Aimee Mullins at TED, and her many legs

Great TED talk by Aimee Mullins: "How my legs give me super-powers."
Athlete, actor and activist Aimee Mullins talks about her prosthetic legs -- she's got a dozen amazing pairs -- and the superpowers they grant her: speed, beauty, an extra 6 inches of height ... Quite simply, she redefines what the body can be. About Aimee Mullins A record-breaker at the Paralympic Games in 1996, Aimee Mullins has built a career as a model, actor and activist for women, sports and the next generation of prosthetics.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/aimee_mullins_prosthetic_aesthetics.html

She's my new rockstar hero.
Check out those carved ash legs, the cast legs with potatoes or jellfyish looking attachments, and the amazingly cool way she sees the world.

Viruses and A Motorhome

Last week my computer once again got a virus. I shut it off and walked away to work on the motorhome Kori bought two weeks ago.

The motorhome has been gutted since then, but this damn computer still has issues, although we have so damn many virus scanners and killers on it they aren't doing much but pissing me off.

People who write computer viruses for fun should be lobotomized and given jobs fishing used condoms out of sewage treatment pools.

There's no reason to write them and turn them loose other than sheer malicous intent.

Now the motorhome, there's no reason to have one of them, either, but I do love a good dirty project, and if the quadrillions of dollars worth of credit default swaps go Cherynobl on the world economy, I'll at least have somewhere to sleep when I park it in one of my pal's back yards.

In honor of this motorized bedroom, I offer one of my favorite oddball artists doing his song "If Jesus Drove A Motorhome" by the deeply freaky yet shy and polite Jim White, who moves through strange air.

Quote of the Day: Wendell Berry on Failure of Imagination

We are involved now in a profound failure of imagination. Most of us cannot imagine the wheat beyond the bread, or the farmer beyond the wheat, or the farm beyond the farmer, or the history beyond the farm. Most people cannot imagine the forest and the forest economy that produced their houses and furniture and paper, or the landscapes, the streams and the weather that fill their pitchers and bathtubs and swimmingpools with water. Most people appear to assume that when they have paid their money for these things they have entirely met their obligations.

An excerpt from “In the Presence of Fear” by Wendell Berry

Hot Springs and Crumbling RVs

Soaking at Indian Springs No. 1
After three days of driving and this brutal Wisconsin Winter, this was the sign pointing to bliss.

Martye's little adobe house.

Soaking in the mineral water baths in TorC rocks my cranky middle aged many times broken boned body. In a good way.

We soaked every day we were there but for the last, and Indian Springs was my favorite. It's a run down old hotel with the springs on the same property, housed in a bare bones metal roofed shack.

The pools are concrete, with pebble lined bottoms.

Because it's a natural flowing hot spring, there's no chlorine smell in the water, and it averages somewhere between 101 and 104 degrees Fahrenheit.

It is very salty water. The first few days I felt like a seal or a whale coming up for air, because whenever I took a deep breath, I'd rise up like a balloon, then fall back into the water when I exhaled.

I thought it was from one too many bean burritos this winter, carrying around an extra 30 pounds of my own human lard.

But a few days later we soaked at another hot spring across the street and the owner told me it was the salt content.

One more week in those hot springs and I'd have had dreadlocks.

Some days we'd walk down the hill to soak, others we drove, because walking home after a hot soak is like trying to move around with warm rubber appendages.

T or C is a strange town, filled with closed buildings, old crumbling hotels and beat up RV parks.

Every other yard seems to have an RV in it, too, most of them in terrible shape.

New Mexico, day three

The sign in Martye's yard
Truth or Consequences, from the south side at night, looking towards the hot springs district.

The second and third days of the trip out were pretty flat, filled with tumbleweeds that kept rolling into the car and vast stretches of scruffy looking over grazed land.
We rolled through Dodge City, Elkart, and a bunch of towns that mostly consisted of big grain silos surrounded by run down houses and a few gas stations and beat up grocery stores. The two lane highways we drove on were mostly empty.
We stayed the night in in a cheap hotel near Dodge City,
In the morning we walked across the dark parking lot , the sun just starting to show in the east, the biggest full moon I've seen in years going down and went into a little breakfast joint and had an unexceptional breakfast.
You could tell that the Mexican influence was there in the food, but watered down like the coffee.
And nobody uses real half and half out west, it's all non dairy creamer.
The joint was filled with late middle aged guys in cowboy hats with pot bellies, the parking lot filled with big beat up trucks.
On the long drive west did pass a few huge wind farms, but the cold hard wind and a need to get somewhere left us rolling along, so we didn't stop for pictures.
We hit the interstate near Las Vegas, New Mexico and set the cruise control on 75 and pushed on to Truth Or Consequences, not stopping at Santa Fe, Los Alamos or Socoro.
Seeing the beauty salon sign that told us we were in front of Martye's house sure felt good. We unloaded and headed down to the hot springs district, and bought a soak at Indian Springs Waterhole No.1.
One thing I did find funny was how small the Rio Grande was. It's not much of a river at that point of it's run.

My New Favorite song: Colin Hay Beautiful World

My my my it’s a beautiful world
I like swimming in the sea
I like to go out beyond the white breakers
Where a man can still be free (or a woman if you are one)
I like swimming in the sea.

My my my it’s a beautiful world
I like drinking Irish tea
With a little bit of lapsang souchong
I like making my own tea.

My my my it’s a beautiful world
I like driving in my car
Roll the top down sometimes I travel quite far
Drive to the ocean stare up at the stars
I like driving in my car

All around is anger automatic guns
It’s death in large numbers no respect for women or our little ones
I tried talking to Jesus but He just put me on hold
Said He’d been swamped by calls this week
And He couldn’t shake His cold

And still this emptiness persists
Perhaps this is as good as it gets
When you’ve given up the drink and those nasty cigarettes
Now I leave the party early at least with no regrets
I watch the sun as it comes up I watch it as it sets
Yeah this is as good as it gets.

My my my it’s a beautiful world
I like sleeping with Marie
She is one sexy girl full of mystery
She says she doesn’t love me but she likes my company
For now that’s good enough for me

Big Sky, Flat Land, the first day of the trip

We got a slow start, rolling out mid day after making three days worth of sandwiches, roasted pork on good Italian bread with cheese and horseradish sauce and lots of lettuce. About the only way I can stay awake on long drives is to spend them gnawing on something every once and a while, dragging along a cooler full of food.

We drove the first day on mostly two lane roads from home across Iowa, through Dubuque, around Des Moines, stopping at a ratty little Super 8 motel between nowwhere I wanted to be and nowhere anybody seemed to care about.

All day long the land got flatter as we rolled west, the vast flat broken only by the big grain storage silos that poked up out of the landscape, looking like lonely skyscrapers or steamboats coming over the curve of the ocean.

Interstate highways sure homogenize and suck the joy and diversity out of the drive west. It's all chain restaurants and big box stores punctuated by miles of corn stubble and trailer homes and beat up farms.

And WalMarts. Way to many Walmarts and too many rotted and empty downtowns where you do get off the interstates.

We stumbled into the hotel, burned down some herb and I spent the rest of the evening either snoring or cleaning our .45 and watching TV preachers or The Weather Channel. The next morning we hit the road early, knowing the long boring drive across Kansas would take most of the day.

Back From the Desert

Two weeks in New Mexico gone. We're back, but fried. Photos and sick observations to come soon.....

Blur Guitar, Shot by Kori

Kori takes almost our band photos. She also comes to almost all our gigs, built my amp, wired most of my guitars, bakes killer bread, writes some powerful computer code, invents and writes whole worlds with her writing, and is beyond a shadow of a doubt the best pal/sweetheart/co-pilot/cellmate/sentient creature I ever fell in love with.

She's my rock star heroine.

And in case you didn't know, if you click on a photo on my blog, it opens a link to a bigger version.

Mr. M.F. the Seventh

Everybody thinks the MF in our band name is short for a crude expression involving having sex with your mother.

It's really because Mikey is the 7th Fairchild boy to carry that name.

While I am glad they're consistent, it shows a serious lack of imagination to keep using the same damn name over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

And then they named their little girl Luna instead of Michelle.

Go figure.

Here is his bad MF7-ness self going all rock star hero from Saturday's gig.

I like playing with him. He never phones it in, or takes prisoners when he's playing music.

No Wonder they're going broke

NEW YORK – General Motors Corp. will offer buyouts to all of its hourly employees, a spokesman confirmed Tuesday, as the troubled automaker continues to slash costs.
GM spokesman Tony Sapienza said the buyouts will mainly target GM's 22,000 retirement-eligible hourly employees, though any union employee can take the offer.
News of the buyouts first broke on Monday. A union official told The Associated Press then that GM would offer $20,000 in cash and a $25,000 car voucher for workers who retire early and those who simply leave the company.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because workers were not yet notified of the packages.
Sapienza confirmed that the offer will consist of a car voucher and a one-time cash payment, though declined to offer more details, saying that employees will be informed of the specifics of the offer on Friday. However, he said the latest offer would be less generous than previous buyouts.

Huh, must be nice to have somebody give you more than a few month's health insurance and a few week's pay when they hand you your walking papers. That's all I got last time I worked somewhere for ten years.

And I can see why the big auto companies are going broke by being generous, although I suspect that the folks taking the buyout will be in the street soon enough after the government takes it's share. It's all taxable income, and more than likely taxed higher than usual paychecks.

Sometimes it really helps to have a Union behind you. I suspect those days are numbered, because of the way people love to hate unions for past abuses.

Cars are part of the reason we're a fucked up bunch of creeps in this country.

They're useful tools, but too often they are giant rolling cocoons that isolate us from the rest of the world and feed our paranoia when it comes to mingling with other people.

Mass transit done right has a real grounding and equality inducing element to it.

Cars just breed more sprawl, more aggressive behavior and a huge sense of entitlement that extracts far more cost and damage than most people realize.

Add up the costs of suburban development, the lack of walkable neighborhoods, the cost of road building and all the runoff problems and green house gasses and particulate matter that wind up in every body's lungs and the whole picture shifts.

But most people's creepy sense of entitlement about their cars makes them turn a deaf ear. They're too busy bitching about the taxes they're paying for those bums to ride the crappy bus service most places have.

Luna, Future Drama Queen

Luna.
I suspect she will not lack for a sense of dramatic projection when she becomes an adult. She's already a show off for cameras.

From Last Night's Show

We had a rockin' good time
Michael sang in rhyme
Jonathon pounded the skins
at just the right time
and C. Scott Fry was
spinning his bass with a grin on his face
and I was bashing out notes
all over the place
the joint was rockin' and the beer was flowing
and for once it actually stopped fucking snowing

They liked us again. Gave us an extra fifty bucks and booked us for March 21st. And I got to watch Ellyn and her horribly cool monkey brained sister dance with Dimitry. A fine night.

Bruce Sterling: 2009 Will Be a Year of Panic

2009 Will Be a Year of Panic

http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2009/01/2009_will_be_a_year_of_panic.php
From the fevered mind of Bruce Sterling and his alter-ego, Bruno Argento, a consideration of things ahead.

"As 2009 opens, our financial institutions are deep in massive, irrational panic. That's bad, but it gets worse: Many other respected institutions have rational underpinnings at least as frail as derivatives or bundled real-estate loans. Like finance, these institutions are social constructions. They are games of confidence, underpinned by people's solemn willingness to believe, to conform, to contribute. So why not panic over them, too?
Let's consider seven other massive reservoirs of potential popular dread. Any one of these could erupt, shattering the fragile social compact we maintain with one another in order to believe things contrary to fact.
1. The climate. People still behave as if it's okay. Every scientist in the world who isn't the late Michael Crichton knows that it's not. The climate is in terrible shape; something's gone wrong with the sky. The bone-chilling implications haven't soaked into the populace, even though Al Gore put together a PowerPoint about it that won him a Nobel. Al was soft-peddling the problem.
It's become an item of fundamentalist faith to maintain that the climate crisis is a weird leftist hoax. Yet, since the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, an honest fear of the consequences will prove hard to repress. Since the fear has been methodically obscured, its emergence from the mists of superstition will be all the more powerful. Unlike mere shibboleths of finance, this is a situation that's objectively terrifying and likely to remain so indefinitely."

The rest of this is pretty good, too, and sums up a lot of what I've been thinking about from reading economic blogs like Calculated Risk, The Big Picture and Ian Walsh's work over at Firedoglake blog.
I'm starting to think about buckling up for the ride, but with a four point harness like a stunt flier.
I also feel sorry for anybody who bought into the idea that they'd have any investments to retire on.
Looks like the grasshopper might come out about even with the turtle by the time this shakes out. And we'll be buying a lot less crap we didn't need in the first place.
http://firedoglake.com/

The Big Picture:

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/

http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/

Quote of the Day: Steven Weinberg on Good and Evil

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg

If there's a bigger bunch of thieves out there in the world than the godbags, I can't figure out who. Since the first shaman conned a tribe into buying into the angry gods idea and suckered power and money out of folks all the way up through the Catholic Church's Papal power madness of the dark ages through Rick Warren's slimy book sales and church tithes, it's been about money and power.

I find the Abrahamic godbags the worst of all, from Islam to Mormonism, they're all about keeping women under control and getting the menfolk to be scared enough to kill for their mean manly gods.

And Steven Weinberg's right about good people doing evil things in the name of god, brainwashed into doing things by propaganda and the need to feel righteous.

Even Spidey's been hijacked by the godbags to push fairy tales, it seems.

MF7 Gig this weekend

A young girl is given a pile of manure for her birthday

by her cruel parents.

She's over joyed, and starts digging in it.

When asked why, she says, if there's this much shit,

there's got to be a pony here somewhere.

Here's the pony making my month better, on the last day of it, we're playing a gig this Saturday night at The Alchemy bar.

And it's free, and starts and nine pm, and goes all night.

You'll have time to catch the motor primitives at Mickey's and still see us, as we stumble through our third set, if that was already in the works.

The gig's free, and starts around ten pm. Usually a little before.

What was wrong with Cafe Zoma

Aside from the backyard on the bike trail, Cafe Zoma sucked. Not serious suck, like a chest wound from a hollow point .45 slug or having to go to one of the snotty coffee shops down on the square where the barristas are all bored shallow young creeps, but it sucked.

Here's my take on why:

The layout was terrible. You walk in the front door, and you're shoved right into a cattle chute. The coffee bar and the kitchen space behind it cut the store in half, with tall walls making an open space into a cluttered broken up mess. There was no center to it, no feeling like it was more than a walk through joint.

The coffee was average at best. Not nearly as good as what can be had at EVP on East Washington, and not even as good as the coffee at Mickey's brunch on weekends.

The folks running the coffee bar were too isolated from the rest of the joint. A good shop has barristas that not only like their job, but who also make a coffee shop feel like it's an inviting and welcome place.

I never had a bad interaction with someone working there, but never one where I felt like anybody really cared much about it either. I can get as good a coffee at McDonald's these days and it didn't feel much different, vibe wise.

The furniture sucked. A mish mash of uncomfortable tables, with no sense to how they were arranged, the really never gave the impression that you could find a regular spot.

Part of the reason a lot of people go to coffee shops alone is to sit and listen to other people while pretending to surf the web or read. EVP is perfect for that, and so is the Mermaid.

I know this because people often jump into conversations I've having in either place, and there's a funny dance where folks often orbit around our table full of loudmouth folks before they decide to jump into our circle of hypercaffinated world problem chewers. I never felt like there was any of that vibe in Zoma.

But they did have a good bathroom. And really clean. And it was an ok place to have a live music show, I played a few there. I'll miss stopping there off the bike trail on a hot day and getting something iced. But it had little pull for me besides that.

Lots of local coffee hounds are lamenting the fact that it's closing and trying to figure out how to save it. But until some serious rethinking of the space and attention are given to the overall scheme of things, I don't see how it can survive. Not in a town filled with good coffee houses.

You want the best coffee on the east side, with good barrisats and some seriously thought out space designed to be both cozy and filled with a sense of community, go to EVP. And Rae, Greg or Peter and the rest of the crew will make you a few shots that are perfect, and you'll feel like they actually care.

Cold Air, Cold Beer

Bell's Hopslam beer is without a shred, a micron, a jot, dash or smidgeon of doubt my new favorite mind altering chemical.

Thick, slightly sweet, packed with high alpha acid hops like Cascades that work like a valium, and what must be a barley wine level of ethanol, it's both dangerous and sublime. Worthy of the five dollar a glass price tag.

And I have to say that my new favorite bar is Dexters Pub on North and Johnson.

Good pub chips, fairly good pizza and walking distance from home, and it's not crowded or loud like The Harmony, and the bartenders are less grumpy.

I hate when Allison yells at people and acts like a hard ass about folks who aren't drunk.

I still think Mickey's has the best burger in a bar in this town, though. And brunch on the weekends.

Last night's ragged and bliss filled practice with Mikey and Fry, today's long walk in the cold winter air, followed by a fine pair of beers with Kori has taken the edge off this strange and sorta ugly week.

That cold front blew a little clarity in, too. Upon further reflection, cutting the baby in half doesn't seem so hard. Metaphorically speaking, that is. Not that I know what to do with two halves of a baby, I tend not to eat my own kind, and there's all that unpleasant paperwork if somebody finds out...

This winter sucks. And I'm starting to think about what I want on a purely selfish personal level, because I am one truck repair from getting in my truck and leaving it all behind until my credit card maxes out. Maybe take a long a pile of guitars to use as firewood along the way.

I want somebody to make me supper for a change. Somebody besides me or Kori to cook.

I want somebody to say, "damn, that was a fine time playing those songs tonight" or "hey, let's finish up that cd and play a few gigs"

I want the folks who say they're going to help me with a project help me with a project after they've used up my time and energy on theirs. I want them to clean up after themselves when they use my shop.

I want people to tell me what they're thinking. Not to evade it, or not even give me an answer when I'm doing something with them that I feel passionate about. If I ask you if you want to do a group project, fucking tell me. Don't just say "I show up, don't I? Lame, pal. Showing up is how you get through High School.

I want my pals who ask my fucking opinion on something to actually listen to it and stop using me as a sounding board for their own insecurity, or to stop asking me if they're not interested. I am not interested in telling you what to text people, or if your ass looks funny in those pants. You're not going to pay attention to what I say anyway. I really don't care as long as you're happy, and nothing I say will make a difference.

I want a few of my pals to stop their internal monologs long enough to hear my point of view. To not retreat into emotional breakdown because my worldview doesn't support theirs. To start considering thinking with more than their emotions.

I want people I used to be in a band with to stop whining to me about the band I'm not in anymore, and talking about what new projects they're going to do with other people. It's already been made very clear that I'm not worthy to play with you anymore, so why fucking dump on me about your next plan?

I want my tribe to start giving me back a few things, so it feels like a tribe again instead of me being the person who makes lunch and a handy mother confessor and fix it person.

I'm not holding my breath.

Same As It Ever Was

In any country where talent and virtue produce no advancement, money will be the national god. Its inhabitants will either have to possess money or make others believe that they do.

Wealth will be the highest virtue, poverty the greatest vice. Those who have money will display it in every imaginable way. If their ostentation does not exceed their fortune, all will be well.

But if their ostentation does exceed their fortune they will ruin themselves.

In such a country, the greatest fortunes will vanish in the twinkling of an eye. Those who don't have money will ruin themselves with vain efforts to conceal their poverty.

That is one kind of affluence: the outward sign of wealth for a small number, the mask of poverty for the majority, and a source of corruption for all.

Denis Diderot, Observations on the Drawing Up of Laws (written in 1774 for Catherine the Great), quoted from The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations

Pacing the Cage

Pacing the Cage

Bruce Cockburn, 1997

Sunset is an angel weeping

Holding out a bloody sword

No matter how I squint

I cannot make out what it's pointing toward

Sometimes you feel like you live too long

Days drip slowly on the page

You catch yourself
Pacing the cage

I've proven who I am so many times

The magnetic strip's worn thin

And each time I was someone else

And every one was taken in

Powers chatter in high places

Stir up eddies in the dust of rage

Set me to pacing the cage

I never knew what you all wanted

So I gave you everything

All that I could pillage

All the spells that I could sing

It's as if the thing were written

In the constitution of the age

Sooner or later you'll wind up

Pacing the cage

Sometimes the best map will not guide you

You can't see what's round the bend

Sometimes the road leads through dark places

Sometimes the darkness is your friend

Today these eyes scan bleached-out land

For the coming of the outbound stage

Pacing the cage

Pacing the cage

Some days I miss cleaning toilets in Seattle back in 1993.

Tonight I do, anyway.

Nobody knew me, everything was new again, and I had nowhere to go but up from the bottom I hit before I moved, and I didn't have to be den mother to a bunch of folks who took but didn't give when I needed it.

It's a new day, new president and there's supposed to be hope in the air.

I'm not feeling it. Maybe that's what tomorrow is for.

Quotes of the day:

Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: "My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly." This stranger is a theologian.

Denis Diderot, Addition aux Pensees philosophiques, from John Daintith, et al, eds. The Macmillan Dictionary of Quotations (2000) p. 34

Mankind shall not be free until the last king is strangled in the entrails of the last priest.
Denis Diderot, Dithyrambe Sur La Fête Des Rois

It is raining bombs on the house of the Lord. I go in fear and trembling lest one of these terrible bombers gets into difficulties.
Denis Diderot (1768). Quoted from and citation quip by Jim Herrick, Against the Faith (1985), p. 85.

Source: Deni Diderot, Quotations

It's the holiday season. But let's get some shit corrected.

Jesus was not born on the 25th. Jesus freaks stole the date from the pagans, who needed to use the Winter Solstice traditions to sucker tribes of unsuspecting and happy humans into buying their single Father God in Heaven who kills babies and sends plagues and death when he's in the mood. His ways and will work in mysterious ways.

And I'm sorry to say it, but the fat guy in the red suit and beard isn't all that, either.

Santa Claus doesn't know when you're bad or good. He's a fucked up mix of myths and ad copy made up to sell shit.

And the Baby Jesus does not care if you're being bad or good, or he'd be kicking the living shit out of the Israelites right now for bombing the shit out of Gaza and killing innocents and beating the shit out of a million folks who were unlucky enough to not be born Israelis.

Planting a god baby size foot right in the ass of the guys sending the bombs tonight.

And Easter? The next big holiday coming up? Also stolen by Jesus's control freaks from the pagans. But instead of having it be a celebration of fertility and springtime, the thieves turned the holiday into a gory spectacle celebrating nailing some poor dude to a tree.

In the church of my youth they took it a step further and turned it into ritual cannibalism. When you point that out to your Catholic relatives they tell you you're nuts. But what the hell other meaning does "body of Christ" have after that alter boy loving unmarried Priest says it to you?

There's even a nice vampire touch where they turn crappy wine into the blood of Christ. Of course, that politician child molester in the funny black robes is the only one who gets to drink the blood wine.

Coming up: New Year's Day! You know what that means.

It means BushCo only has 20 days left to fuck shit up!

Happy good fucking riddance to him, and the whole year of 2008.

Oh, and Obama? Fuck you for putting Rick Warren in your lineup of speakers. You and your team of misguided and calculating idiots.

But what do I know,according to Rick Warren, I'm morally equal to a pedophile. A dirty hippie to be tossed aside after giving Obama and the Democrats my vote, as usual.

I need a beer. Happy New Year's everybody!

Quote of the Day: Bruce Sterling, GEEK!

Forget trying to pass for normal. Follow your geekdom. Embrace your nerditude. In the immortal words of Lafcadio Hearn, a geek of incredible obscurity whose work is still in print after a hundred years, "Woo the muse of the odd." . . . You may be a geek. You may have geek written all over you. You should aim to be one geek they'll never forget. Don't aim to be civilized.

Don't hope that straight people will keep you on as some kind of pet. To hell with them. You should fully realize what society has made of you and take a terrible revenge.

Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird, and don't do it halfway. Put every ounce of horsepower you have behind it. . . .

Don't become a well rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a pufferfish.

Bruce Sterling, speech on The Wonderful Power of Storystelling to the Computer Game Developers Conference, March 1991

Ho, Ho, Ho, Here's a Gallon of Snot

Things here at Hint of Dementia Research Labs have been rather bleeech. A rhinovirus of disturbing effectiveness has given Kori, Kate, and I a great deal of creeping crud, making our ears clogged and our heads woogly, turning our brains into semi-dyslex-ick muck and making our eyeballs feel like onions boiled in rancid corn oil.

Me anyway, that's how I feel. Sweetie's just coming down with it, and is descending into mushy brained mucus laden despairing human flesh for a few days.

It's a pretty virulent virus too, I know of at least a dozen other folks who have had this in the last two weeks. I know one of them gave it to me. But I try not to take viruses personally.

It does not make for much creative flow, these rivers of snot. And I've been cogitatin' on how freaky things are, not wanting to write about them, because it makes me feel like the priestess of gloom, thinking and blogging about the end of Bush and the end of things as we knew them.

But at our mostly godless pagan Solstice Party on Saturday, a few folks told me they liked what I had been writing, so I think I'll start cogitating on my keyboard here instead of just thinking and ranting at the coffee house.

There's something about this time of year that makes me want to crawl into a warm bed every night around eight pm and hibernate.

The short days, the often grey skies, and the frigid air all combine to make the remaining parts of my brain left over from our pre industrial days want to just shut down till the days get longer.

I'd like to find the guy who decided money and mass production were the only ways to measure and make things and shove a sharp stick in his eye.

And as long as I am searching for pointy stick in the eyeball candidates, how about adding the folks who made the idea of sharing things and having a life beyond buying and selling and putting a dollar value on everything from human heartbeats to nature itself, and give them another sharp stick lobotomy?

Then again, there are so many shallow thinkers and greedy shitheads out there we'd run out of sticks. Expecting a lot for no work is how we got into this big money mess.

Sweetie and Mikey were talking about socialism the other day, and how so many people have a knee jerk reaction that sharing things is bad when you're an adult, but what you're told to do when you're a kid.

Few folks ever question our "free market system" or capitalism, but god forbid any hint of socialism.

Funny how greed trumps love once you're an adult.

Bundle up folks, it's cold out there today. I wish you unbroken furnaces and hot tea as needed.

Clusterfu*k Nation: Kunstler on the future

He';s good today, go read him.

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/

The economy we're moving into will have to be one of real work, producing real things of value, at a scale consistent with energy resource reality. I'm convinced that farming will come much closer to the center of economic life, as the death of petro-agribusiness makes food production a matter of life and death in America -- as opposed to the disaster of metabolic entertainment it is now.

Reorganizing the landscape itself for this finer-scaled new type of farming is a task fraught with political peril (land ownership questions being historically one of the main reasons that societies fall into revolution). The public is completely unprepared for this kind of change.

We still think that "the path to success" is based on getting a college degree certifying people for a lifetime of sitting in an office cubicle. This is so far from the approaching reality that it will be eventually viewed as a sick joke -- like those old 1912 lithographs of mega-cities with Zeppelins plying the air between Everest-size skyscrapers.

Salt and Plastic

So, I drove out to Farm and Fleet today, with a stop at Woodman's. It's snowing like crazy and the salt trucks are out dumping tons of sodium into the local environment, all of which drains right into the aquifer over time.

This raises sodium in the water, which we then consume and it tends to add to overall high blood pressure problems as well as stressing out our local aquatic systems, which Madison is famous for.

So we salt the roads to be safe today, while poisoning the water table. Instead of just driving slower, using sand or not driving at all.

Then I went into the grocery store, where nearly everything is packaged in plastic, from the celery to the extra bag they stuck my lip gloss and bottle of ibuprofen in.

This happened when I wasn't looking, because I was busy loading my reusable bag, made from plastic garbage recycled into another use. For some reason that escapes me, grocery stores feel a need to put items in plastic into bags of plastic to keep them away from all the plastic wrapped items they feel they have to sell you.

Why the hell you need plastic wrap on celery or lettuce escapes me. I just peel off the outer layer and put it in the compost bin.

Of course, a huge amount of plastic washes into our rivers, then out to our oceans, which then degrades into toxic debris that attracts all the pesticides and chemical soup we make to make the plastic that covers everything.

There's an area full of plastic bigger than Texas in the Pacific, growing bigger every year, killing off a huge chunk of ocean that used to have organic debris in it that fed the aquatic life.

People demand salted roads, demand plastic coverings and obsess over safety for their kids. The same kids that will inherit a world with a toxic ecosystem that's teetering on the edge of system crashing climate change. The ones being born with defects and long term health problems due to exposure to plastic chemical residues.

Fuckin' up the future to make sure that your little bundle of DNA is safe today is pretty much how we do things.

Some days I am amazed at how short sighted we are, driving our way to extinction and making sure we're covering everything with plastics that mimic estrogenic compounds so our kids can grow up with serious health problems.

In the end, it won't matter, because we're already setting the stage for what comes after us. I wonder if there's a bigger scheme of things, if that's not our job, to bring on the changes that shift the world over to the next step for life on earth.

I find the whole idea that there's a higher power using us to fuck over the current ecosystem rather amusing.

What I noticed at Woodman's Grocery on Tuesday

Signs things are getting ugly:

The canned soup aisle in Woodman's is jammed with people, and canned soup company stocks are going up in value, fast.

There's a section of the frozen meat bin at Woodman's where the put the discounted meats and sausages that need to be used. For years, I've gotten things like sausage out of it for making beans and casseroles, and most people ignored it, and it was usually half full. Today, when I first looked, it was empty. Moments later, there was a big pile of things added. A half hour later, it was empty again. People are getting less picky.

The generic store brands are almost all off the shelves, while the more expensive brands of the same foods remain fully stocked.

The discounted produce they sell in 79 cent bags at the front of the store? You're lucky to find anything there anymore. Even last summer, there were usually a half dozen bags of apples, pears or whatever else they overstocked.

And the Oil Change service they offer at the gas station? Last summer it started to slow, now it seems like there's hardly ever a line.

That's just what I noticed this morning.

Folks are getting nervous. You can feel it and see it and hear it if you're not too busy whistling in the dark and bitching about those damn liberals/queers getting married/colored folks taking over the guvament'.

Even the idea of banks being "too big to fail" has become common talk.

Nothing is too big to fail. Everything that exists in time runs out of time someday.

Our whole world has become obsessed with optimizing everything, squeezing every last dollar out and making everything in our lives subject to the idea of "just in time delivery". We have no slack, no cushion, be it in cash reserves for banks or warehouses full of food, spare parts or the consumer products we actually need when we take a hit, be it in the markets or when disaster strikes.

And if you don't think it strikes, remember what happened to New Orleans. Then think of what global warming induced drought and hurricanes, or another big California earthquake would do to our already messed up system.

Meanwhile, the government is busy making up trillions of dollars of money out of thin air to bail out a bunch of fantasy economic concepts and the liars who knew they were bad ideas.

They're busy watering down what our money is worth when it comes to buying things we actually need, like food, fuel and housing.

I think that within six months to a year we're going to see ugly inflation because of this.

You can only pour so much water in the soup before it stops being soup. And nobody is really doing anything to stop the worst parts of the bailout, because we elected spineless democrats and are too busy ignoring what our evil and dull witted President is doing on the way out the door.

Fun times ahead. Better start building a tribe/community/family outside your blood relatives, because you're going to need it. And learn how to garden in your front yard, get used to riding bikes and learn to cook from scratch.

You might even find it more fun in the long run than our doomed present lifestyle. I know I feel better from having made those choices.

Quote of the Day:Letting Things Break Down

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/25/opinion/25herbert.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

From Bob Herbert, Via the New York Times:

The idea that the nation had all but stopped investing in its infrastructure, and that officials in Washington have ignored the crucial role of job creation as the cornerstone of a thriving economy is beyond mind-boggling. It’s impossible to understand.
Impossible, that is, until you realize that bandits don’t waste time repairing a building that they’re looting.

This ends the quote of the day, for those of you who have attention spans long enough to read two short paragraphs.

Must Read: On Sustainablity- Bruce Sterling

http://craphound.com/lastviridian.txt

"What is "sustainability?" Sustainable practices navigate successfully through time and space, while others crack up and vanish. So basically, the sustainable is about time -- time and space. You need to re-think your relationship to material possessions in terms of things that occupy your time. The things that are physically closest to you. Time and space.
In earlier, less technically advanced eras, this approach would have been far-fetched. Material goods were inherently difficult to produce, find, and ship. They were rare and precious. They were closely associated with social prestige. Without important material signifiers such as wedding china, family silver, portraits, a coach-house, a trousseau and so forth, you were advertising your lack of substance to your neighbors. If you failed to surround yourself with a thick material barrier, you were inviting social abuse and possible police suspicion. So it made pragmatic sense to cling to heirlooms, renew all major purchases promptly, and visibly keep up with the Joneses.
That era is dying. It's not only dying, but the assumptions behind that form of material culture are very dangerous. These objects can no longer protect you from want, from humiliation -- in fact they are *causes* of humiliation, as anyone with a McMansion crammed with Chinese-made goods and an unsellable SUV has now learned at great cost.
Furthermore, many of these objects can damage you personally. The hours you waste stumbling over your piled debris, picking, washing, storing, re-storing, those are hours and spaces that you will never get back in a mortal lifetime. Basically, you have to curate these goods: heat them, cool them, protect them from humidity and vermin. Every moment you devote to them is lost to your children, your friends, your society, yourself.
It's not bad to own fine things that you like. What you need are things that you GENUINELY like. Things that you cherish, that enhance your existence in the world. The rest is dross.
Do not "economize." Please. That is not the point. The economy is clearly insane. Even its champions are terrified by it now. It's melting the North Pole. So "economization" is not your friend. Cheapness can be value-less. Voluntary simplicity is, furthermore, boring. Less can become too much work.
The items that you use incessantly, the items you employ every day, the normal, boring goods that don't seem luxurious or romantic: these are the critical ones. They are truly central. The everyday object is the monarch of all objects. It's in your time most, it's in your space most. It is "where it is at," and it is "what is going on."
It takes a while to get this through your head, because it's the opposite of the legendry of shopping. However: the things that you use every day should be the best-designed things you can get. For instance, you cannot possibly spend too much money on a bed -- (assuming you have a regular bed, which in point of fact I do not). You're spending a third of your lifetime in a bed. Your bed might be sagging, ugly, groaning and infested with dust mites, because you are used to that situation and cannot see it. That calamity might escape your conscious notice. See it. Replace it. "

Baby Loves Jesus

Need to put some music to this, it popped into my head while doing the dishes the other day. It's about somebody from my past I haven't seen in over thirty years.

baby loves jesus
and crystal meth
born again and headed
for an early death
tryin' to keep up
left me out of breath
I remember a time
when we were something fine
had ourselves a real good time
rolling in the wet grass
up on clem's hill
the stars so bright
time was standing still
we were gonna be something
gonna go far
but she never got far
from that corner bar
the drunks and the creeps
and the redneck freaks
turned her into another tweaker
but now my baby loves jesus
and crystal meth
born again and headed
for an early death
tryin' to keep up
left me out of breath

Another Fine Gig At The Alchemy

The madman and the cranky old guitar player,

photographed by Kori

The MF7 played the Alchemy bar last night. It was raw, rude, wreckless and a damn hoot.

It was a good crowd, lots of my tribe showed up, and we made new pals and some converts.

The boys rocked, I got to play snarling lead all over the place, doing lots of feedback and snake bite leads. Mikey busted out a lead on his wanker Eddie Van Halen guitar that sounds oddly acoustic, and Fry and Jonathon blew me away with unexpected and funky moments that make dragging all the heavy shit down to the bar and going a bit more deaf worth it.

And the beer was free for us, at least. I love gigs like last night where we don't have to share the stage with three other bands.

I hate the way the bars in this town usually have three bands in a night. When I started playing music it was usually just one band a night, three sets of music and you had to be good enough to hold people's attention for more than just one too short set.

Yeah, the third set was and is still a hard one, usually playing to what often is an empty bar. And you get tired, and last night mildly drunk on IPA, so you get sloppy.

But sometimes there's a great mayhem in sucking during a set that I like.

Usually by one AM the crowd's drunk enough to not care how many wrong notes you hit if you act like you mean it.

This band is more about rolling with things and letting chaos open doors than anything I've been in. And it's sorely lacking in big ego problems.
I love Michael's one constant and standing order:

"be brilliant"

It was a long fun day of music, starting with practice down at The Madison Music Foundry and ending at two AM when we rolled into the driveway. And it blew out a lot of the carbon in my brain, having that foot on the pedal all night.

Quote of the Day:Robert Heinlein

History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it.

Robert A. Heinlein

Baby!

Another Show Coming up!

Hey! Another Alchemy Show!

Saturday 11/15!

Nine Thirty PM!

Just us, no three or four band freakshow of wannabe rockers with expensive guitars and day jobs being weekend warriors,

playing through giant amps they can't turn up loud enough to be good.

Just us four low rent fabu-luss freaks beating the music into a pulp and drinking fine Alchemy beer.

And it's free!

Nuff' said, time to go pray to my pagan homo gods that nice dark skinned and eloquent man opens a can of MegaWhoop Ass on the crabby old man and his wretched running mate.

(original poster art by the master himself, Jack Kirby!)

Lyrics of the day: Paul Simon

American Tune

Words & music by Paul Simon

Many's the time I've been mistaken

And many times confused

Yes, and I've often felt forsaken

And certainly misused

Oh, but I'm all right, I'm all right

I'm just weary to my bones

Still, you don't expect to be

Bright and bon vivant

So far away from home, so far away from home

And I don't know a soul who's not been battered

I don't have a friend who feels at ease

I don't know a dream that's not been shattered

or driven to its knees

but it's all right, it's all right

for we lived so well so long

Still, when I think of theroad we're traveling on

I wonder what's gone wrongI can't help it,

I wonder what's gone wrong

And I dreamed I was dyingI dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedlyAnd looking back down at me

Smiled reassuringly

And I dreamed I was flying

And high up above my eyes could clearly see

The Statue of Liberty

Sailing away to sea

And I dreamed I was flying

We come on the ship they call the Mayflower

We come on the ship that sailed the moon

We come in the age's most uncertain hours

and sing an American tune

Oh, and it's alright, it's all right,

it's all right

You can't be forever blessed

Still, tomorrow's going to be another working day

And I'm trying to get some rest

That's all I'm trying to get some rest

Fits my mood these days, these lyrics.

And on another note, or perhaps I should say several thousand notes, tonight my funky fun band is playing at The Frequency around nine thirty. The high point of my week, I suspect. At least until I hear Obama won, or we play again next Saturday at the Alchemy bar.

Monoculture America

I hate lawns. They're a gigantic waste of energy, time and represent the worst things about our culture.

I suspect they're a holdover from our former owners in the British Isles, because a lawn in the old times came from people needing clear lines of fire and pasture around the castles. Somewhere along the line, people came to equate lawns with wealth.
We have multi billion dollar industries devoted to them, and a whole culture that worships them. People wait all week to mow their fucking lawns. They dump huge amounts of chemicals on them, destroy every thing in them that's not exactly what their narrow vision block headed desire insists should be there.

They pump tons of exhaust into their own local environment, right into their own kid's lungs, fill the local waterways and children's skin with pesticides, fertilizers and waste gasoline and oil spills.

They rake, blow and whack them to eliminate anything that might make for a healthy ecosystem.

Then, they sit back and admire the total lack of diversity. All the while driving the bees and butterflies to the edge of death or out to the edge of town. And the edges of town are getting pretty far away.

And instead of growing food in their yards, the drive a gas hog to the grocery store and buy terrible tomatoes and tasteless lettuce driven thousands of miles.

And it's symbolic of the way suburbs think about a lot of things. They're nice safe places, where dark skinned people rarely go, where the queers get driven out, and where everybody agrees that god, family and country are the really important things. Places the often don't even allow gardens.

Shortsighted and stupid to a degree that escapes me, we have millions of people in this country who embrace the STUPID of lawns.

Even my own sweet mother suffers from the monoculture lawn syndrome. It's taken me years to get her to let me put some raised beds in her yard, and all summer long she doted over them, weeded them and talked about how much her boring ass neighbors loved her flowerbeds.

I have almost no lawn left. Just the front terrace between my sidewalk and street. And next summer, I think I'll put in some flowerbeds.

I'd put in some vegetables, but the STUPID human monkeys who drive their kids to school all year long would just cover the plants with exhaust fumes. Or trample the garden beds as their fat little entitled special snowflake larvae looking brats try to tug their bloated by corn syrup bodies into the rolling death machines their parents drive them to school in, because we're too stoooopid as a society to actually let our kids walk, or walk with them.

But enough about lawns.

We have a little less than three days to go, and we'll know if we have a nice new President Obama to look forward to hounding into doing the right thing, or riding along in the drunken clown car that is a GOP government that ignores us, helpless passengers in the back seat with a mean old bastard and his Witch fearing,G dropping idiot opportunist godbag Vice President in the front seat.

Please, for god sake, get out and vote for that nice dark skinned fella. Because a vote for Blinky and Winky, AKA Bible Spice and McCrank is a vote for more things going right into the open cesspool of evil Stupid.