Like I Was Saying:

28apr05

Grin Therapy

When in need of some grin therapy I often turn to David Sadaris's camp/comedy masterpieceNaked or head down to the nearest Wal-Mart for doses of human inanity and madness too wickedly fun for reality TV. Black Flag albums do it for me too, but I suspect what makes the world brighter for me is maybe different than the icksome lite jazz and spiritual healing seminars that boost the souls of my mid-Michigan brethren. Embrace the masses...something Jesus would say, and gosh, I do fall short of that, almost every time, despite my best intentions. We DO know what intentions are worth, no? A cc of vagrant's spit, maybe.

Lord knows that Incurious George has the best of intentions. Has had them since he traded cocaine for Jesus, and I applaud his swim in the spiritual, even though the chemical realm has its own rewards. I'd feel a bit better if President Beavis Jesus had read a few books and maybe studied a philosopher or two besides his Savior. I'm a goddamned Radiohead fanatic, but I spread my love of music around. My music collection is massive, from Coltrane to Slayer, not all Radiohead bootlegs, not that I'm comparing Radiohead to Jesus...for one thing, Radiohead are not as earnest...not since the closing notes of OK Computer. Threaten Thom Yorke with a date on The Cross for his socio-literary pinings and he'd go Kenny G on yo ass quick. I can see that in him from a mile away. Score one for Mr. Christ. Bush The Junior likes a man who sticks to his convictions.

Anyway.

My friend Matty turned me on to a brutal tribute to Ann Coulter. Man, I laughed so hard I almost turned blue from lack of oxygen. You wanna be a bilious gasbag of disinformation, go ahead, but remember that karma takes care of such matters, and that Ann Coulter screed is proof. Thank God for freedom of the press and lax libel laws. Seriously.

That's about it for now. Heading to Vegas. Next thing I slap on this page with be the product of pollution and pain...of the sort only Vegas can provide...the junkfood version of L.A.

- k

top

24apr05

Spring Blizzard 2k5 and the Adak Flashbacks

The weather is dreadful again. Ol' Man Winter wanted to sneeze one last time before releasing this twisted state into tepid purgatory: Winter Storm Warning, 8 to 12 inches, cover them newly planted garden greens, wtf? Can't do a thing about it cept bitch, and bitching is something I'm rather skilled at...I am in Flint and I work from a computer, the terra firma of Bitchland lies beneath my feet and soon, oh very soon, wonderful things shall grow from its fertile soil for five months or so and then everything will turn dark and barren from the cold and the process shall repeat itself.

I'm sober, by the way. Seriously. That won't change till next weekend. Vegas bachelor party...all ye need to know.

After my main workstation went tits-up a few weeks ago (I've since had it restored), I decided to get serious about archiving my work and my music, and so today I got around to the actual archiving. I have 20-something gigs of tunes on my hard drive and half that amount in animations and rants and photos. I needed 9 DVD's to to back it all up when I should have needed half that amount. I'm not sure if I should be pissed at HP (the maker of the DVD-R discs), Pacific Digital (the maker of the burner), or myself for not making sure I could stick 4.75 gigs of data on a discs rated for 4.75 gigs of data. Right...like that will get me somewhere.

Back to the weather:

Regarding my experience with late-April blizzards, I have to go back to my 18-month vacation at the fine Naval Security Group installation on the Aleutian Island hotspot of Adak, Alaska. Out there at the south end of the Bering Sea, late April brought anything from light freezing rains backed by 60mph winds to blinding blizzards known to blow rickety government vehicles off one of three dirt roads (and they were roads in name only) that ferried metal and civilized flesh around the island. Half the folks tasked with driving those government vehicles, usually white tattered Dodge vans, grew up south of the Mason Dixon and took a few hits of cheap whiskey with their breakfast. There's not much else to do, and being sober in a sunless mean environment for more than a few days a pop will drive most folks nuts.

T.C. was our main driver from the NSGA barracks to our fortified secret workplace. Our watchcrew and T.C. happened to be on the same schedule: two days shifts, two eve shifts (~15:30 till 00:00), two mids, and 80 hours off to drink, fight, shoot pool, and get our bowl on at out 4-lane alley between the barracks housing and the bar. T.C. was a North Carolina boy with a yen for Southern Comfort and Guns-n-Roses. In nice weather, about seven to ten days a year, our trip from the barracks to Zeto Point (the aforementioned fortified workplace) gave us 10 minutes of splendid views-- grass and snow-covered mountains, volcanoes rising solo from the sea, sea-otters frolicking in Clam Lagoon, and sunlight tickling faraway ocean waves.

The other 95% of the time, we battled driving rain, blizzards, and T.C. drunkenness to get from point A to point B without joining the otters in the Lagoon. There were guardrails where guardrails were needed, and in some spots you saw where vehicles bounced off the guardrails, and in a special few places you saw newer sections of guardrail replacing stretches punched out by government vehicles being kicked off the road by Ma Nature throwing one of her many hissy fits. To my knowledge, it had been many years since someone actually died in one of these mishaps (the road was so rocky and cratered that you couldn't go faster than 15 or 20mph), but the prospect and reality of mishap was out there, brought fresh to our imagination by a drunken hillbilly screaming It's So Easy at the top of his lungs when not challenging the Sea Otters to a duel should they ever meet in the lagoon.

We never crashed, and T.C. never got in trouble for being drunk on duty, and for that matter, neither for the rest of us. When you're stationed a couple thousand miles from proper civilization, the benchmark for finding trouble in this matter is to be stumbling, reeling, and stinking of booze from 50 yards in any direction. We were young, 19 to 22 mostly, but we knew our limitations.

Our reward for battling the elements to Zeto Point was eight hours in front of computerized workstations that were the bees nuts in 1988: A main floor with connected desks in a 40-foot semicircle dotted by Zenith PC terminals. Thick cables connected the PCs to dumpster-sized data processing units in a nearby cold room with processing speeds approaching that of a spunky Pentium III PC. More cables connected our terminals and the mainframes to standalone magnetic tape drives and clacking line printers on the main floor.

The mag tape drives looked like mutant stand-alone refrigerators and spun content onto the tapes in both directions and at almost every speed...depending on exactly we were picking up. We were very serious about archiving our electronic intelligence. If a squadron of MIG's came through undetected and strafed Elmendorf AFB in Anchorage, folks in DC would be asking questions...and probably haul off most of Adak's senior officers to a place that doesn't appear on most maps. We always had enough functional equipment and brainpower to collect the intel and archive it properly, but at any given moment, about a twenty to thirty-five percent of the equipment was offline for repairs. I'd never seen a line printer squeal and then send 10 yards of ribbon straight into the air until I hit Adak, but then again until Adak I'd never seen members of our military chase giant rats across the tundra at 4am with broomsticks and flashlights...so I learned to take things as they came.

In order to interfere with potential eavesdroppers, installations such as ours were allowed to play 'cover noise' to mask out super-secret conversations. During weekdays, when the offices and admin types were everywhere, the cover tunes leaned towards easy listening or 70s corporate rock. Fleetwood Mac was a biggie...I had Rumors memorized within my first few days on duty and when I suggested that mixing in some Slayer or Black Flag may help with morale while promoting musical diversity, my division officer cruelly shot the idea down and gave me a week of kitchen cleaning detail....

We were a good crew, as far as being among a group that kept me sane. Even though someone was rotating in or out of Adak every couple months on our watch crew, there always seemed to be about a 60 - 40 male / female ratio, half minority, half white, half urban, half country.

The midnight shifts were the best. The entire building, and it's umpteen millions of dollars of equipment and priceless strategic importance was left in the hands of our Watch Chief, 8 to 10 of us manning the machines, one maintenance guy, and two guards. At night our running mantra was 'whatever, as long as the mission was completed.' We had 8 to 10 technicians, but really only needed 2 to 4. Even on really busy nights with crazed EL-INT signals coming from everywhere, 6 qualified signal interpreters got the job done. Our Watch Chief gave us a lot of slack. It helped that our Chief loved cigarettes, booze, and good music...as long as the mission was done...screw up and punt the mission and you gotta go. Don't send sloppy reports to DC...make them think we are on it every single moment.

Here we were, on one of the planet's most isolated outposts, kicking back in our chairs between revs in a high-tech building at 3am with the lights off so that all luminescence came from the switches and LED indicators on the machines-- the PCs, the mag tape drives, the printers, the glow from the cold room, the clocks, and a small wall-street-like news ticker above the Chief's cluttered desk that let us know what was we were missing. We all brought in something for the government mandated cover music: Husker Du, Hank Williams, Joy Division, Kool Moe Dee, George Jones, Kraftwerk, Sonic Youth, King Crimson...played at a level so no damn Ruskin eavesdropper would hear a thing cept He stopped lovin' her today....

We'd dance about our darkened clubby floor like a mashup of Valley Girl and Urban Cowboy, looking somewhat akin to a late 80s SF's Palladium snapshot on a quiet weeknight...only a few thousand miles away. We never took a sip of anything intoxicating on our workfloor, though we did smoke on the main floor-- which added to the nighttime clubby look and no doubt hastened the demise of more than one line printer and PC. However, we'd sneak back to the food room for a quick snack and a hit of Irish Coffee every now and then. On top of learning how to tell the difference in electronic signature between a fishing boat and a Russian bomber, most of us picked up serious skills in chess and euchre.

I think you would call these coping skills. Indeed, and that's why I didn't put roots down in Adak, because once you get used to a thing like springtime blizzards and drinking on the job, life pulls you away from the vast majority of your fellow beings...and maybe it's too late to worry about that anyway.

So much for all that. I'd much rather be working on my farmer's tan right now, and the weatherman says soon, oh very soon, it will be back to normal and I can safely look over my shoulder without spotting one of these strange flashbacks reintroducing itself into my frontal lobes...which I try to keep clean for them delicate decisions.

- k

top

19apr05

Adobe and Macromedia

It's going to crack 80 today, so when I pound this thing out, I will head out to bike and ball and in general work diligently on my farmer's tan. Tweaking illustrations and animations on a day like this can do nothing but promote anger and depression. We'll have none of that....

Adobe and Marcomedia are 'joining forces'. I love corporate euphemisms...leveraged to sedate the victim during assimilation. Good stuff, we can never have too many MBA's making policy. At least I understand why Macromedia left their illustration application Freehand free to wither on the vine while beefing up ColdFusion (server app) and Flash, as I similarly now understand why Adobe turned down GoLive while turning up Illustrator and AfterEffects. This merger had been in the works for quite some time.

I have nothing against mergers in general, I am a capitalist, so what businesses do is up to them. Except, always an except, except when it creates the odor or reality of monopoly. Given current competition, this comes close.

But wait, you might be saying, what about Microsoft's web and document design applications? Aren't they are the competition that Macromedia and Adobe have joined up to smite?

Microsoft's client-side web and document apps all suck. They cannot be looked at as real competition. Microsuck is going after entertainment delivery and server apps, everything else is a bundle of licensing revenue that comes whether improvements are made or no. Microsoft's FrontPage and Visio are bad jokes to a point that I suspect Microsatan receives kickbacks from the manufactures of blood-pressure meds. FrontPage and Visio work poorly with other Microsoft apps, and work worse than poorly with Marcomedia and Adobe apps. Ergo, the Redmond Devils prolly shouldn't factor into this discussion.

But wait, you might be saying, or not (maybe you've already stopped reading this), what about the Swiss Big Cheese, Quark, and their mighty portfolio of design and illustration apps?

Quark has pretty good illustration and desktop publishing apps, no doubt, but they are not considered the standard. Click around various web and print design agencies, and you'll notice that >80% use Adobe and Macromedia products. The standards:

Web site design (client)- Macromedia's Dreamweaver
Paint and photo, digital and print - Adobe Photoshop
Digital and print illustration - Adobe Illustrator
Rich media apps - Macromedia Flash (w/ Adobe AfterEffects)
Document design / layout - Adobe InDesign

On top of that, Macromedia's Director is becoming the standard for rich media publication and Adobe's Audition is but a rev or two away from biting into Digi Design's ProTools as a standard for sound production and editing. My hat is off to these people. Digital web production will be a mind-blowing cash cow over the next 20 years as convergence between consumer electronics and PC continues. I think this is a market that will grow into 12-figures and the new Adobe, with all of Macromedia assimilated, will be poised to do what Microsoft did during the 80s.

Unless, and there's always an unless, unless Microsoft or Quark have plans crank out a 1st class studio suite of web and document authoring apps in short order. Even though both Microsoft and Quark have a wealth of knowhow and general intellectual capital, Adobe and Macromedia have so many collective patents and such a lead in product development that if potential competitors start stepping on toes...let's just say that any growing company worth its salt has a crack legal team to keep pretenders bent and fearful. In fact, Microstain may start worrying about where ColdFusion is heading with respect to their server-side products. This merger has long-term enterprise solutions written all over it.

I hope that the new Adobe does the right thing and continues to be at the forfront of innovation and kick-ass product launches. Products like Photoshop and Flash have revolutionized digital media design, and made my life easier, and the promises of these apps are still to be fully realized. I'm encouraged knowing that both these companies are based in The Bay Area, which is a place that destests stagnation, and frankly, desests what Microsoft did with their massive accumulation of power: stiffle and contest competition through fear rather than innovation, just like any other tinpot tyrant. I hope the new Adobe leviathan picks a better path.

Now, it's out into the freaking sunshine...f%#k computers, luddism uber alles!

- k

top

16apr05

Flint's Y Culture, pt3

As previously mentioned, I've been strangely captivated by the ambience and culture at Flint's Downtown Y. It's a good place to get into shape, stay in shape, and see all segments of our wonderful society freak out and interact. After a few-hundred hours shooting hoops and lifting, few questions remain in my head as to why things are the way they are...for humans in general, and Flint in particular. Nope, no more questions, just hard answers-- observable evidence with a horrible white-trash top-40 funk soundtrack blaring through the muzak speakers.

I've gotten to know a few of the regulars, for instance:

Jacko is a Republican and a tax lawyer who has been getting his lift on at the Y for ~20 years. I've been thinking quite a bit about taxes along the past few months, so I've been hitting Jacko up for some free advice. In turn, he asks me what he should buy to round off his music and booze collections, since I have much experience with bartending and spinning the discos. It's symbiotic, and I like symbiotic. Jacko is genial, dedicated, and absolutely convinced that everyone living in the Y's residence halls or sharing a pipe behind the back entrance has brought their plight upon themselves, and it's important to point out that he sees it as a plight and not as a form of in-the-moment freedom.

"These people," Jacko says, "Always have excuses. That's all they have...that, and a way to get high."

"Sure," I say. "What's your favorite bourbon?"

"Oh, I don't know. I've been enjoying Bookers, but I can't enjoy it too much anymore." Jacko slaps his waist. "I'm telling you, once I turned 45, my goddamn metabolism just stopped. I only drink once or twice a week now, otherwise I'd gain 100 pounds and probably blow out my goddamn liver." He shakes his head. "Christ, I'm falling apart."

That's a common concern for middle-aged fitness buffs at the Y, falling apart. There is an angry truth about the work of nature that defies all remedies and attempts at stopping the clock, as it were. No matter your work ethic or natural gifts, time will wreck you. Roger Daltry hoped to die before he got old, and he managed to screw that one up, though bandmate Keith Moon took the notion to heart, and so it is with some of the far-out cases on the Y's charity lists.

In Jacko's mind, and maybe in the minds of most Michigan GOP-types who once had to grit their teeth through years of union domination over politics, everyone born into our scared society has high opportunity, everyone. That's the central myth of hardcore Republican thought: that elbow grease and bootstraps and a decent IQ will take you where you need to go. It's a nice concept, wiping away the thorns of mitigating circumstances like twisted parenting and other tendrils of a sick environment. The truth, as always, lies somewhere else, and often in several places at once. What's the point of busting your ass every day when the end result is the same? That's the question you hear in those residence halls...that, and rants about how The Man is gonna screw you over whether you wanna get high or not. So why not just let go? Smile and nod your head when asked, and when the Boss ain't looking, fire that little glass bastard up.

The more time I spend in Flint, the more the term 'intractable' bounces around my brain. In the long view, everything dies, including cities. It's happened all over civilizations every since humans had the gumption to build and maintain cities in the first place. What made Flint special, I think, was that birth and death seemed to come so close together. This town is not yet 200 years old, and it's already seen the highest of highs...and now. Maybe those folks who pass the pipe out back understand something that Jacko doesn't. They've released any notion of permanent anything, and they have no illusions. At least half of everyone who lives in Flint feels like their rolling rocks up an endless hill, and so some let the rocks go...and maybe that's why we have so many goddamn potholes in this town.

I used to wonder why nothing has popped up to fully replace the jobs that went away when GM went away. Boston used to be a textile town, and now it's the East Coast's version of Silicon Valley. Why not here? I wonder if, after 20-plus years in the pits, people like Jacko, who have the money and ambition to start new businesses, have come to think there is nothing left in this town to support their ambitions. There's something to that. Aside from Dollar Stores and Chinese restaurants, new businesses last about a month in Flint. New manufacturing plants are out of the question because no one wants to pay union prices for labor anymore, and everyone knows that if you set up a manufacturing operation in Flint, you'll have to pay union wages.

Sure, as I've mentioned, there is life here, and some of it quite virile. 25,000 college kids can't be wrong...and them damn strip malls still bloom like mutant dandelions around Flint's periphery. Jacko's doing okay. There's always a bunch of folks around here in trouble with the IRS, and those cats passing the pipe out back don't seem worried bout much either, so maybe I fuss over nothing.

- k

top

12apr05

Evil eMachines

Ah sagas sweet sagas. I'd like to send a heartfelt kiss-my-white-ass atop a middle-finger salute to the fine folks at eMachines. Why the hell did you freaking morons drop a 64-bit processor into a machine with a cooling system made for a PDA? How did that get past your Testing Department? Do you idiots know what testing is? Has it occurred to you that maybe people would buy your evil machines on the promise of great technology at a nice price only to come back at you like angry yellowjackets once said machine starts overheating at the slightest provocation? The web is full of hate towards you trifling twits...Google eMachines and overheat, and you'll be rewarded with more angry content than you can shake a stick at, and I didn't write a bit of it. eMachines, you folks built a flawed machine, the least you could do when I called you on it was jump at the chance to fix it, to rectify your mistakes...install a better cooling system, give me another model that can handle more than zero peripheral devices and three applications running at once. Is that unreasonable?

I've never been enamored of the HelpDesk culture because I've worked for several firms that have staffed Help Desks, so I know what that game is about: four to six printed answers on a cue card next to the phone, ~20bucks an hour here, ~2bucks an hour in India, you get the picture. However, one thing I do expect from Help Desks is the simple courtesy of knowing when the Company is obviously at fault and having a solution at the ready. The term 'Help Desk' implies solution provider. If eMachines' Help Desk wanted to solve my low and mellow blood pressure, well they freaking aced that exam, but when I queried as to how I might get a machine UNDER WARRENTY fixed for an overheating problem due to a shitty-ass too-weak cooling system, I got the runaround:

Help Desk lackey: Call the corporate office.
Me: What am I talking to you for?
Help Desk lackey: This is the Help Desk.
Me: You have my name, serial number, warranty information, and description of my problem...why do I need to jump through more hoops?
Help Desk lackey: Talk to the corporate office (gives number). Maybe they can tell you where to ship it for repair.
Me: ^&*%!

Fine, eMachine Help Desk troll, be an ass, be difficult, and get your company out of its warranty obligations by forcing me to take my machine apart and clean out the fans myself...something I expect I'll be doing once every six months as long as I own this flawed bastard, and I do not live in a particularly dusty environment.

So, I took my machine apart, I cleaned out the cooling fans with electronic cleaner and compressed air (the areas in question were not terribly dirty), and reassembled my machine.

Naturally the defective motherf%^ker did not power up. Of course it didn't. Fooled around with the battery, took out and re-installed the hard drive, checked to make sure I didn't pull out any cables or loosen any wires, and still nothing. Just a blank screen and a feeling deep in my guts like a long-suppressed volcano. I knew at that point that I'd need to both get this machine to a repair shop, and also buy another, properly made, machine.

More importantly, when my machine died, I decided to stay away from computers for a week and enjoy the ultra-fine spring weather and recreational reading. It's been glorious 'round here, and I've been getting my fill of asphalt basketball and biking, sunshine and green grass, and Detroit Tiger ballgames, and now that I look, I even have the early makings of a farmers tan. Life is good in the non-digital world. I felt ten years younger, and anyone with a modicum of sensory perception could feel the added spring in my step. I already long for that abbreviated simple era of existance...and that too was thanks to eMachines. So really, how made could I be? Nevermind.

All good things come to an end though, so I took this evil bastard into a nearby repair shop, and I kid you not, the tech tinkered with the battery and the hard drive before running diagnostics, and viola, it powered back up. I can't even explain. Nor could the helpful technician...who was so cool that he didn't even charge me. I tipped him anyway, because this cat was so head and shoulders above the human dreck I dealt with at eMachines that there was a sudden reservoir of good will I wanted to express to someone who actually deserved it.

In sum, do not buy an eMachines. Don't do it. It's like dating a hot girl with baggage. Your friends will be impressed at first, and your life will seem perfect, but then, out of nowhere and for no reason at all, your girl will screw the neighbors, steal your car and your credit cards and leave you with something a doctor will need to cure.

Nuff for the moment...back in saddle, kidz.

Back up in yo ass with the Resurrection

- k

top

01apr05

Parking Spaced

I pulled into the Y's parking lot yesterday afternoon and it was full, productively but not literally, meaning there were about 47 cars taking up 50 spots. I counted three cars that were either angled across two spaces or simply straight-straddling a yellow line. Can't choose between two parallel spots? Be a dick, and take them both. Good parking is a basic skill, and in Michigan you're tested on parking before scoring your first license. Unfortunately, in a free society, folks without important basic skills can mingle with the rest, polluting the pond water and the wildlife around it. Wanna true snapshot of Flint? Visit the downtown Y and all ye questions shall be answered, parking warts and all.

Representative of Flint's wide base of bipedal fauna, YMCA members and employees include crackheads and convicts, pediatricians and trial lawyers, police officers and pole dancers...pimps and hustlers...clergy and the certifiably crazy. That's just what you'll find in the weight room. The gymnasium is a bug-light for every athletic thug in Flint. Almost everyone owns at least one vehicle despite wide arrays of sketchy employment records, and these cat will park any damn way they see fit, paht-nah.

Some people park like jerks by accident. They are too harried or incompetent to master general details. You can spot these types by what they drive-- economical hoopties (Vegas, Pintos, rusted out Cavaliers), signifying that there are tons of important details beyond parking that these folks will never master. These people think life is unfair, especially to them...and they take out their frustrations in the weight room and they never put their weights back and they always smell like dead ass. That's one segment.

Many people, however, park over the lines on purpose. This one cat with a tricked Escalade does this all the time. His rims are worth far more than the laptop I'm typing on, yet he calls attention to himself, in Flint! His Escalade comes, rudely takes up two spaces, and then leaves, unmolested. I ran with a crowd back in high school that keyed cars up for doing that. I've lost that particular taste for danger but surely there are others in this fine city who wish to be dispensers of karmic justice. Coat his rims with a few dollops of white flat paint. I ran with another crowd that helped to open spaces in parking lots by driving off in a Lincoln or Trans Am owned by some poor bastard trying to decide between skim and one-percent. Grocery store lots are good places to steal cars so long as your face doesn't show up on a security camera. Grand theft in the parking lots of strip clubs, while enticing on paper, can lead to bad trouble since such properties tend be protected by a wide assortment of firearms.

Right, and what I'm trying to say is that I'm not the guy anymore to dispense with that kind of justice. I complained once to the front desk about the Escalade ...attempted to complain:

me: "Some dude's Escalade is taking up two spaces in the lot."
clerk: "Oh, that Dontell. He do that to keep his doors clean."
me: "He does this a lot, and there are no open spaces out there."
clerk: "That the only car he can drive now and he wanna keep it clean."
me: Gave the 'you got to be kidding' look.

I got my towel and club key and ambled off to the locker room, wondering what cardio machine I wanted to use (turned out to be an elliptical). There was nothing for me to say to the clerk, philosophically, urgently, or even offhandedly. I could ask her to bring Dontell to the front desk and I could explain why hogging parking spots in a parking-scarce lot makes you a solipsistic dick, but then I'd get into a fight for the first time in 15 years, and then to cap off my workout I'd prolly get shot. There comes a point in most peoples lives when criminal violence is either sworn off forever or used only in special cases. For me that bridge was crossed during my time in the military.

Solipsism:

-The theory or view that the self is the only reality.
-That person who drags 30 items through a 15 item or less lane and then writes out a check.
-Barry Bonds
-That person who parks like an asshole
-That jerk who gases up at a crowded station and then runs into the Quicky Store for 10 minutes without moving the freaking car away from the pump.
-Tom Delay
-A person who complains during and after every purchase
-Larry Ellison
-Sure, there are 6.3 billion people milling about, but I am special!
-Al Sharpton

My friend Nate was ranting about Tom Delay's kind solipsism recently, and it made me think about what a widespread disease the self-based tunnel vision is. As some of you know, not only is Delay thrice in trouble for ethics violations, for among other things, going on free and swanky junkets with lobbyists on the eve of legislation votes, but also a man whose right to die stance did a one-eighty from dealing with his parents to dealing with Terri Schiavo. Skanky, eh? Do we need these people? In the cases of Miles Davis and a handful of jive-ass geniuses, sure, their contributions outweigh the poison. Gifted people tend to be full of themselves and if you contribute heavily, then what the hell, set your house on fire, blame it on your enemies, and score a fat check for a nicer house...but know there is always a price. People like Delay, and this low-rent pimp wannabe bastard who is messing up my parking opportunities, are not contributors. They are not making anything better, they build nothing. Rather, they spread fear, bad vibes, and or bad ideas. Larry Ellison is, alas, entitled to be an overbearing unctuous prick, he has given much to our modern economy, and in business he's been almost always right. But Tom Delay?

There are thousands who could do what Delay does. Being a hustler is one of those skills you're born with, and you tend to have the refinements of the craft in place by time you reach puberty. There's a 14-year-old out there right now selling stolen cigarettes and pimping his girlfriend, who can do exactly what Tom Delay is doing right now. A mantra people like this have in common: The rules are for everyone else. I'm special, therefore I have my own rules. Straighten up or go away, seriously. Space is valuable in the 2k5.

Just one of many reasons I could never be in charge. It'd prolly take me, oh 48 hours or so before I was totally out of control. I sell Texas to Mexico and legalize drugs-- nothing like a full plate in front of you to truly test your abilities. I'd free up the markets and declare war on Mars, thereby getting emergency spending authorizations to colonize the Red Ball in our own image. Mars, bitches...parking spaces forever and teamwork uber alles. Indeed.

USA - We had to burn the villiage to save it - World Tour.

See what you get for lettin' honkies run the show?

- k

top