YOU CAN GO TO JERSEY, OR YOU CAN GO TO HELL

2012-02-19T17:14:00.002-05:00

I dreamed Jenofur drove me up to the corner of Belleville Avenue and Ridgewood Road in Glen Ridge. Here I was to meet my buddy, White Bobby (see also emptygrowler.com). We set off on foot, just me and Bobby, headed toward Bloomfield Avenue. But this Bloomfield Avenue was more like something out of the 1800s, tightly clustered low- to mid-rise buildings, Victorian style, your basic ordinary construction: a couple of old pubs turned restaurants and the like, gas lamps, etc. As we approached the intersection of Bloomfield and Ridgewood, I happened to look up into the sky, and saw suspended there, as if by wires, a giant green garbage truck. "Funny," I thought, and punched Bobby to get his attention. As we both looked up at it, I realized it was actually hurtling through the air, and aimed at the one modern building along the avenue, a water filtration plant. The garbage truck landed ferociously, and there was a massive explosion and the sound of collapse. We started running, only to find a scene of some horror: people stumbling, confused, out onto the street; cops and firefighters everywhere. All of a sudden an old man, nutty, appeared on a iron-ringed balcony armed with a six-shooter and started firing wildly. Bobby and I ducked behind a corner, and could hear the cops shooting at him.END

2012-02-15T10:38:00.003-05:00

Started reincorporating some boxing into my workout. I love capoeira, but anyone who plays me knows my tendency to instinctively reach out and smack a person's face if they're in range. When I was a kid, my dad and I used to slap-box some; even the year before he died, I remember being awed by the way this little guy (five-foot-five-inches or so to my six-foot-two) could slap me with this magical lightning jab, the hand usually striking from a low position, left hanging at his side. From when I initially quit Goju up until about 2002, there was usually a boxing component to my workouts, mainly in the form of shadow boxing and bag work. That all changed when, in a moment of rage, I busted my hand on the heavy sand bag (literally filled with sand) that my dad had made. The pain was amazing and nauseating, and my hand still doesn't close right. Three things were wrong with the strike that did it: 1) I was exhausted, and was pushing my punches; 2) I struck out angrily in an uncontrolled fashion; and 3) I was, of course, not wearing gloves. Bare knuckles on a hard-as-concrete sand bag do not make for a good time.

But boxing just feels natural, I guess. Even when I restarted Goju, I had a hard time shaking the boxing stance I had used for so long, and was repeatedly getting reprimanded for squaring myself to the opponent, rather than "making [myself] skinny" and keeping my center line withdrawn--a stance which I always felt made it very difficult to strike from.

But now my hand is feeling better, and the shadow boxing has been enjoyable. So the bags will go up again. As my old sparring partner Malcolm once said about fighting: "Box until they make you do something else." While the rest of us "pure" Goju guys would be fruitlessly slugging away at the heavy bag, he was able to make it sing with just a touch; apparently his first training had come from an uncle who was in the services who had taught him boxing. His uncle's other advice: "If somebody kicks at you, punch their foot." Have not tried that one yet.

At any rate, there are some notable overlaps between capoeira and boxing:

They're both "Western" martial arts;
They both evolved from street fighting;
They both employ dynamic stances, whereas oftentimes karate/other Eastern martial arts practitioners seem to settle into static stances (although I'm not sure that stems from how the art ought to be practices vs. degradation of form over time);
Both capoeristas and boxers hit with body movement, using the torque of spinning, usually, to increase the force of their attacks;
Both styles favor evasion as the first line of defense.

We'll see how things go once I actually start making contact with the bag (which has been re-stuffed with old newspaper and rugs). This time, I think I will use some gloves.

2012-02-12T18:08:00.001-05:00

I dreamed we were Jenofur, the rest of The Circle, and me were going to visit the Musee des Beaux Artes in Camden. It was night. First you're driving on this four-lane highway with no media through the midst of these bombed-out, boarded up row houses. Then sudden it starts to descend, and you're in a tile-lined tunnel. Then all of the sudden the highway abruptly ends, and there's a drop of like 30 or 40 feet (there apparently had been a number of accidents where people who didn't know about this just drove at full speed down the highway and launched into space. So we parked along the edge of the highway and walked the last leg of it, and when you get to the edge, there's this giant golden statue of Athena, her blue-helmet with giant wings, her arms raised in triumph. She's facing away from you, and standing there you can only see the back of her head. But see, across the way, maybe a six-foot jump, is this suspended platform against the opposite wall, and on your left over there is the entrance to the museum (it's underground). So visitors have to make this leap across to get to the entrance, basically jumping over Athena's head or right shoulder, where the platform is closest. So everybody does it, and I'm of course on the edge getting dizzy and nauseous, but hey, it's an easy jump. I leap across and join the others. We turn for a moment to admire the statue's front side, then we go in.

2012-02-05T17:32:00.000-05:00

Probably because I was reading The Devil in the White City, I dreamed that they refurbished the waterfront near Coney Island so that it was this horseshoe-shaped resort area jutting out into the sea, with glittering high-rise towers and palm trees. We were going to vacation there, so Jenofur and I went to check out the resort we were interested in.

Hundreds of yachts were moored around it, and the whole stretch was encircled by an eight-lane highway that was elevated over the water; there were tons of twisty entrances to hotels and off-ramps and convoluted overpasses. Jenofur was driving, and she seemed in a weird mood. She would point and shiver and drift across lanes. At one point, she turned and, staring out at some resort building, she drove us directly into four lanes of traffic that were going the other way. The cars opposite had been stopped at a light, then suddenly they were coming at us. I grabbed the wheel and diverted us into a shoulder, where a couple of cars narrowly avoided a head-on collision with us, scraping up the fender good. After the traffic had passed, I swung the car around (somehow now I was driving) into an illegal U-turn and started driving with the flow of traffic, but just at that moment, a cop car came zooming up. It had evidently been pursuing this white Caddy, which it rammed at full speed, sending the vehicle slamming into us and our car spinning and spinning and spinning. We were okay, but I smiled, because of the stupid irony of it all.

***

I dreamed there was an old capoeira mestre who was now living in Rutherford where my dad's shop used to be, right across from the train station. He was living a pretty miserable life there, apparently, on the edge of poverty. The only contact he had with American society was with this chubby Jewish guy with a grey helmet of hair who was filming a documentary about him. I finally went to visit the mestre, and found that the one thing he could use more than anything else was water. So me and the documentarian walked up the street to a supermarket and bought him a case.

***

I dreamed that I was watching some unreleased movie Arnold Schwarzenegger had filmed when he was young. It was about the last days of some Soviet-like state, which eventually succumbed to internal strife; Arnold portrayed a leading "senator" in the party who contributed to the downfall of the government. Also it somehow was starring Marion Cotillard, who was like Arnold's personal trainer or something.

Next thing I know I'm up on a roof, thousands of feet above New York City, staring down queasily into the teeming streets below. I know I have to get off this roof, but the only way to do so is make this, like, 8-foot jump across the gulf to a maybe 10 x 6' platform that's just hanging, Super Mario-like, in the air; the platform has a sort of fence around the edge, and these bad guys in goggles and mask are waiting there for me. I know when I jump they're gonna try and trip me up and send me hurtling down into the canyon-like abyss. I finally get up enough nerve and jump, and land, hanging on by my fingertips to the near-side fence. The bad guys are on me, trying to pull my fingers off and kicking me in the head. I punch one of the dudes and manage to get a leg over the fence. Then, struggling with these jerks for every inch, I get onto the platform, where I kick one dude screaming off of it and subdue the others. So now I have to climb down to a building below via this ladder that is just hanging beneath the platform. I start going down it, and realize the coldness of the metal is affecting my grip, and the wind starts howling, buffeting me and shaking the ladder.

Then I wake up.

2012-01-31T16:56:00.003-05:00

I dreamed I was watching this documentary about a guy who had two wives, who managed to keep them both in the same house and both unaware of each other.

One was a rapacious ginger lady who used to break plates over her head, as a way of telling her husband how crazy she was about him. The other was a quiet blonde, who also happened to be the ginger gal's sister. They were sisters and also sister-in-laws! How the guy managed this weird feat I have no idea.

They lived in some gray wooden shack down in Louisiana, and I remember one day all three were up on the roof and the girls were like, "Hey, let's all jump off this roof," and the guy was like, "Let's talk this over for a minute..." They ended up jumping, and nobody got hurt cause it was not very far down.

Then I was down there visiting, and the guy turned out to be my real-life bearded chum from capoeira. We got on a strange jet ski that also worked on land and started driving along these wooden-plank roads that ran for miles through the swamp. Driving the craft emitted a horrible noise as the bottom of it scraped along the planks. I think we were bound for New Orleans, but I was going the wrong way, so I pulled off into some dude's yard to turn around. The guy was a black gentleman who wore this old-timey suit and collar and wire-rimmed glasses, and we waved to him as we tried to turn the jet ski around. He came up and stood like literally breathing down my neck and said, really loud, "HMMMMMMM." Then we got the jet ski back on the road (planks) and took off.

2012-01-26T12:29:00.004-05:00

GOING THROUGH THE MOTIONS IN AMERICA

I think American culture is in a death spiral a this point. So many of the things people supposedly cherish--their employment, the art/culture they consume, etc.--seems devoid of an approximation of worth.

For instance, let's talk about The Slide phenomenon. A talk with my friend Rich clarified this idea a little for me. He was talking about how the "genuine" Art Deco you find in such place as New York City eventually gave way to the sort of schmaltz Art Deco you find in place like Wildwood and Miami. This sort of thing is widespread and well-documented: The Slide in cultural value as an "original" thing is echoed and reinterpreted over time, where the reinterpretation no longer really represents the value or shares the same ideaset of the old.

At the risk of sounding like an Old Codger (which I am), this is the sort of thing we see in the Cult of Celebrity that our culture is awash in today. Used to be (sound of creaking rocking chair and smell of corncob pipe) that people became celebrities because of their work--that is, their work had a perceived value, so their persona acquired this value. Over time, the value of the persona turned some of these celebrities into "eternal" "icons" (think Elvis, Monroe, etc., the kind of stereotypical celebrity that the media associates with certain time periods or Golden Ages in American culture.) At some point, I think, people's desire to acquired this sort of weird mythological status trumped the desire to produce good work (keep in mind, these are all generalizations--clearly there are some folks doing great art or whatever out there nowadays.) Hence you get the Cult of Celebrity, which is a facet of the mainstream media yet which likely holds sway in the minds of a certain mass of regular American people. The Slide has occurred.

The Slide occurs routinely in all sorts of walks of life, of art, history, whatever. It also seems to happen economically, especially now that our currency is not hitched to anything, i.e. Gold standard, etc. For example, once a particular home had this and that value; now it has something else. The Slide goes this way and that--more like The Electric Slide than the one you'd find in a kids' park.

That's not to say the original things had any "real" value to begin with, merely that they had perceived value, which is virtually the same thing. The Slide occurs when that original value of x is now attributed to something that is not really x, but more y. At some point, though, and I'm not sure how, but the value of the thing and the signifier becomes uncoupled, i.e. being a celebrity is no longer valued the same as it was. What happens then? Cultural dislocation?

What happens when a mass of people wakes up one morning and realizes, hey, our culture is bankrupt? Like, hey, none of this means Shit? Maybe I'm just speaking for myself, but I think we're gonna find out.

2012-01-25T13:44:00.004-05:00

I dreamed that, in honor of my boy White Bobby's birthday, he brought The Circle and some of his weaselly Ohio frienz (including the Black Keys) over to his back yard in Park Slope, Brokelyn. There he forced us to perform a stage play based on the television show Parks and Recreation. I was forced to portray Ron Swanson, reading dialogue off of a yellowed piece of notebook paper and wearing a fake mustachio.

Then I dreamed that I took my daughter to a strange water park in Bergen County. The exterior looked a little like the Willowbrook Mall--some kind of giant concrete alien vehicle, with strange, non-native plants around the parking lot. We waiting on line to get inside, which was a large, dark space full of balconies, three stories up, full of arcades and fast food stands. At the very top, there was a stream that was flowing around the edge of the balcony and down, and you would get into it and it would carry you around and around and down and finally spit you outside in this huge waterfall on the side of the place, and you would get dumped into this little pond. Seemed like fun, only when we got to the top and were gearing up to enter the stream Kiddo got scared and bolted. I was terrified. Luckily some friends of mine were with me and helped me in the search for her, and we ultimately found her. Just another dream where Kiddo gets into a scrape while I'm watching her. Yeesh.

2012-01-25T13:43:00.001-05:00

2012-01-15T17:18:00.002-05:00

"Don't blame God [for the evil shit people do]." -- My Dad [Stuff in parentheses added by me to emphasis what I believe my dad meant]

2012-01-14T13:18:00.003-05:00

I dreamed I was at a dark, high-ceiling cafe, very modern decor, lots of tables. It was night. I was a regular there, and ran into another regular I knew, an old Jewish guy named Avi. I sat with Avi and talked some. Then a ton of his relatives filed in and sat at another table. Avi explained that they were here either celebrating a birth or a marriage or some such, and as such, there was this tradition where they all ate this cornucopia-shaped flaky cookie. One of Avi's younger relatives came over to escort him to the family table, but the old man insisted that I come along. At Avi's urging they even let me, a goy, partake in the cookie eating. Pretty good cookie.

In real life, old Jim Teacher was an extra in the climactic battle scene in the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises (I'll likely be cut out when the thing is in theaters, but it was a fun gig. I was one of Bane's thug henchmen. If you ever saw me these days, you'd realize it's my ideal role.) Anyways, I dreamed that I got a call from the movie company saying that they needed to shoot another scene and I was in it, along with the other thousand-odd Bane henchmen. It was set in a prison yard, where Bane is giving a speech to his troops. In the reshoot, I actually got to be standing a few feet right behind the guy who plays Bane, which was pretty cool--I reckoned it would be harder for them to cut me outta the picture that way. I remember the sunlight was orange, streaming down on this mass troop of bad guys in the prison yard. Somehow they explained the back story how Bane, when he was in this prison and a kid, got his guts cut out of him, and they rigged up that mask to somehow keep circulation going (not that the GI system is related to circulation--this is a dream, people) and relieve his pain. It also turned out that Bane actually didn't have a brain. It had been cut out in the earlier incident, yet he remained, for all intents and purposes, fully functioning. I speculated it was because his mind had somehow been transmitted to other organs.

During a break in filming, I got a text from Jenofur. She was also an extra in the movie, along with her sister and their close friend Cheryl. They were filming on a different set, this one in Manhattan The girls were all dolled up like they were from the '50s, and their role was to drive up in a car and place something in a mailbox. When they drove off, the mailbox would explode. Yet they kept having to shoot the scene again and again, because the girls would fumble the package or because somebody's skirt would get caught in the door or this or that. The director was fuming and getting annoyed at the constant reshoot of what should have been a simple take.

Next I dreamed I was in some huge ski lodge like thing, all heavy timber beams and dark brown wood paneling (a common setting in many of my dreams) and stocked with all sorts of dead animal heads lining the corridors. There was a big firefighter party in the central plaza, which actually was outside, encircled by the building, with a second-story balcony above ringing the area. Most of our authors were there, and everybody was drunk and drinking. One of our columnists was trying to make his way through the crowd to get back to the bar and get a refill on his lager. I jumped out of my seat an took the older gentleman's glass and told him I would get it for him. He thanked me and headed back up the stairs to the balcony's second floor. I sought out the bar, which was someplace deep in the bowels of the lodge. As I walked on, there were fewer and fewer people. I finally found a bar area near the kitchen, which was still bustling. There was no bartender to be seen, though. My father-in-law was there. I didn't realize he was going to be at the party. We said hello and I stood next to the bar with him. He'd been waiting for a while, and I told him we'd best go find a different bar or we'd never get served.

And that was that.

2012-01-03T18:55:00.001-05:00

I dreamed I was in a Tarantino movie. I was in a car with a bunch of other miscreants, and we were headed back to my mom's house on a sunny, bright day. There was some strange plot afoot, to grab some money and leave on a bus. I had a Bowie knife, and started stabbing my would-be associates in the head willy-nilly, then left.

2012-01-03T09:15:00.004-05:00

Fuzzy and I wrote and recorded this song in the basement. "Better Off." Fuzzy's riff and basic idea, with me filling in some words. The recording itself is pretty awful--the levels are hither and thither and there's some weird loud clack early on--but you get the basic idea, and I love that initial riff. Reminds me of Ween, and I get to finally employ my beloved falsetto. Happy new year.

Better Off by Jimteacher

2012-01-02T08:25:00.002-05:00

Sometimes I am stunned, almost literally, by the weirdness of the universe. It's as if a veil has temporarily been pulled back and I glimpse it objectively: why do we have two eyes, and hair on heads? Why do we have heads and bodies at all? These are seconds of sheer terror and near panic. It's indeed amazing that there's something instead of nothing, but why this particular something? It's as absurd as anything else.

And then I just keep going.

2011-12-29T12:09:00.000-05:00

I dreamed I was watching a movie in which the young Frank Sinatra portrayed a spy who had been kidnapped by this cult of men who wear deep blue robes and small bear masks. They imprisoned Sinatra in a mountaintop castle, high above the cloud layer. The bear-masks had this unique form of torture in which they would give their prisoners a rope that was attached to the back of a biplane, and then they would take off. The prisoner had to hold on as long as he could as the plane spun and twisted and danced high above the Earth, which usually wasn't very long. At any rate, Sinatra, cagey spy that he was, managed not only to hold on but to crash the plane, killing the two bear-masks that had been flying it. Stranded in this arctic region, Sinatra then made his way back to the U.S.

Fast forward thirty years or so and Sinatra had retired and given birth to this brood of five daughters before finally passing on. All the daughters worked as teachers at this fancy girls' school in a mansion in the middle of Manhattan. So Tom Waits is the dean of the school, and he finds that some of his teachers--namely the Sinatra sisters--are being systematically burned to death. Then it turns into your basic murder mystery picture, with Tom Waits trying to track down the cult of bear-masks who are bumping off the women (one of whom was played by Cate Blanchett, hair tightly cropped).

Then I dreamed, bearily, that I was up in some mountains in Montana, lunching at this hunter's house, out on his porch overlooking the wilds. He provided us with bear, and seeing as I'm vegetarian these days, I really don't eat meat and all, but being that we're out in the wilderness and this guy went and fried up some bear that he killed for lunch, I said what the hell, and ate some. It was delicious, full of fat and tasting like candy.

2011-12-29T12:01:00.001-05:00

The universe is made of the stories we tell others--and ourselves.

Some of these stories, of course, comport more with reality than others.

**

We live under the illusion that we have control over things, but in reality, we have very little control. It's this illusion that helps us get through the night. The people most fooled by this illusion are the assholes of the world.

2011-12-28T12:55:00.001-05:00

2011-12-28T12:51:00.003-05:00

I dreamed my cousin had a layover in Newark while en route back to Italy. It was one of those dreams where you talk half in one language, half in another (not sure if other people who speak multiple languages get these). We talked nonsense and drove around the Rutherford area in the night. Someone told my Rage Against the Machine was playing in Sayreville, and if I drove fast enough I could make it. But my cousin's connecting flight was in like 40 minutes. We started driving, but not sure if we made it to the concert or not.

*

I dreamed I was taking the kids to Disney with some folks from my job. Jenofur and the children were in another car, while I drove around with this old firefighter, to whom I was explaining about this weird standpipe-like device I had found on a residential street in Fair Lawn. I kept asking him what it was for, but not sure I got a real straight answer. We parked in the lot, which was old and small and surrounded by barbed wire-tipped fences; there were like a hundred little lots in this fading industrial area, and you had to walk a good two miles or so to get to the actual park. So we walked and walked through this weird desert area, huge sand dunes, with strange inflatable characters fluttering back and forth in the wind, some people sitting in lounge chairs drinking cocktails out of colorful plastic cups. All these crying kids and parents making the voyage, some kind of misery. I hoped the park inside was nicer than this. At least they had a couple of water fountains you could drink at along the way. Just as I was about to get to the gate, shit, I remembered my wallet was still in the damn car. I told Jenna to wait there with the kids--of course she gave me a look, like "You fool"--then took off running through the sand. I had half a mind not to bother coming back.

2011-12-28T09:02:00.001-05:00

2011-12-22T17:46:00.001-05:00

I dreamed I was in Bahia. The buildings were tall and blue-tinted, old relics of the colonial past. I was there with my capoeira instructor and his instructor, the contra mestre, whom we were helping set up for some kind of club band gig. Then I was practicing cartwheels on a steep, rocky slope, digging my hands under rocks as I went; it was perilous, I kept slipping near the edge of a cliff.

I dreamed I was in a long, brown bar like a harmonica face, with brass rails and lots of unspecified clear liquor bottles. I was me but I wasn't me; in the mirror I was a guy with blue eyes, shot red, bleary, bald on top with black, curls that hung low and went around the side of my head, very pale skin, pockmarked. The place was set up in rows as if for a concert. It was some sort of familial function, but I felt like we were being recorded for reality TV. Something was simmering and I erupted at my wife when she asked me to get her an espresso, hurling abuse. It was horrible.

2011-12-16T19:26:00.002-05:00

I dreamed I was skydiving over a beautiful mountain area near the sea. The houses and trees below looked like miniatures you'd see in one of those sculpture-animated Christmas specials. I jumped several times, but then one time I was up there with a couple of old ladies who didn't know what they were doing. Thing is, the people flying the plane wouldn't wait; they'd just push you out at a certain point whether you were ready or not. The old ladies hadn't even got their parachutes on. I helped them put them on, foregoing putting on my own parachute.

Suddenly we were pushed out the plane. The ground came rushing up. The hapless old ladies thankfully managed to get their chutes open. I was still struggling, holding on desperately to the unopened chute; my arms were straining, the muscles aching in real life as I struggled with the straps. Finally, at the last moment, I pulled the thing open, and fell into a soft field of tall wheat.

Woke up thrashing about, as if struggling with the parachute. It was barely past midnight.

2011-12-03T11:57:00.001-05:00

I dreamed it was dark alongside the highway; the only light came from cars passing by on Route 4, headed East towards the GWB. We were going to park in my old university's parking lot and take public transit into the city for some type of celebration or bar. I wished I had my alumni card so the night guard wouldn't hassle us, but we decided to take the chance. I was eating lots and lots of fried chicken. Then I was searching through piles of coins, searching for quarters. Then I woke up.

2011-12-03T08:26:00.001-05:00

Fuzzy and I went to see Hot Snakes last night at Maxwell's. We arrived about mid-way through Rye Coalition's set--truth be told, the room may have been more packed for Rye.

Second time I've seen Hot Snakes (both times at Maxwell's; first time was when they passed through around the time of their first record) and they were just as impressive as the last time. Two of the most memorable rock n' roll shows I've ever seen. It's never that they're doing something revolutionary or crazy. It's just that the atmosphere is always intense and driving, due mostly to the fact that the drums are really the lead instrument. Most of their tunes have this similar thunderous, caveman-clobbering beat that just dominates the room (and making the tunes eminently danceable), and the other instruments (and vocals) are flowing along, punctuating the rhythm, reacting to it. They rarely pause between songs. There's not a lot of chit-chat. But as Fuzzy noted, they get a monstrous sound out of the arrangement, and they're not using as much distortion as you'd think. Probably because, like olden rock 'n roll, they deal in rhythm music; the melodies are complex, but they are dependent on that constant, unrelenting, pummeling beat.

Real great show. One of those bands that inspires me, like the Ramones. It's amazing the kind of creativity and sound they can wring out of a stripped down rock 'n roll setup. Truly awesome.

2011-11-28T17:02:00.000-05:00

2011-11-28T16:57:00.002-05:00

I dreamed I was walking to Indianapolis, a giant heavy case on my back, through the starless night. I had just left a tall, pastel-colored, fern-bedecked railway station in Eastern Pennsylvania, where my coworkers were milling around, waiting for the next train out. Tired of waiting, I decided to hoof it, and, about a mile out on the highway, with the weight from the case just starting to bite into my shoulders, realized that I had forgotten something, and turned around to go back. Typical.

2011-11-22T16:09:00.000-05:00

2011-11-22T16:05:00.000-05:00

So I dreamed I was driving down a weird jughandle entrance to my parents' house--well, my mom's house--and some big old car had parked in the middle of the narrow roadway so the driver could yak with folks, an entire family, standing on the curb. I honked and then wrenched the wheel and drove up onto somebody's lawn to get around the car. Neighbors watching waved their fingers, but I didn't care.

Then I had parked and was doing garden work at my mom's place, and this evil talking Barbie-like doll, something from The Twilight Zone, came walking up the street and started threatening me. I smashed it with a rake and tossed against a wall and stomped it and bit its head of with my teeth, but it kept on threatening. In the dream, I was not afraid, just annoyed, as annoyed as I had been by the slowpoke who was yakking in her car.

**

Then I dreamed I was watching a new show where the guy who played Bubbles was starring as an ex-con who, after getting out of jail, shacks up with his sister-in-law (her name: Tibia) and her kids, and how the FBI, as represented by a bunch of middle aged white dudes with big Princeton haircuts, follows them around, suspected our man of being some kind of crime kingpin (which he is most certainly not). I just remember some scene where the suits are following the family around a giant carpet warehouse, trying to look like innocent customers.

2011-11-17T09:42:00.001-05:00

Even up until the time of the Revolutionary War, there were still tigers in New Jersey. They were a dark red, with deep black stripes, smaller than the tigers you see on Nature programs, but tigers nonetheless. In my dream I was watching a biopic of a Native American hunter named Ceebuleeth (which was also the name of the film). This Ceebuleeth was deadly with a spear and was one of a handful of Native Americans who joined up with George Washington and the Revolutionary Army during their New Jersey campaign. He would sneak behind enemy lines and do battle with the Redcoats to try and disrupt their Tiger Division, in which the Redcoats would train tigers to be ridden like horses into battle). He came to some tragic end or another. I just remember a scene where, spear in hand, he swam across and river and climbed the thatched roof of a whitewashed house to peer down into the enemy camp, with tigers pacing hither and thither.

**

Now last night I dreamed I was watching a movie about a supposedly real-life hardcase from Hoboken from the '30s and '40s. The lead role was played, alternately, by Sly Stallone and Brad Pitt. This guy grew up on the mean streets of the 'Boken and he was known for having mistakenly gunned down his own wife when she became trapped in a shed in the night; he, thinking it was a robber or some other stalker on his property, made for the shed, which was rocking and shaking from his wife actively trying to escape, and, not hearing his wife's cries, opened fire, killing her. He was devastated, of course, and they let him off the hook. But then later in life, when his son was threatened by a schoolyard bully, our protagonist ended up once again resorting to violence, burning the bully's house and slaughtering his entire family as the son looked on. The story arc was basically this seemingly one-time nice guy's rise to become a violent gangster.

**

Been having a lot of dreams where my daughter is left in the car. Last night, after the gangster dream, I dreamed Jenofur and I were going to get a coffee at our usual place and Kiddo had fallen asleep in the car. For reasons unknown, we just locked her in there, but as I waited on line for coffee, I could see that she had woken up and was crying and banging on the windows of the car. A horrid dream.

A few nights previous I dreamed I was driving in one car with Kiddo and Jenofur was driving in another with the young Kong. We were heading through Newark down to a bay area (? It sort of resembled the Bayonne port area) where they were having some kind of convention on desserts and chocolates or something. Kiddo had passed out in the back seat. I just remember Jenofur driving through a light, and me having to pull over to wait for her to somehow reroute herself behind me (I was leading the way), except the minutes passed and she never showed. Finally I considered getting out of the car and looking around for her, but that left me with the agonizing choice of leaving a snoring Kiddo locked in the car on the streets of Newark.

Woke up feeling horrible.

2011-11-12T13:00:00.001-05:00

Dreamed my uncle passed away. He had two separate funerals, one in English, one in Italian. Both were extremely florid, beauteous affairs: a giant white coffin, copious flowers, etc. One guy who my uncle worked with made a hand-weaved wicker statue in the form of my unc, and he asked me if he could put it up near the coffin as a tribute. I said sure, why not, but then a tough-guy looking usher hurried over and said it wouldn't fly and escorted the hapless wicker-statue-maker from the premises.

**

I dreamed the band was on a thirty-state tour, this giant kinda Lollapalooza thing with fourteen stages. We were somewhere out West, tumbleweeds and sand and scorched earth, a set up in the desert. Everyone was drunk, including us. I got a missive from somebody at home, imploring us to cancel the rest of the tour, because Brother Stephen had been dragged down into drug use and his antics were making the evening news back East and they were concerned. I didn't know what to do.

**

There's this place we go every year for my birthday, in real life, in Nutley. Little hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant, fake fountains and grape leaves on the walls, outstanding food, and a fantastic maitre'd who can remember everyone's order (we sometimes go with nearly 20 people) without writing it all down. At any rate, the place is apparently switching hands and the future is bleak for the place, at least in its current incarnation. Nothing stays. At any rate, I dreamed I went to check up on the place, and found it boarded up, wrecked like scenes of war you see on the tube, a shell, black mists in the street.

Like I said, nothing stays.

2011-11-01T10:33:00.003-04:00

Had a doozy of a dream last night. Dreamed I was watching the pilot for a new HBO drama, of course set in New Jersey, in the fictional town of Oceanside, a Atlantic City suburb, kind of like a weird combination of Brick and Little Egg Harbor (where my in-laws used to live.) The hero was a small-time hustler and gambler who was played by the guy who played the Jewish loan shark on "The Sopranos," and he was a similar type of character, except in this show, he was wayyyy down the ladder, more near the edge, a two-bit huckster living a two-bit life, encamped with his wife in the shadows of A.C. In the first scene, he is outside his humble little turquoise ranch (replete with seashell ground lights along the walkway up to his door) when he's confronted by this giant, bald, Mongolian-looking guy. The guy had loaned our hero some money and he hasn't repayed. Our hero desperately tries to placate the Mongol, who isn't having any of it, who threatens something awful if he isn't repaid in two days. The Mongol then skulks off. Our hero, perspiring, settles down on the step outside his front door, shaken. Next up walks a guy who is the spitting image of Larry from the Three Stooges. Larry also loaned our hero some cash that hasn't been repaid, and Larry is taking no guff: He grabs our hero and tries to load him into the back of his van. Our hero struggles in vain. Just as he's about to be hurled into the van, the Mongol drives by, levels a pistol at Larry, and shoots him in the head. Larry falls to the ground, dead. Our hero, his clothes stained with Larry's blood, looks across at the Mongol in terror. The Mongol shouts, "Two days!" then drives off.

Next our hero tries to solicit help from his partner in crime, a 10-year-old Korean kid who looked basically like the little Asian kid from "Temple of Doom." The Kid lives in a flat above a converted barn (see, this town has gone from totally rural to crap suburb in about a decade) with his parents, a couple of talors who can't speak English. Somehow the Kid works as a messenger/advisor for our hero. When our hero goes to visit the Kid at his home, the Kid's dad is haranguing the Kid about how he's stupid (in the dream he actually used the word "retard") and the Kid rushes out of the barn, crying. Our hero tries to comfort the Kid, but you can tell that it's not 100 percent effective. At this point I was guessing that this Kid's conflict would be like a secondary plotline of the first season.

After that the dream kind of went off the rails, with a weird house with an orange roof run by a couple of old South Jersey-type vampires, a furry dragon living on top of said house, a fire-lit beach party with people kung-fu fighting in quasi-Hawaaian dress, and your requisite long-legged blonde ladies lounging around.

But it was fun while it lasted.

2011-10-21T09:25:00.001-04:00

2011-10-21T09:18:00.003-04:00

Jenofur woke me up while I was in some kind of transitional dream state last night. She wanted me to pick up young Kong so that we could put him in a sleep sack. But when I saw her, poised over the crib talking to me, I was filled with inexplicable dread and terror. I have not been so terrified in a long time. I raised both my hands to her. In my mind's eye, she was a person wearing a black and orange ski mask (it looked like a jack o' lantern head) who had burst into the room and was trying to steal my son from his crib. I was seconds away from pouncing on her. Luckily the sensation slowly passed, and I awkwardly picked Kong up, waking him. He screamed for a couple seconds, but Jenna had no idea that I was basically hallucinating through the whole thing until I emerged from the room a few minutes later to tell her about my terror.

The sense of dread, however, persisted throughout the night and led to some strange and horrible dreams.

I dreamed I had been diagnosed with the same cancer my dad had, and was told that I had three weeks to live. Jenofur and I were separated and was living with my ma, for some reason; she had taken Kong with her, and he had a cold. On top of all this, Kiddo, my daughter, was working as a sex phone line operator somewhere underneath Route 19. I just remember driving my Camaro on a lone stretch of highway, determined to bust up the joint and rescue my wayward daughter.

Had some other strange visions, too, but can't recall them. Probably for the best.

2011-10-19T16:57:00.000-04:00

2011-10-17T10:43:00.000-04:00

2011-10-16T20:36:00.001-04:00

I would say I'm a Christian atheist, in that I don't necessarily believe in God (as an old guy sitting in the clouds, judging everybody), although I engage in the usual fuzzy thinking of equating God with the cosmos/universe/greater creation (a pantheist, I guess). Being brought up in a fundamentalist environment, though, I can't help but have some attachment to Jesus, especially the Sermon on the Mount and the philosophical aspects of the faith. Thus, I wouldn't pass the traditional Christian snuff test (i.e. believing in a creed, literal miracles, the absolute veracity of the Bible, etc.)

I view Christ's teachings as a good antidote to the type of Social Darwinism that some folks might infer from the reality of evolution (certainly the process of evolution doesn't dismiss the idea of human cooperation for survival, as some recent studies have shown.) The idea of forgiveness, or Christ as one who forgives, is, on the face of it, contrary to what you'd expect from human beings; yet forgiveness in the proper context has a power to heal. Similarly I veiw the idea of a Second Coming of Christ as a time when majority human beings recognize fully the power of forgiveness and work together in harmony, a process I'd like to think is accelerating.

Similarly I view the "sin against the Holy Ghost" in the sense of a person who is sensible to the moral imperative of Christ's teachings (The Golden Rule, the Sermon on the Mount, etc.) but deliberately turns his back on them.

So I am Christian not in the sense that I am a Christ-worshipper, but that I believe in the lessons and life of Jesus Christ.

But you're just picking and choosing, you say, the teaching that are reasonable. What about all that other crazy, horrible stuff one can infer from the Bible, with its multitudinous tales and fables and commandments? No argument there. But even the Creation myth one can infer that reason is our "original sin"--Adam and Eve did indeed become like God, in that they possessed the knowledge of good and evil, i.e. they were able to discern the good from the bad, namely reason. This is a gift we alone possess, and one we must make use of. So yes, throw out the inane crap. Do the right thing, as Jesus might say were he still around.

Of course, you can do without all this sort of mumbo jumbo and simply live a moral life. But for some of us raised on the stuff it's useful to find these kind of examples within the existing culture and draw on them for inspiration.

2011-10-03T11:03:00.003-04:00

MUSIC LESSONS LEARNED

Despite the fact that its roots are much deprecated these days (cf. most indie rock), rock 'n roll, being a synthesis of Western music (with its emphasis on melody, chords, structure, etc.) and African music (with its emphasis on rhythm, call and response, harmony, etc.), only works when both of these aspects hit at the exact right time, i.e. intricate melodies and structure hitting stride in the perfect rhythm.

Call me dumb.

2011-10-01T09:43:00.000-04:00

Did the Iraq/Afghanistan invasions help precipitate the Arab Spring, thereby leading to potential greater liberty for millions? If so, ought liberals to reevaluate these wars?

I ask this as a genuine opponent of these conflicts, who thinks the reasons given for these conflicts were mostly pretext for getting us in close to that sweet Iraq oil.

The other grave sin, at least in terms of the American economy, of the Bush era (originating probably in the Clinton era), was the creation of the housing bubble and the enabling of large-scale Wall Street malfeasance, a fact of American life that is persisting under Obama and is abetted by the Obama administration, to boot.

2011-09-28T10:39:00.003-04:00

My first-ever proper job (paper boy jobs don't count) was in a factory. Punch clock, five o'clock whistle, fights breaking out between whites and Hispanics on the work floor, the whole deal. I used to pack little print outs into cardboard boxes with a couple other people. They would come down the conveyor belt and you would grab as many as you could at once and try and fit them into these boxes. Your hands would inevitably be raw and cut from doing it, again and again. I was 15, and I hated it with all my soul. Remembering the noise of the conveyor belt would keep me up at night. I worked with this guy who was a couple years older than me, maybe 17, and had just had a kid. I mean, I was just doing this for some extra money in the summer; this cat had to do it to support a family. I could (and did) ditch out after a few weeks of agony. This dude had no choice but to go back to that damn conveyor belt.

The whole experience was miserable and probably traumatized me on some level. Have no illusions about factory work, dear reader. It blows. It made me kind of get into a mind set, though, with every subsequent job, where I feel that all work should be hateful, and that one should never truly enjoy one's job. I mean, they don't call it work because it's fun, right?

I've probably told this anecdote before--on this blog, even; it was a formative experience for me. I was thinking about it because I realize that, with every subsequent job I've ever had, I try to make things as mechanized and efficient and thus hate-able as possible, like I was back on that fuckin' conveyor belt, my hands getting cut and my legs aching, waiting for the day to end.

2011-09-26T15:37:00.002-04:00

I dreamed I was back in college, going for an advanced degree. The campus looked suspiciously like my high school, except you could walk to various buildings outside and there were tons of flowers on the landscape, and no paths...you had to trudge through the flowers to get to where you wanted to go. Because I have a family, I signed up to do one class per semester for some excruciatingly long time, years and years, and this math one, headed by a slobbering yet jovial, jowly professor, was the first in the series (I hate math, I told myself. But you can make yourself better at it by applying yourself, another part of myself argued. I wished I had a class on the historical context of mathematical developments, a third part of myself noted.) I said this out loud to the professor, who just smiled a slobbery smile. I was older than everybody there. I walked out of the class, having forgotten my homework, then ate a delicious fried chicken breast that I peeled off the floor of the hallway.

2011-09-22T11:13:00.000-04:00

I dreamed I was listening to story of this kid who was a Brazilian-American, talking about his dad and how his dad used to always talk about rodas down in Bahia. Then the kid and his family visited Bahia one day, and he told a story of how his dad was outside using a lawnmower (not sure of the context) and then suddenly disappeared. The family got frantic, 'cause the dad was mad old, but then after a brief search they found him playing in a roda with a bunch of other old dudes. Then I was suddenly in Bahia, in this tall, blue, circular hall, with hundreds of people in chairs and a slightly raises stage and large windows opening out onto a bay. The old man and his family were there, and they were explaining to the audience how a roda works, and I was told to string a berimbau. So I had to arm this damn ancient berimbau, with the help of a couple of other incompetent white kids, and then everybody started galloping in a circle around the perimeter of the hall, like some vast herd of zebras or wildebeest like you see on National Geographic, and there I was, herding along holding this old berimbau.

**

I dreamed I met a girl I used to have a crush on in high school and we started making out in a gazebo covered with sort of gauze sheets on the side of a wooded hill.

**

I dreamed I was looking down from a high window in my house to where the local grammar school is, a big red brick building that looks like it once had stained glass windows. Then I was down there in the street in front of the school, and a couple of douchey kids, all ghetto-styled out, had grabbed ahold of each of my arms and were holding them out straight. I did some crazy kicks and really injured the kids, one of whom was a girl who crumpled up like a piece of paper thrown into fire. Then it turned into an incident where the cops were questioning me about the whole thing, and I was back in my home, disavowing any knowledge.

**

I dreamed I was taking a whizz in my parent's house, and these spectators in turbans were sitting on benches along the wall in the bathroom, commenting on me whang and poor pissing skills.

2011-09-21T14:28:00.002-04:00

My old band is playing again. On November 4. In Hoboken. Go HERE for slightly more detail.

2011-09-20T16:50:00.004-04:00

I love martial arts and fighting (to a lesser degree), but I despise the macho douchebag culture that often swaddles it, and the inevitable paranoia and anxiety that comes along with that mindset. Probably why I gravitated towards capoeira, which, although it has that element in it, has much less of it, and more of a degree of "consciousness," to use a foul New Age-y term.

One manifestation I found of that constant "under siege" mentality, at least in myself, was a tendency, looking back, on clutching my fists, of constant physical and psychological tension, as if I walked through life waiting for something to step into my way so that I could smash it. Now whether it's because of that above-mentioned consciousness, or because capoeira doesn't have many hand techniques, or because capoeira practices an "evade first" mentality, or all of the above, I find myself walking through the world with much less of that berserker slant. Which, for my mental state, at least, is a good thing.

2011-09-20T15:26:00.000-04:00

2011-09-20T15:25:00.002-04:00

"If someone hits you, hit them back 10 times." -- My Dad. Probably not the best advice to give somebody, but this was back when he was younger and angrier.

2011-09-19T11:03:00.000-04:00

2011-09-16T16:15:00.000-04:00

2011-09-15T12:00:00.004-04:00

Last night I dreamed I was at our annual convention for my job, but this time I was allowed to bring my whole family: Jenofur, Kiddo, and the Young Kong. We sat at this like wedding table with my other coworkers in a giant, golden cathedral-convention hall. One of the company higher ups was at a table directly across from me, and there was this girl I knew in grammar school sitting next to her. He was really drunk and was going in for the grope, and she, reticently at first, then more firmly, resisted him, until finally she walked off.

I went up to the dude and picked him up--he weighed next to nothing, like a ragdoll, and was so drunk I held him like a paper baby in my arms and took him to a basement room off to the side of the stage. My wife and kids followed, and we walked down these gloomy basement steps. Everything was a dark turquoise. I ended up putting the drunk guy, who by now had passed out, onto a cot in this dungeonous cavern. As we tried to make our way back up to the party, winding up these stony stairs, our way was blocked by hundreds of spider webs, until we got to the very top, where a massive Web blocked our path; a huge green spider with a head the size of a small cat was curled up in the middle of it, and it said to us, in a weird, high-pitched voice: "Where are you gooiiiiinggggg?" We pushed through the web, breaking it, and got the hell out of there.

The night before that I dreamed that I broke into my son's school (actually my old grammar school) and tried to steal a box of cereal from the teacher's lounge and got caught.

2011-09-15T12:00:00.001-04:00

2011-09-15T11:58:00.002-04:00

"Be your own man." -- My Dad (I never could figure out if listening to this piece of advice would result in paradox.)

2011-09-14T13:45:00.000-04:00

2011-09-13T10:46:00.001-04:00

"Follow the money." -- My Dad, as a practical strategy for living as well as a way of figuring out why human beings do certain things to other human beings

2011-09-13T10:45:00.000-04:00

2011-09-12T11:26:00.002-04:00

"Those grand palaces and churches, all that beautiful art, were made from blood." -- My Dad

2011-09-12T11:22:00.000-04:00

2011-09-09T10:23:00.001-04:00

2011-09-09T10:11:00.003-04:00

I dreamed that my family and I bought a huge, old, greenish, dilapidated Victorian house up high on a hill in Clifton. It was ornate and sagging in a lot of places, three floors, but plenty of room for the kids to play. The inside was full of secret nooks and almost looked like how I'd imagine a pirate ship. The third floor was almost bare and the kids were running around like mad. I ambled downstairs to take a leak in the first-floor bathroom, but behind the shower curtain I found in the tub the yellow corpse of some old hobo. I hollered and we ran out of the house. The real estate guy told me it was no big deal, it came with the place.

I dreamed a friend of my aunt's died, and we had to fly to California with the kids on a blimpy jumbo jet to get to the funeral, which was to be held in a castle.

I had a dream I was down in D.C. and went to meet my friends for beers and dinner at this cosmopolitan-looking joint. When I entered they turned to greet me, and I made some quip about "Where's John Boehner?" and then the real John Boehner turns around (he was sitting at the bar) and says, "I'm John Boehner." No harm done; he actually sent our table a round of beers.

I had a number of dreams about working at the old bookstore, having to rearrange the place from front to back. There was an entire children's playground in the one, which made arranging the bargain section difficult.

Had a dream that, after work at the bookstore, I ran into my aunt's ex, who had remarried and had kids with his subsequent wife. Visited his family at this house in Glen Ridge, which turned out to have a frickin' hammock inside and contained stunning early '80s period decor, tall white walls, like something out of a Hall & Oates video. That guy always did love the '80s.

2011-09-08T15:36:00.001-04:00

2011-08-12T11:40:00.003-04:00

A friend of mine once asked about certain capoeira moves that seemed, on the face of them, absurd to perform in a "practical" fight situation. I defended the au on the grounds of 1) just being able to scramble away from an attack and 2) if someone traps your leg (cruz) when you are trying to kick, you can au out of it. However, it was more difficult for me to rationalize your basic handstand/headstand (bananeira), in pratical "fighting" terms. It seems silly.

On rethink, I'm not 100 percent sure anymore. Granted, I come from a Goju background, so anything short of a practical stance I generally dismiss. But seeing some drunken-style kung fu "stances," i.e. where the practitioner is laying on the ground, seemingly defenseless...yet not so, in reality. The same thing goes with a bananeira: the legs of the capoerista are primed to kick and block when you're planted like that, and anyone trying to sweep would have to get under them. Any capoeirista who can hold that stance can also easily roll out of it if they are rushed with brute force. So it's not as indefensible as you would think.

Thinking about chamadas common to capoeira angola, too: While it seems like these are just "breaks" of a sort in the game, they actually appear to be, in a strange way, a "secret code" of sorts for when a capoeirista is unable to resist a movement (i.e. in a hold or throw). Think I'm crazy? While the "escapes" of a chamada are not as practical or perhaps sophisticated as those escapes for throws developed by Bimba (cintura desprezada), they nonetheless take you through the basic capoeira responses to situations in which a capoeirista is compelled into certain positions.

2011-07-23T21:57:00.003-04:00

I had a dream that I had the ability to climb in any direction, on walls, ceilings, the whole magilla. And I used this power, of course, to rob houses. I was in the middle of trying to rob the house of WFMU radio celeb X-Ray Burns (which was a lovely little Tudor located far out in the woods, like some little Gingerbread Cottage), when I heard a squeal of pain. I rushed over to the nearest McDonald's, where i found my cohort, the Human Armadillo (a short bald guy with shades who was half armadillo), dead and stuffed in a garbage can.

2011-07-23T21:50:00.003-04:00

I used to think my dad had some sort of secret knowledge, an understanding of the ins and outs of the universe, the meaning of life. No good reason for thinking so, really, but it was just the impression that I got. But as time goes on, I realize more and more that that's not the case, and that maybe meaning itself is slippery. Ambitions are often a fool's game, and there is no winner in the world except those who survive.

**

You can't argue with biology.

**

Getting into fights over name-calling, being called a "punk" or whatever, is some middle-school shit. And I am glad that my old Goju school reiterated that again and again, even going so far as to train you not to respond to verbal abuse, only to physical cues. As Br'er Stephen once said, I used to go down the street just wishing somebody would start a fight with me. Now, though, with kids and a family, et al., the last thing you want is a physical confrontation, so when dudes spit in the street in your general direction or try to stare you down, it's best to just keep on walking, as there are real legal consequences for getting into a scrape (beyond that fact that these days retribution and vendettas seem to end fatally). It's a lesson I pray my kids learn--sticks and stones and all that.

2011-07-17T06:43:00.005-04:00

Finishing up Battling Siki, a biography on the '20s-era Senegalese boxer of the same name that was written a few years back by a former professor of mine, Peter Benson. It's the tragic tale of a man who sought equality by was pigeonholed by the racism and exoticism of his time. Thoroughly researched, it's also a well-structured story, flashing back and forth from Siki's days fighting in Paris to his later life in the states (he trained and frequently fought right here in the Garden State). A great read for any fight fan, it could also double as a companion piece to Boardwalk Empire, as portions of it detail the flagrant corruption in New York and New Jersey at the time.

But beyond the tremendous societal and political corruption of this era, the tome is also a constant reminder of the corruption, both mob-linked and inherent, to boxing itself. Without taking anything away from the superb training and athleticism of boxers themselves, boxing, as noted again and again in the book, is, in the end, an entertainment. So whether it's fighters "carrying" other fighters (taking it easy on them in the ring) or actually taking dives, we're reminded of just how fixed the sport is. Boxers are in it for money. They're not fighting out of rage or hatred, usually, and, unlike "proper" street fights, boxing, or any ring-fighting, is a deliberate contest between two willing combatants. The training, therefore, as noted by Dan Djurdjevic in his excellent "Way of Least Resistance" martial arts blog, is fundamentally different than that of a "civilian defense" system. In boxing, winning entails knocking the other guy out or scoring points, whereas on the streets, you win simply by walking away from the situation unscathed. And that makes all the difference in the world.

2011-07-14T11:54:00.002-04:00

Had a dream last night that I was down at a wild street fair on Jersey Ave. in Chilltown. It was night, and there were big bonfires roaring. I came across a food vendor selling fried baby tiger heads. I bought two of them; the guy heated them up and wrapped them in aluminum foil. I took them to a bench and started to eat them. God, they were awful, and so poorly reheated that they were a little cold inside, and when I bit down one of the eyeballs was hard as a rock. Then some dudes with scraggly white beards ran up and told me there was a brawl going on a few streets over, so I threw out the heads and left.

2011-07-13T20:06:00.003-04:00

So, after several years of study, I say: Capoeira is great for building balance, stamina, coordination, rhythm, flow, timing, and strength, as well as "deviousness" in the mind of the capoerista. Capoeira increases agility, spatial awareness, dynamic movements, and reaction time, and helps develop kinesthetic sense. Its techniques, though, from a purely practical self-defense standpoint, leave something to be desired. It is tremendously fun, however, and every person alive should be in the roda at least once in their lives. As Mestre Moraes said at the workshop I took with him in Newark, "Capoeira will make your life better."

Life is short. Play capoeira.

2011-06-30T16:55:00.003-04:00

I dreamed I had a sister, and she married Vin Diesel. They had a bunch of Vin Diesel kids, and lived in a house that looked like the house on that show "Kate and Allie." I left them after a visit. The drive home would take five hours or more, and it was late night. Their street was a one way that was on a hill with an almost 90-degree angel. I kept driving and driving.

**

I met a long lost cousin of mine in a big, gloomy, grey hospital, where Jenn was having another kid. He had like six kids. I let Kiddo go and play with his brood on some mechanical animals in the lobby.

**

I dreamed I was in Indianapolis, at some weird, tall bar. Hundreds of thousands of bottles of liquor lined the shelves, and a strange convention of dudes on stilts wearing wigs like the Founding Fathers was in town. Stilted Fathers stalked around the barroom, spilling beer on the heads of unlucky, shorter patrons.

2011-06-20T12:01:00.003-04:00

I dreamed I was meeting my capoeira professor out in Pennsylvania for some exhibitions, far out in the boons. Me and my pal White Bob Duffy headed up the Delaware River from Philly on a small boat. We saw all sorts of ancient watercraft parked on the shores, little islands full of geese and geese crap, and this and that. I pointed out that this is where the British lost the Revolutionary War, because an American fleet blockaded them into the river and destroyed them (fake dream history). Then W.B. and I turned our tiny vessel off down a tributary that was overhung with black, drooping trees and vegetation, like the proverbial mouth of Hell, something out of the jungle. And I thought: Why didn't we just take a car?

2011-06-20T11:55:00.003-04:00

I preface the sentiments below with this statement: I love capoeira. I love the movements, the flow, the game, the deception. But as I've noted before, I've had some philosophical problems with capoeira that I find irreconcilable with my own beliefs and that are becoming harder to ignore.

Namely this: Any martial art that chastises a practitioner for responding or acting in self defense or, heck, plain old attacking isn't really much of martial art at all.

2011-06-15T22:19:00.003-04:00

Fiction is a false memory that we willingly implant in our own minds.

**

I dream of a day that atheists can openly voice their opinion without fear of reprisal and hold higher office.

**

If I absolutely had to choose an ethical religious figurehead, I'd probably choose Jesus over Buddha, for several reasons.

Buddha came from money, and gave everything up. Jesus kept it real from day one.

The teachings of Buddha can be misconstrued as accepting of suffering, whereas the teachings of Jesus can be misconstrued as a call for social justice. Although Jesus turned the other cheek, he did resort to ass-whupping, at least when it came to those money changers. He knew where the problem was, and didn't just lay back and let it go.

Jesus flouted religious laws when he felt like it.

Jesus could turn water into wine, and did.

2011-06-14T15:57:00.003-04:00

Kinda funny: My grandpa and dad always knocked me for my "book learning" (gramps was semi-illiterate, while dad taught himself to read and write over time), mocking me for my lack of manual-labor skills. Now that they are both gone, I understand what they mean, and regret not having acquired more of the skills they had to pass on. And while I earn substantially more than they ever did (at least if you were just to look at the numbers), my grandfather was able to support his wife and six daughters by fixing construction machinery. A different time, for sure. Blue collar jobs have certainly fallen on hard times.

2011-06-13T10:40:00.003-04:00

Dreamed Jenofur and I were still in the hospital after the birth of our son, here nicknamed "Kong." The hospital was a gigantic, sprawling Art Deco facility like that monstronsity on Montgomery Ave. in Jersey City, weird winding staircases, dark wood paneling (my dreams never tire of dark wood paneling), strange wall murals. I was running up and down these staircases, trying to get ready our stuff to leave the hospital. As I brough Jenofur down the stairs (no word where Kong was), I sawa man's face peeking out of a ripped hole in the floor, which was made of that rubbery material you see on playgrounds these days. He tried to spit at Jen, so I moved her out of range, then ran up and stomped on the guy's face a couple of times. He just winced and said, "Ow." Then we left.

2011-05-26T08:50:00.004-04:00

Makes sense that the modern genre-descendents of rock n' roll would drop the "roll" part of the name (i.e. classic rock, punk rock, indie rock, et al.), in that they all go a long way (though not all the way, and not irreversibly) towards losing that swing.

2011-05-20T16:17:00.003-04:00

"Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man." -- Jesuit saying

There are plenty of yuks to be wrung from Harold Camping's rapture business, but as David Silverman's piece on CNN says, there is real damage being done, to boot.

Organized religion preys on the most vulnerable at the most vulnerable period in their lives: children. All organized religion is a fear-based scam. While the promise of eternal life sounds great (until you start thinking about the particulars, like whether or not there will be breakdancing in Heaven), the real incentive, especially for kids, is the stick, not the carrot. Nothing is more terrifying to a kid than losing all that they love, namely their parents and family. And nothing promises this eternal separation in the worst way like hell. It's why preachers resort to hellfire and brimstone so often; the sugar plums of heaven don't measure up.

But, crucially, this fear needs to be instilled in kids at a very young age, the younger the better. It's a seed planted that can be cashed in when the child is older. THe psychological damage done is a rich reward for churches, who can then extract money and favors from adults, who, in the back of their minds, in some secret, hesitant place, are still afraid of losing it all. In essence, organized religion is the single, most blatant case of child abuse on a massive scale the world has ever known.

And unless principled people step up, choke back their own fears, and resist the urge to terrify their own kids with gobbledygook, this cycle of abuse continues.

2011-05-17T19:11:00.002-04:00

It's been 20 days since my dad died, and I am still kind of in a fog. No crying, which worries me. Sometimes I think I have an emotional defect. I only cry at nature programs. But there hasn't been much time to reflect on things. Like in a dream, you just kind of keep going. You go through the motions of things--the wake, the funeral, the whole shaboo--without fully understanding why you are there or what you are doing, much like a dream, where logic is cast aside for the sake of action. And the universe rolls on, and on.

2011-05-11T09:20:00.003-04:00

Dreamed I was at some kinda capoeira event in Jersey City, which, in the dream world, was in New York City (it might as well be, these days). I was in the roda with this dude I used to work with, a friend, and I jabbed him twice in the eyes with my fingers, hurting him pretty bad. All the chicks in the audience started to cry. Then I got kicked out of the event. So I tried to go to the subway stop back home (in the dream, the PATH ran to Bloomfield), except there was a police cordon. The cops were sifting through the crowd, searching for me. So I had to doff my capoeira gear and changed into a black shirt and jeans, kept my head low, and snuck past the coppers. Then once I got back to B'field there was another police cordon--still looking for me. Apparently I was wanted for assaulting this dude. I ducked the cops once again, and finally got back home.

**

I dreamed I was at some fancy American-style luxury resort in Salvador with my family, and this famous capoeira mestre was just hanging out at the pool. I had never met him, but he seemed to recognize me, or misrecognize me, and invited me to some kind of drumming performance. So I went. Real excitin', huh?

2011-05-09T11:55:00.001-04:00

I dreamed I stabbed a miniature Donald Trump with a fork, and silly putty came streaming out the wounds.

2011-05-09T11:54:00.001-04:00

Human beings love to invoke God when they abuse other human beings. Some of these abusers hijack airplanes. Some of them hijack souls.

2011-05-02T08:37:00.003-04:00

Yeah, great that they got Osama. He was an asshole. But this is not the end of terrorism. We need to get over the collective delusion--which evidently prevailed in the U.S. before 9/11--that we (the civilians) are safe. We aren't safe, and we never were.

2011-04-22T19:29:00.004-04:00

I dreamed I took Kiddo to this Disney Lion King-like museum. It was a dark blue silo made of stained glass depicting the entire story, and you would start at the top and walk downstairs, watching the walls as the story unfolded like a film reel, the sun shining through. Kiddo got afraid when the lions were trapped by some weird looking wolves, so we bailed.

*

Turns out I was the president of a Johnny Depp fan club when I was 12 years old. I used to make this photocopied fanzine about Johnny Depp that contained lots of strained literary references, mostly to Bukowski, and mail copies out to chapters all around the country. I learned about this hidden history from Johnny Depp himself, who was wearing a weird mustachio disguise and found me unawares as I was waiting in a futuristic train station, waiting for a train to take me home from Indianapolis (they had these bullet trains that took you from Indy to Newark in 45 minutes). Depp took out a handful of yellowed scraps, the old 'zine, and told me there was a hidden riddle in them, and that he would answer all of my questions in an online format. I found it a little weird that he was the one who hunted me down all these years later, but eh.

****

We went to a party off what looked like Irving Place in the city. It was raining, dark blue cobblestone streets dashed with puddles. As we arrived at the mouth of the party, all red velvet and laughter inside, I remembered that I left Kiddo all alone in the car (these days I have lots of dreams where she is stranded or I have left her or she has run away). I ran through the rainy streets, leaping over cars, til I arrived at ours. Kiddo was in her seat, asleep. I elbowed the window and it broke, then pulled her out and wrapped her in my jacket and walked back towards the party.

2011-04-18T09:19:00.003-04:00

A country, financially and ethically bankrupt, is hobbled by internal strife. While its people squabble, two threats arise: One in the east, appealing to masses of beaten-down people and wielding a powerful resource that enables fantastic things to happen; another from across the border, which people are trying to cross fleeing from an unimaginable evil.

Sound familiar?

*SPOILERS, I THINK* I'm sure I'm not the first to comment on this, but these themes in George R.R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" likely resonate with us today because they mirror some of the United State's foreign policy problems.

That wall made of ice, which some people in Arizona and other Southwestern states would probably love to put up if it weren't for the climate, is supposed to keep the Wildlings (the presumed evil threatening the realm) out. But the Wildlings are fleeing something much worse--the Others. This somewhat parallels what is happening in Mexico, where immigrants who are trying to escape conditions down there are being slaughtered by the busload by cartels in the border drug war.

Then you have Daenerys and her dragons and her slave rebellion in the East. This is a populist uprising. But on top of her army of slaves, Daenerys controls a resource that nobody else has (dragons) and which enabled her family to conquer the West back when, and which was the only thing holding that country together (in addition, the dragons enable magic, which otherwise ceases to function). The metaphor is not exact by any means, but to me I see this as hinting of oil, the most important resource in the world today, and the one which makes everything else work. The combustible Middle East has it, and we here in the U.S. need it. The Long Emergency, a.k.a. the Long Winter, is about to settle in, and it doesn't look like it's gonna be easy.

2011-04-18T09:18:00.001-04:00

A good friend and capoeira instructor once had two indomitable thoughts:

1. As much as we love capoeira angola (and for me, it's almost the only game in town), if it weren't for Mestre Bimba, we wouldn't ever know of capoeira. Period. Not much you can argue with there.

2. Different people have different takes on capoiera--it's a real-deal martial art; it's a dance; it's a workout; it's an almost meditative practice; etc. But capoeira only works, only matters, when it has value in our individual lives. In essence, and here I am extrapolating, we cannot make capoeira fit into a category if it will not work for us. We have to play our own game, and love it and enjoy it for what it is.

2011-04-17T22:51:00.000-04:00

"God is you, God is me, God is every person on this earth." -- My Dad

2011-04-10T21:09:00.002-04:00

Had a genuine nightmare the other night. I was dreaming I was in Philadelphia, in Center City. I was at a ritzy restaurant that let you somehow observe the entire downtown, and I was watching them film an episode of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia." In it, the gang is sitting around a table in the restaurant and talking about how the one guy who is the brother of the chick bought tickets to see New Order, and they are making fun of him for it.

My attention wandered to this one street that was like an old bumpy country road, just there in the middle of all this city. I started walking down it, amongst the weeds and cart tracks and willow trees. There will these broken down farm buildings all around. If you turned around, though, you could see downtown Philly a few steps away.

Then I see this old guy with a beard and a straw hat drinking from a fountain in the distance, standing among the ruins. He turns to me and says, "I'm gonna drink this water, and then I'm gonna eat your brains." And then he starts singing it, even, and slowly walking towards me. And I turn to run, and, of course, everything is slow, my feet are getting caught in the mud and the tall grasses are slowing me down.

And then I woke up, somewhat freaked out.

2011-04-10T20:58:00.003-04:00

I mean, I just want a job that I can go to and leave at the end of the day and not have to think about. The American Dream, you know? Just a plain old job. Once this was an attainable goal. Unlike my dad's generation, where you lived your work, you could just get some job to get you by and go about living the rest of your life.

No longer. Now jobs you demand that you give a shit, or pretend to give a shit to such a degree that it is indistinguishable from actually giving a shit. And I am not that good an actor. To all those that actually care about their jobs, that's great. I'm just speaking for myself. My life is rich and magical enough that I need no succor from a profession.

At any rate, jobs these days want participation. They want engagement. They want, essentially, your soul. Now I would go to great lengths and do some backbreaking shit or sit for 8 hours a day staring at a screen so long as my soul is untouched. But these jobs, they are soul-hungry. They will not be appeased. They want it all.

And the reason I refuse engagement, in the end, the reason I withhold my soul, is that this whole foul enterprise--this current configuration of America they have rigged up, Dick Cheney's imagined American way of life--is such a failure, or rather such a wild success, that it really has no use for any of us anymore. As I have opined before, most of the shit that makes human life laborious and difficult is done nowadays by machines. So, in order to keep us working and fulfilling the imagined ideal of a working life, they have had to invent roles for us. Whereas people in other less affluent situations have to do real work, we can sit in our air-conditioned offices and look at our screens for 8 hours and have that be called work and return home to a household overflowing with food and goods. And we can complain about how hard we have "worked."

So yes, this whole thing is so tremendously successful and awful that the only option for a sentient person, really, is to soulfully opt out. But they are making that harder and harder to do. Damn them all to hell.

2011-04-06T07:36:00.003-04:00

After years of working at this new place, my mind has finally gone over to dreaming about it, to boot. Specifically conventions, aisles full of weird, magical merchandize and machines, plazas with fountains, ridiculous and ornate walkways. No specific plots that I can think of (my dreams are mostly environments), but it's kind of sorry that it's come to this, ain't it?

2011-04-05T07:40:00.003-04:00

Jenofur and I watched the first 15 minutes of HBO's Game of Thrones the other night. Loved it. The tone was spot on. Really looking forward to the full show.

Not to start nitpicking already, though, but it would seem from some trailers that, in the show version (SPOILER), Cat is trying to convince Ned not to go to King's Landing, whereas I think it was the other way around in the book (Ned wanting to stay, Cat telling him to go). If this is the case, that's a major departure from the books, and it will seriously affect how things shake out emotionally down the line (if, of course, the show gets picked up for future seasons).

2011-04-03T19:04:00.005-04:00

God, the spirit of all things, surrounds us and engulfs us. Regardless of religion, humans have the sensation, unreasonable though it is, of being privy to God's presence. Every moment, every human being, every being, even, is witness to the further unfolding of the divine vision. Every day, through science and logic, those fruits of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, we learn more of the mysteries of existence, and see more clearly the divine vision--although this vision is not always what we would like to see: it is filled with violence and evil as well as with good and benevolence, and there's no use trying to justify it in human terms. Still, it is a wonder, and a wonder to be alive at all.

2011-03-17T18:36:00.003-04:00

It's a source of aggravation to me when people use "dreams" to mean "hopes" or "aspirations," even in the case of "The American Dream." It's almost an intellectual fault, and it's especially egregious when it's used in poetry or singing; I can no longer take the poet or singer seriously who uses it*. None of my dreams (i.e. the things I see at night when I go to sleep) are aspirational. They are not things I strive to achieve. They are amorphous, weird encounters with strange beasts, usually on railway platforms or Staten Island. Where did this idiotic usage come from? It's just shorthand for "I'm-too-lazy-to-use-a-more-rational-word-choice," and it pierces my heart. Take them away.

* Caveat: There may have been some time I used "dreams" this way in my songs. But I like to think not.

2011-03-15T14:18:00.003-04:00

Before my mental images of "Song of Ice and Fire" are upended entirely by the HBO version of the books, I thought I'd share how I pictured some of the major characters, if only for my own memories' sake. Any other readers who chance upon this post can feel free to post their thoughts, as well.

In no specific order, then:

Ned - Tanis Half-Elven (Weird, I know, but I just pictured this dude basically looking like another fantasy dude, but there you go.)
Cat - The lady CIA agent from the Bourne movies.
Arya - The young girl from Panic Room.
Theon - James Franco
Bran - The guy who played Sam in The Lord of the Rings movies.
Tyrion - Peter Dinklage (duh!)
Jaime - Heath Ledger
Cersei - The lady who was the princess in The Princess Bride.
Varys - Stephen Fry with his head shaved.
Littlefinger - Robert Downey Jr.
King Robert - The guy who plays Hagrid.
Viserys - Elric (see Ned.)
Ser Loras - Kenny G.

Of course I had mental pictures of the other characters, but these were the ones that really stood out. Now that I've seen the guy they cast as Jon Snow I can't imagine him any other way, but in this case, I think the dude fits the part.

2011-03-13T22:27:00.003-04:00

Dreamed I was on a business trip in D.C., and there was an attack by someone or something coming from the waterfront: D.C., Balmer, and Philly all under assault. I got in my rental car and drove through the night, blood-red shadows long upon the land. I looked in the mirror, and I was David Lynch. I stopped at a payphone and called Jenofur and explained what was going on. There were vast spotlights in the sky and sirens like an air raid (I assume). Then I got in the car and drove some more.

**

Brother Stephen and my bud Robesperre Duffy were finally going to duke it out. I convinced them to let me film the fight. So we drove around town looking for a suitable place. The town was some glitzy Shore combination of Atlantic City, all golden and shining, as Asbury Park and Ocean Grove and Seaside, with neon-flashing ferris wheels. We stopped in the lobby of an elegant casino and the two began to slug each other, with me filming. Then we got kicked out. Then we got in the car and drove to another casino. By this time, more friends were showing up, and I decided it would be cool to sprite-ize the footage and use it to design a fighting video game with all my friends, using the casino lobbies as the fancy backdrops. But we kept getting the boot before I could get decent footage. After awhile we were all laughing and drove to the beach and played some baseball.

2011-03-01T21:56:00.005-05:00

I coulda been a contender. Probably. If I put my mind to it, I could probably have been the doctor my mother wished I was, or the famed cartoonist my dad thought I ought to be. I mean, I'm not that dumb. Right?

But something in me resists, and I don't think it's just my innate desire to defy. There is something about the whole human endeavor as it is currently imagined, and especially about the American endeavor, that strikes me as inherently corrupt. It is spiritually void, about nothing more than securing temporary material advantage. Even the driftwood and debris of the culture that I learned to cherish, like its music, even that seems ultimately based on a false premise: the illusion of control. Sure, it is amusing in the sense that its artwork plays with and reveals how fundamentally wrongheaded the entire enterprise is, but not much more. It is, ultimately, pointless, and I frankly don't know how much longer it will persist, considering that this version of human culture is predicated on a constant supply of resources from unstable places to fuel it.

The first thing that really depressed me when I was a kid was the idea of death, that everything was finite. The second thing--and I don't know which was worse, really--was that people were, yes Holden, insincere. That everything people did, behind the wall of smiling, electric faces, was done purely for advantage. So behind the veneer of civilization, of kind words and pretend courtesy, there is the same jungle of beasts tearing each other apart just to survive a little longer. Moreover, people did this without even thinking much about it, because, shit, it's coded in you to do this, to fight to survive. And finally, the most depressing thing of all: that nobody, in the end, really cares about these sad facts. When push comes to shove, people will shove and shove wildly, and it won't strike them as odd, even, because that just what people do.

So why even get involved? I prefer to lounge on my fortunate ass and smile a long-toothed smile, and let the river run, and watch it wash all away.

2011-02-23T13:30:00.003-05:00

I dreamed I was with Fuzzy and my little Kiddo at a food court in a super futuristic airport, waiting for our plane to depart. Kiddo was fast asleep, hunched over in her chair. We had tons of luggage, giant black suitcases with wheels and all, strewn about the table we sat at. Fuzzy and I talked and watched the people filing by, waiting for our plane. Finally we decided to get up and mosey on over to the departure gate. We gathered up all our things and started slowly, laboriously making our way over.

Then I realized I had left my daughter back at the food court. I dropped my stuff and ran back, heart pounding. She had slipped under the table and was laying there peacefully, rubbing her eyes, waking up as a bus girl cleaned off our table. I almost fell to my knees and gave thanks.

2011-02-23T13:28:00.002-05:00

Minsiga, so I finally finished "A Feast for Crows" and am all caught up on the story. But seriously, the dude does leave us all hanging. At least now I can resume my normal life again, be a father to my children. Until the next book comes out.

2011-02-19T11:23:00.004-05:00

I dreamed they opened one of those hundred-mile-an-hour trains that ran from Bloomfield to Chicago. My parents and brother and would-be sister-in-law and Jenofur and Kiddo and I were all going. We had packed up our things and were waiting to board in an ornate Bloomfield train station kind of like the one you see in Hoboken, gas lanterns, tilework and mosaics. Yet the train was sleek and futuristic, a bullet. We boarded and got a private spacious car. The thing took off, smooth and fast. We coursed through the countryside, then suddenly pulled up to a stop at the next stop: it was Montclair. Led by my mother, my father and brother and sister-in-law disembarked, my mom proclaiming that this was Chicago. I tried to tell them no, the journey had not even really begun just yet, but they left anyway, so I dragged my family after them shouting. The train doors closed behind us, and we were left at the Montclair station, my parents shaking their heads in disbelief.

**

I dreamed I was in a car, pinioned up against another car. In the other car was my friend Rich, who had given my wife a grievous insult somehow, and smacked her. I couldn't get out of the car to turn around fully, so I rolled the driver's side window down and craned my neck out at Rich, who just smiled. Then I reached out and found a groove in the car near Rich's head, and, after much pulling slowly opened up a large enough seam so that I could reach through and pummel him in the face. My friends, who were evenly divided amongst the two cars, were either screaming or laughing.

**

Then Rich was directing a movie, a musical about some greasers in a kindergarten. Ted Leo was doing the music part. It was only going to be a 15-minute movie, but Rich was going to direct and act in it all by himself, yet he had never done this before, and I was trying to warn him that it was harder than it looked, and that it would probably take longer than the 20 minutes he had set aside for doing the show. Of course, the cameras didn't even work, and the twenty minutes flew by, and nothing got done. Ted Leo left the set, tossing aside his leather jacket.

**

I dreamed i was back in Clifton, which had become filled up with casinos, a la Atlantic City. It was New Year's Eve, and there was to be some big, VIP party in the whole town that night. I wandered among the buildings. Somehow it came about that I won a pass, via Z100 of all things, to this party. What they would do is take the winners home, no matter where they lived, so they could freshen up for the party, which was but a few hours later; they had one woman who was from Tokyo and were escorting her to a supersonic jet to take her back for her party clothes at home. The shuttle buses were all filled to overflowing with winners, and when I asked if they would stop and drop me at Bloomfield, the driver said "Just a sec," then, as I stepped down, he took off, with all the other buses in tow. The message was clear: Bloomfield was close enough for you to see to yourself home. So I started walking.

2011-02-07T09:37:00.003-05:00

I dreamed we were at a house fire. You could see flame in the windows on the second and third floors of this Victorian home. My wife's sister and her friend were wearing PPE and said they had it under control, but they didn't have a house. They walked into the burning home like that. I hollered, "Shit, you need to vent those windows!" So I used a stick to smash a small window showing fire on the topmost floor, and flames came through. Then my father-in-law ran into the house. Now you saw angry smoke pushing out from under the eaves, and windows exploding. My father-in-law came flying out onto a balcony, his arms all red and melting, saying his back hurt, but the back was the least of his problems. Then my father arrived on a proper fire engine, and other apparatus arrived as well. I ran up to my dad to tell him what had happened, that my sister-in-law and her friend were inside and that my father-in-law had been badly burned. Smoke came pouring out of the home as the firefighters swarmed the place and we carried my father-in-law onto the lawn.

2011-02-07T09:28:00.004-05:00

Yeah, so I am maybe 100 pages shy of finishing book three in George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire epic. It's exhausting and exhaustive. Seriously, these books are eating what's left of my brain. Life swirls by and I sit pinned to my mighty armchair Caesar Augustus, spellbound. I haven't been this engrossed in reading psycho-fantasy shit since I took it upon myself to kill King's Dark Tower monstrosity, and to be honest that story did not have the intricacy of Martin's. These books are hundreds of pages long and I don't feel like Martin is being verbose at all. I love the way the fantastical elements slowly seep into the story over time, and the plotting and history is so deftly woven it's hard to imagine. But I have to wonder: what kind of a mind would imagine this horrendous world? Still, amazing and ridiculous. Feel like I'm back on the School 9 playground, running around like a beast on all fours, fighting monsters.

Edited 2/7/11 2:08 PM: Random speculation (since I'm not even sure if he survives past the end of book 3): I suspect Tyrion is not a Lannister, but a Targaryen. Lots of dragon references around him, he doesn't seem to have the Lannister looks, and it would account for his father's hatred of him (above and beyond him having killed his ma in childbirth).

2011-02-05T14:42:00.002-05:00

Capoeira's symbol is the circle, the roda, the shape of infinity. Similarly, although there are great players in capoeira, there are no champions--no trophies are awarded, no number 1s to stand above all. Capoeira is nothing without more than one person--na coise da gente. Loneliness, aloneness, is the antithesis of capoeira.

And again infinity: the game never ends. Players come and go, faces change, but the game continues. There are ups and downs, and though there are points where certainly one player has prevailed, the play continues unabated. The struggle, as Mestre Moraes characterized it when I attended one of his seminars in Newark, goes on.

Capoeira stems from some of the most vile oppression ever concocted by human beings, and thus it continues to be the weapon for the oppressed. And as there seems to be no end to oppression, only high and low tides, capoeira plays on.

2011-01-29T20:28:00.003-05:00

At the Trop in Atlantic City, there is this mall-like area (The Quarter, done up in a Cuban-like [I guess?] style) where the ceiling is painted blue like the sky. The rational part of you laughs when you see it, but, as Jenofur noted, it seems like there is some more primitive part of your brain that, try as you might, isn't entirely convinced that it's fake (blue means sky). So even though it's snow and cold outside, there's a shadow in your brain telling you that you're actually outside under the clear blue--if only for a second.

Facebook, aptly named, is somewhat like this. Everyday you log in and look at a host of faces of your friends and acquaintances and co-workers and God knows who else. And though you know that virtual relationships are not the same as seeing somebody in the flesh and hanging out, I would wager that there is some backwater in your brain that is telling you (because you are looking at these mug shots) "Hey, there's so-and-so again." It is a superficial dismissal of the essential loneliness of the activity. On some level, you feel like you're actually seeing these people for real. And maybe that makes you think twice about actually in real life hanging out with these people--a mirage mistaken for the genuine article.

Disclaimer: I am a notorious Luddite ("late adapter" might be more precise), and my feeling with the Internet and all this technology is: These things are tools; in and of themselves they will not save you or damn you. It's all in how they are used, for good or ill. Yet if the scenario I propose above is true, and we are now operating with a diminished awareness of our own loneliness...I dunno. There's something to be said for sitting around and shooting the shit, even if it's in the mall corridors of a faux-Havana in sleazy old A.C.

2011-01-23T19:01:00.002-05:00

In the next hotel room in the Tropicana, a loud party was going on. I swear I heard someone say, as I drifted in and out of sleep, that "he was going to bust inside and kill all their children." Referring to our room. Jenofur said it was because they wanted our room. Pig said, "I can't believe what they're saying."

I dreamed that I woke up with a condition in which I understood exactly what I was saying, but the rest of the world just heard gobbledygook. No one could understand me, and everyone thought I was just kidding around, making noises. Except my daughter, who was older now. She opened a medical book and pointed to the name for my condition---''invictus via alles," in the dream--and told me she was going to take me to a pair of goofy Italian doctors who had made it their life's work to cure this horrible neurological disorder.

Meanwhile, I met Mike Tyson on a muddy, snowy street corner in Jersey City. I asked him what the secret was to punching, or tried to, but all he heard was gobbledygook. A couple kids came over and started talking to Mike. He showed off by punching a trash can a few times, denting it badly. He told them "it's all the legs." Giant frogs croaked in the neighborhood trees.

2011-01-16T20:08:00.007-05:00

Read "Game of Thrones," the first book in George R.R. Martin's septology (Martin, incidentally, a product of Bayonne, New Jersey), the one they are making into an HBO series. Great book; absolutely could not stop reading it*. If I had the time, I would probably write some long thesis about it--"Virtue in George R.R. Martin's 'Game of Thrones,'" or some such.

The way I figure it, in this mythology, the Children of the Forest are like the Indians (Native Americans), and the First Men like the Vikings; the Andals and all the subsequent invaders are like, well, the rest of the Western Europeans (the Dothraki meanwhile seem like a mash-up of the Mongols and Turks, and maybe even the Huns, for good measure). Real interesting stuff; I would like to compare this fantasy world, created by an American, to those created by Brits, and see if yields any thematic differences.

* Yes, I was a fantasy nerd. Read "The Hobbit" in second grade and the Lord of the Rings shortly thereafter after finding dogeared copies of it in my grandmother's basement. Then got in Dragonlance. Then got out of it for a long while.

UPDATE, 1/18: Besides the Jersey connection, Martin turns out to be a Jets fan. Better and better.

2011-01-10T11:54:00.003-05:00

I dreamed we were detectives that had unearthed this treasure trove of short, demented films from the early 1900s. They were some sort of evil fetish videos that got around on the black market of the times: There were skeletons dressed up like nannies rocking babies in clown's makeup. Seriously demented shit. We were watching the films, looking for clues as to who might have made these strange vile things.

Then I woke up.

2011-01-10T11:47:00.003-05:00

I fell out of love with the punk rock scene when I realized that it was just more commercial bullshit, more selling you what you think you need. On top of all that, it's also blasting out your eardrums and encouraging you (in some instances) to get blasted out of your mind in order to get closer to whatever it makes out to be the truth--a sort of immolation of the soul through drunkenness and all that. In his latest post, James Howard Kunstler makes a good point: a lot of this is, like the rest of bullshit commercial/corporate culture, about acting as a safety valve for young men, who are basically unable to mature by a society that has no use for them. Kunstler says it much better HERE.

This Arizona shooting really had me angry and ready to blame the usual suspects (the Tea Partiers, a.k.a. Republicans). But in reality the kid seems deranged. Shows you, I guess, that taking a deep breath and waiting to see how things shakes out often alters your perspective.

2011-01-03T16:56:00.002-05:00

Idolatry is not the creation of graven images, but the exaltation and adulation of those images above the concepts they represent.