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August 02, 2004
 I sort of half-ignored this story in the Tombstone Tumbleweed last week: "TWO GROUPS OF MIDDLE-EASTERN INVADERS CAUGHT IN COCHISE COUNTY IN PAST SIX WEEKS." You'd be ignoring it, too, if not for the Blessed Google Cache.
Basically, the story is a "this guy says that" and "Official Guy denies same" sort of story:
On or about the early morning hours of June 13, 2004 Border patrol agents from the Willcox station encountered a large group of suspected illegal border crossers, estimated to be around 158, just east of the Sanders Ranch near the foothills of the Chiricauha Mountains. 71 suspected illegal aliens were apprehended; among them were 53 males of middle-eastern descent.
According to a Border Patrol field agent, the men were suspected to be Iranian or possibly Syrian nationals. “One thing’s for sure: these guys didn’t speak Spanish and after we questioned them harder we discovered they spoke poor English with a middle-eastern accent; then we caught them speaking to each other in Arabic…this is ridiculous that we don't take this more seriously, and we’re told not to say a thing to the media, but I have to,” said the agent, who spoke to the Tumbleweed with the promise of anonymity.
Adame confirms the groups of illegals were apprehended on those dates in the same area but stated, “There were no middle easterners in the group. Every single one of them was Mexican.”
Today, from the NYT, we have this: "U.S. Warns of Terror Threat Against Financial Buildings."
Nestled amongst the feel-good threats to buildings near where I work are the following warm and cozy thoughts:
Saturday's warnings appeared to be linked to the arrest on July 19 in Texas of Farida Goolam Mohamed Ahmed after she entered the United States from Mexico by crossing the Rio Grande and crawling through the brush.
According to several news accounts, she had an altered passport along with several thousand dollars in cash and an airline ticket to New York. CNN reported that she was charged with illegal entry, making false statements and falsifying a passport.
[...]
The ABC report said intelligence sources had described a plan by Al Qaeda to move non-Arab terrorists across the Mexican border into the United States.
Just moments ago, they closed the Holland Tunnel to inbound commercial truck traffic.
I've asked it before, I'll ask it again: are we at war here or not, people?
...American officials said the new evidence had been obtained only after the capture of the Qaeda figure. Among other things, they said, it demonstrated that Qaeda plotters had begun casing the buildings in New York, Newark and Washington even before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Among the questions the plotters sought to answer, senior American intelligence officials said, were how best to gain access to the targeted buildings; how many people might be at the sites at different hours and on different days of the week; whether a hijacked oil tanker truck could serve as an effective weapon; and how large an explosive device might be required to bring the buildings down.
What's it going to take? Striking, iconic aerial footage of the CitiCorp building lying canted on its side against other buildings? Maybe a dramatic close-up from the helicopters of survivors crawling out of windows, and standing on the building's shattered face, as though they were on the keel of a capsized ocean liner? Or perhaps images of a succession of skyscraper-dominos, a smoking wreckage that's twenty blocks long and eight blocks wide? Or maybe a truck bomb? Two truck bombs? Three? How about one in front of the Stock Exhange? Oh, right--they've got those big concrete barriers now, so you can't actually get a truck near it. Which means that they'll set the explosives off on the other side of the barriers--near, for example, my "financial building." Thank goodness we've got that nifty new shatterproof film on all the three-story windows in the lobby. That way, I can stagger out into the carnage free from wounds caused by flying glass...just like on September 11.
The evil spectacle of massive buildings crashing to earth in murderous ruin wasn't enough. The deaths of thousands of fellow citizens on live television weren't enough.
Can happen here? It did happen here.
What's it going to take?
August 03, 2004
Yeah, yeah, yeah:
Much of the information that led the authorities to raise the terror alert at several large financial institutions in the New York City and Washington areas was three or four years old, intelligence and law enforcement officials said on Monday. They reported that they had not yet found concrete evidence that a terrorist plot or preparatory surveillance operations were still under way.
Well, duh. Al-Qaeda didn't begin planning for 9/11 attacks in May of 2001, either--there's evidence for a planning phase going back to 1995. Typically, the organization plans attacks for 3-5 years. As some nameless senior government official with a bag over his head remarked,
"You could say that the bulk of this information is old, but we know that Al Qaeda collects, collects, collects until they're comfortable [...] Only then do they carry out an operation."
Of course, some people either don't know that or don't care:
Former Democratic presidential contender Howard Dean on Sunday had suggested political motivations may be behind the latest terror alert. "I am concerned that every time something happens that's not good for President Bush, he plays this trump card, which is terrorism," Dean told CNN. "It's just impossible to know how much of this is real and how much of this is politics, and I suspect there's some of both in it."
We're all concerned about that. Because, you know, terrorism is always good for Bush, because he's all evil and whatnot, with the secret mihrab in the White House where he worships the god of his Saudi benefactors and the skillful manipulation of the national psyche by his corporate puppetmasters and the hey hey hey I'm selected.
Maybe Mr. Deeaarrrghn should look at why it might seem that terrorism is "good" for Bush: could it be because every time the reality of the threat shows itself, people are reminded about how little they actually trust John Kerry to make the right decisions about confronting it?
Having said that, Kerry gets a couple of points and maybe some Pez for the following:
Kerry dismissed former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean's comment that raising the terror level might be politically motivated.
"I don't care what he said. I haven't suggested that and I won't suggest that," Kerry said. "I do not hold that opinion. I don't believe that.''
Which is big of him, especially now that he's got the nomination and people are paying attention.
Still: I'm not working in the city this week. Last night, that was because I was all IMMINENT THREAT-ed out. Today, it's because I'm nervous enough without more roadblocks and more guns carried by people who aren't me. I can do without a squirt of adrenaline every time there's a thump in the elevator shaft, thanks.
---
[That doesn't mean I'm not at work, you sods...it just means I'm not at work in New York. Sheesh.]
August 04, 2004
"We desire to give voice to our opinions, to try to elevate them to the status of knowledge. Relativism denies that desire. What it does instead is homogenize all desires. All desires and values are equal precisely insofar as none is ultimately defensible. Such equality is unacceptable, unlivable, a denial of what is patently true about human beings. It is simply not the case that, when questioned hard, persons A or B are willing to declare that their values are no more defensible than their opponents'. To declare that this is the case, is to defy the phenomena of ordinary life."
--David Roochnik,
The Tragedy of Reason: Towards a Platonic Conception of Logos
(Routledge 1991)
August 05, 2004
I wrote a bit on July 29 about Swift Boat Verterans for Truth. They've got an ad, now (.MPEG here, Quick Time here, Windows Media here, Real Player here).
See, that's what happens when you spend only four months in Vietnam, instead of twelve like all the other grunts: people just don't get to know the real you. I'm sure we'd be hearing a different story if the good Senator hadn't had all his limbs blown off, forcing him to cut his tour short.
EVER HAVE one of those days where you're pretty sure that you're not doing all you could be doing with your life, in fact, you're almost certain that you're doing exactly the wrong thing with your life, and you're acutely aware of all the redusomes shortening deep within your cells' chromsonal nests, and of tiny ion fountains tick-tick-ticking off the years of your life, while all your Great Works remain entombed within your skull, unexpressed, equal to all the other trillions upon trillions of unrealized hopes and unfulfilled desires of all the other shuffling gray humans, leaving you with nothing spectacular for observation by anyone else, an empty handful of sparks that only you can see, that only you can fan from obscurity into raging fire, but which remain dull orange pocks, like the centers of powdery coals beneath the grease-caked grate of the barbecue grill off of which you've just yanked your overdone London Broil?
No?
Never mind then.
What a buncha bunny-suit wearin' maroons. The Kerry campaign is making scary legal noises about the Swift Boat Vets for Truth ad.
By hopping up and down and yelling "Not a single one of these men served on either of Senator Kerry's two SWIFT boats," they're exposing their soft underbellies to the accounts of men who did, like Steve Gardner:
"The John Kerry that I know is not the John Kerry that everybody else is portraying. I served alongside him and behind him, five feet away from him in a gun tub, and watched as he made indecisive moves with our boat, put our boats in jeopardy, put our crews in jeopardy... if a man like that can't handle that 6-man crew boat, how can you expect him to be our Commander-in-Chief?"
They also might prompt the US military personnel who can't stand Kerry to make themselves more publicly known. Which, it seems, could turn out to be most of them [via Stephan].
And, as Glenn notes:
Well, if Bush had threatened legal action to block Michael Moore's film from showing, I know what people would say.
Let's see...Bush has been called evil, stupid, traitorous, a drunkard, a fascist, a criminal, and a terrorist. He's been accused of knowing about the 9/11 attacks in advance and doing nothing to prevent the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans, making him an accessory to mass murder. He's been accused of collaboration with the house of Saud. The Democratic leadership has never distanced itself from the partisan outfits that support such claims, such as MoveOn.org. It has tacitly embraced Michael Moore's privately funded pro-Kerry campaign ad.
Has BushCo sued? No.
Have they threatened anyone into silence? No, despite what Tim "I'm So Oppressed I Get To Speak At The National Press Club" Robbins thinks with his tiny Stalinist dried-raisin brain.
So now, with the publication of a single book and the production of one 30-second ad, we see what the Kerry campaign thinks of free speech.
What a shrill, wretched effort. We hates them, we do...the public scrutiny, it buuurns!!!
[And, I am strangely compelled to note the possibility that these Swift vets are all androids programmed by Karl Rove who were never actually in Vietnam, but instead spent several months on a junglefied soundstage being injected with hallucinogens by CIA operatives who were under orders from a very far-sighted GOP leadership.
I am eagerly awaiting the onslaught of Media Inc. investigatory reporting that will uncover that fact.
Hey, it could happen.]
[I am also compelled to cut n' paste this, so that your head can explode from political fooshness:
Although the men quoted above are often identified as "John Kerry's shipmates," only one of them, Steven Gardner, actually served under Lt. Kerry's command on a Swift boat. The other men who served under Kerry's command continue to speak positively of him:
"In 1969, I was Sen. Kerry's gun mate atop of the Swift boat in Vietnam. And I just wanted to let everyone know that, contrary to all the rumors that you might hear from the other side, Sen. Kerry's blood is red, not blue. I know, I've seen it.
"If it weren't for Sen. John Kerry, on the 28th of February 1969, the day he won the Silver Star . . . you and I would not be having this conversation. My name would be on a long, black wall in Washington, D.C. I saw this man save my life."3
— Fred Short
"I can still see him now, standing in the doorway of the pilothouse, firing his M-16, shouting orders through the smoke and chaos . . . Even wounded, or confronting sights no man should ever have to see, he never lost his cool.
I had to sit on my hands [after a firefight], I was shaking so hard . . . He went to every man on that boat and put his arm around them and asked them how they're doing. I've never had an officer do that before or since. That's the mettle of the man, John Kerry."3
— David Alston
"What I saw back then [in Vietnam] was a guy with genuine caring and leadership ability who was aggressive when he had to be. What I see now is a guy who's not afraid to tackle tough issues. And he knows what the consequences are of putting people's kids in harm's way."2
— James Wasser
Go here for the footnote references.]
[Still more compulsion...to my ear, the Alston and Wasser quotes read like talking points for a DNC convention speech. I mean, really: "caring," "leadership ability," "aggressive when he had to be," "tough issues," "people's kids in harm's way," "mettle of the man, John Kerry."
Either the GOP is much better at coaching natural-sounding quotes out of their drones, or the Swift vets are telling the truth.]
August 06, 2004
Because I'm so whimsical, there will be no free cabbage today.
Or there might be.
But not until later.
In the meantime, have some mayonnaise.
August 09, 2004
 I seem to forget too quickly the oozing, sticky, nasty nature of political writing. I dip my toe in and before I can say Long John Kerry I'm up to my eyeballs in partisan goo.
And we all know how unappealing that is, so I'll be moving along.
The image that your monitor is firing into your brain is of a drawing called Astonished Head, created by Manuel Alcorlo in 2003. Mr. Alcorlo was born in Madrid in 1935, and is, apparently, a fairly well-known contemporary artist in Spain.
I have no idea whether the artist has ever visited this site. I rather doubt it. According to my site stats, there haven't been enough visitors from Spain to make the Top 30 Countries chart.
Limited edition, signed artist proofs of Astonished Head are available from PicassoMio for $379.
I'm not affiliated with PicassoMio in any way.
I'm just saying: look! Some Spanish artist guy has drawn Astonished Head!
August 10, 2004
 The girlfriend of an old friend of mine (or, perhaps more accurately, given his nature, "the person into whom he was inserting his penis on a regular basis,") once expressed her dislike for me by spluttering to him, "He's always saying, 'I wanted to do this or that, but I couldn't because of my brain.'"
She probably took me more seriously than I took myself, but she did have a point. I've long felt subject to the unpredictable tides of the neurochemical sea behind my eyeballs. My mood and anxiety level often have little to do with my surroundings or my situation in life. I can be enjoying a bracing near-panic attack at my desk in the midst of job success, prosperity, good health and a shiny new bicycle. It hardly ever works the other way...I'm never cheerful in the face of total adversity; the most I can muster is a kind of neurotic Zen-style indifference that I pay for later with bouts of obsessive anxiety and cheap wine.
Some people are firm believers in psychology: for them, it is always the mind, rather than the neurons, that determines their outlook on life and dictates their response to adversity. I believe, in turn, that many of those folks enjoy nice, relatively stable neurochemistries, and can thus easily make that claim. I also believe that some of those psychological evangelists (see, Phil, Dr.) are, in private, raging balls of cortisol-driven excess. Yet another portion of those folks are idealists who desperately want to believe that they can overcome their depressions and manias with a thorough application of Proper Thinking, and attribute their plunges into chemical canyons to a failure of will. I suspect that everyone else making that claim is secretly and happily medicated.
Mind is a process, not a thing, and that process is driven by the physicality of the neurological medium. Medical case histories by the thousands bear this out: alter or destroy the brain, and you alter or destroy the mind.
To wit: one Phineas P. Gage, who in 1848 received a tamping iron thro' the head. A tamping iron (for those unfamiliar with mid-19th century railroad construction techniques), is a metal rod 3 feet seven inches long, 1 1/4 inches in diameter at the base, tapering to a point about 1/4 in diameter at the tip. To remove rocks that were in the path of construction, holes were drilled at their base and filled with gunpowder. A fuse was added, and then sand was packed in on top using the tamping iron. Gage apparently struck an errant spark, and the tamping iron blew ninety feet through the air, after first passing through his skull.
According to a local Vermont newspaper account of the incident, "The iron entered on the side of his face, shattering the upper jaw, and passing back of the left eye, and out the top of the head." It destroyed significant portions of the ventromedial areas of his prefrontal cortex.
After the accident, Gage sat up, signed off his timesheet, and walked home to wait for a doctor. His primary care physician, Dr. Harlow, subsequently reported that
"He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom)… capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operation, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned… Previous to his injury, although untrained in the schools, he possessed a well-balanced mind, and was looked upon by those who knew his as shrewd, smart businessman, very energetic and persistent in executing all his plans of operation."
Basically, a three-foot iron rod through the brain turned Mr. Gage into something of a jackass.
Where did the nice Mr. Gage go? Was he, somehow, trapped inside, unable to express himself? Was the reception of his soul's transmissions now crippled by the faulty radio of his brain?
Nope. The nice Mr. Gage was his brain. The asshole Mr. Gage was, now, his broken brain.
Prior to becoming King Of The Worrrld, James Cameron directed The Abyss, which was sort of like Close Encounters of the Third Kind only underwater and without Steven Spielberg. The plot involves the deep-sea recovery of a sunken nuclear submarine and the subsequent encounter with an intelligent aquatic species, but the plot isn't the important bit. The important bit is a certain sound effect. At the beginning of the movie, an underwater UFO causes the submarine's systems to fail, and it bounces off a cliff face and begins its long, slow fall to the ocean floor. All during this scene, as the camera flits from the sweat-beaded faces of the crew to exterior shots of the ship plunging inexorably downwards, there was this sound. It was an engine-genre sound, thrumming, declining in pitch, and it represented death for everyone aboard. It chilled me: it was the sound of certain, but not rapid, doom, a steady and unstoppable decline to crushing pressure and cessation of life.
I've "heard" other sounds that seem to have significance byond mere perception and, sensibly, they are probably just another irrational tic from my quirked-out brain. Sometimes, though, when it seems like who I am has ground to a halt, and I'm staring stupidly at the wall or the monitor, I can hear that sound, descending, falling, into black, cold, crushing silence.
If I had any real confidence in my own rationality--as opposed to the bluster that most people assume makes up for the empty tautology that forms the foundation of their entire intellectual life--I'd be able to dismiss this peculiar pseudo-audio phenomenon. But I don't, not really, and I can't.
It's possible that while I developed from an itty-bitty zygote into the trillion-celled ambulatory sack of water and proteins I am today, a few key processes were interrupted or altered, so that the uptake of this or that neurotransmitter is too inhibited or augmented to allow me the relative stability enjoyed by so many other folks. It's possible that the psychological evangelists are right, and that there are unexamined conflicts deep within my personality process that express themselves in tight bursts of anxiety or sloping depressions and upright manias. It's even remotely possible that, in some n-dimension, the perfect expression of my self, my soul, gazes sadly out into this world through the thickly blurred lens of my ill-made cortex, forever thwarted until the next go 'round.
At the moment I haven't got the wit to argue the merits of any of those possibilities...but the effect, whatever its cause, is the same.
Pleh.
August 11, 2004
 On September 11, after the first tower fell and I took the last elevator down from my 39th floor office to the dust-shrouded lobby, I had a choice to make. I could patiently wait in line with all the other folks who were taking the down escalator to the sub-lobby, where there were exits that faced away from the Trade Center site. Or, I could jump down the up escalator, which wasn't being used.
I had a bike outside. So I jumped.
Since then, I've wondered what I would have done if I was making the long, long trek down a stairwell in one of the twin towers. Would I have plodded patiently, going no faster than the person in front? Or would I have jumped from flight to flight?
I remember a story I heard about a red-coated WTC security guard in the sky lobby of one of the towers, where people normally transferred from the express elevators to the local elevators that went to their floors. On that day, after the planes had hit, he was guiding people down stairwells. He was telling people to remain calm, and orderly: "How you conduct yourselves today will affect you for the rest of your lives," he said.
I didn't panic that day. I had a bike: transportation away from Ground Zero, and I was determined to get to it if I could. So I jumped down the up escalator. Once outside in the dust cloud I passed by what I thought was a body...he looked dead to me, so I didn't stop to check. I was Leaving. The. Area. Once on my bike I stole a Mango Madness Snapple from an abandoned bodega, to clear my mouth and throat of the thick dust and grit. When I returned to the office two weeks later, I stopped by the bodega and paid the man for it. So I'm not a looter.
I was in a local gun shop when last Sunday's terror alert was announced on CNN: threats against buildings I know, threats against the area where I work, threats of great specificity and immediacy. My first response: get drinks. Lots of drinks. (I restricted myself to two pints and a martini with dinner at our lovely local pub.) That sudden craving for anesthesia was the result of the knot-in-the-chest anxiety that erupted as soon as I read the crawl along the bottom of the shop's TV screen. It was a lesser version of that trapped, gotta-go-now fear that began at 10:05 AM on September 11, 2001 and didn't really diminish until 11:30 PM on September 7, 2002, when I arrived at my new house, far away from anything even vaguely worth blowing up. Except for the car wash. That could use some explosives, I think.
I don't have to come to work in New York; the company is headquartered in Connecticut. So, without much thought, I spent last week at the offices there, opting to drive 90 minutes and work in relative ease instead of travelling 2 ½ hours by car, train, and ferry just to spend the entire day suffused with adrenaline, jumping at every loud noise and surrounded by the evidence of threat. This week, I'm back in the city. It's not as bad as I thought it might be. But it's not at all normal, either. I don't much care for it.
I don't consider myself a New Yorker, and never did, even during the five years I lived there. It's not my home, and I'm not one of those people who thinks that the terrorists win because I'm not Going About My Daily Routine. I'm one of those people who thinks that the terrorists will have won when the crescent star flies over the White House and every American man, woman, and child is either dead or Muslim. Not before.
Still: there it is. They said "Boo!" and I left.
I'm glad I did. I've got enough loopiness in my head without putting myself three blocks from the scene of a mass murder that I witnessed while the same bunch of psychotic pork-fearing bastards is reportedly roaming around looking for ways to do it again.
I had a way out, so I took it. Down the up escalator I went.
Sometimes, I wonder how anyone who wasn't there that day can possibly have an opinion about anything related to the war. How they can possibly say anything other than, Do whatever it takes.
Until you've had to seriously contemplate the fact that you probably won't feel much if the anonymous panel truck explodes as you walk past it with your Chinese take-out, you don't really know what this is all about.
August 12, 2004
It's a lazy, lazy, lazy, lazy day, and I'm hopped up on yohimbe extract, so I'm going for a bike ride, and maybe a run, and some kitesurfing and then perhaps some rowing and, probably, a deepsea dive to the wreck of the Titanic later with my good friend Bob Ballard, who's a lot more low-key than he seems. Then a Guinness, or maybe some crank. Who knows? The day's wide frickin' open, man, and I've got stuff to do.
August 16, 2004
"Hahrumph the people Bush swing state Vietnam, although ahem Iraq centerpiece tax cut bow-legged economics."
--The Intelligentsia Simulator
"Dreams within dreams within dreams. Last night I slept in my own bed, with my wife beside me. Light filtered through the pale blue curtains…light from the fixture over the shed door that I forgot to turn out before I went to bed. I lay there in the semi-darkness, wondering whether I should get up and trudge out of the bedroom and downstairs to the backdoor, where the lightswitch was. Just then she sighed, talking pleasant sleeptalk, and turned on her side, her head against my shoulder, her arm falling across my chest. I can still smell the fragrance of her hair as I sit here in the dark and type: some sort of exotic green tea potion, full of hair-healthy botanicals and who knows what else. The scent lingers in the air, but is rapidly getting lost in the stench of this place. I have never felt more alone, more…imprisoned…than I do at this moment. I am surrounded by lunatics. I am a lunatic.
The texture of my mind, right now, at three-thirty in the morning, is unfamiliar but lucid. I couldn’t sleep tonight, so I got up and turned on the laptop and I’ve been scrolling back, reading page after page of…I don’t know what. I remember all of these things…Frasier hanging like a demented bat from the television with his smoking beard…the paintings…even that unholy halluncinatory dinner, which seems to have happened a few days ago. But I remember it they way you remember a movie you saw awhile back, that was engaging and entertaining, but lacked substance, so that you can’t remember any of the characters' names, or why they were important, or why you cared about them. And I think I’ve been here for years; I don’t have years’ worth of writings, but I know it. I can feel it. I had a wife, a life outside of this place. But it’s gone, now."
--Parker Clark
[This is old school A-Head...you can read more of Parker Clark here.]
August 17, 2004
I've got a really amazing essay that starts with Plato's Protagoras and ends up explaining absolutely everything about the vitriolic nature of modern American political discourse, including why John Kerry is going to lose and how George Bush will secure the Republic for future generations by being a simple-minded man. It's brilliant.
But I'm not going to show it to you.
Because I'm a bastard.
August 18, 2004
Let’s consider our man Frank Fallon. Look at him: 30 and watching the first veneer of youth peel away, just a bit, Frank Fallon looks like a man with a mission, a man conscious of the passage of time, a man dedicated to the notion that pleasure in youth makes for a happy old man. He’s got the jaw that’s going, just a bit, a little round on the bottom as it were; he’s still got the broad shoulders that hold a shirt so nicely taut, forming that favorite shape of modern human natural selection, the triangle with its point at the belly, the big genetic arrow pointing to the healthy package, the fine spurt of good healthy seed for the babies and the surviving and the evolving.
But the big healthy genetic triangle doesn’t mean quite the same thing, these abstract days, what with the money and the success and the prenuptual agreement. It no longer means the many progeny and the big fist in the face of death, the shouting of “Loook! A bit of me lives in them!” Now it means the bars and the condoms and the indulgence. It means the frenzy and the searching and the finding. It means many, many things, the having of the genetic goods does indeed, all of them different now. With the coming of the age of plastic and chemicals, a level of societal indulgence became possible that, hitherto, has only been attempted by the aristocracies. Didn’t see the Roman peasants getting together and having orgies and throwing up now did you? Of course not.
Nowadays, our man Frank Fallon participates in the sybaritic rite that is modern city life, true city life, anyway, for anyone who actually leaves their Habitrail™ apartment and gets out in it. The city now is imperial; we enjoy the fruits and the dangers of living well within the empire. The world closes in a bit, takes a poke now and then. Tries to see when the walls might give, just a bit. Testing the aged power. The tests alarm the citizens, the mood shifts a bit, the awareness is up, and we realize our youth. The still-fresh sinewy strength. Frank Fallon is in the best shape of his life, and knows it.
Today, actually, is a Wednesday, and Frank’s got nothing to do. The job is weeks in the past, and the new job hasn’t had the courtesy of presenting itself just yet. So, like many other days, he starts with a small colorful glass bowl of marijuana, a glass of juice and a banana in front of the computer. The machine, he turns on with foot; for the bowl he uses his hands and a Bic™ lighter. The machine is a Falcon, and Frank uses it to play insane video games while under the influence of one the many new psychoactive pharmaceuticals that have become ubiquitous over the past decade. There are the old standards—good old Number Five and E™, the original Captain Trips and Ecstasy—but now there were the fractals, the targeted neuroinhibitors, the targeted neuroenhancers, the limbic box wetware stuff that our Frank had always heard about but never tried.
--from Our Man Frank
August 19, 2004
 So, according to the excellent National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website (where you can get the exact same radar images and weather bulletins used by your Local Weather Puppet), a vast tide of blood and destruction is sweeping upon us all from the south. From the looks of things, I've got about another hour before primeval Cthulhu-like destruction tears me apart and thrusts me into an eternal hell of thrashing bits of tortured ganglia attatched to splintered bone and ruptured, twitching viscera.
That's too bad. I was looking forward to riding my bike this weekend.
Ah well. When you gotta get consigned to an unimaginable realm of suffering beyond your blackest nightmares, you gotta get consigned to an unimaginable realm of suffering beyond your blackest nightmares.
I think I'll go find a cookie.
Maybe some ice cream.
Good ice cream, though, not that hippy crap that's like a frozen block of sugared egg with chunks of diabetes in it.
I hate that stuff.
August 20, 2004
Crap!
I forgot to be an eccentric genius today.
August 23, 2004
 Yesterday, I rode 25 miles on my still-new HP Velotechnik Street Machine GT and got burnt like a forgotten bratwurst on the grill. It was for a good cause: the Tour de Goshen benefits the Winslow Therapeutic Center, so my toasted legs and arms helped enable the practice of hippotherapy. For you non Greek-speaking types, that's the therapeutic riding of horses by folks with various disabilities, not the psychoanalysis of certain large amphibious mammals.
25 miles isn't much, really, but I'm still in the process of getting back into shape, which is a bit more difficult because a recumbent bicycle uses a different set of leg muscles than an upright, and is less forgiving of big gear mashing. When travelling up a hill on an upright, you can stand on the pedals, using gravity and your body weight to do some of the work. On a recumbent, it's all leg muscles, and you have to use a high pedalling cadence of at least 85rpm. Trying to go uphill on a recumbent using the same big gears you would use on an upright means exploded knees. Cartilage everywhere. So, my uphill speed is about 5-8mph.
The payback is on the downhills: with significantly less air resistance, I topped out at 44mph without trying very hard. I probably could've gone much faster if I'd pushed it.
But I didn't, because I needed to survive the day. Hauling 60 extra pounds of myself around is a lot of work, and that's another reason why the process of getting back into shape is difficult. Hopefully, the muscles I build up moving my big fat self around will eventually enable a slimmer version of me to go Very Very Fast.
It's a trick I played on myself: stuck in a rut, expanding like a dying star, I found every attempt to get back on the old Bruce Gordon BLT a Whitman's Sampler of Assorted Milk & Dark Pain. So I bought an expensive new machine, and now I'm out exercising as much as my wobbly red thighs can stand.
Now, the only things that hurt are my legs, which is how it's supposed to be, and I'm enjoying the various benefits of cruising country roads in a German-engineered lawnchair.
Still: I am toasted. And tired. So I won't be writing anything today.
Except for this.
August 24, 2004
Busy, like stinging insect. Posting will be light for a bit.
Then it will get, like, heavy.
August 25, 2004
Oh. I seem to have shrunk a bit. Into a spotted t-shirt wearing muttering shut-in sitting in the pale dark, my wide-stretched pupils glinting in the illumination of my Samsung monitor. Excuse me, Señor? You are squashing my creativity with your enormous ass.
August 26, 2004
And then, in the midst of my cynical disillusionment, I read this.
This is why I am envious of and fascinated by people of faith.
They remind me that we monkeys are not all that there is in this world.
A post on the good Reverend's site obliquely targets some my malaise, icing on top of cake freshly baked by NPR, USA Today, and other Standard Media, Inc. outlets.
What I keep coming down to: either we live in a representative republic, or we don't.
If we do, then all of these creatures who play on this absurd stage are there because, as a people, we want them there, or simply don't care enough about our nation to remove them.
If we don't...well, then, the Great Experiment is over, and it was a failure. We just don't know it yet.
Either choice is cause for despair, and I see no others.
But was it too much to expect? I myself alternate between outrage at those who treat the populace as ignorant sheep to be managed by their intellectual, moral, or political betters, and disgust with that populace when it does, in fact, act like a bunch of blinkered, stupid ruminants. Did the Founders, practical as they were, overestimate the potential of the people? Or did they not truly foresee what would happen to a population with unprecedented prosperity and leisure? Surely not--didn't they have the example of Rome?
But they did not have the example of an industrialized Rome, a Rome where even the poor have running water, food, and the miraculous television, a Rome where sustenance and entertainment are so abundant that even the murder of three thousand of its citizens within the heart of its greatest metropolis and its capital utterly fails to bring about unity of purpose and action, an un-Imperial, fattened Rome that does not immediately mete out the most profound and utter destruction to its enemies but, instead, prevaricates and wrestles with gentle questions of decency, value, and identity.
What is wrong with us? I will not be surprised if, even in this Most Important Election, the voter turnout is still abysmally, embarrassingly low. Far too many of our citizens are content to let the decisions of representative government be made by others, believing that they know many people who think like them who will take responsibility, and who will ensure that their own, personal circuses continue on unabated.
Perhaps it's a function of scale: the imperfectly realized principles of the directly democratic polis of Athens, with its 30,000 propertied male participants governing 10 square miles, became even more imperfect when expanded out to 193 million indirect voters scattered across 3.5 million square miles.
We lament the biased rhetoric that passes for "news coverage," but were we really expecting our media to be staffed by philosophers of the Socratic mode, believing in Truth and pursuing it, while simultaneously acknowledging the impossibility of achieving perfect knowledge? No: somehow, we expected the media to be made up of Cartesian hyper-rationalists, presenting only that which is beyond doubt and discarding the rest. What a foolish, blind demand. A stupid idea: we will trust you to make the proper judgements by the proper method, and will assume that we learn the Truth from you. Only fools are outraged or surprised by the media's failure to be "objective."
We, as individuals, are supposed to be the final estimators of what is true, relying on our uniquely human ability of reason, of logos, to form our judgments. We are supposed to engage in conversations with each other, to test ourselves and our beliefs, to ask questions and to participate in dialectic which has as its only possibility the approach of Truth, not its ultimate realization. We are supposed to take the results of our discussions and our thinking to the polls.
As a people we have abdicated our responsibility. We have turned our governance over to people who will parse the meaning of the verb "to be" and who will "smooth over differences" among themselves by limiting discussion and debate among the citizenry, and to professional rhetoricians who will imbue the spectacle of an out-of-office triple-amputee denied entry at the gates of a desert ranch with moral significance.
We are faced with an enemy that thinks nothing of blowing itself up against the armored flanks of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the sides of our tallest buildings, or the iron dome of the Capitol. We live in a world where the technology to kill a million people comes in a package that will fit in a panel van.
And we argue about the validity of three medals awarded in a war that ended 35 years ago. We fume about the connections of a patrician's son that allowed him to avoid travelling to that same godforsaken jungle in Southeast Asia. Our public discourse is dominated by the clever editing of a visual sophist and the machinations of a lawyer from Texas.
We are rotting.
August 27, 2004
Once you wake up naked in the monkey cage next to an empty bottle of gin and a passed-out primate, it's all over.
Isn't it?
I mean, really. What was I thinking?
August 28, 2004
It's Occult Saturday!
Every Saturday I shall present an excerpt from an occult work, because Saturdays are dull days on the Net and because I have a vast occult library which rivals that of Jimmy Page. In fact, that strung-out has-been still has my copy of Reuchlin's De arte Cabalistica libri tres Leoni X dicati. Bastard!
At any rate: today, we have Mr. Francis Barret, from 1803's The Magus, or Celestial Intelligencer:
THERE are some of the school of theologians, who distribute the evil spirits into nine degrees, as contrary to the nine orders of angels. Therefore, the first of these, which are called false gods, who, usurping the name of God, would be worshipped for gods, and require sacrifices and adorations; as that devil who said to Christ, "If thou wilt fall down and worship me, I will give you all these things," shewing him all the kingdoms of the world; and the prince of these is he who said, I will ascend above the height of the clouds, and will be like the Most High, who is called Beelzebub, that is, an old god. In the second place, follow the spirit of lies, of which sort was he who went forth, and was a lying spirit in the mouth of the prophet of Ahab; and the prince of these is the serpent Pytho, from whence Apollo is called Pythius, and that woman a Pythoness, or witch, in Samuel, and the other in the gospel, who had Pytho in her belly. Therefore, these kinds of devils join themselves to the oracles, and delude men by divinations and predictions, so that they may be deceived.
August 29, 2004
It's Holy Sunday! For reasons why, see yesterday's Occult Saturday! blurb, only replace "occult work" with "Abrahamic work," "Saturdays" with "Sundays," "vast occult library" with "vast library of holy tomes," "Jimmy Page" with "the Pope," "strung-out has-been" with "mitre-wearing octogenarian," and "Reuchlin's De arte Cabalistica libri tres Leoni X dicati" with "Aquinas' Super quarto libro Sententiarum." Leave the "Bastard!".
Today, we've got a bit from Reverend C.H. Spurgeon's sermon, "Negotiations for Peace," delivered at Cambridge in 1870.
May I not urge [...] that it is not commendable to be at enmity with any of the wise and good. It is best to be at peace with all men, but it is incumbent upon us to be in friendship with holy men. I should deeply regret to have anyone for my enemy, but if he were a godly person I should consider it a calamity. If the angels of heaven were opposed to us it would have an ill look, those holy beings who would not needlessly take umbrage; but when it comes to opposition to the infinitely good, just and holy God, who in his right mind can do other than bewail it, and desire to see it ended by a glorious peace? Strife against evil, injustice, and tyranny is honorable, but to contend with uprightness, goodness, and holiness is deplorable. No possible benefit can arise from a conflict in which we are on the wrong side. If God be for us, none can successfully fight against us, but to have God opposed to us is in itself the chief of evils. My hearer, "Acquaint thyself with God and be at peace, for thereby good shall come unto thee."
August 30, 2004
 There will be no--I repeat, NO--coverage of the RNC monkeyhorde here.
Why?
Because I'm not there. I'm far, far away. I won't be on the train. I won't be on the ferry. I won't be downtown. I won't be in my office building. I won't be getting salad bar from Zeytuna or evil-lovely crispy-fat General Tso's from Miscellaneous Chinese Place #76. I won't be commenting on the squad of black-clothed anarchist jackasses or the bell-ringing flakes or the panty-clad solipsists or the speechifyin' Suit Men and their handlers.
There will be none of that.
This week I will be indulging myself in whatever I damn well feel like indulging myself in, preferably in big tub-sized quantities, maybe with some chocolate sauce. And an almond.
Unless, of course, something flagrantly interesting happens.
But don't hold your breath.
'Cause, you know, you'd eventually pass out and maybe die, and there's no way I'm taking the Big Rap for that, let me tell you.
Buncha jerks. You fall over and die on your own time.
Ya hear?
Alright then.
August 31, 2004
 Did you come here looking for something about the protests? Or even the convention itself? Maybe some Funny about the difference between Ron Reagan's insipid commentary and some dried algae on a rock? Yeah? Didja? Huh? Yeah?!
Too bad. I got nothin'.
I willfully got nothin'.
You heard me.
I remain far away from New York in body, soul, and mind, and I like it that way. I like it so much I'm going to slather it with mayo, slap it 'twixt two slices of hearty wheat, and have myself an it sandwich.
No, you can't have any.
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