May 13, 2002

Since that evil little node-eater deleted my node I figured I would repost it in some form or fashion - No one should be depreived of it - ITS CUTE DAMNIT!
Foulness

'I' before 'E'
Except after 'C'
And when sounding like 'A'
As in neighbor and weigh

And on weekends and holidays
And all through May
And you'll never be right no matter what you say.

On a lighter note
I get to go to SAO for an internship it should be grand - I will hopefully post all my wonderful vacation news here too :)

Today is my IRL birthday. Dylan Taylor Singletary was born May 13, 1980 and turns 22 today. I have a twin brother, Devon Tyler Singletary who is identical and was born thirteen minutes after me. I've been feeling weird about this birthday. The whole I was supposed to be somebody by the age of 23 thing, it's creeping up so fast. I've got to get some work published. Scattered poems and webzines here and there isn't enough progress. And since moving to Portland I've done little in the way of public performance. Something is still brewing... I get scared that it will just keep brewing and never percolate.

I wish I knew computer animators. I wish I knew people in positions that would allow me to experiment with my ideas. I'm almost trapped in the art of writing, I never feel like I'm going to accomplish exactly (not even that strict of a word) what I want to be doing. I love chance. I love chaos. I love experimentation. I want to bridge many worlds, and explode something that has been missing from the cultural/social landscape until then. I want to remove the "I" from all of my sentences--I want there to be a "we" that I am speaking about.

22. Maybe today I'll learn I have some neat mutant super-powers. Or my third eye will open all day long. I finally got a job after months of employment. I start that today too. A law office. A file clerk. On my birthday. They seem all right though.

Installing Gentoo linux for fun....

Be good to each other, everyone...

I did some Tarot this morning...

Stop blaming the world. By not getting clear on your highest priority, you have let yourself get distracted. Stop and recognize that you can't commit to several projects and serve them all very well. You will continue to feel internally conflicted until you clearly grasp your situation and commit to your highest priority.

If you get over the reflex to resist change, you will flow right into your wiser and fullest self.

The card in the Self-Undoing position points to self-undermining tendencies, areas where you could be in denial, where you could get stuck -- until you examine yourself and make some corrections. When Judgment appears in this position, you lack confidence in your infinite interior life. You seem to believe that everyone else's being is divine and yours is not. That you lack belief in your own worth, rightness and immortality is the very last veil that keeps you from reunion with your greater self.

You can pull this thin, transparent veil aside by choosing wholeness over fragmentation and obscurity. When the veil parts, you will feel it like a thunderclap, a trumpet blast. Your infinite being awaits your acceptance so it can bless you with all the powers and gifts you already naturally possess but may not be aware of.

Looks like it's time to get to work.

Now into my wife's 10th week of pregnancy we're starting to get the warnings from the doctors:

• As a diabetic, you may miscarriage, even later in-term.
• As a diabetic, you may not survive the birthing.
• As a diabetic, the child might have Down Syndrome.

and so on. Gloom and doom.

I keep an optimistic face on for my wife, but I sit at work and reel sometimes, gripping my desk, flush with a panic attack as all of the stress I internalized pours out of my system. Heather is stressed enough without me adding to it, and I'm trying really hard to support her.

The doctor's told her on Friday that she'll probably give birth in October, almost 45 days early, because it looks like her left kidney is failing. Heather's been taking really good care of herself, and it still might fail. I want to believe that Heather got pregnant for a reason (well beside the actual reason), but it's hard to imagine all of this fear and stress and potential for loss to be of some good.

Heather's writing her will today. She just turned 23 and she's already writing a will. She wants to make sure that I don't have to worry about anything if she should die in the middle of the C-Section. She wants me to be in the room when they deliver but I really don't think I could stomach seeing someone cut into my wife.

With all of the stress and the panic attacks lately I've been having chest pains, but I think it's heartburn. What an appropriate image: my heart aches so much it's starting to burn under the weight of it's own worry, like mulch that smolders and combusts spontaneously. I've started to think about taking out a will myself. This is not where I pictured my life at when I was in college.

Sleeping on the couch gives me a crick in the neck.

Ah, bugger, the phone rings . . . I get up to answer it.

"Hello?"

"Hi, is your mother home?"

Shit. Must be a telemarketer. They always seem to think I'm five years old. "What's that?"

"Hello?"

"Uh, HI. . . ."

"How are you today?"

"Fine."

"Do you get the Gainesville Sun?"

"Uh, no. . . . " Thinking fast, not wanting to hear the spiel about buying the local newspaper because I would never read it. "I get my news at work. I work at a bookstore and I read it there--"

"Oh, okay. . . . "

"And other times I get my news online. Is that all the call's about?"

No answer. I realize she has hung up on me sometime in the last sentence.

Damn it! You may have been only interested in talking to me to sell me stuff, but you should at least be nice enough to tell me 'bye, and have enough freakin' consideration not to hang up on people, God knows people must do it enough to you. I was nice to you even though you woke me from my nap.

Fuck this.

Thanks anyway, though. . . .

The prosecution's case should be finished tomorrow. I thought it was going to go on for days, but finishing Commander H. was the biggest hurdle, and now they've only got three more witnesses.

Commander H. has been on the stand for something like two full days now. He started testimony on Thursday afternoon, testified all day Friday, and much of Monday. It's not that he had a lot to say, but more that there are four attorneys, each with separate questions, and the only one he cooperates with is the prosecutor. When any of the defense attorneys question him, he becomes deliberately obtuse, playing little games.

He said that the people who obeyed the dispersal order are the ones who went east and west, even though the dispersal order explicitly says to go south.

He said that the police didn't shoot anyone. Last time he said that they don't beat people.

He implies that he has some kind of 6th sense that allows him to know who's a demonstrator, rioter, protester, whatever, and who's not, with me in the 'rioter' group, of course. He claims I'm interacting with people who are standing more than 10 feet away from me, when I'm facing away from them. He apparently can't see the part of the tape where a police officer pushes me into the street, despite going over it frame by frame.

He refuses to watch parts of the video, saying that he was there and doesn't need to see them.

Commander H. is pretty obviously someone's trained monkey, which is very sad. He's fine answering the prosecutor's questions, prosecutor leading him by the hand. He nearly misidentified someone as one of my codefendants because he thought that was what the prosecutor wanted him to do. Commander H. structures his narrative in us-them terms, talking about the event in terms of police and rioters, without room for anyone not part of either of these groups. He refers to the demonstrators consistently as "rioters", and says "your people" when he talks to the defense attorneys.

The jury got pretty sick of him, especially towards the end. Unfortunately, the judge continues to side with the prosecution, and capitalized on mistakes made by my codefendant's attorney, letting him rant about anarchist training methods for a long time after the attorney had tried to withdraw the question.

Next: May 16, 2002.
Previous: May 11, 2002.