Liberty, Tyranny and Experimentation

Long time no post

2008-11-20T16:04:00.000-08:00

Well, here's my attempt to begin writing again. How about we start with a Eagles of Death Metal cd review? Sure, why not. No one listens to them and no one will find this post. Its a match made in heaven! Or maybe the place with the pointy sticks . . .

And away we go . . .

The Eagles of Death Metal get no respect. Named after a stoned comment while listening to some archly dark metal, “if we were a death metal band we’d be the Eagles of death metal,” they have never been taken seriously. Written off by meager rock minds as a joke band, EODM isn’t one, unless you think quality is a joke. Seriousness has become a pose for many in the rock world, and childhood friends Jesse (Boots Electric) Hughes and Josh (Baby Duck) Homme pose their band as serious fun. This isn’t the Darkness, or Spinal Tap. And with this final installment in the EODM triptych, it’s matured into one of the seriously finest cd’s of the year.

Homme, who is the sonic master behind this party boy duo, is the front man for Queens of the Stone Age. And he’s made every track on “Heart On” a stand alone masterpiece. Pick a song, any song, and the craftsmanship radiates like a 57 sunburst Les Paul. Guitars matter to Homme, and the way he’s placed each rhythm track, bass line, drum pattern and solo lead makes each stand alone, shimmering. It’s the kind of cd that makes it hard to stop playing because you know whatever your going to do after you turn it off is not going to be as much fun as listening to the next song.

Space won’t allow me to pontificate about the beauty of every single rip here but a few mustn’t be missed. (I Used To Couldn’t Dance) Tight Pants’ falsetto chorus “I don’t want to do what I’m supposed to, I just need someone to get close to,” whipped up funk rhythm section, shuffling drums and fuzz box guitar will pull “the ladies” as Hughes likes to say, on to the dance floor. Cheap Thrills, with its Budweiser frogs on steroids bass and scratching interwoven guitars fairly signify the aforementioned song title’s conflicted hedonism. Changing gears, Now I’m a Fool, melodically winks at Steely Dan’s Only a Fool Would Say That, narrating the illusions of Hollywood love while pointing toward a new vulnerability in Hughes bad boy persona. I’ve seen him have bouncers kick d-wits out of his shows for uncivilized behavior toward his female fans, and it’s nice to see that side now appear on record. And the title track Heart On follows up by asking “once your heart’s broken, what do you do?” to which Homme and Hughes answer “I only want some pieces of you.” The sum here is much more than the pieces and the pieces are delectable.

If there is a standout to the cd it might as well be Wannabe in L.A... With a woof and a cowbell the circulating melody runs across the freeways of Hughes story and gives a brief history of the band, one that judging by the black velvet portrait on the back of Homme holding a fork may be done. But they’re not finished. Not as long as there is room on the dance floor.

Just wrong or perfect?

2008-04-14T11:01:00.001-07:00

This is taken from a blog called "Fables of the Reconstruction." He took it from another blog. I'm not sure, but this might be one of the most disturbing light switches on record.

I hear that Mr. Obama is being elitist. What I notice is that both he and Hillary are pandering to the "Christians." Guns, church and bitterness do go together, historically speaking. I think that we hear the truth so infrequently in the mass media we forgot what the truth was. Whomever owns this light switch is either bitter, or embittering.

I'm Lazy read this

2008-03-12T15:56:00.001-07:00

I haven't got the time to be pissed off or even mildly confused about things today. Here, read this, you'll laugh like a maniac.

http://overheardlines.blogspot.com/

More crazy dreams

2008-02-15T12:25:00.000-08:00

Last night was a doozy. It started off with myself as a boy, say 11, and I had this crush on this girl, say 15. We lived in this little town dominated by a round-about, and I remember seeing her riding with her mom in a Mercedes. I was in a car with my mom (dream mom not really my mom) too and I saw her and we were both wearing sunglasses. We gave each other some sort of little secret sign, acknowledgement from car to car as it seemed that our moms didn’t want us together.

From this situation I was sent to some sort of new school, not the regular school where I met this girl maybe but a new school just on the outskirts of town. It was like a business park kinda, the entrance was all glass doors in a glass wall and the seats in the class were in two or three rows about ten each facing the teacher so that our backs were to the door. I went somewhere, maybe the bathroom, and this new kid comes in. He’s a black kid and while he’s kid sized and he comes in and sits in a vacant seat in the front row he’s clearly older, experienced, even jaded. He was sweating I think and he asks/ gets up to go to the bathroom and the teacher says, “the police will always go after you first” something like that. It was bigoted for her to say this and it pissed him off. So I go back into the row behind him and he disappears to the bathroom but he leaves his backpack and out of that come this reptilian/ marine serpent snake monster creatures who proceed to kill like 6 students. I remember lying on the floor while the attack took place, and I really didn’t see the violence. Just felt something creepy on my neck.

Next time I come to class I’m delivered by a really long limo and before I get out these employees of my mom jump out, armed, looking for the monsters and searching the room to make sure all is safe for me. I guess I’m sorta a golden boy. Anyway, the room is pretty large and a large part of it is given over to this kinda organic area, like giant leaves or pods shaped like Pringles that the employees begin to pull apart looking for the poison serpent disc shaped monsters. What they find is a deer-like creature, with a really bizarre head like an American Indian totem creature and they drop this little marble ball into its mouth which falls into its sea-like belly, there may have even been a small explosion at this point. From here my perspective goes all “Fantastic Journey” with me and some other co-pilot searching in our little submarine for the creatures. We find one and shoot some darts, which penetrate and explode in a creature which is flat and disc-like. It then becomes apparent that this might not be the greatest decision on our part as the creature has a mother and she’s gigantic and now maybe a bit pissed at us. Then I wake up.

The night before had a disc theme too. What I remember was that I had to pee and so I started pissing in this rather deep toilet and there was some stuff on the sides so I started to use my stream to clean off the imperfections. As I turned from one side of the bowl to the other my stream got stronger and stronger until I became like furious and I began to dissolve from the feet up. I do believe my wife was around to witness this. From this point space aliens in a gigantic disc vehicle absorbed me into their craft and soon after we came hurtling back to ear, with my wife running to get out of the way of the impending impact. The disc hit the ground on edge and then I woke up.

Some dreams bite

2008-02-12T09:02:00.000-08:00

Last couple of nights I've had some dreams that were frankly a bit scary. Not really nightmares because I was never out of control. But dreams full of threat and searching, with a bit of violence. I'm not thinking portent. Mostly its just gotten warm around here and I think the brain is giving me a better show at night.

Two nights ago I had a dream that involve a pile-up on a road (Waring) that I drive every day. Its two lanes each way with a median and its got a bit long curve in it. The speed limit is like 35 but people drive too fast on it. In the dream some guy in a Datsun 240z painted primer grey is follow some other rice-burner of newer make around the corner and they are joshing for position. I've got the whole family in the car and just as the guy gets around me a car with a couple of rastafarians (or as we call folks in the NFL with dreads: stinkheads) pull out from the curb and this guy tags them, causing me to do a 180 and I end up ramming the trunk of my car (not one I recognize, some piece of shit sedan) into the rasta car hard, impacting at the drivers door. I'm now facing oncoming traffic around the corner and people are driving too fast and close to stop so its turning in to carnage infront of my eyes. I'm worried about the health of the rasta guys, and I'm worried about getting hit by the idiots who aren't stopping in time. One car is going way to fast and the passengers are hurled toward us, hitting a car at the curb and this one guy just sorta disintegrates, I turn my head to avoid seeing more and I can feel body parts (which is weird cause I don't think the windshield is broken) lightly spray me. I look up and there is an ear, neatly sliced off on the dash or somewhere, and for some reason there is a fish tank in the car standing on end. I pick up the ear and neatly put in gooey side down on the glass thinking: somebody is going to want this back. More cars continue to crash and with some sort of supernatural ability I pull our car closer to the curb so we can avoid being hit. Now how's that for a nice dream? My wife had just kicked me out of our bed for snoring and I went downstairs to the extra bedroom and had this dream straight away. It was the most vivid colorful dream too.

Last night I had a couple of good ones but the best was included a Saber-toothed Tiger, who sorta became attached to me, cheek to cheek as we careened down San Roque Rd. We started at my folks house, he was sleeping at the base of the driveway and I woke him up and then we sorta skated (can't tell you how) down the street. He was half-awake so first I took him right at this bus that was coming up the street to try to rouse him. Then we went down the street swerving back and forth. Eventually we made it to State street (which is perpendicular to SRR) and crossed it, whereby the road changed into some other road, lined by trees. I think that we ended up at the beach but I really can't remember anything more.

I could analyze these dreams to death but there's really nothing in them that requires a whole lot of thought from my perspective. There are no revelations. Just stuff taken from my life and mixed together along with maybe a late dinner or two. The brain goes as the stomach rumbles. I wonder what I should have for dinner tonight!

BTW spell check is down right now on the blog server. Its a blog so your not supposed to care.

Interesting women

2008-01-23T14:34:00.000-08:00

I got caught in my car by an actually interesting story on NPR this morning. The topic was Muslim women in Britain and their new empowerment. Granted that any woman who thinks that becoming more patriarchal is the way to more political power is smoking some powerful shit, but the conundrum of being faced with Britain's stupid and racist obeisance to all things anti-terror and American has apparently led a certain group of Muslim women to both argue for sharia law and and takeover of their tired ass man-based culture. One woman, her eyes but a slit in the fabric of empowering self-denial, argued compellingly that she'd never vote in a British election unless it was to bring on the atavistic hell of dogmatic religious law by the ballot. Ah, the joyful power of getting to play the victim! Fuck the Enlightenment! I want certainly and perhaps the comfort of getting to play with other girls without the boys getting to watch. Purdah or something like that. She was pissed too that Jack Straw, the PM, had the temerity to what to talk to her face to face and not behind her veil. Its enough to make somebody weak think that laser-guided bombs are not an over-reaction. Even though they are.

Chicken or egg, why try to play nice when the "other side" is so full of shit? Well, sure, we in the West, if you believe in such a monolith, have done a hell of a job killing Muslims. They have been victimized. Except that I don't think we have actually bombed any M-folks in Manchester or Chelsea. Probably this is too small a point to parse given, yadda, yadda, prejudice, yadda, salad bowl etc. However let me go on a limb here. If you hold your religion more dear than your country, do us all the good favor of keeping that shit to yourself. Your fucking mosque, synagogue, chapel, goat pen did not build as much of this life you are now leading as you think it did. My dad, and thousands like him, white, educated, ethical, socially ignorant, scientific, objective, progressive, and now both loved and vilified built the lion's share of the world we all live in. And for that they can be cursed and thanked. If your here waiting for Armageddon, please don't feel like you need to delay departure for me. The spacecraft is hiding behind the next comet. Drink the juice and go see your leader.

As you can see, work has been a little pissy today. I'm not really that against the believers, true, deluded or simply traditional as long as they aren't too arrogant about pushing their unquestionable knowledge down my throat. I simply don't believe in unquestionable knowledge. I did my fucking homework and I got an A. Getting an A in a madrasa is like being a really good drug dealer. There's some honor in it but its still insanity. I may end up in hell but it would seem to be one of my own choosing and most assuredly won't be the one designed by either Pentecostals or Osama Bin Ladin. They may kill me. That bugs me a bit and it bugs me more that they may kill my kids or grand kids with their stupidity and need for certainty. And everyone who gets offended by someone else who has spit at their god, get over yourself. This woman over at ESPN named Jacobson got in trouble for saying, at a celebrity roast, "fuck Notre Dame." I won't say what I want out of respect for mystery. But really, do we have to play nice when the people who want respect only want to bury us?

I sound like a tired old white guy who tried for years to be understanding but found out that if you show weakness people will just climb up your ass. I will continue to take my lumps with the good humor of someone who has been treated fairly in this unfair world. But I'll hold the line at voting for Hillary. That bitch is wearing a veil. And she's really not that interesting.

A New Species

2008-01-08T15:18:00.000-08:00

A new year demands new thinking. That and I'm just tired of the old junk. My brain, which I was beginning to think would never turn out anything interesting for my soul to contemplate, seems to have recovered. Weird shit is happening daily. My stress levels are down. I am back to fantasizing about various impossibilities, ones that have just enough reality attached to keep them from drifting into the void. My kids are cracking me up daily. In fact they should probably get the credit for getting me out of my most recent philosophical cul-de-sac. Them and Joe Strummer. In his new biographical documentary "The Future is Unwritten" Joe goes into a pretty good funk post-Clash and then after a while snaps out of it. He became something of a hippie toward the end of his life, which while not recommended, is OK if you've never been a hippie. Basically one day he woke up and said to himself, "I'm still alive." That's about all it takes if you say it to yourself in the right tone of voice.

An old employee just happened by today and it didn't surprise me that he was here given that I had thought about him a few weeks or days ago. What the fuck happened to him? Well, besides alcoholism, nothing in his previous straight life seemed to do it for him and after his folks died he just went nuts. Literally. Dealing drugs, smuggling illegals over the border, stuff like that. But he didn't seem unhappy. In fact he seemed to have embraced his demons in a way that calmed his own fears down, for the fear of the unknown can provide one with many a visit to Hades, sans the actual placement of the foot in hell. I am of a similar species of neurotic. Not so willing to delink from reality but with some aspirations. I'll report back after a lunch or two with this most interesting bloke.

I read a book, The Elementary Particles, by Michel Houellebecq. This would be the first book I've managed to finish without a gun to my head in a fairly great while. And what a book. In the end he suggests that the problem with humanity (I'm going to elide a great deal here) is that we are sorely in need of a new paradigm. Religion was supplanted by Rationalism which left us with soul killing Materialism. Which means the guy with the biggest dick wins. Back to a Hobbsian hell is hardly an upgrade. What to do? Become a new species, who no longer needs reproduction to define it. Sort of a moral eugenics I guess. Without the killing of inferiors. Just the raising of superiors. Like I said I elided a lot. Read the book if have the time, for just in the way he handles many thorny intellectual problems it is worth it. Translated from the French, of course. The irony about the book is that it attacks hippie idealism, something that sorta saved Strummer. But what is the same about both is that both get the bigger point: you have to live for something outside yourself. And that should be my mantra, because that's what I do better than the living only for moi.

In Real Life there's Beer

2007-12-14T10:15:00.000-08:00

I've been back to emailing semi-public figures, like newspaper columnists and radio program directors. Its part of my get-back-to-work-changing-the-world-self-improvement-plan. If I can get the dumbshit at the local rock station to play something deeper in Queens of the Stone Age's catalog then their four attempts and making a pop song that idiots can understand and will buy while still maintaining the QOTSA brand quality, perhaps I can show today's young-uns and the corporate spew that manipulates them that better things exist under the surface of our shiny dumb world.

I wrote this nasty screed to a local baseball writer about one of his stupid polemics:

Tim,

If you could take a drug that would triple your salary and wasn't tested for and many of your co-workers were taking and getting all the promotions you wouldn't? What if you lost your job because you didn't take the juice? You'd rather lose your job because you are pure as the driven snow, we all know that. Add to this scenario the fact your management winked and looked the other way while this was going on. Yeah, its the selfish players, nothing more.

Why not a paragraph or two on the owners? Scared Moores will send your column back to you wrapped around a dead fish? George Mitchell's a chump. He's on the boards of the Red Sox and the Disney Company, who own ESPN who shushed Joe Morgan back in the 90's when he wanted to comment on what he saw happening on the field that reeked of steroid use. The report is bait and switch. The players are idiots, but the owners are the bigger problem.

Do your homework. And see the big picture. Its about the 6 Billion brought in this year, and the drugged up bums they use to sell their bs product to the fans. It bugs me that you still haven't learned the biggest perfidy comes from the biggest money.

As you can see, I am just a big freaking help. I am trying. It helps to know that I am paying attention to reality even in my present delirious state. We are all so valuable. God loves us all!

The perils of normalcy

2007-11-28T11:24:00.000-08:00

I had a hell of a time getting out of bed this morning. The fog of sleep was clinging to me big time and forcing myself to get in the shower took superhuman strength. Well, maybe not super human but extra effort. Washing the funk off it occurred to me that I am freaking middle aged in a way that made the occurring more than usually palpable. Like it hit me and I felt it. Plus my damn foot hurts all the time from plantar fascias. Constant pain is a real pain, let me tell you.

What hit me is that I've been doing this freaking job of mine since I was like 30 and now I am on the north side of my forties and what the hell is this all about? I've blathered on and on about how home owning and car owning and marriage etc sometimes leave me feeling like I don't have anything to do but whatever it is I'm supposed to be doing, but its looking really a lot like I am going to have to do this gig into my 50s which while normal and all, sounds suspiciously like something I shouldn't oughta be doing. Maybe its the pain in my foot but I don't want to feel like this for the rest of my life. I don't want to feel like I have to do a series of daily behaviors that while not totally sucking, are still not the behaviors I'd like to be doing. I feel somewhat frozen. I hear words in my head like, "well if you want to go on bike ride, go!" and week after week that damn bike just sits there looking at me and mocking me with phrases like, "if you go for a ride you'll have to put air in the tires and you're ass will hurt for days afterwards." Fucking objects are making fun of me. My house does it, my cars do it, even my fish tanks. What kind of strange hell is this?

Well, surely, its one of my own making. But just because I built this jail doesn't mean I know how to escape from it. Drinking beer is like giving the keys to the trustee and making him think he could just let himself out, but he realizes that they'll just catch him so at the end of the day he hands them back to the jailer. Occasionally I will go to a rock show that brings me to the edge of the precipice of change and moral enlightenment, but its just not enough. Music used to be the pivot upon which I could leverage my soul toward something grander than fitting into the surrounding society. It still is but my lovely wife has trouble sharing my musical tastes. Anyhow I'm going to have to end this entry now because the dogs of normalcy are howling on the other line. They must be fed. For how much longer, that it a question I'd like to get movement on.

"Back to Work" or "I'm OK, You're OK"

2007-11-08T13:55:00.000-08:00

I figure sometimes I should just start writing and see wtf happens. That's the ticket sometimes, just assume that you have to get things done and do them. Mentally the challenges I've been getting from the inward view are regressing and I'm feeling like getting back to being pissed off at our dumb world. And I really love our dumb world. I mean that.

When my beautiful wife and I have one of our struggles, its always interesting to see how it resolves after it has. Our patterns are predictable to everyone but us I suppose. Basically we find something that we both feel pretty passionate about and that we want to stick our feet into the ground for, and then we wrestle. Wrassle. Tug and pull and basically try to find a way to drag the other person to their senses. Drama ensues. Mock exits, feet stomping and the ever so popular words that wound are all a part of our stock and trade. Maybe we're bored. You'd be half right if you said so.

The culmination of these semi-yearly (on average I'd say that's about right) power struggles is the "go too far and then write a letter apologizing for it" end piece. Some of my best shit comes outta writing these far too personal to show you here missives. Basically I say with humor that I am an idiot while gently reminding my winning lass that she has a couple of Claymores strapped to her emotional bodice. Is that supposed to be bodices? Whatever. I can't help but jab at those suckers from time to time for as I have explained in earlier posts, I like explosions. I like the pure heat and then the crap flying through the air and then, after all the hilarity, a deconstruction of the damage. Call it emotional CSI. "See here Grissom, this is the place where the dagger of family self-immolation went right into the left testicle of the victim. Damn that musta stung a little." I'se a bit damaged, and I like the feel of the gnarled skin where the shrapnel went in and laid me open for a bit. New skin, who doesn't like it?

Well, not to be over confident, although that too must be part of the pattern, all is better now. The kids wisely keep the doors closed while we have it out, and we try to keep our voices low. They feel lucky their parents have stuck it out for 27 years or whatnot. We do too.

Smoke gets in yer eyes . . .

2007-10-26T12:23:00.000-07:00

Hell decided to visit our sunny clime, picking the weekly anniversary of a previous visit as bake the city day. The national news folks visited so you know that it was serious, and worse still the President made a stop and stomped around in the ashes. I sensed some glee. I won't be flippant about the suffering because it was real and frankly if you have never been through a firestorm I wouldn't recommend it. Tragedy is centering though. We couldn't find our navels for an entire week.

One repeating trope was "to evacuate or not to evacuate, that is the question." Evacuate won big, with over a half million folks following orders and getting out of the way of the fire or out of the way of the firemen or just getting. For my buddy who nearly lost his house, the touted "reverse 911" phone system failed. A neighbor knocked on the door and they got out, and he got out just barely. His Honda was showered in embers and when he left he didn't really think that his house would survive the same treatment. Its good to have insomniacs in your neighborhood. Something to consider.

For those who live in east Jesus and have an acre or two to defend, best to stay or maybe best to have a crazy gun-toting NRA neighbor with an apocalypse fetish who has a surplus fire hose and a gas generator for his 3hp water pump. People who had such a neighbor or death wish managed to save a lot of homes. The authorities can't be everywhere and frankly, thank god for that. The violence of the passive aggressive conformists is waxing pathetic. If you can't judge reality for yourself, who are you going to trust? But hell being as unpredictable as it is and was, to heck with your homes. Run for it. Such a response to this type of global warming doesn't provoke much controversy.

The cure for solipsism

2007-10-04T09:59:00.000-07:00

Woke up in the morning to this lovely scenario. I've been full of my own bile lately and wallowing in a morass of self-doubt and mindfucks. Tuesday night I felt a strange terror come over me and I struggled to maintain a semblance of sanity throughout the evening. (It turned out that my vertigo had returned without my knowledge or approval). At 7 Wednesday morning my family informed me that we had a problem. And the greatest relief for the hypochodriac is actual pain. So to the little fuckers who did this: I hope when they catch you I get a chance to pee on your parade. God has a pretty fucked up sense of humor, but I get the joke. Thanks for the pain, boss.

Seriously

2007-09-17T15:26:00.000-07:00

I declared early in the year that 2007 would be a year of change. Prime example in "be careful what you ask for, you might just hit a tree in a dumptruck." As I just got back from a 4 day trip with my daughter I am feeling a mite runover. It was as it should be, insightful, fun, stressful, interesting, and exhausting in both body and mind. After 17 plus years she is a formidable person and I love her. I feel like I could have done a couple of things better but all in all, she's got some tools.

What with Ma dying this year, Sis finally getting that house she pined for, Bro still not talking to me, and Dad working at getting his life back to something besides caretaking, its not hard to miss how fucked up my head has become. I made some serious bets about 20 odd years ago and most all have paid off. But I've been faking it so long that the bicycle has begun to wobble and its looking like I might have to jam my foot in the spokes just to get off. And that, as they say, will hurt me.

I would like to get out of the fixing to die rag and back to something hopefull and seemingly new. This would be nice. I would like to be nicer and more hugable, along with less profane and prickly. And yeah, I would like to be taken more seriously, but I haven't figured out by who in the fuck I would like that serious regard to come from. Ooops, more profanity. Finding the right folks to hear my roar would seem to be the crux of the problem, if in fact there is a problem. I think the person I need to convince of my seriousness might appear in a nearby mirror.

Once my wife told me that given how I managed to talk myself into intellectual cul-de-sacs, I would never be satisfied. Thinking about that, I tried to fake satisfaction, or at least reach a level of distraction that approximated the satin sheen of satisfaction and included some quality air-conditioning. Done. Problem solved. Except that I don't take that kind of accomplishment seriously enough. This is an interesting development, at least knowing that I knocked over the tree that fell in the forest because I have read some reports about this tree. Plus I got the bill from the tree-trimmers.

One teacher who spent a lot of time telling me how great I was and then eventually told me that not only there was no god but I was not quite up to man's standards as well used to tell a parable about a man who knew how to build the magic fire. Then he taught his kids about how to do it, but as time went on, each generation had more trouble and whatnot reproducing the conditions necessary for this level of accomplishment. In the end, he said something like the great grandchild of the original didn't know how to collect the wood, build the fire, start the spark, but he knew the story. And that was enough.

Bullshit. The prof had is daughter murdered by some motherfucking psychopath and all the kings horses etc won't make that whole. The first baby died for me and the mrs. and while I don't pine away about that I wonder deeply indeed whether or not there are scars inside my belly that keep me from fully digesting my food. Still, I like to eat. And maybe my food would taste better if I didn't dilute it quite some much with strong solvents. Its surely worth thinking about. Seriously.

Friends and Time

2007-09-10T15:02:00.001-07:00

I had one of those moments with a friend of mine the other day that left my ego in a uproar. Being not only of the "blame America first" but "blame myself first" crowd, I got an earful about my loutish behavior three nights previous. Essentially he said he didn't appreciate my drunkenness (fair I guess although no one but he complained) and that he expected to have a conversation with me and that was his only recompense given that he didn't dig the band we were seeing that much. Not his cup of tea. I apologized and basically said it was OK, even useful for him to give me a mini-lecture on the value of our friendship. Bye-bye.

After getting over the initial adrenaline shock of being told I was bad, I began to do the math. Granted, he had to chauffeur me back to his abode without me being awake, a daunting task no doubt. Probably took 90 minutes. Say 2 hrs. Of course there was the fact that I wasn't really into hearing about his issues with my usual carefulness on the way up. He had to go to his therapist, a late addition to our itinerary that pushed back our arrival time to the venue to about 20 minutes before they started. He did try to call me the day before with this knowledge but the week before when I asked him if he'd like to go, there was no awareness of this previously scheduled meeting. No big. And yet since others were involved and we had originally planned to met them for some ya ya's before showtime this was not ideal. And things need to be ideal, you no doubt believe.

I asked him what the point of therapy was given that he seems pretty OK to me. Successful business, although you wouldn't know it from his equivocating, some friends, a warm place to shit etc. But no long term relationship and I know this is a biggy. Therapy will be continued, he intoned, as long as the LTR eluded him. And then he dropped me off in the lobby of his health club so he could take a shower.

LTR's are dandy, I love mine. I'm sure that my boy will get his just as soon as he remembers that loving someone by definition requires putting their needs in front of your own, at least some of the time. Now I'm not saying I needed to get drunk but wtf, it was a damn rock concert and the sonics of the place needed a bit of beer so the volume wouldn't cause pain. Ah, no excuses. But its kinda ironic that the very thing we both need is a little bit of consideration for the other. I get this. I hate to say it but I'm not sure if he ever will.

No reason to dog pile, and I hope that he's smart enough to think about why he got pissed off at me and put it into some sort of context. Let's see, I change my whole day for him and he thinks he's doing me a favor by going in the first place. I ditch work early, I initiate the whole scenario, and bring him a composter and a car stereo to boot. Were is the love? I looked in a beer glass for something predictable I guess.

Years and years of this type of behavior, not the drinking, the making time so that we have a relationship in the first place, going to his shop, his building, and never so much a one trip to my house, these things don't matter until that moment when they do. The larger question for me, besides AA, is that I do this shit all the time. I connect, reconnect, reconnoiter, write, pester, remind and maybe this shit is getting old. Most folks who get married, have kids, get a mortgage etc do a real fine job of getting rid of their old friends. I am shitty at getting rid of old friends. If I ever went to war with you ya got a couch to sleep on, literally or metaphorically. How the fuck can it be any different?

I married better than most. I have actually spent some amount of time being introspective, and I know shit from shinola, give or take a couple of things. Some times when I am arguing with somebody about history the only way I can get their attention is to point out that I, unlike them, did my homework. I did my relationship homework and my buddy never did. I've got time and he doesn't now, because he's busy catching up on how to love. I really hopes he meets his deadline.

As you can see I'm not really ready to forgive him yet. My brother must feel something akin to this about me as he no longer talks to me. My offense was I asked him why the heck didn't he call me back when I was in town one day years and years ago and he musta felt kinda like I felt Sunday morning. Shit happens, and I said I didn't have time for his shit. So I'm off the team. I sure as hell don't plan on doing this to my friend, 40 years knowing somebody would be a terrible thing to waste but we did have a falling out once before over his "born-again" phase and my intolerance of his ignorance/arrogrance. Ah well, something to think about anyway. I'll end by quoting the band playing the soundtrack for this misunderstanding:

sadly I remain in need
all you do is talk
help yourself don't think
help yourself don't speak
help yourself don't say a thing at all
your lucky words don't bleed

What I want

2007-08-24T10:15:00.000-07:00

The last few weeks have been filled with navel gazing solipsism, so excuse my tone if it seems too pedantically morose. My trip to Kona became my great idea became my nightmare and is becoming some other phantasmagoria of doubt and possibility. WTF. I have known for some time that I have lost sight of the person I was and now it seems really likely that I don't have a frigging clue where to look for what I was. I guess this could be a good thing: redesigning an obsolete prototype that barely ever took flight might be a good thing. So I'll speak in parables and hope that it helps me to figure out what to do next 'cause if I don't figure something out soon my world very likely will just rearrange itself and my perspective. At the point of a shotgun.

If you have a dream and your partner doesn't share in it, what do you do about that? Since most of my dreams either involve felonies or explosives, I can't blame anyone for not wanting to go down that path with me. But one thing that can be said for me, I've been consistent. Oh, maybe the only thing that I have been consistent with is inconsistency, but let's not split hairs. I have always wanted, I think I remember this, that I wanted not to want what everyone else wanted. I wanted to try to be part of the solution and not simply be a tool for the occupation. We are living in a very fucked up world and as I remember from my high school days, "to be considered normal in an insane world makes you insane." Behaviour-wise I seem normal. I don't feel dirty. But there have been some negative reports filtering in. The corporation is having some issues with my "unusual management style." Honesty and directness are fine, as long as you don't have a brain in your head. My bad.

So as I enter the end of the reproductive gulag, and the offspring make their choices as to what kind of prison they are tending toward choosing, I get to ask the question: what the fuck is next? My job is boring and banal, even thought its unique and low stress. I cannot fathom doing it for another day let alone another 10 years, but that would be the smart thing to do. I really wonder if I will live that long if I continue to punch this desultory clock. If it wasn't for my second job, which does allow me to display my actual personality and provides me with a fair amount of strokes, I would go freaking nuts. More freaking nuts.

As there is only one person who reads this blog, I apologize for this long-winded drama show of woe is me. Its actually kinda funny. I am reminded of a comment my one reader made: the answer to the question of whether the glass is half full or half empty is that its half full of urine. Something like that. I had another friend bitch me out because I wasn't being positive enough. But he just had babies and doesn't have a clue what he is in for. He will have long forgotten me by the time his divorce papers become final. Either that, or he will teach kids how to dream in black and white. (Hey, maybe not, maybe he'll just keep going to Mexico to remember how to dream, I haven't been in a while, that might be an easy fix . . .)

Maybe the whole problem boils down to me almost always having to initiate in the bedroom, but that would be a problem that I am supposed to weather with a stiff-upper lip, amongst other things. I love my wife, I love my kids, I kinda like my house (and often hate it) I like at least some of my friends, and I am not completely broke. Life is good, no? No? What I want is for someone to share my dreams with, and someone who wants what I want. I am completely insane for saying this here but she didn't pick up the phone.

Somewhere I lost the ability to say what I really want to people. I got the weird look from too many strangers and "good friends," got told not to be too negative, got asked why I wasn't negative enough about what I was supposed to be negative about, got told to count my blessings when I really wanted to burn them. My mom, god rest her soul, when I got like this used to tell me to "count my blessings" and I actually would. Through gritted teeth and a rage that still haunts me, I would try to enumerate all the "good luck" I had. Have. Had. Fuck if I know anymore. Isn't that a pretty sunset? Took the picture myself!

"Excuse me while I set myself on fire"

2007-08-10T13:56:00.000-07:00

I quote Katha Pollitt from The Nation magazine entitling this missive. Her piece is about a particular Harvard prof who argued for going to war and now has published a half-assed self-serving mea culpa about getting it wrong. Like Pollitt, I was not against the war from the beginning simply for "ideological" reasons (like we are a dirty fucked up selfish nation full of racial bias and whining fear-mongering who like to kill people to mollify our night tremors) but was against the war because as a historian I pay attention to evidence. And there wasn't any evidence good enough to go to war on. The WMD strawman fallacy or whatever you want to call it was crap and if you had a decent ear you could tell that this shithead couldn't sing a clear note. I suggest, modestly, that assholes like Michael Ignatieff should be force to ride in a Humvee though the streets of Baghdad, naked and straped to the hood until that time they have the joy of being hit by an IED. If they survive, then they can have their dignity and gravitas back.

I picked up a Time magazine while waiting for my kids orthrodontist and read the editor's note about why they went back to New Orleans to see what's going on there two years down the road. And that fucker, Stenger or something like that, said that he was surprised to find that his previous position of having "Katrina fatigue" was replaced after actually visiting the area with a new appreciation of what is wrong with America. Strap him to a building in the Ninth Ward, light it on fire and give 100 of his closest friends the opportunity to save him by pissing on the conflagration. If he lives, make him edit a local New Orleans obituary column for a year and then tar and feather him. That might make it about even. Fuck mainstream media. And fuck the experts of the meaning of 911 who what completely failed to make a difference in the way this nation does business.

200,000 Reasons

2007-07-17T10:49:00.000-07:00

I stayed up and watched Nightline last night and was stunned to see U.S. soldiers actually interviewed and allowed to speak their minds about their deployment. What they said should have been the lead story on the nightly news and it should be every night until the reality of the evil we have perpetuated on the people of Iraq becomes a lived reality for J.Q. Citizen. I predict that the war in Iraq will only end when Al Queda (sic) manages to get off another round and people realize that the great distraction in Iraq made that possible. We have killed, by official estimates, around 200,000 people in Iraq by "accident" or "because that's what happens in war." Every person we kill now, given that the Iraqis want us out, is a new point of hate directed at every American. It doesn't matter what our intentions are, it doesn't matter how hard we try to only kill the "bad guys;" we are completely fucked because we cannot get people to love us with violence. Rules and logic are not applicable when you use high explosives and lead as a policy device.

On a completely different level yet analogous plane I took my son's Frisbee group to their first Goaltimate tourney. And the ugly head of a twenty-six year old coach appeared with just the same indifference that his brethren's indifference to understanding why they should protest this illegal/immoral war. Our team was seeded 4th out of 5 teams and the 5th team was made up of Junior High students. We, lost to the eventual winners first, then to the kids coached by the gen-X tool. Game three was a battle with a group of high schoolers who were directly linked to the junior high team by family and location. So, as often happens with rookies, they got to a point where neither team could score and our team was down 1-0 in the series and tied 2-2 in the second game which was running "late." Tool boy starts pestering me while I am watching the game about capping it because his team needs to play the winner of our game (maybe not given the vagaries of point differential and bullshit). I am incensed by this. But I acquiesced. So we basically forfeit and let the other team go play pussboy's team. Now we start playing the junior high school kids and they are very good. They win the first game 5-4 and our team is exhausted. But I tell them that they can win if they decide they want to because I know they are bigger and stronger and eventually they will wear out the other team. I tell them this while they are winning the second game 2-1 I think, and they hear me. I can't tell you how proud of them I was as they fought back on pure heart to force a third game.

Pussfuckhead comes back during this second game, which we eventually won 5-4 on a diving catch in the endzone, and says (and I knew he was coming back because I have had to deal with his lawyer ass before) "are we going to cap this game" to which I say "no" and "I don't like you." I wanted to be a violent man right then, but alas I am not. Lucky for me the other captain was in complete agreement. Referring to our boys he says, "This is their playoff game." Exactly. Shithead's team had of course beaten the older siblings of the team we were playing before but got killed in the finals. There had been no talk of caps in the captain's meeting and for jesus fucking christ's sake its about all the damn kids, not just the elitist fucking kids. This yo-ho had the temerity to say (during the first time cap episodie) that the reason we had to follow "the schedule" was because it wouldn't be right to cut into "parent time" should the event run long. To all the helicopter parents, Reaganite hellspawn and general over-competitive fuckheads: may your children volunteer for an illegal war. Because its you fuckers that have made this great country into the cowardly shitbrain-lead nation it is today. Cowardly not because the boys killing and dying over there are cowardly, but because of all the rest of the folks who can't stay up late enough to understand that we lost the war in Iraq when we illegally invaded it. And following schedules, timelines, and whatever else is so god damn not the issue that I can only imagine disaster being the reality this stupid generation of coddled idiots needs to see the folly of their ways.

The tournament finished early BTW. This war is going way fucking overtime. I hope it doesn't cut into too much "parent time."

Missing Children

2007-07-06T14:06:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I played some Goaltimate with my son and his friends and a nearby park. This park is frequented by a lot of folks walking their dogs and sits adjacent to an elementary school that my kids once attended. It was 4PM when we went out there and we played for two hours, taking frequent breaks for water as we had only one sub per team and it was hot as hotcakes out there. Humid too. Anyway, the remarkable thing about our presence there in my mind was that we were the only damn people there pretty much. A couple of dog walkers and a couple of teenagers went by but that was it. The playground stayed mostly empty. There were no kids less than 12 anywhere. What gives? I mean its fucking summer and I know there are some little kids in the area. And some medium sized ones too.

Sure, its probably just that mommy and daddy both work and they send their kids to daycare or grandma's. Or it might be that per capita we have not as many of these types of children around. But I really think that here in the land of constant beautiful daytime the kids spend most of their times huddled around electronic campfires of one type or another. Couple that with the rampant ubiquitous paranoia that seems to have gripped the age and voila, no kids are alone with their dreams anymore. The boogy man doesn't just come out at night anymore, he drives a panel van during the day and tries luring helpless suburbian offspring into lurid dens of genital perversion. Or worse, they might end up on a milk carton.

I fucking ran wild as a kid. I was riding my bike to school at 7 or 8, a latch key kid by the same. I communicated with my folks by landline. I never ever had any perve try to fuck with me. No broken bones. No arrests until 18. No felony convictions to this day. It just seems that these "helicopter parents" as they call them are such a bunch of pussies that we end up living in these suburbian enclaves of bad imagination, trying to "protect" our charges from monsters of our own furious and hallucinatory design. Bad shit happening is always top level news, and if any predator or rapist nails a white girl its a fucking national story. Meanwhile the places of darker hue get drive-by talleys and back page reports that are code for "gangs" which means "what the fuck do you expect to get in the ghetto anyway, those people are animals." Anyone born after say 1978 as far as I can tell has about a one in four chance of knowing a damn thing. The Reagan revolution guarenteed that these cloven hooved progeny have lived in a bubble of such a red hue that they can't see certain colors because those rods and cones have been burned out by the overdose of bad imagery that is the legacy of our media age.

The Goaltimate kids play without adult supervision most of the time. They screw around, play hard talk shit, suggest impossible anatomical mixings and question their friends masturbatory habits. They don't do drugs, or drink. They get ridiculously high grades. And they are not as integral a part of the overarching average of coersion and control that those kids stuck at home or stuck at practice often are. Freedom might happen for a few of them. Few of the safe kids have much of a chance at freedom at all.

Rocky the squirrel

2007-06-22T15:06:00.000-07:00

A friend sent me a link to this contraption that some squirrel hater had constructed. Got to admit, its probably better than what my Border Collie does. I found one she had killed in the backyard, her first. The poor fellow was on his back, blood covering his nose, as if he'd been shot. My wife walked right by the crime scene and I called her back to see "Freckles'" kill. Right then Freckles walked by and proceeded to begin to pick up the prize, no doubt to suck the eyeballs out as they are quite delicious. I told her to drop it and she gave me the same look she gave me when I told her to leave the possum she had captured alone. "You have got to be fucking kidding me?!" she pretty clearly declared with those fierce BC eyes of hers. I can only imagine what the squirrel must of thought as he cruised into his doomed fate. He may never have seen a Border Collie before. They are cat-like dogs and Freckles has made it her life's work to kill any four-legged mammal that comes into the backyard. She even used to chase their ghosts in the trees. Anyway, here's the link. Don't send it to PETA.

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/oh,-food%21-i.ll-just-_-wahhhhhh%21%21/squirrel-catapult-is-awful-yet-we-cant-look-away-270290.php?autoplay=true

Queens for Summer

2007-06-12T11:45:00.000-07:00

Catch a free listen of the new Queens of the Stone Age cd. It doesn't sound like anything else out there right now. This is a good thing. I don't pump bands as a matter of course because most bands that are popular now are not worth it. They are just trying to fit into some Gen Y fantasy that I can only imagine smashing with big heavy objects. QOTSA seems to not actually give a fuck what anyone thinks. That is a big step in the right direction.

The lens of deceit

2007-06-11T11:20:00.000-07:00

The United States lost the Vietnam War not because we didn't kill enough or weren't committed enough or got cheated somehow. We lost because we saw the war the the lens of the Cold War and we were convinced that the conflict was more about a global ideological struggle rather than the nationalist inspirations of the Vietnamese people. When Robert McNamara sat down with the foreign minister of Vietnam, a fellow named Thach, in 1995 he asked why the Vietnamese had fought so doggedly losing 3 to 4 million people to expell the Americans. To our way of thinking it seems so stupid and McNamara said as much to Thach. Thach replied:

"Mr. McNamara, You must never have read a history book. If you'd had, you'd know we weren't pawns of the Chinese or the Russians. McNamara, didn't you know that? Don't you understand that we have been fighting the Chinese for 1000 years? We were fighting for our independence. And we would fight to the last man. And we were determined to do so. And no amount of bombing, no amount of U.S. pressure would ever have stopped us."

In the last week I have read a couple of op-ed pieces by Henry Kissinger, Peter Rodman and William Sharcross. They point out what a disaster pulling out of Iraq will be and they lament that they real history of the Vietnam War and the American pullout has either not been written or has been missed. I honestly wish them suffer in hell for their words. Kissinger no doubt will be consigned to that imaginary place. But what galls me to no end is the willingness of our leaders to denigrate the idea of democracy and freedom. These bastards do not believe in democracy. They are fixers, like McNamara, smarter then you and I about the realpolitik world that matters. Fuck them. They hate all commoners. They give elitism a bad name.

The lens of deceit that motivates those who argue for our extended presence in Iraq was minted in the lying regime of the Bushies. Stupid is as stupid does and here again we have been sold a story about what Iraq means in the larger global war on terror. Iraq is not about terrorism. Terrorism is about war and terrorism is certainly taking place in Iraq but the terrorists in Iraq are not the one's we need worry about. Why would we allow our enemies to define the time and place of our battles? Why would we encourage the weak minded to become fundamentalist bombs? The lens that we see Iraq through will be proven in a generation to be as clouded as the Cold War lens that we saw Vietnam through. The problem is not in how the question is being defined as much as who is doing the defining. The proles do have enemies. They are here at home and it is these homegrown devils that we have the most to fear from. They are working, whether they want to or not, to deliver us a terrorism war here in America. They don't believe in freedom and they don't believe in anything but power. They will bring us nothing but pain.

Grumpy

2007-06-04T13:59:00.000-07:00

A long fine weekend turned to shit in my mind in seconds. Whatever the fucking disease I have that prevents me from accruing bonus points for the positive things in my life in such a way as to ameliorate those exiquisite moments of mental breakdown when faced with a few perfect seconds of frustration, I need a damn diagnosis. On the plus side I have better dreams when I am basking in my own urines of angst. A fine yellow haze of malcontent envelops and I feel strangely liberated to not give a shit-whisker about the daily grind. Which may in fact be the name of the disease I am harboring.

My blessed wife can ascertain an iota of grumpiness in the timbre of my voice and I in turn can and do sift through the inflections of her comments like a Right whale pulling the krill of her judgements forth with my big stupid tongue. Something like that. This last weekend I dreamed I was decapitated and tortured which was not nearly as bad as it sounds and I dreamed Hunter S. Thompson was telling me something important around the time the pain generated by an nights worth of bladder juice was jabbing me to my feet to face yet another damn Monday. Fuck mo. I'd like to just get away or get into something that feels like it has nothing to do with me. I guess what I'm trying to say is that everything is totally fucking perfect right now. Like I am a perfectly perserved artifact of myself in the museum of my life. Better use those white gloves when handling the artifact . . .

Today's highlight had to be when I got a breakfast burrito from my usual spot and with my last bite I came down hard on a molar-sized piece of pee gravel that found itself in wrapped happily in that meatless sublime cholesteral delivery device. If the burritos start going bad in San Diego what is next? Closing the zoo? Padres position players who can hit? My daughter breaking up with her boyfriend? God only knows. Or would, if he existed.

We want your kids to be fricking robots

2007-05-29T13:44:00.000-07:00

I read an article today in the New York Times magazine by Ann Hulbert that reminded me just how stupid we have become as a nation when the words "standards" and "education" are mentioned in close proximity to each other. My daughter just got back her SAT test scores and while I am proud of her for achieving the 97th percentile overall on her scores, the lack of serious talk between her and I over what counts for something in this world depresses me. Part of it is her decision to (for good reasons and bad reasons) to become involved with her boyfriend's family who are members of a mega-church. This means that my irreverance is not very welcomedby her because it causes her to feel like she must pick and choose. Which of course is the meaning of Christianity in the first place. Pick a side. Now arm yourself and get ready to kill.

The other reasons why we don't have the kind of debating society I had with my folks (mostly my dad) when I was growing up is that there is no value placed on debate by my lovely wife given the fact that her folks were not formally educated. This is no knock on them but debate is not something they really get. They take everything absolutely personal and they needed to given that they had to fight for everything they got in this world. They are winners, and they are honorable people. Just don't try to debate anything you really care about with them our you might end up missing some vital part of your psychological anatomy. Or you might get a knuckle sandwich.

As for that last reason, the fucking public school system has decided to make "No child left behind" into "we want your kids to be fucking robots." Behave, test, behave, study, behave, conform, drug test, conform, lick the boots of death, etc etc etc. So my good decent brilliant daughter has busted her caboose to make grades and learn her stuff and she will be rewarded, as will I, with bills the size of a Ferrari so she can learn something in the University that very well might make her take SSRI's or a heavy dose of Jesus to try to make sense of the fact that conforming to an insane society makes one insane. Rebellion is the normal coin of the realm in the free world. We are training our kids to be robots in the corporate world of profit and greed. To hell with all of us who think this will make us happy. And fuck those who sell it knowing it for the poison it is.

Death of a Bigot

2007-05-22T08:27:00.000-07:00

I'm remiss in not writing about the death of someone I use to imagine dancing happily on after they were placed in the ground. There's a lot to dislike about Jerry, and there's not a lot new to add to the cacophony of derision and false respect thrown in the direction of the dead pompous windbag. I had an interesting evening with a friend of mine in the week before Falwell died, and it had to do with he and his wife's late conversion and "mission" to Africa to help talk black folks out of fucking and getting HIV. I pointed out that I was only mildly ashamed that my daughter goes to church, which got some eyebrows raised. I pointed out that the part of Christianity I couldn't abide was the bigoted part, which while heavily denied by "true" Christians is as American as segregation. As the conversation went and as the evening developed a little confrontation had to occur whereby my friend had to call me to carpet about my apparent hypocrisy (as I had cut down my own brother he felt comfortable to do as well, which I pointed out was something of a no-no in the backhanded compliment department). I said something like "I just love when people tell me that they can't believe those are my kids" which is sotto voce for "how can somebody like you who is irreverent and profane" raise such decent humans. Exactly because is of course my take on things. But this could not stand. And the reason is the same as the reason why people gravitated to that shitman Falwell. Because Americans will compete over anything and their eternal souls are no fucking different. "My soul is cleaner than your's sinner" ought to be burned with acid onto the tailbumper of every motherfucker who puts his little Christian fish or Jesus slogan on the back of their fucking car. I shit in your general direction seems to be something Americans and everyone else too scared to be without a get out of jail free card must have. Whatever gets you through the night is actually fine by me. But if you lord it up over me then join Falwell in hell. If only I believed in that place.

The Feminization of American Culture

2007-05-15T13:19:00.000-07:00

I had an interesting back and forth with a student in class last night. Men and women have been sold such a sorry bill of goods about how they are the same or how they are different in history that discussing what has changed in the relationships between the sexes has become mostly a collection of agitprop phrases, repeated at various volumes with fervency and obedience. I have spent most of my time in historical study trying to avoid picking the easy fruit of feminism where the rotten pears of men are bad women are victims lay on the low branches of self-righteousness and certainty. Whenever you start talking about the advantages of a more feminized world you open yourself to the oft-repeated “men and women are the same” phrases of happy thinking. We are not the same, and thank goodness for that.

What went well in class was I managed to fairly describe gender as a continuum of masculinity and femininity that does not adhere directly with our genitals. And over the centuries we have witnessed a shift in the amount of femininity that has entered our culture, politics, and society. The historian Ann Douglass calls it “The Feminization of American Culture.” I won’t go and try to defend American Culture as a progressive phenomenon of ultimate transcendence. We very well may find ourselves at the bottom of a dark pit of despair if we continue doing dumb as we so clearly have been doing for decades now. But if something does wake us up and leave us with a future with having and a society worth lauding, I’m going to bet that it has something to do with the fact that year over year women and their subjectivity strengthens the Republic. But no way in heck am I voting for Hilary.

Support our Troops . . .

2007-05-02T12:03:00.000-07:00

So the President's veto was supported by idiot congressmen and women who are afraid that their masculinty is being questioned or some other weak-brained self-lascerating bullshit. America is not simply the sum of her fighting forces. Whatever guilt folks feel for the reception that soldiers returning from Vietnam received, it helps this country not one wit to hold fast to stupidity by leaving the military in Iraq. If you want to support the troops stop tying your damn reality to war as the central means of defending American freedom. If the only way we can live this type of over materialistic lifestyle is to war on others and kill hundreds of thousands of people who we think might try destroy our abilty to drive dually pick-up trucks to our office jobs, then fuck it. All the kings horses and all the kings laser-guided munitions can't put Iraq back together again. We lost. We voted for a guy who managed to steal at least one election and we went along and he got us into a evil war. And we lost. We are losers this time. What is good for America is to learn how to learn from losing instead of blaming others for our faults. God bless somebody else because all those stupid prayers we are giving are not helping. Support our country, not just our troops.

The lying bastards

2007-05-01T09:50:00.000-07:00

George Tennant is a shitwit. And listening to his self-serving "we never had a debate about whether it was a good idea to invade Iraq" is so piss off provoking I can only hope he chokes on the millions he got for his whorish book deal. There are so many lying bastards who have worked for the Bush regime that it would be hard to pick one who had an ounce of integrity among the whole cabal.

While I hope that the pain of global warming might actually get Americans to focus on a problem that has solutions, I can't help but doubt if Americans have acquired some new unnamed condition that confers shitwit neuronal structures to their flabby under-exercised brains. We are a country of isolated twits, twittering over the latest media fascination with death and destruction. Virginia is a popcorn fart compared to Baghdad but the media almost drowned in its own drool over "the tragedy" that some isolated worm food delivered to their cherished illusions. Gun control will not solve what lurks underneath. To fix the pairing of depression and vengeance will require the media to actual stop pedaling the old guanos of righteousness and purity as enfotainment and develop a narrative on honesty as the best marketing policy. Looking at the departing market shares the mainstream media gets, this is no longer some sort of happy idealistic thought. The survival of decent newspapers will require that the start getting things right more often. And they sure as hell got Iraq wrong.

Queens Of The Stone Age Creating Era Vulgaris II

2007-04-24T14:24:00.001-07:00

June is going to be a good month.

Second Rate

2007-04-20T10:33:00.000-07:00

I have been living in San Diego for the largest part of the last 28 years. During that time, we have gone from two newspapers to one newspaper to two and back to one. We have a weekly, The Reader, which is tremendously uneven but often very good in a muckraking sort of way, and another weekly, City Beat, which is newer and cheesier and often funny if also light-weight. The two I remember from day one were the Union and the Tribune which became the Union-Tribune and after a failed attempt by the Los Angeles Times to do a San Diego version (San Diegans are not going to love anything with “Los Angeles” on the cover) we have only the UT as a consistent daily read. There are other papers like the black-owned “Voice and Viewpoint” but they are only after a niche market and willingly seem to write themselves into a cultural cul-de-sac. The UT is our paper of record and by many many standards it is not a good paper. But it is what it is.

Last year the UT won a Pulitzer for taking down Randy “Duke” Cunningham. Duke was always a piece of crap but it wasn’t until he started nakedly lining his own Republican pockets that the UT found the fortitude to take him down. Good for them. They didn’t spend a lot of time being introspective about the fact that they had never to my knowledge tried to unseat the S.O.B. from Congress and in fact had always sung his praises. It’s a military town and he was a fighter ace. No questions asked please. His takedown and the UT’s prize are symbolic of the greater demographic changes taking place in San Diego. According to Lionel Van Deerling, resident democrat and columnist for the UT, the city is now blue and the suburbs are red. We are a county that has always gone to Bush in a state that goes the other way. But that dog is getting tired and the highly educated populace is trending bluish especially in the over-priced housing in the city limits. I guess you could say that things are looking up.

But our media lags. We have always had a second rate media. Local TV news is polished and pathetic. The UT is still owned by the corpulent Copley family, old Republican money that refuses to spend enough of it on their paper. Look at the size of the UT versus the LA Times and it becomes obvious that we are just not in the same league in terms of resources and talent. Eventually the UT will have to join the wider world and sell outside the market as the Times appears to do or it may fade away. Look at the advertisement section and watch it shrink day by day. San Diego would like to be known as one of the great cities of America and the world. We have the scientists to do it: Scripts Research Institute is already at the cutting edge of the global warming problem. But our leaders are too comfortable and foolish. So will we too be if we don’t demand more from our local media.

Dreams

2007-04-12T18:17:00.000-07:00

I had one of the better talks I have ever had last night. Learning for me requires that I say what is in my heart out loud. I guess that is what is called an “auditory learning style.” It might explain why music has been such a key ingredient in my life. I used to prepare for the most intense history seminar classes by listening to whatever band was giving me the juice at the moment. I would hurl my thoughts into the sound and from this some sort of neo-verbal essence a central and usually quite powerful synthesis of my ideas and emotions would coalesce. I was a demon in those classes. I could tear anything apart that wasn’t tightly and rigorously built. But I digress.

The other night I was talking with my sister. She and I discussed the implications of owning the same internal architecture of personal vexation that seems to animate all three of us siblings. Somewhere in our upbringing we assembled a toolbox of odd shaped assumptions about our place in the world. I am not knocking the specialized implements that we own and ironically enough can’t quite seem to master. Around us are people, good people, who have benefited from our machinations. I won’t go touting our successes or spinning our failures. We’ve done OK except that we have accepted too many backhanded compliments from the mouths of others. “I can’t believe they are your kids” says the judge of my character. The fools that my sis and I are when we hear such things we put down our tools and let the elements add their rust.

As the words spun out of my maw and they turned from experimentations to analysis, my sister’s eyes filled with tears and she could not speak. Writing for me works if I can hear my voice and so talking is writing when it is done at its zenith of rhythm and lexicon. I found myself saying things that I had forgotten I knew. I asked why she couldn’t answer me, what had I said that so wounded? “You hit the nail on the head.” I was speaking of dreams and it occurred to me that I no longer can identify those moments when the sounds are from my own creative spirit. Still, I can hear those wishes echo when my words are right and somebody will listen to me for a generous spell. And as more words and tears spilled out of the two of us I heard myself giving chase to the fleeting vibrations and knowing that their direction was clear. I can no longer afford the compromise of an experience where my music is played only in the hearts and lives of those who love me yet hear not with my ears. I want to be in the front row as the songs are played. Gently I go forward to hear what I must.

What's Next?

2007-04-05T14:33:00.000-07:00

I have not been able to focus well on any one thought for weeks now. My mom’s passing aside; I think that what ails me ails a lot of folks at the moment. Mostly we have been listening to so much spin and so much dissembling and so many blatant untruths that reality seems like a fond memory and hope something you shouldn’t drink too much of. What matters and what counts are distant cousins. Productivity reigns over imagination and ethics. A great cloud of unwanted gas surrounds us and there is no away to go to anymore. Happy thinking has become a cult. When good things happen we sigh and quietly whisper a dark prayer to ourselves of bad expectations. Days are beautiful but they are weightless. The body counts climb methodically. We hope the impossible might happen in foreign lands even as we realize we are riding a rudderless ship in a hurricane of destruction. It seems useless to talk.

And there is that other realization that eventually and hopefully soon something is going to change. 2007 sure feels like a year of change to me. And my friends are doing new things and they seem driven as I do to become something better if for no other reason than the opposite doesn’t seem like as much fun as it used to. I count my blessings and I am stunned at the amount and quality of my good fortune. We are poised on the precipice of something momentous and I think we may in fact be ready. At least as ready as we will ever be. As Ludacris says, I just feel like slapping someone today. Our time to slap is coming up.

The stuff we don't know

2007-03-20T09:31:00.000-07:00

My mom died last Wednesday. That morning I had a dream and she and I were sitting in the kitchen in the home I grew up in. In my memories the times I felt closest to this woman who had brought me into the world came at the kitchen table. These were the few times when I got a chance to know Lorna rather than be with mom and at least a couple of these moments happened at the kitchen table. To be clear, in the dream mom showed up, not Lorna. But the compelling memory from the dream will always be that she was mom again, and not the woman who had a stroke nearly five years ago and ceased to be much of what she was. Why I had this dream, on this morning, just before she died is a mystery. Yet it was perfectly logical that it happened, and a beautiful gift. Thanks for saying goodbye mom. I love you.

Obama why not . . .

2007-03-06T11:37:00.000-08:00

I often tell people I argue with "to do their homework" when I know that their facts are specious. Well, after reading Barak Obama's comments to the AIPAC policy forum in Chicago March 2nd, I'd say that he's clueless about the larger Israel/Palestine issue. That would be charitable. Clueless suggests that he is daft about the amount of hell dealt by Israel to its neighbors. Clueless suggests that he could be clued in. But I fear that he is just more the same given that the speech was written for him by a fellow who worked for Clinton and Feinstein. So unless you want to believe this is just posturing because he thinks he needs to make these obeisant gestures to the Israel-can-do-no-wrong-crowd if he want to get elected you have to say that he's already bought and paid for by a group that is holding America hostage to our own ignorance about the Middle East. Call this reason # 1 why not.

Tipping Point

2007-02-16T09:15:00.000-08:00

The lead actor for the hit television show CSI Las Vegas is a fellow named William Petersen. This irony cracks me up for a lot of reasons, although my last name being Peterson doesn’t begin to tell the half of it. Over a decade ago I wrote an article about the crime lab here in San Diego that was published by the local weekly newspaper The Reader. A few weeks back they republished something else I had written for them back in 1995. I wouldn’t have even known that they did this if a check for 100 bucks hadn’t appeared out of the blue (the check was blue . . . ha ha) as I don’t read The Reader that much anymore. It’s hard to read something that you probably should be writing for.

My boss’s boss is having us read Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” to prepare for a meeting we are going to next week. He’s an interesting fellow. I once knew a professor who said that whenever he was correcting a paper with arguments in it he detested or thought were bullshit, he would write in the margin “that’s interesting.” I don’t think Gladwell’s book is crap, but I sure as hell am not exactly surprised by anything he says. It’s an interesting reminder I guess.

Being five years ahead of the curve is not something that is worth much. It’s interesting. I wrote a blog entry for my company and Israel Mizrahi thought it was the shit. He’s mentioned in Gladwell’s book and when my boss’s boss saw this he was pleased I think. My boss pretty much shit all over my enthusiasm and I swore to myself I wouldn’t ever give a fuck about work again. The corporate world is filled with half-bright interesting fuckwits who are certain about something and love to look at themselves in the mirror. Certainty, ego, knowing other like minded people, enthusiasm, appearing to do things that matter, manipulation, aggrandizement, obsession, lack of introspection, etc etc; these things are the coins of the realm. For now.

To be fair . . . I’m not really interested in fairness. I’ve never really been interested in being loved by all and lauded for my beauty. I was raised by a physicist, not a salesman. Reality is not something to be spun. And money is nice to have and I’m glad for my unusual corporate job that pays squat. Squat is enough actually, especially if it comes with medical benefits. But not caring about my job is really starting to get to me. I’ve started caring again and I want to make the folks I work with see that they can play the corporate game and still save their souls. In fact, they are already working for the man so they would do well to remember that it is a game and frankly nothing they do is really that important so they might as well do it well. I am maybe ahead of the curve again. And if I get run over one more time . . . .

Obama, Why Not?

2007-02-12T15:31:00.000-08:00

I watched the 60 minute piece on Barack Obama and after doing so, I figure what the hell, I’ll bite. Listening to Hilary Clinton talk is enough to make a man doubt the meaning of life, so hearing someone act halfway fucking normal on national TV is like a gift of oxygen in a land of methane and piss. I’m sure that some folks will suggest that he’s got some sort of fatal flaw and that he’s too ambitious and whatever. But until someone shows me a person like him who is as basically human and who answers questions with something like the truth attached to them rather that something that sounds like it came out of a polling focus group I’m for this son-of-a-bitch. Damn, his wife even made a sardonic joke about the two of them fighting and her being pissed off that he smokes. Listening to the radio the other day I heard a story whereby he apologized to a brother because he had inadvertently hurt the brother’s chance to get laid. Vote Hilary in and we’ll all have trouble getting laid.

American Tragedy

2007-02-07T08:53:00.000-08:00

We watched "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" the other night. I watched my wife cringe at the foul language that began the movie but even she was eventually sucked into its maelstrom of wickedly funny set pieces and man-centered moralizing. The funniest parts were outside the main thrust (of course that's a pun) of the plot; a discussion of some rule of getting laid etiquette on the loading dock behind a electronics store punctuated by the repeated and wanton destruction of four-foot fluorescent bulbs; a game of "I know you're gay because" illustrated by the on-screen video gaming battle whereby one player's avatar rips the head off the other player's avatar and with pixelated blood squirting throws it back at the decapitated body which then explodes. Good stuff. Laughing should not be sneezed at regardless of the size of your furrowed brow.

But even in this childish set-up piece of artistic frivolity there had to be a moment whereby the protagonist and the object of his ultimate de-virginizing have to have a potentially apocalyptic row that threatens to turn the fairy tale sour. Meaning, in American films, is almost always the same. The difference between drama and comedy is mostly about the scale and seriousness of the loss or potential loss to the protagonists. Americans believe in the struggle of good vs evil as the point of existence. Survival with dignity (and we are in many ways the most undignified people on the face of the earth) is not enough.

When Hunter S. Thompson killed himself I was seriously bummed out yet I knew that in his story this was a likely outcome given what he had said about the subject and his well-documented impulsiveness. His suicide note went like this:

"Football Season Is Over"
"No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt"

When I think about it now these are the words of an American. He must live within his own self-defined rules of engagement and failing that, what is the point of existence? Of course the answer is myriad. Existence may feel like its yours and you control it but we are all riders on a silver stage driven by a mad jehu and guarded by an anal-retentive shotgun messenger. In the mountains there are those moments when it looks like the whole apparatus is going over the side. But jumping out hardly seems to be a solution. Buy the ticket-take the ride. The destination is always the same and pretending that it isn't just seems to fuck up the scenery. Maybe that's what HST was saying at the end. Things were just looking like shit to him.

Almost Burned Out

2007-01-29T10:15:00.000-08:00

Reading the NYT Week in Review from Sunday there was a quote from a young Shiite in Sadr City. “This just has to burn itself out.” In those areas where the fire has gone through and ethnically cleansed the locality of offending religious heretics, it’s gone back to men sitting in teahouses sipping tea amongst streets dotted with fruit stands. Nearby can be found the desolate neighborhoods where the waves of hatred have washed away the vast majority of human targets. In Iraq, according to our Vice President, there has “been a lot of success.” Not only is our VP a glass half-full kind of guy, he’s drinking something that would sell well at an all night rave. He’s raving, and he’s holds the rest of us in complete contempt.

When I think just how separated our leaders are from our people, our people are from other peoples, our personal knowledge is from our history, I can’t help but think it all seems pretty hopeless. Delusion is a necessary ingredient for sanity. Mythical thinking is the bedrock of our nation. Consumerism is the balm for tragedy. And tragedy is necessary for Americans to justify their exalted position as God’s chosen people. For those American who have suffered a real national tragedy, say maybe a collapsed levee or suicidal Boeing, your gift to us does not go unnoticed. You personally, sure, fuck if we care that much about you regardless of our tears, but the talisman your suffering and loss gives the rest of us as we blunder on down the cow path of banality is invaluable. We couldn’t stay blind without it.

I find that my demeanor oscillates between being a Pollyanna and an imp of the apocalypse. Some have warned me that I’m just not that important of an entity to worry about the larger states of our national mental health. Better I should take a trip to Mexico, or enjoy the beauty of my children that to contemplate such dark fjords of our imperiled coastline. I fear my Job-like wife has begun some of the processes of disconnecting from my desultory navel gazing. Either that or neo-menopause hormone fluctuations are spacing her out. Win-win I guess.

In a week I begin teaching my 16 week version of American History. I’ve been reading a book by David Hackett Fisher about the iconography and changing definitions of liberty and freedom in American history. His is a Whiggish history, one that basically and positively traces the changing and broadening definitions of what these terms have come to mean to Americans. In the last 26 years, which both encompass my political reckoning and my marriage; I would say that I have been subjected to a powerful example of the American way of liberty. What my personal life has given my political life has diminished. The irrelevance of my citizenship and my intellectual cosmology has not negated the meaning I attach to my existence, but it sure hasn’t been a boon to my worldly engagement. I can tell funny stories though. And I can make my friends wince. My students are privy to a life of raw hilarity and self-immolation. My classes are full. All I have to do is keep the fire in my belly, and keep it out of my head.

Bad start, bad ending

2007-01-16T08:34:00.000-08:00

The San Diego Chargers started their year of by having one of their linebackers shot by and off-duty cop. They ended it by losing in the first round of the playoffs, again, to the New England Patriots. The lost because they played dumb. After the game, some dumb Patriot players mocked the Chargers by doing Shawn Merriman's "Lights Out" dance on the Chargers symbol in the center of the field. LaDainian Tomlinson suggested that the responsibility for this rude behavior was their coach's. This is an interesting comment given that it is so obvious by now that Marty Schottenheimer is a loser because he is not real smart about certain psychological aspects of playoff football or even close games for that matter (5-13 in the playoffs, 7-16 in games decided by 4 points or less) and perhaps it is time to hold him culpable for this rottenness. That the majority of San Diegans want him to stay is pretty strong evidence that we are a town that supports losers. Like we have supported Randy "Duke" Cunningham, Roger "felony" Hedgecock, and George W. Bush. Fuck.

Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck.

Is this all there is?

2007-01-03T14:05:00.000-08:00

I watched a replay of the Frontline episode entitled “The Dark Side,” so named by the comment delivered in the days after 911 by our VP, who suggested that the war would require doing things “that the American people won’t know about.” If you are inclined you can watch it as well on the internet, and join into a discussion about its merits. Those comments may piss you off as much as our vice-president Dick “Son-of-a-Bitch” Cheney. The truth of the matter is that Iraq was and is a clusterfuck of the highest order and our engineering of our foreign policy toward invasion was based on a willful campaign of deceit that goes to the highest levels of our government. The only thing going for the present regime is that this is not a new thing. We have always played the American public for suckers. Father knows motherfucking best.

When George Tenet received the presidential “Medal of Freedom” along with that shitbrain Paul Bremer and Tommy “I guess I support Bush’s reelection” Franks all you need to remember is the press conference where Robert McNamara resigned and LBJ’s shiteating grin to know that these sob’s know when to fall on their swords. The most telling quote in the whole show was where president Bush said to Tenet something to the effect of “is this all there is?” when presented with the National Intelligence Estimate that Colin Powell presented to the UN that bought Bush (along with the artfully inserted 16 words about yellowcake which were totally bogus and not Tenet’s doing but Cheney’s) the political space to order the illegal invasion of Iraq. Even Bush knew it was all bullshit, and his crappy National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice didn’t do her job to make Tenet do his. Of course, she has no backbone anyway. Rumsfield and Cheney have been running this country, along with Rove and Bush can’t be bothered to do the right thing because he never really gave a shit about the rest of us anyway. But he knew what the right thing was. Remember this is all you need to know about our dear President.

Responsibilities

2006-12-28T18:32:00.000-08:00

As a teacher of history, I have to take some of my far out views of reality and pack them deep in my personal luggage, underneath the official clothes of my “professionalism.” I’m not real professional, but I try to give the appearance of normalcy to my charges on the off chance that one of them is some sort of psychotic punk who might report my leftist leanings to the wrong authorities. Such are the candy-assed fears of the “successful” American citizen.

One benefit of taking on the appearance of one beholding to the great civilizing banality that rules the consumer-citizen’s mentality, is that I can slip dissident thoughts into the minds of my charges within a well-camouflaged persona, one that does not raise “red flags” if you will. I still remember the words of a professor of public health I knew at San Diego State who when queried as to why he appeared so conservatively normal and unthreatening while promulgating rather radical shit to his students replied, “guerilla warfare. If you want to change the system from within, you have to blend in.”

I blend in. But there is always the risk that the wool pulled over the pelt of the wolf will begin to alter the creature inside. You know we’ve all seen dogs eat grass and frankly there’s a fair amount of cereal in commercial dog food. I stopped eating red meat years ago. Things are at a stasis and I know it.

Reading Alexander Cockburn’s book “Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press” reminded me that history training itself has its own heuristic dangers. We who get paid for telling plausible stories censor ourselves down to easier and easier levels of proof. But reality follows no such path. And the larger lesson probably should simply be that paranoia and suspicion has its place in all healthy minds. Go ahead, read the paper, watch the news, and enjoy you various states of consciousness. But keep your credulous powder dry. The fucks who run the world are playing by dirty rules. And few if not none of the things they tell you they care about that you should care about are right. War on Drugs? War on Terror? How about a war on billionaires, that one would get my vote. Because they have the biggest responsibilities for the shit that we step in.

Covering the Spread

2006-12-21T11:50:00.000-08:00

Winning or losing? Bush has finally started to cant towards the reality that we are losing in Iraq. Losing what should be the damn question but that is so far away from Washington media dogpack mentality that they won't ever get to that part of the story. As a society we are losing, and we have been losing ever since Vietnam and frankly ever since the beginning of the Cold War. We have been stupid bullies for so long we now fail to recognize that we have a goiter the size of a football hanging off the side of our precious necks. So fuck it. We are finally getting some neo-truths from our frat boy president. If you feel satisfaction, well, . . . . . . .

John Stewart played the bit in Bush's newsconference whereby he pointed to the words of that pencilnecked fuckhead General Peter Pace who said, "we're not winning but we're not losing either." Stewart then put in, "are we covering the spread?" No. Even though the Iraqis have spotted us something like half a million deaths, we are still behind. What we need is a Goldwater to come in an start pushing for a tactical nuke strike or two, like those good old days in the 60s. If a old bastard like Robert S. McNamara can point out that "proportionality should be a guideline to war" maybe some day it will actually come to pass that we will start keeping a real score in the war on terror. We are terrorists too, and we have been using the threat of terror to keep our place in the world for a long time. Technology being what it is there is a terrifying chance that the chickens are going to come back to roost some day. I feel pretty fucking bad for my kids.

As Noam Chomsky pointed out, if you happened to read the newspapers in Central and South America on September 12th, 2001, they all pretty much said: "this is a terrible thing that happened in New York, but . . ." The media can suck my ass for not knowing about the "buts" and for not standing up to this pathetic little frat shit until now. We need to start covering the spread of terror if we want to win "the war on terror." Victory begins at home.

Bullshit Detector

2006-12-08T08:51:00.000-08:00

Americans are a funny sort. They are best defined by what they forget rather than what they remember. I had an interesting breakthrough in class the other night. I was showing the students a segment from Ken Burn's documentary series, Jazz. The interesting part to me was that even in the 1930s all the aspects of black musical authenticity, white mimicry and its attending patterns of shit and shinola were in play. Benny Goodman was a hell of a player. But he was no Duke Ellington and he was only a echo of Louis Armstrong.

The point is not how white folks copy black culture. I love Elvis for Elvis and I don't really care too much about the thievery. But I do think that if you don't train your brain to tell the difference between copy and original, or at least play around with all the different shapes that define a genre, you will have a hard time building a functioning bullshit detector. And that was the point that fairly jumped out at me when my dull obedient students refused to engage with what they had just seen presented by Mr. Burns. They don't have functioning bullshit detectors, or they have just turned them off because its plainly easier to get through the waves of crap being dealt to us culturally, socially and politically if you just say "whatever."

To some extent the last election was bracing in that it appeared for a moment that a fair number of Americans turned their BD's back on and said enough is enough. We need to start talking with our enemies. As Lee Hamilton pointed out the other day, we talked to the Soviets, why can't we talk to the Iranians? The answer is that we got so arrogant and so self-righteous that we thought we don't need to talk to them, they need to come to us. Well, an few thousand IED's later and we are beginning to realize that we'd be better off talking. No bullshit.

The truth about Iraq

2006-12-01T13:48:00.000-08:00

I haven't felt much like writing, and its partially because many of the things I think about provoke pain and anxiety about the future. Toward the top of this list of frets is the situation in Iraq. It has gotten so bad there that to contemplate it is to despair that there is hope for our nation and the one we have so recklessly unhinged.

Listening to the common wisdom, left or right, about the situation can only further unhinge me as both sides talk past it each with the self-righteousness of bullies. I cannot find comfort in knowing that the lies of the Bush administration and their over-weening hubris have come to a political reckoning. The Democrats are saying nothing smart at the moment. They seem only to be fantasizing about their time in front of the great American feed trough. Their lack of a narrative that might carry us toward a fairer better place in this world only confirms my bleakest cynicism about our future prospects as a nation. Glad as I might be that the Republicans had their wings clipped I am not buoyed by the first cloying grabs of Pelosi and her ilk.

What I meant to mention however was a something I did read today that while not buoyant and full of positivity, does contain the seeds of truth about what is actually taking place at this moment in Iraq. Truth from the perspective of one person, a soldier at that, might seem in scope and lacking the required gravitas of our political architecture, but if you have a decent bullshit detector, it can work. It takes me a constant reminder that there are people everywhere who are doing good and decent things. I hope someday to vote for one of them.

Boner

2006-11-14T08:17:00.000-08:00

Sung to the tune of "Bingo."

I had a dog with a big ol' dick
and Boner was his name-O
B-O-NER
B-O-NER
B-O-NER
and Boner was his name-O

His dick was pink
pink and thick
and Boner was his name-O
B-O-NE__
B-O-NE__
B-O-NE__
and Boner was his name-O

OK, who wants to help me with the next three verses? I can't help it if I wake up with these classic tunes in my head. Then I spend five minutes reading the New York Times in the morning, and all the joy gets sucked out of my life. There was a lovely article about the damn white evangelicals supporting Israel blindly, encouraging the Olmert Reich to kill kill kill. Does anyone give a rat's ass about the latest massacre in Beit Hanoun? No. And the Democrats are tip tip toeing around our impeachable president and talking about "winning" in Iraq. Everyone and their dog is working for the terrorists. They just don't know what a terrorist is. Boneheads.

Win or lose?

2006-11-08T10:45:00.000-08:00

I figure there are two ways to look at this election victory for the Democrats. Either they won the requisite number of seats to take over the House and we can hope, the Senate, or the Republicans lost those aforementioned seats. There is a difference. If the Dems continue to futz about and base their party's platform on shapeless and ill-defined policies, we may just get another damn Republican President in 2008. Bush will not get away with attacking Iran now, and he may find that by making nice and listening to some reason, the world isn't half as scary as he'd like us all to believe. It could be an interesting two years. I think that it is going to be better, even if it still sucks. Suck lite I suppose.

There was an interesting article in the Nation the other day pointing out that fundamentalists are just as likely as anyone else to vote Democratic. That's because the black folks tend to gravitate to the four square type of church and they also tend to avoid voting Republican. Its time for the secular yuppies to get of their high horses and stop yapping about dumb religion ruining everything great about America. Religion has its problems. But selfishness is an equal opportunity fuck-up. The day I see someone sacrifice their Hummer in a fiery display of martyrdom (kinda goes against fighting global warming but it would make the news I bet) is the day we reach a tipping point in civility in the culture war. It's time to go met the neighbors, even if they are certain Jesus walked on the water.

The meaning of history

2006-10-26T09:40:00.000-07:00

Talking with my 16 soon to be 17 year old daughter has become more and more of a chore for both of us as she moves into the habits and deceits of adulthood and its attendant alienations. But it is always worth it as I get to hallucinate backwards into my own high school memory miasma and get reminded where my demons come from. Clearly they don’t come simply from high school, but its certainly one area where they do come from.

The little voices in my daughter’s head have been put there by her parents, teachers, peers and god knows what other projectors of the American mentalité but as we were talking I could see simply they are actually alien to her spirit. “Aaron Burr” she said, “is longer than I though it was.” This book she is reading was this mornings worrying burden. And so we take our worrying burdens around with us until they become little robotic architectures of concern that rarely let us have a moment of peace. When somebody talks in a history class about our Puritan roots, this is exactly what the fuck we should be thinking about. A little Puritan devil robot has been injected into the minds of way too damn many of us and it makes us all alienated from the ground we walk on.

The meaning of history is that these memes or whatever some scientist might try to call them are the ghosts of our forefathers, spewing their regrets forward into the future for as far as we have the lack of imagination to cull their shit from our brains. And shit we have in our brains, given our desultory present of war and gasoline. The Cadillac Escalade parked in front of us at her school is an emotional reaction to something in the world that is beyond reason and colored with hubris. The person who drives it marks their personality with just one of the most obvious shades of brainshit that the Puritans (Republicans?) have bequeathed us. And there are ten thousand more flavors of these little demons floating about in each and every one of our heads, and its no wonder we try to stun them out with drink or sex or some sort of sensory overload because they are parasites on our free enjoyment of our own liberty to figure this world out for ourselves.

History is bunk: this is supposed to bug a historian but frankly it has gained a new appreciation in my lexicon thanks to my daughter. Not because she would ever say it out loud. What I see in her eyes is the dull polluting sheen of our smoggy past. Don’t ever forget that there were a tremendous amount of assholes that lived in the past. Try not to honor them with your worried mind.

Jerry Brown Uber Alles

2006-10-19T08:15:00.000-07:00

The Dead Kennedys were on the XM this morning and I heard them in a new way, thinking to myself what the hell is wrong with this state, both the one I live in and the one I live in. Yeah, you've got to start questioning things when the San Diego Union Tribune, one of the most reactionary, imbecilic, asinine, puerile, misguided, petty and ugly papers to befoul a major US metropolis endorses the former future king of the universe, Jerrrrrryyyyy Brrroowwwnnnnn for Attorney General of the State of California. Holy shit. The UT is a petulant, flatulent declawed and dentured leopard trying to change its raggedy ass spots. Just like Jerry fucking Brown.

And then it hits me, we are Minnesota. We are that lame ass state with Jesse Ventura for a governor, only now our JV governor sounds like he has a blue-bellied lizard in his mouth everytime he opens his Austrian yap-yapper. We are a laughing stock. No wonder I am having a seriously bad time with my internal demons. They are struggling to get the golly god damn out of me because they are embarrassed to be living inside my stinky folds in the Disneyesque hellport. I've have accomplished the well neigh impossible task of shaming my dirty bits. The suede-denim secret police have set up residence in my discontented consciousness and I can hardly enjoy my personal revolt against the revolting banality chasers because I have lived in the sorriest city in California for too damn long. Still, the burritos here are really really good.

Update. I want to correct one of my earlier comments about the Steve Foley incident. He was drunk and he was driving. He will rot in a compound surrounded by guards from MADD until he perishes from this sunny purgatory and moves into a crypt of questionable taste upon his ultimate demise. The UT reports today that the cop never did show a badge. So when somebody with a really bad haircut driving a small Japanese car tries to pull your drunk ass over in the middle of the night, just remember, only cops have those kinds of haircuts. And they like to shoot Negroes (if your feeling black, that's probably close enough) especially if you got a white woman in the car with you.

Poaching

2006-10-16T09:08:00.000-07:00

One thing that makes me sick with anger is poaching. Not the killing animals without a license type. I'm speaking about car behavior. People who are always trying to get one more foolish space ahead in their race to be in front of somebody they don't even know. They don't leave a space to merge into when they clearly see that you need to get over. They pull into the lane that must exit because it is moving faster than the rest of the freeway and then they muscle in at the last second back into the main artery so they can poach 5 or 10 or even 3 spaces. They park in places that are attached to a particular business a take that space away all day so that people who might actually need to get into that business have to hunt for a space farther away. You could probably add to my little list. And you could probably add other public behaviors that qualify. We could probably agree that it is an ethos of the age.

Its not just selfishness that makes me want to get some sort of weapon (non-lethal, of course!) and put it to them right where it grinds a hole in their panties. It's the willful disregard mixed into a slothful inattentiveness that makes me consider going berzerk. We all should be fanned a little room to be stupid. We all do selfish things that if we had a chance to contemplate them minus the swirling miasma of the average inertial shitstorm which defines "normal" city behavior we might not so readily acceed to. But don't cry if somebody decides to crap in your gruel. I know its possible that I deserve something back for my ignorance that is not pleasant. I just wish some of these poaching cows get tipped over today.

Evolutionary Biologists Lack Imagination

2006-10-12T11:51:00.000-07:00

Years ago when I thought it might matter to somebody, I used to ask the question “why do men have a refractory period after orgasm?” This question was the completing half of the more interesting question (for me) “why can women have multiple orgasms?” Scientists of the evolutionary stripe have tried to answer the question of why women have orgasms and when they talk about it even the folks who think like Desmond Morris and decide that it is so the cervix will dip into the semen pool and get a better shot at fertilization seem to miss the point that there is little evidence that this matters in the least. Women who don’t orgasm get pregnant pretty damn well. That would have to be the truth given that apparently something like 75 percent of women do not regularly have orgasm during sex. Something like 10 percent never have orgasms, and they get pregnant with no apparent difficulty.

Besides the obvious point that the EB researchers never seem to consider that patriarchy might have something to do with the success rate for female pleasure, the question of women’s ability or inability to have orgasms and its evolutionary advantages have to been seen in the larger context of the evolution of culture. And I can see a really obvious and supportable hypothesis that Sarah Blaffer Hrdy danced around in her book called “The Woman Who Never Evolved.” She pointed out that some primate males will not kill the offspring of any female they have mated with. Females that mate with multiple males end up protecting their offspring. More pleasure might equal more sex might equal either females needing more rogering for orgasm or maybe more orgasms period.

But if you extend this to a cultural analysis rather than simply a mechanical one, you might suggest as I will that females were the centerpiece in the development of better male relationships. Males that are hypercompetitive are freaking dangerous. And males that find ways to share stand a great deal better chance of working together as a team to survive and prosper. The development of the tribe does not go together real well with nuclear families. To wit: if you make sexual behavior a group activity you end up with an extended family of males who, by not over stressing on sexual availability get to focus on other behaviors that enhance the survival of the group. If a female can nail multiple men (which is something that some women can and enjoy doing) she becomes a very culturally valuable creature. Ramón Gutiérrez in his book “When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846” points out that one of the first things that Spanish clergy noticed and had to “fix” when they met up with the Pueblo Indians is that they didn’t seem too possessive about their women and they didn’t really freak out properly when their women laid the Spanish soldiers. Shame had to be taught. There is a reason they call it the missionary position, dumb asses!

Beyond this crazy speculation, there is the work of those scientists who point out that sperm behave in a manner that shows they figure they have to fight off other flavors of sperm to get their uber boy to the egg. Some cohere and create plugs to wall off the passage to the gamete while others sprint to the goal. And then there is the issue of why women bleed every month. Simply they do so because it is good for them. Semen is a disease vector. Blood is a cleansing agent. And women who have sex with only one partner actually adapt to that reality and biochemically make it easier for those boys to come home. Which suggest that less is not more from an evolutionary point-of-view.

Given our obsessive issues with fidelity and virginity and the attendant ownership issues, we might just stop for a moment and decide if all that bullshit has made the world a better place or not. This all ties into heaven and especially hell, and the freaked out masculinity that needs to be assured and coddled and told that the kid really is theirs and that in some psychic way they do get to live forever. Living in the sexual regime of the male has defined our human history. The evolution of sexuality has a role to play in figuring out where we went astray and headed on into making violence a copartner with sex. If you don’t believe me this is the case, ask a Bonobo. Or go to your local women’s shelter.

The White Guy

2006-10-10T14:43:00.000-07:00

I was seven years old and in love with all things sport. I remember pretty clearly when Tommie Smith and John Carlos walked up to the podium to accept their medals for winning the gold and bronze medals at the Mexico City Summer Olympics. I remember very clearly the two men swinging their medals casually like whirlygigs as they walked off the pedestal after standing and listening to the national anthem. I vaguely remember them being haranged by the ABC broadcasters for being disrespectful. But I don't remember anything about the white guy. And he died last week.

I had no idea that Austrailan Peter Norman knew what Smith and Carlos were up to. I had no idea that he wore a human rights badge in solidarity with the two black Americans. And even reading the local paper which pointed out that Norman was "a physical education teacher" I would not have learned that he paid a real price for standing up there and supporting their protest. He was blackballed from the Sydney Olympics. He was left to be a P.E. teacher and he didn't complain about it. And Smith and Carlos were pallbearers at his funeral. The three had been friends ever since that day. Carlos's kids called him "Uncle Pete." There's something damn beautiful about that white guy. I'm going to make sure that a few more folks remember him.

That didn't want to be . . .

2006-09-28T10:14:00.001-07:00

IN BRIEF / GEORGIA
Bondage Is Prelude to a Heist at Sex ShopFrom Times Wire ReportsSeptember 28, 2006Three masked men robbed a Stone Mountain sex shop after tying up employees with black fur handcuffs and silver leg irons taken from the store shelves, police said. Authorities said the men stole $230 from the cash register. No one was hurt.

Beautiful Hate

2006-09-15T09:27:00.000-07:00

A winsome demon approached me and told me that she had a bargain I’d be interested in. She said that I could have anything I wanted in the world as long as my anger never superseded her own. Now that sounded like a pretty good deal. If you had seen her you would have taken less time than I did to say yes. Did I tell you that she lived in this world?

Years later and I’m still keeping up my end of the bargain. But don’t think that it’s easy, letting a vision have its way with you. Sometimes, a lot of times, more frequently it would seem, I’d like to have the most beautiful hate. I know that sounds selfish. Every time I get pissed off and start stomping around the demon will remind me with a quick wolfish gesture that I’d better not go to that place where I believe I’ve got a handle on the order of things. Be patient. Good things come to those that wait. Now I know who said that and it ain’t helping. I wonder what all of us who are holding our hate back are waiting for. Shoes are dropping everywhere folks and we are just waiting.

76 Ball

2006-09-06T15:17:00.000-07:00

A friend wrote me an email asking for a story. I tell stories sometimes rather that just ranting like a pathetic fuck. So here's the story I sent her, minus most of the incriminating details, like real names. And the comic I stole from Zippy the Pinhead, which made me think about the story in the first place. I hope Bill Griffith doesn't sue me.

When I was in high school, and the drugs started to take ahold of each nights proceedings, interesting things used to happen. We always partied at my friend Neil's house (cause he was an orphan) and after getting properly lit up, we'd try to figure out something destructive to do. Neil was a pretty good golfer, and he lived off an alley that was just off State Street, which was the main artery thru Santa Barbara. Across State Street across from where he lived (like a nine iron we figured) was a Union 76 Station with one of those giant 76 balls, looming like a big target that we could see from his backyard on the alley. Well, you can imagine that as soon as we were properly ffffed up, it was time to take a couple of shots at that sucker. We sent our Canadian diabetic alcoholic friend Random Soucey (we just called him Soucey) over there (he became a lawyer . . . hmmm) to spot where the balls were landing. Neil would then launch a salvo of 3 or 4 balls and then we'd hide as eventually we did attact some police attention. The thought of those balls landing and then bouncing thirty feet in the air as they bounced off the concrete was further heightened when Soucey reported that he watched one guy filling up, hand on the nozzle, watch one and then another ball careen through the parking lot maybe ten yards away each time. The guy didn't move, just kept filling up as golf balls leapt and pinballed around him. Neil did manage to hit the ball but it never broke, as we all secretly hoped for.

Ah, the good old days when wanton destruction could trigger hours of hilarity. We made our own fun, damnit, none of this relying on the fucking internet to provide us with some sort of vicarious destructive thrill. (Although the stuff I've seen with Mentos and Diet Coke looks like it could be fun. Especially if you did it in a Walmart. )

Call the Police

2006-09-06T10:36:00.000-07:00

I remember one time driving down the hill from Valley Center to Escondido, I ended up behind one very drunk asshole who managed to bang up against the J-wall as we came down Bear Valley Parkway and then, on the streets of Escondido, he almost ran over a woman pushing her laundry across the street. With my wife and kids in the car, I followed him and when he stopped in the middle of the freaking street near his house, I knocked on the door and talked some homeowner into letting me use their phone to call the police. They showed quickly and I pointed out the drunken dope that was still in his car. They arrested him, thanked me and I figured that I had done the right thing.

A cop ended up shooting Charger linebacker Steve Foley the other night. And among the things he didn’t do was call for backup. That the cop was off-duty, in an unmarked car and not in uniform only add to the smell associated with this event. The local media, a bunch of pathetic whiteboy asskissers, can only say that Foley has a history of alcohol abuse and that the car he was in was weaving. He wasn’t the driver, rather it was a female passenger. The DA just dropped a case filed against him in April alleging public intoxication, resisting arrest and battery of a police officer. The team has suspended Foley without pay for the season, essentially saving 775,000 bucks and they could ask for an 875,000 dollar signing bonus to be returned. His teammates are pissed of course, and we are not going to know for a long time what really happened at 3:30 in the morning. Suffice is to say is that the cop, one Aaron Mansker, should be asked if he too was drinking.

Foley will be out for the season with three gunshot wounds. The Chargers have a bevy of linebackers, one of which they planned on dumping (Donnie Edwards) who they now will have to consider keeping. What pisses me off is the way the local press always likes to make sure the cop’s side of the story is what drives the narrative. What the Union-Tribune hasn’t noticed is that the cops have been running the show in this town and in this red country for far too long. How about hiring a black sportswriter or two?

No debate

2006-09-01T11:45:00.000-07:00

I spent ten minutes watching the Jim Lehrer news report on the last day of August, and I almost gave myself an aneurysm doing so. Debating the Presidents shit talk of the same day, was a half-wit blond representative from Tennessee and a chokingly inarticulate democrat from Massachusetts. Lehrer looked almost stunned as he tried to pull something viable from two denizens of the spinning hell which is Washington. There is no real debate going on about what we are doing in Iraq, because what we are doing in Iraq amounts to nothing. Talk of terrorists has become so facile and reactionary that real questions about what behavior identifies one as a terrorist and what are the real legitimate aims of this great nation are buried like the bodies of 9/11 under a steaming mass of broken capitalism.

Given the way terrorists are defined these days I am sure that the Native American fighters of the 17th-19th centuries deserved their “savage” nomenclature. And if you do stop to think about it for a second you know that us Enlightenment following Europeans have systematically gone about making new batches of Indians to demonize in the process of populating the hell of our own creation which exists to justify our hateful religion of choice. Not to knock believers, but Christianity of the lower order runs on certainty and fear. Without hell I’m not sure it could even exist. And this is precisely the point our beloved W is making in idiot code. We must see the other as the evil enemy of the past. No debate is necessary. We are soldiers of Christ, not a bunch of damn hippies. Hoo rah!

Winning Wars

2006-08-22T11:47:00.000-07:00

We are a nation of wars. The war on terror. The war on drugs. The war in the Middle East may not be ours, although smart money says that it is and the IDF’s munitions are certainly in the main American made. We are having a culture war here at home over “morality” which is having such a polarizing effect that we can’t talk rationally to anyone we disagree with anymore. We are pretty fucked up right now as the image of Israeli girls on the left here would suggest. Hey, at least the economy is OK.

I read an article by a former Israeli soldier that pointed out that among other things that Israel lost this war with Hezbollah. I’ve read a lot of things about the war, but one thing that keeps coming up is that the most powerful military in the world cannot win a war without winning over the hearts and minds of the people. Which people, I’m not always sure of, but either you have to have a strong stomach for killing or you have to actually help somebody gain freedom. If you only bring pain and chaos, you only get pain and chaos in return. This should not be news to a country that lived through Vietnam.

But it is news, and as somebody once said “what a revolting development.” What revolts me the most is willful stupidity. Plain ignorance is somewhat forgivable if not amusing, but willfully aiming the gun at your head is just mean and vicious. We are busy committing suicide and what drives it is our hate. We are in love with hate. As Ren would say, “I like being angry.” But Ren wouldn't say, "I like killing my enemies."

Joe Strummer said that “anger can be power if you know how to use it.” We don’t know how obviously. Neither does Israel. Here’s what you do guys. Start loving. Start helping people, even your adversaries, have decent lives. Don’t be so god damn judgmental. Know what you don’t know. I know one thing. We don’t know shit about winning wars.

Flying Naked

2006-08-18T08:56:00.000-07:00

The day before my wife and daughter were to fly to Vegas along with my friend’s wife (two sons and two husbands got to drive) the British apparently foiled some sort of terror plot that hinged on the use of liquid explosives. General panic ensued, and then after about 24 hours nobody gave a rat’s ass anymore. Packing less shit for a trip is not a hardship, and it reduces the hardship on everyone else if you’d just leave your damn shit home when you travel. I, along with the Vice President, are rooting for nude travel.

The reduction of carry-on materials is a silver lining for those of us who sometimes travel for business. And you can still take your laptop, despite hysteria to the contrary. Not that the reduction or elimination of electronic gear would be a bad thing. Having conversations with strangers is a necessary ingredient for the health of our society. And you learn shit too. Yesterday I spent the day watching the fucking Padres lose pathetically to the Giants with 7 guys who I knew pretty well and the only really good conversation I had all day was with the retired Mexican-American guy sitting next to me in the stands. From him I got the wisdom of someone who knows what is important and who hasn’t fallen to his knees in obeisance to some canted ideology of the moment. “Retire early” he suggested, and since we were there to celebrate my buddy’s retirement, it rang especially true.

It may become obvious to more of us, and soon, that retiring sooner rather than later is the most moral thing any of us can do given our countries complete descent into willful imperialistic violence. Consuming less or “dropping out” as was once suggested, is probably what more and more of us should be doing. The damn planet is heating up. What the hell, might as well take off some clothes.

Your Nation Will Die

2006-08-11T09:04:00.000-07:00

There’s a scene in the movie “The Third Man” where a svelte Orson Wells tells his pursuer/ex-friend James Cotton a little bit about the advantages of corruption and chaos. Brilliantly set on a giant Ferris wheel, Wells is being chased by the authorities in post-war Vienna for selling bad drugs to hospitals. His soliloquy goes something like: Rome, Athens, etc, = intrigue, back stabbing, dictatorships, and great art, great architecture, greatness. Switzerland has had 800 years of democracy. And they invented the cuckcoo clock. Something like that.

When artists are faced with repression and cultural malaise, they do better work. Right now mainstream rock is so-so at best, but just outside the fringe there is some good shit happening. Last week I saw a new band, Burning Brides, out of LA that is just that. Good shit. Listen to Your Nation Will Die or Heart Full of Black. Any of their stuff will do. And go and buy the new Wolfmother CD too will ya?

The Question is Religion. The Answer is Violence

2006-08-10T11:04:00.000-07:00

I read one of the most depressing essays in recent memory yesterday. It was depressing especially because it was written by an intelligent, sensitive man, a French philosopher by the name of Bernard Henry-Lévi. He wrote from the Israel perspective of the war on Hezbollah. Entitled Pondering, Discussing, Traveling Amid and Defending the Inevitable War he discusses his reasons for supporting the violence against Lebanon within the context of a considered morality. To simply: the war is just because the missiles Hezbollah fires will only get deadlier. Israel is fighting for its existence, the Iranians want to wipe us out and they are fascists, and we are doing our best not to kill civilians so we are moral. The use of the word Islamic-fascist is telling, as is his truncated history of the Middle East and the lead up to this war. The linking of Hamas with Hezbollah, even as he notes that this war was is hurting the Palestinians is telling. His linking of Daniel Pearl to the soldier captured by Hamas is telling. But what is most telling is that there is no other answer for Israel. Violence is the only answer. Religion seems to be the question. How fucked is that?

Henry-Lévi is right about the missiles. They will only get deadlier. He is clueless as to why they will get deadlier. Israel’s mastery of violence will ensure that the only discussion her antagonists will ever have is how to poof her out of existence. But the reason there is a rise in Islamic-fascists, is this only because they are a manifestation of evil? I wonder what percentage of Lebanese support Israel? 5 percent? 3 percent? Israel doesn’t fucking care. We pay for their bombs literally. We will pay some more, on some day, no doubt. Violence is our only answer. Religion is only answer to the questions of why we are here. Jesus, we are stupid.

On a more hopeful note, I listened to comedian Doug Stanhope this morning as he discussed smoking DMT (a powerful hallucinogen) and the aftermath of this overwhelming experience. Besides being funny, he suggested the only way to understand what the experience was like was to imagine that you were a rat and for ten minutes you were given the consciousness of a human, only to return to a rat consciousness with the added knowledge that you are a rat and that there exists a higher consciousness. We are rats. I feel better knowing that.

Cracker

2006-08-08T09:37:00.000-07:00

This fellow up in the Bay Area, John Perata called a bunch of folks down here in San Diego (anti-immigrant folks) “a bunch of crackers” and it seems to have caused a minor stir. Thing of it is, how do you characterize folks who are ignorant, hateful, and loud? If not “cracker” then what pejorative would be more sublime? Assholes? Too generic. Fuckwits? Better, but still lacking something. It needs to be more regional, hopefully something that could be tied directly to America’s finest city. I’m not saying I have any answer here. Diegans are a pretty mixed bunch but the military history of this town has left us with a cancerous root in ugly Americanism. Diego=Go-die.

The media has it that there are shitheads in every group, and they measure up every event through the lens of a false objectivity. Therefore Cracker is to whites as Nigger is to blacks, although no self-respecting white person sees it that way. A recent political cartoon on the UT’s editorial page suggested that the Israeli response to Hezbollah was the equivalent (morally?) to the US response to the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor. Proportionally that is, it is proportional to be disproportional. If anyone tells you that it was morally understandable to nuke Hiroshima, they are a moral imbecile. You can make arguments about the reasons why we dropped the bomb, and they are never easy to understand unless you are a cracker but there are no moral reasons for dropping the bomb that stands rational support unless you are basically a racist fuckwit. This is also true for the bombing in Lebanon. As for the rockets of Hezbollah, two wrongs don’t make a right. However, proportionally, the two wrongs aren’t the same. Israel will become moral the second they start losing. We are no different I’m afraid.

A Modest Proposal: Peace

2006-07-28T14:39:00.000-07:00

“If we could just join hands , , ,”

More killing or less, which way should we go? I’ve been drifting between making a modest proposal and singing “give peace a chance.” At this moment, it’s pretty clear that the former is the way of the world and nothing in our shitheaded moral universe is going to change that. Unless the fucking Republicans are thrown out of the majority this fall, killing is going to be a growth industry for the foreseeable future. And Fox News is going to make it sound sensible to middle half-witted Americans and their sympathizers in the churches of holy self-righteous gas-guzzling fuckwits that pollute the sight-lines of rationality across our fair land. And if you think this is an endorsement of the Democratic Party, pass me the crack pipe.

The damage report for Lebanon is a fun first place to start thinking about this killing spree. No doubt the officers in the IDF who did such a good job prior to the kidnapping of their charges will probably get demoted or something tough, but any fool in this country who thinks Israel invaded because of those missing soldiers is just a cow looking at a pile of alfalfa waiting for fun in a charnel house. There is one possible upside to this invasion. Hezbollah will do something that we certainly can’t: unite Shiites and Sunnis in hate against Israel and their arms suppliers which you may have a clue to as long as you haven’t been staring at that steaming hay for too long.

Ah, this is an evil screed. Get out Physical Graffiti, cue to “The Rover.” Stop the madness. Get me a Boddington’s . . .

Save the planet for less than a buck a day

2006-07-27T11:53:00.000-07:00

I love horseshit, and on the internet there is a lot of horseshit flying around. Big green chunks in this case. Or maybe not: maybe all it takes of offset my supposed 20 tons of CO2 that I produce driving and chewing up the kilowatts and flying about is a measly 206.87 or whatever this "Carboncounter.org" calculated as my fair share of recompense for burning energy like the ugly American I most certainly am. I will begin donations shortly.

I was thinking that this is something that I would like to invent, and then I just googled “My CO2” and this is what I got. I feel better about myself, which certainly makes me wonder about the validity of this site. Its probably funded by the oil and car companies . . .

Do the Right Thing

2006-07-17T14:50:00.000-07:00

I was weak, I tried to be nice, tried rationality with a disagreeable right-wing arrogant San Diego columnist because he had said something nice about a friend of mine. Fucking stupid of me. Materazzi (the guy who Zidane head-butted) is known to my Italian friends as "a rugby player." I should have stayed dirty and profane with Nick Canepa. Stay the course America. We need to kill more people so that we can gain the world's respect.

Here's the actually spew, his response and my retort. I love Italians, just not this piece of shit.

Nick,

I spent my lunch with an Italian. He says Materazzi is a dirtbag, and he won 8 grand on Italy. Churchill said that he loved Americans because they always do the right thing. After they have tried everything else. Keep trying!

APnick.canepa@uniontrib.com wrote:

My freaking name,

I don't know if you could be more wrong, but you're probably close.

Thanks for writing,

Nick

-----Original Message-----

Sent: Mon 7/17/2006 9:57 AMTo: Canepa, Nick

Subject: Right and Wrong

Mr. Canepa,

I waited a good 24 hours to cool down after your Zidane piece. And I also wanted to be fair and to thank you for doing the Ultimate column on my friend Jim Herrick. He, in my mind, is the embodiment of a sportsman, someone who plays for the love of his game and who as long as I have known him as always been both a fierce competitor and a class act. Again, thank you for taking him seriously. Ultimate is a good sport, with a long history in this country. And its a sport Americans can be proud of.

On the negative side, and of course you knew this was coming, I am always disheartened when someone as respectable as yourself misses the mark so widely on an issue that could provide for your audience what we like to call in the corporate world as "a teachable moment." Zidane's act was something that many on this side of the Atlantic percieved as a clear sign of moral failure, something that was just not understandable given the situation. But did you bother to research the Italian player he fouled, the history of the man himself, or even get your local baseball contact Gwynn to use an analogous situation in his career (which he may never have had actually) to contextualize what Zidane did? No. You took the easy way out to my mind (and writing as many columns as you do for as long as you have certainly gives you a pass if you wish to take it) and just went along with the crowd who think that there could be nothing to justify Zidane's actions. Sports are great when they give us a chance to be our best and honor our finest ideals. But sports are not the meaning of life, they only reflect and enhance it. And if, and this could be too big an if, Materazzi did use racial and familial taunts at that moment in a World Cup that many feared could be damaged by white supremacists "fans" could this context change the meaning of what took place?

The German replay of the incident in the stadium would not have taken place in Petco. Tony Gwynn, was he ever called the n-word during game seven of the World Series by a catcher before a two-strike pitch with the winning run on third? You can read the Dave Zirin piece below if you like and tell me that he's just a biased lefty hack but you didn't even ask the right questions. He did. That you didn't is a shame.

If nothing else, know that among your peers, even though I disagree with much of what you write about and the ideological perspective that bleeds through your pieces, I admire your professionalism. In fact, you are the only columnist I regularly read in the UT. Some day I hope to live in a city with a world reknown newspaper. Since I was born in raised in Santa Barbara, I know that should I ever move back, it won't happen there . . .

Respectfully, My freaking name

Confronting Racism, Head On Why I Wear My Zidane Jersey
By DAVE ZIRIN

Imagine Michael Jordan in his last game, with the score tied in overtime, knocking out his defender with a punch to the throat. Imagine Derek Jeter in game seven of the World Series, at bat with the bases loaded, thrashing the opposing team's catcher over the head with his bat. Our collective shock would only be exceeded by disappointment. No one, fan or foe, would want to a see a great player end their career in an act that speaks to the worst impulses of sports: when hard competition spills over into violence. Now imagine if Jordan and Jeter claimed they were provoked with a racial slur. Does their violence become understandable? Even excusable?

Herein lies the case of French National team captain, the great Zinedine Zidane. Zidane, competing in his last professional match, was kicked out of the World Cup final in overtime for flattening Italian player Marco Materazzi with the head-butt heard around the world. Zidane, or Zissou as he is known, became the first captain ever ejected from a World Cup championship match. The announcers denounced Zissou for committing a "classless act and the French team withered, eventually losing to a demonstrably inferior Italian squad in overtime. The following morning the international tabloids with their typical grace, gave Zissou a new nickname: "butt-head. Less examined was the fact that Zissou was literally carrying a lightly regarded French team to the finals. Less examined was the fact that Zissou had been grabbed, kicked, and fouled all game by the vaunted Italian defense. Less examined was the fact that Zissou had almost left minutes earlier due to injury, his arm wilting off his shoulder like a wet leaf of spinach. This unholy amount of pressure is the primary reason the 34-year-old veteran snapped and planted Materazzi into the pitch.

Now the great mystery is what set Zissou off. What could Materazzi have possibly said to send him over the edge? Answers are beginning to filter out. According to a FIFA employee transcribing what was said during the match, Materazzi,s called Zissou a "big Algerian shit. A Brazilian television program that claims to have used a lip-reader said Materazzi called Zissou,s sister "a whore. The highly respected French anti-racist coalition SOS Racisme issued a press release stating, "According to several very well informed sources from the world of football, it would seem [Materazzi] called Zissou a 'dirty terrorist'." Materazzi, in an answer that can only be called Clintonian, said, "It is absolutely not true. I didn't call him a terrorist. Of course he didn,t comment on what he did call him. Zissou himself has only said cryptically that he would reveal what Materazzi said "in the coming days."

Right now, we do not know beyond a shadow of a doubt what was said but all the circumstantial evidence points at least toward a variant of SOS Racisme's claim. Zissou is the son of Algerian immigrants who has sparred verbally with Europe's far-right political machine for more than a decade. He is an outspoken anti-racist on a team that has defined itself by its multiculturalism and stubborn insistence to stand up against bigotry both inside and outside the sport. Materazzi on the other hand, will be playing this year for the Italian team Lazio, where his father was the former coach. Lazio's fan club, The Ultras, are notorious for their Fascist-friendly politics. Lazio's hardcore Ultras, known as the "Irriducibili," have members in Italy's extra-parliamentary far right and try to use the club to recruit. The group has frequently uses racist and anti-Semitic banners, one time hanging a 50-foot banner that said their opponents were a "team of niggers."

It's wrong to taint Materazzi for the actions of Lazio's fans, but there is more. Earlier this season in a match that pitted Messina against Inter in Sicily, Messina's star African player Marc Zoro famously picked up the ball and walked off the pitch in protest of the monkey chants rained upon him by Inter supporters. In a stirring act of solidarity, many of the Inter players immediately showed support for Zoro's actions. But one opponent yelled, "Stop that, Zoro, you're just trying to make a name for yourself." That opponent's name was Marco Materazzi.

At the start of this tournament I wrote a soccer column with my colleague John Cox, called Racism Stalks the Cup. We expressed our concern that the monkey chants, banana peels, and peanuts raining down on African players this year would continue on the sport's grandest stage. This largely did not occur. But then in the final act, at the moment of most exquisite tension, it seems racism may have actually emerged from the shadows. I, for one, am damn glad that when it did, it ran smack into Zissou's beautiful head.

We don't know with iron certainty what Materazzi said, but if it turns out to be more of the anti-Black, anti-Muslim, garbage that has infected soccer like a virus, the Italian team should forfeit the cup. They should voluntarily give the greatest trophy of them all back to FIFA as a statement that some things in this world are more important than sports. Racism will be the death of soccer if things don't change. Italy can set the sport back on course, with one simple, stunning gesture. Give the damn thing back.

Dave Zirin is the author of "'What's My name Fool?': Sports and Resistance in the United States." Contact him at whatsmynamefool2005@yahoo.com.

City of Mice

2006-07-13T10:24:00.000-07:00

I drive a 1970 Ford Ranchero, and driving down I-5 the other day with my sister I found myself stuck in traffic listening to the city of mice squeaking fiercely in the undercarriage. The struts and the shocks and just the old rubber that lies beneath makes this rodential din, and then my brain drifted into Zappa's "City of Tiny Lights" as it started up in the synapses. This forced me to put "One Size Fits All" on the cd player, something my sister's backround in decency and polite thinking has never before had to contemplate. There's a song on there about San Ber-dean-o (phonetically correct spelling!) about Bobby getting slobbering drunk at the Palomino and doing thirty days for drunkedness. Something about "there's 43 men down in cell block C and there's only one shower and it don't apply to Bobby." Yes, the City of Mice were talking. And they are telling me that its a far better thing to drive an old beater with no airconditioning in the glaring haze of Orange County than to convince yourself that the Volvo Wagon that does 130 in climate controlled comfort is what we all deserve. I like going 130. And I like it when my ass cheeks are not dripping wet with heatburn. I like it a bit too much is what the mice told me.

So the planet she is a-cooking, and even the most daft are starting to come around. Just listen to those freaking mice. They will tell you what you need to know. Sure, the Ranchero ain't helping global warming but we all need some chemical translator and the time to not give a damn about those damning things that seem so freaking important. BTW, Zappa's kid and a lot of the folks who used to tour with FZ are doing a tour and playing Zappa's catelogue. The mice told me to write this down. Go listen to something from Sheik Yerbouti will ya? And those toliet seat covers? Complete bullshit. They protect you from nothing. Al Gore, on the other hand, he might be doing something for the City of Mice.

Carrots and Sticks

2006-07-05T22:41:00.000-07:00

I have taken it for granted that the world my father introduced to me was, while unique, not something outside the centrality of our civilization. That he was raised on a small farm, his father an immigrant from Sweden, his mother an immigrant from Wales, and attended a one room school house and ended up a scientist with a graduate degree from Caltech seemed special but not abnormal. The rationality that clothed me was part of the essence of our modern world, and it felt comforting in a way that did not require constant presentation and defense. There were fair and approachable ways to confront the mystery of life, and if the people around me weren't too freaked out then I didn't need to freak out. It was a world of carrots. You got fed according to your abilities to master the codes of knowledge. It wasn't always fair but it was fair enough. I was a well-fed kid.

The other day I took a runner at a born-again who was trying to defend Ann Coulter and Intelligent design. I guess Ann takes some shots at evolution, and he thought she made hay. I sent him an article from the Nation and he went apoplectic. This issue isn't light for him. Evolution threatens him to his very core so he chooses to attack it and pretend the half bright attacks against the nuances of a theory he abhors prove something big and worth fight over. He is angry, pissed to his core. I believe that he, like our president, comes from the world of sticks. Hell exists and anyone who can't abide this or the magic wands of biblical rationality is the enemy. Hit them. They will only understand when they feel the real pain of God's sublime wrath. We need more sticks he is saying. Sticks that will break godless one's bones.

I stopped fighting this unwinnable fight a while back, not caring to give these clubby haters words to push up against. It was wise, you can't churn shit into butter. But I wanted to move past my own anger at the irrationality and negativity of the half-assed believers because I really don't have any bones to pick against belief, its the anger that causes damage I am coming to believe. I don't want to have confrontations, I want to find some dialogue. Pie in the sky? I know that it would be easier to discount this hate, say its coming from some childhood hurt, but it seems to be a deeply rooted phenomenon. I know plenty who love Jesus but don't judge those like myself who need to be far away from the human institution of religion. But there is this other animal lurking. They want to live in a world of sticks. They may get their wish.

The Fog of War and bullshit

2006-06-26T11:36:00.000-07:00

One of our local pundits, not a bad fellow really but not a real smart fellow either writes in today's column that we should be careful not to judge too harshly our Marines who have been charged with murder and kidnapping. I am not blind to the distinct possibility that these 8 soldiers are going to have to pay a symbolic price to make a larger point about democracy and justice. In this town such a bargin rankles the populace like a Charger's loss, and nobody even entertains the possibility that symbolic or not they may well be guilty. Here in America's Finest Sycophancy, we remain Red and White.

That the aforementioned pundit, a Mr. Logan Jenkins, used the phrase "The Fog of War" opens up the possibility that he has watched the documentary of Mr. McNamara and perhaps learned something from this fine film of Errol Morris. His column shows clearly that he has not, for while he gets the point across that we should show some sort of adult understanding about the stunning violence of modern warfare and the resulting tragedies that result from flinging about a lot of high explosives, he misses most of the larger geopolitical points about having a freaking clue about why you go into a war in the first place. I won't get into the holes that McNamara leaves in his lessons, ones so large and evil as to fairly ruin the effect he sought in making his views known to modern audience. Lesson nine "you may have to do evil to do good" turns the film into an apology for McNamara's tortured soul. It might have been better to say simply that good people do evil when they forget that goodness prevents nothing. Knowing your limitations is what prevents evil. We don't have a fucking clue about limitations right now. But we will.

Wheeling dumbly towards third

2006-06-23T13:38:00.000-07:00

Most baseball fans remember how Bill Buckner had a ball go between his legs, essentially losing the World Series for the Boston Red Sox and forever placing him in the sports goats hall of fame. What Dodger fans might remember was a playoff game that came much earlier in his career whereby he hit a key double late in the game and then, instead of stopping at second, he (in the golden words of Vince Sculley) "wheels dumbly towards third." While I may have missed some of the particulars, and created a sentence with verb tense disagreement, Sculley's statement remains forever burned in my memory. I loved Billy Buck, and felt sick about the Red Sox gaft. But thinking backward I should have seen that it was completely within his character. Somewhere in his reptilian ball playing brain, he had the wild stupidity of one that slithers across the boundaries of reality. And he ended up, so to speak, as roadkill on the baseball legacy highway.

Young Bush is now wheeling dumbly toward third. There sits Iran, who we understand about as well as the emotional lives of turtles, and who qualifies as evil enough to do evil to. When and if the U.S. Airforce, Navy, Marines, etc launch some ill-considered but effectively cataclismic attack against nuclear enrichment sites or perhaps commercial infrastructure, say freaking goodbye to anything you have logically hoped for in regards to a life moored to a modicrum of decency, civility, hope and justice. It will open up a 30 year shitstorm of bile and worldwide hatred towards this fair nation, not to mention a realistic damning terror that will become as much a part of our life here in the states as baseball box scores. Idiots will pray, economies will crumble and your kids may get to fight. Those fucks that voted for this absolute disaster of a regime will probably never get the beatings they deserve. Perhaps they will do the right thing and leave their seatbeats off, crank their wheels hard to the right and crush their bodies in a rollover of hubris.

Just Kill Them

2006-06-15T08:09:00.000-07:00

The three Guantanamo detainees who hung themselves the other day have started a shitstorm of self-doubt amongst the keepers of the gulag. The Pentagon is busy expelling reporters who are daring to try to cover the story there and the stupid fuck general who said this was an act of war is looking as daffy as a duck for his comments that their suicides were "an act of war." Personally, I don't see what all the fuss is about. We are trying to pretend we are nice which always strikes me as the most base type of hypocritical societal self-delusion. Just kill the fuckers. We have lost the nice war, it's time for us to become the great Satan openly and stop this wolf in sheep's clothing transvestitism.

Some may think that just killing these fellows would be wrong which I guess at some candy-ass level is a correct assessment. But we've been killing a lot of people who are far less likely to want to wear a dynamite supository into the pediatric wing of your local hospital and go "gaa gaa goo!" These are fellows who are justifiably pissed off at this point; four years and counting with no due process, no charges, and no future. Only 10 of these guys, who number around 250 have even been charged and frankly we have no idea why the fuck we are holding half of these Muslims. We are holding them because they seemed bad to us. Queers seem bad to the ruling regime right now so maybe we should hold them without charges next. That does sound a little queer though.

Anyway, we kill people all the time for reasons that are opaque to the candy-ass crowd so let's get right with evil and find a way to do these guys in. Maybe there could be an outbreak of bird flu or something, and if it "killed" a couple of the Marines guarding them all the better for the cover story. (I mean we wouldn't have to "kill" the Marines, just make them disappear, give them a new job killing people that we don't want to suffer somewhere else. That is unless they wanted to die for the good of the country, which I'm sure some would volunteer to do being so into death and all and loving God they way they do.)

We'll I hope this doesn't seem too extreme. Go back to your shopping America. Lots of shit to buy!

I am that fanatic

2006-06-12T10:45:00.000-07:00

I've been to batches of shows where I sorta knew the band and upon entering their concert world found myself next to that fanatic who, alone among the hoards of novices like myself, was a true fan. You know who I am talking about, this person knows all the lyrics to all the songs and dances like a dervish for 93% of the show and basically makes you feel like you either don't quite get it or that they have a better dealer than you. In San Diego so many of the shows are marred by stupid crowds who have only showed up because some radio whores told them to and therefore they only know the encore song and maybe two other "deep tracks." The energy of such events tends to be flawed. The societal restraints are still firmly in place, and the eyes overpower the ears, pulchritude winning over orgiastic release. If your lucky there's pulchritude at these things.

Being a fanatic has its rewards. Half way into Eagles of Death Metal's set at the Crystal Ballroom in Portland, Oregon, my wife grabbed the hips of the teenager in front of her (brought to the event by his Zorba the Greek grandfather) and started shaking some life into the rigid little putz. My friends wife swung in front of the little fellow and shook her experience right at him, and the two basically gave him a dose of "the ladies" as frontman Jesse Hughes constantly reminds the crowd is the reason for these rocknroll events. Our little trio had escaped propriety and we were just going nuts, and it struck me that I could care less that most of the capacity crowd was three levels lower than us. They aren't all looking at you. Just remember that.

Final point: When the third song triggered the beefy dickheads to fight forward in an attempt to make a manpit, Hughes himself aimed the bouncers to rip their violent asses out of the show, all while finishing the song. And then before the next number, like a leader, pointed out that some "ladies" had been bounced about and this was certainly uncool. A fucking pro, and a gentlemen. Get that last drunk asshole off the dance floor.

Terrorist = nigger

2006-06-06T08:58:00.000-07:00

I don't like using the n-word but damn if it doesn't explain our love of terrorists. We just can't exist as a nation without some sort of dark soul to justify our God chosen status, and thank goodness these human C4 bombs are making us feel justified for our imperialism. White society and its derivatives (all those who in the words of Ian Anderson "lick the boots of death born out of fear") just can't function without bogeymen. After Ronald Reagan slayed the Soviet dragon, we have been on a continuous diet of bad guys in order to keep us sane and the world safe for mass marketing of the American Dream. These fellows, Quaddaffi (who the fuck knows how to spell his name-I've seen it done six different ways) Hussein, and now Bin Laden, are ultimately sorry attempts to fill a psychic void that has been ruined ever since it became problematic to say the word "nigger" in polite company. But the terrorists, who have always been in the lexicon, have provided a neat solution to the ready need to have a group to blame and say out loud on the nightly news. So say it loud and say it proud. Terrorist. They make us clean by way of their steaming bits of burned flesh. They are the anti-people, who apparently can make decent Marines go into houses and shoot kids. Damn Hajis.

5001 dollar fine and the fires of hell (I hope)

2006-05-31T14:41:00.000-07:00

I was looking at the Nation magazine on line and ran into this memory jog. Kinda makes me hope GM goes bankrupt.

"In 1949, three of our largest corporations--General Motors, Standard Oil of California (SoCal, now Chevron) and Firestone Tire and Rubber (now Japan's Bridgestone)--were convicted of having conspired for more than a decade to replace highly efficient urban electric transit systems with bus lines. The bus lines' operators contracted never to buy new equipment "using any fuel or means of propulsion other than" petroleum. GM, SoCal and Firestone were fined $5,000 each, the maximum the antitrust laws then allowed. GM's treasurer, also convicted, was fined $1."

I guess I should stop buying my gas at Chevron. Damn, I really think Techroline makes my injectors shoot better. . .
Read the whole article at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060612/mintz

Do Your Homework

2006-05-30T09:14:00.000-07:00

A recent Purdue University survey noted that over 50 percent of Americans felt that in order to be a citizen of this fine country you had to be "a Christian." And about half of those idiots felt very strongly that was the case. We have all heard the stories about how more Americans can name the characters of the Simpsons than name the freedoms listed in the constitution. Hey, the Simpsons is a damn good show.

Last night I got sucked in to a show on PBS called "Two Days in October." It was the story of two events, one domestic and one in Vietnam that happened at the same time in 1967. One was an ambush of two American companies about 50 miles from Saigon. The other was a student protest at the University of Wisconsin, Madison that galvinized the anti-war movement. The brilliance of the show is that it had interviews with many of the central characters for each of these events, including folks from both sides of the student protest, cops and students. I won't paraphrase the events but its useful to remember that the Army lied to the American people about what was happening in Vietnam, and its useful to remember that a substantial number of the cops who beat protesters with clubs were ignorant shitheads.

I asked my class to write a paper on why it is that American's can't agree on the meaning of the Vietnam war. And after watching that show it occurs to me that we can't agree because the lesson of the war is the lesson of complete bullshit. We perpetuated bullshit on a country because we are so drunk on our own special ideology and so willfully ignorant about it that we can't face the facts. Let me give you one little fact: 3,400,000. That's how many Vietnamese we killed trying to "free" them from communism. OK, just forget it. Go watch American Idol.

Slave Power

2006-05-21T11:24:00.000-07:00

W has made an attempt to address the immigration issue and in the process he's done us a favor by reminding us of the Northerners who feared slavery prior to the Civil War. Much could be said about the causes of the greatest conflict in our nation's history, but one thing I rarely hear is just how the racist northern fear of slave power was one of the main causes of the fatal animosity between the states. The Minutemen who volunteer to police the southern border are of a direct lineage to those northerners who cared little about "the Negroes" and a lot about what slave labor would do to their free labor economic system.

The Minutemen are right when they suggest that immigrants place downward pressure on the wage system but that hardly covers their xenophobic souls. Nafta basically destroyed our protected labor market and keeping every immigrant out of America isn't going to amount to a hill of beans even if it could be pulled off. Refusing to trade with countries that allow their workers to be exploited and their enviroments to be polluted needs to be our central trading dogma, but given our oily addiction, we are in no position to be curtailing trade with the Chinas of the world. Without their infusion of capital, essentially financing our buying frenzy with loans taken out by our Treasury, we'd be in a world of hurt. Actually, we are in a world of hurt. We just have really good drugs. Eventually, we are going to have to come down. That's the truth the conservative debt dealers are blocking. It seems that we are slaves to their power.

Neo-Christians

2006-05-15T12:11:00.000-07:00

There is a lot of ugly bigoted behavior going on these days in the name of folks who regard themselves as "Christians." As an unchurched heathen, I tend to ignore this type of American or if forced into conversation I always strive to avoid talk of politics and religion. In fact, talking to people I don't know too well I tend to avoid talking politics and religion as a matter of course, especially if I think that I might have to work with them in the future. There have been times when I wished I didn't know what people think in their heart of hearts about these things because I have come to the opinion that had I not known about their general level of intellectual banality, I very well might have been friends with them at a simple plane of shared humanity. Not everyone I like is as addicted to symbol manipulation as I am.

I just don't know how twisted some folks belief systems are, how internally self-serving their bargain with the lord may be. I think this is probably a commonplace for a lot of folks who abhor the anti-gay, pro-slavery (pro-life my ass) prayer in school, jihad against the Muslims crowd. They think that these folks are Christians because they claim to be Christians. Hey, I can claim that I am going to be re-incarnated as a black Labrador retriever but that don't necessarily make it true. Self-proclaiming is popular. We want to think that however oddball we are, their are others who are oddball too. Kinda a weird self-denying prophesy if you come to think about it.

But frankly much of that hate speech uttered by the devout is just plain self-serving shit, and we who dislike the architecture of their frightened minds shouldn't take the shortcut and call them Christians. Meaning when we say it that if you swallow the dogma, your basically admitting that rationality runs second to magic wands in your personal cosmology and that you shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a court of public opinion. I think in fact that much as the way "Neo-Conservatives" has come to mean "crazy-fucker working for the rich and filled with hubris" we might start differentiating between those who actually holds some Christian love in their heart and those who simply want to be declared the victors in an evil bargain with death. There is a substantial difference between MLK and James Dobson. Dobson doesn't ask much of his audience, other than that they should hate what he hates. In return they get to believe in salvation. Hitler offered as much, and his followers are called neo-Nazis. Call Dobson's Focus on the Family sheep, Neo-Christians.

Invasion generation

2006-05-13T12:39:00.000-07:00

Listening to Black Rebel Motorcycle Club the other day pulled my mind over to the war in Iraq and the general level of acquiescence that describes the present public situation. Every generation has its blind spots and every generation has its strengths but the 20 something of the moment seems to me is a stunned little animal, lacking anything to strongly recommend it as a factor of political force. Maybe growing up with papa Reagan so stunted them that the emotion of outrage was detoured into a bleary cul-de-sac of opinionated nullity? Everything is just a matter of opinion, and we are all equal in our rights to express them. So nothing really matters, ‘cause its all bullshit.

The volunteer army stationed near the apocalyptic crescent is full of decent fellows, judging by the ones I have met in my classroom. There is nothing in their demeanor and aspect that worries me, they are doing tough shitty jobs with a lot of esprit de corps and self-awareness as far as I can tell. Either that or they are champion liars. But the ones that have never been to our little war have been tracked to the expectation of success through the Foxed media and Rushed ideology and are really fucked up. They are dangerous precisely because they have just enough anger mixed with their self-righteousness that they feel comfortable ordering air-strikes. Their bullshit detectors are jammed on the liberal frequency and they can’t image an America that hurts others for the wrong reasons. They believe their fathers.

There has been nothing like Kent State in our historical moment, and nothing seems to be coming from the 20 year olds even as they realize they have been lied too. They should be screaming some sort of bloody murder at the moment. Unfortunately they have been insulated by their cheap cynicism (and an all volunteer army) and they think, well, this is just par for the course. Everyone lies. Nothing to get excited about, just keep the economy rolling and if push comes to shove, we can always move back in with the parents. Don’t get negative. In America everything is possible except self-delusion.

Once in a Lifetime

2006-05-08T10:32:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty sure that the life I am leading now is probably going to be viewed, in retrospect, as something of a waste. That's a pretty harsh assessment but wtf, I've been wrong before so I might as well just let fly. On the outside I am successful, prickly for sure but successful. I'm living the words of David Bryne. It'd be nice if I could see the humor in that but I'm thinking that I'm really just killing myself so my kids can be wage slaves.

If you don't know the lyrics to this song it goes something like and you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack and from there to large automobile and beautiful wife and then the asking of well, how did I get here? Watching TV last night, the commercials went from emaciated supermodels hawking bras to make their tiny adolescent tits bulge to McDonald's selling salad and yoga to salvage their corporate image after years of selling quick greasy deathburgers to the poor, the tired and the deluded, to a Kaiser-Permanente ad saying we push blueberries not Prozac. They all push fear. Fear is how you answer the question, "how did I get here?" You fell into normalcy because outside normal is slowly, excruciatingly and viciously being eliminated.

We love our lives, the ones we build in this regime of capital, and we love our toys and our food and our kids and our gardens. It is pleasant here in the land of winking, blinking and nodding. But it is just a la la la floating island in a sea of dark monsters, some which are swimming in the opaque waters of our ignorance, some which feed on the scraps of our willful conceits, and others which we may never see as the maw opens up and swallows its' fill. Somebody told me the other day to "get over yourself." Upon reflection they were right, and then they were nothing at all.

Self-Inflicted Wounds

2006-05-01T08:42:00.000-07:00

The local fishwrap reports today that Americans are offended by the Republican's generous offer of a 100 bucks to offset rising gas prices. To the Republican's I can only say, "well, duh!" 100 bucks buys you two tanks of gas, wait a sec, one tank and a splash so I guess if I'm used to being bought off for a couple of grand (gimme my tax cut, red state boys!) 100 would seem pretty offensive. Seems to me that they shouldn't have tried to bribe the public for anything less than a grand.

Yet the idea that gas prices are too high is sort of a hoot, unless of course you are barely scraping by and you live in a city that has only recently discovered mass transit. I do feel bad for those folks but it doesn't change the way I feel about anyone driving a V-8 four-wheel drive station wagon, you know, a damn SUV. No tears for you. In fact, fuck you if you can't take a joke. If you think you're a lefty and you are complaining about the price of gas, you aren't really a lefty. Complain about the obscene oil company profits sure, but high gas prices are good thing. We might actually have to face reality, which is for our kids if not ourselves going to include a daily report on worldwide carbon dioxide levels.

The fattening of the American automobile over the last couple of decades is just plain short-sighted, kind of like a 100 dollar congressional bribe. The good news is that engine technology has gotten scads better and for the extra 100-200 horsepower required to pull your chubby thighs and cloven hooved offspring around with the type of alacrity you deserve the mileage per gallon has only dipped slightly. For each horse we use less fuel, and this is a good thing. Unfortunately we have been too fricking selfish to put this calculus to use to cut fuel consumption. This dog is now, just now, learning to hunt. Let's all pray for 4 bucks a gallon and some new blood in the public sector.

Lynching Capitalism

2006-04-27T08:55:00.000-07:00

Teaching U.S. history is sometimes a satisfying experience, never more so when you find a hook that works and you see in the eyes of the students a dawning recognition that the past was a freaking nasty place. Patriotism being what it is these days, an insidious virus of banality and acquiescence to the lowest common denominator, there's a fair amount of pushback built into every survey class like the one I teach, and that makes for a few openly confrontational students who have swallowed the Fox News mind pill and inserted the Bill O'Reilly American Imperium celebratory butt plug. Actually I sort of relish their agitprop, and their squinty W-esque smugness.

Regardless, the hardest thing to do, sort of a natural impossibility I believe, is to get modern Americans to empathize with their proto-modern ancestors who lived in a world of raw indignity and injustice. Last night I took a wild run at trying to get them to conceptualize Progressive Era capitalism as an oddity as equivalent to their lived experience in the modern economy as lynching seems to their racial mentality. After a lovely description of an actual lynching, spiced up with a dollop of feminist irony (the first woman Senator in history, Rebecca Latimer Felton, was an advocate of the practice) I suggested that the fear and loathing they were experiencing was an appropriate emotion in its distance to their understanding of early capitalism. Sure, I could suggest they read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle but this turned into a irresistible shortcut. Finishing the demonstration with a tangential shift into globalization and the exporting of our dirtiest economic exploitations offshore (did slave labor make your shirt or put that diamond on your finger?) you could fairly see the clicking go off in brain after brain, that dawning recognition that makes teaching worth the effort. And as the cynic, actually the sharpest knife in the drawer, went for the bait and was hooked too by the realization that yes indeed, the working life of the working stiff in the past was a capital lynching indeed I could afford myself one clean breath for having not wasted their time on a cool night in History 110.

America's Finest Lobotomy

2006-04-24T12:06:00.000-07:00

When I first moved to San Diego in 1979 I was not very impressed. I thought, out loud unfortunately for me, that here was a city lacking in parks, anti-bicycle, noisy, dirty, over-crowded, car-centric, and lacking some sort of intellectual consciousness. I remember driving one of my cousins to complete apoplexy, to the point where she suggested I just leave. Leaving wasn't an option I could contemplate, so I stayed, got married, and now have the complete freedom of a mortgage, two jobs, kids in high school . . . the freedom of success!

So yeah, I'm totally screwed. 26 years later and I, for stupid self-indulgent reasons I can only begin to accept, I have been asking folks a similar question: what is wrong with this place? I know that the short answer is simply me. I don't fit in, and I ask too many negative questions. People I've queried on the general malaise that is San Diego "intellectual" life ask me fairly enough if anywhere else is better? Better for what I guess should be my reply. But it always puzzles me how normal it is for folks to always default to local pride whenever they are describing their city and their life. "I bought this ticket and I'm taking the ride. And because life has got to be great, therefore I made the right decision! San Diego rocks!"

Please. San Diego is kinda pathetic, us always looking north to say what we are by what we are not. And the rest of the nation and world sees us as a cul-de-sac branching off from LA, with a second rate newspaper (hey, we got a Pulitzer, for busting a guy that the editorial board loved and always mindlessly supported, woo-hoo!) half-assed sport teams, a polluted river, gridlock, and, of course a world class zoo. The scientific community here is first-rate, but how much does that trickle down into the mentality of the plebeians? Like any huge metropolis there are cities within the city that can be occupied with some amount of grace and decency. But you can't argue with the voting record of this town: we vote for stupid. Stupid works for us. And that is the answer I think I will always get, gussied up and painted pretty colors like a 19th century whore, when I ask why it is this place is such a parochial shitland. Now shut up and enjoy the weather will ya?

Death by Sexy

2006-04-24T09:58:00.000-07:00

For those of you out there who need a band to live by, right now there is a "joke band" named Eagles of Death Metal that might just make the difference for you. I first experienced EODM as the opening act for Queens of the Stone Age last year. Sitting behind a couple of fellows from Los Lobos at the House of Blues, these fellows came out and started playing their "boot scooting" brand of garage rock with such precision and hilarity that I do think my brain started to melt just a tad. I'll never forget looking over my shoulder at my buddy, grinning maniacally myself, to see the psychedelic muse in his eyes as he bobbed his head clownishly in affirmation that here, yes hear we are my god these guys are freaking good. How many times have you gone to see one band, especially a hot in the moment band like Queens, only to be completely mind-boggled by something you didn't expect to see in the opener? Like never. For me, that would be exactly never. The new cd is out, part of an apparent 3 cd triptych that Josh Homme and Jesse "the devil" Hughes plan to complete with one more "take over the world" submission. On this one they claim to have ripped of better Rolling Stones songs from, but it would hard to write a better song than the first cd's "Speaking in Tongues." Homme's main band is QOTSA but he plays drums with Eagles in concert at least occasionally. He says one primary goal with his bands is to get "that one big dumb drunk guy" out of the audience. Which is another way to say that EODM is, to put it in Hughes words, "for the ladies." Call me his . . .

Jesus wants to kick your ass

2006-04-17T09:07:00.000-07:00

Drinking a 7 and 7 with two friends in front of my buddy's house on Passover, we observed a pony-tailed solicitor approaching from the east. How door to door begging got so popular I can only speculate, but they tell us down in Old Town not to give quarters to the homeless because they'll just waste it on booze or drugs. Perhaps that caution should be rebroadcast to affluent suburbia to lessen the bane of the Christian canvasser.

We proactively engaged our missionary with what we considered lighthearted jibes directed at defusing the script we correctly anticipated might be coming. Patting our pockets theatrically, had either of us actually had a buck for the self-proclaimed graduate of Acme Missionary School (not its real name . . .) we might have actually succumbed to the easier path of "just take it and go." But when pony-tail sardonically opined "god bless you anyway" I stupidly took his implied negativity and amplified it with "especially the Christians." This lead to a macho back and forth of "everybody" vs "the Christians" because I suggested they needed it more given the born-again in the White House and the present geo-political situation of terminal clusterfuck.

When PT took it, logically in retrospect, to the next level by quoting scripture I should have de-escalated. Wisdom being the better part of valor and also being nearly absent in my incautious 40s, I told him, roughly, "shut the fuck up" and "I am so sick of you religious motherfuckers." Ah, the power of the f-bomb. He called me out, stupidly for him after ringing the neighbor's doorbell, telling me something to the effect that "just because I'm a Christian doesn't mean I won't kick your ass." At this my reason returned, perhaps because he looked like he'd seen a gym or maybe a Meth dealer or two in his day, and perhaps because I was now chagrined beyond my usual point by bringing this holy soul closer to his level of ignorance than I should have. Also, as he was threatening me the neighbor opened his front door and I didn't really want to continue our discourse as it may have interfered with PT's chance to collect another buck. To his credit he remembered his real reason for visiting the neighborhood and did a little quick duck back into begging character.

As an epilogue, it seems as though anger management training is in my future. And perhaps it should be in America's too.

How can you tell if Bush is lying . . .

2006-04-11T11:40:00.000-07:00

The short answer would seem to be: his lips are moving. But it really isn't too useful to suggest that our beloved W is willfully lying to cover up the mendacity of his regime. The lines between truth and fiction have blurred so completely in the last six years that some sort of new word should be invented to address the phenomenon. Trution? Fictuth? Ah, whatever. The American people actually deserve this s.o.b. That's the reality of the situation.

I could be accused of being a misanthrope for saying such a blasphemy, but really, is there anywhere in the institutions of American society that is willing to step up and call the demons out of power? So far there have not been enough deaths, enough suffering, enough outrage to fundamentally change the way business is done in DC. And the willingness of Americans to live in their own comfortable orbits and look askance at world opinion and the misery we are dealing worldwide with our policies is stunning in its solipsistic obsession. So I feel pretty confident saying we deserve this bastard. I hear more chickens leaving their roost's. I am not happy at the sight of such feathers falling from the sky but they are what they are. An inconvenient truth.

What to do? Read your Orwell, confront that mindless patriot parroting the latest Fox News shitrant, donate to moveon.org or greenpeace or counterpunch.org, put a bumper sticker on your car that suggests Leviticus was a fucking dumbass, etc. The sorry state of the Democrats is of course another big part of the problem but for my money the issue is that we all are afraid to offend our friends. Better to piss of some sort of soft headed acquaintance than to add more inertia to the coming storm. And there is a storm brewing. A really fucking big one.

I hate fucks in trucks

2006-04-07T08:59:00.000-07:00

I had one of those typically Southern Californian traffic events happen yesterday that reminded me that even though we can pretend to be open minded, deep down we really do hate some bastards. I could make some nice noises about how the skinhead driving a red F150 with the Harley Davidson sticker and the Vietnam Vet flag etc probably couldn't wait to get home to his loving, kind wife and his two cute kids; how he'd been working out of town and he missed them so much that my not pulling within a skeeter's asshole to the vehicle in front of me on 52 East at the merge from 3 to 2 lanes allowed at least two more cars to get between him and his joyful reunion. Selfish me in my vain convertible, wasting those imaginary 4 seconds this was going to cost him. You know what they say, a second can feel like a lifetime. Especially right before you die.

I will credit him for not, upon pulling along side me (after threatening to go offroad around me as I tapped my brakes in a passive aggressive salute to his impatience) for not simply calling me a motherfucker and inviting me to feel his masculine fury. The theatre of the highway must have amused the others stuck in the shitmess that 52 is as it comes down the hill into the Santee rubbish zone. He simply said "keep up" and I replied "it doesn't matter." He said "yes it does," whereby he pulled within a skeeter's asshole of the Hyundai that had been in front of me. I apologize to that poor driver for elevating his stupid competitive dickhead feelings to such a fever pitch. I am an asshole, indeed.

But finally, the real point is that in traffic merge situations, driving slower and allowing people to merge in front of you is actually in everyone's best interest. Not just as a courtesy, but because it actually speeds the overall average speed. Every time someone has to hit the brakes it causes a dozen others to do so on the freeway and this adds reaction time which tends to exacerbate traffic jams. Don't believe me, look it up. (no link here you lazy bastard) I just wish he understood I was trying to help him get back to his family sooner. I hope he got a big hug when he got home. . . . Or a bullet in the head.

A knife edge in DC

2006-04-06T13:48:00.000-07:00

Ok I can't exactly figure out how to post pics to this freaking thing but here is a pic that my lovely wife took of me in DC. And if you can't make out all the allegorical and metaphorical elements in the image, keep staring and it will come to you. You also might look at a one dollar bill for clues to decoding the semiotics of Po.

DeLay works for Satan

2006-04-04T08:42:00.000-07:00

There will be thousands and thousands of posts today about Tom DeLay and his decision to step down. There will be thousands and thousands of predictable words about his motivations, his timing, his guilt, his perfidity, his innocence, his legacy. But why should we care? Hasn't the damage already been done?

I went and saw Mort Sahl at a church (he turned and faced the huge crucifix on the wall behind the altar and said "who's that for?") and of the many funny and trenchant things he said, when it came to remarking about the damage W has done to the country he simply said that "its going to take decades to repair the damage." The damage Delay, Frist, Rove, Cheney, Rice, etc ad nauseum have done to this country will take decades to repair if in fact anything does get repaired. These fuckers are the political equivalent to Katrina. We are all New Orleaneans now. The levee broke. The polis is broken and its going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

Immigration and Slavery

2006-03-30T09:27:00.000-08:00

The other thing that occurred to me this morning was that as a nation, we learned how to control masses of people for the good of very few people during the 19th century, and frankly we have turned it into a science. Economics. It should be worth noting but it isn't really noted that our country operates on a principle of free trade that is based upon the unimpeachable ideal that your markets (your being anyone else but us) should be open to us so that we can exploit them to the fullest extent of our ability. Not everything is exploitation, but in the main, the momentum of our trade and economic policies is not to provide more liberty and freedom for our trading partners but simply to provide more opportunity for our corporations to make shitloads of money. And if we can make money by using your labor (which is literally slave labor in some cases) then we are all for it. We love making money, and drinking mint juleps whilst resting our feet upon street urchins we brought in from the cold. The idea of making money off of slaves did not go away after the Civil War. It just evolved into something less crass.

Our assholes

2006-03-30T09:18:00.000-08:00

Woke up this morning with the clear thought that all those things I have taught my class about the nature of American chattel slavery apply in a real sense to our modern condtions. I wouldn't try to tell you simply that we are slaves as we go to our fine cubicles and earn huge dollars so we can be the consumers we always wanted to be. That would be an affront to the slaves of the 19th century. We have a lot of advantages, which we tend to self-identify under our definition of freedom, such as we can't be whipped (with leather or wood) by our bosses nor do we have to work on Saturdays (all Saturdays anyway) or have our wives screwed by the master, or our children sold away from us or live in leaky shakes with no decent medicine. Then again, all of these things do apply to some degree and it would behoove us to start opening our eyes and hearts up to the idea that we are slaves of a different sort. Last night on the TV show "The Evidence" Orlando Bloom's character pointed out to his cop partner (Shawn Estes) that he was "pre-pissed." I see a lot of that pre-pissed behavior in myself and fellow man, but what I don't see is an analogous understanding that we are "pre-beaten." We don't even try to fight back anymore. The man still exists. Fight back you pussies.

And away we go . . .

2006-03-29T14:29:00.000-08:00

There was an article in the NYT today that occasioned a lot of intelligent whining from that selfish bunch of isolated whites about what to do about the black boys who don't want what white boys want. It seems to me that not wanting what white boys want shows yet another example of how black boys know something that all the kings sociologists and all the kings educators don't know or won't accept: the game is rigged so that liberty is never the reward. I teach history and it seems like when people read the Declaration of Independence they forget that liberty is not necessarily something that goes along with equality. And it just pisses the people who make a living off of analyzing the "dysfunction" of black society crazy to think that there is something superior (however marginal or isolated) about black culture even at its lowest ebb to just giving in and working to bring the GNP to an ever higher level of accomplishment. Going along is "a white thing" and a lot of education and success is sold out crap. And it kills as surely as a drive-by. White folks so uppity these days we want to make sure that the black folks die for things we approve of.