Journal - 2008

Waning

Where does our time go? I'm still tired from 2007's New Year's Eve party. Actually, that's not quite true. I have come to believe that New Year's Eve is the ultimate amateur night. People who usually don't go out and whoop it up use the holiday as an excuse to go bananas and muck it up for the rest of us. 2008 was a rough year. Lots of good things happened (Obama) but they were tempered by a lot of personal (loss of loved ones) and national (economic meltdown) challenges. One thing is sure. 2009 will bring some changes and I'm strapped in and ready to buy the ticket and take the ride. 12.31.08



Cough

I'm here. Really. Just over a week ago I woke up with a sore throat. The kind of sore throat I get when I sleep in a room that is too cold. Weather does change in Los Angeles. It is admittedly less violent and for that we endure wildfires, mudslides, drought and the ever-present spectre of earthquakes. At bedtime I was quite warm so I opened all the windows and turned on the ceiling fan. We were at the tail end of a late season heat wave and the temperature dropped considerably overnight. By morning I had a scratchy throat and I went about my business hoping that it was just a one-day thing. I used to get illnesses like that every winter back in colder climes. Every year one cold or other devolved into a season-spanning annoyance that in turn signaled the arrival of my perma-cough. My perma-cough outlasted the sickness by months and didn't abate until it was warm enough to once again sleep with the windows open in Chicago.

By moving south and west I have been able to dodge this yearly tradition... at least until last week. I don't know if it was a wicked cold or the flu or what. Honestly, I don't actually care. The results were roughly the same. Sleepless nights drowning in mucus. Endless days of blowing my nose and coughing up nasty stuff. Chicken soup and pot pies. I spent hours on the couch watching movies on the TV.

Here I am a week and a half later and I'm still not out of the woods. The abject misery phase is gone... only to be replaced by the dreaded perma-cough. I cough when I wake up, stand up, sit down, walk, make food, take a shower or write a journal entry. My ears click and pop whenever I swallow, which makes eating a study in distraction. Rain has arrived in southern California... this signals the start of our other season. Lots of folks dig what Louden Wainwright called Grey in LA. Weather, as a concept that is anything other than sunny is a welcome change. But it just makes being sick that much harder, and Chicago-esque. So I guess you could say that being sick when the weather sucks feels like home. 12.1.08



Birdman

This year I will attempt to cook The Bird on my charcoal grill for the 3rd time. Bird #1 was phenomenal. Last year, Bird #2 was pretty good as well. A certain amount of grilling prowess is involved, although I think that the voodoo aspect is just as important. This is what I've always loved about charcoal grilling. The element of chaos theory.

Growing up I wasn't a fan of what my family simply called "grilling." Grilling meant that dad had received an especially good paycheck or it was too hot to prepare dinner for the 7-member Armstrong family inside the house. Mom would prepare burgers or chicken or steak and dad would fire up the grill. Young boys are drawn to fire like tornadoes to a trailer park. When dad dug the bag of charcoal and lighter fluid out of the shed I could sense it from hundreds of yards away.

I was invariably off the bike and flying through the air before it even stopped and fell over. I'd hit the ground running just ahead of the dust cloud I'd created. Dad would usually let me help him stack the briquettes and spray the fluid. I'd beg him to let me light the pile and he would usually and wisely do it himself - fishing a lighter out of the pocket on his t-shirt and afterwards lighting a cigarette with the same flame. My gathered friends and I would watch the growing fire like it was part of our soul - stopping only to pick a little grass and add it to the flames so we could watch it smoke. Dad was inside showering by now and that left us to putter with the growing pyre and dare one another to squirt a little fluid at the grill without being caught. This was inherently counterintuitive because the ensuing fireball would inevitably draw my mother out of the house to run us off.

I wasn't enamored of BBQ night as a kid - mainly because of my father's penchant for burning all the food to unidentifiable pieces of pure carbon. It wasn't that he was a bad cook. He preferred his food that way. To this day he asks servers to relay his instructions to prepare his steak WELL DONE. I can almost see how someone would prefer their steak this way but anything off dad's grill was hopelessly charred. Hamburgers became small, parched meatballs. Chicken wound up on our plates resembling little baseball mitts... and tasted how you'd imagine a worn Mizuno mitt might taste. And the vegetables... well, in those days people in Illinois didn't cook vegetables on the grill. The remaining 3 food groups were filled out with potato chips and onion dip and Pepsi.

I was in college before I did a whole lot of grilling on my own. Along the way I'd tasted other people's grilled food and discovered that it didn't have to taste as if a space shuttle astronaut had rolled the passenger window down and held out a drumstick with a pair of tongs as they descended through the atmosphere. Grilled meat could be juicy, moist, tender and flavorful. Corn and other vegetables could also be prepared on a charcoal grill with similar results. Not only edible, but delicious.

I conducted empirical culinary experiments. I researched. I clandestinely observed established grillmasters and sometimes asked key questions about their techniques. My mania was all-encompassing. I even got to the point where I'd shovel out a spot on my back porch to grill cheeseburgers for my friends on New Year's Eve in Chicago. There is simply nothing - nothing that tastes like a charcoal-grilled burger when you haven't had one in months because the weather is too cold for normal people to go through the trouble of grilling.

I figured that the coup de grace of grilling was preparing the Thanksgiving turkey on the grill. Somewhere I'd read that it took all night and I am always up for eccentric feats of strength and prowess. My epiphany came with a book I received as a gift. The arrival of Cook's Illustrated Guide to Grilling and BBQ was a watershed moment in my grilling career. These guys were SERIOUS. The book isn't just a few how-to pages in the front followed by 120 pages of recipes. These guys combined the art and the science of grilling. It was Method Acting with briquettes. I became a devotee and I worship at their altar to this day.

My first attempt at a bird was three years ago. My girlfriend and I were hosting an "expatriate's" Thanksgiving for those of use who couldn't fly home to our respective home states for the holiday. I was ready to step up to the plate - so to speak - and take my first big league pitch. Having redundant systems has always sounded like a good idea to me, so I talked my girl into preparing a backup bird in the oven while I handled the new frontier of cooking something much larger than I'd ever attempted before on my venerable Webber kettle grill.

The good people at Cook's were indispensable. It didn't take all night to cook a brilliant bird on one's grill, they said, and I trusted them implicitly. I was maniacal about details... counting the precise number of briquettes used, timing things with a stopwatch and minding the grill like a first-time mother. Maybe it was beginner's luck. Maybe the first time really is the greatest. Or maybe my subsequent two grilled birds were just as delicious and I am merely enamored of the memory of that first one. To me, that first bird is my crowning achievement in my grilling history - so far, at least. I'm still an active player, and living in California just means that I can grill year-round without having to shovel or wear fleece.

Even my father has seen the light a little. I spent some time with my family in Alabama a few years back and would grill for them. Dad still prefers his steaks on the done side but he has admitted that my grilled chicken is among the best he's ever had. In no way am I gloating. Fathers cast very long shadows for their sons... and hearing that sort of thing from your father can make your day. To say the least. Thanks, dad, for inspiring me to become a grillmaster. Also, an honorable mention goes to my closest friends, who successfully surprised me with a party and new grill for my 30th birthday. I have great friends and I love all of you. 11.25.08



Locked the Front Door, Oh Boy



I was cleaning my cherished workhorse Weber charcoal grill sometime over the last several months. It was a gift from my dear friends on my 30th birthday and I can honestly say that I have put it to good use in their honor. Many a belly has been sated by its bounty. Thank you again, Bill, Jeff, Matty, Michael and Co. There is another funny story attached to that blessed assemblage of metal but I'll save it for another day.

Maybe I was prepping it for a Thanksgiving turkey. Maybe it was just one of a billion things by which I can be easily distracted on any given day. There was a crusted black film on the inside of the lid and as I poked at it with my cleaning implement the piece you see in the above picture fell off along with all the other flakes. They say that people see what they want to see... and if that's the case then I obviously want to see a rough outline of my home state. Is it a coincidence that nearly all those who procured that grill for me still live there? I think not. 11.10.08



Speechless, Almost

It has been 5 days since Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election. I feel as if I've dropped the ball in terms of writing anything about it in here. I haven't exactly been speechless, but I haven't really known what, exactly, I wanted to say. One would think I'd have been gushing 1500 words a day since 8:pm PST Tuesday night. Obama is far and away my favorite candidate in my lifetime. I grew to like Kerry because I had to do so. People eat what they are fed. I didn't vote for Obama because he was the candidate from the left. I didn't vote for him because he was black. I voted for him because he was like The Dude. He was the man for his time and place. And I voted for him for so many more reasons than that.

I managed to distract myself until about 4pm local time, when east coast results started coming in. From that point on I was glued to the TV and the Internets. Nate Silver from the polling analyst site fivethirtyeight.com had long since become the most important person in the election save for Obama himself. His repeated assurances that McCain's chances were dwindling sounded nice but I wanted real numbers. I settled in with a 3-liter growler of Stone's 10th Anniversary IPA that I'd saved for the occasion. My good friend Soupy - world class drummer and even better thinker - dropped by as the only guest out of the cadre of folks I'd invited to come over and share in my joy or sorrow for the evening. Soupy isn't a hophead so I served him a boutique porter I had hanging around and we settled in to watch the circus and discuss the clowns on parade.

I managed to wait until I had a wingman to break into the Stone IPA, and wisely so, because the stuff is, apart from being absolutely delicious, every bit of 10% Alcohol By Volume. I'd originally hope to lure all my fellow devotees of the hop to my living room to help me finish the thing. 3 liters of anything made up of 10% alcohol is a challenge. If only that rotten attorney of mine had been in town.

So I set in with my Imperial Pint of what we call Stone's 10th. I'd sat by myself around sundown with McCain leading with a scant 20 or so electoral votes. Obama had only won Vermont by then and I knew that the torrent hadn't yet let go. We on the left had conceded Kentucky and her 8 electoral votes eons ago. Kentucky was no concern of mine and I suspect that David Axelrod shared my position.

My girlfriend came home and she laid into the Stone IPA growler as well. I figured that I'd need the good ghost of Hunter S. Thompson this night... both for boozing and election reasons if I had any hope of putting a dent in the growler and surviving the electoral college dirge. Obama had taken the lead by this point. Vote-rich states like New York and Illinois had by this hour been called for Obama... along with the rest of New England. Things were going well... and still I couldn't believe it was happening. There are those on The Left who feel as if an election was stolen from us in recent memory. I'm not saying that I am one of those people... but I am not saying that I am not, either. When Orwellian times start to look eerily like modern times one comes to expect anything. Obama is black. There are people who share my blood and and surname who would never vote for him for that reason alone.

The 10% was starting to have an effect on me... and I squirmed in my chair as the better part of an hour passed with no significant change in the numbers in the juxtaposed columns on my TV. Obama was hovering around 200 and McCain seemed hung up around 126. Simple math should have eased my pain by this point. The total of the three west coast states, 73, when finally allocated to Obama, would put him over the 270 necessary to win the election. The race stayed this way for the better part of an hour. States were being called here or there... Alabama for McCain. No surprise that the state of my birth, whose governor had stood at the door to block the entry of black students a mere 45 years before, went for the Republican candidate. Barack Obama was almost two years old on that dark day.

The race seemed to be overwhelmingly tipped towards Obama's favor but nothing much seemed to be happening. It's a dangerous game for the networks and websites - playing chicken with fate in terms of calling a state one way or the other with such a small percentage of the electorate reporting legitimate numbers. Just before 8pm local time I decided to amble into the kitchen to refill my pint. I eased the heavy glass growler over as gracefully and carefully as possible. The thing weighs a good amount empty... and weighs considerably more when filled with the stuff of life. My kitchen isn't even 20 feet from my living room. Only a darkened dining room separated me from the action in the living room. The door that divided the rooms wasn't even closed.

I stepped through the doorway on the way back... and what happened next is honestly a blur. I recall hearing whoops and gasps. I am nearly tearing up as I remember it now. My universe seemed to be falling off its needlepoint precipice as I looked at the TV and tried to process what I was seeing. Images of Grant Park on Chicago's lakefront flashed throngs in jubilation. A talking head was saying the words... "Barack Obama has accumulated enough electoral votes to win." It was all a blur then and that's how I am sure I will always remember it. One by one the dominoes fell. "John McCain has called Barack Obama to offer his congratulations..." I remember not being able to sit. Standing seemed appropriate to the gravity of the moment. I remember raising both arms just as I'd done when I'd once crossed a finish line after 26.2 miles of agony. I recall tears streaming down my face. Everything was going to change. Hope had prevailed. Hope and courage and action together had been too much for fear to handle.

Somewhere along the way a couple different neighbors had joined us in my living room. I'll always remember who was there the night America stood up and moved to the left, having had enough fear and lies and obfuscation. There were hugs. And cheers. And then my phone started ringing. I have deep, deep roots in Chicago and there was a cavalcade of people with whom I had to share the moment. Obama made his name in Chicago. He's ours and now he will be president.

We might have made it halfway through the growler and that turned out to be the right decision. Obama came out on the stage in Grant Park and made a speech before those lucky few thousand who represented the dreams of millions upon millions. I stood for his speech as well. He was hopeful but also stoic. The road ahead is unclear and our motor isn't running all that well... and Obama knows this. For the first time his thoughts were turning from all-that-matters-is-November-4th to what-in-god's-name-are-we-going-to-do-now and it was all over his face. Hope had won, but it was going to take a lot more than hope to make it pay.

After the revelry and tears and hugs our guests bid us farewell. I watched some pundits try to wrap their heads around the new reality. I watched Joe and Jill Biden join the new First Family onstage. I fielded phone calls from people who knew all too well how much I'd had invested in this election. Eventually I came to my senses and turned the TV off. I cycled through news sites one last time and rinsed out my glass. I walked out on my lawn and brought my Obama '08 sign inside. I want to be able to show it to my children someday and couldn't very well do that if someone stole it on election night. Besides, I no longer had to advertise for the real underdog. It has been said that every dog has its day... and November 4th, 2008 was ours. 11.9.08



Done and Done




My civic duty is complete. At least for this morning. I've been checking my news and polling sites all morning and there are no substantial changes as of yet. The country has been eerily calm since yesterday. Change is coming and I think that everybody can feel it in their bones. I have been awaiting this day for a long time. And now, we wait.

Prop 8

For those of you who don't live in California, one of the most important ballot propositions is Prop 8. Prop 8, if passed, will amend the constitution of the State of California to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry. Without getting deep into the issues around it, I just don't see why anybody should care about how other people choose to live their lives. If you're against gay marriage and you're not gay... what difference does it make? Nobody can explain, exactly, why gay marriage would be a threat to marriage. A threat. We need more love in the world, not less. We need to lift people up, not tear them down. Call me a hokey liberal if you like - I'll be proud to wear the label.

My favorite aspect of the Prop 8 conundrum is the No-on-Prop 8 commercial that recently has been running in California. The voiceover is done by Samuel L. Jackson. I applaud the man's courage... and I can't help but say "Vote No on Prop 8, Motherfuckers!" out loud every single time I see the ad. 11.4.08 11:48am PST

Distraction #47 - jogging. 3 miles. 12:07pm PST

Distraction #53 - Returning an overdue libarary book. Mission accomplished. 2:45pm PST

Distraction #61 - Buying a wood carving set that I'll use to carve pumpkins next year. I bought some other spooky supplies at a craft store and got a 40% off coupon for any single item. I was all jazzed to pick up this little wood carving kit until I noticed that the damn coupon wasn't valid until after Halloween. Balls. So I went today. It was a welcome distraction. 3:04pm PST

North Poll vs. South Poll

It is now roughly 5pm PST on election day. Polls are closed in many east coast states and results are tumbling in. Kentucky has already been called for McCain. It's a pretty state - I've driven across it about a million times in my life - but McCain can keep it. Vermont has been called for Obama - no surprises there. Obama is currently leading in the popular vote with the numbers spread across the various TV networks. FiveThirtyEight.com, my bible, hasn't reflected any states as called just yet. Help us Nate Silver, you're our only hope. 5pm PST







OK. Up and at 'em. I've already cycled through my news and polling sites and tried to get an answer about a rather unclear part of an online unemployment form - the latter to no avail. The automated voice said "We are unable to help you at this time... goodbye." Thanks a lot.

Above is the most amusing thing I found in this morning's political news. Somebody went around and took down a bunch of Obama signs in Las Cruces, NM. So a local guy with a large format printer made the above graphic, printed out a bunch and placed them around town. Nice work, fellas. Although your Obama logo is listing a little to the left. Perhaps the guy lives near a mountain. I once got a speeding ticket while passing through Las Cruces late one summer night. 11.3.08 11am PST

Read It

A very well-penned article can be found here. Try to ignore the vitriol spewing from the right wingers in the comments section as they are overcome with sheer terror while watching their ideology slip away. 12:57pm PST

Sad News

In the last few minutes, the news that Barack Obama's grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, passed away has reached news sources. Such sad news in the waning hours of a seemingly eternal election season. As if the election wasn't emotional enough. 2:20pm PST



Stay On Target

We're almost there. This obscenely long election cycle will be wrapping up in less than 48 hours. As for me, it can't come soon enough. I've been engaged by this circus for far too long. I recently lost my job, which means that - while looking for gainful employment - I have every waking hour to devote to the latest information. The Internets have become my best friend and worst enemy. Who needs to shower? There are new poll numbers coming at me from every angle. Four years ago I was only this manic on election day... sitting at my laptop and hitting F5 every 30 seconds to refresh my browser.

This time around I'm on a Mac... so it's a different keystroke to refresh... and I've got several news sites tabbed and open. It's annoying and maybe even embarrassing because I know that it is grotesque - and yet I cannot look away.

Tomorrow and Tuesday will be feverish. I will simply be able to focus on nothing else. I don't have The Cable, so my information comes via the Internets and whatever local TV stations I can pick up with my rabbit ears. I much prefer the former because of the lack of commercials. This does mean that I am unable to watch any given night's airing of The Daily Show until the following morning when they post it on their website. This is normally only a minor inconvenience... but not being able to watch the night before the election's show until the day of the election will be like torture.

The State of the Race

The McCain campaign has been acting like a dying archer pinned against the moat. They're shooting any and every arrow in their quiver hoping to hit something. They've shot the one with the dented arrowhead, a few crooked ones, the one with the missing feather and the one they found in the woods behind the garage. They're doing what any cornered animal would do... snarling and trying to act dangerous. But they're facing a tall, blue tide. The race is "tightening" a little - such as it is - just as all the experts and pundits said it would. All the pollsters are posting a multitude of reassuring articles on their websites... framing the math from a million different angles in order to help us sleep. I haven't yet resorted to drinking, although I have not yet retired for the evening. What with the extra hour and all I could yet down a few pints. It is unlikely that I will but my beer fridge is up there in the living room... and its holds are full of plenty of brown bottles of hoppy elixir.

Tomorrow is the last day for candidates to do any realistic campaigning. I applaud both their efforts as they try to convince the last 18 people in the country who haven't yet grown a pair and made up their minds. If you can't figure it out by now... maybe you should just stay home. I guess I just have a hard time believing that anyone who has done any research at all about Obama and McCain and their respective ideologies could still be unsure about which one they prefer. And maybe there's the rub... those undecideds out there will likely never make up their minds... and I'm glad that I'm not dating any of them. I have a hard enough time discussing where my girlfriend and I are going to eat on any given night and she's known for whom she is going to cast her vote for a REALLY LONG TIME.

I am going to attempt to head to bed. If sleep doesn't come easily and my visions are made up of pie charts, percentages, graphs, and multi-colored maps of the United States perhaps I'll be back. If I succeed, look for a whole series of updates Monday and Tuesday. Good night... and good luck to us all. 11.2.08


B is for Bimbo





Nice work. Here is a post from the blog of a Fox News executive vice president, John Moody.

October 23rd, 2008 9:32 PM Eastern Moment of Truth It had to happen. Less than two weeks before we vote for a new president, a white woman says a black man attacked her, then scarred her face, and says there was a political motive for it. Ashley Todd, a 20-year-old white volunteer for John McCain’s presidential campaign, says she was mugged at an ATM machine in Pittsburgh (my hometown) by a big black man. She further says he threw her down, then disfigured her by carving the letter “B” into her face with a sharp implement when he saw that she supported McCain, not Barack Obama. Part of the appeal of, and the unspoken tension behind, Senator Obama’s campaign is his transformational status as the first African-American to win a major party’s presidential nomination. That does not mean that he has erased the mutual distrust between black and white Americans, and this incident could become a watershed event in the 11 days before the election. If Ms. Todd’s allegations are proven accurate, some voters may revisit their support for Senator Obama, not because they are racists (with due respect to Rep. John Murtha), but because they suddenly feel they do not know enough about the Democratic nominee. If the incident turns out to be a hoax, Senator McCain’s quest for the presidency is over, forever linked to race-baiting. For Pittsburgh, a city that has done so much to shape American history over the centuries, another moment of truth is at hand.

It should go without saying that Ms. Todd's story was a hoax. Mr. Moody, how you take your crow? I added the italics... mostly because I like that part, but also to make sure that sentence wasn't missed. This dopey young zealot branded herself. If she had thought to carve an "O" instead of a "B" onto her face while using that mirror perhaps her batshit story might have held a little more water. We were 13 letters away from Mr. Moody's prophecy - and the fact that she could have gotten away with it is a little scary.

The saddest thing about this story is that now everybody knows that this girl is mentally ill and needs help. As for me, I'll just hope that her scarlet letter "B" will still be visible on her cheek in the mirror on election night. And, hey kids! Cheap Halloween costume! 10.24.08



The Empress Has New Clothes

Does it really come as a surprise to anybody that Sarah Palin's wardrobe is largely new and unbelievably expensive? I don't really think that this qualifies as news. There are still issues to discuss, people. Sure, the debates are over. Obama's Styrofoam columns are long gone. Palin's acceptance speech zingers are on their way to Alpha Centauri. But we have 11 full days until election day. That's plenty of time for... well, what I don't know. But whatever it is, there is plenty of time for it to happen.

Early voting is a big deal this year. This is fine with me as it likely favors Obama... who has been ahead in the polls since roughly the middle of September. The bad news is that if we win, we really lose. Who wants to be the lucky schmuck who will inherit the financial clusterfuck that our economy has become? It was going to be bad enough after 8 years of Dubya running amok on the world stage like... uh... a toddler on the world stage.

Speaking of our favorite reigning low-approval ratings champion lame duck, let's take a look back at what I was writing in here during his election cycles, 4 and 8 years ago, respectively. I've been thinking about this all week. Here's my entry from November 3rd, 2004 - election night of that fateful year.

Donkeys Live A Long Time We are so fucked that I don't know where to begin. I try not to be pessimistic but I really think that this is the beginning of the end for America. Sound drastic? Look at the numbers. What kind of national debt are we going to have after four more years of incompetent leadership? Our great grandchildren will be paying off the debt as it currently stands. How are those same young people going to feel when they have to pay off the national debt on a military salary once compulsory military service becomes a reality? How are we going to stretch our already overextended military enough to invade a couple more countries? Like trees? Take a picture. We're going to cut them all down to get at the last drop of available oil to make gasoline for our Hummers that the government already gives us a tax break to own. The future of Iraq? It will continue to blossom into the best Al Qaeda training ground that our money can buy. Be careful not to trip over that pile of bodies. Gay marriage? The kooks actually think that it is important enough to amend the constitution in order to take away the pursuit of happiness. Roe Vs. Wade? Forget it. The republican party will own your uterus. Once that fucking idiot appoints a couple more zealot right wing supreme court justices the republicans will have control of the executive and judicial branches, the house of representatives and the senate. Big Brother is watching. I am embarrassed to be an American. I am frightened for our future. I am sickened to look into the eyes of my countrymen and women knowing that fully half of them actually cast a vote for that man. In a word, I am disgusted. Oh, and I'm thinking Costa Rica. The weather is nicer. 11.3.04

And then there is this... from the closest post-election day entry I could find from 2000.

This Will Sting a Little "Wisdom is knowing that things won't always be as they are right now." - me I might have a foolish heart but I am still standing. Pain is like fire. It cleanses you and baptizes you and if you survive you come out on the other side a stronger person. You have to be careful though, for if you aren't paying attention you could come out a stronger and bitter person. Surviving anything is all about time. Everything in the Universe is moving and changing at speeds both too rapid for us to conceive and too slow for us to notice. The year 2000 finds us all in a time where everything changes too fast to even name it sometimes. The game is over before we have even bought our popcorn. Human time remains the same despite our best conscious and unconscious efforts to change it. We put our pants on one leg at a time whether we wear underwear or not. How can we tell if we are ahead or behind the curve anymore? I sure as hell can't. I'm usually too busy trying to keep up to notice if I have blown past it. 11.15.00

Not even a mention of political bullshit. I was writing to a friend the other day... a friend who wisely abstains from discussing politics with anyone. I wrote to him that I wished I could stop talking about politics. I also told him that politics had become my white whale. Which is true, perhaps sadly. Such as it is.

My brother, David, once told me that he thought that I should teach Political Science. My answer to him was as honest as anything I've said in a decade. I responded that, as much as I talked about politics, I couldn't stand the stuff. This is also true fucking blue. And in that respect it could be said that I have become a true junkie. I have become hopelessly addicted to something I cannot stand. There are so many things I'd rather be doing, but I cycle endlessly through news sites. I should be playing guitar - finishing a hundred songs - but I'm volunteering in swing states. I should be riding my bike, but I'm making calls. I should be booking shows for my band, but instead I'm ordering stickers and posters. I should be looking for a new job... but I'm WRITING ABOUT POLITICS IN THIS FUCKING JOURNAL.

But I look back to a note from the past me to the present me in that journal entry from November of 2000. Looking back I can see what was dogging me at the time. Unsurprisingly, it was a girl. I recall being annoyed that George W. Bush was about to be Doofus-in-Chief - but I was writing about losing a girl. I remember precisely how I felt about the latter as well. Women have always been my kryptonite. I'm fairly certain that my current girlfriend would say that I am full of shit in this regard. Three pints in it's hard for me to mount a legitimate defense.

Instead, I'll try to bring this entry full circle. Barack Obama has the republicans on their heels. Part of that is the seeming inevitability of his career arc. The other part of that is the colossal reaming that Dubya and his cronies have put us through lo these many years. They're teetering on well-heeled heels of their own cobbling. Will the tide slosh high enough on the beach to put someone other than an Old White Guy's name on the mailbox at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? Tune in again next week. Or, more aptly, the week after next - to see if our heroes will escape the clutches of Irrelevant Wardrobe Eskimo Woman and vanquish Negative Man and his Army of Snarkyness. 10.23.08



Am the Lizard King!



This picture - taken at the end of last night's final presidential debate - sums up the current state of the race. Obama is ahead, calmly and coolly moving forward. John McCain is behind and awkwardly trying to figure out something. Everyone has awkward moments. God knows I wouldn't want a hundred cameramen following me around all the time. It's just that this particular moment it time is so symbolic. McCain showed up in a way that only he can. He made brazen statements and bent the truth to his will. It's just that Obama is utterly unflappable. If we can pull this off, it will be a triumph of reason in the face of hype, ideology and blind faith. 10.16.08



En Fuego




A snapshot of mid-October 2008. We are three weeks to the day until the 2008 election day. Democrat Barack Obama leads Republican John McCain by somewhere between 5 and 10 points, depending on who you ask. The economy is like a delirious, drunken bull in a china shop. I've heard rumors that there are a few teams still playing baseball. I am an uncle again - for the 9th time. The fires have started in Southern California.

It is hard to explain the fire situation to people who don't live in Southern California. I get calls from a family member or friend back east every now and again asking if I'm OK. They have invariably just watched something on their hometown news that depicted Hollywood engulfed in flames. I appreciate the concern. I really do. But let me assure you that if it ever gets to the point where my apartment is threatened by wildfires then we're looking at a national crisis. I live in town. It's not that it couldn't happen, it's just that if the Glendale/Eagle Rock area of Los Angeles is on fire, then it's likely that all of Los Angeles is being seriously and legitimately threatened. The worst I've seen was before I actually moved out here in the fall of 2004. I was dining outside and there were little bits of ash flying around everywhere. I was riding my my friend Sue's car and we were headed over the hill from Hollywood to the San Fernando Valley on the 101. On the crest of the hill that divides them we could both easily see the Simi Valley Fire creeping over the hilltops on the opposite side of the valley. It looked like a volcano.

Note that the car in the foreground of this procession is a Toyota Prius. Proof positive that this picture is California and not Mississippi burning. 10.14.08



McCain 1908!




John McCain is a 20th century solution to a 21st century problem. 10.09.08



Wisdom Here! Get Your Red Hot Wisdom!

Here be wisdom. 10.08.08



Hollywood Town Hall



Today is the day of the 2nd presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain. The above graph was taken from the polling site www.fivethirtyeight.com. It reflects the state of the race as of 3:30pm CDT today. I started paying attention to them somewhere along the line. They're admittedly left-leaning but about as legitimate as any polling site I've seen. They've accurately followed the trends reflected in all the other news sites that I regularly check and have all manner of algorithms and formulas they use to track the campaigns using a whole bevy of polls. I will likely never fully comprehend how they go about that process.

In two hours and nineteen minutes our contenders will take the stage in Nashville. I can only imagine that both men have arrived on the ground and will be at Belmont University shortly - if they aren't already there.

I have posted the above graph because I suspect that it will change after tonight's debate. I am not saying who I think will "win" because that sort of thing isn't quantifiable. They don't debate until one of them wins by two. McCain is desperate right now but has a well-earned reputation as both a fighter and someone who cannot control his temper. It will be interesting to see how he handles himself. Can he find it in his creaky heart to simply look at Barack Obama? His body language at the first debate displayed a deep-seated loathing rather than implying that he might be capable of working towards the common good with people with whom he disagrees. On the other hand, is Obama capable of maintaining his cucumber coolness without a litany of "That's not true" and "I agree with Senator McCain" statements? The funny thing is, much to my dismay the strategy - if it can even be called as such - seemed to work last time. Hold onto your hats, folks. Things are going to get interesting. T-minus 27. 10.7.08



100+

The one good thing about the Cubs seemingly-inevitable collapse is that, as Cubs fans, we are used to it. We have come to expect failure because the one thing that we know our team excels at is losing in October. One week ago today we were going to take over the world. This was our year. And here we are, not even a week into October and we've been out of the race for a couple days. I am disgusted, ashamed and embarrassed. Worst of all, because I live in Los Angeles I have to endure the ceaseless taunting of Dodgers fans.

But even with this morning's (latest) stock market crash the Cubs' first round exit has left me feeling positive about the world in one key aspect. My attorney and I were certain that the moment the Cubs' pitcher threw the final strike of the World Series - the precise nanosecond when the ball impacted the catcher's glove with the scoreboard favoring the Cubs - a black hole would open up somewhere in the ivy along the left field wall and swallow up the entire solar system. The sky would turn to sackcloth and the moon would be the color of blood. Hordes of locusts would devour the Ernie Banks flag and mass hysteria would ensue. Dogs and cats would be found living together. But now we're safe. The Cubs screwed the pooch and the fate of the universe is secure. At least for now. 10.6.08



One Hundred Years of Turpitude





It is 7:07pm PDT. It is the first cloudy evening of the fall of 2008. Because it is cloudy I can see the lights of Dodger Stadium diffused in the clouds in the southern sky out my window. Normally this would be more or less irrelevant to me. Tonight, however, these may be the lights of doom. My hometown team, the hapless Cubs of Chicago, are standing under those lights and facing the Dodgers. This, too, would normally be no big deal. "Hey, the Cubbies are in town," I might think if I happened to know that they were. The first pitch should be hitting the catcher's glove right about now.

But tonight the Dodgers hold the key to whether the Cubs will be playing golf for the next 5 months - or baseball for at least one more day. You see, these Cubs dropped both the first pair of home games of this 5-game, first round series. Even if those lights smile upon them and they manage to win tonight they will face another elimination game again tomorrow. And if, somehow, through imaginary curses, sacrificial goats and all-too real Bartmans, they win that game, too, they'll have to win yet another game to win the series. I am not saying it isn't possible. It's just that the Chicago Cubs and the month of October are not particularly copacetic.

There are many Cubs fans back in Chicago who are far more devoted than I could ever be. May fate look over Jeff, Matty, Jason and Tonya tonight. We'll need luck... and perhaps more runs than the Dodgers to pull it off for the next three games. And if the Cubs somehow manage to escape from Chavez Ravine to force a game 5 at least that final game would be back at Wrigley Field, nestled as it is in a beautiful neighborhood listing slowly towards autumn proper. And I won't have to hear the fireworks at Dodger Stadium with my own ears. 10.4.08



My Aversion To The Woman Cannot Possibly Be Overstated

Sarah Palin is my nemesis - my arch enemy. She's my Lex Luthor, Wicked Witch of the West, Saul Zaentz, Gozer the Destructor, Hans Gruber, Darth Vader and my second grade teacher, Sister Mary Jo, all rolled into one well-dressed non sequitur. Her mere existence enrages me. I still recall, lo these 32 days ago, when I awoke to the news that McCain had picked a woman whose name I had never heard as his running mate. It seems like a lifetime ago.

I am absolutely incredulous as for how, having heard the woman speak, anyone can still believe she has any business on a presidential ticket. People who cannot balance their checkbook or remember to water their plants are apparently enamored by her. They seem to think that it's a good idea to have someone "like themselves" put their hat in the ring. Have any of these folks looked in the mirror lately? I have, and I want someone orders of magnitude smarter and more collected than I'll ever hope to be running the show. Or even running behind the guy running the show.

I have largely avoided writing too much about her because every mention of her name is just fuel on the inferno. Outrage draws attention and there is no shortage of attention for Sarah Palin.

I should never say such things, but I hope that Joe Biden eats her soul tomorrow night. 10.1.08



T-minus 35

My girlfriend found a funny picture on the Internets. I used Photoshop magic to tweak it a little and have decided to post it here. I hope that my right wing friends and siblings have a sense of humor.

Debate #1

We hosted a debate watching party last Friday night. I have devolved into the sort of person who is a freak with a yard sign. Believe it or not I reluctantly became involved in the political process. I was admittedly happier during the gay nineties when Wild Bill was in the oval office and life seemed simpler. We weren't involved in two wars and I was broke but always had money for beer. Scandals were about stains on dresses instead of inconceivable piles of money being given to petulant fools who told everybody that they knew what they were doing. I guess that maybe our biggest mistake was believing them.

My father taught me to never trust any politician. If he voted he would fall somewhere loosely among the Libertarians because he wants to be able to both pee and shoot a gun off his front porch. Luckily for most of us he is safely sequestered in rural Alabama. Now, I love my father. He taught me innumerable things about life... usually in the manner in which a southern male does such things... by not talking about them. Sooner or later you figure out that you learn by watching. Watching what your father does and does not do. He is a Southern Man. I was, as he would say, raised Yankee. Except that I doubt that people who say such things would be likely to capitalize the "Y."

Countless books and movies have been made about the conundrum of fathers and sons. It isn't really until the son grows older and starts taking on similar responsibilities as his father that he starts to have a clue. And usually that clue is that you realize that your father didn't have any more of a clue than you do. Every generation is trying to figure out how to get by in the times in which they find themselves. Wise fathers show and tell their sons how to do they best they can. Wise sons simply do the best they can.

But back to my father. His situation growing up was light years away from mine. He did the best he could and I'm not complaining. His father and his time taught him that politicians are simply not to be trusted. By and large, I agree with him. I've said for years that I am not a member of any political party, and also that I believe that the two party system is broken. I was just speaking with my attorney a bit ago. He has been saying for years that the next president is completely screwed. I tend to agree, but we both think that we'll be worse off with McCain running the show. As for not trusting any of them... I'm more pragmatic that dad. Somebody has to drive. We're just trying to pick the best driver for the terrain. I guess my attorney and I are really just wondering how long it might be until our society reaches Mad Max territory.

Thunderdome

There are harbingers of doom running amok in our country. The hapless Chicago Cubs have their best record in a century and are screaming into the playoffs. It is raining in Pasadena in September. The stock market plunged 777 points today. My girlfriend has been poking around on Google since the closing bell just waiting for the religious kooks to chime in on that numerical coincidence. I imagine that it wouldn't have taken very long had it instead closed a mere 666 points down.

The impetus behind the unlucky sevens was the House of Representatives' flunking the bailout bill earlier today. I have a suspicion that many Americans have a two pronged problem of comprehension in terms of this crisis. First, they've never seen that kind of money. And neither has anyone they've ever met. It's tantamount to interstellar space and time. Most folks haven't the foggiest idea what a light year really is. Secondly, save for the people who have actually lost their homes this crisis doesn't affect them at all in their daily lives.

People in Lawrence County, Alabama buy the local stores out of milk and bread when there is an ice storm in the forecast, not when some rich people in New York City are losing their shirts. Regular, working Americans won't take note until the rotten apple falls in their yard. Which is just like the war(s). The neocons would have us believe we are locked in a mortal struggle for the fate of civilization - which we very well may be - but you wouldn't know it at the fragrance counter at the mall or tire shop down the street. The last time we really were locked in a mortal struggle for the fate of civilization there were scrap drives and rubber drives and mandatory blackouts. Now it's just BE AFRAID, but please, go to the mall.

On the upside, this mess is some cold water in the shorts of a lot of people when it comes to my archenemy, Sarah Palin. They're realizing that they don't want her anywhere near a crisis of this magnitude. On the downside, I still agree with my attorney. Bad things are coming and the next POTUS is FUBAR. Mad Max will be camped out on my lawn singing The Dustbowl Blues.

Glory Days

This is a picture of the illustrious Hock Trollmaster of the famous rock band, High Noon. It is widely known that he has the longest middle finger in rock & roll. 9.29.08



This Is More Or Less Irrelevant, But...

The A B C's according to Sarah Palin:

A, B, C, D, E, F, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, W Z.

How about a little less yammering about "Fixin' an Shakin' up" and a little more time speaking like an educated person? Making fun of the way someone talks is 3rd grade material, and for that I apologize. It's just that I can barely listen to the woman speak without throwing up.

And then there's Johnny Boy with his whistling pronunciation of the letter "S." This seems to be a recent development to me as I've just started to notice him doing it. I used to have a spot-on impression of my own aged grandfather doing the same thing. It was funny, and I dearly miss him, but it was a bellwether of his advancing age before he passed away.

Simple Math

Can people who think that the universe is only 6000 years old comprehend 700 billion dollars? I believe that the universe is, oh, let's say orders of magnitude older than 6000 years and I have a hard time wrapping my head around paying 700 billion dollars for anything.

It must be nice to be a capitalist. You get to play with and steal a lot of money and make up the rules so that whatever you're doing is always legal. "Small government and free markets!" is their rallying cry. That is, until they fuck it all up and need that government they derided to come wipe their butts and pull their pants back up. They're just like a teenage boy who gets his car stuck at the make out spot and has to call his girlfriend's dad to come pull them out of the ditch in the middle of the night. Except the tow is going to cost 700 billion dollars and we all have to pay for it. 9.25.08



This Just In

John McCain called David Letterman to cancel tonight's appearance on The Late Show. The following is hot off the wire from The Drudge Report.

"In the middle of the taping Dave got world that McCain was, in fact, just down the street being interviewed by Katie Couric. Dave even cut over to the live video of the interview, and said, "Hey, Senator, can I give you a ride to the airport?"

Earlier in the show, Letterman kept saying, "You don't suspend your campaign. This doesn't smell right. This isn't the way a tested hero behaves," and he joked "I think someone's putting something in his Metamucil."

"He can't run the campaign because the economy is cratering? Fine, put in your second string quarterback, Sarah Palin. Where is she?"

"What are you going to do if you're elected and things get tough? Suspend being president? We've got a guy like that now!"

I've always loved David Letterman. 9.24.08 3:58pm PDT



Damn Everything But the Circus

I've had the date and time of the first presidential debate on my calendar for some time. I have been chomping at the bit to see these two guys on the same stage. Is there are room on earth big enough to hold the spin? It will be the latest main attraction in this election-cum-circus that has been dominating the news since people got bored with the war(s) a couple years back.

Today, John McCain called for a a delay in the first debate scheduled for this Friday evening. This stunt coincides with two things... the current state of our economic syste, which is teetering on the brink of catastrophic failure, and Barack Obama's surge in the polls. Depending on which sign you have in your yard you will likely interpret this request in one of two ways.

If you are a McCain supporter I'd be willing to bet that this suggestion to delay the debate feels like sound logic. You'd like to see our leaders back in Washington instead of Podunk, Ohio - where they could theoretically do someting about the crisis. A quick stop by my know-thine-enemy news site Foxnews.com reinforces this suspiscion.

If you are an Obama supporter, then this whole thing seems like just another ruse - a Palin appointment-esque tactic designed to distract our populace of consumer/citizens.

To me, it sounds like a good idea but I'm not sure that it is one. It is a political move, to be sure. Believe it or not, we have a sitting president with his very own administration. This latest move by McCain just seems like he's grabbing for anything within reach. He is a maverick who is willing to gamble with his future. I have been once again reminded that I do not want him gambling with mine. 9.24.08



Huzzah for Tone Loc

Loc, you are The Man. Not The Man who keeps the rest of us working folk down, but The Man who takes care of a brother. 9.19.08



Wish Me Luck

Without it I'll be dead in the water. I am about to make some software changes that will enhance my ability to keep up with this here website. If it doesn't work I'll be robbing Peter to pay Paul, so to speak - giving up something to get somethig else. If everything goes properly I'll be back in business soon. See you on the other side. 9.18.08



Shine On

The world lost an almost faceless legend on Monday.

The members of rock and roll juggernaut Pink Floyd always let the music be bigger than they were. Their founding keyboardist, Richard Wright, passed away from an undisclosed type of cancer on Monday. In a band of personalities predisoposed to shun the spotlight, Wright was even the most reclusive of the bunch. He could walk down the street in any American town and the only remarkable thing people might notice about him was that he spoke in a British accent.

Along with his screaming Hammond organ on the track "In the Flesh" from their 1979 album The Wall, his ethereal soundscapes, jazzy electric piano licks and elemental synthesizer playing nearly wrote the book on rock keyboards for me. Perhaps only Benmont Tench sits higher on the mountain than Richard Wright.

I never met the man, but I did see him play live a couple times. It wasn't about jumping around, bedding models, fighting with photographers and getting thrown out of bars for Wright. It was always about the music. So, rest in peace, sir. Thank you for being big enough to let the music be bigger than all of us.

The Sweetest Sound

Last night I worked up the courage to take apart my laptop to see if anything was obviously amiss. For those of you not paying attention, my Powerbook slipped and fell about 5 inches to the floor in the Las Vegas airporton Monday afternoon. Afterwards the sound stopped working. I spent the night gnashing my teeth and lamenting the fact that I was going to have to find $3000 for a new laptop.

Yesterday, as a last ditch attempt before resigning myself to a life without music and aural notifications, I took the thing apart. Most people aren't crazy enough to take a part a laptop. Hell, most people's eyesight isn't even good enough to see the screws. I, however, am unafraid to take things apart to see how they work... or at least attempt to fix them. The way I see it, somebody repairs them. They're no differnt than I am. Bipedal. Two arms. Two hands. Large cranium. Opposable thumbs.

I sat at my desk and amassed my arsenal of tiny screwdrivers. I'd done this once before when my wifii card died. I got it open and back together again with no luck in repairing the wifi. So I guess I sort of knew what I was in for. Tiny screws were removed and carefully lined up on my desk in the pattern in which I took them out. Even smaller screws were then removed and added to the array on my desk. Breathing tends to slow when one is doing tasks like this. Ther are a lot of very small and exceedingly delicate components inside a laptop. It would be easy to forget that this silver box I carry around has orders of magnitude more computing power than the Apollo-era space capsules that got us to the moon and back.

So there I sat, my beloved laptop in pieces on my lap. I checked wires and little connectors. OK, this wire goes here, that one there. Everything looks OK - at least to the extend that I comprehend what the parts are at all. I had my trusty old PC laptop open so I could consult other fools like me. I found a picture of where the sound card lay inside the chassis. Sure enough, by following the cable over to it I noticed a connector was loose. It was oriented in a way that would have caused it to come undone with a jolt to an upside-down computer. I clicked it into place with that "aha!" sort of feeling. My gut told me that I was victorius.

I put the thing back together as quickly as I could and hit the power button. The moment of truth. The black screen... and then... that Apple startup chord was the most beautiful thing I'd heard in weeks, months, maybe longer. There was a brief hitch while I figured out that I'd lift the balance slider panned all the way to the left speaker. I centered it and the right speaker came to life. I raised my fists into the air just like I did when I crossed the finish line for the Chicago marathon.

The rollercoaster of life goes on. I still wound up shelling out $600 for car repairs yesterday. But I will chose to look on the bright side. As much as I would love a new laptop $600 is a lot less than the additional $2800 I'd have to beg, borrow or steal to pay for a new one. 9.17.08



Phuque uh Duque

I am traveling today. Chicago to Las Vegas to Los Angeles - or, Burbank, truth be told. I arrived in Vegas and scouted out a power outlet. As I sat on the floor along the main hall of the terminal in the Las Vegas airport I got my laptop out of my bag. I set it leaning against the wall on its side. Like a fool. It slipped and fell to the carpeted floor. It wasn't far, only the width of the laptop itself closing the side of the triangle - and winding up flat on the floor upside down. The little pulsing LED that tells me the thing is alive didn't even blink. It was still slowly and calmly fading from lit to dark and back again. Just like it always does.

So my momentary terror was alleviated. Momentarily.

I sat down, dug out the ear buds from my bag and fired up iTunes to play some music while I typed and the battery charged. I press play. Nothing. I press pause. Still nothing. I check the cable. Nothing. I try the little volume up and down keys that usually make such a pleasing, Apple-centric sound when I normally press them. Nothing. I pull out the headphones and try the speakers. Nothing. I perform the IT guy's creed. Reboot. Nothing. I can see that iTunes is playing, there is just no sound. Nothing.

Somehow, I have broken my laptop's ability to play sound. Everything else seems to work just fine, which I guess is good. But now I can add this new problem to the fact that my wifi card died a couple years back. At home this is irrelevant, I just plug into an ethernet cable and deal with it. Once upon a time I felt cool because I was wireless anywhere in my apartment. Or even the world. Nowadays the Greentown wireless router broadcasts to no one. Shit. This really bums me out.

The reality is setting in now. No more listening to anything while working. No more checking of CDs before or after I burn them. No more checking out bands online. No more streaming WFUV. No more sound. Period. I'll never hear the sacred Mac startup sound on this machine again. Shit.

Sure, I could take it in to be fixed. Or I could put the money I'd use to fix my list of problems and put it towards a new computer. A computer with functioning wireless. And sound. Shit. Repeat after me, Joe, you lunkhead... I will never prop my laptop against anything ever again.

Like I have $2,600.00 lying around to buy a new computer. Shit. Maybe I'll take the damn thing apart and look for unplugged connectors or broken solder. What have I got to lose? Shit.

Burn After Reading

My attorney, my girlfriend and I went to see the new Coen Brothers movie last night. Burn After Reading is a return to quirky, sometimes black comedy after their bleak, Oscar worthy No Country for Old Men. I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's always hard to decide what I think about a Coen Brothers movie the first time I see one. Wes Anderson movies are exactly the same way.

Critics panned this most recent Coens picture. But they also panned The Big Lebowski when it came out. I find Lebowski to be wickedly funny and I discover new quotable lines even now - years later. I also recently watched their film noir genre piece, The Man Who Wasn't There, and dug it even more than I did the first time around. So I am going to hold off on what I think about this one - or at lest telling you what I think about this one. Keep in mind that they are lambasting spy movies and political intrigue flicks. If you like Joel and Ethan's work you won't be dissappointed with Burn After Reading.

.500

The Bears dropped their 2nd game of the season yesterday. After stealing a win from Indianapolis for their season opener they ran out of gas in Carolina. I happened to be in Chicago and it was raining. My attorney had also just had his wedding reception the night before so sitting still on the couch for a few hours sounded like a better idea than it nomally does to me. I could feel it coming. The loss, I mean. Being a Bears fan is a tough row to hoe when one is easily bored with boring football.

"What's the play call, coach?"

"Run it up the middle!"

This may be the best record we have all season. 9.15.08



Cue the Calliope

The McCain camp has turned this election into a circus - complete with an American Idol/Desperate Housewives VP candidate and The World's Oldest Man.

Watch closely, folks, as they turn lies to truth right before your very eyes in Orwell's Wild Ride and Memory Hole tent! Listen to the Pundits on display while they weave a never ending web of contradiction! Hear Selective Memory Man recall distorted versions of events of yesteryear! See the Incredible Shrinking Middle Class! Watch as perfectly rational adult women undermine their own best interests in the Equal Rights Distorted Reality Hall of Mirrors. See the Amazing Crumbling Infrastructure creak under the weight of the Administration of Ideologues!

See Caribou Barbie shoot helpless and endangered polar bears from a moving plane high in the air! Watch Mac the Indestructible crash no fewer than 5 airplanes and live to tell!

It's all smoke and mirrors, folks. Please do not the party of Dubya convince you that things will change with another four years. They're like an abusive spouse. They'll say anything to get let back into the bedroom. Haven't you seen enough?

I was sickened to read the other day that Palin's rimless glasses are causing a fashion sensation. These are the people who will vote for her because she has a vagina even though that vagina is attached to a scheming and opportunistic brain that will work tirelessly to take our country back to some idyllic place that never existed. Perhaps my only solace lies in the fact that they are also the demographic who are more interested in new glasses than they are in voting at all.

Mayberry

Mayberry never existed. But the republicans seem to think that it did. It seems to me that Republicans want to take us back to a place that never existed while the democrats want to pull us forward towards a place that may never exist. Republicans want all of America to be like Mayberry. Democrats want us to work towards Utopia. I don't think either is more realistic than the other, but I do know that I am firmly on the side of a constant struggle to make things better than they are. The future is out there. It is coming. Mayberry is back there somewhere in our collective memory. But that memory is no more than that. Mayberry never existed. It was a back lot set where they shot a TV show. Fake buildings. Facades. Wouldn't you rather go where we have to go anyway? The future is real. Be part of it. 9.10.08



Zap

Here's to hoping that when scientists fire up the Large Hadron Collider tomorrow it causes some sort of brain wave-altering vortex that causes millions of people in the Great Plains and Deep South areas of the United States to no longer give a shit about what other people do with their genitalia. Or whether or not they wear a flag pin. Or maybe causes them to lose interest in war. Or mindless consumerism. I wonder if the people protesting this large scale scientific experiment are the direct descendents of the folks who locked up Galileo. 9.9.08



60

60 days to go. I have come to be obsessed with the 24-hours-a-day news machine's coverage of our election fracas. I am repulsed by it yet I cannot look away. I, like so many of my countrypersons (how liberal of me to not say countrymen), feel that so much is on the line this time. I'm proud of my boy Obama. He has reacted to the right wing onslaught with dignity and intelligence.

However, I am disgusted by Sarah Palin.  She gives a speech like a catty high schooler trying to get elected in student council... light on substance and heavy on lies and insult.  The sad and dangerous thing is that people whose lives are light on substance and who revel in lies and insult will eat it like the cake her party wants to serve them.

Johnny Mac takes the stage tonight to perform the final act in the lead up to the time when most Americans start to pay attention. I'm somewhat jealous of anybody who has been able to tune it out until now. I'm scalp-deep by now and I won't be coming up for air until the morning of November 5th when I will either be too hungover or too depressed to speak - depending on the tally of electoral votes. Tonight I'm headed to west LA to sign up for volunteering for Obama. Money and mouth will become one in a way that my constant blathering about him for the last year or more never could have.

Palin has become a major story in this election, so major that McCain is running the risk of becoming a sideshow. Her speech last night at the convention hacked away at any promise of bipartisanship in the foreseeable future. I just don't see how McCain's insincere, yellowed smile, bullshit stories of reform and war stories from decades past can compete with Caribou Barbie's 15 minutes. We'll find out in just over an hour. 9.4.08



Miss Alaska

I've got to be honest. John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate has left my head spinning. Not because I think she's a good choice. There are just so many ins and outs and what-have-you's.

First off, it is the opinion of the author that McCain's choice, although bold, paints him as a fool with an attitude of gross negligence in terms of governing the most powerful nation in human history. He might rather lose a political campaign than lose a war but he is running the risk of putting someone with basically zero foreign policy experience one ambulance ride away from the oval office. This choice undercuts his whole attack plan surrounding Obama's relative lack of experience. Compared to Palin, Obama looks like FDR. For Christ's sakes... Palin's resume lists being in the PTA as a credential for being Vice President. I'm speechless.

But not so much so that I won't go on.

The woman hasn't even been in office 2 years. I have nothing against Alaska. It's the only of the 50 states upon which I haven't set foot so it isn't really fair for me to say. (I once saw it from an airplane.) But it seems to me that it might be a little easier to get elected governor in a state that has a smaller population than the city of Indianapolis - by more than half if you count the Indianapolis metropolitan area - such as it is.

Let's see, Ms. Palin. It says here that you were on the local PTA board?

"Yes sir."

It also says that you were mayor of a town of a town called Wasilla?

"Yes, that's true."

And Wasilla is in Alaska?

"Also true"

And Alaska, as everyone knows, is right next to Russia?

"Correct."

I also couldn't help but noticing... you have a vagina, don't you?

"I do, sir."

Great Zeus' ghost. The McCain camp thinks that they can woo the menstruation vote by upping the estrogen content of their ticket. They think they can convince women who are obsessed with their right to make choices involving their own bodies to vote for a woman who wants to take away that right. Pro life and many married women were already going to vote red. Because we all know that there is nothing a stay at home mom loves more than to send her sons and daughters off to fight another war. Oh wait...

Ladies, listen up. USE YOUR HEADS. THINK ABOUT IT. THIS IS A RUSE.

Let me say the following again. I have nothing whatsoever against having a woman drive the boat. I make my choices based on issues, not gender or race of which side of the egg a candidate likes to open first. I'd love to see a woman take the oath. But it has to be the right woman... not just ANY woman. And certainly not one with a laissez faire attitude about the fate of the polar bear, a grossly endangered and noble creature who is practically Alaska's state bird. One of my uncle's exhortations still rings in my ears as the nature show music plays... "Fuck the spotted owls!"

I can see how this makes sense to John McCain. He knows that he farts air from the pyramids. Better get someone young and good looking on the dais. But he's shooting himself in one foot while he puts a bucket that says FREE MONEY in front of the other.

I can't help but laugh at all the racist misogynists out there who now have to choose whom they hate less... African Americans or women. Who am I kidding? Pricks like them are going to vote for the oldest, whitest guy they can find - if they can be bothered to vote at all.

In summary (for now) I'll say this... I have never watched a vice presidential debate before. This time around I cannot wait to watch Joe Biden eviscerate Ms. Palin on TV in front of God and everybody. She could have a decade to prepare for their debate and still look like a girl scout. It's almost cruel. Maybe their plan is have her bait him. He tends to throw out some clunkers in between blinding flashes of his megawatt smile. Maybe so, but I like our chances.

Rope a Dope

Obama is smart. We have 66 days to go and last night he turned the ship into the wind. I thought his speech was great. Pundits will punditize. Republicans would say he couldn't swim if he walked on water. My golden boy is taking the fight to the enemy... partly by asking them to join us in the fight against the real enemies... poverty, intolerance, lack of education, greed, war, small thoughts and even smaller actions.

Do I really think he'll accomplish all those things he spoke into the thin air in Denver? Of course not. But you can't think of him as if he's going to change the world while we watch from our easy chairs. He finally said it last night. This isn't about what he will do... it is about what we will do. He's like a coach. We have to make the plays. Shooters shoot. Punters punt. Goalies protect their goal. A great coach gets all of them thinking, acting and playing like a team.

Let's go. 66 showers. 66 sunsets. 198 dog walks. One 3-day weekend and one Halloween.
(Guess who might have an Obama pumpkin on his porch?) We have to believe that things can get better, for if we don't, what do we have?

PS

Confidential to the two jerks sitting at the table behind me in the lounge at the French restaurant Taix last night during Barack Obama's speech: Shut the fuck up. I fully respect your right to disagree, to discuss said and vote in kind, but don't be a rude asshole and talk loudly when everyone else is trying to listen. You were acting like jerks and giving your party mates a bad reputation. 8.29.08



Big Brother is Watching You - And Me

I love the Internets. It has changed my life in profound ways. I almost never watch television anymore, preferring instead to get my news at my pace, on my schedule, and focused on stories I deem to be of note. Electronic mail has helped me keep in touch with people around the world with whom I likely wouldn't have otherwise. Like anything, you can use its power for good or for evil and there is certainly a lot of uses for it that sometimes make you wonder which way it is being wielded at any given time. Case and point...

I was poking around on Google Maps. It's is the cartographical wing of the technology empire that will soon enough have everybody's DNA cataloged. What better to advertise to you, my dears? Google largely uses their considerable powers for good, and their interactive Maps application isn't an exception. It is more functional, elegant, deeper and easier to use than their predecessors' products. And, like most everything else - it's FREE.

So, poking around I was, looking up this and that. I've been using it to check the mileage of my near-daily bicycle rides. I'm getting up into the tens-plus in mileage and like to log the rides to check my progress, or alternatively, my lack thereof. It works great for this purpose and even allows me to scout out new routes as I grow ever more bored of riding the same streets.

I managed a great ride today, up what I once would have described as a mountain while living in my pancake-flat hometown of Chicago. I recall that the overpasses were the only hills back then. I turned the ride into a loop instead of an out-and-back ride with the help of Google Maps. While setting my point of origin address - my apartment - I clicked on the little Street View tab that pulls up an actual panoramic photograph of a given location. OK, so there is no street view of my parent's place in rural Alabama but a goodly number of neighborhoods have been photographed. You can also view the locale from a satellite view, or terrain view, which shows elevation and topography. These people have thought of everything.

As I clicked the Street View tab and looked down my street it took a little bit of clicking and dragging to get the little virtual humanoid figure to be standing right in front of my apartment on the map. I panned in a circle on the Street View window. Well holy shit, there's my girlfriend's car parked across the street. There are both the cars of my neighbors who live in the house across from us. Would you look at that - there's my truck parked up the street. It must be a weekend if both our cars are there. These pictures also must have been taken in the summertime because my windshield shade is in. And it makes it late summer because the grass is green and I'd only started watering it late last summer. I'll just scoot the little guy back down in front my place. The angle the sunlight is hitting the front of the building and the shadow of that guy walking up my front walk means that it was probably taken about 1pm. Hey, wait a minute. I'd know that gait anywhere. That guy looks... like... me. Well holy shit.

I can't be certain, but there, in gradual progress up the walk towards my front door in the sequence of pictures, is me. What are the chances that I'd be outside in front of my apartment when the person who takes the Google Maps Street View pictures for my neighborhood went past? I know I've looked at that site before and I don't recall seeing anybody there. I imagine that they must update their images from time to time.

This strange coincidence is kind of cool at the same time that it makes me feel creepy. How long before they have that two-way Orwellian screen in my living room? How long before they have one in my bedroom? My toilet? My head?

The Good Doctor

One thing that nobody has brought up over the course of this never ending election dirge is the absence of one of its patron saints of anarchy... the sadly-deceased Hunter S. Thompson. What with the Democratic Convention taking place in the state he called home and all. As all good Gonzo fans know, Hunter lived in Woody Creek, CO, just down the road from Aspen. Even in his declining condition I find it hard to believe that he wouldn't have set up camp in a bar in Denver. Political spectacle was irresistible to the man, and to have the blue version of the swine a couple hundred miles away would have drawn him like the sun to a sunset.

How I would have loved to get his take on all this. A black candidate. The comic tragedy of the Clinton family hubris. I am riotously amused by what Jon Stewart is doing but Hunter S. Thompson would have been such a delightful wild card thrown into the carnage. Granted, we might not have heard his insights until he got around to penning the book version of the goings on months after the confetti was swept up. But just knowing he was there would have been a welcome respite to the sturm und drang of the 24-hour news machine stinking up the place. I can barely watch them strain to fill every passing second with conjecture and guano.

All in all, I'm not into political conventions. There is too much aggrandizing. Too much kingmaking. Too much bluster. In years past I wouldn't have even tuned in until the parties had chosen their respective saviors. But I couldn't look away this time. Too much is at stake. I watched several of the headlining speeches and quickly learned to mute the commentators. But damn do I miss having a drunken, drug addled freak around to cut to the heart of the matter and expose the ugly truth and point out what little stark beauty exists in of all this nonsense. I guess you have to be crazy to speak the truth.

He, Too Has a Dream

Barack Obama, this is your moment. Everything you've done up until tonight was child's play. Not that it was easy. Jesus, far from it. With our help, you wrested the sceptre away from the Clinton juggernaut, believing that your version of change was the truer arrow. You went from a small crowd on a frigid Springfield day to a sea of hopeful faces on a sultry August afternoon well over a year later. And that doesn't count all the foundation-building you've spent your lifetime crafting. Some of what they say and what you will do is true, and some of it isn't. But you're the best thing America has had going in more years than I'd care to admit. Nobody is perfect and what I love about you is that you have enough humility to be the first to admit that fact.

My countdown ticker says you've got 67 days to go. That's just over two months to convince the American people that they need you. Desperately. The Republican shit machine will tell them anything to make them think otherwise. We don't need another tired old man. Tomorrow is coming and we need someone with the energy to make it a better tomorrow and not just another day like today. I know that you look into your young daughters' eyes and find the strength to endure this circus - and it is every inch a show. Clowns and all. It will be our children's world soon and we both know that we have a duty to leave the world better than we found it. We have no moral duty to ensure today's profit to those who hold the deeds. It would be awfully hard to rake it in on Wall Street if it was underwater.

It doesn't matter what color you are. People who will not cast a vote for a person based on the color of their skin need to be invited to be part of the future. I'm sure you will try to do just that. If they can't get big thoughts into their small minds then they need to be left behind. There is no place for them in the future and we will get there without them. It takes one man and an axe to fell a tree that has grown for 100 years. It takes one coward and a bullet to fell a man who has spent a lifetime raising people up. You very well may be the tip of the spear of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream, but you would deny that. We need you because you are not concerned about you. You are concerned about all of us. You can inspire us to make ourselves better, and by doing so making everyone better. Fear is a powerful thing, but hope is more powerful when it is combined with courage. Kick some ass on your speech tonight. Take us into that future. 8.28.08



McCain Rant #1

A few things occurred to me while I was writing the latest of my "open letter to" series of entries. I was trying to make a point about Dubya vs. John McCain and decided that it didn't fit with that material. It goes something like this...

I'll say this about John McCain. He was either brave or foolish enough to fly his jet plane over people who were shooting at him. It is notably harder to get shot down while flying in the Air National Guard over Alabama. But I didn't want the latter as president and I sure as hell don't want the former. I used to have respect for the man. No one can take away from him what the years in captivity already has. It's the fact that he and his campaign use his POW experience to as a catch all answer to any question.

Q: What about those poor grades in the Naval Academy?

A: It was hard for Senator McCain to focus on his studies because he was worried that he might spend a few years in captivity during an upcoming war.

Q: What about his treatment of his first wife?

A: Her injuries in the auto accident reminded him of his own injuries suffered during his five year captivity at a POW camp in North Vietnam.

Q: What about Senator McCain's penchant for eschewing computers and the Internet?

A: Senator McCain knows what a real net feels like, because he spent five years in a POW camp in Hanoi.

Q: John, why won't you pick up your dirty socks?

A: Because I spent five years in a POW camp after being shot down on a bombing mission.

An Open Letter to Hillary Clinton

GET OUT OF THE WAY. You didn't win the nomination of your political party. You lost fair and square despite your attempts to change the rules. If you really, truly cared about the future of our country, of your political charade-cum-party, you would get out of the way. This isn't about you anymore. It never was. This isn't about who does and does not have a vagina. This is about issues. This is about who will get to nominate supreme court justices. This is about pulling this thing back out of the ditch.

Call off your ill-informed attack dogs. They are acting like spoiled toddlers who didn't get their way. They are making you look bad and their vociferous blathering are jeopardizing the entire election. United we stand, goddammit.

The words I need to hear spill from your mouth tonight as the stage at the Democratic National Convention strains under the weight of your ego are... a vote for Barack Obama is a vote for Hillary Clinton. Roll them around in your mouth. Say them out loud a few times to make sure your cadence is correct. You may feel free to refer to yourself in the third person if it makes you feel better. GET OUT OF THE WAY.

An Open Letter to the "PUMA" Crowd

You are acting like spoiled toddlers who didn't get your way. This isn't about you... it's about all of us. If you fuck this up we ALL run the risk of god knows how many more years of Republicans hacking away at the Constitution. If you fuck this up we'll all have to watch right wing appointments to the Supreme Court erode our ability to live in the manner in which we choose.

Would you honestly sleep soundly at night knowing that a hawk with a storied temper has his finger next to the big red button? You yammer on about a woman's right to choose and yet it seems logical to you to cast your vote for a man who unequivocally opposes that right? You really would rather rebuke the Democrats because your candidate isn't on the ticket? You'd be shooting yourself in the foot. You'd be pissing in your own bed. You'd be shitting where you eat. Are you insane? 8.26.08



That's the Ticket

So, it's Biden, then. Fair enough. Now get out there and take that hill. 8.23.08



Just Do It

Jesus, Barack. Just tell us who your goddamn vice president is going to be. All eyes have turned to you. I haven't been able to get more than 5 feet from my cell phone because I was one of your faithful legion to sign up to receive your fantastical, 22nd century revelation by text message. You have an army of strategists. You're working the crowd... and playing the media like a music box. I get it. But enough, already. Your foot dragging is beginning to become annoying.

I am no stranger to wrangling with myself over big decisions. Just ask my girlfriend. Sometimes the curse of empathy - or the ability to see both sides of the story - is that both sides can at once sound like the right and wrong choice.

Just do it, man. Send. The. Fucking. Text. Message. 8.22.08 12:07pm PDT



An Open Letter to Joe Lieberman

Suck it.

Sincerely,
Joe Armstrong

8.21.08



Veep

It's a Tuesday night. My street is quiet. Democratic Presidential hopeful Barack Obama is about to announce his choice of sidekick. His Chewbacca. His Robin. His Walter Sobchack. His wingman. Sure, everybody knows that the American Vice President is like a little brother at a high school party. Not exactly irrelevant but also not playing quarters on the kitchen table, either.

My choice for VP won't make the cut. Wesley Clark impressed me last time around when John Kerry ended up pissing away his shot at having his face on high school picture rails. Clark is a left-leaning former general who came off downright logical to these peace-loving ears. Obama is a half African American intellectual from Hawaii whose middle name is Hussein. What could be better than to have a militarily experienced old white guy with the all-American last name Clark on the ticket? Clark just seems to balance the exotic-sounding Obama on a bumper sticker. Granted, it might not fit as well with the pastoral Obama logo with the sunrise and all.

But they won't pick him anyway. He was a diehard Clinton supporter, even though he did fall in line when Hillary lost the race. (A side note to all those people that she insists must be heard at the convention next week... SHE LOST. Get a hold of yourselves. You're causing an unnecessary distraction that may cost us the White House. Do you REALLY want to see Roe Vs. Wade go the way of the dodo? How, exactly, does that help your cause as a woman who feels disenfranchised?) The Obama team will pick someone safe. In lieu of my #1 I think I'm hoping for Bayh from Indiana. We sure could stand to have a couple red states list just to the blue side of purple. Obama/Bayh doesn't look as good on a bumper sticker, but I am ultimately more concerned with how it will look in the history books. They need to pick whomever will convince Americans to put them into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue - one of them, at least.

This road has been too long. I think everyone has election fatigue. I know I do, and I follow this shit like a little leaguer stays up reading his baseball cards with a flashlight under his blanket. In any case, we'll all know in the next few hundred hours.

In other election news... McCain has been acting like an asshole. So much for his honorable campaign, eh? I'm not daft. Politics is a dirty business. Perhaps the dirtiest of all. The Republican shit machine is churning out all the same claptrap they always do. And Americans swallow it down like the Mayberry fantasy they all so desperately want to exist. Can you not see? The last 7 years have been disastrous. Compassionate conservatism has us fighting two wars. Dubya's self-tauted status as a "uniter" has left us more divided than anytime since 1860. Outsourcing and a fancy for small government has left us with an unfathomable national debt.

Senator McCain said on Saturday night that the benchmark for being rich was a yearly income of $5 million. He joked at the time that he'd be grilled on that remark... but also he didn't offer a lower, more realistic figure for anyone to grasp. What he did do was offer a figure so far out of reach of so many of his constituents that they took it as the joke that it was. But the joke is on them. And on you. And me.

This election is the opposite of the last one in some respects. I didn't love John Kerry - but I desperately wanted him to win because he wasn't the other guy. It seems that the republicans aren't in love with McCain but they have to stick with their ideology... because they're ideologues. Now is not the time for sticking to one's guns. Now is the time for swallowing pride and fixing shit.

Anna Bug

I have a niece. Three, actually, and one of them is named Anna. Her daddy (my brother, David) and consequently everyone else - calls her "Bug." This isn't her middle name but I suspect that it will stick.

Little Anna just turned one last month. She is a tiny bundle of light and smiles. I have honestly never seen a happier baby. When I was home for Christmas late last year, fully halfway back to zero in her lifetime, she barely even cried the whole time I was there. All babies are precious, but little Bug is something else.

Just over a week ago Anna had been sick for several days. She had been running a fever but was by all accounts sticking it out pretty well. Kids are like petri dishes - they get sick all the time. I got a series of phone calls of increasing concern from Alabama. This went on for a couple days, until I got the call that she was being admitted into the hospital. And this was shortly followed by the harrowing call that she was going in for emergency surgery. David had just started a new teaching job the day she was admitted - as if the situation wasn't complicated enough. When they opened up her tiny abdomen they discovered a pretty serious infection - the unpronounceable name of which was relayed to me by my mother. Mom could pronounce it just fine. I seem to have a knack for forgetting things like that the very second they make it down my ear canal.

I felt so disconnected from the whole thing. My entire family was there to support them and all I could do was call and keep them in my thoughts. I slept with my phone on the night stand. I hoped for the best.

Anna pulled through surgery OK but the doctors couldn't initially ascertain the cause of the infection. They had to strap her down to keep her from pulling her stitches or the tubes running down her throat out. That is an image that I can barely picture without a quivering lip. Days passed and her condition improved little by little. Somewhere along the way the hospital staff figured out that Anna's appendix had burst. Perhaps the most amazing thing is that it had burst days before she wound up under the knife. That tiny little person bore the pain of a ruptured appendix for several days. I've read of adults in the same condition being doubled over in agony to the extent that they were semiconscious.

Little Anna Bug came home yesterday. She has lost weight but her condition is improving. David and Danielle sat that she is trotting, rather than running, around the house as she was before. Children rebound quickly. I'd bet that she won't really ever remember this whole ordeal, and thank heavens for that. Us grownups will remember every agonizing minute, but so far it will be remembered with a happy ending. 8.19.08



Shakin' Shakin' Shakes

OK. Here I am almost 24 hours since yesterday's earthquake and I am sitting in the exact same place doing the exact same thing. The dogs turned out to be fine. As some who had never experienced anything like that before I have spent a goodly amount of time talking and thinking about those 20 seconds. I have also spent a goodly amount of time with a phone in my ear. I wouldn't call the event traumatic but it was a wholly new experience. Those sorts of things happen more infrequently as years pass. Christmas is the greatest thing ever when you're 7 years old. By the time you're 47 you've been through it all before. Not that I am 47, but you get the idea.

The lingering thoughts about yesterday involve a few key points. The primary point is my recollection of the initial boom. It was almost like a crack or snap accompanied by a near-subharmonic hum. I wonder if earthquakes have an overtone series. It would stand to reason that an earthquake's shock waves, which are below the range of human hearing, would have resonances that are above that frequency. Perhaps those overtones are within the range of human hearing. In any case, it was pretty amazing. The closet association I have in my memory was watching the space shuttle launch while sitting on a lawn chair in the Banana River at Cape Canaveral in 1983 or so. The rocket was pretty high in the air by the time the sound of the engines arrived. Even the water in which I was sitting vibrated. The roar it made was a combination of low and high pitches. Sort of like a rumble with a higher-pitched tearing sound. This earthquake, which I've noticed has yet to have been named, was just low and warbly.

Research into what The American Red Cross calls a "Preparedness Kit" revealed some obvious, some not so obvious and some fairly amusing results. First, the amusing. Although I don't doubt their logic for including the sheer amount of stuff that they do, the list is so long that my entire apartment, in essence, is a preparedness kit. I joked that it would take a room the size of my apartment to put all that gear in one place - and since I already have nearly every item on the list somewhere in my apartment - I am basically there. My camping gear alone has nearly everything on the list.

What most concerns me is the potentiality of having my upstairs neighbors' apartment collapse down to the ground floor on top of mine. It would be awfully hard to get to those tongue depressors if I was having to dig through shattered plaster, broken floor joists and all their clothes. Not to mention that the roof of the building would be sitting on top of the pile like the top bun of a cheeseburger. All my things would be somewhere under the patty with the pickles, mustard and onions. Not good.

Everybody in California is more or less playing chicken with fate when it comes to earthquakes. All the news articles since yesterday have pointed out that there is a 99% chance of an earthquake of magnitude 6.7 or greater in the next 30 years. I'm not sure which number qualifies as The Big One but perhaps it is like the old pornography barometer. I can't tell you what it is but I know it when I see it. I'll say this... given the exponential nature of the Richter Scale, if yesterday was a 5.4 I want no part of a 6.9. The reality is that the situation is not a matter of if, but of when.

So, when it happens we will find out just how good all those building codes will turn out to have been. Here's hoping that it won't be another case of levies rated for Category 2 in the case of a Category 4 hurricane. I'd rather not find out that a particular quake was .1 stronger than my building happened to be rated by waking up with 2x10s across my forehead. Like Christmas, bigger earthquakes are coming. Paranoia doesn't help but thinking on your feet does.

I am perhaps happiest that yesterday's 5.4 was my first earthquake. It was powerful enough to give me the fear but weak enough to not kill me. The next time it happens I'll have the benefit of experience. The next time it happens I'll have a sated curiosity and can grab my dog and my laptop and get under a table. Who knows... I just might be able to see out of a window from under there. 7.30.08



High Summer*

Back in Illinois this is the period of the summer I've always called High Summer. It is that period after the warmer weather finally arrives and the last echoes of the 4th of July's crack and boom have faded. Summer comes on strong at the outset. Especially in cities where pasty white skin hasn't felt the soothing warmth of the sun since the prior calendar year. As soon as the weather breaks the sidewalks, parks and beaches are swarmed with people shaking out their cabin fever. What about spring, you might say? In Chicago proper, the meteorological influence of Lake Michigan quickly douses any hope of spring being the gentle last breaths of winter. I can recall seeing my breath in the month of June more than once. Easter can bring crocusses or snow shovels. Usually the weather for easter egg hunting is just brown and cold... much like the weather Thanksgiving Day dinner smokers have to face as they step outside. Spring in Chicago is cool and gray.

I was once dating a girl back at college the year after I'd graduated. She was coming up to stay with me for a few weeks before her summer stock theater gig started in some podunk town or other. We spent the morning unpacking the things she'd brought up and then loaded into the car to drive back downstate for her graduation weekend. We were wearing jackets and jeans when we left the overcast city where the skyline looked much as it had for months prior... a large stand of dark buildings partially shrouded by low clouds. The sun came out somewhere south of Joliet and by Pontiac we were feeling quite warm in the car. When we stopped for gas and opened the doors the warm, humid air spilled into the car as if we'd driven into a lake. We were taken aback. It was downright hot. It was summer. It was then that I realized that it had likely been that way for weeks down there - where the towns are slowly sinking into the miles and miles of corn inching upwards towards the sun. Spring in Alabama is a wondrous thing to behold. But that's another story altogether. When summer comes to Chicago it has meaning.

So, as the cardboard fuselages of a million contraband bottle rockets are washed into the gutter by summer storms High Summer arrives. Frisbees are pulled from closets and basements. Weber grills are rescued from the mud and windows are wrenched open. As Bradbury said far better than I ever could, the breathing of the world is long and warm and slow. This is perhaps my favorite time of the year. The initial excitement of milder weather has worn down just a little. Weekends are filled with impromptu barbeques and the long evenings have a way of getting away from a person. You

HOLY SHIT

I just rode out my very first earthquake. I was sitting here typing in a nearly empty office when I heard a boom. A boom that sounded like a mountain being dropped somewhere off to the south... which is where the epicenter turned out to be - in Chino Hills. The boom was followed by what seemed like about 30 seconds of undulating and shaking. My girlfriend checked the National Geological Survey as soon as it was done and said that it was a 5.5 or 5.8. That was the second thought I had as I was walking around feeling as if I was surfing on carpet with the building creaking around me - wondering what size quake I was experiencing. The first thought was "Is this the big one I've been reading about all these years?"

One never really knows now they will react in a situation like that. Somehow I knew after it started that it wasn't big enough to bring down the building in which I was writing. I thought to myself... "Should I grab my laptop and get under the desk?" I sort of froze for a second or two to make sure it wasn't just a big truck or airplane crash nearby. When I started to feel that it wasn't The Big One I did what you are never supposed to do in an earthquake and walked over to the window to see if lamp posts were falling over. Even as I did so there was a voice in my head saying "Do Not Go Near The Window." Curiosity got the best of me. I just had to see. When I looked out I could see that nothing was falling down and that the vertical blinds were moving more noticeably than anything outside. The guy raking leaves on the roof of the building next door was just sort of standing there as we both got shaken and stirred. My heart rate is still elevated these 15 minutes later. The oddest lingering sensation is that I don't trust the ground anymore. That floor over there isn't as stable as I thought it was 33 minutes ago. It can wobble around just like everything else - from the water in the bottle on the desk next to me all the way up to Mount Wilson looking down on Pasadena. The room is still ticking as it settles. I am headed home to check on my dogs.

* Interrupted - I'll have to pick up that story about summer later. 7.29.08 12:24pm PDT



Tit for Tat

Obama said this. McCain did that. I've had to take a little break from the political theater that provides fuel for the 24/365 news machine. I still pay attention, but I am saving my energy for the home stretch which is set to begin any minute, now. For now it's all about the candidates being seen with babies and world leaders. I'm nearly blue in the face from holding my breath hoping that there isn't a new catastrophic terrorist attack or that Obama gets caught with an underage stripper in the bathroom of his private campaign plane. Obama seems to have the edge right now but I flat out refuse to speak too soon. He's been my golden boy all along, but all my hopes for him were couched in hopeful but realistic optimism.

Our assets include the fact that our candidate is better looking, younger and doesn't have the stink of political experience around him. Our liabilities include the fact that he's - oh no - black. Or part black, at least. Depending on how big of an asshole the beholder happens to be this is either an asset or a liability. Another liability is that he's young. Old folks like to elect other old folks and old folks like to vote. Yeah, uh, and then there is his relative inexperience. Our adversaries see this as a problem. They must like the way things have been going.

I guess I can see their point. If I was older, rich and didn't know how to use a computer I'd want things to stay the same as well. The problem is that it's too late. Things have already changed. Clinging to some sort of idyllic post WWII prosperity utopia is futile. And in this I can't really see their point at all. How can we have a guy running the show who doesn't know how to use a goddamn mouse? Oh wait. We already do. So how could it be worse. McCain is just an even older guy who doesn't know how to use The Googles.

We're down to two, now. It's the age old American bullshit scenario of A or B. This old white guy or that old white guy. Only now there's a tic in the works. One of the old white guys is a young-ish black guy. But it's still this or the other. I am in luck because my guy is one of those guys this time around. It is unfortunate that the folks we've elected to drive the boat have us all convinced that it's OK to only have A or B. It means a lot of fighting over the folks at the blunt tip of the bell curve. Because that's where most people's viewpoints lie. Right in the middle.

I guess the good news for guys like me is that the whole scale shifts slightly left with every passing year. There were no openly gay characters on television shows while Nixon was running for office. I'm not even sure there were any when Reagan or Clinton ran. In the summer of 2008 we are at least thinking about these issues as a society. It is pragmatism on a grand scale. There always have been homosexuals. There always will be homosexuals. We can no more fight the sunrise. All of Dubya's ranting about privatizing Social Security bought the farm. All his talk of small government and being "a uniter" has turned out to be a crock. Like him or not he didn't do what he said he was going to do. Which brings me to a little lady called...

Katrina

We are Netflix people. Spike Lee's Documentary about hurricane Katrina and her legacy recently came up in our queue and showed up in our mailbox. This event was a modern day catastrophe and that should go without saying. Everybody should have to watch Lee's documentary. It should be shown in schools whether or not there are any black kids in the class. We failed those people. Americans far and wide hung those people out to dry. All the open arms waiting in Utah, Houston and wherever else those displaced residents of the lower 9th ward wound up cannot replace what was their home. A home is more than a house. Many of those people escaped with their lives and nothing more. How many people didn't even manage to escape with that one precious thing that they cannot get back? We saw them floating in the fetid waters of New Orleans.

I felt badly for the face person Lee chose for the Army Corps of Engineers. Sure, they built inadequate levies, but anyone who knows anything about engineers is that they like to build things well. Ask a Howard Roark-esque engineer to build a 100 foot tall hurricane proof wall around a city and they'll say "Can do. Where would you like me to send the estimate when my drawings are ready?" And that's the tragic flaw right there. Politicians hold the purse strings. That gaunt colonel who Lee put before the camera in his fatigues wasn't a colonel 50 years ago when the levies were built. It isn't that the Army Corps of Engineers aren' t liable. It just sucks that somebody chose to ask them to build a $100 wall for $10.

There are no simple answers for what happened down there. Or maybe there are. If only someone had had the courage to heed the warnings of the scientists and prepared for the inevitable. What the hell did they think was going to happen? They built a city below sea level in hurricane country. What do I think is going to happen in Los Angeles where I live? This whole place is like a pile of gasoline-soaked rags half the year. When - and not if - the earthquake(s) come(s) it/they is/are going to kill people. With destruction and subsequent fires. The most sprawling semi-urbanized area in North America is sitting on cracks in the crust that makes up their bedrock. New Orleans' fate was a matter of time - as is Los Angeles'.

What really pissed me off in the movie was exactly what pissed me off when Katrina came and went. George Bush asked the pilot of Air Force One to descend low enough for him to survey the damage. I've written the following in this very journal before, but I hope that the plane was flying low enough for him to see the thousands of people standing on houses and overpasses flipping him off. And then there was his mother, the blue-haired wife of our 41st president, who uttered a "let them eat cake" statement to the cameras while touring the squalor in the Superdome.

My favorite moment of the film was when a Katrina survivor from Mississippi managed to pay a profane insult forward to Dick Cheney, while the Vice President was touring the damage weeks after the carnage took place. This young man had been managed to get close enough to the Vice President for him hear a familiar turn of phrase echoed back to him... "Go fuck yourself, Mr. Cheney." This man's balls were obviously larger than the levies.

Cheap Good, Free Better

Such was the mantra of my college days. Still it applies from time to time. However, there is one place where it very much applies.

Craigslist burst on the scene about 5 years ago. I suspect that its origins date back a little farther than that but I'm writing at a location without Internet access (gasp) and I cannot confirm its lineage. I first learned about it in its most mature market because it happened to be the locale of its formation. I was traveling around the country on a sort of walkabout and found myself in Marin County, California. For the geographically challenged, Marin County is the red-wooded peninsula whose soil you touch as you cross the Golden Gate Bridge when headed north out of San Francisco. It was the home of Janis Joplin and Jerry Garcia. It is now the home of Bonnie Raitt and countless Subaru-driving rich liberals. It is a beautiful place, as I discovered, nestled perfectly between a world class city and the bounty of California's primary wine region. The weather there is better than in San Francisco, which is saying quite a bit.

From a home base at a friend's apartment in Corte Madera I once set out on an expedition that took me to Yosemite National Park, Lake Tahoe, up to Oregon and back down the 101 all the way back to Marin. Along the way I slept in a tent, ate peanut butter and marshmallow sandwiches, hiked to the top of Half Dome, felt the frigid water of Tahoe and inadvertently convinced the staff of Sierra Nevada Brewing Company's restaurant that I was an author visiting to write about their establishment (they comped my tab - thank you!). I also managed to sample IPAs at every brewpub I could find... and I found quite a few. I wound up sleeping in my car on the beach at some state park because I initially thought it was too rainy to set up my tent. By the time I drove back to the gate to find a hotel I was locked in. I spent the night listening to the surf on the beach and wondering how high the tide might rise in my slumber - half expecting to be awakened by the sound of water coming in my open windows. It was so dark I couldn't tell how close I was to land's end proper. I had parked in some kind of parking area but one can never be sure. Northern California, as I came to find, is full of expatriates, redwoods and great beer.

But back to Craigslist. In the days before this online trading post one had to post an ad in the paper if one wanted to sell or buy some esoteric item. Like everything else, the Internet is the perfect medium to foment sub-sub-sub-subgeneres. Want to sell approximately 15, 2-foot tall artificial pine trees? Looking for people to play ultimate Frisbee on Tuesday mornings at 5? Done and done. I have been cleaning out an office for my employer. I had a lot of junky old desks and other office-related accoutrements that I needed to make go away.

I started by selling off the items that had relative value. People would come and wheel and deal with me trying to get a bargain on metal shelving, dirty microwaves, boxes of hanging file folders. Here I am on Monday morning, having posted a FREE STUFF - COME AND GET IT ad last Friday. I received no fewer than 200 responses to my ad, which brings me to my ultimate point. If you want to see some peculiar, bottom feeding examples of humanity, put the word "free" in front of anything. One guy asked me for a screwdriver so he could remove the bulletin boards from the walls. He became less interested when I told him that I would be happy to sell them to him for $100 each - that I might offset the cost that building management would charge me to fill the holes left by the missing screws. One girl said that she was a grad student and she would just love to have the conference room table and would I mind just dropping it off at her apartment? I was laughing to hard to respond. I think that everyone should do this sort of thing once. Just like I think that everyone should take a long Greyhound bus trip once in their life. It helps one understand that some of those people in all of those houses out there are certifiably insane. And you get great fodder for writing as a bonus. 7.28.08



The Truth is (Still) Out There

I have a friend who works for Fox Sports. He does some sort of scheduling of audio engineers and video editors and such. One of the perks of working for a company that owns a movie studio is the free screenings they provide for their employees and their friends. I qualify as a friend. Earlier in the week he called me up to say that they were screening the new X-Files movie on Saturday afternoon and asked if I was interested. "Does the pope shit in the woods?" I replied. I am a longtime aficionado of anything spooky. Not so much ghosts and vampires as they tended to lean towards the mystical - and that was more my brother's cup of tea.

As a kid I worshiped at the altar of the holy trinity of spooky - UFOs, Bigfoot and The Loch Ness Monster. Every time mom took me up to the North Aurora library I would make a beeline for the section where all these books lay in wait for my imagination. I could take you to the exact spot on the shelves even now. I read and re-read every story. I stared at the pictures imagining my own eyes peering through the camera lens that captured those photographs that captured me in turn. My developing intellect needed something to be bigger than the world I was grappling to comprehend. Something needed to be untamed, uncontrollable and beyond the reach of the priests and teachers that filled my waking hours with endless columns of arithmetic and the hubris of human understanding about the universe.

I'd check the books time and time again and work myself into a fervor just before bedtime. So much so that I could never fall asleep because I knew that my bedroom was about to be bathed in an eerie, white light. I was positive that if I slept I would miss the oversized shadow of Bigfoot cast on the window at the foot of my bed. I felt the dichotomy in my bones - that I didn't know what would be worse - if I missed the lights in the sky or actually happened to see them.

Our annual summer vacation to rural Alabama provided a much larger field of play for the objects of my obsession. Bigfoot really could live in the endless pines in a place like Bankhead National Forest. Surely the aliens would fly over those quiet houses. There were no street lights to compete with their anti-gravity engines and fewer people to report the fact that they'd been there at all. Nights were pitch black and the billions of visible stars didn't have to fight Chicago's haze just over the eastern horizon. Riding down Highway 33 in those mountains found me staring at every tree in the headlight's periphery. I knew that I would be the only one able to discern Bigfoot standing among the tree trunks at the edge of the forest.

I would wake to the smell of granny cooking bacon and the sound of adults talking about adult things. Bigfoot, whose graveyard shift gig was over for the night, was likely stretched out in a thicket or cave or something. The UFOs knew better than to show up in the daylight. There was simply too much competition. But my books were still there, just waiting to string me along until dark when my imagination could take over and my young eyes would practically beg a star to shift one way or the other.

Now that I am reluctantly grown I still harbor a low grade fascination with stories of unexplained lights in the sky and the shadows of ape men. Bigfoot seems to have gotten himself displaced by a ceaseless advance of strip malls and mcmansion neighborhoods on the sunrise side of the Mississippi River. Resistance is futile. Oh, he's still out there. My eyes now have a few lines around them from squinting at things like Colorado and Northern California. Having seen what real mountains look like I am confident that he can hold the line. Until they put in the Starbucks on top of Mt. Shasta, at least.

Here we are, going on a decade past the millennium. That Patterson guy fessed up to their fake footage. A couple guys in Scotland woke up from their single malt stupor long enough to let us all down about their grainy black and white film with the castle. Why can't these guys do the honorable thing and preserve the legacies for future generations of kids with overactive imaginations? Isn't it more fun to believe than not?

I jumped at the chance to see the new X-Files flick. I came to the show late - just about the time that it had built up enough of a following to afford its producers and writers more complicated mythology. I had quickly fallen in love with Gillian Anderson... or, more aptly, Dana Scully. I have always found smart girls to be irresistibly attractive. I've always felt that dumb girls are easier to impress, and where is the challenge in that? How could I pass up seeing Ms. Anderson's face 20 feet tall?

This particular sequel wasn't the least bit necessary. The television series and the first movie carved out their niche just as the collective human consciousness was expanding to include the Internet. Suddenly there was a channel for kooks of all stripes. This X-Files movie came years after we last heard from Mulder and Scully. It used to be that all you needed for a good hour of Sunday night television was those two with their cell phones, flashlights, pistols and an urban legend. In the summer of 2008 everyone has an iPhone (or imitator) that they can use to download and read stories from those books I used to check out - right up to and including episodes of the original X-Files series.

I'd read some early reviews of the movie before I went in and the critics were picking the bones. My own expectations were admittedly low. My girlfriend was unabashedly not interested. I'll tell you what - I actually liked it. Yeah, I was a fan of the show. I don't know the names of any of the episodes like those fanboy types. But I always liked the chemistry between the lead actors. They had spooky shit and I had a jones. The movie reviewers took issue with the fact that this movie played out like a longer episode with a bigger budget rather than elucidate on the considerable mythology the show had built up over the years. As for me, I found that tack to be a welcome respite from all that shit. A show that had cut its teeth with multiple layers of conspiracy theories had grown a little thick for me. It was tantamount to having Han Solo also be Luke and Leia's brother or cousin or something. The X-Files - I Want to Believe did play out like an episode... and that was precisely what I wanted to see. Just like the old days. Flashlights and cell phones. And if you do see it... be sure to watch the credits all the way to the end. Fanboys rejoice.

And Then They Probed Me

All the talk of the new X-Files movie got me to puttering around looking up UFO stories on the Internets late last week. My favorite in recent memory is the story of the flying saucer that reputedly hovered above gate C17 at O'Hare International Airport on a November afternoon a couple years back. Those particular ETs must have balls of steel and the patience of Job. O'Hare is widely known as not such a fun place to hang around for us earthlings. I ran across this website looking for information about that story. I wound up spending a couple late night hours over the weekend searching UFO reports from towns I've known and loved on that very site. I got myself spooked enough to feel strange about walking down my hallway in the dark on the way to bed. Just like when I was a kid. It was perfect. 7.27.08



Hangovers Installed and Serviced

Last night was my last night on vacation in Chicago - my hometown. I have often remarked that at this point in my life I can be leaving home and heading home all at the same time. Chicago is what feels most like home to me. I find the cursed humidity quite pleasing. My parents and siblings moved to Alabama when I was in college but I never really lived there. That house smells right. The mix of mom's candles all our things and all those Armstrongs make it feel like it should be home. But it isn't. I spent last weekend in my old stomping grounds in Chicago's western suburbs. Batavia, Aurora, North Aurora, Geneva. Eternal green under forever blue with lazy white clouds. Alot of those places feel like home. Some more than others since the wave of development drowned all the cornfields and turned the woods where I used to play into another damn outlet mall.

My high school reunion was last Saturday night. I live a long way from Batavia High School and because I do my interest in the event was piquted. I am notoriously nostalgic and things like this easily capture me in their gravitational pull.

Whenever I find myself in Chicago it has become a tradition to have a send off evening on my last night in town at The Hopleaf. I have been going to that bar for a long time and although it has grown and expanded Michael Roper - the owner and beer Svengali - took great care to retain its original charm. The PBR drinkers think that we Hopleaf devotees are pretentious. I don't care so much about that because I happen to think that PBR tastes like shit.

Last night was no exception and by 10pm I was sitting at a wooden table surrounded by my best friends - all illuminated in the soft glow of table candles and beer. My attorney and I had had a talk about our goals for the evening. At the time, we felt that it was in our collective best interest to attempt to not close the place - and in this we failed miserably. Not only did we manage to close The Hopleaf, but in doing so found ourselves in a cab headed out to find a bar that stayed open later still. Last night the bar that fit that bill turned out to be the famous Green Mill on Broadway and Lawerence, which any good Chicagoan knows to be a 4am bar.

I had a great time and I wouldn't change a thing. But now I am paying. Not the kind of debt that finds me curled up in the fetal position on the bathroom floor. No sir. I haven't done that kind of damage in nearly a decade and I intend to keep that streak going. But there is still pain in the house of Joe. I'd rate today's hangover at roughly 3.7 out of 10, with the latter number representing the top of the scale and being a state of abject misery. Last night's assault by the present me on the future me is more like a police action than a war. But there are casualties - and my stomach ranks among the most exploited. 7.14.08



Flyover

I am among my people. Sitting on a train headed northward towards Chicago. Out the right side window is a water tower bearing the name of the town of Ashkum. It has an American flag painted on one side and a stick figure drawing of a little boy and girl on the other. The sun is shining and the universe is blue and green and white. The only thing that has visibly changed since my formative years in this area of the country is the roundness of the cars and the gas prices into the 3rd digit per gallon. There are also cellular phone towers but I can't see any of those from my Amtrak vantage point. I am not from Ashkum - nor have I ever been there to my recollection. But it is just like so many towns strewn about the plains of the middle west.

On the train with me this morning is my forlorn girlfriend, whose parents we just left behind on the asphalt beside the train in Effingham. These rural farming communities are truly her roots. Also joining me are a group of what I've determinted to be convicts of some sort. They're a motley crew dressed in white t-shirts, heather gray sweat pants and shoes with no laces. I left the bathroom in the station in Effingham to find them trying to decide whether or not they'd asked me for a cigarette. I'm a dry well in that regard. The rest of the folks on the train are quite unlike the people among whom I live in Los Angeles. Most of them are white and middle-ish class, save for the cadre of convicts, whose racial cross section bears the colors of the byproducts of capitalism.

The woman across the aisle from me has been quilting since we got on the train. She put her swatches away a bit ago and has been reading a large-print book ever since. There are a few students from the University of Illinois headed north for a weekend away from summer classes. Red, white and blue flags and bunting leftover from last week's Independence Day celebrations hang from porches and street lamps in every little town we slice through on our way to Chicago. I can just smell the dew-soaked bottlerocket sticks peppering the lawns of each little town. The men have deeply-tanned necks and the women are tired from getting up in the wee hours to feed babies.

This feels like home at the same time that it feels like some alien land of weeds and puddles. We just passed a highway department storage bin with a geodesic dome roof. I wonder if the guy who has worked in that thing every day for years has any clue who R. Buckminster Fuller was. Maybe he does. Never confuse simplicity for stupidity. They are not the same thing. The people in small towns revel in their lifestyle. Or, like my aging great uncles in Alabama, they don't stop to consider their lives in any fashion other than the fact that they live them. Change comes slowly in this part of America. Sure, there are the cell phone towers. Oh, and the tanning salons as well. It seems that every podunk town has at least one.

WARNING - EXPLETIVE-LADEN TIRADE AHEAD

What the fuck? My pastoral Amtrak experience has been derailed. We've been sitting still in the train just outside of Union Station in Chicago. For forty minutes. Completely still. They've made all manner of announcements about this and that freight train and wrong tracks and other bullshit. I am not going to die or anything, but this is a SERIOUS FUCKING INCONVENIENCE. My friend who has been kind enough to loan me a car for the weekend has been waiting at the station on his lunch hour. I just spoke with him on the phone and he said that they just posted our arrival time as 2 o'fucking clock. It isn't even 1 now and we've been here for quite a while. We were already running late on top of that. What the fuck? The poor conductor has been pacing up and down the aisle. The goddamn Metra trains are careening past us coming and going. The convicts have been wandering back and forth to the bathroom and dining car, which they have ever so kindly reopened. The bathroom on our car is out of toilet paper and the floor is covered in a liquid whose origin I'd prefer not to think about.

I am now in a foul mood because this means that I'll be leaving Chicago in the heart of Friday afternoon rush hour traffic. So much for my motherfucking idyllic public transportation experience. I used to complain up and down about the CTA when I lived here. The trains are slow, erratic and full of unsavory people. Sparks shower down below the tracks as the cars teeter down the serpentine tracks - seemingly on the brink of falling off at any moment. Don't even get me started about the bus lines. And then I moved to Los Angeles where one's transportation options aren't really options at all. You can drive or drive. There is no catching up on reading one's Vonnegut while comuting to work in LA. Traffic can be abysmal at any hour of the day or night - not even counting the usual rush hour gridlock. I've been looking forward to this train ride. I am, after all, writing as I sit here. And maybe that's the problem. I am fucking sitting here. Still, in both senses of the word.

I have left the driving to them and now have plenty of time to think about how long it is going to take me to get out to the western suburbs when I finally reach the borrowed car. I had already been vexed about the fact that we were running late. My girlfriend is on her Internets-enabled phone looking for the phone number to Amtrak world headquarters. She is not renowned for her patience in such situations and I pity the poor customer service rep who is about to be torn a new asshole.

It isn't as if this is the first time this goddamn train has showed up in Chicago. It is a regularly-scheduled regional commuter train. Surely, they knew we were coming. Therein lies the primary problem with trains. It isn't like you can drive around an obstacle. If there is something in the way the show stops dead in its tracks. We have just now begun moving. I think I might like my money back. 7.11.08



Stuck in the Middle

Ever since Barack Obama won the delegate count pissing contest that filled our newscasts for the better part of 6 months back in early June he has been tripping over himself to get to the middle. I knew this would happen but it still smarts to see him courting the juggernaut that is America's overweight, underpaid and over-entertained middle. Granted, we have to get that iceberg moving before it melts underneath their Hummers but it isn't pretty to see our poster boy for dramatic change playing the straight man. Also granted, he's still black and still pushing a blue agenda. It's just that the blue agenda seems more like Panderfest 2008 to these leftie ears. I am a little bemused by all his supporters who thought he wasn't going to do this and are now casting him as just another politcian. Jesus, people. He has been a politician all along. Didn't you notice that he is running for public office? 7.08



Six

That's how many delegates Barack Obama needs to clinch the Democratic nomination for the presidency as of 5pm PDT this afternoon. At least according to CNN.com. The Huffington Post has him holding steady with eleven to go. Either way he is poised to claim the nomination with the magic number of 2118. Rush fans will no doubt note that Obama is currently holding steady at "2112."

I have made no secret of my support for Obama. I have been cautiously optimistic every step of the way and I am still excitedly reserved. Even if he does claim the blue side nomination the real work will have just begun. We've got the whole Vice President choice dog and pony show for both sides. We've got another several months of mudslinging and high stakes salesmanship. I can't say that Hunter S. Thompson would have supported Obama, but he would likely be happy with our chances this time around. McCain has been showing his true feathers like the hotheaded hawk that he is. He has a wicked combover to boot. This alone doesn't mean that he would be a bad commander in chief. It means that he would be a president with the worst hairstyle since James Polk's mullet.

In the time it has taken to pen this tome, Obama has closed the gap to a mere four delegates. Much to the consternation of the aforementioned Rush fans. 6.3.08



Mixed Up

We went into the studio for the first round of mixing the new record last week. LA based mix engineer Ronan Chris Murphy handled the knobs and was patient enough to deal with the two-headed monster of Tyler and I just over his shoulders. I feel like we put that poor guy through the ringer while trying to coax these mixes into the light of day. Ours was one of the last projects to work in what is soon to be the old location of his studio, Veneto West. We laid down basic tracks way back in December of 2006 with Matt Lynch at the mixing desk of an Atwater Village studio called Mysterious Mammal.

Another round of full band tracking followed in February of 2007 and then Tyler and I set to overdubbing. The whole thing could have been done in 12 or 16 weeks working like "normal" musicians. And by normal I mean if we'd had the ability to work on everything full time instead of scheduling around the shit that fills up our days - like medical school, day jobs, dogs, girlfriends, fiances, buying cars, holidays, showering, eating, etc. And then there's paying for everything. My record label, Greentown Records, isn't able to offset recording costs with the windfall from cash cow artists on their roster. Renting Neve mic preamps and vintage compressors costs money. Such is the life of an independent musician.

All in all I am quite proud of what we've done. We pushed the envelope on the time side of the more money/more time continuum. Since we didn't have the money we took the time. I have been working on songs for this record since before my last record came out just after the turn of the millennium. (Egads.) There were some detours along the way. Girlfriends came and went. Friends and siblings had babies. My Chicago band imploded and I abandoned ship. I wound up hiding out in exile in Alabama. Some assholes decided to make a point by flying airplanes into buildings and in doing so turned the world on its ear. Some other asshole played his hubris card and invaded a country unrelated to the first set of assholes. Assholes all around.

But I'm getting off topic again. Like Walter from The Big Lebowski, none of this has anything to do with Viet Nam, so to speak.

The record is good. It is different than the record I intended to make but it seemed to achieve consciousness somewhere along the way and grow up to be what it wanted to be. Far be it from me to bend it to my will. The louds are louder, the softs are softer and there is quite a bit of real estate in between. Andy Baker's drumming brings a life and spark to my music that it has never had. Jay Lauden's loping bass lines pull Andy's pure rock and roll sensibilities away from the pedantic. Tyler is a fellow guitar tone monger with a penchant for twiddling knobs that far exceeds my own patience for the art. Every piece of gear should have one knob in my world.

So Mr. One Knob learned Pro Tools along the way. I recall the day I set up my new little M-Box and laptop in the living room of my old apartment. I had to read the instructions to learn how to add a fresh, empty track to a new session. I have since gone back to open that session and hear the crickets from the courtyard outside my apartment window along with my test pilot guitar tracks. What I really wanted to do was track the album on 2-inch analog tape but tape has unfortunately become cost prohibitive for guys like me. I ended up using Pro Tools like a glorified tape machine. Funny how a hard drive can become the single most important thing in your universe.

Also contributing to the new record were some old friends. Most notably, Chicago's Daryl Coutts on his 1958 Hammond organ and a little piano. His playing is brilliant, as always. Definitely worth my putting the mobile in Molly's Mobile Studio by dragging the operation back to the Central Time Zone to track him and our trio of chicks in black dresses Ava Fain, Anne Hamilton/Katzfey and Crescent Tay Prah. Chicago conspired to make tracking the girls a complicated operation. Anne called me while I was waiting for my connecting flight in Memphis to say that her condo association was demolishing and rebuilding their back deck on the day we'd set up our vocal tracking session. Calls to my other friends in the city didn't get me anywhere because the city was digging up the park across the street from option 2 and contractors were building a new condo building just outside my attorney's place. Old crony Tone Loc would have been a great option as he was already loaning me mic stands and headphones but he was moving that weekend as well. Ava came through in the 11th hour by offering my choice of rooms in the Leo Burnett Building where she works. I ended up tracking the girls singing in a cafeteria on the 20-something-th floor. The weather was blessedly good while I was in town, my attorney plied me with Two Hearted Ale and I got good tracks. Everybody wins.

Back in Los Angeles, I got Wurlitzer, piano and vocal contributions from Darice Bailey, more chick singing from Suzanne Spinoza and an ace in the hole back up vocal from the Broken West's Brian Whelan. Collegiate buddy and all around good guy John Mezzano happened to be in town on business and I roped him into laying down some percussion between pints of IPA. Alison Ewing overdubbed her violin enough times to make a song sound like an orchestra along with Craigslist gem Shirley Hunt on multitracked cello. Shirley turned us onto violin artisan Stirling Trent who came in to retrack some parts when an earlier session didn't work out. Congratulations to Shirley and Stirling on their Master's degrees.

I did my usual I'll-play-whatever-I-can-find trick by contributing lead vocals, harmony vocals, acoustic, electric, Nashville strung, 12-string and baritone guitars, mandolin, harmonica, accordion, percussion and chord organ. I also spent countless hours editing tracks and wrestling with Pro Tools. Many thanks go out to my engineering wingman, Tyler Macy. His gear made up a good part of Molly's Mobile Studio for this project and his ears kept things sonically legitimate. I am happy to see these songs grow up and get out into the world. They'll be yours pretty soon. Enjoy them, feed them and treat them well and they'll be good for a lifetime of entertainment.

Gray in LA

Today is May 23rd and it is raining in Los Angeles. I am not complaining, as gray skies in Los Angeles mean that weather is actually happening. Those who do not live in the so-called City of Angels know that May 23rd is pretty late to be seeing raindrops and gray skies. Locals who have been here decades longer than I are saying that this is the latest rain they've ever seen. You see, once the rains taper off in the spring out here they don't return until after Halloween has come and gone and we are making plans for the year's holiday light spectacle. I moved out here because my soul needed some unabated sunshine so I am more or less fine with that situation for now. I am staring out a window at skies that would look just fine behind the skyscrapers of Chicago. You know the Chicago weather mantra - if you don't like the weather, stick around. Out here, a more appropriate statement would be - if you don't like the weather, what the hell are you doing here? There aren't many reasons beyond that to put up with this overcrowded mess.

Go Barry

My favorite Hawaiian cum Illinoisan, Barack Obama has been kicking ass and taking names. I have been following Acts I and II of 2008's political theater with hopeful uneasiness. I haven't been commenting about the roller coaster in here for two reasons. 1. Because I have been finishing up a new album and that process is taking up all my "free time and disposable income." Because I have so much of both of those. And, 2. Because I didn't want to get my hopes up about my Golden Boy. He's our great, half white hope. I believe that America desperately needs Barack Obama. Not because of what he will do, but because of what he will inspire us to do. I remember asking my buddy Jeff how to pronounce Obama's name when it started showing up on election signs in my hometown of Chicago. I've been following his career arc ever since. It's unbelievable - in him we have a politician who opens his mouth and - holy shit - things that make sense tumble out.

I didn't want him to run this time around, but I decided long ago that I'd support him if he did. I am still getting over my depression from the results of the last presidential election. But Obama stood on Lincoln's steps and filled my head with hopeful but trepidatious optimism And now look where we are. My golden boy is poised to get the nomination. Every step along the way Obama won when he needed to win. If he hadn't won in Iowa his boat would have been sunk right next to the dock. If he hadn't held his own on Super Tuesday his chances would have dwindled to much of nothing.

Hillary has held her own. Considering the fact that every Commander in Chief since 1988 has had either the surname Bush or Clinton she dropped the Rodham like flaming potato and rode her ambition to the bank. What has turned me from Mrs. Rodham Clinton was how she has made high art out of changing the rules when she feels she's not winning. I don't have any issues with having a woman running the show. I suspect that a lot of Hillary's supporters support her simply because she's a woman. I get it. I really do, but what matters most to me are candidates' positions on the issues. I don't care what color they are or whether or not they pee standing up. Look at it this way... what if you could read and assess the three remaining candidates by reading about their platforms without knowing about whom you were reading? I think a lot of people, red, blue or purple would realize that all three have good ideas. Conservatives would realize that Obama opposes gay marriage without getting all riled up about the color of his skin. Female Clinton supporters just might (maybe) not let gender cloud the issues.

What is happening is historic. At least on the progressive side of the fence. The Republicans are running - you guessed it - a rich, old white guy. The Democrats' best man for the job will either be African American or not even a man at all. In some aspects, we can't do any worse than what we have now. My disdain for the policies of the current administration is storied. My attorney thinks that whoever gets the job next is out and out screwed. I am inclined to believe him to a point. However, we've got to try. What is the point if we don't? 5.23.08



Paw Paw

It's funny how your name changes over the course of your life. Donald Freeman Armstrong started out as "Don." I'm pretty sure that somewhere along the way to "Dad" there was a transitional period where he was known as "Son of a Bitch." In the southern states, fathers are called "Daddy" and it is pronounced more like "Deeddy." After a couple decades of being known as "Daddy" to a goodly number of children he acquired the title of "Granddaddy." I think it was my cousin Herbert whose young mouth hadn't gotten the feel of too many words yet who mangled the word Grandpa and put it back together as "Paw Paw." And that's how I came to know the man that was my grandfather. I don't recall ever calling him anything else. His wife and my grandmother, Jewell, called him Don and Daddy and then Paw Paw - and more than likely Son of a Bitch at one point or another along the way. He was all those things and so much more and now we all have to figure out how to get along without him.

Paw Paw passed away in April. He had been in failing health since I was starting college. He bounced back from at least one stroke over the years and survived a good while after his kidneys gave out - loathing the constant trips to the dialysis clinic. He stuck around long enough to look upon no less than 14 great grandchildren (and counting). He dispensed wisdom in the manner of a traditional southern male - with short bits of sage advice carefully placed within hours of keeping his thoughts to himself. I always wanted to hear more stories about the old days and I suppose that I'll never get enough. Like John Mellencamp said, there is nothing more sad or more glorious than generations changing hands. By the time most people figure out what a treasure their elderly relatives are it is too late. I managed to figure it out in my own and spent as much time with him as I could. Except for a short period a few years back I always lived far away from Paw Paw. When you're young there are always important things to do. I thankfully learned that spending time with Paw Paw trumped nearly all of those things.

Spending time with Paw Paw meant a good deal of sitting in silence. He was tired and weak and couldn't see or hear all that well. I learned to compensate for those things by writing larger on his handmade birthday cards, speaking more slowly than my normal, rapid midwestern cadence and with a louder tone. And by simply letting him speak when he felt he had something to say. College football is as big a religion as any in his home state of Alabama and when football season arrived the aforementioned silence was broken with the sound of the TV filling his wood-heated basement. In terms of stature he was not a large man and the years whittled him smaller still. When the brown and gray Alabama winter came, a good fire kept his basement around 90F and that was fine with me. I have always had an aversion to cold weather. He was still mostly silent but I didn't know that televisions went that loud. I would sit with him and Granny and we'd watch whatever game Paw Paw deemed to be the most interesting. In 63 years of marriage I don't think that Granny ever really figured out the rules but that somehow made the experience more endearing. She was there to be with him. I was there to be with him. And now I miss him.

Paw Paw's last morning was a good one. His doctor had adjusted his medications to help him sleep more soundly. He awoke saying that he'd had his best night of sleep in years and made his way to the breakfast table where Granny had been serving him breakfast since time immemorial. He always drank his morning coffee out of a saucer. I always wondered to myself whether this was to help it cool or because he just liked it that way. I never did find that out and I am content to let it remain a mystery. Paw Paw was in a great mood and was enjoying his breakfast. Granny and his youngest daughter, Donna, were there with him when he slumped over right at the table. Donna is a registered nurse who lives in San Antonio and she'd taken time off to help her mother take care of Paw Paw. Paramedics were called and they all managed to get him into bed when they arrived. They said that they thought he'd had a massive stroke and it became clear that the end was likely near.

His seven children were summoned and all got a chance to be with him. I received an early morning call on a Tuesday - the kind of call that reminds you that good news always sleeps until noon. Alabama is two hours ahead of California and early can come pretty early when the news from home isn't good. He wound up passing on in the wee hours of the following day and I was on a plane less than twenty four hours after that. My sister was among those with him when he took his last breath. She told me that she would tell me about how it happened when I was ready, but I haven't been yet.

Alabama during high summer is hot. Cicadas and tree frogs fill the forest with a never ending echo after nightfall and the heat doesn't wane with the setting sun. To me, my visits to Alabama in the summers of the 1970s was like a 12-hour car ride back to the 1950s. Paw Paw wore cotton coveralls with his glasses in his breast pocket and rattling change at his hips. Once, during the bicentennial year, Paw Paw and great grandpa made me a walking stick with special 1976 quarters set into the handle. One in each side for heads and tails. It was just like the ones that they used to walk and to poke my ribs except shorter in order to accommodate my smaller stature. Paw Paw was all too eager to use that jingling change on trips in his pickup down to Wren - a town disguised as a crossroads with a service station. The worn hardwood floors would creak below my knobby knees and tennis shoes. Sliding back the tops of the metal refrigerators revealed a young boy's mother lode in the form of soda pop - all Coke to Alabamians regardless of the brand - and what I came to crave the most - popsicles. A sortie to Wren to buy gas for the tractor was merely an excuse to pile into his truck and head off the mountain on Highway 33. Older grandkids like me got to ride sitting on a wheel well in the back and I'm sure that my mother shudders when she thinks of that to this very day. Paw Paw would patiently talk with the staff while we carefully selected our sugar fix for the day. A candy bar, a small pile of hard, wax paper-wrapped Double Bubble and a nectar-sweet bottle of pop. Or, for me, a popsicle instead. There was cherry, lime, grape, orange and my father's favorite to this day, banana. They were simple - two sides and two sticks, meant to be broken in half in order to be shared or bartered for gum with a younger sibling or cousin. We'd deliberate over our choices and then set them on the counter underneath Paw Paw's gleaming dentured smile. One summer Paw Paw noticed my proclivity for frozen confectionaries and started calling me The Popsicle Kid. Now that I'm older and closer to his age than my age then and summer settles into a warm, humid languor I still buy popsicles. And I still love my Paw Paw. I'd give my right arm to have that walking stick now.

In memory of Donald Freeman Armstrong from The Popsicle Kid - April 2008



April Fool

We're all fools, as far as I can tell. Some are bigger fools than others. I can certainly vouch for my own level of foolery. The more I learn, the less I know. Perhaps this is the essence of wisdom. Wise men know that they don't know everything. I suppose that wise women follow suit. I don't have time for a suitable April Fool's prank this year. Unless, of course, I am an unaware victim of one as I write. Some might say that life is the greatest and cruelest prank of all. 4.1.08



Everything Sucks

Everything sucks now. Ok, not everything everything. But most everything. Everything you're not willing to pay a premium for, at least. Case and point...?

I have been a lifelong advocate of stand fans. They're like tabletop fans except they have some sort of base, usually in the shape of an "X" or a big disc, and some sort of stand with an adjustable base. You buy them at your local big box retailer and you take them home and dump the contents on your living room floor. There is usually more styrafoam and plastic than anything in there, and that, unfortunately, includes the component parts of the device which will eventually strain to keep you cool at night.

With a little bit of luck and a general level of engineering aptitude you might be able to cobble the thing together such that it vaguely resembles the picture on the box... sans the picturesque backyard scene that exists in that neverneverland that people who work in marketing think your idyllic backyard should look if mosquitoes and annoying neighbors didn't exist.

The genesis of this diatribe is sitting on the floor of my bedroom a mere four feet from my bed, where I am currently diatribing. The silver-ish sticker reads WINTAIR. I can't be certain how long I've had it but if I were a betting man I'd say that it is less than 3 years old.

I don't expect much from this fan. For my investment of $40 I expect the fan blades to spin at the speed corresponding to the button or switch that I engage at a time of my choosing. I also expect it to turn off when I defeat the switch same. Nearly all these things have some sort of recirculate option which, when engaged, causes the fan to slowly cycle from left to right while fan blades spin all the while.

What I don't expect is to have to manually remove the cheap-ass wire frame around the cheap-ass plastic blades and give them a hand start when I want a little artificial wind. As if it was some sort of World War I ear biplane or something. This is the honest truth. I'm less than 5 years into this piece of shit's life cycle and I already have to pull the "Contact!" rigamarole when I want it to do what I paid its manufacturer to ensure that it does, which I might add, isn't much. It's that part about spinning blades and all.

I am not an old man, but I swear to god that I have noted a discernable decrease in quality in nearly every given item in the menagerie of machines originally designed to make my life easier. Case and point... this fucking fan.

Obamania

I've been following the career of Barack Obama since his signs started showing up around my hometown when I still lived there. Born in Hawaii from an American mother and African father, Barry - as he was known in his formative years - wound up attending college for a spell at Occidental College in the Eagle Rock area just north of Los Angeles. Occidental is maybe 3 miles from my apartment as the crow flies. Seeing signs with the notably non-Polish name Barack Obama around town was a bit unorthodox in a city like Chicago. True, it is a melting pot and many ethnicities are well-represented buried back there under the snow drifts. But a name like Barry Ovaninski might not have piqued my interest back in my Chicago days. But Barack Obama was memorable. And here we are a scant few years later and he's the by-a-nose frontrunner on the blue side of the presidential primary race.

Over the years he earned my respect a bit at a time. I've read his books. I've heard his speeches. He may not be our native son but he is our hometown boy just the same. Granted, I am a Chicago expatriate but that is largely because of the weather. I very well may be back someday in the land of thunderstorms, lightning bugs and wearing shorts when it's 50F in the month of March. Not today, but someday. After all, it is a balmy 27F in Chicago as I write this.

When I heard the first rumblings of Obama considering throwing his name into the hat for a presidential nomination in 2008 I had to make a choice. I felt as if he - and we - might be better served if he held off a bit. Between my attorney's theory that the next president is a de facto patsy who will be left holding the bag of a faltering economy, a wildly unpopular and mismanaged war and a Cubs-worthy record in foreign affairs and the fact that he really was a bit new at the game of big league politics I was convinced that he should let someone else pick up the pieces this time around.

On the other hand I desperately wanted a republican out of the white house. More right wing judiciary appointments would cast a pall over any form of actual progress in our country. We've spent 7 years and counting going backwards. Incidentally, the Dubyaville countdown ticker on my Apple Dashboard reads 332 days, 18 hours, 5 minutes and 40 seconds. Americans are starting to realize that they were hoodwinked.

I want a democrat at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue because I would rather hammer a democrat on the issues than a republican. And mark my words... I will be relentless. I long to criticize a donkey. They're all more or less republicrats anyway.

Which is why I support Barack Obama. I decided that we need new blood instead of the tired old guard this time around. Experience counts for a lot, but there are times in life when you have to trust the next generation with their own future. I'll feel a little badly for Hillary, provided she gets bested by Obama. Normally, I'd be gung ho for a female president. Ms. Clinton is the best shot the smarter gender has as of yet had to have one of their own sitting in the big desk behind the eagle on the floor. But this time... in 2008 and beyond... we need someone to set a hopeful tone. Someone to inspire US - the Americans who most of the working and paying and living and dying in this country to be the best version of ourselves. Someone to inspire actual change.

The president can't make us do anything, but he or she can inspire us to do it ourselves. Kennedy set us on a course for the moon. FDR did us so right that no nominee gets more than 8 years to do his or her thing. Go read about Obama. Listen to what he has to say. Make up your own mind. Maybe give him a chance to lead us somewhere. 2.22.08



Superman

Today is Super Tuesday here in America. It isn't a holiday, per se, but it is a big day in our political process. Our convoluted voting system dictates that a bunch of states decide which presidential candidate will get their delegates and be their contender in the mudslinging, us vs. them race to be the most important figurehead in our country, and I daresay the world.

The political conservatives are on their way to picking which rich, old, white guy will be their man in this race. The political liberals are picking between a woman and an African American. The actual election is fully 8 months away. We have a lot of mudslinging yet to endure.

I don't particularly care for our two party system. It disenfranchises a lot of people, which, I suppose, is the idea. However, I am at least 50% pragmatist and that means that I will work with what we have at the same time that I'll work to change it.

I won't tell you how to vote. I will only encourage you to listen to the words of the junior Senator from my home state of Illinois, Mr. Barack Obama. I'm sure that if you can find my words here you can find any number of places to see his. 2.5.08



Damn

That year went fast. I have all manner of things I've been writing that I need to post in here but I wrote them in a word processor so I need to square peg them into this web editing software. I'll get to it soon. Welcome to the latter part of the decade. Everyone in? OK, here we go. 1.7.08

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