little boy calls little boys little boys and the rest of us idiots

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To my shock, I have found that the Pentagon Missile thing is still in dispute. Jesus. And this obviously intelligent hypnosis victim here can't tell his physics from his bellybutton. Crikey.

Ry, you little shit, I was watching when the first images were coming out of DC. The bottom floor was NOT knocked out. There was a hole that looked to be about twenty feet in diameter and there was NO damage to the lawn.

THERE ALSO WAS NO PLANE.

Obviously, you've been so busy stewing about the Israeli involvement that you haven't LOOKED at any of it well enough. It has long been established that the plane heading for the Pentagon was a fighter plane that shot the missile into it and overflew the building. If you think for a minute you might agree they wouldn't risk either not doing enough damage or too much, at the Pentagon. So even if the physics worked for it to have been a 757, it wouldn't have been one. Don't be a jackass. Don't be a laws of physics denier. And quit being such a fatuous little boy panting over a fucker making a fat living off Palestine's agony and our impotent loathing for Israel's perfidies.

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Unless, of course, it was a directed energy beam....

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love, 99
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he was so much older then

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This song has been playing in my head for over a week. I'm sure you haven't even forgotten it since I posted it a few days ago, but I'm trippin' on this song completely supplanting anything as seasonal as, say, well, Jingle Bells. I think I was in Junior High when I first heard him singing something, and it thrilled me... made my cheeks pink... and it felt very strange, a scandalous secret—something—I didn't know what—probably, no, definitely not something I should mention to my mother. His voice was booming all through the clubhouse by the public pool. Scantily-clad people, mostly young, but mostly older than I was, were all around and Eric was getting to me, all in this secret cosmos nobody else touches—well, nobody knows how to enter—but I was afraid it was going to show anyway. I was afraid people could see, that there would be some blinking neon tag to alert them to this sort of feral urge filling up my air. So when the song was over I was relieved... and grieving. Luckily, the songs they were playing were on a short rotation so I got to not miss him again for a few minutes a couple more times that day.

I was already an old hand at having crushes on men, starting right with Harry Belefonte and Liberace and Korla Pandit when I was three, but very chastely and prudishly—having not mentioned my crush on John to anyone because I thought it wasn't okay to be in love with a married man—opting for George for public purposes—not being remotely inclined to adore Paul—my sister being ALL over the Ringo thing—but Eric was definitely an entirely other kettle of fish. Kept my yap immovably shut about it, I did... and I know you don't find that remotely credible, but the great thing about never keeping yer yap shut about anything is that nobody can ever tell what you aren't mentioning. I'm a veritable Everest of secrets that will never pass from me to any inhabitant of this world. But I figgered the coast was finally clear to admit at least this. I think my first bona fide case of the hots for anyone was Eric Burdon, an older man... and it was still some years before I ever stayed in proximity to any case of the hots for anyone at all.

I was crazy for Robin Williams. I mean I was beside myself crazy for Robin Williams. He was at College of Marin while I was still in high school, but also going to College of Marin. A mutual friend tried to get us firmly introduced at least three times and each of them lasted about a heartbeat longer than it took Robin to say, "Hello 99," and I bolted. Yes. Literally. I ran. Finally, he did an entire performance—alone on the stage—for me—alone in the audience—while the rest of the cast and crew were striking the set from a soon-to-be-famous play they'd just wrapped at the seminary theater in San Anselmo, and the director/teacher was screaming for him to quit dicking around and help backstage, and Robin just completely ignored him, despite the mounting threats of failing grades and invisible career future. By that time, I'd been having a great deal of trouble with the avalanches of male attention from every direction, and most of it not remotely pleasant, so it was just right at that remove. I could stay, not run, just the two of us... with audio from the irked director backstage. I can tell you that he was every bit as good then as he has been since you've gotten to know him. All during my private audience, I was dazzled that he was as riveting and funny and sad and convincing as Red Skelton, mourning that Robin Williams should be famous as though the world had already passed him over when he was only, what? Nineteen? Twenty? I can't remember the exact year. I think I suffered this for at least two full years... maybe longer.

I saw him at the industry screening for Beverly Hills Cop years later, but I grinned and ducked when he recognized me, instead of finally getting to talk with him, because I was in the middle of being freaked out by Hollywood and men, again, big time. I was down there, staying with my newly extremely important type friend and her husband. Always an ordeal. It was fun going to movie screenings at the studios or the big nights at the big theaters. It was fun seeing so many movie stars. But the society was always outright appalling. And I was having to watch what that pit full of vipers was doing to someone I'd loved for a long time... not pretty... and I was catching all kinds of peripheral action from people in various positions in the industry... and most of it was SO shallow and SO venal and SO much vanity and falsity was dripping from every encounter that I usually stopped having any fun after two days or so. Except it's really stupid to go all that way to see your friends and stay only two days.

Earlier that evening I'd been at UCLA with my friend who was doing one of their classes by professionals for film students and there was THE MOST HANDSOME MAN IN HUMAN HISTORY in the elevator with us after class. OMG, it surpasses my powers of description, for sure, to give you that picture. OMG, OMG, OMG. I'm NOT exaggerating. He was with an older professorial type man... a professor and his assistant, thought I... and he was giving me the tractor beam treatment with those incredible eyes the whole absurdly-slow way down. I mentioned to my friend as we neared her car in the parking lot that I thought that fellow had to be the best-looking man of all time. She mentioned she'd noticed he thought pretty highly of me in there too... and shame he's that old queen's gigolo.

Sheesh. How to pop my bubble in a big ass hurry. I resolved not to believe her, but just a little later, there he was with the same old queen at the big to-do at some huge old theater, I think just the night before Beverly Hills Cop would be opening to the public, and still staring at me with the same longing as in the elevator earlier. Then, and while this one was still locked-on, Sean Penn's head popped up like a periscope breaching the sea of people making their way in for the screening, and he was giving me that look—truly unmistakably—too. I'm trying to think if I ever in my life saw any man bursting with that much testosterone. I don't think so, and, well, that's saying something, okay?

I didn't like this much. I was having a very bad time. I was EXTREMELY upset from just breaking up with my lover of five years, what you might call "wrecked" in fact. My friend's oldest daughter, also a dear friend, was right in the middle of making it abundantly clear to everyone in her life, everyone in LA, that she was a drunk of transcendental aspect, humiliating me at least half as much as she was humiliating herself. I'd been having a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful few moments with Edward James Olmos out by the pool in the back of a house where a very large party was in full swing, when someone at whose zipper she would not stop tugging came staggering out to beg me to get her out of there. End of the first truly enjoyable moments of my visit so far. I had NO idea where we were and now had to drive someone too drunk to even point the way home. Her mother had just the day before been a RAVING bitch about my innocently mentioning what I'd thought of a movie to someone who knew I was staying with her, shocking me down to my toes. I mean, she'd gone postal... over nothing at all... over something I still can't quite fathom would impinge upon her life or reputation in even the most minute way. Then went postal again when I brought her daughter to her house in that condition, even though I'd had no choice because I'd only been lucky enough to recognize a road I knew led to her house, not having the first part of a clue where her daughter lived. I'd've done better to just drop her at an all night diner and find the nearest freeway home. So, having already been there for a week of this action by the the night of the screening, I was a bloody wreck, all things considered, and completely unhappy about now going to sit in the specially-roped-off-for-bigshots section whilst there were these two fellows with their radar locked on me, and my hostess in such a freakishly irascible state of mind.

That's when I spotted Robin. Eddie Murphy was all slumped down in a seat behind me and to my right, trying not to be noticed or something, and Robin and Christopher Reeve had just come up to him to give him shit about being such a big chicken. Robin's eyes got wide with recognition and started pointing at me. I couldn't face the famous person thing with him by that point. I just couldn't. Who the hell could even tell how my big shot friend would have taken that. Maybe yet another breach of important person's friend's protocol that it seemed to me she was just making up as she went along. Much as I've always wanted to finally be able to sit down and talk with him, not be so frightened by love to even speak, I just grinned at him and slunk down in my seat as though still too shy to say anything. There's only so much of this noise I can take and, even though I could take much more then than I can now, I've NEVER been able to take much of that. I was a wreck.

And that turned out to be the end of my friendship with Ms. Big Shot's eldest daughter. The end of my wholeheartedness with Ms. Big Shot. The end of any willing existence within the boundaries of the LA Basin... hell... of Southern California... at all. I could not parse the notion of the most gorgeous man of all time being so clearly heterosexual and yet a gigolo for an old queen. I still try to think of other excuses for him staying glued to the old guy and yet ravishing me with his eyes and psychic energies. Maybe the old queen was his wealthy uncle and wouldn't have stood for his nephew squandering a visit by going off with some babe...? There are other explanations. Whatever. That creepy notion put a soaking wet rag over the inclination to find out one way or another. And, yep, if I'd've so much as twitched an eyebrow, Sean Penn and I would have missed the movie. No question. Luckily for everyone, he took no for an answer, despite the force of his interest. Heh. That was then. NOW, for sure, I wouldn't turn him down... well, I don't think... possibly... conditions permitting.... I didn't know there was a BRAIN and a HEART behind all those hormones. I do now.

Heh. Too laaaaaaate.... :o]

I bet you I'm never going to run into Robin Williams again. I bet I'm never going to get the chance to describe to him the size and shape and nuance of my girlish spiritual obliteration over him. How the chemistry or the cosmic wind or whatever the hell does that to someone had me zapping with the tao over him.

I'm sure I've told you a lot of this before... and I can't remember if I told you about all the rock stars and the drug dealers before either... but whatever I told you before, you didn't know about my thing for Eric Burdon... how it intersected with everything that came after... what it did to me when I was young.

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Oh, oh, and I went off so far down the garden path that I forgot to mention the whole reason I reposted this song. It's been playing in my head for a week. The reason I broke down and posted it to begin with. Right. Well last night I found it on the website of someone I really admire like crazy. Do you suppose he got it from me? Was it psychic? Or cosmic? Just another completely accidental synchronicity?

Maybe something splendid is nearing.

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love, 99
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'twas ever thus

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Don't you think?

Study highlights mental problems in US teens
(AFP)

WASHINGTON — Around half of US teens meet the criteria for a mental disorder and nearly one in four report having a mood, behavior or anxiety disorder that interferes with daily life, American researchers say.

Fifty-one percent of boys and 49 percent of girls aged 13-19 have a mood, behavior, anxiety or substance use disorder, according to the study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

In 22.2 percent of teens, the disorder was so severe it impaired their daily activities and caused great distress, says the study led by Kathleen Merikangas of the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH).

"The prevalence of severe emotional and behavior disorders is even higher than the most frequent major physical conditions in adolescence, including asthma or diabetes," the study says.

Mental problems do not get the same attention from public health authorities even though they cost US families around a quarter of a trillion dollars a year, according to the study.

Around nine percent of all US children have asthma and less than a quarter of one percent of all people under the age of 20 have diabetes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Merikangas and a team of researchers analyzed data from the National Comorbidity Study-Adolescent Supplement, which surveyed more than 10,000 US teens.

The study is the first to track the prevalence of a broad range of mental disorders in a nationally representative sample of US teens.

They found that nearly a third of the teens met the criteria for the most common mental disorder among US youth, anxiety disorders, which include social phobia and panic "attacks".

This class of disorder also had the earliest median onset age, occurring in children as young as six years old.

Behavior disorders, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, were the next most common condition (19.1 percent), followed by mood disorders (14.3 percent) such as depression.

Eleven percent of teens with a mood disorder, 10 percent with behavior disorders and eight percent who had anxiety disorders, especially social phobics, met the criteria for severe impairment, meaning their condition affected their day-to-day life and caused them great distress.

Teen mental disorder rates mirror those seen in adults, suggesting that most adults develop a mental disorder before adulthood, say the researchers, calling for earlier intervention and prevention, and more research to determine what the risk factors are for mental disorders in youth.

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love, 99
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i wonder if they knew how grateful i'd be

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It just kills me, all the gorgeous old chiefs posing in front of fake backdrops for posterity. Crazy Horse wouldn't do that, it is said, and we so can't know for certain if we've seen his face, but a lot of them did, despite the killers taking their pictures like gawkers at a fatal accident. I think maybe the thing that decided them was their descendants.

I'm sitting here gazing at this itty bitty picture of my dad sitting on a stump when he was 22. He was a hunk. All the girls have loved him everywhere he's been his whole life. All the nurses and aides are crazy for him still. I envy them. They get to see him every day.
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i just hate lusting after dead men

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Truly. It sucks....
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i love chris floyd's voice

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I also love his writing, but I almost never link to him because it depresses me to continually be excited by the literary ways he reviles just about the same things I revile. It's pretty clear to me that only the choir is interested in that stuff and, well, we don't have any business soothing ourselves thus.

In this conversation with Scott Horton, he drives home how the Obama administration is keeping the war machine going, how everything is in place for a repeat of the entire process of attacking Iraq, only this time for an attack on Iran.

AND HE CLEARLY AGREES WITH ME THAT ALL THIS CULTURE WAR SHIT CAN MORE APPROPRIATELY AND SANELY BE DEALT WITH AFTER WE BRING OUR TROOPS BACK FROM THEIR MULTIFARIOUS DEPLOYMENTS, AFTER WE SOLVE THE REALLY BIG THREATS TO ALL OF US.

So I HIGHLY recommend you listen to him, here, and even will link him out of gratitude in case you care to spend time enjoying someone being eloquent about what you already think. Maybe you could start emailing his URL to people who don't already think like we do.... Maybe I will. No, wait, for sure I will.

He's also trying his hand at singing, but if you ask me, and I realize nobody is asking me, the guy should crank out audio books... or even read his own pieces into a microphone so those of us who prefer to listen to this stuff could just hit "play" and go back to his text for the bits we particularly want to contemplate. His speaking voice is the ticket.
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something to deeply enjoy

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I found this lecture soothing. I downloaded it and listened to it in bed very late last night. It is an extremely entertainingly-told story about the kind of man this planet needs in abundance. Joseph Needham should NOT have been exceptional. He, mostly, had the knack for being the kind of ordinary most humans don't imagine is ordinary. So even though he is being presented as an exceptional and eccentric character here, what was most soothing to me was to hear about the life of a man performing somewhere akin to ordinary human potential. That it is rare is a pity.

Yes, I'm saying we should not be so impressed by guys like this who are functioning at or around ordinary human capacity, but I can't help but love hearing about one anyway.

It usually is better to download the mp4 and listen from your video player because then you can skip through the stultifyingly boring intros of academe, but in this one it's relatively painless, taking up only five minutes.
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i'm still completely mad for christopher walken

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He's in a new play with Sam Rockwell—who also blows my skirt up all the way over my head—and, even though I gave up completely on theater when they started ruining it with microphones and bad sound guys, I'd get my ass to see it in a New York minute if only I had the money.
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sam rockwell blows my skirt up over my ears

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Russell Crowe does it with that bass hum of building-rattling manmanmanmanman that just doesn't ever go away. Rockwell does it with electricity. Plenty of prettier fellows out there, but, uhm, who cares?
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my amazing creepy friend again

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He's still riveting.
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tell him you need immune support

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this picture was taken TODAY

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my sordid past

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Man, you don't know the beautiful men I've been through. I used to have a little box full of pictures of them all, because I loved them all and couldn't stop that part even if I stopped the relationship, but at some point the collection was just too depressing as a keepsake. I burned the box. So there is no evidence extant of this marvelous array... except in the memories of those who have known me that long. Men with this kind of history prefer to call themselves "serial monogamists". I have no term for it. It just never stops being what it is.

I was dreaming that Randy, the tall, devastatingly attractive Marlboro Man, circa 1974-79, had moved to Crescent City, that we bumped into each other there and I was trying to convince him to move away to an even more boondocks with me.

This doesn't wake me up a happy camper, love him still as I do, because nothing deeply matters to him except fishing... and drinking... and staying solid with extremely shiftless drinking buddies. He is funny. He is friendly. He scares the pee out of full-grown men because he is so tall and strong, even though he doesn't have a mean bone in the whole vastness of his body. He is the best bed-maker of anyone on earth, can just stand in one spot and handle the whole ordeal with a manly grace. He's as attuned to my "biorhythms" as it is possible to be, but can't live up to it in any way beyond just being that way when it strikes him to take refuge there, can't relate much beyond keeping me a sort of mom who's good in bed... enjoying laughing at his panting friends and my mortification by those same panting friends.

We used to talk to each other in our sleep. His roommate and girlfriend used to pull their pillows and blankets out into the hall to listen to us sleep-talking for their late night entertainment. They sometimes woke us up, laughing so hard.

Incapable of fidelity, he is still a bachelor, and determined about it now. He's held the same job for his entire adult life. Nothing fancy, but good enough pay to support a condo someplace expensive and fishing and hunting and drinking and a new truck every several years. So he should have been able to stick with one or another of the women who would have died for him, but that just always got too sticky for him. He was always bewildered by it too. Clueless.

Why would I want to run away with him?

ouch!

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That had to hurt....

treasure on the gobi

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maybe i have an idea

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Since it appears Obama will cave in to whatever pressures are applied by the powerful, maybe we should all concentrate on turning Bill Gates and Warren Buffett into pit bulls for human rights and the Constitution. That might solve everything.

I mean, Viggo is not having the impact he should.

do i have to wait a whole YEAR for more russell crowe?

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No tights. Damn. Finally a manly enough Robin Hood and no tights? Damn. Still. Opposite Cate Blanchett. Whoa. Ridley Scott? It's gotta be great. At least his hair will be short again and he won't be so tubby, won't be so mortifyingly good at playing a lightless schlubb CIA asshole. I'm sorry if it sounds cheap and superficial, but he's much better for the devastatingly heroic type... even when he's the bad guy he's heroic. Seems going heroic for exceptionalist bureaucrat means completely disappearing into heartless pig, and while I can appreciate the acting feat, I want all the heroes, even fantasy ones, I can possibly get out of him.

my new friend joel reminded me of my old dear paul

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I'd never seen this little tribute to him before.

yes, cookies and milk

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nice boys

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