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March 03, 2003
Well now. That wasn't so hard. Awhile back I wrote of the turrible turrible things that were going to happen to me once I kicked the evil Paxil habit. After a few weeks of reducing dosages, and arcing them back up when the gee-willie-weeblies got too intense, I finally said the hell with it and stopped cold. That was over two weeks ago.
This morning while listening to the Cocteau Twins' Victorialand through my Sennheisers on the train, I realized what the Paxil had done to me, in addition to making me less of a PTSD lunatic. Because the 7:54 train is always nearly full, I grab any window seat I can get. This morning, my seat on the train faced backwards, so I was able to look out and see where we had been, unscrolling past the window. The train itself cuts through low wooded hills, following a wide, ice-banked stream for much of the early part of the journey. There is still much snow on the ground, and so the forests have that stark, high-contrast wilderness look, black wet bark against cold white. If I narrowed my eyes a little, and let my mind drift along with Liz Fraser's melodies, I could project myself from the train, just a bit. Suddenly, I would very nearly grasp what it would be like to be out there, near that tree, or over there, flat on my back in the snow of that field, looking up at the sky. Then the train would roll onward and the fleeting sensation would be gone. I kept this up until forest and stream gave way to town and then to city. Then I didn't want to be anywhere but where I was, warm and being moved along.
I used to do that sort of thing often, and when I felt the familiar deep rushing my chest--sort of like the first hints of MDMA coming on--I realized that Paxil had put the big pharmaceutical kabosh on my ability to be sent by music. To give over to melody, and drift along all tingly and finely-lightened. I don't think it's a coincidence that I sat down at my K2500 this weekend (see left) and recorded about thirty seconds or so of 80s Cheese Factory. That's what I'm calling the tune, anyway. It's been a very long time since I've recorded anything at all, and this weekend I managed to record something of my own that sent me, just a little, to the places I travelled this morning on the train.
The downside--as Pea will attest--is that more than a bit of the Ugly Angry Man has returned. My temper has shortened, it's a struggle to maintain equilibrium when something goes awry, and I don't always win. But now I can feel the surges coming on, and I'm aware of them in a way that I wasn't before I took the Paxil. That's what it's supposed to be for: to provide a break, a respite from whatever patterns of depression or obsession are overwhelming you. I'm still not particularly good at beating back the swells of impatience or anger that continue to crop up, but that's still a far cry from how it was before, when I'd just let them wash over me and would float along with them until I got deposited, battered and bedraggled, on some regretful shore where nobody was happy, ever. Now I can beat the shit out of an old dryer with a hammer, go upstairs, crank up my own version of Müller's Bavokirche organ, and blast away until I am satisfied and my ears are ringing.
In the future, there will be less demolishing of old appliances, and more loud music, I am thinking. Right now, there is fascination: from a small pill, perspective. They should list that under side effects, right after dizziness, tremor, and sweating.
March 04, 2003
Last week, a friend received a letter from the New York City Property Clerk's Office. The letter was actually delivered to her in-laws, who still have a business at the street address the envelope was mailed to. That address, it turns out, was the address that was on her old driver's license. That license was in the wallet that was in the backpack that she dropped as she turned and fled for her life when the South Tower of the World Trade Center began falling in her general direction on September 11, 2001.
She went to the Property Clerk's Office this morning, and picked up not her backpack, but just an envelope containing her license and a couple of other items from her wallet. The officer there told her that these items had come from the Fresh Kills landfill on Long Island, which is where everything went during the cleanup. They sent over a million tons of concrete, steel, glass and miscellaneous pieces of skyscraper there, by truck and by barge. And out of all that, they found her driver's license.
She told me that there was someone else at the Clerk's Office this morning, a man whose sister was on the 94th floor of the North Tower. He saw the plane go in, and knew immediately that she was dead. He'd been to the Clerk's Office before: first for a credit card, then for a driver's license. Early last year, he attended his sister's funeral, and ten days later he got a phone call telling him that they had found her remains. He told my friend that he just wished the calls would stop. Each recovered fragment of his sister's life must be like a hot wire dragged across a scab. I can't even begin to imagine what that's like.
The property officer at the desk told my friend that she'd been working on the recovery process from "day one." Some weeks, it's nothing but survivors. Then, for days on end, only family members. When my friend asked about her backpack and the other items in it--the wallet, some jewelry, some cash, and a notebook containing poems that were eventually published as a book at the end of 2002--the officer told her to send a letter to the Clerk's Office with a description of the bag and its contents. Apparently, they've been able to return some items based on description alone. That means that, somewhere, there's a storeroom, perhaps with row after row of wire shelves, and every so often, someone who works there will read a letter and think: a blue bag with a silver buckle? I remember that one...I walked right by it last week...it's over on the West wall, somewhere. The officer said they've got another two years' worth of stuff to go through.
One million tons of rubble, from the sixteen-acre Ground Zero site, plus another two or three hundred acres surrounding it that was littered with shoes, purses, and backpacks. A team of workers at a landfill, patiently sifting...finding credit cards...driver's licenses...watches...wedding bands.
Every so often, it hits me anew. Just this morning I walked past Ground Zero, and thought how small it looks. The massive basement-hole is slowly filling up with the structure of the new downtown transportation hub. I saw how they've repaired a lot of the jagged, broken top edges of the bathtub, the massive concrete retaining wall that was the first structure built on the site in the Sixties, and now is all that remains of the 110-story towers and the other buildings in the complex. And I deliberately reminded myself of the numbers: two thousand eight hundred, give or take. I played the images of the fallen and the falling in my mind, so that I would not just walk on by, hurrying to start my day without a thought for the ghosts of the air that linger there.
And now, I am reminded again by circumstance, with no effort on my part, of all that happened on that day. And I thank God that I'm alive, and that Pea is alive and well with me, and that my cat is fat and stupid, and that I've got a little house with a basement that floods when it rains, and that I am so rich and content that I can get angry about installing a dishwasher or bouncing a check. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
March 05, 2003
No particular inspiration today. Last night when I got home, though, I was feeling a little...transcendent. Another neurological spark that Paxil snuffed out with its wet chemical blanket.
Not that I actually did anything with my "transcendence," mind you. I managed to express a dinner preference: meat...loaf. That sort of knocked me off my pillar. Nothing like the prospect of a big lump of ground-up creature with some ketchup and green peas to remind you that you are also a creature, albeit with fewer condiments and side dishes.
March 06, 2003
 To understand evil, start with DNA. Deoxyribonucleic acid. It's the building block of all life on this particular planet. Everything that you are physically, and a good deal of who you are as a personality, is determined by this molecule. DNA makes up genes, which make up chromosomes, and humans have 23 of those. DNA is a polymer, and it's made up of a repeating pattern of just four compounds, called nucleotides: Adenine, Guanine, Thymine, and Cytosine. Each nucelotide is in turn made up of varying arrangements of just three sorts of atoms: Carbon, Nitrogen and Oxygen. That's it. A particular arrangement of those four nucleotides contains every bit of information needed to make a bacterium, a clam, a tree, a gorilla, or a human being. Four compounds, arranged just so, mean that you got your father's nose and your mother's hips. Four compounds, arranged just so, determine the risk of disease, the propensity for certain behaviors, and the length of life. Four compounds, contained in genetic material exchanged between two people and then combined into a new arrangement, create a child--new life.
But that life wouldn't happen without another nifty property of this particular polymer: it can replicate itself. Hundreds of billions of times, with near perfect accuracy. It does this with the help of two other chemical compounds, called enzymes: a helicase, and two DNA polymerases. In today's world of cloned sheep, alien-human hybrids with bad teeth, and bio-tech company logos, the twisted-ladder "double helix" shape of the DNA molecule is familiar to us all. In actuality, the "twisted-ladder" is spiralled and coiled up in on itself, so picture the double-helix curled up into a kind of compact little wad, nestled within protective proteins called histones. In the middle of each rung of the curled-up ladder is a hydrogen bond, a weak electrical attraction that holds the molecules of the two sides together.
The weakness of that attraction is key: when DNA replicates, a helicase "unzips" the double helix, splitting it in two by breaking the hydrogen bond in the middle of each "rung" of the wadded-up twisted ladder. As this occurs, a DNA polymerase binds to one of the newly-unzipped half-strands and uses it as a template for re-creating the now-missing half of the double helix. Another DNA polymerase binds itself to the other half-strand and, with the help of yet another enzyme called DNA ligase, works to synthesize the missing half of the double helix and then stiches them together. When this molecular construction project is complete, there are two exact duplicates of the original DNA molecule, each composed of one new half-strand and one old half-strand.
It gets better. The average human chromosome contains 150 million nucleotide pairs, a nucleotide pair being, roughly, one "rung" of the ladder. If all of the unzipping and synthesizing and restitching had to start at one end of the double helix and proceed to the other, each replication would take a month. But it only takes an hour. Why? Because the unzipping and synthesizing and restitching can take place at many different places along the strand simultaneously. Different sections are taken apart, and come back together, all at the same time: molecules swimming around, atoms swapping electrons and realigning themselves, chaos! one would think. But no. The error rate is around ten to the negative tenth per base pair for each round of replication. That means that, each time a single nucleotide pair is replicated, it has around a one in 100 billion chance of replicating incorrectly. For reference, that's 4,000 times more unlikely than being killed by having an airplane fall on you.
The latest estimate is that this replication process has been going on here for somewhere around 3.85 billion years.
And that, my friends, is an amazing thing. For the moment, forget about seeking an explanation for this molecular dance. Don't be tempted to ascribe it to the powers of God or natural selection. Just contemplate the mere fact of it. The staggering elegance of 150 million nucleotides engaging in this near perfect pattern, the busy activity of the enzymes as they shuttle along the coiled double helix strands, working with machine-like precision as they dissassemble and reassemble infinitesimal structures at a rate of 50 base pairs a second. Call it elegant. Or even beautiful. But one thing that this process most certainly illustrates is creative order.
This process is at the fundamental base of all the created beauty you might care to appreciate. Bach's Trio Sonatas? DNA made them possible. The rose windows of the cathedral at Chartre? DNA girds every sparkling piece of glass. The elegant lines of well-written computer code? Impossible without the master molecular code of DNA. It drives every attempt to order the raw stuff of our world: sharpening a flint to stab at the heart of a bison; digging a ditch to bring water to our first crops; pressing mud and straw into brick molds baking in the noonday sun to form the walls of our towns; tearing iron ore from the depths of the earth and refining it into strong, lightweight beams that loft our gleaming towers toward the sky; transforming common silicon into circuitry pathways one one-thousandth the width of a human hair, to power our computers...all of this symmetry and beauty that we humans have wrought from the very stuff of the cosmos depends upon the sucessful and ordered completion of the molecular dance outlined above.
Entropy and the second law of thermodynamics aside, the tendency of the "stuff" on this planet and in the universe at large for the past twelve billion years or so has been an attempt to order itself, to achieve creative synthesis. Whenever we, as manipulators of the matter around us, creatively reshape the world, whenever we create that which is aesthetically pleasing because it suggests refinement and order to our senses, whenever we create new life, we are echoing that basic, fundamental tendency. When a flautist causes her breath to vibrate a column of air within a tube of refined metal as she plays the aria from Bach's Cantata number 208, she is participating in the very essence of creation. Likewise, when Bach dipped his quill made from the feather of a goose into an ink prepared from gum arabic, copperas, gall apples, and water, and then set the symbolic representations of each notes pitch and duration down upon parchment made from animal skin, he participated in that essence. When I hear those black blots transformed from static symbols into moving air, decoded from pits in a thin layer of aluminum by a tiny point of coherent laser light, I, too, am participating.
We are, each of us, surrounded by the essence of creation, which is creation, the continual ordering and reordering of the stuff of matter by human beings, who are in themselves made up of the most finely-ordered matter. Every building we raise, every object we make, every idea we refine and put down upon paper or preserve within the binary patterns of magnetic media...all of this is participation in creative order. Again: don't seek the soul, here, not just yet; instead, appreciate the mere fact of the human tendency to create, to order the world around us. Even our most destructive atomic endeavors spring from a desire to be able to organize the stuff of matter at its most elementary level. We are creatures who exist by virture of order on a monumental yet molecular scale, and this can be expressed by our behavioral tendencies. The more we resemble that cause of our very being, the more we approach a kind of harmony with our small world and with the cosmos at large.
Likewise, the less we resemble that cause, the more we approach disharmony. The more deliberately we seek destruction, the disordering and the unmaking of things, the ending of lives and the snuffing out of potential unfoldings, the farther away we are from the essence of creation. We then turn ourselves towards an unfathomable absence of being. We face the Ancient Kind, in an unknowable time before time, a place of no place, where there is no creation and no existence.
The farther away we are from the essential nature of creation, the closer we are to evil.
[First in a series.]
March 07, 2003
Taking a break today. Must paint molding, nail to wall, hop up and down. That sort of thing.
Hoo-boy! That sure quieted things down.
I suppose I should warn people before busting out the Big Big Thinking. Not that it's all my Big Thinking, mind you; a lot of it is courtesy of my good dead friend Plotinus.
By way of explanation: it seems to me that, despite certain right-thinking folks being all a-tizzied over Bush's flagrant use of the word "evil," and despite the attempt by certain sign-carrying right-thinking folks to turn the tables on Herr Bush by calling him evil--sort of an I'm-rubber-you're-glue thing--what's not happening is a serious consideration of what evil might be. Thus, you have people who can seriously compare Dubya to Hitler and think that it's a moral stance worthy of consideration.
At a superficial level, evil is a provocative word. It's so packed full of implication that its use in earnest provokes a reaction from the listener. Either you think that there might be something to this "evil" business, and you recognize that the speaker has taken some sort of moral stance, or you think that "evil" is for simple people who believe in a great white-bearded man in the sky and have not been paying enough attention to the development of Continental philosophy over the course of the past century and a half. For many of those who have not deliberately adopted the uber-sophistication of moral relativism--or absorbed it via osmosis while attending college--evil is somewhat like pornography: they can't quite describe it, but they know it when they see it.
I, for one, have difficulty taking anyone who claims that the Bush administration is composed of "evil" people seriously. I tend to suspect that people who point to the Bush-Cheney Axis of Oil as evidence for said evil lack a certain moral seriousness, and are unable to distinguish between greed or unethical fiscal behavior and true evil. In short, I find that such people need a good smack in the head and, when we start digging up mass graves in Iraq, they should be sent there in hip waders and rubber gloves with a shovel to help out.
That being said, I also believe that one of the reasons such muddle-headed thinking about evil is even possible is because of the insular nature of our comfortable, wealthy society. For certain people, this nature has not led to the development of the higher, more nuanced ethical standard that they seem to believe they hold: instead, it has lowered the bar of evil. Evil used to mean starting a war that killed 60 million people and spending a large portion of that war deliberately attempting to turn an entire ethnicity into soot. These days, "evil" means practicing realpolitik, indulging in the same economic perquisites as the rest of the ruling class, and being insufficiently attentive to the executions of 140 death row inmates while you're a state governor. Are these issues to be ignored? No. Do they reflect poorly upon a person's character? Most assuredly. Do they indicate that a person is evil? Absolutely not.
I've been thinking about this issue for a long time, starting long before Bush ever took the oath of office. I believe that the assignation of evil to the realm of the the religiously daft and the unsophisticated is itself daft and unsophisticated. It does not serve our culture well. It certainly hasn't served European culture well at all: the birthplaces of mechanized warfare and industrialized execution are now strongholds of a shameful amorality that will not recognize the existence of evil and will countenance no meaningful effort to stop it.
So: over the next few weeks, I will be producing material that attempts to arrive at some kind of consideration of evil: what it is, how it works, how to recognize it, what to do about it...most of all, how to treat evil, as a moral concept, with the seriousness that it deserves.
There. Now I'm going to go have some wine that I am mildy ashamed I bought.
[Although...I suppose calling an old dishwasher "evil" sort of dumps a pile of wet socks on the whole "seriousness" thing...ah, fuggit. Waiter! More shameful vino! --IW]
March 10, 2003
In addition to my ability imaginatively project myself into forests and snow fields, I'm trying to develop a similar, temporal ability. Not to project myself into the future--we all do that, every second of every hour of every day. No, I'm trying to reach back into the past. My past, specifically.
Music--like scent--is a powerful conjurer of memory. Some of the music that I listen to I've been listening to for a long time, and some of it dates from my freaky early twenties, when I was insane. Well, not insane insane, that's far too dramatic, but I was a little, shall we say, "touched" in a way not entirely in keeping with the long-standing tradition of youthful flakiness. I was a maniacal melancholic. There were more than a few instances of the deepe blacke depression, the sort of fathomless mood that resulted in bizarre behavior. Sitting naked wrapped in a thin blanket during parties, that sort of thing. For I was an artiste! Do not attempt to understand my madness, it is my muse! I would laugh at your conventionality, but I am too wrapped with despair...it goes well with this shirt, don't you think? That sort of thing.
In addition to the oh-what-an-old-soul-I've-got routine, I also enjoyed a wunnerful magickal Head. I'm not quite sure, now, what that entailed exactly, because my sense of it has has faded as I've gotten older. But the magickal Head had something to do with possibility...a boundless sense of what-may-be that, I have recently noticed, has faded as I enter my third decade. Although I've recently done a bunch of Very New Things (moving in with Peapartner, buying a house, et cetera), I feel very much in a rut. All of my focus has been inward...and I'm starting to run out of things to look at.
Then again, it could just be the last vestiges of my Wintermind, which I never seem to notice until shortly before Spring. The landscape of my home has been white, with bursts of muddy brown and gravelly black, since late December, and the tendency has been to stay indoors and keep quiet. Nevertheless, when snippets of the twenty-something Head flash through the thirty-something Head, I've taken to grabbing them, holding them up for close examination like a piece of multicolored gauze fluttering by in the wind. What is the Head doing, back there in time? What is it feeling? What makes that Head so different from this Head? And, most importantly: what do I like about that Head?
I've long since come to the conclusion that one of the reasons that the Amazing Converting Christ! experience works so well for some people is because they cannot escape the clawing tendrils of their past. Like Augustine, obsessed by the stolen pears of his youth, they are unable to escape the terrible weight of conscience, not just for sins committed now, but for all sins they may have ever committed. They are unable to cut their past selves some slack. So, when the man with the bulletproof hair, the shiny suit and the Big Big Book tells them with authority that Christ heals all wounds...well, for some folks that's a pretty good offer. And for some folks, it even works. For me, the experience is not so much one of sin and guilt as it is...well, embarrassment, for want of a better word. It took me a long time to tell myself: well, look, you were young, and foolish, and doing too many drugs, and so the fact that you couldn't be bothered to put clothes on for the party--or got far too drunk at those weddings...or shaved your head when you were out of your head on those nifty pills--doesn't really have much to do with who you are now. This is because, for a long time, the recollections of other people were to be feared: what construct of my past self do they carry with them? What must they think of me? Now, I don't care so much about that.
Unfortunately, one of the ways I've managed to not care so much about that is by greatly reducing the number of people around me. After all, this "embarrassment" is a social function, by and large, so the equation works: reducing social contact equals a reduction in the chances for observable regrettable antics. But that equation ignores some important variables. It's simple math when something a bit more sophisticated and nonlinear is called for.
So now, when the gauzy snippets of my past float by, I try not to let them drift away, but take hold of them and stare into them, as though they were scrying mirrors. I forgive myself for whatever foolishness they depict, and try to inhabit the Head of the past, peering around from within the emerging personality. Sometimes, if I'm in the right mental place in the present, I can feel a ghostly touch of my past self: the burgeoning thought, the mania, the unresolved issues. But beneath that all are some of the things I've left behind: wonder, openness, magic.
And sometimes...if I'm very, very, careful...if I'm honest...I can bring small caresses of those things, the good things, back to the now with me.
Jimmy cracked "Peace!" and I don't care
Jimmy cracked "Peace!" and I don't care
Jimmy cracked "Peace!" and I don't caaaaarrrrrre
He's not the President!
This constitutes today's political commentary. We now return you to your regularly scheduled Headage.
March 11, 2003
Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote that, "Hell is other people." When viewed through his lens of mauvaise foi--bad faith--I gain some small insight into issues of my past, which I wrote about yesterday. I feared the all-seeing eyes of other people, and their images of me held in memory became a kind of voodoo-doll collection that, for some time, held a certain power over me. Their recollection and judgement, even if never shared with me or anyone else, was a source of anxiety. This condemnation by "the other" is part of Sartre's hell.
One way in which we escape that hell is through the mechanisms of bad faith. Any time you hear someone explain away past a transgression by saying, "I was a different person then," you are hearing bad faith. These are lies we tell ourselves, to lessen our neurotic anxiety by pretending that we are not utterly, dreadfully free and thus totally responsible for ourselves and our actions. I was never a "different person." I am the same person now as I was then, with the addition of experience, the accumulation of memory, and a smattering of new knowledge. So, when I forgive my past self for certain behaviors, and tell myself that they don't "have much to do with who you are now," I must be careful that this absolution does not constitute a lifting of responsibility. By that I mean, the fact that I know better today doesn't mean that I wasn't a fool then, and doesn't make me into something more than a fool now.
It is this sort of freedom and responsibility that is denied by the elite worshippers of language, and all those who would have us believe that the only knowledge we can claim to grasp is that which is allowed us by the power-classes. Such theoreticians, of course, exist outside of this power structure: only they can see clearly enough to tell us the truth. Their truth is truth, not some manufactured terminology designed to maintain their hold on power, and intended to keep us ignorant enough to allow them to do so.
This theoretical structure has no place for the individual mind. It thinks in terms of collectives, groups, and social structures...unwieldy, blocky constructs that lurch about the human environment like bulls with rings through their noses, led about by the will of the empowered.
It is more than a little ironic that Sartre was a Frenchman. Over the weekend, I kept hearing a "Voices In The News" snippet on NPR's Weekend Edition. The audio montage was bookended by President George Bush and French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin. The President's Voice said:
If the Iraqi regime were disarming, we would know it, because we would see it. Iraq's weapons would be presented to inspectors, and the world would witness their destruction. Instead, with the world demanding disarmament, and more than 200,000 troops positioned near his country, Saddam Hussein's response is to produce a few weapons for show, while he hides the rest and builds even more.
The Voice of the French Foreign Minister's translator said:
There may be some who believe that these problems can be resolved by force, thereby creating a new order. But this is not what France believes. On the contrary, we believe that the use of force can arouse resentment and hatred, fuel a clash of identities, and of cultures, something that our generation has a prime responsibility to avoid.
Driving in the car early Sunday morning, these words roused me from my too-sleepy-to-be-driving torpor. I thought about what was wrapped up in that phlegm-like bolus of theoretical spew, uttered by a man supposedly serious about his place on the world stage, a man who is supposed to represent the sovereign nation of France.
To begin with, "resentment and hatred" are to be avoided at all costs. This is a perfect expression of fear of the Sartrean hell: we simply cannot have other people thinking ill of us. It is our responsibility to ensure that no one holds a malformed voodoo-doll simulacrum of us in their minds, the mere thought of which makes us get the Big Big Angst. This is followed up, in the same sentence, by the elevation of academic theoretical abstraction to the level of national foreign policy: a clash of "identities" is to be avoided at all costs. Not "bloodshed," or "violence," or even "killing little children with expensive precision-guided munitions." No, what we must avoid at all costs is causing a culture to question the ephemeral beliefs which make it a culture. For--all cultures being equal, of course--it is most forbidden to disturb the precious growth of such a thing...as though, in this day and age, cultures bloom in splendid isolation, each safe within the bounds of its own sociological petri dish.
Mr. de Villepin's language is that of a college sophomore seeking a pat on the head from his professor. It is not the language of someone who is seriously engaged with the problems of the real world, or concerned with the conditions of individual lives. What is of supreme importance to him is not the human being, but the idea; not the actual resolution of real problems, but the maintenance of theoretical structures; not the freedom of the individual, but the preservation of an abstract collective identity. I'm fairly certain that Mr. de Villepin is not especially concerned with the consequences to American identity and culture should the battle begin, and so I can safely assume that it is the Islamic culture--which has been doing so well lately--that requires such delicate care.
Set against the background of the theoretician/politician class that is ever-more-firmly enthroned in Brussels, such academic rhetoric is entirely unsurprising. But what underlies it are the same values that underlie true totalitarianism and true oppression: ideology over individuality, theory over fact, and anxiety-soothing mauvaise foi over the dread responsibility of freedom.
March 12, 2003
Well, I'm just a wrung out washcloth today, after it's been hung up on the bar and it's gotten all dry and stiff and whatnot, so when you take it down it keeps the shape of the bar and it's all gross. Yeah, that's me today.
So: read something really innaresting (and longish), if'n you haven't already: Lee Harris on "Our World-Historical Gamble." I think the TCS site is being overwhelmed with hits on this document, so be patient with the loading; it's worth it.
Just how much like a grungy dried-out washcloth am I today? This much: I visited a bunch of sites and saw March 12, 2003 on all the top entries. The news looked familiar. I visited four sites in quick succession: duh! I thought. Blogger must be screwed up again. Some kind of archive problem, no doubt.
But no.
Today is March 12. Has been, all day. But through some quirk of ephemeral neurochemistry, reading that date gave me the immediate sense that March 12 was months ago. That this was some other month entirely.
When I realized the trick my brain had played upon me--bad, naughty neurons!--I was pleased to experience a moment of vertigo as I wheeled back through time to the present, from whatever imaginary future I thought I inhabited.
Wheeee! Who needs drugs? Look, ma! No sense of temporal location!
March 13, 2003
Q: Please state your name for the record.
A: The name I'm using now is John Smith.
Q: You have other names?
A: Of course. I've been around for awhile.
Q: I see. John Smith will do for now. What is your current address?
A: Well, currently I seem to be residing at the Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, but I keep my stuff at 31-92 Steinway Street, apartment 4-M, in Long Island City, New York.
Q: And your occupation?
A: I am an angel of the Lord.
Q: I see. And what is it, exactly, that an angel of the Lord does?
A: We do what we're told, generally.
Q: We?
A: Yes, there are six of us. One each for Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, North America, and Australia. There used to be fewer, but now that you're everywhere, we had to share the workload a bit.
Q: When you say "you're everywhere," to whom are you referring?
A: You all. Humans.
Q: I see.
A: There used to be just three of us, in the Mediterranean, the Near East, and Africa, but now...well, it's a big job.
Q: And what, exactly, does that job entail?
A: Lately? A lot of death. Not so much with the guarding of empty tombs and the revelations to bearded prophets anymore. The plan involves lots of death.
Q: You've mentioned this "plan" before. Can you elaborate?
A: Not really, no. I'm just an angel.
Q: But you have claimed that this "plan," which comes from God, accounts for your actions on the night of February 22 of this year?
A: Sure. And on every night of every year for the past twelve thousand or so. By the way--your son is going to be diagnosed with bone cancer next week. Terribly sorry about that.
Q: What?
A: Your son. That's why he's been complaining about his legs hurting. I know he's only eight, but that's the way it goes, really.
--From God On Trial: The Peculiar Case of John Smith of Queens
March 14, 2003
 Hey, man--I'm going to Woodstock!
You know that "expensive, delicate" toy I've been playing with that's "a bitch to maintain, but peerless?" (see left). Well, it done busted. Again. So now I have to haul its expensive, peerless, broke-down carcass up to my tech-guy in Woodstock. Road trip!
I don't have groovy wireless capability, though...bummer, man. So like, light posting today, if you can dig that.
Whoa...have you ever looked at your website? I mean like, really looked at it?
March 15, 2003
And in the freaky spirit of this aimless Saturday, for those Heads who pay attention even on the weekends, which is just too hep, please enjoy:
Blunderbuss Halagalo And The Freaks
"Hey man, you listen to me," Blunderbuss called out from his precarious perch on the piano stool. "I ain't got no truck no how with all of your mystic voodoo bullshit. So shove off." He bobbled his thick and burly eyebrows at the mud-painted and shell-rattling Doctor Voodoo. The Doctor fell into abrupt silence, his bright white eyes staring disbelievingly from the black-painted sockets of his skull-faced makeup. The others in the cafe fell momentarily silent. "And furthermore man, I can tell you that you've got that reek of politically correct liberal horeshit nonsense around you like a cloud. Doctor." The last was added witheringly, and Blunderbuss' round face contorted into an expression of pure contempt. Doctor Voodoo's jaw dropped and his shoulders slumped. His hand fell uselessly to his side, and the bone rattle rattled feebly. He turned and slinked off, shells and beads clacking, while Blunderbuss ordered another espresso and dumped a shot of scotch into it from a bronze hip flask. He had stolen the flask from a tomb in Crete. It was empty now, so he threw it after Doctor Voodoo. It cracked on the back of his head and knocked him to the floor unconscious and bleeding. "Yeh, where's your mojo now?" Blunderbuss mocked. He cackled, and the cafe broke up, everybody laughing at the unfortunate Doctor. Blunderbuss snapped his fingers with pleasure at the whole scene. "Too hep," he bubbled delightedly.
"Blunder, Blunder man," called Stiffy Jones. "You're too outta sight. Knocked that Voodoo freak right on his head." Stiffy always sucked up to Blunderbuss because Stiffy was a bad poet with no future and a very limited wardrobe.
"With a Cretan flask!" Blunderbuss added with gusto. He patted his broad belly with satisfaction. "Can't think of a more proper use for such a thing. Hep! Hep!" he began to chant, rocking back and forth. "Hep man doctor voodoo clocked in the nappy head with ancient artifact of Western culture," he intoned, and the others in the cafe leaned close. Each small round table held a flickering candle in a colored glass globe, casting shifting patterns of fluid shadows and tinted light onto the close brick walls. "Hep man doctor voodoo laid out in tribal splendor on cafe floor," Blunderbuss closed his eyes as he rocked. "Hep man doctor voodoo needing a good civilized enema, hep man doctor voodoo, hep man doctor, hep man... hep... hep..." he trailed off, and the crowd in the cafe smattered with applause.
"Man, ya'll got no taste," Blunderbuss said modestly, his broad face split by a grin. At that point, his brain squirted a good dose of tryptamines into his neural pathways, and Blunderbuss spent some time dealing with the molten elves that began crawling out of the walls. When he came to, the cafe was dark and closed and he was alone, prone on the floor. The good Doctor Voodoo was nowhere to be found. "Drag, man" he muttered. He let himself out of the cafe and walked home.
When he got there and stumbled through the front door, Jesus was sitting in the living room watching Nightline and eating a bowl of Fritos with Catalina dressing. Ted Koppel was talking about the sudden rise in guava prices. "Christ, man, you gotta chill with the television," Blunderbuss advised from the front hallway.
"Yeah, well,"Jesus said. "Since Dad died I don't get all that omnipotent gossip of His, so I gotta use the TV."
"Well, just remember it's bad for your eyes," Blunderbuss cautioned, heading for the kitchen for a peanut-butter and pickle sandwich.
"You got it," Jesus said. His eyes were scratched and puffy-red, and one of them seeped a straw-colored fluid into his long, loosely curled beard.
Shiva had been in the kitchen; he could tell because the place was absolutely wrecked. Now that he had lost his job as Destroyer of Worlds, Shiva settled for wrecking Blunderbuss' house. "Goddamn wog god," Blunderbuss muttered, broken glass crunching under his feet as he surveyed the damage. He would have to call that Roman guy up the street and have him whip up a new kitchen. In the meantime-- snacking! Blunderbuss opened the refrigerator to see if the peanut butter and pickle jars had survived. He yelped when most of a goat corpse slid out onto the floor, squirting a small stream of purplish blood. "Dammit!" he yelled, and stomped back into the living room. "Did you have those prophet-of-Baal freaks over while I was out?" he demanded of Jesus, who hunched his shoulders with embarrassment.
"Uh, yeah," he admitted. "It was just one goat, though... I'm sorry. I hope it's not too bad."
"I don't mind the fucking goat, man," Blunderbuss railed, "but every time they come over they use my knives and dull them up hacking through bone and stuff! At least those Aztec putzes use their own damn knives."
"I'm sorry," Jesus said again, cringing into the Barcalounger. On the television, Bob Dole was demonstrating the proper use of a condom.
"Dole knows to press the air out of the tip before rolling it onto the shaft of the penis," he intoned lifelessly into the camera. Jesus' eyes were black and clotted pools, dripping ichor onto his spotless white robe.
"Hey man, don't you have a fucking white horse to ride somewhere? Hosts to lead, Apocalypses to foment?" Blunderbuss said sarcastically, and went back into the kitchen. He angrily kicked the slaughtered goat out of the way and peered into the refrigerator. The only thing in it was half a case of econo-size blocks of Velveeta. "Just like cheeseloaf only without the bubbles," Blunderbuss was fond of saying. He shrugged and wolfed down half a block, crouching before the refrigerator so that his belly hung over his belt like a verge of thick cream just as it crests the edge of the pitcher. "Ah," he said, and farted.
The phone rang. Blunderbuss ponderously got to his feet, his knees cracking unpleasantly, and waddled across the kitchen to answer it. "Yellow?" he said.
"Blunderbuss man, you gotta come, man!" It was Stiffy Jones. "Man, you won't believe it!"
"That is evident," Blunderbuss replied dryly. "I don't believe anything." There was a mouse scuttling among the shattered bottles and spilled milk, eggnog, and Jell-O. He squashed it flat with his Doc Martens.
"No man, I mean you really won't believe this!" Stiffy pressed. "I've got Vishnu in my bathroom, man!" Blunderbuss rolled his eyes.
"Oooo, ahhhh!" he said in mock wonderment. "A multi-armed blue deity on your crapper. Ooo, ahhh, I think I'm dying from excitement." There was silence on the line. "Oooo," Blunderbuss droned.
"Well man," Stiffy managed at last, trying to stiffen his voice with some sort of indignation. "I suppose like you've got a god at your house every day." Blunderbuss grinned, thinking of Jesus watching TV in his living room.
"You suppose like right," he said harshly. "Now fuck off!" He slammed the phone down, and it immediately rang again. He snatched it back up "What!" He shrieked into it.
"Mr. Halagalo?" came a stern and official-sounding voice. "Mr. Blunderbuss Halagalo?"
"Maybe," Blunderbuss returned warily. "Who's asking?"
"Agent Johnson of the Gnarly Offenders Office of the Bureau of Reality Control, badge number seven-oh-two-three-nine," the voice recited crisply.
Oh dear, Blunderbuss thought. This might be problematic. "Look Agent... uh..."
"Johnson." clipped the voice.
"Johnson," Blunderbuss continued. His piggy eyes darted about the kitchen for possible escape routes. "This really isn't a good time--"
"This is to advise you that you are being charged with violations of the Perceptual Code including but not limited to Section one-two-eight-nine subsection D articles 1-b and 36-a:2," Agent Johnson barked. "And also with failure to register the pagan sacrifice you've got in the refrigerator behind you." There was a rapid series of thuds on the roof, and Blunderpass gasped, clutching the phone to his great, soft pillow of a chest. Window glass shattered upstairs.
"But I didn't make that sacrifice!" he cried out to the empty kitchen. He heard booted feet thudding down the stairs, and he dropped the phone, heading for the sliding glass door that led out into the backyard. It exploded into millions of tiny glass fragments, and a trio of black-uniformed men in body armor and facemasks burst though. "It was the prophets of Baal, not me!" Blunderbuss squealed and backpedaled furiously, but tripped over the goat and fell backwards, full length, onto the kitchen floor. He felt broken glass dig into his fat flesh. "Jesus!" he yelled. "Jesus, help me!"
"No way dude," came the voice. "Pauly Shore is having his skin peeled off on Saturday Night Live." The black-suited figures hefted Blunderbuss' considerable bulk to a standing position, and bending his tallow-soft arms behind him slapped on the cuffs.
"Hey man-- I've got rights!"
"No way-- what you've got is a problem," said one of the figures, and whipped off its mask.
"Allah!" Blunderbuss cried in fear, recognizing the features. "Not again!" Allah produced a blackjack and clipped Blunderbuss just below the ear with it, and he dropped like a sack of meal.
---
"Well, Halagala, you are really a piece of work." Blunderbuss opened his eyes. The owner of the voice was Doctor Voodoo, still wearing his flaking painted skull-face and with quills in his earlobes, but dressed in a midnight Nazi SS uniform. The death's head on his cap glared balefully at Blunderbuss, and the twin lightning bolts glimmered. Blunderbuss was strapped onto a cold, metal table, inclined at a thirty degree angle. He was naked, and by straining his eyes downward he could see that his body was thin and emaciated. There was something staining his right forearm-- it was a number. He rolled his eyes around, taking in the bright sterile whiteness of the tiled chamber, the steel and chrome of the overhead lights, the table of sharp, evilly glinting surgical steel instruments on a small rolling tray next to him. Shells clattered, and he looked over to see Doctor Voodoo crouching in his uniform and waving a rattle at him. "You no got cause to fear the Voodoo now," he canted, "because you are truly in a world of hurt."
"Look man, I'll put them all back where I found them," Blunderbuss sputtered nonsensically, beginning to panic. His head was strapped down with a wide, sweat-soaked leather strap. Behind him, he heard a door open. He rolled his eyes in fear like a cow in the final narrow passageway leading to the knives of the abattoir. Doctor Voodoo tossed his smart Nazi cap aside, shaking out his dreadlocked hair filled with bright feathers, beads and shells. He began crouching and dancing around at the foot of the table, his boots thumping on the floor as he waved his rattle and wiggled mystic fingers at Blunderbuss.
"The subject is a twenty-nine year old Jewish male from the Swabian region," a voice dictated from behind him. "Approximately one hundred twenty pounds, five foot six inches in height, slightly undernourished but otherwise healthy." A nurse, dressed in pure white with a protective cloth mask covering her mouth and nose, began rattling the instruments on the tray. At least, Blunderbuss thought she was a nurse-- when her face came into his field of view, he saw that it was completely featureless flesh, smooth and blank above the white mask like an egg.
"Get back!" he screeched. "I'm a member of the Valhalla Frequent Flyer Club, and I won't stand for this!"
"Oh, your travel perks no help you now, Halagala," Doctor Voodoo intoned, and rattled his beads and shells for emphasis.
"I demand that you get this freak out of here!" Blunderbuss shouted.
"We will begin with the removal of the scalp, and then we will gain access into the cranial cavity itself," continued the nameless voice behind him.
"Get back!" Blunderbuss continued. "I must get my medication!"
The first slice into the top of his head was cold, so shocking it wasn't even pain. That came after they began to peel the skin away from his skull. After that, he wasn't aware of much except the sting of blood in his eyes, and the whirring, all-encompassing sound of the bone saw as it burred into his skull with a smell like burning hair.
It took hours. He finally blacked out when the nameless and faceless doctor removed just one more little-fingertip sized chunk of his brain. "Subject expires after six cubic centimeters of tissue are removed," was the last thing he heard. "Interesting."
 Today I've got that too-much-wine-and-martini rubber-liver-on-the-head sort of feeling coupled with an overindulgence-in-weapons-of-chocolate-destruction kind of slooooow grind going on in the noggin, all wrapped up in the vertiginous timelessness of waiting for that SPECIAL BULLETIN with Dubya sitting at his desk looking Very Concerned and saying Well, I've given the order, and as of this moment the brave men and women of our armed forces have commenced combat operations in Iraq and I really should just start painting the doors downstairs so's I can have at least one part of the house that's nearly-almost-completely finished and there's taxes to do as well which I'm behind on and the place is a mess with boxes everywhere and I've gotten waaaay too fat this winter and I'm reading the same blogs over and over and over again and I really need to branch out and I think. That's. It.
March 16, 2003
 that's right there will be no hopping up and yelling or shouting or flipping upside down and waving arms and legs in the air no twitching shaking bawling or breaking of unimportant but satisfyingly shatterable objects no whimpering moaning rocking back and forth no flagellation agitation fustigation or remuneration paid to purveyors of potions pills and other musty mystical remedies because folks this is it this is how it's going to be we will sit and seethe stateside while desert warriors clamber into tanks and leap skyward and it'll all be OK honest I mean it just sit back go about your business nothing to see here it's just history on the hoof that's all
right?
March 17, 2003
 And so...what? Really, what?
Today is Saint Patrick's Day, a fact of which I was blissfully unaware until I reached the train station early this morning, whereupon I saw gaggle upon flock upon herd of suspiciously green-haired college-sweatshirt-wearing beer-swilling Young People all about to get on my train, which is full-up on a normal day. "This will not stand," I declared. "The freedom-loving commuters of Harriman will be free." So I hopped back in the car with Pea and went back home. No way, no how, no sir! And I was really looking forward to the raucous drunken puking train ride at the end of the day, too.
The trip to and from the train station, pointless though it turned out to be, was a near-perfect metaphor for the mood I'm already in this week. The temperature is nearing fifty degrees, but there are still blankets of melting snow on the ground, and that means snow-fog. Mist rises up from the still-whitened fields and from the forests on the hills, obscuring the road, enfolding it on either side with walls of deep, soft vapor. The sun becomes a perfect ghostly disk of diffuse illumination, only visible from the highest crests. It's hard to see ahead, and the way is uncertain.
Fortunately, when I get to the train station and am confronted with the mildly menacing specter of the incipiently Drunken Youth of America, I can hop in the Honda, turn around and go home. Not so our soldiers. Onward into the fog they move, at speed. During my antsy, nervous, jittery moods, I remind myself of that as often as I can stand it.
It doesn't calm me down. But it gives me perspective, which is always helpful.
The window of diplomacy slams shut today. Henceforth: into the fog.
I wonder what Mr. Hussein is up to right now...?
Jittery Aide With Big Mustache: Should we call the physician?
Jittery Aide With Bigger Mustache: I don't think so. The last two physicians mysteriously died when Our Leader became dissatisfied with their services.
Jittery Aide With Big Mustache: I was under the impression that someone shot them in the eyeball.
Jittery Aide With Bigger Mustache: Yes. Very mysterious. In any case, I think we should let him be.
Jittery Aide With Big Mustache: But he's been in there for seven hours. Surely no one can swim for that long.
Jittery Aide With Bigger Mustache: He is strong and virile. He can swim for as long as he likes. I suspect he is rehearsing his victory speech.
Jittery Aide With Big Mustache: Then we should call in the writers, to assist.
Jittery Aide With Bigger Mustache: There are no more writers. Clearly, you have not seen the front gate of the palace this morning.
Jittery Aide With Big Mustache: Shhh! Listen: there is no more splashing.
Jittery Aide With Bigger Mustache: Our Leader has finished his exercise. Bring him his towel, before he emerges from the waters as a mighty warrior prepared for battle.
Jittery Aide With Big Mustache: I'm not bringing him that towel. You bring it to him.
Jittery Aide With Bigger Mustache: I must guard the door so that no one enters the pool room. You must bring him the towel.
Jittery Aide With Big Mustache: Absolutely not. I am the father of nine children; you are unmarried. It falls to you.
Jittery Aide With Bigger Mustache: Surely you realize that the punishment for every goose-pimple on Our Leader's flesh will fall heavily upon you, who have refused your duty to him.
Jittery Aide With Big Mustache: Wait--listen! The splashing has started again.
Jittery Aide With Bigger Mustache: Our Leader returns to his exercise.
Jittery Aide With Big Mustache: He must look like a giant prune by now.
Jittery Aide With Bigger Mustache: I will favor you by not mentioning this insult to Our Leader's strength. Only soft Americans are subject to pruning.
Jittery Aide With Big Mustache:Of course, how foolish of me. [Silence, but for the sound of distant splashing] So...have they, uh, assigned you a bunker yet?
Well. That's something you don't hear every day: our President telling one man and his progeny to get the hell out of his own country. Coupled with explicit instructions to that man's military: you will be told what to do to avoid getting killed.
Is there anything even remotely resembling a precedent for this? I didn't even get chills watching the President, the gravity of the moment as my eyes anonymously met his through a phosphor-coated glass screen was beyond that. The words just dropped to the floor, one after the other. Get out. Thud. The UN has failed to uphold its responsibilities. Thud. We will, therefore, fulfill ours. Thud. Hang on: we're coming...the tyrant will soon be gone. Thud. Threat Level: Orange. Thud.
Now, I've got to go eat something. Thud. I expect I'll have something else to say about all this at some future point.
March 18, 2003
Hmm. Probably little or no soup today, many apologies. I'd offer you a random link, an amusée, if you will, but I'm just too busy. Even Google is boring today.
 When I was a lad, living in a suburban New Jersey townhouse, we had a succession of neighbors live in the unit next to us, which was a rental. One such neighbor was David Petraeus, who lived there for a short while with his wife and their daughter. I say a "short while" because David was an officer serving in the Army, and--like everywhere he lived--Lawrenceville, New Jersey was just another stopover until the next duty assignment. This particular "duty assignment" involved getting a doctorate in international relations from Princeton University.
David was what my mom called a "real go-getter," which meant that he really went and got on planes for the express purpose of jumping out of them. My mom kept in touch with his wife, and every so often I'd hear a story: David's in the hospital because his chute failed, but he'll be OK. Some idiot accidentally shot him, but he'll be OK. To call him a resilient guy is entirely inadequate.
I remember one snowy winter, when he tried to get me off my bookish lazy ass and out into the street to shovel driveways. "Every snowflake should look like a little dollar sign," he told me. "That's your motivation."
I knew that he had been moving up in the Army during the past two decades, and last night I was talking about him after the President's speech. I wondered what rank he was now, and where he might be on the command structure charts with the little pictures that they were showing on ABC.
Now I know: he is Major General David H. Petraeus, and he commands the 101st Airborne Division. Synchronicity--as always--is an amazing thing in my life. I mean: just last night, I wondered about the man. And today, from Phil Carter via Glenn Reynolds, there he is. Carter's point is that two reporters filed a story containing the same vignette about push-ups, but I don't care.
There he is: commanding the 101st Airborne. The 101st. In a little over 24 hours from now, he will
"...personally oversee the attack by the most potent portion of his 16,000-soldier division: the assault deep into Iraqi territory of 72 AH-64 Apache helicopters armed with Hellfire missiles, rockets and 30mm cannons."
They will engage the armored divisions that protect Baghdad.
Godspeed, sir.
I never made a dime shovelling driveways.
Godspeed.
March 19, 2003
OK...tap-tap...is this thing on? Can I have a little more in the monitors, please? Thanks...testing one-two-buckle-my-friggin' head...
So far this morning I have swiped my Special Nifty ID Card four times: once to securely enter the lower dining area level, there to obtain my oatmeal with stewed apples and raisins and brown sugar and a dollop of steamed milk, very nice; once to securely get up from the ground level to the plaza level via escalator; once to securely get to my bank of elevators; once to securely get into my company's offices. The Security Person at the elevator bank told me that, starting today, I'll have to swipe my card to get out, too.
Yes...we know for a fact, from the computer logs, that the terrorist with the stolen card got breakfast at 9:07 AM, went up the escalator at 9:13 AM, and took the elevator at 9:15 AM. Sometime after that he must have broken the lock on the utility room door and dumped the anthrax into the ventilation system on the 52nd floor. He exited the building at 9:52 AM.
Over the past six months, Building Management has installed a bevy of security cameras in the elevator lobby, and placed something called "security film" over all the towering windows. This is a tough plastic film that turns the glass walls into windshields made of Safe-T Glass, and becomes psychedelically iridescent when viewed through polarized sunglasses. They did this because a piece of debris flew 1000 yards on September 11 and shattered one of the windows around the sunken fountain in the plaza outside.
The Management has also insured the safety of the local bird-citizenry by putting bird-shaped silhouette-stickers high up on the tall glass panels.
Here is the terrorist with the stolen card and the anthrax on this videotape...and this one...and this one. And look! Here is a bird veering away from the window at the last moment.
At every card-swipe station is a blue-jacketed Security Person. They are empowered by Management to Visually Inspect All IDs. I haven't had mine Inspected, yet, but it's good to know that they have the Power. At the permanently installed security turnstile stations, employees swipe their cards against the glowing yellow square, get the glowing green arrow, and pass through waist-high glass doors that swoosh open before them in high Star Trek style.
I dunno...he had a beard, the picture on the ID had a beard...it was the morning rush, I couldn't keep track of everybody. He had oatmeal and a V-8 in one of those little cardboard tray-things from the cafeteria. He looked like everybody else.
They've closed off the plaza outside with spiky-looking Expando-Gates. This funnels everyone down into the lower ground level which is, I suppose, an easier entrance to secure. No Star Trek style down there, though: they have portable card scanners on black pressboard pillars, each trailing a thin snaking cable that's plugged in to the security system computer network. Swipe your card, a red light blinks green, there's a beep, and off you go.
Special Nifty ID Cards, security cameras, security film, bird-shaped silhouette-stickers, and Star Trek swooshiness aside, all of this apparatus relies on one thing: the Security Person. There are a lot of them in and around the building these days. Without them, it's all pointless. They have to catch the swarthy gentleman who's trying to get up the escalator with a card that doesn't make the red light turn green and beep properly. It's their job.
It always comes down to the person. They are the key elements. We may have cards, cameras, servo-driven doors, satellite-guided JDAMs, unmatched night vision equipment, and the biggest conventional bombs known to mankind, but none of that matters without the eyes, ears, hearts and minds of the people watching the gates and fighting the battles.
So on this day, of all days, I'm directing good and grateful thoughts towards the men and women whose job it is to keep me safe, whether they're watching me cart my oatmeal up an office building's escalator or engaging the Republican Guard in Persia's ancient desert. The scale and the training are different, but the task is the same.
Thanks to you all.
Boy, those folks at CNN are on the ball.
Their front page currently asks: U.S. poised to strike?
Uh, gee, I dunno...what do you think?
Criminey.
[Note: This bit is best read aloud at shouting volume using a frenetic English accent. --IW]
"Good evening and welcome to Baghdad. You join us now, as Saddam Hussein has less than five minutes leave Iraq, or face war...it looks as though we're going to be seeing military action of some sort very shortly, because there's no sign of--no, wait! Look! There he goes! He's over the wall and heading for the highway! Look! At! Him! Go! What a start! He's reached the highway and he's dodging the cars and, oh, no! He's realized that he's heading in the wrong direction! He's heading East now, the shortest way to the border! He's got a good pace on him now, and he's been joined by his senior staff! They're making for the Tigris, Tariq Aziz pulling up hard and fast, and it looks like a neck-in-neck between Qusay and Uday for third, Uday's really feeling that injury now, and he's flagging! Qusay, now Uday, what a contest! Followed up by the half-brothers--Watban, Barzan, Sab'awi, setting a good pace for the long stretch, with Vice-President Ramadan and al-Douri of the Revolutionary Command Council bringing up the rear! They're all pounding the pavement! My God, this is exciting!!!"
--Commentator
And here I was going to turn in. The President addresses the nation at 10:15...
From Ari Fleischer: "The opening stages of the disarmament of Iraq have begun..."
Anti-aircraft fire over Baghdad, and a U.S. strike against an as-yet-undescribed "target of opportunity" there...
So there's that. Four minutes, we're at war...
And, apparently, they were shooting at Sadaam and his cronies, a "decapitation" attempt. No word on its success...
I remember the Gulf War...the green lightning bolt streaks of panicking Iraqi soldiers, firing anti-aircraft tracers up into the night sky...instant, fiery, impressive...not so now...6AM or so in Baghdad...early morning blue sky...sporadic fire...it seemed so instantaneous in '91...
At any rate, unlike some people, I gotta get some shut-eye. I'm sure they won't do anything important until I'm awake again.
March 20, 2003
I know for a fact that the bespectacled fellow giving a speech on CNN last night was not Sadaam Hussein.
How do I know this?
Because at this very moment Sadaam is downstairs in my living room, watching CNN, drinking far too much coffee and attempting to make long-distance phone calls.
He's kind of pissed off that Bush reneged on the whole exile to my spare futon thing.
Of course, what he doesn't know is that the whole deal was brokered by myself, Rich Little, and Dana Carvey...
Sadaam: Operator? I must place a call to Baghdad immediately...what? Why is it going to be difficult? Yes, I know that...I have been watching the criminal junior bomb my country all night...yes, I am "from there"...yes...thank you...I and my people appreciate that you have "no problem" with us...that it's just Sadaam Huss--evil? I am not evil! I am a hero of Islam!
Me: Sadaam! Get off the phone! I want to order a pizza.
Sadaam: ...operator, by the sword of my people and the will of Allah, you will complete this phone call...do you not know what happens to people who do not do Sadaam's will? I--what?! [Standing up and shouting into the telephone] Zionist! Coward! Loser! I--hello?
Me: Hey! Buddy! Take it easy on the coffee. Gimme that. [Takes phone] What do you want on your pizza? And let's get some light in here...you've been sitting in the gloom all day. [Opens curtains]
Sadaam: [Sits down on futon-couch, defeated] Eh. Whatever. I'm not hungry.
Me: Hey, it'll be OK. You've still got your health, right? I mean, that's something, isn't it?
Sadaam: I suppose. [Looks sheepish] Pepperoni?
Me: That's the spirit! Hey, you've got some kind of bright red dot on your forehead...hold still, I'll get it...
Don't forget to check in with Salam in Baghdad.
As I suspected, parts of Sadaam's speech this morning read so oddly in English because it had bits of poetry in it. Salam writes: We watched saddam's speech this morning, he's got verse in it!!
CNN just reported that Major General Petraeus' 101st Airborne is moving out of Kuwait and into Iraq.
Jesus, if I hear one more talking head tell me that the war so far is neither shocking nor awe-full I'm going to vomit. Just frickin' relax, guys.
The last time I had the television tuned to the news all day was on September 11. After awhile, there's a repetitive fatigue that sets in...the same images, the same words, over and over. Now we've reached the six o'clock hour, wherein the day's events are packaged with neat graphics and presented in little polished segments.
Connie Chung makes me uncomfortable (I don't know why...I thinks it's because she looks like she's been beaten or something), so I'm going with Brit Hume and his Amazing Tilted Brow.
Dammit, they're talking about it again!
March 21, 2003
Because I have a force of nearly 300,000 soldiers protecting my interests in the Gulf, it is also appropriate that I enact trade sanctions against other nations.
To wit: my shoes. I have needed new ones for a long time, having been let down by my pair of New Balance 503s. Two years ago, I bought New Balance 502s, because they were black and comfy and made in the U.S.A. of mostly-made-in-the-U.S.A. bits. The 503 was the new model of the same shoe, and it sucked, sucked as a gaping maw in the earth leading to hell sucks. They collapsed. I've been getting out of bed in the mornings like a vitamin-deficient old man for months, what with the aches in the heels and calves and all.
And so, I resolved: the most expensive...the most well-made...the best shoes...shall be mine. Mephistos. I was going to cough up the dough for the legendary shoe worn by...people who wear legendary shoes.
Across the street from the cemetary of Trinity Church--wherein are buried Alexander Hamilton and the inventor of the steam engine--is an outlet shoe store that, for a long time, boasted that WE HAVE THE LOWEST PRICES IN THE CITY. At some point over the past year or so, that sign changed to WE ARE PROBABLY THE LOWEST-PRICED IN THE CITY.
Such candor demands respect. So I went there to buy my Mephistos.
A good salesman is good and speedy judge of people. The store was nearly empty, with one person being fitted, and when the salesman asked me what I needed, I told him: Mephistos. For walking, please. He had recently sent most of his Mephisto stock to his warehouse, so he showed me the catalogue. I blanched at the $270 price tag, but there they were: the Mephisto walkers. A great shoe, he told me. I have a pair on right now. Look at that sole--I've worn them for a year, and--nothing! I needed my feet measured--for, as age approaches feet warp and change, spreading out and morphing into different shapes. I'll measure you, he said. Then, I can have the shoe from my warehouse in 2-3 hours. He must have seen it on my face. I was ready to buy now. Right now. I was thinking: I'm willing to wait, I guess... But I wasn't sure.
The salesman knew this. His insight was keen, and he had the incantation that would secure a sale. He lowered his voice, and said the magic words: They're made in France, you know.
I felt my eyebrows elevate. Really, I said, in a tone that I'm sure said to him, steenking frogs, I will buy no shoe of theirs!
Let me show you this shoe by SAS, he offered. It is American-made. Indeed it was. Handlasted and handsewn, using moccasin construction so that the leather wraps completely around the foot. Funky hi-tech Selfset footbeds that will mold to my foot over time. Available in black or cordovan. Priced for you at $130.
I tried on a pair, and my calloused heels and strained achilles tendons rejoiced and did little dances, which was momentarily embarrassing. Two laps around the store and I was sold, as were the shoes. I happily handed over my debit card and watched with sadistic glee as my New Balance 503s were tossed screaming into the trash. Less than twenty minutes after I walked in, I walked out with a pair of new, comfortable, soft and yummy shoes wrapped completely around my feet, shoes that were made right here in America.
Where in America, exactly?
Texas.
Life is good.
From a small victory, we have this morning another sterling example of...what, idiocy? Ideological cramping? Brain hemorrhage? I don't know, but Ted Rall made it, and I'm sure he's happy with it. It's yet another everyone-who-disagrees-with-me-is-a-Nazi bit of phlegm, a cynical expectoration from a man who perhaps needs medication, or a different social clique, or maybe just a boot to the head and a face-full of mud.
I've become fascinated by this sort of thing, not because of the ideas themselves, but because of the psychology of the people who proudly proclaim them. At the risk of sounding equivalently knee-jerk, I've come to believe that anyone who is truly interested in debating ideas, who is a sincere seeker of the truth of a thing, does not make such broadly drawn comparisons with any seriousness. Not because the comparisons are Offensive, or Wrong in a PC-sort of way. Rather, they are so sweepingly, demonstrably false that proclaiming brave faith in them does not demonstrate cleverness, but instead reveals an entire, thickly-gnarled, trunk-like structure of belief with roots deeply gripped by a near-total lack of moral awareness and a deep, abiding hatred.
However, this lack and this hatred have found a home, and that's where my fascination comes in. There is a social psychology that must accompany these beliefs, because--like it or not--rare indeed is the person who holds such beliefs in complete isolation, or who holds beliefs that do not result in some perceived benefit to him. Rall is not in his Unabomber-style shack somewhere, making his own inks from goose-gall and pens from feathers, generating poorly-drawn panels and writing lengthy treatises on the Bush-Hitler-Oil-Bilderberg-Zionist-Martha Raye conspiracy that rules us all. He's got friends. A community. A readership. All of which must feel pretty good, to him.
In short, he's found a way to satisfy himself and his own needs with this output, just as I have with mine, and countless others have with theirs. That's generally how people work. They tend to avoid doing things that make them feel badly about themselves, and try to do things that build themselves up and project their core positive image of themselves out to the world. Problems--called "neuroses"--arise when their actions do not project that core positive image, or run counter to it. If, for example, someone believes that they are a moral person of good ethical character, yet actively participates in (for example) the consignment of a certain ethnicity to ovens and gas chambers, they must resolve that contradiction in some fashion in order to remain functional.
One of these ways people do this is by surrounding themselves with other people who are doing the same thing, or who profess the same beliefs. They clique up, which reduces the opportunity for confrontation and self-examination. This is a phenomenon easily observable in the online weblog communities--it's called cocooning, and it's soft and comfortable. People often do the same sort of things in meatspace as well, choosing friends and forming relationships based upon comfortable idea-kinship.
Another way that people do this is by using any number of methods that blunt introspection. Drugs, alcohol, and and activities like sex and eating can all work for this, particularly if (like me) you're not very good at forming social bonds.
These ideas are fresh in my mind because of a brief exchange I had recently in a Tech Central Station forum with a fellow named Brad. Brad, it turns out, is a Constitutional absolutist. Or he would be, if he knew what the term meant. Which is unfortunate for him, because he would be hard-pressed to find the definition of a "declaration of war" within the hallowed Constitution, without which, he believes, the Iraq campaign is unconstitutional, a crime against humanity, and so forth. So wedded is our Brad to the idea of Bush's sheer evilness that he has forfeited his ability to reason cogently. I provided links to three relevant legislative documents, and suggested he read them before continuing th discussion. But no. He is unable to reconcile Article I Section 8 of the Constitution with the War Powers Act of 1973 and the authorization for the use of force in Iraq issued by Congress on October 12 of last year. He can't do it. It would break his head. So he continued arguing from ignorance which, to him, was what he already knew to be true. No further input required, thanks.
For a brief while, I toyed with the idea of pedagogical responsibility. If I could just...reach...the...Bat-Methodology...belt...I could help him out.
But, in the end, there's nothing that can be done for such folks. This is because, for them, there is more at stake than simply the refinement of an idea, or the changing of a position. There are deep-seated needs involved, and established interpersonal social structures, all of which serve to resolve uncomfortable psychological conflict. It's pointless to wrestle against that, and arrogant to try.
I've crammed a couple of friendships into the crapper over the past eighteen months because I was no longer willing to be part of their idea-kinship group. That sucks, really, because I would have been happy to find out that the friendships were based on mutual respect, rather than the need to maintain a comfortable relationship with our own psychologies and to minimize the emergence of neuroses. That's a shallow bond, easily sundered by the intrusion of dread reality, and I'm just as guilty of mistaking that shallowness for depth as they were.
Fortunately, I'm not friends with Mr. Rall, and need not shoulder the burden of minimizing the inevitable neuroses caused by his True Believer's faith.
Holy shit. So that's what they meant.
And there it is: towering columns of smoke, bursts of Death Star cotton-ball flame, cascades of sparks and the flickering afterglow of secondary fires. All countered by small streaks flying skyward into the green night.
Live. On television. With feeds from a dozen different news services. And commentary.
This is disastrous. Not in the sense of extremely bad and terrible (although it is that), but in the sense of the accompaniment of calamity. We're watching destruction, violent unmaking accelerated by chemistry and electronic technology. Small packages of high order that descend and then unmake themselves with enough force to bring down buildings.
It's not fun to watch. It is impressive, and tragic, and terrible and powerful, all at once on multiple channels.
March 22, 2003
"I believe if you really want to show shock and awe, you should show love and justice. That would shock the world."
--Bob Edgar,
a former Democratic congressman
and the general secretary of
the National Council of Churches
I just love this. In the flighty, touchy-feely world of peace activism, diversity is everything. Which means that the goals of one representative do not necessarily do much to support the goals of another representative:
"All the reasons to oppose the war have now changed," said Bill Dobbs, media coordinator for United for Peace and Justice. "We want this war to end as soon as possible and to bring the troops home. That is the best way we know how to support them."
And...how, exactly, are we going to end this war as soon as possible, Mr. Dobbs?
Love and justice, maybe? That'll make 'em lay down their guns, for sure.
I'm also impressed by the ethical gymnastics on display here. Before the war began, there was one set of reasons to oppose it. Now that it's underway, there's another set. What happened to the first set of reasons? Amazing. And here I thought that principles were something you committed to.
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