Blue Trees. Orange Skies.

Feeling marginally better today in that uncontrollable sadness has given way to a deep contempt for all things human.

I can handle contempt without bursting into tears!

Human beings really fucking suck, and nowhere is that more evident than in their collective behaviors.

On a one-on-one level, humans can be quite pleasant. Interesting, inventive, even kind.
Amass them together into any kind of group, and they are stupid, petty, mean, and filled with vindictiveness toward anyone who floats more than one standard deviation from the straight line down the middle of the normal curve.

Of course, that normal curve varies historical moment to historical moment, giving the illusion that things change.

But things don’t change. Not really.

In fact, historical cycles repeat.

###

Given the insect crawl of a single lifetime, though, things appear to change. In fact, often they appear to change wayyyyy too fast. Because the pendulum can’t accumulate enough momentum in the space of a mere 80 years or so to start swinging back in the opposite direction.

Talked to Ichabod for more than an hour yesterday.

When it changes, it changes quickly!

That’s what I wanted to tell him as though this was some distilled elder wisdom, the punch line to some koan starring a wise Buddhist monk and a clueless young acolyte.

Ichabod, of course, is neither clueless nor (let’s face it) particularly young, being in his mid-30s. I’m sure by now he’s familiar with his own version of When it changes, it changes quickly!

But I ranted on for breathlessly for 20 minutes or so. (Fortunately, Ichabod has seemingly limitless supplies of filial forbearance.)

That van trip I took in the early 70s.

I’d just done a runway show in Milan, and I wanted to go to Greece before I had to return to the States and resume my U.C. Berkeley studies.

I could easily have flown to Athens.

But I’d met these young Brit guys and decided to join them on the overland trip in a van through the country-formerly-known-as-Yugoslavia.

In Sarajevo, the van broke down. So we ended up having to spend a couple of days there.

The thing that has always disappointed me about foreign travel is that when you get to that foreign place, everything looks much the same!

I want the trees to be blue when I’m in a foreign country!

I want the sky to be orange, and the sea to be purple, and the buildings to be ornate rococo palaces.

Instead, Sarajevo looked remarkably like Brooklyn. Same dirty brownstone municipal buildings, same pollen-and-pollutant haze choking the air. Sarajevo was so ordinary. Sarajevo was so boring.

In the early 1990s, when Sarajevo became the site of the longest siege in the history of modern warfare, I was absolutely flummoxed: How could this have happened in boring, banal Sarajevo?

But I think that’s what started this particular obsession of mine. If things could change that drastically in Sarajevo, they could change anywhere. They could change here.

Since that time, I have been imbued with this sense of the absolute evanescence of it all.

You think it’s real because you see it, you breathe it.

But in another second, you could very easily not be seeing it or breathing it.

###

What else?

The National Counting Project still hasn’t given me a working phone.

But they’re deluging me with desperate emails: We’re offering bonuses! Bonuses! Hundreds of dollars for every name counted!

You’d think with that kind of desperation, they’d be eager to provide me with working equipment.

But you’d think wrong.

I’ve been feeling so awful that I haven’t generated any revenue at all in several days.

That must change!

And Sybyl wishes you a Happy National Cat Day.

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