AD.

WALKING ON THIN ICE

perchance to dream


window across the street – foto by smith

Lady gets 10-12 hours of sleep a day with her night and naps. i get 6, need 8. i envy her ability to lie down, close her eyes, and fall asleep. i lie down and my brain goes into interactive overdrive while my body starts cataloging every single aching pain. i think my brain’s on some sort of natural speed – it can’t be external stimulants because i no longer drink coffee and haven’t done chemicals for a decade. i always wanted to meditate, but was stopped by the first instruction to “quiet the mind.” how do you quiet the mind? my mind never quiets, just runs on and on in the loneliness of a long distance runner.


graffiti – foto by smith

s s d d


Oaxacan political graffiti – foto by smith

you want depression? then deal with the government. specifically the social security administration.

this is to be my first month of early retirement benefits, and yet my application has yet to be filed. i applied december 10 last year. sent them my birth certificate and navy discharge papers the same day. 2 months later they send me a rejection letter because they don’t have proof of my age.

my mother-in-law goes in to check on them for me since we’re living in mexico, 1,946 miles from their office. they find my birth certificate and discharge papers on the person’s desk under 3 months of dust and return them to my mom-in-law. the workers apologize, promise it will be taken care of immediately.

we call this morning to check. i’m still not in the system. this is my first month of coverage, for which i’m to receive a check middle of may, and yet i’m still not registered.

it’s even worse because we cannot call the Painesville Ohio social security office because their phone message system puts you on hold for 5 minutes and then pops you out and starts the loop all over again. ever 5 minutes they loop back and say “So glad you called – this is what you have to do.” we’ve tried for hours on multiple days in multiple months to call. may have to wait for our year-long mexican visa to come through, then fly back to cleveland and take care of it manually. but if i’m within arm-reach of these folk, i’m afraid of what my desire to fight blight with might might do. stupidity and sloth are two of the easiest ways to push my buttons – a silly situation to be in considering how much both rule the world.

i’m not a conservative, or a right-winger–in fact, i’m way left of anarchy–but they do have some valid points when they say how bloated our government has become with worthless workers. seems if you can’t do, you tell others how to do. if you can’t tell others what to do, you make things in factories. if you’re too dumb to make things in factories, you work for the government, where you get to tell others how to live their lives.

what’s depressing is once again it’s an example of the system saying you have to play by their rules, but when you do play by their rules, they screw you anyway. governments and the rich and the powerful all say “do as we say, not as we do – and even if you do do what we tell you, we’ll still muck you over if we feel like it.”

as Stephen King wrote, “SSDD” – same shit, different day.

still, this is a fine Zen lesson in anger management and self control. i’m failing the lesson, but not too too badly.


Oaxacan political graffiti – foto by smith

skid road


Oaxacan political graffiti – foto by smith

welcome on in.

Every morning I look into the mirror of morning, and I see the monster.” – Francisco

every morning i read the news and see the monster’s track, spoor, detritus, jetsam, flotsam. we’re all monkeys on somebody’s back. we live in Niche Now here in Concrete Castle, roil in expectation of reciprocation, adjudication of expectation, where less is less and more merely a mockery sent to deceive into belief.

we’re smoothed off in the u.s., our edges softened, which is a shame because american$ used to be all about edge. we lost our edge in the 50s. lost our will in the 70s. lost our way in the 90s. officially became mass-murdering thieving war criminals in 2003, though played with it via the iraqi genocide and child murder-mutilations under the fists of bill and hillary clinton’s theft-in-office during the 1990s.

welcome on in, the blood’s fine on Skid Road down here on Road Kill Lane.


Oaxacan political graffiti – foto by smith

the state of the sate


Oaxacan political graffiti – foto by smith

blogs are in reverse-chronological order, which makes sense if you’re reading daily because the latest entry is always at the top. but it’s one big mess if you’re trying to read the whole story. we’ve got 942 blogs since june 30, 2006. i need to go through them to see if any are applicable to our manuscript, so i’ve been manually putting them in chronological order. that’s 22 months of cut & pasting. took 4 days to do.

glancing through the blogs, i see both Lady and i used to write a lot more political and global warming entries. we’ve both slowed way down. think it’s because at first we thought the bad guys could be stopped – which doesn’t seem to be happening. then we thought the bad guys would soon be out of office. but the bad guys may refuse to leave office. and even if they do, the people coming in are as bad.

we’ve accepted that the world is fricked up, or at least mankind’s portion of it. greed and global warming have abrogated any future we might have. so our problem becomes not saving the world, but making our own little corner of it as magic as possible. we brighten our corner and make life around us better for others, and make life within us better for ourselves.

as for the rest of the world – so long, it wasn’t all that great knowing you what with the human destruction and lying and killing and thieving and inaction and silence and gobbling greed (and that’s just Vice-Dick Cheney). i figure when we’re all been wiped off the face of the planet, Mother Earth will be a much happier, more peaceful, tranquil, beautiful place. the fewer humans, the better for Gaea.


Oaxacan political graffiti – foto by smith

in the shadow of fact

My impulse is to want to read the news, but then I hold back. I know how it’s coming down, how the world is. Reading the news brings this sharply into focus, right into my the television screen of my frontal cortex. I do not want news to be the focal point of my consciousness.
  This brings to mind the latest political movie we watched, The Hunting Party. In the movie, a young aspiring journalist tells an older, successful news photographer that the journalist’s job is to be dispassionate when reporting wars. O contraire. This is the entire question of the movie. The photographer’s buddy, a kind of gonzo journalist, lost his job because of his passion and the movie is about his redemption via the quest of a Serbian war criminal.
  I wonder if there are any journalists out there with passion, or if they get sorted out before they make corporate news.
  So, I don’t want to focus on the news, but I don’t want to be dispassionate about the world. Traveling and having a good marriage makes me more enthusiastic about my stake in my fate. I’m starting to realize how very little power I’ve had all my life versus how empowered I am now. I have the ability to move anywhere in the world, at least for a little while. I have the ability to patronize myself in whatever endeavor I want. This stake intersects with politics because I want to be fully free. I do not want to be bound by political borders. I also want everyone else to be able to experience this freedom…

I find my tongue thick when I talk to people. I feel every word as it’s formed. When I try to speak my mind to people other than Smith, I hear myself as though there’s an echo in the room. I hear my precocity. I hear my doubt of people my age, of people any age. Having conversations requires a faith in the ability of conversation to fix things, to improve the world.
  I don’t know what to do other than to have a kind of reasoned faith in myself and what I want to express. I usually feel like Wile E Coyote running over cliffs with my conversational constructs. Anything that could be said is irrelevant in the context of our creation and life in the face of the world’s total environmental destruction. Everything is said with consciousness of its existence in the shadow of terrible fact.

Lady

bra removal


Oaxacan graffiti – foto by smith

Lady has this odd bra removing trick. she pulls her left arm in through the armhole of whatever she’s wearing, unhooks her bra, and pulls it out and off through her right arm sleeve hole. told her she should wear three bras, then at the next poetry reading she could remove one bra while reading, then in the next poem remove the second bra – then when done flash the audience so they’d see her third bra. now that’s performance poetry.

we had to disallow comments on this blog, and had to delete the last 10 blogs as well because someone left a virus on our site. it’s gone now – Lady fixed it. but no more comments. it’s a sad sick vicious world we live in. the internet is the perfect metaphor for humanity – a golden core of delightful light surrounded by a huge mass of sick dark weak greedy scum.

didn’t blog yesterday. that’s the second day recently i didn’t even though i had WiFi access. sometimes feel this daily blog monster is collapsing on itself. no one’s thoughts or life are worth daily words. but the fotos keep it interesting.


Oaxacan graffiti – foto by smith

Malicious code

Someone or some “botty” hacked into the walkingthinice blog and inserted a virus. I think I’ve fixed it now by deleting the last ten posts and recent comments. I’m also changing our passwords.

If anyone sees any virus warnings when visiting the site, please email me at kathyvirgw [[at symbol]] yahoo [[dot]] com.

I’m disabling comments for now.

Thanks,

Lady

22 / 50

made our 50th move into our 51st place in the past 22 months.

nice place – more light, more rooms, prettier colors, more little space units to occupy – like the 2 direction stairs from street to second floor, and the 2 direction stair space unit from our 2nd floor to room and patio on roof – this space unit has 2 windows, one into our bathroom, the other into our hall.

bad place because is way noisier due to fronting a main bus / truck street, plus we´re closer to the night street dogs who bark all night long.

bad place cuz there´s no water at all coming out of the hot water taps – not no hot water, but no water period.

bad place cuz there´s at least 2 thick concrete walls between us and our landlord´s WiFi, so no internet at all. daily reportage will be minimal or nil until we get cable installed. but that´s cool because i´m running low on words.

a blessing in disguise for all.

until next time, whenever and wherever that may be.

being & nothingness


she – foto by smith

My Rock

Most people think of a rock as
something stationary on the ground.

There is a rock in me
that makes me go.

I was bewildered
by the mystery of my ambition.

That’s when I found this rock.

This rock won’t break up,
and it doesn’t respond
to my questions.

This rock just says
“I am a rock”
and it makes me go.

– Lady K

that’s why Lady and i are left the u.s.a. – her rock told her to. i don’t mess with this rock. i remember when a train in lodz, poland, tried to leave the station without her, she ran down the platform and jumped for an open door on the moving train – ended up hanging by her fingers outside, her legs dangling beneath the car, heavy backpack pulling her down, me running along the platform trying to help her up to door level. i still don’t know how we got on. had to involve teleportation.

but that’s old adventure. new adventure afoot. moving into new apartment today – our 50th move in 22 months. it’s unfurnished, our entry into being & nothingness.

our futon was delivered yesterday. so we have a couch to sit and sleep on in an otherwise empty apartment. we’ve a 4-burner gas stove, midget refrigerator, toilet, shower, kitchen sink. which is a step up – we don’t have a kitchen sink in our current place. did the dishes in a lead sink in the open court, covered the drying dishes with a towel to keep the falling dirt off.

this is a water-starved incessantly dirty city. the recent heat has turned some dirt to dust. once the rainy season starts in a couple months, the paved streets may turn to mud. until then everything is coated in various thicknesses of dirt and germ. you can’t touch your mouth, eyes, or nostrils when out walking. Lady and i repeatedly push this parameter since we pick up street trash for assemblage.

peter’s piper picks a peck of pickled parameters.


me – foto by smith

slices of life one floor down from the underground

My gel pen won’t write well. It’s too thick. The ink sticks. It’s not continous. I much prefer Bic Blue.

“Bic Blue? Why not Bic Black?” Smith asks.

“No, Bic Black won’t work. I tried it. Gotta do Bic Blue. Nothing like Bic Blue.”

++

Outside past twilight and the mascot bird above us–that’s what they call pets here in Mexico, mascots–the bird utters a subdued muttered “tchk tchk tchk tchk tchk tchk.”

Smith says he’s reporting to Bird Base.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yes. Sometimes with my increasing understanding of their Reality, they let me lift up the curtain, take a peek at their hand.”

++

We walk through the park on our street. Everyone warns us to stay away from the park after dark. It’s dusk now. The benches are strewn with hot young blood wrapped around hot young blood.

Smith says, “We don’t have to be wary in the park. There are lovers there now. Later there will be robbers. Usually when there’re lovers, there’re no robbers. But at some point they gotta mingle, lovers rubbing up against robbers.”

“I wonder if the robbers are lovers?”

“They don’t have to be mutually exclusive, do they.”

“Reminds me of an Escher print, where fish turn to birds.”

“Those are bird fish. Those are common.”