The Blog

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.

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.

Stalkers: This is not me.

The guy in the second paragraph. Leave him alone. He’s not guilty. I’ve never even been to Pittsburgh. Also, my oath to the Vikings would preclude me operating on this particular patient. Nothing personal, you understand. Just benign neglect.

Because sometimes, you just need to laugh.

I don’t remember where I first heard this joke. I think my brother told it to me. It was long and convoluted, and when I started telling it, it kept getting longer and convoluteder. I think this was partly because the setup has to be just right for the punchline to work, and partly because I knew I was going to crack up before I got to the end and be unable to utter the final words, so I was always playing for more time, trying to choke back the guffaws. In fact, if you’re like me, when you repeat this, you will probably find yourself falling apart on the next-to-last line of the joke, the one that sets up the payoff, because it’s funny in itself, and because you will not be able to not think of the next line.

It comes off way better when you hear it rather than when you read it – it’s that kind of a joke – so, because I spare no effort for you, the Precious Few who read this blog, I have a video presentation, for your chuckling pleasure. The guys in the video get right to the point because, unlike me, they’re joke-telling professionals.
Now without further ado, I give you…