Okay, so I'm Blogging now: Specious observations of an over-examined life

BLOG THE FIRST: January 16th, 2004

I don't know why the hell I'm bothering with this. Which only stands to reason, as anyone reading it, no doubt, will wonder why in the hell they're bothering with it too. Maybe just the thought that a blog might be something the reader takes in at nearly the same rate the writer wrote it. Nah. That's silly.

The HTML tags alone negate that possibility.

Anyways, this will be a short note, especially for a blog, especially for the first blog in a series, which this may or may not be. I'm on my way to the showers on a cold winter morning, having gone to sleep too late and gotten up too early. I intend to mount my vehicle, drive to my favorite music store, an amatuer joint up in the area known as The University (named for it's proximity to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, which our dumbass mayor thinks ought to be re-named the University of Charlotte in order to boost our fair city), where I shall buy new strings for my wife's guitar and tune the 12-string Takamine they have hung on the wall (unless someone's bought it by now). I have made it a habit, since the Wifey and I discovered the store back before Christmas, to drop in and tune the thing every few weeks, usually buying some trinket or another in the process. The last time I dropped in was when Doc Nagel and wife were out east visiting. Chris remarked, after I had tuned and played the thing for a bit, that it was a beautiful machine. I concurred, but then said I already have enough guitars-- I really do-- and that it wouldn't fit in with the decor of the back bedroom which serves as office and music room. I then noticed-- and noted-- that the warm butterscotch tone of the maple sides and spruce top, finished natural, would match almost exactly the wood flooring & furniture of our newly refurbished front room. Ah, well.

(On that visit, the desk jockey informed me that the 6-string version of the same model guitar came in and sold just the day before. Ah, well . . .)

JANUARY 16th, SUPPLEMENTAL

As Doc Nagel correctly points out, this is not a blog:

"In fact, what I am writing, and what you've written, are not examples of blogs. A blog in the strict sense is a hypertext document linking to other stuff, with abbreviated entries in a main page linked to the full text."

In fact, I think I knew that. In fact, the ancient and virtuous practive of blogging, which refers to the keeping of a web log, a record of activities and pertinent data, was once quite practical. It wasn't just a personalized journal with web notes and links, but rather a research tool for other web denizens to use to further their own activities. Of course, these days, when links to everything everywhere are ubiquitous, they tend to be less useful and more full of personal junk. In fact, were I to be blogging, I would be sticking in links to every site I go to on a daily basis, and that would quickly become redundant. What the Doc and I are doing is just journal keeping, and I resisted it for a while, tempting though it was, on the grounds that a) I'd feel dumb, 2. I'd lapse, and III_b nobody'd care anyways. (The last one, of course, is probably the most valid. I might, in fact, ditch this altogether and wipe it off the page.

This is just an exercise in which I write about whatever I want to write about, and what I want to write about right now is the price of gas. Over in my neck of the woods (Charlotte, NC) the price for premium has jumped significantly, and, scarier, the price fluctuates like all hell from place to place. I have to put premium in my car, a Chrysler LeBaron convertible, or else the valves rattle. Tooling about today running errands I noted prices ranging from $1.71 to $1.79, which is abnormal. The price fluctuations normally don't range any wider than a nickle a gallon. I chanced across a better price at my neighborhood Crown station, $1.64 per gallon, and decided that I would go ahead and fill my tank instead of waiting to see if the prices were better on Monday. And it's not that I'm cheap. It's that the reason the tags have gone up is the outfall from the revelation that the major US petrol corporations recently fessed up to lying about the nation's oil reserves (there aren't any). Why should I pay these bastards?

That's unfair. I know it's unfair. But that's why we blog.

Of course the price of gas out in California, where some mooks live, is even worse. Last time I was out there the Doc and I went to Yosemite and ended up getting gas at the Last Chance Gas 'n' Grub (not it's real name) up at the top, not far from the entrance to the park. There they were charging something really outrageous, like three and a half bucks a gallon. I remember being shocked, then thinking, "Well, I guess that's what it costs up here."

BLOG THE NEXT: January 18th: Stringing a Guitar

Several years ago my wife asked for a guitar for Christmas, thinking she would like to learn how to play. After a thorough examination, I selected for her a 3/4 size Montana for about 80 bucks, on the grounds that the price was right, the quality of the instrument was decent, and she wanted a smaller instrument to learn on. She noddled around on it for a few months, practicing chords as we sat on the sofa watching the evening news, and then lost interest in the thing. (This, sports fans, is the world's oldest story. The same process occurred with my nephew, Joe Macklin, who has officially outgrown the half-size instrument I bought him some years ago, and my niece, Amanda Airington, who has her 3/4 stuffed under her bed somewhere.)

Recently, the Wifey decided she wanted to learn again, so last Friday I ran out to the University and bought new strings fopr the Montana. I use D'Addario strings, and I have a hard time-- have had a hard time-- buying anything else. A pro musician aquaintance of mine swears by Elixir strings (also by D'Addario), but the 12-Strung strings come in a slightly (very slightly) heavier gauge than the D'Addario 12-string extra lights, and, well, I just couldn't do it. The Montana got a brand new set of D'Addario extra lights (six string) on purchase, and that's what she's wearing now. I unstrung her one string at a time, applied the new strings, and she sings like a cheap angel now.

Years ago, in the music store I frequented (and would later work at) there was a guitar tech/sales guy named Bob. After a customer dropped off a guitar for re-stringing, Bob would grab a pair of wire cutters and, grinning, cut each string. His claim was that it was faster than unwinding the strings and, for reasons I never fully got, better for the machine as well. In the back of my head, however, I always understood that Bob was doing what we all thought of as a kind of crude and uneffective vigilante justice: people who wouldn't take the trouble to re-string their owen instruments deserved to have them cut by a mildly sadistic guitar tech.

It's a funny old world, id'n it?

BLOG THE FOLLOWING: January 23rd: Advertising and life.

There are two schools of thought regarding advertising: either you think advertising is an effective medium for conveying the superiority and utility of consumer and corporate products and services, or not. I've always tended towards the "or not" category, because so much advertising is so bloody damned stupid.

This causes me difficulty, being the kind of hyper-honest person I am. For instance, although I appreciate the subtleties and nuances of gourmet food, I also have a deep appreciation for the occasional great big slab of dead cow on a bun, preferrably with fake cheeze. (To be completely fair, the cheese is not precisely fake, but it sure as hell ain't Winsleydale.)

But here's the problem: occasionally, one of the purveyors of said crimes against gustation will come out with an ad campaign that is so completely horrible that I will have a hard time rising above it. That's how big a geek I am: I actually feel guilty about lending aid and support to the advertiser. Even though I know, in my heart of hearts, that advertising is one of the hugest shell-games in the known universe, that my single purchase will have little or no effect on the ads, that by the time the numbers are put up to suggest whether or not the ads are in fact selling the product they are more thoroughly cooked than the product itself, I still feel like I shouldn't be doing this. I feel as if, as ridiculous as it might sound, my consumption of this junk food is more damaging to the society as a whole than it is to my fragile human form.

I know. I know. Stupid. Fortunately, a few of the most egregious offenders have removed themselves from the field. Burger King, for instance, offers the most consistently insulting advertising in the fast food world, but fortunately their product offends me more than the ads. The fake "grilled" taste of the burger always catches up with me before I finish it, so I only go there when they are offering trinkets in the kids' meals that prove irresistable to my nieces and nephews, an occurrence that has been blessedly rare of recent times. Hardee's . . . Let's begin with the name. Hardee's? Who the hell . . . Oh, never mind. What's in a name? What you get at Hardee's is actually Carl's Jr. They bought the chain some years ago, replacing whatever product had been being sold with the Carl's Jr. patented TNT beef. That's right folks: Tough and Tasteless. So when I hear or see one of their insipid ads for a thickburger, I think to myself, "Wow, now you can get a really huge indigestible hunk of crap. The last time I ate a burger at a Hardee's was shortly after Carl's Jr. bought them. That doesn't mean anything unless you have a really good long-term memory. I have tried the breakfast once since then. I now permanently know better.

Jack in the box . . . Well, I haven't had a Jack in the Box product sine the late 70's, but I love their advertising. There are six or eight Jack in the Boxes in my area, follwing a building push in the late 90's, but for one reason or another I have yet to be significantly tempted. At least two of them are positioned so that by the time I see them from the road I am already past their entrances. Two of them are always on the other side of the road: one is on a corner of a bad intersection, and the other is always on the left hand side of a six lane road on the way out to where we're going, and only on the right hand side on the way back, by which time I've already been fed. Problem solved.

But then there's McDonald's. Which brings us to ther impetus for today's blog. (In reference to the above de-bunking of my use of the term, I still use it as a perjorative, to remind myself that there's nothing hugely important about this, that no one's paying any attention anyways, and that I shouldn't take it too damned seriously.) Yesterday afternoon, in the process of running about doing errands with my father in law and niece Cayla, it occurred to me that I might have a McD's for lunch today. On Fridays I always end up running out for a thing or two in the middle of the day, mainly by way of keeping myself occupied, and often that means something special for lunch. When our Yankee kin are down, it often means seeking out some kind of exotic fare with a nephew or niece (or two). On my own I tend towards either something subtle or something substantial.The Harris Teeter supermarket in our neck of the woods employs a very nice sushi chef, and very often I'll opt for a tray of spicy roll and a 22 ounce Sam Adams. Other times, the something substantial ends up being a burger, and McD's offers several products that fit the bill.

I have a hard time eating lunch alone sometimes. It's a psychological thing. I read some wretched short story years ago where the characters talked about the abject humility of the middle-aged bald guy eating dinner alone in a Chinese restaurant, and, on some stupid subconscious level, that stuck with me. But I have been able to wolf down a burger at McD's solo, a tendency that I picked up during a Christmas shopping sortie some years ago when, famished, I broke off from the pack at the Wal Mart and grabbed a Big Mac at the in-store-store. Some time later, actually years later, I dropped into a McD's that had bins full of fliers giving out the full nutrition info of every McD's product-- this was just in advance of the big low-carb advertising binge currently going on-- and discovered that the Double Quarter Pounder I was consuming supplied me with 100% of my USDA daily recommended intake of fat. That helped alot.

So this morning, digesting my first cup of tea and contemplating what kind of burger I might procure from McD's, I was distressed to find myself viewing one in the latest line of their commercials. The last line was insulting enough-- "We Love to See You Smile"-- up until the crowning moment when, due to widespread industry (media) outcry, the corporation admitted that their half-trained, low paid employees were anything but glad to see the patrons smile and instituted an all-franchise-encompassing program of employee advancement training, seeking to make it seem possible that any lowly entry-level hire could feasibly move into management before reaching the age of 40. (I can't speak universally, but the folks who work in the McD's I happen into in my area still seem, by and large, pretty content for fast food workers.

The problem with the new campaign, however, is twofold. First, the slogan was obviously created by a white man. Secondly, the campaign markets strongly to the black community.

Now, that might sound like a pretty strongly racist statement, and it is, of sorts. For while I myself am not a racist, there are no stronger racists than those in advertising.

The slogan, "I'm Lovin' It!" is pretty clearly the kind of thing meant to appeal to white males. I might be missing something, but I am not aware of the phrase being of any great coin in the hip-hop world. The ads themselves, however, are strictly tailored to the hip-hop world, which, I can say without serious fear of contradiction, is, and remains, largely black.

But he condescending racism is really only part of the problem. While McDonalds, or their advertising people, may be racist, or perhaps they are simply trying to hedge their bets against Burger King (which has been doing racist advertising forever), the advertisements seem to have almost nothing to do with their food at all. It's as if they're selling a way of life, have absolutely no idea what that way of life is, or why it might be remotely attached to the food they sell. It's insulting. Or, at least, I find it insulting.

So, approaching the second cup of tea, I had a sinking feeling of impending doom. Dammit, I want that burger. (Probably, improbably, the newest offering on the menue, the McHero, which has only one real distinction as a burger: it is big.) But the advert had really put me off it. I mean, it was so unrelentingly, insultingly stupid. How can I act in support of that?

Blessedly, the next thing I encountered upon returning to my desk (I have the atrocious habit of watching TV while I write, which, clearly, slows me down and inhibits the creative process) was an ad for Manwich. Why this crap is still around I cannot say. I suppose some people need to have their ground beef sweetened before they can consume it. My mother served us Manwich two or three times before desisting in the face of entrenched protesters (me, my brother & sister). So after hearing the joyous proclaimation, in multi-part harmony, "I want some fun stacked on a bun, I want some Manwich please!" I concluded that I could swallow my shame along with a burger and fries and wash it down with a soda.

Yeah. If I can do all that, I guess I can order the McHero without much additional strain.

BLOG THE NEXT: January 25: Snow Day

The morning paper carries, as it's front page news (after the ongoing aggrandizement of our local sports franchise, the Carolina Panthers, who, after years of disservice, have won a bid to go to the Super Bowl), the startling rvelation that the Democratic hopefuls have begun to eschew "issues" and concentrate on which candidate has the best chance of winning the election.

Oh. So "issues" are no longer important. Freakin' DUH! "Issues" have never been important! "Issues" have always been a thin tissue of civic concern to cover the cold hard motivation that has always governed every candidate's campaign: the desire to raise money and win the election. Call me cynical, but that's the impression I get.

Doc Nagel has informed me that he has no help nor guidance to offer in what he calls my "burger dillema." I might have guessed as much. Doesn't matter. I had my burger. I ordered the McHero meal. It was good. I'm probably up to my McD's quota for the mext month or so.

In other news, it's snowing here. The paper also warns-- aside, obviously, from the unveiling of the Democrats' souls-- of the possibility of sleet and/or freezing rain all day long. We have planned a junket out to my pal Bryan's to watch crappy movies and, probably, eat pizza. I don't think the weather is going to circumvent our plans. If nothing else, we'll just stick to the surface roads and avoid the Interstate. And feel blessed that we already have both milk and bread. In our part of the world, when this kind of weather hits, the natives go nuts and hit the stores to stock up on milk and bread. No one knows why.

THE ANSWER IS BLOGGING IN THE WIND: January 26th: The Icing on the Cake

So last month, as Doc Nagel and his wife were visiting, we had perfect weather, 50-60 degrees and blue skies, with what the weathermen insist on calling "variable winds." Now we got the flip side. Yesterday dawned to a light snow, which was delightful, following by a spate of sleet, which was less enchanting. Overnight the roads turned into rough sheets of ice. My wife, stalwart that she is, insisted on driving in to work, only to find that most of the rest of the company were less fearless. I have been bragging about our lovely weather off and on for the last three months-- Fall and Winter are particularly splendid here on a regular basis, although Spring has a great deal to be said for it, and summer is not at all bad, just so long as you own one of them cars where the top comes off-- so I can't help but think that the current bad weather is primarily my fault.

Last year we had an ice storm that was a real dilly, I mean a shocker. It broke hundred year old trees (yes, we still have some) and bent others to the ground. Many of the trees are still bent to this day; we have whole forests of arches. The power was out due to downed lines in many areas for an entire week. The meteorologists, who are almost universally wrong about these things, are predicting an ice storm on par with that one this afternoon. Yep. All my fault. I shoulda kept my mouth shut.

So, since my wife was off practicing the luge, I got up at seven thirty instead of slug-a-bedding until after eight as usual. As a matter of killing time, I watched CNN, for the first time in I don't know how many years, for longer than thirty seconds. I was pleasantly suprised. WHat I expected, from the previous spate of thirty second viewings, was a byte show of horrific proportions. What I found is that CNN, thought incredibly dumb in whole, has more bright bits that I would have expected. The sharp right-wing turn I had had an inkling of before wasn't actually there in whole; the middle-aged curmudgeon who acts as color commentator in the trio (two anchors and an old fart) isn't so much right-wng as just mean. Funny mean, but still. Aside from a medical report that made no sense at all (Paging Dr. Gupta!) and a selection of suggested titles for Clinton's memoir (overdue and past deadline, not to mention late, and thus in the news), most of the broadcast was 80% better than what one might get on any of the network morning shows. (If that's not damning with faint praise, I don't know what is.)

I grew into adulthood with the advent of CNN. I had grown up with Ted Turner's enterprising cable stations. I even dug his billboard-- "I Was Cable When Cable Wasn't Cool"-- although my understanding from the rumblings out of Atlanta was that he was an unspeakable bastard. I became politically aware at about age 3, and when I entered college I became a news junky. On any given day I would buy a copy of the Observer, the New York Times, and USA Today, which, at the time, was being unfairly maligned as being a comic book, but often had good intel on subjects not covered by the other rags. I usually got back to my dorm room mid-afternoon, where I would turn on CNN Headline News, the latest wrinkle in Turner's burgeoning empire, for the latest. I found out that I could watch the first half hour, roll over, take a nap, and count on waking up if anything new turned up in the cycle. (This was during a brief two-year stint in which I was perpetually exhausted enough that I could, in fact, take naps.) Fairness first: in those days, as in these, after the first half-hour of HN, it was the same damned thing over and over again, until something new broke-- thus the wake-up call. Fairness last: these days, HN doesn't really get to anything new faster than anyone else, especially given the advent of internet news outlets, and they have increasingly gone for "Item!" stories. As if the singing dentist weren't enough.

We stood around entranced while CNN HN showed us the bombing of Libya. We stood petrified while we watched the Challenger disintegrate into a firey slash in the Florida sky. But by the time the Gulf War came around, with thousands of journalists standing around in the desert waiting for America to make up its mind, it was over. The people at CNN had lost their keen edge. They expected now to be treated as the Prima Donnas all press people expect they are. When the cell phone calls came out of the darkened Baghdad hotel rooms, while the press world was screaming "What Heroes!" most of the rest of us were thinking "What Dumbasses!"

BLOGGING IN THE WIND CONTINUED: Of Burgers and Music

Speaking of dumbasses, I just had the last two out of a box of six frozen White Castle cheeseburgers for breakfast, whereby I offer the following observations:

--Fast food is precisely that: fast. You might as well eat it as not.

--Discriminating tastes can be as limiting as they are illuminating. Were I not able to appreciate a good fast food burger, I'd never know how crappy the frozen White Castle burgers were.

--I am capable of being a dumbass too.

Of course, once you know this about yourself, it is impreative that you pick your battles well. Neice Cayla had a friend over to the folks' place yesterday, a young fellow she ahs been talking about non-stop for the past week. Although she is not far from the right age for a first crush-- she's 8-- she insists that The Kid is NOT a love interest. She is, however, fascinated by him in that way that only Cayla can be fascinated. On arrival at the house, after driving through slippery slush in drizzeling sleet, I discovered, via Cayla's delighted proclaimation, that The Kid owned a snow board!

I tried to sit on my immediate judgement, but my instincts screamed to me a single central message: The Kid is a brat. A snow board is a glorified piece of plywood. It costs a hundred bucks to be a public nuisance or, in the case of The Kid, awkward.

As the day wore on my instincts proved true and honest. The Kid was jaded beyond belief, didn't stop to be introduced on the way into the house, virtually led Cayla around by the nose. Although he did stop to take off his snowy boots before going into the house, he issued a proclamation that Josh (Cayla's younger brother) better not mess with his snowboard, or else he'd have to beat him up. Being a good uncle, I let it go. If Cayla want's to be friends with this little shit, I don't necessarily know that I have anything to say about it.

A bit later, Cayla asked me to play her favorite song, the Rolling Stones' "Dead Flowers," to which she commonly dances and twirls. I played, but The Kid was too jaded to be impressed, stood there smirking, with the result that Cayla was too self-conscious to twirl. After that she asked me to play "Relaxin' with Mister Todd." It's a deceptively simple tune, originally based on the chord changes to Robert Johnson's "Hot Tamales," finished as a tribute to my pal Doc Nagel's habit of watching hockey games in the far back room of their house with the elderly stray they took in some years back (the titular Mister Todd). I knew it was a mistake, but I played, as I always do when Cayla asks. The Kid sat in a chair with La Cayla, smirking and making faces and sticking his pinky up his nose. I played a slightly truncated version of the piece, after which The Kid mentioned to Cayla-- not to me, mind you-- that his mom plays the guitar too, as well as the piano and the flute. I shooed the kids off to lunch, and reflected that there are always bumps in the road. After long contemplation I have decided not to worry about it. The odds that The Kid's influence will turn Cayla into a brat are not worth intervening in the situation. The chances that Cayla's sweet nature will make The Kid turn over a new leaf are equally slim. With any luck at all, I'll never have to deal with him again.

BLOG EVERLASTING: January 27th: Le Show, Tamales, Advertising

As noted on my links page, I have made a habit of listening to Harry Shearer's Le Show. It isn't broadcast anywhere locally-- and I mean, man, I'd have to cast a long line to pick up a braodcast from here-- but it is available on the internet. It usually takes his crew a few days to get the audio file available for download, and it usually takes me a few days beyong that to actually listen to it. Three possibilities: one, they use Real Player as their medium, and Real Player tends to crap out; two, my machine (a Dell) is programmed to default to Real Player for audio files (probably my fault), and Real Player tends to crap out; three, as soon as the show is available for download, thousands of people across the globe try to tune in, thus jamming the internet channels and causing Le Show to download like a drunk telling you his favorite joke while falling off a barstool. I like that last possibility best: thousands of people around the world, sitting at their workstations, cursing while their PC's spastically refuse to download seriously non-work-related media. (I don't know if the programming their using qualifies as "streaming media," although "streaming" is an excellent way to describe Harry's show, but I like to belive it is. "Streaming media" is yet another one of those catch phrases that get touted in meriad ads for various computer goods and services, especially intenet connectivity services, and I always like to think that anything they stick in there as a catch phrase or buzz word is automatically a bad thing. That's because the ad people invariably neither know nor care what's good or bad, they just want to know what'll sell.)

Speaking of advertising, I had a minor revelation last night while watching a documentary on the first Super Bowl. I was mainly killing time until it was late enough to reasonably sleep, about which more below, not that anyone cares, and it occurred to me that canned tamales are the Mexican equivalent of White Castle frozen burgerz. Except that there can be found canned tamales that are not only bearable, but actually tasty. Now, there is not argument that real tamales are superior to the canned ones, and anyone who is anything of a devotee to Mexican foods know that, very often, one may find real tamales that are infinitely inferior to the canned variety. The point, really, is that canned tamales are fast food: zip, zap, done. They are a tad messier than many things, in that they are packed (typically) in chili sauce and require unwrapping, but once that is accomplished, zip, zap, done, Yer eatin' in a flash.

The brand of tamales I've settled on is something called Casa Fiesta, which doesn't mean a damned thing. The product hails from Bruce Foods Corp of El Paso, Texas, not a bad sign, with the parent company located in New Iberia, Louisiana, not a good sign. The label of the sample currently cluttering my cupboard offers the following serving suggestion:

TAMALE HERO
Cut tamales lengthwise
Spread halved French bread with refried beand
Place tamale halves on refried beans
Top with CASA FIESTA medium taco sauce and grated cheddar of Swiss cheese
Heat on a baking sheet in a 400 degree preheated oven for 10 minutes
Cut in diagonal slices
Serves 6.

Chee-rist.

The ad guys came up with that one.

Speaking of such things-- am I overusing that segue?-- my pal Doc Nagel has recently posted his latest screed against adverts on his web page, this time hammering GEICO and Nextel, both favorite targets of his. I had thought to kvetch about a seeming lack of continuity or connective argument in his criticisms, btu on reflection, that might actually be his point. In both campaigns, there's a huge disconnect between the product/service hybrid offered and the way the ads vet the product/service. (I mean that splice literally; both GEICO and Nextel offer a product that is implicitly also a service.) The GEICO ads are all about how saving is good news for the individual in any case or condition; no longer is there any refernce to the level of service or the necessity of insurance. The Nextel ads are all about improving communication. To paraphase John Popper, in offering a sure-fire way to speed things up, they only demonstrate how they can slow things down. Or, perhaps, their point is that Nextel communicators allow everone in the Corporate world to de stupider faster. Or maybe they want to imply that every marriage ought to be a quickie marriage. I don't know. Something.

So maybe the Doc was trying to imply the dissconnect with a dissconnect? Perhaps I am giving him too much credit? Perhaps I read the thing first thing in the morning, less than halfway through my first cup off coffe, and missed the point entirely. I always give the Doc too much credit. (Nooo; it couldn't have been Moe.)

Speaking of Moe, now, about advertising. (My segues keep getting wierder as the years go by.) My wife got home eraly yesterday due to the foul weather we've had of late. (Being a trouper, she drove in fairly early and stayed until the official company closing time of 2 o'clock.) After having a light lunch and doing some book keeping, she joined me for one of my all-time fgavorite time wasters, watching re-runs of M*A*S*H. (Actually, I have been working on a thesis about the thing for a number of years: "The Metaphysics of M*A*S*H." My central argument is that the series doesn't take place in the Korean Conflict; it takes place on an insular moral plane, which is specifically constructed so that Hawkeye is right. I must be insane.) She dealt with the re-runs well enough, but reacted with genuine disgust at many of the commercials. Which is only right and fair: the advertising game seems to teem with people who think the best way to sell things is to insult consumers. But the experience made me dwell on the copmmercials that most disgust me, and, aside from the ads for digital cable and sattellite TV services, which are so deeply and univerally insulting that they no longer matter, the two that are currently bugging me the most are the ads for anger. The first one I noticed is about how angry people get over their high mobile phone bills. None of the people portrayed in this ad are in the age group most likely to run up high mobile bills, eg. kids, so one can only assume that these consumers are angry at their (pictorially absent and hugely irresponsible) kids, or that the ad is implying that older folks are too dumb to pick a decent mobile service (they get mad because they can't read). The other ad is for e-file tax services, or, as my wife puts it, let-us-take-your-money services. One has a lady walking out to her mailbox in a series of semi-frumpy work outfits (to symbolize the passage of time, natch), each time finding it empty, until she finally rips her mailbox out of the ground and smashes it Pete Townshend-like against the ground. The message is that we should get mad because we don't get out refund back in time to pay for our frumpy clothes and out lousy little house and our economy car and our crappy little lives. Truth be told, e-file is only really useful for people who procrastinate and don't know how to file for an extention. Otherwise, you're just giving the government more of your money for the privledge of using the internet.

I am a consumer. Hear me roar. Grrrrrrr.

BLOG THIS, MELON FARMER*: January 29th: of source material and carrot juice

"And every Saturday we work in the yard
Pick up the dog doo; hope that it's hard . . . "

--Joe Walsh, "Ordinary Average Guy"

I begin this lovely and sanguine morning by watching "True Lies," which was a mistake. I am often overly cynical before I've had my coffee, aznd I watched "Aliens" night before last, so immediately, before the first scene was over, I leaped to the following conclusions:
--The story is from the kind of spy novel written for guys who like to think that spies atre allowed to be rude bastards
--It's also the kind of thing that's meant to appeal to closet racists, i.e. those who like to indulge in the Bad Guy Syndrome
--It's also targeted at guys who like to think that selective sexism is OK-- that is to say, sexism is okay so long as they acknowledge that SOME women are smart, strong, and suprisingly corageous
--James Cameron is incredibly adept at disguising weak source material

I should have more coffee.

This is not, of course the first time I have made this kind of observation. The first time . . . Well, let me set this up properly. When "Titanic" came out, the Wifey declared that we were going to go see it in the theater, which turned out to be a good call. The love story, as I had been warned cfrom numerous reviews, was bullshit, but the boat was magnificent, and the sinking scenes were visceral. I still cling (however vestigally) to the classical notion that the point of replaying tragedies is to raise the sympathies of the audience, and that somehow that experience enriches the soul. Obvious cinematic sdaism, therefore, earns no sympathy with me, and I thought that Cameron had really carved the marble here. It was breathtakingly, painfully tragic. The aftermath scenes were a touch on the patchy side, but that was all due to finishing out the love story.

To make a long story short, we saw it again, and then again, due to pleas from neices who had not yet seen the epic. By the second time, I had lost all patience with the love story. By the third, I was just waiting for them to sink the ship.

("Just waiting for them to sink the ship" has since become a very valuable shorthand to describe films that drag out their premise without excuse. It came in particularly handy while watching the lower third of "Master and Commander," a truly wretched flick based on truly awful source material, and the less said of thatm frankly, the better.)

Here's the thing: the sinking of the Titanic was a hugely horrific tragedy, but, oddly and ironically and, actually, sadly, it makes for a hard tale to tell. The hype, the hubris, the sheer mass of humanity involved make the telling of the tale so myopic as to lose scope or so broad as to lose focus. So inserting a country mouse/city mouse love story seemed as good an idea as any to bring the thing under control. Cameron mainly wanted to sink the ship, and there he succeeded.

Similarly, with "The Terminator," the source material is reduced to a back story and the movie is transformed into a spectacular series of chase scenes. (The source material, after all, had been done and done and done, done to death, hell even Stephen KING had taken a couple of slashes at it, so the thing was just get the maniacal machine to LA and get the scrappy hero in and get the down-and-out party girl in position and crank the engines. Reduce the machines-vs-man element to a backstory, a demi-glace, the secret to which, after all, is reduction.

So with "Aliens." The plot combines a Viet Nam-era Green Beret hubris with the same damned story told the first time, multiplied by eight (standard Hollywood screenwriting procedure), with a cute moppet tossed in for pathos (ditto). Cameron tried to outbalance this by amping Rippley's trauma and forcing the corporate mouthpiece's sympathy. (I don't know about you, but I knew he was going to turn out to be a shit, but I really didn't want to believe it. That was the first viewing. In subsequent viewings, I find myself wishing that they either hadn't cast Paul Reiser or had given him some lines he could really do something with. I mean, the man is a comic genius.)

To be continued. Duty calls.

Sorry about that. Had to go do some light baby sitting for my sister in law, followed by my monthly sortie to the Total Wine outlet for a month's supply of Guinness, then some more general Uncle Jim duties. Seven hours later . . .

So I guess my point here is that, if you remove the veneer of technique, "True Lies" is really crappy stuff. The hero is mysogynistic and sadistic, the other members of the company are even less admirable, the story is worse than hackeneyed, and the whole thing carries a heavily racist tone. (One of the worst crimes of racism is to exaggerate the cultural factors to jsutify making the detruction of the other race justifyable.) But Cameron juggles his balls well: Ahnold in the lead keeps the racism and sadism (not to mention narcissism) muted; Tom Arnold in the buddy role makes the offensive garbage coming out of his mouth sound like dismissable comic relief, and the head terrorist comes off as an obnoxious jerk rather than a commited homicidal maniac.

Still and all, I think that'll be the last time I watch that flick for a while.

I have made a practice in indulging, or, as might be better put, conscienciously indulging, in some of my favorite things. I do this as a simple matter of enjoying life, but also because I have this strange, inate feeling that it somehow makes me a better person. Yesterday, it turned out to be carrot juice. If you have never had carrot juice, you will never crave it, for there is simply, absolutely nothing like it. Carrots don't taste like carrot juice. And, if you have tried it, you either love it or wonder why the Hell anyone would ever put such a thing in his/her mouth. Yesterday morning I woke up with a craving for a vodka tonic. As consciousness slowly crept up on me, I began to acheive the understanding that some carrot juice, as opposed to the vodka tonic, would make a much more reasonable way to start the day. As it turned out, I ended up not having the stuff until the afternoon. I rattled around our house for a while, had coffee, did some writing, watched some junk on TV, and fnally decided to get out and start making the rounds a little before noon.

There is only one place in this burg (that I know of) to get carrot juice, and it is the Home Economist out Independence Boulevard. Independence is a vernerable commerce road that carries NC Highway 74 east and west through the city, The western portion was truncated decades ago when 74 was dumped into the flow of the interstate. The portion leading from downtown out east has been turned into a six-lane superhighway out a ways and then somewhat abruptly turns into a dumpy, frumpy, six-lane commerce road which the City plans to turn into a Superhighway over the next decade or so. (I think the time table has it happening faster than that, but I've lived here long enough to know better.) There are intersections with functional signals about every 1/2 to 3/4 miles.

The traffic here is always murder. It's crowded with everything form the beat-down Toyota of the fast-foods workers to the SUV's of almost anybody to the 18-wheelers taking goods in and out of town. To get to the Home Economist, one must suffer this lousy traffic, which is something I patently avoid. But the HE has the stuff. We go there for spices, since they sell in zip-lock bags for maybe 8% of what they cost in bottles in the grocery stores, and I go there for carrot juice. The brand I got this time was Lakewood. Previously I had a brand that I liked somewhat better, probably had something to do with the method of pressing the juice-- free-pressed or clear-pressed, something like that. It cost five bucks after tax. (Just so the trip wouldn't be a total waste, I also picked up a little less than a quarter pound of sea salt for 75 cents.) An hour later and I was home and dry.

I drank the stuff over the course of the day, a glass at a time, the whole quart.

What does carrot juice taste like? It's swseet and salty and musky all at the same time. It has, depending on the press method, a texture that is something like fresh, whole milk, thick and not quite viscous, but very slightly (and very softly) grainy. That's probably the best I can do. It's one of those things where I keep feeling, just vaguely, like maybe I shouldn't be drinking it. If anyone our there ever finds a better description of what the stuff tastest like, I'd love to see it.

It tastes a little, a very little, like tomato juice. I tried to make a variation on the Bloody Mary once, intending to call the resul "Kill the Wabbit." No dice. Kids, do not try this at home. It just tasted like carrot juice cut with vodka, not precisely nasty but nothing you'll want to tell yer grandkids about either.

*"Yippie-kai-yay, melon farmer" is how the studio PG'd the famous Bruce Willis line from "Die Hard" for broadcast television purposes.

LOVE LIFT US UP WHERE WE BLOG: January 30th: Neil Simon, politics, enchilada sauce

I have seen the final wisdom of Doc Nagel's habit of stacking his blogs, as it makes the most recent entries immediately apparent. At some point, when I have a better presence of mind, I will attack this file and stack the entries last-to-first, but this morning I woke up too early, and I have yet to decide whether I need another cup of coffee or a blow to the head.

Meanwhile, I'm watching the 1980 film of Neil Simon's "Seems Like Old Times," in which no stereotype is left untrammeled. It would be very easy to accuse the Simon of being a sexist, a racist, and an exploitation artist in general, except for the fact that the man is soooo damned funny. The article in question wouldn't be half as reprehensible if it weren't for the fact that it was hijacked-- if you know the film, you know the irony, if you don't know the film it doesn't matter-- hijacked as a vehicle for pairing Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase.

Now, I've always been a fan of Chevy. He's made a thousand rotten movies, but I'll forgive him almost anyhting for those times when he has hit the groove and generated some seriously funny stuff. Goldie I remember fondly from the Laugh In days, when she was very clearly clinging on by her fingernails, riding this wild beast for as long as it lasted. The film also sports strong turns by Robert Guillaume and Charles Grodin. It's as loaded with stereotypes as it is with laugh lines, and the deliveries are all dead on, but there's a flatness to the whole affair that somehow deadens the air.

Speaking of dead air, there's an election afoot! This time around, it seems to me, we don't have quite the load of buffoons as last time around. (Say what you will, I have never been able to take Al Gore seriously, and, say what you will, our president is a buffoon.) The worst of it is that I have gained a grudging admiration for Al Sharpton. So far from re-inventing himself, he seems to have shed his skin; the track-suit-wearing, race-baiting, Tawana-exploiting loudmouth of yesteryear seems extinct, and in its place is an elder not afraid to question the wisdom of the conventions. He's still unelectable, but I kinda like him in his gadfly role.

John Kerry is the current frontrunner. Our guy John Edwards is down on the list. But if nothing else positive has come out of the whole thing, at the very least we can cheer the good news that Dick Gephardt dropped out early. I don't know why, specifically, but that guy just gives me the creeps, moreso than most other politicos. It's not even the usual creepy feeling I get from knowing that the guy is a phony-- Gephardt actually seems genuinely engaged most of the time, as opposed to the usual crap-spewing, party-agreed political mannequins that get elected to high office in this country. It's not even the superficial problems I have with, for instance, Colin Powell (he insists on his first name being pronounced like a small bowell, he insists on genuineness but exhudes superficiality, he leans heavily intellectual but always caves to policy stupidity, he claims his wife's wishes come first but only uses the claim to play political dodgeball, etc., etc.). I think it's maybe a general sense of disappointment. Yeah. I remember in high school a buddy of mine was looking at running for one of the lower-level student body positions. We were all for him; I mean, we figured, only good could come from one of our own running for office. Not that the student body ever made any decisions heavier than which weekend would be homecoming (the same weekend as every other year) or not stringently dictated by the administration (detention rules and drug possesion penalties, and more on that in a second). Then one day I saw him sitting at a table in the cafeteria with the half the student council, notably the president, who was an insufferable jerk known for being a bully up until the year he got elected to student council, after which he was so saccharinely pleasant and fundamentally unapprochable it was astounding. It was just dishearteneing.)

(When I was in high school, one of those weird things happened, one of those things that was so clearly aligned with the Reagan Revolution but had nothing directly to do with the Administration: a state Supreme court ruled that a local police force had no jurisdiction on school grounds in a case involving drug possession and a locker search (decision regarding probable cause). The major basic ramifaction of the decision were that the school, not the cops, were responsible for any matter involving the privacy rights of the students. Overnight, like rolling thunder, schools started announcing that, in accordance with the ruling, there would be a new policy put in place regading the rules on how to deal with student drug possession. The expectation was that the admins would react to the ruling with an eye towards reforming their policies in the hopes of protecting the right of privacy for their students. One by one, all across the country, the school systems began announcing a policy reform of a singular nature: any student caught with drugs would be escorted off campus and handed over to the police. Oh, and the admins also reserved the right to search the students' locker on less than the same "probably cause" grounds the police were typically allowed by the courts. Never mind the potential for abuse; the left was left with the dubious duty of defending the students' right to privacy via protecting the students' right to do drugs, which has never been terribly popular with parents.)

Why do I care? Why do I pay attention? The whole thing is so fundamentally meanigless. It's a great hack-saw of American culture that those who do not vote have no right to complain, but the great whopping fact of the matter is that the elected officials more or less ignore the will of the people most of the time. In fact, only the truly rich get anyhting they directly ask for, and the voiceless and unwilling get service by way of civic guilt.

I have much greater reason to care about enchilada sauce, and I do. Not long ago I aquired a can of hot enchilada sauce manufactured by the previously lauded Casa Fiesta brand. (Note: I had previously made this brand of red sauce my usual, but I was using the "mild" variety.) I have found that the red sauce is useful for many things, among them tempering the texture of refritos. Typically what comes out of the can is too stiff and sticky, and for my tastes a slightly more pliant, even silky texture is preferrable. So I dosed my refried black beans with this stuff, and it turned out to be way too tangy.

Some things should be sweet and sticky. Some things should be tangy and tart. Refried beans should be none of those things. Damn near ruined the whole meal (beef taquitoes with beans and rice). Luckily I had had two double cheeseburgers for lunch. (For those of you who haven't visited the photo galleries, I am a trim 150 pounds. I have been since I was in junior high. I have on occasion lost a few pounds, and last summer I gained five pounds for about two months, but other than that I stay about the same regardless of what I eat. I have been roundly cursed by all and sundry for this, but there is a rather horrible flip side to my condition: I sometimes have to force myself to eat. That is to say that I am sometimes hugry without appetite; my gut roils with need while the very thought of eating makes me nauseous. Other times I will have appetite beyond my stomach's physical capacity, with the result that I stuff myself to the point of very real physical discomfort. Which is just another way of repeating one of those great American all-too-truisms: there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.)

I WOULDN'T BLOG TO ANY CLUB THAT WOULD HAVE SOMEONE LIKE ME AS A MEMBER: January 31st: Marlowe, Denial, Saint Mick the Divine

I am now watching "The Big Sleep," the movie version of Ray Chandler's novel. Chandler was a good guy, by all the accounts I've read, although maybe a bit creepy at the edges. Bogart was a good guy, too, by all accounts, and repentant for his bad behavior, of which he was more than well aware, thanks to his lovely wife. The problem with Marlowe-- Chandler's detective, Bogarts character-- is that Cghandler tried too hard with him. He drew him as private detective as consciencious objector, and it just doesn't fit. The kind of people who become private dicks are low-life craphounds who can't make it in any legitimate business. They're a bare notch above bail bondsmen, and sometimes a notch beneath. Bogart plays him with all the smarts and savvy he brought to the role of Rick in "Casablanca", which, as revered as it is in the film world, is a rotten piece of work. In "Casablanca," everyone is an American. At the time of the filming, nothing was farther from the truth. America was barely in the war during the filming, contributing little more than troops to ferry supplies to the Allied forces. I have nothing documented to back it up, but I've always suspected that the film itself was made to encourage America to join the war effort. We were largely (populistly) isolationist in those days, and the majority of Amewricans resisted the idea of joining the war effort. It really didn't have anything to do with us. It had to do with nationalist zeal and border treaties. Even the Holocaust was something of an afterthought. (Which makes it all the more horrific: we'll take over all of Europe, turn it into the Fatherland, and, oh, by the way, let's kill all the Jews.) I have studied this war in depth, and I have reached three immutable conclusions: the Allies were losing a war of attrition, it's a good thing we did get involved when we did, and the whole thing was a goddamned rotten stupid bloody waste.

You might get the idea, form reading my entries here, that I watch too many movies. On the contrary. I don't watch too many movies. I just think about them too much.

As with all great artists, Chandler was in perpetual denial about any faults his craftwork might have, while publicly berating himself for indulging in his craftwork in bad faith. He also liked to think that his craft was necessary in the reformation of the violent world into a place more calm and contemplative. Again: denial.

Yesterday I drove through a construction site where one half of the road was blocked off. The two flagmen, holding the signs that said "SLOW" on one side snd STOP on the other, were wearing fleece pullovers. So, presciently,Jagger was correct in asserting the there would be "people dressed in plastic bags/directing traffic." I'm shattered.

WE'RE GONNA BLOG AROUND THE CLOCK TONIGHT: February 1st: What It Was Was Football

SO my city's team is in the Superbowl. Or our region's team, depending on who you ask. The Carolina Panthers, sop named, originally, as an effort to a) convince the NFL that we had the market to support a franchise by implying that people would come from BOTH Carolina states, and b) try to convinced people from both Carolina states to attend the games. There is some balderdash about the team being so-called because they perform up here and have their training facilities down south, but the cross-state appeal always seemed far more plausible. Anyways, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

It has always been a bit hard for me to get excited about pro sports. As a kid, my brother decided at an early age that he wanted to be the sportsfsan in the family, and, being a gentlemanly youth, I let him have it. Also, it became pretty apparent to me pretty early on that there is a limited amount of honor to pro sports. One year the big thing was the white knights of the Dallas Cowboys, the next iut was the dirty tugs of Pittsburgh. It was all just fashion, really. And fashion is never really about anything but money.

I will admit, though, that there is something kinda cool about the whole thing. It's been fun to make quips about the local papers damn near orgiastic coverage. (The morning after the Panthers beat the Eagles for the NFC title, I remarked, several times to great effect, "The only thing that happened yesterday was a football game." This morning, when I called my Dad to talk about arranging a hike next weekend, he said that there was a good write-up on a trail system in a wilderness park near Brevard, in that morning's paper on the last page of the sports section. "Which one?" I queried. (Of the Sunday paper's seventeen sections, all but one bore some angle or another of the Panthers' performance and/or odds.)

But there are other aspects as well. The local newspaper pundits keep insisting that the whole thing has made the city a better place full of better people. And there is something to that, an un-definable something that might have been a bit more powerful had the same angle not been immediately ripped off for an ad for a real-estate training school. People are acting differently. I mean, they drive just as badly and they are about as incoherent as before, but they drive badly and remain incoherent with a definite sense of cool about them.

We took niece Cayla downtown yesterday for a little lunch and urban hiking, something I like to do when I can. (A coupla times it's been just me and La Cayla, or me and La Cayla and one of her cousins, this time it was me and the Wifey and La Cayla.) We parked and wove our way up to the Square (which is really little mmore than a glorified intersection in our town, with mini-plazas on each corner), and trotted a half-block west to have lunch at a local chain joint called The Graduate, which serves college themed bar food. Afterwards we walked back to the car, moved it to a slightly different location, and walked across the city's humped back to the stadium. Ercicsson Stadium (so named for the cell phone giant who bought the naming rights while the thing was being built) is an odd beast. Architecturally ambitious in some ways, structuraly staid in other ways, it crouches in the shadows of the old "outerbelt" (the new "outerbelt is under construction). The outside of the structure is festooned with bright blue panels, and each of four entranceways is guarded by a pair of cast bronze panthers, some twenty feet tall on their pedestals. My wife thinks it's ugly as hell. In the decade since it's been built, I still haven';t made up my mind how I feel about it.

In the stadium gift shop, folks were lining the walls, milling about, examining the merchandise. You can't walk out of that store with anything for less than ten bucks, and most items ranged from thirty bucks up. From what I could tell, few folk were opting to drop their cash there. (When we first entered, I thought I saw long lines at the register, but it later turned out that, for whatever reason, the transactions that were taking place had more to do with price checks than purchases. As with most such places, the placement of price tags was haphazard at best.) We, too, opted not to plunk down our loot, despite Cayla's tireless effort to find something that was relatively cheap but not so dinky as to seem a ridiculous thing to purchase.

Back out on the street, back up to the square, where Cayla got a "Beat NEw England" pin for free, on the advice of a guy we ran into at the corner of Tryon while waiting to cross Trade, spent twenty minutes waiting for the girls at Starbucks to fill a dozen orders at the same time, back out to a vendor stand where Rachelle broke down and bought a penant for both Cayla and her brother, Josh. The streets were filled with people garbed in team wear, and there was definitely an air of genteel superiority in the air, not arrogance, mind you, just a kind of sense of well being. I guess that comes with being associated, however tangentially, with success. It's not like the people of my town won the games that took the team to the Bowl, and it's not like we haven't had any record of Fan Abuse; our people have boo'd our players when they failed to produce on the grid iron. (There are several schools of thought on the matter, and while I can see the validity that booing is a genuine and honest response to bad performance, you gotta know it doesn't make the team want to play any harder to please those schmucks in the stands.) So, I suppose that despite the fact that it's really all just fashion and commerce, despite all the cynical (and, frankly, pointless) objections that it's not a game anymore, I guess that it has done something good for my town. I guess maybe football will, in the final analysis, effect a bit of real change on the nature of my beloved idiot town, this Judas goat called Charlotte.

Why? Beaucoup bucks, baby. Man, those guys at the stands were turning over the fan wear and trinkets like candy at Christmas. Nobody didn't have something that said Panthers on them, except me and my wife. (And there were a few others.) And everybody knows that if it'll bring a buck to this town, it's in like Flynn. The city council will probably declare February 1st an official holiday, whether the Panthers win or not.

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER BLOGGER: February 2nd: We Lose

Terrific game. The Pats beat us fair and square, 41 yard field goal right at the end. The game otherwise would have gone into overtime. The Panthers left the field looking like somebody had stolen their Christmas stockings. Something is rotten in the County of Mecklenburg. They didn't look like a team who had just narrowly lost the most prestigious sporting event in America. Somebody, I think, must have been waiting backstage with a brickbat.

In other news, I just ran across the ad that was the real death knell for Hardee's. A fake soldier in a camo t-shirt talking about taking his young male sibling (relationship undefined), who is clinging to his back, to Hardee's while berating him good naturedly-- let me check that: while he berates the kid "good naturedly." It's disgusting. It's the worst exploitation of the Iraq war, which is a very odd thing to say, as the whole damned thing was exploitative in and of itself. Our President could not hope to even pretend to do anything about the horrific events of 9/11, so we attacked Iraq. Meanwhile his approval rating goes through the roof on the basis of almost nothing at all. Never in the history of our country has any one of our leaders gotten more credit for doing nothing right. And these are the coat tails Hardee's figures they can ride to great profit.

Welcome to America. My country, right or wrong. My mother, drunk or sober. Quick: hide the car keys!

BLOG LIKE YOU'VE NEVER BLOGGED BEFORE!!!: February 3rd: Of Tits And Stranger Critters

SO my city's ball team losing the Super Bowl is not such big news. The big news is that Janet Jackson had her top ripped off by Justin Timberlake. A throng tunred out to welcome the team, but the local paper, the Obzerver, let THREE WRITERS contribute to the story of the loose tit. Apparently, people were appalled. Which is to say that, apparently, people are stupid. Janet Jackson? A media whore? NOOOOOOOO!!! Or, as people at the Super Bowl Party I attended said, Janet is to most normal of the Jackson siblings, but frankly that doesn't say much. Justin a media whore enabler? NOOOOO!!! He's a media whore, actually. Nothing like this has happened since Lil' Kim. Whoever she is.

In other news, the Media is just crazy to report that John Edwards has taken a turn towards nasty campaign strategy. He's apparently suggested that John Kerry is a Washington insider-- HOLY SHIT!!-- who has taken campaign contributions from lobbyists-- JESUS CHRIST!! Of course, there were watchdog organizations (insider lobbyists) on hand to point out that Edwards got alot of monetary support from trial lawyers' organizations-- MOTHER OF GOD!! I went to high school with the guy who's now the head of the Heritage Foundation. He was a shit then, but who am I to make a conclusion. I think I'll change my voter registration from "independent" to "disinterested."

BLOG THE DISTANCE: February 3rd Suplemental: Why I Am A Patriot

I kid because I love.

I am currently listening to Harry Shearer's Le Show, as I do every week whether I like it or not. He played a song called "Crimes of the Witness," by artist or artists unknown (because his web page has not been updated, even though Sunday's show has already been loaded), which implies that everybody is guilty of not stopping bad things from happening. After which he broke the news that recent "terrorist threat" security drills were only successful because they were rigged.

I, for one, am shocked.

I mean, come on. Really. Could anyone, looking at these mooks running around in gear that doesn't fit, that they are clearly uncomfortable in, doing crap that, in the event of the terrorist attack imagined, which is always something 180 degrees away from what the terrorists have ever done, would be way too damned little way too damned late, imagine that the excercises were about anything useful? The authorities, it will be noted, are idiots.

But don't get me wrong. The terrorists are idiots, too. Anyone who can be conned into thinking the general conditions might be improved by their death, well, gee, need I say more? And this is part of why I'm still a patriot: in the long haul, America really has done more good than ill.

I know whereof I speak. I studied all sorts of stuff in college, and the claims that we are behind the major ills of the world I have pretty thoroughly de-bunked. We propped up some dictatorships in Central America. We bombed the crap out of a number of places, but usually for good enough reasons. (We've bombed the hell out of Iraq for good reasons AND bad reasons, as well as, on occasion, no reason, both during this administration and the previous, as well as the admin before that. I never agreed with the rationale for the bombing of Kosovo, and I have always thought we could have achieved the same goal, eg. the crippling of the Serb infrastructure, with far less bombast, and more on that later.) We have waged a "war" on drugs (and more on THAT later) that has accomplished little more than publicizing the war on drugs.

But, really, honestly, so what? Our nation has been, in history, the least slave-owning, the least imperial, frankly the least brutal, and the most transparently bad at influence peddling. I mean, we ship arms all ove rthe world, but we really don't get that much out of it. Really, when you get right down to it, money talks. The rest of the world, for the most part, would reather have bucks than bullets, and our governemnt hasn't really go the hang of bribery by commerce yet. The Brits were really good at it for about a hundred years, but a series of popular revolutions forced them to back out of a dozen places which are now desperately poor and torn by political and cultural strife. (That's not racism; that's cold, hard fact.) More Americans are involved in international aid than any other nationality in the world. More food aid originates in America than anywhere else. No matter how false or superficial or stupid or wrong America might be as a whole, I honestly think our pro's outweigh our con's. American over-eat, over-consume, over-do, what have you, and we do it simply because we can. There really isn't anything wrong with it. This came to mind recently on the way to the grocery store with one of my sisters-in-law; I requested a stop for a burger on the way back, and she started cracking on the current low-carb, Atkins diet craze. My wife noted, years ago, that the current trend of criticizing Americans for being overweight would hold more weight if the standards for weight-to-heigh ratios hadn't been manipulated to death. But we buy it because we feel so goddamned guilty for being so well off. (It's an old story. This same phenomenon can be traced directly to the formation of the Catholic church. Ask any Catholic, and they'll tell you it's true: the church only succeeds because it feels so good to feel so bad. Guilt, for most of us, is theraputic.)

The majority of Americans can trace their roots back to non-slave-owning, non-Indian-fighting, non-fruit-producing-nation-exploiting people (although my ancestors on my Dad's side were missionaries, which I have mixed feelings about). Most of us, honestly havae nothing to feel guilty about. And most of us who ahve nothing to feel guilty about feel really, really bad about it. Honest. Sorry.

The bombing of Kosovo was all about bombast. It was about spectacle. It was stupid and it was unneccessary, and not one of the bombs dropped pulled a single body out of a mass grave. My high school debate coach, at a dinner during the period immediately after the bombing, claimed that it was necessary to give the UN sanctions teeth. If that were true, then the bombing would have settled the whole matter. Slobo wouldn't be stalking about claiming that there was nothing wrong with what he did during his tribunal. We dropped the bombs in order to take pictures of them.

The current fiction being passed around, that we entered the last "war" with Iraq on the basis of faulty intellegence, is so obviously false that it's laughable. Our intellegence was terrific. Our intellegence determined that we had identified an enemy that was easily defeatable and reasonably suspicious. Our intellegence was so good that the fighting was over long before anyone expected. It wasn't really even a war. It was a rout. We attacked, they fled. Now they are employing a favorite age old Arab strategy known as the Trickle of Blood: rather than mass a sufficient force to route your enemy, attack small targets persistently. Eventually, the enemy will conclude that the prize is not worth the small but humiliating defeats.

The war on drugs . . . Don't get me started. Talk about a war of convenience. There's nothing good you can say about the drug manufacturers. CARTELS! I mean CARTELS, of course. The rest of the drug manufacturers, the legit ones, are all bloodless and legal and everything. They couldn't possibly need to be propped up by, say, the federal government.

RAPIDLY DEPLETING THE KNOWN USES OF THE TERM "BLOG" AS A PUN: February 4th: Kids in the Hall, National Security, Tea

Currently watching a re-run of the old "Kids in the Hall," which, if you've never seen it, might mean nothing to you. The Kids, five weirdos from Canada, ran the show for a few years and produced what was, and remains, some of the neatest bizzaro sketch comedy this side of Monty Python's Flying Circus. Of course, they didn't always hit, and some of the time they padded weak concepts with camera pyrotechnics, but that's mostly forgiveable. I think part of whay I like about it is the tendency to mix the mundane and the surreal and their exploitation of uncomfortable situations. Also I have a soft spot for them because they gave my wife and I a nickname years ago for Ralph Reed.

We were watching a sketch in which Kevin McDonald does his evil guy, and Dave Foley walked in wearing a black plastic wig and stretch jumpsuit as Hecubus, the evil guy's evil servant. I swear, he looked exactly like Ralph Reed, then director of the Christian Coalition.

At the time, some of the strangest things were coming out of the coalition in the name of Christianity, especially veiled attacks on the poor and non-whites. The leaders of the various sects in the coalition were some of the sleaziest scumbags ever to profess to know the immutable will of God. Reed really did seem to have a boyish face and an evil mind, but it seemed pretty clear to me that he was just a slick political operator, and that had the same money and position been offered at the other end of the spectrum, say the Sierra Club, he'd have just as easily spouted their propaganda. So being able to see him come up on the screen and dismiss him by saying "Oh, look, it's Hecubus" (to which the other of us would respond "EEEEEEVIIL!", which was Kevin's standard line in the stitch), came in handy.

Dave Foley went on to be on News Radio. Ralph Reed haung out his shingle as a political consultant, moved to Atlanta, and aged 20 years in about 6 months. So it all turned out for the best. Whenever I get the chance, I watch the Kids. They produced some smart, funny, and sometimes insightful comedy, despite having to work for that bastard Lorne Michaels. They are bright, funny guys. (Except for Bruch McCulloch. Something's just plain wrong with that guy.)

In other news, Doc Nagel's latest blog suggests thast security is an illusion. Of course, it is for him, but still . . .

But, really, he's right. No matter what kind of improvements they make, aside from banning flight altogether, there is no way we can gurantee airline security. It's really all just show. The major leaps in security happened back in the 70's, when hijackings really were a common thing. After September 11th there was alot of flailing about and stepped-up security measures, but honestly nothing that would have permitted a similar highjacking. If someone had really wanted to do something-- and I don't mean someone like that idiot Shoe Bomber-- the increased screenings wouldn't have necessrly stopped it. The most believable cards, as far as I'm concerned, are the ones I have heard trotted out on the street-level. Flight 93 did more to deter hijackings than anything else. It seems pretty clear that the passengers here in America aren't as timid as they used to be.

I was going to write something on the subject of tea, but frankly I spent a great deal of time screwing around and don't feel like dealing with it right now. I am going to make yet another observation about the war: I'm watching BBBC World News, where they just aired details of the Blair government's admission that the 45 minute claim leveled in the intelligence used to justify the Brits part in the invasion had to do with battlefield weapons, not Weapons of Mass Destruction. I think they didn't get a copy of the playbook. The whole reason the justification of attack was couched as "Weapons of Mass Destruction" was so that, at some point, the military experts could begin claiming that we found some WMD because we captured, say, tanks or missles. They are weapons, and they would in fact destroy a mass. To paraphrase Ray Chandler: it was a vague term, and they meant it that way.

BLOG IN THE USA: February 5th: Tea, Questing, Patriot Acts

So now I'm going to write something about tea, for two wholly distinct reasons. Our intermittent* pal Nick the Brit claims that what we get in tea over here is nothing like what they get in the UK. That bothered me for a little while, but OK. At first I thought maybe I was really missing something, but I have decided that I will have Brit tea someday, and in the meantime I will enjoy the teas I enjoy.

Right now I am drinking a cup of Celectial Seasoning's peppermint tea, which I love because it's hot and it's minty, and screw you if you think it's frou-frou, I like it and that's that. (Besides, I've already had my large mug of French roast, freshly ground, made in a French press, which is a manly brew indeed. GRRRRR! Of the four people who have had my coffee made my way, three have had the same comment: "Whoa!" The fourth: Nick the Brit.) The down side to this mug of teas is that I only have three bags left. Translation: a tea buying pilgrimage is in the works. Which is a good thing.

For a short period of time in college, my friends and I began referring to the standard pre-party provisioning trips as "Questing." I'd like to think I started it, but I honestly can't recall. Tghis was in the same period in which, when you spilled beer in somebody's new apartment or the first time you vistied their dorm room, you hadn't made a mess, but rather had "Baptised" the place. The notion clearly came from our habit(s) of serially viewing "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," and meant to add an air of urgency to our trips to the grocery store to get chips, dip, and a case or two of Milwaukee's Beast or Olympia ("It's The Water") Beer. (Later referred to as 'lymp. (pr. "limp." It's a joke. Get it?)) Sometimes the Questing reached monumental levels, as it did before "Tequila Sunrise Night"-- about which the less said the better-- or the few times the fare rose above the level of chips and ranch dressing. The largest and most elaborate bout of questing . . . Well, actually that's hard to say. It might have been the time we decided to grill steaks in my folks' back yard, or it could have been some other time. The most fulfilling bout was the one where one of my pals got carded at the ABC store by a somewhat elderly clerk and exclaimed "Oh no! It's the old man from Scene 24!" Whereapon the clerk demanded "What is your quest!"

I think most of my friends have ceased this practice, but I haven't. This ocurred to me a couple of weekends ago, when I decided that I wanted pastrami. The local Harris Teeter had been selling a store brand of pastrami, which was quite serviceable, as well as the Deitz and Watson brand, which is actually a bit better but goes for 9 bucks a pound. (The store brand went for 6 or 7 bucks a pound.) Then, one day, it was gone; the store brand had dissappeared. At first I assumed they were just out of it, but after a while it sank in: the store brand of pastrami was no more, leaving only-- GASP-- turkey pastrami available in the store brand. Turkey pastrami, it will be noted, does not stand.

Visits to several other Harris Teeters confirmed my deeper suspician: the HT brand pastrami was no longer available anywhere. I digested this for about a week, then, one Saturday, after a noon-time break in the action, I made a decision: I was going to get pastrami. I made the announcement top my wife and her family, jumped in the car, and I was off. It was a cool, bright winter day, 46 degrees under cloudless skies with a light breeze, the perfect conditions for questing.+

A little over an hour and four or five grocery stores later, I had aquired an eight ounce package of Sara Lee pastrami, which turned out to be not quite the right stuff. (Not the first time I've been burned. I have an explorer's tendency where foodstuffs are concerned, so I was dippy enough to buy a package of Hormel pastrami, which was depressingly bland. The Sara Lee was better than you'd expect from a company known for making frozen cakes, but not by much.) But the quest had it's purpose, and it was fulfilled: from here on out, my pastrami related commerce will be directed to Mssrs. Deitz & Watson. I did find that could get it for a buck less at a different store, but I probably won't. When it comes to pastrami, as with proscutto, as with stilton, as with many things, there comes a point where it just doesn't make any sense to skimp. If you're gonna bother at all, you might as well get the good stuff.

In other news, the Patriot Act is all over the place. And that is all I have to say about that, in all honesty. I certainly can't say where it's done any good. As near as I can tell, thery have yet to arrest a single patriot. Come on, people! Let's get on the stick! If Michael Moore can find Charletan Heston, certainly the ATF has a shot. (Get it? ATF? Has a shot? Eh. Skip it.)

*Nick makes it over the pond every couple of years, but we don't hear much from him in between.
+Any weather conditions are the perfect conditions for questing.

BLOG LIKE THE WIND: February 9th: Why Didn't I Think Of That Before?

A while back I ran across the original version of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," the original, hour-long mockumentary produced by Larry David as a result of HBO's request to do a special on the creator of Seinfeld. It was, I was shocked to discover, genuinely funny. I ma not a fan of the ongoing HBO half-hour series, which I do not find funny. I know that there are many others who disagree with me, and many of them are in the industry, so screw me. But I don't find it funny. I find it squirm-inducing and thicki-headed. I mean, I see what they want to be funny, but it all just registers, in the final analysis, as crass. At one point I thought I was just missing the gag, but watching a couple of shows in their entirety I concluded that I was getting the joke, but that it was the one about the farmer's daughter that I've heard a million times, only this time the salesman is a Jew.

The hour-long has two main advantages: the Larry David stand-up segments, which to me were howlingly funny, especially when the material was at its most absolutely innapropriate, and the effacing nature of the thing. About midway through, Larry does a bit about Hitler going to magic clubs and coersing the magicians, after their shows, into revealing their secrets, and the show itself has a kind of quality in common with that gag: every card is shown. As many such things do-- Larry Sanders' shows come to mind-- the foul nature of the kind of people involved in the show business industry serves, in itself, as a central gag.

Back before my last trip to California, I rented the film "Comedian." For anyone unfamiliar with it, it's a documentary that was essentially supposed to recount Jerry Seinfeld's return to stand-up comedy after the sitcom folded. There were alot of levels to cover here, but the main thing was the man himself. Jerry Seinfeld is funny because he expects to be. The slick observationalist you see onstage is juts a persona. He's like a duck: smooth as silk on the surface, paddling like all hell underneath. I had heard the objection that the kid he's sorta pitted against was a mook or a patsy, and that the film treated him badly, but what was really clear to me was that the kid was just an egotistical schlub who wasn't about to let anyone tell HIM what comedy was all about; he was gonna show THEM. He kind of acted like he was the subject of the film, and in the end that reflected badly on him.

A second viewing during the visit to Doc Nagel confirmed this. I didn't make any preliminary comments to Chris before we watched it, and he rooted out the same final messages as I had through the course of the film. All of this prompts me to write something about the nature of comedy. But what?

BUILDING ROME, BLOG BY BLOG: February 10th: As I Was Saying . . .

In my usual morning routine of torturing myself while drinking my coffee, I found myself watching a video-- vh1-- of the latest "hit" by Jessica Simpson, in which she proclaims to never have felt to beautiful wearing just a t-shirt. Now, follow me here: the lyric is very clearly meant to be post-coital, and really only just post coital, registering thast moment of pleased shock when one realizes the immdiacy and carnality of the act just committed. (I am a connoiseur of such moments.) In the video, she is shown doing haoushold chores, mostly laundry, chewing on a pair of rubber gloves, and wearing a series of humorous t-shirts, one of which reads "plata-ma-pus," and one of which, troublingly, reads "Stinky Ass." Jessica is a lovely looking young lady, and I'm willing to overlook her overcooked arrangements and manufactured songs, but I draw the line at being encouraged to consider what might be terribly wrong in her digestive tract. I would rather go back to assuming that her trim figure is either natural or maintained by a regimine of excercise, bulemia and plastic surgery, rather than dysentery.

Did I change the chanel? I did not. In order to study the beast, one must face it. After a short break filled with rotten commercials, most of them for other shows on vh1 (or is it Vh1, or is it VH1, or is it Sub-MTV, or does anyone care?), they played a new entry in the Top 20 Countdown, which is (apparently) from the soundtrack to Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, which brings to mind something I have been meaning to address, somewhere, somehow, for a while now.

I am a fan, not to say a devotee, of the series South Park. Not to say a devotee because I don't always find it funny, and more often than not I'm only watching it because it is less reprehensible than any other show on. Anyone who's ever see South Park will understand that this is a scathing indictment of the rest of television programming, at least in the 9:30-10:30 time-slot. Some of the show's diatribes-- and the show does consist largely of diatribes-- are right on the mark, some of them are sweetly disingenous, some of them are just terrifically bizarre, and some of them are just gross. One of them, recently, should have been funny, but just wasn't.

This episode meant to parody the Queer Eye show, and, frankly, such was more than overdue. Let me make it clear: I have not seen the Queer Eye, which is to say that I know exactly what I'm missing. The Stereotype Confirmation Department signed off on the concept before they were allowed to go into production. The fact that they have, so far, had only one remotely funny line to run in the teasers-- one of the "Fab Five" emerges from a swath of tiger-striped fabric saying "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Drag Queen!"-- absolutely screams and screeches that this show is not nearly as fun as it might have been.

Now, teasers are meant to make viewers watch the show-- right? right?-- and my wife and I have come up with a very basic running rule concerning teaser, trailers and previews: if it is readily apparent that they have used up all the funniest gags and/or lines in the preview, we will not be seeing the movie. Which is just by way of saying that the Queer Eye show flunked this test from the get-go. My conviction is that the show is a drab and dowdy affair, despite the distinction of being hosted by a five-finger contingent of men who butt-fuck.

So I'm not wasting my time with it.

I expected the South Park parody of it to be stupid, but what I didn't realize is that there is a gray area between my dissapproval of the Queer Eye show and the tack the South Park show took. Lame as it might be, the Queer Eye show does have a laudable intent: the hobbling and incapacitation of homophobia*.

I have known my share of fags, probably more than. I have known some that I respected and some that I have not, but as with all the people I have met in my life, my respect is never based on sex or preference. (Or politics or religion or race.) It's based on intelligence and sense of humor and love of life. I have determined (and I maintain) that homosexuality is not an immutable condition or genetic trait or disease: it's a choice. It's mainly a matter of deciding how one gets laid and with/by whom. The people I have known who were scared of fags-- male and female alike-- also had other irrational fears. Fear of liberals. Fear of blacks. NRA memberships. That sort of thing. So their irrational fear of faggots could be easily and handily dismissed as part of a larger pattern of fear of things that would not and could not believably be a threat to them. So I was kind of dissapointed when the South Park episode exploiting the Queer Eye show veered towards homophobia*.

A comedy show, by nature, is going to be somewhat self-referential. But the death of it is for the show to become self-reverential. To esteem itself so much to think that what it is saying is more important than what it is saying it about, it's no longer funny. But enough about MAD TV.

(Hey, look! There's fish in this barrell!)

The premise of the show was that the Queer Eye show was turning all the townsmen, young and old, into "Metrosexuals(R)," a term so meaningless it defies description. (I suspect the same empty-headed dolts who watch and favor Sex and the City are devotees of Queer Eye.) The parody was good enough, but there prevailed a strange sense of homophobia* over the whole affair that, pardon the phrased, queered it all up.

For the most part, the attitude the South Park have taken towards perversion has been straightforward parody. This episode seemed to take a more subversive attitude. It seemed to be suggesting that the "Metrosexual(R)" movement would turn our red-blooded American males into fashion-conscious pansies, at least until they came to their senses. It was probably a foregone conclusion that the show would go after the QE show, and it makes as much sense as anything else that they would have taken this tack, but there was a certain easiness to it that lacked the usual South Park bite. Instead of using the usual sly hook, they grabbed a stick of dynamite and dropped it in the barrel. (Not that this is an unusual thing. They do it from time to time.)

Not that this has anything whatever to do with the previous diatribe on comedy. As Mark Twain famously said, "Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog; no one learns anything from it, and the frog dies of it." It's completely untrue, but it does serve to dissuade people from examining humor. In other words, it convinces smarter folks not to do what I am doing here.

As I always do when dealing with Twain, I ran directly to my Bartlett's Familiar to confirm the quote, and, natch, it wasn't there, although I did find another one I quite like: "Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand." Which isn't true, but it's fun to think. The reason I run to the Bartlett's is that, so often, Twain's quites are mangled before being passed on. Especially "Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated." He did say that, later on, but the original quote was "The report of my death was an exaggeration," which is infinitely funnier in my opinion.

All that said, off to troll for Le Show!

*"Homophobia," literally, means "Fear of things that are alike." But "homosexualaphobia" is too much of a mouthful, and "too much of a mouthful" is something that no male who is phobic of homos would be comfortable saying during a discussion of the matter.

BLOG THE RICH: February 15th: Death, Taxes, Marriage

So I took a few days off. From blogging, that is. I took one day off for pain. WHich is to say I had a visit to the dentist's office, where a lovely young lady scraped the muck off my teeth below the gumline, after which I spent the day feeling as if I had lost a rather vicious barfight. I woke that morning with a single compelling thought: I had only one thing to do that day.

After that, well, I've been busy. Time spent helping my Dad sort out some things at his house, time spent with Bryan, a pal since junior high, during which we completely and utterly failed to watch a '70's sexploitation movie, time with the Wifey, who has taken time off from work this weekend, partly for recreation, partly, it turns out, to de-shamble-ize our financial documents in advance of doing the yearly taxes. (Not to celebrate Valentines day, or Saint Valentines day, as she sees it as a sham holiday made up by the greeting cards companies in collaboration with the candy makers, whereas I see it as a sham holiday sold to the Papists by slapping a sham saint on it.) We are ( she says) probably going to be facing a two thousand dollar debt to the Man this year. I have had a hard time feeling bad about this, as I have been receiving substantial refunds from the government the majority of my taxable life. (My wife has also discovered, rather suddenly and just this minute, that in the seven years she has been keeping our records, during our seven years of married life, she has not, until now, ever had to make a file labeled "Medical Information-- Jim." The aforementioned confrontations with the dentist, and a surgical wisdom teeth extraction earlier on, were the necessity for creating said file.)

Now, I am fully aware that the majority of tax monies are wasted, and in fact the vast majority of tax monies are wasted in the expense of collecting and accounting for taxation or paying those who determine how much taxation should be garnered and to whom it should be distributed (themselves). But I am more adult than all of those whiners who somehow want to believe that the crop of politician they endorse is less likely to squander their moneys than the other breed of politician. The only Americans who are really aware of the amount of their money taken by the government fall into three categories: the greedy, the incompetent, and the opportunistic.

(Do no assume, gentle reader, that I intend to insult my busily indexing Wifey by naming these categories. I do not. My wife does not fall into categories. Period.)

The Greedy like to complain about taxes because they are under the impression that having more money makes them better than anyone else. Now, I am no communist, I know that money does, in fact, make the world go 'round, but I also know what the definition of "enough" is, and we have it. We could have more, and I would be loathe to have less, but I'm not kvetching. The Greedy like to complain that all those unworthies who subsist on government cheese and live in section 8 housing ought to be allowed to starve to death. Congratulations: you stand in favor of Hitler's Final Solution. Kudos to you.

The Incompetent want to think they have the world by the tail. They work hard and they run their own small businesses and they spend their revenues on fun, fun, fun. Then, at the end of the year, they pretend that they were completely unaware of the bargain they made with the devil the year before. What? I owe TAXES! IMPOSSIBLE!

The Opportunistic like to claim that the government is composed of blood-sucking leeches. Which is fine, as far as it goes. But, you see, and this is the point, they want to claim that the OTHER blood-sucking leeches are the problem, and THEIR blood-sucking leeches are the solution. So we end up with idiots who propose "tax cuts" that are supplanted with deficits that make up 100 times the revenue loss and tripled governmental agency budgets that push the deficit to astronomical levels. (There's a pun there, but you have to dig for it.) This, as you might have heard, is known as "The End Of Big Government."

I have a problem with Reagan. That might sound odd, since he is no longer in office and is in the process of losing his marbles. (Anyone who wants to call me "insensitive" to Reagan's pain and loss can get bent; all the reports I have heard about the Ex President's growing dementia have indicated that he is, as always, blissfully unaware of any shortcoming at all.) The problem is not so much with him as with his supporters. Which also might sound odd, since he is out of office and in the process of losing his marbles. Why would he need supporters? Why indeed. Hey, if we don't name airports and office buildings after him, who's gonna remember who won the Cold War for us? Spots arenas. Food courts.

(Ironically, the office building is loaded with toxins after a hugely delayed construction schedule, and the airport doesn't work. And Reagan didn't "win" the cold war. The Soviet Union collapsed under it's own bloated weight while the rest of the insurgent world learned that all they had to do was embrace the communist ideology to get the capitalist world to squrim on it's belly and offer them money.

What is generally not remembered is that the bastard saddled us with big government form the goddamned starting line, all in the name of small government. Reagan embossed in the legacy of America the place, nature and function of the Common Lying Louse. Not that he was the only one. He just made it seem more respectable.

Which brings us to gay marriage. I don't know why it brings us there, but I insist that it does. (Could be because the Reagan Revolution gave ample opportunity for anti-fag-coalitioning, which gave ample excuse for pro-fag-coalitioning. Ah, the Eighties! Reagan doesn't remember either ours or his!) I have been thinking about the whole gay marriage issue alot, completely due to the fact that the whole country is supposed to be thingking about the issue alot, wholly due to the fact that I am incapable of not watching the bizarre wallpaper that is known as the NBC World News Tonight. (Or NBC Nightly News. I get the titles mixed up. It's all the same paste.) And reading the paper. Apparently, the argument against gay marriage is that gay marriages will erode the legitimacy of straight marriages, three in ten of which end in divorce. Apparently, the argument FOR gay marriage is, ah . . . I've lost track. Something about dignity? The argument used to be about legal rights and health coverage, but it turns out the Authorities were willing to bend over backwards (stop it) to grant those privileges without actually calling it marriage. (Really, just so long as they didn't HAVE to call it marriage, which, for some reason, was the whole point.)

When my wife and I got married, it was sheerly for convenience. We were going to be living together anyways. Hey, the commitment was there. We didn't need some minister's words or a slate from the state to tell us we were going to be inseparable. We pretty much were. In fact, up to this day, during our leisure time, it's quite rare for us to be apart, and it ain't cause the state sanctioned it. It's the whole Valentines Day thing all over again: love and politics ain't got nothin' to do with each other.

Hah. That worked out rather nicely. Full circle and everything. Amazing what you can do when you don't put your mind to it.

But taxes. Plenty to complain about there. I complained, in theory, quite loudly last Fall. I voted against the Mayoral condidate* who was amongst the coalition that decided our tax monies ought to be used to buy a new coliseum to house a new NBA franchise after we lost the last NBA franchise for not building them a new coliseum (this brings the score to two old coliseums in thirty years) despite the fact that they had a referendum to see if the voters wanted a new coliseum and they said no. He got elected anyways. A lot of guff was made over the one member of the club who got voted out who had been instrumental in deciding the voters didn't have a say in the coliseum matter, but, frankly, she was on her way out anyways. When the newspaper reports that a City Council Member is drinking wine in a hot tub with her (soon to be ex-) husband, even the casual observer (hic) knows the jig is up.

But anyone who complains about taxes is a mook. The thieves are going to take them. In fact, they've taken them before most people get their paychecks. I never doubted the wisdom of that. Take it out ahead of time, give it back if-- and ONLY if-- they fill out a bunch of complicated forms. The game is fixed? The HELL you say! It takes a confederacy of low-level mooks a lifetime to figure it out, but they got the market cornered. Even a blind pig can find truffles. (Notice: the mooks who have the game figured spend most of the time they have being paid by our taxes complaining about our taxes and accusing each other of squandering the monies which have been collected to pay them. Orwell, eat your heart out!)

*"Condidate" was a typo, but I decided I liked it.

BLOG EVERLASTING: February 18th: An Apology to Parties Unknown, Condemenation of Parties Known

I found out recently that I seemingly owe an apology to The Kid. Apparently, he's just shy around adults. OF course, the likelyhood that he would ever read this page or give a damn (or know he was being referenced) are so remote as to be absurd, but still. Also, apparently he plays drums, which earns him a special place in my alleged heart. (As a rhythm guitarist, I know two universal truths that lead guitarists, regardless of their talents and abilities, mostly do not:

-- A decent drummer is better than spun gold.
-- An excellent drummer is a ticket to heaven.

This is despite the fact that there are few things funnier than a good drummer joke, such as the following:

-- What do you call an asshole who hangs around with musicians?
A drummer.
-- How many drummers does it take to screw in a light bulb
Drummers don't screw anything.
-- What's the difference between a pig and a drummer?
A pig won't stay up all night to screw a drummer
-- How many drummers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
Five: one to screw in the lightbulb, and four to stand around saying "He lost it during the bridge."
--What's the dfifference between a drummer and a drum machine?
When a drum machine gets smashed, it stops trying to keep the beat.

There are others, but that's enough for one day. Well, one more:

-- What's the difference between a drummer and a drummer on drugs?
What's a drummer?

So The Kid might actually be ok.

What isn't OK is Sara Lee pastrami. I gave it more than an even chance, but frankly it's just not right. A healthy serving of Deitz & Watson put the final nail in the coffin, but their final doom was still waiting in the wings. This morning it came in the form of their commercials. Sara Lee-- now, follow me-- Sara Lee is in the process of the hugest corporate act of bad faith in the history of corporate acts of bad faith. Never mind the DeBeers-- at least they are pretty straightforward in their promotion of greed, so they can't be far behind in the acknowledging that they make their profits on the back of state-sanctioned and approved murder. Forget the DelMontes-- the people in the fruit producing climes never had it good for the most part, going way back to pre-colonial times. In a land where the fruit literally drips off the trees, apparently, God has decided that life can't be as easy at it appears. The people at Sara Lee have decided they are going to give America everything it wants, at any cost. So what if we never know what good bread, cold cuts, cakes are supposed to taste like? So what if we never know there was a time when our underwear didn't fall apart on the third washing? So what if we are brought to believe that mediocrity is an American birthright, to think that we can get all the varieties of experience at a single corporate outlet, so what if we are made to believe that this plastic crap is really, honestly The Good Stuff?

Maybe I'm making too much out of this. Certainly, were Doc Nagel to make the same argument I'd call him out as being too cynical, suggest that The Good Stuff, as recognized by gourmands like ouselves, will always be about. I might even suggest that Deitz and Watson are maybe guilty of the same sorts of crime (certainly, as terrific as the D&W stuff is, it can't be nearly as yummy as the stuff Chris and Kim used to buy along The Strip in P'burgh, and no way is it better than the stuff available in NYC, beloved Manhattan (although it's easily better than the crap I got in Chicago the one time I was there). (Luck of the draw, readers; I'm sure there is Good Stuff to be had in the Windy City.) But really: the juggernaut that appears to be the hubris of the unstoppable momentum of the Sara Lee Corportation's drive to be all things to all men bugs the living crap out of me. Probably because they're from my home state. They're just up in Winston Salem. You'd think I could do something to stop them. But when that corporate juggernaut gets rolling, there's no stopping it. We're doomed. Our collective, national decline and fall is written in stone, and underwritten by Sara Lee(TM).

I say this for reasons other than the lame pastrami. I mean, it wasn't really all THAT bad. This morning I see our doom spelled out by Sara Lee due to their bread ads. This stems from a stalled side project of the Doc's and mine, the Unified Sandwich Theory. I had been working on a theory of excusion elements, that is tio say, what is not a sandwich, and what makes non-sandwiches non-sandwiches, and specifically what makes fast-food sandwich attempts fail. BUrgers, for instance, are not sandwiched, because the meat dominates the affair, thus preventing the vehicle from achieving the balance that is the essence of a sandwich. The "Market Fresh Sandwich" provided by Arby's-- itself a shameless purveyor of non-sandwich-sandwiches to begin with-- I have been wanting to exclude on some ground or another, but I haven't been able to nail down a real, concrete reason to exclude the thing. All of the criteria of the UST are met or exceeded by the "MFS"-- I like that-- those being, cheifly, balance of bread to veg to meat to sauce. The artifact might cross the line on the sauce factor, but that is a sin that I cannot condemn,as I prefer to commit said sin myself and refuse either repentence or forgiveness. But, having had the thing twice, I have to admit that something is rotten in the state of Denmark. The gaddamned thing just isn't a sandwich, but I could not, for the life of me, figure out why.

Then it dawned on me: the chain made a big deal about the makings being produced by Sara Lee, especially the bread. The bread, actually, seemed to be the problem-- too spongy, a bit too yeasty maybe? Something? But the argument didn't hold up. (Keep in mind that this was a while back, long before we started talking about the UST.) The sauciness of the thing almost made up for it, but not quite. The bread really wasn't so bad, though, that it should have had that great an impact on the overall sandwich.

It now dawns on me that the bread is not, in fact, to blame. The reason it dominates the affair is that the cold cuts are too bland, the sauce is under-spiced and over-applied, and the veg is just veg-- letuce, tomatoes, nothing that could be construed as either a) offensive or b) tasty. In other words, it was Sara Lee'd into existence, and it bears the mark of the corporate demon: if it were underwear, it would be within a breath of having it's elastic snap

People are always talking about how corporate American culture is going to ruin us, but they're all wrong. The stupid follow in the corporate lifestyle footprints, the intelligent walk around. It was always thus, and always thus shall be. But my former boss, herself a dicriminating consumer in her own right, way up there in my estimation of fellow human being as discerning entity, was at least once taken in by the Arby's/Sara Lee monstrosity. This corporate Frankenstien's monster has been let aloose on a very unsuspecting American public. God help us. God help us all.

What gives me hope is what always gives me hope, which is love. Let me put a translation on this: love is something that comes in many forms, and several forms of it are severely under-rated. For instance, I love the kids that work at the Harris Teeter where I shop, and they love me back, in the kind of limited, I-see-you-too sort of way that the retail grocery store environment makes possible. For this reason I abstained from purchasing the pastrami at the Bi-Lo, despite the lower price, until about a week ago, when a mid-day craving sent me there, purely in the interests of science. The chick working the counter, in an exchange with the customer in front of me, who, it turned out, was a family friend, divulged that she had put some time down in California. So, after the friend had departed, before placing my order, I chatted her up on the subject of California vs. Charlotte. We agreed on alot: California is beautiful but expensive, North is better than South, the Bay Area is massively overcrowded, that you need to see California at least once before you die, and anyplacde you have friends is better to be than anyplace where you're alone. In addition to being cute and personal and engaging, she also had one quality I have always found nearly irrisistable: her reach clearly exceeded her grasp. Her major ambition was to get a degree in architecture.

Now, as most of my readers are no doubt aware, I'm a big fan of architecture, at least when done right, and sometimes when done wrong. A spectacularly botched job of design is often as riveting as an excellently executed one. And some of the best design I've seen has come from right here in my fair city (and some of the absolute worst has been imported from Manhattan), and more than a few of the better architects I knew when I was reporting on this market (three of the best years of my life, frankly) graduated from the UNCC College of Architecture. But the chick behind the deli counter doubted she'd make it; there were stones in her pathway, so she said, chiefly debt and living arrangement. But when cheered on, she gamely admitted her ambition in the face of adversity.

Atta girl. Give 'em hell, kiddo. I may never see her again-- likelyhood is I will never see her again-- but in that short space, in that plastic place, the kid won my heart. So I did what I could to make her feel like she was better than just a kid working the deli counter at a Bi-Lo. Which, frankly, is a pretty low place to start out from. This particular store was built and opened recently, I think less than a year ago, and it's set up to look like it's a Harris Teeter, but with less of the good stuff. The produce department is twice the size of the one at the HT, but has about a third of the variety (no fresh herbs, for one thing). They have impressive refrigerated kiosks for cheeses and specialty cold cuts, but nothing of any real note in them, and certainly nothing as impressive as the variety of cheeses avaiable in the single refrigerated kiosk at the HT. In the wine section they have a placard describing reisling, where it comes from, what it tastes like, and so forth, but I have yet to find a single bottle of reisling in stock there. To exist authentically in such a remarkably absurd place is a feat to be admired in and of itself.

NEW KID ON THE BLOG: February 18th: Pastrami, Duty, Aliens

This morning began with Uncle Jim Duty: had to take niece Cayla to school. Which was fine, and I enjoy doing it. Afterwards, I bolted out to the Bi-Lo, again for the pastrami, and half-thinking that the same chick who had been at the deli counter might be there again, so I might begin the rest of the day with a little light conversation.

No such luck. The young lady who was behind the deli counter very clearly didn't want to be there; when I arrived, she was petulantly filling stainless steel deli tubs with bright yellow potato salad (the kind that looks as if it has been spray painted). She had to be alerted to my presence twice, and when she did come to help me, she couldn't find the pastrami. Handily, there was a package of pre-sliced stuff in the adjacent counter, so I grabbed it and told the chick not to bother. No conversations about architecture for me this morning.

Which maybe serves me right. I guess sometimes I expect too much out of people. I mean, it's not like I have never sloughed off a duty, although I really rarely do. And it's not like the Bi-Lo is the world's greatest place to work. But honestly, my dissapointment was not with the kid at the counter (although it was initially). My beef is with Bi-Lo. In the first place, if all of your employees are crabby and cranky, something is definitely rotten in the state of Denmark. To produce such an atmosphere, in my experience, Management has to be imbued with an intractible attitude that life should suck. It takes a special effort. Also, the kid at the counter clearly had not been well trained. Throwing people into situations they are not prepared for and being dissapointed when they don't perform is one of the great earmarks of the Greater North American Moronic Manager.

So to hell with the place. To hell with it's half-assed deli and it's near-gourmet cheeses and the cute little goddamned train that makes a cicuit around the front section of the store on a track about 10 feet up in the air. I ain't got to work on Maggie's farm no more.

So, on returning home, I sat down to watch "Alien," which, I am noting for the umpteenth time, is a vastly different movie than any of the ones that suceeded it. The tone is grimmer, the look is grimier, the tension is thicker, and, strangest of all, it's more believeable. There's a gentle shabbiness to it that makes me think that this is what an intergalactic salvage scow would look like. And the punches aren't pulled. The thing is a thing, and it behaves like a hunting animal, unlike the creatures conjured for James Cameron's version, which are for some reason systematically destroying their food supply. (I think that's supposed to have some left-wing resonance with depletion of resources arguments, but it doesn't.) I keep trying to make something out of that, but sdo far all I end up getting is a vague dissatisfaction with the films of James Cameron, and there are certainly worse films to be had out there. Certainly there's no connection between the incompetence of Bi-Lo managers and the films of James Cameron. Of course not.

BLOGGING A DEAD HORSE: February 20th: News, Newz, The History Channel

Good news! I read my local paper this morning. There isn't any news. Well, they say no news is good news!

I got in the habit, years ago, of refering to the Network Nightly News (NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, take your choice*) as newz, the same way I refer to Processed American Cheese Food Product as cheeze. I can't remember when, but Doc Nagel started it, and, as with many things in our correspondence over the years, it made too much sense not to make it a habit. The local paper, some days, is full of nothing but newz, and today's paper is a fine example of Processed American News Feed Product, with the exception of a story which might or might not connect the deaths of 3 elderly women in nearby Shelby, but they've been running that story for a fortnight now.

All of which comes to mind while pursuing a sudden inspiration: years ago, when we first moved in here and got cable (we'd lived without it for several years), we were jazzed about a couple of cable prospects, amongst them The History Channel. We were dismayed, eventually, by the consistently low quality of the shows on The History Channel. (I say "eventually," as, having read American History magazine, among others, I was dismayed and over it far sooner than was my wife. She held out hope for a good three weeks of programming.) Over the course of the intervening years, I had chance to ponder, now and again, the quality of the content of The History Channel, and it never really ocurred to me why the stuff is so damned dissapointing so much of the time.

Yesterday I got hooked into watching the Channel for a good four hours; they ran, back to back, several segments of the series The Big House. I had sampled it before, whether on the Channel or elsewhere, and found it satisfactory: decent history, to the point, not much in the way of suspect content or conclusion. Besides which, incarceration is one of my fascinations. (Not for the reason you're thinking.) So, having watched this stuff during the day, later, after killing time with a Food Network show, dinner, and the last half of a half-decent movie, I tuned in to the Channel to watch part of a show about armaments of the civil war, just as a matter of killing time before going to bed.

I eventually shut it off. It was not really very entertaining, nor really very informative, and some rather specious things were said about the timeline of industrial mass production. For a show about things made to kill people more efficiently, it was a pretty thin gloss, with an NRA sensibility lurking in the shadows. I did as much as I could to tell myself "Well, it isn't THAT bad."

This morning it dawned on me why the programming is, by and large, so bland. The people at the Channel have figured out that their target audience consists of two parts: people who are unemployed and are home all day, and people who have returned home from work and will be going to bed soon. So, they figure, by and large, they can expect a good chunk of their audience to be drunk and under the impression that they're bettering themselves.

*The reader will note that I ommited Fox News, which isn't news, or even newz, no matter how you slice it.

DEVIL WITH A BLOG DRESS ON: February 22: Death, Taxes, Weekends, Fox News

Anyone reading this might conclude, if they were paying an absolutely incredibly unhealthy amount of attention, that I do not blog on the weekends. There is a very good reason for this: I do not blog on the weekends. It's not a religious thing, I just generally don't have the time. Like death and taxes, it is a certainty that, come the weekend, I'm booked beyond belief. Hiking with the wife, spending time with nieces & nephews, shopping, eating, movies, whatnot. It's what the weekends were for. Back before I quit my job, there were Mondays when I reflected to myself, in the middle of a particularly busy or hectic morning, that no matter how much I was exhausting myself now, it was nothing compared to the activities of the weekend.

Fox News is a criminal organization. It ought not to be allowed to exist. Just making the observation; I'm not actually prepared to pursue the matter, not am I in a position to. There's alot of robber-baron-ism going on in the media industry these days, sybmolically represented in the radio world by the ongoing battle between Infinity and Clear Channel to buy every independent radio station in America. They're under the impression that they can concolidate their profits in the long run. I'm betting the whole goddamned house of cards will eventually tumble Enron-like to the earth, leaving a small mutitude of broke low-level execs standing around wondering what in the hell just happened.

EASIER THAN FALLING OFF A BLOG: February 24th: Criticizing Pepsi Ads, The President

Any company stupid enough to think that Michael Jackson would be a reliable product endorser deserves anything they get. PepsiCo, in my opinion, despite any and all local ties or advantages, deserves to come down with corporate cancer, lose all it's stock value, and spiral into Enronization. I posit this sheerly on the basis of their ads. I may have had a Pepsi once upon a time, but memory fails, so I can't really criticize the product. But the ads! Sheesh! Feh! What crap! The latest is particularly galling. It features (supposedly) a bunch of kids who were prosecuted for downloading MP3's off the internet, claiming that they will continue to download MP3's off the internet, despite having been caught, prosecuted, and punished. The backing music is the Clash's cover of "I Fought The Law."

Only it ain't the Clash. It's some other milque-toast band, probably some studio conglomeration that Pepsi's ad people put together to sound sorta like what somebody might think the Clash sounded like. Get this? The f*cking corporation is so stupid and disingenuous and cheap that they sidestepped paying whatever it might have cost to get the rights to use the Clash's version of the tune and instead played a faked up version while these supposed felons proclaim that their love of music is so strong that no federal penalty is capable of stopping them from downloading music, no matter how illegal it is!* FREEEEEEEEEDOOOOOOOOOM!

In high school there was a klatch of guys who were "Music Fans." they spent their time in the library reading Rolling Stone whenever possible, and spent their afternoons at the music store in the mall, buying whatever was new. Their follks were rich; they could afford to buy whatever crap Rolling Stone said was hottest or newest or whatever. They ended up with some really bad music. I don't really recall the context, but I remember one of the guys-- named John, I think, a tall, thin, dark-haired, blue-eyed chunk of Americana in a maroon letter jacket-- responding to something I said by asking "What? You don't like the Clash?" I gave him what, years later, I came to refer to as dumb look #3 and said "I don't like the Clash you like." It took it a few days to compute, but once it sunk in, he really got it: the Clash had numbers they did because they dug it, and then they had the stuff meant for the radio. They were musicians who really knew what it meant to have the chops to be able to pull off anything: you played the gig 'til midnight, then after the management went back to count reciepts, you dug in and jammed. We weren't friends per se-- he was a Senior, I was a sophomore, and the rules of the klatch precluded anything more than a grudging acknowledgement of my existence-- but he had a knowing smile for me when we passed in the hall, and the first time I showed up on campus with a guita he gave me a wide grin and said "Now you're talking!"

The moral of the story: people who screw around and pretend they like music are The Enemy. End of discussion.

In other news, our president is a wimp. The local paper ran a story this morning about the so-called "Free Speech Zones" where protesters are coralled during public his appearances. The Republicans are idiots. They tried to cancel out Clinton's popularity by painting hism as morally bankrupt. The same party who vetted presidents who lied to the public about everything from the reasons our nation ought to go to war to who they were sending weapons to (the nations they were telling us we ought to go to war against) wants to accuse others of dishonesty. Brilliant! Fools me every time! So I have no compunction at all to disbelieve them when they remove the protesters to "a safe distance" for "their own safety." They don't suspect that I will draw the conclusion that the President, after all, is speaking outside the Free Speech Zone. Ah. Must mean that everything the Prez is saying is a lie.+ That explains a load.

A stupid damned wimp who has advisers pick the easiest targets to knock over in the name of National Security. Before the war, I had a discussion with my Dad during which I confessed my doubts as to the veracity of the stated need to go to war with Iraq-- this was during that uncomfortable ramping-up period, about which more in a moment. My cards were simple if intuitive: it just seemed too easy, too obvious. He was fighting the war on terrorism by attacking the same country his father sent us to war againt at the end of his term. Too easy.

My father's cards were simple too: Would we rather find out Saddam has weapons of mass destruction after he's used them, or before? Not the best argument, granted, but the implication behind it was even more sisnister: if we don't find weapons of mass destruction, so much the better! I mean, grant the following: Iraq had been stringing the UN inspectors along, making them play site tag, being deceptive and alternately claiming to have big guns (to their people and other Arab nations and Israel) and claiming they didn't have big guns (to the US and UN). The administration could have made the claim that it was worth the war just to settle the matter. But they're even dumber than that. They decided it made more sense to say the weapons all got towed over into Syria. Damn trailer trash Iraqui's! Everytime Animal Control comes to take that vicious pitt bull away, they stick it in the cab of Floyd's pickup!

Here's what really gets me: they responded to Spetember 11th by institutiong the Patriot Act, and they still haven't arrested a single patriot. Not one! Hypocrites!

*I use the altered version of the F-word here in two contexts: corporations, by and large, are so stupid as entities that they don't deserve the full use of the F-word, and I mean the alteration of the word to in some way amplify the disingenousness of the ad campaign, although that, in my estimation, is not wholly necessary.

+The Wifey points out that juust because he's speaking outside the Zone doesn't make he's lying, it just means his speech is not free. It's very, very expensive, and we're all going to pay for it. And pay, and pay, and pay, and pay.

BLOG THE GOOD BLOG: February 24th Supplemental: Observations

Ann Coulter is a mean bitch who thinks it's funny to pick on cripples. I know it's an obvious point, but some things, I think, just can't get said too often.

BLOGGING IN A WINTER WONDERLAND: February 26th: Toblogganing Down A Never-Ending Hill

Yesterday, in order to prove that I am an obsessive mook, I drove nearly 40 miles in search of a .021 gauge phosphor-bronze guitar string for my 12-string guitar. This is the g-string, which breaks rather often, and, thus, the jokes upon which all have been made. Suprisingly, there are fewer jokes about needing a new G string than you might think.

There will be none of that today, as a killer winter storm has hit my lovely town, which at this latitude means a wet accumulation on the roads that will be difficult to clear. I did run out-- a brief circuit around this end of the city, a total of about 15 miles-- to fetch some things I don't wish to be without if we are to get snowed in, among these de-freezing salt and beer. I also ran past the post office to mail a bill and to the public library to drop off two books and pick up one for my wife. The trip took almost as long as yesterdays, due mainly to the necessity of cautious navigation, but also partly due to the necessity of avoiding people who are not navigating cautiously. I've got a pretty good handle on navigating in the muck, as does my wife, but there are countless others out there who, in addition to not having the knack for it, either can't be bothered to think (and thus try to drive as they would on dry roads) or are so scared that they are paralyzed behind the wheel. While driving amongst them, I have felt free to judge them with curses and cajoling (though not with my horn; I'm a skosh too polite for that). But now, in calm reflection, I am less harsh. I've seen people up in Yankeeland lose control of their vehicles for what appear to be a variety of presumably unforgivable navigational sins, people who drive in the muck all the time and ought to be used to it, and I have reached the conclusion that the muck is difficult to drive in, and that if I am going to be critical of the way other handle or fail to handle the muck, maybe I would do better to stay away from them. (That is, maybe I ought not to drive in the muck.)

Which is kind of a shame, because I do get a bit of a kick out of it. I don't go out in the muck for the most part, unless I have to, and this morning's trek had gotten more than a little sporty by the time I got in. This, of course, is nothing: the real adventure begins this afternoon, when I will be required to take my wife to the airport, where she will be catching hell.

Okay; she will be catching a flight to Austin. She has been monitoring the airline's flight board, and so far it's still on. The flight delays in Atlanta, where the storm hit yesterday afternoon and last night (this thing is a killer, dumping snow on some places for up to eight hours), have diminished. My wife is uncharacteristically optimistic about the chances of her flight 1. not getting cancelled, and b) not missing the connecting flight in Atlanta. This is because, despite her make-a-million-dollars-and-never-work-again propaganda, the Wifey is more than gung-ho about work. In the last few places she worked, after she left they had to hire at least two people to do the work she was doing (in one case, they eventually hired three people to do the work she was doing). As she has left lesser jobs for greater ones, her former employers have discovered that they should have offered her the sun, the moon, and the stars to keep her.

Her flight is for a convention of information architects. It wasn't even her idea. It was proposed by a co-worker, who isn't going because management decided it was crucial for Rachelle's career development, but not for the colleague's. It's a funny old world, id'n it?

IT'S BLOG, IT'S BLOG, IT'S BIG, IT'S HEAVY, IT'S WOOD: February 29th: Upsides, Downsides, B-sides

As often happens when my wife goes out of town, I spent the first two days stuffing myself with junk food and the third day feeling green about the gills. This time around a large portion of the crap I packed my gut with was chili, which I absolutely love. I have found that I make a damned fine chili from scratch, but also that I can derive a fair amount of pleasure from doctoring up a can of the stuff as well.

Of course, there are perils. The first one being that there are almost no decent canned chilis, which I find very odd. (If you're going to pick a food to be canned, chili seems to be one of the likliest candidates.) (There's a pun there, but I'm ignoring it.) I've heard various tales about the origin and/or purpose of chili-making, and they range from ways to preserve meat to ways to cover up suspect beef. (There's also a legend about chili being a way to use up bad cuts of beef, and more on that in a moment.) These legends tend to vary wildly, and there's not specific or reliable proof for any of them. There are several reasons for this:

--Chili is an easy thing for anybody to make and claim they have an exclusive best recipe, therfore most chili-makers are liars.
--People who eat chili tend to drink-- or vice-versa, take your pick.
--Nobody interested in preserving recipies as a matter of haute cuisine would give a damn about chili anyways.

My Dad used to make chili, back in our Texas years, of which there were precisely one and a half. This is not the worst habit he picked up in those years, not the worst by half, but it did lead to some pretty bizarre behavior. The going wisdom on chili then-- or at least the one my Dad picked up on-- had it that chili was a way to use up bad cuts of beef, and preserve the stuff as well, thus the hotter the better. The cubed beef was sauteed and then stewed in tomatoes, onions, and peppers for approximately sixteen hours, after which is was barely fit for human consumption. The next day, fetched from the fridge and re-heated, it was pretty good. The third day, served over rice, it was terrific. In later years, after our move back to Charlotte, he abandoned the practice slowly but surely. Of course, that was not the end of the insanity: for a number of years, he grew cayenne peppers in the back yard, which he would seasonly turn into an almost completely inedible salsa that kept the house reeking of peppers for up to a month. He would grind the peppers in a meat grinder and mix them in huge mixing bowls, then can the stuff off for later inconsumption. Shortly thye practice was made of opening all the windows on the ground floor of the house to let the fumes dissipate. Texas will make people do some strange tings.

Here's the truth about chili:

--Chili can be made with anything, up to and including ground turkey, although that dazzles me. (I can't see why anyone would make anything with ground turkey.)
--Anything you will be cooking for 3/4 of a day-- usually while consuming beer, at least-- and will require seasoning and re-seasoning over the course of the cooking, has a better than even chance of coming out palatable.
--If the mixture does start heading south, the solution is easy: MORE HEAT.

This is the reason for all those multiple-alarm-chili recipes and/or mixes that proliferated with so much alacrity in the 70's: it takes a finely tuned palate to make a good chili. Any fool can make a hot chili. Nothing specifically AGAINST hot chili, or hot curry or hot sausage for that matter. But a fair amount of the stuff I sampled in Texas was just plain hot, nothing but hot, not tasty, not spicy, nothing, just hot. I didn't like it. For a while there my folks (specifically my Dad) thought I just didn't like hot stuff. So it came as a large suprise to him later in my young life when I took a fancy to an Indian restaurant that served the hottest, tastiest tandori chicken and pocket bread in the Western world. This was the authentic stuff: spiced up and cooked by slapping it onto the red-hot walls of clay ovens. The bread itself was not spiced, but it picked up the flavor from the chimney of the oven and the smoke inside. I like hot stuff. But I prefer tasty stuff. I don't like stuff that's just plain hot, and I don't get into the macho trip of who can stand the hottest thing in his mouth without passing out from the pain.

Portions of this crop up due to the fact that my wife is in Austin, which, as so many places do, has an undeserved reputation as a swell place. As with Ashveille in my own home state, Oakland in California, and a dozen dozen other places scattered around the country, it is a place buoyed on the fiction that it is a hip, interesting place to live, despite the fact that it is dingy, dirty, expensive, and populated by silly, pretentious people. And we all know there's only one place where those factors add up to someplace you might actually want to be: Manhattan.

(Of course, combine the two and you end up with Kinky Friedman. Ride 'im, Jewboy.)

(Which only goes to show: it's easier to make good chili than it is to make good company, even, and maybe especially, if your main ingredients come out of a can. I have no idea what I mean by that.)

I have never known anyone who made the choice to live in one of these dirty little paradises who turned out to be actually happy. Lemme phrase that a little differently: I have never known anybody to choose one of these crappy little salons as home and been 1. actually happy, or b) actually hip. I had a school chum who moved to Austin because it suited his business purposes. He seemed pretty happy there until a few years ago when he took a job in Austin. While before, when he had been travelling around and spending a month or two in Austin at best (rarely long enough to take a course or two at the University there), things weren't so bad. Then he took a job with a major corporation that kept him in Austin full time. The last time I heard from him, he sounded like he had aquired a permanent hemorrhoid.

HAVE I DONE "BLOGGING A DEAD HORSE" YET? OH . . .: March 2nd: Love Death, Sex, Travel, The Asphalt Jungle

A couple of problems with this whole blogging business, and, yes, they're personal:

-- I always thing of things to blog about when I'm out running around, and I never get around to blogging about them, no matter how terribly, crucially important I think they are.
--I often find myself blogging when I simply have nothing better to do.

Now, anyone reading this might think that the first objection is the same problem anyone who has ever seriously engaged in writing has complained about-- the ones that got away, those terrific ideas that woulda been gold if only you coulda gotten them down at the moment, and of course that's entirely true. And of the second objection, it could be said that blogging as a method of wasting time beats, say, forming a serious heroin habit and/or masturbation. Which is fine, as far as it goes. However, it seems to be that since the object of modern-day blogging is to complain, and I simply don't have anything to complain about right now, since I'm blogging to waste time and I can't remember what I had thought I might blog about either six hours ago while driving around on an odd errand, nor two hours ago while I was watching The Asphalt Jungle, that the above complaints were, however speciously, valid.

Forget I said anything.

BLOGGING ABOUT LOGGING: March 4th: Why I Quit Debating

I just finished watching one of my favorite guilty pleasures, a Showtime feature with Penn & Teller entitled, enticingly, Bullshit. In addition to being one of those things I only watch when the wife is either asleep or away-- she watched about three installments before getting annoyed at the presentational style, and one must admit that, whatever his merits, Penn Gilette is nothing if not overbearing-- it's also a show that speaks to my heart, a show that beats the liberal, left-wing, bullshit science agenda into the ground without having a conservative, right-wing, corporate society axe to grind. (This is why I hate politics.)

This installment was on environmentalism, a movement which has gotten more and more absurd over the decades and done itself far more harm than its enemies ever have, and done so by embracing more and more junk science and making more and more outlandish claims about less and less damaging practices year after year after year.

Now, listen: I am an ecologist. I recycle. I don't litter. In fact, I pick up trash when I find it on the trail. I am terribly aware of the quality of our water and our air, and I am willing to make sacrifices to ensure that I am not contributing to the diminishing of those qualities. But, Geeze Louise, the lumber companies are NOT to blame for the greenhoue effect. If anyone is, it's those nice people who build all those nice houses for other nice people to live in, or thosae nice people who build those nice shopping centers for those nice pople to shop. There are places people will drive their SUV's to, and where the green trees will not grow back.*

And don't bitch about global warming to me while standing around a bonfire. Puzzle that one out yourself, poindexter.

I don't think smog or pollution are good things. I also don't think textile plants are good things. It took thirty years of constant pressure from the Feds to get the textile industry to stop dumping live chemical dyes into the rivers in my part of the world. Now that the rivers no longer run rainbow colored poison, the textile production business has all run off to India and Indonesia. (AH AH AH! Got you there, too: the textile industries are not poisoning the rivers there, either. The fact of the matter is that, during their forced re-education, the textile industries as a whole came to realize that it was cheaper and more economical to use limited-run dyes and non-contaminatory agents in their processes.) I also recognize a huge shift in protest over the lasdt ten years: nuclear power is no longer such a favorite whipping boy anymore, chiefly because it became aparent that commercial nuclear power and it's by-products don't seem to be producing near the biohazards as were direly predicted. (In fact, the most prodigious producer of nuclear waste is, in fact, the American Military Industrial Complex, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of the American Political Establishment.)

During the Penn & Teller show, one of the environmental activist spokespersons, an charming young lady with magnificent tits and absolutely no idea what she was talking about, claimed that the Smithsonian Institute claimed that we were losing species to extinction worldwide at the rate of 300 species a day.

300 species a day! Man, talk about your brutal efficency!

I joined the debate team my first year in high school at my parents bequest. I had become something of an outcast through my junior high years, I was pulling in mediocre grades due to lack of interest, and my folks thought the deabte team might help shift the winds on both matters.

In the long run, they were right. I made alot of good friends through the debate team, and several times I was made to snap to attention (to my studies) by the threat of not being allowed to compete in debate tournaments if I didn't bring in passing grades in this or that subject. (I've always been bright to the point of boredom, and if a teacher wasn't engaging me intellectually, I often didn't give him/her the satisfaction of keeping my attention.) Additionally, there were the girls. I had several romantic attachments due to the travel and society involved in scholastic debate; sometimes the combination of intellectual discourse, adrenelin-fueled argumentation, and unfamiliar surroundings sparked amorous adolescent passions in a most excellent fashion. Plus, everybody got to go home the next day. No broken hearts, no sloppy breakups, no heated parking-lot arguments or projectile jewely. (Or relatively little, anyways.) But I digress.

I learned alot. Those guys I talked about earlier, reading Rolling Stone in the library? They were on the debate team. They were on the debate team so they could spend time in the library.+ They were not there for the true purpose of debate, which is simply this: to learn.

I was on the debate team through coercion, remember, so I was not pre-disposed to learning from the get-go. But, by push and shove and coincidence and happenstance, I learned a helluva alot. I learned that lawyers and judges speak a very different language than the rest of the world. (Second year, NDT topic "Resolved: that there should be significant changes in the procedures of the criminal justice system." Or something like that.) I learned alot about weapons of mass destruction-- a great deal of the debate game depended on what we called "impacts" to "disadvantages," which were arguments that insisted that any change to the status quo-- ANY status quo-- would end in complete and utter disaster, hopefully, the arguments contended, in world-wide nuclear war.

Of course, most of the arguments linking the disads to the impacts were bullshit, and we all knew that, but we ran them anyways. I walked away from debate a few times, usually out of disgust at the fact that the highest I could rise through all this bullshit was semi-finalist, sometimes for lack of a suitable partner (I was always in the two-man debate element), and finally because I lost faith in my coach, who started out being a helluva nice guy and turned into a back-biting academic bastard of the first water. Through it all, though, I got a tremendous education in junk science.

So I know that the numbers that are presented year after year that are supposed to prediict global warming have been cooked. The formula used to compile the numbers concludes that the overall temperature of the ocean has risen 2.4-3.6 degrees. It has concluded that often enough that the overall temperature of the ocean should not be about 110 degrees today. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Even if the pun were intended there, it would still not be half as ironic as the most valuable thing I learned through all my years of debate: junk science is often absolutely invaluable.

When W refused to ratify the Kyoto treaty, I had the most surreal feeling. I knew that he didn't sign it for the wrong reasons-- his party supposed the requirements of the treaty would hurt American industry, which they wouldn't, and hamper American industry's competetiveness, which it wouldn't-- but the treaty itself was based on conclusions furnished by the worst junk scientists in the world. But, for all and in the end, the requirements of the treaty, to a one, were not bad ideas at all. There wasn't anything in there that I, as a huge and rabid fan of Mother Nature in all her glory, wouldn't stand up and applaud as a step in the right direction and a boost for the cause.

And that's the thing: for all the 100 degree oceans and forestless desert globes and 100% depletion of resources those junk scientists predicted, largely in the quest of tenured faculty positions and study grants (and, ironically, spy-vs-spy industrial espionage escapades financed by huge multi-national industrial interests), there bullshit input has been invaluable in convincing otherwise uneducable senetors and representatives that they had better push American industries to clean up their acts. All this junk science has made it possible to clean up many of our rivers and our air. Long live junk science!

The real conclusion is that all the crap I learned through debate is fictitious, and I would have done as well to sit in the library reading Rolling Stone. It's a funny old world, id'n it?

*The argument that trees create oxygen and eat carbon dioxide, and that the more trees we cut down the less oxygen and more carbon dioxide we will have to breathe, was de-bunked for me by a college professor teaching a freshman level geology course. Don't freaking bother me with it. Trees create as much oxygen as they eat carbon dioxide. Trees aren't THE SOURCE of the oxygen in the atmosphere. Oh, and the soil compost that the trees require to grow creates enough carbon dioxide to easily cancel out the oxygen created through photosynthesis.

+When I suggested that people who pretend they like music and don't are The Enemy, I was exaggerating.

SHE'S A GRAND OLD BLOG, SHE'S A HIGH FLYING BLOG: March 7th: Selling America

I am currently watching one of my favorite films of all time, "Scrooged," on Comedy Central (while also reading up on recently released albums on the All Music website, thus making the commercial interruptions palatable). So far, at least, it looks like they didn't cut the thing too much, although the commercial breaks have been eggregiously long so far. As I made my way to the kitchen to re-fill my water bottle, my wife was headed back to hang a damp shirt on a door frame (she was doing laundry). She noted "Ah, watching "Scrooged" I see." I affirmed, noting that the thing had been cut pretty well so far, except for some bobbling in the scene where Bill Murray's character requests, eventually, for the workmen to "Please, for the love of God and your own jobs, hold the GOD-DAMN HAMMERING!?!"

(I'm just going to throw that out there, without any other reference, since if you haven't seen the movie no amount of explaining will make the line as funny as it is the way Bill delivered it, bless his twisted soul.)

I remarked that they cut the word "God" in the compound curse, since that is the foul part.

It's not a commentary I haven't made before, and it's completely unfair. As part of my intellectual baggage, I have a healthy distrust for most things evangelical. When I was forming into an adult, the late 60's and early 70's, the city of Charlotte was a mecca for evangelists and "televangelism," the brand-new practice of holding church services on TV. The most radical and rabid men of the cloth tended to be the ones who were insane enough to book air time, so I got to hear preachers praising war and begging for money, excorciating the rich and telling the poor that they had to buy their way to salvation. Add to that Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, whose PTL show tried to dress up as Sesame Street-- no foolin'-- in order to try and trick little kids into subscribing to thier particular Southern brand of smilin' religious zealotry . . . Color me jaded.*

So the criticism that taking the "God" out of "God-damn" suggests that "God" is a dirty word is a kind of knee-jerk reaction, and I don't really mean it. It is, I think, a funny little joke in my own household, but I would be careful to consider in whose presence I should repeat it. I don't mean to hurt anyone's feeling. Except on a limited basis. In the case of Toby Keith, I would love to hurt his feelings, but the single-minded little prick probably doesn't have anything you could genuinely call "feelings."

This came to mind earlier today, while we were on our way out for a hike with my sister-in-law Danielle, who had her radio tuned to a country radio station that was doing the weekly top-twenty countdown. Toby has the number one spot locked in still, with a nice little ditty dedicated to our soldiers in Iraq, which contained lines to the effect of "They don't do it for the glory, they just do it to serve their country," or something like that. Now, rather than leaping to the conclusion that I don't support our troops, please let me explain that I asked my sister in law to turn off the radio because it pains me to listen to craphounds who try to make a buck off of the suffering of others. Worse yet, I hate to hear about our soldiers getting duped, and the broadcaster introducing the tune suggested that many of our brave men and women had adopted it as their own personal anthem while overseas.

This is the same jerk-off who penned the post 9/11 piece of shit "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (aka The Angry American)," which suggested that we were gonna find out who was responsible for 9/11, and they was gonna have a great big American boot up their ass, courtesy of Uncle Sam. (I can't be bothered to look up the actual lyrics right now.) As it turns out, his prediction was nearly accurate. As it turns out, it was the wrong boot and the wrong ass, but Uncle Sam did, in fact, swing a leg. Wiping out the Taliban wasn't the worse thing we could have done-- these are the jerks who went around blowing up ancient statues of Bhudda (or Bhuddas)-- and any organization, eg. al Queada, that spends a significant amount of time and money trumpeting that they are going to sabotage the US and drive The Great Satan back to hell (or whatever) kind of deserves some harassment, in my humble opinion. But I have heard nothing-- nothing-- that convincingly links that organization to 9/11. (Besides, we still haven't got their leader, they are still active and blabbering, and, frankly, no matter how hard we've made it on them or how widely they've scattered, they really don't have it too much worse than they did before we started harassing them. I mean, c'mon, they were living in CAVES then, they're living in CAVES now.) Then, of course, there's the matter of Iraq, which we attacked because the candy man can.

During the painfully slow and deliberate "ramping-up" to the war, I told my Dad that it looked too easy: pick a popular enemy, blame them for 9/11, and attack them. As it turns out, I was 100% right. Iraq has no weapons to worry over, they were not connected to al Quaeda, although they may be after this is all over, and we are now suffering the classic Arab tactic known as "the Trickle of Blood." If your opponent is too vastly superior to be flat-out-defeated, make a long series of small strikes. Keep the trickle of blood flowing until the enemy decides that the objective is not worth the harassment. (Of course, the religious harassment currently underway was not something I predicted. I didn't have to. My wife pegged that one before we went in.) And Bush is still selling the war.

There's some wisdom to the old salesman's mantra "this stuff sells itself." I have largely avoided sales positions in my life, because to sell is to degrade one's self-respect in the cause of an object, and often a crappy object at that. But one of the best jobs I ever had was as "Sales Associate" (read: "cashier") at the Warner Brothers' Studio Store. Because the stuff sold itself. Nobody came into the store in a bad mood. Everyone was there for fun stuff, either for themselves or their kids or their friends or other loved ones. I never had to justify a product in order to prompt a sale (although some of that did go on in the back corner of the store, where a separate sales associate sold "art cells"). One time, I told a customer handling a particular product at one of the impulse-buy displays next to the cash register "Those break." My manager, who was standing at my elbow, looked at the merchandise in question, and said "Yes, they do break." So the customer went away happy at not having spent seven bucks for something that would have proven, ultimately, dissapointing.

The war has been initiated and pursued and seen though and called done. The current mission has been characterized as peace-keeping, just until the Iraquis get their governmental act together. (Although there is little if any difference between the previous action, "war," and the current action, "occupation," but more on that later.) It has all been said and done, and our president is still selling the war.

This suggests, to me, that maybe the war was something of a shoddy product. As is the brand of "patriotism" sold by Toby Keith. It doesn't do anything to strengthen the country. It ain't nothin' but lip service to ideals that the target audience actually lacks. Toby doesn't love his country. He loves his record label, and he wants to make them billions and billions of dollars, because he knows that if he makes them billions and billions of dollars they will love him back and give him millions and millions of dollars-- the law of diminishing returns, you know-- and so he packages himself as the ideal product for the target demographic. And he keeps needing the millions and millions provided by that corporate amour because the sickness of celebrity+ requires that celebrities live in ginormous houses and arrive places in stretch limo SUV's and pay people yearly salaries to scrub the cracks of their asses.

I love my country. I am a patriot. I have defended her against her harshest critics, most of whom have been, ironically, Americans. One of America's worst enemies is Rush Limbaugh, who is not a patriot, but rather another salesman with another shoddy line of goods. Most of the dangers to our country these days are, in fact, rhetorical, because our country is powerful and generous and largely unassailable.~ The war against Iraq wasn't something we did to protect America. It's something we did because her leader was a cheap and easy and popular target, and loud-mouthed yahoo who held power largely by bragging that he would lead his people to victory against the Great Satan America. So while I didn't think it was the brightest idea, and still don't, it is a little bit of an intellectual stretch for me to honestly claim that I was fully against the war. Back during the first Gulf War-- who in the hell ever thought we'd be saying that one day?-- the French "philosopher"^ Jean Baudrillard made the claim that the Gulf War was not happening. Among the essoteric claims and looping logic, I found the solid and basic truism behind his statement: the Gulf War was not a war in any real sense. The enemy was inferior, the objective was unclear, even the political necessity was fuzzy. We were ostensibly going in to reverse and occupation that had occured (by the time of the actual declaration of war) most of a year ago, an occupation that didn't seem to be doing any harm to anyone but the deposed ruling families. (The peasants were about as bad off under the Iraqis as they had been under the Kuwaitis. The Middle East is one place where the poor stay poor, the rich stay rich, and the ambitious largely get screwed.) Baudrillard wanted to break it down into rhetorical categorizations and he wanted to claim that war, in it's most basic and definitional sense, was no longer possible, but for me, the more basic truth was the truth: the war did not take place. That wasn't a war.

Nor was this a war, this thing they are calling "Gulf War II," this strike into the empty heart of Baghdad. This wasn't a war, it was a mugging. Baudrillard may have had a point, that after the horrific scale of World War II, war as we knew it is no longer possible-- I truly hope he was right about that, because war sucks-- but the real point is that this "war" was more about Vaudeville than veracity.

*I don't mean to suggest that I consider all other Christian organizations and/or affiliations to be clean-headed and clean-handed. I judge these things on a case-by-case basis.

+Celebrity is not a uniquely American problem. We didn't invent it, we didn't perfect it, and it's not the most dread disease our society could succumb to. (Still and all, to quote the Reverend Simon, most of all we have to hide it from the kids.)

~Despite all the crap one hears about how many countries our country gives military aid to-- which is actually largely true-- or how rotten Americans act when abroad, the fact remains that the vast majority of the world loves to see us coming, because we leave lots and lots of wealth in our collective wake.

^Baudrillard, I think, is one of these cats who is as much about self-promotion and self-preservation than actual philosophizing, and more about the popular political agenda of the party he belongs to and supports than what might actually be good or true about the state of mankind and the meaning of it's existence.

WE GOT FRIENDS IN LOW PLACES: or: BLOGGING TO A CLUB THAT WOULD HAVE SOMEONE LIKE ME AS A MEMBER: March 8th: Responding to Doc Nagel, Clearing Up Salient Points

Just to start off: Zantac 75 is the only appropriate sponsor for back-to-back re-runs of the cops 'n' robbers show Law & Order on TNT.

As I often do, I shot a rough copy of the text of my latest blog off to Doc Nagel for response, and, as usual, I should have known better, for this is what I recieved in return:

"Quibble the first: Just about the only thing Baudrillard can't plausibly be accused of is partisanship. And it's not that he is to party politics what bisexuals are to dating; the categories of party politics just have no bearing."

Okay; I might not know anything about art, but I know what I like. I detected a strong whiff of leftism in the volume The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, although it might have been part and parcel of the influence of the company he was keeping at the time (which is to say French journalists at the end of the 80's). And he definitely had an agenda: the project was initially concieved & executed as a series of articles for a left-wing magazine, and the first installment was entitled "The Gulf War Will Not Take Place." Finally, still and all, even if my criticism of Baudrillard is completely unfair and innaccurate, I don't suppose anyone at all will ever care. (Besides Doc Nagel, and God knows why he cares.)

"Quibble the second: I don't know if it's a quibble, but it's always the Islamic nut-jobs who call the US the Great Satan. Hussein was a secular dictator."

This is a multi-point quibble. 2.b:

"In fact, I've been pondering this weird blindness in US political/editorial/etc. discussion of the Iraq thing. Hussein was never popular among the Islamic fundamentalist world, making a link between Hussein and al-Qaeda incomprehensible."

BAH-DAH! Give the man a cigar! It was largely speculated that the reason for the invasion of Kuwait was to bolster Hussein's newly found fondness for the support of the fundamentalists, although I never heard anything really concrete to support the conjecture (oddly enough). Hussein-- Think of the name! Think of the name!-- only courted the hard-liners because he had to, and, as the fallout of his ouster demnonstrates, he was only really placating them rather than ruling them. Subset C:

"Besides, it's not as though they have shorter attention spans there than in the US:"

Don't get me started. The fundamentalists in the Middle East have demonstrated a very selective memory over the last century, combined with an extreme willingness to jerk the chains of those who mean to rule them. But I digress. Article 2.d:

"Besides, it's not as though they have shorter attention spans there than in the US: they remember that Hussein began as a subsidiary of US Geopolitical Adventurism, Inc., as a way to stomp on Iran and a butt plug to shove up Afghanistan. They remember Hussein was held up by the US throughout the 80s. Only when Khomeini croaked, Iran started to moderate, and the Mujahadeen-now-known-as-Taliban had claimed Afghanistan did we cut bait with regard to him."

(I added caps in there. Anyone who can find them gets a prize.)

Of course, the good doctor forgets that everyone was reading Machiavelli in those days (Tsun Tsu was just coming into fashion), and Hussein was considered a minor prince (which he was, and remained, up to the point of his ouster, no matter how many times the nightly news flashed that one single picture of him shooting a rifle onstage to the plaudits of . . . Oh, who the hell knows who he was shooting off for?). So in addition to plugging the Mujahadeen "Freedom Fighters" (which we always knew they weren't, because the people in Afghhanistan who really wanted freedom just ignored the damned Soviets and went about their poor and sullen business) with as much money and guns as we could (which really wasn't much, because the economy was not doing what the Reagan admin thought it would, so there was far less money to go around than was budgeted for use, and it was a hard vote in Congress because just about the time they had built up a good rep for these cats one of them would step up and shout out that the USA was next after they beat the Soviets, which they couldn't and didn't), we propped up Hussein, because-- Remember the name! Remember the name!-- he had connections, and we thought we might be able to count on him, at least, to maybe help quell some of the anti-Americanism rampant among the Muslim hard-liners. And indeed, most of the warlords of the Taliban were formerly Mujahadeen, and those that weren't were too young to be Freedom Fighters (which is to say they were not yet born) at the time of the conflict. Remember that Iran only fell to Muslim hard liners after they deposed the Shah that the US had been propping up. (We screwed up alot over there back in those days. Talk about "Nation Building!") Chapter 14, verse 7:

"As fer yer point that there's not a super-clear evidentiary link between al-Qaeda and 9/11/01: didn't they make a claim to it at one point?"

I love this part: When Osama bin Laden (literally "Asshole cum Lardhead" first heard of the WTC attack, he was visibly suprised, and he said-- I can about quote this from memory: "Oh! Well, it wasn't us, but I'm glad someone did this!" The first-- and only-- claim of al Quaeda responsibility by bin Laden was recorded during a meeting with possible funding monkeys. (The second claim of al Quaeda responsibility, made by one of bin Laden's looeys, was also during a fundraising session.) The fact that the American Intelligence Community (an oxymoron if EVER there was one) blames Osama and his posse with anything and everything terrorist leads me to belive that he is an impotent blowhard who has never been responsible for anything. (I mean, look at the tapes! He NEVER cleans his room!) Sanity clause:

"In any case, as Bill Maher is wont to point out, the pilots were Saudis. (And the secular monarchical family there vs. the fundamentalist Islamic set is sort of the whole Middle East in micro.)"

(And Osama comes from Saudi money, was disowned by the family, although he apparently got a part of his inheritence at some point. And it stands to reason the CIA would keep bin Laden in the crosshairs as a means of pacifying and placating the Saudi royal family, which, I suspect, is where the real power in the Middle East resides.) (Which is to say that nobody done made sense of nothing so far.)

So the Doc's quibbles all stand up, but there are qualifiers. Still, my basic points here remain: we don't know who, aside from the dead, we might take out our vengance on for the attacks, but we have located some convenient placebos in the mean time. The American Military/Intelligence Machine: they don't know much about war, but they know what they like.

BLOG THE NEXT: March 9th: Death

Spalding Gray is dead.

His body was found in the East River nearly a month after he had wandered off. It took them two days to make a positive ID from dental records. Gray had made himself famous by opening his life up to public scrutiny. His monologues were considered by many to be not only great entertainment, but high art as well. I can't recall how many times I've heard a comic or monologuist or another referred to as "the poor man's Spalding Gray." (Come to think of it, that's a referrent that doesn't make any sense, for there was nothing that made Grey's works inaccesible to the poor.) To some he was an over-intellectual, self-absorbed show-biz redundancy. To others, he was beloved and irreplacable.

I didn't know his work thoroughly myself. I have been told by many people that I should check it out, but those people, frankly, didn't know me very well, so it was never a huge recommendation. I have an inkling that those who do know me well have not recommended Gray's work because they assume I'm already steeped in it. It struck me as amazing, though, what he did: to have written and memorized not just one but several shows well enough to deliver them, night after night, to a paying crowd.* It seemed not just to take talent and skill, but also guts. Then to hear that the man was seriously depressive in off hours was . . . well, depressing. This is also one of those things where it came on but such small degrees that it was possible to think that tragedy was not inevitable. He wandered off on January 10th, giving some indications that he didn't expect to be coming back. The presumption is that he jumped from a bridge or otherwise deliberately did himself in. It wasn't like hearing of the overdose of a celebrity or a sudden death from complications. It wasn't like a car wreck: there wasn't the grim inevitability of the thing. The sadness of the thing, for me, has been mitigated with time. I feel the loss, but I also feel a strange sense of detachment, a feeling like his death is more a found thing than an event.

I also feel a sense of shame for feeling anything at all about it, let alone writing about. His family must be going through a particularly fine sort of hell right now. His friends too. As noted, I only really knew of the man, have only the cursory knowledge of his body of works, and although I admired the man tremendously, I'm could hardly describe myself as a fan. Like the great man said: write what you know. I don't know a damned thing.

I don't like to think of myself as a death junkie. I mean, I don't have any particularly perverse fascination with death. I have had my own experiences with it, I have come close to it a time or two through accident and timing. I have been suicidal, but, honestly, that was not my fault. It had to do with people and situations I should have known better to put myself in proximity to in the first place, but I didn't, in any way, coordinate their appearances at that time in my life. I have my own belief about death: I think it's the end. Game over. Out of quarters. No bright lights, no heaven, no hell. Lights out. I have an inkling that there is an after-life, but only just an inkling, and I use that to comfort myself when someone I loved or admired passes. My grandparents are both in heaven. A girlfriend of mine is looking down on us. George Harrison looked up Roy Orbison right after Gabriel cleared him. It's contradictory. It's contradictory as all hell. But that's the way I operate. You don't like it? See the management.

Maybe the fascination is with the man himself and the strange contradiction he not only represented but was. The walking, talking poster boy for manic depression. When the mind was operating at full blast, it was a sight to see (forgive the unforgivably clumsy metaphor there). When the circuits crossed, when the signals mixed, life was a hopeless tangle, and ugly mess, that no one else could ever possibly straighten out, and he couldn't seem to touch anyone he loved without hurting them. To large degree, I can identify with that. I am fairly certain that I am an undiagnosed manic-depressive myself. (I intend to remain undiagnosed; Uncle Jim don't do therapy.)

The Doc's reaction to the news was anger. He felt like Spalding ought to have kept it up, put a brave face of things and soldier on. (He put it this way: that the man ought to have been able to derive enough pleasure from the work he did, bringing joy to others, to make life worthwhile, and certainly that case can be made.) I don't know. I mean, I hardly wish to come off as an advocate for suicide, but I do think, frankly, that when existence itself becomes an unmanagable horror, perhaps the only person who can gauge a response to it is the individual living the existence. Just a matter of civil liberties, really.

*As Doc Nagel quite correctly points out, part of Gray's schtick involved bringing spiral bound notebooks onstage with him, purportedly containing the act, written out long-hand, but I don't know that he ever referred to the things or read out of them.

BLOG YOU YOU BLOGGING BLOG: March 14: A Momentary Lapse of Reisen

Some time back I grabbed a copy of the Pink Floyd compilation Echoes. It's something I had been tempted to do earlier, back when it first came out, but I didn't, for one basic reason: fear. For while the contents beckoned me, because of the whimsical nostalgia of remembering those first long-ago awakenings, those first epiphanical listenings (sober, I might add, to dispell a myth), because of the paradoxical arrangement of old tunes juxtaposed against new tunes, because of the allure of hearing a couple of rarities that I could almost remember having heard ion the long ago days of my youth (exaggeration), still, there was something paradoxically frightening about it. I was afraid that, having spent forty bucks on the thing (after taxes), I would get it home and listen to it and feel like a mook.

Events transpire in this world, sometimes so serendipitously as to make one believe there is a God, a God for whom, for whatever reasons, minute details and slight turns of fate are incredibloy important. This was one of those times.

Some time back, say a year or so ago, I went to replace mny copy of The Police's Zenyatta Mondatta, which is one of those recordings people refer to as "seminal." The disc I got, I discovered, after the thing failed to play several times, and only after I read the fine print (finely), was a SACD. The SACD, to credit the propaganda on the SACD site, is the newest, brightest, bestest technology for reproducing sound, and that's fine, as far as it goes. But the SACD (Super Audio Compact Disc) will not play on a conventional player, conventional players cannot be converted or made to play SACD's, and the cheapest, most rudimentary, bottom-of-the-loine SACD player went (at that time) for a thousand dollars. No way in hell was I paying a thousand bucks to correct a simple mistake. So I went on-line and purchased a disc I verified was not an SACD. The SACD was purchased at a once-trusted chain store which shall remain nameless, which is just as well as they're shutting down our most frequently frequented outlet which sold me the damned SACD in the first place, and who in the Hell needs a Media Play across the street from a University in the first place (besides the college kids who were really jazzed to work in a joint that sold both rap discs and puppy calenders).

I kept the SACD for a while, kind of as a gag, kind of to show of to musicians and/or fellow music fans as an artifact of warning, kind of a reminder to myself that I am capable of being a mook. Then, one day, I decided that the thing had served its purpose. I gathered it, along with a slight dozen other discs, and headed to The Record Exchange, one of my favorite places in the world. I had frequented the Exchange in my youth, when the CD was barely a blip on the radar, and drooled over the hundred-dollar half-speed masters of such juicy artifacts as Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick. I learned Yes, I learned Clapton, I nearly completed a catalog of Beatles recordings. I gave it all away when I embarked on graduate school, correctly divining a vagabond existence that would see me collecting pirated tapes as quickly as I was losing them to theives and felicity alike. (Felicity because, as a vagabond, there are only so many tapes one can handle.) At this juncture, I have discovered that a quick combing of our CD collection will remder a handful of discs that we either no longer listen to or should not have purchased to begin with, and I almost always find something that I feel I should have. I have yet to take anything back to them, although that is probably just a matter of time and, well, felicity.

On this journey the total store credit for my exchanged discs was 33 bucks, and I picked up about $34.50 in merchandise. Among these was the Echoes compilation. It was seventeen bucks, looked to be in good condition, and was every bit as breathtakingly tempting as it had been on it's release. I got it home, and listened to it, and foudn that it was revelatory. It was astounding. It was worth listening to, in it's uninterrupted entirety, precisely once. After that I found myself (perhaps unconsciously) positioning myself so that would be able to skip tracks at will, providing the revelation that old Pink Floyd is old Pink Floyd, and from The Final Cut on, nothing was Pink Floyd ever again. (In fact, almost starting with The Wall, a revelation that friends of mine posited upon that album's release; with the sole and single exception of "Comfortably Numb," the whole thing seemed a strangely souless afair.)

So do I feel like a mook? I started to, but naahhhh. Far from it. James Guthrie, now he should feel like a mook.* That the online All Music Guide (www.allmusic.com) lists it's main attributes as "Bleak, Nocturnal, Clinical, Theatrical, Paranoid," speaks volumes.

*James Guthrie is the compiler of the disc, so he is purportedly to blame. I can see what he was after, but, realistically speaking, it's impossible not to conclude that the feller ended up pulling a great big Wile E. Coyote in the end.

BLOGGITY BLOG BLOG BLOG: March 23rd: Why I Haven't Been Blogging Recently

So I picked up my semi-annual gig, a quasi-academic affair that pays pretty good and gets me off the streets, but I can't divulge anything more about it. It's nothing sinister or top-secret or anything, just something that requires a little sensitivity. The upshot of it is that I haven't felt much like blogging lately, never mind having what I could call "spare time."

A QUICK BLOG WHILST THE COFFEE COOLS: March 24th: The Fine Art Of Missing The Point

I'm listening to Harry Shearer's radio program, Le Show, on the internet, which I do every week whether I like it or not, and Harry is making unmerciful fun of the current dust-up over the Bush "administration" missing the chance to go attack al Quaeda after September 11th, choosing instead to go after Iraq. Of course, the point would be whether or not there was actual evidence that al Quaeda was responsible to 9/11, which would equal a concentration on Iraq distracted our president from attacking the parties responsible to 9/11-- or, for that matter, having the chance to do something to prevent 9/11, instead of, as the current contention goes, concentrating on finding some rationale, SOME kind of rationale, dammit, that would let us attack Iraq with a free hand, kinda like Daddy did. See, that would be the point. But the opposition, like the administration, is deeply and finely schooled in the art of missing the point. Which is to say that going after Bush as an Iraq-attack-hound is just too easy. Just as attacking the Taliban was too easy. Just as attacking Iraq was too easy. I mean, when you got a steak on the table, why go hunt squirrel?

Of course, there is always the accusation that the admin (not to say the oppo) is just lying. That, again, is just too easy. True, substantial, substainable, provable, documented, detailable, easily developed into a list headed and sub-headed by topic or arranged in chronological order, but too damned easy. Look how often Clinton lied (aside from the sex stuff-- just on political stuff). Look how often Regan lied. (Aside from the economy stuff-- just the Cold War crap). Look how long Bush lied (I refuse to refer to him as Bush the First, gives him too regal an edge) before we went into Iraq the first time (leave off the whole "threat to the region" crap, just the crap about how the whole world backed us) before he let slip the dogs of war. (Who then rolled in to Bhagdad facing almost no opposition. Okay, there was the CNN crews, but my niece Cayla could whip the crap out of Paula Zahn any given day, before or after lunch.) (Not that Paula Zahn would ever dirty her hands with that kind of duty. After all, she's a STAAAHHH!) But it all boils down to the same thing. As it does in Israel. They're still playiong the same stupid game of Cut the Head Off the Chicken. They don't get the fact that the chicken isn't running the railroad. As it is, so it goes. The world is run by People Who Don't Fucking Get It. God knows why. Perhaps God does know why? That would explain alot about religion.

BLOGGIN' ON TULSA TIME: March 28th: Music, Music, Musik

An ex friend of mine, while sharing the toils and triumphs of learning to play guitar in high school (or maybe it was during college), made the outrageous claim that Andy Summers, late of the Police (hey, a man must harbor his illusions), was playing only the chord A-minor in the song "Roxanne." He was completely and utterly wrong, and, as those of my close friends who know whomof I write here will no doubt readily attest, that remained one of his defining characteristics duirng his early adult life-- being wholly wrong and utterly confident that he was completely, not to say sanctifiedly, right-- up to the point where he became a commercial real estate agent, after which it became impossible to tell whether or not he even knew whether he was telling the truth or telling a lie. It later turned out, much later, that he was suffering from some sort of digestive tract ailment, and, as it just so happens that his wife's brother turned out to tbe the world's worst internist, suffers gasll bladder problems on a-- ahem-- regular basis. It is only the deepest regard for God and fate, and my humblest fear of divine retribution that prevents me from suggesting, let alone saying, that it serves him right.

THIS IS A BLOG; THIS IS ONLY A BLOG. HAD THIS BEEN AN ACTUAL COMMUNIQUE . . . April 1st: Life

Nothing more to say just now. Life continues apace, the weather has been predictably unpredictable for this time of year, finally settling on blue skies and gusty breezes after a couple of days of lousy cold rain, and the dog lounges nearby as I write, plotting mayhem . . .

I'm also off to work on another styory for the The Architect Sketch, a series of stories which I continue to write, hone, pursue, order and balance, despite the fact that I'm too much of a wimp to approach getting them published, which is mainly due to my unshakable conviction that they would be considered to be of little or no merit by today's publishers as there are no lesbians in the stories. (Yet?)

OPne of the idiot sub-editors of my local paper-- one of those people who managed to foster the illusion of usefullness long enough to merit a nominal title and inconsequential duties-- went on a jag a few years back where, to her mind, there was nothing more wasteful, hateful, corrupting, or corrosive than cynicism. I don't know. Maybe it was a movement.

The trouble was, see, she didn't seem to have a really good grip on the concept of cynicism herself. (This lead me to believe that maybe it was something she heard about in church.) She seemed to think that cynicism and pessimism were the same thing. Frankly, they are not. Why I should say that frankly, I know not. Pessimism is the inherent belief that things will fail. Anything-- the government, nature, spoons, forks-- hell, sporks!-- will fail, given time, chance, and a bit of human involvement. Cynicism is the instinctive suspicion that someone is lying to you. Not everyone. The notion that everyone is lying to you is paranoia. (She didn't seem to have a handle on that, either.) Not the notion that the government is lying to you. That is the condition commonly known as "consciousness." My pal, Doc Nagel, claims to be a pessimist. He's wrong about that. He's a cynic who's been taught, somewhere along the line, that cynicism is wrong, which convinces him that his cynical instincts are somehow dishonorable and his doom is inevitable and near to hand.

This also leads him to believe that our culture, as he puts it in his latest blog, is "becoming gradually more empty and useless," and that everyday "there is less beauty in the world."

I hate that for him, for several reasons, not the least of which being that he is completely wrong. There is not a growing dearth of beauty in the world, no matter how hard the Sierra Club (et al) wants to convince us that this is the case. And I can speak clearly here: I live in an area where the powers that be are busily building am outer beltway, which, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, means "crapping up the landscape with great huge ribbons of steel and concrete on which people will drive huge, crappy-looking SUV's." Our culture, I must point out, was far more empty back when we saved the world, that time that the sage scholar Tom Brokaw refers to as having spawned "The Greatest Generation." Yes, that generation that oppressed aliens, beat women, eventually produced AA, polluted the world, blew their arms and legs off in hunting accidents, chopped off their fingers during drunken woodworking sessions, and shot ferel cats in the junkyard (or dump) with .22 caliber rifles bought cheap as Army surplus (because the Army conscripted a number of production runs of .22 caliber rifles before coming to the conclusion that .22 caliber rifles were pretty much useless in battle). The generation of polack jokes and wetbacks! The generation of spitting on civil rights activists! The generation of tube socks and dress shoes! Hallaluyah!

My point is, realistically speaking, things aren't actually any worse than they ever have been. The generation before the greatest generation, the one that survived the Great Depression, was just as boring and crappy as the generation after it (and the one before it), no matter how much Steinbeck tried to dress them up. (Henry Fonda, God bless his soul, must also take a share of the blame.) And no matter how much you demonize the Wal-Martization, Benniganization, Rhythmnationization, Everybodylovesraymondization of this world, this generation, this time, reflect on the crappiness of the Roman Empire. Hell! They didn't even have sporks!

For every Schoppenhour their was a Niblitz. Every generation. I may sit around and carp and whine about the lousy nature of the writing business-- and come to think of it, don't mind if I do-- but the fact of the matter remains that the Stienbecks of the previous generations were every bit as much an exception as the Joyce Carol Oates of this generation are the rule. After everything has shaken out, all things being equal after all, this generation, this society, this frozen point in time isn't any dirtier or drier or emptier than any other. Time is what we make it, generally speaking. The only thing that's worse is spam. Goddamn spam! Ruins everything! Whattaya mean just delete it? IT'S RUINING EVVVVVERY THING!

All that said, Pizzario Uno, or as it's trying to be known, the Uno Chicago Grill, is proof positive that this generation is morally bankrupt and doomed to a hellish, meanigless existence devoid of any possible redemption, earthly or devine.

Some weeks back we went there on the pretense of making the most of their special offer: an appetizer, two entrees and a dessert for 20 bucks. The Wifey had a pasta dish that was pretty good, while I had a steak that had a great rifle of grizzle down the middle. The appetizer was a mashed potato pizza, which was trange but good enough; the dessert was a spiced up cheesecake, which was certainly good enough. Last night, by way of diversion, we went back to the Uno, inviting my pal Bryan to join us (as he works in a nearby downtown skyscraper). The 20 buck deal was no more, but we got an appetizer (as Bry was late joining us) got a pizza to split and bought Bryan (once he got there) a chicken quesadilla, and all this, along with a matched pair of Sam Adams lagers, ran just over forty bucks. The only problem was: the pizza was raw.

Now, there were things setting off alarm bells in my head from the get-go. The host staff, three of them, were all too eager and all too available. The sort of place that requires three on the host staff is the sort of place that seats 200, or the sort of place that's so popular they need spies to soert out the vacant or soon-to-be- vacant tables for the waiting hordes. This place was barely half full the first time we went there, less than half full the last time. The kid who seated us actually turned out to be our waiter, another bad sign. We nibbled the appetizer, fried onion chips with a vingary dressing, while waiting for Bryan, then ordered a pizza when we determined that he was going to either be late or non-existant. Rachelle remarked that it should take a while to come out. She had recently made a business trip to Chicago, and all the pizza joints there claimed that deep-dish pizza took 45 minutes to cook. Bryan arrived, and shortly thereafter the pizza showed up. In a spirit of bonhommie we invited Bryan to share the pizza tith us while he awaited his quesadilla, and all was well until we discovered that the pizza was not. It was, in point of fact, raw.

I had been a bit dismayed by the tem,perature of the artifact when I began conmsuming it. It was warm, but it was not hot, which is what I expected. I first put this anomolous fact down to the vessel in which the pizza arrived, a steel pan with a coil in the bottom suspending the crust by a half-inch. My thinking-- and that's a genrous term-- was that [perhaps they utilized the coil to cool the pizza, thus preventing that most common of pizza-related mishaps, scorch mouth. But late into her second slice my wife, ever vigilant, realized that the sausage on the pizza was, in fact, raw.

The toppings on the half of the pie we started on-- sausage, pepperoni & extra cheese-- had been appropriately finished, but the toppings on the other half were only cooked on the surface. The lumps of sausage were raw in the middle, and the sheese was only mildly melted. We ceased eating the stuff, finally got out waiter after serial flaggings, and Rachelle and Bryan informed him of the sorry state of our entree. I requested a check, and before it arrived we were offered-- follow me here, we're entering bizzaro world-- we were offered, by the waiter, a box to take home the leftover pizza, and by the manager, who might have ben fourteen, a second baking of what remained of the pizza in the pizza oven, puportedly to render the item consumable. Both offers we declined.

It came to my attention, some time ago, that all the places we eat curretly are chains, and most of them nationwide joints that, in theory, differ not a whit from location to location. I was saved from ingominy by the fact that we do frequent a handful of locally owned & operated joints, and that one joint, a Mexican eatery known as the Azteca, is becoming a chain in the most unorthadox way. (They just keep opening restaurants that serve authentic Mexican fare.) Additionally, the sting of the chain phenomenon lost it's savor for me long ago, when the local paper, criticizing the leviathan that is Wal-Mart, held up as example a local junk store that claimed it's business was being choked off by the chain. The fact was that anybody who continued going to this Mom 'n' Pop "variety store" was too stupid to discriminate one store from another to begin with. I had been in there once or twice, and they sold nothing of any value whatsoever. Everything was of such low quality as to not perform even the simplest function. I think I bought a package of paper plates there, or maybe a box of plastic wrap; whatever it was, I do remember that it didn't work. Over the years, I've had chance to pose the question, and no one I've ever posed it to has been able to conjure a useful Mom 'n' Pop that closed down due to the Walmartization of America. But, dammit, the Uno got us last night. We got chained.

But, as all great generations do, we will have our revenge. Tonight, for dinner, we will be dining at the Red Bowl Asian Bistro, a locally owned and operated joint. They occupy the storefront next to the Harris Teeter, our locally owned and operated regional grocery store, where there used to be a Mom 'n Pop hardware store that closed down when the rumor started circulating that there was goping to be a Home Despot plunked down across the highway. (Home Despot is not a typo. It's how I refer to Home Depot.) The hardware store, which often didn't have what I was looking for in the correct size and charged a slight premium for its wares and sold fish that all patently had ick, is sorely missed. I bought my hand tools and a stock of nails and some wiring and a leash for the dog there. I bought air filters for our heating system and a balde for my hacksaw there. I bought twine and I had keys made there but, dammit, it juts wasn't enough. I could not save the Mom 'n' Pop hardware store. If only I'd bought grass seed there.*

Ah, well. Tonight we will go to the Red Bowl, and I will assuage my guilt by eating spicy Thai chicken, and if I really feel guilty enough I will force myself-- the horror! the HORROR!-- to begin with a round of soft, savory potstickers. And, of course, penance is not penance wihtout the ordeal of the Tsing Tao. To ask which part of the Tsing Tao contains the Bhudda is to ask the wrong question . . .

*As near as I could tell, the vast majority of the sales made by the hardware store concerned grass seed, which they stocked in front of the store proper by the ton, which was bought mainly by old men whom, I always thought, were putting their frail forms in mortal danger by the act of purchasing, and therefore ahving to load into their vehicles, bag after bag of the stuff. Said old men have either gone elswhere to buy their seed, concluded that seeding the lawn twice a year was not necessary, or shuffled off the mortal coil and retired to that place where the lawn is always green & watered. I never bought grass seed there, as I use perennial rye to overseed our lawn, and all they sold at the Mom 'n' Pop was fescue and fake Kentucky blue.

BLOGGY BOTTOM BREAKDOWN: April 10th: Adventures in Appalachia

I do not, indeed will not aplogize for the constant overlap between my blogs and those of the imperious, not to say insidious Count von Nagel, on two grounds: first, if I feel the need to comment on his commentary, I feel I should be free to, and secondly, no one's reading this anyways, so I can pretty much do whatever the hell I wish. This week his blog is all full of speculation aout meaning, or "meaning," or meaning, which is all well and good, as far as it goes. Except that the good Doc seems to think of meaning (or "meaning" or . . . you get the drift) in the same way that all ex-hockey players construe meaning, eg: "I been meaning to hit that guy."

No, seriously: meaning is meaning, representations are representations, and never the twain shall meet. By saying this I mean alot of things, most of them subversive to the real rest of the world. I mean that representations are representations, as in treaties are only representations of good will. They are never good will in service or substance. Truces too. So when they talked about "meaningful" reductions of the nuclear arsenal, I tought "Ah, REPRESENTATIONAL reductions of the nuclear arsenal!" And, as it turns out, I was right. The arms were only representational, after all, to begin with. Our biggest, brighjtest assholes had to argue like all hell just for the right to blow one up now and again, not to go oooh and aaaah and watch all the little critters run around flaming and melting-- which, frankly, I would have expected-- but to reinforce the representation of being warlike and heavily armed. Let's face it: the hawks of the Cold War were all pussies. I won't make the classic Maher and compare them to terrorists, because the terrorists are differently funded pussies. They just don't have the same kind of political pull that those other guys did.

But enough of that. About meaning. The matter comes to me at least one a year-- who are we kidding!-- when I make my soujourn to Mount LeConte. Lovely, brutal, absurd Mount LeConte. The climb is always brutal, the descent is always taxing, the accommodations atop are always not quite as luxurious as they appear, and the whole event is surrounded by restless nights of fitfull sleep. But, once a year for three years running, we go, my Dad, pals Alex and Danny (who are more or less my Dad's age), sometimes others, we drive up three thousand feet in the mountains on the border of North Carolina and Tennessee, camp out, drive up to a traileahd, hike another 3,500 feet to the peak of Mount LeConte, eat rotten food, enjoy good company, sleep in "rustic" beds, then hike back down to face a trek back to the flatlands that is never like it was last year. (The trek back always involves some kind of side trip, just because of the standard weirdness of the culture in Western NC/Eastern TN. This time it was a trip to a barbecue joint that caused us to make a 100 mile U-turn through Tennessee, which turned out to be worth it since the barbecue was beyond repraoch, the sauces, mild and hot, were perfectly balanced contradictions of themselves, and the journey planted us on the Foothills Parkway, an extremely absurd little road that offered, fleetingly, stunningly gorgeous vistas of the Appalachian range. Year before last, travelling with my brother, it was a detour through Cherokee, NC, to find the "As Seen On TV" store, where we failed to find a souvenier cheap enough to justify buying it just so I could say I bought it at the "As Seen On TV" store.)

But none of this is why I go. I am always tempted to say that all of this is why I go, but it is not. I go because I have this delusion that this mind's eye, this camera obscura you-ain'ta-whistlin-Dixie-bruddah, this consciousness of mine, can somehow take in and process and record for all time the extremely vast and gorgeous vistas of the Appalachias that are afforded by the views from the trails and peaks of Mount LeConte. But it is impossible. Chris has often claimed that it is impossible (or redundant, or silly) to take pictures at Yosemite since cameras are incapable of grasping the vast scope of things. The same is true of Mount LeConte. I try, oh Lord I try, to maintain a mental snapshot of this vista or that, but all I can really keep is a profound sense of having been pleasantly stunned, as if struck a resounding blow to the head with the world's most resoundlingly delicious wheel of brie.

Which is why I go. I love that absurd moment when, looking out over the ranges and ridges and hills and hollars, I think to myself "This only has meaning if you can remember it." Then I get back to the lodge and realize, as I hear the rich red-neck hollar to his wife, "Honey, before you go to the john, would you make me a Jack-n-Coke?" that any yahoo can climb a mountain, and no one, except maybe God, is gonna bother downloading alll those thousands of images just to see if we got any good shots.

BLOG THE NEXT: April 14th: An Open Letter To Doc Nagel

"This is not to say that the agricultural concerns that dominated this island until sugar was no longer a viable commodity here were any better, nor really that the native Hawaiians did the island any favors by bringing mongooses and invasive plants with them. But the resort development people are doing their absolute damndest to replace everything natural, organic, and living about the places they spread with a clean, well-groomed place, anti-nature, anti-life, all-too-human. (As I've mentioned before, human beings are a scourge, an infection on the earth. It's our evolutionary niche.)"

-- from Doc Nagel's finest-kind blogging

Dear Doc,

I know you hear this alot, and I know I'm not telling you anything new, but I have to say this, and I speak not only for myself but for almost everyone who knows you. So believe me when I tell you I'm saying this with love in my heart and only for your own good:

Stop it.

Stop the misery, stop the guilt, stop the doom-saying. Stop assuming that the world is going to Hell in an unstoppable death-spiral for which we are all to blame. I mean, it might be true that the vast majority of human beings are dirt-dumb cretins* who would as soon piss on a Faberge egg as eat a Big Mac,+ but, frankly, you give us too much credit.

The notion that we are destroying the earth, slowly or quickly, is fanciful at best. People have been claiming that people are destroying the earth for millenia. Hell, go read the Bible-- it's full of that sort of crap. And people who blame people are the luckiest people in the world. At least they have someone to blame.

The fact of the matter is this: You can't beat Mom. Nature will eventually grind us-- our races, our civilizations, our species-- into a fine, indistingiushable dust, and mix us back into the evolutionary paste of primordial existence. We can import plants and slaughter animals and build Wal-Marts and Costcos and superhighways and space platforms and put on endless episodes of Survivor: Shithole! for as long as we like, but the fact of the matter is that our species cannot destroy the earth. The very notion that we might be that powerful is-- well, I guess I said it before: fanciful.

So cheer up! We, all of us, want you to get better. Put on a bright face, eat some red meat, and nourish in the back of your mind the notion that, even if we're all doomed, at least you can admire the view.

It's intellectually vogue, and pretty much always has been, to claim that the majority of people are idiots, but I don't really think it's strictly true. We're not as stupid as we think we are.

+I like the occasional Big Mac.

BLOG THE NEXT, PART NEXT: Cashing checks, eating burgers, reflecting on the plight of humanity

So, while Doc Nagel and wife have been surviving deluges of rain while Summering (Springing?) in lovely Hilo, Hawaii (which, for reasons that escape analysis, I insist on pronouncing "Hiyo") ("Hilo," not "Hawaii"), we suffered two days of relentless rain which resulted in two relatively catastrophic events: I have not yet gotten out to cash my latest paycheck from my latest seasonal occupation, and I have missed two potential play dates with niece Cayla, who is out of school on Spring Break just now.

The paycheck cashing is really the more painful of the two. I have in my possession a scrap of paper that I can turn in for $577. Do you realize how many Big Macs that is? ALOT.

It's also a great many guitar strings, bottles of beer or wine, plates of sushi, cups of coffee, egad! The mind boggles! But more to the point, the elements have reached confluence: yesterday, mid-day, the clouds began breaking up, a great, boisterously warm wind out of the west tearing the sky to shreds, leaving behind a sharply blue ruin streaked with grey. This morning the skies are more calmly blue, dotted with grey-white clouds. In other words. perfect weather for cashing a check and, with any luck at all, having lunch out. Maybe I'll take the kids out for lunch? Yeah, I think probably so . . .

When in despair of mankind's fate, I remind myself that we just got past-- evolutionarily speaking-- the great wars, or Great Wars. History of humanity-wise, they are just an eyeblink away. The majority of the world seems to have learned the Big Lesson the wars were (perhaps) designed to teach us.* Large-scale, state-sanctioned wars are no longer in vogue. Smaller scale massacres, the kind the rest of the world can easily hold up and dissapprove of, are more the thing these days. The kind of mess we've gotten ourselves into in Iraq, for instance. I noted (two weeks ago) that there were some eerie similarities to the end-game played out in Saigon in '73-'75, but it dawns on me now (now that the rest of the world has started asking if there are some eerie similarities to Vietnam in the current conflict) that the one key element that keeps Iraq from being Veitnam is daylight. We were trying to keep what we were doing in Vietnam quiet and loud by fits and starts. Part of the military establishment wanted us to see our cold-blooded killers cold-bloodedly killing, part of it wanted us to see the Great White Father bringing truth and justice to the unwashed savages. And while the same schizophrenia exists in the American military presence and establishment in Iraq, at least we have the small, strange comfor that it remains in light. As long as it's under the Kleig lights and at the end of the long lens, it will at least remain so absurd that the MIC (Military Industrial Complex) will eventually run out of ways to sell it.

See, Doc? Thing's ain't so bad!

*Despite my training as a scientist, I can't help but feel like the Wars were somehow a logical consequent, that we had it coming: we were destined to learn the big lesson: War Is Stupid. It's fitting that we learned it when we did, at the cusp of the age of scientific invention, or, as it was once widely misdescribed, the Nuclear Age (it turned out to be anything but), and it's equally descripitive that the Veitnam conflict was prosecuted by three of the most stupidly arrogant civilizations of the time: The French, The Americans, and The Vietnamese. The French thoguht that anything that went wrong was due to the lack of embrace of the French culture; the Americans thought that nothing could go wrong once we impoosed the American culture, and the Vietnamese thought that the only reason they were on God's green earth was to subvert and exploit any culture that came their way. (These are socio-cultural judgements, not nationalistic or racial ones: I speak of the cultures of the time as expressed by the various politico-military establishments.) Everybody else learned The Big Lesson, but we let the dickhead momentum of the Great Wars slide us into a lousy stinking quagmire of a war that we ought not do anything other than regret.

BLOGGED DOWN IN DETAILS: April 16: Ironies abound the Williams houshold

After a rather full week, I went ot my folks' place to do some light yardwork yesterday, half on the premise that I needed to get out and get some exercise. In the process of digging out an old rotted post in the vineyard, I promptly strained my lower back, with the result that I spent the rest of the day sitting on the couch with a heating pad, getting up to fetch refreshments occasionally and recieving therupon periodic reminders that I was in plenty of shape to casue myself a great deal of pain if I didn't handle myself properly.

The vineyard, currently, is not. Which is to say that after the last season my Dad decioded that the crop had been so badly ravaged by black rot, insects, and drought that the best course of action was to dig up the remaining plants by their roots and plow the sod under and start over with new plants next growing season. The grapes make-- made-- wonderful cabernet sauvignion, which, when aged in oak casks, was magnificent. For more years than I can count or remember I have helped in the tasks that the growing of grapes require: pruning, trimming, spraying with anti-fungals, netting, harvesting, and so on. Several years ago we-- my Dad, my brother Doug and I-- rented a gas-powere auger with a two-foot bit and drilled holes in the ground and set ten foot four-by-fours at ten foot intervals around the perimeter of the vineyard, so that rather than having to sew nets onto each individual row of grapevines, we had only to drape net sections on this huge wood and wire frame and sew them together along the seams. What once took three of us and entire day now takes two and a half of us most of a day. (One of us, me or Doug, always eithers shows late or has to leave early.) Early in the process, after hanging a screen door on the nearly-finished frame, my Dad spotted the white plastic table we use out there as a work surface, and proclaimed "We have to put the table in there!" So we did, and took pictures of the table inside the invisible house delineated by it's door and frame.

In the down time my Dad has decided to do a couple of small things in the vineyard, things that will be easier without plants to work around. One of these was to replace a couple of rotten trellis pieces. When the trellis pieces rot they rot at the surface level, leaving a hard, sodden pice of treated four-by-four down below the topsoil, in the hard clay where there is no air. So, as I tried to pluck the thing from the earth with a post hole digger, stabbing down at it with the half-cylinder blades and then clamping onto it by prying the handles apart, then pulling up until the mud-slippery morsel of pine slipped loose, I caused significant enough strain to my back muscles to cause me a full day's worth of imobility. (Meanwhile, my Dad discovered, after I had done the damage to my back, that by digging down parallel to the base of the trellis he could pop the thing out like a cork.)

Having decided that my back was causing me enough pain to justify calling it a day early, I headed to McFadyen's Music, one of the last remaining local music stores here in Charlotte. Now we have Guitar Center and Sam Ashe and Music-Go-Round (a chain that goes to tremendous ends not to look like one) we're down to maybe three or five local music stores, two of which are nearly useless to a guitar player. (One boasts a small handful of guitars but specializes in band instruments; another sports no playable guitars at all and sells two of the worst brands of guitar strings in the whole of existence, strings that only continue to be manufactured because people who run shops that sell only band instruments-- people who don't actually consider guitars to be viable musical instruments-- continue to stock, if not sell them.

McFadyen's is a mere shadow of it's former self, a storefront about one eighth the size of the old store, which was choked off from traffic in the course of a road widening that turned a huge swath of Independence Boulevard, long an artery of commerce, into a walled-off superhighway. But it's still one of the best guitar shops in town. Not only do they still stock decent machines, they also mostly have the right stuff-- strings, pegs, tuners, picks, straps-- to keep lunatics like me coming it. The kid at the register when I walked in has a bit of a grudge against me; twice I have gone there for specific strings, and twice he didn't have the gauge I needed. It's not a huge deal, but when you're trying to be Joe Cool working at the music store, it doesn't do to be forced to admit you don't have the gear your customer wants. I tooled around on a couple of nylon strung pieces, a Yamaha and a model allied with the Seagull line that rattled too much under a flamenco strum, and eventually stumbled onto the Seagull Portrait Series six-string. A couple of test strums-- roughing the strings with the fingers and palm while the machine is still on the rack-- provoked me to investigate further. I brought it down from the wall, pulled a Fender medium confetti pick from the watch pocket of my jeans, tuned her up and played a couple of tunes. The things was terrific, splashy and bold with crisp trebles and full basses. The standard Seagull matte finish was replaced with a high-gloss finish; the top, clear spruce, shone yellowly; the standard logo on the headstock was replaced with so elaborate an inlay as to be nearly unrecognizeable. (Lovely though it was.) It was perfect. It was also $999, which is more than I can really bring myself to pay for a guitar. Normally. The damned thing is haunting me, however. The usual bnrands that attract that sort of price-- Taylor, Martin, Gibson-- never strike me as worth the scratch, escpecially when I know for a fact that there are three other brands-- Takamine, Yamaha and Seagull-- that seem to understnd the fact that real guitarists know better, and Taylors, in particular, are generally for show-offs.*

Joe Cool was across the room when I started monkeying with the Seagull, but I got his attention with it. After that I toddled about, decided I didn't really want to play any of the other instruments there-- even the Seagull 12, which I really should have, about which more in a moment-- selected a set of Augustine Blacks and a new set of tuning heards for my Takamine classical, and hit the counter. He was back in the saddle at that point, and managed, this time, to fish out what I desparately hope is the right string (replacement for the high E on my sister-in-law's guitar, also currently strung with Augustine Blacks), and rang up the tuning keys I had selected, a snazzy set of gold rails with transluctent keys on black shafts. The thisgs were actually gaudy, and when they rang up at $17.50, I balked, settling, instead, on a plain jane set of chrome tuners for thirteen bucks (as opposed to the five buck kind I used to call "gum grinders," which would grind off their own chrome finish in the process of refusing to keep a uniform tension to the strings). As I checked out, two guys in courier uniforms came in, clearly on their lunch breaks, and started toying around with a couple of pieces. As I left, one of them was mangling C and G chords on the cheaper of the two Seagull 12's they had in stock. I gave Joe Cool a sidelong glance that said "Better you than me," and he rolled his eyes, giving me a smirk that said, as near as I could tell, "NOW don't you wish you'd tuned that thing?" (I can sense these things. My wife insists that I am insane, but I still maintain: I know thse things.

So I got home with my booty and decided that the Tak can wait on strings, I wasn't in any kind of shape to go over to her folks place and replace the E string on Danielle's Carlos, and I haven't the guts to replace the tuners on the Tak yet, and may not ever. One of the tuning heads deteriorated years ago. The hard white plastic crumbled off the shaft, rendering the peg useless.+ My quick fix was to stick a gold-chromed shaft and head from the machine tuner of a long-dead guitar, an old Lotus electric that we picked up for parts years ago when I was working in a music store and both my brother and I had some sort of modification going on one of our cheap-jack instruments at any given time, into the slot from which the old peg had been extracted. I never named this guitar. It is not mine, technically. Over two decades ago, on a camping trip, I traded my old blonde German-- honestly, I forget the make-- for my cousin Lee's Takamine, on the grounds that I could do some work on the frets to eliminate a third position buzz it had developed, replace the strings, and trade guitars back with him next time we saw each other. It seemed like a safe bet at the time, but I never saw that old blonde German again. I never named the Tak, even after I concluded that it was mine by common law if nothing else. But for-- Jesus!-- ten years, or nearly, I have been able to identify it as my Tak with one gold tooth. I saw Lee a couple of years ago, and decided that, when and if the time came to get back the old blonde German and give him back his Takamine, I'd replace the tuning heads, just as a courtesy. That time has not yet come.

*Except my brother, who bought a Guild for show, which, in his defense, he had tricked out by a luthier some years ago, so that now it is an immensely playable instrument.

+On a classical guitar, once the peg head is gone, the peg is useless. On a steel stringed instrument, I've seen it done where the peg is manipulated with pliers or vise grips, but, frankly, it's a piss-poor way to treat any respectable instrument.

BLOG THYSELF FOR PENITENCE SAKE: April 25th: Unfair, unfair, unfair

I bought a CD at The Record Exchange* yesterday by a band called Mellowdrone, and so far they live up to thier name. I bought it on the grounds that it was priced at $1.98, and I was on a splurging expedition anyways, out for things that I could buy rather than things I needed to buy. (I also made a couple of transcendental side trips: one to Media Play, in order to prove to myself that I had no further use for Media Play, and one to the local overpriced outdoor outfitters, to prove to myself that I still had use of them.) The disc isn't bad, yet it isn't anything I think I'll listen to in anything you might call a compelling fashion. At six songs, the thing runs and ends in the blink of the eye. The best song on the CD, entitled "Worst Song Ever," is almost wholly unmemorable. On the other hand, nothing on the disc is worse than anything I have heard on the local hit radio stations or VH1 in recent memory. All of which brings me to the epiphany I had about halfway through: I expect too much.

I Got out of the habit of buying albums in my youth almost exactly the same moment I got into the habit of buying albums. My sister had just brought home a volume of ditties by a band that had a hit single at the moment, and I found myself thinking "Hey, I guess I could start buying albums too!" About that time, she placed the platter on the turntable. Seventeen minutes in, she declared "THIS SUCKS!" It was a conclusion with which I was forced to concur. My sister didn't force me to concur, although in that day it was not an uncommon element of her modus operandi. The first song on the slbum was bad. The second was the current hit. The third song made no sense whatsoever, the fourth didn't seem even to be a song, and I fail to recall if there even was a song after that. After this experience, I trained myself to be completely unfair in selecting musical albums. Which is to say that I give no quarter, nor ask none, in the realm of determining the musical quality of the few albums I do buy.+ The criterion are as follows:

--Every song has to be good. If not great. Very few musicians, let alone musical groups, are capable of creating such an artifact, and, in fact, there was for a long time an A&R myth that allowing an act to produce an album without two or three clunkers amongst the brilliant gems was downright irresponsible.
--That's really about it. I don't really have another criterion. If I cleaved-- clove? cloven?-- to a singular school of music, or a particular genre of same, I might have something more to guide me, but I don't.

So here are a few of the albums I have that I consider to be great, based on the criterion above, followed by a listing of albums I have and love that are not great, also based on the criterion above, and following will be an explanation of why I have those albums and why I'm listing them here, assuming I think of one (and remember it) before I'm through:

--The Beatles' Revolver. A grilfriend of mine gave this to me when I was in high school (the same chick, God bless her, gave me a copy of The White Album after we broke up), but I didn't really get the full scope of the thing until a few years ago, when I clammed onto the orginal British version. Of course, there are other examples of the form displayed by the Lads, but this is, I think, really, the epitome, except for:

--Magical Mystery Tour. This album, EP really, was a notorious disaster when it first came out, a hubris-fueled, drug-induced nightmare that would not go away even in the bright light of dawn. It wasn't until later-- and I have never found a reliable pinning down of the datew and circumstances-- that the whole package was delivered, and it was essentially a pastiche of works from the same general time period placed together because some of them ahd perfomed well in the charts and others might profit from the proximity. Whatever the case, the final result is one hell of a good piece of work.

Miles Davis, Kind of Blue. The copy I have is a re-issue, which irked me for a while. It includes an alternate version of one of the tunes, and the tunes are not in the order they were in on the original copy I had of the album, which I illegally copied from the copy stored in the music library at UNCC as a college student. For many years I went to sleep with this album, nursing one last drink and smoking a last cigarette or two, drifting off just as the last strains faded out. Thus, it took a while to get used to the new arrangement.

Dire Straits, Dire Straits, Love Over Gold. Both albums are brilliant, in vastly different ways. The first album, the debut, was partly brilliant due to Mark's brother Dave's terrific rhythm guitar work. The second, I think the Strait's third outing, is brilliant due to how Mark and his crew worked around Dave's absence. As it turns out, he decided that his shit didn't stink, so he went out on his own to turn out several solo albums that never amounted to anything. The same thing happened to Tom Foggerty. A lesson for you, fellow rhythm guitarists: You can be replaced, and even if you can't, you can be dealt without.

To be continued. Just got a call to meet the in-laws at Denny's, which is to say I'm putting the chain to one last test. This may be the last time for this American in Denny's, about which more later.

*I started going to The Record Exchange as a kid. There I purchased a nearly complete collection of albums by Yes, a respectable scatterintg of late 60's proto-jazz albums, a discrete selection of Billy Joel's works, and the best of the Beatles' offerings, which collection I later scattered to the winds prior to my embarking on a vagabond journey into (and past) adulthood, which is to say that gave the whole thing to a friend of mine who was, at that time, a turntable fanatic.

+My collection currently numbers something like 300 discs and 75 vinyls; I routinely trade out a half-dozen discs to the Exchange three or four times a year, and the Good Doc sends along copies of his favorite finds religiously.

EVERLASTING BLOG-STOPPER: May 8th: I Am Dragged Beneath The Keel

OK. So I've stopped blogging.

THE GOOD, THE BLOG, AND THE UGLY: May 9th: Explaining a long absence

Having taken a long break in blogging since posting an unfinished, potentially embarrassing piece in which I began writing about some of my favorite rock albums-- an iffy undertaking at best-- I found myself feeling somewhat self-conscious, slightly silly, and a bit pressed to either get back to it and finish the last entry or quit this crap altogether. This entry represents my fully and focussed intention to continue in this pursuit, regardless of the outcome. Not that anyone has, will, or will ever give a rip.

But seriously, blogging is more difficult for me these days. After working a full day reading essays, I am usually to de-energized at the end of the day to do anything more demanding than read some news and watch some television. On the weekends, my wife is usually doing internet work for her old company, about which I shan't complain, seeing as she's raking in thirty clams an hour, which is not quite soaking the mooks, but it ain't hay, either. Also, the weekends tend to be pretty well packed these days. For instance, this weekend, on Saturday I got up relatively early, coffeed, read some news, then embarked on a little light yardwork, which began with some basic trim-up work and culminated in mowing the lawn, which took most of an hour. Towards the end I ran out of gas, and after taking a breather grabbed the can and bolted to the station on the corner for a three-gallon booster, returned home, finished the lawn, showered, then bolted off again to catch neice Cayla's softball game. Afterwards we went back to the house to check the Wifey's progress, waited while she showered and dressed, during which I kid sat and wolfed down a quick pepper-jack pimento cheese sandwich, then bolted off to do some light shopping-- the Record Exchange, where I bought The Alman Brothers Eat a Peach and a posthumous compendium of recordings on which Duane Allman had appeared as a studio musician. Sfter this I traipsed across town towards the used book store, where I picked up a historical memoir of the Korean war and a history of the CIA's experiments with psychadelic drugs to facilitate mind control. After that, I rendevoused with the Wifey at her folks place, and we bolted off to Latta Plantation for a barbeque benefit, where we rendevoused with my folks, my brother and his new girlfriend. After this we went ot the Harris Teeter for the weekly grocery shopping junket, visited w3ith her folks briefly, and headed back home. We were settled in by about 8. This was all without any real special arrangement to which to attend.

So I've been busy.

BLOG THE TORPEDOES: May 29: Another note after a long absence nobody in the entirety of creation has bothered to notice

For the first time in a month I find myself with free time, in the morning, before going in to work (on a Saturday), without my wife using the computer to do work on a side project, and I find myself blogging, with absolutely nothing to say and an aching need to explain to anyone reading this, for no good reason whatsoever, what I mean when I say my wife was working on a "side project." Some people just shouldn't blog.

Later today, we are going to go see the movie "The Day After Tomorrow," reviews of which have lead me to believe that this is one of those flicks that defeats it's own overt and dumb-headed purpose. It's apparent intent-- who am I kidding? They were out to gig the Administration-- our President et al-- on the grounds of not taking stronger steps to protect the environment. Now, I think I'm already on record here: the environmental stuff is mostly all crap, but if said crap gets corporations to clean up their shit and stops at least some of us from chucking McDonalds bags out the car window, then bully. But the filmmaker, who already has environ-mentalists going "See! SEE!!!" failed to take into account that, by making the Prez and the Veep such obvious straws of W and Cheney, and by making this enviro-nightmare take place overnight, he's actually taking alot of wind out of the crusaders' sails. The Admin deserves, and is taking, alot of shin notchings these days (and deserves more, so get in there, kids!), not only over the enviro stuff but over alot of other things as well, but making a goofy movie, especially one that, retrospectively, could have been made in 1962 with cheesier effects and Leslie Neilsen as The Noble Scientist, isn't going to do squat.

Rachelle wants to see it. I love my wife. It was her idea to see Van Helsing, too. My idea would have been to see Van Halen, but I dare say that would have been just as bad. I base that solely on the basis of having heard a dozen promo spots advising me to see the band "together again," no word of what that means in terms of the line up (although I can guess), and no reviews, which, oddly, seems to happen alot when a revered band makes a bad come-back tour. (Or, more aptly, their inagural tour of the Oldies Circuit.)

See? Nothing to say.

BLOGGING ROAD AHEAD: May 30th: Birth of the Cool

In the fine tradition of forcing our ridiculous obesessions on each other, Ol' Doc Nagel has asked me for my "take" on the Miles Davis (more there in a moment) album Birth of the Cool. This is difficult for me for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I have a hard time convincing myself that this is a Miles Davis album. A quick history, for those of you unfamiliar with the artifact and as a way of laying out parts of my trouble with it: in 1948, a young Miles-- 23 years old but already something of a cherished commodity in the jazz world both as a side man and an auteur-- assembled a nonet, a collection of nine musicians, for miscellaneous sessions, including a multi-week stand at a New York hotel club and some studio recording. The live sessions were not well attended, and dates came and went. The nonet changed out some members, and about a year later they booked some more studio time. Several arrangers, notably Gil Evans and Gunther Schuller, whose nickname was Carl,* were worked into the mix, which should have helped, but, based on the sporadic attendence at the club dates, the masters were shelved and the album was not released until 1956. For all the palaver about this being a "seminal" album, there seems to have been no real reaction in the music world, and the claim that this was, in fact, the birth of Cool, as in Cool Jazz, often referred to as the West Coast Sound, I haven't found any evidence of it that I couldn't just as easily write off as standard issue jazz history hubris. Besides which, from what I've read, the nonet never left New York, the sessions didn't see the light of day for the better part of a decade, and-- wait, wait, I'm getting to that-- and so if these players as a set and their nonet work in New York influenced the development of West Caost Jazz, it only could have been through some sort of weird gelogical osmosis. (And even thought I watched the movie "The Day After Tomorrow" yesterday, I'm not swallowing that last one.)

Now, true, some of the key players, among them Gerry "Poochikins" Mulligan and Kai Winding were terribly influential in later years, and they were both somewhat responsible for the development of Cool and West Coast Jazz as schools of technique and composition, well, hell, for that matter, so was John Lewis, so was Schuller, so was Max Roach, so was Kenny Clarke, etc. etc. etc. As far as the conent of the album goes, it's kind of neat, if for nothing else than for the fact that it's music being produced by a nonet which neither drowns in complexity nor gets flattened through arrangement, which is the particular hazard of the nonet, or was in that part of the Jazz age anyways. So, what it finally boils down to is this: I keep feeling like the label (Capitol) yanked this off the shelf, packaged it as a "Miles Davis" album, slapped the label "Birth of the Cool" on it, and sent it out on the streets to rake in yet more money from the fine line of Miles Davis(TM) products. I know, intellectually, that this isn't the case, musn't be the case, but I can't keep from cynically rejecting any real claim to aunthenticity this album might have.

So I dunno. I guess I'll just have to keep listening to it. DAMN YOU, DOC NAGEL! DAMN YOOOOOOOOU!!!

*I have absolutely no basis for that at all. It just popped into my head.

BLOGGING 'TIL THE BREAK OF DAWN: June 2nd: Inauthenicity, Commercials

It's almost disingenuous to label commercials inauthentic. In fact, it's odd that the genre even continues to exist. Even the most cynical, yellow-eyed, bitchy little critic of the ad world, Bob Garfield of Advertising Age Magazine, occasionally succumbs to the weird psychosis of advert-think. But the most rewarding experiences come in those serendipitous moments when the right hand truely knows not what the left hand does. Like today. I was minding my own business, surfing the web, playing some solitaire, obliviously watching a rotten movie I love-- "Brewster's Millions," a truely, stupidly empty vessel for Richor Pryor and John Candy to pour some sweetness and light into-- when a commercial I hate came on. Now, I suppose that if you are an admaker making ads for an embarrassing product, you're either in deeper denial than the average ad maker or on the verge of authenticity. I mean, advertising stuff of that nature has to either shock you into reality or completely numb your senses. (Admakers for, say, panty liners or douches, in particular, seem to have given up on reality altogether.) The people who are currently making ads for Beano, the anti-gas additive, seem to be dancing merrily on the line between cynical awarness and complete psychosis.

Now, I come armed to this campaign with a peculiar bit of knowledge: the kind of gas that products like Beano are designed to aid are not expulsive. It is internal, and it is painful because it is internal. The flatulence factor, unpleasant though it might be, rarely requires treatment and is chiefly a relief for the gas sufferer more than an embarrassment. I have known more than a few people who have had gas problems that required medication, one who required a prsciption medication. Farting was not an issue for these people.

So it was serendipitous that the ad for Beano, in which a companion of a new convert to the vegan lifestyle expresses relief that the convert is using Beano to battle digestive gas-- "You had me worried there," the companion opines on learning of the blessed chemical aid-- was followed immediately by an ad the product for which completely escaped my attention, as it began with the spokes-model proclaiming "I've tried everything: air fresheners, disinfectants . . . "

I didn't catch the rest of the ad. In fact, it took a good minute for me to catch the rest of my breath.

But what is the point of such a revelation, if it doesn't provoke thought? The thought it provoked is this: once in a while the message is so inappropriate, so counter-intuitive, that it suddenly makes perfect sense to live in a world where car dealers fund the media who sell us a president then record his huge missteps. Beano: the Anti-Fart. I love America!

CAMP ON BLOG ISLAND: June 2nd, Supplemental: Vendetta, American Style, or: Bob Garfield Must Die

I am making it official: I hate Bob Garfield. I don't just mean as an abstract concept, I don't mean him the way some of us hate Dan Rather or Tom Brokaw or Britney Spears. I mean that I have an inner laothing of the man so strong that, were I to see him on the street, it might be beyond me to restrain myself from physically attacking him.

Now, Doc Nagel will probably accuse me of stealing his gag here; he introduced me to Garfield's ad reviews on Advertising Age's website, by way of complaining that Garfield had stolen his material from one of the Doc's ad reviews no one asked him to write, and part of his act there involves claiming a certain amount of ire due to Garfield's continued adventures in critiquing advertising. But no. My ire has nothing to do with the Doc, his image, his reputation, nothin'. I have made a habit of reading Garfield's column, which is, for the most part fun. But I have not brought myself to watch most of the ad spots, which are made available on the site as video clips. Today I read two reviews, both recent, which read a little more like shooting fish in a barrel than usual. Surely, I thought to myself, the spots can't be that bad. Then there I was, watching these video clips, one for Coke and one for McDonalds. And, lo and behold, they were that bad. They were bad. The McDonald's ad is stupider, but the Coke ad purloins the Rolling Stones' song "You Can't Always Get What You Want" to back a generic goof on young adults suffering the calamities of waiting in line, having a straw hat blown off by the wind, or having their possessions thrown out the window after saying something to fuck up a relationship. And, living where I do, in Charlotte, North Carolina, where nothing ever happens, I very well could have lived out my quiet little life without ever having seen the bits. The vast majority of the ads reviewed on Garfield's page die before they get to my market. But thanks to Garfield and his bloody ad reviews, I saw them. And I am disgusted.

So prepare yourself, Bob. Should I ever meet you on the street . . . I strongly suggest you go to my gallery and puruse the pictures therein. Study my features. Make yourself familiar with my visage, so that if you see me you might make good your escape. And be warned: Should I see you first . . .

What's the frequency, Kenneth?

BLOG TO THE CHIEF: June 8th: It's Mourning in America

I am convinced that I am the first person in America crass enough to use that line.

Of course, as the world knows, our beloved President Reagan has died, at the age of 93. This came to a shock to many of us, who thought that he was 93 while he was in office two decades ago.

While some people are genuinely moved by his passing-- for no president has ever been more symbolic of patriotic unity and strength-- many others are disgusted by the ongoing stream of nostalgic and revisionist palaver-- for no president before or since was as stupidly and stubbornly divisive. Reagan was not responsible, as has so widely been proclaimed, for the end of the Cold War or the demise of the Soviet Union-- he ran on the Cold War, pretty much single handedly revived the whole notion of the Cold War in the public mind, and the Soviet Union shrivelled from within-- while he did contribute, strongly, to the phenomenon George Will referred to as "the watery Marxism that has run to ground in American Academia." The Regan Revolution comprised a recognition that, politically, the mental disconnect that let you say you believed one thing and do something that entirely opposed that belief, or arrange for something to be done on the basis that you could simply deny that anyone had ever commanded it be done, could be not only effective, but also be efficient.

So, on college campuses everywhere, the kids who felt like they had to protest some way but knew, both insinctively and by experience, that their cries would fall on deaf ears unless they had some sort of power structure from which to cry, latched onto whatever milky, moronic leftist movement there was, which, by process of evolution, is how we end up with the kinds of cluster-fucks that happen whenever and wherever the G-8 show up to meet. Why peoiple have gone from "GLOBALIZATION GOOD!" to "GLOBALIZATION BAD!" in less than a decade, with nothing, globally, having substantially changed-- in THIS decade, remember, not the last three. Then there's the matter of the Sandinistas, the Irangate thing-- hell, he is even obliquely responsible for the stupidest coining in history. He was, after all, the first president to inspire the press corpse to attach the suffix "GATE" onto any and every prsidential scandal. Then there's the widespread evidence, cast throughout the eight years of his reign, that every time he did anything, his aides de camp had to scramble about undoing it before whatever he had fuzted with either blew up, set off a war, crumbled the economy, or just plain pissed everybody off.

Flat, plain facts tell us the sad truth: Reagan had a tendency to fuck things up. God bless America.

But he was a kind, gentle man, by all accounts. One of those Hollywood sponges once said-- I want to think it was Dean Martin, but, as many people do of Reagan, I ascribe far better things to Dino than he ever contributed-- one of those Hollywood sponges once said that you could say nothing better of a man than to say his ex-wife doesn't hate him. Apparently, that was true with Reagan, and his largely alienated family swarmed to him in a large, warm knot when they found out he was clinically losing his mind. This is not to say that they would not have swarmed to him if, say, it turned out that he was addicted to crack or heroin.* And there is ample enough evidence that the man meant well, and that he believed he was doing good, despite any and all evidence to the contrary. And although this stands as more evidence that the man was a dufus-- or doofus,+ if you prefer-- it also contradicts all thge claims that the man was black of heart. I think he only lacked compassion through lacking consciousness of others. As the Doc might allow me to say, although I know in my heart of hearts he won't, Reagan had an intersubjectivity deficit. (And God knows, the man had deficits.)

On the other hand, here's something else no one else is crass enought ot admit: we ought to let the poliutical craphounds to dedicate bureaucracy buildings and airports after Regan. Such edifices are wholly and truelky sumbolic of the empty-headed stubbornness and stupid fiddling that Reagan brought to the Executive Branch. Deny any contrary evidence! Shout down the dissenters! Damn the lack of torpedoes! Full steam ahead!

*It is well documented that the effects of Alzheimer's, on a strictly mental level, are identical to the kind of deterioration seen in longtime drug users, although without the same level of physical deterioration. A researcher was heard to say, then made to retract, that if there were a drug available that would create the conditions associated with Alzheimer's, the government would be compelled to ban it.

+According to James J. Kilpatric, either spelling is acceptable, although "doofus" is largely preferred. On the other hand, screw Kilpatrick.

BLOG, BLOGGER, BLOGGEST: June 8th, Supplemental: My Goddamned Paperboy*

My hometown paper, and ain't it a shame, included the following treat in today's edition:

"Who's the best news anchor? Where's the best hot dog? Find out in our 2nd-annual 'Best of 2004' awards."

Those lame craphounds. This lousy year isn't even half over, and they're already doing a second "Best Of" list? Jesus, they're like spastic puppies! And as lousy as this year has been, generally speaking, it's not like there's much "Best Of" to comment on, certainly not enough to have a second celebration halfway in. What's for dessert? A Third Annual Best Of? What will there be left to celebrate besides more bitumin?+

*In point of fact, our paper carrier(s) have a nearly unbroken track record of getting our newspaper here rain or shine, snow, sleet, hail, whatever. And as lousy as my local paper might be, it has nothing on the Atlanta Journal-Constipation, or, God forbid, any one of the immacualte California-based Bee publications.~

+One of the ongoing jokes about my home state is "First in Pavement, Last in Education," which never has been completely true. We do outspend the education budget on building roadways, but roadways are more expensive that schools, teachers' salaries and books. And most of our roads are bitchin', even if most of our schools are not. My own city is in the final throes of building an "Outer Beltway," which, depending on who you talk to, has been a progressive miracle or a disaster of suburban retail sprawl. Portions of my own side of town, and outlying areas, have been moonscaped and are currently being sculpted for overpassed and off-ramps, a process which I find soul-rending: is a way, it's horribly ugly and destructive, and in another way it's an amazing display of creative engineering and mechanical force, brutal only in scope, and artistic at heart.

~The Bee publications, which, in a true crime against humanity, are rife up and down the Left Coast, seem to groom their reporters towards stupidity and fill their pages with bilious tripe. In my all-but-last incarnation as a Construction Reporter, I had ample opportunity to sample Bee publications from all over the state, and they were not only homogenous, but sculpted to appear as if they were organic products of their unique local settings. They are the Steppfrod Wives of news publications, and further evidence that there is something about California that either attracts freaks or dissolves people's brains.

BLOGGING THE NEW WESTERN WORLD: June 9th: Old Dog Learns New Tricks

So it's semi-official: I'm a free lancer. Or contractor, pick the term you like best, whether it puts me in a brighter or dimmer light. I signed up with an outfit called SMCI, which stands for Software Management Consultants Inc., which, for those of you who know me, sounds like the last place I'd ever possibly end up. I don't really do software, except the kind where you pop in a CD and keep clicking on buttons util the thing tells you you're finished. However, I have learned a new trick or two of late, so I guess I'm not completely hopeless.

The reason for my contracting through SMCI is so that I can take part in a project at my wife's company to standardize a tech manual, and that's all I'm gonna say about it. I signed a couple of fairly heavy-duty non-disclosure form yesterday, but, frankjly, that ain't it. The tasks that will come to hand soon will probably be boring as hell. I don't want to talk about it. I mean, from what I know so far, it's going to be a challenging, perhaps even thrilling gig, but just to me, and only because I'm a geek.* Like LBJ said to the economist, it's like pissing down your leg: it might seem hot to you, but not to anybody else.

In far better news, Doc Nagel just received the copy of Gil Evans' Svengali that I ordered him a while back. The disc+ traveled via media mail, so it took a while, seems like a coupla weeks to me, although it was more like 10 days. Chris introduced me to this album in college, about the same time I picked up on the Cannonball Adderly set Mercy, Mercy, Mercy. There's an odd serendipity here: Svengali, I learned on buying my own copy with liner notes and all, was a series of concert recordings, laid flat on each other, with the audience noises (applause, etc.) quashed until the very end. Mercy, Mercy, Mercy, however, is a "concert" performance staged in a Hollywood studio to be used as a front for a new club in Chicago to be called, humbly, "The Club." As I hadn't access to the liner notes for the Evans work, and the liner notes on the Adderly set are a pack of goddamned lies, none of this was apprent to me during my first listenings of the things. But learning the facts, all these years later, has served to confirm what I thought on the first hearings. Svengali, although it works as a whole, definitely has a kind of piecey texture, which also works for it. The Adderly set has a kind of slickness, a disingenousness to it, that also works for it. The audience reactions are way too effusive, the compositions are not nearly such genius as they are held out to be, and the band plays way too well for the compositions. Svengali reads like a Sysiphean epic ode to existence. Mercy, Mercy, Mercy sounds like a drunken Hollywood party.

*Shortly after watching a re-run of the Drew Carey Show-- I know, I know, I could have been spending that time curing cancer-- in which there is a discussion over whether "pathetigeek" and "sarcastabitch" were words, I decided that I am a "poetigeek," in that I get all poetic over the strangest things, not the least of which is architecture. I also have been know to get poetic over the spreading of grass seed in my front yard, which is marginally less weird than waxing over architecture. So I'm a poetigeek. I'm actually pretty comfortable with that, until someone re-interprets or re-defines the phrase for me.

+CD's are superior to vinyl. We all know it. I have made a bit of a mook of myself by buying vinyl records at the Record Exchange, but the only reason not to own something on CD is if it's only extant on vinyl or if the CD version has been mortally tampered with. And the myth about the liner notes accompanying the LP's being superior to those with the CD version? Balderdash. The cover art on a CD is going to be inferior, true, but let's face it: most album covers are just album covers.

I'VE NEVER BELONGED TO A CLUB THAT WOULD HAVE SOMEONE LIKE ME AS A MEMBER: June 10th: Reflections on Reagan, and the First Title Without The Word "Blog" Horribly Missused

As it turns out, I was not the first to use the "It's mourning in America" gag following news of Reagan's death. Newsweek beat me to it.* Only they didn't use it as a gag, per se. They were a bit more maudlin about it.

One of the more gratifying things about the fallout in the press has been the widespread accounting of Reagan's contradictions. The odd thing, for me, is that it's also been one of the most grating things. See, here's the thing: Reagan, as a man, as a living, breathing, relexive human being, wasn't all that bad, really. It was his presidency that ruined him. His governorship dealt him wounds of conscience, but it wasn't until he rose on the shoulders of the GOP that he was really crippled. Frankly, and I don't recall if I mentioned this to anyone at the time, when the diagnosis of Alzheimer's came out, I thought that it had come too late. He should have been spared back in '81.

He had all the makings for an admirable man: self-consciousness born of self doubt, a struggle to reconcile himself with his own shortcomings and those of his parents, a humanitarian impulse to save the unfortunate, and that greatest of all American delusions, the impulse to foster the illusion that all things were for the best in this best of all Western worlds. I had a couple of things in common with him: as a child, I didn't know I needed glasses until long after I needed them, and after getting them, it explained away a wretched year of academic underperforming. My second grade D's (eventually grudging B's, if I remember correctly) were not due to laziness or ineptitude, as surmised by my teacher and parents, but due to the fact that I couldn't read the words on the page and didn't even know there was a math problem on the board at the front of the room. When I got my sight back, it was revelatory. I read voraciously and omnivorously, just like Dutch.+ I over-achieved for a spell, then fell off a bit when I realized no one was noticing. I started over-achieveing again a year or two later-- for those of you scoring at home, that would be in fourth grade-- but kept it to myself. For many years I didn't let on that I was a bright, capable kid. A teacher or two recognized it. One incredibly naive teacher gave be the terribly cute designation of hiding my light under a bushel, but her diagnosis was psychically shouted down by all the teachers whose modus operandum consisted largely of browbeating students for falling short of the mark in any area they could find.~

Now, I didn't know dick about Reagan's life as I was growing up, but there were some very eerie parallels: Reagan took life-saving courses. I tried, but I was bumped the first time due to enrollment constraints-- my name, after all, begins with a W-- and the following year the age requirement was raised, so I was too young to take the courses. Reagan became a life guard; I wanted to become a life gurad, but I would have had to take a course in swimming that wasn't being offered the year I was age-eligible. I later found out that, even if I had been able to take the course and become swimmer certified, I would not have had the opportunity to become a life guard in my land-locked little town: the positions at the local swimming pools, public and private, were closely guarded and handed out strictly on the basis of regimented nepotism. I spent that summer fighting the waves at Crescent Beach in Florida, two miles south of St. Augustine, and on a self-imposed dare took to the inland waterway, where I entered the water with canvas sneakers on, tied them together by the shoe strings and slung them around my neck to swim, then struggled into them again as I reached the next oyster-bed shoal, walked across it, and began the swim anew on the other side.

I wasn't a sports star. My brother was hot to play midget-league football, and, the story went, my parents couldn't really afford to buy a full set of pads and a helmet and a jersey and the special fitted and padded pants for both of us. (At one point, my Mom, in a bizarre bargaining tactic, offered to buy me about 1/3 of the pads necessary for the sport, which would have been utterly useless. I declined the offer, although I remember being oddly tempted by it.) I was almost tempted to joining the pre-little-league baseball team, until I realized that the coach was an asshole. I played pre-little-league basketball for a season, but the coach was an asshole. He decided on day 1 that I was a sub-standard player, benched me during both games and practice, and only sent me in during the last game of the season when it became apparent that our team had no way in HELL of winning. (This was in Texas, by the way.) He picked an opponent, and gave me strict orders to "COVER THAT MAN, STICK TO HIM, AND IF THE BALL COMES YOUR WAY, DON'T CATCH IT. IF YOU HAVE TO CATCH IT, DON'T SHOOT, GIVE IT TO SOMEONE ELSE.

Alright, goddamnit. So I covered that guy, covered him so hard that he couldn't hardly move, covered him so hard and close that the kid got pissed off at me just for covering him so well, and then one of my team mates, next to the goal, not well covered but too scared to shoot, decided that I, covering my man and with my back to the court, was open. He threw the ball at me and hit me square in the back of my head. After the play, on the sidelines, the coach yelled at me for not paying attention.

Reagan did drama, knew the thrill of adulation and applause. So did I; but I soon found, in high school, that I didn't like the dissociation involved in becoming a character. It gave me a weird sense of inauthenticity (although I wasn't armed with that word to express it at the time), and I made an excuse or two to get transfered away from the front, off to the wings to do stage sets and up to the booth to do techie stuff. The last supporting role I had I nearly booted, as the star of the show, during our one scene together, almost couldn't deliver her lines since I had, as she said, smiles in my eyes. I think, I guess, that's where the Gipper and I really parted ways. Not that I ever had anything in the way of a real shot at going where he was going. He had many advantages over me that I would have considered liabilities.

Here's where we get where I'm going. One thing Reagan and I share, truely, madly, deeply, is a sense of optimism about America. He came from a generation that was lost between the devil and the deep blue sea, reeling from economic depression, the entire social structure hanging by a thread, and it was only just becoming apparent, in his day and age, that the Native Americans, the bold, humble, noble Indians, had been shoved into desert lots to either subsist on government food alotments or starve to death with whisky bottles in their hands. His Dad was a drunk and his Mom was a logic-defying moralizer. Still, he managed, as many of his generation did, to generate an optimism, a sense of America, that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, insisted that this was, and always would be, the greatest country on earth. And it worked. Say what you will, it was not economics, but metaphysics, that got us out of the depression, by sheer force of will.

That same sheer force of will was what got us through World War Two, and it's what brought our boys home. That same sheer force of will is what, eventually, brought us to stalemate in Korea. The vast majority of veterans who came back from that war agreed that stalemate was about the best that could be hoped for, and it was plenty good enough so long as it meant they could come home. We lacked that force of will in Vietnam. It wasn't just that we were up against a tough, determined enemy. It wasn't that we weren't used to jungle warfare and guerilla tactics. It's that we were gung ho about fucking up some VC gooks, going deep into the shit and getting some poon tang, which was military slang for causing death and dismemberment. Suffice it to say that our forces in Vietnam lack, to say the least, optimism, and to say the most, force of will.

(To those who say Reagan was hypocritical in making training films rather than serving overseas: eh. He thought he was doing the right thing. And, really, would you rather have had him driving a tank? Consequences, people!)

I grew up in that generation for whom is was a matter of denial and defiance to consider this the greatest country on earth. We had abused our authority in Vietnam. The fight was supposed to be about a bigger thing, the struggle of ideologies. But our guys were on the ground to fuck people up. Everyone knew it. The gung ho soldiers didn't give a shit if the gooks lived under Communism or Capitalism, and the gooks didn't seem to care either. The soldiers who did give a shit either got out or, eventually, didn't give a shit. (This is the real reason our soldier were no heralded back as they came back form action. We couldn't tell the heroes from the assholes.) We had gone, in the space of a decade, from electing a dashing hero who became a martyr, to electing a conflicted political time-server who didn't seem to know what, precisely, was the right thing to do, to electing a thug. (We were in national denial about that for a long time, but I think that we all either knew it or didn't give a shit.) People bitched incessantly about the music, the fashion, the whiny "Me Generation," the cars, the pollution, television, all kinds of things that really didn't matter at street level, but what it really was was this: we had lost that sense of optimism, that insistent, dominant, sheer force of will that told us that, no matter the situation, no matter the condition, America truely was the greatest place on earth.

Which is doubly weird, because it really was. Whether it was intentionally or by happenstance, the War on Poverty had actually been won, by and large. (It's hard to credit LBJ with anything. The poverty matter might have been solved by his policies, or it might have been the burgeoning economics of the 60's and 70's pumping up the socio-economic barometer, but the recovery that was taking place started before his reign, and continued long after it, and by the time Dutch coined the term "welfare queen" (which he didn't), poverty had become the wretched condition of living in which one claimed disability and lived on welfare in subsidized housing.$ We had shopping malls and public transportation and most families had two cars. Poverty was a rare thing and confined to a small patch of territory usually referred to as the "inner city," although that phrase had been coined to desribe a specific and unique part of Chicago and diodn't apply in any shape or way to the other places it was applied, with the possible exception of Atlanta, although even that is a stretch.

We had almost nothing, really, to complain about. And that, really, was the problem. We turned our sheer force of will to the task of finding things to be pissed off about, and we kvetched about the taxes we could easily afford to pay, and the government interference in our substantially free lives, and the affronts of minorities we were extremely rarely in conact with and the horrors of the the influx of immigrants who were going to steal our jobs and take food off our families tables.^ And yes, alot of disco did suck, but some was really terrific, complex, beautiful music, and gave employment to some very talented musicians who otherwise wouldn't have ahd squat.

So in comes Dutch.

When I have been questioned by former servicemen of various generations, both veterans of wars and those who served during peacetime, about why I never joined the service, I had only to say "It was the Reagan years." this explanation is met with nods of assesnt. We had gone from the bumbling lacky who let the thug off the hook to the grinning hayseed who didn't seem to be able to follow through on anything-- to be fair, he was constantly getting jumped by an increasingly twitchy and aggressive GOP-- to an agency pitch man, an actor playing in a constant and continual after-shave commercial. The product he was hawking was America, and even if we were all using the product, we resented the advertisements.

And the people who bought in to the advertisements didn't seem to actually have what you would call brand loyalty. They didn't seem so much intent on preserving the product as they did on raping it's by-products. They were the big polluters, the ones who poured chemicals into our rivers (see ^), the ones who dictated what kind of huge, ugly cars or small, ugly, unreliable cars we drove. And, worst of all, they were largely resoponsible for the poor quality crap on TV, by virtue of paying for it on the back end. (This is largely why most Hollywooders are staunchly, if wholly ineffectively, left-wing.)

So it was hard to buy. It was very difficult to buy into Reagan's whole cheery optimist line, because we wanted to yell at him, shout him down, tell the gaddamned pitch-man "HEY! ASSHOLE! YOU CAN'T HAVE THAT! IT'S MINE!!! Because it was our optimism, if there was to be optimism. That's how we got into this whole REM, whiny, angst-ridden pop-culture cycle that embraced Punk Rock as an aesthectic while watching MTV. Reagan, with his enthusiasm and his chicken neck and his goddamned jelly beans, didn't mean a goodamned thing, and his administration didn't know a goddamned thing, and they proved it again and again by changing courses and srcewing up the economy and the standing of our nation and the world political stage, fighting the cold war and upping the ante by trying to bury the Soviet Union by running an inflationary arms race and meanwhile taunting them in such ways that, were all the Cold War rhetoric true, should have plunged us into nuclear conflagration overnight. And we would be good goddamned if we would let that idiot-- those idiots-- commandeer our natural American optimism.

(The only ones who seemed to buy into the optimism were those who had vested economic interests, the political right wingers, and the God-n-Gun nuts, who didn't really have anything to say, but who banded together and shouted everybody else down anyways.)

(They weren't really optimistic.)

So what the hell is all of this about? Maybe this: maybe I gave Reagan too hard a time. Maybe he had something worthwhile to contribute, and maybe it was just what he did contribute: he stuck it out there that we should quit our whining and realize that we got it so goddamned good it almost hurts from smiling. Maybe we should remember what was, for me, his most memorable line" "Oh, shut up!" When his campaign ads insinuated, breathily, almost obscenely, "It's morning in America," our national instinct was to say "Oh, bullshit." Reagan offered nothing, really. And certainly nothing new, and mostly nothing useful. We were not entering a new age, as far as any of us could tell. It was in this era that a powerful new phrase was born: SS, DD. Same Shit, Different Day.

Since his death, I have heard people of many different stripes proclaiming that there hasn't been a president since Reagan who could measure up to Reagan, and although it seems substantially true, it really doesn't say a hell of alot. Right-wingers can scream all day long about what great things Reagan did, but all his administration suceeded in doing was distorting a political reality so that it looke like things that needed doing were getting done. A great deal of the things that did get done-- imposing regulations on business & industry to decrease pollution, for one thing-- very nearly got un-done during his administration, as it is in very real peril of being un-done in the current administration. But in another way, a largely substantive way, it is true: none of the creeps we've had in the White House since Reagan did such a good job of selling snake oil, preaching to the choir, fucking with unstable elements or presenting known quantities as great windfalls. God bless America!

Doc Nagel says the Wife didn't appreciate my assessment of Reagan having a good heart. I think he really did. He went to Hollywood, they sucked out his brian, and he spent the latter two-thirds of his life serving the party machinery. He chose not to see how cold-blooded and vicious they were. He chose not to recognize that there were people selling God for political juice, chose not to ignore, but just refused to recognize the immensely pompous blasphemy of it all. Having a good heart doesn't mean he wasn't stupid and naive. When they told him not to worry about AIDS because it was only going to effect people who were politically marginalized anyways, and that, fiscally, it would have been a meager expenditure the government could live without, he sqaid-- and this is an actual quote-- "Oh. Okay." And, realistically speaking, his indifference did more to energize the people who actually got the programs going than anything his administration could have possibly done at the time. This, my friends, is what even the staunchest Republican craphound would have to acknowledge as "the law of unintended consequences.#

*My wife says that, since I used the gag before reading it in Newsweek, technically, I got to it first. The logic doesn't necessarily follow, but what the hell. I'll take it.

+The nickname "Dutch," as I understand it, came later in Reagan's life. I always associated it with it's old deroggeratory meaning: Dutch as in fake, a facsimile of the real thing, which described Reagan, in his presidential years, to a T. His old handle, "The Gipper," referring as it did to a semi-fictional role he played in a very, very old movie, appealed equally to the false facade that was the latter half of the man's life.

~This si an unfortunate form of pedagogy that comes largely from two problematic realities: first, that many times those who chose to teach are manily interested in yelling at kids, and secondly, of times those who choose to teach don't actually know anything, get frustrated because the are unable to teach anyhting, and, thus, end up yelling at the kids. This may be rarer than I think, but my own experiences, from grade school through grad school, suggest about a 60-40 split, with the majority ascribing to this unfortunate form of pedagogy.

$I don't mean to say that there are not people pathetically struggling and just getting by on very low wages. There are, but people don't starve to death in America, and if they do, it's either through sheer stupidity or stubborn ignorance.

^It hasn't been until just recently that the mainstream has begun to acknowledge that the migres are largely doing the jobs the gringos don't want to do anyways, and, ironically, putting food on our tables. Many in my own region are still in a deep, bizarre form of denial over the loss of textile mill jobs to overseas operation, when, if these people had any brains at all, they'd know that they really didn't want those lousy, stinking, crappy jobs to begin with.

#Republicanese for "the only way liberals ever get anything positive done." Paradox: Liberals are stultifyingly, stodgily moral, while conservatives are liberal with the truth. Discuss.

BLOG LIKE YOU'VE NEVER BLOGGED BEFORE: June 10th, Supplemental: The Paradox of Anthony Edwards

I hvae developed, over the years, a deep addiction to re-runs of ER. This is even more obsessive and compelling than my addiction to M*A*S*H, and has resulted in a couple of rather dubious additions to my mannerisms, among them the George Cloony smirk 'n' chuckle-- which, to be fair, I probably get more from serial viewings of "Ocean's Eleven"-- and the Anthony Edwards I-Am-Serious head duck and direct delivery. Since I notice these things, and I have yet to have anyone else comment on it-- and I shoulda kept my mouth shut, since I betcha my wife won't let me hear the end of it after reading this-- I suspect the affliction is not grievious. But every once in a while, when I catch myself doing it, I think to check myself. I never do. I go on doing as I am doing. But at least I think about checking myself.

But one other effect of watching ER two hours a day for weeks at a time is that I will, in the afternoon or evening, stumble across a movie starring Anthony Edwards, and I have come to find out a simple, strange, incontrovertable fact: Anthony Edwards, for all his compelling, breathtaking ability to bring his ER character to life in almost every single episode of the show he was in, has never been in a good movie in his entire career. Not one. The closest I can think of was "Revenge of the Nerds," which was so bad it was good, and "Revenge of the Nerds II," which he was barely in-- 2 scenes, one of which was the worst scene in the entire film. I am currently half-watching one of his rotten films, "Mr. North," based on a`Thornton Wilder book, which should be enough information for my readers to deduce the thing is airless and unfunny and maudlin where it wants to be passionate. Another time I ran across a piece of work called "Local Boy Makes Good," which I couldn't watch more than five minutes of at a stretch. I caught enough scenes to get the gist of the film before giving up. Why? Fan devotion, I guess. And also, I think, because I've always liked that phrase: "Local Boy Makes Good." It's the sort of thing I'd like to have said or written about me some day. I mean, it certainly beats "Local Boy Makes On Carpet."

REGATTA DE BLOG: June 11th: Corrections, Equations, Hydration

Doc Nagel has responded* to my last entry by making the following observation:

"I't official; you are insane."

Now, it would hardly be disingenous to assert that Ol' Doc has missed the point-- that's his career area, after all, he's trained for it-- but in this case, he has not missed the point, but rather has impaled himself upon it. That I live so intellectually realized a life that I catch myself aping television characters so subtly that no one else is aware I'm doing it is not the sign of a madman, but rather an indication of a mind so keen as to be able to reflect istelf, and a character so well honed as to actually be dangerous.

The Doc did, however, have a point when he suggested that it should, perhaps, be of some concern that we both have an obsession with sharp knives.

Speaking of conflict, I am done mowing the lawn, a duty which has increasingly become a pitched battle between myeslf and my mower. It's a standard Briggs & Stratton powered machine, gotten used from some of my red-neck in-laws the spring after we bought this house. We traded a television that didn't work very well for it, a fair enough trade at the time, and, since then, it has continued to function. Of late it has developed a cough-and-sputter routine that suggests I need to do some maintenance on it: clean and/or change filters, that sort of thing, but of course I never thing of it until after I've started the machine, and of course it does keep running, though sporadically making quitting noises (or, rather, lack thereof), and surely it can't hurt to mow one more time before I clean it. I suppose I will eventually get around to working on it, or, failing that, buying a new machine, which would actually be something of a treat.

A couple of years ago we bought a reel mower, which is to say a non-gas-powered mower. Our rationale was-- and, suprisingly, it took us a year to break down and do it-- that the gas mower was bad excercise, since although you are exerting and such, you are also breathing in some pretty fresh and nasty exhaust, and that we would be doing our little part for the environment by not spewing carbon monoxide into the ionoshpere. After a few uses, we concluded that the reel mower isd made for flat lawns that consist chiefly of young fescue, whereas out yard is hilly and uneven and populated by a variety of plantlife. (I don't like think of the non-grass components as making our yard weedy; I like think of it as "mixed greens.") We also realized that the reel mower was more efficient the faster it went, but in running behind it we neither of us could mow a straight line. The final realization was that it left a shaggy, uneven thatch behind, looking much like the firsy haircut your mother ever gave you to save money in grade school, and to hell with it. If the environment depends on the non-use of our one little Briggs & Stratton engine, brother, it's too far gone to worry about.

Also speaking of conflict, I have just finished listening to Ghost in the Machine. This was the second to last album before Sting left Andy and Stew high and dry and went out to become an absurdist. There were alot of us who, hearing this album the first time, thought this was it, that the Police were washed up, syonara, lights out. It took a couple of listings, but after a while it sank in. This is one of those selections which is powered by the friction between the players; on some of the numbers, Andy's jangling guitar and Sting's thumping bass and Stew's rattling drums circle each other like thugs in a parking lot. In other numbers, Like "Invisible Sun," they grind against each other like millstones. In others-- specifically "One World (not three)," which I will come back to directly, the arrangements seem to exist like gun molls, keeping the thugs away from each other in the hopes of forestalling an altercation. Several of the numbers are preachy, but "One World," specifically, is a reductio: it defeats itself musically by being preacherly, so that it seems to just go on and on and on without really getting anywhere. By the time Synchronicity came around, alot of folks thought the Police were back. "Every Move You Make," "Wrapped Around My Finger," "King of Pain," a true return to form. But there were those of us who had our doubts. "Every Move You Make," I noted early on, bore a great resemblance to Leo Sayer's last gasp hit, "More Than I Can Say," better known to some Americans as "Whoa-oo-oh-oo, Yay-ee-yay-ee." And, of course, it was en vogue to make fun of anything that was high in MTV's rotation, despite the fact that it was, at root, a terrific composition nicely managed and probably had no relation to Sayer's composition at all. Then, later, having gotten a copy of the album itself, I ran across "Tea in the Sahara," and it clicked: yep. These boys are done. I could have fairly predicted it. LAter, when I heard that the break-up had been a suprise to both Stew and Andy, that had been under the impression that they were just on a sabbatical, and that Sting never told them directly that he wasn't actually coming back. Sting had always been the auteur of the group, and yeah, everything else on the album bore his stamp, but "Tea in the Sahara" was his, and his alone. It was Sting's way of announcing that he was done with the sophomore effort, and was ready to move on to the next stage of his development, the next step towards superstardom. Sting always had that peculiar mix of humility and arrogance that so many of us find so perversely seductive. Me, I can see right through the bastard like nothing. Don't get me wrong: I love Sting, and most of his music, but he doesn't get inch 1 from me when it comes down to basic ethical concerns. You can't screw over the band and then tell the rest of the world how to live, no matter how good your good advices are.+

*I always share my latest blogging outings with Doc Nagel, usually to little or no good effect.

+REM fans will recognize this as a sarcastic pun. Nobody else will think it's funny in the least. In fact, REM fans might not think it's funny in the least. REM fans tend to be an odd lot.

BLOGGY WENT A COURTIN' AND HE DID RIDE, UH-HUH: June 13th: Showbiddnis!

"But show business has always been like that-- any kind of show business. If these people didn't live intense and rather disorderly lives, if their emotions didn't ride them too hard-- well, they wouldn't be able to catch those emotions in flight and impriont them on a few feet of celluloid or project them across the footlights."

Ray Chandler wrote that in The Little Sister. It's bullshit. It was bullshit then, and it's bullshit now. I'll complete this thought later on. But, as far as it goes, it can stand on it's own. Everybody knows it didn't take a surfeit of emotions, rubbed raw and kept close to the surface, to concoct "The Stepford Wives." Not the original, not the remake.

LOST IN A SEA-BORNE BLOG: June 14th: Multiple Seasonal Considerations, Urges and Qualms, Finished Business

Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly. - M.F.K. Fisher

Of course, she's wrong.

The over-stylzing of food and meals is responsible for more reprehensible harm to the dining process than all the McDonalds in all the mad, wide world. All the rotten, crappy, three-can-casserole books in the world would never have been produced had it not been for that effete, snobbish, stylized impulse to find a way to tell the rest of the world that you enjoy stuff better than anyone else, and they should all just fuck off.

Now, when it comes from someone of authority-- myself, for instance, or Doc Nagel-- it should be understood, taken for granted, that we DO in fact enjoy stuff on a much complex, intense, intensive levels, and we pay a kind of ironic, not to say moronic price for it in suffering. The Doc has bizarre nightmares involving fast food that is far more disturbingly dangerous in his dreams than it is in the wrapper. I have some compulsion to understand why Rush Limbaugh pursues his twisted, tortured, demented logic to the ends of abusive absurdity when the answer-- money-- is really stupidly simple. We both strive for truth, which is probably the most improbable pursuit for anyone living in this day and age, although less so for Americans than for the rest of the world.* Now, this is not to say that we don't stylize or posture-- I'd be a fool and a hypocrite to say either-- but rather to say that takling things lightly, in many cases, leads to a greater enjoyment of events. Some of the best meals have been ones that took great preparation and had exquisite levels of subtle nuance. Some of them have been hamburgers. Some of the best meals I've had-- and I actually rate these highest-- are the ones that snuck up on me. Like Chicken Cashew. We were at a family gathering-- and I mean the whole Williams clan, like twenty of us-- years ago when I was just out of high school, at the Chinese restaurant in the Cotwold area (so named for Cotswold mall, having othing whatsoever to do with merry old England or the Cotswolds there), and I was having diffuculty concentrating on the menu due to raining questions from various relatives as to why, precisely, I had dropped out of high school. In a fit of pique, I ordered Chicken Cashew, also known as Cashew Chicken, and, just to be difficult, a Tsing Tao, which, for those of you who don't know, is a beer. Two bites into the dish, all conversation on my part ended. It actually didn't really register until the fourth or fifth bite, when I realized that I had my head down, in the position Wodehouse describes as having squared my elbows and had at it. I have had Chicken Cashew (aka Cashew Chicken) many times since then, but there was something undefineable about the dish that one night that I have not experienced since, and it's probably because I expect it to happen every time I order, especially when it's ordered in a duo or trio as something to share with friends and/or loved ones.

So there.

Not to say that you ought not appreciate things. Just, well, people who make grand generalizations about how or why to appreciate food are not to be trusted. Me included. I don't remember the actual Latin, but I think it goes De gustibus non disputandum. As my grandad was fond of saying, anything muttered in a low voice in Latin sounds profound. But the sentiment, in my view, is incotrovertable: There is no arguing in matters of taste. If you dig what I dig, terrific. If you don't, so be it. But nobody gets to tell me that things I like are fundamentally wrong. I also don't particularly appreciate when people say things aren't good for me. I eat a fairly balanced diet, most of the time, because I want to, and when I am not eating a balanced diet my body starts to give me signals that it wants GREEN STUFF, YOU MORON! Some times I want something subtle and spicy, some times I want something basic and plain. Most of the time the former.

Which brings me, kind of, back to the Chandler quote from yesterday: bad behavior is bad behavior. Now, I'm no moralizer, but I do consider myself a moralist. I don't intend to impose morality of anyone, but I do tend to recognize moral and immoral behavior. And I find things that must seem very odd to moralizers. I find, for instance, that it's much more morally suspect, not to say morally wrong, to concern yourself with who other people are (or might) have sex with than to have sex with people. And tjhe pople I have known who have made a big deal about having sex with people have ended up, eventually, paying for it. (You can take that anyway you like, but I know how I mean it.) And the people who pay attention to who other people are having sex with always end up having "irreconcilable differences," at best, with the people they are contracted (legally and religiously) to have sex with-- and ONLY with, if you read the contract. I forget who it is he's quoiting, but Doc Nagel is fond of saying "All morality is descriptive." It's supposed to mean that morality is descripitive of human behaior, but it's funnier if it means that morality describes the nasty things going on in the minds of the moralizers. Jean Genet was fond of probing those possibilities. Maybe I should just leave this to the experts.

*In reality, no matter how much we whine and bitch about the level of dissembling in America, we have more than enough people willing to uncover the truth, or at least a semblance of it, from under the rubble.+

+That target was supposed to give you a Leonard Pitts column in which he claimed that we should pay attention to the ugly, dirty Reagan beneath the shiny plastic veneer, largely ignoring the reports that surfaced in most of the major outlets detailing rotten aspects of the man's governorship and/or presidency that, ironically, are so numerous that they would not have fit in the standard length of Pitts' column. But the target gives you the Miami Herald's sign-in form, which, although it is free, is evil. They use the sign-up to claim all the people who visit the site are "subscribers;" in all likelyhood they inflate the numbers in any number of semi-eligible ways. And, heroin-dealer-like, the first hits are free-- which is to say that they don't ask you to sign up unless you are looking for last week's news. All this is used to pursuade advertisers that they should pay more money for there adverts, and, since it's driven by the ad people, the sign-in often doesn't work, in subtle and maddening ways. (My own paper's sign-up, for instance, won't let me sign on from my father-in-law's computer, and won't let me create an identity there in my name since I have an identity on my machine in my name, or at least that's what the web site keeps telling me.) So don't sign up for it. (Of course, if you don't sign up for it, you can't read Leonard's column. See what I mean about suffering?)~

~About what I am getting at with this whole truth-in-America thing: were there an Arabic version of Sex in the City, for instance, it would be state sponsered. Here, it's just HBO sponsored, and HBO, in this country, amounts to an energetic, yet oddly ineffectual, opposition party. (I do know what I mean by that, but I can't be bothered to explain.)

(The last time I had Cashew Chicken (or Chicken Cashew) was at a joint called The Red Bowl Asian Bistro, and since nothing there tastes like the equivalent dish anywhere else, I had altered expectations, and I tucked into the stuff with gusto, not to say hutzpah, not to say chutzpah, and enjoyed it nearly as much as that one evening back in 1984-- that one soft, early-summer evening, walking out into the reddening dusk into a smooth, cooling breeze, crossing the parking lot in deep conversation with my cousins over the nature of knowledge and experience, having had a hearty and subtly nuanced meal. (The Tsing Tao was good, too. Tsing Tao is never as good at home as it is in an Asian restaurant. Doug Adams would be able to explain it.))

CAPTAIN'S BLOG, STARDATE 36-24-36: June 15th: I Have One Word For You, Ben: Plastics

Doc Nagel made sure I noticed Bill Buckley's latest column regarding the mess in Iraq.* As usual, or at least as I am used to, it was a melange of good logic, sharp wit, and vocabulary words, making a good point almost in spite of itself. Buck is an extraordinarily good soldier, operating on behalf of a party and an ideology that scarcely deserve him, but, at this stage of the game, even he can't wholeheartedly back the admin. But I am less interested in Buck equivocations than I am in a central point of contention that cannot be denied: the military is a machine that is designed to justify sadism when necessary, but it doesn't do it very well. The reason being that the kind of people who think justifying sadism is a good idea aren't really all that bright, or at least not as bright as they think they are.

Now, that's going to come off as anti-soldier, but it's not. The military exists for many good and right reasons, and I have known many who served with clear consciences and for the right reasons, and comparatively few who served for the wrong reasons. (Although I did know one who proclaimed to me, in a proud, loud voice, that he enlisted in the Marines strictly for the sake of killing Arabs. That was in 93, and he fervently hoped that the Gulf War thing would flare back up, just so that he could, y'know . . . He didn't have what you would call a balanced geo-political outlook.) My viewpoint is also not anti-military. The notion that systems corrupt is a good and easy answer for all kinds of things, which is why it is also the wrong answer in most cases. People enter systems for any number of reasons, and sometimes the reason is that they thing the system will give them the opportunity to do crappy things to other people (witness Enron). Sometimes, also, people who enter systems find themselves provided with the ways, means, and opportunity to do crappy things to other people (witness Enron). However, systems are also equipped, almost by default, with ethical and moral fail-safes that ensure that anytime it gets noticed that people within the system are doing crappy things to other people, it will be symbolically and, yes, systematically outted (witness Enron) until, if all goes well, nobody really cares anymore. I suspect that a part of the system in this case, the Military (read that as a whole, including all branches) sat on the whole prisoner abuse scandal until they figured that the few scapegoats mentioned by name or pictured in the media would recover and fade into the distance. Of course, I'm giving them some credit there they may not deserve. But my point here is that systems are designed to try and protect themselves, so that when crap like this happens it can be dealt with in a systematic fashion in order to diminish the socio-political impact of the actual events themselves.

So that's why I, for one, don't really give a crap how high it goes, who knew what or when they knew it, or whether or not my president+ was/is culpablle in the events. What concerns me more is that the Military mandated the use of techniques that have been proven ineffective for over forty years. (I have so encountered a few people, mainly people who ascribe to right-wing conservative politics, who have indicated that they simply don't want to hear this.)

The Military, and the CIA, engaged in a great deal of experimentation and documentation in an effort to determine whether there were techniques that would render the human mind more pliable to questioning and open to confession. They tried drugs, alcohol, blackmail, sexual and otherwise, isolation, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, electrical shock, friendship, comradship, bribery, hypnosis, and the use of supposed psychics, and what they found, increasingly, was that there was no single silver bullet to be had, no golden key to the minds of men. By the sixties the evidence was all but conclusive, and only the most perverse and determined practitioners continued to pursue the matter.

Of course, by then it was the Nixon era, and perversity was making something of a remarkable comeback. Whether one really had anything to do with the other, I can't firmly say.

What came out in the end is this: good old fashioned torture was as good or better than anything else, and more predictable. The Chinese had better results in "brainwashing" people because they were willing to go to further extremes, and they had a simple intent, conversion to communism and indoctrination into the party. The Russians were rumored to have better methods, but it turned out that they were just locking people away and/or sending them to Siberia. Conversion was besides the point; incarceration served as an example to others to be good and loyal party members. But there was no way to just reach in and change someone's mind, convince them to give up information or convert them to an ideology or turn them into a killing machine that would have no memory of what his orders were or who gave them. Ah, well. So much for that bright hope.

But there has still persisted the notion that sexual preversion~ held some special persuasive qualities. This is the same kind of delusion, I think, that leads people to champion medicinal marijuana when, realistically, they just want to smoke dope.$ The same kind of things has outted in the military with people who wanted to experiment with drugs, mind control, and those who just wanted to do crappy things to other people.

A stark example of this revealed itself to me when I noticed the differences in interrogational style displayed by our special forces soldier and those in the employ of the CIA . The Special Forces guys asked questions, listened to the answers, and made their evaluations. The CIA guys, from what I saw, acted like high school bullies and got no answers. This might be why we had faulty intel going in.

I like Joe Biden's rant-- that the rules apply to our soldiers so that when they get captured by the enemy we can be reasonably sure they won't be tortured-- but it stops short of the mark. The Geneva Conventions exist to keep people from doing crappy things, and they came about during a time when a great many people were using the role of soldier to justify the doing of crappy things to other people. It's just common sense, really. Or call it common decency. Humiliating our fallen enemies takes the whole task of interrogation to Orwellian levels: it doesn't help, and it's being done for its own sake. When it comes to that, the purpose of torture is torture.

*Jon Stewart and Co made the best observation regarding the situation most of a year ago via their take on the Big Dumb Graphic: MESS-O-POTAMIA.

+I recently remarked to Doc Nagel that it's as if George Hiram Walker Texas Ranger Bush Jr. III Esquire had died in office and Dan Quayle had taken over. The more I think about it, that's an amazingly astute observation, and I'm glad I made it. Also, I hope I made it first, and if I did, it's a damned shame no one's paying attention.

$I don't necessarily see anything wrong with people wanting to smoke dope.

LOST BLOG OF THE DAMNED: June 17th: Polka of Doom, Tango del Muerto

I have finally, at long last, watched the entirety of the 1967 vanity project "Two for the Road," which I have been told, off and on since 1982, is a work of cinematic genius. Up to now, I lacked the wherewithall, since I couldn't watch more than a couple of scenes without concluding that the whole thing was nothing more than an excuse to watch Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney romp around Southern Europe. Now, Bert and Audrey were gorgeous at the time, and Southern Europe, at least the portions picted in the film gave them great company. BUt still. Today I had the good fortune to stumble across it in its first scenes while I was at the tail end process of editing a technical document, with the result that combination of translating LARGE BLOCKS OF ALL CAPS TEXT into conversational English, without ruining the program commands, and formatting the document to standards not my own, and the brain-freeze that accompanies such a process, I managed to watch the whole damned thing, with the result that it's actually a very nicely accomplished piece of work. It's still a vanity flick, but every element clicks nicely into place. Once or twice it threatened to get too sticky-glossy, and a couple of times both of the characters* flirted with losing my sympathy, but they ended up redeeming themselves, either through wit or heart, and the inter-changing car gags-- that won't mean anything to you if you haven't seen the movie, but I can't be bothered to explain it in full-- I found to be both an amusing segue device and a kind of a neat way to sandwich the multiple-flashback storyline.

I have had this argument with Doc Nagel before, and it's one my wife always sides with me on: movies are just movies, and when they try to be too much more than that, they only suceed in becoming ridiculous and pretentious. Thusly, I sometimes enjoy sitting back and watching something that is admittedly a steaming pile of crap, if it is apparent to me that the actors enjoyed acting. Now, I don't believe for a second that there's anything big or important about actors or acting. The best actors I have know personally were, in real life, complete bastards or bitches whoe were no where near as smart as they assumed they were and delighted in making other people catch Hell for no particularly good reason. With the result that they had alot of sex with multiple partners. However that works out. I never really understood it.

So, now that we've established that Jim's last name ain't Lipton, I do enjoy a good acting job. I usually don't get anything out of watching "actors" "act," which is to say I recognize the kind of hyper-stylized Actors' Studio crapola when I see it. But every once in a while I enjoy watching a film that exists strictly as an excuse for a pair of professionals to ply their trade. For instance, the under-handed cop-movie-satire+ "Face-Off." I mean, it's a rotten flick, a kind of cop-flick-on-steroids with a mean spirit and a weak mind, but it's juts kind of fun to watch Cage and Travolta take the sucker all the way over the high side, where brave men dare not tread. After "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" came out on video, both Doc Nagel and I watched it. His take: it wasn't writerly enough. There wasn't enough of Doc Thompson in it. It was just an excuse for Johnny Dep and Benicio del Toro to act like they were on alot of drugs. My take: sure it lacked the depth it might have had, but then it maybe wouldn't have been as much fun. I just got a kick out of watching Toro and Depp do what would otherwise have been scenery chewing had they not been portraying such bizzare beasts on such a strange journey.

I had a point here, but I've forgotten what it was.

*There are only two characters in "Two for the Road." The rest of the people appearing in the film are just stage dressing.

I FOUND MY MIND IN A BROWN PAPER BLOG AND THEN . . . : June 22nd: An Entry Which Has Suprisingly Little At All To Do With Kenny Rogers' Early Recording of "I Just Stopped In To See What Condition My Condition Was In

Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly. - M.F.K. Fisher

The Good Doctor has accused me of missing the point, and I insist, I maintain, I declare that the case is the opposite: taking care to prepare good food, sublime food, is not something I would decry, let alone eschew. Sharing food with other human beings is something I not onlu indulge in, but revel in, take pride in. My nephew Joe, who lives in Ohio most of the year, is set to arrive here today, and between the two of us we have already planned enough meals just for the two of us to imply interruption on other family plans since Saturday. But my point, and it is a good one, is that such admonitions are not to be trusted. Anytime anyone suggests to you that they have the secret to enjoying things, or that you are not enjoying things as much as you should, you tell 'em to go straight to hell. As I have observed, somewhat famously, the majority of American misery is achieved by people trying to hard to have fun. It has been since after the war, and probably the trend started around the time of Prohibition. The real misery in the world-- starvation, poverty,* genocide, truly bad food+-- is reserved for people outside the States, for reasons that passeth understanding. (It's not that we're better people, or blessed by God, or the Gods, or Whomever Almighty, and it's sure as hell not that we have smarter management, and if there's a reason to feel guilty about it the reasoning is certainly gauzy enough to bypass the majority of us. Although I do wish alot of us would not buy and not drive huge, ugly trucks just because we can.) That whole "not to be taken lightly" thing is a European thing, and it's to be deeply mistrusted. And the Doc should know that, and know that were we to take such admonitions to heart we might not have had that stunning pinot noir with the wild salmon he smothered with that rich cream sauce that one time at Jen and Andy's place in St. Cruz. Red wine with fish? Charlatans! No no! Bad bad bad bad bad! Bad bananas! You'd enjoy it so much more with a pinot grigio, ANY pinot grigio, however rancid! TAKE IT, IT'S WHITE!

And if he wants to continue to miss the point, fine. He can continue to deny that most of the good times really are as much due to serendipity as to planning. He can try to ignore the point that the reason felicity is called felicity is because it's felicitous. It makes no never mind to me.

*Don't get me started. No matter how bad some people have it here in the good ol' USA, other people have it worse elsewhere. And the people who have it really bad, for the most part, have chosen to have it really bad. I do love my country, as much for the inadvertent things as for the intended: the right wing nuts who decry the "Welfare State" mostly voted into existence to begin with.

+Check out the junk that gets sent to starving peoples through relief efforts. No matter how rotten and indigestible you think our "junk food" is, it's still better than the instant gruel mix offloaded by the ton in Africa, and I have that on farily good first-person authority from a number of sources. (Worse yet, a number of sources going back a couple of decades. For the price of a cup of coffee, you can give a starving child crap that you wouldn't touch with a ten-foot spoon!)

BLOG JEAN, I JUST MET A GIRL NAMED BLOG JEAN: June 28th: Love, Death, Sex, and Travel. Authenticity and the Eye of the Beholder

Just that things sometimes are made out to be not what they seem, to no great effect. Think of almost any televison show you've ever seen. If you apply any mental effort at all-- that is to say, if you are sentient-- you can easily spot the inauthentic means by which the producers (writers, actors, network executives, the whole cabal) think they are sucking us in, and it's usually thin as well sliced prosciutto, and neither as salty or tasty.* So it wouldn't take anybody in, ever, anytime, anywhere. When you get down to it, the real hook they are dancing around-- beautiful people cavorting on beaches, lifestyles of the rich and famous, things you can't have or can't afford-- is what most people are supposed to be watching for, and this supposedly laudable hook-- the social advancement of the murder mystery, the progressive awareness of other races and/or sexualities, the profound understanding provoked by employing an actor with a degenerative disease-- is nothing more than a lazy afterthought. As that fake character on that fake show said, when confronted with the suggestion that Baywatch was just pretty people running on beaches: "THAT'S THE GENIUS!!!"

It's important to remember that.

Most of the time, damned near all of the time, things are made out to be more important than they really are. Our Greatest Generation-- screw that goddamned bastard Brokaw-- fought the Second World War based on some of the most outrageous prevarications imaginable, and it's a damned good thing they did. Not because the Nazi's would have won-- they were bankrupt and falling out of favor by the time our lads crossed the border-- but because the world very well could have gone the wrong way without that rotten terrible sacrifice. The world was already quibbling over the distinctions between "Nazi," "facist," "fascist," "socialist" and "communist," mainly as a way of justifying their political leanings and ambitions without admitting that what they were advocating, actually, was yet another form of brutal dictatorship.+

But the truth is usually something that requires no elaboration. As I grow older I find I believe mor and more that there is a God, and notions that I visited in my youth as questions come to me as certainties. God created us in such a way that we recognize blue skies and green hills as beautiful, lush things. He also created us to appreciate the starkness of deserts and granite mountain peaks. He gave us the powers we need to appreciate existing on this planet. He gave us pain to know when something is wrong-- although, for my money, he could have done better on the wiring-- and pleasure because . . . Well, I guess he must like us. He plunked us down here, and it's up to us to figure out how to manage the six, seven or eight decades most of us will spend here. All that miracle horseshit is for mooks who insist on missing the point.

I don't think I'm saying anything new here. I think I'm just saying those things that need to be said, over and over, with fierce conviction. And especially in an election year. The news came out this morning that we're handing Iraq over a whole three days in advance of the deadline. There are so many things wrong with that I can hardly bring myself to elucidate them.~

What all this has to do with love, sex, death or travel, a few know and a few could guess, but I can't be bothered to explain.

*Salty and tasty are qualities of both prosciutto and real intellectual thought.

+Most governments are dictatorships in base nature, and most fortunate nations have facist dictators elected by the populace who are too dim-witted to push forth anything very potent in the way of a mandate. The least fortunate nations are governed by a dimwit who is backed by an intellectual elite who for some reason have the backwards notion that they have the slightest clue what the fuck is going on. The U.S. is currently somewhere in the middle.

~The tilde has been one of my favorite typemarks ever since my famous novelist pal Steve Sherrill, who goes by Stephen these days and no longer seeks my advice on anything whatsoever, pointed out that calling it "that little Mexican squiggly accent" was not only inadequate but wrong. We invaded Iraq because it seemed to work for our president's Dad when he was president. Anyone who can't admit to that needs to seek either therapy or a position as a telemarketing fundraising for the GOP. We are probably withdrawing because some of the guerillas-- or terrorists, or mercenaries, or whatever you want to call the murderous sonsabitches-- got a Marine now, and Lord knows what kind of shit might break lose if they kill a Marine, from either our side or theirs. Or we could just be admitting that we made a rotten hash out of the situtaion, or we could just be conceding that the Iraqis can't be helped, or it could just be that the prospect of the newz people pointing out how many more casualties there have been since Bush declared victory (over a YEAR ago) than there were during the course of the war itself (about a MONTH!!) is distasteful to the administration. Or it could be that it just keeps getting harder to justify the kajillion bajillion dollars that it costs to keep the war going month to month. Or it could juts be that even the most scurrillous reason for this stupid charade of a war-- oil-- doesn't seem to hold water, justify anything, or benefit anyone. Or it could be that the paper-thin facade of justification has become too mealy for the most callous administration tool-- Rumsfeld-- to bring him/herself to mouth. It could be a flat, simple admission that we do not have any way of indentifying or defeating the enemy, which, frankly, we would have done well to consider before going to war with Iraq in the first place.

THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES ROAMS AMONGST THE BLOGS, AND IF YOU THINK I MEAN SOMETHING BY THAT YOU DON'T KNOW ME VERY WELL: Julu 4th: Gimme Love, Sex Death, And Travel, Hold The Death, With A Side Of German Potato Salad

Some recent events have caused me to think to look up the Ferlinghetti poem "On People Getting Divorced," but not the kind of recent events you might think, e.g. people getting divorced. No, did I think to look it up on people getting divorced, but most recently I thought to look it up on reading the first five or so stanzas of Larry's latest work, which is entitled Americus, Book I, and thinking to myself, sometimes, people should just shut up.

Now, that's probably unfair of me,* and I probably would get shouted down by anyone claiming to be a poetry fan were I to say it in public, and certainly Larry would be hurt to hear it-- luckily, he doesn't know me and subsequently does not monitor this space-- and I probably ought to have read further before making the claim, but it is how I honestly feel. I had the urge to lok up "On People Getting Divorced" because it's one of the poems by Funk Master F that I understand but simply do not like, one of those where I feel like he's pulling too hard on the sheet and neglecting the mizzen. I mean, I get it, but I don't feel like he's really realizing the powerful parts of the piece, subjugating them in favor of modernistic imagizing.

And the same seems to be tru of this Americus thing. I know perhaps I am being unfair, but I come by it rather honestly. I mean, on the one hand, maybe I shoulda read farther than the first page of the thing before condemning it, but I had just put down a volume I strongly covet, the collected works of Robert Frost, and so far from condemning it by reading the first page, I couldn't have done so after reading the first poem I randomly flipped to, nor from reading a few stanzas of one of his longer, talkier pieces, nor from reading the poem selected for the flyleaf opposit a photo of The Author. So let's say I condemn the Ferlinghetti volume honestly but unfairly.

Also, I don't see why Ferlinghtti gets to write the Great American Poetry Book. I mean, the man was elected Poet Laureate of San Francisco. Is he honsetly to be trusted? To quote lines from the movie "Animal House," "He can't treat our pledges like that; only we can treat our pledges like that."+

Or perhaps it's my increasing feeling that The Old Man of the Sea is resting on his laureate, and, of course, that's not fair of me either. I came to realize a short time ago~ that a great part of why I enjoy my life and especially my poetry right now is that I am not compelled to churn stuff out. There have been times when I feel so compelled, and the product was not always what I would consider my best stuff. There is a kind of mixed blessing in being so widely rejected, after all.

One of my official favorite sites, which, now that I think about it, I never got around to putting on my links page, has now been officially ruined. The All Music Guide was, for several years, my go-to source for music information and reviews, and a serious hobby of mine had been looking up the bios of bands and musicians for a refresher on the history. Relatively recently I had taken to occasinally taking advantage of theior allegiance with Barnes & Nobles. By linking any given album to the B&N entry for that album on the B&N website, they gave me occasion to sample collections both new and aged, by way of deciding whether or not to buy said album. (I was all prepared to argue that it was ironic that I have, as yet, only perused albums that I decided I didn't need to buy, but that's not so much an irony as a happenstance.) (As a matter of fact, I was still trying to decide whether or not to buy the first five Chicago albums, and had I decided to, I had figured on buying them through the B&N site. I may still do so.) The B&N links have been replaced with an exclusive All Music Guide Sampler! Providing three (or so) selections from a given album by a given artist as representative of the group!* Which, as near as I can tell, doesn't damn work.

I don't wanna talk about it.

*The B&N sampler gave a sound for every song (some albums were exceptions, especially newer ones). It only gave a thirty second bite (strike one) through Real Audio (strike two), which I thought was completely inadequate until I sampled the first track off the James Gang's Rides Again. ("Funk #49," I think. I was gonna look it up, but when I went to look it up the All Music site gave me some kind of cockememe "Error 2 timeout," or some such dose of rotten nonsense. Bastards.

BLECH BLOG: July 16th: The Rottenest Cup of Coffee in the World

I am currently enjoying the rottenest cup of coffee in the world.

This may seem an odd statement to you, especially if you know me well.

There are many of you who have listened to me bitch and carp and whine
about Yankee coffee in hotel rooms
or the freeze-dried shit I tolerated at conventions and colloquia
or the diluted-from-concentrate junk
I drank five cups at a time
from the college cafeteria.
This is none of the above.

Let me tell you about Hate. I know Hate
I know hatred. I know it like a red glow under the soul
that lights everything in a pool of hot, blood-red shimmer
so that all of a sudden everything looks poisonous
and rancid.
I'm glad to say I know it more by second-hand experience,
from seeing it in others more than myself.
But, still, I know it.

I am currently enjoying the rottenest cup of coffee in the world.
It is made from freshly ground beans
French roasted and French pressed
the way I like it best, the way I have it almost every morning
Today it is rotten.
It is rotten because a friend of mine is going through hell
because of hatred. It has floated up from under the crust of the earth
and colored the world a shimmer of blood-hot red
so that people can't see straight.
It has made some people act like strangers
and others act like the way you knew they always would
if pressed up against the wall.
It makes people who normally understand things
misunderstand things. It makes people twist facts and emotions
into a barbed wire noose for emotional lynching
and call it truth.

It's what I always knew would happen. The sword of Damocles
if you will. It has turned this cup of coffee
into the rottenest cup of coffee in the world.
And I hate it.

BLOG CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID: July 21: Making up for lost time, or A Recherche du Temps Perdu Redux

This past weekend we-- me and my Dad and a couple of buddies-- canoed the French Broad River between Hendersonville and upper Asheville, which will serve as as good an introduction to an essay on understanding as anything else might.

The French Broad is a romantic sounding river, and the upper stretches-- it flows south-to-north-- have some dramatic and dangerous passages. The section of the river we were on, starting with a tributary called Mills River, stinks. I mean that literally. The water is thick and brown with run-off from the fields in the river valley, so thick at times that it literally felt like I was running my paddle through mud. The fields produce some of the finest fresh vegetables in the state, and they are for sale at stores and stands all over the county. But I don't give a good god-damn for a ripe tomato while paddling through sludge. Call it a failing.

We had planned the outing for a coupla months, and I owe something of an unspoken oath of fealty to these guys, the kind of thing you develop with people from hiking the woods over a period of years, so we put a glad face on it and soldiered through and had a helluva good time, despite the fact that it rained on us through the second half of the first day, despite that fact that the river was brown and dull, despite the stiff headwind that the second day's sunshine brought with it.

My Dad has a saying he used to use with me all the time as a kid. "You'll have fun inspite of yourself," he'd say, on approaching a site or activity I was less than thrilled about. It seldom worked. It was difficult to have fun in spite of myself at, say, the Mecklenburg County Fair, which was a loud, crappy spectacle filled with rusting rides that weren't any fun, grim-faced carnies who clearly weren't having any fun, in spite of themselves or no, and lousy, sticky food that attracted more bees than tourists. I took a lesson away from it, unconsciously and, well, in spite of myself: sometimes you just ahve to decide you're going to enjoy what you're doing. The components of that can be misleading. As when I found that I was enjoying stroking gray-facedly through the cold rain in the shank of the afternoon of Saturday, or when I found myself giving in to the poetry of motion while driving into the headwind on Sunday.

It's all about understanding.

Or misunderstanding, according to your own notions. Think of it this way: in order to appreciate a bad time, you have to understand it. If you truly understand a bad time, you can be completely miserable, I mean just deeply, deeply unhappy and angry. This demonstrates the accute value of understanding.

Of course, if you truly do understand your situation, you might, you just might appreciate how non-un-well-off you are. For starters, you're an American. Which means, for the most part, things can't really suck as badly as you might think they do. In America, you have to fuck up really hard in order for things to truly suck. I mean, everybody has things to complain about, sure, buit in America, there are all kinds of things set up to make sure that no one starves, and however much we might have the right to call our government agents jack-booted thugs,* we have to admit that they are not abducting, beating or raping us at will. For the vast, vast majority of us, the worst thing that will ever happen to us is that we will have to work at the Mall.

Something else I get a chance to re-visit on usch trips is something I learned (or, rather, that impressed itself upon me) while I was living in the mountains: misunderstanding can be the absolute key to making the best of a bad situation. I knew all kinds of people, all kinds of people, living in the mountains under some deeply misconcieved notions of ontology, living under miserable, not to say intolerable conditions, and surviving and thriving based almost wholly and solely on their misconceptions. The hippie couple squatting in the abandoned holiday shack up past Vilas, for instance: forget that they were in their early 20's, they remained convinced that they were primed for a farming life. Forget the fact that they had never had any actual contact with the owners of the property, surely they'd take produce in trrade in lieu of rent. Forget that they had only been together seven months, sure thing that it would be recognized that their common law status was just a matter of time.+ And it all worked well enough, until she came to understand that he was a fall-down drunk with tendencies towards insecurity and violence, and that she didn't actually have the steel to endure the fiasco. Once she understood that, she split. I don't know that he ever came to understand. I lost track of him shortly after that.

The real point there is that, in America, the majority of the reasons people are miserable are things they chose or brought on them themselves. I can understand if you didn't understand that to be the point initially. I didn't explain it very well.

Misunderstanding has had other benefits, historically. Misunderstanding justified the slave trade and colonialism. Misunderstanding is the reasoning behind most wars. Misunderstanding fuels most political campaigns and movements. Misunderstanding is crucial to the survival and success of the Amrican Sitcom. Misunderstanding, in fact, is celebrated in our land, universally and to great effect. Chiefly at Christmas and on July 4th.

But here's the thing:

Understanding is pretty easy. Especially for us. We speak English, or at least a form therof, and our language has remarkably few abmiguities compatred to most others. French, in particular, is maddeningly idomatic and contains deliberate obscurities.~ Some of the African languages are rife with built-in dissemblances, and Arabic, in particular, seems designed for deception, and was known, up until the last century, as "the language of theives," and not without good reason. You can bitch and kvetch$ about the langue Americain all day long, but say what you will, it beats many of the alternatives. So: here, in English, is a guide to how and why people misunderstand things:

Willfulness. People decide to misunderstand things, either because they see some sort of profit or gain in it for themselves, or because they feel they can use it to put someone else at a disadvantage. The impulse to put someone else at a disadvantage, far from being an evolutionary compulsion, is mainly just a misguided attempt at self-realization, and it's mainly practiced by people who don't think too far ahead. Or too well at that.

Stupidity. This is the tricky one, because it isn't always a known quantity. A person can seem perfectly reasonable and intelligent, and then fail to understand a simple, demonstrable fact, preferring an obvious fiction. Other times, the synapses seem to just fail to fire. It's hard to know which is which, but, and call this a failing if you wish, I tend to give the benefit of the doubt until the eleventh hour.

That's about it. People often like to include ignorance in this kind of list, but ignorance is a condition to be remedied, not to be blamed. To think otherwise is cop-thinking, and, thus, stupid.*

*Oh, and how our agents do so wish they were!

Common law marriage requires seven years of documentable, consistent co-habitation, and doesn't mean a thing until and unless someone gives a damn.

~eg. Maurice Merleau-Ponty: "I wish nothing more than that I could see more clearly, but I fear no one sees more clearly than I." He never said that. What he meant to say was "I have forgotten my spectacles," but the French language prevents that. So it was either this or an announcement for a circus attraction.

$Don't get me started.

BLOG UNTIL YOUR HEAD FALLS OFF: July 21 supplemental: More true evidence that I ought to just give up

A headline from this week's edition of The Onion:

73 Percent Of U.S. Livestock Show Signs Of Clinical Depression

I don't know who's more wrong, them or me.

BLOG LIKE A LION: July 21: Ars Gratia Artis

OR: Yet Another Jimmy Buffett Album I'll Never Buy

Let me be very clear on this: I like Jimmy Buffett. I respect Jimmy Buffett. I understand and respect that, in the music industry, he more than passes the industry standard for genuity, not to say gravitas. But still, I guess that any musical figure will dissapoint sooner or later, just so long as you're paying attention.

The latest dissapointment has nothing to do with his most recent album. It has to do with a reflection on his last book, A Priate Looks at 50,* which had several flaws:
--It should have been entitled "A Pirate Looks BACK at 50," which was the name of the song, and the gag simply isn't funny any other way.+
--For a book about a rock star evading burn-out and embracing familyhood, there's suprisingly little evidence of rock-stardom, troublingly much evidence of burnout, and the disturbing insistence that being a family man just isn't any good unless you get to fly float planes around the world. --Autobiographies are supposed to dispell haze. This one not only induced haze, it became haze.

I suppose my beef isn't really with Buffett. I suppose it's with his editors, assuming he had editors. (Hell, ONE might have been helpful.) But it isn't really the quality of the book that gets me. And I don't fault him as a writer. (I know his style, and that kind of descent into fuzziness is, I think, both symptomatic of and necessary for his genius-- and genius there is, whether you want to believe it or not.) I guess it's that it's symptomatic of everything that's really wrong with the British pop music scene.

I have been making it a habit, over the last year and change, to occasionally check out who is supposedly the latest hot number or revolutionary band on the Brit charts, and to seek out those artists being currently hailed as neglected geniuses, and I have come, inexorably, to the same inescapable conclusion:

What in the HELL are these people on?

Maybe it's me. But everything I've listened to has sounded like the same murky sonic soup, a kind of anti-disco-disco. It's as if the bands/impresarios/etc are trying so hard not to sound like a melange of the Beatles, the Police and Bow Wow Wow that they end up soundling like a low rent Dido (y'know, wihout all the hired-gun songsmiths) backed by Wilco during a bad laudnum binge. One of the shining exceptions is Radiohead, who sound as if they've lost the plot entirely, which is perhaps undertsandable, as you'd have to be certifyably insane to think that Thom Yorke has a vision. Suffice it to say that I have a new appreciation for Coldplay. (If that's not an insult, I don't know what is.~)

Now, bear in mind that I am a musician myself. I have never pursued it professionally, for a number of reasons, the chief amongst them being abject fear. I have known enough people in the music industry to know that the two main attributes required to suceed in the industry are to be an asshole with a thirst for carnage. And, I guess, I was never as conventionally good as I ought to have been to suceed: I sing too fast and, so I'm told, I mumble. But I still play guitar, I still compose tunes, and I still sing my songs, and those who hear me tell me I'm good and say they like what I'm doing, so I am keeping the sobrioquet "musician" in my official profile. So, as long as I'm claiming shit to my credit, I might as well claim that being a musician gives me some sort of unique insight into or hightened appreciation of music. Who's gonna stop me?

To give you another slice of reality (upon which I pile my ire), the phenomenon that propelled me to investigate the Brit pop scene was the realization that the Brits play something like 98% more music by 108% more artists over their airwaves than we do here, and Brit music fans, apparently, spend half their gross national product on records and spend an average 34.4 years of their lives attending club gigs and concerts. So I sought out, so I listened.

So I came to the conclusion: Go ahead. Blame the US for Mcdonald's. Blame us for Coke. God Bless America!

Of course, then, I look at the American charts, and any sense of nationalistic superiortiy fades to nothing. Rap artists, Disney frails, artificial life forms like Pink and Avril Lavigne, Gad! The industry is full of theives and mercenaries. Christ! It's worse than academia.

Then one morning I get a story in my morning news feed that Jimmy Buffett has an album at the top of the charts. Now, on the one hand, I dig it. In an industry full of lying, cheating scumbags, Buffett has always managed, somehow, to stay clean. The worst thing that ever could have been said about him was said some ten years ago, right here in my very own town: due to a scheduling snafu and a bit of miscommunication, Buffet and the (then) Corral Reefer Band showed up and peformed a half-set during what was billed as a full concert. He came back to town and played a full concert just a few months later, giving some sort of tickets concession to people who were dissapointed at the first performance. (He promoted it on the local rock station by saying "And this time, I promise, we'll play the other five songs."

And I could have a problem with this one. The title-- License to Chill-- has some heavy hip-hop overtones. The roster is packed with country stars, a couple of whom have earned my unending ire for packaging partiotism as an appeal to the asshole within, a few of whom have come close to earning my respect as musicians, despite being country musicians.$ And the fact that it ripped up to number one in the charts on sales of 238,000 before anybody ever even heard of it . . . more standard industry bullshit. Those aren't sales. Those are orders. Everybody knows better.

Then again, he's Jimmy Buffett. Lots and lots of aging would-be hipsters are gonna go out and buy this. Lots and lots of country fans are going to embrace his cross-overness, or whatever you want to call it. So who am I to negat his success? Who am I to question the sales figures before the orders can be converted into per-disc-sales figures?

Who indeed.

I saw the wisdom in calling the Greatest Hits compilation Songs you know by Heart. Especially since it was the fifteenth or sixteenth greatest hits compilation. It sorta needed something to make it stick out. I had my own copy of A-1A for a time, and I enjoyed it while I had it. I lost it in an acrimonious break-up and, in true parrot-head form, let well enough alone, decided that it wasn't worth fighting over. I still know the changes to "Margaritaville," and all of the words, and in a pinch I can play "Cheeseburger in Paradise." And-- try this on for size-- I know the changes to "Biloxi," although I have never quite mastered the half-comp lay-back in the chorus part, which always sounds as if it should have been sung in harmony until I realize that, paradoxically, it is. Somehow, it's one voice achieving a harmony. Or at least that's how I hear it.

So I'll let Buffett have this one. Like all the jokes about his albums all containing the same twelve songs, like the jibes about "Jimmy Buffet" (it's all good, but some of it's cold and some of it's old), any criticism I might have about cronyism or profiteering will fade with time and the tides. And, like many things, it makes sense in it's own perverse sort of way. Like Steely Dan getting a Grammy for Two Against Nature, when, had they waited a short eighteen moths, the Academy could have given them the self-same award for Everything Must Go, which still would have been perverse. It's more than time Jimmy got a number 1. After all, he's put in the hours.

But that damned book! It's almost like that rotten postumous Hemingway volume True at First Light, about which the only truth is that is should never have seen the light of day. Somebody should have told Jimmy to quit writing when he got tired. I don't know. Maybe he had a contractual obligation.

*The last one I read, anyways.

+I would add "You jackass," but, really, as Leigh Ann (formerly) Sackrider noted, the seersucker suit is implied.

~I will be purchasing their first two albums shortly, having come to the conclusion that, as much as I loathe admitting it, I do like Coldplay.

$Every time I get around to using that symbol to denote a footnote, it ends up being somewhat ironic. Country music is music, but it's stylized and packaged music. It's the Dole Fruit Cocktail in heavy syrup music. It's the Chef Boyardee music. Were Plato around today, he'd hear a Garth Brooks song and go tear every page of "The Allegory of the Cave" out of The Republic. But it is music. It's music product; it's all straightened out and formatted all to hell and has had all but all of the life squeeeeeeezed out of it, but, for all intents and purposes, whatever else you might say, it's still music. (As opposed to anything that might be called hip-hop.)

BLOGGED DOWN IN COLD BLOOD, LIKE A MAD DOG: July 24: Another note on another topic

Doc Nagel's new paramour, Lauren, rightly points out that the Buffett song is, in fact, entitled "A Pirate Looks At 40," and argues that the book title, thus, may be forgiven. I am mailing her my copy of the book, just to prove that even though the title may be forgiven, the book itself is another matter. I'm right about everything else though.

MAD BLOGS AND ENGLISHMEN: July 28th: It's all about the cruelty

Some time back I noticed something about independent filmmaking in our day and age: it's all about cruelty. The characters are all set up to fall, through a combination of circumstances and timing and character flaws. Sexualities, e4specially, are to be targeted and exploiteed. A sexual ambiguity, why that's pure gold! Or, as Bela Lugosi supposedly observed: Pull de strings! Pull de strings!

It doesn't help me that I am making that observation under the current circs. The tech writing project I am working on is semi-stalled, the couple of ideas I have for fiction writing are not gelling as rapidly as I had hoped, and Chris has informed me that, in regard to my latest poetic effort, he has no idea what I'm after. Which was not unexpected, and it's not the first time. He had the same kind of reaction at the outset of the writing of Big Sur Poem, as I recall, although he was more enthusiastic about it because of the language, and he had the same reaction to Visiting Berkeley, which he still professes (or has professed in recent memory) not to get, so I eventually had to say screw it, I said what I meant and meant what I said, and if he doesn't wanta get it, I'm just gonna have to live with that. I mean, it isn't going to be easy, since I wrote the poem for him, and I probably ought to take into account that what I have basically set down is Yehuda Amichai at the beach, for which, probably, I ought to be ashamed of myself.

Yeah. That's helpful. You just keep thinkin,' Butch; that's what you're good at.

I was also going to vent a bit of dirty laundry here, but I have decided that I am not going to. In the first place, it's not my laundry. In the second place, venting it wouldn't do any good, and would probably, in the long run, end up doing harm-- or, rather, provoke someone else into seeking to do me harm. Suffice it to say that I will not have myself made an accomplice, nor will I have myself made a traitor, and if anyone has a problem with that, they can see the management.* If you can figure out what I'm referring to based on this information, kudos to you, Sherlock. If not, it probably wasn't any of your business to begin with.

It's all about the cruelty. This is why I'm not a rich and famous script writer right now. I just don't have the cruelty for it. (Then again, there was that movie "Intolerable Cruelty," which I haven't seen, but which I have been told is not very cruel and not actually intolerable.+ It's all a mystery.)

I think that's all I have to say for right now. It's an election year, the Democratic convention is in Boston, the Pope wears a funny hat, and if a frog had wings he wouldn't bump his ass a-hoppin.

*I am the management.

BLOGGING IT LIKE IT IS, MAN: July 30: The Cold War.

I have spent a portion of my day, after battling down a well-earned hangover, watching "Ice Station Zebra," which is a very difficult thing for me to do. As I mentioned earlier, I have a real problem with inauthentic writing, and most spy-type writing is hugely inauthentic, because the spy business is, or at least was, hugely inauthentic. The spy business was larghely based on The Cold War, and The Cold War was stupid.

Now, don't get me wrong here: I know that the threat was very real, on both sides, and that the balance was very delicate. It's just that the presence of the threat and the delicacy of the balance were due to rather boorish people who took an unconcealed delight in the notion that it might become incumbent on them in the course of events to act like assholes. This comes from long study and bitter experience.

"Ice Station Zebra," both the movie and the book, have much to be said for them: the explication of the operations of the (then) modern nuclear submarine, the detailing of the use and trajectory of spy satellites, some discreet knowledge on arctic weather monitoring stations. It is a book highly praised by many I have known who were knowledgeable in these areas for it's accuracy. But the whole thing's just so damned rigged.

First they gotta get the sub en route to the Arctic. Then they gotta get a Russian spy and an English spy on the boat. Then they gotta have a sabateour on board, and it can't be obvious who it it. That particular detail is so that they can have a hull breach that couldn't possibly happen except by a very detailed and nuanced act of sabotage, which is to further the fungus-among-us flavor of the spy novel. (Oh: and half of this has to be stuff that has never been tried in a nuclear submarine before.) Then they gotta have a disaster at the ice station that wasn't a disaster, but a diversion from the spy-vs-spy shoot-out that sets up the ending, a showdown between American sailors and soldier and Soviet paratroopers (who, if the footage in the film is to be believed, arrived via single-seat MiG's) against the backdrop of the arctic hellscape and cold war platitudes issued from both sides, justifying homicide as a way to avoid full-out war. (Or start a full out war. It's somehwat unclear in spots.) In the end, so long as it turns out that neither side walks away with the super-secret satellite surveillance film that a dozen men have died for already (or been mortally wounded for, then gotten up and walked around before being mortally wounded again), everything's just hunky-dory. More platitudes, honor of soldiers type crap,* and then finally, FINALLY, at long long last the thing is over. In the final analysis, the most believable thing about the movie is Ernest Borgnine's cheesy Russkya accent. Once or twice, I swear, I thought he was gonna break out and say "Mama Mia! That's a spicy-a meatball!"

But I did it. I sat through the whole damned thing, start to finish, including the prelude and intermission, wherein they play the film's score as if it were an important piece of classical composition. I skipped the reprise at the end, where they play it once again. To hell with it: my work here is done.

So why did I do it? Why did I force myself to sit through what was clearly a queasy and uncomfortable experience?

Someone once wrote "Those who forget the mistakes of history are condemned to repeat them," I forget who. And it's not precisely true, but it is a pleasant thought. The fact of the matter is that the majority of the people will probably never learn the mistakes of history, and the mistakes won't ever visit them in any real or tangible way. But I find a sort of compelling certitude in reading and/or viewing such things these days, from a know-thine-enemy standpoint. The justifications of spywork are constantly afoot, and it's important to know which seams to pull at in order to induce the tissue of lies to unravel. And not just regarding that bastard Clancy, either. Oddly, his lies seem to stand up longer and unravel more stubbornly than the actual lies told by the actual CIA.* Then again, I guess he uses computers to make up most of his lies.

*By "honor of soldiers type crap" I mean the kind of crap that soldier-types spew. I've known many honorable servicemen and women, plus a couple that were assholes. As it turns out, the honorable ones don't talk much about the job, and the assholes wouldn't shut up. When someone starts telling me that I can't possibly know what battle is like until and unless you've been there, my immediate reaction is: fuck it. This cat ain't been there.

I'VE GOT A BLOG IN ME POCKET: August 10th: Why I Haven't Blogged in a While

I been thinkin.

I WOULD NEVER BLOG TO A CLUB THAT WOULD HAVE SOMEONE LIKE ME AS A MEMBER, PART II: THE SPAWNING: August 14th: A Meeting With The Author, Hurricane Season Opens

So last evening the Wifey and I tottered over to Park Road Books, formerly The Little Professor Bookshop, to hear my old pal Steve Sherrill read from his newest novel, Vistits from the Drowned Girl. I'd like to report that Stve has developed a kind of schizophrenic personality, a public/private persona split, and identity as author distinct from his identity as self, but that wouldn't be news to anyone who's ever known him for very long. I got my copy of his novel signed, listened to him field questions from the audience, watched him sign books,* and after all was done lead him down to Sir Edmund Halley's, a Brit-Pub styled place, for a beer. The wife and I cut out early-ish, 8:30, on the excuse that I had to be up early for a canoe trip, which was subsequently cancelled due to hurricane.

It was a good evening, all told. Best of all, it gave me a chance to confirm what I'd already guessed: Steve is still Steve, and he's managed to do what so very few of us have: he's written two books his way, and gotten them published. Both are set in our native land, and both cater to his finely tuned sense of perversion, which is the fuel that fires Steve's unique creativity, and is also, I will now confess now that it hasn't mattered for over a decade, what convinced me that sooner or later he was gonna crack the code.

In other news, Hurricane Charlie tore Florida a new throughway and is headed up throught Charleston, with the result that we can expect, at worst, a week's worth of rain. The reports from Florida are preliminary so far, but they're estimating damages in the $15 billion range. After recieving news from my Dad that the canoe trip was off-- he called about 6:25, while I was slurping down coffee, getting ready to leave by 6:30-- I left the Wifey snoozin' whilst I tripped off to the Eat Well Family Restaurant for a feta cheese omlette and a side of bacon. While dining, I read Kilpatrick's column, wherein he discussed the finer points of the subjunctive versus the indicative, to absolutely no good end at all. Afterwards, I drove home through the soggy, soaking weather, thinking to myself that it was simply too lovely: the lush, verdant green of the trees in full Summer plummage, the gray-on-gray clouds in the tumbling sky, the air thick with silver crystals . . .

Back in the Fall of 1989, Hurricane Hugo ripped through the North side of Charleston, barrelled up through the middle of South CArolina, and slammed into Charlotte. Years later, while I was living in the mountinas, I heard people claim that the destructive force Hugo carried with him as he passed the Piedmont and settled into the mountains was at least as powerful as what had happened in Charlotte. This was a final confirmation that the majority of the people who choose to live in the mountains are goddamned liars. Hugo tore trees out of the ground that had rooted over a hundred years. Hugo took entire fields of scrub-brush and planted the refuse in the middle of the streets like a collossal floral arrangement. Hugo tossed cars around and tore the roofs off houses and slung tree limbs through brick walls and crippled my city for over a week. Hugo went on the be the name for the mascot of our newly aquired NBA team, the Hornets, proving, once and for all, that the vast majority of people who choose to live ing Charlotte are freaking idiots.

*I made several faux pas during the event. When there was the usual pregnant pause after Steve asked for questions and comments from the audience, I took my copy of the book up to get it signed, then said I'd be waiting up front when he was ready to conclude the proceedings, then wandered back when the Q&A actually got underway, then ended up standing over his shoulder as he was signing people's books. None of these are acceptable behaviors at book signings. Steve didn't seem to mind much; then again, he knew me during my college days, so this bad behavior would seem extremely mild by comparison.

DRAT! BLOGGED AGAIN! August 18th: The Good, The Bad, The E-mail

As I mentioned earlier, I've been doing some tech writing and editing lately. While on the one hand, I have been quite enjoying the quiet industryousness of the activity, it comes with it's own particular set of headaches, which, out of professional coutesy, I won't go into. But the latest bit of weirdness is something that almost anyone who has ever used a computer and, by extension, the internet, can identify with. having done that voodoo that I do so well, having completed the document to specifications in record time, I am currently sitting here waiting for my Yahoo e-mail box to tell me for the third time that it can't attach the friggin file. I signed up for an upgrade this morning, at the bargain basement price of 20 bucks a year, in the hopes that this might be the last time I see this problem-- and, true enough, the upgraded version didn't have any trouble sending a massive, nearly 900,000 byte attachment earlier in the day-- but now it is having trouble attaching anything at all. Which means I may have to default to my wife's e-mail to send this thing across.

The moral to the story: It's always something.

BLOG OF THE LIVING DEAD: August 20th: Breakfast

After bothering my pal Doc Nagel* with a late night revelation-- Yehuda Amichai was wrong about our relationship with God-- and his addition to that revelation-- if you're going be a Jew in Israel, you're probably going to assume that God's eyes are closed-- I awoke with a mighty hangover and a craving for salt and eggs, and so went to the Gitmo Family Restaurant, where the waitress remembered my fondness for the feta cheese omlette, and only required minimal prompting to remember that I require grits, toast, and a side of bacon. There I sat ensconsed, reading the movie reviews in the entertainment section of the Friday morning paper, when in walked The Schlub.

Now, mind you, I didn't know this guy, never met him before. But I get a vibe sometimes, you know? It's sometimes a shared thing; there are a few people in this world who meet me with a sad smile, understanding that there are facets of their personality or of mine that assure we will never be friends. This time I tried to make sure it wasn't shared, for reasons that will becom,e immediately apparent.

The Schlub approached his booth, shepherded by the waitress, a lovably tubby broad in her upper fifties, and delivered his order while standing, then went back out to "the van" to get a pen. The Schlub himself was on the tubby side, wearing shorts, a print shirt, a cheap trucker's cap, a weedy mustache, speaking with no discernable accent. All of this I got with sideways glances and without actively easesdropping. Something about the guy caught my attention, but made me want to avoid contact with him. Like I said, a vibe.

As he awaited his ham & eggs, he got on the cell phone. Head set and all. Trying to look like a NASA guy, an air traffic controller, a NASCAR driver, something. Anything but a mid-south semi-urban schlub. I cursed myself for being prejudiced and judgemental and went on with my meal.

The the converstaion started in earnest. "Hey, how you doin' buddy?" Non-descript small talk, dovetailing quickly into "Hey, listen now: you're way down this month . . . "

And I had him pegged. Sales manager. I hate those guys. As I sat there, plowing through my meal by now, detail after horrific detail of this relationship came to light: not just a sales manager, but a high-pressure one, one whose very organization had as it's hue and cry the notion that anybody can make more sales if only they are squozen just right, just that pefect tweak of the left nut.

Suffice to say I didn't like the guy. It seems little coincidence to me that the intials for Sales Manager are S and M. The weedy little fart warbled at his vitcim for a full ten minutes, telling him that everybody wants a washer and/or dryer, even if they already have one, and if they don't have one, well, then they REALLY want one. It was like listeing to Dave Barry on a very bad mescaline trip. And then it got even weirder: in addition to selling washers and dryers, the organization also sold, apparently, computers, and The Schlub seemed convinced that anybody would jump at the chance to buy a computer once they learned it had the BIG SCREEN. But the coup de grace was when he started telling his guy to carve out some time in his day to go door-to-door.

"I know for a fact that a sales manager in Alabama walked home with nine orders in one day, just from walking into a trailer park." This, apparently, was on the authority of some senior sales manager, unless that senior sales manager was lying, and the senior sales manager, it was The Schlub's opinion, was hardly likely to lie.

It is a widely accepted myth, in this country and elsewhere, that the rich prey upon the poor, and there's a good deal of truth to it. But it is less recognized, and far truer, that the dumb prey upon the dumb. So the tactic here was to send the sales guy, who was, apparently, stupid enough to take guff from this twerp, in amongst people stupid enough to live in a trailer park. I say this firmly and without prejudice: I have known many people who lived in trailer parks, and with one grand exception, they were idiots. Well, OK, more than one, maybe two or three who weren't complete mouth-breathers, a couple of college students who absolutely couldn't afford anything better, but such arrangements rarely lasted more than a semester. And I have know people who turned trailers into architectural marvels, modular Taj Mahals. But those are effervescently the exceptions to the rule. So, if this sales guy was stupid-- clearly The Schlub's opinion-- the best option was to sling him in amongst the really stupid.

Of course, it said something even worse about The Schlub. It said that he was stupid and cruel enough to go try to sell major appliances and computers to people who couldn't afford to live in anything better than a trailer. Absolutely ridiculous.

I have been in such organizations in my life, but not often and never for long. After I quit grad school, when I was out looking for a real job, I ran across countless, countless examples of the thing, companies that tried to get you to sell cheap jewelry, first wholesale to retail outlets, then discount retail to people door-to-door, then, eventually, to your friends and family, just to make up what you paid for your "sample case." I did a telemarketing gig for about six weeks, one of the cleaner organizations, raising money for the local firefighters' union so they could fund pensions, although the way we sold the concert tickets was by vetting the community fire education projects. I quit shortly after the new sales manager-- NOT the guy I got hired by initially-- while making his mid-evening pep-talk made the worst mistake I've ever seen a manager make. Trying to impart the liesurely nature of our task, he said "You're not working hard." The room groaned with disbelief; to our salesman's ears, it sounded like he was accusing us of slacking. A couple of our number disappeared shortly after. I quit the same night he told me I had to get my numbers up or he'd can me. Screw him. People either buy or don't. You might hit the greatest Johnny Paycheck fan of all time, and they might buy a ticket for everybody and old Claude. More often than not, you hit people who didn't know or care if you were selling for a legit organization. The calls were randomly generated by a computerized auto-dialer; we had a set script that were obligated, by law, to follow.+ Get my numbers up? Not on behalf of this dumb bastard. I quit.

"You're in a heck of a hole," said The Schlub, "you're gonna have to dig yourself out." It's August 20th. End of the month. Time to turn the hose on the animals. Get 'em riled up.

Screw this bastard. I left my tip and paid my bill and walked out. It was all I could do not to turn around and scream at the bastard.

"GET A REAL JOB, YA CHEAP-JACK SON OF A BITCH!"

*The real reason he moved to the west coast: these late-night calls are now received in the early evening.

+This is the way it works: the law sets certain guidelines by which the telemarketing companies are obliged to work, so that if a company works by those guidelines it's pretty much immune to any complaints by the people. So we stopped calling at nine, we took our "lunch break" during the standard dinner hour, and we read from a script, from which we were not supposed to stray, but from which we all did, since we all knew that nobody ever sells anything from reading a script.

BLOG IT, DUUUDE! August 20th, Suplemental: Surfing

"I love baseball. It doesn't have to mean anything, it's just beautiful." --Woody Allen

After breakfasting, returning, blogging a bit, I formulated what I thought would be a pretty good battle plan for the day: I would mow the lawn, take a shower, piddle around here, wash some dishes, then dash out and run the usual Friday errands, which includes buying Guinness and lunch. I had added in, as an option, picking up my niece and nephew from school. Mowing the lawn turned into weeding and trimming, which required a rest & re-hydration break, which turned into a casual viewing of the film "Quiz Show," which turned into an ethical consideration of last night's religious question, which in theory should have turned into working on Indulgence, which I swear I am not done with yet. Then diaster struck: the next show on Showtime is the documentary film "Step Into Liquid."

Most of the reviews I've read about the film, and I have read quite a few, desribe it as an indulgent love letter to surfing, and ass-kissing job of Hurculean proportions. Which is as it should be.

I love surfing. It is beautiful. I got kind of hung up on those stuffy damned surfing competitions they had on the Wide World of Sports (later ESPN), because it became all about finding a way to make money off it, which required a LOT of standardization by way of commodification, and they jerked the poetry out of the thing. I didn't watch them. Still don't. I never made it through that damned "Blue Crush" movie, and for largely the same reason: too plastic. It's the Dell ad of surfing movies. But when it's done right, it beautiful. I can watch "Endless Summer" over and over again, and I have been known to watch it twice in one night.* When I read that this movie was about nothing more than beatiful people riding beatiful waves in beatiful places, I thought: cool. This is for me. So there's my afternoon. I'll go buy Guiness tonight after dinner.

I am not a surfer. Maybe I covered this earlier. In my youth, I had a serious love affair with the beach. We spent two weeks of every single summer of my life up to age 18 in Florida, and we spent half that at Crescent Beach, two miles south of St. Augustine. There my Dad and Grandad taught me and my brother the rudiments: body surfing, catching a wave, rolling into the surf before you ground on the sand. We went through dozens of cheap styrofoam boards. We rubbed ourselves raw on the one good baord we ever got ahold of, a heavy foam thing with a woven fiberglass skin that left us beat near bloody from belly to chest. As soon as it was not exactly excruciating to get back on the board, we were back out in the surf.

But riding the three-footers of Crescent Beach doesn't make me a surfer. We pursued it, avidly, but I do not have the temerity necessary to call us surfers because we rode those anaemic waves. I think my brother, Doug,~ feels the same way. I never once had a ride long enough that I could muster the concentration and speed to "get up" on the board. All of my rides were done on my belly. One year a storm out past the gulf stream churned up some five and six footers, but as fate would have it I didn't have a board with me that day when the waves came up. I managed to catch a couple of dozen terrific rides. My favorite was one I caught mid-torso, perfectly half-in and half-out of the wave. It sped me towards the shore, and just at the end, by way of teaching me a lesson, it picked me up and slammed me down and I smacked against the shallowing sand so hard I thought I was gonna die. Seconds that seemed like minutes passed, I finally figured out which way was up, and I emerged from the foam trying to grin and gasp at the same time. Around my left eye, I had a shiner the size of a pancake. It lasted a week. (I kept surfing.)

Still: I am not a surfer. Those people who get out there and ride the real monsters, the ten-to-thirty footers that come in over razor-sharp reefs of crash into jagged rocks, with real boards, the ones who ride a wave sideways until they've skimmed every last second out of it, they're surfers. Like one of these guy in the movie said earlier, it's like music. I am the rabid jazz fan of surfing. Not to say the Nat Henthoff of surfing.^

So plan B. The Wifey and I are planning on going out to dinner tonight. I'll buy my stout afterwards. The critics were right: it's a big, sloppy wet kiss of a movie, wholly uncritical almost to the point of being guileless and hokey. So should it be; so should it be.

*Rachelle was asleep.

~This very well may be the first and only time that I have mentioned my brother by name anywhere on this page.

^I have no idea what I mean by that.

BLOGGED OUT OF THE WATER: August 22nd: Reductio al Credo in Blase Sauce

Some days start out better than others. Some days are mixed.

Today, for example, I started out by reading Bill Rood's debunking of Kerry's "fellow" Vietnam vets who have been saying that Kerry's tales of heroics are all a bunch of lies and his medals undeserved.* Now, I grew up listening to people lie about Vietnam, vets and non-vets alike, and while I must admit it's kind of refreshing to hear people lie that shit didn't go down in Vietnam, I was already bored with listening to people lying about Vietnam by the time of the Watergate scandal-- that's about age 8 or 9, folks-- so I was about ready to hear the end of this load of crap. Which I'm sure I haven't. I'm sure Kerry and his people will want to keep this wound fresh through November, justy so they can keep making the allegations that the ads were backed, pushed, stoked, whatever, by the Bush people. So we can expect them to keep picking the scab for the next ten weeks.

Then I made the mistake of tuning in to the Journal of Mundane Behavior. Now, as a fortunate former contributor, I know I ought not criticize, but one of the bits there irked, a piece entitled "Food, Fasting, and Fanatics: What Kafka's 'Hunger Artist' Teaches Us About Terrorists," by Ronald Pies, MD. While on the one hand Dr. Pies does an admirable job of cobbliing together some illuminating descriptions of the mindsets of terrorists, he deliberately misses one major point-- terrorists don't actually want change or power, a point to which he alludes but doesn't annunciate-- and his major point turns out to be kind of minor. That the terrorists of the September 11th hijackings ate pizza the night before the flight doesn't make any symbolic difference in any way shape or form. The fact that some of them went to a strip club the night before, too: don't prove nothin. Except that fanatics are as capable of hypocrisy as they are self-righteous states of denial. It was a terrific little article until it turned out that the goddamned butler did it.

Sour grapes? Not at all. As I said, I have been published there before, and I feel rather like I have done my hitch. I don't expect to write for them again, but then I don't think I would decline to either. It's just one of those annoying Academy thing, Dumb Academics Tricks: you wanta write about terrorism or fanaticism, give it a hook, link it to a work of lit and a popularly considered social disorder, give yourself a chance to throw the term "gastro-porn" in there just for kicks. Ironically, it's a big part of why I left academia: I couldn't find the food I liked.

*NOT a Kerry fan; NOT a Kerry supporter. But, like everybody else, I just hope he beats Bush, because Bush IS a liar, where as Kerry just ACTS LIKE a liar.

THAAAAAAAR SHE BLOGS! August 23: The Fine Art Of Shooting Fish In A Barrel

I put it off. I waited. I made excuses. But I finally am forcing myself to watch "The Hidden Fuhrer: Hitler's Sexuality."

I heard about this some time back, probably on the Onion's AV Club page or something, and immediatly had the most mixed feeling it it possible for me to have. On the one hand, Hitler, being the ultimate historical villan, is eminently brandable with all kinds of neuroses and psychoses. It's just too easy. Also, if that ends up branding Eva Braun a fag hag, well, dammit man, so much the better! But the fact remains that Hitler was so obsessed with his megalomania that he didn't have much time or inclination for sexuality, and if he did, his twisted, tormented notion of ethics would have more likely lead him to necrophilia than anything. (I have a higher-voltage gag I was going to inser there, but I have decided I don't want to go that far.) I think what bothers me about it is the National Enquirer-ness of it. The "I CARRIED ELVIS' BABY" element to it. And the notion that, were this notion to take root in any serious fashion, we might start seeing politically energetic homosexuals wearing t-shirts bearing the legend HITLER WAS ONE OF US . . . Kinda frightening, frankly.

On the other hand, it is a perversely interesting notion. In a kind of right-wing, bluenosed, retro-Edwardian way, it would be somehow satisfying to ascribe to this demi-moralist the very perversion that was most officially abhorred in his administration? The persecution of homosexuals by the Reich, indeed, is well and heavily documented. On the other hand, it puts us a hairbredth away from a really dangerous idea, that Hitler's megalomania was in some way prompted or caused by his homosexuality. Imagine what Ricky Santorum* could do with that kind of ammo! Not to mention Pat Robertson!+ Far from suggesting that laws allowing homosexuality will lead to beastiality-- they will lead to GENOCIDE!!! OK, now I've gone too far.

But still really, this thing is ridiculous. All they've really managed to prove so far is that, if he was a homosexual, he really wasn't very good at it. Also, most of the evidence is stuff that would have come out right after the war; if he was a fag, he wouldn't have been very good at hiding it.

*I think Ricky Santorum is a fag. But I think we'd have to ask his wife, and I don't want to ask his wife. Yeah, Tricky Ricky's probably a fag.

+Pat Robertson is not a fag. No on knows why he dresses that way.

I BLOG THE BLOG THAT I HEARD BLOGGED: August 26th: Fighting the Beast

Tuesday night we went out to test drive a Mini Cooper-- with the result that the dealership that had the Mini we were after didn't have the Mini we were after-- making a stop by my folks' place for instruction and guidance for this year's run to West Bend Vinyards for grape juice to make wine, which my brother and I will be doing in the absence of our father, who will be in Connecticut or Nova Scotia on vacation, depending on the timing of the harvest. The end result of all this was that we got home a bit later than anticipated, and I resorted to packing the usual amount of drinking into a short period of time, and the end result of that was a raging hangover.

I don't get hangovers much anymore, at least not like I used to. In college I was famed for them, as I had them most mornings, low-grade things that usually faded by mid-morning, aided by coffee, fruit juice and egg proteins. Also, in that period of my incarnation, I was able to occasionally use the condition to my advantage. Believe it or not, this state of self-induced vulnerability was found endearing by many persons of the opposite sex, and set into motion a great many flirtations. But the chief advantage to having hangovers was an improved sense of self, a sort of strength of spirit provoked by overcoming hardship. Self-inflicted though it was, there was a sense of satisfaction in overcoming the condition.

Again back in college, my senior year, I had an apartment off campus that I furnished with the most appalling collection of junk, most of which I found discarded at the curb. At one point I fashioned a kitchen table of crappy wood from a packing crate and a beat over railway crossing sign. The dimensions of the frame didn't quite match the expanse of the sign, and the resulting hole I filled with the useless glass panel in the bottom of the apartment's refrigerator (which was supposed to form the top of the crisper drawer, which was, of course, missing). On mentioning this feat of carpentry to my fellow poets at school, my pal Steve Sherrill said "You should have a kitchen table. I can just see you sittin there in the morning, drinking coffee and feeling baaaaaaad."

So now where I sit and drink my coffee is this oak table in the back bedroom of our house, looking out at the green jungle of our back yard and takling my own sweet time easing into consciousness. And sometimes feeling bad, but not for the reasons I'd expect. Sometimes I find myslef feeling bad because I have it so easy. I feel guilty because I have this liberty. I can sit at my desk and watch a crappy movie and drink my coffee. I can write if I want to, or goof around with the chords to a known song to make my own miscreant tune of it, or I can refuse to write and refuse to play guitar. I can write whatever the hell I want. I don't have a market to reach or an audience to play to. DAMN ME! How do I rate such luxury?*

So the hangover gave me a sense of worth that I had been somehow missing, that had been oddly absent despite the hiking and the canoeing and the privations of camping. I sat at my oak table and I drank my strong coffee and I gutted it out, through the headache and the blurriness and the self-induced nausea, and I felt better for it. I fought the beat out and I won. By noon I was ready to go meet the Wife for lunch, at a picnic table under the trees beside her office building. Luxury; luxury.

*I should cut myself some slack here; I probably have suffered enough to rate such luxury, and it's not costing anyone else anything.

ALL THE WARMTH OF A WET BLOGGLETT: September 2nd: Spoilers

Lately I've adopted the annoying habit-- annoying to me-- of reading movie spoilers. For those of you unfamilair with the genre, movie spoilers are reports in which all of the details of the vehicle in question, and I read them for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is to avoid watching movies that have shameless and, often, pointless plot twists thrown in in the hopes of drawing in more viewers, who will come to see the plot twists rather than to enjoy a movie.

A great narrative doesn't need a twist. A great narrative twists from the word go, and keep going until a height of tension is realized, then untwists. Think of a wet cloth hung on a line with a weight at the end. The greater the tension built up, the greater the final momentum of the unwinding. Peckinpah knew that. (Peckinpah, whatever other faults he may have had, knew this.) So narrative where the good guy turns out to be the bad guy, or the bad guy turns out to be the good guy's father, or the bad guy turns out to be the good guy who turns out to be the bad guy who was the female lead's lover who always had secrets about his past that bothered him in dreams but that he could never tell her about because he didn't want any harm to come to her which leads him to self-destruct rather than kill the bad guy who turned out to be the good guy, frankly, don't cut it.

So reading the spoiler for Suspect Zero was time well spent. On the other hand, reading the spoiler for Garden State was less gratifying. Suspect Zero, being yet another serial killer hunted by FBI agents, had to throw in plot twists from Se7en,* The Manchurian Candidate, and The Shining, to no great apparent effect, unless you count as effect the driving to distraction of the writing and/or directing crews, who seem to have been content to wrap up the proceedings without explaining four out of seven (there it is again) plot twists. Garden State, being a vanity project/Indie Film for Zach Braff of Scrubs "fame,"~ doesn't require plot twists so much as consist of them, a formula I either like or dislike depending on the wittiness or lack therof. So the purpose of reading a spoiler in this case is to try and get a sense of which camp this particular venture belongs to. It's not so much to determine whether it's worth seeing in a theatre-- that question will only be answered in terms of whether I run across someone else who wants to go see it in a theater-- as just plain curiosity.

So imagine my chagrin when, in the midst of the spoiler, the writer of said informs me that I just have to go see one particular bit in this movie, as it's "*hilarious.*"

IN case this isn't abundantly clear yet, the reason I read spoilers is to get filled in on all the twists. Not getting this one bit, this one, insignificant bit, spoiled the spoiler.

Yesterday I got up early and met my brother at our folks' house to make the semi-annual pilgrimage to West Bend Vinyards to buy grape juice with which to make wine. Most years my Dad and I have gone up together. He's done it once or twice solo, and has said that even though it can be done that way, it's better to have company, both to help watch the load and for company's sake. Naturally, since I have made the run many times and because I'm the elder brother, I took those damned thing way too seriously, with the result that my stomach was in knots the whole way.

It always is. We transport the juice in a 55 gallon plastic drum. Most years the drum rides in the back of the folks' Dodge mini-van, lashed to the back of the front seat, and by trial and near-error my Dad and I have managed to avoid the tighter exit loops. The plastic drum is designed to be packed in tight with other plastic drums in gargantuan cargo containers. The single drum, being plastic and therfore light-weight, becomes something of a Krakken, unstable and prone to shifting momentum. Only once have we com close to tipping it, but that once we came so close as to scare the bejesus out of me-- I was nominally supporting the ting at the time, and as we came around an exit ramp loop and the fluid momentum inside the drum began to shift, it took every bit of strength I could muster to keep it from going over. By my Dad's calculations, the liquid-filled drum weighs somewhere on the lines of 866 pounds, nearly half a ton. There may be different theories as to what happens when such a vessel overturns inside it's two-ton craft, but I have mine and I believe it's prudent: the craft founders.

So naturally the ride in the back of my brother's Dodge Ram truck was dead solid, and after the drive up, the reception of juice, the ride back, and the process of siphoning the juice from the drum into 5-gallon jugs in the basement of our folks' place-- about which more momentarily-- what I had to show for my six hours of discomfort bordering on nausea was a slight sense of accomplishment and a deep, inspecific hunger that I finally managed to solve with a tomato and cheese sandwich on white toast with mayo and salt and pepper.

The ride itself mitigated the effects. This year, having misplaced our Dad's driving directions, Doug called West Bend before we left, getting instructions on how to get there "the back way." The usual way-- the front way, I guess?-- takes you up the interstate nearly to Greensboro, and then back east and south, which is a rather drab slog through some less than picturesque mid-Piedmont towns. The new way took us off the interstate sooner and back through rolling hills and working farms and houses that look like they date back a century. Once arrived, Doug backed his truck up to the doors to the winery. The pressed grape juice is stored in 20 foot tall stainless steel silos. This year the Chardonnay we got was a mix of free run and pressed juice, sweet and pungent, and David, the Vinter, shook our hands and set up his hoses and pump and we had the drum filled in no time. By a combination of main force and using a rope wrapped around the drum and anchored to one corner of the truck bed, we positioned the half-ton barrel in the front of the bed, tied it down, wedged it in, shook hands again-- Doug had run up to the office, filled out the check, filled in the invoice-- and off we went. Doug insisted we stop in Statesville for a biscuit-- he had one, I didn't-- and we slogged back down I-77 though the thick commercial traffic, and, finally, home.

After digging out equipment and readying things in the basement, we argued briefly over methodology before hoisting the barrel back to the tail of the truck with the same basic combination of muscle and physics. Using the long siphon hose, I drew the juice down the stairs into my waiting mouth, getting, as almost always, a larger dose than I had counted on before moving the hose to the neck of the first carboy. I filled the jugs two-thirds full while Doug pretty much did whatever I said, strictly on the basis that I have done this more times than he has. An hour and change later we had sixteen jugs two-thirds full of dense yellow liquid, dosed with yeast and protected by sulfite, capped with bubblers, begining the wonderful alchemy that is wine making.

Having written all that, I've probably jinxed the batch. It'll probably be vinegar by the time my folks get back from their vacation. Oh, by the way, that's why Doug and I went without Dad this year, in case I hadn't meantioned it earlier.

*I feel stupid spelling that that way.

~That might seem like a cruelty, but, firstly, I've heard the thing thusly described so many times that I have absorbed it as wisdom, and secondly, far crueler things have been said, and likely will be said, of it elsewhere.

A BLOG IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS: September 8th: Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

Just had the most successful four day weekend in recent history.

Friday night had us babysitting our nearly 2-year-old nephew, Thomas, while his Mom Danielle took Cayla to play in an exhibition softball game. Thomas is at that age where he's into everything, all over the place, and while he has his own particular brand of video sedation-- provided by an Austrailian group known as The Wiggles, who tend to make marginally more sense than the Teletubbies-- it did make for a fairly active couple of hours. Reinforcing the notion, long held by my wife and myself, that we really don't have any intention of ever having kids, and if that makes us bad people, so be it.

Saturday, operating on the assumption that we were in for 3 days of solid rain starting Sunday, we got out of the house early and went to hike Latta Plantation, where we did a good solid five miles over some semi-hilly terrain. From thence to take care of some chores of an undisclosed nature, after which we took our nephew Josh to the grocery store to get lunch while Danielle took Cayla to look at sports equipment. I munched some terrific sushi and had a beer while reading the paper, and after we had lunched I played Monopoly with Josh. He kicked my ass, but it was largely a matter of fate: I rolled doubles three times, which gave me a free roll, and the result of every sigle roll was the same: I landed on one of Josh's properties. When at last I landed on the one property on which he had installed a castle-- this is the Disney version of the game, by the way-- and faced a rent of a thousand bucks, I didn't have it. Game over. After this Rachelle and I went to watch the second half of Cayla's softball practice.

After that, came home, mowed the lawn while Rachelle napped, did some e-mailing, and later that afternoon/evening embarked on an odd quest: I decided that I didn't know what I wanted for dinner, so by way of whetting my appetite, I decided to go questing. I got out of the neighborhood before I suddenly decided I wanted a Wendy's Classic Double with Everything. I traipsed out towards the Mountain Island Lake area, stopping at the nearby Bi-Lo to buy my monthly allotment of cigarettes, a carton of Camel straights. At the Customer Service Counter, which is where they have such things, there was some sort of difficulty, requiring the services of one manager, and then another, between which an old, dumb country fart decided his need for a pack of Salems was important enough that he could walk to the counter and interrupt the proceedings in order to get them. A few minutes after he left, I decided that I could just as well nip down the road to buy a pack at the convenience store where, inexplicably, they sell Camels by the pack for nearly 1/8th less than they sell them for by the carton, and thence to the Wendy's.

At the Wendy's, I espied a few people waiting in line, and so figured my odds of getting in, getting food, and getting out, were good. When I got in line, however, who should be at the head of the line but the old, dumb country fart I had encountered at the Bi-Lo.

Now, don't get me wrong, I don't mean to impugn him at all: at this stage of my career, I have concluded that dumb is not an insult, it is merely an evaluation. I reserve insults for those who are willfully stupid or proudly ignorant. Dumb is juts dumb. And the old fart was dumb in an endearing kind of way. He had not clue he was holding up the line, nor any malevolent intent. He simply needed an in-depth description of each meal on the menue that caught his eye, fearing that what he ordered might not be something he would enjoy eating. And, to be honest, at Wendy's, it is a valid concern. After finally recieving his meal, he felt compelled to tell the counter staff and manager of the state of play in the ongoing hurricane coverage, which he was gleefully going home to watch more of.

After him in line were The Ladies. They were very typical white suburbanites, probably in their late fifties, whose affiliation was clearly close but not binding. I immediately labeled them Lady A and Lady B. Lady A initiated the discourse and controlled the subject matter; Lady B reacted, provided illustrative antecdotes, and interjected current events. After the fart left, they took their own time interrogating the staff, placing their orders separately, and Lady A, upon being asked for payment, finally revealed that she had a coupon that might or might not still be valid. This necessetated the approval of a manager. Still, again, they were perfectly nice, but they did serve to gum up the works.

So an hour later I got home with, as opposed to the Double I had craved, but a Bacon Muchroom Burger, which was good enough but which I wouldn't order a second time, some fries that were nicely greasy and salty, a Cheerwine, and a cup of chili.

Wendy's used to be famous for making a decent and reliable Yankee chili: not hot, not terribly spicy, crowded up with tomatoes and beans and slightly watered down, but still, a hearty stew that was generally worth the price of admission. What I had when I opened the cup at home was a cruel joke. All tomatoes and beans, the merest hint of meat, and sweet. Not just sweet like it didn't have enough spice in it, sugar sweet, like somebody had spilled Kayro syrup in it. The Wife confirmed my diagnosis. I tried to liven it up by adding salt and pepper, but when the brew then proceeded to taste like little more than salt and pepper, I gave up. Wendy's is officially dead to me now.

Sunday was probably the best: out early, hiked at Latta, then snagged La Cayla for an outing, which inlcuded a quick brunch, a drive out Indepemdence to the Home Economist, where I bought black peppercorns and Celtic sea salt, thence to the Sports Authority, where we shopped for, but didn't find, catcher's pads-- just as well, as it hasn't been determined what position she'll be playing on the softball team-- thence to the used book store on Plaza, where I browsed while Cayla pawed through the kids books, finding a couple she wanted, including a collection of Poe shorts that has been slightly Bawdlerized but seems largely intact. After all this, lunch with the motley crew that tends to surround my pal Bryan, inlcuding Chris the Chef, and family, at the Red Bowl. The Chef ordered a medley of appetizers, and clearly found each substandard, especially the sushi. The rolls they serve at the Bowl are basic, straightforward, kind of the essence of sushi, Ur-sushi, just fish and rice bound with seaweed. Chris soaked 'em down in soy sauce and eventually piled wasabi and pickled ginger on top of the pieces. The potstickers he duncked in sauce and wolfed down, the spare ribs he chewed while trying to keep the younger kid, 2, from tearing the joint apart. Fortunately we were having a mid-afternoon affair, and there were only a few older people in the place, who seemed to either be deaf and therefore oblivious, or considered the brat's behavior with that oh-isn't-he-precious denial only the elderly seem to be able to convincingly muster. After lunch we ducked into the HT and picked up goodies, did the weekly shopping, went back to the folks' place, got the dog, and split. later that evening, back at the house, I left Rachelle for some more napping whist I zipped up to the Lost Target of Roi Rama to buy a new pepper mill, a clear acrylic affair with a twisty-looking top with an adjustable grind feature I don't quite trust yet.

After that, at the folks' place, Rachelle started making noises about having to get going if we were going to make the movie-- wait for it-- so we left at a little before 1 in order to make a 2:50 movie, with the result that we found ourselves at Concord Mills with over an hour to kill on Labor Day.

I know that sounds horrific, but we had a fairly good time of it. Early on Rachelle made the observation that we might as well resign ourselves to moving with the crowd, but pretty soon that turned into a challenge to navigate the herd as quickly as possible, something that she's every bit as good as I am at doing. I hit some shoe stores, she hit some jewelry stores, we hit the Earthbound Trading Co, and after a while wandered back upstream to the theatre to watchy "Collateral."

The theater was packed, largely due to the fact that it was only playing on one screen, and it had the effect of magnifying the reaction we collectively had to the thing. The main effect it had was one of unexplainable glee at the lightning-fast violence, provoking gales of wholly inappropriate laughter. It was as if the entire audience was laughing at "Swallow, baby, it means ya love me."

That said, the film was a real hoot, one of those things where morality was on hold and in play constantly. I think the real key was that, while the characters were largely believeable, the situations were largely absurd, so that it was abundantly clear that we were watching expert choreography rather than expert carnage.

After all that we dropped in at the On the Border, Tex Mex chain Rachelle favors, where she had the usual same chimichanga while I had a combo, decent if overly floury empanadas, curiously botched chile relleno and a rather bland enchilada. The relleno was filled with basic queso, but they hadn't properly prepped the chile, so it had a tough skin that resisted cutting. It made for an interestingly chewy dish, but the end result was trying to match bites of chile with bites of queso. Back to the folks, picked up the dog, came back here, where Rachelle dozed off while I watched Dave Chappelle's Showtime special, which, rather like my evening meal, was profanely bland.

Yesterday the rains finally came, long, hard squalls mixed with slow, drenching soaks, all day long, from early morning all through the day and night. Rachelle had the day off, so we lazed about for most of the morning, then made a quick outing during the pre-afternoon lull in the weather. We verified sad news-- the Shiny is finally defunct-- then made a rather fruitful trip to Big Lots, where I finally obtained an over-sized acrylic cutting board and what might actually be a serviceable cheese plane, Rachelle got a package of colored markers, we picked up a selection of chip clips on the grounds that we never got around to buying any before, and I finally caved and bought a can of the off-brand chili I had been eying for God knows how long. I know, I know, anything that stays at the Big Lots for that long is not to be trusted, but there's that hubris inside me that tells I can overcome any canned chili, no matter how many times I have proved it wrong. After a quick trip to the nearest grocery store for stout and condiments, we traipsed home as the downpour resumed.

We prepped and ate lunch while watching "Alien;" the chili was dosed up and cooked through and slightly reduced in time for me to dine while watching the thrilling denoument. It was delicious, redolent and savory and very slightly hot. The canned stuff turned out to be fairly meaty, and I covered it with cheese and onions and a generous dose of sour cream.

After lunch, having confirmed that there was nothing else of any interest on, we watched "The Passion of The Christ," which Rachelle's Mom bought while they were in Ohio. As usual, the critics had it all wrong: the film's chief wrongdoing is not the exaggeratedness of the violence leading to the crucifixion, it's the impossibility of it. Had all this torture taken place, Christ would have exsanguinated three or four times before ever getting close to the cross. At the very least, after all that, he would have died within less than an hour, let alone any number of days. In Rachelle's estimation, based on her Catholic Bible Stories up-bringing, the film got most of the Christ myth right, which is to say it got much of it wrong, which brings us to my estimation: If that's not damning with faint praise, I don't know what is.

Spent the rest of the evening reading, tried to watch the Beeb news against rotten reception, watched the bullshit Network news. Jon had Chris Matthews on as his guest, to absolutely no effect at all. Matthews tried to play the whole Zell Miller thing-- this would be the re-run of last Thursday's show-- as being Zell's unreasonable reaction to his innocent questions, but in the process verified what it's suprising that everyone doesn't already know: he's just not very good at his job at all. When he should have re-phrased or clarified, he re-tracked. He lost his mark. Worse yet, he did the whole Daily Show thing with a conspiratorial tone, as if for the moment he was just one of the Media guys, and not a right-wing republican Media asshole-whore. (Too strong?) Jon didn't let him get away with it.He subtly played the anti-spin cards, so subtly that Matthews didn't seem to notice, although that doen't necessarily mean too much since it seems obvious that Matthews rarely notices anything.

After that, we watched a nature show, during which, while trying to decide when to have dinner, it occurred to me that the chili from earlier was boiling up inside me, and after rationalizing that it was the effects of the sour cream or the fact that I consumed a rather large bowl of the stuff, I finally tumbled to the conclusion I knew was waiting for me all along: Don't buy food at Big Lots. It almost always ends badly. I could get away with it alot in college, and I did, but I'm thirty-eight now. I can still take alot of abuse, but I do have to draw the line somewhere. So, eventually, the Wife went to bed, and I sat there the rest of the evening, gurgling away while watching a documentary about a high school football player who makes it to college from the ghetto. Finally, about eleven, I trundled off to bed, the good man taking his rest.

That enough? you want I should let you up now?

BLOGGING DOWN THE HORSE: September 9th: Rationalization

So why did I just do that? Why did I open up the details of my life to a possible, open-ended public? Not that anyone's paying any attention, mind you, but they could. Easily.

And bad things could happen. For instance, I didn't, although I might have, disclosed that my neice Cayla and I, being pals, and having been pals for her entire life practically speaking, have secrets, things we tell each other because we know we can, observations we disclose for the sake of corroboration that we know will never go any further. Confidences, dig?

And someone could-- not to say any specific person, not to indicate that anyone specifically has this kind of tendency or proclivity-- take that simple little fact, that sweet little observation about the nature of friendship, and spin it into something dark and ugly, use it to imply something perverse about my relationship with my niece, and cause serious hell to break loose in my life. Now, why someone should feel so inclined, to cause harm for harm's sake, is honestly a mystery to me. Not to say I haven't done it myself, because I have, and felt deeply ashamed of myself afterwards, which is why it remains a mystery to me. Some people seem to enjoy it, to get a kind of intellectual cat-and-mouse thrill out of it, that I just don't get. But I know that other people do, and could, and might, so it is foolish of me to put anything at all out there, to disclose the facts and happenings of my life against the chance that someone might sling them back at me like so much warmed over hash or make out of them something that isn't.

Call it a compulsion.

NOTE FROM THE LAST OF THE ORIGINAL BLOGSTAS: September 10th: Last blog for this file, weather notes, coming attractions

TAKING, as almost always, a cue from goood ol' Doc Nagel, I have made a decision to shut down this wing of the web page on the grounds that the fiule has gotten huge and unweildy. I have had complaints that it opens slowly and painfully, although I, of course, have never had that problem, since almost nothing ever phases our monster Dell, which devours big files like candy floss. I had been waiting for some sort of landmark, a year gone by, a birthday, something, but the opportunity has yet to present itself. So, I figured, I might as well do it today, while waiting on an estimator to come give us a price for having the house painted. It's September 10th. September 10th doesn't mean a damned thing. More on that in a moment.

So does this mean I'm shutting down my blog? Far from it. I've found myself enjoying keeping a journal of sorts for the first time in my life. Hell, no, I'm not quitting. But I will be making the frollowing changes:

--This file will be archived & linked at the top of the new blog.
--The new entries will be reverse stacked, so that the newest ones will be on top and thus easily found, which I should have done to begin with.
--I will most likely cut the new thing in chunks, probably a couple of months worth at a shot, and archive the chunks as I go. We'll see. I'm not entirely sure about that last one.

So, starting whenever I next have the urge to write one, the next blog you see will be in the Twilight Zone.

September 10th of 2002 I went to bed a bit early and woke up in the middle of the night, completely unable to sleep, having no idea why. After some judicious shutting of doors and turning on lights, I booted up and logged on, and after a very few exchanges with some on-line pals, it dawned on me that it was September 11th.

Now, I have tended to say very, very little about 9/11, mainly because I have been continually disgusted by the continuous use of the disaster for pandering purposes, and let's not even begin to think it's worth pointing fingers and choosing sides, because it's not. It got to the point, very early on, that to say anything at all bout it was to automatically join the ranks of assholes and jackoffs and scumbags. So I kept shut for the most part. But that morning I chatted back and forth with my on-line pals from across the globe, some in Autralia and New Zealand, most here in the US, from Georgia to California, and there was no pretense and not a shred of pandering, and we all just let loose and talked about how the worst part of the whole goddamned thing was how powerless and insignificant it made us feel, and how maybe that's what everybody should have been saying all along, up to and including our raging dumbass of a president. As dawn approached, after some four hours of confessionals and backpatting and commisseration, I got my shit together and drove over to my Dad's, and we went up to buy chardonnay at West Bend. As we drove up through the golden sunrise and silver mists in the verdant green of the Carolina Piedmont, we listened to the inevitable retrospective on NPR and reflected how little, really, our lives and world had actually changed since that rotten day. And it ocurred to me that that, really, was the unkindest cut of all: this great tragedy doesn't mean a goddamned thing. Whatever in the living, breathing hell those goddamned idiot bastards thought thier bloody stunt would prove or change, they were wrong. We got a war in Afghanistan and a war in Iraq. They got dead. The end.

And that's what makes me angry.

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