Author Archives: Kyle Kimberlin
new dccc ad
to kill an american
This is one of those countless “pass this on to everyone you know” things that circumambulate in the internets and just won’t die. But when it came around again this time, it struck a chord. It speaks to the best of what we are as Americans. If someone had grafted this into Bush’s brain in the fall of 2001, we’d be so much better off. Because the best we can be is so much more peaceable than we’ve been.
To Kill an American
You probably missed this in the rush of news, but there was actually a report that someone in Pakistan had published in a newspaper, an offer of a reward to anyone who killed an American, any American.
So an Australian dentist wrote an editorial the following day to let everyone know what an American is . So they would know when they found one. (Good one, mate!!!!)
“An American is English, or French, or Italian, Irish, German, Spanish, Polish, Russian or Greek. An American may also be Canadian, Mexican, African, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Australian, Iranian, Asian, or Arab, or Pakistani or Afghan.
An American may also be a Comanche, Cherokee, Osage, Blackfoot, Navaho, Apache, Seminole or one of the many other tribes known as native Americans.
An American is Christian, or he could be Jewish, or Buddhist, or Muslim. In fact, there are more Muslims in America than in Afghanistan . The only difference is that in America they are free to worship as each of them chooses.
An American is also free to believe in no religion. For that he will answer only to God, not to the government, or to armed thugs claiming to speak for the government and for God.
An American lives in the most prosperous land in the history of the world.
The root of that prosperity can be found in the Declaration of Independence , which recognizes the God given right of each person to the pursuit of happiness.
An American is generous. Americans have helped out just about every other nation in the world in their time of need, never asking a thing in return.
When Afghanistan was over-run by the Soviet army 20 years ago, Americans came with arms and supplies to enable the people to win back their country!
As of the morning of September 11, Americans had given more than any other nation to the poor in Afghanistan . Americans welcome the best of everything…the best products, the best books, the best music, the best food, the best services. But they also welcome the least.
The national symbol of America , The Statue of Liberty , welcomes your tired and your poor, the wretched refuse of your teeming shores, the homeless, tempest tossed. These in fact are the people who built America .
Some of them were working in the Twin Towers the morning of September 11, 2001 earning a better life for their families. It’s been told that the World Trade Center victims were from at least 30 different countries, cultures, and first languages, including those that aided and abetted the terrorists.
So you can try to kill an American if you must. Hitler did. So did General Tojo, and Stalin, and Mao Tse-Tung, and other blood-thirsty tyrants in the world. But, in doing so you would just be killing yourself . Because Americans are not a particular people from a particular place. They are the embodiment of the human spirit of freedom. Everyone who holds to that spirit, everywhere, is an American.
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that’s some expensive spin
Bush Administration Spent $1.6 Billion to Spin the News:
“How much is good press worth? To the Bush administration, about $1.6 billion. That’s how much seven federal departments spent from 2003 through the second quarter of 2005 on 343 contracts with public relations firms, advertising agencies, media organizations and individuals, according to a new Government Accountability Office report.”
In my humble opinion, elected officials should be prohibited by law from engaging in media manipulation. They have publicly funded offices, staffers, computers, fax machines, etc. They can issue press releases and call news conferences. That’s enough. Spending $1.6B on how we perceive the news – not on telling us the truth – is an indefensible waste of our money and simply Orwellian.
Shoot, we could have paid for a short but highly televised war with that much scratch.
“Careful oversight of this spending is essential given the track record of the Bush administration, which has used taxpayer dollars to fund covert propaganda within the United States,” Rep. Henry A. Waxman (Calif.), ranking Democrat of the House Government Reform Committee, said in a statement yesterday.
by what measure genius?
Marc Ash of Truthout, on Rove::
“I never thought Karl Rove was a genius. Rove is not brilliant; he’s ruthless. There is a difference. What makes Rove dangerous is he will take risks no one else will take.”
see dick’s house
Protesters show up in force near Cheney home:
We organized it because of the war in Iraq and what an injustice it has been,’ Walt Farmer, retired Air Force captain and registered Republican said. ‘The Vice President has received a pass in Jackson long enough. We want to let them know we don’t approve of the war or how they play fast and loose with the Constitution.
See Dick.
See Dick’s house in Wyoming.
See Dick’s house get marched on.
It is good.
fatigue cripples US army in Iraq
Exhaustion and combat stress are besieging US troops in Iraq as they battle with a new type of warfare. Some even rely on Red Bull to get through the day. As desertions and absences increase, the military is struggling to cope with the crisis. [The Guardian]
Welcome back to Peaceable after its two week hiatus.
My first reaction to this article was shoot, millions of Americans back home rely on caffeine, just to make it to lunch. My second was I wonder if the company that makes Red Bull is publicly traded. My third, and the one that I’m going with, is Another proof that Bush is marching this once great country, boots first, straight into hell.
Of course the soldiers are exhausted. Soldiers are always exhausted in war. War doesn’t have office hours. But war, though always insane, is presumed to have a discernible objective: whop the crap out of the enemy and go home. This one doesn’t; no objectives, nothing to win, everything to lose.
I don’t know about you, but even sitting here in my comfy desk chair, I’m pretty farking tired of it myself.
Impeach Bush and Cheney.
pit and prune juice on the road
Nobody has guessed the location of the photo in the last post. I guess that saves me having to award a prize. It’s the California Aqueduct, somewhere north of Patterson, CA.
Have you ever picked wild blackberries at dusk? I have now. That was fun. And a good hike, on a steep trail above the American River. Thanks to my loved ones for that.
Among the inventories recently done of my life, character, prospects, interview suits, etc., is included a substantial inventory I’ve taken of my creative affairs. I find general disarray. 
My poems and short fiction are showing hope of harvest. I’ve recently compiled a collection of poems and I’m putting the finishing polish on it. I’m trying to choose the title, sending out email feelers in hopes of finding a publisher, etc. But my story – novel, novella, or long exhalation of emotional havoc – has simply gone awry. It has devolved by turns to 31 chapters of sentimental saltmarsh or many dead leaves floating in a bottomless flooded quarry of woe. This cannot stand.
* Feeling suddenly thirsty, nonplussed on the brink of a pit of creative failure, he stands and leaves the room without excusing himself.*
I like crystal light, don’t you? It’s better than heavy carbonated sodas, especially late at night. No caffeine.
Where was I? Oh yes. Scrap it? Toss the poor thing into a drawer? (By which I mean drag the files onto a CD-R, and toss that into a drawer.)
I’ve seriously considered simply clicking on the folder on my hard drive, holding down Shift to bypass the recycle bin and hitting Delete. But I think there’s a ritual involved with doing that, after so much work, that I’m not ordained to perform. I seem to remember something about doing the hokey pokey while chanting “I’m wasting my life” until dizzy and nauseous, but I’m not sure which way one is supposed to spin. Does anyone know? Probably clockwise.
Well. I was cruising the San Joaquin in my rented car, a very red Chevy with a thoughtful hook-up for my iPod, and I was listening to a podcast on philosophy from Australia. One of the speakers paraphrased a quote by Oscar Wilde, to the effect that a sentimentalist is someone who doesn’t know that emotion has to be paid for. Which gave me an idea.
(Note: If you go looking for the garbage dump in Placerville, you’ll find it on Throwita Way.)
Either throw the damn project away or start over. Clean slate. Enough cluckin around. Rewrite the whole farkin thing in my own voice, first person. Tell the truth. Screw sentiment. Lose the cute. I have to do it this way, because I don’t know how to plot.
…I gave my love a chicken
That had no bone
I told my love a story
That had no end…
Yep, that’s exactly what I’ve got here, in countless drafts in MS Word: a boneless chicken.
So how does one pay for emotions? By telling the truth. Life is at the same time beautiful and terrible. Death is always in front of us, so go ride your bike along the beach.
I have thumbed through some previous pieces I published, seeking inspiration. I came across a line from On the Road by Jack Kerouac, which I used as an epigraph in Finding Oakland:
“Because here we were dealing with the pit and prune juice of poor beat life itself, in the god-awful streets of man.”
That’s beautiful, don’t you think? It was very kind of Mrs. Kerouac – or her legal representatives – to let a humble poet use it. And that’s where my little novel/novella is going. Into the streets, or at least to be a little prune juice on a country road. I cant bear to see my characters die of willful neglect.
I have a new title, to inspire a new direction. I’ve written a new first chapter, and heavily rewritten the second. I’m using my previous work as source material mostly, but not pasting anything in to the new manuscript unless it’s really great. I’m completely changing the POV and the voice. Every line in the book that’s remotely derivative of The Waltons is being hauled out against the barn and summarily shot. Well, maybe that’s a bit harsh. But I’m shooting for something between this and this.
where’s the blogger?
Guess correctly, win a major award.
Click to view larger.
productivity
I had a pretty productive weekend I suppose. I washed my truck, right before the wind shifted and brought in still more ash from the infernal Zaca fire. I did a little housekeeping; not enough, certainly.
I started a new chapter for my novel, and introduced a character that’s been in the background all along, but never revealed or discussed before. She’s dead, and exists only in backstory, but she needs to be revealed a little. She’s mother to two central characters, grandmother to two others, so she’s crucial to their situation. Want a little nibble? You don’t, but what the hell.
Maybe she had a temper, we don’t know. But this is how her sons remembered her; like an angel in the room, amorphous. Maybe she raged against jackets tossed on chairs and filthy boots worn in on her rugs and just-mopped floors. She was only human. We know that John found her sleeping, completely, in her armchair – dim fabric of roses on a field of pale yellow – one day of soft and steady rain. Knowing nothing else to do, he sat down at the table and waited for everything to change.
Does he sit at the table and weep and wait? Perhaps. I’ll ask him.
So in the past few weeks, I’ve reorganized all the chapters and edited at least 30 of 230 pages. Actually, I’ve snipped and stroked at maybe 20 pages more, like a bored barber, or a topiary gardener at Disneyland. This week, I’ve rewritten one chapter, a long one, entirely from scratch. But the thing I found the most fun was today, drinking coffee and watching the pretty girls in my favorite cafe. I made a list of 20 possible titles for the story; 16 fresh ones, from the damp hall closet at the back of my little brain. New tracks of possible thought, and pretty girls. And French Roast. Life was good.
Weak Vision
This isn’t anything finished. I just thought someone might find it interesting. I wrote it this morning, having my coffee, just to get my hands moving and my brain in gear. Maybe it’ll become a story or something.
He got his first pair of glasses when he was six. Heavy black resin, with silver hinges and screws that glinted in the light. He was in the first grade, and wore them to school. He couldn’t see the blackboard clearly otherwise. And clarity seemed so important to the grownups in his life. They seemed to seek that above anything and everything else, except comfort and relief from the abiding anxiety of the early Cold War. But he had come to accept the world as fuzzy, at least from a distance. A slight gaussian blur had comforts of its own.
Before he got the glasses, two kids fighting across the playground were in a kind of dance, derived from Polynesia, or mimicking the clash of wild mountain rams. He had come to think of girls as dangerous fairies; from a distance soft and flightful, but in the classroom full of blunt intensity.
Now he was faced with all this sudden focus. The fights became what they were, lashing out at the world for all its gravity, spinning indifferently, complicit in every authority of people who had lived too long to know that freedom is the most important thing next to love. Even from halfway down the line of wooden desks and chairs, the teacher’s face was anxious, tired. He saw the impatience and frustration in the set of her eyes, the crease of her brow, and the purse of her lips. He had assumed she was an extension of their mothers’ love for all of them, and he’d been wrong. She was simply trying to be nice.
my precious
Want to see something extremely cute? Check out Rusty, a friend’s cat. Pay special attention to what he’s carrying.
Now that he’s famous, he’s ready to meet with his agent.
Metaphor 