squidbag

Dream Post IX

Max & C are away for an overnight at the homeless shelter, and Abby had a rough night on Friday night, so we hung back for quiet time and sleep.  And it worked.  We played until 8:40 or so, and she actually crashed on the floor, and had to be schlepped to bed all passed out.  She awoke once, at 9:30, was easily soothed, and as of 8:27am, is still out.  Which means I caught nearly eight hours of sleep.  I woke up numerous times, mostly because my REM was pretty active.  Here's some of it:

Undetermined time before dawn: No images, just the phrase "prostitute barefoot in the snow" being spoken aloud by a woman's voice.

Woke me at 5:23:  Sitting on the floor in a living room I don't recognize (I observe that it has too few books), watching my brother-in-law, Brian, tune an enormous cello made out of cherry, or mahogany, something reddish.  Brian does not play the cello in the real life, but he does in my dream.  As he tunes, multi-colored notes slide from the strings of the cello and fill the room.  I am holding my daughter on my lap, she is warm and happy and smells good and is playing with a non-talking baby doll.

Woke me at 6:55:  My wife and I are in what I can only describe as an apothecary's shop with wood floors above a residence.  We have mortar and pestle and are gathering ingredients to make some sort of chemical concoction related to potency.  The motivations are unclear, but the ingredients include things like powdered shrimp, toadstool stems, yellow cubed salt, something red that looks like coarse paprika but isn't, some little blue swirly things, and a couple I now can't remember.  Vic Tayback is helping us, wearing a white shirt beneath a yellow sweater vest tucked into khakis.  For those of you keeping score, (or running a diagnostic) this is the second Vic Tayback dream.  We are being quiet, worried that we will be caught, when the nice lady who owns the place opens the door on us, tells us not to worry, and starts helping us make the concoction, as she knows more about this kind of thing than anyone else in the rather cramped, jar-laden room.  Vic takes me aside and tells me that he wears a size 13 shoe.

Woke me at 8:14:  I am working at a large drafting table on a comic book about super-intelligent non-violent socialist moles, when something explodes outside my window.  A truck has detonated on the street, it appears, and so I run down about three stories to see what's going on.  As soon I open the door and hit the street, I register that the truck was full of what look to be now partially destroyed Bibles, which are burning and filling the air with swirling, smoldering pages and smoke.  I grab a fragment and glance at it, but it's gibberish, and I wake up.  This one seems pretty obvious to me in terms of interpretation.

Bhutto: An Aftermath

It seems as though Pakistan is destined for chaos.

On Thursday last, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was killed in the streets after speaking at a political rally.  A suicidal maniac person fired several shots and then blew himself up, taking Bhutto and twenty other people with him.  She was buried quickly and without autopsy (though that may be par for the course in Pakistan, I don't know, so I'm not implying anything) accompanied by accounts that she had been either the victim of the assassin's bullets, or shrapnel from the exploding bomb.  The people of Pakistan went nuts, and have killed a bunch more people, derailed trains, destroyed train stations, (I understand that they're upset - but what's with the trains?) and robbed & burned a bunch of banks - by which, I think we can infer some inherent opportunism wrapped up with the mourning.  Again, initially it seems as though it was just Bhutto's supporters tearing up stuff, but now it seems as though fundie Muslims (dead set against being ruled by a secular woman) and her detractors (supporters of the current regime & those holding her record of corruption against her) have joined in on things, along with a bunch of opportunistic criminals.

Now, we have the government changing their story, making it look like they're either covering something up (always a good idea) or covering their collective ass because they didn't supply the protection everybody and their brother seemed to think Bhutto needed after the last assassination attempt.  If it would calm things down, they've offered to exhume the body, so everyone can know for sure what killed her.  I'm going to guess that's not going to help things.  An exhumation just adds another ring to the circus, and no matter what killed her, some people are going to blame Al-Qaeda, and some Musharraf.  As it goes, no one will likely ever know the facts.

Not even Hillary Clinton, who's demanding a multi-national investigation into the killing, asserting that "there's no reason to trust the Pakistani government."  Wow. She is apparently being politely refused, on the grounds that only someone as arrogant as Hillary Clinton would seriously suggest such a thing in public.  Do I think that the Pakistani can be trusted?  No.  Do I think we'll ever hear the unvarnished truth about who killed Bhutto, would could have been done to stop it, and who was deliberately responsible?  Not long ago, I said, "no one will likely ever know the facts," and I stand by that.  Nothing that is contained in the impending full total shitstorm that is brewing in Pakistan justifies another shoehorning of Americans into another supposedly sovereign nation to dominate the wills of its citizens.  No matter what Hillary thinks.  Or McCain, or Fred fucking Thompson (who ripped off my secular woman motivation, which is a bit creepy).  Or especially Rudy, who just uses this as a place to hang his "continued threat/I was in 9/11" platform plank.  Disgusting.  Not as disgusting as "Two Girls One Cup," but pretty goddamn bad.

Who weeps for Benezir Bhutto?  Her family and supporters, certainly.  And perhaps, anyone with hopes and dreams about this thing the current US President only plays at; the spread of freedom and democracy.  With her evaporates any chance at orderly elections that anyone will trust in Pakistan.  No matter what happens there in January, the next great while will be filled with questions and mourning and uncertainty about the future of democracy.  What is the aftermath?  I don't know.  But chaos is on the menu now, and likely will be for the foreseeable future.

"A Pox On Him!"

Not very often is television this amusing for me.  Very seldom these days does something just tickle me in that "would watch it over and over again - find myself repeating to others" kind of way.  This skit (from earlier this year, and I think - the end of last season), however, of SNLer Bill Hader doing Peter O'Toole excoriating those who would sully the tradition and title of "drunk" with their racism and perversion - is fucking hilarious.  Weekend Update's always been the best part of the show, but usually I hate when they break in on the "news" for impressions and shit.  This is a notable exception.  Would that I could have just posted the embedded video here, but alas, the Internets have failed me, and so I direct you to teh AlterNet for the watching.

Dead Days of December

I have never liked the downtime between Xmas and New Year's. 

In past years, I have been able to ignore/avoid it by being on vacation the whole time, (usually in some other state) and so extending the holidays into one another ("Oh yeah, we'll just do our Xmas on the 26th with you guys"), and then across the bridge into the New Year, after which I can buckle back down and just deal with normality again.  This year, we had Xmas at my house, which was great, and also somewhat tumultuous.  The tree was beautiful, the gifts proliferate and heartfelt and useful, and the food bountiful.  There was a little more static than I would have liked, and the time spent felt shorter than I had imagined it would.  I saw everyone I needed to see for at least some part of Xmas Day, though, so that was a great thing.  More than one of my immediate family members is dealing with serious shit right now, and one person was worked up about stuff for no discernible reason, so this complicated things, but not in an insurmountable way.  So yeah - Xmas 2007: tough, but worth fighting for.  Now that the holiday has ended, I had to work for a couple of days (not at all pointless, but not what I would have liked to have been doing) and drive comparatively empty streets past the rain-soaked skyline, contemplating the bad news on the radio and being subjected to an early onset of routine and "year-end focus pieces."

I become inward-thinking at the arbitrary year's end anyway, as I prepare to begin the next calendar year.  I no longer have a choice: as a father of two, things worth paying attention to are happening near me all the time.  As a family, we seem not to be able to get through a year recently without a major event or two, either positive or negative, but I suppose that's just life happening all around.  I don't know that I would be interested in the alternative.  And of course, on June 10 this year, I will have been married longer than my parents; kind of a bittersweet hallmark, to be sure, but an accomplishment nonetheless.

Last night, C wonderfully broke up the doldrums by seeing Max off to a friend's house for his first night away (he needed some comforting for a short piece of this) and getting the Guys to babysit for Abby for a couple of hours so we could go to the movies.  I also recently parted with the millstone box of old comics that I had been trying to sell or trade since October.  I got store credit for that, and plus the gift certificate I got for Xmas from the Guys I have a stack of new escap- I mean, comics.  So my monkey is happy for now, anyway.  The world intrudes again today, but mostly in good ways.

And soon it will be 2008.

The Miracle

And it came to pass, in the city of Hoboken, New Jerusalem, there was born unto a "virgin," a baby.  And this was Chris or something, the Lord.  In the nine months since Phoebe had engaged in congress with a space alien, her head had swelled, and finally, on the ninth hour of the ninth day of the ninth month, she could take it no longer, and her husband, Joey, called for his pipe, and he called for his bowl, and a flaming chariot pulled by a team of blue donkeys.  It did spirit them to a palace, grand of scope and staggering the imagination, guilded as it was with gold, and with ivory, and with rubies, and with sapphires, and with square carvings of obscure pagan Celtic music, and with Froot Loops on chains of elastic, yea, even interspersed with buttered popcorn; but they had no reservations - other than the normal, reasonable ones anyone has about long-distance travel and impending parenthood - and Charon did meet and turn them away at the door, saying, "Fuck off out to the barn."

So it was there that the child was born, springing forth fully formed from the midst of a virgin's headache.  And when her head did burst, the droplets of her blood did rain down, and became most of the world's larger economies, and Pandora's box, called so by her people, the Lesbians.  And the Savior child did carry before him the severed and rhyming head of the Gorgon, and the hammer of Thor, and this would later cause no end of contention.  And Phoebe, his mother, did dip him in the magic Krypton of Righteousness, all except for his hands, feet, back, and head areas, since those would be needed for the crucifixion.  But the rest of him was invulnerable to strikes and attacks of most any kind, and so he was a great fisherman.

And so it came to pass on that night, that a great singularity did form over the Spring deserts of Hoboken, and a star did appear to three stoned General Contractors, wandering as they were in the desert area there.  And from out of the midst of the star did come an engorged angel, and this was Melchizzdek, saying unto them, "Gather thy tools and hammers, and go unto the Savior, who is born this night, in a barn, it is Chris, or something, the Lord.  You will know him by a pink carnation tucked into his lapel, as he waits beneath the clock of destiny."  And they did journey forth, using survival skills, and arrived bearing gifts of flaming trees, socks, fudge, sausages, nails, and videos of Chuck Norris.  And he was well pleased, and did reign over the countries of the Earth a thousand years times seven, and did perpetuate the gifts of his origin by riding forth in a magic sleigh pulled by malamutes, and pitching cool stuff down chimneys, like sugarplums, and DVD players, and unique headgear, and G.I. Joe with the Kung-Fu grip, and sex toys.

And that's the story of Christmas.  Or something.  Happy holidays, everyone. Especially that little crippled kid over in the back.

Nashville Drivers

When it rains - and it takes little more than just a light drizzling to achieve this - but when it rains for a good long time or in great volume, or Elvis forbid, both - the licensed drivers of Nashville lose their goddamn minds.  They always have.  Since I was a kid, you could count on Music City motorists to leap in one of two directions as soon as liquid precipitation begins to drop from the sky in quantity.  Rain is bad, other kinds of precip are worse.  Snow interferes with the average Nashville driver's central nervous system in a way no one yet truly understands.  It's under-researched, you see.  Again - the Squidbag needs a grant.  Anyway, my original segue (before I trod all over it with useless verbosity) was "one of two directions," I believe.

First and foremost is the class of people who become useless puddles of nerve-ridden gloop ("Simon's turned to jelly!") behind the wheel the instant rain strikes their vehicle.  These are people who normally are on the phone, applying makeup, or doing any number of things inside of their several-thousand-pound accelerating vehicle that they should never be doing.  Now, add water, and - POOF! - they're idiots who forget how to signal, who slide through intersections, who gun their cars and then slow to a fable-like crawl, and who seem to experience some sort of spontaneous reflexive collapse when rain is added to normal driving conditions.  I picture it like this: "I can barely handle this normally, but NOW..."

The other group - my group - is of course, the drivers who undergo a psychotic break caused by the behavior of the other drivers.  Once again, there is an element of "I can barely handle you fucking people on a day-to-day basis, but when you act like THIS..."  If you listen closely, audible snaps can be heard, even through closed windows and over wiper blades, as people completely lose their patience.  Middle fingers, without fanfare, are flipped to attention, and aggression fogs windows with pure unbridled rage.  It's a wonderful time.

Days like that you have the Mad Max dream...

100 Monkeys

(a poem for my son, Max)

If I had one hundred monkeys,
I'd be the luckiest guy around,
and they'd proceed before me
across the streets & open ground.
Clearing sidewalks as I strode by,
my efficient monkey cadre,
and their shrieks and monkey chatter,
would drown out what doubters might say.
Of course, I'd have to train my monkeys,
each with a special task,
and command them ruthlessly,
from behind my monkey mask.
I'd let them drive, I'd have them shop,
carrying groceries up the stairs,
they'd make me cereal in the mornings;
win me prizes at state fairs.
Cut my cigars, bring me paper,
fetch the colors that I require,
so many monkeys could delegate,
and thus, they'd never tire.
From within my simian cloud,
swirling 'round with energy primate,
I would soon rule over all those
who upon monkeys used to heap hate.
They'd see it my way or be peeled!
That'd be the novus ordo seclorum,
as I shared my food and space with monkeys,
and they altered ideas of decorum.
Why, if I had one hundred monkeys,
I guess I'd share one or two with you,
as long as you returned them punctually,
and never drunk, or painted blue.
I'd love all my monkeys, and at night,
tuck them in to have their rest,
a well-rested monkey army is essential
to my dreams of world conquest.

Bum Piles

I work in Madison, Tennessee, nearly 20 miles from where I live, and not the most upwardly mobile or economically enfranchised place in the world.  Gallatin Pike runs right through the center of Madison, and has changed a great deal since my grandparents lived there 20-odd years ago.  Madison's main drag is now hamburger stands and check cashing places, a large mixed immigrant population, active daytime hookers, street preachers and day laborers.  Additionally, Madison has its fair share of weird homeless guys walking around, and I was informed by a friend the other night over post-hockey beers that this is because it is essentially a run-off point for something like 5 mental health clinics.  I think my co-workers and I are currently experiencing the work of one of these men.

Across the street from the sign place where I work is a branch of one of those regional BBQ chains that use a lot of vinegar.  Next to it is a bright yellow concrete block building which houses what we call the "Creepy Mart."  Run by guys from various parts of the Middle East, but inexplicably called the ARG Mart (for Argentina), they are a convenience store with global calling cards, beer, discount tobacco, chips and candy bars, digital gambling, hookahs and glass pipes (for tobacco only, of course) and various random crap.  Between these two establishments is a gravel lot that many people, myself included, use as a parking lot.

Last week, on Wednesday I think, when I arrived at work the parking lot had its perimeter ringed by no less than ten small piles of rocks and earth, each one with an object - plastic comb, toothbrush, stick, pen - sticking out of the top of it.  Like tiny Smurf graves.  I crossed Old Hickory Boulevard, went into work, and later, when throwing out some trash, saw that the piles were also in our back alley, holding shards of wood, pencils, a thermometer, a spork, whatever the guy can find.  Some of these had mustard squirted all over them, the bottle discarded a few feet away.  I knocked a couple of them over, because they looked to be in the path of traffic, like punji sticks for tires, and our customers and delivery guys come through there all the time.  Some of them are loose, others really well formed, and several have finger lines and prints in the sand, so they're not just kicked together.  They have a real obscure-significance / Blair Witch Project kind of feel to them, and I'd like to know why he does it. 

I assume he's one of the guys who asks me for money whenever I go to the Creepy Mart or the HG Hills across the way, so I'm offering a dollar to him to explain it. 

I'll let you know what's up when I find out.

Hangin' With the Prez

Now and again, I hear people talking about why they would or would not vote for a candidate for President, and I think in 2004, it seemed to boil down to one thing for a lot of people; they didn't like John Kerry.  With his driftwood face and stiff posture, he just didn't seem like a lot of fun.  Dubya, by sharp contrast, comes off to a great number of people as a bluff, hail-fellow-well-met, easygoing, aw-shucks type that you could really spend some fun time with.  Probably shoot some pool with, or go to a game with.  I don't understand how people get there, but they do.  I'd end up cracking a pool cue over his thick, monkey skull.  People respond to candidates on that gut level, which is why Hillary's calculated moves, if she doesn't inject some real Hillary back into her public appearances, will land her in Gore/Kerry land.  You have to be as genuine as possible, not what people seem to want.  They don't know what the hell they want; liking someone is easy.  Be someone they'd like.  Republicans like Huckabee better than Thompson or Giuliani.  That's because he's in a band, not a cult, is a little nutty, and not completely fucking boring.  Shocking.

So - Your top 5 Presidents you'd like to hang out with for a weekend.  I'll give you mine, and then I'd like to see yours over in the comments field.  No particular order with be enforced on these;

First, there's Harry Truman, not just hang out with, but take a long train ride with while listening to Harry swear individually about every group of idiots & panderers along the way, keeping up your end of the stream of invective as he washed over it all and got down to some serious talking.  You'd wear Hawaiian shirts and kick your feet up, chilling with the S man as he broke it all down, no bullshit.

Next, I think I'd have to go for Bill Clinton, an easy vote.  You know there would be proliferate food, drugs and members of the opposite sex.  He'd know a good party to go to, and if it turned out to be lame, he'd know where to go then, too.  He'd be concerned that you were having a good time, and he'd probably stay out all goddamn night telling stories, yelling for more of whatever you were having, and losing his voice laughing.  You'd wake up somewhere interesting with Bill.  You just have to make sure you're not with Bill.  In a biblical sense.  After Bill would be Teddy Roosevelt.  I don't know what we'd do, but it would probably be outside and involved killing something if we wanted to eat.  From an easy good time to one you'd have to goddamn well work at.

My next guy's destined to be an unpopular choice because it's Gerald Ford.  Why?  Because, from all accounts, Gerald Ford was a decent, genuine human being.  He might fuck up or do stuff for the wrong reasons, but that's just because he's misguided or dumb, not insidious or evil.  He seems to me to have been a stand-up guy for the most part - simple and direct.  You're not talking about big fun here, you're talking about someone to have some beers and play a game with, maybe go to the movies - Ford would have bought popcorn and shared with you.  Finally, I choose JFK.  Going into why would lose me friends.

Now - in all honesty, I'd also like the opportunity to hang out with Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Nixon, Taft, Cleveland, Hoover and Carter - but for totally different reasons none of which have anything to do with any accepted definition of fun.

A Different Understanding

The Monkeyface administration (including current White House Press Secretary Dana Perino, shown here answering a question about how often she has been truthful) has a well-documented history of spinning.  When things aren't going their way in terms of benchmarks in Iraq, they retroactively adjust the perception of reality to fit - "Hey, that's what we were shooting for all along."  Not satisfied to torture just secret and illegal prisoners, they torture the domestic policy facts as well, prodding them into frameworks for which they were never intended - fitting the round pegs of the facts into the square holes of their lies.  Often, what we're dealing with is deliberate arrogance masquerading as fractured logic.

I'm enjoying this new tactic:  In Ms. Perino's December 13th briefing, she said, in response to a press corps question about the contempt of court citations against former administration officials Karl "Baby Huey" Rove and Michael John Bolton,

"Well, the Democrats should know the futility of trying to press ahead with a criminal case.  It's long been understood that the Justice Department, in situations like these -- that the constitutional prerogative of the President would make it a futile effort for Congress to refer contempt citations to U.S. attorneys.  The Department of Justice would not require a U.S. attorney to convene a grand jury or otherwise pursue a prosecution of an individual who carries out a President's instruction not to provide documents or testimony on the basis of the President's assertion of executive privilege."

I'd like to take a few moments and break this down, just to watch myself do it:  I agree that it would likely be futile for Congressional Dems to press ahead with a criminal case against former Monkeyface drones, but for different reasons - we all know it would get stymied, lied about, covered up and never amount to anything under the most secretive administration this country has ever had.  The Constitutional prerogative of the POTUS has nothing to do with anything here, since his understanding of what exactly constitutes executive privilege is so far beyond anyone else's (other than that of his lackeys) as to be unrecognizable.  It's a masterfully arrogant piece of politics, this statement, as far as it goes, since to someone not really paying attention it makes the Dems out to be BIG time-wasting bad guys who won't stop wasting time trying to pry into the President's private affairs, when in reality, the pursuit of a recently vanished concept like justice is here being made out to seem like vendetta, while a public official who makes more than a quarter of a million dollars to work for me gets to classify everything he does from his morning dump to what used to public information as a secret.

I wouldn't have thought that someone with such a tenuous grasp on recent history would have had it in her.  And maybe she didn't.  Maybe she wears one of those animatronic radio mike backpacks like Dubya does.  Maybe someone's pulling her strings.

Someone's pulling something, anyway.