I find it sad that in response to the mass shooting in San Bernardino last week, people have responded by buying more guns and applying for more concealed weapons permits. I understand the fear. I understand the helplessness. But what exactly is a gun going to do? Does one imagine that when a shooter like that comes into their office, they’ll just whip out their gun and shoot him dead? By the time the gun is produced, you’re dead. Guns are just about as effective as a blankie in safety. The only difference is that a blankie won’t kill anyone (save for a very rare and extraordinary circumstance.)

I’m not even going to begin to dissect the fascist idiocy that a certain presidential candidate uttered, but man. Fear is a powerful thing.

Thinking about my last couple of posts here, and man, I need a hard penis rammed into my butthole soon.

The Grandmother had a busy weekend. On Friday, three of her children stopped by to visit. Yesterday her old pastor and his wife stopped by. So it’s been busy around here which is nice. Also, it hasn’t been as much of a fight to get her to eat which has put me a little at ease.

Because of her frequent urination, I am a little wary about her kidneys so I took her to her doctor. It turns out she has a bladder infection. Antibiotics and painkillers. Let’s see what good that does.

As for me. Well. I’m here somewhere. I don’t know. I really hate that I had to miss Yobo’s birthday shindig Saturday night. I hate that I’m going to miss Faith’s birthday celebration tomorrow night next Tuesday. I hate that I’m horny as fuck but can’t really do anything except touching myself.

The Grandmother’s decline has gotten steeper the last couple of weeks. For the last year her decline was steady. Of course there was the exclamation earlier in the summer where her sciatica blew up for a month or so. But even after that she kept going.

Things plummeted a couple of weeks ago. All of the sudden she was throwing up. She didn’t want to eat. She was having to urinate way more than usual — she would have to go back to the bathroom just minutes after getting out of there.

Fortunately after a couple of days she stopped throwing up, but she still refuses to eat. She still is having to urinate frequently, and that is getting worse. Her short-term memory is nearly gone, she can hardly understand anything when you talk to her — you have to yell and talk very slowly.

While Dallas Aunt was here, even though she was able to look after the Grandmother while I went out and tried to be human again, she got very mad when I wasn’t there. She’s clinging to me as if I’m her only hope to live on.

While over the summer I was in tears, now I’m just numb. I know she’s knock-knock-knockin’ on heaven’s door so to speak, and I think I’m protecting myself emotionally for when that happens.

Dallas Aunt came and left for Thanksgiving. While I always welcome some time away from having to stress out about The Grandmother, I’m not sure why she had to come. She refused to go to our family’s Thanksgiving dinner (albeit it was actually held the day before Thanksgiving, but she was here in time to attend.) It seems the only thing she did the entire time was yell at people, yell at the Grandmother, yell at me.

But it was still nice to get away. I was so happy to go to LACMA on Monday. I’ve been meaning to go to New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic 1919-1933 for a while.

Madd and I had a late lunch, and we took our time since we knew that after 3 pm admission is free for LA County residents. We weren’t quite sure whether they closed at 7 or 8, but we figured we had time. So we got there at 4:30 and find out that they close at 5! Oops. We went through the exhibit in like 20 minutes which meant we didn’t really get to absorb it.

I’ll have to go back around Christmas time when Dallas Aunt comes back to visit. But I also got to take a picture of Urban Lights above like every other basic bitch here in LA. But at least I didn’t pose or get a shot of anyone posing. That’s just stupid.

I’m not a big margin-writer. I would like to be since I do tend to get really immersed into whatever I’m reading. Also I tend to have a really bad memory, and I think if I were more interactive with what I was reading I would be able to remember plots better. For instance, for 1Q84 which I just read last year, I totally forget the ending. I remember that I loved 2/3 of the book, that I loved the prose and how it flowed. I also remember how much I disliked the last 1/3 of the book and can’t remember exactly the mechanics of how Aomame got back into the “real” world.

The Millions posted an essay by Dustin Illingworth about writing in the margins of books.

Our culture is less than forbearing in matters of extra-textual scribbling, its very presence analogous to vandalism or, perhaps worse, the intellectual’s vague sedition; our training, therefore, begins early. For a child overly fond of the library, the rituals of card and stamp and due date quickly (and, for some, permanently) accord the book a kind of material sanctity: to write in one would be akin to relieving oneself in the narthex.

That could be why I don’t annotate much, that as a child I was told it was vandalism because I was reading from textbooks and library books. As I have been reading books from the library a lot recently, I’ve seen others scribble in books. Maybe I’ll have to start doing this and say fuck it. I’ve noticed that a lot of people who have read the books I have read are pretty prudish. I wonder what people will think of me.

Alternately, who hasn’t succumbed to the delicious voyeurism of a stranger’s scrawlings? In following along with the previous reader’s checks and brackets, their snarks and synopses, their tangents and revelations, we read a text doubly, illumined by the spectral presence of past engagement. Used bookstores are graveyards of casual epiphanies, awaiting the resurrective animism of fresh consciousness. And whether we are of like mind with the erstwhile owner or we find ourselves adversaries in interpretation, it is a literary haunting the seductive power of which depends on the worth of its abandoned concealments.

Maybe I will start doing this in library books, too!

Towards the end of Henry and June, Anaïs Nin shares a love letter from Henry Miller in August 1932. In it he writes:

When you return I am going to give you one literary fuck fest — that means fucking and talking and talking and fucking. Anaïs, I am going to open your very groins. God forgive me if this letter is ever opened by mistake. I can’t help it. I want you. I love you. You’re food and drink to me, the whole bloody machinery as it were.

Isn’t that sweet? He continues later on,

I love you as you are. I love your loins, the golden pallor, the slope of your buttocks, the warmth inside you, the juices of you. Anaïs, I love your so much, so much!

If a guy every writes anything like this to me, I would just cry and be putty in his arms. I got really jealous reading this. I also get really jealous when I see friends receiving dirty pictures on their phones.

Oh romance. Où est le mien?

Tony Pierce wrote one of the most depressing things ever the other day. After Halloween he rightly admonished UCSB kids for allowing the police trample over their right to party. Apparently some yahoos up there didn’t agree with Tony, so he amended his thoughts thusly:

they say things skip a generation. maybe thats the case for IV too. maybe these kids really do want to study, but they dont want to learn. we wanted to learn. we wanted to live. we wanted to date a different girl every day for a week. we wanted to ingest one different thing a night every day for a month. we wanted to see Janes Addiction and then be them. We wanted to see the Grateful Dead and then be hippies.

we wanted to start newspapers and make poetry books and fight anyone and everyone and dance and kiss and dance and kiss and dance.

these kids want to graduate.

I think about my younger cousins who are just starting college now and wonder what’s wrong with their sense of fun and adventure. Tony unfortunately hits the nail on the head, and it really depresses me.

The last time I was at Rancho Los Amigos rehab center was probably around 1987 or 1988 when Wheelchair Cousin was there to rehab after getting hit by a car and left paralyzed from her waist down at the age of two years old. Fast forward about 30 years, and there I was again today. Wheelchair had skin flap surgery on Thursday and is bedridden for two months to recover. At first I thought she was going to have the surgery and then be released home to recuperate. But no. She’s in a special bed at Rancho for eight weeks. Sometimes as well meaning as medicine is, there is some barbarism to it.

A couple of months ago, I requested the new Mark Z. Danielewski book The Familiar Vol. 2: Into the Forest from the library. I had already read the first volume of the series, and I figured I would get to the front of the line of those wanting to read volume 2. Mission accomplished. I picked up the book today.

Now that I have it, I’m wondering if I really want to read it. Anyone who knows Danielewski knows he loves his text art, he loves multiple narratives, he loves patois and vernacular. Sometimes it works brilliantly as it did with House of Leaves. But in the first volume, it was up and down and pretty painful to read at times. Am I going to put myself through that again?

Honestly, I don’t know. I’ve opened it up and read a little, but I’m still ambivalent. I’m going to give it the weekend, and if I still feel the same way I’ll return it so that other folks who want to read it can.

All is not lost though. I also borrowed Al Jourgensen’s memoirs Ministry: The Lost Gospels According To…

You cannot quench a woman’s strength with laws, curse it with solitude or abandon. It must be dealt with. It is the woman’s revolution, the flower of revolt and injustice. The men who lost their power as primitives are the prey of this woman. It is a kind of vengeance. There is something in it of the cutting of Samson’s hair. The nature of woman has not suffered the damages the man has in his struggle to suppress nature. She has not been as exposed to the social poisons. She has been relatively sheltered. Her power is unspent, new. – Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diaries of Anaïs Nin 1939-1947, Sept. 28, 1943, p.200.

I’ve always said that Houston was a shithole of a city, and now that Houstonians yesterday repealed Houston Equal Rights Ordinance more people will see how true this is. Fuck Houston. Every queerby should just high tail it out of that shittown and let the breeders try and fend for themselves.