Archive for January, 2011

Friday night, watching Countdown with Keith Olbermann I heard and saw him announce it would be his last show.

“There were many occasions, particularly in the last two and a half years, where all that surrounded the show, but never the show itself, was just too much for me,” -Keith O

Mental double take.

Then a half triple. I was only trying to keep my cat’s butt away from my drink.  That’s all.

I first discovered Keith Olbermann six or seven years ago on the internet, before the birth of brainspank.  Youtube I think.  Special Comments if I remember right.

I was in awe of his ferocious conviction and adroit articulation.  This guy says what I think better than I can, I thought.

Since then, people have said the same to me and about me and it’s always occasion for my own humility.

There has been no greater influence on my writings and style than Mr. Olbermann, save for the somewhat more existential specter of Hunter S. Thompson.

It goes without saying that I am saddened and dismayed.

I’m kinda pissed off.

I bet he would have said fuck a lot if he could.

I was fond of thinking of Keith as Edward R. Murrow but understood it was intellectually dishonest because Murrow was, out of necessity and protocol, far more impartial and absent an agenda.  Yet Murrow didn’t have a faux new agency like Fox News to contend with.  Indeed, the rise of MSNBC was doubtless possible in a big way because of Fox News.  The appropriate analog might be of Walter Cronkite in the context of the Nixon administration and the Vietnam war.  I’m old enough to remember the the musty smell of vacuum tubes and the visage of Cronkite on the black and white Zenith console television.  I’d like to think I remember Cronkite declaring that the Vietnam war was “unwinnable”.  I remember Apollo moon shots.  It coulda happened.

Lies propagated by the the media now are on a scale that Murrow and Cronkite would not have even been able to comprehend.  Prolific, profligate and insidious.

According to Politico, Lawrence O’Donnell will be filling the slot.

Rachel Maddow was on Real Time and had nothing to say.  Bill Maher didn’t hesitate calling bullshit on it.

I hear there was a four year contract two years still fresh.  They fired him.  Anyone seen Zucker?  They fired him.

Yes, Keith Olbermann was ostentatiously guilty for various forays into hyperbolic invective.  Still, he never failed to illuminate.  He never failed to tell the goddamn truth.  The fucking truth.  And with a confident hand, established the identity of what was a callow flailing would be cable news network.  America was in need of it.  Fearless, daredevil courage with unmitigated honesty and some sloppy catcalls were the fuel for his rocket.

I’ll bet he’s a dick.  I’m sure he is unless he likes you.

It should be noted that he was suspended in November in part for his campaign contribution to Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords; she of the remarkable recovery so far of a bullet through the head.

“The man who sees absolutes where all other men see nuances and shades of meaning is either a prophet or a quack. Donald H. Rumsfeld is not a prophet.” -Keith O

Don’t doubt for a minute that it was the fight he fought that led to his walking away.  He probably tipped out the door as he was getting axed.  Out the door of a house that he built.

The very vacuum of intel or reason obviates events as they are being described.  Comcast’s acquisition of all things NBC is a cheeseburger and a road map to Keith Olbermann’s departure.  COO of Comcast Stephen B. Burke, a ‘Bush Ranger’, raised at least $200k for Bush in ’04.  -Democraticunderground.com

Burke is definitely a dick and we all may be in trouble.

Keith Olbermann spoke truth to power.  It was his specialty.  He took obvious delight in it.  I crap you negative when I tell you that’s why he’s gone.

I am sad.  He was by no means perfect.  But he filled the holes left gaping by progressive passivity with righteous anger and he will be missed.  We needed him and we still do.  He’s a champion.  I’m waiting to see how MSNBC intends to do better.  O’Donnell is quite good but it’s hardly the show or the spectacle that Olbermann masterminded over the last eight years.  Respect him much for the firebrand he is but understand that he’s pretty damn funny and an intuitive master of ceremonies.

This is stupid.  It was my favorite show on television.  I hated it when he had guest subs.  But I like them all now.

Crap false equivalency between the O’Reillys, the Hannitys and the Limbaughs as opposed to the Olbermanns, the Maddows or the O’Donells these days.  Bullshit.  The difference is elementary.  The former pursues an evil agenda with lies and obfuscation and the latter pursues an agenda with truth and clarity.  Yes they both get carried away.  Get over it.  I mean, they shoot horses don’t they?

“Moral? It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all the answers,” -Thurber via Olbermann

“Good night and good luck,”

Drinks for my friends.

I like her. I can’t help it.

She’s just so bold.  Brash.  Fearless.  She calls ’em like she sees ’em and she’s just so authentically American.

I like how big politicians don’t intimidate her.

All the Republicans fear her.

And she’s a fighter.  Not afraid of a dust up.  Never walks away from a fight or even entertains the notion of apologizing.  She’s got a winning smile and a pit bull wit.  A folksy, classy charisma.  When she enters the room, she controls the oxygen.  I’ve only ever seen her on the TV but you can see people running out of air.  And you can see other folks all puffy with too much of the air.

She doesn’t care about the status quo.  She’s got talent and she’s not embarrassed to know she’s right.  She says and does unpopular things but she knows she’s right.  I admire her certainty.

She has moxie and confidence.

She could be our next President of The United States.  She’s running you know.  They keep showing her dodging the question.  I think she’s just being coy.  Noncommittal.  But I heard her say it tonight.  I think.  On the TV.

There was a Vanity Fair article about fifteen years ago where she said she liked having her hair pulled while she got fucked in the ass.

Roseanne Barr.

Drinks for my friends.

My best friend tells me he’s always thought of me as Spiderman.

The other day I was on my way to work and my car died one lane right of the fast lane just past Coldwater heading west on the 101 to Calabasas from downtown.  Rush hour like it can only be in Los Angeles on her freeways.  Traffic came to a stop and so did my ten year old Audi.  My car died so silently it took me a minute to understand I was dead in the water.

I don’t do helpless very well.

There I was paying my cell phone bill so I could dial 911 as I sat in morning rush hour traffic at a dead halt.  Tires literally screaming to a stop behind me while I listened for myself on the radio for my fifteen minutes of fame as the latest asshole foolishly attempting to commute in a jalopy destined for mechanical failure in the human race to process the grist.

To say it sucked would be my personal contribution of understatement for the new year.

Eyes glued to the mirrors.  I watched them swerve recklessly.  They came to a stop behind me and hesitated too much in trying to steer around me.  They came upon me suddenly and slid to a stop.  They careened.  They cursed and blared horns.  I didn’t dare do any damn thing but sit there in neutral with my seat belt on.  I “fingered” them as they jerked around me to speed by.  I knew I wasn’t out of gas.  I knew my battery was good.  I understood that whatever had happened was most likely serious as in seriously expensive.

Turned out that was true.

Timing belt.

A $60 part.

When the timing belt gives up on a fairly expensive German car, the valves tend to bend themselves in the confusion and chaos.  Can’t just tow it because it’s all wheel drive.  Gotta have a flatbed.

Took the free freeway service about 45 minutes to even show up.  He sat on the shoulder and gestured at me to put my car in neutral and stay strapped in.  I did my best to gesture back that I understood and that I already had.  So the tow truck appears and I tell him he can’t do anything more than get me off to the side because I’m basically four wheel drive and he’ll do more harm than good if we go any further.  He left me on the side of the freeway to wait for a flatbed.  I had ample time to reflect upon when I had money and a warranty.

The free freeway service guy insisted upon pouring a gallon of gas in my tank and trying to jumpstart me.  I let him even though I knew it was futile.  He told me it was maybe two hours wait for a flatbed and pointed out that it was a pretty nice day.  He said at least it’s not raining.  I lit a smoke and examined the early morning freeway architecture.  The sun was bright, fat and glared hard.  The wind blew and I was was one of those poor fucks you see on the side of the road with a hopeless look on their face.  Ever been in that scenario where you know you’re completely upside down and it’s just about waiting for it to play out to a worse case inevitability?

I get to the repair shop and they confirm it will be thousands of dollars.  Thousands that I don’t have.  They tell me it could take five days.  I take some minutes to remember times when I had money and how this would have merely pissed me off.  I spend less time realizing that although I’ve managed to gain back some self sufficiency, my ass is still broke.  I think hard and begin to call anyone I know who has money and think about the losers who owe me money.  There is one woman who owes me enough to buy a pretty good used car.  More than enough to pay for this shit.  That woman will pay me if it’s the last thing I ever do or she ever does.

I worked it out.  I can’t say how save for some people think I’m worthwhile.  I turned onto a few dead ends before that.  It was pretty ugly.  Heart fracturing and skull crunching.

I tried to understand how it could have been worse.  I just came over the Sierras a week ago and it would have been a nightmare then.  White knuckle driving anyway.  Had it happened then and there, in the wind and snow, well, that would’ve tested me.  I’m agnostic so I have no business praying.

A few days prior to this nightmare cape, I obtained my medical marijuana recommendation from a certified and official physician.  Told him I had insomnia and carpal tunnel I thought from playing the drums.  They gave me some important looking letter sized certificate with a gold seal and for an extra nominal fee, an official ID card.  I didn’t have  to pay for any of it.  Employment perk.

I rented a Hyundai.  I don’t have an actual credit card but the owner of the shop put his card down for me.  How cool is that?  For what it’s worth, the dealership quoted the job at $6,600.  I sped away in my silver automatic Hyundai.  Is it Korean?  It only has 17,000 miles on it.  The radio is lit blue.  The AM reception is excellent.  I like blue lights.  The repair shop told me it would be about half as much as the dealer quoted.  The torque of the Hyundai is glaringly anemic.

I did my best to have a lemons into lemonade afternoon.  I had a late lunch at a place in Hollywood I used to adore.  Excellent gravy for the noodles.  I went to a dispensary for my first time to buy some green leafy medicine.  It was warm.  An almost hot day in the middle of January.  I couldn’t stop thinking about my yesteryear tiny apartment in the Hollywood hills.  The view and the Fish moving in with me and then the Bean.  A wonderful woman and a magnificent feline.  Simpler times.

The Bean died prematurely and The Fish dumped me after ten years.

All I want is for things to be simpler and enough money for when they get more complicated.  I can’t stand when things are beyond my control.  I hate not being able to impose my will in my own life.  I’m pretty good at what I do and I’m grateful for the opportunity to do it again after a few really long, challenging years.  It’s still pretty jacked up.  I need to see a dentist and a doctor.  I drove the silver Hyundai to Walmart to pick up my prescriptions.  It’s too far but they’re so cheap with the pharmaceuticals.   Thirteen bucks as opposed to thirty five anywhere else.

Yeah well I understand I’m feeling sorry for myself.

But I think about all these people with all these cars.  One smog certification or check engine light away from living on the street after that car stops dead.  After it’s only movement is because of gravity or a tow truck.  How many like that?  Poverty is up.  The new normal.  Buy stock in Ramen noodles.  One or two more rivets pop in this economy and we’re flirting with a tsunami.  I could be learning to grow vegetables in the harsh northern Nevada climate by spring.

I wonder about buying gold.  Gas is way up.  Write your congressman.  Make him tired of you.

Today I learned that my base salary was to be doubled and a bonus structure was being implemented that would remunerate me for what I know how to do well.  I sell stuff.  I’m good at it.  I’m old enough to understand that taking anything for granted is foolish.  I’m not prevented however, from feeling pretty damn good about today and my efforts not going unnoticed.  I’m grateful, but I earned it.  Humility and confidence are not mutually exclusive.

It was that kind of day that only southern California affords.  Gorgeous and warm.  Spring in the middle of winter.  And my new employer gave me the chance to show my stuff a few months ago.  I showed it and they recognized it.  Today they showed me.  On top of it all, I’m being payed to write.

I wish all of you the kind of day I had today.

Drinks for my friends.

Remain calm.

Everybody just take a breath.

Look people, the guy was blind shithouse nuts.

These days they tend to blame homicidal crazy on video games or movies or Satan worship.  When I was a kid they blamed Dungeons & Dragons, rock and roll or Satan worship.

I really don’t care what they discover about this guy.  It simply doesn’t matter if they discover he ritualistically rubbed one out every morning at dawn to Sarah Palin or had a bedroom festooned with Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter paraphernalia.  He did what he did because he was fucking crazy.  Sometimes life and death is precisely that random.  Get over it.  It sucks but get over it.

Sorry, it’s not Sarah Palin’s fault.

I reserve the right to advance the theory that she’s a stupid, albeit brilliantly opportunistic bitch but, can’t hang this one on Caribou Barbi.

The callow and feckless eruption by short attention span circus of 24 hour media to somehow define or even refute his actions based on some political calculus is just ridiculous.  Hinckley and Chapman were profoundly disturbed whack jobs and so is Jared Loughner.  It is what it is.

It’s our fault.

For being sheeple.  For being aloof.  For being oblivious.

Kinda.

The lesson here, the takeaway if you will, is that we have to figure out how to keep guns away from crazy fuckers.  And I dare anyone to justify for any regular citizen, much less an aspiring candidate for the booby hatch, to be able to purchase, possess and wield a goddamn Glock with a magazine of thirty rounds.    Shut up uncle F and cousin R or Ted Nugent, no one’s looking to compromise your often absurdly interpreted 2nd amendment rights.  That is, unless your certifiably insane.

We are the most thoroughly armed citizenry in the world.  90 guns for every hundred of us.  We kill more of each other and ourselves with guns and wound more of each other and ourselves with guns than anyone else.  We don’t let children play with matches but we consistently allow the obviously disturbed among us to compile virtual arsenals so that the arguably stable among us might have our own armories?  For what?  Fuck me.  This is unimaginably stupid.

And it keeps happening.  Over and over.

The hold that the gun lobby, the NRA, has over American policy is vulgar and despicable.  They prevent sensible regulation of any kind by scaring every gun hobbyist into thinking that the government wants their guns in order to be able to enslave them.  It’s a distraction and it’s a lie.  The war against us is being waged on an economic field that has no chance of being level, or fair, or commensurate, or equitable and so they are winning.  They count on guns and religion to be a distraction, a placebo, an opiate, for the genuine fuckery they are getting away with everyday.

Twenty two cents per bullet.  Per victim.

And it keeps happening.

Over and over.

Give it three to nine months and it will happen again.  Hold your breath, it could be next week.  It happens everyday fer fuck’s sake.  Maybe no one famous will be a target or die.  But people will lose their lives without ever seeing it coming.  Yup.  Count on it.  And count on the media to ask all the wrong questions and count on the rest of us throwing our hands up in dismay and horror.  Gobsmacked.  Count on it.  Count on war and man’s inhumanity to man.  No bookie in his right mind would ever lay odds on it.  No casino would ever get in on this action.  It’s as inevitable as death and taxes.

Maybe next time it will be political.  A mosque or an abortion doctor.  What’s the difference?  Anyone who would take it upon themselves to commit such an atrocity is mind bendingly absent any sense or decency.

Round and round she goes, where she stops, everyone knows.

Yeah yeah, if we severely restrict gun ownership then only criminals will have guns.  Bullshit.  We can do this and still let our half suspicious but still well intentioned relatives keep their stupid penis aggrandizing firesticks.

Humanity has never been a match for technology when it copulates with violence.

Look at it this way, we killed at least a hundred thousand innocent civilian Iraqis for no good reason whatsoever.

Context is a bitch.

How do we like us now?

What exactly is “crazy”?

Drinks for my friends.

In my very last blog I wrote, “Yes, racism is still breathing giant lungfuls of air in America.”

I meant it.

In order to confront racism realistically and efficaciously, it’s essential to realize it’s inherent.  Yeah, that’s gonna leave a mark.  Gonna be pretty controversial.  Gonna piss some of you off.  Kinda analogous to how so many of us believe in monogamy while we know that the imperative of procreation has been hardwired into us by the impetus of survival long before we became “civilized”.  I don’t proffer my theory as an excuse for either manifestation.  It is what it is.

We are after all, animals.  Mammals.  Human beings last but not least.

All that separates us is not reason but art.  Creativity.  That’s big.

Racism is not and never has been the exclusive province of the majority. We are all tribal.  Yes, as instinct it’s obsolete.  As a world view, it’s archaic.  As  dogma, it’s evil.  The object is therefore to look inside ourselves, recognize it, and with vigor an indefatigable consistency endeavor to mitigate it.  We owe it to ourselves to do so.  It’s a moral imperative.

I’m completely confident upon witnessing anyone declare themselves free of racism, that I’m in the presence of a liar.

It’s lamentable to observe that far too many subscribe to and practice bigotry and chauvinism without consciously meaning to.  There is however, no one to blame but the self for a lack of self awareness.  ‘Some of my best friends are homos’.  See what I’m saying?  That shit is bullshit.

I know and have known many otherwise good people who are or were embarrassingly guilty of being indefensibly racist.  Willfully ignorant jackasses.  A few are uncles, some were friends.  As much affection as I have or had for them, they are completely without excuse, much less reason.  To be sure, particularly in the case of relatives, they have deliberately limited experience with anyone different.  Not of their own tribe.  I don’t doubt they have done themselves an odious disservice.  I know they weren’t raised that way.

Why is it that the most self proclaimed God fearing ‘family values’ pontificating assholes are most often the most shameless and frighteningly prideful in their backward ass views and beliefs?

Fear.

Fear is a great force multiplier.

I’m afraid of cancer and car accidents.  Not so much vampires and snot oozing swamp creatures.  There’s plenty to be afraid of.

I grew up among my own kind.  White people who loved God or pretended to by worshiping at least semi regularly.  Thereby absolving themselves of any and every indiscretion, be it sexual deviance, financial malfeasance, discrimination, hubris, avarice and/or substance abuse.

I’m agnostic.

Fear is the shared, pervasive malaise of every specie on this planet and probably the entire universe.

If we were able to exert control over our own fears, I don’t doubt we’d be much better off.  Instead we exert control over our own facts.

Fear of humans different than one’s self is a convenient and lazy one, especially in contemporary society.  It requires little effort.  There is precedent and tradition easily relied upon.  As Americans we have a rich tradition of slavery, discrimination and insensitivity.  A commodious litany of among other things industry to justify our own special brand of hate, prejudice and fear.  It’s a little too easy for the unenlightened in this country to embrace nonsensical bullshit by branding it nostalgic.

It’s kinda what pisses me off the most.  It’s too goddamn easy.  Dipshits that think nothing of appearing in public hoisting a likeness of our president with a bone through his nose.  How simple are you if this your fear and how you choose to communicate it to whomever you might encounter including national television?  Paint loser on your forehead backwards so you’re able to read it in a mirror.

Fuck you.

This brings us to what I really wanted to talk about.  The soon to be published version of Huckleberry Finn with the word “slave” replacing the word “nigger”.

I’m a huge fan of Mark Twain or Samuel Clemens.  His work is still so very powerful and subtle.  Elegant and witty.  Sublime.  I’m absolutely sure he knew exactly what he was doing when he chose to use such an egregious slur over two hundred times in what is perhaps his most seminal work.  To edit it in any way is an artistic delictum.  There is no one, despite any scholarly qualification, with the right or privilege to alter the work of any artist alive or dead save for an editor or producer at the time of completion with obvious consent.

The dehumanization of the word slave is not as vile as the dehumanization of the the word nigger?

It’s a sterilization.  An unnecessary compromise.  A muting of the intended impact from a genius who sought to teach us with what he knowingly understood to be brutal honesty.   I loath that the work in question has been redacted from curriculum ubiquitous since it’s initial distribution for that very word.  Tough shit.  It’s the truth about the way it was and maybe the real rub is about how it really still is.

We have a president that at least one of my own uncles has admitted that his problem is that he’s a nigger.  He’s not alone.  Nevermind that he’s half white.  I’ll never look at that uncle the same way.  He’ll forever be a punk in my mind.

We distrust anyone but our own for no good reason.

Time to get over it.

Long since.

Drinks for my friends.