why pay for therapy when you can have virtua fighter 4?

sure, it may not give you successful strategies for dealing with your emotional challenges, or even help you purge the simmering resentments that power your anger. but it sure as hell taps into that anger. and uses it to direct a spin kick back knuckle combo.


spun by the propagandist at 6:43:00 PM

 
i did a very boy thing last night.

i bought a playstation.

next thing you know, i'll be watching football games and making misogynistic comments about women, guzzling cheap american beer by the 12 pack and letting my library gather dust, but no books.

in short, i'll be like most of the guys i know that women are attracted to.

but i don't think i'll let that happen. i'm still bitter about the football team ripping up soccer fields while i was in high school and college, can't throw aside my feminism that easily, have a nasty (acquired) allergy to budweiser and am a compulsive reader.

i mean compulsive reader. i will read the back of a bottle of shampoo if i have nothing else. you think i am exaggerating for effect, but i am more than familiar with the ingredients of most of the leading brands of hair care products. drama it is not. detorxhydrocycline it is. i've read the same book three times over when stuck on a bus. and to my great shame, i even read the fine print on those little "DO NOT EAT" packets that come in boxes with new stuff...

and i also read all the combo moves for pai on virtua fighter 4. that proved much more useful to me than the back of shampoo bottles.

bitterness level warm yellow today.
spun by the propagandist at 4:22:00 PM

 
i'm swamped today, so a flashback:

SETTING: Honduras, 1999.
CONTEXT: Diving and drinking.


mom, read this part. so i score the safest ride in the country. i meet a spaniard on the plane that works with medicos sin fronteras (doctors without borders), we both get to skip customs (damn! what i could have brought!) and have a toyota landrover pickup waiting for us. Three or four beers later we are on our way to yoro, in the mountains south of la mosquita. we get a free pass through all police checkpoints, and i get to spend three hours practicing my spanish with the kid driving my truck (we had two) and get a guided tour o fthe remnants of hurricane mitch, which still scars the countryside deeply. he showed me several places where entire villages were eradicated by tumbling hillsides and hundreds of people washed away. the devastation is still very fresh, people are still living in tents and the roads are horrible, nary a bridge to be found. when you cross rivers (thank you four wheel drive)you can sometimes see THE WHOLE BRIDGE about two or three hundred yards downstream.

mom, don´t read this part. so we´re driving through all this, and i ask the driver in halting spanish why he won´t pick up anyhitchhikers. well, its becasue medicos sin fronteras has a policy against carrying anyone with a weapon. A gun, i ask. yes, a gun, and since everybody has one, why bother even stopping to ask? the outstuck thumbs look much more menacing from here on out. so i´ve been in this little town in the mountains for a few hours before i figure out that one of the main goals of the doctors is to eradicate the assassin bug, which likes to bite you on the face while you´re sleeping and inject a fun little protozoa lovingly referred to as chagas. chagas may or may not (who knows?) induce heart failure from one month to thirty years after you´ve been bit. no cure. i´m told to cover my face while sleeping in the department of yoro. i oblige. i stayed in their house and accompanied them on their drinking excursions, which may or may not be related to their humanitarian work - that question went unanswered. there are not many tourists here, as evidenced by the large degree of attention i get as a tall, yes finally, TALL (i have to go out of the country to experience it - why do you think i prefer central amerrica and asia to europe?) white guy on a bus in the middle of fucking nowhere. mom, all your cookies went to the urchins in yoro and on the bus. They needed them more than me. and rachel, the scooby doo cards are scattered all over northern honduras in the hands of incredulous little people, some of whom, amazingly enough, seem to recognize our favorite crimefighting dog. nobody called me shaggy, tho. it’s the nazi haircut.

i´m off to utila in the carribean tomorrow. until then wish me luck, and hope there isn´ta line at the decompression chamber.

spun by the propagandist at 10:36:00 AM

 
bitterness downgrade to level yellow.
spun by the propagandist at 11:00:00 AM

 
i am fettered by a lack of knowlege of things i should know.

we backpacked into the eastern sierra nevadas and made our way up to the baboon lakes.

not that there are any baboons there. it was just named by some packers with an unusually broad knowlege of zoology. and if there is any literal meaning to the naming of lakes in the sierras, you can bet i will NEVER hike to or camp at dingleberry lake.

lake naming protocol aside, we camped at the baboon lakes, a lovely lake bifurcated by a outcroppin of land and lagoon, the baboon lakes lie in a glacial depression at about 11,500 feet up in the sierras. we camped on a granite outcropping that thrust out into the northeastern side of the lake, and location that exposed us to the cold wind that came blowing down from the ridge and 13-14,ooo foot peaks surrounding us. while this is usually not a good thing, the cold wind was more than endurable for its lovely side effect of blowing away the marauding mosquitoes and hordes of midges that plagued every other step of out trip. mercifully spelled from the legion of bloodsuckers, we could while away hours reading, sleeping, leaping from the rocks into the freezing cold snowmelt of the lake (oops - that was just me) or watching the stars at night.

which brings me to my point.

i have had dozens of people try and point out constellations to me. significant stars, planets, find this, then follow where its pointing, then take a left, a right at the seven sisters, spin around four times, two steps left, one back, and there is the mexican constellation called the chupacabra. i have never been able to do more than find the big dipper and then lie to people more ignorant than me about constellations. to me, it is a big galactic rorschat test.

so i bought a little constellation wheel, which i left at home because we all know how often i get to use it in la.

so again my ignorance is revealed. one of these days i'm going to get caught making this stuff up - like the time i got busted at the dog park telling this lady that my lab mix was a siberian shepard specially bred to hunt sun bears on the kamchatka peninsula. she believed me until half way through and then got really pissed off.

i couldn't even get anybody to believe me about new constellations on this trip...like the garbageman group:

"see, those four stars make up the can, and then those three are his cigarette..."
spun by the propagandist at 10:26:00 AM

 
okay, i'm back. wonderful trip to the baboon lakes, sunset and blue lake in the eastern sierras.

but more on that later. and believe me, there is much to tell.

right now i am in sacramento. one of my best friends recently lost her dog - lost her in that she passed away. i may be part of a freakish minority, but i look upon the loss of a companion like s's mona as a loss in the family.

and what a family member mona was. i met mona while s and i were still and college, and my dog inyan and i lived with s and mona for almost four years - and they were often partners in crime. at that time s and i moved around the state quite a bit working on various campaigns in glamourous places like west covina, stockton, and santa ana. often the dogs were left to their own devices as were worked long hours.

we had the good fortune one night to come home late, and find our front door blocked. after climbing the fence and coming in the back, we saw that the hounds had chewed the corner off one of our couch's ottomans, ripped all the stuffing out and spread it evenly (no one said mona didn't pay attention to detail) across out living room floor and then dragged the ottoman down the hall to barricade the front door.

we deserved it.

RIP Mona Westly, arbiter of justice 1990-2002
spun by the propagandist at 12:40:00 PM

 
can you be disappointed in someone and not be angry?
spun by the propagandist at 6:49:00 PM

 
i'm back, only to leave yet again for the mountains. yes, its time again for the 6th annual run for the hills backpack trip.

every year several friends and i head up into the sierras for a few days of relief from the pressures of life - and while the last few years have been difficult (rain, gastroenteritis asserting itself AFTER i walked in 5 miles and up 3000 feet) i am really looking forward to this year's trip. it is back to the nucleus of the group, and i really need to get away and think.

optional thought:

love isn't about the good times, even though it may seem that way or we may perceive it like that. it is about making good on your pledges and commitments during the bad times.
spun by the propagandist at 8:33:00 AM