Is it healthy to pee day-glow green?

I started taking vitamin B-complex and C supplements, and suddenly my piss could light up a room, it's so bright green. Almost fluorescent. Makes me wonder what's happening to my kidney and liver. But I feel good...so maybe I'm overly concerned...or just not used to the whole thing. Or maybe I'm inputting too much of that crap into me and need to stop, already. I don't know. No matter which way you turn, you get different answers. So I guess I'll keep going, for now...and drink more water.

Of course, this chatter is my way of avoidance. Tomorrow I begin working on my book -- "Inherent Flaws" -- which is a weak title but I haven't come up with one that's better, yet. Anyway...as another form of avoidance, I made a cake. And HATED it. One of those Red Velvet things with white frosting. It was almost tasteless, and I've never had that happen with Duncan Hines, before. Their chocolate is usually CHOCOLATE, and I once made a yellow cake with fudge frosting for a co-worker at Heritage that vanished off the plate. But this thing...meh. My only thought after sampling it was, "That's a waste of a great omelet."

Well, I have 3 eggs left from the half-dozen I bought; guess I know what I'm having for din-din tomorrow. Build up my stamina to start in.

I don't know what the opening is, yet. I've got ideas but nothing's gelled. I do have a couple of moments worked up, like when my lead (currently Pete but soon to be renamed because it just doesn't work, as is) is walking through the Little Italy off Mulberry in Manhattan and imagines a musical number set to something like "Volare" as he's off to deliver a bribe to a judge...for his boss; he's 14 years old, which is too soon to be handing out bribes of his own.

I'm remembering this one odd moment in a very lumpy, awkward movie starring Robert Downey, Jr. -- "Heart and Soul". It's about four people who die in a bus crash the instant a baby is born in another part of the city. They're stuck as guardian angels of that baby until they finish some business on Earth and he has to help them. Well, after successfully completing one bit of business, as they're walking down the street they break into a neat rendition of "Walk Like A Man", along with the "Wooooh-OOOOH-OOooh-OOOoh-ooooh-Ooooh-OOOoh-OOOOH" chorus. And it was so charming and sweet and right, it felt like it was from another film. Damn, that was nearly 20 years ago, and I still remember it. And wished they'd kept that jaunty emotion through the whole damn movie instead of becoming this preachy bit of Live-Your-Life-Right twaddle.

Hm...I should start another blog -- movies that messed with my mind and made me mad (in every sense of the word).

So..."Voooooooooooooooooooooolaaaaaaareh....woooooooooho! Cannnntaaaarrrrre, whohoho-oh." Here we go.

Hmmm.....

I was working on prepping for NaNoWriMo and have a goodly amount of stuff together...then this popped up.

Another plan for a painting to do. I had a problem with another shipment, so needed to open PhotoShop to make corrections to some paperwork needed for customs (I was working off PDFs and had no other way to change them), and once I was done, I suddenly found this image.

Okay, that's not exactly true. I'd opened one of my thumb drives to save my work and take it to the office to download into my desktop PC, and an unknown jpeg was on the drive. I opened it to see what it was...and things exploded. The initial image is a torso in full color with some nice shading. But I didn't even try to enhance that; I cropped it, shifted it to monochrome, intensified the contrast and stripped it down to three layers then returned it to RGB and painted in the red. And now I plan to put it on canvas.

I'm not sure how I feel about this image. It's almost violent, even though the model is in a form of repose. But I couldn't stop until it was done. It's been while since I've zoned like that with a piece. I wonder if it has something to do with this story I'm prepping?

There will be some vicious violence in this book...and yet I'm approaching the whole thing like it's a farce. Or very black comedy. Which I don't usually like. I wasn't fond of "Prizzi's Honor", for instance, which is expremely dark humor and at which I did not laugh once. That said, I do like the work of Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weil, whose "Three-Penny Opera" is a classic musical of the purest cynicism. (This is where "Mack the Knife" came from, thirty years before Bobby Darin made it a classic pop tune.) And "The Rules of the Game" is hysterically funny in parts but has an ending that is breathtakingly tragic.

And I think I'm going to pull off something like that? Merde.

Okay...I'm getting into freak-out mode, now. Time to STFU and just let the story tell itself like it wants to. And if it gets me killed by pissed off mobsters, I'll be able to say I died for my art.

Ha! Talk about a lack of reality.

47 directions to take

Today was one of those odd times where every five minutes I wanted to head in a different direction -- write, paint, go for a walk, prepare for NaNoWriMo, clean my desk off, plan to shoot a short film (I've got a tight script but it's 14 pages and pretty damned intense) with the idea of posting it in 3 minute increments on YouTube. Major lack of focus.

It didn't help that I had to do some work for the money-paying job -- coaxing a book dealer into correcting errors on their paperwork in time to get it to our foreign broker so it could be imported into another country. It seems even if you give some people exact instructions AND provide examples, they won't do what you tell them they need to do. Or they only do it halfway. And it's driving me nuts.

I finally broke the cycle by walking to a nearby Indian restaurant and having some decent lamb curry and a couple of Samosas. And a beer. And then I was able to hone in on prepping for NaNoWriMo. I still need to clear my desk for working on, but now at least I'm back on track. Dunno why I was so ditzy, I just was. Maybe it's because I was up too soon, today. I'm sleeping in, tomorrow; naps just make me draggy.

November's going to be a trip -- working all day and writing all night. And I have a packing job in NYC to handle, as well. Nothing big; maybe 3 days, depending. But it'll still be intense...and is probably all I'll be talking about. Tomorrow's a short get-together of Buffalo peeps at a downtown coffee shop. I may go, I may not. Don't want the distractions...or to be reminded I'm the oldest person in the local group.

Looks like I'm telling this story in first person, again. It's the easiest way to write and puts the reader straight into what the main character's thinking, feeling and fearful of. And it's going to be a crazy-assed novel. The guy whose story I'm using has Mafia connections; I've already asked him not to hire any hit men when he finally reads it and he swears he won't. But I wouldn't be surprised if he changes his mind. That's how far out I'm going to take it.

So...anybody know some good, obscure Sinatra tunes? Or Dean Martin. I'm already planning to use "Come Fly With Me" and "Ain't That A Kick In The Head?" during some rather...oh...bloody moments.

Hm...I think I saw a bit of the devil in me.

Countdown

While the cops and officials in most cities have held back on doing anything to the Occupy Wall Street protesters encamped in their parks, other cities have begun forcing the issue by having their police forces arrest some and trash their camps. One decorated marine (Scott Olsen, who served two tours in Iraq supposedly protecting our freedom of assembly) was just standing still between the Oakland cops and protesters...until he shot point blank by a canister of tear gas and seriously wounded. Then when people went to help him, another Oakland cop tossed a flash grenade at them, forcing them away from him. It's not propaganda from the left; it was caught on tape...and it shows a nation on the bring of fascism.

I suppose it was only a matter of time before the Power Elite started demanding these protesters be attacked, and cops usually identify with the Power Elite...even when the people they are attacking are supporting things the cops ought to care about. In Wisconsin, people protesting the legislature ending collective bargaining rights were treated roughly by the cops there, even though their own rights were being threatened (and don't tell me the police were exempted by the GOP from that bill; once the teachers got done being screwed, the cops would be next). In NYC, they're protesting the pillaging of our country and how billionaires are paying zero taxes, thus cutting funding to all departments, including the police; but people doing nothing more than chanting were deliberately pepper-sprayed by NYPD supervisors in white shirts and others were lured into being arrested for fake reasons.

There's nothing new about this, not even in the US. In the 60s, demonstrators for civil rights and against the Vietnam War were brutalized by the cops and soldiers, right up to the point where 4 kids were shot dead by out-of-control National Guardsmen (whose conduct was then whitewashed). In Derry, 13 peaceful protesters marching against internment were shot dead by rampaging British Paratroopers (whose conduct was then whitewashed). In Hungary and Czechoslovakia, peaceful attempts to bring democracy to those countries were crushed by Russian tanks, and in Poland they had a military coup to keep it from happening. In Iran, student protests grew to the extent that even killing people wasn't enough to save the Shah, but then his brutal regime was replaced by one just as brutal and even more vicious and they have no problems killing and "vanishing" protesters, even today. And consider South America in the 70s and 80s, with all the desaparcidos (people who just vanished thanks to the brutal regimes in power in so many of those countries).

So why should the US be any different? We like to think of ourselves as exceptional and a beacon of Democracy, but that's only for the Democracy we like. If someone dares disagree or criticize our government, we can become just as vicious as any other country where the elite are trying to maintain their power. And now it's starting, again.

I'm rambling, half because I'm tired and half because I just can't believe this crap. The actions of the cops in Oakland are more in line with the actions by Mubarak's cops against those protesting for democracy than anything else. It's more like Tianamen Square, where the Chinese crushed a push for Democracy by students and the death toll still is not known, for certain. We are no longer "the shining city on a hill" or whatever that fucked-up phrase was. We have descended into the gutter and that so many people support the attacks on the protesters only proves how debased we've become.

No rewrite or polish; I may decide not to post this because it make no consistent sense.

My world itches

To get back to writing. I haven't done much outside of semi-blogging and journals over the last two weeks. Some notes, here and there. It's like I'm waiting for something. I can't even seem to focus on my artwork. I've got one painting half done and just feel "meh" about it.

I'm in Toronto, now, and will head back to Buffalo tomorrow about noon, if all goes well. I'm helping load in some clients for a book fair. I like the city, for the most part. It seems livable and is relatively easy to get around in. I still haven't gotten used to them calling access roads "collectors" and all the signs being in both French and English, but I do like how I happened to find a massive grocery store in the middle of Mississauga's high-rise condo city that is solely Asian food. Nothing Western in it, at all. There's even a separate room where you can pick out your own crabs to kill and eat. I saw a woman picking them up with bread pinchers and dropping them into a brown bag. I don't now if that's cool or cruel...but it was the first time I've seen it. I left the store, right then.

I don't know if I could kill my food in order to eat it. I guess I would if I was hungry enough, but the idea makes me itch. I was with some friends who brought home live lobsters and cooked them in a massive pot of boiling water...and I couldn't eat it. To be fair -- I'm not big on lobster or crab or even shrimp, so that may have had as much to do with it as anything. But it still bugged me. guess I'm a wuss at heart. Better for me not to see where my burgers come from. I'd probably wind up a vegan, and they get sick all the time.

Now off to bed. I have to get up at 6:30 am and I HATE getting up that early. I'd almost rather that be my bedtime. I'm the kind of guy who likes to have bacon and eggs at 1 in the morning and go to bed about 3. I've always been that way. My best writing times is between 4 pm and 8 pm, even on weekends.

Maybe I'll play the Canadian lottery and see if that will wind up paying for my preferred life.

The beauty in truth

This was written by people who'd risked their lives to topple the corrupt regime in Egypt. Seeing the images of cops attacking OWS people in Oakland and Seattle and Boston, I can't help but remember the images of cops attacking people in Cairo and Tehran and Tunisia, and is still going on in Syria.


Solidarity Statement From Cairo

To all those in the United States currently occupying parks, squares and other spaces, your comrades in Cairo are watching you in solidarity. Having received so much advice from you about transitioning to democracy, we thought it's our turn to pass on some advice.

Indeed, we are now in many ways involved in the same struggle. What most pundits call “The Arab Spring” has its roots in the demonstrations, riots, strikes and occupations taking place all around the world, its foundations lie in years-long struggles by people and popular movements. The moment that we find ourselves in is nothing new, as we in Egypt and others have been fighting against systems of repression, disenfranchisement and the unchecked ravages of global capitalism (yes, we said it, capitalism): a System that has made a world that is dangerous and cruel to its inhabitants. As the interests of government increasingly cater to the interests and comforts of private, transnational capital, our cities and homes have become progressively more abstract and violent places, subject to the casual ravages of the next economic development or urban renewal scheme.

An entire generation across the globe has grown up realizing, rationally and emotionally, that we have no future in the current order of things. Living under structural adjustment policies and the supposed expertise of international organizations like the World Bank and IMF, we watched as our resources, industries and public services were sold off and dismantled as the “free market” pushed an addiction to foreign goods, to foreign food even. The profits and benefits of those freed markets went elsewhere, while Egypt and other countries in the South found their immiseration reinforced by a massive increase in police repression and torture.

The current crisis in America and Western Europe has begun to bring this reality home to you as well: that as things stand we will all work ourselves raw, our backs broken by personal debt and public austerity. Not content with carving out the remnants of the public sphere and the welfare state, capitalism and the austerity-state now even attack the private realm and people's right to decent dwelling as thousands of foreclosed-upon homeowners find themselves both homeless and indebted to the banks who have forced them on to the streets.

So we stand with you not just in your attempts to bring down the old but to experiment with the new. We are not protesting. Who is there to protest to? What could we ask them for that they could grant? We are occupying. We are reclaiming those same spaces of public practice that have been commodified, privatized and locked into the hands of faceless bureaucracy , real estate portfolios, and police ‘protection’. Hold on to these spaces, nurture them, and let the boundaries of your occupations grow. After all, who built these parks, these plazas, these buildings? Whose labor made them real and livable? Why should it seem so natural that they should be withheld from us, policed and disciplined? Reclaiming these spaces and managing them justly and collectively is proof enough of our legitimacy.

In our own occupations of Tahrir, we encountered people entering the Square every day in tears because it was the first time they had walked through those streets and spaces without being harassed by police; it is not just the ideas that are important, these spaces are fundamental to the possibility of a new world. These are public spaces. Spaces forgathering, leisure, meeting, and interacting – these spaces should be the reason we live in cities. Where the state and the interests of owners have made them inaccessible, exclusive or dangerous, it is up to us to make sure that they are safe, inclusive and just. We have and must continue to open them to anyone that wants to build a better world, particularly for the marginalized, excluded and for those groups who have suffered the worst .

What you do in these spaces is neither as grandiose and abstract nor as quotidian as “real democracy”; the nascent forms of praxis and social engagement being made in the occupations avoid the empty ideals and stale parliamentarianism that the term democracy has come to represent. And so the occupations must continue, because there is no one left to ask for reform. They must continue because we are creating what we can no longer wait for.


But the ideologies of property and propriety will manifest themselves again. Whether through the overt opposition of property owners or municipalities to your encampments or the more subtle attempts to control space through traffic regulations, anti-camping laws or health and safety rules. There is a direct conflict between what we seek to make of our cities and our spaces and what the law and the systems of policing standing behind it would have us do.


We faced such direct and indirect violence , and continue to face it . Those who said that the Egyptian revolution was peaceful did not see the horrors that police visited upon us, nor did they see the resistance and even force that revolutionaries used against the police to defend their tentative occupations and spaces: by the government's own admission; 99 police stations were put to the torch, thousands of police cars were destroyed, and all of the ruling party's offices around Egypt were burned down. Barricades were erected, officers were beaten back and pelted with rocks even as they fired tear gas and live ammunition on us. But at the end of the day on the 28 th of January they retreated, and we had won our cities.

fetishizing nonviolence; if the state had given up immediately we would have been overjoyed, but as they sought to abuse us, beat us, kill us, we knew that there was no other option than to fight back. Had we laid down and allowed ourselves to be arrested, tortured, and martyred to “make a point”, we would be no less bloodied, beaten and dead. Be prepared to defend these things you have occupied, that you are building, because, after everything else has been taken from us, these reclaimed spaces are so very precious.

By way of concluding then, our only real advice to you is to continue, keep going and do not stop. Occupy more, find each other, build larger and larger networks and keep discovering new ways to experiment with social life, consensus, and democracy. Discover new ways to use these spaces, discover new ways to hold on to them and never givethem up again. Resist fiercely when you are under attack, but otherwise take pleasure in what you are doing, let it be easy, fun even. We are all watching one another now, and from Cairo we want to say that we are in solidarity with you, and we love you all for what you are doing.

Comrades from Cairo.
24th of October, 2011.

NaNoWriMo 2011

I'm preparing to dive into my fifth National Novel Writing Month competition and see if I can get a first draft of this book I've been circling around done. It's the story of a cop who found out NYPD detectives were stealing drugs from the evidence room and replacing them with powdered sugar or something like that, and when he tried to do something about it, he was driven crazy from paranoia and possibly being slipped some hallucinogenic stuff. I initially did a non-linear rewrite on it for the man whose life it's based on and he liked what I did, but no one was interested because the same story was basically told in Serpico.

Well, after a lot of work, he's asked me to make it into a book. I can't say no because I told him it probably should be one, and I'm already vested in it. But here it is, eight months after I said I'd work on it and I haven't done much, at all. Plus it's interfered with POS on more than one occasion. So now I'm going to get the damn thing out of the way and do it in as obnoxious a manner as I can.

Well...maybe not obnoxious. Just irreverent. I'll stick to the original story as much as I can, but I want to add this layer of chaotic comedy to it to give it its own edge. After all, the guy I'm writing it for is as straight as they come (all puns intended) so I'm sticking to the whole world of boy chases girl, they get married, move to "Lon-G-Island", have a kid and he goes nuts cause he's a cop and they're after him. They really are. We'll see how that goes. Anyway, beginning November 1st, I'll be hot onto it.

I may start it out with a musical number. In a book. Just for the hell of it, to show how nuts the whole enterprise it. By the time I'm done, that cop'll probably hire a hit man...and for some reason, I honestly do think he knows some. I have this wild notion of him imagining a capo offing some dude who needed offing then cutting him up as he whistles "Come Fly With Me", moving the hacksaw in time with the melody. Does that put me in "Sweeney Todd" territory?

Hm...maybe It's time for me to write this because I'm slipping into my psychosis period, again. Just like when a woman has hers, I have mine...just not quite as bloody and often more internal, except when I get pissy with my characters.

Ah, chaos.

Betty Rushing

She was the mother of two very good friends of mine, and she died just a little while ago. She was a very sweet lady who was kind to everyone she knew. She will be missed.

My heart goes out to both Brad and Sharon and the rest of her family.

Image and Steve Jobs

When Steve Jobs died, I was sorry but it wasn't unexpected. He'd been looking very ill for some time, obviously from cancer. I did wonder how Apple would be able to keep going without him, since he seemed to be the driving force behind the company. Other than that, I knew little about him except he was an attractive man when he was younger, seemed like a really cool guy, and was into Zen Buddhism.

Well...since his death I've been learning he was anything BUT an honest Buddhist. He was really a Tea Partier  hiding behind this image of a calm, clear-headed, far-thinking dude whose sole interest was in making terrific products people didn't know they needed till they'd been developed. He was a miserly, conniving, anti-union, anti-government jerk who even told Obama he'd be a one-term president if he didn't end all the regulations on businesses, because it was strangling the economy. Seriously?!

Now I'd already heard about the sweat-shops accusations...and nine times out of ten they're nonsense. What passes for a sweat-shop in the US is above average working conditions in the Third World. And what we consider to be slave wages are a decent standard of living in countries like Vietnam and Thailand and Bangladesh because the relative cost of living is so low. I even understand why cheap-assed companies send their manufacturing over there -- it cuts costs by a huge amount, and the bottom line is all that matters to some of these businesses. But to find even Apple has the same business philosophy as WalMart and GE is disconcerting.

Because these companies are starting to find out you get what you pay for...if you're lucky. Boeing's learned outsourcing some of the workings for the 787 Dreamliner wound up costing them delays and massive amounts of extra money because the quality control was slapdash at the sub-companies. Parts wouldn't fit or wouldn't do what they were supposed to do half the time. So this great and glorious airplane, which was supposed to be in service years ago, is just now being delivered to clients.

But it's not just Boeing; it's places like Target, too, even though all they do is buy things from companies that have their clothes and appliances built in China and India. If you purchse even something as simple as underwear from them, there's no guarantee the size on the package is the honest size of the article of clothing. I've bought 3 packs and 5 packs of briefs at Target, and every time there are one or two pair that are off -- either smaller than the others, or larger. And I no longer will buy t-shirts from Penney's because the cotton they're made from is not absorbent and they don't feel (or smell) right.

Still, the Macs I've had have been excellent machines and lasted me a long time. And I was happy to pay extra for them because I liked them and I liked supporting a Zen guy like Steve Jobs, who seemed like the underdog against big bad Microsoft. But now Bill Gates has given away most of his fortune and Steve Jobs is accused of not helping charities in any way, form or fashion. And I'm conflicted. I feel like I've been shopping at WalMart, now, a company I refuse to do business with because of how they treat their employees and the right-wing causes they espouse. Have I been sending my money to a guy who actually wanted to decimate unions in this country? Who's attitude was you let business do as it wants without interference? Even though it was government regulations that ended child labor in American sweatshops and unions that built the greatest middle class ever in the history of the world?

If this is true, that is not cool. And so totally NOT Zen. It's just craven and avaricious. And now I'm almost not sorry he's gone.

I'm so sick of the GOP

Here they go, again, preferring to support billionaires and the hell with teachers, cops and firemen. Check this out.

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/republicans-block-second-attempt-jobs-bill

And there are Americans who still support the bastard Republicans. Our country has a sickness and it needs to be healed.