City of Mice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.