Where's my damn Carmex at?

I always carry on my person a package of floss, a tub of Carmex (not the tube or the stick, those suck), and a nail clipper. I'm currently keeping an eye out for a suitable container that will make it possible for me to also carry a couple Tums as well.

In part I've built this mini medicine cabinet in my pants because, frankly, dudes have pockets. I could carry a lot more and still be comfortable, and who likes to waste space? But the addition of each specific component was caused by crises. I've been in situations where I need each of these thing and had to take a shot in the dark. Asking people if they, in the off chance, had a set of nail clippers on them (of course they didn't) convinced me that I guess I'd have to be that guy. Now at least I know if some poor schmuck out there decides to take a chance and ask if anyone has nail clippers I've got his back. Also I will never worry about hangnails again.

This is a mundane example of pretty important principle I hold. I believe that the fact that something occurs once means it could possibly happen again, and that this in fact changes the nature of the world. I want to live in a world where you can ask if anybody has a set of nail clippers on them and some dude will be like, "Yeah." By carrying the clippers on me, I become that dude and this becomes that world.

Better example. It was raining one day in high school, and the food court was about a hundred wet, rainy yards away from where all the kids were huddled under some overhangs. I had an umbrella, and a couple girls who I'd never seen before asked me if they could borrow it to go get some food. Against the advice of my friends I lent them the umbrella, because imagine: a world where you could ask a stranger to borrow his umbrella and he would be only too happy to help you out. And by the same token, a world where you could lend a stranger your umbrella and have it returned as a matter of course. They brought it back, naturally.

This is not a revolutionary philosophy to hold. In fact, I'm positive that I co-opted this concept essentially verbatim from some Buddhist or Hindu or New Age practice that I just can't remember at the moment. Ultimately this is just an activation of Gandhi's exhortion to "Be the change you want to see in the world," only with umbrellas and nail clippers instead of justice I guess.

But the justice thing holds! Who's never been in a situation where they need some justice but left theirs at home? Ung, I've got a lot of thoughts in my head right now that are more sophisticated and less trite than the ones I've shared in this post I promise, they're just not resolving into sentences. They have to do with mindfulness and right action and personal efficacy and stuff and it's all really good but you've gotta take my word for it, okay? Awesome, thanks.

Patrick:

Your hip-hop recommendations are right on the mark.

Deeply troubling

Reyanne thinks someone should explain this whole "Twilight" thing to her. Ready, GO! 11:38pm
- 3 Comments

Vanessa Johnson at 11:43pm November 18

agreed.

Devon Ian Peterson at 2:15am November 19

It's an immaturely-composed girl book that creates deep sympathy with the characters despite the poor writing and contrived narrative. It's also pretty regressive in terms of women's empowerment, which is the worst bit, because its major fanbase is young girls who are being socialized into idealizing a female character who actually begs to give up her life to be with a man (literally; she has to become a vampire) and is otherwise flat, shallow, and uninteresting.

Michelle Duncan at 4:08pm November 20

okay no....Reyanne listen to me!!! Twlight is amazing! I've only read the first book so far but i am about half way through the second book...its a love story and i think you should give reading it a try. i was skeptical about it at first but once i started reading it i couldn't put it down!! so get the book...Ready, GO!

You do just fine

Ugh, god, I'm stuck on a song again. It's really too good. There are so many great moments in it – particularly at the end of the verses. "I'm the homerun king 'fore his muscles grew," "so what's the use in even tryin'?" and "I say you were born up in the sky." Okay so only one of those is at the end of a verse but they're just delightful.

I had lunch today with a bunch of Arabs. A Tunisian, an Egyptian, two Syrians, and a Sudanese. Dunno man, I don't wanna get all T.E. Lawrence up in here but it was chill. I think it's time I got myself over there. I'ma just up and go one day. Save my money, work out an arrangement with some friends' family, and be like, "Alright guys, I'm off to Syria, catch you in a couple weeks." Oh man. That's incredibly tempting. Don't even give mom a chance to worry. Hah, even better, I could just go and then when they call I'd be like, "Can I call you back? I'm in Damascus right now."

It's kinda like, y'know? Like, my parents have never really worried about me and I've never done anything really stupid. I figure I get one free. One free chance to just go and be gone and then come back like, "Ta-da!"

Ugh, I've found flights from San Francisco to Damascus for $700-$800 round-trip. And that's without looking or talking to anyone who would know better. I'm threating it. Next winter maybe. People gonna turn around and suddenly I'm eating lamb and learning Syrian dialect from the cab driver. Or something.

Slip

Weather's been weird. Hot wind like a Santa Ana blowing in from where the houses are burning down south, turns the Bay inside-out, no one knows how to dress. Went bhangra dancing tonight with DPE after spending yesterday moping around my apartment and not eating.

I eventually did eat though.

Money came in today – paycheck six days late, but it's probably for the best – those were six days it wasn't being spent. To celebrate I bought Old Crow's most recent studio album and I'm glad I have headphones cause otherwise Charlie would probably get pretty annoyed with me.

Guess I'll head to bed after this song – arms around a pillow instead of a girl, listening to the city murmur outside rather than her breath in the room. Damn.

Poetitudes cont.

So what makes a poem "good?" Well, first it's important to understand what a poem is. Poetry does not communicate. Poetry does not transmit ideas or feelings about the world. Poetry is the very stuff of reality itself. Suggesting that poetry communicates feelings or ideas or experiences is like suggesting that I communicate Devon.

How does understanding this affect a poet and the process of writing? First, it (hopefully) releases the poem from the obligation of "telling" and allows it to "be." Therefore, the poet is freed from the preconceptions of what the poem is about or what it is for, and they can exercise their artistic skill in many more various directions.

Secondly, it is instructive about how to craft a poem. Poetry doesn't transmit ideas or feelings. If there are to be feelings or ideas aroused in the reader, the poem cannot serve as a device to pass them from the poet to the reader. The poem must create these feelings and ideas inside the reader, organically. There are a number of ways to do this, but the simplest, often the most effective, and also (I contend) the most fun, is through imagery.

A poem should explode in your mind when you read it. It should burst with colors and sounds and temperature and heartache. This turns the reader from someone reading about an experience to someone living it. Remember – there is no meaningful distinction between reality and poetry. How can it do this? It's important to avoid what I call "grey words" or "blank words." These are words and phrases that fail to light up the mind. They're only words, things like "confused" or "feeling whole" or "good music." These are telling words – they come from the poet, telling the reader about something, but giving them nothing to hold on to.

Images serve as hooks for the mind, making it pause and linger over a passage to savor it and see it. I know when I read a piece with a lot of blank words my eyes sort of slide down the poem and when I pause I realize I can't remember anything about it. It ends up being a real effort to read – and you don't want people to have to really try just to read your stuff. Maybe to analyze it, pick it apart, but they should be able to read it and feel it in their mind with relative ease.

"Put in more images." Almost every time someone asks me to read their stuff this is my advice. "Dump your ideas and put in images." Don't describe your feeling – search around in your mind or heart or wherever poetry comes from and find something that is your feeling. Something that will make you have that feeling every time you read it. Most of the time a poem can't be great on just images alone. But if it's chock full of them – good ones, of course – it can't possibly be terrible.

There are times to scale back and do other things, but whenever someone starts to feel dissatisfied with their work, or that they feel like it's not ringing true, or what have you, the first thing they should do is think, "Where do I have ideas without images? Why? Can I change that?" When they edit they need to be ready for their poem to change – the point is not for your ideas to be communicated, the point is for the poem to approach perfection.

There's plenty more I could talk about re: writing poetry and crafting poems, but that starts to get more particular and less accessible (sometimes). I'll probably end up writing more about it, but this is the big stuff.

On the Overcast Nights

On the overcast nights—
orange fog above the Bay,
sodium glow from streets
bent under the clouds
like a broken compass rose;
on the overcast nights—
when street people toss
and turn on their concrete or grass,
murmuring half-dreams
in the ruddy twilight;
on the overcast nights I
stare out on the cities
staining the sky with their
electrical fire, and I wonder
at the darkness that I
managed to clutch
with you, when we sat beneath our own
chemical glimmer,
and the yellowish mist
was burning.

Old Crow Interlude

Old Crow at the Fillmore. Willy Watson's hair is all long. Ketch Secor is a madman. It was an amazing show. Impossible to overstate how rad it was. They're so intense and energetic and fun on stage. Stuff came out in their songs that hadn't come out before. Very cool.

Very, very cool.

edit:

This was a dumb post because it was late at night and I was equally excited and exhausted. I explained it much better to Patrick just now.

[15:36] tyedyedtruth: So dude.
[15:36] tyedyedtruth: I saw Old Crow at the Fillmore, right?
[15:36] tyedyedtruth: Holy shit dude.
[15:37] SquidgeeMoot: Good time?
[15:37] tyedyedtruth: It was an unspeakably good show.
[15:38] tyedyedtruth: Ketch Secor, the fiddler, had a layer of dust built up under the bridge of his fiddle.
[15:38] tyedyedtruth: Which is what had become of his rosin.
[15:38] tyedyedtruth: o_O
[15:39] SquidgeeMoot: ....
[15:39] SquidgeeMoot: Wh-shit.
[15:39] SquidgeeMoot: Shit.
[15:39] SquidgeeMoot: Wow.
[15:39] tyedyedtruth: It was totally insane.
[15:39] tyedyedtruth: They were all totally drenched in sweat.
[15:39] tyedyedtruth: I mean, especially Ketch and Willie.
[15:40] tyedyedtruth: Cause they do most of the singing and also a better part of the gallivanting on stage.
[15:40] tyedyedtruth: But there was this insane feedback loop of energy from the crowd and the band.
[15:41] tyedyedtruth: I mean, okay.
[15:41] tyedyedtruth: I've read in several places that their early and continued success has been in large part fueled by the extensive tour schedule and excellent live shows.
[15:41] tyedyedtruth: But I had no idea.

Poetitudes

I recently had a brief but invigorating chat with my friend Sarah about poetry, which she's only just begun writing. Like most new poets, she writes when she overflows, spilling her Self all over the page. She asked me to read her stuff, and in the course of an elliptical conversation punctuated by a anecdote or two I described to her what I thought about poetry and how to "improve" it. Being both as qualified and unqualified as any other journeyman wordsmith, I've decided to share.

As I said, new poets are often exhilarated at the writing of poetry, of both releasing emotions and thoughts that are pent-up inside, and also at the prospect that what's been written might be read, communicated, and understood. This exhilaration in the act of expression is that "feeling" that people get. New poets – in a generalization that I should know better than to be making – are often less concerned with the poem itself than what it accomplishes, within themselves and in communication with others.

This is okay! Catharsis is a critical aspect of creation. However, most want to "improve" their work, and this is where my anecdote comes in.

One night, junior year of high school, I found myself up late at night, on the computer, listening to Ella Fitzgerald, and very much in the throes of that "feeling." I wrote with the swing of the music and the gyrations of my heart, and then went to bed. I had written about two stanzas, and finished the poem with two more the next day or so. I ended up putting it in the next fM. Magazine because I needed a piece, but I wasn't totally satisfied with it.

A few months later I needed something to submit to the Young Writers' Conference, and thought that that poem had some promise if I cleaned it up. So I sat down with it, thought about it, and fixed it up nicely – by removing the first two stanzas (saving one line and two or three images) and writing something entirely different. It would be difficult to overstate how much it improved.

I edited the poem by eliminating the bit that was written during the "inspiration," when I had that "feeling." This isn't to say that the inspiration was unimportant – it served to sort of find the poem and crack it open for me. I certainly released a lot of good feelings doing it, but the poem itself, if it wanted to be good, had to grow beyond that.

More later.

Yawn

It's exceedingly difficult to update a blog when your work schedule is 9 pm - 2 am. These are prime blogging hours. Blime hogging prours. Hime progging blours.

سأكتب أكثر غدا إن شاء الله

Man Arabic's so damn pretty.

Librarians

I somehow today found myself reading articles on Wired.com about child porn and pornography in general. This reminded me of something very important:

Librarians are awesome. Librarians are Great Americans. The librarian cliché of kindly, moderate, reasonable older women (a trope that is probably exceedingly annoying) is mixed with an implacable dedication to the right to privacy and the right to access information. Librarians are activists that people pay attention to. Librarian resistance to the PATRIOT Act is well-documented, often witty, and steadfast.

One of the articles I read dealt with a law that would require libraries to install porn-blocking software on their computers to receive federal funding. Part of the evidence was a black binder filled with printed color images from sites that could be potentially be accessed from libraries without the software. Part of the librarian's argument rested on the fact that books and magazines about sex were standard parts of their library collections anyway. To quote the article:

When the Justice Department's Zick showed her the black smut-binder and asked if those items would be included in the library's collection, Morgan replied that some of the images were "similar" to items already owned by Fort Vancouver.

Zick wondered: "What are they similar to?"

Replied Morgan, with no sign of a blush: "Different ways of having sex. The hot teen pussy one. We have books on lesbian sex that might be similar... We do have books that show sex acts similar to that."

Enough said.

Real Lives

There's this game called Real Lives put out by "Educational Simulations Products" that lets you experience, in painful and hilarious detail, the actual lives of people from around the world, based on statistical data available from all over. From the website:

Experience life as a:

• Peasant farmer in Bangladesh
• Factory worker in Brazil
• Policeman in Nigeria
• Lawyer in the United States
• Computer operator in Poland

or any of thousands more ...

Except that you won't ever be a lawyer in the United States because everyone in the world is poor and has a goiter. Insofar as this is intended to be an educational sim it's been successful. So far I have learned:

1) Illegal immigration is the best choice a poor person could make.
2) Political activism will always get you arrested.
3) Seriously everyone has a goiter.

Games that start you out somewhere impoverished (mostly China and India, for demographic reasons) all follow a similar pattern. You are born, you have some talent that's almost enough to make you a musician or artist or pro athlete, but not quite, so you go to trade school cause you failed to make it to college, then you graduate and work as a salesperson, get married, scrimp and save, and then illegally immigrate to Europe or the US or Japan. Also you will be crushingly unhappy (probably around 15% happiness) and have a goiter.

The best games are the ones that go beyond the sort of numbing tragedy of the poor and really plumb the depths of the human suffering. I played a game where I was born in some country in Africa (Namibia?) to a 16 year-old soldier father and a 15 year-old subsistence farmer mother. We all had goiters, and I was stunted. I was gifted with exceptional artistic ability, but then my father was killed in some war and my mother died of AIDS or cholera or something so I had to work as something like a manual laborer. I lived on meager food and in a makeshift dwelling, but then finally found a man that loved me and could support me. We got married and then I died. I think it was malaria.

The only places where people don't have goiters are America and Europe and Japan, but if you happen to be born there (wildly unlikely) you will most likely be dumb as a rock and go to trade school and work as a salesperson and then when you retire to some island nation at 65 you'll contract a liver parasite and die.

In all seriousness – and against my best efforts – I'd have to say this game has genuinely given me a bit of perspective on my (apparently) insanely privileged life. In contrast with the vast majority of the world (and my country), I'm in no danger of starvation, I'm going to university, and my life, in all likelihood, will not consist of a series of senseless tragedies and absurd loss. Also I don't have a fucking goiter.

EDIT:

0 years old
I was born a boy in a village in Ethiopia's Gonder Region, not far from the city of Gonder.

Happiness: 16
Intelligence: 86
Artistic: 61
Musical: 87
Athletic: 32
Strength: 32
Endurance: 56
Appearance: 52
Conscience: 52

My parents have named me Tulu. My surname is Sarsa-
Dengal. My mother, Leki-Ye-Delu, is 16 and my father, Kelile,
is 18. I have no brothers or sisters.

1 year old
Growth stunted from inadequate protein.

2 years old
Died in a fire.

Symptomatic Amorophilia

It's outrageous how emotionally refreshing it is to shout at someone and then tell them how much you love them you love them you love them.

God I've been drowning in string band music. It's amazing. I ache for it. When I'm truly enjoying music I appear to be experiencing a moderate-to-severe back spasm. When I'm truly in love I appear to be experiencing a bout of nausea and a migraine headache. When I'm truly blogging I appear to have Cotard's Syndrome.

Crow Medicine

I've written elsewhere that I believe that Old Crow Medicine Show, besides just being good, are in fact important. Of course, I'm certainly not immune to simply aggrandizing my preferences to make them appear founded in some greater truth and thereby elevate my tastes to something profound. Whatever the verdict on their importance, they are good music.

I first heard Old Crow on KPFA ("KPFB in Berkeley, KFCF in Fresno") in the late evening driving into town off highway 99 to see my girlfriend – 20 minutes on the road burning gas for a conversation about God and a donut. It was crossing the dry sandy river when I heard a song from the back of my mind, something I'd heard earlier but could never quite remember. KPFA has good music at night; it was "I Hear Them All," with some of the most sophisticated lyrics written, to say nothing of written by an old-time folk and bluegrass band.

I hear the sounds of tearing pages
And the roar of burning paper
All the crimes in acquisition
Turn to air and ash and vapor

* * *

Have you ever kissed in a riverbed, surrounded by weeds and pushed into coarse sand on the bottom? A dry river is such a good, dangerous place to kiss. They say fear sometimes feels like love; the reverse is certainly true. Passion is a panic, a giddy terrified rush to be consumed by something external, to lose your self – to die, in other words. A river is such a wonderful place to die with someone.

* * *

I haven't been writing much lately. My poetry has become too content with speaking to people who already know what it's saying – my dad, Patrick, fM. Magazine back in high school – or worse, talking to itself. I read that when Nietzsche got a typewriter he wrote differently, changing his style, even some of his thoughts; of course by that point he was already starting to go insane. I'm desperate to reach the poetic in Arabic – to read and to write and to submerge myself, be consumed by it. Passion is a suicide. You can hide from yourself in another language, but wouldn't that be fantastic? "Dad, I wrote this poem in Arabic, what do you think-oh-wait-you-can't-translate-poetry-sorry-Dad."

I think I'm good with a sort of wandering prose. Especially late at night, the time in the few hours just before dawn, known traditionally as the "blogging hour."

Non-halal

Classes might as well have never stopped. Things are all well and good – except that I'm most definitely not going to be able to take that Intro to Logic course I'd been planning on forcing my way into. The professor made it eminently clear that if you weren't enrolled for real by Friday, you weren't in the class. Considering I haven't even made it on the waitlist yet, I've decided to throw in that particular towel. So I spent the rest of the class thinking about pork.

Pulled Pork and BBQ Sauce
in a crock pot. Delicious, cheap and easy.

Pulled Pork

Ingredients

1 pork shoulder roast
1 onion
1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
Worcester sauce
brown sugar
salt
pepper

Quarter onion and sweat, then place in bottom of crock pot. Place roast in pot on top of onions, with the fat pack on the bottom. Add vinegar to pot, splashing some on the roast. Also add Worcester sauce, a bit less than the vinegar. Finally, pack roast liberally with brown sugar. Cover, and cook on low for 8 hours, flipping over halfway through if desired.

When finished, take pork from crock pot and put into new (large) bowl. Remove and discard excess fat, and shred with a pair of forks. Salt and pepper to taste (you will use lots and lots and lots of both).

Sauce

Ingredients

Drippings from crock pot
1/2-1/3 cup ketchup
1 tbsp liquid smoke
1.5 tbsp cornstarch
1 cup water
salt
other seasonings (cayenne pepper, garlic powder, etc.)

Take drippings from crock pot, ladle off excess fat and discard. Remove onions. Put remainder in saucepan and simmer. Add ketchup and liquid smoke, whisk into drippings. Mix cornstarch and water together well, and whisk into sauce. Reduce to desired consistency, then salt and season to taste. Don't season before the reduction, otherwise it will be over-seasoned when it's reduced. Use sauce to mix with pork for sandwiches or what have you.

This is in the pot right now. I've made more rudimentary pulled pork in the past, but I've decided to step it up a notch. I'm going to need to go down and pick up some more cornstarch seeing as I accidentally dropped mine out the (fourth story) window. Very exciting.

Bloggin' like my daddy taught me

Earlier today sitting at an auto race exposed in the blazing sun my dad made some remark about video games and I defended the medium because I speak my dad's language and most video game people don't, and also because it's really satisfying to disagree with someone who's shaped your thinking and guided your intellectual growth.

I remember the first time I disagreed with my dad. Well, I may or may not remember. I remember the feeling of disagreeing with him, but the topic escapes me. However, I do remember disagreeing with him about gay marriage, and I think I'm just gonna call that the first time, since who's gonna say otherwise?

Dad said (this was a few years ago, mind) that he was getting frustrated by all the hullabaloo about gay marriage, that it wasn't the right issue for the time. Setting this aside – since I didn't take issue with it at the time – he continued to argue that the issue of marriage wasn't what the gay movement was about anyway, and that for anyone from back in the day (70s-ish I guess), the idea that gaining the right to marry would be some kind of major milestone was totally off-base. That wasn't what the whole thing was about.

"That's totally ridiculous, Dad. Most people aren't in 'Movements.' Most people are boring – they want to get a good job, find someone nice, get married, maybe have kids. Some of these people are gay. Movements are fine, whatever, but this isn't about a 'movement.'"

Bear in mind this is reconstructed and phrased in my current voice – I'm pretty sure I had different speech patterns when we had this discussion.

Dad likes to take bold stances, which I do as well and which I probably got from him. He supported the Soviet Union's communist experiment, and unlike every other semi-communist out there he doesn't immediately cave the instant you bring up Stalin, or take the coward's way out by saying "If Trotsky had won out it would have been better" or whatever intellectually-dishonest backtracks people use. In fact, the only thing he regularly criticizes the Soviets for was their treatment of art and artists – but that's just his way.

This has gotten tangential. He took a bold stance on gay marriage because bold stances surprise people and make them think. I thought, and I disagreed with him. I like disagreeing with Dad because it means I'm not a parrot, even though I by and large share his views; because he's a lot older than me and can argue much more effectively than most I've met; and because I like to surprise him and make him think.

But really Dad? "Gay movement" are you serious? Come on.

Posting with my eyes closed

I can't focus my eyes.

I started noticing it about an hour ago and begged out of a couple of IM conversations to give them a rest. It's really hard to do anything while you're resting your eyes. You can't read a book or do a puzzle or play a game. What you can do, it turns out, is turn on music, turn off all of the lights but one, and lay on the unfolded futon couch with your head buried in a hood and your arms scrunched up beneath you. Also, it turns out this is over all pretty boring.

So I'm here, making my first blogpost with my eyes closed, glancing occasionally if I think I've made a typo, but for the most part blind typing. It feels different than regular typing.

Okay, I've opened my eyes now. They seem to be focusing — wait now they're closed again. I wish they would just get rested and be done with it. Stream-of-consciousness lol.

I'm too self-conscious to blog.