Oakland, My Oakland

Oakland, My Oakland, originally uploaded by itchy biscuit.

A hoop full of blue sky
Held high over the green and yellow trees
By the sturdiest, polished steel
Brand new from the catalog
And useless without the plywood and nails
And duct tape and determination
Somebody decided to leave behind

Be liberal in your quest for evidence

and miserly with your trust in …  that other thing that more often misleads than rewards…

I went to the A’s opening day awhile back.  I left convinced that my anti-terrorist plan to promote the distant constituent project is a must-do for this coming year.  I also noted:

you can’t watch every pitch, so you never know when you’re going to miss a crucial moment.  It’s a game of inches, & there’s a mile of agonizing anticipation between “looks like the game’s over” & the actual, final out.

Advice for the power hungry

1.  Count your friends before you make enemies.

2.  Ask more questions than you give answers.

3.  Know your own job best.

4.  Feign attentive disinterest in your objectives, until they are within your grasp.

5.  Naked ambition is, itself, a persuasive argument, but no one wants to watch you disrobe.

If you’re gonna have an evil cat, don’t name it “Forgiveness.”

The smoothies were good.  Yeah, how was your day?  Yeah, mine was fine.  Driving home.  All of the cross streets turned to schools, and they stood on stage, purple trophies were what they gave.  You held my hand.  You asked me why I wanted to stay.  “But there’s no way to believe all the things I don’t say to you.”–Jim Infantino

So one barnacle says to another,

“I could do your job if I wanted.”  And the other barnacle says, “I could have your job just for you saying that!”  And the one barnacle says, “It’s not my problem.  Think of the children.”  The other barnacle squints, and works extra hours on the weekend, and for want of a nail the phalanx of spartans had their legs cut out from under them.

I too, I wrote…

…have felt the odd equivocation that arises from operating withing the constraints of syllabic paucity.  Meanwhile, by which I mean earlier, I considered the joint problems of prying the French snail out of its shell, and inviting the mistrustful Germans to parley in a manner so as to allay my own misgivings.

“Everybody needs money! That’s why they call it money!”

That’s a David Mamet line, delivered by Danny Devito in the movie Heist.

Tell you what, how about you go into that McDonald’s bathroom and spend 3 hours cleaning it.  In exchange, I’ll give you a brand new CD from Tower Records.

Not interested?  But the market says these two things are about equivalent–they each sell for roughly 15$.

That’s the power of money–its action as an exchange medium allows us to compare values across the whole spectrum of our society.   The comparisons may be flawed, warped, crude, or otherwise shadowy forms lit up on the wall of the cave, but if it weren’t for money, we wouldn’t be able to have the conversation at all.

Would we?

Towards a tentative meta-ethics

1. Do as thou wilt and suffer the consequences is the only law of human affairs that carries scientific weight comparable to the law of gravity.
2. Amoral, hypocritical, and other unprincipled means may be privately justified by ends, if the end is successfully achieved, and the integrity of the violated principle is publicly preserved.
3. Harm reduction policies should be introduced and implemented in ways that first do no further harm.
4. Sustainable systems can be built through unsustainable measures.
5. All differences between people are reconcilable given the proper time, circumstance, strategy, and effort. 
6. Not all people are redeemable.
7. Deep down at heart, people are stupid.
8. Everyone can surpass what is bred in the bone.
9. No one can overcome what was warped in the womb.
10. A clear mind, a steady heart, and human fellowship through a life in struggle is all we can ask.
11. We are all distant constituents of each other’s behavior.
12. There are no universal etics.
13. “We like to stand on one thing and look at another.”
14. “Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.”
15. There is something that moves behind the shapes and shadows that we see and know, and it doesn’t matter what you think it is or how you celebrate it in the good times and negotiate with it in the bad times, as long as what you do works for you.
16. Sometimes disengagement is the best rebuttal. (“To deny a thought is to engage a thought.”)
17. Anything is possible, and somethings actually happen
18. Anything can happen, and given enough iterations shifting across the gates of probability, it will.
19. We chose to be born into this broken world, living under the gypsy curse; and we are not the first to feel this way, nor are we likely to be the last.
20. Always stack three chairs at the end of a meeting.
21. You get just as wet by running when it rains as you do by walking; you do get out of the cold quicker but your posture probably suffers.
22. We are pattern recognition processes that have achieved sufficient abstract cognitive power as to treat our own perceptive processes as patterns.
23. Dreams, mostly, are the firings of uncompleted cognitive self-programs performed through the day, interpreted through story at the moment of consciousness.

Oatmeal or cookie dough?

Last full day in the wide open house
Chairs to move back and avacodo stains from dishes

Cards to make and posters to take down
And so many packets and web addresses
And boxes of color and typeface to set and order
And order in sets

Oh, and about 2000 4-color stories to note and bag and board and band
and then forget until it’s time to waste away and read again.

The leaves are many shades of green

Go to a meeting, try vegan, move the boxes, call in sick, clear out the car, kill some spiders, do the dishes, throw out clothes, write a blog, keep a food diary, watch I Heart Huckabees, tell a joke, fashion a vision for a five year plan, cry about it, cut the heads off dead flowers in the backyard, explore the attic…

Why do the quandry days always accompany a gray sky?