Tomorrow I run off to southern Nevada. It’s gonna be a long, long drive, but I like it like that. I’ve got language lesson CDs I’m going to listen to, and I’m burning MP3s to CD as I type this. Wish I had an iPod…

It’s the time of the pre-travel resistance. I get like this just before traveling, where I just want to give up on the whole thing because it seems insurmountable. It’s no small feeling, either. It’s also ubiquitous to many of the things I try to do; there’s a dread about shifting patterns and changing grooves. It’s like training for a year to run a marathon, and then deciding to drop out when the race is about to start, because it would mean the end of training.

Right now I’m a person who is preparing to travel. That’s my identity. I’ll have to switch identities once I’m traveling, because then I won’t be preparing to travel any more, and the assumption is that the switch will be a lot of work. Of course it won’t, and I’ll be cruising through the beautiful forested mountains of northeast Oregon before I know it, but right now my Inner Autistic Brat is doing everything it can to sabotage the process.

There was a rumor going around that I might end up driving to Houston, delivering a car for a friend of a friend. It turns out that rumor is now false. Well, unless she calls and convinces me that it’s worth doing, all in the next, oh.. 2 or 3 hours.

The other gripe about this thing has to do with the fact that my friend (the one with the friend who needs the car delivered) is in Landmark. Now, I don’t have a problem with Landmark, and I don’t have a problem with my friend being in Landmark, but the thing is this: Landmark teaches you their own vocabulary for self-analysis. In Landmark, there are ‘stories,’ assumptions and lines of thought that lead to a tautological conclusion. For instance, if I were to tell myself that I don’t think I can get something done because I estimate that I don’t have enough energy, I’d be less likely to try to complete it. The assumption guides the end result more than the actual amount of energy I had at the time.

Another example would be that if you think you’re not likely to end up driving your friend’s friend’s car to Texas, you’re obviously just telling yourself a ‘story’ about this outcome. He’s telling me it’ll only take 15 minutes to set it up, that it won’t be a big deal, that people at Landmark set things up like this at least 4 times daily. Now, I’m good at deciphering new-speak of all varieties, and being able to translate it into sincerity or lack thereof. My friend sincerely thinks he’s doing me a favor by telling me about my ‘story,’ when in fact, the reality is that I’m freaking autistic, and changes in plan upset my situation in a way that Landmark-speak doesn’t account for.

But can I tell him this? Can I say, “Uhm, you really don’t know what you’re talking about.” Well, yes I can, actually. I’m more polite than that, but he keeps pressing. Eventually we’re off the phone, but let’s now tally up the stresses involved here: I’m trying to leave, which is already difficult. There’s a possible change in plan (which is actually worse than a real change in plans, from my perspective), which involves driving a car I’ve never seen to a place I dislike for a person I’ve never met, but there’s also a considerable up-side. And now, here my friend is, without knowing it, telling me that it’s my fault that I don’t think I’ll be able to help out his friend.

So I spent about five hours last night driving around letting these things spill out of me, and not because it was optional. This is obviously the 15 minutes my friend was talking about. If I had been ready to leave, it would have been the perfect time; five hours closer to the destination. O well.

I’ve had other friends who got into Landmark, as well. My observation is that Landmark is uniquely American. The ideal is to resolve issues as quickly and as deeply as possible, and to challenge yourself to accomplishing something beyond your own social, cultural, familial, and spiritual ties. That means that, ultimately, you’re going to have to sever those ties, or at least modify them beyond recognition. So, in a nutshell, the Landmark ideal is to disrupt relationships (with society, friends, family, self) in order to pursue attainment (in whatever realm). It always reminds me of the Shadows on Babylon 5. Being among Landmarkians makes me think of the scene where Sheridan is being tempted on Z’Ha’Dum. I don’t mean to insult the Landmark folks, just that their brand of extreme applied existentialism creeps me out.

Unless you’re easily depressed, you’ll want to read this report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which basically states that the case for war against Iraq is, was, and always has been, a load of bullshit.

Note also that the report is quite even-handed and gives policy advice for future intelligence leaders who don’t want to get screwed over like Tenet did.

Want to see some really good 30-second PSAs about how rotten Bush is?

Well, here they are: BushIn30Seconds.org

I especially like ‘Child’s Play’ and ‘Leave No Billionaire Behind.’

Good thing I’m not headed anywhere anytime soon.

We’ve been having a lot of snow here lately. It’s a real cold snap, that’s been going on for close to a month, I’d guess.

I love the snow, but I’d love it even more if I had a garage that wasn’t packed full of my landlord’s stuff.

The irony of this picture is that I’m from Houston, and my parents’ house tends to flood. The way to figure out if the flooding is about to happen is to keep track of how far up the yard the water has risen. You really start worrying when it gets up to the door. Well, the snow’s at my door. What does it mean?

One of the things about writing, for me, is that when I start to write something worthwhile, it’s always big and rich and complex and complete in my head. And like a dream that fades soon after you wake up, it’s only going to be there for a short while.

So the challenge is to keep this world alive inside my head, long enough to walk around it and touch the leaves on the trees and listen to the music coming from over the hills…. To stay there long enough to take pieces of the world and line them up in linear language.

And not only that, but to stave off the inevitable encroachment of a new vision, one that’s just as complete and complex, but which makes all the previous descriptive language meaningless.

I think I don’t write as much as I should, in no small part because it reveals this aspect of myself to me. I think everyone has within them whole worlds available to draw on, and that these worlds shift and mutate for everyone, just as they do for me. I think my difference is that it’s much easier for me to be conscious of them, and this difference is part of what makes me odd, eccentric, and more than a little nuts. Writing reminds me that this is the case, which is frustrating.

What lives beneath the boundary of consciousness is really quite potent. It’s where all the really difficult work of the mind gets done. If that processing horsepower were more accessible to the consciousness in more people, we’d all be Intuitional Geniuses. But we’re not.

The point being that since I’m conscious of more of my would-otherwise-be-subconscious process, and since that information is pretty much outside the realm of language anyway, it’s difficult to put it into words. My experience is that, merrily merrily, life is but a dream. Thoughts and visions fade as new ones replace them, while consciousness waves its hand through the fog, trying to catch individual drops of water vapor. Or exclaims the beauty of the silent pristine meadow while roaring through it in a 4X4, leaving chaos and tire ruts in its path.

Sometimes I feel as though the beauty inside me, which is really both integral to and a reflection of the beauty of the world, is too delicate, too precarious to even begin to describe. And even this description of its delicacy, and my relation to it, is heavy and thick and incomplete.

So come visit me in our dreams. It’ll be easier.

Really great travelogue from Sydney by Bob Harris, Jeopardy Master, world traveller, and frequent guest blogger on This Modern World.

I point it out because it talks about the disconnect between American ideals and American arrogance. I’ve been thinking about that disconnect lately, as a function of how our baseline ideals about America have shifted over the past few decades, and lo and behold here’s Bob’s travelogue dealing with just that topic.

Juanita Bay, Lake Washington, near Kirkland, Washington

Help save the endangered Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus!

I don’t write enough fiction. Of course, after reading this, you may think I write too much fiction.

——–

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I’m married. I have two kids. Remember?”

“Like I said: Why not?”

“How can you say that?”

“Because. I know you’re crazy about me, and because I know I’m the best thing that ever happened to you. I know that you’re not happy with her. I know that you buy a lot of porn, that you’ve slept around in the past, that you’re overwhelmed with the guilt and shame. That you’re loyal to your kids and not to her. That you hate yourself over this. And, most importantly, I can say in all honesty, that this level of infidelity really turns me on.”

“You know I’d screw around on you, too.”

“I value your self-awareness. But I also know that what you really really want is to be with someone different all the time. There’s Viagra for when you’re with your wife, and Ritalin for when you’re with me.”

“That’s funny. But I still can’t.”

“I’m not going to try to convince you any further. I’ve laid out my cards. It’s all here, transparent for you to see.”

“Would you screw around on me?”

“Of course. And you find this intoxicatingly attractive.”

“I need to know. For real.”

“Of course for real. And it turns you on.”

“I’m sitting here on my couch and I’m sipping a beer, and I’m listening to you talk about me leaving my wife and joining up with you and your merry band of…”

“The Church Of Infinite Complexity.”

“Yeah, your little cult of people who want to spread the genes all over the place by fucking and fucking and fucking… And…”

“It turns you on.”

“No, it doesn’t turn me on. You turn me on. That you’re in this little club which I hold in such disdain is part of what’s sexy about you. And that you’re hooked in with all the cool kids… I mean, you know people who wear black leather and answer to ‘Spike.’ That’s certainly alluring, isn’t it? But what’s it all mean? Where does the real you begin?”

“[sigh]”

“Yes, the real you. We’ve been doing this for years now and you’ve never let your guard down.”

“The real me is just as dangerous as the real you. You’re hiding behind your wife, and what a shame that she won’t let you in from that direction. But seriously, folks… Go ahead, tell me that there’s not a part of you that wants to run off with my little circus.”

“Of course there is.”

“So why not? Why not free what’s trapped back there?”

“Because it’s not really me. And what’s alluring about you is that you haven’t even really been intimate with me.”

“Ahem. Pardon? We’ve been having a freaking affair for two years…”

“That’s it, isn’t it? Intimacy is the most frightening word in the universe as far as you’re concerned. You fear yourself, which is why you’re on a mission to erase racial differences by going around and fucking and getting pregnant out of wedlock. That’s what’s alluring about you: You’re so vulnerable you’d commit to something called the Church of Infinite Complexity.”

“I don’t know whether to be touched or pissed off.”

“Exactly. So I have an idea… You come over and meet my wife, and I’ll tell her about you, and we can all get it on.”

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