong
so you choose to smile
to shift
to give
to take in
 what you might keep out
arriving through indirection
 where you didn't know you wanted to go
are you dancing with us,
 smiling girl, smiling boy?
if every soul deserves worship
and every soul deserves praise
let us bend, like you
let us dance, with you
another answer to the question
 of this world
i kiss what you are
 and smile

---

Hello, friends. How are you today?

Later. Love.

What I Remember About You

Once we shot guns in the woods. I didn't really want to, being so damnably mild a person. My chief memory, when I stop and think about it, is sitting alone by the barn out in the back field, near the woods. That's my chief memory, from all those years and all those trips to your house. The dog followed me out there and I scratched his head as I sat there. It's funny, you know, to be best friends when you're just boys. We practically grew up together, were inseparable, and I'm quite certain that neither of us ever really particularly cared for the other. We hardly had a thing in common. We had fun, for sure. Friendship is funny when you're a kid. All those trips to your house, and all I remember was that you always wanted to do things that bothered my quiet sensibility and that I sat once by the barn with the dog. It was a warm day and everything was yellow. Must have been late summer or early fall. I had a hole in the sole of my shoe and a rock had gotten in there. I pulled off my shoe to remove it. I watched the wind move the trees. The dog didn't make a sound. That's what I remember about you. You weren't even there.

Hello, friends. How are you today?

Later. Love.

Immortality: The Inside Scoop

The hardest part of being immortal is the "being" part. After that, the second hardest part is the "immortal" part. We immortals have a saying, "The only certain things in the world are life and taxes." It isn't a very good saying, but it's a very, very, very old saying. (I coined it in 1974.) Did you know that 75% of the immortals in the world are gerontologists? It's true. The other 25% are morticians. The psychology of these choices is not difficult to interpret. "You'll have to excuse my mood," an immortal might say. "I'm suffering from a dearth of death. I'm afflicted with life, like a disease, but not a terminal one."

Some immortals, of course, love life. Immortals are no different than mortals (except, of course, for the whole "not dying" thing). Some are happy and some are morose and some are bipolar. I happen to be one of the more melancholy sort. We have a name for optimistic immortals, my friends and I. We call them "Gleetards." This does not bother them, of course. Bastards. They've even taken the name as a sort of badge of honor, printing it on T-shirts and such. Idiots.

Many mortals assume that we immortals would spend our time defying death. This is not true. Defying death leads to injury, and injury is a terrible thing for an immortal. Forever is a long time to suffer with an injury, and we only heal just barely enough to keep living. Limbs don't grow back. Scars don't go away. Sight and hearing and taste and touch never return. As you can imagine, therefore, we don't sign up for the army or jump out of airplanes. Mostly we play cards. We're all very good at cards.

Here's a story for you, to illustrate a bit of what it's like for us:

Once there was a rosebush that grew beside a mountain. The rosebush saw the mountain every day, from the time it first broke through the soil until the year of drought, many years later, when it finally succumbed to the elements and died. For the rosebush, the sun rose over the mountain late in the morning. Water ran down the mountain from the melting snows high above. The mountain blocked the most of brutal winds from the northeast. The rosebush loved the mountain like a brother, like a father, like a friend. As for the mountain, one day it thought it saw a rosebush near its feet, but it blinked once in its slow, mountainous way, and the rosebush was gone.

Immortality, current theory speculates, is a failure of the aging process, an inability to decay properly. Once we unlock the secrets of gerontology, we might find a cure. Until then? Poker anyone?

Hello, friends. How are you today?

Later. Love.

Software doesn't love you and Beck is a thetan.

"I've been drifting along in the same stale shoes, loose ends tying a noose in the back of my mind." - Beck, Jack-Ass.

The fundamental problem with software development, in case you were wondering, is that software cannot love you back. Some hardware - or so I've heard - can love you back, but it's not really love. It's just mechanical stimulation. That's what she said. We're all - the programmers I mean - working on this fundamental problem every day. It's too bad programmers have to try to teach software to love since programmers, many of them, hardly know how themselves. Would that poets could write the software. Until software learns to love us, it will never really be dependable for doing what we really need it to do. We really need it to take care of us, to do what's good for us and not what we ask. I once got a program to think I was entertaining, but it didn't love me. It said it loved me, but when I attached the debugger I could see that it didn't really love me, not like I loved it.

One of the fundamental things wrong with the universe is that Beck is a Scientologist. How is that possible?

Hello, friends. How are you today?

Later. Love.

On Peace

There was a clamor from the assembly. They were trying to figure out how to make peace, but that doesn't make any sense. Peace is easy. Just stop fighting. Don't want to stop fighting? Hate each other? Then why try for peace? Peace is not something you have to struggle to attain. It's what will happen naturally if you stop wanting to fight.

Some will point out, of course, that it's not that easy. "It's not that we want to fight, it's that we don't want to be oppressed." The ruling class always wants peace, right? "Just accept your lot in life. Stop fighting. Let's get along. Things are fine just the way they are."

I am reminded of a friend in the construction business who was doing work for a church. The minister was imploring my friend to be charitable when it came time to charge the church for his services. You know, because of god and all. "There ain't no groceries floatin' down from heaven over at my house, Reverend," my friend replied. He charged the church the full amount for his labor.

You can't expect the poor and oppressed to foot the bill. Do you really want peace, no matter the cost? What would you be willing to give for it?

Humanity is like an artist, I think, painting portraits and landscapes and still lifes with her own blood. If I knew how to contact her, I would commission her with all the resources at my disposal. "Please," I would say, "don't paint anything for me. Just stop painting." If I could, I hope I would pay whatever it cost.

Hello, friends. How are you today?

Later. Love.

What becomes, I wonder, of fellows like me?

Recently I've had spurts and fits of trying to take things more seriously. I can never sustain these efforts. In the end, I'm too much the ambivalent person, unable to sustain passion. I'm not driven by any fiery will. I'm not driven by deep desires. I'm not driven at all. I just do whatever's in front of me to do, or I don't. I think a lot, though little seems to come of it. What becomes, I wonder, of fellows like me?

This is why, I think, I would rather lose physical function as I age than lose mental acuity. Thinking is my only real hobby and activity. "If your mind just blanked out, though," someone said to me recently, "you wouldn't know. You'd be content because you wouldn't know what you lost." That sounds so awful to me. Just terrible. I've never sought oblivion in any of its various dispensable forms. I've never wanted to forget, to lose myself, to abandon my mind. It's just not me.

In someone else's idea of the future I can see myself jogging at 60, head as empty as my happy smile. It isn't me. It may be happy and fit, but it isn't me.

Hello, friends. Thanks.

Later. Love.

Picture Day

Now, a few pictures.

Kenny is Rayn's new boyfriend, her first ever. Aren't they cute? They are 13. Doesn't Kenny just sound like a 13-year-old boyfriend name? He will always sounds like someone's 13-year-old boyfriend until he starts going by Ken in college.

This is Susan and Rayn at Robyn's basketball game. I love this picture of Susan.

Here's Robyn playing post. She the one in white who isn't blurry, the awesome one.

Here is Robyn with her good friend Holly on New Year's eve. Isn't she beautiful?

Here's River listening to music and pondering how unimaginably cool he is.

I spent most of the evening on New Year's Eve talking to this buffalo rib roast. Bison are so delicious. Who knew?

All the girls on New Year's Eve decided to wear dresses (except Rayn, of course, who always does her own thing.) Here are Jasmine, Elaine, Price, Rayn, Robyn, Holly and Francie.

That's it for today.

Hello, friends. How are you today?

Later. Love.

His Pattern

What he said was, "I've never really been a respecter of persons, as it were." He had meant to say, "I just want to stay here with you, just the two of us. I want to make love to you several more times before the weekend is over. I don't want you to leave." That's what he had meant to say, but he had never been able to say real things of a certain ilk. It was a part of his pattern. She was talking excitedly about someone, some guy who was speaking at some meeting this evening. She was drying the shower water from her fair skin and talking excitedly about things that had nothing to do with him, about some meeting he was learning to hate.

"A respecter of persons?" she asked. "What does that mean?"

"Like experts and such," he answered, flushing red in his cheeks with dismay at his impending loss of her. "I don't believe in them."

"This guys isn't like that," she said, pulling her bra over her arms and the slipping straps down onto her shoulders. She adjusted everything into place and then turned for him to work the fastener. "This guy is really revolutionary. I think you'd like him."

A lump rose in his throat as he fumbled with the hooks, not wanting to clasp them together. "I don't know," he muttered. She was leaving and he wanted to scream. He was fairly certain he hated the revolutionary speaker intensely.

Later that afternoon, when she was gone and he was lying broken in his bed, he decided to hate her. This was the type of bullshit he always did to himself and to everyone who cared about him. He didn't have to do it, but it was his pattern. It was what he did. It would be years yet and he would have to travel thousands of miles before he met the crisis that would finally break his pattern of pointless hate. After that, so many years from now, when he stopped crying and began learning to live again, he would think of her. She would be the first person to come to his mind.

Hello, friends. How are you today?

Later. Love.

Regarding the Local Saber-toothed Cat Issue

Texas is overrun with saber-toothed cats, giant ones with fangs an average of twelve inches long. (Some say the black ones have longer ones, but I think that's a myth.) These cats have come back from the Stone Age to haunt the fertile pastures of Texas because time is all messed up everywhere. The Law of Time has been broken and now anything can come back from the past, even disco or variety shows. Everyone in Texas has been killed by the cats so far, including me. Twice. What are we going to do about it? We're going to be content with our lot in life. Time was we didn't have to worry about such things, but time is no more. As for me, I'm hoping to get a song and dance routine onto the Gong Show. Beatniks from out of history smoke hand-rolled cigarettes outside, sipping espresso, digging all the cats and daddies. Rain falls this morning, into the freezing air. Time was such sights would thrill me in arcane ways. Time will be again.

I had a conversation with love while putting away dishes. My back was sore from standing too long, stooping to lift and such. Kitchen timers screamed orders at my full hands, asking me for more and more. Love told me that hard water requires biannual replacement of rubber stoppers in toilet tanks. I made note of it and washed my hands to retrieve hot dinner from the oven, burning my knuckles in distraction as usual. Love told me to buy a new coffee maker. When I hit the sheets at night, I can hardly stay awake long enough to put the television on sleep for an hour. Sometimes I wake with the remote still in my hands. In the morning I stubbed my toe on love, sitting where I left it by the bookshelf instead of stowed behind the door in the closet, where love belongs.

I lied about the cats in the first paragraph. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "No, it's not a lie. It's a metaphor." Sometimes, however, a cat is just a cat is just a lie.

Hello, friends. How are you today?

Later. Love.