My longtime readers remember when I used to show them art. Not mine, but links to other works that pleased me. It's been quite a while since I've done so. Six months? Maybe more. Over the fall, during the period of continual hard drive crashes, I lost all my links and files in the first one.

Tonight I sit quietly, listening to music and the sound of obnoxious cars outside my window (local drug dealers cruising up and down the intersection), I thought of finally researching and recompiling my files. Or some semblance of them.

Wondering which artist to seek out first, a painting came to mind. And then another.

300 years separate the painters Juan Sanchez Cotan (Spanish, 1560-1627) and Giorgio Morandi (Italian, 1890-1964). Two unique artists, and yet, not so different. Both are still life painters. It may be my mood that brought them to mind.

Look at Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber by Cotan and Blue Vase by Morandi.

I love the austerity. Within what may appear as barrenness, lay a whole world, rich and filled of substance. These two paintings remind me that isolation and quiet, or even nothingness, is a space of resonance. Sufficient and teeming.

This is a good thing for me to remember.

Today Mark Morford goes off on a different vein in Stray Dogs Deserve Back Rubs.

I made it to work this morning, and forced myself to be there until certain things were complete, which meant for a 10 hour day. But now I'm at Cafe Septieme where I can relax. After being home sick for 5 days, I couldn't spend another night indoors. I still feel like crap but had to get out of the damned house. Tomorrow is my regular day off and Monday is a holiday, so I have a few more days to get better.

Sir should be meeting me here in a bit. We chatted via AIM a few minutes ago, and he wanted to join me for a drink.

Okay, onto serious stuff.
I've written 3 entries and they are still sitting on my desktop. You know those insights I alluded to a little while ago? I can't seem to get them out right now. It feels so fucking intimate. Maybe it's just not time to share. Honestly, I'm in the throes of dealing with the awareness and therefore it's all about feelings and not much in the way of intellectual stuff. I haven't a clue how to articulate it. And I don't know if I have the courage.

Today I mentioned that to the shrink. He assured me that I would be sharing with you. Huh. You'd think this blog has become his domain. :-)

Anyway, in addition to being sick, the feelings I'm immersed in and struggling with are those of invisibility and extreme loneliness. It's all heightened a hundredfold. Today there's a sense of despair.

In the midst of this, I've been checking the Seattle Academy of Fine Art website. 4 years ago I took a weeklong drawing workshop for advanced artists. I love this place and would like to begin their open figure drawing studios. I can see myself drawing and painting again. At the same time, the chasm is wide. How the hell am I going to get to the other side?

My horoscope this week spoke of nurturing talent I've neglected. Yeah...

I'm grieving. I'm fiercely grieving the aloneness, invisibility and lack of home that I felt as a child. I'm grieving the fact that I'm 45 and all these years feel wasted. Imagine if I wasn't so broken inside, and had the security and suredness to pursue my passion. Where would I be now? What would I be painting? Who would I be?

I know that dwelling in 'what if's' can be a futile task. But I believe it's the perpetual wallowing in 'what if's' that is pointless. I've never before mourned what I could have been. So it's time. And it fucking hurts.

I'm angry at my parents. I'm angry that I never felt I truly fit in. I'm angry at my continual 'outsider' state of being. I'm angry at the isolation and freakiness I felt as a child. Childhood is NOT the time to feel freaky. Kids need to feel loved, wanted, secure and safe. Then and only then, can they become the brilliant freaks they were meant to be as adults. Shit.

Bloody cheery entry, isn't it?

Yeah...still sick. The asthma is under control and my cold is progressing nicely. It has gone from my head and is making a nest in my chest.

I still have stuff I want to share with you, but it needs to wait until I'm clearer. In the meantime, I'll give you Mark Morford:

"God fails. Earth fails. Man fails. The disaster, it just is. We stare at it and see the devastation and feel a deep relief that we were spared this time because we know, deep down, it could have very easily happened to us.

And we blink hard and we are touched on some primitive level, some ancient chthonic instinct that hearkens us back to the beginnings of time, before there was a person on the planet to conceive of a god who would gently explain it all away as a grand master plan and you just have faith and stop your worrying there there now. Right."

Read Morford's latest column, God Does Not Cause Tsunami.

Check out my horoscope from Rob Brezsny:

Capricorn:
"One of the strongest characteristics of genius is the power of lighting its own fire," wrote essayist John W. Foster. While you may not be a genius in the same way that Albert Einstein or Emily Dickinson were, Capricorn, I believe that one of your special talents deserves the title. The only problem is, you haven't consistently given that talent the nurturing it needs to flourish. Would you consider correcting this neglect in the coming weeks? No later than March 1, I hope you will put into action a disciplined, long-term plan to create a metaphorical greenhouse for this natural endowment of yours."

Considering I'm dealing with my lack of painting in therapy...it's timely.

In case you aren't a capricorn, here's your horoscope.

I've got to get these thoughts out otherwise I'll just bust. I am still sick and so you are going to get snippets.
And, even though I've reread the following 3 times, I'm not editing anymore. I'm tired. What you see is what you get.

Oh yeah...feel free to comment or email if you desire. It's cool.

Hmmm...where to start.

Okay, the boring stuff first.
Guess what? Asthma. I've got asthma. Ugh. When I was a teenager, my asthma would only kick in when I was with cats.
Two years ago, although I wasn't aware of it for almost a year, I had an apartment filled with black mold. I developed asthma that wouldn't even cease with an albuterol inhaler. My fabulous doc gave me a 16 day 'script for Prednisone and told me I had that many days to find a new living space.

Saturday, my cold began. Last night, while in bed, I couldn't breathe. I thought the cold had settled in my chest rather quickly. This afternoon, at the shrink's, I seriously couldn't breathe. Every 3 or 4 words left me gasping for air. After the shrink I buzzed to my doc, hoping she could see me. She walked in.
"I'm really sick and didn't know where to go, so I came here" was uttered between gulps of air.
"Awww...." She smiled.
We talked, she gave me another 'script for prednisone to only use at the first sign of intense asthma. From there my inhaler should work. It did. 24 hours of working for breath really takes it out of you.

Doc gets me. I've said it before and I'll say it again. I love my doc. She said that because I live my life walking on the edge of society and choose to delve into dark spaces, she wants to keep me healthy. A few times over the last year she said she felt I was courageous and admired that. Yes, good for my ego. It's important to have your doctor on your side.

This is where I get stuck. What do I blab about next?

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Okay, next thing. A few people have sent me articles on Susan Sontag and the silence around her sexuality. Yeah, it's annoying. More than that but I haven't been able to dwell on it. I think it's for the same reason I can't spend time thinking about the immense, mammoth disaster in Indonesia. Each, and I'm not comparing them, are so big in very different ways. I know I have loads of feelings around them and no energy to indulge in extra thoughts.

But, here is a quickie about coming out. I'm not specifically speaking about Sontag here, yet about coming out in general.

Regardless of my private feelings around coming out, I will wholeheartedly support someone's decision to come out or not. It is not my place to judge them because I am not living their life, with their history and baggage.
I don't believe it's anyone's business. Yes, I know that if everyone who is queer publicly came out, I think we'd have an easier time of it. But I don't believe in outing.

Now...when someone has come out and the press keeps quiet about that fact...it seriously pisses me off. In a sense, it's an example of how the media rewrites history by creating a fantasy, concocted with a lie of omission.

Or...once someone has passed away, I don't see any problem with outing them.

That's that for now.

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Here's an update on my art. Guess what I'm doing? Nope. I still can't paint. But last week I pulled out a few of my large art books. I love art books, don't you? They are some of my cherished possessions. Anyway, AE was here, hanging out. While he was checking his email, I pulled out two books. Big, thick, fat hard-covered books. One is about Picasso's portraits. The other is a large book from the exhibit at the Met (I think a few years back). It's Leonardo's drawings. I wanted to see the show really bad and couldn't So I did the next best thing. Ordered the book.

In my little sketchbook I began doing pencil copies of Picasso and Leonardo's drawings. Small sketches. Yes, because it's art it is emotional. According to the shrink, I'm tricking my psyche by thinking it's only a technical exercise. This allows me to get my feet wet again by committing myself to a level of intimacy that I can handle right now. I'll agree. What I love about it is once again, my body and spirit are showing me how a part of me is really looking out for me. Quite pretty.

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While on the topic of art, due to the writings of a fellow blogger (thanks Pete!), I've been giving a lot of thought to angst, dark times, change and the creative process. Friday and Saturday I spent a little time researching creativity and depression. There is a thought floating out there that embraces the mad genius, the mad artist stereotype. Maybe we have to be totally whacked to paint, write, compose etc.
I read articles on how clinical depression or even a bipolar disorder go hand in hand with creativity. Personally, it doesn't sit well with me. Sure, it can happen in some. But I don't believe in a blanket statement.

Then I found other articles where people are misdiagnosed. Because many creative people have an increased level of sensitivity and intensity they are incorrectly labeled. Their depression may in fact be situational. Imagine the individual who's told he's crazy because of his divergent thinking or view of the world. Imagine the child who desires to become an artist and yet can't because it's not practical, doesn't offer insurance or retirement plans and has nothing to do with our society's idea of a successful life. If we continually find ourselves in situations that hamper instead of support our passions and creativity, that sure as hell can lead to depression and in extreme cases, either passive or active suicide. Although someone is strong of character, if highly sensitive, it takes very little to wound that person.

Now even when we finally somehow grab our gutts and break through into the life we envision for ourselves, we may have years upon years of old voices to deal with. Ha...not like I'm talking from experience.

Right.

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And I suppose this leads me into some insights. Or not. Sigh...

I really want to share, and truly promise I will. But I'm bushed, my head began pounding again and it will have to wait. It should also be easier considering I've done an inital dump.

I will leave you with a couple short revealing things. First, I'm shy. And I'm not shy. I just realized this morning that I'm only shy when I'm in a space where I feel I fit, yet feel intimidated by the people gathered. Like....I really, truly want them to like me and so I end up feeling like a dork.
I'm not shy in a new space when I don't care. Or, if the booze is flowing. :-)

Number two. I need to learn to be freer and goofier. I tend to take things so seriously, including statements meant as jokes. At work, it must happen at least once a day. It really doesn't matter if I know and love the people or not. I believe I'm too serious for my own good.

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I think that's enough for tonight. It's time for my pillows and comforters.

Still sick.

I never made it to Septieme's yesterday. And we can forget about the art party I was invited to. A one block walk to get coffee pretty much nixed those thoughts. I returned home and just wanted to sleep.

Today I'm at work. My coworkers took one look at me and ordered I go home. My stubborness kicked in. Kinda. I need to speak with another coworker and therefore am not leaving until after he arrives. Then yes, it's home to bed.

I hate being sick.

snow...


...SNOW!!!!

I love, love, love waking to a freshly white covered earth. What I love even more is when the sky is an infinite plane of flat gray and it's still snowing. The icing on the cake is when it happens on a weekend. You can smell the collective breath of calmness where the daily freneticism seems to cease. Silence in the air.

I love it.

Today is it.

Yeah, I still have my cold. The nonstop nose runniness stopped during the night. I'm kinda wiped due to waking every few hours. Working on a couple loads of laundry. Curled up in my sweats. Drinking a vat of ginger peach tea. It has just enough caffeine to ward off a withdrawal headache.

Although sick, I am considering popping into Cafe Septieme this afternoon with my laptop. It may make for a cozy afternoon. Or not. I'll play it by ear. There's plenty of food in the house, and once I'm further awake I will walk to the corner for a latter. Maybe gingerbread spice latte?

It's a quiet day.

I'm not sure how coherent this entry will be. I have a fucking, nasty cold. It's the kind that begins out of the blue with sneezing fits and a nose that starts to run. This in turn leads to a fully stuffed up head and a nose that won't stop running.

Today, Auxugen and I went to check out apartments for him. Afterward it was off to the Harvard Exit Theater for Pedro Almodovar's Bad Education. Brilliant film. I don't have more words than that cuz, well....a stuffed up, foggy head. Remember? Actually my cold reared its ugly head as I sat down in the theater. The sneezing began when the film began. In spite of that, I thoroughly enjoyed this flick.

I'm now sipping on Cold Care PM tea from Traditional Medicinals. If it can make my nose stop for a bit, I'd feel a tad better.

Since the post I wrote on Wednesday...I'm still feeling...well...bleh. Actually, the last few days have seen me feeling intensely invisible. It's nothing that anyone can help with, so honestly, don't bother trying. This isn't a passive way of seeking connection. It's just where I am right now. I don't want any comments or emails with advice. In this particular moment, it will annoy instead of help.

Intellectually, I understand what's going on and what's really real. But my heart has to get in sync with my head, and it just ain't happening right now. No one other than myself can get me through this piece. And I'm doing all I can. It's simply a matter of time. Wade through the muck.

When I get do get together with people, like my birthday night or today, I feel detachment. Not from them, but separated from myself. It's strange and at the same time feels like a little resting spot from what is happening inside. So that's what's up with that.

From the Village Voice, a good read about Susan Sontag.

Susan Sontag (1933-2004)
Remembering the voice of moral responsibility—and unembarrassed hedonism
-by Gary Indiana, January 4, 2005

Like Maria Callas's voice, Susan Sontag's mind, to borrow a phrase from the great filmmaker Werner Schroeter (one of countless underappreciated artists Sontag championed), was "a comet passing once in a hundred years." In a dauntingly, often viciously anti-intellectual society, Sontag made being an intellectual attractive.

She was the indispensible voice of moral responsibility, perceptual clarity, passionate (and passionately reasonable) advocacy: for aesthetic pleasure, for social justice, for unembarrassed hedonism, for life against death. Sontag took it as a given that our duty as sentient beings is to rescue the world. She knew that empathy can change history.

She set the bar of skepticism as high as it would go. Allergic to received ideas and their hypnotic blandishments, she was often startled to discover how devalued the ethical sense, and the courage to exercise it, had become in American consumer culture.

Sontag had impeccable instincts for saying and doing what needed to be said and done while too many others scrambled for the safety of consensus. Hence the uproar when she declared, at the height of Solidarity's epochal crisis in 1982, that "communism . . . is fascism with a human face." Hence also the depressingly rote indignation mobilized against her response to a New Yorker survey about the 9-11 attacks, published on September 24, 2001—a survey that most respondents used to promote themselves, their latest books, the depth of their own "feelings."

Of course it was, and still is, easier for many Americans to pretend the events of 9-11 were inexplicable eruptions of violence against American virtuousness, perpetrated by people who "hate us for our freedoms." Indeed, the habitual assertion of the American way of life's superiority is probably what persuades supposedly serious writers to weigh in on a civil catastrophe by promoting their own narrow interests, dropping in news of their current travel itineraries, their marriages, their kids—oh, and how shaken they were by the tragic events.

It takes unusual bravery to cite, in a large media venue, cause and effect as operant elements in a man-made emergency—especially when the programmed pieties and entrenched denial mechanisms of society run in the opposite direction.

Sontag drew her own better-than-well-informed conclusions about what happened on 9-11. The habit of independent thought has so little currency in 21st-century America that dissent is the last thing most Americans consider worth protecting.

What Jean Genet referred to as "the far Right and its imbecilic mythology" have already been activated in several "obituary" pieces, including one fulminating, hateful dismissal of Sontag's entire lifework. It's lowering to realize how terminally bitter the American right really is: Even in its current triumphal micro-epoch, it needs to demonize somebody.

Sontag's political "lapses," cited even in sympathetic articles, are in fact the public moments one should most admire her for. She was usually right, and when she hadn't been, she said so. It's customary these days to damn people for "inconsistency," as if it's somehow virtuous to persist forever in being wrong. Sontag interrogated her own ideas with merciless rigor, and when she discovered they no longer applied, or were defectively inadequate or just plain bad, she never hesitated to change her mind in public.

Certainly she felt the same revulsion and horror at the atrocity of 9-11 that any New Yorker, any citizen of the world, did. But she also had the moral scruple to connect the attacks to generally untelevised, lethal American actions abroad, to the indiscriminate carnage that has typified both state policy and terrorist violence in the new century. Where, exactly, does the difference lie?

Unlike our government's loudest warmongers and their media cheerleaders, Sontag put her own life on the line, many times, in defense of her principles—in Israel during the Six Day War, in Hanoi during the American bombardment, in Sarajevo throughout much of the conflict there. Like Genet, she was willing to go anywhere, at a moment's notice, out of solidarity with people on the receiving end of contemporary barbarism.

The range of her talents and interests was no less impressive than her moral instincts. She once told me that "every good book is worth reading at least once" (in her case, it was usually at least twice). Her appetite for cultural provender—opera, avant-garde theater, film, dance, travel, historical inquiry, cuisine of any kind, architecture, the history of ideas—was inexhaustible. If you told her about something she didn't know, she soon knew more about it than you did. She routinely went directly from a museum to a screening, then to a concert; and if there was a kung fu movie playing somewhere after all that, off she went, whether you were still ambulatory or not.

I know I'm in a minority, but I remain a fan of Sontag's early novels The Benefactor and Death Kit—Sontag herself cared little for them in later years. Not enough people have seen the films she directed: Duet for Cannibals and Brother Carl in Sweden, Promised Lands in Israel, Unguided Tour in Venice. These early and middle works could be considered noble experiments, operating on a high level of fluency and daring.

None of these works are as sumptuously realized as her best essays, or her later novels The Volcano Lover and In America. At times, her reverence for the European modernists who influenced her eclipses her own seldom mentioned, American gift for absurdist black humor. (Death Kit has anything but a reputation for hilarity, but it's one of the most darkly funny narratives written in America during the Vietnam War.) Many of Sontag's essays, for that matter, have threads of Firbankian whimsy and manic satire running through them—and no, I'm not referring to "Notes on Camp."

There's no way to summarize her restless cultural itinerary and her immense services to "the republic of letters" in the space of an obituary. What I can speak of, here, again, is the indelible example she set as a moral being, citizen, and writer. She sedulously distinguished between the merely personal and the insights personal experience generated. "I" appears less frequently in her writings than in those of any other significant American writer I can think of. If Sontag was less averse, in recent times, to saying "I," it could be that she at last realized she'd earned the authority for "I" to mean more, coming from her, than it does coming from most people. (In America, "I" isn't simply a pronoun, but a way of life.)

It's my guess that growing up in Arizona and Southern California, among people who placed no special value on intelligence and none at all on its cultivation, Sontag's first line of defense against being hurt by other people was the same thing (aside from physical beauty) that distinguished her from ordinary people—that awesome intellect. She could be ferociously assertive, and at times even hurtful, without at all realizing the tremendous effect she had on people. In some ways, like any American intellectual, she often felt slighted or underappreciated, even when people were actually paying keen attention to her.

Her personal magnetism was legendary. Even in later times, she had the glamour of a film star. She almost never wore makeup (though she did, finally, find a shade of lipstick she could stand), and usually wore black slacks, black sweaters, and sometimes a black leather jacket, though occasionally the jacket would be brown. She had the body language of a young person: She once explained to me that people get old when they started acting like old people.

I never heard her say a dumb word, even in moments of evident distress. She did, from time to time, do things that seemed quite odd, but then, who doesn't? Her will to keep experiencing, learning, and feeling "the old emotions"—and, sometimes, to make herself empty, restock her interiority, break with old ideas—came with a project of self-transcendence that Sontag shouldered, like Sisyphus's stone, cheerfully, "with fervor."

She once told Dick Cavett, after the first of her struggles with cancer, that she didn't find her own illness interesting. She stipulated that it was moving to her, but not interesting. To be interesting, experience has to yield a harvest of ideas, which her illness certainly did—but she communicated them in a form useful to others in ways a conventional memoir couldn't be. (To be useful, one has to reach others on the level of thought, not only feeling—though the two are inseparable.)

In light of her own illness, she set about removing the stigma then attached to cancer, dismantling the punitive myths this fearsome illness generated at the time. We don't look at illness in the same way we did before Illness as Metaphor and the widespread examination of our relationship to medicine that it triggered.

Her detachment in this regard was a powerful asset. Many years ago, I went with her one morning to her radiologist. The radiologist had gotten back some complicated X-rays and wanted to discuss them. On the way uptown, Susan was incredibly composed, long resigned to hyper-vigilance as the price of staying alive.

At the clinic, she disappeared into the doctor's office for a worryingly long time. When she came out, finally, she was laughing.

"She put the X-rays up," Susan told me, "and said, 'This really doesn't look good.' So I looked them over, and thought about it. Then I said, 'You're right. These don't look good. But you know something, these aren't my X-rays.' "

They weren't her X-rays. Her most recent procedure had left a temporary, subcutaneous line of staple sutures running from her throat to her abdomen. The tiny metal clamps she knew were there would have glowed on an X-ray.

For some reason this was the first memory that flashed to mind when the sad news came that she was gone.

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I have to tout a new blog. Feeding Frenzy, the catering company I periodically work with, has a food journal now!

Daniel, the owner of Feeding Frenzy is passionate about food and writing. He does both well. Check it out in his new entry on cheeses.

"Maybe stupid is too strong a word.

Maybe it's more like willful ignorance. More like intentional blindness. More like a calm and conscious denial in the face of a staggering stack of overwhelming facts that if you looked at for even one minute would prove that land tanks are some of the most overrated and silly and harmful and utterly pointless vehicles on the planet.

OK, maybe stupid is the right word."

That's Mark Morford latest column, sounding off in Do SUVs Make You Stupid?

I need to run out the door in 15 minutes but wanted to thank everyone who sent nice messages. Thank you all!

The Bear and wonderboy are taking me out for dinner tonight. We are dining at the Kingfish Cafe. It's only 6 blocks from my apartment...and I've always heard wonderful things about the food, the ambience, the fried chicken and the coconut cake. There are always large groups of people lined outside the door waiting for seating at this little corner restaurant. I am looking forward to this seeing I am a virgin Kingfish person.

It's been an interesting day and hope to write about it when I return.

see you soon...

Tomorrow's my birthday. I'm not really old. Although I'll only be 45, I feel fucking old this year. We can blame it on therapy. I mean...I gotta blame it on something, right?

The last month has seen times of intense loneliness, despair and loss. The loss feeling is strange because it's not as if I've lost people or material goods. I feel I've lost a sense of myself. The self that I knew. And I haven't a clue who the new me is. Surreal.

Imagine heading down a path which turns into a tunnel. You know it opens up into something else. But I've taken enough curves in this damned tunnel that there isn't any light left from the opening where I entered. I can't see the hand in front of my face. I can't see a speck of light from the exit. All I know is that there are walls on either side of me and as long as I keep walking forward, I'll get to the end.

I really haven't written about this because I wasn't sure how.

All of a sudden, for the first time in years, my larger blood family (uncles, aunts, cousins) have been writing and emailing me. They all want to know how I'm doing. When I lived on the east coast I used to see them at least once a year. But I haven't seen them once since I've moved to Seattle over six years ago.

How do I begin to tell this large french canadian very catholic family that I'm pissed about the election? How do I tell them that my life consists of being in the moment, which includes massive doses of sexuality in all its forms? How do I explain that when I was taught that self pleasure is sinful I was actually having my spirituality squelched?

Here I am. I work for a queer organization. I've come out to everyone in my life, and yet I can't seem to do it with them.

Well...seeing they've all generously given me their email addresses, I started a letter to the ones who have expressed curiousity about my life. No, they don't need to know about my s/m. That's a little much. No, they don't need to know that although I remain female, my sexuality is gay male...with room for other queer folk. Shit, most of my friends couldn't understand that, let alone trying to explain it to these people. I began composing something, and of course it brought up all sorts of feelings. So I've saved the email and left it untouched. I can't quite seem to work on it right now.

Because the opportunity has presented itself, it's thrown me into a state. A state of rage at some of my upbringing. Old events flash before my eyes and I feel the hurt, isolation as well as the actions that led to my shame and guilt for feeling angry at those who live the 'godly' life.

Addictions come in many forms. Destruction has many faces.

I am an offspring of a religionaholic. When everything is wrapped in a package of christ, it's not necessarily the healthiest way to live. When christ is used as the excuse for family vacations, or infiltrating the home with rejects off the street, or not being able to speak of anything else other than godliness and sermons...there is a problem.

I remember being too embarrassed to take my friends home. I remember being offered grand opportunities to go to Jerusalem or Portugal, which I turned down when I realized it was because they needed an extra pair of arms for a pilgrimage to holy sights with wheel chair ridden folks. It wasn't a vacation for me. I would be a pack mule. I remember having my magazines marked up with words such as "not until you're married" scrawled over lingerie ads.

Everything centered around god, not us. And as children, how could we feel badly about that? I remember my little brother and I talking one afternoon in the car. I was driving him somewhere. He quietly said "i hate god." I knew what he meant. And I understood the guilt in his voice because I felt it also. Our parents were trying to do good. People all over loved them immensely. They had opened their doors and hearts to everyone. Everyone except us.

Now don't get me wrong. They weren't cruel in the traditional sense. We received bedtime stories and love. We had great vacations. But somehow the house, car and camper was always too full. There was one extra person along. god.

Just writing this sounds silly. You see, even now a part of me feels I'm being the bad child...betraying the wholesome upbringing I received. I love my parents. And a part of me hates them.

In their innocence, they tried to stomp and smother the very essence that makes us vital, healthy individuals. They didn't know better. To them, they honestly believed there was only one way to live. And they did their damnedest to squish us into those boxes.

I am feeling the effects of that. My unsuredness, my struggles with self-worth, my abandonment feelings all stem from these past experiences. My extreme sensitivity with fitting in. This has been my struggle. Little by little, with the help of the shrink, I'm learning to make sense of it all. And maybe hopefully see myself in a new light.

Some days I feel strong, wise and brilliant. And most days I feel like the lowest mess on earth. I've learned how to hide the intensity of that. The times I can't are the times I remain silent or hide out in my house.

So happy fucking birthday to me. Maybe next year will find me heading out of the tunnel. In the meantime, I suppose I could look for beauty in the place I'm in now. I may not be able to see anything, but I wonder if there's texture to the walls. I ought to take a deep breath and note what the air smells like and how it feels on my skin. It's a matter of immersing myself in whatever this is, right? And maybe it's with my other senses that I'll find the light.

"This is the year.

No, really. This is the it. This is the year you resolve to let it all hang out and lick the fingertips of the divine and stop holding back and stop quivering with unchecked anticipation/dread as you realize that, if you care a whit for self-definition and spiritual nuance and hot wet intelligence and deep karmic color in this tsunami-hammered, Bush-ravaged world, you are desperately needed right now. It's true."

Sound familiar? Yup, it's Mark Morford, back from holiday break and he's focused on resolutions in his latest column, Resolutions For The Damned.

One of his suggestions:

"It is, in fact, about doing all those things hand in hand with a sly and elusive energy called consciousness. Presence. Awareness. It is about avoiding the cheeseball New Age stigma that's mutilated those luminous terms and instead choosing to use them to stick yourself to the moment, to the right now, and plumbing it for all its heat -- so when you eat that organic hot dog or lick that lover, it positively curls the toes of your id.

Do you have any idea how to do this? To be this conscious? This present? Do you know what the hell this really means, how hard it is and how unbelievably invaluable? Neither do I. Let's resolve to find out."

I slept last night. What a difference a full night's sleep actually makes!!!

If I have a chance, I'll write more about it later. But before I step out of the office for a little bit, I wanted to make sure you have your weekly dose of Rob Brezsny's Freewill Astrology.

The question for 2005.

Questions, questions, questions. It's all about the questions. Think of zen koans. Riddles for the purpose of stretching the mind past the familiar into enlightment.

Before I began training, I would meet with Sir once a week, and he would give me a question to mull over. He explained that it was his responsibility to give me questions that I wouldn't know to ask, not having experienced his training before.

My shrink speaks of questions all the time.

I've personally experienced that the times I struggle for answers are the times I'm not asking myself the right questions. Once I have the question, the answer easily follows.

It's all about the questions.

On Arts and Letters Daily (another favorite site) they mentioned a NYTimes Science article for today. In God (or Not), Physics and, of Course, Love: Scientists Take a Leap a group of scientists were asked a question by the publisher of Edge. This particular question is the annual question for 2005.

This year the Edge Foundation, Inc. asks:
"What Do You Believe Is True Even If You Cannot Prove It?"

I love questions.

Here's a beaut!

Although these are so not my favorite calls, it's definitely a part of my job. I stay calm and always keep a stepford smile in my voice because there's no point in arguing. I know some are trying to get me riled but I won't bite. I'm not giving it to them.

caller: (brusque and authoritative) Could you please take me off your mailing list? Although I support civil unions for homosexuals I don't believe in full marriage rights. Honestly, I believe homosexuals are among the lowest life level of humans...caused by mental illness...

me: (cutting him off while remaining pleasant). What is your name sir?

caller: My last name is "X"

me: I don't seem to have you in our database. What did you receive from us?

caller: I got a letter in the mail from you guys this morning.

me: Oh yes. We recently purchased a list from "X" org for one time use, which is that direct mail piece. We do not add any names unless the constituent donates money.

caller: Okay. Now I'll have to call that other org because I thought they focused on reproductive rights for man/woman relationships. Seeing they've become political, and strongly took sides in the last election, I have no desire to continue supporting them. But I do want to tell you that I spoke with my Republican congressman and encouraged him to try to get some of the same legal rights for gays, within a civil union context. I don't believe people should be discriminated against.

me: Thank you for calling sir.


Huh? Apparently we are a low level mentally deficient life form...but I guess he doesn't discriminate.

Now...the call I took earlier more than made up for this joker. It's a good thing we get plenty of warm, fuzzy mail and calls to tip the scales. At least 3 times a week we receive thank you's from organizations and individuals who've received assistance. There's a lot of pain out there, yanno? Being able to help ease someone's burden even a specky bit is absolutely worthwhile.

And calls like this one remind me there is still so much work to be done.

It's that season and I'm inundated with year end numbers. But I wanted to pop in and bring you a link from one of my favorite sites, The Padacia.

Check out Reuters Pictures of 2004.

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I'm back.
I didn't realize I needed to take a mini-blogging vacation until yesterday, but that's what happened.

How were your holidays?
Although it was all good, I'm glad it's over.

This will be short because there is way too much to do at work today. I may or may not be back later. Have a good day!