Manic Pixie Dream Girl

While watching Cameron Crowe's dissapointing, "Elizabethtown" I learned from a review of the movie about a phrase used to describe stock female characters. Manic Pixie Dream Girls. These women are simply a foil to deep men. The description even brought literature into the equation with the example of Beatrix (yes, that's the spelling of Kill Bill's main character while probably related to Dante's Inferno anyway.)
Women have long been seen as a muse to great men. There is the great clique, "Behind every great man there is a woman". But it's poor writing.
That's why people like Bridget Jone's diary so much. It grossed tons of money. Why? Because she is so relatable. She's looking for love. She is her own worst enemy. She has a good heart yet she is not perfect.
So today a very long blog was lost in the wind, so make due with this one.
Think about all the women in movies and even books and think about whether they are deeper then a foil to their male lovers.

I am not normal

Oh my, I've had so many blog ideas on my mind, and too much time has gone by to make them articulate, focused blogs. Instead I'm going to change these blogs (for now) to make them a personal diary with points, digressions, and observations. I'll try to write what inspires me.
Yes, I am not normal. While at Humboldt State, a sociology professor singled me out and tried to steer me off my Literature major course. I collect parental figures, and she became my mentor for two semesters. Since, at the time, I was beginning a two year battle with heroin addiction, she was there for the unraveling.
I was unlike the well adjusted twenty year old students. In an auditorium full of students I was the only one to raise my hand to the question, "Have you gone to a gay bar?" Yeap. There are more layers to our initial bond then being a social anomaly to this brilliant professor, but I'd like to believe she knew my experience aside I was innocent to the core of human understanding. At the time I wanted to fit in more. So I was told by her to write an essay, which this blog was initially going to be-the essay- on, "What it means to 'be normal'". That was my assignment. In five minutes I came to the conclusion that no one was normal.
A crass example: My aunt is a paranoid schizophrenic. She is mentally unhealthy. But a lot of her attitudes/beliefs that are taboo in the wealthy, slightly uptight world of Annapolis, Maryland, are popular in California. She does not wear socks. Or shoes in the summer. In the town of Arcata it is popular to become a hippie and discard your shoes in public. That's a crass example because the only thing that is not 'normal' in a person is mental illness.
As a side note I dated that professor's teaching assistant. This being the second teaching assistant I dated. The first being my first fiancee. As another side note I've lived with one teacher in a platonic relationship, got a marriage proposal from my Shakespeare professor and stayed in his guest room often while withdrawing from a spectrum of designer drugs. He also gave me his prescription drugs. I had 'a fling' with my political science professor, who actually taught me the beauty of hugging a tree, picking out the best white mokkas in town, smoking swag weed, and getting lost in the woods. We made out on giant rocks overlooking the ocean, knowing all of this was as good as life gets. Am I leaving any professors out? See, major digressions and diary material. Maladjusted rants.
Side note: I think I dated the sociology teacher's aid just to fight with him on the subject of sociology vs. psychology. I wanted to kick him out of bed every morning and argue that his entire belief system was wrong. He never budged. I did slightly.
"You can only know yourself when your personality bounces off another person." Those were the great sociology professor's first in office words to me. I don't quite believe that. I believe that people have different degrees....different strengths of critical thinking. Also I believe in mental hygiene. Two different topics. Being 'normal' is something I want no part in. Mental heath in tip top shape? Give it to me baby.
I've done ten cross country trips. At thirty three I have a modeling contract. I lived in New York, Maryland, California, Vermont, North Carolina, and now Austin Texas. I lived on a boat, an attic, a tee-pee, a shack, a home where my lover and I grew marijuana and fought and loved passionately. I spent six months as the passenger in a Jaguar and another six months taking public transportation. There are two poems published about me. "The Dark Continent" and "My Rose". The former won the San Francisco poem of the year award. The only common link between these two poets is their belief that I am often unhappy. I kicked a heroin addiction. I loved heroin too. I remember this one homeless man, Justin was his name, shooting me up (because I never wanted to learn to put a needle in myself). His face looked like Jesus Christ when he was pulling the needle out.
Now I live in Austin. Every day I'll make it a routine to (inprove my spelling) come to this lounge where I can bring my laptop, get free wi-fi, and just write what is on my mind. If it's unpolished or no good it still stays. Like L. Cohen says, "You're living for nothing now, I hope you keep some kind of record."

Love is a Mirror

There are bambozzlers. Wolves in rainbowed scaled skin. They will take your clothes and leave you naked, not able to appreciate the wind on your face. You will lose against them.

There are lovers sunrise sunshine high, that make you love each breath you take. Make no mistake, both these characters are a reflection of you.

Take the Poem and Run

The poem here was taken from a beautiful man I knew in San Francisco. I found it in a dresser earlier this week. The man was a walking poem, maybe the most beautiful I've known. But perverse and an island unto himself.

Whatever
Sex
The Sex Terror
Love is Enough
These date back to 1976

A poem from a man I lived with briefly

About me: my Rose this isn't about age but the feel of taste, the swell of the chorale ---obligato she liked my pirate flag, she was a pirate too she said, and as it snapped at the mast we took up the old bike horn and tambourine and honked a giddy march, laughing at money said she'd kick my ass in pool, though she didn't play; she said i was gay, a communist, a gay communist she asked a customer for our check once, recalled it as the dumbest thing she'd done when told she'd done it, her soft laugh a moisture of stuff boys told her, nuts in love the distortions of unhappiness! but with Rose no meanness, sometimes a tendency to romanticize revenge or get dark tattoos; she liked to close a hand upon the other hand and crack her knuckles with a sound like who cares Rose liked strong coffee to get going and made kava kava to sleep i always drove (she hated cars) i nearly hit a squirrel, and a bird, which i did hit, but couldn't tell her, not the way she yelled and pushed into her seat enough to put me off women half my age relying on you to take them places she wanted Fall of the Damned tattooed down her arm, but had no way to meet the artist, who would've had trouble with Bosch Irish Cherokee, wine-dark lips, sorrowing Slovac when my Rose lies down, opens and smiles and looks down herself at you she'd say yeah to move the river around my boat, becoming what you heard for days; she told me i was hard to know and had a teenager's libido which i whispered yeah to we weren't going anywhere, we didn't care, then I cared and in the mirror watched the bird try to fly off the road i'd find her, my lovely Rose, waiting for me on the road back to her family's farm, in her jeans and jacket, listening to her sad music on those little earbuds so nobody'd know she didn't like the crack across my windshield, why don't you get that fixed she said then would pull up the soft skirt she sometimes wore and reach over in traffic, arousing the men in my horse lying in wait outside the gate, ready for the myths of famous dates © Copyright 2011

1984 & Drug Crazy=War on Drugs

Mike Gray's "Drug Crazy" and George Orwell's 1984 bring up interesting points. Drug Cray was published in 1998, before the Patriot Act.

Whoap, here is the facts, mixed between the two books. Also, for required reading for the political genere:

1.) SHOCK DOCTRINE: NAOMI KLEIN
2.) EMPIRE OF ILLUSION: CHRISTOPHER HEDGES
3.) CONFESSIONS OF AN ECONOMIC HIT MAN: JOHN PERKINS
4.) AGAINST LOVE: LAURA KIPNIS
5.) 13 BANKERS: SIMON JOHNSON
6.) THE BIG SHORT: MICHAEL LEWIS
7.) SAYING YES: JACOB SULLUM

-The problem with most people and their dreams is that they are so desperate in their struggles to have what they do not have, they never ask why they want what they do not own. Or what repercussions will be faced in achieving the goal. They are so consumed with the struggle that they don't have the luxury of thoroughly analyzing their options. That's an elusive quest for some aches so much that they don't see what it means in the broad scheme of things. The struggle itself is all they see.

-Enforcement of reality, and the regulation of free thought function to, and opposing of oppressed people.

-CIA is the Inner Party.

-Constantly reconstruct reality for the purpose of ignorance works in institutions to create a power relation where the masses are manipulated and controlled.

The institution for the creation of the 18th Amendment of the United States Constitution was the cause of wasted tax dollars and illusion of the drug war. Like Oceania in 1984, our country is held hostage by the oppression of a fabricated war. A war that can corrupt your children, pose a threat to your very health, and spread like a plague, “The Drug User as [a] Vampire” (page 186) across America unless we take a stand. The stand is a surrender of our tax dollars to fight a war that the CIA participates in creating, the ultimate catch 22.

The book “Drug Crazy” by Mike Gray is unique in that it does not only list the banes of the history of the war on drugs. Gray also offers a solution to the problem this hoax of a war created in America. Legalize drugs. When drugs become against the law than the law creates outlaws. This way those who partake in the recreational use of drugs seventy million Americans (page 186) are not in direct violation of the law.

“America must open its eyes and recognize that human nature cannot be changed by legal enactment”. (page 67).

Also on (186) Grey makes a parallel with Nazi Germany in the U.S.A.: “You could confiscate….property without due process, put [users of drugs] in concentration camps, and conduct medical experiments on them against their will.” Much like the goings on in Guantanamo Bay.

The War on Drugs is facilitated by the CIA. “By the end of the Bush administration total cocaine output in the Andes had increased 15 percent.” (page 117). Drug Kingpin “Manuel Noriega had been on the CIA payroll throughout his brutal career. When Noriega was indicated in the United States for turning Panama into a free-trade zone for drugs, Bush was hard-pressed to explain the photos of himself and Noriega chatting it up in Panama at a time when Bush had to have known the general was up to his ears in the cocaine trade.”(page 112). During this exact time Bush was in his 1988 campaign (page 112).

Like 1984 people rat each other out in this war on drugs. (Page 110) Gray notes that “a 1990 study of pregnant drug users found that a black woman was ten times more likely to be reported to the authorities than a white woman.” One might conclude that the war on drugs is a race war more than a drug war. “The drug war…evolved into a race war. (page 110). [When] Ronald Reagan left office, the prison population had not only doubled in size, it had changed complexion.” Like the days following the end of slavery, prisoners became the slaves, offering free work as penance for their sins.

Before Reagan there was Nixon, who also used the War on Drugs as a political platform. “Nixon had appointed a Republican drug hawk, former Pennsylvania governor Ray Shafer, to head the commission, and his job was to create a scientific foundation for the administration’s hard line on marijuana. But after months of digging, the facts overwhelmed the folk talks and the Shafer Commission reversed engines: ‘Marihuana use, in and of itself, is neither causative of, nor directly associated with crime…’ Nixon buried the report.” (page 97).

George Herbert Walker Bush promised to be hard on drug abuse in the US. “But Bush not only failed to stem the tide, he was accused of consorting with the enemy. When the Senate’s Iran-contra investigators ripped the sheet off covert operations in central America, they discovered that the CIA had known for some time about contra drug trafficking. They also found evidence of a coke-for-guns cover-up.” (page 111). Our government, the CIA’s inner party, has been dumping drugs in the ghettos of the county in exchange for weapons to bully other countries with a wealth of natural resources. Drug Crazy was printed in 1998, before the current war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and before the departments erected in the USA after the September 11 attack on the World Trade Centers. If one follows the Presidential campaign of the then major of the city of New York, Rudy Giuliani, one would find a plethora of bogus departments and spy laws waiting to be passed as a promise of Presidential action. In a somber feminine voice a ‘orange coated curfew’ can be heard as a warning in airports everywhere, a function of Homeland Security. Homeland Security, as Wikipedia states, “is an umbrella term for security efforts to protect the United States against terrorist activity.” We are warned that we must give up a bit of our freedom in order for protection to be effective. After all, we have nothing to hide if we are not doing anything wrong and Big Brother is watching us. The syntax of the name “O’Brien” in 1984 is “Sorrow” in Celtic. Indeed he is intelligent but ruthless.

Richard Brautigan

These two poems have nothing to do with each other. One is about a lack of love and one is noticing someone- an act of love. Here they are, but first, a tale about the writer. He spoke at Humboldt State University and was so drunk and horny that the English department rented him a hooker and a hotel room.

Here is one of my favorite poems by him:

"The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster"
When you take your pill
it's like a mine disaster.
I think of all the people
lost inside of you.