Tommyjournal  archive    May 2005
Saturday  05.28.05 I hiked the ashrama trail (in the Sierra Nevada near here) today for the first time this year. We had a lot of snow this winter, and many many trees along the trail are broken and uprooted from avalanches. It's impressive looking (at least, it was to someone like me who'd never seen such a thing before). The trail itself is fine until it crosses the creek; the usual crossing (rocks and wooden bridge) is buried under a pile of downed trees. You can find a way across if you don't mind scrambling over the mess. (Photos taken last month of debris in the area are here and here; the snow is gone now.) Clearing the trail at the bridge is going to be a job. I wonder if it'll get done this year. Postscript: the dashed line running from top to bottom on the map above is a wilderness boundary. Operating power tools is forbidden in the area to the left of the line. Disassembling the downed trees with a hand saw wouldn't be my idea of a good time. Tuesday  05.24.05 I've heard that sex somehow gets associated with notions of immortality or with (the desire for) experience on a scale beyond that of mere terrestrial life. I don't doubt that there are people who have such views of sex, but I'm not one of them. On the contrary; sex is, for me, very much about the here and now. Sex is an experience of being in a particular place, at a particular time, and having particular feelings. It has all the hallmarks of reality: your partner isn't perfect, and neither are you. A sex act doesn't last very long. It's messy. It's potentially dangerous. It feels great, or maybe it doesn't--and you don't know for sure going into it which it's gonna be. What makes sex exceptional to me is not that it's somehow an intimation of eternity or vastness, but rather that it's a vivid experience of what is really there at the moment. The most liberating experience of my life was the realization (at age 16) that thoughts of immortality stood in the way of my having a full experience of the world that I in fact live in. Monday  05.23.05 I had a college professor who maintained that people wouldn't want to live forever. When the topic came up, he'd say "how many times do you wanna look at the same freaking sunset." I thought he had a point, but I don't remember everyone in the class agreeing with him. Friday  05.20.05 Tommy as a teenager. You see, I was already inverted. Thursday  05.19.05 Flowers on both of my Echnopsis subdenudata specimens popped while I was out of town (and promptly wilted, as is their wont). You know they bloomed while I was away just to get my goat. Some 24 years ago, I invented a new identity for myself in a hair-brained Walter Mittyesque scheme. Long, silly, pathetic story. I bring it up only because I had assigned my new self a birthday of 5/19. (I was partial to the month of May and to the number 5 in general. The 19, of course, needs no explanation.) Juliet was wrong. Monday  05.16.05 I lost something that had once belonged to E. I thought he might get annoyed when he found out. I had a plan for how to deal with such a situation: I'd tell E that if he enjoyed getting upset over it, I wasn't going to ruin his fun. But E didn't get annoyed. A few days later, E did something that annoyed me (something minor). Reflecting on what had happened, I realized that I have a degree of control over whether or not I got annoyed in such situations. It occurred to me that a comment about enjoying the habit of getting annoyed could be made about my own behavior. Sunday  05.15.05 A few days ago, a conversation with a merchant in town turned to the topic of taxes. He thought it sucked that the IRS gave his business a tax credit (applicable to the next year's taxes) rather than a refund. He thought it sucked that he had to pay as much in tax as he did. He said the level of taxation in the country forced him and other merchants to do a portion of their business in cash (to not pay tax on it). Every so often, someone I know tells me about how they cheat on their taxes. I just listen, I don't say anything, I want to leave them guessing about what I think. It's not that taxes aren't a potentially interesting topic; it's just that I've never had an interesting conversation about taxes that started with someone making a point of telling me how they cheated. Those conversations were mostly about bragging. Taxes are a can of worms. I'd like to see a tax system that most people regard as fair. I realize I'm asking not just for a fair tax code but also for a culture in which people generally accept being taxed, and coöperate. (Tall order.) As it stands, some taxes are fairly well accepted and others are not accepted at all. By analogy: if most of the drivers on a road exceed the speed limit, that's a hint that the limit may be set too low. And if a tax is evaded by almost everyone, maybe that tax needs to be reconsidered, or at least made less easy to evade. How many Californians pay the use tax that the state says you must pay on out-of-state purchases?		related pages current journal Tommyjournal FAQ Tommy email Tommy home page archive 2003 jan feb mar apr may jun jul aug sep oct nov dec 2004 jan feb mar apr may jun jul aug sep oct nov dec 2005 jan feb mar apr may jun jul aug sep oct nov dec 2006 jan feb mar apr may jun jul aug sep oct nov dec 2007 jan feb mar apr may jun jul aug sep oct nov dec 2008 jan feb mar apr may jun jul aug sep oct nov dec 2009 jan feb mar apr may jun jul aug sep oct nov dec 2010 jan feb mar apr may jun jul aug sep oct nov dec 2011 jan feb mar apr may jun jul aug sep oct nov dec 2012 jan feb mar apr may jun jul aug sep oct nov dec 2013 jan feb mar apr may jun jul aug sep oct nov dec 2014 jan feb mar apr may jun jul aug sep oct nov dec 2015 jan feb mar apr may jun jul aug sep oct nov dec 2016 jan feb mar apr may jun jul aug sep oct nov dec 2017 jan feb mar apr may jun jul aug sep oct nov dec 2018 jan feb mar apr may jun jul aug sep oct nov dec 2019 jan feb mar apr may jun jul aug sep oct nov dec 2020 jan feb mar apr may jun jul aug sep oct nov dec 2021 jan feb mar apr may jun jul aug sep oct nov dec 2022 jan feb mar apr may jun jul aug sep oct nov dec 2023 jan feb mar apr may jun jul aug sep oct nov dec 2024 jan feb mar apr may jun jul aug sep oct nov dec 2025 jan feb mar apr may jun jul aug sep oct nov dec