here.

Way, way too much "I should blog this" material has come through for me to be thorough about it at this point. In brief:

- Dad moved to OR with wife and 5 cats. Girl and I went out and helped shuttle the cats from plane to rental car, then I went out the next morning to the hotel to help lift the bed to re-retrieve the cats for the ride to central OR. Went OK, I guess. He calls Girl my "buddy".

- Yesterday, which is why I finally feel inspired to get on here and log something, the vet called to say a woman contacted them saying she found Girl's cat who went missing two years and five months ago almost to the day. He was in a cat carrier in a ditch about a half hour's drive south of the city. So, after a bit of phone runaround involving proving to the rescuer that we weren't the ones who ditched the cat and that we do in fact deserve to have him back, I went down to get him. Turns out the rescuer works at a veterinary hospital and did all this work to check him out and deworm and deflea him and everything, and didn't want to be reimbursed at all. (We'll have to see if there's something nice we can do for her, though.) He's in reasonably decent shape considering he's 11... his teeth need help, is the main thing. So now we also have 5 cats...

- Recording is going to take more deliberate planning and more time than we originally thought, mostly because we were having trouble thinking it through until we listened back to our initial attempts. So we're heading into woodshedding mode.

Since I still don't have sufficient time to maintain Nucleus here, I might move this to LJ. We'll see...

My Chinese textbook contains a dialogue which begins like this:

ͬ־£¬ÎÒÒªÂòÑÌ¡£
ʲôÑÌ£¿
¡°ÈýÎå¡° ÑÌ£¬¶àÉÙǮһºÐ£¿

Translation:
Comrade, I want to buy cigarettes.
What cigarettes?
"Three Five" cigarettes, how much money for one box?

Once about a zillion years ago I was informed, and for a while I agreed, that it was cool to smoke those damn things. I did some Googling and apparently they're big throughout Asia. Evidently they are endorsed by the BJ Language Institute as well. Ha!

Lulu (like CafePress for authors)
Find-a-Human IVR Cheat Sheet

Aargh. No time to look at the code screwing up the comments section here and fix it.

Greycube Farms is a raw deal. I want my life back. I need to figure out what I want to be when I un-grow up, the minimum I need to earn to get by, and within what time frame I can make this happen. Clearly if I had a containable amount of work time and less time and distance involved in commuting, I wouldn't need as much money to hire out the basic services I don't currently have time to deal with, and I could easily go back to employing supplemental non-wage-based methods of attracting services and stuff to myself. Same old thing as always: the additional income is required to perpetuate the lifestyle that generates the additional income. Stupidity.

For now, the two non-work non-negotiables are the band and the language study. I expect both to come along with me when I am finally able to rejoin my regularly scheduled time on Earth.

You are a Virgo!!You are real, honest, helpfull and
analytical. You can pick out every detail and
when something isn't right you wont stop till
you have fixed it! Unlike any of the other
signs you sleep less, because your always busy
thinking about how to improve something!! You
are modest and humble about all that you do and
you give your all to anything that you do!!!!
Of all the animals in the world you are most
like a bee, a bee you say, yes a bee. Like a
bee you are a hard worker and like a bee you do
things that other people think are ipossible.
Also just like a bee, you are worth your weight
in gold, because you do things that are usefull
and actually help the world! Without bees we
probably wouldnt be alive, and for that we
thank you bees (i am talking to you of
course!!).

-Your colors are navy blue and grey

-your metal is mercury


-your precious stone is a sapphire, and like a
sapphire you are never "cut from the
cloth" you are different just like every
sapphire is a different color and heu!

-your lucky day of the weeki is wednesday

-the part of the body that you rule is your
intestions and nervous system

-your element is earth

-the planet that you are ruled by is mercury

-your true love comes from a scorpio, capricorn,
taurus, your own virgo, and sometimes aquarius


What is Your TRUE Astrology Sign? (for guys and girls with incredibly detailed answers and incredible pictures+READ MEMO PLEASE)
brought to you by Quizilla

A few random thoughts on Coheed IV (follow the link for some other mixed yet probably fair takes on it -- "charitably compared to Alvin & The Chipmunks" -- ha!):

This CD is what might have happened had The Fucking Champs evolved -- TFC's stuff tends to sound like random outtake noodlings from a session where a Coheed CD ultimately gets crafted... great sound, goes nowhere, and that's okay, thank you very much. Plant a Fucking Champs "song", water it, and this is what might grow.

I don't know how they do it, but Coheed sounds like all of Canadian radio. Like when you drive from Vermont toward Montreal, abruptly all the rock stations start sounding exactly like this -- the Canadian content rules reveal a completely different evolutionary track from what it sounds like happened to rock without weighting the playlist toward the Canucks.

Like Kate Bush sometimes, I get the feeling Claudio lifts his vocal lines by playing other people's records backwards. Always & Never, he lifted by playing Dan Fogelberg's records forwards. With a generous pinch of Wall-era Floyd, naturally.

Kitties are still sick. This goes on and on. They stopped eating and drinking. Subcutaneous fluids, Clavamox. I did ask the universe to let me care for somebody else needy, didn't I.

Vacation's over after today. I really would have no problem turning this level of relaxation and personal organization into a lifestyle, if the money came from somewhere. Must continue to strategize.

I have to say, I'm impressed with what I can find about Noah's Wish. My kind of no-nonsense charity.

I made some fish broth for the upstairs kitties, since for kitties with colds you gotta make them high-quality stinky food so they can smell it through their congestion, remember they have an appetite and get the nutrients they need to heal. Pix was feeling shitty today, sniffed it and went back to bed; he might not like fish too much anyway -- hard at this stage to know for sure. [Cole], on the other hand, went nuts for the aroma of the stuff, and although the broth was still a bit warm for him to slurp down, he was happy to lick it off my fingers, and it got him started on wanting to eat again, so he downed most of the open can of wet food that was there too. Then he wanted to stay out and cuddle on the guest bed. What a sweet, gentle guy. Once he feels safe, he's the sort of cat who will come over and just fall over with his belly up until you rub him, and then he'll fall asleep purring with his chin resting on your hand. I'm glad. I was worried there for a while.

Still need to be sure what his name is.

With any luck Pix will start feeling a little better after sleeping it off a while.

I'm not the only one thinking it. From the comments:

Spoke to my local (Virginia) shelter yesterday

They will be gradually taking in animals from LA; the Humane Society in LA will be keeping displaced rescued domestic animals for about 30 days in the hope that they will be claimed. But to make room for the evacuated animals and also to help areas with damaged shelters, the first domestic animals to arrive in our area will be animals that were in LA and Mississippi shelters before the storm hit. Our own animal shelter is far from empty now.

The BEST ways to help are: First, to adopt locally; there are thousands of cats and dogs that desperately need rescue now in our local shelters. This will help make room for the evacuees. Second, send as much as you can afford to the Humane Society and Noahs Wish or other organizations rescuing and caring for animals. Third, contribute long term to your local animal shelters, participate on their boards or with animal care when you can, and support spay/neuter programs.

To me it doesn't matter if the cat,dog or bird I bring into my family was at risk of being killed in New Orleans or at risk of being put down in our local shelter for want of someone to adopt it, even though the former situation is more romantic; it is still a valuable life saved. (Our shelter cannot afford to be a "no kill" shelter although they will keep animals as long as they can; the toll of animals put down last year was in the thousands.) And by adopting locally, we can help make room for some of the evacuees.


Both have colds, so they're somewhat miserable, but they're quarantined in the guest room and hopefully will get through it naturally without developing full-blown respiratory infections.

There is no way in hell I am going to have a cat named Sheldon, so I asked him what his name really was and he eventually told me it's Pixel. I think he was telling me that from the start, but the transmission was cloudy since I was listening for something else; if he had a jazz/composer name that would preserve the prevailing cat theme around here. That's okay, though, since even if there were 3 jazz/composer cats, there would still be one named Tylenol. So Pixel it is.

I held off on making his brother's name tag for now, since I need to speak with him more about it. If I were going to honor their semi-pair-bondedness, that would make him Pete (Petronius the Arbiter, you know), but I'm not convinced he *is* Pete. He came as Cole, and he might really be Cole; I keep checking back, but he's shy and not feeling that well, so he's not terribly forthcoming with information right now. He's a real sweetie, though, as long as you go to where he is and you're slow and gentle and respectful about it.

Pix, on the other hand, knows exactly what he is getting out of this new arrangement and is stoked -- he's the type who will curl up in your lap all winter while you sip cocoa and read. Girl, with her psychic plug-in to black kitties, might have a better idea about whether Cole is Cole or somebody else when she gets back, if he hasn't told me yet.

• eggs
  
• beagle day at the dog park
  
• the latest Punk Planet
  
• cats!
  
• engraved pet tag machine
  
• cheap camping stool at a garage sale
  
• Trader Joe's
  
• blues and jazz on KBOO
  
• car ride with the dog
  
• bean and cheese burrito
  
• chat with a neighbor
  
• cheap Merlot in a plastic Harry Potter cup
  
• surfin'
  

I'm cancelling my birthday this year. I don't really need to have it. There are plenty of people out there who are short on birthdays; maybe you know someone who wants mine.

Of course, some clown thought it would make me feel loved if they sent out a request to every god damned cow-orker and their dog to send me an e-card today. I'm sure they meant well, but every one of those that came in felt like someone poking me in the eye. At least they knew enough not to generate any kind of cake, which seriously would have been the icing on the poop pile.

I went to the Humane Society the other day to test-drive cats. The thing about New Orleans, what I more or less had in mind to do with technology on a small scale, my employer has actually begun doing on a large scale, and I am not in a good position workload-wise to be able to walk away from my daily haul of crap to join in the effort. So there was brief talk here at the Falling Down Farmhouse about taking in people, but I have no idea where we would put them or how I would stay sane, since even having people I know and love around the house for more than a few days drives me completely out of my fucking skull. We can, however, house animals. It strikes me as unlikely that any orphaned pets from down south will find their way to Oregon, but this seems like the sort of thing it makes sense to pay forward -- there are needy cats here; donate to pay the medical and housing expenses of the animals there, sure, but to try to acquire an animal specifically from there when I'm 2000 miles away would seem almost like some kind of ghoulish trophy.

As for whether we can handle it: We've had up to four cats before. I alone have had four cats before. We had three until old Tucker died. The hardest integration we've done was the third dog, and I'm not even sorry about that, as hard as it is sometimes (for example, I didn't leave for my own vacation this week for lack of competent dogsitters). Most importantly for the house's carrying capacity -- apart from pre-screening for cats who not only tolerate, but actually *like* dogs and other cats -- I don't feel particularly encroached upon if a cat shares my studio space, or my kitchen, or my bed. I can count the number of people I can say that about on one hand, easy.

[As an aside: wouldn't it be cool to set up a kind of Pet Bucket Brigade in this country? I know, the numbers of pets needing homes would get suddenly astronomical as you hit the Gulf Coast area and anywhere close by that the animal relief organizations are evacuating them to, but maybe if we each traveled a little further in the direction of southern LA and MS than we would normally go to adopt a pet -- 50 miles, 150 miles? some distance relatively easy to get within a half day -- if executed on a grand scale, it would free up some resources closer to the Gulf Coast to accommodate more of the astronomical number of pets. Simplistic and silly, I know, but sometimes these things work.]

Then again, just as the national conversation about people in trouble is taking place in small ways, resulting in varying levels of mental and ethical contortion around questions of charity and what makes a person worthy to live -- hey, FEMA backed out of sending the 1000, no, wait, 500 people to a shelter in Portland, but it turns out we have our own needy people here we somehow failed to notice or care about all this time! What's their story? -- Oh, hold on, those aren't the same caliber of needy people, these ones brought it on themselves and just want a handout while I work hard, I'm being taken advantage of... what's that you say? The ones in NOLA were like that too? Well, this is working well for them then... uh... no, shut up, it's them, it's not the system... well, even if it is the system... EXTERMINATE THE BRUTES! -- now consider the same problem with animals in trouble. Once you try to wrap your brain around the enormity of the issue, even though the whole idea of the handout when it comes to housepets is a given and therefore doesn't engender the same type of resentment, by the same token there are plenty of folks who believe the animals are less worthy of our attention, and the resulting sheer numbers are more than enough to make a person shut down. While I have no intention of becoming a pet hoarder, I think I understand the drive, and I think it comes from trying to grapple in some way with the sheer enormity of the issue; maybe it's a way to deny the temptation to look at those numbers and just go numb, to have the thought flit through your head for the briefest moment that the so-called companion animal population would be more manageable if we just tossed a thousand here or a thousand there into the oven. And so then you say to yourself, oh no, I am not that monstrous, I won't let myself be that monstrous; and you either get into the clearinghouse business, starting or working for a shelter or a spay-and-neuter-strays outfit, and you don't get attached except to the larger cause, or else you take it upon yourself to try to connect personally with each and every critter, and you hoard.

The other side of it is, though, apart from being immune to criticism over taking advantage of freebies, the striking advantage most pets have over people (even over baby people) is that they're cuter. It's the whole which-species-to-eat argument all over again: dogs cute, chickens not so cute. Ethical considerations aside, could it just be that all of this posturing comes down to Southern refugees (or Pacific NW street-dwellers) not being fuzzy and rolling around on their backs with their paws in the air?

Maybe a little, but more than that, I just hate people. And there were a couple of really cool cats.

All of which is a roundabout little bit of mental gymnastics to figure out what I personally want to do. Insofar as people are concerned, the ultimate goal has got to be self-determination; I don't think I possess the love for humans that's required to help anyone get there except when it comes to leveraging my Stuff Juju and maybe some computer skills, and to the extent I am able to flex my idealism muscle in those areas, I absolutely, non-negotiably need to be able to go home to my lair afterward. It's the same reason almost all of the communal living situations I tried were so abysmal. Do I feel I am morally obliged to compromise my non-negotiable space requirements because so many tens of thousands of people were driven out of their own lairs? As selfish as it undoubtedly is, I don't see the point of helping others at the expense of my own sanity. Inasmuch as I don't think it's possible to describe my own digs as anything other than modest, better to work toward ensuring I have space *and* they have space. I'm sure this makes me an asshole.

But I can, as my contribution toward sharing space, house animals, can't I.

Girl saw I was sad and has softened somewhat on the subject of test-driving the cats. It's a bummer she's not in town to meet the ones I met, but still, maybe I'll go down there again tomorrow.

Actually, there may be at least a partial retraction due here -- not all at the Red Cross may be what it seems. For instance, see one of many articles on this topic on LW, RW and all sites in between: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/9/1/224719/8718

An interesting read that came up Googling "Atheist Jews":
http://www.vbs.org/rabbi/hshulw/outreach_bot.htm

This past week I find myself alternately heartbroken, enraged and so anxious I can't breathe as I watch my country quite literally float in the bowl with the feces -- and I find also that there is much more to mobilization from afar than simply sending cash into a black hole and feeling smug about it. Not that I intend to belittle what the Red Cross and a small handful of others are doing, since by most accounts they are very good at what they do. However, what they do is not what I am personally and directly able to do -- there would be real trouble if anyone were depending on me to be a medic, or even a host. Do I love humanity any less for hating people? Not really, no; I want to work for world peace, I just don't want to fuckin' hang out. My strengths revolve around directing the flow of communications and the flow of material goods, so those are the spheres in which I am stepping up operations. Specifically, I am best able to help with communications equipment and expertise, and with research and bureaucratic navigation. And so I'm trying, primarily directing resources toward and through the household of a friend who got out safely (albeit homeless, jobless and with very few possessions), because I know my friend is the same way about it *and* she knows at least hundreds of people formerly from New Orleans and vicinity who need to get plugged back in and talking to each other and to relevant organizations, neighbors, and so forth. And unlike me, she does love people, and we need to hand over access to information to some people who do.

Some of the hatefulness spewing forth from piggies large and small in response to this clusterfuck has me unspeakably spitting mad. Just as perfectly good food on your restaurant plate becomes garbage the second you've had enough, people who had homes and jobs last week are now The Homeless and The Jobless, people without anywhere to shower or a change of clothes since before the hurricane are now The Unwashed, humans who suddenly have specific needs become The Masses Wanting A Handout, and everyone wants to push the plate away. The Internet is one of the best tools I know for engineering focused remedies to that, yet some people seem to be very angry about anyone even trying. The message appears to be: send your cash into the hole, pray to Jesus, turn your head away and shut the fuck up, God's will, blah blah.

I have recently begun to make peace with the fact that I am an atheist. And that is why I believe this work must be done: because I believe there is no God. This puppy is all ours.

Realized that without really thinking about it, I'd been staying away from here because someone's comment got me down a while ago. This is someone who hasn't seen me in years now (my repeated invitations notwithstanding) and who decided I'm a sellout based solely upon some of the superficial details of my life. However, I think it's fairly safe to say I'm still myself in spite of having a house and a reasonably decent-paying job at the moment, and I can easily make the case that I'm more myself than I was before I got here since I'm back in language classes and have been back regularly playing live music for several years now -- but whatever. We don't need no steenking justifications. By now I've been through enough rounds of blowoffs and petty attacks by people I love that it's just another day, another regrettable loss, keep going.

So it's not quite 7am on a Saturday and I'm wide awake, which is fine. Girl is dragonboating in SF this weekend, and I have my long puttering-around-the-house list (included: install new 3-way pickup slider switch in the Gibson SB-350, install a new case fan in the living room surf box, change my spark plugs; not included: cleaning anything...). Helping Xaos's GF move this morning too, which ought to qualify as my workout for the day.

Regarding the Gibson SB-350: why is it that every Gibson bass I've ever had has been up for sale as some model other than what it actually is? This one was mistakenly advertised as an EB-3; the Ripper I had in VT was on sale as a Grabber. Use the Internet, folks.

But I'm still really happy with this bass, I realized. I had been thinking about getting a Mustang or Musicmaster to supplement it, and someday I still might, but for now I just ordered new DR SMR-45 roundwounds for the Gibson (no patience for driving around town trying to figure out who carries DR short scale bass strings; just let them show up at my door in a few days, I have enough to do while I wait), and then I have to put in the new pickup switch so I can swap positions without using a paper clip, and after that I think it will be a tad punchier and easier to deal with sonically. I just replaced the Fender 160w combo I sold last year with a nifty Tube Works 300w head and a mediocre and extremely heavy 1-15" cab (oh yeah, add to my putter list: install casters on that monster), and I've still got the little Trace bass amp, all of which exponentially increases the odds of my getting ad hoc gigs in between band activities if I'm just feeling itchy to do something on stage... which I find I am.

Oh, yes, let me say that working with J in the band has been nothing short of delightful. Xaos, I'm sorry I resisted this idea for so long. The synergy between the lot of us is staggering.

Bolton's installment as Ambassador to the UN has me looking at mls.ca again. Wonder if there are MLS sites for other planets?

Nerd Ball III was yesterday in Eugene -- our very own Bilgewater's salad bar scene.

Note to gamers: I know many of you don't get out much, but it is bad form to ask the band to turn down at a benefit concert because you can't hear each other in the impromptu role-playing game you've started in the same room. At a CONCERT.

Note to all actual and potential attendees of ÷ shows: As Precious advised between taunts, "Don't ever turn your back on a performer. EVER." Further, attendance by devout Catholics is probably contraindicated going forward, unless planning to actually beat Precious with a shoe rather than just expressing the desire to. Be sure to let him record it.

Notes to benefit concert organizers: (1) Include the venue location in your advertising. (2) Lay out the room for a music show rather than a chess club meeting. (3) If you want people to dance, book a whole series of acts with a beat; people might not stick around to hear the headlining rock band if they are preceded by two hours of folk and experimental avant-jazz looping, as talented as your selected performers might be, and no one at all will be left to hear the DJ at the end. (4) Look up Sissyboy, and if what they do disturbs you, avoid booking bands whose lead singers are members. (5) Even if you more or less know what you're getting, the VFW ain't the place to host it.

I am confident we will not be asked back for NB-IV.

On the plus side: played a little with Dgoat. Said he couldn't hear me, but J could, so I dunno. Maybe try again at the next Cobra, depending on the composition of each group (they're breaking it into 3 I think).

Played out last night for the first time since our fill-in-bassist-soon-to-be-co-guitarist joined. Went rather well really, although as always with us, the crowd could've been bigger... had they not all left after the second of four bands... grrr. Ah, well, we made friends with two great bands we definitely want to play with again, The Gentry and Submarine Fleet. A laptopper band called Home Before Sundown also opened, and I don't think any of us got a chance to talk to them afterward, but they also had really nice vocals and some interesting sonic ideas. Great night for lead vocals from start to finish, actually.

Nerd Ball III next weekend in Eugene! Now if only the organizers would remember to post the event location and lineup every time they post notices telling people to go... :P

You Are 27% American

America: You don't love it or want to leave it. But you wouldn't mind giving it an extreme make over. On the 4th of July, you'll fly a freak flag instead... And give Uncle Sam a sucker punch!

I recently took this back up again, and it's been really fun. While we're not concentrating on literacy as much as I'd like, we're delving directly into things one person might actually say to another, so less grammar, more idiom than the last time out, and we get past sentences like "I read the book, I buy the pen" fairly quickly. And, of course, this time I have the Internet and all kinds of software tools, not to mention a decent supply of native speakers at my disposal once I'm not embarrassed to talk to them anymore. :)

From the first round of lessons fifty zillion years ago, I will always remember "yi kuai banana cake"...

We got an old tent trailer. Now we just need to find time to camp. We'll take it out for a week or so in September for sure, but I hope we get somewhere with it before that. We won't camp at Pickathon, since Mom is coming and is excited about Pickathon but terrified of camping. Maybe we can bring it to our friends' sleepover beach wedding the weekend after that.

New Divided shows soon! In Portland, come down to Ash St. on Fri 22 to check out the debut of our kind of in-betweener lineup! Once we plug in a full-time bassist (we have a couple of leads), our current fill-in is going to join alongside Precious and me on guitar, creating what I now believe is going to be a SERIOUS POWERHOUSE. And you know I don't say those things lightly...

Girl is in Kah-lee-fornia. I go tomorrow night for a few days. For now, keeping oddball hours to tire myself out. Not that it's hard to tire myself out if I manage to keep up with even a fraction of what I'm supposed to be doing.

So this morning I won a ticket to Pickathon for knowing that Peggy Seeger was married to Ewan MacColl. NO competition on the contest line for that one -- I had to get out of bed and go to the phone and everything. Yay obscure knowledge (for my age set)!

It never really occurred to me until tonight, but spelling is power. So much of finding things depends on being able to spell what you're looking for -- and as we all know, to grok the grep is to hold the keys to the whole world.

We need a bass player now. Is anyone reading this the right kind of bass player in the right city?

Jaunting down to SFO just for fun next weekend. Missing Pride -- ho hum, so very sad.

My group at work these days is noticeably shy on testosterone; I probably have the highest level of it unless you include the new guy just hired in India. Drama ensues. The catfighting dropped fairly dramatically when one backbiting obnoxious petty instigator moved to another group two weeks ago, but now a cow-orker's marriage is imploding, and assorted other COs are pregnant and are being cooed and fawned over, and then the one who's oldest is endlessly talking about crafts and her son's wedding. I'm a friend of the implodee and have done my best to be helpful in my bleak depressing little way; I find I don't have much to say to the spawners or to Grandma. I wonder if I got married, would anyone care or show up? Probably no one from there. Everyone loves my work, of course, but I'm an impostor. Some days I feel it fairly acutely. Thank heavens I can come home to Little Beirut and my farmhouse and my twisted little family at night. Girl laughed when I called her "my sanity" after getting home yesterday -- but it's true.

Bullshit du jour, I mean, apart from the high-level ongoing Fristian/Dobsonian bullshit which is, as Malloy said last night (as closely as I can remember the phrasing), "going to beat your ass to pieces with the body and blood of Christ" -- but then again, not really so far apart from that: http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050526/NEWS01/505260481#

I may be inhumanly busy making a living under The Man's new terms and conditions these days, but I'm still paying close attention, and my gut isn't happy.

Off to get medieval this weekend. Bringing a good book with me.

Figures that we had the biggest crowd at Holocene that we've had for any show in the last I-cant-remember-how-long -- the sound in there sucks ass, like literally locates all the ass in the room and sucks it into any available sonic space, and consequently our coordination was less than precise... but it definitely wasn't the worst show we've ever done, and we probably got a couple new admirers out of it. I felt all oogy about people afterward though, just wanted to go and hide. I'm still kind of socially hung over from it.

I actually break strings playing the SD! How odd. Must be the whammy. Good thing I keep a stage backup...

Played a Seagull Plus Spruce the other day that someone near work was selling. Very nice instrument for its price range (course it is -- LaSiDo is god, or at least merits demigod status compared with the Holy Grail of Greven), but I still don't want to jump at anything not properly sized on the body end. I'm coming out of being a dreadnought; so should my guitar.

Oh my god I played THE MOST beautiful acoustic guitar yesterday. Greven is absolutely the shit; his cult following is 1000% justified. This is my new dream guitar, more than any of the Martin 000's, more than any other comfortable classy acoustic I've ever played, hands down. And I didn't even play one of the smaller ones, which was funny since I was out expressly looking to test-drive parlor and folk guitars. Throaty and full, buttery to the touch... course, even the used one I played yesterday represents a couple house payments, so purchasing one of these isn't an endeavor to be taken lightly. Maybe this is incentive to reward myself for something later (like winning the lottery)? Christ, these instruments are worth more than my vehicles...

The Divided tonight at Holocene @10, alongside some beautifully offensive drag action. Be there!

Link du jour -- great:
Smoke Pot, Not Email

Quite unexpectedly, a Godin SD followed me home the other day. Good thing, too, since it rids me of any need for a Strat and feels infinitely better than one -- SD must stand for Stubby Digits, since it's another of these short-scale dealies my fingers so dearly love. And it's the purdy amberburst color, too. Gonna have to look into a sponsorship deal with Godin once we get famous, or with LaSiDo in general -- one of these days I'll have to wander down to Artichoke and see if they have a Seagull Grand Artist in stock for me to try...

Apart from the obvious (I have been working; after that, I have been working), the following stands out:

There are seedlings growing in my car. No, I didn't plant them there.
No idea what they are.

Q is such the quintessential dog, getting the quintessential dog illnesses the others never bothered to get. He was the one who got worms, and now he's the one who got kennel cough. Still no formal permission to get his medical history from E -- we'll just revaccinate for everything not already dealt with once he gets over this. You can give them Robitussin DM for it, it turns out. Also got antibiotics from the vet.

John Renbourn is at the Aladdin on Thurs. Totally broke, but might have to try to rob an old lady to go see that while the guy is still around and touring.

Either way, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum is at Dante's on Fri, with Faun Fables this time. That's payday, and I am so there.

Argh. Rectum terribly sore from work this week.

In the middle of dealing with a basically untenable workload brought upon us by one person leaving the group, another not really knowing their job and a number of empty seats on the team that it's taken months to fill, plus a large last-minute emergency project for the rest of us to do on top of our regular jobs, I had a mandatory 8-hour Kool-Aid transfusion session yesterday wherein we played a rousing game of Jungle Escape and had a senior marketing manager regale us with mangled metaphor upon mangled metaphor ("this beachhead is a cornerstone of our business..."). And they didn't buy us lunch. Bastages.

Well, back to work. WEEKEND IMMINENT! W00T!

It's really not my intention to abandon this blog, so I'm just going to have to find the time to post.

We played a benefit for Sisters of the Road at Berbati's last night, which was cool because the club a great stage and sound system and sound guy, plus they've gone non-smoking in the part of the club with the stage in it, but the show was underpromoted (by the organizers and by us, really), we went on around midnight on a weeknight so all our daywalker friends either chickened out or went home early (or went to the stupid weekly queer event up at Porky's, although Precious pointed out to several of them that Booty happens every single week while we do not), plus at the last minute they put a magician doing card tricks on the stage while we should have been setting up (the evening's earlier magic acts had taken place on the floor, which was perfect since the next band could plug in and mic up while the act was going on), so there was the musician on before us (Joe Haege of 31 Knots... who was great; reminded me in a way of Jason Narducy with maybe a touch of Richard Davies thrown in on the piano, plus some tasteful looping), then the card tricks, then us setting up, then our set... which was apparently enough downtime to lull or bore the remaining audience members into clearing out, so we played another fabulous club gig to about two and a half people. We deserve better. Really.

Anyhow, in the opening slot, Ross & co. were great fun as usual, and later the other magic guy did some fairly impressive balancing and juggling tricks with heavy stuff and fire. Then we also had the side project of the lead singer of a popular local indie-pop band, and the guy has apparently found Jebus and had lots to sing about it. He didn't talk to Xaos (wearing his Evil Never Looked So Good shirt) or me (wearing my Dykes on Spikes shirt); felt like he was glaring at me. I guess Xaos used to be on speaking terms with him. Decent songwriter, though. Oh, well.

Woke up this morning glad that my dream turned out to be a dream. I had worms, but not in the usual way. When I coughed or blew my nose, they were coming out my nose and mouth, and when I looked up my nostrils in the mirror I could see more of them sitting there. There was long ones, tall ones, short ones, brown ones, black ones, round ones, big ones, crazy ones. Related somehow to sashimi consumption yesterday? If so, I hope it's only because I'm neurotic and not due to some kind of telepathic communion with intestinal parasites, which would suck.

The other night I woke up in the middle of the night all freaked out with the realization that I am speeding up my life. Which isn't to say shortening my life, although on a practical level it could amount to the same thing even if my life is long. Ack.

Yeesh! In between yanking my torn and half-munched limbs out of the mouth of my job, I managed to finish installing the trim around the new living room floor and then reinstall and rewire most of the furnishings in there. I suppose we're allowed to come back into polite society now that we finally own something by Ikea -- something second-hand and kind of broken by Ikea, granted (corner desk, Onestepuppfröm Milkcråte model), but nonetheless.

It actually looks pretty good in there, if you ignore the ghetto slip covers and stuff.

Link du jour: The Age of Overwork

I need to formulate a retirement plan starting NOW...

Installed the living room floor over the weekend. Everything hurts. Need to remember not to use my body for anything. Bad things happen.

Found out an indirect cow-orker from VT got murdered. Not good. Not good at all.

And now back to work, work, work. My ass is beat.

Work is kicking my ass. Need to get used to the severely-ratcheted-up pace and workload, or die. And everyone said I was working hard before.

Thinking about Japan for a fall vacation, just for fun and to drop in on Girl's cousin. Should know if it's affordable within the next 4-6 weeks maybe.

So, okay, for optimal performance from the UTC9, sensibly enough, you gotta fill it and then you gotta *stop* filling it and just spin it around for a while, so you wind up with a finished product that you can say was started within a reasonably narrow date range without new unprocessed materials continually getting added along the way, as they have been in my Trio of Directionless Piles. So what I have rigged up, after a weekend of hefting biomass to and fro, is an improved staging area so I can get the (ideally pre-shredded) plant poop out of my house with a minimum of fuss, and then a so-far-half-full tumbler filled with chopped-up materials that either were already much of the way toward decomposing under the old system, or were run through the chipper/shredder this weekend. The largest of the three old piles has been dealt with. Of the two remaining, one's mostly leaves and should be easy to fix, while the other promises to be a serious mess. I doubt I'll get to it this weekend, since we're going to Eugene to make rawk and will probably make an overnight out of it, and then I envision the rest of the weekend being spent doing things like finding the house under the pile of dishes. Who knows, though; maybe I'll get to it. Planting season's just about upon us, and I want this stuff cooking properly ASAP.

I am such a fucking slacker. I need to stop sleeping so I can get back to work on the band publicity stuff! Then again, I'm pretty much required to start taking lunch hours again now, so maybe I'll just set some of those hours aside as my project time.

So Friday was my last day as an Office Supply at Greycube, and today was my first as a Tiny Cog. Today was all about getting my Kool-Aid levels recalibrated, suffering through PowerPoint presentations and safety videos and team-building exercises and silly trivia quizzes about the company's founders. Then they didn't have my new improved login ready, but they also were nice enough not to cancel out my old one yet, so at least I could work. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Can't sign up for bennies until the new login kicks in, though.

I think I owe a lot of my success at work to an understanding of when and how to streamline processes. Naturally enough, when I get deeply into that mode at work, attacking whole stacks of tasks and assessing one by one how to most efficiently dispatch them, I automatically start looking at my whole world with that eye. At the practice space, for example, it might manifest by my altering amp or pedal positions, or patch assignments in my multi-effects board, to make it easier to reach the things I would probably use more if they were only more accessible. At home, I might put a suitable shelf or some kind of organizer in a spot where random piles of crap tend to generate. The underlying principle here is compliance with Rule One: If it ain't convenient, it ain't happening. Regardless of how I feel about the existence of Rule One, it does indeed exert considerable force in my life, and compliance is much simpler and more satisfying than trying to battle it.

In that spirit, I upgraded my compost rig today. Part of the impetus for that was that The Fuckin Dog totally destroyed one of my fenced-in piles the other day and started eating the scraps and pooping around the perimeter, none of which really works for me. So I got me one o' them fancy UCT9 big black spinny bins (floor model... score! No assembly for me) and put it on the concrete section just the other side of the tool shed by the back door. Let the dogs out, step outside, put stuff in and/or give it a spin: no navigating poop-mines and newly dug holes to get to the back corner of the yard at night, no shovels or pitchforks, no great hassle getting to the finished product when it's ready, plus there's better sun for better heating in that spot anyhow. And there's also that nifty aeration tube down the middle of the bin.

Shaved the backyard laurel hedge down, shredded the shavings, did a fine grind on the latest batch of food scraps, dumped it all in there, no problem. I cut the sickly euonymus in the front yard WAY back to try to get it to regenerate into a healthy and decent-looking plant, and I also tried to shred the leftovers from that, but they didn't want to shred; probably need to dry the pieces some more and then just turn them into wood chips to put around the big tree.

I think I'm going to the zoo now...

Mini-vacation's winding down. I got relatively little done, but actually did a fair amount of outdoor exercise. The weather's been glorious.

Still haven't made that phone call. Maybe if I ignore it, it'll go away.

Mostly I'm waiting for money, and scheming over what will be acquired during the annual tax-time Orgy of Supplies. There's only so many times you can rearrange a list before the process becomes oppressive, even to a Virgo. For this and many other reasons, most of which have to do with work, I need to find a trick for quickly unclenching my brain. I think this is why so many people drink after work, but since drinking renders me useless for doing my *real* life's work, it won't be that. If only I weren't so damn crappy at meditation.

I need one of these. Looks like something I'd draw.

Last night's gig was fun. The more we wing it, the better we get at winging it -- for example, at the last minute we ditched one of the songs off the set list and made up a new arrangement on the spot of something we hadn't practiced in at least eight months, and then Precious dragged Feral Fawcett (aka Bitches) up on stage to help sing a song. I seriously dig having band chemistry which allows for spontaneity like that. Only mild bummer of the evening was our having to contend with one particularly self-serving and self-obsessed music industry person, but thankfully Precious took the initiative to deal with it since I hate that shit, delicate little flower that I am.

The seven-years-ago ex who Mosaic calls "Chairman Mao" called the house looking for me the other day, left a message with Girl. I haven't called back since I hate phones and I have no idea what to say, although of course part of me is really really curious since we haven't spoken at all in five years. Maybe tomorrow I'll have a glass of wine or my one remaining light beer in the fridge for a splash of courage-lite and make the call. Or maybe I'll just think about it again.

Took a day off today because I can, and because I probably won't be able to for a while after my job gets shuffled across employers (sweet vacation payout's coming from the contract agency, though, since I rarely take as much time off as I'm allotted unless I lose the time off otherwise, and often not even then since I don't have great backup coverage at work). I had all these ambitious ideas about getting things done, and I guess I did a little of it, but mostly I slept in, then puttered around the junk stores looking for something to want to buy. Closest I came to wanting to buy something was a little hand-crank coffee mill, but it was missing the drawer and I figured it would be a hassle without it; in any case, when I need coffee I don't have the patience or energy to deal with a whole lot of manual labor, so I would probably just throw the stupid thing across the room some morning and break it. So I bought stuff I didn't necessarily want but that I needed, like groceries and a non-Superfund-site trash can, and I got my hair cut and put some silicone sealant on my leaky car window seams and went to the dump with a van full of large broken crap. There was a fricking huge dildo on the ground at the spot I was unloading. I wished I had a camera phone.

Oh yeah, the other thing I did was eat breakfast by myself at Paradox, since I'd only been there once four years ago and Girl won't go there because she hates the food. The one time I was there I was fighting with someone I was dating, so I wasn't paying much attention to the food, but after going back today, I have to concede that it really isn't very good. It should be just like Vita, but it isn't. The food they pass off as chicken sausage is made of that same style of weird mealy meat you find in Mary Kitchen Corned Beef Hash, except stuffed in a casing; I couldn't finish it. Their almond gravy is decent, but their whole grain biscuits are utterly bland compared with Vita's herb 'n' onion bread. At least the Stumptown coffee was good.

Received my official offer from Greycube Farms. Accepted same, although on the face of it it looks like a pay cut -- regularly scheduled bonuses later promise to make up the difference, as will getting my unused vacation time paid out from contract-land (and as will, I think, significantly cheaper medical benefits). Once again my pee-cup runneth over, and this is probably the first time I've had *no* worries, however remote, about the results... how boring am I? At this lab they didn't zip-tie the faucets on the sink shut, I think because it's not just a drug testing facility; they also do paternity tests and stuff.

Talking of which, Majesty and her Canada-endorsed bride are getting themselves pregnant. Wifey is receiving daily deliveries of hot-beef-injection-in-a-vial from a family friend, with which they are shooting her up using not a turkey baster, but the syringes from a friend's lip balm manufacturing business. Or, in this case, Lip Bomb...

Been sick with the cold/fever thing that's going around. Hate being sick. Especially hate fevers. At least the fever part seems to be over with. I was due for one of these, though, going nonstop like I've been doing.

Eugene fans take note: The Divided will be back there on 3/4. www.thedivided.com for details.

So we keep getting power surges in the rooms with ungrounded and unprotected outlets, and the appliances keep dying one by one. Latest casualty was the teevee, so Girl bought a mammoth one from Costco to replace it. While certainly not something I would have gotten for myself, I dig it now that it's here. Me, I gave in and finally got a modest and decent-sounding home theater rig to go with it, which means I was able to move the old crap into other rooms (yay for DVDs in bed!). Also got a frickin' surge protector for that outlet. She also got a steep discount on a DVR rental from work, which adds a level of flexibility to watching live TV which I have to admit I like. So now we have beeeeg picture, deep bassy sound, and can fast-forward through commercials. Snazziness.

Course, I only ever get sucked into the teevee, I never turn it on myself unless it's to calm down a dog or something. Today I felt crappy though -- seem to be coming down with the cold everyone's got -- so I voluntarily watched two DVDs and a bunch of stuff on cable. That's how you can tell I'm sick, I guess. :P

My sister's not coming. Too logistically difficult to fit it into this trip out West, apparently. So at least until Frasier and Lilith descend upon the state this summer, I can slip back into I-never-had-a-human-family-and-was-
suckled-by-lizards mode.

Caught up on Mosaic's journal -- sending nurturing-type vibes toward Colorado.

Tomorrow I interview for the job I already have, but with the actual company that owns my cube. I should probably sleep before tomorrow.

Picked up my box of kitty cobbler today. I guess that means they took a look and agreed she was dead. I was somehow irrationally hoping they'd have discovered otherwise.

Speaking of which, I read the transcripts and commentaries following the SOTU -- last night I only heard a few words of Bushler live through the parking attendant's radio outside the club where we played -- and that overpowering sense of foreboding steadily gets worse. Short of leaving the planet, a certain amount of denial seems absolutely necessary to maintain enough strength to keep going. There's no way this could be happening; it's too crazy, it's not American. But it is. It is really exactly that vicious here, and the people I deal with every day would either be exactly that vicious to me if they knew who I am, or at the very least, their silence would imply complicity with those who will, one way or another, nearly inevitably be taking the shredder to my freedom in the months or years to come. Can't shake things up, you know. And in the moments when I feel strong enough to look squarely at it and try to think of how to protect myself and what I love from it, I try and formulate contingency plans -- but I always stop short of putting any of it in motion, because this can't be happening.

I can't bring myself to listen to Randi today. I'm listening to POV, of all things. I brought almost all the CDs I was storing upstairs into the downstairs office the other day when the dog started randomly eating CDs in the living room, so I'm going through and putting on things I've been listening to only in snippets in my head for years and years. A bit of melancholy escapism for getting through the day.

Thank your stars I've been waning verbose these past couple weeks. Saves you the trouble of sloshing through sad tales of endlessly malfunctioning appliances and that sort of crap.

Played Berbati's last night -- I've played better, but overall I think we all were looser than we often are (energies having been fully expended elsewhere, with Xaos and the Yeti just having moved into new places, Xaos working 6500-hour shifts, etc.), and I think it helped... Then again, aspiring producer Jay took copious notes, which I'm sure we shall hear :)

I think it's also helped that we've been changing up the arrangements so much just to try things out lately; while I guess that also has the potential to cause confusion if we're waiting for cues that never come, it also makes us pay closer attention to each other so we can adjust arrangements dynamically.

Sounds like my sister and brother-in-law will be out here to visit the end of April. (Not their first time in PDX, but their first time visiting me here -- really, their first time visiting me, period. I will have to do the same in return sometime soonish.) Hmm... I wonder if we can arrange to be recording something then, so we can possibly avail ourselves of their mighty classical-monkeytude?

All, very sorry if I nuked any of your comments further down the blog -- it was easier to fumigate than to check the boxes individually after a while. I kept what legitimate content I found while I had the patience to look.

No time, unfortunately, to ban ALL the IP ranges with a "DIE, SPAMMER FUCK!" notification...

I will continue to keep comments switched on for now, on a trial basis. Too much adcrap and off they go again, and you can email me.

Long month... as for the blog, first my host performed some upgrades, which dominoed into me needing to perform some upgrades, around to which I have just now got. So a big hearty welcome back to me.

Eldest cat died at 5 this morning. She made some otherworldly noise which in my half-sleep I took to be a dog having a bad dream, then I nearly stepped on her when I got up to pee. She was collapsed in the hallway by the bathroom entrance, struggling to breathe, stony-faced with that fixed stare they get when you know they're on the platform and they see the train coming. I went off looking for a box or a bin to set a soft piece of clothing inside of where I could try and make her comfortable; in the meantime the house sounds had gotten Girl up, and Girl sat with the kitty, and Girl saw kitty die while I was off getting the bin with the soft thing, all within a matter of about 5 minutes. So Girl went to the basement and got a shoebox with a lid, and then we were at a loss about how to keep something dog-related and bad from happening to the kitty body, so we cleared space in the freezer and shoved the box in. Then we sat on the couch numbly and watched TV until it was time to go to work.

(Amusing aside: Majesty told me her mom's had a badger in the freezer for about 5 years. A badger!)

I telecommuted, then brought the box to the Humane Society at 10am when they opened. Another private cremation, another box of crumbly-cat in a week, another wooden urn I need to go find on Hawthorne or somewhere, one more entry added to the line of Feline-B-Gone across the top of the TV set.

She really wasn't a nice cat a lot of the time. When I first got her at around 5-6 weeks old from the drug dealer in my apartment building in Burlington, she'd poop in the food and eat the litter. Her spaying at approximately 6 months either coincided with or caused a transition from benign stupidity to unpredictable violent psychosis, not sure which. As an adult cat, she'd lay in wait and ambush you as you walked by, clawing the shit out of you to try and get some petting, or else she'd come on all loving and demanding for a while and then suddenly change mid-session, ears flat back, scratching and yowling. The memory that stands out most is of her at the vet hanging by the teeth from an impossibly thick glove on the vet tech's hand; the same visit they tried putting her in a towel or pillowcase or something to try and trick her into allowing them to give her shots, resulting in a violently writhing clawing yowling bag or towel or whatever it was and them having to send me home with sedatives to feed her before coming in another day to try again. She was always runty and sickly, but these last couple years she went through some particularly rough spells, at least one of which I wasn't sure she'd make it through. Yesterday I thought she might be really sick again, then she was just sleeping peacefully and I chalked it up to her having been nervous about the dogs, and then this morning happened. Another good candidate for the epitaph: "I told you I was sick!"

+++TUCKER EMILY HEATH McSTERNIEL: 4/10/94 - 1/24/05+++

Meanwhile, we adopted the third dog when the old owner came to the pretty much unavoidable conclusion that he had neither time nor cash to devote to having one, then we immediately scheduled his neutering appointment. We had to cancel the first one because we had an ice storm and the doctor couldn't get out of his driveway to perform the surgery. Got it done last Wednesday, and now we're doing this wacky quarantine rotation to keep the others from chewing his sutures out. Two more full days of this and we can go get the sutures removed, and he can go be a dog again. Maybe not quite as humpy of a dog, though. Maybe.

He also had a tapeworm. That was fun. Nothing says lovin' quite like finding squirming sesame seeds in the doody. At least the remedy for that only needs to be given in one dose.

About that ice storm: that happened the night of the Kultur Shock show, so we didn't get turnout like we otherwise would have, although a surprising number of insane people braved the streets to get there anyway (remember they don't salt the roads here). I got totally stuck and had to get the van full of equipment towed to the club, at least temporarily at my own expense (let's hope Triple-A reimburses; pretty much the only tows on the house that night were the ones related to serious accidents). I really miss my Subaru on nights like that.

As the one non-ethnic act of the evening (I don't count), we were enjoyed by some folks who generally like The Rock and not enjoyed so much by those who were enthusiastic about Balkan rock but not into the whole limp-wristed art thing. Gino dug it, said Brendon reminded him of Marc Almond. It's always somebody different he reminds people of. (I like my mom's, comparing The Divided to "those Scissor Girls".)

After watching a whole stack of Moloko videos and listening to more Mars Volta and stuff, we are looking to add a keyboardist. Wish us luck.

Meanwhile... the Farms might actually hire me! This could be a Good Thing in terms of benefits and such, although it probably wouldn't involve any significant pay raise at this stage; the real trick with Greycube is always to set firm boundaries between work and life, because they will eat your life if you let them. And I like my life too much these days to let it get eaten by the Cube, even in exchange for coveted Real Boy status. So I should have a better idea what's going on within the next few weeks.

Whew!

The long weekend kicked off with a New Year's Eve music party -- I basically brought my basement over to my friend's house and a whole bunch of us had an open jam. Someone brought a sax, another person brought a didgeridoo and a really nifty hand drum. Turned out sometimes chaotic and unmusical, sometimes interesting, definitely fun overall.

Next day Girl tore a calf muscle working out, shifting the day's focus to dealing with the Kaiser urgent care branch that happened to stay open on New Year's Day, helping with mobility and ice and painkillers and crap. She got one of those walking splint boots and a pair of crutches.

Spent yesterday bringing ice and food and water and ice and ibuprofen and ice and food and the splint boot and tea and ice and food. Also spent the latter part of the day wandering around deliriously exhausted with tools, figuring out how not to install the bedroom floor.

Today, figured out how to install the bedroom floor, which is done and looks good. (At one point I was despairing, feeling like a complete stupid failure, then I pulled off a piece of moulding and found a fortune cookie fortune behind it -- which said: "Your hard work will soon pay off." Which it did.) I love my little circular saw. Will deal with reinstalling the trim tomorrow, since not all of it was there to begin with and some of the existing stuff shattered when I tried to put it back.

Also went to Fire On The Mountain, the new Deadhead wing place at Interstate and Skidmore -- The whole Dead thing aside, thank the gods we have a dedicated wing place here now. Their stuff's gooood, and although it's a bit spendy, their portions are quite generous and they drown the wings in sauce. They have meatless wings, too, which maybe I'll try next time.

Gah. Back to work tomorrow...

Holy crap!
We got a support slot on the next Kultur Shock show!
Saturday 1/15, Dante's, 10pm, only 6 bucks, muthafuckas!!!

So I go to the Yahoo homepage and one of the news items in the box is "Hundreds gather to pay repects [sic] to Oates". I'm thinking, John or Joyce Carol? Either way, a mild bummer -- but it's Johnny Oates. Who the smeg is *that*? So I read who that is, and then I'm thinking, Rangers, oh, okay, hockey. But no, it's baseball. Some team down there in Oilwellistan. Oh, well, bummer for him. Hockey would've been more interesting.

(Same Yahoo page, incidentally, had a tsunami aftermath thing up saying, "Help those afected by this recent tragedy." Yahoo has evidently shipped their surplus consonants overseas to aid in the relief effort.)

Went to Rhinelander last night for Xaos' birthday. That place is so, so horribly wrong... but worth going to at least once, simply because it's so completely over the top. Yeah, I'm of half Austrian descent, but not *that* kind of Austrian... was half expecting after they led us through the door marked "Austria Room" that they would take one look at me and hastily reseat me in the Zyklon B room (first up on the menu: Judenwurst mit Sauerkraut). But nope, Murcans is Murcans, just plain ol' Volk partaking of Disney-style Vaterland together, Bier und Hassenpfeffer und the whole nine yards of dead animals on the walls and accordion players and crazy clocks and crap... but hey, apart from the forest, where else in this town ya gonna get rabbit? I wanna take Girl there next birthday...

What a useless night, on the heels of a useless day. First had to redo a stack of things the 19-year-old daughter of a friend we've been trying to hire to help us clean didn't do or didn't do right, which put me in a seriously foul mood early on. Then tried to shop for flooring for the living room and bedroom since it's on sale right now, but the discount floor place closed at noon today. Enjoyed a brief respite at Pepino's eating tortilla soup and a huge salad, although the stupid norteño clown music seemed even louder and more annoying than it usually does; then tried to mail stuff at the automated postal thingy on SE 7th, just to get something useful done, but the unattended 24-hour lobby was inexplicably closed for fuckmas eve. Then I needed to get more dog food, but the grocery stores are also closed tonight so everybody in Whoville can snuggle in their damn beds praising Jebus and Santa and not serving me, dammit. Even bad-attitude Girl is off being sort of Christian tonight (Unitarian, but still, it's some kinda fuckmas choir service thing, the prospect of which was making her nostalgic for the days she used to go to such things with her recently-deceased maternal grandparents). Bleah. I remain here and curmudgeonly, thank you very much. Christ already has a surfeit of spiritual fuel wafting up out of this miserable misguided nation towards his ass, and doesn't need mine.

(Today's fun edjacashunal link: Mithraism)

So I figured I would try to be handy with materials I already had. Went to change a hallway lightbulb and found the whole middle part of the fixture was dangling loose, and then twisting the bulb to get it out led to showers of sparks and tripping the circuit breaker and destroying the bulb. (LAWD JEE-ZUS is showering his WRATH upon me, yea verily! Does becoming a born-again heterosexual address functionality issues with flush-mount interior lighting? I need to know before needlessly cluttering up the charge card with home decor items!) I'm hoping it's just the fixture that has woes, since now I know the bedroom ceiling light is on the same circuit (incidental plus: this helps with writing up a more accurate map of the service panel, which the dude who installed it pretty much labeled "lites-plugs" next to almost every breaker) and that one's been buzzing really loudly the last few weeks every time I turn it on, so *after* fuckmas my regular contractor will be getting a call to see if he suspects anything with the wiring on that circuit. Assuming nothing financially catastrophic with the electrical system, while I'm replacing that fixture I might as well swap out the other ugly hallway fixture to match, and also might as well enlist Contractor Dude to help install drywall in the other section of hallway ceiling where the crappy tiles are falling out since I really don't like standing on ladders while balancing really heavy objects and I think it'll be fairly straightforward for him, since one 4x8 sheet minus a cutout for the light should cover the whole area. Everything I read says to drywall ceilings before walls, and I don't know how that affects a repair where only the ceiling needs redone, but I bet he knows.

So then I was going to add a layer of waterproofing to the section of kitchen floor underlayment I put in, but the label reminded me you need lots of ventilation when using that stuff indoors, and a chilly night with myself and the dogs inside and nowhere for us all to go seemed like a bad time to go opening doors and running fans. I'm thinking maybe tomorrow I can do that early and drag everybody to the dog park while it sets. Not much else I expect we *can* do early on fuckmas day, except maybe watch Lawrence Welk or something. Or, I know, A Christmas Story 12 or 15 times.

I wonder if Kornblatt's stays open on 12/25? I could really go for some pastrami on pumpernickel and a big half-sour pickle.

Continuing to have a simply lurvely Jeezus Christ our Lord 'n' Savior Up Your Nose With a Rubber Hose week. (Kill me.)

This is definitely the Year of the Cookbook. I didn't consciously put this out there -- I was definitely squeezing massive power tool vibes out into the universe, and did get one, but wound up buying the rest myself -- yet those perpetual and evidently overpowering food-preparation vibes I always give off yielded me four different cookbooks: low-GI, low-fat, Jewish and Thai. The Thai one showed up from my sister yesterday. It kicks ass.

Random notes from the front:

• Have begun transferring reinvention of the band's press kit into far more capable hands, at least as far as presentation and publicity go. Our collective manual capability bandwidth seems pretty much maxed with playing music and living life and stuff without trying to learn from the bottom up what some people we know have already spent their lives perfecting. Yay again for friends saving our ass. :)
  
  
• Jackpot rules! We wanna do the whole second record there. Need to save up -- or talk some of you into buying extra copies of the first record to help pay for it (no, don't bother... it's okay... we'll just sit here in the dark and suffah...). Contact us for special rates!
  
  
• Fuckin dog ate my copy of A Confederacy of Dunces right off the shelf today. Already had to install a little door over the mail slot after getting the mail eaten three or four days in a row. Wonder if I need to move the books up to the tops of all the bookcases.
  
  
• Have been spending all my time walking the dog, and walking the dog, and walking the dog. Oh, except for the part where I'm ripping up part of the kitchen floor down to the original planks since the fuckin dog's haphazard drinking habits have accelerated the buckle-and-rot problem in that one corner significantly enough that I started worrying about the bottom layer starting to rot away, which luckily it hasn't, but gah, the mildew smell was enough to topple over a few rhinos when I pried up the two layers of tile and three layers of subfloor over the painted planks dating back to the 1940s when the kitchen was added on. I set the water dispenser thingy inside one of those big Rubbermaid under-the-bed boxes to hopefully catch most of the spillage (although not all).
  
  
• The fuckin dog's owner (I love the fuckin dog, I really do, despite my present level of irritation) hasn't yet either relinquished custody of the dog or agreed to take the dog back. Dude has a new place to live and everything, so we told him he needs to figure things out by the 2nd weekend in January so if we're keeping the dog, we can do things like fix him and train him so he calms the fuck down. Meanwhile, I walk (er, get dragged) down the street like one of those hapless fathers of triplets pushing a huge stroller around, except the babies are between 70 and 100 pounds each and are very interested in squirrels. But life's not bad, it's just not particularly controllable. Yeah, that's it.
  
  
• Got my smaller circular saw today. Muuuuch better.
  
  
• In the political realm, regarding everybody's beef with Bev Harris: I really don't think she's a scam artist, despite widespread problems with her methods and relative lack of disclosure. I suspect it might be more of a control freak thing, although she states she's in favor of a more decentralized form of election reform activism. I could be wrong, though.
  
  

A freshly laid egg for y'all:
Misapplied Mathematics

Add to the Chanukah Chaul: one reciprocating saw. W00t!

My favorite cousin has this. If I understand it right, he's going in to actually get his tumor-ridden adrenal glands removed this month (although it might actually be the pituitary coming out, I'm not sure), and then is gonna be medication-dependent for life. Totally sucks...

Ccchhhanukah Ccchhhaul so far (6 nights to go!):

- Hebrew Hammer DVD
- 5-pack o' undies
- Citizens Dissent: Security, Morality, and Leadership in an Age of Terror, by Wendell Berry and David James Duncan
- fitty buck from the out-laws (I love how the snail mails always come from anyone in her fam to her full name plus my first name, presumably because none of them can remember -- so I'm perpetually the sidekick: Girl McGirlson and Lexicon, like Pink Lady and Jeff.)

Girl also wanted the Misto I wanted, so I got it for her, so we have that too.

No recip saw, but I won a bid on a smaller circular saw, which is good because I realized I stand a really good chance of slicing my fingers and legs off with the the 7-1/4" one. Kind of like wielding the wrong weight bowling ball, but with spinning blades attached. So the old one's up for sale. I'm watching auctions on the recip saws now.

Also want to get a shopvac. They're the cheap alternative to something like a Dyson Animal for properly sucking up the pet hair, plus I can also use one to clean up the pet watering pond area of the kitchen and try to avoid inflicting further damage on the floor. Costco has one I like -- maybe I'll go brave the zoo this weekend.

The huge puppy is still a huge puppy -- much less afraid of his own shadow at this point, but he eats EVERYTHING. Mail, socks, dishes, whatever. Good reality check in terms of whether I ever want human children. Fuck that...

Now those silly camo Washburn Dimebag Darrell Explorer-copy guitars are gonna be collector's items...

Stopped at a coffeehouse we like yesterday because it was nearby and had a bathroom, and from there we saw a sign pointing to a socially-conscious-type craft fair thingy at the local UCC, so we walked down the street to that and ran into a friend helping to run one of the booths, and got to talking, and somehow by the end of the day we wound up fostering his ex-boyfriend's dog, who is bigger and more active than either of our pre-existing dogs and, while very sweet, is kind of skittish and neurotic also. And, of course, the expected territorial battles have ensued within the house. So it feels kind of like Cheaper By The Dozen around here.

At least they're tired right now. Whew...

Although it amounts to a largely symbolic gesture for the moment, I installed a fine-toothed carbide blade on my circular saw tonight. I'm going to put floors in the living room and bedroom this winter, dammit. I've got the flooring picked out from the warehouse-type place in NW and everything. Maybe I'll even go pick it up and stack it in here this weekend.

I was good: I went to Depot because I had a store credit there, but I did not spend actual money on them again, although there were of course half a zillion shiny things I would've loved to cart home. When I actually find myself needing those things, I'll go elsewhere. Sounds like it might be time to renew my Costco membership.

Link du Jour: buyblue.org

Here's a start on how to vote with your grocery dollars.

I'm thinking about what I want for [your holiday could be here!], and I can only come up with two things that are actually things, both of which I'm perfectly capable of going out and just buying for myself. One is a reciprocating saw, and I probably will finally just buy one since I've had this on my list for three years running and nobody cares. The other, I just saw in a store the other day; it's a sleek stainless steel spray bottle designed for using ordinary olive oil as a Pam equivalent without any propellants.

Beyond that, in case anyone reading this is actually tempted to send a gift not involving massage or hot tub rentals and hasn't already purchased some random filthy-minded faux-intellectual tin-foil-hat-wearing-lefty obnoxiously darkly humorous t-shirt/button/sticker that made them snort soda through their nose and think of Yours Truly, I hereby supply the first installment of this year's Nonprofit Donation Wish List. Among the chief guiding principles at work are (1) that social justice would be kind of neat, (2) that freedom from encroaching theocratic fascism would be REALLY neat, and (3) I like animals. So, if you really wanna give something, give here (presented in no particular order, and by all means, if you live elsewhere and know of a local equivalent 501(c)(3) in your own community that you'd prefer to support, give to them instead -- this year the whole world's hurting, and probably will for a long while given the way things are going):

1. Sisters of the Road. Hot meals, work exchange, no side order of Jebus. Kid-tested, Utah Phillips-approved. If you happen to work for a local restaurant or farm and think you can help hook them up with a steady stream of wholesome surplus food for the café, visit their site for their wish list.
   
   
2. Community Cycling Center. Really friendly and helpful folks running all kinds of bike mechanic classes and create-a-bike-commuter low-income donation programs up in NoPo. If you're local and have an old spare bike/helmet/other bike accessory you're not planning to use, you can give them that.
   
   
3. The ReBuilding Center. Forget Repug-funding Home Depot; *this* is my toy store. A homeowner's treasure guaranteed in every heap of glorious crap. They take good-condition cabinetry, fixtures and all that if you have something to donate other than cash.
   
   
4. Electronic Frontier Foundation. Here's just one thing they're doing.
   
   
5. Black Box Voting. Bev, Andy and crew are the face of today's true patriotism, folks, and they need your help -- and we need theirs, if we honestly want participatory democracy here (I do). Cash is always good, but they also need talented anal-retentive paper-pusher types with lots of free time to volunteer.
   
   
6. Oregon NARAL Foundation. Maybe it seems like women's rights issues are so totally 1975, and if only they were; however, I'll be damned if the Cons don't want to return us to the days of wire hangers, and I'll be damned if the monied Seventh Heaven crowd isn't lapping this shit up. Note that donations to Oregon NARAL itself are not tax-deductible, since they're involved in political advocacy, but donations to NARAL Foundation are, since their mission is education about reproductive choices -- which we are going to really, really need to make sure we have in place.
   
   
7. Oregon Humane Society. Yeah. Besides cash, they take cars and stuff (although you need to not be in a hurry -- they take a while to respond to requests to take in a car). And if you're thinking about buying a dog, cat or other fuzzy one from a pet store or breeder, please consider OHS instead.
   
   
8. Basic Rights Education Fund. Again, this is the nonpolitical education arm of a political advocacy organization, Basic Rights Oregon. By all means also donate to BRO -- they were among the folks who fought like hell to defeat Measure 36 -- but those donations aren't tax-deductible. They also need stuff.
   
   
9. Cascade AIDS Project. It isn't fuckin' over. If you don't believe me, check here for a more global perspective.
   
   
10. SMYRC (Sexual Minority Youth Resource Center). Puddletown's GLBT youth hangout. No online donation mechanism in place yet, but there's a snail mail address and an email addy on the site.
    
    
11. PDX POP NOW!. Yeah, social justice includes days of free music by scads of little Portland bands. :) I work with these folks.
    
    
12. Growing Gardens. I like food! food tastes good! I like food! Food tastes good!
    
    
13. Food First. And second, and third...
    
    
14. Oregon Nature Conservancy. Not kidding about saving the last great places on earth -- and I don't get how that wound up being only a liberal value; the whole spotted-owl-took-our-jobs family of rants misses the point.
    
    
15. Oregon Food Bank. Self-explanatory. They also do gleaning in addition to the drop boxes and all that.
    
    
16. Dove Lewis Emergency Animal Hospital. Nonprofit emergency vet care in the Portland area.
    
    
17. Earthward. A Florida-based international atheist-run charity dedicated to providing humanitarian aid to victims of religiously motivated violence. God everyone knows we need more of that...
    
    

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/kerry_won_.php

Kerry is a little bitch for rolling over and dying with no resistance whatsoever. Those progressives who refused to hold their nose and vote Dem were right. He fuckin' betrayed us.

http://www.moveoutusa.org/

I wish I could say this sounds preposterous:

http://www.legitgov.org/essay_madsen_terrorism_and_california_071404.html


Here’s the scenario we must be all be prepared for:

If the pre-election internal tracking polls and public opinion polls show the Kerry-Edwards ticket leading in key battleground states, the Bush team will begin to implement their plan to announce an imminent terrorist alert for the West Coast for November 2 sometime during the mid afternoon Pacific Standard Time. At 2:00 PST, the polls in Kentucky and Indiana will be one hour from closing (5:00 PM EST – the polls close in Indiana and Kentucky at 6:00 PM EST). Exit polls in both states will be known to the Bush people by that time and if Kentucky (not likely Indiana) looks too close to call or leaning to Kerry-Edwards, the California plan will be implemented. A Bush problem in Kentucky at 6:00 PM EST would mean that problems could be expected in neighboring states and that plans to declare a state of emergency in California would begin in earnest at 3:00 PM PST.

I am reposting The Nation's endorsement of John Kerry for President. I will also be fortifying it with links of my choice for your further edification, probably not all at once, so please revisit this a few times over the coming days. I also urge you to conduct further research on the assertions made here if you're skeptical. The mainstream media corroborates all of it, albeit in most cases with woefully little fanfare:

editorial | Posted October 21, 2004

John Kerry for President

The presidential campaign debates are over, and the time for decision has come. The Nation endorses Senator John Kerry to be the next President of the United States.

Any stocktaking must begin, of course, by comparing the records of Kerry and George W. Bush. Yet the upshot of such a detailed comparison, though entirely favoring Kerry, is not our principal reason for supporting him. To make clear why, despite strong disagreements with Kerry, we not only recommend a vote for him but do so with fervor, we must step back from the candidates and their positions and set forth an independent view of what we believe are the stakes in this election.

The most important is the consequence it will have in what has emerged as a crisis of American democracy. The crisis began on December 12, 2000, when Bush was chosen to be President by the Supreme Court. The gift of a true electoral mandate now to this previously unelected President would give fresh legitimacy and momentum to all his disastrous policies. And that new momentum could in turn place our constitutional system itself at risk.

This magazine's disagreements with Kerry are deep and touch on fundamental matters. We believed that the invasion of Iraq was "the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time" (as he now describes it) before the war was ever launched; he has come to that conclusion only recently, having voted to authorize the war. We believe the United States should withdraw from Iraq; he wants to "win" the war there. We think the military budget should be cut; he plans to increase it, adding 40,000 troops. (For what, exactly? to fight another wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time?) We reject pre-emptive war; he embraces it. We oppose the wall that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is building on Palestinian lands; he supports it. We believe in the elimination of all nuclear weapons; he wants only to stop their spread. He calls for significant expansion of healthcare; we call for a single-payer system that would cover everyone. He opposes gay marriage; we back it. If he wins the election, The Nation will pursue each of these differences vigorously.

But while we have sharp differences with Kerry, we believe he has the qualities required for the presidency. He is more than "anybody but Bush." His instincts are decent. He is a man of high intelligence, deep knowledge and great resolve. At times in his life--notably, when he opposed the Vietnam War--he has shown exemplary courage. He respects the law. He believes in cooperation with other countries and has the inclination and ability to bring America out of its current isolation and back into the family of nations. As a senator, he demonstrated concern for social welfare and has backed this up with enlightened policy proposals. He has supported civil rights and labor rights and opposed racism. He has supported the rights of women, including the right to an abortion. He has been an advocate of nuclear arms control and opposed the almost incomprehensibly provocative nuclear policies of the Bush Administration. He would rescind the most unfair of Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy. He would be a friend of the environment and return the United States to the negotiations on global warming.

The Bush Record

As for Bush, where to begin the list of his mistakes, delusions, deceptions, follies, tragedies and crimes? Where to end it?

He failed to respond to repeated clear warnings of an Al Qaeda attack ("Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.," the CIA told him) and displayed startling incompetence when the attack came. Then he tried to cover up both failures by opposing the formation of the September 11 Commission, obstructing the committee's work once it was formed and denying key findings once they were disclosed. (To this day, Vice President Cheney asserts a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.)

In the name of fighting terror, Bush waged a war in Iraq that had nothing to do with terrorism and was as unjustified when it was begun as, after the loss of thousands of Iraqi and American lives, it is unwinnable now. He has inaugurated an immoral and unsustainable policy of global hegemony based on military force, estranged most of the country's principal friends around the world and dismayed the world at large--which has begun, indirectly but pervasively, to resist US domination. He mocked the United Nations as "irrelevant" and defied the Security Council. Today our forces are overstretched in pursuit of delusional goals.

Bush's policies have turned away from the country's tradition of seeking disarmament exclusively by diplomatic means and adopted force as the mainstay of its nonproliferation efforts, violently pursuing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, where there were none, and overlooking them in Pakistan and North Korea, where they existed. All the while, his Administration further provoked and disturbed the world by pursuing the development of new, "usable" varieties of nuclear weapons, to be employed for new purposes against new targets, mostly in the Third World. He has systematically cast aside or weakened environmental initiatives, domestic and international. He withdrew from negotiations to address global warming, which except for nuclear war is the gravest danger facing the world; sponsored a Clear Skies Act that fouled the air; gutted regulations limiting strip-mining; and sold off public lands to oil, gas, timber and mining companies; rejected fuel conservation measures; tried to suppress or repudiate the science on which knowledge of environmental hazards is based.

And while thus conspiring to discredit these and other scientific findings, he has pandered to a "base" of religious fanatics, many of whom are looking forward to a day of "rapture" when Jesus returns to earth and kills everyone but them. His attitude to the factual world in general is one of hostility and rejection. He has made fraud and fantasy foundations of his Administration. His own belief in something--that Iraq was a threat to the United States, for example--appears to be evidence enough for him that it is true. One of his advisers has mocked his critics by stating that they live in a "reality-based community," explaining, "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."

Bush has by almost every measure worsened the US economy and set it on a path to likely disaster. He has taken hundreds of billions of dollars from the poor and people of ordinary income and given it to the rich through tax cuts (if you dare to point this out, you are accused of waging "class warfare") while driving the country into unprecedented federal debt and trade deficits, delivering the nation's finances to the decisions of foreign creditors. He has increased our dependence on foreign energy sources. His approach to the economy and our resources is the same as to the environment--this putative believer in a "responsibility society" strip-mines the future to gratify the present.

Bush has broken his oath to uphold the laws of the United States. He asserted and made use of an array of "inherent" powers nowhere mentioned in the Constitution: to lock up and place in solitary confinement American citizens and others, with no access to courts or even legal representation; to withhold information from the public and Congressional committees; to detain hundreds of people outside domestic and international law in the legal no man's land of Guantánamo; and to permit the torture of prisoners.

He has governed through fear and intimidation. His party will not tolerate dissent either in its own ranks, from which it purges any moderate voice, or in the country at large, where his Administration insinuates that his opponents are in league with America's enemies. At his rallies, composed of carefully vetted supporters, people who oppose him have been thrown out and even arrested.

A Dangerous Mandate

A matchup of the records of the two candidates only begins to measure the stakes in this year's election. These come fully into view only in the larger context of a deeper crisis that has overtaken the American system of government. To begin with, the irregular procedure of the last election lends a special importance to this one. In 2000 candidate Bush, who lost the popular contest by half a million votes and was put into the presidency by a Supreme Court decision, failed to receive a popular mandate. However, he embarked on a radical, right-wing course anyway, compounding the insult to democracy. Yet it is so far only the government that has asserted global imperial ambition, waged aggressive war on false pretexts, condoned torture, strengthened corporate influence over politics, turned its back on the natural environment and spurned global public opinion. If Bush is now elected, then a national majority--a far weightier thing--will stand behind these things. The consequences would be profound. A crippled presidency would begin to walk on two legs. At home, public affirmation would turn the record of the first term, now having been inspected and approved by the people, into the starting point for an accelerated movement in the same general direction. Bush has already put through a new round of federal budget-wrecking corporate tax cuts, called for new repressive legislation in a Patriot II act and clearly announced his desire to "democratize" not just Iraq but the entire Middle East. Abroad, such a vote would deepen and confirm the United States' separation from the rest of the world, enclosing it in an eccentric and dangerous mini-climate of ignorance and lies.

On the other hand, if Bush is defeated, his entire presidency will acquire the aspect of an aberration, a mistake that has been corrected, and the American people will be able to say: We never accepted Bushism. We rejected the brutality, the propaganda, the misbegotten wars, the imperial arrogance. And we never, ever chose George W. Bush to be President of the United States.

What Is at Stake

But even these stakes are not the largest on the table in November. The largest and most important is the protection of American democracy. It is always difficult while enjoying the comforts and privileges of taken-for-granted liberties to imagine that they could be lost; but the elements of Bush's misrule have plainly converged to form this threat. It is the wars of aggression designed to expand imperial sway abroad that produce the fear that fuels his campaign. It is the transfer of money from the poor or average majority to the rich few and corporations that cultivates the allegiance of the corporate chieftains who swell Bush's campaign coffers while at the same time helping to bring the news media, now owned mostly by large companies, to heel. It is the media that amplify his Administration's war propaganda while failing to expose the deceptions put forward as justification for war and puffing up the bubble of illusion whose creation is perhaps the Administration's top priority. And it is government secrecy and Justice Department repression and a right-wing judiciary that chills the dissent that tries to puncture the bubble of illusion. The upshot is a concentration of power in the Republican Party that has no parallel in American history, including the Gilded Age and the Nixon era.

It is not only all three branches of government that have fallen largely into the same hands; it is the corporations, the military (which tends to vote Republican) and, increasingly, the communications industry, which are either propaganda arms of the party, as in the case of Fox News and other outlets of the Rupert Murdoch media empire, or else simply bow to the pressure of Administration threats and popular anxiety.

Even before Bush's selection by Supreme Court fiat in 2000, a dangerous pattern had asserted itself at the top levels of American institutional life. The Republican Party embarked on a process of using legitimately won power to acquire more power illegitimately. In the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton for lying to a grand jury about sex, the Republican majority in Congress abused its power in the legislative branch to try to strike down the leader of the rival executive branch. The attempt failed. In the election of 2000, the party in effect abused the judicial power to seize the presidency for itself, and this time the attempt succeeded. The deed was in fact a culmination of a long, deliberate (if not conspiratorial) campaign of politicization of the judiciary, pushed by right-wing legislators as well as such groups as the Federalist Society. In a series of reapportionment battles, notably the one waged by House majority leader Tom DeLay in Texas, the party used legislative power to entrench itself in that same legislature. Meanwhile, a web of think tanks and other institutions, supposedly independent but actually de facto instruments of the Republican Party, was created. They cooperated in vetting political loyalists for government posts and in flooding the news media with apologists for the party and its policies. Under DeLay's leadership, the Congressional Republicans, leaving no stone unturned, have sought to take over even the lobbying establishment of Washington by threatening firms that hire former Democrats to work for them.

The persistent theme of these policies and actions, domestic and international, is to acquire power--to seize it, to increase it and to keep it for good. A systemic crisis--a threat to the Constitution of the United States--has taken shape. At the end of this road is an implied vision of a different system: a world run by the United States and a United States run permanently by the Republican Party, which is to say imperial rule abroad, one-party rule at home. Somewhere along that road lies a point of no return. It is in the nature of warnings in general that you cannot know whether the danger in question will come, or be averted by timely action, or perhaps never present itself at all. But it's also in the nature of warnings that one must act on them before it is too late, and this is especially true in the case of threats to democracy. That is why the danger to democracy takes primacy over other perils that are in themselves greater, including nuclear war and irreversible damage to the ecosphere through global warming. (It is notable that none of these three perils has been more than glancingly mentioned in the election debates that have just ended.)

No one can know when or how the decisive test of democracy might arrive. It could come quickly, perhaps in a crackdown following another terrorist attack on American soil, this time conceivably on a far greater scale than September 11, or it could come slowly, in a protraction of the process, already well under way, of gradual strangulation of independent institutions, amounting to a coup in slow-motion--a hardening of an informal monopoly of power into a formal monopoly--leaving the institutions of democracy technically intact but corrupted and hollowed out from within, helpless to resist a central authority that has drawn all real power into its own hands.

Although the precise steps by which a systemic breakdown might occur are obscure, most of the main elements of the danger seem to be contained in microcosm in one episode--the torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and elsewhere in the United States' nascent global gulag archipelago. The story begins with a secret memo from Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel to the President and most frequently mentioned name for a Bush appointment to the Supreme Court, recommending that he issue a "finding" that neither international law, in the form of the Geneva Conventions, nor US law, in the shape of the War Crimes Act (18 US Code, Section 2441) was applicable to abuses of prisoners in Afghanistan. The "war on terror," he said, was a "new paradigm," rendering provisions of the Geneva Conventions "quaint." As for US law, a presidential determination would help tormentors brought to justice by creating "a reasonable basis in law that Section 2441 does not apply, which would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution." Even before the crimes were committed, the White House was planning how to beat the rap. In one short memo, a new vision of law came into view. In this vision, the executive was freed from legal accountability as well as Congressional oversight, while at the same time the individual person was stripped of his fundamental human rights. It was law--if "law" is the right word for it at all--cut to imperial specifications.

A blizzard of other memos justifying the abuse of prisoners followed from lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department, and soon Defense Secretary Rumsfeld had authorized several new varieties of torment for the prisoners at Guantánamo. Not long after that, the superintendent of Guantánamo, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, traveled to Iraq to teach the command there the new interrogation arts. To the surprise of the Administration, the war was not going well, and the military command was hungry for intelligence from the prisoners at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. A memo had gone out from a captain in intelligence stating, "The gloves are coming off gentlemen regarding these detainees. Col. Boltz has made it clear that we want these individuals broken."

They were. In the recently published report "AR 15-6 Investigation of the Abu Ghraib Detention Facility and 205th Military Intelligence Brigade" by Maj. Gen. George Fay, cited in The New York Review of Books by Mark Danner, we read:


In October 2003, DETAINEE-07, reported alleged multiple incidents of physical abuse while in Abu Ghraib. DETAINEE-07 was an MI hold and considered of potentially high value. He was interrogated on 8, 21 and 29 October; 4 and 23 November and 5 December. DETAINEE-07's claims of physical abuse (hitting) started on his first day of arrival. He was left naked in his cell for extended periods, cuffed in his cell in stressful positions ("High cuffed"), left with a bag over his head for extended periods, and denied bedding or blankets. DETAINEE-07 described being made to "bark like a dog, being forced to crawl on his stomach while MPs spit and urinated on him, and being struck causing unconsciousness."

The overthrow of law by legal-sounding phrases penned in secret; the laws of the Republic falling before the demands of empire; nullification of any check or balance on the President; suspension of fundamental human rights; a tangle of contradictory bureaucratic memos; blind imperial ambition leading to catastrophic war; mayhem and failure in that war unfolding behind a shimmering screen of high-sounding phrases extolling the spread of democracy; panicked resort to criminal emergency measures; torture and other outrages against human dignity hidden behind a battery of euphemisms ("sleep adjustment," "setting the conditions" for interrogation); the pre-organized rejection of any accountability, including that imposed by the articles of the US criminal code: Are these not the main features we might expect to see writ large if a full-scale collapse of the Constitution of the United States were to come?

Safeguarding Democracy

And that brings us back to the election and our endorsement of John Kerry. The most important reason to vote for John Kerry in November is to safeguard democracy in America.

Kerry's election would not necessarily save, and Bush's election would not necessarily destroy, democratic government in the United States. Even as President, even "in power," Kerry might well find himself "in opposition." In that case, he would need all the help from ordinary people he could get, and there's good reason to believe it would be forthcoming. The impeachment of Clinton failed, but it demonstrated the strength of the assault on legitimate government that can be waged not by the presidency but upon the presidency--and that was in peacetime. Clinton, after all, began his two terms in office with all three branches of government in Democratic hands but ended with all three in Republican hands. (His presidency was perhaps the most brilliant political retreat in American history, but it was a retreat.) Moreover, Kerry has given his right-wing opponents powerful ammunition. By pledging to win a war in Iraq that is unwinnable, he may have put his foot in a trap that would snap shut once he was in office, leaving him open to the charge of failure. What would the party that impeached Clinton for sex and lies do to a President who presided over the "loss" of Iraq in the midst of the "war on terror"?

If Bush is elected, the role of popular activism in support of the democratic system would be even more important. Roughly half the country dissents from Bushism. The antiwar movement, and now the campaign itself, have generated widespread and intense opposition. Activism has blossomed. New progressive organizations have been founded and will outlast the election. Events are also unlikely to favor the Administration. Already, its war policy and its fiscal policies are widely recognized as disasters. Opposition is bound to be strong and can save the Republic. And let us recall that when President Nixon threatened the constitutional system thirty years ago, he was driven from office in disgrace by popular fury. For all its importance, the election is only one episode in a longer popular struggle, whether Bush or Kerry is President. Either way, The Nation will devote itself to the fight.

Yet it remains true that of all the things Americans can now do to support democracy, the election of John Kerry is the most important. A Kerry presidency would seriously disrupt the concentration of power at the heart of the present danger. He might still try to "win" the Iraq war but would be less likely to wage future wars. His appointments to the Supreme Court would stop the Court's slide into unchecked, one-sided partisanship. His control of the bully pulpit would be a powerful counterforce to the right-wing propaganda that now all but drowns out other voices in the news media. His control of the agencies of the executive branch would halt, or at least retard, their merger with corporate America. More important, the simple structural fact that the Democrats are the other party would create a counterbalance to the right-wing power that predominates elsewhere in the system. The Democrats, including Kerry, have been disappointing champions of their namesake, democracy, yet the culture of their party is still an improvement over that of the Republicans. The Democrats are reluctant imperialists; the Republicans are imperialists by avocation. The Democratic Party generally wants to defend civil liberties and does so when it dares; the Republicans, with honorable exceptions, apparently would sweep them aside. The Democrats prefer social justice, however weakly they fight for it; the Republicans would give every dollar they can find to the rich. The Democrats are inclined to limit corporate power; the Republicans are corporate power.

What can be lost, slowly or abruptly, as the crisis unfolds, is everything that was lost by Detainee 07. What can be saved--let us rescue the beautiful word from the cesspool through which the Bush Administration has dragged it--is freedom.

I guess the crowd last night would have been OK had we been at a venue one-sixth the size... it was kind of a big cavernous bummer downstairs at the Meow Meow, but par for a rainy Wednesday night in Portland. It was one of those gigs where we had to pay for our bottled water from the club, and there was a last-minute change in sound personnel which may or may not have contributed to some skronky and lopsided weirdness up on the stage resulting in our not being able to hear a fucking thing anyone else was doing, so maybe it's OK that it was sparsely attended. The headlining touring band was a shade too testosteroney (testosteroni?) for me, and would have done better for themselves at a more mainstream rock club, but I really dug System and Station. Next week will be better -- yeah, the stage at the WE is the size of my kitchen table, but McMenamin's actually pays its performers, and there's good food and drink and stuff that will draw The People in. And maybe I'll get more compliments on my hair. :)

Speaking of food and drink and stuff, there's sugar in absolutely fucking everything, you know that? Crazy. Why they got to go putting sugar on a god damned rotisserie chicken? Or in turkey sausage? Or in a bag of frozen blackberries? Or on chicken slices, or in chili? What the smeg is wrong with those things without the added sugar?

Tomorrow I go to the chiropractor. I hope they can help with the back and neck pain I've been having. Reading Yeti's recent posts makes me wonder if some of it is playing-related -- I think more of it is weight-related and computing-related though. We'll see what they say.

Also in the Oy Vey Dept.: So I went to the gynecologist all worried about this lump. The gynecologist said the lump was nothing, but took a look at my ample girth within the context of my medical profile and started waxing all verbose about cardiac health, saying maybe I should look into going on cholesterol medication -- so basically I got to trade fear of one terminal condition for fear of another. Good thing I'd just started this diet two days before, I guess... I haven't had my cholesterol screened in a bunch of years, but yeah, maybe I should do that. At the moment the challenge is coming up with some cardiovascular workout-type things that don't exacerbate the issues I'm going to the chiropractor for. Oy!

Playing Meow Meow tonight. Yay! Come on out if you're in Portland. All ages, $5, we're playing at either 10 or 11 pm, not sure, but System + Station and Shim are both great, so come on out at 9 and see the whole thing.

I got 11/1 and 11/2 mostly off of work to go do volunteer voter outreach. I feel strongly about it this year. Also want to get down and volunteer some geekness to No on 36 either later this week or early next week, especially since according to statewide polls (yeah, yeah, but still) slightly over half the interviewed voters are in favor of a gay marriage ban. Not that I can change anybody's mind, and I think I want to do clerical volunteering rather than canvassing because the latter would either make me sputter evilly or make me really really depressed, but I definitely want to do something.

Sorry for the long absence, folks. Between chores, political junkiedom and a new dieting scheme I don't wanna talk about yet lest I jinx myself, I've been wrapped up in other crap.

If you're local, come see us with System + Station and Shim at the Meow Meow this Wednesday night. All ages, $5.

Sectional with Xaos was good. I think some new ideas came out of it which could work.

Then I installed a DVD drive in his puter for him and did all the things you have to do to make it play alternate-region DVDs. Seems to work well.

Now it's basically bedtime and there's nearly no time left for my own putergeeking... but it looks like Popfestmeeting might get cancelled tomorrow night, which is bad because we've had a hellish time getting everyone together to do a meaningful postmortem, but good because it means I might be FREE!! tomorrow night. Very exciting.

Course, if this happens, I should mow my lawn now that I finally got my long extension cord back...

Again, the activities have been stacking up, so the detailed narrative here will suffer. About all I can do right now is acknowledge each event before it fades.

9/22 - Todd @Aladdin. Same audience as ever, a bit more grey around the temples, some with kids in tow, but still I was one of the youngest adults there. Todd is still Todd, and yes, he's still relevant: who else musical right now is as forthright and as fearless with his particular message? Certainly no one as soulful... and the back-catalog in-jokes were friggin' great (go Kaz!). The guy who mastered our first record was in the audience, which I thought was cool.

9/23 - Cho @Schnitz. Yeah, she's always on the preachy side, while at the same time funny enough to make you poop your pants... no exception this time, although the show seemed shorter than most and the preachy:pooping ratio was perhaps tilted a bit toward the former, but then again that was probably her intent, what with the State of Emergency swing-state cannonball tour and all that. Still worth it.

Also practiced before the show -- one of those painful-minstrel-cramps sort of practices, after which...

9/24 - ...met with Xaos over dinner and determined that extra weekly sectionals would probably be helpful to concentrate more on arrangements. Thien Hong's General Tso's Tofu isn't all that great.

9/25 - #1: us at Disjecta. Went over reasonably well given the odds against it -- first, Xaos woke up feeling crappy. Then at the last minute the bands were relocated outside, but the PA wasn't (by order of the club owner), and the bike activist band playing first had pedaled theirs over there with a bike trailer but it was just a little powered mixer and a stereo speaker, the sound guy was MIA until the last possible second, so we scrambled to get our PA over there, set it up, and then the skies turned semi-morose and passive-aggressive -- by virtue of extreme luck and Yeti's French pleas to the skies, we avoided rain, which was especially fortunate since the venue-provided canopy was only set up over half our stuff. Played decently considering the material's transitional state and philosophical differences resulting therefrom. Precious's dress was perfect considering that we were playing on a square of concrete surrounded by stumps and blackberry bushes and small sandpiles.

#2: Scissor Sisters at Roseland. Soooooo gay!

9/26 - agreed to go on morning AIDS charity walk with Girl. Was whiny-ass bastard. Didn't finish walk. Went to Value Village and bought drag stuff (love Halloween season at the thrift shop!) and a chair and an outdoorsy jacket I don't need. Went fishing on the Sandy; girl caught one nanotrout which of course went back, I caught my limit of air as usual, but the weather and scenery and new fishing rods were great (although it's a bit disconcerting feeling the rumble from the heavy trucks under the I-84 bridge over the river, especially for someone like me whose nervous system is pretty much always on high alert waiting for Armageddon). Cancelled out of going to Muse out of sheer exhaustion and knowing I won't have any other free time until Wednesday night (sorry, Xaos, but I really did need it).

I went and got a No on 36 lawn sign. Now if only the so-called organizers around this state would let us play benefit shows. Might have to try and scare up some house parties.

I also went into the Kerry campaign office to see what they were up to and what they had -- I wanted one of those "Vote Democrat" signs rather than the "Kerry - Edwards stronger America blah blah" ones, but I think it's ACT who's supplying those. Anyhow, the Kerry office isn't set up to take debit or credit cards, and I usually don't carry cash, so I wasn't equipped to give them the $5 suggested donation for the Stronger Blah Blah sign. They should also do up some of their big gay designs in lawn sign form; I'd buy that, even though he's just selling us slightly less far down the river and counting on our support nonetheless because at least he's not seeking outright federal bans against us. If I do get a Kerry sign, I'm tempted to tape an extra section on top with "Hold Your Nose and Vote" written on it in Sharpie -- while I will do what I can to try and get him in there instead of the monkey, I fuckin' hope I don't live to regret getting what I asked for.

"Gets plane diverted"? Not misleading, nope, inasmuch as he didn't do a damned thing except be a Muslim against the Iraq war and try to travel -- and in case you think that phrasing was accidental, the link from the Yahoo home page said "Cat Stevens, on watch list, diverts plane".

Worse, it occurred to me that we can no longer think: "They made a mistake, misidentifying a Muslim who is critical of US government policy and who records songs about peace as an enemy!" I believe they have genuinely decided that this sort of person *is* an enemy of the state. And all the dumbass kneejerkers out there will be going, "wow, I loved his songs when I was a kid, and lookee now, he's become a terrorist":

The Former Cat Stevens Gets Plane Diverted
By LESLIE MILLER, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - A plane bound for Washington from London was diverted to Maine on Tuesday after passenger Yusuf Islam — formerly known as pop singer Cat Stevens — showed up on a U.S. watch list, federal officials said.

United Airlines Flight 919 had already taken off from London en route to Dulles International Airport when the match was made between the passenger and the watch list, said Nico Melendez, a spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration.

The plane was met by federal agents at Maine's Bangor International Airport around 3 p.m., Melendez said.

Federal officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, identified the individual as Islam.

One official said Islam, 56, was identified by the Advanced Passenger Information System, which requires airlines to send passenger information to U.S. Customs and Border Protection's National Targeting Center. TSA was then contacted and requested that the plane land at the nearest airport, the official said.

"He was interviewed and denied admission to the United States on national security grounds," said Homeland Security spokesman Dennis Murphy. He said the man would be put on the first available flight out of the country Wednesday.

Islam, who was born Stephen Georgiou, took Cat Stevens as a stage name and had a string of hits in the 1960s and '70s, including "Wild World" and "Morning Has Broken." Last year he released two songs, including a re-recording of his '70s hit "Peace Train," to express his opposition to the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

He abandoned his music career in the late 1970s and changed his name after being persuaded by orthodox Muslim teachers that his lifestyle was forbidden by Islamic law. He later became a teacher and an advocate for his religion, founding a Muslim school in London in 1983.

Islam recently condemned the school seizure by militants in Beslan, Russia, earlier this month that left more than 300 dead, nearly half of them children.

In a statement on his Web site, he wrote, "Crimes against innocent bystanders taken hostage in any circumstance have no foundation whatsoever in the life of Islam and the model example of Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him."

Purrr... purrrdy little Sawtooth showed up yesterday in the mail. Yeah! Tell you what, they've made the whole Macinputing experience a whole lot more comfortable since the last round of HW and SW I had from der Apfel. Enough so that I even caught myself contemplating using it as my primary machine. Which would of course fuck up my basement logistics in all sorts of ways, so probably I'll park it where i intended to park it and just hang out in the studio room more. :)

As usual with this type of project, had to embark on a round of domino-effect modifications, to wit:

• Sonnet Encore/ST G4 proc upgrades require updating G4 firmware to version 4.2.8, or the system won't boot with the new processor installed...
  
  
• ...and the firmware updater requires that you have OS 9.2.1 or later installed on a fixed disk somewhere on the system. (Good move acquiring that 9.2.2 CD back in the day for times like this.) Weighed pros and cons of installing 9 on same partition as X, and (even lacking FWB Toolkit or anything else handy to use for nondestructive repartitioning) decided (okay, to be honest, I'd forgotten that installing both on the same partition is a valid option with a host of tips and tricks to go with it, since I hadn't gone that route since OS X first came out, so I did all of this considering and weighing *after* the fact; nonetheless, I did do it, and I believe would have come to the same conclusion had I retained an optimal level of cluefulness... ahem) that it'd be smoother in the long run to give 9 its own smallish partition and just reinstall both operating systems from scratch. Which took a while...
  
  
• ...and allowed for a smooth upgrade to the firmware, which in turn triggered what I discovered is a well-documented and by now long-running issue with versions 4.1.9 and up, corroborated by various online forums and a really nice support dude at Sonnet who I talked to about assorted stuff (will my Encore overheat because the Apple heatsink dent isn't centered over the new processor die? Nope, highly unlikely, since the coverage is still there despite the lack of symmetry) --that is, many flavors of third-party PC100 SDRAM are no longer recognized after the firmware gets updated. Fortunately compared with some folks, I still have a working gig left. Sigh...
  
  

After yet another blistering practice, I broke down and followed Precious's advice and ordered my Earloves. Cotton's definitely not good enough.

No. At any rate, that's certainly not all we do, although staying visible and loud is valuable for getting the message to isolated doubters who fear they are going insane. But for the real work, I'm fond of the Nature Conservancy model: get the high-powered Lawful Good people, in their case primarily lawyers, in there to play hardball for you. For our own Nation Conservancy, we do have a small core of hard-ass, smart, thorough, conscientious, tireless and incorruptible people working around the clock on our behalf -- Randi Rhodes comes immediately to mind -- but there need to be more, and in some cases (particularly where greater access than usual to money or power is available, and by "power" I mean not just political power, but also unusually highly developed skills, media access, and so forth), we will need to become those people.

To that end, I offer you up as an audience for what Black Box Voting has to say. Carefully read the story at the top. Keep reading through all the parts. Then follow up in your own district, and tell all your friends to do the same.

Whatever it is at any given moment that I'm proud of, it's a baby step for the real people. A beautiful hole is still a hole. Feeling warm and comfortable is terribly highly overrated.

Yeesh. All these things I skipped. Like:

- Homie is back as of a couple days ago, but in highly unstable form. I am struggling between wanting to pull some kind of magical philanthropy out of my ass to try and make it all better (fukkin American healthcare eats shit), or just falling out of love with the whole friendship and repositioning my snout back in the bottomless feedbag of knowledge instead of Doing the People Thing at all. Part of the latter has to do with the fact that I'm busily processing whole bucketloads of other mindstuff, plus spinning the Wheel of Deal exceptionally hard right now just for fun. (Isn't it selfish to go acquiring all this crap instead of helping a friend in need, you ask? Maybe I'd feel that way if I were using actual money, or winding up with more crap than I started out with -- but that's not how the Wheel operates. Along those lines, I'd probably be more useful doing something for my friend like preparing yummy cooked fish.) Anyhow, I just never know what the fuck to do about people.

- The second Diamanda show, the skewered countrybluespop one, was deeply satisfying, nicely reframing the weekend as displaying two sides of a many-sided die instead of leaving it at Oh God This Spooky Goth Thing Is Starting To Get Old But Damn Can She Sing And Damn Is This Heavy. Plus I love doing stuff with LadyD, I really do, even if (maybe especially because) she's so all about her own headspace. A high point was running into somebody I don't know that well at the show wearing a Divided pin.

- Talking of pins: because we do not in fact all live in a vacuum, and also because this is some severely nifty shit, I tipped off the whole Poplist to Arteto's band button hook-up offer. Here's hoping this generates oodles of fruitful bicoastal-type exchanges.

- It was silly of me to cut myself off from reading most other people's blogs for 12 or 18 months or something. Pointless self-impoverishment, that, and I missed some important stuff. It's one of those things I suspect I'll always go back and forth on, though: enrich yourself by engaging with people, or define and strengthen yourself by disengaging.

- Shnootre moved to Portland, Maine. (Email quote of the month: "I used the word 'commiserate' in an email just now, and that always makes me think of you somehow.") He'll be in Seattle for a few days in November. I will definitely go visit, but also I asked him if I should try to set up a show for all of us. Wonder if he really would, and if we could pull it off with the connections we have now?

I did this to the laptop, and it seems to help. Going in there and poking around, it looked like it'd been done before to that machine. Makes sense -- probably needs to be done periodically as basic maintenance. It's really not that much of a hassle, as disassembly jobs go. The biggest ass-pain is getting the plastic piece between keyboard and screen off without busting anything.

Still, I am not altogether satisfied with this system's performance as a DAW; clearly it wasn't made to handle what I'm throwing at it, which is no real shock considering it's an eMachine and they have a whole different user base in mind. On top of that, here is what I have to consider:

• The wolves have backed off with regard to my continued employment, which means I have continued use of my much-better work notebook for general mobile surfing and writing.
  
• Girl has had a hard-on for laptops for a while now, and is on a budget.
  
• My main peecee would actually handle the task nicely, but I don't necessarily want to use it for that. I want the main music computer to be set up with music as its primary function, and I want it to live in the project studio.
  
• Beige G3s won't run Panther, and Pro Tools 6.4 won't run on Jaguar or lower.
  

Soooo, here is the shuffle currently in progress:

1. Sell G3 - done (guy's daughter needed a basic box for college).
   
2. Transfer ownership of eMachine to Girl at cost - will be done within the next week or so.
   
3. For the new DAW, pick up a loaded G4/400 Sawtooth with Panther included at a great price; at the same time, order a 1GHz proc upgrade and an Apple multiscan monitor adapter for VGA (in process - most of this is shipping from CA). With a gig and a half of RAM already installed, this ought to be sufficient.
   
4. Wireless USB NIC and MIDI interface were already on order anyhow, originally for the G3 and the eMachine respectively - will still need both for the G4.
   

I love low-level commerce in used crap almost as much as I love tinkering with used crap. ;)

Today's magic words: SHIELDED CABLES.

Before: <SQUEEEEEEEfsshhhffhshshshhh>
After: <                           >

Oh, how I love the Plaid Adder. Here's the latest, just to make sure you're all reading her: Unexcused Absence

I'm telling you, look at the behavior of this president and his whole administration as if your regular friends, family or co-workers were doing these things or their normal-sized-life equivalents, and imagine how much you'd be sputtering over the utter malevolent sketchiness of it all then:


If your employers allowed you to spend 40% of your time on vacation, you'd get five months of vacation every year. You could knock off in April and come back in September. Which would be nice for a while, until you started to feel some nagging doubts about whether the people stuck covering for you back in the office were really covering for you, or whether you were going to show up and find out that of the eight important projects you had been working on when you left, three have been fucked up beyond recall, three have been transformed into something you never envisioned, and the two most important ones haven't been touched since you left your desk.

And that's why most people don't get 40% of their work days as paid vacation, whether they're President of the United States or not.

Just now I Googled "one sacred place always in your heart for me" looking for some resonance out there. This is my favorite one I found, although I'm torn between pain over the author's tragic naiveté (heady rationalization for stalking much? But then again, we make an effort to avoid each other... But then *again* again: every night we penetrate the veil... I give up -- it's quite possible these things never really end, they just mutate, waxing and waning in amplitude periodically, and you go on living your life more or less the same whether or not you acknowledge it's there, or you go crazy) and something else more along the lines of vindication: http://www.toddisgodd.com/loveunityeternity.html

(Free salmon filet to anyone who was able to follow that. :) )

The broader question is something closer to: "What is real? What can I trust?" And to that, the closest thing to an answer I can hear coming from that eensy corner of my mind that occasionally spews forth wisdom is, "Dunno. Depends what you aim to get out of it really."

Craigslist typo of the day:
~*Wall Scones *~ - $2

Japanese dinner was pretty great -- 9 of us (including Majesty, doing the eat 'n run thing before sprinting crosstown to do a drag show) had a big ol' spread in a tatami room at Bush Garden, Girl gave me a veritable shitpile of fishing tackle and literature and Elric gave me a Music Mil gift cert (and Precious and Xaos are getting me in to see Scissor Sisters and Muse respectively... w00t!) -- and yet it felt like there was a big fat gaping hole torn out of the middle of the whole shindig without my homie there. Precious puts it down to "syphilis", his catchall term for chronic irrationally cunty behavior from persons who have gone and proven themselves to be less than savory, but I'm not there with the dismissiveness thing yet, and I really hope not to be. Short version is that a largely electronics-based massive communication breakdown took place leading to some probably misguided yet mutually explosive shitting on of hearts. I have no idea how to fix it. Adding to the sorrow is that my homie is very ill. I have a card to drop off, but I need a few hours at a minimum to get my own message right, and the more time goes by, the more time goes by, you know, and the deeper the damage sinks in. I wish I could be cold. Not just cruel, which I know I can be, but genuinely unfeeling about crap like this. So tired of standing again and again to have the pie of social involvement flung in my face. If only disengagement from society didn't carry such hefty costs of its own. I'm between that pie and a hard place.

Meanwhile, one of the other two things was: Diamanda Galás show #1 of 2, Defixiones, Will and Testament. Before my first cup of coffee of the day is finished, I really don't feel I have it in me to muster the right words to describe this -- to say "the message and execution were powerful" is the "well, duh" version. Had bad dreams as a result. (That's in addition to the morning's final dream, something about trying to recapture a mess of goldfish undertaking a mass exodus from a fish tank on top of the upstairs toilet tank in the house I grew up in, but they kept flopping down the stairs and I kept accidentally stepping on them, plus I kept trying to clean out Cool Whip containers to temporarily put them in but even the clean containers had spaghetti and parmesan cheese permanently caked on the inside and it kept expanding to displace all the water.) Binki and husband co-engineered the performance, which was a trip. (Hopefully at some point I perporm por Binki, too, but not this weekend unfortunately, since we're not frickin' corporate enough for MFNW, I guess.) Haven't seen Binki for 17 years. Didn't see her yesterday either. Tomorrow, I think.

The last thing was that I treated myself to some new recording toys (on credit, sure, but, oh yeah: they figured out it would be more profitable to let us keep our jobs for now. Any disappointment felt as a result of not getting cut loose with severance pay to force myself to make a living as a full-time musician/roving geek is offset by getting to keep milking the cash cow to finance my evilly expensive gear addiction -- with less time to use the stuff than if I were no longer employed by The Man of course, but I'll live). We were gonna go fishing today, but Girl has the hacking plague, so I'm going to snuggle up to my gear. And probably spend a good chunk of time trying to write that heartfelt apology to my friend. And (yeah, right!) clean the house.

...

...and it's a known design flaw which eMachines appears reluctant to own up to; idiotically, they apparently have their customers run the restore disks to try and fix it. WTF?!?

When this started happening to me the first time I left mine on for more than a short while, I typed "emachines overheat" into Google. The first link that came back was this: http://napps.nwfusion.com/weblogs/cool/archives/003206.html

They really are a good value for the price except for the fact that they won't stay running. :P I ordered a $16 notebook cooler and we'll see if that helps. Planting a large house fan running on High underneath it while working definitely does help, although one might imagine this could cause issues if trying to use the machine for audio recording.

See June 17. Another one of those days.

This time, I get to be accused of things I did not do. Joy.

Hate people. Hate hate hate.

Anybody who wants to meet for Japanese birthday dinner on Friday, contact me for details...

No Pixies -- Girl's birthday prerogative to cancel, dontcha know, and anyhow we spent insane cash in Alaska and were probably better off cooling it on the funds-intensive leisure activities this weekend. Girl's sister showed up in town from SF and they went backpacking, which I sat out because I was all rabid for some project time on the house, not to mention some time generally spent at home after being gone 9 days and then immediately starting back at work. So I spent two days repainting the bedroom a nice shade of not-fuckin'-lavender-anymore (funny how my rebellious act in 1986 was to paint my bedroom at home very nearly that same shade of fuckin' lavender -- these days it's just way too much like sleeping inside a box of feminine hygiene products, and anyway, that room was the last one still sporting the exact same colors it came with when I got it, hence the need for territorial pissings).

So this weekend we have my birthday, Diamanda Galás, MusicFestNW, and a meeting with a luminary from another time and another plane which will be nothing if not interesting.

Two years old now, but still bears reading, particularly if somehow you have been living in a cave and are unsure of the true intentions of our current administration:

http://globalresearch.ca/articles/TUR409A.html

Here is Hentoff on this topic: http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0236/hentoff.php

And from the FindLaw forum on CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2002/LAW/08/columns/fl.ramasastry.detainees/

Todd and the Liars are coming through Portland 9/22... yay! Reviews of the tour so far are here.

Margaret Cho's the next day (going to that), and we're playing the 25th and (if we get done early enough) going to see Scissor Sisters afterward, then Muse is the next day, which I might not have any cash left to go see, but maybe...

So many more good shows, too, besides those. What to do?

Today's tasty fruit for the conspiracy theorist...

Day 1, Saturday: Portland > Seattle > Anchorage

Encountered almost no traffic en route to SeaTac, and consequently had a long long long wait hanging around waiting for the plane. The plane was late arriving from NY, too, due to weather issues out there, so it was even longer than that. Movie: Man On Fire (sucked).

ANC is one hour earlier than here, and even in late summer it stays light until 10PM, so we left around 6:30 and got there around 8:30 and had plenty of time to walk around and check things out in a preliminary sort of way. Not too much stays open late, but got some yummy beer at a pub overlooking the water and watched the sun set, then crashed out at the downtown HI hostel.

Day 2, Sunday: Anchorage

Started the day by walking around, acquiring maps, looking at the stores full of tourist crap. The Anchorage Saturday Market stays open on Sundays now too, so we went down to that for a while, and it was the usual assortment of tourist-geared garbage you'd expect, plus Alaskan-themed food concessions with things like deep-fried halibut plates and reindeer sausage and salmon quesadillas. (Note: I managed to get through the whole week without succumbing to my desire to try reindeer.) We ate, strategically sitting down next to a couple of obviously queer slightly older women and striking up a conversation with them about what would be fun to do. Got a tip from them about some hiking trails right near Flat Top (a nice hike just outside of the city we'd been contemplating doing) which were less strenuous than Flat Top itself -- Flat Top takes several hours to climb and ends with a directly vertical scramble up the rocks -- but nonetheless quite breathtaking, so we headed off and did that. Ran into a number of horseback riders and other friendly folks up there. Girl got stung by a yellow jacket.

At night, we walked a bit of the Coastal Trail and watched the sun set again. Saw a bald eagle pretty close overhead; we'd see many more over the course of the week.

Back at the hostel we talked to an assortment of people, and found that this particular hostel (one of at least three in town) had a distinct halfway-housish quality -- instead of the usual hostelling sort, many of the residents were there longer-term, hadn't ever heard of hostels before, and had been recommended there by the street people after they got to town and ran out of cash owing to one hard-luck circumstance or another. Seems it's relatively common for a certain type of tough and rugged working person to ditch their life and head north in search of something different. Seems it's also relatively common for such people's plans to get all screwed up along the way.

Day 3, Monday: Anchorage > Ninilchik

First, bought a feature-and-accessory-loaded laptop off of one of the long-term hostel residents for a little bit more than the pawn shop would have given him; just seemed like too good a deal to pass up. He'd been denied entrance into Canada on the bus because of a DUI on the books and had been forced to blow a stack of unexpected cash on a last-minute plane ticket into ANC, forcing the sale of his tricked-out computer. He included an international power and phone adapter kit with it, which was cool.

Then we meandered around Turnagain Arm and down the Sterling Highway toward Ninilchik, stopping at some of the interesting attractions along the way. Went over to Portage and checked out the educational film and displays at the visitor center; didn't take the boat to the glacier or go further on to Whittier, though. Also stopped at Big Game Alaska since a guy in the rental car line had raved about it a couple days earlier -- it wasn't all that, but it was vaguely worth it to get to see the canned rehabbed animals up close. They had a couple of bear cubs who were completely adorable to watch play.

The Ninilchik hostel was run by a couple who appeared to be staunch religious righties (maybe Catholic, maybe Russian Orthodox -- didn't look closely enough at their religious paraphernalia to be sure, but the right-wing part was unmistakable). Requested a private room and were given private access to one of the bunk rooms, which pretty much defeated the purpose and which got us exactly the same arrangement we would have had if we'd just asked for separate bunks, since there were no other females there, except we had to pay more. The only other guest there at the time was a massively Orthodox Jewish guy with underdeveloped social skills who spent most of his time with his nose in the holy texts reading half-aloud to himself, and who was kind of cranky and snappy whenever either he or we tried to make conversation. Made me realize how exactly non-practicing I am -- I probably just barely have the right to call myself a Jew.

Anyway, we borrowed fishing poles from the hostel owners, got 3-day licenses and went down to the harbor to fish until dark. Here we first became acquainted with the inedible and spectacularly fugly rockfish known as the Irish lord, which is all either of us kept catching that night. Stunk up our clothes real good with salmon egg bait and went back to the hostel all soaked and smelly. I had trouble sleeping that night, feeling all unhinged from the enemy territory vibes.

Day 4, Tuesday: Ninilchik > Homer

Cancelled our second night in Ninilchik and headed down to Homer, giving the Orthodox gentleman a lift down there for some daytime exploration (he planned to hitch back -- evidently hitchhiking is an overlooked offense throughout Alaska, and the cops will drive right by you without saying anything). Our rider had headphones on and didn't talk very much.

Discovered we left our bag of wet smelly clothes in Ninilchik, and had to call the hostel up there to see if they'd hold on to it for two days. Had to put off doing laundry since we didn't actually have the laundry to do, and determined to make do with whatever clothes we had left.

Checked into the pleasantly funky Homer Hostel, rented fishing gear from there, and while sitting around trying to figure out if there was any way a really strange typo in the tide tables could be accurate, got to talking with another guy staying there who turned out to be a complete fishing fiend, so we packed him into the car along with the bait and tackle and we all fished for hours and hours off the Spit until it got dark. He could cast much further than we could, and was consequently able to get both more fish and better fish than us -- tell ya, those Irish lords are stupid, hungry for everything and willing to come pretty far inland -- but it was still a great day, and the bunch of us dragged flounder and halibut (almost all caught by him) up to the public fish cleaning station to filet.

Day 5, Wednesday: Homer

We were supposed to go to Seward, but arranged to stay an extra day in Homer and pushed the Seward reservations out an extra day, figuring there was no real reason to circle back to Anchorage until the day of our flight out. Started the day by dropping off our fishing buddy at the Spit, then walking the strip looking for a short boat tour (we'd originally wanted to go across hiking, but my comfortable shoes that didn't dig into my ankles had been left with the bag of smelly clothes in Ninilchik); we got a cheap ride-along on a water taxi depositing tourists at a guided hike dropoff point on the other side of Kachemak Bay. It had been quite a while since I'd been on a small boat, and I was reminded that the sensation isn't an altogether pleasant one for me, but the weather was glorious and we saw puffins and a humpback whale at close range, and we saw all the seagulls and kittiwakes on Gull Island, so it was worth hanging on for dear life for the duration of the trip. :)

Then we went back, rented the poles again and fished with our buddy until maybe 8pm, then left him there to finish up and went to the Fishing Hole to try and catch some easy salmon. There I discovered that the pole I'd rented had crappy worn-out line on it which would not suffice for reeling in a good-sized salmon, as three beautiful fish in succession snapped my whole rig off as I was bringing them in. The first time, the fish got free of the detached hook, bobber and sinker and Girl helped me snag it out of the water; the second time, the fish took off with all of it, and all I had left was a hook, so I baited that and cast close in, and I still got a fish, but that one yanked off the remaining bait and tackle and took off. Heartbreaking. Girl almost got one too, but the same thing happened using the other rented pole while I went down the Spit to pick up our buddy, who had a massive string of flounder with him. We tried to tell the hostel owner his rental equipment needed some help, but he seemed unconcerned.

Day 6, Thursday: Homer > Seward

We finally started getting the crappy weather that had been promised all week, but not really until we got closer to Seward. Woke up, cleaned out the bait cooler and left all the bait outside in a bag for our buddy, headed to Ninilchik to get our smelly clothes, once again didn't stop at the old Russian village (one of the main reasons to go into Ninilchik in the first place... ah, well, next time), stopped in Soldotna (probably the biggest town on that stretch of the Sterling Highway) for greasy breakfast and groceries, then headed up and over to Seward. If you could cut straight through the national parklands, Homer to Seward would probably be around a 50-mile trip, but getting to the only road requires that you head back northeast up the coast about 130 miles and then cut over and down about another 40, so it was another good half-day endeavor, peppered with smoke from the wildfires up north trapped between the mountains here and there. We got there and it was crappy out, so we sat and did laundry, and I headed a few blocks down the street to the harbor to investigate fishing charters while the clothes dried. Turned out we would probably have been better off getting a charter booked in Homer, since Seward turned out to be considerably more of a tourist trap and it cost about twice as much to set it up there -- but we were there and we wanted to go out fishing on a boat before going home, so we booked a half-day salmon charter for the following day at the inflated price anyhow.

The Moby Dick Hostel (a pretty nice indie place run by a German family) offered discounts on tickets to the Sealife Center, so we went there since it was mostly indoors and warm and dry. The place was definitely on the small side compared with similar places we've been -- Newport is substantially larger, for instance -- but they had this great Steller sea lion named Woody who was alone and bored, and somebody had left a super ball outside the underwater viewing area of the tank, and damned if Woody didn't want all of us there to play ball with him with the little super ball so he could chase it around from his side of the glass. We and a bunch of other spectators did this for a really long time and then tried to walk away, and Woody would follow us to the other tank window like a puppy, looking at us like, "Hey! I'm not done yet!" So we played ball with Woody almost until the place closed. The other cool thing there was getting a waterside view of the puffins, so we could actually see them flying underwater.

Went to bed relatively early so we could get up for our early morning fishing charter.

Day 7, Friday: Seward

Crappy weather again; good thing we didn't book a sightseeing tour, since we pretty much would've seen fog. Got to the dock at 6:45am in time to board a smallish fishing boat called the Revelation (urp... way to get me worrying excessively about the End Times) for a 7am trip. The captain was late, but he was able to get us and the other two pairs of fisherpeople (good ol' boys all, two of them actually decked out in full camo) out to sea fairly swiftly after showing up. Yep, definitely swiftly. While I have no regrets, I am also now acutely aware that there are sensations far worse than standard-issue air turbulence. Standard-issue small boat turbulence, for instance. I guess I can pat myself on the back for holding out a full two and a half hours before turning completely green and starting to hurl over the side, and for trying to fish again a while before resuming hurling over the side. Note: MotionEaze seems to help a little if you're already feeling bad, but won't necessarily stop you from getting sick. It might be more effective if you take it earlier; I don't know. At any rate, Girl caught more fish than anyone else on the boat, my catch was too small to keep, and we wound up with everybody's fish anyway since the other two teams didn't want to deal with theirs (the guys in camo had already gone caribou hunting and halibut fishing, and had insane quantities of food to send home already). So we left out a couple filets to cook in butter, garlic, lemon juice and dill at the hostel (yay Girl!), and had about 25# of tasty tasty coho packed and frozen to bring home.

Meanwhile, back in inner ear land, the whole world kept heaving like a small boat for hours and hours, and I couldn't quite get warm after getting soaked through in the rain out on the water near the glaciers, so I begged off of the rest of the day's activities, wrapped up in four blankets, drank hot water and read a book. Girl went up to Exit Glacier with a German guy staying at the hostel, which I'm sad I missed, but I'm really glad I got a chance to rest.

Day 8: Saturday, Seward > Anchorage > Seattle

Woke up feeling much, much better. We gave the German guy a lift up to Anchorage (next stop for him: Costa Rica), inexplicably letting ourselves get really, really low on gas and just barely making it to the Tesoro in Girdwood. Stopped again at the Saturday Market to eat lunch (Girl got halibut; I got an elephant ear since we probably won't make it to the State Fair this year unless we go on Labor Day itself, which we won't, since we'll be exhausted from going to Bend for the Pixies show... but I regress. Waaaahh!), then dragged all our stuff including the big box of fish to the airport. The flight back to SEA was cake -- nothing at all like being on a small boat. Movie: Mean Girls (acceptably amusing).

Toyed with the idea of just driving home, but checked into the Motel 6 across the street from the car parking place instead, which was probably a good move since we both crashed frickin' hard.

Day 8: Sunday, Seattle > Portland

Only worth mentioning because the Denny's on Highway 99/Pacific near SeaTac is so incredibly crappy that it bears publishing so the rest of the world will know. Understaffed as hell, the staff that were there were clueless and slow, and they got sausage in my vegetarian omelet. I thought about going off on them that I'm Jewish, and it's against Jewish law to eat milk with meat first of all and to eat pork anytime second of all (both technically true statements, although it would be seriously disingenuous to suggest I am or have ever been anything close to kosher), but I didn't.

So I'm back. Time to take the music world and my house by storm...

Started planting the fall veggie crop yesterday; hope to finish today, and then I have to make sure to tell ye olde housesittre to water stuff daily while I'm gone. I love long growing seasons. Ate the first tomato yesterday, and we should continue to have those and the various squashes coming in while I wait for the autumn round of spinach and stuff to come up. Growing food rocks.

Working at home today so I can spend my lunch hour doing laundry and dishes and crap in preparation for being gone a week and a half. I hear Anchorage has been having what for them is a heat wave (over 70 degrees every day), things are browner than usual and there's a big wildfire nearby casting a layer of smoke over the whole city; it's supposed to rain in every town I'm going to on every day I'm in AK, which is good for them, and I guess it's not really a dealbreaker for me either, although it won't be much of a weather vacation from here.

...of corn, that is. They like to jam themselves into tight spots on plants, making a corn husk an ideal resting place.

So I'm picking the corn and carrots and beans, and then I'm bringing the corn and carrots and beans inside, and then all of a sudden I'm tossing everything hurriedly into the sink and running the water and whapping at the whole pile with a paring knife and yelling "Aaaaa! Earwig earwig earwig die die DIE!" while they all go scurrying out of the stack of veggies away from the water, brandishing their little pincers and wiggling their little wiggly bodies. Ugh.

Girl laughed at me...

Spent the weekend in Ventura watching Girl's other cousin get married. Culturally pretty bland right there (though we found a really tasty hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant outside of Santa Barbara, and I'm sure there are dozens if not hundreds more of those), but the weather was damn near perfect, the water felt great, and the dolphins put on a show for us the afternoon of the wedding, which was held right on the beach. Nice reception, too, at some country club over near Oxnard where we got a yummy veg spread and sake served in cedar boxes; I spent some time hanging over the mobile sound folks' equipment and talking shop. Best thing, though, was the rental car company upgrading us from econo-shitbox to gadget-loaded Toyota Prius at no extra charge since they were out of the former, and now I really want to become a successful business type at least for a few minutes so I can get me into one of them there 2004 or later Prii, yessir.

So, after a honeymoon in Mexico, the happy couple is headed back to Japan to resume teaching. Would love to go see them there next year maybe -- with the whole band, maybe? One can hope... although, boy, do I not enjoy the feeling of flying, but at this point I've got a full supply of good drugs and I accept the whole thing as a necessary inconvenience, at least at those moments when I'm not scrunched up in a ball with my fingers in my ears and my head in my lap, bargaining with God and poking whoever's next to me.

Right now I feel very relieved to be on solid ground. Hitting the skies again next weekend, though, bound for Anchorage and 9 days of my work not being able to reach me. W00t!

...or, more aptly, Trashy Trailer. Although that's not quite fair: it's makeshifty and funky (it was converted from a tent trailer to a utility trailer using pressboard), but it's structurally intact and dry and quite lightweight, and the Ark pulls it real nice. A steal at a hunnerd fitty buck.

That solves some problems. And now I'm even more of a Portlander. Although I do need to go to a big parking lot and practice some more before I'll be expert at backing it up.

Finally broke down yesterday and got a Mackie SRM450 powered PA speaker on my Guitar Center card. It'll be good, since now The Divided has 2 and can decently power itself in non-music-club situations. Xaos's will suffice at his practice space, and mine will do nicely in my practice space -- now I can decently amplify my Vdrums if I want to drum in a crappy project band. :)

Also picked up a cheap used bass DI on auction so the Mackie (or whatever PA is handy) can double for bass output, since I got rid of my bigger bass amp and the ol' Boxer 30 isn't gonna cut it outside of a coffeehouse setting.

Precious and I went up to Oly to the Saturday night show at Homo A Gogo, which was fucking unbelievably fun and great. Oh, how I wish I didn't need to work for a living so I could've been there all week -- the lineups were dazzling. We ran into countless Portlanders, a handful of whom had been there all week and who said it had in fact been exactly that much fun. But anyway, the Saturday show:

Imani Henry. There was a bit of trouble getting the multimedia component of the show to work right, but his power as a playwright/storyteller made that easy to forgive. Moving and heady autobiographical stuff from this articulate and very hot transman.

Michelle Tea. In a manner not unlike Margaret Cho (except more literary and less bluntly sexual), listening to Michelle is like sitting around the booth in your favorite bar with your friends and listening to one of the really fun, perceptive and witty girls in your circle tell a story. Much goofier than I expected, which is a good thing. :)

Justin Chin. A delightfully wickedly dark and often very funny writer whose stuff I'm going to need to chase down now.

Allen Svenadaitor and the Amazing Fruit Experts. Jody Bleyle's also-queer brother Allen's hysterical and infectiously catchy freak-folk ensemble featuring Allen in a purple and yellow wizard-looking big robe-cloak-shirt type thing playing acoustic guitar and singing about fruit and other random stuff with a gaggle of folks wearing fruit masks behind him providing background singing/shrieking and pelting the audience with fresh fruit. Highly recommended. And their last song "The Worm" won't leave my head.

Tami Hart/Gangway! I happen to have liked Tami's solo stuff a little better for having been melodic while still mostly crunchy (although her thoroughly non-crunchy dark ballad "It's Not Mine" is still one of my favorites) -- I thought of her, and still to a great extent do, as a diamond in the rough who could benefit from a great producer -- but, although like Kristin Hersh and countless others, she's currently on hiatus from beautiful melodies and throwing herself headlong into The Rawk, this was energetic for sure and quite adorable too. Tami herself is a super-cute fat chick, which I didn't expect since I've only ever seen photos of her taken from angles which didn't make that clear, and she's got the Beth Ditto flippy-hair thing going on, and she was sweet and polite and reminded me a lot of a younger and punkier Majesty. The one true bummer about her set was the sound, which sounded like it was coming entirely through the stage monitors and was tinny as fuck.

Tracy and the Plastics. Not really my thing, although Wynne (Tracy) does have a fairly great voice. This was laptop/cheap drum machine electroclash with two virtual band members projected behind a live lead singer, and it would have been a lot more passable had she stopped rambling about herself and the audience needing to try to process the whole week's worth of discussions together as the Queer Community, man (she even stopped the laptop in the middle of one song to start blathering about it again). Also, even Tracy in the flesh had so little stage presence she might as well not have shown up in person either.

Team Dresch. Oh. My. God. Hands down, the best live show I've been to in a long long while -- the energy was amazing, they did a full 20-song set of buzzsaw-crunchalicious harmony-stuffed classics replete with stage-divers (including band members while they were playing) and all kinds of topless chicks jumping up on stage and making out and dancing and stuff. And it was just phenomenal to hear those songs played live, having been back East and getting them second-hand and listening to the records over and over when they were happening here. Absolutely 100% what I had hoped it would be.

On the way home Precious played me Antony and the Johnsons -- nearly indescribable queer quirky torch-pop with tastes of Nina Simone, Jeff Buckley, Bryan Ferry, Rufus Wainwright (except, unlike dear Roofie, Antony actually expresses emotion) -- and the Stephen Sondheim songs performed by Madonna on the Dick Tracy soundtrack, which I'd never listened to and which were actually quite good. And we revisited Belly's Star, which is worth revisiting if you haven't for a decade or so.

Stopped in on one of those women's open mic empowered blah blah type things at the coffeehouse near girlnextdoor's house -- no one was awful at this one, some friends played, but I dunno, I'm feeling particularly burnt out on the genre at the moment. If I start participating solo at these deals it's going to be in more of a TJO vein I think, although probably both poppier and crunchier than TJO is. Sisterhood of the Lesbian Loopers or something like that. Maybe I just won't.

But Cat wants help recording, and Maj still wants help recording, and of course there's the terrible specter of my own half-assed material looming over my head, and I need to soundly kick my own ass for having completed like 95% of this incarnation of the project studio and then stopping. It's to avoid facing my own inadequacies, I know. If I get laid off on schedule, though, I need to be able to jump right into that with minimal downtime spent doing stupid stuff like cabling and painting and hanging doors, because everybody knows I literally refuse to sit around doing nothing, and if I find myself with a wide-open opportunity to create art and I fail to use it -- even if I make myself look really busy while failing to use it by waiting until then to do all the busywork things to the artspace -- my life as I conceive of it is basically a lie.

And no, I don't think that's too harsh.

From The Nation, an excellent piece on computerized voting: How They Could Steal The Election This Time

So this one was a dirt-cheap featureful ceramic-cooktop range that the guy had bought untested from a relative of his and, lacking the pigtail, had never hooked up, just stuffing it under a tarp; he put it up for sale when he decided to convert to gas instead. I bought it contingent upon it working correctly when tested, with the understanding that I'd clean off all the grease and stuff myself in exchange for the low price. Well, it mostly worked. The right front burner didn't turn on at all, which by itself might not have been a stopper for me, but also the two left burners never quite shut off. The guy agreed to give me a day to consult with a trusted appliance repair person, who told me it sounds like a short in the burner switches and it would run $175-200 to fix. So I loaded it back up in the van and called the guy, and he agreed to refund my money completely and did so promptly, but he didn't really want the stove back -- so now I have a free sort of broken fancy stove in the van, and I'm pondering how I can leverage that, ideally to get myself closer to having a range that (1) is not brown (2) with one side of the hull peeling away (3) and a Hot Surface light that never turns off.