i live in seattle, one of the best towns in the country for live music. the local scene is world-class, and every band worth hearing, along with another million or so, comes through the city when they tour.

at the same time, almost every time i go to a show, i can't help but feel bad for the bands, because i can't remember how many times i've watched a great band rock the shit out of a stage somewhere, really putting their whole hearts into it, and then i look out over the crowd, and everyone is just standing there, arms crossed, attempting a look of detached intellectuality, as if they were some emotionally retarded researcher observing an interesting specimen as it wriggles in the plastic restraints, lips pursed, head nodding ever so slightly. like they're attending a lecture they're not really interested in but feel like they need to burnish their cultural and/or intellectual street cred. either that, or they're texting their friends and surreptitiously making fun of what that girl over there is wearing.

call it the cool kid syndrome: i am unimpressed, because i am unimpressable. i've seen/done/been that and am so over it.

it's fucking horseshit.

when i was younger, i was cynical, too; too cool for school. i was sure that my eyes were open, unclouded, that my nose could detect the slightest whiff of bullshit no matter how deeply buried or covered over. it was a defense mechanism, of course, an overcompensation for the fear and discomfort i felt at how strongly and deeply i could feel things, at how i could be carried away out of myself and my comfort zone by things beyond my understanding or control. eventually my brain began to rewire itself so as to filter out things that moved me, things that might dangerously upset my cynical detachment, my ability to put ironic distance between myself and the world, because i lacked the courage to allow myself to be moved. no matter what was right about a thing, i could tell you right away what was wrong with it, and by doing so i could extinguish its power over me. such is the nature of being cool.

you may be asking yourself (if you exist, being that i'm pretty sure noone reads this): what's that got to do with anything? sure, we all feel better calling bullshit on bullshit. it can be very therapeutic and it makes your friends like you more. but there's a point i'm trying to make here.

i had to work last night (i tend bar for a living, and while i work only three days a week, on those days i'm usually there for 12 hours or so), and last night was busy more or less start to finish. as barack obama was delivering his acceptance speech at the democratic national convention i was busy schlepping happy hour cocktails and five dollar pizzas to a couple dozen regulars and some randoms, and then spent the rest of the night slinging cocktails and schooling fools in bar etiquette. i didn't get home until almost five in the morning, because after the fun's all over, we get to clean up the mess while everyone else has sex and/or breakfast. i started to watch the daily show on the dvr, but once i saw evan bayh's face i had to turn it off.

i was beat-down tired, my body aching, my ass chafed raw from the ten miles i walked between the register and the service area. i was pissed off because the girl i like blew me off and is sleeping with a friend of mine. even jon stewart couldn't bring a smile to my face.

then i turned on the computer and clicked on the youtube. i'd heard all night about how good the speech was. i'd been told to be ready for teary eyes and goosebumps, and not necessarily in that order.

and the man delivered. holy shit did the man deliver.

i remember four years ago. i missed obama's keynote speech, the one that made him famous, but enough of my friends talked about it that i looked it up and watched it, and i remember thinking: that guy's going to be the first black president. i still think so.

but back to last night, or rather this morning, because by the time it was all said and done, the sun was clearly visible in the sky.

there were goosebumps. there were tears in my eyes. i remember being grateful when he went down the laundry list of policy specifics, told us what the obama presidency will mean, because if he had kept up with the heart-string pulling i was definitely going to cry, and even though i was alone with noone to see, there is still enough of that younger me inside to feel shame at being so easily moved by a fucking politician.

and yeah, i know that a politician is what he is. i don't agree with every plank in his platform, and i understand that in practice there will be compromises i might prefer not come to pass. but i hear the call that he's giving voice to. i've been waiting for that call my whole life. there's always been an idealist in me, constantly at war with the cynic, and to finally hear someone i can actually vote for say those words i've been waiting to hear stirred me in ways that usually only the love of a good woman or a really good rock tune can.

which brings me, full circle, back to where i started. i spent an hour or so today surfing the web, looking to relive the elation i felt as i watched obama last night, an elation shared by pat fucking buchanan of all people, a man who is as ideologically opposite to myself as it is possible to be, and seemingly almost noone else.

what i found instead is a bunch of cool kids picking nits, people whose intellects i genuinely respect, even if they are only capable of deconstructing things and not building anything, people who are seemingly not for anything, only against things. and it makes me angry. not that they don't feel what i feel, or think what i think, but that such minds could be so colonized by cynicism that their capability for wonder and faith have shrivelled and dried out so completely.

it also makes me sad, for exactly the same reasons. i feel compassion, because i too nearly fell into that trap. it would have been easy.

one of the reasons i named this blog what i did (aside from the fact that i think it's really catchy) is to continually remind myself that it isn't enough just to be against things (a point that barack obama makes quite often). finding fault with the constructions of others is the easy part. in this world of compromise and illusion and imperfection (indeed imperfectibility), there is always a flaw, always a nit to pick. one of the things i like about the scientific mindset is the radical doubt; we can never say the world is just so, only that we haven't found any evidence to the contrary of what we have theorized and tested and found to hold up under scrutiny in the lab and in the field.

but you have to be able to make that leap of faith, to believe in something. you have to have the courage to be for something, because it's the only way anything ever gets done. and so i have dubbed myself the anticontrarian; i am against those who are only against things, because if you ain't for nothin' then there ain't nothin' there.

that doesn't mean you have to close your eyes. this ain't peter pan, where if you clap hard enough and believe in fairies then tinkerbell will be okay. that's the trick, actually. you see the chasm, but you jump anyway, because otherwise you're gonna be standing there forever.

fucking pumas make me sick.

i'm sorry, ladies (and gentlemen, i guess), but ya lost, fair and square, on a playing field as level as you had any right ever to expect. i'm sorry your team got out-organized and out-performed, but you did, and this whole fucking extended tantrum you're throwing is so fucking childish that it makes me want to shake you like a recalcitrant child.

remember, nobody likes a sore loser. and if you help elect mccain, by omission or commision, everything you stand for will have been sacrificed for a moment catharsis that'll last just long enough for the horror to sink in completely.

you'll be like a child who has nothing to play with because she's broken all of her toys. unfortunately, so will the rest of us.

also, note to the media: stop enabling this bullshit. even if you're a secret mccain supporter, there're way too many important issues to debate to waste even a moment of airtime, even in a twenty-four hour news cycle, on this stupid, stupid bullshit.

i still can't get you out of my head. i don't know why. you won't even tell me why you can't see me. you make it sound like you want to, but you can't. i wish i understood.

come back.

for more than a year now, i've had half an ear cocked at the presidential primaries. it's been amusing enough. kind of like following a sports team, in that it's a largely harmless pastime that gives one the illusion of a grander narrative in which one is sunk without actually having to do much about it besides get drunk and watch and blather and bloviate amongst like-minded persons.
it passes the time, anyway.
but now that we've rung in the new year (who knew we'd all survive to 2008? that america would survive, even, wounded and limping though she is?), it's up to the good citizens of iowa to actually get the ball rolling and do some delegate-allocating. i'd say do some voting, but as anyone with half a brain and half an ear cocked (and i count myself as such) knows, they don't vote in iowa, they caucus. and boy howdy is it complicated, and apparently it takes a long-ass time.
some people say caucusing is undemocratic, that a straight-up primary with secret ballots and voting and electronic machines to count those votes is easier, will draw more people out, and is therefore more democratic, because if it brings out more people, then it must, by definition, be more democratic, since more of the demos participates. and they can do it more honestly, since ballots are secret and nobody can see you there in the voting booth, just like nobody can see you in the bathroom (insert your own larry craig joke).
i am amenable to arguments like this, but i'm not so sure they outweigh the arguments on the other side.
hey, we're all busy people. we have lives to lead, kids to raise, mortgages to pay, all that. even people like me, with no kids and who work no more than 30 hours a week have shit to do everyday, some of it obligatory, some of it for love. it is certainly more convenient to not have to spend more than ten minutes or so taking care of our civic duties before returning to our regularly scheduled lives. considering how few people who can vote do, it makes a lot of sense to make it as easy as possible.
on the flipside, what i like about the iowa caucuses is that, by making it difficult to do, only the people who really care make it out and make themselves heard. and while i suppose that that is, in itself, somewhat undemocratic, in that it is effectively if not legally exclusionary, i think that its lack of platonic idealitude actually works in the nation's favor, because only the most passionate, informed voters are willing to venture out into the cold and spend the time that it takes to figure this shit out.
i also think that the collective nature of the caucusing process is a good thing. having to defend your position in the face of direct and personal opposition is healthy for democracies and other living things. the worst ideas, the worst ideologies, always insist that they have a sole lock on the truth of things and always act in such a way as to undermine or suppress debate. and that is as un-american as a thing could be. the greatest of the ideas underlying america, what makes us truly special among nations and among experiments in governance, is that america is a place where the free marketplace of ideas is not only enshrined in the national consciousness, it's actually built in to the system. it's unbelievably difficult for any single idea or ideology to acheive hegemony here, because the system is built to prevent the accumulation of too much power in too few hands.
i am not saying that it always works out this way. far from it. but the idea is there, and it's strong enough to have withstood our entire history of not quite living up to our own ideals.
left alone, it's easier for people to get set in their ways. easier to ignore evidence or arguments that don't fit your position or worldview. having to engage others who are not necessarily like-minded is healthy for people and democracies alike. sometimes, the best idea even wins.
anyway, i know i've made arguments for both sides of the equation here. perhaps i am my very own marketplace of ideas.

well, now that i've wonked off for a bit, here's what i think's going to happen, which i set down solely and only as a record against which i can later measure myself.
i think obama wins iowa, by a small but not negligible margin. he's got the momentum, and from what i hear there're going to be a lot of independents and even disaffected republicans caucusing with the democrats, and they like him.
edwards comes in second. he's been working the state for four or five years now, has the ground game, and speaks middle american better than any of the top three.
hillary posts up at third, and the patina of inevitability that she, her handlers, and msm have been painting her with for the last several months is revealed for the illusion it always was. it's a shame, really. i very much want america to get grown up enough to have a woman president (and eventually get to the point where a candidate's gender doesn't matter, but hey, one step at a time), but man does she ever rub me the wrong way. she's as fake as bill, but without the charm or the humanity. and it's not like the clinton years were super-awesome if you were an actual progressive; they just look that way from here.
on the republican side, i think romney and huckabee split the vote so closely that it's a virtual tie, with ron paul being the real story, even though he comes in third, because noone actually takes him seriously as a candidate (aside, that is, from actual voters who still believe in the old version of conservatism, the one actually grounded in real americanism, not this new imperialistic armageddonite bullshit).

if nothing else, i'm just glad that someone besides the pundits and the columnists can finally get a word in edgewise, because i am really fucking sick of these fucking blowhards pretending they speak for us when they're so very much a part of the problem.

i think i wanted this.
a few months ago, my life was very settled. comfortable enough, i suppose. pleasant even. but every week was the same as every other. time seemed to pass very quickly, or, rather to have passed very quickly when i stopped and thought about it, even though sometimes it seemed as if lived time had slowed down.
i couldn't do it. so i got out.
life seems to have gotten more interesting as a result. i have mixed feelings about it.

it's hard to know what to think sometimes. it seems a number of bedrock assumptions are up in the air. i realize that's a pretty mixed-up metaphor, but the image actually holds for what it's like to be inside my head right now. i'm trying to be that shaolin ninja guy that leaps from chunk to chunk through the madness and gets it done. but my leaps and backflips are a wee touch out of control, and i keep landing funny and knocking myself about.
banged myself on the forehead last night. the door fell off my jeep again, too.
but i got to make out with a girl i've wanted for a long time, and it was like jamming a live wire down my throat until the electricity filled my whole fucking chest cavity.
then she ran away.

i've been drinking too much lately. i've been using it to fill the vice gap that quitting smoking has created. it's a short-term solution, but it seems to have worked. i haven't had a cigarette, haven't even really come close. still miss them, but i miss a lot of things that have come and gone. i'm kind of sentimental that way.
shit, i'm all kinds of emotional these days. i imagine the drinking doesn't help.
it's ok, though, i can feel the wheels turning. i think this phase is done. it's coming up on time to cleanse. after my birthday, i think. doesn't make sense until then.

alright. enough babbling on about feelings. there's work to do.

there is a hole, somewhere very near the center of me. a gap. a thing that i loved and hated and that is missing now going on three weeks. i have tried to fill it with other things, but nothing can quite compare. like a woman i loved but couldn't live with, not forever.

i know that it's for the best. that it's the only option, really. i don't want to die of something stupid. i don't want to be owned by something outside of myself. i don't want to spend fifty bucks a week to sap my vitality and kill my breath.

i don't want to be a smoker anymore.

i picked it up almost by accident, in high school, when my friends and i couldn't score weed. i knew it was a dumb habit, and my mom smoked when i was growing up, and i hated it, and i figured i wouldn't get caught. but i did, and the habit i picked up by accident when my friends and i couldn't score weed became a central feature of my personality for most of my adult life.

as anyone who has known me can tell you, i was a righteous smoker. the kind of guy you can just tell by looking at him is a smoker and loves it, the kind of guy who makes you want to smoke, even if you don't smoke and don't like it.

i was kind of like that with vice in general, but it was the cigarettes that lay at the foundation of it all. they were the basic building block of my pyramid of vice, a constant, regular infusion of chemicals and cool.

after college, i conceded that they were having a detrimental effect on my health and started smoking american spirits instead of camels. but then i realized how bad all those chemicals had tasted, and how good the spirits tasted by comparison, and it was like when you and your lover decide to stop using condoms when you fuck. so much sweeter, so much more intimate. and they last longer, too, like you do with a lover you know well.

but there's no getting around it. i always wondered, when i was younger, why it was such a big thing when the surgeon general said that smoking was unhealthy, like it wasn't before he finally said it out loud, like he was pointing out some 500 lb gorilla that everybody wanted to talk about but couldn't for some reason. it was obvious to me, as it must be to any smoker, that smoking is bad for you. it's as plain as the nose on your face. sure, you might not be able to intuit the percentage increase in your likelihood of developing x, y, z, and q life-threatening ailments, but anyone who has so much as taken a drag off of a cigarette should be able to know, right then and there, that this is something that's bad for you.

but that's exactly why it's appealing to the young-folk. you spend your whole childhood getting told not to do shit because it's bad for you, and then all of a sudden your balls drop and you realize that you get to make your own decisions and so you make bad ones because they're bad because you can. and for the most part, it's consequence-free for a while, because when you're young you're comparatively indestructible, even though you never know how much until you stop being.

but i ain't quite young anymore, and i sure as hell ain't indestructible. and the romance wore off a long time ago. sure, i still enjoyed it, sometimes, but after a while, you can't lie to yourself anymore. you know it's a habit, and that you do it because it drives you crazy not to, and even though it gets harder and harder every year, you keep at it not because you're a rebel or because you're punk rock or whatever it was you thought it made you when you were younger and dumber. you do it because you need it, or at least it feels like you do.

but you really don't. i really don't. that's what i tell myself anyway. that i'm going to be free of that enslavement, and that even if i crack, it won't be what i want it to be. it won't make me happy, it won't fill the hole there near the center of me, because in the end that hole was always already there, a part of me that i've tried to fill with all kinds of things, but that can always hold more. i know because now that i've stopped filling it with cigarette smoke, things are starting to come out. and even though it's like being battered by a constant gale-force shitstorm of emotion and random weirdness while i try and make my way through my daily life, i know that i need to keep walking. i've got this theory, see, and the theory goes that maybe once all that shit that packed down into that hole comes out, once all the sadness, anger, depression and other negative bullshit that i've buried under the surface works its way out, then maybe that hole will close up and heal over. sure, it'll leave a scar, but scars are sexy. open wounds are much less so, once you get past a certain age. if you've reached thirty without learning to heal yourself, if you still wear your damage like a cool tattoo, then something is wrong with you.

things are definitely wrong with me. there's no doubt about that. but i've got more scars than wounds, and the wounds i have are cleaning out and closing up. and it's hard right now, with all this shit coming out of me, overwhelming me sometimes in ways i don't entirely understand. and i hate it, oh how i hate it. feeling so unbalanced, off-kilter, not entirely sure what'll come out of my mouth or subconscious at any given moment, not always able to keep a train of thought on the rails, drunker than usual, and with a slightly nervous vertiginousness to my laughter sometimes.

but i'm still there, in the back of my own mind, sane and rational and mostly clear-eyed. but it's strange to realize that your instincts are off, that for a while at least you can't trust them, and you have to take a moment and filter what you're thinking and feeling back into some more rational frame of reference, because not everybody else is going crazy like you are.

it's okay, though. i've been through this before, and made it. yes, i went back to the dark side, but i made it a year and a half before i did, and this time is easier, in some ways, because i know more surely that this is what must be done than i did last time. and because i know that if i have even one cigarette then i am sliding down a slippery slope and i'm going to have to through all this shit again, and feel bad about myself on top of it.

fuck that. i'm going to make it. i'm just going to have to be crazy for a little while. so be it.

i need to spit you out of my system. i guess i probably figured all along that it would come to this. i mean, the sex was really good, amazing even, but i think there was only so far we were going to get outside the bedroom/bathtub/couch/kitchen counter.

i agree that i overreacted that night, but you fucking pushed me to it. i asked you three times to drop it, and you didn't.

it's like you said, i guess. people are always temporary. maybe someday you'll get around to wondering if that's one of those self-fulfilling prophecy things.

you know, i understand if you don't want to deal with me while i go through this whole quitting smoking thing. i don't necessarily want to deal with me, either. but this whole just blowing me off and not returning texts and calls is just lame. i know we only dated for like six weeks, but i think i rate a face-to-face, or at least a phone call. it's just common courtesy. i think what pisses me off the most is that the most likely explanation, that you're just blowing me off and hoping i'll get the hint and fuck off, means that you're not really the person i thought you were. it's not going to wreck me not to see you anymore, but i really was starting to like you more than a little and dig being around you. if you really are just blowing me off, and i can't see how you aren't, then that means i was totally mistaken about the person you are, and that makes me angry. the person you made yourself out to be would have the respect, both for me and yourself, to put a period at the end of the sentence so we could both move on like fucking grown-ups. but you didn't.

so, i don't know. i don't really know what your deal is. but i do know that i've got enough shit to deal with with the whole recalibrating my neurochemistry thing, and the last thing i need is this extraneous bullshit. i've got more than enough necessary bullshit to get through.

so, whatever. i'll see you around, or i won't. the 'hood's probably big enough for the both of us.

it's a shame, though, for i surely would like to bed you one last time. we surely were good at that.

this is, to a certain extent, a leap of faith, me writing this, because i don't actually believe that anyone reads this blog, since i don't pimp it to anyone, even my friends. but i do believe that the logosphere (for lack of a better term) has something of a life of its own, and that an idea, once floated, can have an effect, simply by being out there.

i suppose what i'm saying is, in effect, that the tree does make a sound, even if noone is there to hear it.

so here's my brilliant idea for what to do about iraq. it's got a couple of moving parts, but it goes something like this:

first step, partition kurdistan and let the kurds have their own country, defended, if need be, by the same no-fly zones that we and the brits maintained to protect them from saddam. you never hear about it, but the kurds are the one good thing, aside from the actual ouster of saddam, that have come from w's war. they've got the beginnings of a representational democracy, enough oil to jump-start an economy, and the peshmerga for keeping their borders secure. sure, turkey'll squawk over it, since they love to oppress their own kurdish minority and don't want them getting any ideas, but maybe we can get the europeans to make it a part of the deal for entering the european union, which the turks would dearly love to do.

that leaves the sunnis and the shiites, who're already fighting a civil war, even if the western media refuses to call it that (kind of like they refuse to call darfur a genocide). whether we stay or not, it's going to get really ugly, and the sunnis are going to lose, because the shiites not only outnumber them by a factor of five or six, and have a few decades' worth of pent-up resentment from sunni oppression under saddam and his ba'ath party goons. we can't really partition them apart, because the shiites would get all the oil and the sunnis won't stand for that kind of marginalization.

so here's what we do: we relocate the sunnis, to america if necessary. it seems only fair, since we screwed up the chance for them to stay and participate in iraq's new beginning. sure, it would be expensive, but almost undoubtedly less so than maintaining our occupation in iraq, and it would buy us some much needed goodwill in the world, especially the middle east.

there are undoubtedly a million problems with this solution (just like every other solution currently on the table), but if we can obviate the sectarian tensions, then the iraqis have a much better chance of making it, and we can bring the vast majority of the troops home.

just a thought.

hurray for the good guys, by which i mean the less-bad guys. like much of the country, if you believe the pundits' spin on the exit polls, what this guy wanted was for america to dtmfa. not that i believe that the democrats have a better agenda. maybe secretly they do (universal health care, anyone?), but they certainly lack the cojones to enunciate what's in their hearts with any specificity.
no, the reason this is good news is because america, like capitalism, works by not working. we've seen from the disasters of the last six years what one-party rule does for the country. without the check of an opposition (or oppositions) with real power, ideology trumps practicality, and shit stops working. america is, first and foremost, a framework for settling arguments, a set of rules by which competing factions that don't agree can split the difference and find a working solution.
checks and balances. they don't call it the golden mean for nothing.
this is one reason i've always had a bit more sympathy for democrats than republicans, even though classic conservatism (the old school variety) usually has a stronger intellectual argument. the democrats (minus the radical lefties, who are cute and funny), despite their many failings, are willing to hear other points of view, especially from each other, and even occasionally have been known to change their minds.
another upshot of the election, i hope, is the end of base politics in general, and republican base politics in particular. extremists aren't very good at working through differences and making compromises; they kind of need absolute power so as to carry out their agenda without adulteration or dilution of any sort, and we all know how well that works out.
so, anyway, hurray for america. the system works (sort of, anyway, enough to correct itself every now and again).

it's been almost three weeks since i quit smoking again, but only in the last couple of days has it really bothered me. for most of the time, it's been like a psycho ex-girlfriend: i missed it some, but knew i had to let it go, and the knowledge comforted me, provided that degree of distance and insulation you need to let your better instincts rule over your animal desires. what always killed me before was the anxiety, that gut-level panicked feeling that something was horribly, horribly wrong. today that feeling has overwhelmed me again. i can't think, can't string more than a thought and a half together. and while i know that it's just my biochemistry adjusting, and that it's actually a good thing, since all this shit would otherwise have lived inside of me forever instead of being processed out, the knowledge is intellectual, lacking the immediacy of lived experience. it's okay. i know it's okay, and that in the end i'll be glad of it, but right now i'm freaking the fuck out and i'm not really sure what to do about it.
that must be why i'm blogging, since i never blog. i only keep this thing open because i really like the name i put on it. i was sure that i'd post regularly, even though my internet access is sporadic. god knows i've got more than enough to say on my favorite subjects, especially politics. some people follow sports. i think it's kind of silly how into it people get, but i also recognize that i'm in the minority on this, and i hardly begrudge people anything that makes them happy, that puts passion in their lives and gives them something to relate to strangers about.
i just don't seem to have that gene.
i tell myself that i'm just trying to be an informed citizen, that i'm just doing due diligence, but there's definitely more to it than that. my behavior patterns vis a vis the blogworld and the universe of discourse have something of the addictive to them.
after all, if i was motivated by the desire to add to the discourse, to actually make some effort to change the fucked-up shit, instead of just yammering on to whoever happens to be willing to listen, i'd be doing more than just spending hours on end in the coffee shop riding the free wireless wave to the land of them what already agree with me, at least substantially.
but what?

One thing the Bush administration says it can do with this meta-data is to start tapping your calls and listening in, without getting a warrant from anyone. Having listened in on your calls, the administration asserts that if it doesn't like what it hears, it has the authority to detain you indefinitely without trial or charges, torture you until you confess or implicate others, extradite you to a Third World country to be tortured, ship you to a secret prison facility in Eastern Europe, or all of the above. If, having kidnapped and tortured you, the administration determines you were innocent after all, you'll be dumped without papers somewhere in Albania left to fend for yourself.-matt yglesias

pretty much hits the nail right on the head.

because noone reads this, i am free to say what i want.

so there was this woman in the bar tonight.
olderish, but still hot. drunk as a sailor on shore leave. burnt down to core-functionality-only drunk. her friends had ditched her at some unspecified time earlier in the evening, but she was undeterred, still going strong.
i hadn't been working for a while, so i don't know anything about what she did before last call. kevin and martha were about, a rare and precious gift, and we were sitting on the couches by the fire, talking about this and that. martha and i got into something or other, and kerry-with-a-k came over to talk with kevin.
she was married, two kids, as later came out, when she decided to lay some truth on us, or something very like it (i'm sure it made sense in her head, and perhaps was quite subtle, but i'm getting ahead of myself). well-off, nicely put together, and trying to get laid.
she took a shine to each of us in turn. for my own part, i was unwilling to ask the question she told me to ask when it was mine to ask. it would have amused me to fuck her, but it wasn't convenient, and i'm not so hard up these days that it mattered much to me either way. probably better all around, as i was the only one underattached, and, as such, the only one likely to take her up on her offer.
i thought about it though, and under different circumstances i might've chosen differently. mostly i found her antics amusing. she was there because the staff assumed she was mine, when in fact she'd just happened along at the right moment to avoid being kicked out when the bar closed. i'd've been gone myself, but i had a new barback, and wanted to make sure everything went smoothly. i'd rather've been gone, back to my apartment to hang out with kevin and martha, but my responsibilities, or at least my working definition of what they ought to be, kept me at the bar, at least until close, after which there was kerry-with-a-k, whom kevin and martha thought i was serious about fucking, at least until it was too late for it to matter if we stayed or went, so we stayed.
in the end, kevin and martha left for the airport, and daniel and andrew went home for the night. when kerry-with-a-k came out of the bathroom, i called her a cab, waited with her until it came, and went home.
and here i am.

from this week's harper's weekly:

President Bush issued pardons to two
turkeys, which were then sent to Disneyland to serve as
grand marshals at a parade. "The granting of the turkey
pardon," said the President, "is not a responsibility that
I take lightly." The turkeys, Marshmallow and Yam, earned
their pardons when they beat out Democracy and Freedom in
an online poll.

i finally get it. i used to think that the present batch of shitbags in white house were simply and only nihilist powermongers who'd hijacked traditional conservative ideology, fusing its hallowed intellectual heft (or at least soundbites therefrom) to a naked play for the most uptight americans and the people who vote like them out of shame at being only human. i used to believe that, deep down, these people didn't give a shit about anything but getting to push the buttons and pull the levers to the advantage of themselves and the people who paid for the jets and commercials during the campaign and back in the old days.
but now i've realized that it's not true.
they do believe in the traditional conservative raft of ideas, in small government and personal freedom and even isolation from foreign entanglements.
the attack is two-pronged: on the one hand, they're gutting the cash-flow while upping the outlay, running up the nation's credit card debt so's to starve the beast, as it were; on the other hand, they're undermining faith in government by demonstrating just how irresponsible you can be with it: getting us into a military quagmire while the people we really have to be worried about get a free pass; infringing on personal liberties to no discernible good end (how many terrorists have they caught in the mainland us since passing the patriot act?); passing a new entitlement, on a par with medicare and social security, that makes no sense to anybody and funnels most of the funding into sectors of the economy that seem to be doing just fine without government subsidies.
they're demonstrating to us, by their own fearless example, just how bad somebody could fuck up the country and the world with the us government, as a cautionary example, so that we'll come to our senses and dissolve or at least castrate it and the big animals can resume feeding without compunction in god's ordained economic state of nature, wihout fear of reprisal or the need to cloak their motivations in highfalutin' bullshit.

It’s hard to know what to say. For the last week, every conversation I’ve had has eventually turned to the catastrophe of New Orleans, and then, once we’ve reached our collective threshhold, where the enormity of the disaster and the suffering that’s followed becomes so great that whatever words we might speak couldn’t possibly express anything but the shallowest surface reflection, we collectively turn away, overwhelmed. Moments of silence stretch, until someone broaches some other topic of conversation, anything, and we all gratefully turn our minds away.

Despite the much-vaunted immediacy of the Age of Information, we all still live in human-sized worlds. Data and information about the millions and billions of dollars in property damage, about death tolls and tens of thousands stranded in the Superdome are so much intellectual fluff, numbers without a human face, compared to the stories that have trickled my way from people who were there, stories of people found drowned in their attics, fingers scraped to the bone as they tried to claw their way to freedom while the water kept on rising, stories of cops shot in the head and left dead in the street so that someone could drive out of town.

New Orleans has always been part of America’s seedy underbelly, a place where our all-too-human penchants for vice and dionysian excess could come out and play freely and without guilt or judgement. I can imagine some among the professionally righteous thinking to themselves that perhaps this is God or Allah’s way of punishing the sinners of the Big Easy, that one can only flout the laws of whatever Book they hold dear for so long before the hammer of judgement falls. As ever, it seems that hammer falls heaviest on those least able to recover from the blow: the poor, the old and infirm, the less fortunate. After all, haven’t they proved they deserved it with the looting and the killing that followed?

Never mind that the Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Emergency Management Agency have predicted for years that this must eventually happen. Never mind that the money that might have gone to upgrading the levees disappeared, earmarked for tax cuts and wars of choice. Never mind that, although a State of Emergency was declared days before the hurricane hit the coast, there was no massive mobilization of resources to provide transportation to those without vehicles, nor deliver food and water, nor maintain order in the chaos which inevitably breaks out in the face of catastrophes of this magnitude. One way or another, we’ve known this was coming eventually, but as with so many other things, it wasn’t coming today, so maybe we can put off dealing with it, just like global warming, which many scientists believe has a more than passing relationship with the uptick in natural disasters over the last couple of decades. I’m sure that even now someone is saying that more studies need to be done before the painful decisions that are coming can be made. I’m equally sure that on the day of reckoning that those people will be saying the same thing, when it’s too late and we all reap what they have sown in our names. I hope that we’ll come to our collective senses before that day.