The House of Vampire

"Once you enter the house of empire, you are lost. You are going to be silenced." That's what Howard Zinn said on Democracy Now this morning about Robert McNamara and the impossibility of changing government from within; they went on to talk about Daniel Ellsberg.

But my daughter piped up from the backseat: "What does that mean, enter the house of vampire?" So we went on to talk about supernatural creatures, admitting it when you're wrong, telling other people you won't be in on it when they do something wrong, etc.

Tonight is the first of a series of eclipses, this one in my first/seventh house, the rest in the second/eighth. Does that mean progress?

Here's my Michael Jackson memory: William S. Burroughs' 80-something birthday party, basement of Herb's restaurant on P street, and they kept playing stuff from Off the Wall over and over and over and over. The big sheet cake had plastic cowboys on it; I think I still have one.

I was thinking of the above commercial the other day; "no, no my brother" is something I say fairly often, but I was a little surprised that there are so few references to it out there. There was another commercial I can't find in which he gives the "no, no" line to a guy trying to cut in on him while he was slow-dancing. This is the time of year that puts me in mind of slow drags, close to skin smelling faintly of chlorine from the pool. I felt more strongly the death of the great Curtis Mayfield; while only one radio station did tributes to him, I painted the room that would become my daughter's nursery; equal parts sadness and hope.

Eclipses mean an open door to choose where you want your life to go next; I choose the blue light in the basement and the grass-tinged night air coming in the open basement door, not the house of vampire.