Republitics

I live in a conservative district. One of Congress’ most conservative members, John Doolittle, is our representative. He served a long time and then got caught doing something or other unethical. And him a Mormon! So he’s out, and we’re having a special election on June 3rd to elect the Republican who will run in November.

I’m not a Republican but I used to be, and I was intrigued that there was a candidate’s forum near my house tonight, so I went. It was very cool. Democracy at the local level is a fun thing to watch, because it is personal and it’s participatory. The major candidates (there were two) are so full of themselves and so full of shit (oops, I said the same thing twice), while the unknowns (two of those also) are nice and kind of interesting and somewhat over their heads. Everyone had four minutes to introduce themselves and two minutes to respond to questions from the audience. They occupied the front of a meeting room at the Community Center that had room for about a hundred people, and stood at the lectern when their turn came as directed by the moderator, one of those professional motivator / public speaker types, who handled the questions as they were brought to him handwritten on cards.

Hereafter, some impressions of the deal.

I’ve been physically close to a few established politicians – a very few – and they all have something in common: Their faces are extremely tight and closed. Politicians are the unhealthiest looking people. Far worse than, say, corporate executives. I was about twenty feet from IMC’s world-famous globe-trotting CEO the other day and he was fit and alert and rosy-cheeked and bright-eyed. Not so the first guy on our list.

Doug Ose moves slowly and deliberately. Nothing, absolutely nothing, about him does anything without written permission from the control center. Not his hands, not his lips, his eyelids, those cheek muscles most people can’t control when they’re nervous, nothing. He wasn’t robotic in any way. He just had a thick layer of absolute control over a core of absolute stiffness. The curious darkness in his eyes was explained by his penchant for using every chance at the lectern as an opportunity to say something critical if not insulting about McClintock, his major opponent. In his introduction, he referred to his opponent in the singular, artfully ignoring the other two candidates’ existence. Maybe not so artful: I heard a couple low ooh’s of disapproval. His background is of running a local family business for thirty years before jumping into politics.

Tom McClintock is a veteran of California politics, mostly from down south. What he’s doing up here I don’t know. But I have long admired his eloquence in defending firearm rights, and voted for him in the fiasco we had over the Governorship a few years back that resulted in us getting Schwarzenegger (who’s turned out pretty well overall). He looks the silver fox, but is very serious. He’s a fairly dependable Constitutionalist, but has spent his career in the minority party in Sacramento hence has learned to compromise in order to get anything done. He squandered no opportunity to criticize Ose – I felt the mean little dance they had was self-serving and unnecessary. He’s been a politician pretty much all his adult life.

Suzanne Jones comes across as the self-effacing heroine of a movie about the home-grown school district employee who just can’t take it any more and runs for Congress. She has a law degree and has worked abroad and generally comes across as a good fit – unless those wide staring eyes really do mean she has no clue and is rapidly making her answers up as she goes. If so, she did fine. I’d consider voting for her (if they’ll let me – not being in the GOP might make a difference), except I’m skeptical about “the conservative tradition that we Northern Californians are committed to” mentioned on her website. I’m from the Berkeley part of Northern California. The conservative traditions I’m committed to involve free speech, medicinal herbs and guns. Somehow I doubt that as a cloth-coated public-schools Republican she’s on quite that same page.

Theodore Terbolizard (“Terbo Ted”) is the dark horse, the libertarian Republican, and a very entertaining public speaker. But he’s not just a young Ron Paul. His bio speaks mostly of a life as an artist and musician, including work at Burning Man and at various places round the world. He’s energetic and unconventional, with an impish smile the fine suit cannot camouflage, yet at the same time very well-read, quick to answer and full of ideas. All the candidates clearly regard Bush and the current crop of Republicans in Washington as almost as big a problem as the Democrats, having led the country astray, but Terbo seems already to embody the next generation rather than a mere correction. In truth, if I’m allowed to vote, he’s more likely to get mine than any of the others.

The audience was mostly retired folks, with a scattering of young couples who don’t have kids yet. The questions were sort of a mixed bag: obscure local issues (“What do you think of the move to incorporate Orangevale and Fair Oaks into a city?” – none of them really had a clue), criticisms of Bush (“Has No Child Left Behind been a success or a failure?” – all but Ose, and most of the audience, thought it a failure), and generalities (“What could you do for our district from all the way over in Washington?” – this was taken as a clear chance to make shit up). Nothing about Iraq or “family values” or Obama, thank goodness.

The cutie with the cameraman saw me taking notes and asked if she could ask me a few questions on camera, so I submitted to be interviewed. Hopefully it won’t go on the air. I now realize she was just trolling for negativity, and I complied by observing how Ose and McClintock talked smack at each other and ignored the other two and it was a big turn-off. But I put it less eloquently and frankly, I’d rather not enable the media’s continuing obsession with undercutting non-Democrats, if that was her game. Maybe she was just looking for a story, in which case she certainly had to look hard at that place. We were a pretty sedate set of suburbanites, even if sauced up with bottled water and cookies.

Come November, their Democrat opponent will be Charlie Brown, and though Terbo Ted calls him an intellectual lightweight and a terrible speaker, there’s really no reason right now to think I won’t vote for him. Especially if he’s up against Ose and, as appears now to be the case, there’s no Libertarian running. (Here’s the last guy’s old website – he comes across as something of an intellectual lightweight too, unfortunately. “The price of Freedom is eternal vigal.”? What? Remember, folks, stupid websites are made by stupid people.)

I need a final paragraph to balance things out or something but I'm late and it's tired so g'night.

Hulu Whoop

Someone at work told me about Hulu.com. (They couldn't believe I'd never heard of it. They also couldn't believe I'd never heard of Apple TV -- whatever that is, I forget already. Compared to the typical IMC engineer I'm something of a Luddite.) I remembered Hulu long enough to try it at home (benefit of a catchy name). Hooked the laptop up to the widescreen TV and the stereo last night and we had dinner watching The Jerk. Let me tell you something about The Jerk. That movie is a lot funnier than you remember. And the younger generation that had never seen it was simply howling. It is full of brilliant silly. (Lots of misses, too, but no movie's perfect. Well, some are, but.)

Anyway, Hulu came through and it was all free, except for the microprocessor commercials that were thrown in without any regard whatsoever for the scene that was playing. But they were only fifteen seconds long and included a countdown to when they'd be over. So here's a big whoop out to Hulu.

Oh and hey, while we're at it, a big whoop out to Lulu. She was a cutie who did more to advance the cause of middle-aged teachers' Lolita fantasies with her song "To Sir With Love" than The Police and Britney Spears combined. Truly a cultural pioneer.

And here's a vote of whoopidom to Cthulhu. As they say, why settle for the lesser evil? He, it, whatever, is the biggest whoop of all, because waking dead Cthulhu where he lies dreaming would bring eldritch horrors out of the deep and ichorous depths of time to gnaw on the skulls of men and blast their doomed and depraved souls to the stygian depths of the spaces between the stars, where they would be consumed by the stricky green minions of blind idiot gods living undead beyond all reason, and that would be kind of a big whoops overall.

I Wanna Be A Puppy Again

 
 

Dug a Trench for the Gas Line

Had a good morning. The company I work for, IMC, an infamous megamultinational corporation (hence the name, Infamous Megamultinational Corp), is celebrating a milestone anniversary this year, a number of years since its founding that is divisible by ten. So we are celebrating.

Are we having big expensive parties? No.

Are we getting big bonuses and creatively attractive stock options? No.

Are we getting new furniture, shaded parking lots, freshly painted buildings, anything like that? No. (Lab tools? Newer computers? Ha ha ha.)

No, the company decided to mark its many years of making money by getting the employee base to log a million hours of community volunteer time. Not each of us -- that would be hard -- but as a collective, and that's actually doable. And so I spent the morning with a dozen comrades at a Habitat For Humanity project in one of the area's more challenged neighborhoods, helping with the construction of a house that will soon be home to a family with seven children, one of them in a wheelchair. I know no more about the family, but the house will be tightly packed: Five bedrooms in fourteen hundred square feet. Still, it will be new, and by whatever scheme HFH uses, it will be theirs.

Sometimes I think that as hives of corporate greedheads go, mine is okay.

The Fine Green Smell of Money

I started work at IMC back in the heady days of increasing internet demand and rapidly rising technology stock futures. Our stock split in every odd year, a fine and profitable cadence. My more seasoned colleagues were cashing in their stock options and paying off their houses or buying big new ones, and putting expensive sports cars in the garage. I didn’t own much yet, but I snatched it up as best I could afford, happy that I was going to be rich. Then in the late 1990s I got stock options myself and calculated that, with present trends, I’d be a millionaire before I was fifty.

I exercised those options last week, on the verge of expiration, ten years to the day since they were granted. The way it works is, you take the grant price and subtract it from the current price, multiply that difference by the hundreds, nay thousands, of options you were granted, and take those vast profits to the bank, whistling as you go, dreaming of Corvettes and Sea Rays. Considering how well the stock market has done over the past ten years, it was no great stretch to take my entire wad and snag me a fancy new set of wheels.


After finding a few dozen half-buried chunks of concrete, the previous model was spreading a quart of oil on each turn around the yard. Finally stopped running with a bang a couple weeks ago and my wife came in with motor oil splattered on her clothes. She was quite exhilarated by the experience and told me about it with great enthusiasm, yet was willing to trade up. The new one has an actual drive motor with several forward speeds. Nearly hauls itself over the moguls and hillocks hidden in the long grass. Best of all, it has an electric starter. I was all for that, because I’m tired of hearing the ol’ lady bitch about the ripcord always throwing her back out.

I’ve already customized it with a cable-tie, stylishly located so as to keep the control cable from dangling into the passing verdure. I’m thinking of adding a cup-holder, though I may have to restrict usage to beverages whose caps can be screwed on tight. But never mind style, I am all about function. How else but with a new lawnmower are we to find more half-buried chunks of concrete? Ah, the fresh green fragrance of capital success.

All Are Beautiful

One thing about having been around awhile: It seems when I look at a beautiful young woman, I can see what she will look like when she is old -- and when I look at an old woman, I can see what she looked like when she was young. I remember there was a time when the distinction mattered.

Beware the Under Toe!

Enough! I hate when my bloggery commentationalism turns political, because my rantings rapidly turn semi-incoherent however right my underlying instincts may be (no, really). All I know is Kennedy was right when he asserted (with proof) that tax cuts generally lead to higher tax revenues, and Bush proved it, and so did Clinton, so quit with the tax-cuts-are-only-for-the-rich Left Coaster-isms already. All I also know is it sucks that if my capital investments make gains, I owe income tax on all the difference, but if they make losses, I can only write off three grand of it. Three grand is not enough! I sold GE (at a loss) the other year to pay off some of the house, enough to keep those losses carrying over against taxable income at 3k per year for the next seven freaking years. How stupid is that? It means any more losses I incur (plenty of opportunity for it these days) can't be written off until, geez, Obama's third term! Choke! (So I shouldn't have sold? Hello? Stock market, or lower mortgage? Come on, quick now, easy question.)

So forget all that! Here's a picture of some toes near and dear to me.

Taxes and Dumbness and More Dumb Taxingness

Tomorrow is Tax Day and if there’s one thing that annoys me, it’s presidential candidates who don’t freaking understand taxation and economics.

Question: What would be a quick and easy way to simultaneously:

• Increase the taxes on most middle-class household incomes
• Decrease federal tax revenues
• Slow the stock market down even further

This should be easy because both Democratic senators have promised to try and make it happen. It’s a standard play out of the Demo playbook and, like many such plays, the fact that it makes no damn sense evidently makes no impression on the vast majority of people who vote Democratic.

No, no, not CAFTA. CAFTA’s a Bush thing (I think – the Clinton’s seem split over it, so I guess many Democrats are too). That’s a whole nother animal – too complicated for me.

Answer: Raise the tax on capital gains. WHAT A STUPID IDEA! Nothing more than faux class warfare dressed in jeans and a t-shirt. Oh, yeah, soak the rich. What rich? Forty seven percent of households that paid some sort of capital gains tax in 2005 had incomes under $50k. Double that income to where most of us mid-century two-income types have settled out and participation is seventy nine percent. And is this supposed to help anyone? In ’97 and ’03 when the rates were reduced, capital gains tax receipts went up, not down. Way up. As you’d expect. Profits were not so artificially held down and the markets got more active, is one way to look at it. Stock market picked up, too, future value projections now being higher. Not to mention foreign investment was less discouraged.

See, though we need government, and we need various means to pay for it, taxes are never the less a burden on any economy. Lessen the burden, and the economy picks up. Right, some taxes can encourage economic activity, it’s true. Investments in infrastructure are particularly good, be they roads and dams or schools and hospitals (yeah, I’m a public school supporter and leaning towards public medical too). But come on. Taxing capital gains made sense in the 1930s when no one had any but the fat cats who were riding their Duesenbergs past bread lines and saying there but for the grace of grandpappy go I but it makes no damn sense today, not when more people than ever own homes and participate in the stock market, one way or t’other, and small businesses are being started up and sold and started up again faster’n you can say Quicken and Turbo Tax.

Obama would double the capital gains tax rate. Clinton’s a little more agnostic but would certainly allow the Bush tax cuts to sunset (arguably his greatest if not only success). So yeah, no one’s perfect. But do they have to be so obvious and partisan about it? Along with many other sometimes well-intentioned attempts at social equalization, raising the capital gains tax is a classic example of what George Orwell called, "an idea so stupid only an intellectual could have conceived it."

This rant brought to you after listening to this on NPR on the way home form work.

And NO! this doesn't mean I support McCain. There's plenty to complain about all around, this is just one of my hot-button issue button thingies.

Next-day follow-up: Not meaning to over-bash Obama. He's been getting a lot of grief for his guns and religion remarks and maybe I'm a little too San Franciscan at heart but I didn't see anything bothersome in what he said, just empathy and understanding. From a high altitude.

A Waking Dream of The Burn

I woke up Friday morning with my head packed into a pipe bomb and had to move real slow to keep it from exploding. I was brought a big glass of vitamin C and love stirred into orange juice, went back to sleep, and had a look at work email after ten thirty. Almost nothing there. It was as if the "out of the office sick today" email I sent out at six a.m. actually got read by people, and the entire corporation was leaving me alone. Very strange. I was tempted to shake my laptop like an Etch-A-Sketch and start over, but no, so I took a bath.

I read a book while absorbing hot water and the steam clouded my glasses and carried toxins away to the ceiling, or so I hoped. There's really no cure for the common cold, however uncommon, but if there was, I would have it include a large tub of hot water. And ceiling speakers.

Feeling like crap is no excuse not to work, of course. Hooked wirelessly into the secure network, I may almost as well be at my desk. If I could create a work space, a sort of home cubicle, I could get plenty done. Lard knows there's plenty enough to do.

But I looked at all those emails (yeah, there was plenty, I underexaggerated), and all these action items required or whatever you call 'em, and the sun on the hillside out back with my landscaping tools strewn about, and the leftover food in the fridge, and all I could think was: It's Friday, and I'm kinda sick. Screw it. So instead I wrote out a story that had come to me as I drifted half-awake a few nights ago. I don't know what else to do with it, so here.

* * *

She walked past a row of rainbow streamers swirling in the wind, her head down, watching her feet. She was so tired. What was it, two in the afternoon? Around her tent flaps slapped, plastic on canvas. Somewhere a pot or something blew over and skiddered in the sand. People were shouting instructions to tie this down or that. A man bicycled by in a crazy wig and colorfully patched pants. He said something; she ignored it. She just wanted her tent. Something like home.

She found it. It was empty. She took off her shoes and put a brick on them and crawled in, tore off her dusty clothes, crawled into the nest. Where was he? She was too tired to think about it. Naptime.

She closed her eyes. Last night, they danced. Or was it just her? Who did she dance with? Someone had a big tent and there was music throbbing and she was happy to turn off her brain and let her body go with it. She did that for hours. Was he with her at all? He wasn’t when she went to bed. He was off, wherever. With whomever, no doubt. Getting it out of his system. What the fuck. Let him. She didn’t care.

Yes she did. That was why she let him. Her mind drifted past twenty years of marriage and childrearing with a man who, she now knew, was never really sure he wanted to be there. After all this time, he still needed something. He claimed he didn’t know what. Fuck a lot of women? Find a new love of his life? Whatever. Here on this crazy playa in the desert, she told him she didn’t give a shit, he could go do what he wanted, just don’t bring anything home. But he didn’t smile or say thank you or anything. Just stared at her, hugged her, kissed her, and walked away. To look at artworks and stuff, he said. Right.

So she danced, alone, and with other alone people. And then she went to bed. It was probably two in the morning. He wasn’t there. She didn’t want to know where he was. She went to sleep and dreamed she was in his arms, and for awhile, she’s pretty sure she really was in his arms. She remembered his body, lying as it does when he’s asleep, and the way he smelled, a smell she loved even after five days without a shower. But when she woke early in the morning, he wasn’t there.

Now she lay still in the windy afternoon and listened to the growing storm whip at the tent. She watched it shake and wondered how other campers were dealing with it. Forty thousand people were out here in a Nevada desert, participating in a sort of ad hoc human circus. She was inclined to worry about them, because this was her first time here and it felt like it should be everyone’s first. But then she figured everyone else knew what they were doing. So she indulged in a little worrying about people whose tents weren’t put up right or whatever, and then told herself to stop worrying and go to sleep. Her tent, their tent, was put up right, anyway. One thing he could do right was put up a tent.

The wind grew and sand flowed and blasted against the side walls and everything shook, but she felt safe, and was so tired, and drifted into windy dreams while Nature called out to remind everyone She was there. The wind grew and grew and fine white sand blew up everywhere. He stopped jogging. He didn’t even walk, but just stopped, feeling idiotic. He turned away from the wind and in that moment, realized he had no idea which way was the way back. If he went one step further, it might be the right way, but was more likely to be the wrong way. He was lost, completely lost. So he sat down, and waited.

How long would the storm last? An hour, two, three? No big deal. It was mid-afternoon, the wind was warm, he had a shirt on to protect at least some of his skin. He knew he could wait. The sand was annoying. It got into everything. A little got into his eye. He turned on his butt to put his back to the wind, hunched over with his face in his hands, breathed slowly, and waited. He sat there and waited a very long time.

He hoped she was okay. He knew she was probably in their tent. She was smart that way. She knew when trouble was coming and managed to avoid it. Not him, though. He was in a little bit of trouble now. He’d been in a lot of trouble lately with her. He was no longer stable, and he knew that and couldn’t fix it even though he knew she needed him to be stable. He needed to be something else, something other than the more or less stable family man he had been the past twenty years. Twenty years was long enough for that. All that time he had vague ideas of doing this or that, of quitting the corporate track, traveling, discovering friendships of every type except the type he already had; of finding women. And though he tried to hide it, he couldn’t, not from his own wife. She knew him better than he knew himself. It tore her apart, he understood that too; yet he couldn’t find enough of him that cared to work on fixing that, on returning to whoever he had been when they got married. It was as if to become a person who cared enough to work on repairing this brittle marriage was to become someone else, someone he wasn’t; and always he had to wonder, what was the point of that? What was the point of yet more pretending? What was the point of continuing to lead a life that wasn’t true, just to try and make someone else happy? Especially someone who wanted pretense least of all?

This ran through his mind and so did a lot of other things, memories, shared dreams. He kept his hands over his face. He felt sand build up and whistle around in his ears. The backs of his arms and his neck were stinging – he was getting sandblasted. Well, that sucked, but there was nothing he could do about it. He could only wait.

He danced with her last night. And then he danced with someone else, and someone else, and danced with the crowd generally, a middle aged man dancing out his inner hippie child. It was fun. Later he found himself in someone’s camp, drinking their vodka and speculating on the true nature of stars and of life out among them, and they gave him a blanket and let him sleep on their sofa. She probably thought he was with some woman, expecting perhaps it would bring some sort of closure, either to his wanderlust or to their marriage, whichever – she said she didn’t care which anymore – and he in turn chose not to care either. But in the depth of the night he did care and made his way back to their tent and slept with her awhile. She moaned happily but never awoke. In the morning he left early to go help his new friends make breakfast for a hundred people, and then did dishes afterwards. He always liked doing dishes.

And still the wind blew. He pretended he was stuck on a flight over the ocean, cramped in a seat, the roar in his ears. He pretended the roof had been ripped off and he had to sit still and small and not get blown away while the airplane returned to the airport. He pretended this a long time.

Maybe he napped, maybe not, he was never sure. The wind slowed way down, and fine white dust drifted everywhere. It was still blowing around, but it was much better. He knew the end was near. He had only to wait for the dust to settle, for the air to clear. He would see the vast tent city then, and could go home. Damn but he was thirsty. His throat was dry and his ears clogged with dust and sand. He still heard the roar.

The roar came at him and passed in a rush of headlights and knobby tires. Another one raced right after. Damn, he thought. How can they see? Could they see him? He was the same color as the dust. What the hell were they doing racing around blind anyway? He heard another coming. No way to know if it was coming from or going back to the place he wanted to be, so all he could do was stand and wait, either until they picked him up or the air cleared.

He heard another one coming and then saw the headlights in the dry dun mist, racing toward him across the flat desert floor. He stood up and raised his arms and watched it approach and when it came near she woke with a gasp and a cry, a hand clutching her throat, her heart racing. She cried out again, staring blindly through the exit of sleep. Something terrible. What? What happened? Where is he? Where are you, baby? Where are you?

The wind was gone, and in the silence she heard him answer, I’m right here, sweetheart. She didn’t see him. Where? I’m right here, he said. I am so, so sorry, honeybunch. I went for a jog out in the desert. I waited out the storm. Some people were out driving in it, driving fast. They couldn’t see me. I am so, so sorry.

Her eyes squeezed shut tight and tears flowed like screams and she felt his arms and legs and body wrap around hers, his body that she knew so well, the body that she had loved so well for so long embraced her and shrank into her, squeezing tears and cries out of her, and enveloped her heart in warmth and light and then, like a candle, melted away and went out.

Sick Sect Sex Sets Scriveners Squirting

The press is having a vast collective circle-jerk over this shit.

SAN ANGELO, Texas (AP) -- Young teenage girls at a polygamist compound in West Texas were required to have sex in a soaring white temple after they were married in sect-recognized unions, according to court documents unsealed Wednesday ... Agents found a bed in the temple with disturbed linens and what appeared to be a female hair ... Associated Press

Hard-on city, right, boys? Them Mormons was purty clever to raise them girls that way, huh? Jayziz. The FLDS is fucked up. But the media's restraint hasn't exactly been impressive.

I believe in religious freedom. If multiple marriage works for people, fine. Of course, there's debate as to whether it does. I suspect it generally does not. Not if one is raised to believe it's God's Will or some shit. If you come to polygamy or polyamory naturally because that's just the way you are, great. I don't want any laws to get in your way. But if you're only there because you were raised by a bunch of patriarchal power freaks, forget it. And let's not even waste time discussing children being married off, even to someone their own age, never mind some dirty old bastard my age. I know how those guys think.

Indeed I do. A bed in the temple, huh? Hmmm.

A Little Man on the Street Carving Carrots

Last year I wandered alone in a far city, thinking lots of little thoughts, mostly about being alone. I liked being alone and I hated being alone. I liked that I could go left and right and stop and go and not have to talk or negotiate or even think about it, I could just do it. I stopped for food on a whim and browsed a bookstore and took a zillion pictures of an old brick castle and had no need to make it fun for someone else or engage in witty repartee or speed up or slow down or anything. It was great. I hated it. I was in Milan, and I was all alone.


Lots of attractive people there. Lots of pretty women, and I was all by myself. This is what you think about under such circumstances. There they are –- here you are. Forever divided, a little by language, perhaps by culture or at least social instinct –- meeting people in a foreign city is not the same as at a neighborhood barbecue –- somewhat by age, certainly by wedding ring … But largely by the division I have always had between myself and the rest of humanity. I know there are people who make friends wherever they go. I’m not one of them. I wish I was. I may yet learn.

So I walked for miles and miles and miles. African men in the Piazza del Duomo tried to sell me stuff. Young people from Forza Nuova handed out flyers with demands to blocco immigrazione while the Hare Krishna clanged by. A well-dressed man stood in front of a store empty but for racks and racks of full-length fur coats. Crowds flowed this way and that, doing all the things the Milanese do between work and supper, mostly shopping by the look of it. I wore my anonymity suit and observed, eyes wide and darting. Sometimes other eyes would look back, and there’d be a moment. A moment, gone. I always forget to smile. Fat lot of good it would do anyway.


I wandered away from the tourist and shopping zone, out to the real streets. There was a wonderful time after dark fell. People bustled about doing their marketing, walking purposefully from shop to shop, trains rattling by between hurrying cars and motorcycles. I hadn't eaten for hours and the rain began to fall and I only had a light fleece jacket, my feet hurt, my back hurt, it was after dark, I had no idea where I was and wouldn’t have been anywhere else for anything.

You can really think at times like that. When far from any person or place you know, everything that is your life is placed into perspective. Important stuff –- my marriage, my career -– things too big to see up close, they became strangely clear to me then. I knew that what I was doing was mostly good, and what wasn’t good could be changed. I even had ideas on how to make those changes. I thought of writing projects, too, and of creative endeavors generally -– snippets of musical arrangement, of fictional dialog. For a short while the evening coalesced into a unified sphere -– an outer shell made up of faces passing by in the trolley cars and restaurant windows, heels on the sidewalk, a Moto Guzzi sliding expertly on wet pavement, a little man on the street carving carrots; and an inner core where everything that was my life found ways to fit together and finally make sense.


That didn’t last long. By the time I realized my innate sense of direction was not leading me back to Stazione Cadorna, I had to urinate like a race horse. The few signs pointing towards public toilets contradicted one another. The geography became all confusion and my lower back whispered of forgotten baseball bats. More walking and a desperate duck into a small hotel to ask the concierge for directions sorted all that out but by then, the unity and the sense achieved earlier was medieval history.

Well, my thoughts are ephemeral, and most of my ideas too. Better I suppose to have thought and lost, than never to have thought at all. I really am just a little man on the street carving carrots, and really, it doesn’t matter.

I Am Man, Arr, I Am A God

I dig in the dirt. I carry thousand of pounds of concrete blocks with but my arms and my hands. I put stone upon stone and reshape the very earth.


Yet my minions are unimpressed. They remain absorbed in their little wars, mindless of the wonders unfolding around them.

Early Morning Rain

No better time for a swim meet than before a drizzly Spring sunrise.

Envy's Lidded Gaze

The Bee puts out a searchable database of state employee salaries. They say, hey, it’s public info. If I was a state employee, I’d be pissed. They didn’t have to make it so easy.

But that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is it bothers me and for the shallowest of reasons. I’ve spent a couple decades in private industry but, because I live in the region of the state capital, surrounded by state workers. The impression one gets is that state office workers have well-defined low-stress jobs and go home at five every day, that the jobs don’t pay so well, but that they wind up with a great retirement package. By contrast, I am always on the edge to figure out how to remain valuable lest I wind up unemployed, I come in about seven in the morning and feel like a shirker if I leave before seven at night, get paid about the average for my generic job description and have almost no retirement at all. Many of us have said over the years, yeah, well, we could work for the state and take it easy, but the state doesn’t pay very well.

Busted. I looked up some old colleagues who left industry to feed at the public trough. I don’t know what they’ve actually been doing since then, but they make more money than I do -– and still, I imagine, go home at five, coddled by state employee union rules, and will have medical benefits when they are old and really need them.

So now I’m just sort of pissed, even though, fuck, I’m lucky to be here.

Benicia Under Wraps

Way back in the beginning of time, they thought the little town between River and Bay would become the great City of the West. But the businessmen went down to San Francisco and the politicians went up to Sacramento, and Benicia has been a nice and small if occasionally busy little place ever since.

But even though it was the Capitol for only a few months, they do preserve its remains.


They have other ways of protecting other buildings.


Evidently so they can crumble in dignity.

Lottery Dreaming

Remember in the early internet days when there was little or no connection between a company and its domain name? Then people discovered they could register a well-known company's name as an internet address and make a boatload of money selling it back to them. For awhile there was a flurry of trading activity as savvy early adopters of the internet domain-buying game snatched up useful URLs and auctioned them off to the companies that wanted to use them, often for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

When I first hit the net in '94 or so, tacobell dot com was just a fan site. At some point the domain was sold to Pepsico (or Tricon or whomever), hopefully for a lot of cash. (For simplicity I'm ignoring the twisted legal history of major corporations beating up on entrepreneurs for being quicker on the draw and basically stealing domain names for a song and a lawyer's fee.)

Those good ol' days are long gone. Domain names themselves mean shit. Content counts. It is said that business dot com sold for the highest amount, well up in the millions; but look at it now. It's nothing. Who would ever have predicted the big winners would have silly names like google, yahoo, myspace and youtube?

But for a moment the dream of unearned riches returned. Turns out back in '06, GM forgot to refresh their copyright to "Oldsmobile" (copyright is distinct from domain name, and rather more valuable). The name sat around unclaimed for awhile. In time, Toyota snatched it up, and Oldsmobile will soon be a component of Toyota's marketing strategy. But imagine if you had been able spend the $5k and snatch it up yourself. Not to make cars (duh) but just to have it in hand when you call GM and ask if they want it back. "Oh wait, Toyota's calling, let me get back to you on that."

Sale! Lingerie Half Off

You know how some people let on that in their non-blog lives, they really are reasonably successful, running this, managing that, doing all right? And then there are others who share their angst and complain a lot. I am inclined towards the latter group. We are treading water in lives that don’t entirely make sense to us, and sometimes we stop paddling long enough to wonder why the hell we even bother –- and then start paddling again as the water rises.

It’s nice that I’m involved with global producers of technology. It’s cool that now and then I get to visit various countries and my employer pays for it. That’s all pretty good. But does it really mean anything to me? Fuck no. Whatever it is I am really supposed to be doing in this life, it has little or nothing to do with being integrated into a vast manufactured society of goal-oriented technical professionals, whatever those are, or with giving a damn about technology and hoping people will buy the next new gizmo.

Well, enough angst for now. Somewhere out there on the interwebnet “we” were talking about how a blog persona is never much like the person behind it. How can it be? A blog is a pseudo-random collection of snapshots. But in using it to express ourselves, surely something approximating the real comes through. Maybe. Maybe not. Begs the point, what. Maybe I should drop this pennywhistle and learn to play guitar.

Well, the Batmobile needs a wax handjob so off I go.