Pride of Baghdad

"Freedom and destruction land atop timeless solidarity and it is unmoved."
-Michael C. Riedlinger, Critical Analysis of Pride of Baghdad

"Perhaps, over time, these ideas are less tangible than we tend to believe and more intertwined than we wish were convenient."

The City of New Orleans

by Steve Goodman

Riding on the City of New Orleans,
Illinois Central Monday morning rail
Fifteen cars and fifteen restless riders,
Three conductors and twenty-five sacks of mail.
All along the southbound odyssey
The train pulls out at Kankakee
Rolls along past houses, farms and fields.
Passin' trains that have no names,
Freight yards full of old black men
And the graveyards of the rusted automobiles.

CHORUS:
Good morning America how are you?
Don't you know me I'm your native son,
I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans,
I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.

Dealin' card games with the old men in the club car.
Penny a point ain't no one keepin' score.
Pass the paper bag that holds the bottle
Feel the wheels rumblin' 'neath the floor.
And the sons of pullman porters
And the sons of engineers
Ride their father's magic carpets made of steel.
Mothers with their babes asleep,
Are rockin' to the gentle beat
And the rhythm of the rails is all they feel.

CHORUS

Nighttime on The City of New Orleans,
Changing cars in Memphis, Tennessee.
Half way home, we'll be there by morning
Through the Mississippi darkness
Rolling down to the sea.
And all the towns and people seem
To fade into a bad dream
And the steel rails still ain't heard the news.
The conductor sings his song again,
The passengers will please refrain
This train's got the disappearing railroad blues.

Good night, America, how are you?
Don't you know me I'm your native son,
I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans,
I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.

Short film

Power from the Greenwitch

I was at my friend Rowan's friend Lyra's house last night with them, watching The Forbidden Zone on VHS. I had been feeling powerless and anxious for a few hours beforehand, and the movie was helpful on that regard in the way that monsters and indignity and ugliness are liberating. I have thought a lot on the subject of monsters. As a child, I believed that naughty but basically good monsters inhabited the space under my bed. The children wanted to eat me, but the adults would reign them in. I dreamed, like most little children, of many sorts of stunningly beautiful, horribly evil monsters.

I was feeling odder and odder at Lyra's and let myself outside into the cool, starry night. I have mentioned in past entries that I am in the weird position of viewing my own internal geometry in all of its complete disarray. It is like a horribly messy room, rife with broken furniture and picture-frames and dusty, crawling with the occasional roach or mouse.

I'm not quite sure what it was like before the past year and a half, but something tells me it was not this way. I'm quite sure that there were "whole" geometries in me, intact furniture, structures which although contiguous were mostly mysterious to me. My life was deeply unknown to me. And now?

What of now? I have no idea. I cannot imagine that I am going anywhere good. Most bizarrely, in many ways I don't care. Sometimes I feel like I am asleep while I am awake; ei., like my brain is in a REM state while I am 'awake.' This is deep, drowsy, sensual, dim, and pleasurable. It seems like the deepest illusion and yet is crystalline in clarity. It is temptation in a high form; my soul wants to... just... nibble it.

So my aim is not to become a dreamer non-stop; as I know the dream of the culture contains ten times more nightmares than fantasies. I am not going to be a monster or an angel. Schizophrenia does not interest me completely; it seems to contain a vicious softness, like a feather bed that smothers you slowly, gaspingly, lovingly.

Hope is a bird whose feathers I've teased out with my teeth. If I chase my ego through forests, I must be cautious not to cut down all the trees in my destructiveness. I wonder if, if the ego is not understood as distinct from the environment, if this is what we call dreaming, both the asleep and awake kind? What a worthy enemy--what will we see?

Greenwitch

I again feel like a dual creature, and this time in a more advanced, whole, and yet confused way. Life has continued to progress, which although obvious, begins to seem shocking.

I was once a human, amazed, terrified, awed and excited at the intrusion of non-ordinary reality into ordinary; feeling frightened & blessed by the ways in which I had been selected to experience non-ordinary powers. I undertook an effort to take on shamanism as my full occupation, to commit all my energy and life to non-ordinary reality, forever.

Now I am still present, still telling myself that I am human in a material framework. Originally, my sorcery was begun as a rebellion and all difference was construed as freedom.

The more I used my strength against the idea of the World, the stronger I became.
Now, I am not like this anymore; there is an amphibiousness to it. An adult-ness?
Where's the center, the heart of iron?

From the book Greenwitch:

"FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN shall find the harp of gold
Played to wake the Sleepers, oldest of the old;
Power from the green witch, lost beneath the sea;
All shall find the Light at last, silver on the tree."

Implicit Awareness

I am at the unique standpoint of being able to see my disintegration, to view the shards of what I had come to think of as my "being" washed away or pulled apart. I may very well be insane, or I may be a prophet of madness. I am at the point where I look at the illusions I have held before and no longer have to fight their truth as much; I look at them and they are not so true, and therefore are not relevant. Anna says, "..someday Brandon is going to be a great spiritual leader," and my ego somersaults in my stomach, does cartwheels in my ribcage.

I think of all the schizophrenic prophets and I wonder how I could be a great leader. I look at my softness, my worrisome thought processes, my dis-integration. I have hacked my way through a jungle, and I've wrecked a lot of beautiful vines, too. They grew back, though not in the same way.

I've changed in some ways and yet I haven't changed in any. There is a temptation to hold up the statement of not having changed as evidence of transcendence. It doesn't matter. What things I have felt are not personal to 'me'. I bow to them.

I miss Gregory. The secret of life is: "shhh...Listen!" I am an Idiot and a God.

Horseshit On Bridge Back From Terebithia

I told the children's community clinic doctor that I was taking Klonopin and asked if they could refill my script. No! We got into an argument. I was not surprised or angry that she would not refill the script--I think that's actually a sign of integrity, and appreciated it--but that she was insisting I go to a mental health provider. She said (yelled) that I needed to see if I had 'an underlying issue' and that I don't just have panic attacks for no reason. No? Really? But, I argued (yelled), I know why I have them. I get scared about things during the day, but I don't feel it, and then it all comes out at once. She paid no heed to this explanation. I told her that psychiatry and me have some major splits of opinion. I said I'd rather solve my problems with spirituality and my own intelligence than psychiatry. She said that made sense but I should still get help! I said psychiatrists love medications, they give them out like crazy! She said no, they can SHOVEL THEIR WAY INTO MY MIND! I recoiled! I said everybody has some type of anxiety! She said to leave her out of it! She went and got me a list of sliding scale community clinics. Community clinics are full of LCSWs trained to deliver tidbits they learned in two years of college through the haze of their own mental illnesses that inspired them to major in social work! I didn't say that, though.

Ok, lady, so you are right. I am sick. I didn't want to say this for a very long time, but I guess it's true. She said that the fact I've moved twice across the country at 21 is a warning flag to her. I wanted to yell something about traveller kids and not understanding transient youth culture. But I really am lonely. I really am drained by always having my next move on the horizen. Every place is equally cold, dry, disconnected. I am tired. I am willing to become comfortable.

Barack Obama

Reading through Obama and Clinton's respective position descriptions on Wikipedia and VoteSmart, I found myself standing more and more behind Obama. His positions are clear and strongly liberal. Hillary is a moderate and has reversed her positions to make them more palatable over time. I believe she probably has genuinely changed her mind about some things, but for the most part she is a politician. I credit her with an evolving and deep understanding of the war in Iraq and with having an outline of an exit strategy that primarily employs economic means of establishing peace. She's a diplomat and I am guessing she is a very good one. Nonetheless, I hate to see her falter on whether homosexuality is immoral or if prisons are too full or not full enough.

However, reading through Barack's positions, I was disappointed to learn that he is strongly in favor of gun control, so strongly that you get the idea that he'd like to ban them altogether. In fact, he has tried to pass a bill banning the sale and possession of handguns. Not only is this in conflict with my personal beliefs and my rights, but it makes him unelectable.

He's a favorite of the Democrats right now, and in the narrow incubator of the primaries he's coming across wonderfully. But already fringed by his color and relative youth, he will have a tough job convincing Republicans over to his side. He still has a chance, however, if he is very straight-shooting, fiscally conservative, and socially permissive. He could capture both Republicans looking to return to more dignified roots after the embarrassment of G.W. as well as the entire Democratic voting base.

However, if he maintains his position on gun control, he will lose virtually every Republican voter, left-voting libertarian, plenty of moderates and a small number of Democrats. He will capture perhaps 35-40% of the vote, and 15% of those will only be voting for him out of fear of all things red.