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What you give
..................Write it in the sand
................................What you receive
..........................................Carve it in granite.

Basically distrust comes from not trusting our parents. If parents cannot be trusted than no one can be trusted. And if someone were very good to me he couldn't be for real because then my parents would be proven even worse.

Can you imagine the parent at bedtime who whispers into her child's ear the hypnogogic suggestion that "no one will ever love you more than I do?"

How then, can this child grow up to trust and believe in the love of any other person?

Marriage is like fine wine...let it mature

Cleaning up notes from the backs of envelopes, matchbooks, and assorted notebooks.


I am a fairly educated person, but not a scholar, and as an educated layman I do quite a lot of reading. But when reading certain authors I run into a macaronic tendency to drag in untranslated quotations. This is an annoying carryover from the days when educated people were expected to know Latin, Greek and a few modern languages like French and German.

Aside from a smattering of Spanish I have none of these languages, and I daresay that few of my contemporaries do either. Its time to start translating quotations, if only in footnotes. Leaving them untranslated has become de trop.

***

In Paris, when the War was over, Albert Camus, having seen both Nazis and Communists close up, defied democracy as that regime created and sustained by those who know that they do not know everything.

James Russell Lowell

Democracy has the unpleasant "habit of making itself generally disagreeable by asking the Powers That Be at the most inconvenient moment whether they are the Powers that Ought to Be. "

***

Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody. She is said to lie at the bottom of a well, for the very reason, perhaps, that whoever looks down in search of her sees his own image at the bottom and is persuaded not only that he has seen the goddess, but that she is better looking than he had imagined.

/
People who give advice should be prepared to give some help.

***

It was in the old days--we tried to be mad in a sane world.
Now, how hard it is to be sane in a mad world.

/ from a note made to myself this summer in NYC:

Two very well appointed black women on the Madison Avenue bus. In the course of enthusiastic office gossip one remarks to the other: "He must respect me--I'm no house nigger."

Still, after so many years Blacks cannot escape the chains of blackness in America. (Or are they only perceived chains?) I wonder to myself why have the links have held, why have they not rusted away?

>

light and darkness
good and evil
matter and God
truth and falsehood

>
Iris Murdoch ----from The Jackson Dilemma

...An awareness of the tragedy of human life, good and evil, crime and punishment--remorse.

Surveying myself in the mirror, there was little light, the mirror old, I always wondered what I looked like. --This connects with who am I, what I am...I wonder why everyone does not feel like this, or is it a gift, free from my gods, an understanding of the only reality which is in truth that we are nothing. The mirror now shows me mostly my father, my brows thickening, perhaps...

/
/
/
Hares may pull the beards of dead lions.

"Postmodernism is about the reappropiation of the past, the making real of false consciousness, the revaluation of values. Until now we have been living in a false culture, surrounded by mass-produced kitsch....We borrow from the past, we have no history so we write it where it doesn't exist." Igor, Between East & West

imaginary realism-- imaginary truth.

ROBOTIC AYN RAND

Need advice about your latest megalomaniacal scheme? If only you could ask history's greatest megalomaniac, "novelist" and "philosopher" Ayn Rand. Too bad she's dead. But wait! In 1963, a secret cabal of Objectivists intent on taking over the Student Union at MIT built the first robotic Ayn Rand, and now you can own a Randroid® based on their original design. Comes with stock phrases such as "Morality ends where the gun begins," "Pity for the guilty is treason to the innocent," and "Nathaniel! Bring me another gin and tonic!"

Price: US$50,000 includes software*
*software tends to be rather buggy. For instance, your Randroid may oppose immigration, yet be an immigrant herself. She may oppose infidelity, yet cheat on her husband. She may espouse individuality, yet believe that only those who follow her are individuals. She may oppose the control of individuals by organizations, yet laud corporate power. These bugs can not be repaired.


Item Available at VillainSupply.com

The few who have everything-- the many who need something. Which side are you on? The few who are unwilling to give up anything? Or the deserving many? Know which side you are on. It is amazing, however, that many of the many take the side of the few. Have I said that the masses are asses?

Last night the little woman and I went to see the International Sport Latin Ballroom Dancing Competition at the Diplomat Hotel. This is not dancing as we knew it in the Catskills. The two Titos would be very surprized, shocked (!) to see this highly stylized, ritualistic, robotic dancing.

The "sport" in the title of the competition refers to the furious movements that partners make on the floor. The Tango's ritual seem to be carried over to every dance, Rhumba, Tango, Cha Cha, Cha. These partners really sweat during their performance and when they violently turn their heads the sweat sprays a circle around their bodies. Did I see a rainbow in the rain of persperation? Maybe. There was some agreeable grace in the slides of the Quick Step and perhaps in the Paso-Doble.

Fred Astaire? Neither present in body nor in spirit.

Saw Matchstick Men last night at Cinema Paradiso. Nicolas Cage is good as a phobia-addled con artist . His life goes awry when Cage's teenage daughter (Alison Lohman) shows up. Alison Lohman is very good as a 14 year old. B+


Look, I want a movie that's free of anecdote and cheap sentiment. This wasn't it. Most films today just can't take me over the wall and into the world of real emotions or beauty or honesty.

I can't breathe anymore. The sterile atmosphere around me has become irrespirable. I need beauty, art, emotion. That's my oxygen. And no one around me understands. People around here equate going to restuarants with living. They fail to know that they are engaged in a desperate search for life. But restuarants and TV aren't life. And talking about restaurants and food coupons isn't conversation either.

Gad.

PPPoE what is it? Why does it hate me? What did I do to make it disappear? How can I get it back? I always lose the one that I need the most. Come back PPPoE what ever you are.

Dick Robinson's American Standards by the Sea

Okay, back in Florida. Joined a gym. I don't know why--the building I live in has its own gym, and of course we have the pool, and the ocean as well, and that's swell.

But maybe I want to get away, meet some people, and the whirlpool at this gym is very hot--hotter than I am used to, and finally I feel satisfied by the heat in the whirlpool and the suana. No steamroom here though. My fellow gymnaughts seem very blue collar which is to be expected here, as the price is very very low. But the gym is spotless, the pool is big enough and there are more machines here than in the Ford Motor plant in Dearbourne.

Maria and I have to go through all the mail that was kept by the post office here. This is the kind of project that proves my need to procrastinate, so I guess it will be a few days (weeks?) before I complete the project.

Le Divorce : American girl lives in Paris with French artist husband who walks out her. Sister comes to help her through her misery, but instead becomes the mistress of an important French businessman-politician. B-

Soulmate Aug 2003


On a walk through Central Park, on a rainy afternoon, I had asked my closest friend whether he felt that the woman that he had been married to for the past twenty years was his soul mate.

At six-thirty the next morning I received a phone call. I picked up the receiver and listened to the plaintive voice of his wife. She was sixty and had gone off the hormones that had kept her flush free for the past seven years. …


……………..

I looked at her, soundly sleeping, hair plastered against her sweated forehead; even in sleep drops of perspiration could be seen on her cheek. She was sixty and had gone off the hormones that had kept her flush free for the past seven years.



He was his own weather system, now in storm cycle, and no, it wasn’t that romantic distant thunder that brings lovers together, but rather it was the startling, fearsome crack right overhead, the flash of it simultaneous with its sound, evidence of its dangerous closeness, and blinding, a cleansing smell of ozone wafting through the brilliantly lit trees, eidetic, drenched and gleaming, then disappearing back to black in the threatening darkness.



He beat her mercilessly, with the alcohol fueled fury of a man too short and too fat, and too slow for his lean and hungry ambition. She loved him anyway, craved him for it, as most women love the men who beat them.


“Uncertainty,” Robert Musil said, “is sometimes nothing more than mistrust of the usual certainties.”

Here's what I want to say about him:

He beat her mercilessly, with the alcohol fueled fury of a man too short for his ambition. She loved him anyway, craved him for it, as most women love the men who beat them.