I’m eating a chocolate bar. It tastes like dirt. Like a little kid eating soil from the yard. The deepest, most fertile earth ever to form a topsoil.

It pulls warmth out of my gums. It melts into mud. My mouth is full of mud.

Mud isn’t the taste of chocolate, but chocolate is the taste of mud. It’s primal. On the tongue, in the aroma, it communicates to my inner reptile and I feel content. Swallowed, it seeps into my blood and I feel intoxicated.

Chocolate, dairy fat, sugar.

I just watched ‘The Motorcycle Diaries.’ They kept mentioning maté, and now I want some. Maté is also primal. There’s nothing refined about it. The social customs surrounding it are refined, but the material itself, the taste, the feel of the tea is basic and unsubtle.

But the main thing ‘The Motorcycle Diaries’ made me think of is this guy I know named Alan. Some of my readers know Alan, too. Yes, that Alan. He looks like the young Che in ‘Diaries.’ Slender, reserved, profoundly intelligent, able to win you over by telling the truth without compromise. There are other similarities, too. Alan’s not leading Cuban rebels to victory, but he’s leading ‘cultural creatives’ to build consensus and act sustainably. A different kind of revolutionary.

I’ve been thinking about this kind of revolutionary lately. When I first came here to the Pacific northwest, I wanted to be one of them. I wanted to learn all about sustainability and organic farming and alternative energy and participate with other folks who were doing the same stuff. Maybe work at a farm. Write about it. Typical romantic dreaming type stuff. I did a little networking, but only in a passive mode, because that’s how you do things if you’re me.

But I still want to write that book. I’ve been thinking about it a lot of late. How it would work, what my focus would be, how best to address certain tricky issues.

The voyage of a thousand pages begins with a single word.

Get ready for April 1 at the First Church of the Last Laugh.

Update:

To go along with the April Fool’s theme (and so I won’t have wasted two entries on a single link each), here’s a quiz from the Freedom From Religion Foundation. How much do you know about the First Amendment?

Earlier this evening I heard this story on the radio. It’s from Living On Earth, which is a show about environmental concerns, and the story is a guy who was a park ranger for a state park about to be flooded under a lake made by a big dam project.

The state (Calfornia) had bought up all the land, or condemned it, in order to clear the property for flooding. They made it a state park in the meantime. But the dam project got held up for many years, and folks sort of settled back into the land. Part of the story here is that these two valleys that would be flooded are on the American river, in the Sierra Nevada mountains, famous for the northern California gold rush back in the 1800s. So fast forward to the time of this story, and prospectors were still fighting and killing each other in order to get the gold.

So imagine you’re a park ranger at this state park where anarchy rules, and you’re not a cop, you’re not able to arrest people in the way cops are, and you’re not really even trained in law enforcement. These guys got by by simply enforcing the park rules, such as a rule forbidding loaded weapons in the park.

The radio show made me want to buy the book the ranger wrote, called ‘Nature Noir,’ which I might just do.

But what’s most amusing about this story to me, what makes me laugh when I think about it, is that around the time this story takes place (the late 70s), I remember being up in the Sierra Nevadas with my mom and dad, and we were visiting my mom’s sister and her husband and son, who all live in the area. My uncle is very conservative, and we were driving through this very valley, and he says, “Just think. All this could be a nice lake, generating some power, and giving you a place to go boating. But some doped-up hippies and kayakers want to keep it like it is, where it’s not doing anybody any good.” I specifically remember ‘doped-up hippies.’

So I’ll have to get ahold of ‘Nature Noir’ and find out if there are any doped-up hippies in it.

Went to a new camera store today. New to me, anyway. It was crammed full of old treasure, too. The kind of place you should think of when you hear ‘used camera store.’

Utterly lined from wall to wall, floor to ceiling, with cameras and accessories and other assorted gee-whizzery. Rollei next to Polaroid, Contax next to Argus. All organized, of course, but according to its own logic. The kind of organizational system you feel certain exists, and could be reverse-engineered given the inclination, but which is still baffling to you.

I used to never be able to understand car buffs. People who know which make and model have how many cylinders and displacement and gear ratios, all the way back to 1924. Since my brother’s a bit of a car buff and was a greasemonkey gearhead as a youth (and makes his living by fixing really big machines as an adult), I used to want to be able to play along with him and his greasemonkey friends. I had the genetic inclination, too, given that my dad has an intimate relationship to the various geological stratum and their life cycles, and can tell you the differences between about a zillion species of finch. But I never really liked cars all that much, since I was young enough that I could never imagine owning one. So why get excited?

Well, you can own cameras. They’re small, too. You don’t need to add on to your garage. Though you might end up opening a used camera store, like Jim’s Used Cameras on 43rd in the U District.

I went there and bought an M42 to K-mount adaptor ring, finally. And his is literally the only place in town that will even carry it. I called all the places, and they said, “Have you tried Jim’s in the U?” It’s official Pentax, too. Jim’s story is that Pentax just upped the price of this little silver ring, and won’t even cut retailers a break on it. So even though it’s not a high-dollar item, it’s also not as absurdly cheap as it should be. Makes me want to open a machine shop just to make the things and let Pentax be the loss leader. Or something. This is why I don’t head a giant corporation, by the way.

You might ask: Well, Homer, that’s all fine and dandy, but what’s the thing do? And I appreciate the fact that there’s no hint of irony in your voice when you say ‘fine and dandy,’ by the way. Well, you put the ring in the camera mount like this:

And then you put an ancient M42 lens on your newfangled digital camera like this:

You might well ask again: But, what’s the point of doing that? And I’ll reiterate:

Lonely soldier go home
Lonely but never alone
Good eyes see nothing to shoot
Good feet feel good givin’ up good boots

–Damien Rice, ‘Lonely Soldier‘

This story is based on a rather surreal set of suggestions. I couldn’t include all of them and keep the narrative I came up with, but much of it’s there.

If I do any more research for this, I’ll end up writing a novel, and that’s not the exercise. Eugene Atget was a real person. I might add more to this later, but it’ll take real work as opposed to the seat of the pantsleg thing I’ve got here. And you might have to pay to read it.

———-

The actors on stage struggled against their costume. They struggled against each other; their characters were trying to kill each other. They struggled against a drunken audience who wanted to see dancing girls. Who had come up with this story?

The costume was an oversized pair of vaguely Chinese-looking pants. The rest was normal vaguely Chinese-looking costumage, but since they were supposed to be Siamese twins, they shared a mutual waistline.

In the left leg, no one of interest. In the right leg, Monsieur Jean Eugene Auguste Atget, portraying Chang, the homicidal maniac opposite his Siamese twin brother, Chin, the moral anchor of the pair. The author of this terrible play was insistent that Siamese meant Siamese.

The Moulin Rouge crowd booed and hissed. This tiny, ugly play had been let on stage for two reasons: One, it featured Chinamen luridly threatening semi-nude women in their bathing rooms, but it was neither playful nor sexy. Neither was it suspenseful or even interesting. Two, it was early, and no one was in the place anyway.

Chang held aloft his butcher’s knife! He waved it menacingly at the woman, who dutifully screamed and covered her private parts. Nevertheless, she managed to let slip a few articles of clothing. Her terrified scream turned to a coy embarrassment as she gave the audience a look. Chang waved his knife again! Terror and a scream!

Stuff like that. The audience began throwing things. The play was hurried off stage before it could finish. The ending was a predictable morality play: Chin grabs the knife, kills Chang, and in the process kills himself, for he shares a heart with Chang. The woman holds Chin’s face to her breast and, as he dies, says, “My hero!” But no one saw it because no one cared.

Later.

Eugene Atget approached the bar, hat brim low on his forehead to avoid recognition. He ordered a beer. and noticed that the man next to him was sketching. He was sketching Chang and Chin.

Eugene let out a sigh. “I will need to get out of acting if you continue to put my face on that character.”

The man looked up and smiled a wide grin which was aided by alcohol. “You were… Chang!”

“I am impressed you recall the character’s name.”

“The piece is titled ‘Chin And Chang Get Arrested.’” The man held up the sketchpad, revealing the title along the bottom, previously covered by his arm.

Eugene hadn’t drunk enough to laugh, but he tried.

Mr. Strange Mathematician offers that perhaps I should be on the lookout for chronosynclastic infundibula. Googling this term led me to two things:

1) A band called Triosk, which has a track titled “Chronosynclastic Infundibula.” Which I downloaded, and which, while interesting, isn’t all that great. Free jazz with bizarroid turntable stuff.

2) A ‘blog, called ‘Bad Astronomy,’ which asks this important question: How many people do YOU know who’ve been killed by a quantum black hole?

Also: Random linkage: A list of famous gay men. (This list seems to be duplicated on the christiangays.com web site. Which amuses me.)

Ok. Time for another writing assignment.

Leave a comment with a character trait or setting or situation or whatever. I’ll try to include as many as possible, so if someone has, for instance, already suggested that the character is a girl, don’t say he’s a man.

Ready? Set? Add a comment!

Update:

Ok, so thus far a person at the Moulin Rouge with Toulouse-Lautrec, except doesn’t speak French and is horribly uncomfortable being there, and maybe has the Homeland Security apparatus chasing him around. I need more. Come on.. One or two more things.

Interesting (relatively) fact: My birthdate is one day later than that of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and he’s 102 years older than I am.

Update #2:

I think I’ve got enough to go on now. Not sure if I’ll be able to do the siamese twin thing…

Firstly: I’m still looking for suggestions on writing a story… Add a comment and give me a writing assignment.

Secondly: The Schiavo case. This is my take on what has happened thus far. It’s a rant. You were warned.

The Republicans and their base consituency don’t have the first clue what to do with power. They have spent the last three decades playing victim, saying the media is liberal, saying the Democrats’ political machine is too intrenched, saying that the culture has fallen and needs to be reborn. The agenda of the right wing in this country is not to right any wrongs, but to succeed despite overwhelming odds.

Well, they’ve done it. They’re in power. They can ignore Democrats all they want to. And this Terri Schiavo case illustrates that they are completely, 100%, out of ideas. They have nothing. No plans except to purge, no guiding ideology other than the complete elimination of opposition. That’s it. They don’t have anything to offer the country.

They have accomplished their goal of ‘saving’ the country from the left. And what do they do with this power? They abandon federalism. They abandon state’s rights. They abandon the separation of powers. In short, they abandon everything that makes this country great. They cheer on as the Republicans in congress yell and scream and foam at the mouth about Terri Schiavo. They use their bully pulpit to abandon the rule of law, both ideologically and in actuality. They debase our national discussion into a yelling match. They get people arguing that it’s OK for congress to take the burden of legal responsibility away from Michael Schiavo, simply because they’re afraid he might do something of which they disapprove…..

…unless it’s 1998 and they’re George W. Bush signing a Texas bill into law which allows hospitals to stop treatment of terminally-ill patients over the objections of legal guardians for NOT BEING ABLE TO PAY.

My point here is not to argue the relative merits of the Schiavo case or whether or not it’s legal or correct for Congress to act the way it did. My point is that these right-wing radical hypocrites we’ve got in office (and make no mistake… This last week has proved beyond doubt that they are radicals) don’t have any policy direction, no guiding ideology, and nothing of substance to offer anyone. They are hurting America at every step, and this Schiavo case is just another example. Nothing of substance will come of it. Terri Schiavo will die soon, and then after a few months most memory of her will be gone from the public mind.

But the Republicans will still be looking for some way to keep their phoney baloney jobs.

Now that’s art.