Con-Man

We are not victims. We are perpetrators.

On a lonely night last week, I let a man convince me he needed help. He told me his wife and two year old child were in their car. He showed me his cancerous stomach, and this seemed relevant. He wouldn't shut up. He made me smell his breath, and look at the veins on his arms, and told me how relevant this all was. I walked with him to his hotel and paid for his room. He heaved like an obnoxious man having an asthma attack. He told me how amazing I was. I did not feel good. I wished he would shut the fuck up and just let me get back to being lonely.

He asked me for one more favor, and it was the first strike of realization. He asked if I would get him some food, you know, for his family. It took the wind out of me. I told him I had to pass. He apologized. I asked him for a favor- Let me take his picture. He looked suspicious. I thought- fuck you.

I kept my hand on my camera-bag. He asked to see it. I stepped back from him and lifted it out of it's case. I put it back in a very short time. I was still trying to operate as if he were not a lying creep. He told me he was superstitious about having his picture taken. He was speaking more quickly by the second. He told me he didn't know what I would do with the pictures. I thought- how dare you you pathetic, fucking pathetic crook?

I spent the next morning talking with the hotel manager. He said the man had tried to get another night at the hotel on the same credit card. I told the manager that if he could not eject the man by check-out time, I would have the police out there to make sure it happened.

I am not a victim. I walked up to the counter with my feet. I handed the incredulous Indian gentleman my credit card, with my hand. I signed the receipt with my pen. I went home and explained to my wife that I had paid for a criminal to stay the night in a hotel. This did not go over well. I don't imagine there is anything ridiculous about that.

I am a perpetrator. I am an accomplice. I feel guilty about this. I don't want to dupe anybody else out of their hard-earned money. I don't want to take any more money from my children or my wife, only to hand it over to strangers, to have them do with it as they will. I am a con-man in my own house. I am glad that I have at least warned my wife.

The Atomic Cafe

Quite a film about the Atomic Bomb, entirely made up of archival footage. Originally released in 1982. Not a feel-good film.

Why John McCain Has to be So Sad

McCain has long seemed to me to be a great guy. I lost a bit of respect for him during the campaign, but that mostly had to do with his unfortunate willingness to play puppet to the ideologies of an entire party. He probably wouldn't have made it as far as he did without it (playing puppet). It was sad to see him jeered at when he defended Obama during the campaign. It is sad to see him jeered at when he defends Obama now. It is sad to see somebody genuine forced to waste their political time maintaining their personal dignity by not letting childish partisan comments just stand un-challenged. Bravo McCain... with your sense of empathy, you would make a wonderful non-profit manager.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

There is a group of workmen just down the hall from my desk, demolishing office walls. Something that they are doing is a thudding, thump, thump, thump. Every time that reverberation hits my body I clench, time stops for an eighth of a second, my heart like a fist.

My daughter has a new bed, with soft nets, and no longer has rails to hit her head against, a thudding, thump... thump... thump; I used to feel it in my feet when I was upstairs with my headphones on, and would realize that I had been clenching, unaware, for some time now. My body knew, had heard through these soft reverberations, and was tightening like a knot. I realize then with my mind and run down, and she is crying in bed, rocking, thudding, her soft head making a hard noise on the railing. I feel like a shit-head for not spending every waking hour sitting here in her room, cradling her head so she can rock in bed, back and forth... it is something that she appears to enjoy.

My daughter has a new bed, and I can sit, peaceful, in the office, as long as my son's feet are not padding, thump thump thump, against his hard-wood floor.

In my office I can feel it, pulsing through my feet, heart like a fist, forcing myself to not stand and run.

Somewhere down the hall, my daughter is assisting work-men, breaking through walls with the back of her head.

Auto Tune the News

Let's Have a Culture War!

Let's have a culture war. Let's pit our tribes' nebulous then specific then nebulous ideologies against one another. First we'll brace our bodies, gird our loins with personalized facts, made true and more true through repetition, through volume and rage, through tears because tears are the punctuation of actuality. We'll forge these swords in fires of fear, of rumors made fact through repetition, beaten and worked into fine points which we can use to separate skin from skin, open up flesh where flesh was not built to open, force these pipes to burst and let the life flow out.

Let's have a culture war. We are enraged that they dare and they, in turn enraged that we. Convinced we are that we defend the motherland,
And it is they who's backs are to the sea.

A video that really ought to have been seen by everybody by now

Why this web-log is disappointing

The most disappointing thing about my web-log is that I frequently find myself with nothing to say. My mind is a chaotic mess of noise, teeming with something, like insects eating each-other or something, and yet I often find myself dry-heaving absolute nothingness, sitting blank with a pen and notebook or finding something entirely else, entirely less satisfying than writing, to do online. I am sure there was something insidious about the dream I had last night. It had nothing to do with killing my children, in case you're wondering.

My inability to connect with human beings is proving to be more of a handicap than I had expected. "Fine!' I told myself long ago. "Fuck them. Who even needs friends? Only needy people need friends." 

As it turns out, three years into "abandoning" all my friends by default (the ones you just end up with based mostly on geographical location and popular-ness factor), there are an extremely limited number of people I talk to besides my wife. I won't tell you the number of people, since using a relative term like "limited", it will mean an equal amount of pathetic to everybody, regardless of their limitless capacity to meet people.

I even stooped as low as to look in the craigslist ads section "strictly platonic", but the three people there who were not looking for "just friendly hand-jobs, then we'll see what happens" seemed pathetic to me. Their content was perfectly normal, but only pathetic people look for friends on craigslist. I have to have some standards, right? 

You would have to really really fucking impress me to have me respond to a friendship ad on craigslist Baltimore, tomorrow... I can do hand-jobs.

Gay Porn

Caution: The following porn is very graphic in nature, and should not be read out loud to humans younger than 18. Instead, show them a violent film in which only very bad people die. This way, our children will grow up with a clear picture about who and who does not deserve to die. This prepares them for future decisions like, should I shoot this person while they are running away from me. A good film example of this would be... say... Bambi. Let your kids go watch Bambi, while you read this Gay porn I have written. Here we go:

I was sitting on the other side of the couch. Calvin was sitting on the other side,
the side I wasn't sitting on. We were very drunk. This story is about to get very sexual.

When Calvin started to undress, I did too. I was happy to see that he was as scrawny
and pale as I, but his nipple hair was, to me, horrifying. It dug in like the terrible legs
of an insect. I wanted to help him, to shave it off, but the thought of Calvin's bleeding
nipples made me feel sick. This story is about to get very sexual. I looked at Calvin's pale,
dry lips and thought about whether they would be rough, if he were to run them, closed,
down my back. Would there be white scratch marks when he scraped my back with those lips?
Would I like it?

When Calvin asked if I wanted to touch penises with him, I said yes. It was weird. Our small,
limp penises kissed like monkeys with no eyes or bones in their faces. I don't know how Calvin
felt about this.

When Calvin asked if I wanted to arm-pit with him, I said "what is that?"

A few minutes later, we were interlocking arm-pits. Calvin's face was really intense.
I think he really liked this. I felt like he was sweating alot more than I was, and hoped it didn't make him feel insecure.

When a pocket of air made a farting noise between us I was done.

I dressed quickly. "Thanks, man. That was really good."
I don't think I should drink with Calvin anymore.

I know Bill Maher is often a bit much but..

I am not the type of person who would do well in the audience of "Real Time with Bill Maher". I enjoy his comedy and appreciate a great deal of his insight, but he often strikes me as a radical-- almost the Rush Limbaugh of the Democrats (only mounds of shit more pleasant). I think he is a very smart guy, I think he has just over-committed himself on many of the issues. That said, I want to share a piece he did on his show. I have extracted this from a written version on the Huffington Post website.



New Rule: Not Everything in America Has to Make a Profit

How about this for a New Rule: Not everything in America has to make a profit. It used to be that there were some services and institutions so vital to our nation that they were exempt from market pressures. Some things we just didn't do for money. The United States always defined capitalism, but it didn't used to define us. But now it's becoming all that we are.

Did you know, for example, that there was a time when being called a "war profiteer" was a bad thing? But now our war zones are dominated by private contractors and mercenaries who work for corporations. There are more private contractors in Iraq than American troops, and we pay them generous salaries to do jobs the troops used to do for themselves ­-- like laundry. War is not supposed to turn a profit, but our wars have become boondoggles for weapons manufacturers and connected civilian contractors.

Prisons used to be a non-profit business, too. And for good reason --­ who the hell wants to own a prison? By definition you're going to have trouble with the tenants. But now prisons are big business. A company called the Corrections Corporation of America is on the New York Stock Exchange, which is convenient since that's where all the real crime is happening anyway. The CCA and similar corporations actually lobby Congress for stiffer sentencing laws so they can lock more people up and make more money. That's why America has the world;s largest prison population ­-- because actually rehabilitating people would have a negative impact on the bottom line.

Television news is another area that used to be roped off from the profit motive. When Walter Cronkite died last week, it was odd to see news anchor after news anchor talking about how much better the news coverage was back in Cronkite's day. I thought, "Gee, if only you were in a position to do something about it."

But maybe they aren't. Because unlike in Cronkite's day, today's news has to make a profit like all the other divisions in a media conglomerate. That's why it wasn't surprising to see the CBS Evening News broadcast live from the Staples Center for two nights this month, just in case Michael Jackson came back to life and sold Iran nuclear weapons. In Uncle Walter's time, the news division was a loss leader. Making money was the job of The Beverly Hillbillies. And now that we have reporters moving to Alaska to hang out with the Palin family, the news is The Beverly Hillbillies.

And finally, there's health care. It wasn't that long ago that when a kid broke his leg playing stickball, his parents took him to the local Catholic hospital, the nun put a thermometer in his mouth, the doctor slapped some plaster on his ankle and you were done. The bill was $1.50, plus you got to keep the thermometer.

But like everything else that's good and noble in life, some Wall Street wizard decided that hospitals could be big business, so now they're run by some bean counters in a corporate plaza in Charlotte. In the U.S. today, three giant for-profit conglomerates own close to 600 hospitals and other health care facilities. They're not hospitals anymore; they're Jiffy Lubes with bedpans. America's largest hospital chain, HCA, was founded by the family of Bill Frist, who perfectly represents the Republican attitude toward health care: it's not a right, it's a racket. The more people who get sick and need medicine, the higher their profit margins. Which is why they're always pushing the Jell-O.

Because medicine is now for-profit we have things like "recision," where insurance companies hire people to figure out ways to deny you coverage when you get sick, even though you've been paying into your plan for years.

When did the profit motive become the only reason to do anything? When did that become the new patriotism? Ask not what you could do for your country, ask what's in it for Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

If conservatives get to call universal health care "socialized medicine," I get to call private health care "soulless vampires making money off human pain." The problem with President Obama's health care plan isn't socialism, it's capitalism.

And if medicine is for profit, and war, and the news, and the penal system, my question is: what's wrong with firemen? Why don't they charge? They must be commies. Oh my God! That explains the red trucks!