christmased 2008

rilke quote

"O Lord, give each person his own personal death.
A dying that moves out of the same life he lived,
In which he had love, and intelligence, and trouble."
-R.M. Rilke

future

Joy.

Electing...

walking to my glamorous Hollywood polling place (Selma Elementary!) I dared to hope.

like many of us, I will believe it when I see it- but it lloks very, very good right now


8 years ago i was the office online returns watcher ... there were @ 30 of us then

After 8 years of Bush, there are 3 of us here today...

surely we have hit bottom and are beginning the long hard crawl, right?

And one more parting shot:

Boo.

Sense

(author unknown)

Fall

Coming out of these dark woods I have lingered in before
Circuitous paths betray me, I betray me
Sweet, sweet complication
Innocent vampire
Lost other
Armless wanting

I forgot how good and bad and bad again you feel
Never forget
Never remember
Back in your box you go
Into the sack slung over my shoulder
Wearying steps and lifted eyes and daylight up ahead
It is Fall, that is all

saturday l.a.

a card-sharper's trick

"Oh absurdity of absurdities! How much better it is to understand it all, to recognize it all, all the impossibilities and the stone wall; not to be reconciled to one of those impossibilities and stone walls if it disgusts you to be reconciled to it; by the way of the most inevitable, logical combinations, to reach the most revolting conclusions on the everlasting theme, that even for the stone wall you are yourself somehow to blame, though again it is as clear as day you are not to blame in the least, and therefore grinding your teeth in silent impotence to sink into luxurious inertia, brooding on the fact that there is no one even for you to feel vindicitive against, that you have not, and perhaps never will have, an object for your spite, that is a sleight-of-hand, a bit of juggling, a card-sharper's trick, that it is simply a mess, no knowing what and no knowing who, but in spite of all these uncertainties and jugglings, still there is an ache in you, and the more you do not know, the worse the ache."

-Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

Bernini and The Getty

today I ditched work and went to the Getty for the first time. I have lived in Los Angeles for 10 years now and this was my first visit. Cripes.


I went with a sculptor friend- very handy for answering questions...











No photos allowed in the Bernini room... the bust above is The Vexed Man by Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. 

a clean desk means...

it's no accident that my desk calendar was buried and stuck at July. I had a bit of a psychic shock in July (ooo- mysterious and dramatic!) and it has taken some time to work through it

one side effect is i just haven't given a flying f at work, but I'm still one of the most dependable people around here, even when I'm phoning it in...


but the fog is clearing, the integration of the shadow had begun (!) and life goes on regardless

a messy desk means...

hi kids

can you find, on my work desk, the following :

Fraggle Rock DVDs
Letter opener
FedEx bill
What I am supposed to be doing
my vocatus (hint: it may not be there at all)

2 coldplay songs have the lyric:

"if you never try then you'll never know"


UPDATE: If you look closely, you will see under the pile o' crap, that my desk calendar is still on July 2008. And of course, this is October.

Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit

sunday i went to probation camp

cassandra had me come to work with her to film the play she helped these young men write

they are in a probation camp in san dimas

i am very proud of cassandra

children need help in our world, children that are born to children, being raised by children

and when they get older and screw up they still need help...

you'd be surprised how wide a mind can be opened in a moment

this is saturday october 4 2008 in north hollywood

finally, a day that felt Fall-like here Los Angeles... foggy, slightly chilly

(may I take a moment to curse blogger for the ridiculous difficulty it seems to have uploading simple photos? this is taking forever!)

we went to EAT and then bucks and then vinvoks, and stayed in the valley until dinner at zankou

i had a low-grade persistent headache all day

i dreamt of a badger last night. it was in the backyard of the house I grew up in. i squirted it with a hose to encourage it to move along, but it LOVED it. it closed its eyes and relished the water flowing over its badgery face. it moved closer. soon it had broken through the screen onto the porch, then it was in the kitchen. i nudged it with my foot and it rolled on its back like a dog. i expected it to go all feral and bite me any second, but it was a pretty gentle, rolly-polly (sp?) badger.

i tried to warn my parents and enlist their help in getting the badger out of the house, but ultimately I just nudged him out with my foot all by myself.

what the hell does that mean?

this site tells me:

A badger is a fierce little animal and to see this fellow in a dream will show that you have put up quite a fight and won out over your opponents. An injured Badger tells you to fight another day.

shocking

cassandra shared this with me just now- it's a year old.

watching klein on colbert, she caused a little a chill when she pointed out that the last act of the bush robber-baron era is the bailing out of their friends

they didn't do all of their dirty work right under our noses- they did it right before our eyes

monkey boy

my sister sent this picture of me when i got my cool planet of the apes mask and gun for christmas back in 197whatever. i wore it in the car up to our cousin's in bear mountain and stared at all the people in the passing cars. I remember that it collected lots of saliva in the mouth area, or maybe i was just having trouble breathing...

I like this picture- didn't know it existed... i was a pretty skinny little kid- i only remember being a fat little kid...

I'm in a transitional phase these days, so I see meaning in everything- here is my inner child, masked as a monkey (brewing a stew of monkey-mind only to be unraveled 30 years or so later - i hope) armed and poised for battle

monkey boy warrior

delaware joe and the snowbilly

i'm about to watch sarah palin write tina fey's material for this weekend's SNL


"nice to meetcha, hey can I call you Joe?"

here we go...

lame birthday video

this may be my lamest youtube yet

consider it a video version of my birthday post

imagine you were with me as i grew older in hollywood, way back on september 28th, 2008

how i spent my birthday

i already commented on turning 41 and how it's a rather dull number. i won't go into how i am trying to define my "crisis" as a "transition" and other navel-gazing mumbo jumbo

but i do think a blogger i recently discovered said it too, and better:

heading east on turning 41 check out his interesting blog and photos- his turning 40 post is good too...


went to the west hollywood book fair, oh- had a puppet show last night where i made up a cheer about jeffrey dahmer- i felt dirty afterwards. i also made a hot dug puppet, as mr. belvedere, hit on a minor at the craft services table... improv+booze+pupppets=depravity
bought these
this guy is the king of these women

later we went to jimmy kimmel's san gennaro italian festival in our neighborhood
what is this thing?





it reminded me of the st. anthony's italian festival i used to attend in wilmington when i was a lad... it was like being back on the east coast in the middle of hollywood... south philly with palm trees...

tom tells us tales of burning man

still becoming

Words cannot express, explain
My relationship with time and things done and undone
And how they feel in my gut in my chest behind my eyes
Children never to be born
Aging- trying to learn to outsmart existence itself, as I have always tried to do…
Still becoming, still

i will not be 40 for very much longer

every night I tell myself I am the cosmos...




this is my last week as a 40 year old.

the first 3/4 of my 40th year was easy-breezy

then I got hit with a lot of THINKING that I have tried to deal with mindfully

people tell me being sensitive and suffering (which I try to remind my self is optional) makes me who I am and all that, but man I could really use a break from this head of mine that I seem to have crammed up my ass

5 was a special birthday

16 was pretty good, with the driving...

21 I must have thought was going to be awesome but I was already drinking, so what's the big deal?

25 blew my little mind... that was my mid-life crisis, right there... just thought I'd get a head start

41... what's so special about 41? 40 is the top of the hill. 41 is what? the pregnant pause before the roller coaster starts the mad rush?

I hope to enjoy it all much more that I have been capable of as of yet.

Jung, man. It's all about the Jung.