There is a Vietnam Nam vet sitting in a wheelchair next to me on the train. He is loudly declaimng his politics. This begins with telling the world, or at least the occupants of this car, that he was shot down over Nam, spent two weeks in a hospital and then came back to America where he was denied a job because he wasn’t a minority. Ain’t that right, Freddie, he bellows at the guy on the other side of me. From there, he goes on to explain that this sort of bullshit is why he has never voted for a Democrat in his life and never will. Next up on his litany of grievances is Hippies, and how they took over California and how we still have that crap, but now it’s called diversity.

It is at that point that I cram my earbuds into my decidedly hippie head, mutter asshole under my brreath and turn to Freddie to opine that perhaps if his friend voted for Democrats, there would be fewer wars resulting in fewer disabled vets like his friend, who, I want to add, is on his way for medical care at a VA that his friends, the Republicans, are busy unfunding and dismantling. It’s better that I sit here typing furiously and keeping the sound in my head loud enough to block the Tea Bagger shit pouring out of this douchebag.

Took a header through the doorway to our bedroom this morning. Went down hard on the terrazzo, the dog guard, and my forearms. Contusions, scrapes, bruises and ouchies everywhere.

In other news, the commenting function is working again and having cleared 5,000 spam followers out of my database, you will be asked to register and use the capcha function in order to use it.

In one form or another, I have been keeping a journal since my 18th birthday, when my first college roommate gave me a spiral notebook and a roach clip. I still have that notebook, somewhere in storage, along with all the other books I filled with my jejune, yet deeply felt, ponderings on life, the universe and everything. It’s been years since I attempted to reread any of them, as I can humiliate myself just fine without going back almost 40 years to pick at forgotten follies.

When I started this blog, I was political and passionate. I blogged about my job. I blogged about the news. I blogged about everything and nothing, but I tried to keep the most personal introspections offline, and in my notebooks. Eventually the lines blurred, the postings veered wildly between pop culture snark, bitter dispatches from the workplace, and disquisitions on the cruelty of life.

This week starts the Jewish new year, a time of conscious rebooting of our lives. Last year I changed my body, losing almost forty pounds. This year I vow to change my head. I pledge to renew my writing, and to become the perfect corporate drone that my bosses want me to be. It will be a much greater challenge, but I’m committed to do this.

I gave up on Twitter early on, as MizShoes is unable to contain herself to a mere 140 characters and spaces and moved on to Facebook. Deceptively fun to be around, dangerously easy to talk to, Facebook was like cocaine. I have always prided myself on my non-addictive personality; my ability to say enough. So today, I turned off my Facebook account and said, no more. If I have something to mutter aloud, I can mutter in my virtual living room, and not on the train, if you know what I mean. I wanted to embed a video here, a clip of Peter Weller as Buckaroo Banzai, the scene where he utters the immortal line: “The deuce, you say.”, but alas, such is beyond my Google-fu to find.

See you around.

Constant readers of this blog, both of you whom are left after this long hiatus, will remember that after that Terrible, Horrible Thing happened at the end of last season, Miz Shoes vowed that she had quit Tyra and could quit the unholy troika of Heidi, Michael and NinaGarcia, too. 

Well, MizShoes tried to quit them, but in the event, she has been watching and not recapping all along. And here is what MizShoes thinks about this season. It has sucked. Who or what is Clinque Counter Josh, but the Straight From Central Casting prettier, flamboyantly queenier, bitchier and stunningly less talented (and that was a mighty low bar, bucko) version of the Insufferable Jeffrey the Pin-Headed Schmoo?

These contestants are merely contestants or actors and not one of them has done anything worth remembering, at least in terms of design and craftsmanship. Wasn’t Bryce the same person as the Autistic Yet Talented One on the rip off show about the search for America’s next top visual artist? For that matter, wasn’t Falene the same person as the Woman Who Had Taxidermied Unborn Fawns? The judging, which has always been erratic at best, has become…Well damned if the loquatous Miz Shoes can come up with an adequate word for that pitiful panel.

No, all in all, MizShoes doesn’t think this show is worth the free airwaves it’s broadcast over.

So, I’m sitting at my spinning wheel in the South Miami Farmers Market last Saturday (World Wide Spin In Public Day, which, while not to be found in the Hallmark section, does occur) bonding with a stranger over the concept of centering and how one cannot force it.

She told me about her college days in the ceramics studio, spending endless hours at the wheel and never being able to center, walking away for a few weeks or months, coming back and having the clay fall in place in her hands, effortlessly. Yep, I said, twist is like that, it either flows or it doesn’t.

I just finished rereading Robert Silverberg’s “Lord Valentine’s Castle” and there is a passage, early in the book, where Valentine is about to juggle for the first time. It captures the very essence of what we seek, we who spin on a wheel, be it clay or fiber or ourselves on the edge of this spiral arm.

“We will teach you basics, one small thing at a time. Juggling is a series of small discrete motions done in quick sequence, that give the appearance of constant flow and simultaneity. Simultaneity is an illusion, friend, when you are juggling and even when you are not. All events happen one at a time.” Sleet smiled coldly. He seemed to be speaking from ten thousand miles away. “Close your eyes, Valentine.

Orientation in space and time is essential. Think of where you are and where you stand in relation to the world.”

Valentine pictured Majipoor, mighty ball hanging in space, half of it or more than half engulfed by the Great Sea. He saw himself standing rooted at Zimroel’s edge with the sea behind him and a continent unrolling before him, and the Inner Sea punctuated by the Isle of Sleep, and Alhanroel beyond, rising on its nether side to the great swollen bulge of Castle Mount, and the sun overhead, yellow with a bronze-green tint, sending blistering rays down on dusty Suvrael and into the tropics, and warming everything else, and the moons somewhere on the far side of things, and the stars farther out, and the other worlds, the worlds from which the Skandars came and the Hjorts and the Liimen and all the rest, even the world from which his own folk had emigrated, Old Earth, fourteen thousand years ago, a small blue world absurdly tiny when compared to Majipoor, far away, half forgotten in some other corner of the universe, and he journeyed back down across the stars to this world, this continent, this city, this inn, this courtyard, this small plot of moist yielding soil in which his boots were rooted, and told Sleet he was ready.