revision99

Just a few quick words for my friends in the midwest:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Today in Southern California was the first day in a couple of weeks that the temperature was normal, sort of. In my town it hit 81 degrees, and now, late at night, it’s only 66, truly a California balmy night after a mostly triple-digit July.

So eat your hearts out Bismarck, Iowa City, Champaign, Chicago, Minneapolis, Cleveland and the rest of you. You know who you are. I’ve heard the worldwide heat wave has come to your town now. If you need to lose weight, just mow the lawn. That should be good for a ten or fifteen pound reduction.

Oh, and you poor people - better stay under the bridge if you want to maintain that alabaster skin. Also, it’s cooler there.

If you live in the Northeast (according to my weather girl on KCAL 9), get ready: you’re next.

I pretty much can’t stand to hear any more about the Israeli-Hezbollah brouhaha.

I think the thing to do now is to encourage them to fight it out to the finish, but make ‘em use only weapons they built themselves. No F-16’s, no katyusha rockets, no M-16’s or Kalashnikov rifles, and definitely no cluster bombs. That would leave just Uzi’s and car bombs, so the combatants would have to walk or drive right up to each other. My hope is that at close proximity they’d recognize their common humanity, lay down their arms and go to Starbucks for lattes (decaf for the Muslims, of course).

What is wrong with those people having a war in the desert, ten days into a worldwide heat wave? Isn’t it bad enough just living in the desert? And hey - worldwide heat wave? Didn’t we just have one of those a couple of years ago? Killed all those elderly French people? I bet they’ve got air conditioners over there this year (French readers, please let me know. So I won’t worry.). Too bad the cows in Fresno don’t have AC in the barn.

Locally, due to the worldwide heat wave, I nearly had an underpants crisis. Shocking, I know, but it’s a dangerous world, and I live very near the edge of it. It’s been so f*cking hot in my town for the past two weeks that I’ve had a few multiple shower days. I’d get all sweaty reading blogs or washing the car, then I’d cool off by taking a nice refreshing shower. After that, who wants to put on the sweat-drenched previously-worn boxer briefs, even if I’d only been wearing them for twenty minutes? Not me, let me tell you, so I’d have to get a fresh pair out of the drawer cuz there’s no way I’m going without, damn the consequences.

Boxer briefs are the perfect undergarment for me. I can’t make up my mind about anything: Hunter or vegan? Musician or wage slave? Mozart or Beethoven? PC or Mac? Boxers or briefs? I don’t know how long the boxer brief has been around, but I made the switch this year. Committed fully to them. Hybrid underpants. Snug like briefs, long like boxers. Sure, they look ridiculous, but no more than like bicycle pants, and those are worn right out on the street. The important thing is I didn’t have to decide which way to go. Boxer briefs. The best - and worst - of both worlds.

And under ordinary weather conditions I have enough boxer briefs to get me from laundry day to laundry day. One a day is usually enough, since I almost never have those embarrassing “accidents” any more. But what with the frequent bathing (because of the worldwide heat wave) it was touch and go near the end of the current laundry cycle and it looked for a while like I might have to go back to those shiny acrylic bikinis I got during the Reagan administration. I don’t mind saying I was down to one shower a day there for the last few days.

But you’ll be happy to know that I made it, and all is well now. I had to remain perfectly motionless for the past 48 hours, but I again have a drawer full of fresh, fluffy folded underpants, so when you see me, you will know that I am modestly but stylishly underclothed.

Speaking of underclothed, here’s a story about the latest way to beat the worldwide heat wave: Tubing on the river, with strippers!  I especially like the city councilman who is worried because, he says, they “…are trained to take off their clothes.”  Hooah.

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*Yes, I am f*cking censoring myself, bcause it turns out that words may have powers of their own, and you can’t be too careful.

The U.S. is dodging its responsibility to work for peace in the world.

In spite of the Bush administration’s dimwitted foreign policy over the past six years, the United States remains the only country with the right combination of moral authority and actual muscle to talk some sense into the various factions that threaten the security of the world. Maybe it’s just my hippie penchant for trying to get along, but it seems to me that with those attributes comes the reponsibility not to look the other way.

It’s a very small world these days, and everybody’s got rockets and bombs and people who don’t mind dying for the cause, and hey - we’ve seen what a bunch of fanatic amateur pilots can do with a jetliner, so maybe it’s in our best interest to at least ask for restraint when a couple of hotheaded youngsters start going at it. We could get smacked in the back of the head while we are looking the other way.

For a week now, Israel has been bombing Lebanon, and Hizbollah has been shooting rockets into Israel. 300 people are dead, ninety percent of them civilians, the Lebanese infrastructure is being destroyed and the largest emergency evacuation since Dunkirk is under way, and there is no American diplomat over there knocking on the door saying “Hey! What are you guys doing?”

In fact, our President, the Compassionate Decider, was heard to say today “Sometimes it requires tragic situations to help bring clarity in the international community.” This nincompoop, this international laughingstock, this wannabe cowboy has actually mistaken himself for a wise elder statesman, and he is dispensing his wisdom to the world, while real leaders everywhere plead desperately for calm.

I wonder how tragic he wants it to get. In his soon-to-be-famous Mouthful-of-Dinner-Roll speech the other day, he told the Prime Minister of Great Britain (”Blair”) “…I think Condi’s going over there soon.” Today she said she’s not going until there is a chance of a long-term solution. Or when pigs fly, whichever occurs first. Maybe there’s a number they are considering, of deaths and dismemberments. Maybe there’s a dollar figure for rebuilding Lebanon, and they don’t want to act until that magic number is achieved.

Bush and Rice need to speak quickly and forcefully, to let the factions know this is unacceptable behavior, and the United States is willing to help broker a cease-fire. Tell the victims’ family members that we’re waiting for things to get real tragic, so we can have clarity. There is no time in the future that will be better than right now to start trying to heal the current mess in the middle east.

TODAY’S BONUS LINK: President Bush gropes German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Hey, chicks love this stuff, right?

I saw a short clip of Bill Clinton on The Today Show this morning.

Remember when we had a real President? I looked on the NBC site, and I couldn’t find the exact video, so I’m paraphrasing here, but this is pretty accurate. He was talking about the current conflict on the Israel-Lebanon border:

I am not one of those who thinks we should not be engaged in the Middle East because “they can’t make a deal” and we don’t want to be associated with failure. I just don’t define it that way. As far as I’m concerned, the more involved we are there, the fewer people die.

Imagine that. Despite the crippling and humiliating efforts of the Republican Party which probably doomed Clinton’s efforts as President to bring about an agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians, he is still more interested in diplomacy and saving lives than in looking good (even if he does wear the red-and-white checkered cowboy shirt better than President Howdy Doody).

In the mean time, here is how our current simpleminded forceful and direct president assesses the situation, speaking through a mouthful of buttered roll:

See, the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over.

As if I needed more evidence that the world has gone upside down.

UPDATE: Sky News has the Bush video here.

This is not really writing.

It’s only typing. Actual writing does not seem to be a possibility for me lately. I’m distracted by everything. Maybe there is too much information about the world available to me, but I am frazzled thinking about all the things that seem to be going wrong.

Like that multi-train bomb attack in Mumbai. When did it stop being Bombay, anyway? And when did it become accepted procedure to make your political point by indiscriminately killing and maiming unarmed civilians who don’t even know what you want and are not involved in preventing you from getting it? I can’t face the story. Are the bombers proud of themselves? What kind of asshole would be high-fiving back at the secret headquarters over such a brutal and outright chickenshit act? I can’t hear this news. My mind freezes when I think about it, and I can’t even recall if I’ve heard what it is that the bombers say they want, or what they are protesting, or if they’ve spoken up at all.

And what about the Supreme Court saying that the U.S. government has to treat all prisoners humanely, according to the Geneva Convention? What the walking fuck is that all about? I’ve been a loser in my political hopes and dreams for so long that I can’t believe my side - the good guys - seem to have come out on top of this one. It’s only a tiny skirmish, sure, but it seems to be for real: The Supreme Court! Still, I am mistrustful. Maybe it’s some kind of a trick, something Karl Rove dreamed up in cahoots with Chief Justice Roberts over cognac and cigars in the back room of an exclusive Virginia bistro, alone in the dark with the curtains drawn, under high security. Something that can be used as an OctoberSurprise to turn the midterm election around and increase the Republican majority in Congress. I am circling this story like a coyote in a hungry, suspicious pack, not sure if the wounded prey might still be strong enough to defend itself, or if it’s time to eat. Is this the beginning of the fall of the neocon takeover, or just a kooky anomaly? I shouldn’t be thinking this way, but I am muddled.

And I don’t care about the three Israeli soldiers who were kidnapped, any more than I give a shit about whether or not Israel is “overreacting” in it’s response. I feel only despair when I see this new violence taking place, and it doesn’t matter who is bombing whom. It just makes me think that there will never be an end to this crap, no matter how we pray, no matter how many world leaders act like they hate war. This particular conflagration is based, somewhere way back in time, on religious animosity, as so many wars are. You can talk about your political alliances and why Iran or Syria might be getting somethng out of this, or why doesn’t the Lebanese government rein in Hizbollah, or can’t the UN do something, but the bottom line seems to be that Muslims hate Jews. Maybe Jews hate Muslims, too. I know that’s not politically correct to speculate about, so fucking picket my house if you want to. I’ll bet Jews are capable of stupid, blind, murderous hatred just like the rest of us. My brain won’t track this story, either. Wait: Are we in Northern Ireland? Vietnam? Indonesia? Chad? Iraq? Somalia? If it’s Sunday there must be mindless bloodshed somewhere.

My job, and thus my life, has turned to shit. I can’t ignore it any more, which is something I used to be able to do. Really, of all the things I can’t write about, I probably could write best about this subject, but I am too identifiable on this blog, and the things I would say about my company would be offensive to my superiors and coworkers alike, and I would either get beaten up or fired, probably both. So I’ll have to find a different venue for that particular rant, and probably my supportive friends will never see it.

So I have gone in with another guy (my brother) and bought a PA system, and I am getting together on Saturday afternoons with some other players in my living room and I am taking out my frustrations on my guitar. So far we have jammed on the three hottest Saturdays of the year, and my house is not air conditioned. But it’s the only therapy I know how to do on myself.

I hope it works.

Another week and I still don’t feel like writing.

It’s been hot in Southern California. Not like that time in Yuma, when it didn’t drop below 90 degrees 24 hours a day for the whole five weeks I was there. You’d wake up at 10 AM and it would already be pushing a hundred. You could get sunburned in ten minutes while submerged in the motel pool. Not me, of course. I don’t get sunburned, thanks to my eastern European swarthiness. Fleas don’t bite me, either, maybe for the same reason. The agent said if I did good in Yuma in July, she’d see about getting me some gigs in Alaska for the winter. I did pretty good there.

I met Debbie there that summer. Just a little thing in tight jeans and a big cowboy hat, but she drove a three-quarter ton Dodge pickup. If you’re driving a pickup just for show you get a one-ton. If you want a work truck, something to haul fertilizer or tile or two-by-fours, a half-ton will do. My first day off, Debbie picked me up at ten in the morning by driving her truck into the gravel turn-around at the motel and honking for me, several times. I was already sweating when I got out to the truck and read her bumper sticker: WHEN IN DOUBT, WHUP IT OUT. She handed me a longneck as we spun out of the driveway, throwing gravel through the fence and into the pool.

I felt so cheap.

It hasn’t been that hot here, but I think it might have hit 90 degrees in Long Beach today. I took a vacation day, so I could be home instead of in my air-conditioned office. I saw the national holiday coming up on the calendar, and the weekend just ahead of it, and that pesky Monday was the only thing standing in the way of a four-day weekend for me, so I zapped it with a Vacation Request Form. We’ve got a new Head Guy where I work, and I think mine was the first VRF he’d seen. He was recruited from outside HugeCorp, so he doesn’t know about all the stupid rules and forms we have. He gave me the standard half-joking bullshit about why do you want a day off, don’t you like it here, blah, blah, blah, but I didn’t play, and he was faced with signing it on the spot or appearing to be indecisive in front of a lesser human being (me), so he signed. I should have given myself a raise while I was at it.

So my third consecutive day of freedom, I sat alone in my hot house, and got nothing done. I seem to be paralyzed. Thoughts parade through my brain, and it’s an interesting show, but I don’t seem to care enough to grab one of them and wrestle it to the ground. I felt fatigued, though I haven’t done much lately. I felt uninspired, though the ideas are almost tangibly floating around in the room. I felt helpless, though my hands are not bound.

I feel frustrated, and vaguely disgusted. If I get a handle on this (see title of post), I’ll write it here. In the mean time, thanks to you Precious Few who have continued to comment, though I have become sporadic, and more boring than ever. My heart beats sporadically for you.