Since I'm in a quoting mode

I love this from Yelladog:

Standing over finished work and musing is a great and honorable passtime in the South, and there are certain protocols that must be followed. Someone has to say "Yep," and the other party has to say "Glad that's done." What follows is situationally dependent. If it's a fresh engine rebuild, someone has to say "Purring like a kitten!" even if the engine is thumping like a disco and belching blue smoke. If it's a freshly painted barn or a rebuilt well house, someone is supposed to say "Damn, looks like new, doesn't it?" Digging up a clothesline pole is kind of unusual, so we were in virgin territory. Andy broke with protocol and said "You're never going to bust that ball of concrete."

Well, never say never to a redneck. Especially, never say never to a redneck with a sledgehammer.

Patrick writes so well--he is a regular renaissance redneck, I tell you. In fact, we "met" over this post-election post that someone forwarded me in email and I googled to track down. Almost a year later and still a brilliant post.

Utter submission

From this month's Los Angeles magazine:

The brilliant ad line "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" understands that the vast majority of people who come to Vegas won't really have wild affairs or run off with showgirls or indulge in anything more than the garden-variety debauchery of a few too many White Russians at the roulette wheel. The allure of "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" isn’t what happens in Vegas but the unfulfilled possibility of what might have happened the last time and what might happen the next, even as nothing is likely to ever happen. Vegas is a Sodom of the mind, the City of the Free Pass that you never use, and that it's not free at all is beside the point, because the other thing that Vegas shares with LA is the utter submission of reason to hope. In fact, your chance of winning an Academy Award outdistances any chance of ever winning "big" in Vegas. Every intelligent person understands this and it doesn't matter; once again unfulfilled possibility overpowers comprehension.

Taking my tongue back from the cat

I am still alive out here. And still a non-smoker (day 12 thank you very much). The combination of being half crazy from desire to smoke and a mongo project at work have me silent, but tonight I hope to crawl out from under the writing rock.

Writing without smoking has been humbling at best. It is getting better, but thank heavens this is not the final draft, is what I'm saying.

In other news, I am very excited to have bought Gang of Four tickets today. Thank you Yelladog and Eponymous for the heads-up. Ep has pix from the Athens show.

Just now on the phone

Me: I ate an entire bag of red vines yesterday.

Andrea: You mean the ones you said weren't very satisfying.

Me: Yeah.

Andrea: snicker

Me: If they'd been satisfying I wouldn't have had to eat the whole bag.

I really don't understand men

It's official. I really don't get them--this sudden realization brought on by the announcement of this year's Ig Nobel winner: Gregg Miller, the creator of Neuticals, testical implants for dogs who've gone under the knife.

I know it's tiresome....

...and for that I apologize. I do get that there are about a zillion more important things to be talking about (DeLay, Miers, the NY subway...) than my addiction to the demon weed. But hey. It's day seven.

I am actually in my office here at work--rather than working from home as I have been most of the week. I have a big writing project that I am behind on, but plugging away at. X Unclogged is playing, I am chewing away on my polar ice gum, thinking fondly about the past when I used to be a smart person.

Yeah. I think I'm leaving here soon to go home and work from there some more. That way when I really start to lose my shit I can blast the music and dance through my apartment.

This link from Conor pretty well captures how I am feeling today.

If I were a farmer...

...waking up at four a.m. would make sense. It was like this actually. "Yikes, what time is it? I'm wide awake!!!....look at clock...Oh, it's four a.m. Go back to bed, Travis......Yikes, what time is it? I'm wide awake....Oh, it's four o three...." Repeat until 4:24 at which point you surrender and get out of bed.

I think we should get RJ Reynolds to run for president. Because surely with that level of evil genius in the White House we can both win the war on terror and regain our rightful place as world dominating superpower.

Soothing the savage beast

So I am working from home on a big writing project. Chewing tea tree toothpicks until they transform into a wood pulp substance and listening to Sigur-Rós' Takk, which I just bought yesterday on Eponymous' recommendation. It's a fantastic CD. At the risk of being misunderstood as someone who listens to way too much music described as "ethereal" (first Dead Can Dance, now this) I really cannot recommend it enough. Thank heavens I don't have a roommate because I'm just going to listen to this over and over today while I write and turn tea tree toothpicks into wood pulp.

(And I'll confess that no matter how many times I play this, I will remain completely clueless as to the different titles of their songs as I do whenever I like a band like this--witness my relationship to the Cocteau Twins, for example and their song titles are in English not Icelandic.)

You can hear sound clips on Amazon, of course; though you really should buy from someone with better labor practices.

So far I haven't killed anyone

Hell, I haven't even punched anyone in the face, and I'd say that's damn good.

So this morning they kept me waiting an hour for the fasting blood test. Have I mentioned that patience is the personal quality most severely depleted by not smoking? Well, so it seems for me. And so I'm waiting there an hour. Hungry. Daytime TV is on--The View, which is apparently four women spouting off about things they don't know much about ("Well, if I had to nominate a supreme court justice, I'd nominate someone I know who shares my views"). Bad enough, right? Well then on comes Air Supply to do a medley of their "greatest hits." That was the point I realized god was mocking me and it was going to be alright.

Once again

Conor recommends the finest:
OK Go's A Million Ways video. He's calling it "possibly the best heavily-choreographed-bad-dancing-in-the-back-garden music video ever" and I have to concur.

Happy New Year

Mazel Tov everyone. So far day four is beginning fabulously. DeLay has been indicted on more charges. Two of my best friends called me already to wish me a happy anniversary. My in box is filled with well wishes and I'm on my way to get a fasting blood test taken (which I've been putting off for a week).

More soon. Thank you to all for the non-smoking encouragement. Believe me it helps and I need it. I told Andrea I felt like I was in Lamaze classes. I'd get this wave of compulsion and just need to breathe--it does feel like the addiction equivalent of labor. She says I'm going to give birth to a camel.

I know I should say something about Miers

But I'm not going to. What I'm going to say is simply day three of not smoking is drawing to a close. It was, in fact, harder than day one or two. I'm not sure I can really stand it if day four gets any harder. I don't think I will smoke but I do think my head may explode like in Scanners. I don't think I can become much more of a misanthrope without representing an immediate threat to myself or others.

In other news, if nothing extraordinary happens in the next hour and half, tomorrow will mark twenty years since I've used drugs, including alcohol. I'm going to have to start telling people I got clean at eight to be sure. If I have time and enough functioning brain cells I may post something a little more about this tomorrow. For now, I'm going to bed.

Just for today

So I didn't smoke a cigarette today.

That's all I really wanted to say--that for the first time in oh, maybe 18 years, I went a whole day without smoking.

That and I really feel like chewing my arm off.

I'm thinking if I did it today, I can probably do it tomorrow.

Brilliant

This is really funny.

I love my city

The front page of today's LA Times:

If you've gotta have a birth defect...

I think I'm with this kid--twelve fingers might not be so bad. Frankly anything that could help me type faster at this point would be welcome.

Wow

Bill Bennett Wednesday on Morning in America:

But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.

You know, my first reaction is just "wow." And I was going to leave it simply at that. But then I thought, in fairness to Bennett, I should explain that he claims he was merely giving an example of a bad argument for abortion and being quoted out of context, as I have above, makes it seem as though he supports such a "morally reprehensible" idea.

And so, in the interests of balanced reporting, I'd like to just make it clear that Bill Bennett is not a racist. From his own lips on yesterday's Hannity and Colmes:

I'll not take instruction from Teddy Kennedy. A young woman likely drowned because of his negligence. I'll take no moral instruction with him. That's much worse than legal gambling what Teddy Kennedy did....

When I was drug czar, you bet, we were working on the issue of black crime, Alan and Sean, because there was a lot of crime in the black community.... We got the bad guys. And drug use went down. And we raised the price and lowered the purity of cocaine.... [W]hen we went into the inner city black community, the people said to me, Mr. Czar, or Czar, or Mr. Bennett, you get those people off the street and protect us. And we did our best to do it.

. . .

my wife's program, best friends, has kept more young women from having abortions...than the entire black caucus. She has done more for inner city black girls than the entire black caucus. So I will not bow my head to any of these people. I will not give up the ground of compassion and sympathy.

. . .

All day I've been reading reports and statements by people about me, Sean, and it's interesting, some use the whole quote and are fair, some don't. And that tells you something. But the problem, I think, on the liberal side, the democratic side is they attitudinize

Far be it for me to attitudinize, Bill. For a minute there I thought you might be racist but that was before I read that your wife has done more for urban black girls than the whole black caucus. I stand corrected.

(Our younger readers may not recognize Bennett as Reagan's Ed Secretary and Bush Sr.'s Director of Drug Control Policy--aka Drug Czar.)

A new friend

So I had a new commenter opine about my tone below, and so I took a look at his page (which has an ad from Fox News Gear btw), and what do I see, but this. Gosh that sort of thing so totally makes my day. I can't tell you.

Still burning

The view from my balcony

More roosting chickens

It seems like harvest time for the crop of greed and barbarism the Repubs have been sowing. Frist, DeLay, the fabulous showing the administration gave during Katrina and now today's ruling that more Abu Ghraib photos and videos must be released (link via AMERICAblog):

[R]eporter Seymour Hersh, who helped uncover the scandal, said in a speech before an ACLU convention: "Some of the worse that happened that you don't know about, ok? Videos, there are women there. Some of you may have read they were passing letters, communications out to their men.... The women were passing messages saying 'Please come and kill me, because of what's happened.'

"Basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys/children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. The worst about all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror it's going to come out."

They ought to be in terror. Do I dare to hope that this repulsive administration is finally being brought down and that my country will finally wake up to the atrocities being conducted in the name of liberty?