Personal Pronoun

Laughing….again. I hear it free and easy running down each and every tick of the reason I am.

Clacking, clicking, clucking?  How, what can compare? Can it be described, trilling, rolling, filling, flirting, winking — shy, bold turning the corners of eyes and creasing old foreheads….. from across the room - a beacon - see me? yes, i do see you

I could listen to it all day.. every day… its free - it turns over - rolling across itself

its you - all you - in every way - and i love it.

hahahahahahah….

I watched the last episode of Californication Season One last night and it was a dog.  A barking, tail wagging, peeing on the floor lassie that threatens to put the nail in the coffin on this series for me.  The last few episodes were weak, but the last one in particular was a stinker.  From a series that opened with a blow job from a nun dream sequence, I expected more.

Is hollywood ever capable of producing a show without a happy set piece ending?   WTF are they going to do with season two after that ending?  Anyone else want to see Hank on a five day coke bender and Becca hitting the road with the guitar teacher?  How about a nasty running affair between Hank and Karen (no surprise) or Marci and Bill (mildly surprising) or Dani and Mia (outstanding).

I mean hell, the charm of Hank was that he was a walking disaster.  Unfortunately, hollywood does not like real rouges and usually converts all “high in character, low on morals” roles into safely decent minor ruffians.  Ian McShane’s Al Swearengen of Deadwood being a prime example of the principle.  Hank’s character, granted, was never all that despicable by modern relative standards, but he had a gratifying lack of artifice.  The charm of the show was that it was just so damn irreverant, but, in the end, it really is profoundly (and dully) respectful of the basic institutions of true love and your basic 2+1 family - well so long as that family is cut from the best west coast chintz.

Its Hollywood’s new left moral image you see, yes, they are foul mouthed, yes, they are filanderous sex fiends who smoke pot, screw hookers and do coke.  Throw in a good dose of teen pedo for good measure. Yes, you see ALL the dirty laundry, but at the end of the day they really are just your average apple pie, true love wins in the end kinda family are they not?  Instead of school plays  we have pre teen grunge girl rock band sessions (does she even really ever go to school?  School and Jobs in Californication are kinda like the restrooms in Star Trek, you know they GOTTA be there but no one ever seems to have to go).  How stupid was it to watch Hank (raised by sisters and screwed like hundreds of women right?)  fumble around about his daughter’s damn period anyway… pure romantic comedy bullshit.

The only “villian” amid this cast of independently wealthy libertines is …. yes, Bill.  By the end of the series the vilification of Bill has turned him into a cardboard archetype and removed all the once entertaining dynamic interplay between Karen, Bill, Hank and Becca.

Bill, of course, is the villiage idiot, because he, unlike every other intuitively decent character, has this ridiculous notion that you can “make” love and “create” a family, and he just well tries to hard to do that.  Kindness, rationality, even tempered nature, c’mon, you know you are thinking it, Bill is a PUSSY.  Every character in the show, of course, even his own daughter, take turns bashing the shit out of poor Bill.  Bill is to be universally despised and pitied for attempting to mechanically produce “family” when everyone knows, silly, that it can only be had one way…  the au natural from the groin and heart kinda way.  The cheek of that loser (come to think of it, didn’t Bill have a real “job” too, like one where he actually had to travel and stuff?  LOSER - jeez).

All is well that ends well of course, and we all know the inevitable outcome is that true love will prevail and the “real” family will get reunited and everything will be just peachy………  After all, Hank was mean, so you can forgive Karen for taking a hiatus with lurch.

The character play in Californication is just not all that interesting, but fortunately this is a role that seems custom made for D.D., who uses Hank to deliver some truly hilarious commentary.  The best part about the show is that Hank is like an erudite tourets victim, and the shit that comes out of his mouth randomly are the kind of things I would love to say but either lack the wit or balls to come up with.  The best writing in the show is broken Hank interacting with the drudgery of modern life, the job, the ex, the strange kids, the annoying people in the street…. but, unfortunately, in the show, Hank always wins, leaving him precious little material by the end of the season.

Hopefully season two will mark a return to the strength of the show, which is the unlikely charm of a complete reprobate, Hank Moody.

Miller at his purple best:

It’s strange. I had become so reconciled to this life without her, and yet if I thought about her only for a minute it was enough to pierce the bone and marrow of my contentment and shove me back again into the agonizing gutter of my wretched past.

For seven years I went about, day and night, with only one thing on my mind — her. Were there a Christian so faithful to his God as I was to her we would all be Jesus Christs today. Day and night I thought of her, even when I was deceiving her. And now sometimes, in the very midst of things, sometimes when I feel that I am absolutely free of it all, suddenly, in rounding a corner perhaps, there will bob up a little square, a few trees and a bench, a deserted spot where we stood and had it out, where we drove each other crazy with bitter, jealous scenes…

When I realize she is gone, perhaps gone forever, a great void opens up and I feel that I am falling, falling, falling into deep, black space. And this is worse than tears, deeper than regret or pain or sorrow; it is the abyss into which Satan was plunged. There is no climbing back, no ray of light, no sound of human voice or human touch of hand.

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, p. 177-8.

Thats about how I feel after the latest round of campaign shenanigans.  If you have seen 12 Monkeys the title makes sense, if not, watch it, its amusing as hell.  Whats worse is that the professional political class essentially views anyone without a zest for the inane horse racing of the election year as sheeple, worthy only of sound bites and idiotic targeted political ads.  It all winds up into a frenzy of misguided partisanship. Just like the blackly hilarious mistake in 12 monkeys, I wonder when D-Day gets here if we will all look around and say, holy crap, how did we miss that?

Anyway, there is very, very little either of these candidates says about the other which I believe. I am so completely disgusted I think I might just vote for Bob Barr this time around. The libertarians are always good for a protest vote, but Barr actually looks reasonable. Hell, the last time I looked the LP some LP candidate had turned himself blue eating colloidal silver to avoid the Y2K crisis. Not a compelling representative of the libertarian cause. Barr actually has some credentials and I am willing to overlook the cooky foreign policy stuff on the absolute certainty that they won’t actually win.

So, an anti-vote for McCain becomes, by default a vote for Obama, my buddies ruefully inform me. Yeah, okay, thats true and probably the only thing remotely palatable about the McCain platform at this point since I am resolved that Obama, while patriotic, will not support the military appropriately. I have some real concerns with his record and intentions there.

Mr. Obama’s supports seem unable or unwilling to acknowledge the extreme difficulty of preventing further attacks on this country and, disturbingly, seem to feel that simply sitting down with our geo-political adversaries in a constructive dialouge will obviate the need for further aggressive military engagement.  As Robert Kagan has pointed out,

“Only naked partisanship and a justifiable fear of tempting fate have prevented the Bush administration from getting or taking credit for what most would have regarded seven years ago as a near miracle.”  Kagan, Robert, The September 12th Paradigm, Foreign Affairs - September/October 2008.

Namely, the absence of another successful terrorist attack on this country.

Talking to Iran is good, and Obama is right to pursue engagement, but he and his party are naive in believing that there is any geo political method of controlling jihadists, or, that absent an aggressive foreign policy, the terrorists and their backers will simply go back to being productive citizens of their various countries, allowing us to gleefully disengage militarily.  I have been here for months, its no secret the bulk of the “insurgents” remaining are simply criminals and religious mercenaries, they have no “boss” who can reel them in when their “demands” are met.   Iran can no more control them than France, or England, or Saudi Arabia.

Iraq is and will be a victory because the Sunni and Shia and Kurds, despite their serious differences and internecine violence, roundly rejected AQI and the Jihadists, even as a tool to use against one another.  I distinctly remember the left’s paen of defeat in 2006 when we were heavily engaged, just as now, while refusing to report any good news from this front, the enlightened left insists that the “surge” or our redoubled efforts had anything at all to do with the progress.  Piffle.  Equally bizarre is the right’s sudden notion that we have worked out some sort of “strategy” to win that can now be easily applied in Afghanistan to bring that country back from the brink.  These absolutes are what got our strategy messed up to begin with.

Did the surge “win” the war?  Of course not…. Was it one of many critical elements?  Of course.  The black and white/all or nothing absolutes on each side are ridiculous.  Whats even more ridiculous is how these mantras are adopted by the fringe on each side and shouted out like absolute truths.  The stupidity abounds, from calling anyone who disagrees with you a koolaid consuming moron, to insisting that anyone who opposes this war is “unpatriotic”.

I have taken to simply smiling and saying, your right, I’m just too stupid to understand your brilliant point.  Where is my collodial silver…….

After mulling it over, a vote for Barr and the LP can’t be worse foreign policy wise than Obama winning, and domestically, the LP beats Obama and McCain hands down.  So, the question is whether I think McCain’s foreign policy position is important enough to vote for a candidate who I really don’t care for.   I will have to save that till a little later I guess, because its time to watch Dr. Who.

Meh…..

Alone in a crowd. Its all about perspective I guess. November 18th…. another birthday, less than sixty days, not long at all now, although recently I counted days in hours and minutes of conversations that stretched each day and week into virtual months with its own up and down, rise and fall, meaning, start and end…. the rolling hills of unspoiled emotional landscape, unknown forests of feelings and intense, wide awake attention to those innumerable details we find so very new when we discover we are not alone, and then,

just not…. crashing tearing, desperately …. as if pushing through the last stand of trees vainly hoping to preserve that adrenal rush of the new you find — a vast flat ocean stretching before you… Back is more of the same, just without the newness and urgency, and forward is nothing. You have exhausted yourself and arrived nowhere.

But, its artifice, an illusion fed by emotion, and inevitably, the next journey should be as hard as the last, until we tire, and simply stop and looking back will find that there were trails all through those wild woods, that the empty ocean is teaming with like minded travelers, and that we did nothing special — like the man who returns to the treehouse of his youth finds it a small, silly affair, hardly a treehouse at all compared to the soaring structure looming in his memory.

Cool weather here, clear mornings…. on a long run the hum of the generators fade out and you can see the view across the lake, lined with grimy palms. Along route are exploding and untended bushes, crowding up on the canal edges like excited people watching a parade….. The age. Dust that been trampled for millions of years, a powdery haze finely cloaking everything in a dun silky pall.

The Army ten miler is this weekend. Perhaps I will run faster. Sleep, breakfast, work, each slice of the day put in its proper place, each bite in the finite meal going down and measured sweet or bitter by the day. I think sometimes if there was no one to clear the dust as it settled down, layer after tan layer. Its soothing in a way, its not like dirt or sand, more like powder, the consistency of that fine wisp of makeup clinging to your lover’s dressing room mirror. Smudging out the ugly lines, smoothing all the hard edges, all the ups and downs, all the contour, all the relief…. in some slumberous mummification, a slow and easy erasure and fade.

Mail… there might be mail.

And, of course, there is breakfast.

I really don’t have too much to say, except that I am tired of looking at my last blog entry.  Not much has changed in my views on this election.  Will probably vote for McCain at this point.  I have not seen anything from Obama which would outweigh the negative elements of his tax rebate plan.

I did stumble upon www.factcheck.org which is a really nice site to check before you read any of the dreck coming out of the campaigns.  It is amazing to me that anyone listens to much of anything these guys say.  Do people really believe all this crap thats flying around?   The stridency quotient is pretty high on this one, which always makes me suspicious and the zeal of the Obama supporters is downright creepy.  Talk about a weird longing for a godlike leader…..  Republicans ‘r evul liars… mmm…. okay?  “The One” will save us!  creeeeepy.

I still don’t like the age of McCain, but the Obama tax rebate is just too much for me.  Coupled with my lack of confidence that he would actually hang tough against Iran and the lesser of two evils appears to be McCain.  It really does not help McCain’s cause that his supporters act like Obama is one step away from a Mullah and I am really tired of hearing all about how McCain “lies” about this or that.

It would be nice to have a third choice.  Perhaps a party that thought recapturing the salary of CEOs and Board members who oversaw the nationalization of Fannie and Freddie and AIG.  I mean, after all, the arguments that they are off limits as “free market” gets kind of thin when they essentially have to be funded by the government, which is to say, China, since its pretty obvious the real reason for the bailout is to make our foreign investors less nervous.  Thats a good thing, but as a personal matter I would like to see a couple of these CEOs disgorge some of that cash back to the treasury.

Scroll to the bottom for the tabulation. Here is a larger chart with the sources.

I wonder sometimes how we all wind up so strident about stupid shit sometimes. Ultimately the differences between Barrack and McCain will come down to what issues they support and what issues they don’t but I guess at this point its normal for everyone to be trotting out the normal political bullshit. I have made some pretty spectacular voting mistakes in the past based on voting on the basis of what I thought about a candidates personality, so I think this time, I will just catalog issues and determine which one matches best. So, I will need a table of the issues that matter to me. I guess this table will be organized like thus..

Issue Importance Candidate Position ( on a scale of -10 to +10)

Then I could get a “vote score” for the candidate in question. Presumably, the more issues and the more granular I got, assuming there was no single issue vote determinor, the more accurate my choice would be with my perceived self interest. This sounds better than the way I picked them in the past. So lemme get started. Hmmmmm….. well there is the first hitch, no easy web tabling application set up like this, hmmm….. A Facebook app that did this would be entertaining…. in lieu of that I think I will use an OpenOffice spreadsheet this time, and just copy and paste the table….

Okay, so here is the very modern burning question for the mp3 packrat. Do I slow my breakneck acquisition of music in order to maintain a strict artist/album/ folder structure? Or, do I through caution to the wind and simply dump them all (.mp3, wma, mp4, aac) in the mish mash of folders and let the software sort them? Added to the complication is that I compulsively try new player software which variously renames folders and songs, retags, and moves the data……. Now, add to that the fact that I have several copies of the entire collection in various states of being updated….. the temptation to simply let the player of the moment decide what goes where is overwhelming…. You could spend hours trying to keep all this crap straight. Hell, its worth paying .99 cents just to get a song with the tags right so you don’t have to mess with sorting it.

On another note, Deviant Behavior by Mike Sager…. I was reading it from an earlier post. Don’t bother, its not very good. Turns into a heavy handed rant against the war on drugs and the Reagan years. Somehow, after seeing real problems (Sadr City is a REAL problem IMHO) listening to some journalist whine about what a bunch of alleged Nazis the republicans are rings a little hollow. Not to mention the pointless gloss on being a junkie. If you have ever known a drunk or a junkie there is not much cool about it. Throw in the hooker with a heart of gold and a rich daddy and well, you get the point. At a couple of points in describing the main character, Seede, Sager almost verges on an interesting character study - A Journalist with a fear of talking to people - interesting —- but all that gets tromped on by the over the top cast of semi mystical drug heads.

Shoot me now. Just kill me. Alternatively, slide over to www.facebook.com and write something, sigh…. I guess I will have to watch a musical now……, or actually try Eastern Meditation, or perhaps give myself a warm fuzzy…….no… dammit no. I refuse to succumb.

….discovering you like something that you have loved to hate is always fun, I can feel the muse of H.L. Menken descending upon me……. First a Zune and now Facebook… before you know it I will be a commercial zombodroid, wandering the escalators somewhere in a dawn of the dead mall looking for the latest and greatest online fad of the moment.

sigh… or I will just post a bunch of silly pictures and admit that actually looking at something is conducive to forming an opinion about it…… now, if I can just convince myself that this principle applies to politics and relationships too…..