Scaping Goats and Clearing Brush since 1999
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04/27/06
The strange cyclical world of Republicans moves on. Tony Snow, a former
speech writer for Bush the First turned conservative FOX News radio
show host has now re-entered the Bush reign as the press secretary for
Bush the Second. This odd Republican world always wants it both ways:
they want their "political" wing of the party and they want
their "media" wing of the party and they want the public to
think that these wings do not meet on the elephant's back. Rush Limbaugh,
Ann Coulter and Michael Savage.... why they don't represent the heart
of the Republican party now do they? Now, Tony Snow is more conservative
in the way he presents his conservatism, than Limbaugh and company,
but his appointment to the position of press secretary removes the funny
mirror between the raving right-wing lunatics of the air waves and the
raving right-wing politicians. The curtain is pulled aside; the political
wing of the Republican party feeds their media wing their talking points.
When Michael Savage calls a rape victim a "drunken slut stripping
whore," and a "dirty, verminous black stripper" because
she would dare attempt to take legal action against a bunch of privileged
upper class jocks (dirty verminous white rapists?) he is speaking for
the Republican party. How can we deny it? The ability to call people
like Savage, "fringe elements who don't speak for the GOP"
is becoming logically specious. Especially when the Bush administration
has been caught paying conservative commentator Armstrong Williams $240,000
to promote No Child Left Behind. Especially when they grant a journalist
with no journalistic background and an assumed name daily access to
the white house, access to four Bush press conferences and regular access
to press briefings so he could ask planted questions such as "How
does a gay male escort using a pseudonym get to visit the White House
daily and rub elbows with a bunch of conservative Christians who think
homosexuality and prostitution (and maybe even pseudonyms) are against
GOD?"
Tony Snow simply locks the Bush admin's trifecta in the Armstrong,
Gannon, Snow horse race. Bush gave Tony Snow another trifecta, one of
praise, saying, "[Tony Snow's] a man of courage. He's a man of
integrity. He loves his family." I'd like a list. What makes him
courageous? Screaming into a microphone from a sound proofed booth?
What gives him integrity? Screaming lies into a microphone? And the
last one, is that even praise? "He loves his family." Well
shit in my hat, how many people don't love their families? Fuck, man,
really? Bush must know an awful lot of fuckers who despise their family's
guts for him to think this is a quality worthy of praise in a man. How
about ice cream? Does Tony Snow like eating ice cream? "He's a
man of courage. He's a man of integrity. He loves his ice cream, and
long moonlit walks on the beach. He likes his men hairy and isn't afraid
to cry." Snow will fit right in with the reign of Bush the 2nd.
If I may give him my own bit of praise, "He's ignorant of science.
He hates political opposition to the king. He loves the king."
04/24/06
The shed is nearly complete. You may not have known it, but I'm building a shed. It's not so much that I'm building a shed actually, as assisting in the building of a shed. The life of an assistant shed builder isn't as glamorous as you might think. The tasks are grueling: "Hand me a nail," I'm told and I use my hand as a vessel of nail-delivery. Today, we stucco. Vast wheelbarrows of gurgling sludgy mud to be thrown up against the lathing and smoothed out and flattened over the shed's walls. I'll be the shovel-man or the shoveller or for brevity, the shuv-luh! What is this shed being built for? I need a place to hide the bodies of various public figures as they dissolve in deep pits of lye. The sound of the traffic will cover their screams and cries for help as I torture them for information I clearly know they do not have. "Give me the location of the secret rebel base, and if you say Dantooine one more fucking time..." or something like that.
This isn't a picture of anything in particular. It's just something I
took a picture of at the construction site that's been in front of my
house for the past year now: digging trenches in the street, raising pipes,
lowering giant concrete shells, pumping out cess, filling the holes back
in, jackhammering, laying down blacktop, steamrolling and busting it up
again. There's no clear plan of attack. Things have been haphazard and
spotty. This is sore spot, an open sore of the American economy. The government
says, "Here's some money, but if you don't spend it all, then we'll
give you much less money the next time." The recipients of that money
say, "Spend it all! Dig holes and fill the holes back in, and then
dig out the dirt once more!" In the meantime, I suppose it has been
easier to cross the street as long as you can leap the open trench and
ignore the scent of sewage wafting on the sea breeze.33% and falling and still the media is ignoring all the shortfalls and shortcomings and gross incompetence of an administration that is seeking to widen the gap between rich and poor to a point of irreversibility without massive bloodshed. What's my problem? $3.20 per gallon of gas is my fucking problem. Rent increases of 3% a year and a government that views unions as some kind of commie conspiracy. One of the strongest unions around is the LAUSD and all they can muster is a 3% "cost of living" pay raise. Great, our cost of living is keeping pace with rent control, but in no way keeping even a remote bead on runaway home ownership costs. But this is America! Home ownership is yesterday's American dream. Two cars in every garage and two chickens in every pot... fuck that; the dream is a garage (or at least a landlord that isn't going to attempt to finagle the city into letting him convert the garage into yet another rental unit on this single lot that already contains TWO small houses), and the dream is a dead fucking chicken; not a rooster in the backyard, its repeated 5 AM crowing, blasting right through the insulation-free walls into the bedroom. I want to kill that chicken. I want that landlord gravely wounded and Exxon-mobil's former CEO, Lee Raymond's, head on a pike and marched down Main Street at the front of a parade of illegal immigrants. I'd also like it if the illegal immigrants would that Iranian Shiite thing where they cut their foreheads with razor blades in memory of the martyrs. Only the illegal immigrants can slice at themselves with the crisp edges of U.S. dollars and rake thorny vines across their foreheads. Shit!
04/19/06
It’s over. We didn’t make it. Humanity is dead. The world has been pushed too hard, overpopulated, driven over the edge. We’re through, failed, fucked up. Higher intelligence is an evolutionary dead end. I wish it wasn’t, but the evidence is getting louder and clearer day by day. I prophesize doom with the force of an axe through a chicken neck. All we’re doing is running around mad, unaware we’re already dead. We can set up our scientific experiments; we can project when the end will come; we can announce dates that past which there is no turning back for mankind, but the truth is, we passed it long ago when the first crop was domesticated, when steel was born and a plow forged. The earth was tilled and animals caged in; it was as over then as it is now, and in the face of our extinction ten-thousand years is as meaningless as yesterday to a mayfly.
Oh, for shit! Why did I watch that Nova special on Global Dimming? And why did I follow that sunshine-of-my-love program up with the Secretary of Health and Human Services' Emergency Preparedness Seminar on Global Pandemic airing on C-SPAN2?
To top it
all off my neighbors, the ones in the back, have a god damned rooster
(just to remind me of the threat, I guess) that woke me up at 5:59 in
the terrible A.M. with it's incessant crowing. It is now 11:20 in the
A.M. and it's still crowing. That red-assed bastard won't shut the hell
up! I think it thinks one of the tools being used by the construction
crew working in front of my house sounds like another rooster, and every
time it hears the whine of this particular machine, it's attempting to
respond to it. It's a one-sided dominance game, but I just changed the
rules on the bastard. I recorded his own call and played it back for him.
He's entered into a lengthy dialogue with himself now. I've altered the
pitch both higher and lower (higher seemed to spook the brute), altered
the tempo, speed, bass levels and even reversed the cock-a-doodle-do into
od-eldood-a-kcoc, which drove him further away from my window. Ha! He's
doing nothing now, but staring at my window, awaiting a reply to his most
recent threats. Maybe the sound of my fingers at the keyboard sounds like
his enemy pecking and scratching away at the inside of the wall attempting
to get out and kick his big red behind from here to the garage. Will this sad domesticated descendant of Asia's Red Jungle Fowl really wipe out a goodly chunk of humanity? He seems rather non-threatening, but when you a throw a few million of these sons of bitches all together, they're a viral fuckfestering cauldron of gene-swapping disease. It's only a matter of what comes quicker, a devastating strain of avian flu that wipes out 80% of all humans or a sudden spike in global temperatures that wipes out all humans and chickens and trees and... Honestly, if a global pandemic came and tossed off 5 to 6 billion people, humanity might make it another few thousand years, but if it doesn't, from what I gathered about global dimming, we're all literally toast in less than a hundred. It's all a matter perspective. Do you want total extinction for man or a close call? I'll take the close call, the close call of the wild... cock-a-doodle-do.
04/12/06
The drink came and got me. Somehow, several beers and a half dozen cups full of jungle juice wound up in my blood stream. I do not yet know how this tragic event came to be, but it is being investigated. So far, I've concluded that the drunkeness had to do with sunshine, meat on a grill and a loose sense of resolve to stay sober, but I will have you know I'm only 34 and I'd like to chalk it up to youthful indiscretion, if I may, and I believe I may. The president pleads "youthful indiscretion" for drinking and driving and lines of cocaine at the age of 35; so you tell me who's the younger and the more indiscrete: Him or me? Well, I am the younger, but when it comes to indiscrete that bastard takes the drunken cake.
So I got drunk (twice) when the plan was to go a month without any drink. I really don't blame myself for breaking off with the plan. It's society's fault or the advertising industry or at the very least, God. God is who AA blames getting drunk on, and if they do then I can too. Atheist or not. God!
04/08/06
I took a test. I've always been pretty good at tests. Testing has been no problem. The test I took is on Alcoholism. Specifically, a self-test to check out the alcoholic in me! I answered everything truthfully. Like I said, I'm a good test taker, and if I wanted I could have scored as a raging off the chart drunkard or as the most dedicated proponent for the reinstatement of the 18th amendment, but I wanted honesty. I took several tests. On some I ranked high on the scale, well past the marker that divides social drinkers from alcoholics, and on others I fell slightly below that fine line. In the end, I found one that seemed to, at least, keep me in play within the ballpark.
– The Michigan Alcoholism Screening Test (MAST) is one of the most widely used alcoholism tests. It is a 25-item questionnaire designed to provide a rapid and effective screening for lifetime alcohol-related problems and alcoholism.
– 4-9 points: High risk for problem drinking. Addiction to alcohol is likely. Contact your doctor for help.
I had a nine so that puts me down for a fat resounding "NO!" when it comes to the question of alcoholism! I don't have to go through with this idiotic month of teetotaling; I'm cured. I may be a high risk for problem drinking, but what is a "high risk" really? What does that mean? And what's a "problem drinking?" It doesn't sound anywhere close to as bad as a drinking problem. A drinking problem is serious and constant. Problem drinking is intermittent and kooky.
It's like spot bleeding or scattered showers or guerilla attacks. I can handle that. There's no cause for alarm. Why should I put myself on the rack for a month? I want to take the bottles off the rack, pull the corks and let it flow: cool, crisp, clear, refreshing. Here's to good friends! It doesn't get any better than this! I want to be miles away from ordinary! I want to head to the mountains! I want to get fully kreuzened. I want to age my beech wood. I want to live! Oh, please! Let me live!
04/07/06
A month of no-liquor and I'm looking down the barrel of the first weekend. I have this calendar, it's a Simpsons' TV show calendar, and nearly every day has some obscure holiday printed on it. I drank for Nunavut Independence day and Benton, Kentucky's Tater Day and Belgium's Cat Festival and the Spring Equinox; and who can forget the great booze up for Hinckley, Ohio's Buzzard Day? The wall calendar also features celebrity's birthdays: Tex Avery, Charles Darwin, Joe Frazier, Wayne Gretzky, Toshiro Mifune (drink, drink, drink).
I have bottles of booze in the house; in my little liquor cabinet there's rum, scotch, whisky, gin, sake, port, tequila, triple sec...and so on. I have wine bottles on the rack and beers in the refrigerator and vodka in the ice box. The days have gone from cold, rainy and overcast to sunny and warm with oozing custard clouds streaking the sky. O, to drink under that sky.
A friend came over yesterday to use the computer. He sat at it, pecking at the keys, checking emails and asked, "Do you have any beer?"
I said, "Sure, I'll grab you one." I stared at the beers in the fridge, India Pale Ales. The over-riding command was to grab two. One for him and one for me, one for me, one for me, but it was only the second day of the ignoble experiment, which is precisely what would make it so easy to end.
There hasn't been any real time invested in the experiment. If I was halfway through the month, fifteen days without a drop, then I'd be loathe to toss out all that experimental sobriety on a whim and an ale. I closed the refrigerator door with only one beer in hand. I took the bottle opener to it, and popped the cap off the little guy. I opened well over a dozen of these bastards only three days ago, but the sound of the gas escaping and the top popping and the scent of the vapors rising to my nose came like a distant memory. This is so fucking futile. I delivered the beer to the computer.
"Thanks, man," he said.
"You're welcome."
He asked if he could have another after that one was finished and after that he had a third for good measure, and asked, "You want me to get you one?" Of course, of course, fucker, of course!
"No, I'm doing my annual month of not drinking thing," I said, and found it difficult to say. Not the sentiment, just the words. It was hard to think and speaking seemed like a chore. My eyes felt wider than normal and slightly unfocused. I was attentive to the conversation we were having about popular literature and it was a fine little talk; however, I felt hard pressed not to stare at moss growing in the shadows of my house. We moved outside to the picnic table. My guest smokes, and the rule is: no smoking in the house. When you're engaged in conversation with a smoker who has to move to another location because of restrictive smoking zones, it is the non-smoker's duty to move along with the smoker in order to continue conversation. This is always true unless it's cold outside, then I recommend staying warm indoors until the shivering nic-fiend returns from his burden. He sat at the table across from me, looking content and happy in the sunshine, beer in hand, cigarette burning between his fingers, drink and inhale and exhale and drink again.
I had to put the kettle on and have a cup of tea. It wasn't what I wanted, but it worked as a miserable substitute. In fact, I need one of those miserable substitutes now. Maybe a walk will do some good. A walk past the liquor store, a walk past the sushi bar that serves hot sake, a walk past the cafe to Columbo's Supper Club for happy hour. After all, it's Motherhood and Beauty Day in Armenia, it's Jackie Chan's birthday, it's Friday and there should be more to life than tea and staring at moss. Do you ever want to throw your head through the window just for a thrill, just for the sound of breaking glass, just for the blood in your face, just for a release?
04/06/06
The ignoble experiment begins again. Yesterday I went to the DMV and wrote down on my application under height: 6' 2", and under weight I wrote: 200lbs. I have given up. I have left behind my status as a one hundred club man. It's a sick 200 pounds; people use the word spare tire for what happens around the middle aged man's mid-section, but really, it's more of an undercooked donut; it was thrown in the deep fryer for a whole five seconds, removed, and strapped around my waist like a suicide bomber's final sacrament of Allah. I expect airport security to dive from me for cover and yell, "Don't do it, man! You have so much to live for!"
But the ignoble experiment has nothing to do with girth. Once again, beginning April the fifth and ending May the fifth, I will not drink. This is worse than AA. In AA they say, "One day at a time, brother," and they have people that say things to you like, "You're so strong for being here," and "It's wonderful you have the courage to admit your problem," and "I'm here to help you stick with the program," and, most importantly, "Want to go out for a skim milk latte, extra foam?"
I have none of this AA hooey. I take nothing one day at a time. This is a month. A month long act of weak cowardice performed without a program and with a strict loathing of lattes. Coffee, black, no sugar, fuck all else! And since I only smoke when I drink: no smoking too. I look at that vast white grid of squares on the calendar called "April" and I despair. Yesterday was the first day of this foolery and last night I thought, "Does a double scotch, neat, really count as a drink?" The conversation went on at some length. One side argued that it is indeed, by definition, a drink of alcohol, but the other side made some good points; it said, "Read the ingredients on your Cool Mint™ Listerine; if you can put that in your mouth, then, hey, and also, what if you got sick? Would you withhold the sniffling, sneezing, coughing, achy, stuffy head, fever so you can rest medicine™ from yourself?" He was a sly debater. He didn't probe me with the casually common queries, "Why are you doing this?" Well, "Why not do this?" is a far more appropriate question, but, in the end, the side arguing against having the double scotch, neat, won out. It told me that even though my Cool Mint™ Listerine is in fact, 21.6% alcohol, I do not pour it into a crystal tumbler to enjoy in mixed company, and I do not order the sniffling, sneezing, coughing, achy, stuffy head, fever so you can rest medicine™ on the rocks with a sprig of mint at the airport bar. Fuck, that guy had some salient points, and I made day one out of thirty... dry, dry like an Iraqi sandstorm on a god damn Sunday morning during Ramadan. Fuck.
But still, I do get asked, "Why are you doing this? Do you think you're an alcoholic or something?" And to answer their stupid question, I slam half a liter of Reposada Tequila, drop my pants and run out into traffic screaming, "Would an alcoholic do this? Would he? Would an alcoholic do this, fucker? Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha!"
No, I don't think I'm an alcoholic. Maybe a little, on the lighter side, on the "Jesus I hope I can make it a month side," but technically, yes, probably I am, but really, outside of the cuckoo-bird gang who thinks a couple drinks a night with two to three binges a week is alcoholism, I'm not. Oh, I jest. Maybe.
04/03/06
Avian flu... I was thinking about it, the flu, a widespread pandemic killing millions or even billions of humans before it's run its course. I keep a certain quantity of water here on reserve. We get earthquakes and sometimes they shake the shit out of water pipes and the people are left high and dry; it's basic prudence, but I've gone one step beyond and stockpiled a bunch of canned soups, fruits and vegies. I have yet to fill the cupboards with canned tuna and powdered milk, but it is next on my list. Am I stupid enough to duct tape my windows and doors in case of a chemical attack? Maybe. I might be that stupid. The way I see it, if there's a chemical attack, I'll have very little else to do than go shitballs crazy with a couple dozen rolls of duct tape. The men in hazmat suits will spend hours hacking and sawing through the tape before they can retrieve my chemically charred-out corpse. This minor amount of hording (on the terror alert color-coded scale I'm only at hording level blue) has little to do with bird flu, but it does have a lot to do with FEMA and Katrina, and I'm thinking about buying a gun too because when the cops come to my neighborhood after the next natural disaster to loot and kill the poor I'll be shooting back from behind a four foot thick layer of duct tape.
The bird flu seems to have parallels with Katrina: it's a massive disaster that we can see coming and yet nobody is really doing anything about it. The government's best advice is to load the pantry up with tuna and powdered milk. They will hang us all out to dry; telling us to buy potted tuna fish is an admission that they will do nothing, and when this government says they will do nothing it's the only time I know with absolute certainty they're telling the truth. The government already has plans, and that's to let the poor die and protect the rich. The rich will be able to curb the spread of the flu because they have health insurance. Bird flu will sweep through poor neighborhoods in the U.S. like a flock of birds fleeing a wild fire. People without insurance will hold off on seeking medical care giving the virus plenty of oppurtunities to spread to others. I just hope that the infected can get together and organize a march down Rodeo Drive and beyond up into the hills.
There has been some work done to thwart the spread of the flu. Feathers can no longer be imported from China for example. It isn't much of a precaution, but yet it is one, or it would be if corporations behaved in a responcible manner.
I have a friend, I'm not telling who and this friend works for a company that is involved with the importaion of chicken feathers. Let's call my friend Mavin and let's call the company Pillowcorp. Here's what happened: Pillowcorp imported cheap feathers from China. They need thousands of drums of feathers, and Pillowcorp is far from the largest importer of chicken feathers in America, but they do a healthy chicken feather importing business. The embargo on Chinese chicken feathers went into place. Pillowcorp is now in a quandary. Feathers are going to cost more, and they don't want to see their profits slip or raise their prices, but it looked like one or the other had to happen until a wonderous solution was found! The feathers were shipped into Mexico, which does not have a Chinese chicken feather embargo in effect. Now then, it is still illegal to have these Chinese chicken feathers sent over the U.S./Mexico border. To the U.S. government a Chinese chicken feather is a Chinese chicken feather whether it has passed through Mexico or not, but there are some finer points to importation that can be exploited.
Here's what Mavin said Pillowcorp did:
Pillowcorp needs more than just feathers to make a pillow. They need fabric to contain the feathers and maybe even some kind of feather deodorizer or sanitizer and thread for stitching up their pillows and dye for dying pillows and maybe the tags that are sewn onto the side of the pillows, maybe those tags are printed up in a Mexican factory because Pillowcorp has never invested in a tag printing machine. You see all that goes into these Pillowcorp pillows; it's quite involved. All these non-feathery pillow components have been imported from Mexico for years. What they do is have all the shit packaged together: dye, thread, fabric, labels, deodorizer, sanitizer and now, what's the harm in throwing in a drum of feathers to boot? When the complete package comes across the border it is no longer a barrel of Chinese chicken feathers; it's a package that happens to contain, among other things, feathers, and when this shit's all bundled up together like that they do not question where the feathers have come from.
Pillowcorp. is a good company. They pay their workers well and they try to work with the community, but corporations work on a fundamentally heartless level that seeks profit above all other concerns, and if that means circumventing governmental safe guards that have been put in place to help curb a devastating global pandemic, then so be it. What I'm saying is, "Rest easy your head on a Pillowcorp pillow tonight.™"