There were better tables here before. Big round tables, circular anyway, about three and a half feet in diameter but they were probably measured in the meters, four of them, each stop a different kaleidoscopic mandala mosaic of different colored tiles. The tiles were about an eighth of an inch square, and the patterns must have been laid down in installments at  different times because the tiles of the same color were often in different shades, like you see some of a bright crimson and then further along in the pattern some would be a deep blood red. It was subtle, but if you had time to sit there and stare at it, as I often did in 1994, it became impossible to not notice. And because the tables were outside on the sidewalk you could smoke, cigarettes, which I did a lot back then.

But this place was a deli then, not a vegan bistro. Not kosher but kosher style, they would serve you pastrami and cheese on bagels, but then most of the students would not have known any difference. There were more Japanese than Jews in those days. In some world-renowned universities it's rather difficult to find students who grew up in the area. And the people who ran the deli were very sweet. They would let a person come in off the street and use the bathroom and not buy anything.  Now the restroom door in the vegan bistro is locked and there’s an embossed plastic sign saying Paying Customers Only. There’s a lot of that going around, all over the country. So the alley around back stinks like piss all the time.

30 years ago I had plenty of time to think. Or I thought I was thinking. I would sit there chain smoking unfiltered cigarettes, the generic kind, and drinking large coffees one after the other. I would sit there thinking I was thinking and impatiently wait for something. For her to walk by, or for her not to walk by, or for someone else to walk by to take my mind off her.

It can be hard to think about what you want to think about. At least for me. When I'm actually thinking, which in those days did not happen often.+

The difference is that these days I smoke cigars instead of cigarettes, after 20 years of not smoking any tobacco at all, and I'm drinking an organic apple juice from a big plastic bottle from The Bistro of course, alternating with gulps of cheap bourbon from a little bottle I carry in my pocket. Don't pour cheap bourbon into apple juice, you won't like it.

Too much has changed in the past 30 years. But I'm still the same person, or at least I think so, and the street is basically the same but sometimes with different stores and in some cases with new buildings She'll follow the same traffic pattern that it has for a hundred years. St Paul here runs southbound, Charles Street, a block over, where I used to live, goes north, and Maryland Avenue where I lived before that goes southbound again. This part of the city was laid out back in the horse and buggy days. And in some ways those days never ended.

You can still sit outside at these tables, out on the sidewalk in front of their big plate glass windows with their silly seasonal health related displays , the table is being small folding plastic monstrosities that they take in when they close every night, barely two feet across so much impossible for two people to sit and eat. And smoking tobacco is frowned on these days, and sitting here even outside on a windy blustery day with a lit cigar in your hand you have plenty of personal space all around you. Smoking a cigar says I hate you don't come near me. Which is true.

These days I'm not waiting for anything. Some guy from long ago recognized me today and told me she killed herself before I left town, but nobody told me. There was a restraining order on her anyway. I put a restraining order on her. Those were the days. Several people I knew back down have killed themselves, or died of repeated drug overdoses which is the same thing. But she didn't use a needle, he told me, she used a knife, actually stabbed herself in the throat and sawed at her neck a little to make sure the carotid was severed.  That’s what I heard, sawed. I didn’t hear if the knife blade was serrated, which might have explained the sawing part. And he did not tell me she was on heroin at the time, but I imagine the pain would be too much otherwise. Of course if you hate yourself as much as she hated me, which seems to have been the case, things get easier. It’s easier to die when you hate being alive. And it’s somebody’s fault.

Now I'm sitting here waiting for someone else, if I'm really waiting at all. But there's no one in particular I'm waiting for, just someone who might remember me, or someone who might be so offended at my cigar smoke that they'll stop to tell me how insensitive I am, or for some even drunker bum to shamble up and beg for a cigarette which I don't have. Faces change completely every year or so in neighborhoods immediately around the college campus. Sometimes the faces belong to the same people, they just make themselves look different, as if this new look, this new trend, will give them an identity after all. But I don’t recognize any of the faces passing by, and I think some people would manage to get themselves remembered even after thirty years.  

The difference in my appearance is that now my hair is so thin and so patchy that instead of growing it long like before I shave it bald.  Otherwise I still look the same, sometimes I'm even wearing the same clothes, sometimes literally the same.  Things were made to last longer thirty years ago.  I had no idea I would last this long.  It's not like I wanted to.

30 years and I'm back again.  Only for a while, not very long.  I'm here because.  There is a reason.

But it's not her because she's dead.  I hadn’t known that until somebody recognized me earlier this afternoon and told me about it. Thirty years later. It just happened to come to mind when this guy who tried to steal my LSD once recognized me as he was driving by.  Somehow it’s important that I know that, after thirty years.  I’d almost forgotten her, even though she was very important to me for about six months, and not always in a good way.  I wonder if the restraining order was still in place when she died. It was necessary because she would not leave me alone. She said it was all my fault. What happened was we were at a party, the band she roadied for, and friends of the band, and friends of their friends, and she did a little too much of everything and she could not handle it. She was crying and screaming and blaming me, telling me it was all my fault that she was like this, that I was so broken I broke her, that she hated me, that I should just go away. Go home. Go die.

Apparently she woke up sometime the next morning, face down on the floor, with her panties hanging loosely from one ankle and semen dripping from her anus. She had to tell me that, she told everybody. And she told me and everybody that it was all my fault, that I abandoned her there like that. She did not tell them that that happened after she told me to go away, after she told me to go die, because it was all my fault that she was in that condition in the first place.  So I went away. I went home. If I had been there I would have protected her. Somebody had to. Or should have, when nobody did.

When I had wanted to see her it wasn't easy to arrange. She had to make time for me. She was a very busy person. She had so many friends and so much to do. And I was so demanding. But she had insisted I come to the party with her that night, there was someone she wanted me to meet. Her new lesbian paramour. She was lesbian then she said, except for me, and the boys in the band. She even learned to play bass guitar to fill in sometimes when the junkie who usually played bass couldn’t stand up. But after I had stopped wanting to see her, after she started screaming at me from the sidewalk in front of my house and banging on the door because it was all my fault, she would not go away. She'd be gone for a few days, doing Lord knows what, and then she'd be back to blame me for everything. 

So soon after that I went away. Not because of her, or not just because of her. It was just time to go. Mainly. There were other women out there, far away, who hadn’t met me yet. Whose lives I hadn’t ruined by failing to be sensitive to their needs. There are lots of needy women everywhere. Who will want me to forget about everything else in my life and fix their lives. By being totally devoted to them. So I’ll do that for a while, I’ll devote a lot of my attention to them, until that too turns out to be futile. These women can’t be fixed. That’s not what they really want anyway, it became clear to me after a while.  They don’t really want me to fix them, they just want to blame their brokenness on me. Most of them don’t kill themselves though, and the ones that have usually did it by accident, in a car crash or an overdose or getting beaten to death by some macho man who was so much better than me.  It’s happened before. She was the fourth one I’ve heard of, but probably the first in the series. I’m a serial killer without doing anything. Against my will, without my consent.  

Minor Annoyances

I just learned the hard way that there are USB A to micro USB cables that only charge without doing data transfer. And the older cables that I've had for a few months that were made to transfer data quit working, neither charging nor transferring: they don't stick in the device snugly, wiggling around, which is why I'd bought the cables that turn out to only charge. This happens all the time, cables just stop fitting right, I go through a dozen or so a year. (At first, years ago, I thought the port in the device was busted, but new cables work so that's probably not it.) So I had to order new cables that are specifically supposed to transfer data as well as charge, that'll be here on 3/20 i.e. Thursday, and until then I won't be able to transfer files between my computer and my micro-usb devices.

And to order them, because I'm fucking broke from paying my credit card bills, I had to use more credit. But first I had to check the balances on a couple cards to see which was safe to use, but when I went to log in the site told me I had to verify my identity by calling customer service. So first I entered the 16 digit number, them my Social Security number, then waited for a Customer Service Specialist with a lovely accent (is that racist?) to give me a numeric code to type into the appropriate space.

And now I have to register the Protection Plan I bought for the new Tablet I had to buy to replace the one that got scratched up in my shoulder bag because I didn't have the case on it. I don't usually do that, most things should be covered by the warranty, but the warranty on the scratched one had recently expired and anyway the warranty didn't specifically mention the customer scratching up the damn thing.

And I'm just getting over the headache I got from taking naltrexone after I'd had a couple shots of bourbon: one or the other, not both, and no I didn't need the bourbon anyway. (I know, I know.) Now I'm out of booze and I really can't afford to buy any more this month so I probably won't.

And earlier today I went downstairs to check my mail, but I forgot to turn around and transfer my I'm Not Dead tag into the box provided, so the poor guy at the desk had to come up after 4 PM to knock to check on me.

And I still have to finish wiping off my kitchen counter and cleaning the floor like I do when the exterminator is coming so they don't snitch to management about what a slob I am. (I'm not sure they do, but I wouldn't put it past them.) That'll need doing before I go to sleep or the paranoia will keep my awake.

This has been my Tuesday. It hasn't been a really bad day, like I don't have cancer nor am I in legal trouble, but it can't count as a good day because the only memorable events have been minor annoyances. One after another. I should "count my blessings," for example I have all my fingers and toes, but that's not how my brain wants to work: it's as if I'm hard-wired to be annoyed by trivial "tragedies" like these, and when several of them happen in one day that day will be ruined. Even so this is an improvement over my natural default: I actually had to train myself to endure days like this without breaking down into an over-emotional mess, so, instead of hiding under the covers rocking myself and whimpering for an hour or so, I'm able to sit up here and persist at these tasks. Because of this it's a good thing that I don't have to go out into the world for such annoyances to happen, especially not around people for example at a workplace; over the years I've noticed that when people sense I'm having a day like this they often decide it's a good time to give me trouble, and that when people just had to insist on making a bad day even worse I would get called "crazy" and "violent" for letting them get to me. As if it were perfectly fucking okay to aggravate me just because they can instead of helping me out or even just leaving me the hell alone. It's because I'm able to protect my vulnerable psyche by isolating myself that I've gone 62 years without "going postal" or becoming a suicide bomber. Having an apartment all my own with a lock on the door has been a great boon for Humanity, you see; it also helps that I keep my cell phone set on Do Not Disturb so those voices can't worm through that way. And in order to hide away so other people can be protected from the consequences of their need to be annoying I have to have my rent paid by Social Security, because for one thing if I were medicated strongly enough to insulate me from those assholes out there I'd be too damn sedated to do anything useful, which pretty much rules out trying to work for a living.

This is what I mean when I say that people like me should not have to happen. What I really mean is that people should learn to leave vulnerable people alone, but that would be asking too much of y'all cretinous assholes out there. Because there are always more assholes than anybody else, as if infuriating people gives y'all an evolutionary (and economic) advantage. (Or maybe it's supposed to work the other way: maybe pissing people off until you get yourself stabbed is an example of the herd auto-correcting, but our societies are set up to thwart that natural impulse.) So, because stupid assholes are always going to be so damn common among our species, whatever genetic arrangement that produces people like me should be bred out of the gene pool for the good of the herd. Because the Earth really needs many billions more infuriating morons than it needs people like me.

I found this out for sure back in third grade in 1971, when I was informed several times a day by several different people that my mother who had cerebral palsy was a "retarded monkey," and that my father who had a curved spine was "the hunchback of Notre Dame," and that it was perfectly normal for people to treat me that way -- and abnormal of me to not just shrug it off or better yet play along.

And the only way to avoid it was to hook school, to avoid going out in public, to hide in my room behind my locked door instead. And because when I cut school the Principal would summon my mother to school to scold her for not making me attend, which meant the other kids would see her, so they'd be sure to remember to jump around going "hoo-hoo hee-hee this is your mother the monkey" the next time they saw me. And again it was perfectly normal for children to torment me like that, because it's simply asking too much for patents and other adults to teach these kids some simple fucking manners. And my mother had to Be A Good Mother and show up to give these assholes ammunition, so the Principle could scold her for being a bad mother by not making sure I go to school every day. And a couple years of this got me involved with Social Services and the Juvenile Courts, again because it's perfectly normal for people to let their kids be fucking assholes instead of teaching them that some people have physical handicaps, that it just happens, and that you should leave them and their children alone about it.

Furthermore I could not get this through my mother's head, that instead of agreeing with Those People that I'm a Bad Boy she might try sticking up for herself and trying to get Those People to teach their kids to leave me alone about her cerebral palsy. She didn't get that part, no matter how many times I tried to explain it, because she was too damn weak to stand up for herself to Those People and/or too damn stupid to understand the reason why I kept getting in trouble with the school. No, all she got was that "They think I'm a Bad Mother because of YOU. Because you keep getting in trouble. YOU are a Bad Bad Boy!"

And the few people who did get it were either unable or unwilling to stand up for me (and by extension my crippled parents) because That's Just How It Is. There zillions of idiotic assholes out there who just have to persecute people for one stupid reason or another, because their parents are physically disabled -- or because they're a different "race"* -- and that's perfectly okay. It's entirely natural, and there's nothing you can do about it. You just have to learn to suffer in silence, or grow such a thick skin that empathy is impossible (or was when I tried that), or you have to hide yourself away where Those People can't get to you.

Because there are always so many more of Those People out there, who either cannot or will not learn to leave people alone, and because it's not legal, for example, to take an AR 15 to school and get rid of several of them. The wonder is not that such "crimes" happen but that there aren't more of them. Because if it's perfectly natural to persecute people for some "flaw" then it's also perfectly natural to decide you're just not going to take it any more. One reason such "shooting sprees" are getting more common, one that your brilliant pundits keep missing, is that the more people there are the more bullies there are. Because y'all have decided that it's perfectly okay for people to act like that, and it's somehow "abnormal" to object when it happens to you. You people not only allow it, you encourage it. Generation after generation. Because, even if you are a Nice Person, you think that everybody has a right to reproduce, even if they're unable and/or unwilling to teach their kids to have some fucking manners. This is why I go for what for lack of a better word is called eugenics: this has gone on all over the world for at least all of recorded history, so there might just be a genetic basis for it. That can be isolated and bred out. In fact I got the idea years ago from a bumper sticker I'd see every now and then: STUPID PEOPLE SHOULDN'T BREED.

I concentrate on stupid people not because smart people never persecute The Other, but because smart people can learn how not to. And there are proportionately so few smart people that there must be far fewer of them than there are people who are somehow Different. One thing I noticed in school is that almost all of the kids who followed me around going "hoo-hoo hee-hee your mother is a monkey" were the kind who did not do well in school because they just weren't very smart. (That's an argument against universal education: if you must let stupid people breed you should at least not force your kids to put up with their stupid kids day after day.) And I have no idea what the kids who weren't pestiferously stupid thought of my parents' handicaps because they didn't mention it. If they did think that "people like that shouldn't go out it public" they were at least smart enough to not bother me with it. Perhaps because they had better things to do, like learn the material and get good grades. Smart people can do such things. They can either learn that "some people are handicapped but they're sill people," or at least they can learn that it's rude to bother people about it. Mind you some smart people have criticized me over this, for letting it get to me, as if it's my fault. I posit that those smart people do this because the pattern is an easy one to exploit for their personal gain: it's so much easier to enable people to "smear the queer" than to teach them manners, and there seems to be no political or personal benefit to it. Why stand up for me in public, why even bother to comfort me in private, when there's nothing in it for you? Why not learn to exploit that phenomenon instead? Go into politics! Run for office, start a blog, organize a committee. Make perstiferous idiocy work for you. I'm not sure how many smart bully-enablers are pestiferous themselves and how many just exploit Those People. Put it this way, very few smart kids ever told me my mother's a retarded monkey. Most simply avoided me. Perhaps, as I was told privately several times, they avoided me because they didn't want to be lumped with me and get bullied themselves. (And also, as I must admit, I can be a bit of a dick sometimes.)

Anyway. As I see it the problem is that not enough smart people want to breed out stupidity. That is they don't have enough basic human decency to want fix an obvious problem, or they're too cowardly to buck the ongoing trend. They just don't understand that we have a responsibility to improve the species, that we must favor quality over quantity. No, they "respect human rights." They'd rather try to educate Those People. But listen: Trump 2.0 shows that that's the wrong way to go. "You can't fix stupid." And we should not have to put up with it. Okay, we shouldn't have to put up with babbling crazies either. But I never reproduced because I am smart enough to avoid perpetuating a problem. And because I have some compassion for y'all out there. I practice what I preach. Because I know what I'm talking about. I can't be all scholarly about it here because I've concentrated too much on avoiding the outside world to get much formal education, and I've also been too lazy to teach myself things that don't come naturally, but there have to be a few people out there who've read this so far who think to themselves "this guy has a point." Maybe it's time to wise up, maybe it's time you admitted that to yourself. And maybe it's time to consider doing something about it. Spread the word. Find each other and organize. Write for a blog, go into teaching, run for office. Preach. JUST DO SOMETHING. How many generations of idiots is enough?

*And yes I did just equate kids whose parents happen to be crippled with people who happen to be Black (for example), and vice versa. It does not matter WHY you pick on people who are different, only that you do.

Dr Judith

 "A regularized and constrained repetition of norms is not performed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal conditions for that subject." - Judith Butler.

So a Self is not something you have or something you are. What you're supposed to do is follow the cue cards. You don't even really exist, so why should you matter? They say "know thy place, peasant."

As the doctrine goes, "There are those who fight, and those who pray... And then there's you, whose job is to move that plow and not your mouth. Unless we tell you to, then you say what we write down."

Why are the most feudal interactions framed as "liberating"?

No no no. I come first. It is I who feel, sense, think, and speak. Whether my self is begged or borrowed, it is at least mine. I'll say what you tell me to if you insist, but that won't make me agree to it. I am a subject who performs things. But you can't make me love my role.

Because I have other ways to make a living, because I don't depend on the approval of my sponsors or the approbation of my peers, because I have no need for tenure nor does anyone care whether I publish, I speak my own mind when I can maybe get away with it it. And if what I say or how I say it pleases no one, not even you, that's your problem.

I am a fool. But Judith Butler has sold out. Follow her published writings through the last thirty-some years. Compare them to who she was working for, or was trying to work for. Follow the doctrinal trends of "progressivism" along the same period. Do you see a pattern? If so consider the Benjamins.

This is the same self I embodied literally fifty years ago. Of course some things have changed, but I can show how and why. And you can see that it's got very little to do with making money, just that I'd rather not get locked up again. By the System that Judith Butler supports because she gets paid by those people.

Judith Butler could probably find a way to get me locked up. Everybody in her position knows somebody who can do certain jobs, or have them done. That's what power in society is about, that's why an incipient public pundit gets a PhD. Power ion society means getting people to do what you want. It's tautological. Even I can figure that out.

So her yadda yadda babbling feathers her nest.

Not me. I run the risks, I speak my mind. My own mind. I, the subject doing the performing.

To be generous, I'm wrong. Perhaps Dr Judith Butler is not meretricious but only confused.

I might be wrong. Or confused. But I gain nothing by it.

Now step out of my sunshine. It's still only March.

"OH. So that's what they mean."

 It sucks that two people, both blond women, in two successive decades, tried so hard to talk sense into me, and failed. I'd love to be, respectively, 13 and 23 again, and actually get it. But it took till the early 1990s, after a few years of psychiatric pharmaceuticals, for me to catch on. "OH. So that's what that means."

I can't prove the pills made me any better, but they have made me feel, and act, very differently. As some might notice.

By the way, if those drugs did no good for somebody they'd take them off the market. Or they're supposed to anyway, because of federal and peer-reviewed oversight. Right?

But now the United States secretary of health and human services is a(n ex-?) junkie with a worm-eaten brain. (So it really does happen. Sorry guys.)

I wonder what that means? Put it this way: I have very often in my lifetime been a prophet and have been mostly ignored. And don't forget that even a busted clock is right twice a day. (Or at least it is here.) But now I can tell you that it's the obvious truth, my fellow Americans are in for HARD time, especially those (however few) who might feel "spiritual kinship" with me. Or who might agree with me that I should have listened to not just them but my father. Even if they never met him they saw his side, or would if they could. Some "common sense" might even be necessary, even for me.

So if I can catch on anybody can.

The fact is those who are "abnormal" in the eyes of J.D. Vance are in hazard for our lives. He wrote that book for a reason, okay?

I have nothing, and no one, holding me here. And nobody I know has any use for me, which has gone on for so long that it seems like my general condition. And maybe even if they did I wouldn't be up to it, it's so much easier to sit here alone with the door locked. Albeit on fucking Facebook.

So. This will probably never apply, but just in case (and note the case): don't you dare pretend I deserted you. How long am I supposed to wait? And wait for what? If you had anything for me I'd have known it by now. Okay, I'll admit I'm only thinking back about 15 years, and by then I was middle aged (but still troubled). But that's even more reason to not need me anymore, because my looks had faded. Fourteen years ago, so it's even worse now. And in some particular ways my physical functioning ain't for shit no more neither.

And now I'm almost out of money, with credit card debt worth two month's pay. For that San Diego trip, the one I had to go on or I'd pitch myself off the roof. The one where I had a "mystical" experience, which amounts to "OH. So that's what they're talking about." Golly. Okay, I really am dense. (At least it's not terminal. So far.)

But still. I plead a mental malfunction. I did not set out to be this dense on purpose. That was not part of the plan. I was supposed to be a prophet, a voyant, and not such an idiot. Something happened. Perhaps from heredity, or from hard knocks (including on the inside from drugs), or (most likely) both, I seem to have misplaced my mind. ('Misplaced.') My brain don't work like it's supposed to. Maybe it broke off too. 

So. I can't claim to be a total naif. Far from it. But your dog will probably like me. And I stand alone. Here. Where it's lonely. Out in space. And I think I've got it this time.