BurningbirdI’ve been pestering and pestering Allan Moult to continue with his Dizzy series and today he posted a new entry.
Regardless of whether you like cats or not, you’re going to like these stories. Tasty sample from today’s posting:
I ended up in hospital for a tetanus shot, a bandage and a helluva lot of snickering from the nurses when confronted with the ‘fierce cat’ that attacked me.
Stories are accompanied by an excellent photo of Dizzy — probably one of the best cat photos I’ve seen.
I suffered a bit of an eye opener today when I read Jonathon’s response to my weblog posting and follow up from yesterday regarding self-justification. He wrote:
Yet, even though I don’t regard Oblivio as a weblog, others might. I suppose it could be mistaken for a weblog, just as Michael Barrish could be mistaken for a real person. He probably is a real person since he also uses the website to solicit web development work (though he maintains separate sites for each purpose, for reasons he explains in the story Motherfucker ). But Barrish is also a character who appears in his own stories. As does Rachel, his girlfriend. Whether she really exists and whether she’s his girlfriend is impossible to determine, without knowing Michael Barrish. Even then, the real-life Rachel may bear only a fleeting resemblance to the Rachel in the stories. (Just like the women in some of my stories.)
Of all possible outcomes of yesterday’s writing, what I didn’t expect is that the story that originated my passion might be allegorical rather than experience. I am left wondering whether I am a sophisticated patron of the arts or an incredibly gullible fool. And that’s the inherent danger of mixing the art of creation within the context of experiential recounting.
Jonathon continues with:
So, you might be asking, what’s the point of all this? The point is this: there seems to be an implicit agreement amongst webloggers to speak with an authentic voice, to tell the truth as they see it, to give witness, according to the dictates of journalism.
…
Storytelling depends on a belief that an artfully constructed fiction is frequently more truthful than a carefully described fact.
Must all webloggers speak of true experiences? Not at all, as witness the excellent satire of Wealth Bondage or the historical recountings of Bloggus Caesari.
However, in my opinion, if webloggers establish a truthful context for their words, then they do have a pact with their readers that says, “React honestly to my story because what I tell you is true”.
Something to think about. And write more about later because now I am off to spend the rest of the day in the hallowed halls of Hippocrates.
If you know San Francisco than you know the Castro district. It’s colorful, interesting, lively, unique, and the center of gay activities in a city that’s known to be very gay friendly. All in all, it’s a fun place to walk, shop, whatever, because the people in the area are about the friendliest there are in the city.
Every year, the citizens of the Castro area throw a huge Halloween party. Cross dressers will spend months creating the outfits they’ll wear this night, and travel — by limo — from place to place showing off their finery. Over time, the straights discovered that, hey, the folks in Castro are having a great time. Next thing you know, the street party in Castro is _the_ place to be, Halloween night.
Unfortunately, the last few years, there’s been some good Christian boys who have deemed it their moral duty to show up on Halloween in order to attempt to beat to death anyone gay they might find.
It’s interesting, but in my quest to see how many people I can piss off with my “left coast leftist liberal” bias, I’ve talked about every “right” in this weblog except gay rights and the right to die. I’ll leave the right to die to another day.
Gay rights: I’m straight. I have gay and straight friends. I don’t understand homophobia. And the government and everyone’s neighbor does NOT have to be involved with how a person practices their own form of sexuality as long as the practice is between consenting adults. And if two people want to get married, let them. End of story.
I was in Castro today to go the clinic. My doctor was wonderful. In fact, the clinic is full of doctors who entered medicine because they care about people rather than to make as much money as possible. Gives one a lot of hope for the medical community.
I watched a gentleman on news last night. I wish I had caught his name because he had some of the most quietly brilliant views on the Middle East conflict that I’ve ever heard. If you read this and you watch KRON evening news in the San Francisco area and did catch his name, please let me know what it is.
Meanwhile, this gentleman said things that made a lot of sense, including the fact that he would like to see Sharon and Arafat gone from the picture because both are so concerned with their own egos, their hatreds of each other, that they’ll never work towards peace. If both were gone, perhaps more reasonable people could replace them and peace could be found.
I found this echoed by an article at Time, What are they thinking?, that looks, critically, at Sharon and Arafat. However, a key element in the article, to me, is that both men’s popularity seems to be tied with their more violent actions. Even with Sharon and Arafat gone from the picture, it would take a miracle worker — on both sides of the issue — to bring about peace.
The gentleman on the news also said that we, the United States, could never be a peace broker in the Middle East because we have too much invested in our support of Israel. We are not disinterested.
From CNN today, the Middle East conflict is impacting on our fragile technology rebound. And resulting in higher oil prices. I wish I could say that our government will need to monitor the oil companies in this country to ensure they don’t overly profit from these difficulties, but then I remember whom I speak — Bush and Cheney — and realize that this statement is laughable.
I am not going to focus this weblog on the Middle East conflict, but it does weight heavily on me this week. I don’t see any possibility that war in the Middle East can be avoided. And I don’t see any possibility that the rest of the world won’t get pulled, heavily, into this war. And there will be people in this country who will rejoice the war. And I don’t understand this.
Just as I finished the last post, the sirens went off in San Francisco. Not at the usual time at noon on Tuesday. I searched the fog offshore, anxiously. I looked at the Bay Bridge so close to my home.
Then the security guard came on over my condo’s loudspeaker and announced that the alarms were the city’s annual test of the earthquake emergency system.