Read Billmon about the AIPAC spy scandal. It’s convoluted, but important.

I wrote a tarot exercise thing for Kallikrates, but the dog ate it. Seriously. It was getting too long and too forced, so I thought I’d put it away for a little bit, but the word processor decided to quit without saving it. Grr. The central idea was good, though. I think. So I can re-work it.

Be patient…

LInkage: You can learn a lot about photojournalism from Mark Hancock.

Also: The Poor Man has quite a bit of eliminationist rhetoric from the right. Whenever I mention this kind of stuff to people, they don’t believe me. The culture war isn’t just a discussion over whether the NEA should fund edgy art; the culture war is about to take on the look of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, with the red states in the role of the Reds.

22, for Brenda:

She would rebuild.

That’s what she was telling herself. She would find what she needed and, brick by brick, dollar by dollar…

She sipped at her coffee and wrote in her little notebook. The one where she poured all these things in a torrent of barely-legible scribbles. She flipped through the previous pages, remembering the writing, seeing the occassional sketch or diagram. Her plans for success, her lists of needs versus desires, her ruminations on the ideals of philosophy and a life well lived. What was all this worth right now?

She started to tear up. Wiping at her eyes, as if yawning, trying to hide it. There wasn’t any more crying to do. She closed her eyes and sat up straight and felt more empty than she ever had.

Brick by brick, dollar by dollar, emotional foundation by emotional foundation. She laughed at how silly that sounded.

(The origins of this story here.)

I switched rooms in the house where I’m living.

And one of the things that happens when you do something like that is that you’re reminded of all the past versions of your current life. You find things you chose not to toss out.

I found my green metal box full of stuff from when I was doing the whole newage tarot mystical mumbo jumbo thing, including my tarot decks. I can’t just have one deck, because that’s how I am. My favorite deck, however, is the Crowley one.

Right now I’m The Fool.

The Fool thinks he wants something, but really he’s just fooling himself. In some versions of this card which are more representational, there’s a cliff and The Fool is walking right off of it. He’s got a bundle on a stick, like a hobo, and he’s looking up into the sky innocently, and he’s just walking right off a cliff. And there’s a little dog, too, and this dog is either guiding him off the cliff, or is trying to warn him about what’s going on.

In Crowley’s version, the dog has been replaced with a tiger, and there are a zillion references to just about every other card in the deck. The Fool, you see, is the zero-th card. He’s the hapless hero of our story. The tarot is a big long story, you see. It’s a big book where you’re never quite sure what order the pages should be.

But The Fool is the protagonist, and he wanders around and meets people, is tricked by magicians, is beguiled by priestesses, is instructed by hermits, falls out of a tower, goes on a mysterious quest guided by the moon, and ends up being around when the universe explodes. Or something. He also learns things like how to set boundaries, the dangers of self-deceit, the bliss of true love… and, well, you get the idea.

If you’re not sure what role you’re playing in the grand cosmic scheme (and you should worry if you do), then just go ahead and assume you’re The Fool. But there’s another aspect to The Fool: If you’re foolish, then a wise man will look like a fool to you. So The Fool could be the wisest person you’ve ever met. There could be a perfectly good reason he’s walking off that cliff, but you’ll just never understand it. You could be the little dog, who the fool is wisely ignoring!

More than once I’ve entertained the notion of doing a lot of writing based on the tarot. Reading the cards, especially in that context, is a matter of being creative, not of being psychic. Though it does help. There are uncountable tales inside that particular book. Italo Calvino wrote a novel which is really a series of stories tied together by the tarot, so this idea isn’t new. And I have to mention that the narrative of one of my favorite movies, ‘The Red Violin,’ is based on a card reading early in the story’s chronology.

So I’m going to do an exercise. This will not be a tarot ‘reading.’ People do readings, and it’s a special art, and I can do it sometimes, but I’m not going to now. What I’m going to do now is this:

If you want me to write a story about a three (at least) card spread, comment with a number from 1 to 22, inclusive. I’m going to shuffle the major arcana and count out that many cards, and that’ll be the basis of the storytelling process. Stories might or might not be obviously connected to the cards in question. There might be other cards drawn, there might not. The story will be for you, however, as a gift.

Anyone?

The Rude Pundit reviewed in The New York Times!

Gonna buy five copies for my mother/On the cover of the New York Times!

And speaking of punditry: That whole Iraqi constitution thing sure is going well, wouldn’tya say?

And even more punditry: HorsesAss.org is a Seattle-area blogger who happens to also be the guy who introduced that statewide initiative a while back proclaiming Tim Eyman to be a horse’s ass.

The ‘right wing’ in WA is really, really, REALLY right-wing. Which is to say, if you read some of the comments on HorsesAss.org, you’ll understand how vicious the Republican party animals are out here. They’re really backed in a corner, what with moderate politics and sensibility being the general modus operandi in this part of the world. It’s hard to be outraged and reactionary when people will listen to you and take your position into consideration.

I wrote in an email to my mom about my general sense of malaise.

And it’s not really a malaise. It’s not general. It’s not specific, but it’s not general either. Neither word does it justice. It’s somewhere in between those. It’s like talking about the tide… The tide is specific. It’s a specific thing, but it’s always in motion. It’s never specifically one thing or another. It’s a process, not an object.

Anyway. My mom sent me an email about some stuff and I replied back thusly:

I feel really stuck writer-wise as well as life-wise, which is why I’m so ready to believe that I’ll hike the Pacific Crest Trail next year. I’ve cut my expectations down to the Oregon stretch, but that’s still a month of hiking.

She responded by asking: How is hiking going to help you be unstuck? And the answer is this:

When I was a little kid, I loved looking through National Geographic magazine. And I loved seeing all the documentaries that contained voice-over narration such as: “The Umbegwe tribe forages for food in the nearby jungle…” Some of my earliest formative years were spent in the back seat of a station wagon on a road trip to a national park or two. Trips to the family retreat in central Tennessee were a high point of the summer, with hikin’ and fishin’ and splashin’ around in the river.

And then, somehow, over time, my over-literal mind was fed the notion that people live their lives in a certain way, and this certain way didn’t involve carting a hand-held 16mm film camera into the jungle following the chief elder of the Umbegwe tribe. I don’t know what my family thought I’d do with myself, or what my school teachers thought they were teaching me to become.

I remember looking at a two-page spread in the National Geographic one time back then. It was a smiling Amazonian kid. I say ‘Amazonian,’ because I have no clue as to specificity. A lot of indigenous features, maybe some Latin in there, too, but mostly he was naked and standing on the root system of a tree on the banks of a river. The river was a deep emerald green. All around was dense jungle. This boy was about to jump into the river, where his friends were already swimming. And he had a huge smile on his face. The kind of smile that restores faith in humanity.

Meanwhile, I was skipping school in the fourth grade because I didn’t know how else to deal.

And some of that conflict, between the vision of some (at best) semi-romanticized world, and the one where I had to (by law as my mom would point out sometimes) go to be picked on by my alcoholic fourth grade teacher (unbeknownst to my mom), is still with me today.

And I want to do this hike because: It would be badass. People lose money on all kinds of things all the time, but seldom do they get to say that they hiked from Mexico to Canada as a consequence. Or even from Ashland to Mt. Hood, or up to Canada. (See, I’m thinking of doing both Oregon and Washington now. Oregon’s the easiest part, and I think I’d just be getting warmed up by the time I made it to the Columbia.)

And, in truth, in this moment right now, I don’t need to do it. Just that it’s there is enough to kindle the romantic notion that will keep me interested in the world. But soon I’ll have to put hiking boot to trail and see how far the notion will carry me, and, when it inevitably fades, how far I can carry myself.

My new favorite photograph.

This one’s pretty cool, too.

What noble cause did Cindy Sheehan’s son Casey die for?

Answer in comments.

I’m the kind of guy in conversatoin who mostly creates the space for someone else to tell their stories. The upside is that you hear the stories. The downside is that people assume that they need to fill the silence.

There are people who have told me they like being around me because they feel free to be themselves. I’m OK with most of what passes for human behavior; as long as you’re not telling me you’re a serial killer or that you diddle little kids, we’ll mostly get along OK. Or, more accurately: Nothing surprises me. “I’m vegan.” “So?” “Well, and I’m into body modification.” “And your point is?” “And I like to hang suspended from a rigging by cables threaded through hooks embedded into my skin.” “Oh, yeah, I read something about that a while back.” “And I have sexual fantasies about Muppets.” “Well, it takes all kinds, I guess.” “And I work at Microsoft.” “You poor soul.”

Like that. I mean, am I supposed to be freaked out? Am I supposed to jump up and down? What?

Now, if someone *shows me* their piercings, or invites me to come to see them being suspended from hooks, or whatever (for huge values of ‘whatever’), then I’ll be interested. They’re not just yammering. They’re doing it. They’re out there, being something, no matter how trite or cliché or beautiful or unique it happens to be. They’re trying.

Living a life is the hardest thing in the world, because the main ingredient in any lived life is courage. Human beings are cowards who would rather talk about it.

So I sit and listen. Listening is what I do. It’s my thing. They say, “I’m a vegan.” If they asked, I’d say, “I’m a listener.” I have no idea why it matters. I don’t care that it does or doesn’t matter. It’s just what I do. Does it matter that you are what you are? Not really. But you have to try anyway.

I haven’t left for Oregon yet. I need to finish up some stuff around here first, stuff that should have been finished months ago.

But I can’t help thinking about an art project right now…

I thought about Burning Man, and what sort of project I’d do if I were to go there. The thing that’s needed most is shade structure, and it’s in the desert, so I thought that maybe I would turn this around ironically and make huge lillypads which seemed to be floating on the surface of an invisible lake, 20 feet or so above the playa. The playa itself is a lake, albeit one that dries up every year, and from a distance, in the playful mirage, these liliypads would look as though they were on water. In order for the scale to work, there would have to be maybe fifty of these pads, each maybe 30 feet across. A big undertaking, and an engineering feat.

And then I thought about the last time I was over at Juanita Bay Park, when I took some pictures of a Great Blue Heron hunting. It was far enough away that my little 200mm lens couldn’t really get it, but it’s a legitimate ID pic.

So add to the plan a pair of Great Blue Herons who have lost their way. They were trying to get to Lake Washington, but they ended up in Nevada, where they landed at what looks like a giant pond of lilly pads, and then grew to be 5 storeys tall. One is in the classic heron hunting pose, still and attentive, curled neck ready to strike. The other has already caught something… What’s that in its beak? A full-sized person, of course.