The Existential Diary of a Man with Flu. Or Montezuma's Revenge. Or Something.

8 AM, Wednesday morning.

I wake up feeling like someone has shoved rotten mangoes into my mouth all night. My eyes are sore – even to the tips of the lash. I am NOT going to work today. Yesterday’s half-day off, staggering home was not exactly the biggest picnic in the world, but in essence, a combination of a flu bug, a few too many spoonfuls of bad Chinese food and half a pack of cigarettes consumed at a none-too-clean bar on Capitol Hill have now combined to roll me into a ball of misery, half-buried with my nose under the covers. I must now contemplate my day. Beginning with the phone call to my boss, to let her know I am not putting on pants anytime soon, much less getting my ass to work on time.

After a half hour of fitful snoozing, the cellphone rings – but in shock I think, “Oh god, it’s noon and I slept half of the day away!” Reality is, it’s only 8:32. Comforted, I fall back asleep. My forehead is warm – hence the fan gets turned on my face full blast. What a chipper thought.

9:32 AM

The phone call. I mumble something about not coming into work. Something about pain. Something about being exceptionally tired. None of this I remember. I do remember something about working through the weekend to make up for it – which I will remember to do, as Labor Day tends to keep even the most dedicated workaholics out of the office. Damn. I suppose I could fiddle around with the manuals at home on Saturday and pretend like I’m having a normal two-day weekend. I find my shorts, slip on moccasins, and hear the grumble of the garbage truck out back.

I don’t know I’m sick just yet when I hear that noise, but when I look in the shower and realize there’s no way I’m going to deal with getting clean just yet. Besides, if I’m not wearing pants today, why should I bother to get clean? For that matter, why am I even worrying about wearing my decent glasses?

Right now I feel like used raw hamburger dragged backwards through mud, and taking care of my appearance is not on my high priority list. So instead of shirt and pants, nice shoes and black socks, today I am wearing sweatshorts, a trucker cap, old black glasses held together with electrician’s tape, and a t-shirt that says, “Click Here to See Me Naked.” I get dressed. I feel almost better. Then I see myself in the mirror. And I know I’m not going out of doors. Now I feel much better. I am free to wallow in my illness and glory in my own misery. Self-indulgence will be mine. I am on a mission to pity myself. Let the moping begin. (God forbid I ever get meningitis or something that plants me on my back for more than three weeks. The Zen Shui of the household cannot withstand more than one day of moody bastardness. Plus, the cat will probably start to get territorial with me over the good snoozing spots.)

9:45 AM.

I want to kill Regis and that ever-pregnant host that snickers, interrupts, and in essence acts like your stereotypical bubble-headed bleach blonde from the American South – but without the accent. The show and the next one follow the predictable pattern – celebrities interviewing other celebrities and talking about things that celebrities talk about. Boring. An entire nation watches this? We have multimillion corporations dedicated to the production of this tripe? Better watch another one just to make sure I’m not catching the tail end of the mental sewage outflow.

10:05 AM.

I did not know it was possible to produce a show more annoying than Regis and Dim-Blonde Pregnant Girl, yet it is indeed possible. Perhaps there’s a group of people in the bowels of NBC churning out crappy programming by a rote formula that is just BARELY tolerated by 99% of the American audience. It would certainly explain My Big Fat Greek Family and most of UPN’s evening lineup.

Thinking about this, I wonder how hard it would be to program up something that could act as a sort of “Mad Libs” for short stories and essays – something that would give a bare bones roughness to it that could be cleaned up and edited into something short and sweet later – nothing marvelous, nothing spectacular, just a barebones skeleton that allows me to flesh out the ideas.

I file this in my “great ideas induced in a feverish haze while drinking bourbon, lemon juice, and sweet black tea” cabinet for use later. It is likely the cat will use the cabinet for its original purpose by that time and so render this idea useless – or at the very least, not something you want to pick up and read – at least until the next catbox cleaning.

10:45 AM
I feel somewhat more clearheaded (and I’m out of bourbon-tea) so I head upstairs, pull down the dictionary and look up a few medical words so when the paramedics come to find my body lying on the sofa, they might find a thoughtfully compiled list of ailments the coroner might have missed.

I don’t find anything exotically epidemiological, but before long I am compiling a long list of animals and the words that mean “Critter-like”. Basically, the theory is you look up the latin root of any animal, add “ine” to it, and you’ve got a word that means, “like, of, or pertaining to”. It sounds very dull, but right now I’m having more fun with it than squirrels on marijuana in a jar of Skippy peanut butter.

Zibeline, vulpine, cervine, corvine, lacertine, lumbricine, picine, soricine (sounds an awful lot like sorority-like, right?) and serpentine – my favorites. And those are: sable-like, fox-like, deer-like, crow-like, lizard-like, earthworm-like, woodpecker-like, shrew-like, and snake-like. Enough of this and I figured out where asinine comes from – ass-like, yet usually the word is reserved for the highbrow snits who believe themselves higher than everyone else. Hit my head on the bookshelf. Total body ice-cream headache. I swear I hear the cat snicker.

10:52 AM.

My brain having been taxed, smacked, and bumped about sufficiently for the day, I lay down stiffly on the futon and tried to imagine a world without pounding headaches and visions of viral plagues dancing through my head.

I blame my father for these visions of viral plagues. My father is a microbiologist by training and one of the top water men in the nation - and the best example of scientific obliviousness that I’ve ever met in my life. While he himself is a brilliant man, he also didn’t quite know where the lines of scientific pontification and Things You Should Not Expose Your Children To lay.

For years I could frighten the children in my grade school classes with the descriptions of amoebic dysentery, E.Coli and cryptosporidium infections. To reduce my classmates to a shivering mass of pure terror of outside water, I would recite the potential pathogens resident in one puddle of stream water – and when that didn’t work, explain that it made your eyeballs turn to mush and your skin fall off in a yellow stream with your sweat. Those who weren’t convinced needed to be reminded that peeing your pants was a very childlike thing – but kids with amoebic dysentery had to wear DIAPERS to school. Sound effects could be best supplied with a handful of wet mud and squelchy noises.

Notes came home from school asking that my parents talk to me about appropriate recess topics for discussion. My mother gave all sorts of conversation subjects, from my favorite toys to playing tag. I hesitated to tell her that the only game of tag I was likely to play with my schoolmates was with a dartgun in a schoolyard rendition of “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom”.

It wasn’t that I was a little psycho, it’s just that when you happen to be the pudgy kid wearing glasses on the dodgeball field, you tend to build up a little resentment that manifests itself – sometimes without even thinking about it.

I think my father understood this more than my mother. He listened carefully to my explanations and corrected me on two of the disease effects. Other than that he told me I couldn’t talk about those diseases at mealtimes and maybe shouldn’t try to scare the other kids, and just get along with others.

Granted, I would be a challenge to my peers (to comprehend what the hell I was talking about most of the time) and many times to my teachers – who could not understand how such a bright kid could be so freakin’ morbid. Unfortunately, they also didn’t have access to the school bully chart, where size, speed, and sadism could be rated against the victims’ ability to run away and just hang out with the other kids.

So out of the primordial soup of gradeschool came some cops, some mediators, some construction workers, and then me, someone who can still calmly talk about the most horrendous slaughterhouse conditions at the dinner table until half of the dinner party is slightly green and has pushed their plate of filet mignon to the center of the table. Still then, I blunder on, completely oblivious to the gagging noises under the table, and can instantly switch into a long discussion on why I find most people who attend church on a weekly basis absolutely hilariously wacky – with the remaining six born-again Christians sitting ramrod straight in their chairs.

I don’t get how I can do this and not notice. But I think I inherited my obliviousness from my father. Frog make frog, as the saying goes.

One beautiful fall day in October, when my sister and I were eight and six, my parents took us crabbing on the Oregon Coast. We caught four crabs, all well within the legal limit and with plenty of fight in them. On the way home, we drove with them in covered 5-gallon buckets, and my sister and I named all of them. Without a thought as to where they were to live or the problems of keeping saltwater crabs in an inland river, my sibling and I in a rare show of solidarity immediately named them all, formed a crab family, and fed them bacon on a stick – for which they squabbled in a most unfamilial territorial way. They knew with a certainty that bacon was the last scrap of food they were going to see and to hell with keeping kosher.

When we arrived at home, we unloaded the car, spraying sand everywhere. Once we got to the backyard, Dad called out, “Hey kids, come here! I want to show you something with the crabs!” With equine feet and ursine grace, we tumbled to a stop in front of him. Dad turned to us, picked up the largest of the crabs (whom was named Molly, despite the fact that it was male and decidedly non-maternal – it still wielded another crab’s leg in its pinschers), gave the top of the shell a wrench, and held it up.

“Look!” he said, in a cheerful biology teacher’s voice. “The heart’s still beating! And there’s the lungs…”

That night, as the crabs formerly known as Molly, Fred, George, and Sabrina lay shelled and moist, covered with butter, my sister and I ate salad and garlic bread. Dad couldn’t understand why his two adorable (and heretofore scientifically-minded) children were refusing to eat, until Mom wormed out the story of what really happened in the backyard. Thus Dad was banned from a) using pets in a demonstration of biology, b) discussing said biology at the dinner table, and c) neglecting to inform his children of the fate sea creatures generally had when brought home in a bucket. Although Mom was probably guiltier of this than Dad, she still managed to sneak under the radar in our minds and avoided the title of Inedible Crab Perpetrator by her children.

Three years ago I was temping at a medical center – where our job was to edit and clean up the charts written out by surgeons and entered into the general database. Awkward. Bulky. We had surgeons and oncologists with names that sounded like the family had hailed from some exotic location. Often the languages could confuse the typists who transcribed the verbal and written notes into the patients’ progress charts. And with the long names of the medical complaints, ranging from colonical dysphasia to chronic fatigue syndrome, it wasn’t hard to imagine a world where the sterile case versus the day-to-day reality hits. I was just entering names and diseases. Some days, it would be a goal to get a running total.

“I’ve got three ovarian cancers Stage Two, one warped nose cavity and an 85-year old man with herpes and lumbago. Got anything that won’t make me feel like capping myself at 50?”

“Go fish.”

You got dehumanized to it. The charts meant nothing to us. Nothing to the internal running of our bodies. Had I been entering grease monkey reports of turbines and hoses, pipes and rotting radiators, it would have been easy, since I kind of knew where those went, and the sympathy could have flowed over the owners (ouch! $1,500 for a brake job, that must hurt!) but the minute a cost analysis of someone’s chemotherapy came up, it was type, type, type, hit return, start a new bronchitis and meningitis report. Some days we’d find all sorts of interesting combinations, like the woman who was pregnant for seven months and thought she had just developed appendicitis – but never went in to get it checked out.

I could imagine the most hilarious encounters with people just from typing up their doctor’s medical report.
“So…why exactly did you decide to put that Matchbox truck in your left nostril?”
“Mrs. Fielding, you accidentally swallowed your husband’s dentures while you were making out in the park and got startled by a rat? Is this normal?”
“Why, for the love of God, and all that is holy, did you think it might be erotic to play “hide-and-seek” with a dog chew toy, you f*cking freak?”
“No, Mr. Chisel, it is not exactly normal to have to masturbate nine times before going to sleep each night. Perhaps you should back off on the Viagra.”
“I am NOT going to write you a prescription for arthritis medication. You have video-game thumb and that’s all there is to it.”

Then you’d hit a sad one and the images wouldn’t really be so funny.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Jones, but your daughter has cancer of the spleen, rectum, bone marrow, and throat. There’s really nothing we can do.”
“Yes, I know you want to see your daughter, sir, but unfortunately, due to your being completely drunk at the wheel during the collision, we are still trying to extricate pieces of glass from her brain tissue. Please be patient, and don’t bite the restraints, it won’t help them come off.”
“I know the spiders are trying to eat your eyeballs, Sarah, but please wait until your mother comes here. We have to find out how much LSD you took and whether it will affect your baby. Plus, we still need to know how old the father of your baby is. Is he sixteen, like you?”

This really struck me, lying on the couch in a raw throat and bourbon-lemon-honey stupor, because whether you’re a crab getting your shell torn off in a biology lesson or a colon cancer oncologist’s worst nightmare, or just some guy suffering through a bout of midsummer night’s flu, the name of your pain doesn’t make it go away any faster – it’s just a description, a title, a three-second clip to explain what you’re going through.

And assuredly, even if you get that coveted medical title, your position is still the same, and the last thing you might think of before that rectal scope probes the last sacral tumor is still, “God, this sucks.” And yet someone (God, or your local practitioner trying to avoid a malpractice suit) out there is simply marking you up as yet another complainer to deal with. Viruses happen. So does dinner. And a colon polyp may just be God’s way of saying, “For Christ’s Sake, loosen up once in a while and quit being such a sourpuss.”

Hence the best way I have found to combat existentialistic mental meanderings under the influence of cold medication is to plug in movies, drink ginger ale, eat Campbell’s tomato soup, munch on gingerbread men cookies from Pepperidge farm, and basically pretend to be an amoeba with very little sex drive. Your daily workout? Not an option, sluggo, so just lie back and relax. Pretend your every need is catered to by an army of svelte brunette women wearing efficient clothing – preferably over six feet tall. At best, you’ll have good fever dreams – at worst, you’ll never want to go near an all-women’s volleyball team again. Neither of these are necessarily bad things. For women I’m sure the roles are reversed.

If you’re a single person, this turns into quite an indulgent experience for all involved. Since you know you’re not going to work, or the store, or the gym, or even down to the coffee house to get your morning espresso mainline with a twist of cream, you make tea – and since you know damn well making tea with lemon is the ultimate “calling in sick” thing to do, you add a half jack of bourbon to it as well. By
11:15 AM Wednesday morning,

you’re schnockered, lying in bed wrapped up in a blanket with a cat on your lap, and you might as well be Ernest Hemingway on a bad day or Raymond Carver in rehab.

So you pull out a pad of paper and pretend to write deep, meaningful verses, then realize you’ve already been documenting your day of illness anyway, so it’s off to get books that don’t bore the hell out of you within the first two minutes.

The cat, of course, loves this. A chest to sleep on and fingers that have literally nothing better to do than scratch him under his chin. One hand is occupied pretending to read a book; the other is positioned against the ears and the throat of the Siamese. His entire world is based purely upon days like this – with a spot of sunlight escaping through the blinds and enough cat food, life is exceptionally good. And better yet, when the human sleeps all day, there’s plenty of warm body for a curl-up.

Unfortunately for both of us, a cat with breath like the offal heaps at Pike Street Market, when yawning, provides puffs of nauseating air when burping, yawning, sighing…necessitating an ungainly shove of the cat to the floor and a hand to the stomach, hoping that this won’t be the moment when that ten-foot journey to the toilet will be in vain. The sunlight is streaming through the window on both of us, and the cold medication is making me feel woozy and sleepy.

Which reminds me of just how slovenly I feel. Illness isn’t something you can save up for a rainy day to lounge round in pajamas – and in these late summer days – blue sky, no clouds, sweet, soft-smelling breezes flowing through the Puget Sound - I’m feeling decidedly grouchy when I can’t get up and do work – if not inside, in front of a computer, than outside, at the very least walking around and feeling somewhat active.

Being sick is much more fun on gray and cloudy days – when wrapping up warm and sleeping with the cat is a comfortable prospect. You can get away with not showering in the winter once or twice in a week because everyone smells like wet wool and makeup, leather and wood smoke, warmed polyester and sweat anyway. In the summertime freshness pervades like an army of ants wielding perfume atomizers.

Last time I was at the pharmacy, I was hanging out near the back with my friend Mike and watching the people meandering up for their AZT, herpes, gonorrhea and bladder infections. My friend Mike, the pharmacist, points to a stunning blonde and mentions the H word, and then says, “And she gets a pregnancy test here every month.” Makes my “social disease of the flu”, (perhaps bought by a stolen kiss by a random woman in a bar in downtown Seattle) look like a tame rabbit by comparison.

That frightens me to hell, really, knowing there are people out there who are collecting diseases like some people collect old Mustangs. Multiple infections, multiple medications – and then on top of that, some of them have the gall to go out and look for Ms. Or Mr. Right – or Right Now. Welcome to the great American Selfish Sexual Revolution – but please, for the love of god and your fellow man, put a glove and a condom on, PLEASE.

That kiss may have been the start of this grand lapse into malady and melancholy. Or maybe it was the combination of poorly-cooked squid and two bottles of cognac, two packs of Marlboro reds and a badly-mixed cosmopolitan at a friend’s wedding. Either way, these last three days of general health suckiness have made me seriously consider reading “Love in a Time of Cholera”. Or getting cholera. What fun would THAT be!

It’s a beautiful, tragic, haunting, ethereal thought – lying, wasting away in a tragic disease until I remember what cholera actually does to your body and the level of control one has over various orifices. Then it doesn’t quite seem so noble. Just disgusting. Tending to one’s own body is much less romantic than tending to someone else’s. In every western-romance-Harlequin-bodice ripper I sneaked from my sister when growing up (figuring that SOMEWHERE in all this beautiful sunset crap there’d be something I could use to entice girls away from the jocks and out of their clothes) there was always a tender washing of the body after a spill and a nursing back to health.

This must have given the heroine great joy. For the hero, it was always sort of a bum deal, since they wound up gaining their strength back enough to rip that bodice right down the seams – but then there was the ADDED problem of marrying the woman who’d given you a sponge bath every day and knew inside and out what you were capable of doing involuntarily, conscious or unconscious. They say hell hath no fury like a woman scorned – love hath no whipped bitch like a man who fell in love with his wife while she was helping him poop in a pan.

Now, with these marvelous thoughts of disease, vectors and carriers, biology lessons and the utter lack of social graces running through my head, I fall asleep on the couch and drool prettily on the cat.

1:10 PM

I wake up, and instead of moping about the house, dreaming of disgustingly melancholic ways to die, I decide to go buy David Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day.

A fifteen-minute journey in the Bug and I bring it home, and I read it in one sitting. Then I throw up.

This is nothing against David Sedaris. I love the writing, and I can get past the fact that David Sedaris tends to view the mating habits of heterosexual men as alien and as strange and bizarre as I might view the interplay of your average Mormon/Republican-Hindu/Socialist wedding party. I could help him out there, but somehow I don’t think the vantage point of a hetero male (specifically one whose pride and joy is to collect as many verbal rejections for dates from waitresses) would be overly accepted.

The real reason for my puking is that my stomach also prefers to digest food, rather than gathering bile for the next fluid gift to the porcelain god. The descriptions of food in the book are wholly unappetizing, but Sedaris’ descriptions of New York life in the winter and in the summer make my mouth water hungrily. Then the descriptions of life in East coast urban and country settings, combined with the memories of the SantaLand at Macy’s make me think of sugar-spun whiteness and children with pushy parents, and sweet-soft velvet, and the smells of department stores in winter – and it’s back to the old toilet bowl for me – a watering mouth spells no good for anyone with even a hint of nausea.

1:45 PM

One giant bowl of tomato soup and dry toast later, I realize I and the pharmacy down at the grocery store are in need of some “alone time”. So it’s back into the ’74 bug I go in my gray sweats and old paint-stained t-shirt, wearing black nerd glasses and my hair sticking up in the back.

Driving, I look in the rear-view mirror and realize I could pass for the heavy-set cousin of the White Stripes. Granted, they look like Ozark redneck junkies anyway, and their music is a southern-fried biscuit away from being the next Deliverance movie soundtrack, so this is not saying much. And I pull into the parking lot – which is sparsely populated. Not a Range Rover or VW Jetta in sight.

This seems odd until I remember – I live in Double-Income-No-Kids YuppieLand, where all grocery shopping is done after 7 PM and food is viewed less as a necessity of everyday life and more as a garnish for your new stainless-steel refrigerator.

In this store, which has its own organic foods section, I often feel like a shambling alien from the Planet Ursine, pawing open the door to get at the milk and licking my lips at the salmon counter, my bear-like pelt and beady little eyes staring at the blonde gazelles and their young buck mates swirling through the produce section – and primarily pondering how the hell they make it through the winter running around all the time, eating bark and greens. Likewise they probably find me a little scary, or just want to put me on a treadmill until the fur and the lumber goes away. Me, I just want to feed their skinny asses pasta by the truckload until the silicon boob job is no longer really necessary.

Today, however, all is quiet, and the white, red-furred, bear boy is welcome to amble down the aisles looking for happy hibernation chemicals without drawing glances from the local silicone-Brazilian-bikini-wax-and-tanning-booth brigade.

I lumber into the “special things” aisle at the grocery store – which is on the opposite side of the pharmaceuticals I seek - and there’s a green, hook-nosed witch stirring a cauldron with what looks like a gigantic orange sex toy. Upon closer examination I need my eyes checked (amazing how bearlike one can be) – it’s an orange spoon, and only vaguely shaped like a sex toy.

Without even thinking of checking the isle, I rip off a long, twelve-note aural symphony, dedicated to witches and potions and foul brews – much of the latter of which has contributed to the greenish gas now surrounding my butt, since I can consume vegetable juice, wheatgrass, and sprouted grains, but to hell with meat or cheese products – according to the demands of the now-finicky stomach.

Ten feet away a highly-coiffed woman in her mid-fifties carrying a poodle wrinkles her nose and gives me a look that could wither AquaNet, and I feel like telling her, “Look, lady, I’m sick, and I’m not the idiot carrying around a toy poodle in a grocery store. And how do you know it wasn’t the dog?” But aside from a snuffle, I don’t say anything.

I almost feel like celebrating my sick day in this aisle, surrounded by the pharmaceutical marvels of red, orange, and yellow pills for every occasion. Raise my Ebola Virus flag and speak in a crusty pirate’s voice, “Ar, if ye be wanting to get that Children’s Motrin, ye’ll have to get by me three-day flu bug…” But the tonally-talented body orifices have cleared the yuppie queen from my sight before I could infect her – only after she selected a sleeping pill guaranteed to knock out any Bellevue girl for 12 hours, regardless of how many little blue pills and whippets your husband took before bed.

I creak my way to the register, stopping to grab some Mountain Dew – and on second thought, I go searching for the 7Up – before I realize in a fit of marketing, Pepsi got rid of the 7Up label and went for “Sierra Mist”. Fooled me not, but I wanted a 7Up, not some mislabeled crap. I return to Sprite and clear soda when I don’t feel well – kind of the way I eat tomato soup and watch daytime soaps, trying to identify the storylines with Greek tragedies and comedies (which happens more often than you think. The Lysistrata and Oedipus Rex, and plenty of old Sappho’s stuff comes shooting around on All My Children and General Hospital. Sure, nobody ever has their eyes torn out and for the most part, it’s only long-lost separated brothers and sisters who fall in love with each other, not sons and mothers, but the potentials are still there.)

At the checkout, the girl is far, far too chipper. Popping gum and scanning each item with a nasal twang. I feel like death warmed on a cedar shingle next to her. Each item rings up – chicken soup. Cilantro. Ginger. DayQuil. Cold and sinus medication. Hydrogen peroxide.

“You not feeling well, then?” she asks, perfect little white teeth reflecting each diseased whisker on my face.

“No, not really. Something that’s been going around.”

“Well, don’t breathe on me!” she says, and laughs prettily. She is somewhat hot, and for a moment I have this marvelous fantasy of her naked in bed – until it washes out in cold, illness-colored reality.

I’ve asked her out once before, and due to the unfortunate combination of her having a boyfriend and not at all attracted to me, it didn’t work. Now that fantasy is morphing into her laid out on the couch, drenching said boyfriend in Kleenex and wallowing in nasal-toned misery, gulping Sierra Mist and moaning incoherently.

She smiles and won’t hand me my change, leaving me to pick it up from the counter. I try to smile, but my thoughts are pretty simple. Bitch. Just to be nice, I cough heavily as I’m moving out of the line. With any luck my spores will connect with hers and next week I can walk cheerfully through her line while she’s recuperating and wave a bag of fried chicken under her nose.

Not that I’m vindictively bitter or anything. The Plague Bear ambles back to the Bug, notices that some of the paint is peeling off the Bondo-ed back fender. Resolves to do something about that right quick. Shoves all purchases through the open window and starts for home, mission(s) accomplished.

2:33 PM

I chug half a bottle of bourbon and some of the medication, lie down on the futon, crack open Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings for the fifteenth time and turn on the cartoons in the background. My eyes hurt. The sinus pressure is building and building. And somehow through all this misery – mostly due to the bourbon, I desperately want a cigarette. Clenched teeth and sucking in cloud after sweet cloud of smoke. I’m almost drooling, I want one so badly.

And yet when I reach for the pack on the desk, it’s empty. Part of the reason I flushed the last few was because I wasn’t feeling well, and I knew within three weeks I’d be sipping away at one or two a day, feeling the nicotine seep along my nervous system and my fingers starting to twitch. But now it’s 2:34 PM and I’m tired, and the effort to seek a cigarette has worn me out. I fall asleep with the book open on my chest, cartoons blaring in the background, and the cat curled up between my knees.

7:35 PM

When I wake up, it’s getting dark outside. Glass is in my spine and my kidneys are dancing the hula with my liver. It hurts to even think about peeing. I stumble to the bathroom, where the toilet mocks me as I stumble to it. Staring into the mirror afterwards, I analyze the contours of my face.

A two-day growth of beard sits on my face, waiting to be scraped. My eyes are bloodshot. The glasses have skewed to the left temple, making me look like a badly drawn caricature of a sick geek or a serial killer left in the basement too long. My skin – pale, clammy, spiked with miniature balls of lint and a thin sheen of cold medication covering it all.

I should take a shower. I should get cleaned up and put my real glasses on. I should dress in a pair of lounge pants and a nice, clean, dryer-scented t-shirt with a pair of fleece slippers, and sip black tea, honey and lemon, no bourbon. I should get cleaned up, make my bed, drink a gallon of water, lie in bed with a good book I’ve never read before and call my friends to tell them I won’t make it to coffee tonight. Pop my pills and drift off to clean, comfortable, responsibly sick sleep.

And then I think that today I should have done laundry. I could have vacuumed the carpet, cleaned the litter box, bathed the cat, reorganized the kitchen, mopped the floor, sanitized the counters, washed the walls, bleached the sink, the toilet, the bathtub, washed the bathmats, vacuumed the curtains, reorganized the furniture, done the shopping for the week, made dinner for my roommates, bought new books on the Internet, added a few more blog posts, refurbished my web page, done some design, cleaned the dishes out of the sink, done the recycling, the trash, and watered the front lawn.

…but suddenly the only thing I can think about doing is sitting on the toilet – forget running a bath or taking a hot shower, screw the dishes. Oh, even as I struggle with the lid, I still have vivid, almost sensual thoughts about that shower. Even though I know there’s gallons of steam, sweet-scented herbal soaps- emollients to wash away the layer of illness that covers my body, there’s a part of me that knows I am reveling in my uncovered, unshaven, unbrushed appearance – the self-pitying one who adores feeling sick and likes any excuse to lounge about for the day.

After ten minutes I flush. It’s the most productive thing I’ve done today. What the hell. I’m still a sick little bear. And tomorrow, I plan on getting better.

Welcome to the White House - WWW.WHITEHOUSE.ORG

I love this site. From pretty much everything to the patriotic thong underwear and the bumper stickers to the down and dirty dishing, this thing is hilarious...

Salon.com News | EPA watchdog rips White House

Wow. Not only is the White House administration telling half-truths about the "war on drugs...I mean terror...I mean, they're intricately linked, so don't puff on that doobie lest you see the Space Needle go kablooie...dontcha know them pot-smoking queer marriage Canadians are goin' crazy on the US of A these days?" but the public health risks from the dust in the air from the World Trade Centers' destruction were deliberately covered up.

The excuse from the Bush administration? "Justified for reasons of national security."

Of course. Perhaps we should also note that greenhouse gases are perfectly safe for the environment. Back to freon, kids, unless you want those terrorist-mongering environmentalists to win the war on terror!


The problems I am having is that there is a pat run of excuses made for the United States' actions. Clear-cutting is determined as "eliminating forest fire threats", destructive oil-drilling policies in the Alaskan national wildlife reserves are labelled as "oil exploration while preserving natural resources", and any time the Bush administration is caught in an out-and-out lie - especially one that has serious health and safety risks to the American people, they fall back upon the excuse that any other course would have been detrimental to national security.

Sorry. I'm not buying it. I did buy a Playboy for Molly Ivin's most recent article detailing three conservative, small-town Americans whose lives were directly destroyed by the Bush tornado (and let's admit it, little 5'3" college girls with a waist the size of my wrist are now approximately as erotic as, say a Barbie doll - not to say they don't have other hidden talents, but as far as eye candy goes, I prefer mine to have brains and a body that could weather the apocalpyse).

I'm starting a new campaign group. "Americans for DEAR GOD, ANYONE ELSE, FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST AND ALL THAT IS HOLY!" Drop me a line if you want to join. If I can get the cash together, we'll buy prime-time advertising during the election push. That'll be about $2 million, for those of you wealthy people with calculators and access to TV market purchasing.

Wapsi Square - Monday, August 25, 2003

Nothing to report. I am still suffering from Montezuma's Revenge - although just getting back from the gym and a bit of food shopping helped. Now I'm just getting to the point where I'm about to snooze again...ugh. I don't like being sick.

And the interesting thing is, Niquodemus doesn't quite realize it yet, but there's no more wet cat food for him. So now he's dancing around my ankles, attempting to be a "good cat" so I'll bring that tasty stuff out again.

Sorry cat, no more wet food! We'll see how long this lasts. A battle of wills. And I'd say we're mismatched - but he's no fool - 30 minutes of yowling for wet food may be my undoing.

Alec Guinness Blasts Jedi 'Mumbo Jumbo'

Lest you think Ewan's alone in his dislike of Lucas' "art"...Sir Alec Guinness also had a few things to say about it.

Ewan McGregor turned to drink to cope with depression

Go figger. Even Lucas has turned into the worst kind of sell-out in the world. Starting in 1979, Star Wars spawned a franchise. It's the geeky boy's paradise. However, I am and will always remain a ST:NG fan. Even though seeing Ewan do musicals and run amuck with a lightsaber was more than a little fun...

George Lucas appears to have a negative aura - the Sadim touch. Anything the man touches turns to crap. And his portliness' "visions" are very, very good - but his imaginary world still can't obscure the fact the man is crap at telling a story.

Fortunately, Ewan McGregor admits that working with Lucas sucked - just as Ford, Fisher, and the rest of the Star Wars cast said.

Dean for America: Contribute Today!

Why, you ask?

Because of two things.

Howard Dean, as opposed to many of the other political candidates, opposed the CURRENT Iraqi war while supporting the first Gulf War politically - in the face of naked aggression by a hostile state, it made perfect sense for a U.N.-backed mandate to clean up the region and restore Kuwait to its rightful place. But now...we're in the middle of a Vietnam-era quagmire that is sucking away $2 billion dollars in cost from the American people EVERY WEEK.

He's also a medical doctor, as is his wife. As opposed to our current president, under whose management the Texas Rangers signed a $250 million dollar contract with a washed-out ballplayer - and whose only degree happens to be the honorary one conferred upon him by Yale AFTER being sworn in as president of the United States.

These days I'd rather have someone intelligent and "not-so-folksy" running my country than someone lovable and dumb.

Collorary questions aside, there's another significant reason to this: George W. Bush (see previous postings) has never held a job his daddy and his daddy's cronies didn't set up for him in the first place. Thus, Little W is out fundraising in the Pacific Northwest at $2,000 a plate specials. The "man of the people" - as his campaign has promoted him - rode in a limosuine, never shook our hands, never listened to the out-of-work Northwesterners, and never listened to the Americans gathered outside yesterday's invitation-only fundraiser screaming to get his attention. At just one event he brought in $1 million from 500 of his biggest contributors. Outside the fundraiser more than 2,000 Northwesterners gathered to speak out against Bush’s failed policies, which have ruined their chances of getting even MINIMUM WAGE jobs in this economy. Yet pocketing $1 million dollars for his future campaign was enough for George W. Bush to thank the people of Portland for their “warm welcome.”

This isn't a case of loonies out to discredit someone. This is a man who's listening to the money - and only the money. A king who must be thrown down from his stolen throne.

But it takes money to beat money. So I'm donating $50 per month to the Dean for America campaign. It's not tax-deductible, but if I can send off money to someone who has a strong chance of beating the Little Shrub-King - and prove that wealth does not equal political power in this country, I will definitely do so.

We can’t let George W. Bush continue to rack up millions while American people are left out in the street. Our leaders MUST be accountable to us - and when they are not, we must fight to remove them. It isn't just a right of the American people, it's our civic duty to toss leaders who cannot protect the United States from her enemies or give our children warm places to sleep. They've brought out the bat on the Dean for America website—and putting it up against George W. Bush. The goal is to raise $1 million against George Bush by the end of the Sleepless Summer Tour—midnight this Tuesday, August 26th - and to spend it proving the fallacy that four more years would bring.

The only way to compete with Bush’s ability to raise so much money from so few is if millions of Americans come together and contribute what they can to Howard Dean. When Dick Cheney raised $250,000 last month from 125 people at a fundraiser in South Carolina, the grassroots organization responded—and raised more than $508,000 for Howard Dean, showing the nation that the grassroots has the power to take on the special interests and the multimillionaires who benefit the most from Bush's Tax Cuts(tm).

We have 38 days to prove that the grassroots do have that power. Beginning with the Sleepless Summer Tour, the remainder of August and the entire month of September are critical. We have 38 days to prove that the grassroots have the staying power—that we aren’t going away. 38 days to return to politics of meaning in America. We have 38 days for all of us to pull together in order to reach our goal of 450,000 supporters for Howard Dean by September 30th. Then, in the final days of September, we will make a final push toward a fundraising goal that rivals what you achieved in June—and we will prove not only that the grassroots have the power to win the Democratic nomination, but that you have the power to defeat George W. Bush and the special interests (many of whom skipped town with Enron pension funds) in the general election.

Join the Dean Campaign at:

Hell, join me at Westlake Center this weekend. I'll be screaming my lungs out for Dean.

John Ashcroft and Post 9/11 Racial Discrimination

This ties in somewhat with the story I recall below, but it's a very disturbing thought when the US Attorney General is accused of racist tactics to intimidate suspected "terrorists" into revealing information - to cover up the fact that the current Bush administration has failed in a cruel and unusual manner to protect Americans from terror.

to the REAL posting...

I have to admit, I've never been a happy flier myself. From the suggestion that I take a broadsword onto an airplane flying home from Germany to getting patted in "interesting" places by airport security, I've never had fantastic luck in airports.

My last flight was from Tulsa to Seattle on business. While on that plane, a young African man sat next to me. After a short time of chatting and the traditional "Hello, we're going to be cramped in quarters tighter than two lovesick honeymooners on a single mattress for the next three hours" I noticed his hands were gripping the arms of the chair tightly - primarily because I tried to rest my elbows on top of them. I had just finished talking on my cellphone, and he nervously smiled and asked if I could lend it to him so he could call his brother and let him know the flight was on time to Seattle. He hung up after saying something in a foreign language. Then the hands returned to gripping the seat tightly.

I asked, "Are you nervous?"

He nodded, and I proceeded to explain, full of my new-found aerospace knowledge, that indeed if the plane did blow up on takeoff, that none of us would probably live longer than five seconds to feel it. While that five seconds might then seem like an eternity, he and I struck up a conversation. After a couple of tries on his name, I said, "Wow! So you speak Arabic? That's so cool! How terrific!" and proceeded to talk about the mosques in Seattle, and the strong community of Islam up here. We chatted amiably while the plane was taking off - and when airborne, he got up to use the bathroom.

Now, the conversation pre 9/11 may have seemed innocent, but I was genuinely interested in my seat partner - he was a nice guy, with plenty of things to talk about. And it was only until I looked over at the white-faced businessman, portly belly spilling over his belt and a look of utter fright on his face, did I realize what our conversation looked like...

An aerospace guy talking to an admitted Muslim on a plane to Seattle about the likelihood of a plane blowing up on takeoff.

What really cracked me up was when the stewardess came by, and I introduced myself and my flying friend to her - and we wound up on a terrific ten-minute conversation ranging from flight safety to people's racial prejudices - especially on airplane flights.

When we arrived, we disembarked, and my new friend gave me a hug, and met his brother at the gate. The white-faced businessman made a comment to his wife - the tail end of which I heard, which was, "Damn sandn----- he nearly gave me a heart attack."

And that was when I felt this cold rush flood over me. Because after 9/11, there was this rush to condemn people who had sponsored terror - and the Ashcroft-led Justice department of the government detained literally tens of thousands of people in prison because of the color of their skin - with NO OTHER LINK to explain it other than their names and their skin. Perhaps one in a thousand had any connection to "dangerous elements". All - including my new friend - were lumped into that "danger" category - merely because of the color of their skin.

I stopped by the fat businessman and merely waited until he noticed me, before saying, "I hope you understand this isn't 1950s Alabama, sir" and walking off. A flip of the finger or a profane reply to his racism wasn't in order.

There are hundreds of Muslim and Jewish and Buddhist Marines, Army, Navy, and Air Force members who are fighting in an unjustified combat situation. Had I been on that plane, I would have applauded them too - for surviving the worst foreign policy mistake of the decade. They're caught in the whirlwind - a whirlwind caused by neoconservatives pushing for American imperialization in the Middle East.

So to them, for serving their country, right or wrong, in the darkest hours, even when the dates they are given as to when they will see their friends and family are changed day to day and week to week - when they walk around in 138 degree heat in an Iraqi summer and die from Iraqi resistance fighter attacks - and for the large number of them who are leaving the service (according to the news briefs from the official DOD websites) after seeing what they were ordered to do to people...

I salute them.

Because they weren't over there protecting American freedom - though they served with honor and distinction.

They were there to satisfy the political cravings of a political drive set in motion twelve years ago - to regain political power in a world too weak to resist their machinations.

WARNING: POLITICS AHEAD

Yesterday I was listening to 94.9 KUOW, the Seattle NPR affiliate. Amid the discussions of city councilors and other local news, the news that the U.N HQ in Baghdad had been bombed came through - and at first, I thought, wow, another bombing. What a tragedy. And then it dawned on me - this isn't just another anti-American attack. They hit the United Nations. The groups responsible hit the people who'd been their most likely source of help.

There's a line Brad Pitt's character, Tyler Durden, repeats in the movie Fight Club - "It's only when we've lost everything that we're free to do anything." And at some point, I think that's highly accurate. The basic modes of survival in Baghdad have broken down. In a deeply religious society with very poor families and a moralistic code (Islam), the baser choices of survival aren't being used. The oldest profession in the world has not cropped up on street corners in Baghdad, but fanaticism against an occupying force has - and with disastrous results.

My cousin recently finished his four-year stint in the Marine Corps - and none too soon, in my opinion. When he entered, he was as gung-ho as they come - down to the politics and the battle-readiness. Now, a staff sergeant with a slight, slender wife and a comprehensive knowledge of the inner workings of helicopter engines, he's settled down. Going in a Republican in politics with an unshakable faith in George W. Bush, he seems now to question the intelligence and the leadership of his former commander-in-chief.

His younger brother I haven't gotten to know as well over the past few years, so I couldn't speak for him, but I get a feeling from others in the armed forces that the faith in the commander-in-chief is fading and fading fast. The reality is - none of them wants to be sent to a place like Iraq, where the smiles in the crowd and the open arms could hide an AK-47 or explosive device. And the daffy little man from Texas - who called the Kyoto Accord "a darn good car" - isn't inspiring them to sign on for another tour.

The problem is, the United Nations never thought itself to be a target. They were the ultimate neutral zone. The guys to go to when you wanted to protect the innocent. In fact, they're supposed to be the people who keep law and order in countries full of madness. Serbia, Bosnia - the blue boys are the ones who keep the locals from ripping each others' throats out and make sure everyone plays by the rules.

Now the United States changed the rules of the game. Rather than waiting for a reason, Bush and his cronies invented one. The evidence is there - rather than looking for actual weapons of mass destruction, they simply said "We know he's got them." Rather than valid reports on the Iraqi program for nuclear and biological weapons - they made one up and fleshed it out with believable truths. What that meant for the United Nations was pretty simple - whether they believed it or not, the only way to stall a full-scale invasion was to drag out the U.N. mandates until proof of those pesky weapons of mass destruction arrived. It's the job of a mediator to wait until all the stories are in before giving the verdict.

And when your most powerful backer suddenly turns into the world's neighborhood bully - out to whack someone upside the head for insulting his parents - the mediator has little choice but to go with the flow and make the best of it - even if it puts you, yourself, into harm's way.

The funny thing is, William Clinton said, "I did not have sex with that woman" and spent four years defending his credibility. George W. Bush said, "We gotta go kill this guy, because he's got a big gun, and he's not afraid to use it, so we gotta take him out before he does to us - and we think he's planning to do that." And somehow the credibility he had with the American people has not been affected at all. Perhaps it is more noble to lie about the motives for killing someone than lying about whether one had consensual oral sex in an inappropriate location.

Six months ago, there was an example of rabid chauvinism on the Internet - produced by the "patriotic" emailers who kept trying to plug up support for the war and The Shrub's rationale for it. In essence, the email read:

You are walking with your wife and two children down the street. Suddenly a maniac with a knife leaps out and starts screaming at you. Any minute he could attack. You are armed with a handgun and are a crack shot. What do you do?

Liberal: Well, what could I do? The man has the right to leap around with a knife. How do I know he doesn't have compulsive leaping disorder? I should talk to him and see what he wants - and if he attacks me, I should make sure that he understands the damage he's done and hope he doesn't go after my wife and kids.

Conservative: Shoot the son of a bitch, then go home and thank God, America, and eat apple pie.

More simplistic than I would have expected, but not off-course from The Shrub's plans of action. But now I see that story in a different light.

After literally tens of thousands of Iraqis - civilians, soldiers, children and elderly people - have died and hundreds of thousands have been harassed in Gestapo-style intimidation by the United States armed forces after the occupation (and yes, it is an occupation of a country, and a hostile one at that - no peaceful occupation conducts searches of suspected attackers nor do peaceful occupations fire into crowds of children, nor would they ever be expected to learn how to cope with daily attacks and car bombings from the people they have "liberated") - what do those people have left to lose?

In Chechnya, there are women whose husbands, brothers, and fathers have been killed by the Russian army. Now, with the help of Chechnyan rebel groups, they are turning themselves into human bombs and martyrs to get the Russians out of Chechnya. They're doing it because they have nothing else to lose. They don't have any worry - all they have is an opponent, and a willingness to take as many of the enemy out as possible before their life ends.

Coming back to the Fight Club quote - the Chechnyan women are those with nothing left to lose - and the choices they can make with their lives become crystal clear. Take the fight to the enemy, prepared to sacrifice all, plan most carefully, and success is virtually assured. Nobody can stop a person who is committed to end their life - but we are now faced with suicidal men and women whose entire purpose is to take out as many Americans as they can before the end of their short, bitter, unhappy lives.

That knife is all those people have left - and the hypothetical situation must be revised. The person walking with his family knows that alley is dangerous - more to the point, he has made it so by chasing the local alley "trash lord" down the street, firing every bullet he had - missing the target, but wounding and killing more innocents than criminals. Thus that raging maniac now knows only one thing - that here is an opportunity to hurt those who have hurt him - vengeance, transpired by God to provide him with a way of avenging the deaths of those who were dear to him.

So what would be the ideal solution? STAY OUT OF THE DAMN ALLEYWAY IN THE FIRST PLACE. If the only way to destroy a cancerous growth is to kill the patient, is it preferable to murder the patient by carving it up without anesthetic or to simply allow the patient the best quality of life they can before that growth consumes them from the inside? (The parallels are significant - there was no serious threat from the weapons of mass destruction prior to the American invasion - therefore the radical surgery became unnecessary - containment of the disease had already been accomplished - in this case, through the U.N. Oil for Food sanctions and the Anglo-American patrols of the No-Fly zone for Iraq.) Now we see young and older men sacrificing themselves in the streets of the Iraqi cities - willing to die, willing to cover behind crowds, willing to say, "Yes, you see! The Americans kill our people with no reason!" - and use that to justify the next RPG attack.

This is where Iraq will take us. Suicide bombings are commonplace in any occupied territory - and the pattern is quite clear. Americans staying in Iraq "For the good of the Iraqi people" is just another Vietnam, another Israel and Palestine, another Germany and Austria, another France and Nazi Germany. It's another Cambodia. Another Russia and Hungary, another Czech republic. There will be resistance and there will be bloodshed against the invading force - because those committing the attacks feel they have nothing left to lose.

At one point I was unemployed, penniless, without a job, and I knew precisely how much that hurt. I did not know what I was going to do - only that I lived precariously and without much hope for the future. If I had lost both parents and much of my family to an invading army - perhaps I too would have thought of new ways to strike back at the invaders, even after the last moments of fighting. I do not encourage their behavior - I just understand it - something it's clear George W. Bush does not.

He has never lived hand-to-mouth. Born with a silver spoon in his mouth and a dearth of real-world experience, he's a man who doesn't know the price of a loaf of bread or a gallon of milk. A brick of cheese or the labor it takes to make his Chinese-made suits and ties does not interfere with his world view. Each time he rides in his limousine, he does not think of the cost of insurance on that limo, nor the cost of homeowner's insurance on his ranch. None of that has ever been his province. He's surrounded by infrastructure - an infrastructure that has brought him to this point. And at some point, that infrastructure has isolated him from the reality that other Americans deal with on a daily basis.

This administration acts and does not think, and that is dangerous when you have someone who commands the lives of over a quarter million people, armed to the teeth. The Charge of the Light Brigade into the valley of death in the Crimean War is nothing compared to what George W. Bush could do if he accidentally pressed the wrong red button - for the people whom he sends into battle are merely his subjects, the peasantry who work for him.

His tax cuts - perfect for a country prosperous and at peace, working on making more money - but horribly, horribly wrong for a nation reeling from unemployment and digging into the coffers to pay for costly wars. The nobles benefit greatly - but the peasantry suffers, and when the peasantry suffers, the land will not do as well.

George W. Bush is perhaps the worst president of the United States there could ever have been at this point in time, save Richard Nixon. History will never redeem the man for the mistakes he has made, nor the haphazard governance that has marked this administration.

The saddest part is - the United States cannot withdraw from Iraq without losing face. Which is clear - and even clearer is that George W. Bush will not do so, even if it destroys the nation he's been screaming it's his job to protect. Half of the armed forces of the United States are in the Middle East - and withdrawing them without accomplishing their "mission" would do little to settle matters in that region. Nothing the United States can do right now in the Middle East will help matters, and so now we are stuck, being led by a man who, in the words of A.A. Milne, has "very little brain" and thus relies on his advisors and those who've orchestrated and planned for these battles for the last ten years.

On top of this, the Pentagon is considering removing the hazardous combat pay that the troops in Iraq have been receiving. With a significant portion of the individuals headed to Iraq being Reservists, the reduction between civilian and military pay has been astounding - and has hurt their lives at home. There's only so much an engineer who made $75K at home can deal with on an $800 per month stipend.

Today the Los Angeles times called the attacks a tragic test of US Resolve. Well, the reality is, I was resolved NOT to go to war in Iraq. I was resolved that doing so would cause more harm than good. And I need no reminder that the United States, having stayed a course of military imperialism and aggression, needs to stay and mop up its mess.

Bush's goals for the war were pretty simple - take out the man who tried to kill his daddy. He failed. He also failed to take out the man responsible for the Sept 11 tragedy in Afghanistan. He failed to make sure those tragedies weren't repeated around the globe when a bomb went off in Bali and al-Qaeda representatives bombed in the UN in Baghdad.

I don't care how much the reconstruction of Iraq will cost - we should NOT have placed ourselves in a position where it became a moral imperative for us to spend any money at all. We should not be spending $2 billion in federal reserves every WEEK to run around Iraq repairing the damage we did to the country because our president decided to run off on (in his words) a holy crusade against evil.

Americans are questioning the U.S. occupation of Iraq at home and in the media. Susan Sarandon's plea against the war went unheeded - now public opinion is swinging the other way. When it looks like we can go in, kick some serious ass and get out, we're all for it - but ask us to do any real work and we're not up for it at all. President Bush needs to be reminded that the United States, having invaded Iraq and ousted Hussein, is obliged to repair the damage and help the Iraqis rebuild - not to humiliate them further. First and foremost, though, he should explain in detail how many years the job will take and how many tens of billions of dollars it will cost - and how many more Americans will need to die - especially when it appears more and more that this was a personal crusade of an extremely dimly-lit bulb for the sake of "goodness" - and for his political cronies, windfalls after windfalls in defense contracts and profiteering.

Hussein's ouster may have well benefited Iraq, but a failure to stabilize the country could leave Iraqis worse off than they were under his dictatorial rule - and stability is something we cannot provide, as yesterday's bombing proves. The Security Council and Bush vowed not to be driven from the country, but the president's shaky grasp on realities of the day-to-day lives of Americans, based not in being out-o'-touch with the common family, but on an entirely different planet makes that vow a little more hollow - like the bellow of an armchair general too fat to fit into his uniform. Bush has never set foot on Iraqi soil. He has never met an American civilian, face-to-face, outside of a Bible study or a campaign stop - and he became buddies with Pooty-Poo - his nickname for one of the most notorious KGB agents in the 1980s - who just happens to currently head the Russian government. Perhaps he's not such a grand judge of character as all that.

I question the wisdom of this president, the wisdom of his advisers, and the fallacy of saying, "Well, they're the government, and I'm sure they know more than I do." At this point in time I'm beginning to think that not only is the current president of the United States an incredibly poor leader - he's also an incredibly dense, stupid man when it comes to international politics and the pocketbooks of the public.

It comes down to this: we don't belong in Iraq. We never did. Even if our goal was to depose a dictator, that wasn't our job - it was the job of the United Nations. Or the residents of Iraq. Now we find ourselves in a realm of heat, agony, and tragedy - not only because we invaded without a reason, but because we're staying where we're obviously not wanted. It is, quite literally, Vietnam all over again - from the resistance to our fighting that war, down to the hostility of the troops and the "danger" of speaking out against a right-wing presidency let loose, drunk on power and the seemingly-endless coffers of the wealthiest nation on earth - slowly being defeated by an insurgent force resisting the occupiers.

If that isn't a Vietnam-style conundrum of foreign policy, what is?

ThinkGeek :: I'm blogging this.

Damn skippy. I'm buying one of these and I don't care how damn trendy a blog is supposed to be. If someone sees me coming, they know they have a good chance of getting eviscerated verbally.

Whoo. I'm loving this. Of course, that would actually require I not spend hours upon hours typing away on the computer, and actually interact with the outside world.

But that's BORING....

Amazon.com: Your Wish List

I wish I could say that I don't find this sort of thing neccessary these days. I hate coming across as some kind of cheap materialist. However, at one point during the past few Christmases and holidays, I decided that getting gift certificates - in a word - sucks.

Point being, if I want some of this stuff on here, it's kind of a "catchall" for the things I will eventually get when I have time, money, or inclination to buy them. Hence - probably the perfect gift list. Eventually I'll put one up on Eddie Bauer as well, but that's more along the lines of stuff I need to buy for myself anyway.

If you're reading the blog and you think, "How crass! How material! Does he expect us to give him the things that are on there?" the answers are: I'm sick and tired of getting stupid friggin' GIFT CARDS for my birthday and CHRISTMAS! It means MORE SHOPPING! Which I do for two months BEFORE FRIGGIN' CHRISTMAS!!!

I should probably skip over to REI.com and put one up there too. What the heck.

I realize, too, that in the future this will seem somewhat silly.

Although if someone REALLY wants to make my day, a full arcade-sized version of the Ms. Pacman circa 1981 with working system and full-on quarter play would make my millenium. Or a pony. Maybe I'll just win the lottery instead.

Last but not least...

In October the United States Federal government will make it official - telemarketers DIE!

Or they actually won't die, but if your name is on the national DO NOT CALL registry, or your phone number is, it is illegal for the buggers to pick up your phone number, call you, and say, "Good evening, Mr. Wise. Would you like to refinance your home tonight?"

Instead of coming up with marvelous excuses, such as, "You know, I just sold all my assets and became a Turkish citizen, so no thank you" or "Did you know I can fart in twelve different notes? I just ate some chili, hang on the phone until I get one brewed up. You have to listen to my colonic interpretation of Beethoven's 5th Symphony, you just HAVE to...hello? Hello?" you can just click on this link below and load up to three numbers into the database.

http://donotcall.gov is your site. I did my house line, my cellphone (you would not believe how many twits got hold of that one...) and my parents' number down south in Oregon. Yay.

Now if only they had a "Do Not Spam" registry...

Thoughts on creating a simple life:

1. Reduce the amount of stuff you have in your life.

Now that's fairly easy. Every year most of us go through our closests and pull down clothes we never wear or shoes we've worn once because they hurt our feet. There's that couch you always hate to sit in because of the sprung back. That chair with the loose leg. The table that squeaks; the old oak dining table that doesn't go with the way you wanted to do your house. And yet I keep looking at the basics of simplicity and wondering if that is indeed what I need to do to survive.

I just thought, four years ago, that if everything I owned could be packed into the back of a Volvo station wagon and dropped off, that would be fine. Cat, bed, clothes, computer, games, toys, CDs, photo albums, books, movies, TV and VCR. One trip, done.

Then I got an actual job and realized that with an actual job comes an actual paycheck. Oh, joy! Shall we buy the new computer table this week for our new computer with the new monitor and the new monitor stand? What about a new coffee table? What about a Cuisinart that chops, slashes, dices and shreds? Perhaps we should think about buying a new car! And keep going, because those paychecks will just keep rolling on in!

Now that the two years of consumerism has worn off, I'm somewhat lethargic about "new stuff". The latest acquisition I have is a VW Bug, construction-site yellow with rust spots on the inside of the trunk, a gaping hole where the driver's side A-window used to be, and a strong smell of pee in the backseat. (That's getting taken care of tonight with some febreeze and a strong lime sprayer.) The new car is sitting outside and hasn't been driven in three days - I love the BUG! I love the way the stick jams in my hand around a corner. I love the absolute lack of power steering (welcome to the real world, forearms!) I love the smell of the engine when it overpowers the cat pee in the back. I love thinking of putting up the Elvis mural on the trunk lid, running the interior in blue velvet or velour...

But then the theory of "simple life" hits me - to be simpler in your life you aren't about attaining something, you're about developing your inner spirit. So perhaps the VW project is a good one - now I just need to transform my ideas into something - a work of art that will last longer than five years on the road. It may get somewhat expensive - which is precisely what the whole concept of simple living is about.

More later.

So today I wound up deleting all of the games off of my computer. I suppose it’s not so much of an attack on the gaming industry – it’s just that between work, school, and getting into the gym four days a week, I’m no longer the guy who can sit down and play fifteen hours of Unreal Tournament without blinking. This is kind of a scary concept for someone who still thinks of himself as a grade-A geek – I have my shirts, my esoteric humor. I’d be hosed if someone asked me to DJ a wedding but a natural with an alternative radio show at 3AM in the morning. Drop me into the field of old NES games and a good old-fashioned “Kobolds Ate My Baby!” game and I’m giggling like mad.

But now I spend 10 hours a day in front of a computer at work hammering together manuals and figuring out the different parts that should go together. When I get home I slop down 2,000 words a day and try to make sure that everything more or less makes sense. The problem is, unless I do this sort of thing and try to put the words into some semblance of order, I fear I’ll wind up jabbering on in a completely disconnected fashion.

It’s not that the work is pulling apart my narratives, it’s just that I don’t get to put a narrative into place any longer, and I can no longer tell a story as straight as I would like to. Being a writer is one thing – being a writer who’s forgotten how to do anything except put words in front of one another is an abhorration.

So away go the games. I’m paring down the 100-odd VHS movies one by one – each is dated, and when I haven’t thought to watch them within a six-month period of time, out they go to the Half-Price books, where someone else will manage to watch and love them The same with the computer games – most of them are already gone. When I feel like a little mindless hack-and-slash I’ll plug one in and go to it, but for right now I think I’ll have to maintain the blog as my outlet for the day.

To those out there reading: poor you. Maybe this will make sense one day.

But I doubt it.