Don't Be This Guy, Please.

 
Restaurant etiquette may not be universal, but the version of it I grew up on is well known and practiced in many nations and cultures, including Great Britan.

So, The Man and I are weekending in Budapest. I don't take pictures of famous things in cities anymore. All those things have much better pictures on the internet. I take pictures of smaller things I see. Mostly. This post    will have some of them.

I was interested to note that four deployments to war zones really does affect one's, well, affect. The Terror Haza did not phase him much. I however, have now been there twice, and being thus far a war-virgin --thank all the gods--, ... I'm not going back in. Sorry future visitors to my world, I'll be drinking a limonade with gin over at Karma. I'll be easy to find, and Just Far Enough Away from That.

But, we also wandered in the park, took in some art, went to the Great Synagogue,, did Budapest-y things. And then, we went to dinner at this little French joint in the old city of Pest, Gerloczy Cafe and Rooms deLux (where I hope to stay next time!! Swank at the price!). I mean, come on!, an excellent breakfast is In The Cafe Downstairs. Yes, please. And, it's the sort of place that serves good duck and good mackerel while projecting a pretty beach scene from the Normandy coast onto the wall opposite. There were little fairy lights and upside-down growing plants in special upside-down pots hanging in the tree over the spacious patio. It was completely charming in it's somewhat neglected Hungarian way. Good eye, The Man.

It was Tuesday, a night most restaurants do not expect to get slammed, and this was Gerloczy's unlucky Tuesday. They were all the way in the weeds, completely at sea. Hungarian service is traditionally leisurely, and this was a French joint, so I was doing my service math as HU / F = 45 to 60 min from order to plate. But, it was a longer time than that. Our server was impeccable, precise, efficient, eager for our comfort and happiness. The kitchen, however was overwhelmed. Ok then. Tonight is Slow Night for us and a really nasty Fast Night for the staff. The food was good, not write-to-your-mamma good, but good.

And This Guy. He and his whole family looked pretty peeved even as they were seated. They just had this slightly spiky sort of We Will Not Be Satisfied air about them, and boy were they not satisfied. They ordered, they ate, Mom and Dad and Son and Daughter, all in nearly complete silence ... grimly, you might say. And then, the server came to them and asked, in English as they were Brits, "How was everything?" And This Guy says, "Well, if you had not asked, I would not have to be truthful, but since you asked I will tell you." Notice how This Guy makes the totally undeserved reaming the server is about get all the server's fault. Love him. Oh yes. "The service is slow, the food was barely tepid when it arrived at table," blah, blah, blah, "and the something-he-had should have been just a little softer than al dente." Picky eater much? Flashing some culinary power plays in order to intimidate the server? Tacky, brother, tacky. After a breath, This Guy continues, "I am very disappointed. I see that you have a full house on a Tuesday and very likely the kitchen is overworked and has decided to take short cuts. However, I have emailed with the chef some six months ago as I researched this vacation, and she assured me that ...."

Dude. Shut up. Six months ago? Who are you? ... I mean other than a manipulative git.

Because there's this rule about etiquette in restaurants. If the food is not good, you say so BEFORE you, and I am not kidding in this case, clean your plate of all of it. Not a morsel left. Complain after a bite or two. It's like sniffing the cork and sipping the wine, people. In case the wine has turned, you get a minute to think it over BEFORE you pay for the bottle. Same thing goes for the chow. Complaining after you eat the whole meal is foul play. You are trying to rip the place off. And they succeeded. This decent, charming restaurant gave all four of them some merch, lovely T-shirts and their deepest and sincerest apologies for the inconvenience of ...

Some Bad Luck.

As they rose to saunter grimly off in triumph, the daughter, all of about 14 years old said, "Oh, that's nice. They've given us shirts to mend it."

Nice life lesson there, Dad.

I'm just glad This Guy wasn't an American. I would have had to apologize for him.

The One Percent

Four women and I are working on a project here in Papa. It's a ton of work, so one evening several of us went out to dinner together to  enjoy each others' company rather that doing comparative analysis of widgets and website editors. We're on the walking street in the centrum (pron: tsentrum), dressed for a girls' night out, speaking English, walking between dinner and a strong spiked coffee before heading home. Also on the street, three young men from Papa. They're dressed like most teens in Europe these days, the fashion rage being a re-hash of 1980s soft core punk.

"Fucking Bitches."

My first thought is, "So, that was excellent pronunciation." Because, you see, I've been called names on the street before, and it's getting a little boring. We walk on, ignoring them for a few steps, as women do the world over when harassed on the street. I failed in my allegiance to HollaBack here. The cell phone was in the bottom of my bag, but at about step four, I turned and looked at them, sternly, for a long time. My second thought was that teenage boys the world over need a few lessons in manners, but my Hungarian is not yet strong enough to have said, "That insult was delivered with perfect pronunciation. I congratulate you, little man, on your linguistic skill, but not on your courage. Were you alone, you would not have braved the reprisals four women. Iwill not even begin to imagine for you the frustration you will experience in the sexist life you appear prepared to live. And, just so you can be certain, I am a fucking bitch of what to you are extra-epistemological proportions." What I can actually say in Hungarian in this situation is, "Jo estet" ( pron: yo eshtate -- good evening). This does not pack the high handed diction of the classy version of "fuck you little boy."

I am, however, the international queen of The Withering Glare, which did its job here as effectively as in other locations.

But, then I had some conversations, made some connections. So, some anecdotes.

Papa is a smallish town in provincial Hungary. Descended upon it, all at once three years ago, came an international consortium in the form of a heavy air lift wing. Lots of people who spoke no Hungarian, lots of people needing homes. Homes became available. Other people's homes, homes rented at about 75% higher rates than any real estate agent had ever imagined here. Of course, this process inflated rental and home prices across Papa and in surrounding villages. Restaurant staff and store owners started learning English, or more English, toute suite. Partly, this was a bit of innate cultural generosity: Hungarians are often among the most generous of people, and they know that their language is a labyrinthine mine field for most others. Partly, this was good business sense: There are, relatively speaking, pots and pots of money to made from these foreigners.

In Papa, we are, I am, The One Percent.

That means the same thing here that it means in the US right now. It means that I am grudgingly tolerated. It means that many of Papa's citizens feel helpless in the face of changes to their world wrought by me and on my behalf. It means that I am part of a system that makes me, by analogy, Paris Hilton, and that creates fewer jobs for Hungarians than she does for Americans outside the paparazzi industry. In the US, I am a member of the middle class, or the upper middle class, really. I'm not upside down on my house, and my income (when I had one) was higher than that of 50% of my fellow and sister citizens. Here, I am Paris Hilton. I have a level of freedom, power, and social access that's embarrassing. I went to listen to the USAFE Band the other night, and I was ushered to the reserved seats for the fancy people.

One news report from the US recently informed me that over 900,000 people applied for 62,000 jobs at McDonalds, most of them floor jobs, literally the McJob of middle class high school days and working class everydays. 900,000 Americans would have been happy to get paid minimum wage with no benefits. In Hungary, it's been normal for people with magnificent educations, who speak 5 languages, play the violin, and can do higher math to make $500 per month.

Here, people don't garden because they want to be organic localvores. Here, people garden so that they can eat at all. A rooster crows every morning, just three houses over from my house. Two houses over, a man keeps a flock of pigeons. He feeds them, maintains a wonderful coop for them, and eats them.

I applied for a loyalty card to a local grocery store and the application was full of the usual marketing questions: gross income, number of kids, blah blah blah. The income brackets were defined monthly, per person in the household, and ranged from 10,000 HUF to 200,000 HUF. That's from $50 to $1000.

My rent is 400,000 HUF. Almost all the rents in this charming, crumbly, provincial town are $2000/month, for a house, for a two room apartment. A rent scale wildly out of proportion for this location, and that is creating some very difficult burdens for the people of Papa. For instance, there's a women's shelter here that I've come to volunteer for as they need me. When a woman moves out of the shelter, she usually stays in Papa, gets a job, an apartment ... and because the heavy airlift wing is here jacking up the local economy, she's up against some pretty stiff rental rates, and winds up living in a crappy apartment built in the 1960s by the Soviets. ... Not the local dream home.

I've heard a rumor that some people here are beginning to believe that the Hungarian government, not the most prosperous in Europe, is paying our rent for us, for all of us foreigners. This is preposterous, and dangerous, and hence testy teenage boys trying out their English on me.

For all kinds of reasons both linguistic (on which I'm working), and political and legal (about which I can do fuck-all), these flowing tensions are hard for me, for us, to address.

But, I get it, little Hungarian man, I get it.

So, Dear the One Percent of the United States:

There are reasons both real and imaginary that we don't like you. You would do well to address them. Then, you could come out and live among us, outside your gated and guarded communities, without fear of being called a Fucking Bitch.

Dear FIDESZ,

We could be following some priorities out here that would make life for your citizens in Papa hurt a LOT less in the wake of this wing's arrival. It would be lovely to discuss those with you, and to work together to create some decent interactions in this community. Because, you know, you have truck loads of money coming from this consortium, and not much of it is benefiting the people here who are discomfited by our presence and effects. Developing some real, not just showy, lines of relation and some real benefits to the people of Papa would be, well, the right thing to do. Any room in your new constitution for that?

No? Too busy making life hard for women and gays and ethnic minorities, unbalancing the balance of powers, enshrining the Christian roots of the Hungarian plutocracy? Knock yourself out.

Country and Western Music in Hungarian

So, this morning I am slapped in the face with a cultural hybrid I never imagined. That is my failure, of course. The Man was gallantly sleeping downstairs with neighbor's dog (said dog feeling a little bereft and being too old to get up our suicide staircase), but I had the alarm on upstairs. Promptly, as is the nature of alarms, this one went off at 5:45 and played ... a country and western song in Hungarian.

Given the country music genre's origins in the English and Irish ballads, I would not have been surprised to find it there. But I didn't. Country music and line dancing are huge in Hungary and The Netherlands.

This makes sense. It makes sense on every level. The line dancing even makes perfect sense. It all explains the suspicious numbers of western boots I've been seeing around here.

So, the great American musical exports include not only jazz and rap, but something white people cooked up: country music and line dancing.

The circle is complete.

Speech: Rights are Responsibilities to Each Other

From the 1:28 mark to the 2:21 mark, Sheriff  Dupnik of Tuscon notes that the "mentally unbalanced" are easily influenced by our public discourses. This happens to be a psychological fact. If the rants and YouTube video are the shooter’s, I'd be will to tag him as schizophrenic. Schizophrenics are like radios and kaleidoscopes combined, their minds take in the world and reshuffle it. They almost all suffer delusions of "mind control" because they sense their minds are not in their control. Their maps of reality share points with ours, and then diverge radically. Their particular way of being broken is always a reflection of what is really going on.


So, for the love of all that’s holy, I beg our public servants, our political pundits, our bloggers and radio show call-in listeners to put the CIVIL back in civil discourse.

There are too many undiagnosed schizophrenics, and too many people feeling a serious lack of faith in life in the US at present. Acts like this can and have become the inevitable and necessary “thing to do” for such people. They will again. From the broken mind that shoots a president or a congresswoman, to the racist who commits suicide by cop at historical memorial to the victims of vitriol and rancor in another civil society only a few decades ago.

The real rancor and hate and the metaphorical violence of our public discourse finally killed people yesterday, destroyed and damaged the lives of many more, and bruised the free and civil exercise of our democracy. And this after many threats, much indirect violence in attacks on campaign headquarters, and so on. The most telling thing about this present horror and grief is that none of us are surprised by it. Somewhere in us, we all knew this was coming.

Our manner of speech is part of our civic responsibility. Civility is much more than a formal arrangement of society. It’s how we exist together. How we talk, what we say, our tone and intention, the images and metaphors we choose, all these have consequences. Consequences can be good, and they can be this tragedy.

That’s our choice. Everyday. On every stage. In every publication. On every talk show. In every church. In every home. At the tables of every coffee shop and diner and private club.

We are called by these deaths, by the destruction and disruption of of these remaining lives, by the grief of these families to take to heart the requirements of our civil lives together. The least we can do to honor these people is speak to each other as fellow citizens, not as smack-talking enemies on a battle field. A nine year old girl is dead. A congresswoman will never, ever be the same person again. In all the lives ended and damaged by this boiling over of our public sentiment, what glorious and irreplaceable potential for good and betterment has been forever lost?

The least the pundits and talking heads and political celebrities can do is Stop Stirring the Pot. It's been boiling for a good while now. Time to turn the gas down. Souls are on the line.

Letter Home: Christmas in no Danger at All

Dear Aunt Susan,

I'm waiting for news of the Roberts-Freeman Christmas gathering. While I'm certain y'all had a grand time, I'm also panting for some details. I was a little bit heartsick at missing it, and wanted very much to be there with Adam and let y'all get acquainted with him. I'm hoping for next year, or the year after that at the longest. I really hope that Christopher and Alison got to riffing jokes with each other. They are two of the funniest people I have yet met in life. I'm sure I'll get some story from Mom and Dad in the next while.


Now, because I'm me, and this is us, my report on Christmas traditions begins with a political observation I don't expect you to share, but have a compulsion to express anyway.

I used to find those loose associations of "Keep the Christ in Christmas" people a kind of irritating minor element in the culture wars. Like Christmas is the only holy day at this time of year. They seemed to have problems with abbreviations and with consumerism (many fewer with consumerism, which is what I think is actually sucking the life out of the holiday spirit) and with people like me who think a cresh on church property is great and warms my heart, but in front of the county courthouse they're a serious Constitutional problem. Now I find these people pathetic and laughable.

That's not a real friendly way to open a letter about Christmas traditions in Old Europe, but hang on, it gets friendlier and I'll explain myself.

Stalin, that souless ass, and his political descendants would jail/exile to the Gulag/kill people for keeping the rituals of their faiths, and the USSR covered turf full of many faiths: Catholics and Protestants, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Taoists, and probably a few of the remaining Zarathustrians. People of faith here were not insulted by the abbreviation "Xmas," they were insulted in their being by the brutality of a government violently hostile to any form of social organization that did not consist of, well, it. And people lived like this for a good chunk of the last century. Hungary fell under Soviet control in 1956 and became free again in 1989 along with everyone else.

Christmas in the US has nothing at all to fear for its well being and continued celebration in the US. Of this we can be sure.

No one here forgot how to do Christmas, or what it's about, or why it's good. Even after not being allowed to celebrate it for 40-odd years. In Hungary, because the dominant faith is Roman Catholicism, it's not just Christmas. Every public calendar is marked with the season of Advent and a host of ceremonies and public caroling and performance events run all the way up to Christmas Mass. Small towns like Papa have a tiny Christmas Market, but cities like Budapest, or Prague, or Vienna have huge markets with vendors selling religious and merely decorative ornaments, foods of an astonishing variety, gluwine (mulled wine, we call it), gifts, the whole bit. It is Very Christmasy. The vendors are a mix of local restaurants, individuals with their one-food shops, artists and so on. It's amazing.Towns all decked out in lights and festoons of tinsel and fir branches. Saints are celebrated, like Saint Lucia (especially the Swedes are fond of her) who is the bringer of light in the darkness of winter -- a saint who folds the old solstice celebrations in with Christianity. People eat dinner with their friends a little more frequently, and there's also a good deal of shopping. Adam and I trekked up to the mall in Gyor to do some of our Gift shopping together (great fun learning each others' tastes there), and it was as busy and as much a place to display social status as any mall in the US. It has a Burger King, but also two cafes with good espresso and a couple of gellato shops, a good sandwich shop, lots of places to sit and people watch so the mall is an indoor version of a city square and walking streets. Europe if just fine by me.

As to Hungarian Christmas day traditions, I don't know because we had dinner with some Romanian friends. So, I can tell you about that. This is a big meal. Makes the feasts we typically put on look a little puny. There's a course of cold meats, cheese, bread and veg like olives and tomatoes. A course of salads, usually a kind of cole slaw and an eggplant puree (divine!) and a mixed veg salad with mayonnaise I know from Mom's French version, and a couple others that I've forgotten. I brought Grandma's spinach ring, which also came out perfectly, much to my amazement given that oven and total absence of saltine crackers from this country. Turns out that this oven only cooks at speed when set on convection, and then it cooks things F A S T. Then two meat courses, one of pork and one of fowl. In this case I brought the duck I roasted, which worked after much giggering in this infernal oven that I'm still learning to run. The pork dishes were cutlets mostly, and served with spiced potatoes. Then there was coffee. This after several rounds of whiskey (the 8 of us put down fifth of that), rum that our house had encased in ice that held fir twigs and oranges in it and kept the rum cold (a trick he learned from Jamie Oliver on TV), and a famous Romanian wine called Lacrima lui Ovidiu (Tears of Ovid) which is completely amazing and tastes a bit like a white port but more complex. Then desserts, plural, and about six of them, with coffee and digestives (read more port). These were a chocolate and sourdough bread, a sour cream cake in which are hidden little fortunes for the new year for everyone are folded tin foil and hidden in the cake (mine was an Emerson quote: "A hero is just as brave as a normal man, only for five minutes longer."), and last but not least a kind of cinnamon crumble cake with candied fruit in it. In short, our hostess informed us, that many Easter Orthodox fast during Advent, eating mostly vegetables and milk, and then feast like mad on Christmas and wind up in the hospital. I believe her. We learned that the Romanians of Transylvania like sugar, and Moldovans like salt, and this is a source of much amusement gentle cultural ribbing.

After dinner, because we're all about the same age, we used the TV and a laptop to watch 80s music on the TV, so that was Madonna and Depeche Mode, and some Satchmo because one of the guests loves Louis Armstrong, and a recently famous Romanian sheep herder (I am not making this up) who recorded a song about long memories and regrets that Romanians love for a chance to think back over the hardness of life and appreciate the joy they're having now. Adam and I have lots of Armstrong's music in our collections, so we're making that guest a CD or two. We talked about our various traditions and the vagaries of the Hungarian language (no verb for "to have," possession and various past tenses just work differently here) and how Ovid lived in Romanian, in Costanza where our hosts are from, when the Roman's exiled him for publishing some rather gossipy stories and having a affair with the wrong man's wife.

In short, it was fantastic.

New Year's will be interesting because for two days sales of fireworks are legal and everyone and their uncle shoots them off at midnight. There are parties to which one buys tickets at the local restaurants and hotels for dinner and drinks. It is rumored that people don't go home until 4 or 5 in the morning. Given the ZERO tolerance for drinking and driving here, I suppose the two cab companies in town make a mint that morning.

Other than that, we found a mutt at a shelter we might adopt. It's a mix of German Sheppard and Hungarian Viszla (a pointer), so he's marked like a Sheppard with a pointer head and ears. Ridiculous and adorable (on this page, he's the 19th or 20th picture down the page). He's six months old. We're giving this serious thought as we're keeping the colonel's Viszla now, and she's fabulous but a very "be with the humans" dog. These Viszla look like Wiemarnars, but they're red. Smart as whips, fast as light, and this one we're dogsitting hunts shadows because she hasn't figured out yet that they're attached to other real things. Better than television. Anyway, if this mutt has more of an independent Sheppard personality, then he's for us. Because I can tell from the size of this dog's legs in the picture that he's going to be humongous. I can't deal with a humongous needy dog. I'm sure all his commands are Hungarian, so we'll have to get a list of those!

That's the news, Susan. I send masses of love and heaps of goodness for the new year to you and all my cousins.

Huggin' your neck from Hungary!
M

Hugo Went Home: A Meditation on Otherness

In the back garden we have a stone fireplace with little stools around it, a fire pit really. Having no idea where to get firewood at a good price, and this being Hungary one should be able to find some, I asked the question on my military/ex-pat community's Facebook page, and Hugo said that there was good cheap wood at the Home Depot down the street, easy peasy. "Home sweet home," he said.

What Hugo is experiencing is the expansion of self that comes with familiarity, belonging, with not being the other.

In a moment when we're turning our attention to the needs of capital and away from the needs of humans, I think this is a good point on which to meditate -- because we are all other-marginal-instrumental from the point of view of capital as we experience it for now.

I'm an Anglo, a Celt, a white chick, so I don't look like a person who can't speak Hungarian. Nothing marks me other until I and a Hungarian try to have even a simple conversation like, "Thanks," and "You're welcome, here's your change." It's the clause"here's your change" that screws up my face and causes either an indulgent smile or a closure of expression.

So, the contraction of self that comes with being other doesn't have anything to do with being spotted, as does the contraction that comes with being othered racially. It's in my head. I know I'm lost and confused and a bit of an interloper and asking people to work harder than they otherwise would have to just to help me buy flour (of which there are 6 or 7 types and grades, bread being serious business in Europe). I feel contracted with confusion and humility and a whole aura of apollogetics. I do not fit, am capable of making a huge social mistake at any moment just by doing what comes naturally (by which I mean culturally) to me. I am marginal.

(Don't worry, I'm having a lovely time in my ex-pat adventure, it's just that there's this layer too, this sharpening of my awareness of this phenomenon coming to me thanks to being way outside my comfort zone, as people say.)

What this feeling reminds me of is those moments in being a woman when I feel endangered or just really alienated in very male spaces or in a world that still runs itself on their worst logics and wants no room for me other than as slut or wife-mom--no room for girl or professor or CEO. In that world I can be smart, but I had better be prettier than I am smart in order to get away with it. And if I'm too pretty, I can be fired for distracting the men from their work.

Which, by the way, masculine zeitgeist, would you just make up your damn mind?

Muslims in America and Europe, Roma in Europe, Hispanics and Latinos in America, immigrants of all stripes feel this, this contraction of self that comes with being other. Blacks in America can tell you long, interesting, heartbreaking, hilarious, and very detailed stories about this contraction. So can GBLT people. As other you have two roles: instrument or threat.

And the thing about that contraction is that the attempt to expand the self and relax into one's cultural space can happen like any other very energetic expansion -- it can become explosion. That is its natural-cultural form. It can be peaceful, it can be loving and gentle and insistent, but that is very hard work, as all the non-violent social movements demonstrate in their discipline.

The students and professors in the UK have just very actually learned what it feels like to be other of capital. That there have been little explosions in otherwise weeks and weeks and weeks of peaceful and very creative demonstrations is no surprise. There's money. It's just that 80% of current budgets for the humanities will be cut, and student tuition will triple all at once to $14,000 USD. There's money. Just not for education in meaning.

And not knowing how to mean, or what something means, or how to engage with the meanings that surround you, that are created by science-math-business and are very technical -- that is the contraction of self that comes with being other.

Welcome to the world of women, of non-whites in white nations, of immigrants, of fungible workers. It is not a comfy fit, being human in a wholly technical world. You'll see.

A Post by Way of Explanation to a Friend Unlikely Ever to Read It unless I Email It to Him

So, it keeps coming up, doesn't it? What you think of as my failure, my moral failure; or when you're calmer and feeling kinder, my infection -- which implies weakness rather than laziness.

You track some deep change, a growing unrecongnizability, a listing toward being "an ugly American" and a lack of seriousness that rattles your cage but good. You're disappointed and angry. And I know how hard it was to write that last email because I know how angry you were. Which tells me how much you respected me before (which had not really registered with me for complicated psychological reasons most people take for a charming humility), and so prompts this reply.

My reply email to you did not take several tries, it came fast and sure, and expressed mostly my exhaustion with the whole thing. I had in fact been waiting and waiting to write it. I tried for an explanation. I missed. I defended rather than explained myself, and I did that because the real explanation is so much worse than the one you're thinking of.

That I am supported now by a lover paid by the US DOD is not the problem, the source of my months of dark humor, bad jokes, and generalized laissez-faire-ah-fuck-it attitude. I have no trouble at all with my lover's employer, current or previous assignments. I have always had massive, insurmountable, trenchant problems with the policies and their makers that have determined the course of history for the last, it seems to me now, ever.

You liked the me that had a lot of fight in me. The obstreperous me, the oppositional and defiant me. You read that, my faith with Adorno and Marcuse, my company with experimental poetics, with feminist philosophers of a very difficult and visionary stripe, as a kind of intellectual integrity. I had a lot of fight in me.

And for the last little while, and still now, I don't, and you think me intellectually compromised by my relationship because of my lover's employer. You think I'm feeling stuck because this good person has killed people in two wars, and yet I get angry that world class football treats young players as disposable humans. You think that I have blinded myself to the presumed disposable of the people killed in these wars so that I can have some security of my own. You suspect that I'm making too many compromises, have traded my obstreperous integrity for love and a roof.

If only it were that simple, that easily changed.

The gig really is that I have been toying with the idea of decadence, of giving up, getting high, indulging myself dangerously, and letting that stubborn stupid world eat itself alive like it clearly, and dearly wants to.

That's what the real trouble is. I have been having a very hard time shaking off the cynicism, the bleak, near total certainty that my good work and integrity, or yours -- or that of all the brave and shining souls who still inspire me -- is all for fucking naught because the sheer inertia of the complexity of the proliferating, I'll be frank, intentional meanness of the administered-military-industrial-society with which we all live is inexorable, perfected, and utterly disinterested in any outcome other than its own self-annihilating satisfaction. I mean have you seen the stock markets? There is no real reason for those numbers.

I'm not intellectually compromised by having the DOD for a patron indirectly and unawares. I'm tired, and scared, and pissed at myself for even being remotely tempted to just go get seriously stoned and forget it all. Because the shining souls are still there, inspiring and perspiring and generally kicking ass and many of them are my dear friends, and how, my word, how can I let them down?

So, what you have read as selling out, and that's what you mean to say, is not that exactly. It's a soul-cleaving ambivalence, and I haven't even resolved it enough to sell out.

That's the thing, the unnamed quake that has rattled your cage and made you suspicious of and worried for and so angry at me. And that's why all my apologies have rung false. I can apologize for saying asinine things, even if I said them ironically. The irony was inaudible because of this that I can't apologize for: I am struggling, very hard, not to give up.