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“And I’m also proud to carry with me the goodwill of the American people, and a greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country: Assalaamu alaykum.” -Barack Hussein Obama, President of the United States of America.

Awesome.

Honestly, I teared up.

I am so very proud of my President and my country.  Our Man was amazing today.  He said things no American President has ever said.  And they were all true.  I was transfixed.  Enchanted.  Slack jawed.  I’m grateful I was alone, just in case I drooled.

It’s worth pointing out that in light of the elaborate smear effort to paint him as some sort of extremist Muslim conducted during the Presidential  campaign, his speech in Cairo today was goddamn courageous.  Beyond that, it was an overt in your face to his neoconservative right wing Christian critics. You know, the ones that so desperately want you to believe that we’re in the middle of some war that is ultimately about our God being able to beat up their God.  The ones for whom ridiculous dogma and apocryphal ideology trump compassion, reality and common sense.

“More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations. Moreover, the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.”

“So long as our relationship is defined by our differences, we will empower those who sow hatred rather than peace, those who promote conflict rather than the cooperation that can help all of our people achieve justice and prosperity. And this cycle of suspicion and discord must end.”

Oh man.  That’s the shit right there.

“As the Holy Quran tells us, “Be conscious of God and speak always the truth.  That is what I will try to do today — to speak the truth as best I can, humbled by the task before us, and firm in my belief that the interests we share as human beings are far more powerful than the forces that drive us apart.”

There it is.  We are all just people.  Humans first and foremost.  How breathtakingly refreshing.  How important and authentic.

Obama quoted John Adams: “The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims.”

This notion, so widely held, that America is at war with a religion or an ethnicity or even a geographic region is so very wrongheaded, so perspicaciously misguided, that most Americans, along with too much of the world, have no realistic understanding of just exactly what is happening and why.

It’s understandable, given the litany of lies we’ve been force fed, and our own failure in laziness and apathy to not even bother to investigate for our own edification, the absolute crap the media has foisted upon us so irresponsibly, so relentlessly and for so long.  The failure of journalism in America is mirrored by the doppelganger of breakdown by Americans ourselves, to question what we’re told, to challenge what we are led to believe.  Exactly why we are in this mess.

Willful ignorance.

“The enduring faith of over a billion people is so much bigger than the narrow hatred of a few. Islam is not part of the problem in combating violent extremism — it is an important part of promoting peace.”

As an agnostic,  I am moved  to say Amen.

“Let me also address the issue of Iraq. Unlike Afghanistan, Iraq was a war of choice that provoked strong differences in my country and around the world……….Indeed, we can recall the words of Thomas Jefferson, who said: “I hope that our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us that the less we use our power, the greater it will be.”

Sheezus.  Wow.  In Cairo, Egypt.  An incredibly bold admission about the abject failure of American policy.  I can’t tell you how impressed I am at this honest confession by Our Man on the world stage.  It’s true, America fucked up by invading Iraq.  We screwed the pooch.  Shame on us.

“And finally, just as America can never tolerate violence by extremists, we must never alter or forget our principles. Nine-eleven was an enormous trauma to our country. The fear and anger that it provoked was understandable, but in some cases, it led us to act contrary to our traditions and our ideals. We are taking concrete actions to change course. I have unequivocally prohibited the use of torture by the United States, and I have ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed by early next year.”

Of course I was aware of these steps by Our Man, but his restating of them beneath and behind the proscenium of a stage in front of the entire world is nothing less than golden.  And again, the admission of just how far this once great country has strayed, is so brave and nakedly honest, that I am at a loss for words.

He recounts these events, these egregious mistakes, because his intention is to put them behind us by reconstructing our integrity and pride with honesty and transparency, whenever and wherever possible.

Then, he swung the mother of all haymakers:

“On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people — Muslims and Christians — have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than 60 years they’ve endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations — large and small — that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: The situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. And America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity and a state of their own.”

“It is a sign neither of courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That’s not how moral authority is claimed; that’s how it is surrendered.”

“The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.  This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.”

Unbelievable.  Finally.  A sitting American calls Israel on it’s shit.

This is change.  I can’t speak for you, but this is why this man earned my vote.  It is why I didn’t hesitate to hope.  I believed him then.  I believe him now.  I believe in him.  As I write this, I am inspired and awfully proud.

This speech will no doubt be read, remarked upon and lauded for decades.

This guy is so fucking cool.

Drinks for my friends.

I hope you’re not yet tired of me railing against all things Dick Cheney.  I know I’m not.  History will will estimate him to be nothing more than a misanthropic war criminal.  Besides that, I admit again that it’s morbidly cathartic.  What began as an effort on his part to rewrite history and burnish his legacy, has morphed into a risible rhythmless boogie of dodging bullets fired at his feet by truth empowered gunslingers.

Today he tells us that there was never any evidence of a connection between 911 and Iraq.  Um, no shit.  This despite his persistent insistence that there was ample evidence, long after it was thoroughly discredited. He said:  “pretty well confirmed” that a 9/11 hijacker met with Iraqi intelligence officials before 9/11. -thinkprogress.org

Understand how deliberate this dog and pony show was.  In the ’04 Presidential election, over 70% of people who voted for Bush/Cheney believed that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the attacks on 911.  One could rightfully argue that these two assholes were re-elected by and large because Americans believed their lies and the spell of fear they so successfully instilled.

You gotta love the great unwashed.

He also tells us that those memos he wants declassified don’t necessarily prove, as he claimed just days ago, that torture saved thousands, if not hundreds of thousand of lives, but rather the entirety of the interrogation program did.  What the hell does that mean?  Olbermann wondered if he was referring to instances like the fact that we gave sugar free cookies to a diabetic terrorist.

Then, he has the audacity to blame his lies on George Tenet.  That’s right, the infamous dickhead in charge of the CIA at the time, who said that making a case for invading Iraq to the American people and the world was a “slam dunk”.  As if to say, it wasn’t his fault because that’s what Tenet told him.

After months of pressure and obtuse harangue by Dick truly and his mob.

For his part, Tenet received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

It’s gets better.  He now claims we missed 911 because of former terrorist czar Richard Clarke.  I suggest you read Clarke’s book on the matter.  One of the very first insiders to be overtly critical of the reckless and ideologically driven Dick-in-Bush administration and the Keystone Cops approach they took to every single circumstance after that fateful day.  If Clarke is to be believed, and I believe him, he had been ringing the bell since day one.  The book is titled “Against All Enemies” and it’s a page turning indictment of the whole crew, from Condoleezza Rice, on up.

While you’re at it, pick up of former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s book, “The Price of Loyalty”.  An astounding glimpse into the pre-911 days and the Bush administration’s determination, even then, to to invade Iraq.

What baffles me is how so many talking heads, Dan Rather included, seem wont to purchase that at the very least, Cheney is sincere, that he believes what he says.  No sale here.  He’s a charlatan and should be tried and convicted for war crimes.  Every prediction has been wrong.  Every “fact” he’s ever foisted has been a lie.  The idea that this prick is able to command a single American’s attention on any public airwave, makes me want to puke in technicolor.

Here’s where we are.  No WMD.  There never was and there remains no credible reason to tell Americans it was…..was.  No connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda.  No connection whatsoever between Saddam Hussien and the events of 911.  Again, never was and no credible reason to tell Americans there was.  Nothing, no symbiosis between a secular dictatorship and an extreme religious movement.

No was.  None.

Here we are.  Not a single fucking reason for invading a sovereign country that posed no threat to us or even it’s neighbors in the foreseeable future.  No reason for killing hundreds of thousands if not more than a million innocent people.  No reason for displacing millions of innocents.  No reason for the deaths of thousands of proud American men and women.  No reason for the incalculable grief visited on millions and millions of fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers across the entire planet.  No goddamn reason at all for any of it.

No was and no is.

I usually endeavor to bring a little humor to you the reader, while drawing your attention to the horrible events that surround us all in this world.  Forgive me, this just isn’t funny.  There’s nothing funny about it.  It’s all tragedy kids.  A long slow, brutal and still developing nightmare that will disturb the world’s sleep for decades because Richard Bruce Cheney was somehow allowed to have far too much influence on the course of human events.

More than any other human, Richard Bruce Cheney is responsible for a consummately unjust war with Iraq.  More than any other human, Richard Bruce Cheney is responsible for the abject and utterly reprehensible torture America visited with malice and viciousness on America’s “enemies”.  More than any other human, Richard Bruce Cheney is culpable for America’s woefully reduced standing in the world.  More, than any single other human fucking being, Richard Bruce Cheney is responsible for the hole that we are now at the bottom of.

One of the prevailing messages of the Obama administration is to look forward and therefore not dwell too zealously on our recent past.  It is ever more apparent to me that however wholesome and well intentioned such sentiments are, they are naive and for lack of a better adjective, simple, in an increasingly complex world.

Richard Bruce Cheney shits where he eats.

Hold Dick Cheney responsible.  Show the world that accountability is still a respected idea in America.  Prosecute this prick.  In so doing, we will demonstrate the best we have to offer as a first step, to ourselves and the rest of the planet.

Fuck this guy.

Drinks for my friends.

Fuck that shit.  CHRISTIAN TERRORISM.

Timothy McVeigh was a domestic terrorist.

Whackjobs like Scott Roeder, who assassinated Dr. George Tiller yesterday in his own goddamn church, what should be a sanctuary, do so in the the name of their Christian God.  No surprise here that Roeder was a homophobe as well.  Christian Terrorist, nothing less.

Thank God I’m agnostic.  I crack me up.

“A man named Scott Roeder was convicted in 1996 of criminal use of explosives and sentenced to 24 months probation….” -CNN

Imagine this man was Muslim and he was known to stalk and then kill a Rabbi or a politician.  Think about it.  Really.

Like it or not, George Tiller was engaging in a legally protected activity.  Do these assholes really think these women simply wake up, watch an episode of Maury Povich and decide to seek a late term abortion as a matter of convenience?  I’m not even going to look it up, I’m confident that’s not the case.  Shut up, I will not entertain the issue.

Enter the glowering spectre of egregiously irresponsible “journalists” like Bill O’Reilly.  How much blood on his hands?

“Tiller, O’Reilly likes to say, “destroys fetuses for just about any reason right up until the birth date for $5,000.” He’s guilty of “Nazi stuff,” said O’Reilly on June 8, 2005; a moral equivalent to NAMBLA and al-Qaida, he suggested on March 15, 2006. “This is the kind of stuff happened in Mao’s China, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union,” said O’Reilly on Nov. 9, 2006″ -salon.com

As of today, no apologies from O’Reilly.  In it’s stead, Bill the pinhead offers that: “The far left is exploiting the death of [sic] Dr. Tiller to stifle any criticism of abortion.”  Note the euphemism “death of” in the the place of what should rightfully be “assassination”.  As though, “Tiller the Killer” some how expired or succumbed to natural causes.

There is no doubt in my mind that O’Reilly and his ilk are responsible in some degree for so recklessly fomenting the hate and fear for which such tragedies are an inevitable conclusion.  Inevitable, you douchebag.  Time to man up, you penisless reptile.  Do you imagine your useless vitriol to be without consequence?

To quote Snoop: “Fuck Bill O’Reilly.”

Man I hate these guys.

In other news, I’m thinking Sonia Sotomayor has benefitted  from the magic of rhinoplasty.  Good decision methinks.  She used to have a honker like a potato.  Seriously, she’s hot, smart and exotic, at least to me, self confessed trailer trash.  I’m saying that under the right circumstances, I’d hit that.

For the record, my current significant other is very smart and way hotter.

I gotta tell ya, I think Barack taking Michelle out for dinner and a show in New York is unbelievably cool.  He loves his wife and so do I.  Class and glamor.  A little Camelot for us all.  I am only able to muster a mere modicum of amusement at the FOX news talking heads invective over the cost of the outing.  Vainglorious and vituperatively disingenuous valor on part of their talking heads pretending to give a mad fuck over the expense to you, dear reader.  Did they complain, on your behalf, about Dumbya’s record amounts of vacation time to clear brush in Crawford?  I think not.

Assholes.

Man I hate these guys.

Drinks for my friends.

If Dick Cheney’s lips part at all, he’s lying.

I’m nurturing a man crush for Senator Carl Levin after he bitch slapped Darth Cheny and his little dog Liz with what I’m certain will be the facts.  You know those classified torture memos Darth and Liz persist ad nauseum in referring to? The ones they say prove torture works and saved hundreds of thousands of lives?

Senator Levin said last night that Darth and his little dog too, are full of shit.

“When former Vice President Cheney said last week that what happened at Abu Ghraib was the work of “a few sadistic prison guards” acting on their own, he bore false witness. And when he said last week there was no link between the techniques used at Abu Ghraib and those approved for use in the CIA’s secret prisons, he again strayed from the truth. The seeds of Abu Ghraib’s rotten fruit were sown by civilians at the highest levels of our government.” -Daily Kos

“Mr. Cheney has also claimed that the release of classified documents would prove his view that the techniques worked. But those classified documents say nothing about numbers of lives saved, nor do the documents connect acquisition of valuable intelligence to the use of the abusive techniques. I hope that the documents are declassified so that people can judge for themselves what is fact and what is fiction. Mr. Cheney has made other false statements. For instance, his claim that the techniques used on detainees were the “same exact procedures” used on our own people in the SERE training regime. That could not be farther from the truth.” -Daily Kos

Booya!

Bear in mind that Levin is no partisan firebrand and certainly not an ideologue.  Level headed, reasonable and very well respected on both sides of aisle, when Carl speaks, people listen and they are inclined to believe him.  In contrast, the Cheneys’s aren’t exactly the picture of sartorial splendor.  Dick is the most accomplished and prolific liar to ever sit at the second highest level of our executive branch.

Man I hate this fucker.

In the post Dick-in-Bush era, Darth Cheney has taken it upon himself, with earnestness, to incite and maintain the market for debate over all egregious actions and policies of his administration, despite legitimacy, credibility or even relevance.  My guess is that history will judge this man with an earned but graceful combination of malice and impunity.  He is without question evil and black of heart; his legacy will suffer accordingly.  It is my sincere wish that his charred and diseased cardiac will endure long enough to afford him a fulsome mouth full of what he has wrought and the disgrace he deserves.

It’s ironic that we’ve arguably heard more from this prick in the last few months, than his entire reign as puppet master and dark lord.

He got hammered, shot a man in the face, and somehow orchestrated for his victim to apologize for the inconvenience.  Who would even attempt to question his prowess for malignancy and obfuscation?

With such a thorough biography of lies and deceit, what will it take for America to stop listening to this vainglorious asshole?  No amount of pride or shame seems enough to compel him to shut the fuck up and disappear.  Are we a nation of masochists?

Fuck this guy.

I confess to a certain vulgar delight in writing about him.  Such an easy target.  So obviously flawed.  He is nothing if not compelling in a macabre sort of way.  I love to loathe him and perhaps that’s his appeal.  I can only hope it’s that simple.  Whatever the case, I’m certain his post Vice Presidential fifteen minutes do far more harm than good to the causes of conservatism and Republican ideology.  Perhaps he unwittingly performs a profound favor by not yet letting America forget just how much his administration sucked.

Drinks for my friends.

It is indisputable that Judge Sonia Sotomayor will be the best looking justice to ever sit on the Supreme Court, despite being stupid, under qualified and racist.

Fuck me.

“The Senate needs to asses her ability to rule fairly without undue influence from her own personal race, gender or political preferences.”  -Senator James Inhofe (R) Oklahoma

“They’re just like ‘hey Hispanic chick lady!  You’re empathetic?’  She says ‘yup!’  They say, ‘you’re in.’  That’s the way it really works.” -Glenn Beck, High Priest of Douchbaggery

“Not necessarily, I know lots of stupid people who went to ivy league schools” -Karl Rove

Think he was thinking about Dumbya?  I did not steal that joke from Olbermann, we just happened to be like minded.

“I’m telling you, she appears to be a racist…” -Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo

“White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw.  Latina woman racist should also withdraw” -Newt Gingrich

“This is someone clearly picked because she’s a woman and Hispanic, not because she’s the best qualified” -Curt Levey, Committee For Justice, Head Asshat

“She’s a bigot, she’s a racist.” -Rush Limbaugh, Human Shitsmear

The egregious irresponsibility of such claims notwithstanding.  The resolute ugliness aside.  Typical obfuscation by a cavalcade of morons speaking for the Republican party.  Methinks they doth protest too much and certainly too early as well as too vociferously.  Textbook example of a pot decrying a kettle as all things black.  Man I hate these guys.

As for me, I don’t yet have an opinion.  She is among the most experienced and qualified of any justice nominated for about a hundred years.  She’s had three decisions upheld by the highest court in the land, two overturned and one still pending.  Given that about seventy five percent of decisions are overturned by the Supreme Court,  she’s batting like a superstar.

She obviously deserves consideration in light of her education, accomplishments and distinction in that arena.  Her extensive experience in all matters of jurisprudence.  This woman is a bit of a rockstar on paper.

That’s all I know.  Fer cryin outloud, it’s been two days!

What makes me angry, is that it’s so predictable.  So goddamn obvious.  For people like me who pay a modicum of attention, there are no surprises here.  What exactly does all this say about the contemporary conservative movement?  The abrupt, violent knee jerk so predictable and anticipated, that I could have written their talking points for them.

This country desperately thirsts for and needs something beyond a two party system.  My dismay is that the GOP cannot even provide an intellectually honest contrast in a a tragically flawed and nearly broken government of a mere two parties.  We are fractured from the inside.  The catalyst for most of the internal bleeding is the absolute onus of the modern conservative movement.  Neocons.  They are fools.  Jackasses, unwilling to look further than their own noses, fears and absurd bias.

California’s prop. 8 debacle is a flaming example.  Pun intended.

Unable and unwilling to avoid stepping on their own withering dicks.  I’m talking about the groups who campaigned for it’s passage.  They think it’s a victory.  Pathetic.

The Republicans have failed us in more ways than one.  I’m a Democrat, for lack of a more appropriate political designation.  I have little enthusiasm for what the implosion of the Republican party means for the long term chance America has for prosperity.  Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

At the very least, we require a reasonable ballast.  We really must have a more diversified collection of voices and ideas.  The abject failure of the GOP to even make sense, much less own a viable stake in any ethical argument, will amount to a tragedy for us all, regardless of political stripe.  The Republican party has not only failed itself, it has failed all of America.

Fools.  Goddamn them.

A new ethic is emerging and it is muscular and potent, yet without intelligent and honest contraposition, it cannot evolve.  What we are staring at is a massive shift.  It might be an excellent thing for humankind, but it must endure smart debate and insightful criticism or it will atrophy and we all lose.  This new ethic must suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or it will crack when tested.  If not allowed to arrive with a confident consensus, it will crumble.  

We may be looking at our last best chance.

A last dance.

You people need to contact these assholes and give them a heads up.

Drinks for my friends.

I dove farther and harder into obscurity.

I was stung.  Once bitten twice shy.

I worked nights as a janitor.

The Todd on phones.  He played his Strat upside down and backwards like Hendrix.  I always liked Todd Montgomery, it would take years on up to today to fully appreciate him.  He rode Japanese steel.  Him and Symington.  The grunion run.  His wife was and still is a successful  comedienne.  Tall goofy guy with a ridiculous grin who made friends easily, but chose them carefully.

Easily underestimated.

I ran into him in Vegas a few years back, his wife was performing where I was staying.  He was gracious and sweet.  We had a quick drink.  I had some place to be but he was happy to walk with me to my room so we could talk.  He hung with me while I changed clothes, brushed my teeth and even walked with me and talked with me on my way back down.  He was happy with himself as well as his life and family.

He was sun through the clouds of the mission I was on.  My crew actually traveling with bodyguard.

A lung full of clean air in my toxic life.

We’re still in touch.

Otherwise, I did the best I could to land in studio C.

A little 32 input API.  The most rudimentary of the five rooms.  The redheaded step child of the entire complex.  If you were in there, you were probably assisting on a demo, as in not a record.  The engineer usually understood he was getting someone with training wheels attached.  Not quite live without a net.

It was the lowest profile gig to be had that still afforded an opportunity to learn.  My place to get the big picture on at my own pace.  So, I did just that.  I pushed hard for gigs in C.  I would divine the process and what was expected of me.  The room belonged to the record company, as opposed to the studio, from nine to five.

Bonus.  Sane hours.

Work hours in a recording studio, unless your role is administrative or clerical, have no thing to do with eight hours a day, five days a week.  Twelve hours a day, six days a week is pretty tame.  Hundred hour weeks were de rigueur.  I was to sleep there often.

Thing was, I would still be pushing someone out of a comfortable seat.  Scott Symington was studio C attending.  Symington wasn’t well liked and I never understood why.  At least not completely.  He seemed nice enough.  He had a smarmy cop mustache.  I think he might have shit talked me a few times but beyond that I didn’t think too hard about him.

No trouble there.

It didn’t take me long to displace Symington.  I got the idea he was on his way out.  I doubt he saw me coming.  I’m not sure he cared.

Joe Borja was really my first mentor.  A thick, short Filipino guy with an over sized head and the voice of a ten year old.  Joe didn’t have a car.  Once in a while, on a good pay day for Joe, I’d take him to his hotel in my shitbox and we’d stop on the way at Yamashiro’s for drinks and to do blow in the gardens.

I almost flattened him one day in a crosswalk.  Didn’t see him.

My first gig with Joe was tracking in C.  He assigned me one task.  We had a guitar amp in the machine room.  We were using it as an iso booth.  Two sliding glass doors between the control room and the machine room.  Joe asked me to make sure both doors were closed always before we were rolling.  Wax on wax off.  No shit.  He showed me how bad I could be at a very simple thing.  Then he showed me a microcosm of what I needed to pay attention to in the time I’d forgotten to make sure both doors were closed.

He wasn’t a dick about it, he just pointed it out.

I would assist Joe on and off for years and he did his best to teach me something.

Joe wasn’t always easy on me but he was good to me.  A solid engineer with a giant heart.  He taught me with patience.  Showed me how to hold the hammer.  He demonstrated what happened when it was swung with a good arc.

It occurred  to me I was to be a shitty assistant and Joe was in silent agreement.  He still did the best he could by me, even though he knew I sucked.  I could tell by the way he looked at me that his hopes weren’t high.  We both understood that I didn’t have the temperament or the patience.

Thanks Joe Borja, for all of it.

There were others.  John Bogosian helped me a lot.  Tall good looking guy with cool hair who smoked Marlboro Reds and used a Zippo.  Swagger.  Bogosian was a good friend to me and even went after chief tech Mikey Morongell on my behalf one morning.  Mikey was spewing his coach cleats schtick on me as the underling.  Leveraging the pecking order.  Bogosian called him on it.  Mikey walked away.  Pretty cool.

Mikey wasn’t a bad guy.  He was a somewhat volatile Italian prick threatened by a squad of insanely talented and capable techs beneath him.

John came to the deep Valley one night to get me after I’d fled my Koreatown apartment during the riots. His old man was a coach for the Seattle Seahawks.  He took me to a party with a band we were working with called Aristocratic Trash.  I got drunk and I got laid but I can’t remember how I got back to the valley.

John was kinda damaged and struggling to adhere to the twelve step thing.  Sometimes gracefully and sometimes not, he’d leave the control room.  I would take over.  It is the simplest explanation of how I won the trust of a band called Rat Bat Blue.  Thank you John, Dabro, Allen, Ace and Fraulein Sniffy.

Fraulein Sniffy was the drummer.  The roughly two women drummers I worked with were both excellent.

Here was a band that could play. Rat Bat Blue was to be be my ultimate pig guinea.  Along with bands named Wink, Undercity, Agnes Gooch and dozens of others and eventually some punk band named Down By Law.  I’m not sure how many songs we, Rat Bat Blue and me, completed over the years.  More than twenty is my guess.  Wonderful people, excellent band.  My chops began there as well as my understanding that the only benefit I would enjoy from being an assistant engineer was to learn to from others how to make things sound the way they sounded in my head.

The first time I did that, was with Rat Bat Blue.  I knew it immediately when it happened, it sounded like it did in my head.

It’s a story for another day.

I realized my future in pro audio would only be jeopardized by pursuing excellence as a second engineer.  I knew I needed to bypass this step as much as possible but realized I’d have to wade in as much as I could stand.  My only shot was to make it sound like it did in my head.

To be a good engineer.

Drinks for my friends.

I had a pretty swell day today.

I actually went to a barbecue.  I brought a couple good zinfandels, one was a Pejut.

I contributed in other ways.  I grilled some pineapple.  Quartered slabs of it.  I brushed one slab with teriyaki and another with a with a blackberry preserve based homemade bbq sauce.  I sprinkled garlic on both.

I like that both Deanna and Lisa don’t like to smoke in front of the kids.

Me, I don’t care.

I grilled red onions too.  I think my pineapple went over pretty well, it was gone fast, but I brought home some onions.

Extraordinarily nice people.

We watched the first half of the laker game and these women were on it.  I was the only adult male of ten people.  They sort of assumed I’d be some alpha male grill master.  We had ribs, hot links, chicken, hot dogs, hamburgers and I grilled pineapple and red onions.  The women and children were forced to cook the meat as my emasculation bloomed.

I supervised while I smoked a few of Deanna’s Marlboro Lights because they tasted interesting and I was drinking good zin.  They seemed to have a handle on it.

Anyway, shoulda heard the women talking the game.  Awesome.  Kinda bitchy but not missing a single thing.  I’m not a sports guy but I likes me an NBA playoff game.  I was sitting with at least three women that had been paying attention all season.  One told me the Lakers could for sure stop Cleveland.

There was too an enclosed porch on the second floor with widows on three sides.  As it got chillier it was a nice place to watch the sun sink and have a smoke.

Children were the stars of my day.  These little girls, sisters, were diamonds in platinum.  I tried not to smoke in front of them.  They sang to us on the way home.  I can’t put my finger on it.  Their obvious independence, their overt dependence on mother and whatever innocent sweetness they threw my way.  A rosy spotlight on them.

Two sixteen year old boys named Jonathan and a very pretty girl about the same age.  The young lady such a wide eyed doe.  All three literally teetering between adolescence and early adulthood.  I see it in their eyes and read it in their gestures.   Charismatic geeks and thank the powers that be.  Smart, funny and not thugs or idiots.  Good kids.

Then there’s me.  Huffing on Marlboros, drinking wine and soliciting the cooperation of any teen I can coerce into my onion and pineapple experiments.

It was an unconscionably pleasant day.

I brought a plate home.

It is Memorial  Day, a year and a half after the Thanksgiving I first and last met the Grandma.  No sooner did I enter the living room than she was pulling the thin tube for oxygen that ran across her cheek up so that I could kiss her there.  Not much can make you feel that welcome.

I hate war and I don’t believe in your God.  I am respectful of every single American that has served his or her country in any capacity that includes war.  It is a very big deal.  I have an uncle that served and he is damaged.  I’m an agnostic and a Democrat but I’m also an American.  I love this country, but  I’m not afraid to express my disappointment, disgust and dismay.

I am a patriot.

I take it very seriously.

Would any of you out there be willing and of a mind to come at me from there, I respectfully invite you to bring it.

My gratitude for every man woman and child who has defended these principles and this country.

Drinks for my friends.

http://www.truthout.org/052209R

Cut & paste.  It’s unbelievable.  It scares me.

Darth Cheney.

I cannot countenance who we are.  I can’t stand what we’ve allowed ourselves to become.  I can’t stomach those who would defend these bastards and the actions they so relentlessly try to sell us as performed on our behalf.  For our safety, they tell us.

This is bullshit.  These are egregious crimes.  These people are lying.  The media pads around it with careful feet on deep pile Berber, giving them their say.  People died in custody of the United States government.  The sickest aspect?  They probably expired whilst we pursued our efforts to extract reason for a war that Darth fucking Cheney knew was complete crap.

Bullshit.

Despite all this, we still have to suffer through the airtime the mainstream media affords this lying, disgusting evil jackass who spent his eight years in office doing his damndest  to pervert, distort and destroy all things that allowed Americans to be proud.

I bet this guy is hung like a gnat.  Had a giant safe in his office.  Kinda the bureaucratic equivalent of a big stupid truck in the ‘burbs.  See what I’m saying?

Look, I’m not naive.  Any American who’s lived with eyes wide open for the past handful of years, understands all too well what the Dick-in-Bush regime has done in our name.  What chaps my ass with such profound cheese grating efficacy, is that this pinhead Cheney, is allowed for a single second to utilize public airwaves in an attempt to mitigate, in such an obvious fashion of puerile necropsy,  policies and actions that have indelibly stained us all. 

Actions and policies, for which he should clearly be behind goddamn bars.

It’s crap.  Elaborate falsehoods.  Complete shite.

The neocons and this dickhead Cheney in particular, are attempting to rewrite history as we let them into our living rooms every evening for such dubious ends.  Man, I hate these guys.  In the words of Reverend  Jeremiah Wright, “Goddamn America”.  Any asshole who even attempts to change the elaborate and true path of human events past, should be muzzled and pelted with rocks and garbage.

“They pelted me with rocks and garbage”.

History is sacred and Cheney will do his best, but his legacy will ooze a vile, stinking sewage.  Not even gulls will go near it.  The EPA will get involved.

Write your local network affiliate, tell them you don’t want to see the vulgar and vile visage of this man or any of his lackeys on your television anymore.  Lying to you and impugning the efforts of the man we elected by an unprecedented majority to right the wrongs his administration and office so recklessly and relentlessly pursued and wrought.

I’m all for free speech.  But not if what you say on our air is an incendiary lie.  It is crying fire in a crowded theater.  At the very least the crawl underneath should go bold and all caps when he lies.  Cheny’s kinda soft spoken so it would be like someone yelling from underneath.  I’ll call Rupert.

We, America, tortured.  We killed people in our charge.  Worse, we killed hundreds of thousands and visited life altering suffering on millions for no good goddamn reason.  I’m ashamed of my country and you should be too.

Who are we?  What have we allowed ourselves to become?

This tumor is us.

This parading of a simple dog and a forlorn pony is contemptible and absurd.  Stand up.  Be an American.  Do not tolerate this man man and his lies.

We are so much better than this.

Tell Rush Limbaugh he can blow me.

I’m trying to tell you something and you should listen.

Drinks for my friends.

Hello,

Fuck this guy.  Cheney is a vacuum of credibility.  A black hole.  He is a liar and a thief.  He and his cronies profited immensely from the war in Iraq by engaging in fraud perpetrated on our own troops and we the people as often as not.  Haliburton and KBR.  You think this guy gives a mad fuck about you?

Yet he deigns to flatter us with his opinions by the hour, or so it seems.  Who exactly does he think he is?  What new arrogance is this?  Dude, you were the Vice President and most of us agree you sucked.  Go away.

The CIA isn’t exactly a pillar of truth, justice and the American way these days.  They, both the CIA and Darth, deliberately “fixed the facts to fit the policy” that led us into one of the most unjust wars in history.  Can you say Downing Street Memos?  Nonexistent yellowcake uranium or mobile bio weapons labs that turned out to be balloon trucks?  The Keystone Cops in color.

This guy gets on TV.

They tortured in fact, to gain and supply reason and rationale for that very war.  With every fiber of my being and every ounce of conviction I can summon, I say fuck these guys.  Furthermore,  I invite Dick Cheney, with zero respect due, to shut the fuck up and go away.

Or, we get to waterboard the prick bastard.  I’ll settle for either and sleep soundly.

Dear Dick, You suck.  Please vanish.  Go gentle into that hot cave.

Fear, fear fear.  This is a mess created by our former arsonist laureate, the Dick-in-Bush administration.  “…if we continue to make decisions within a climate of fear, we will make more mistakes…..” -President Barack Obama.  Cheney calls Our Man’s policies, “recklessness cloaked in righteousness”.  I can’t help but wonder just what Darth Cheney knows about righteousness.

The past administration swore up and down that we did not torture.  Upon that lie of extraordinary magnitude becoming as common as the knowledge that one should avoid using motorized garden shears for personal grooming, they try to convince us that torture kept us safe, was justified and wasn’t really torture but “enhanced interrogation techniques”.  My guess is Cheney’s next career will be in real estate.  You know, bridges, swampland, timeshares in Baghdad, that sort of thing.

Or maybe the latest incarnation of Swamp Thing.

I am in awe that this douchebag Cheney is able to command any attention at all.  Why is anyone even listening to such a notoriously full of shit, black hearted blowhard?  Why?  He’s been wrong about everything, caught in more lies than Baron Munchhausen and he should be in goddamn Leavenworth.

It’s all smoke and mirrors.  It’s all they’ve got.  Fear wrapped in the worn gauze of  some obsolete notion of security.  That’s it kids.  There’s nothing more to see here.  It is exactly as it appears.  Move along please.  Please.

Understand, this man, our President, has more on his plate than you can possibly imagine.  The tasks he faces every morning require superhuman effort, attention and acumen.  Most of what our man struggles with in the shower, the great unwashed are willfully ignorant of.

This guy is inside a cat 4 tornado and he doesn’t need Dick Cheney’s irrelevant shit right now.  If Darth were an actual patriot, he would pull a fade starting now.  Cheney, of all people is intimate with the toxic pile he and that little monkey left behind.

This subject of torture has become far too convoluted.  Too nuanced even.  It’s simple.

Torture is immoral because it is cruel and inhumane.  At the very least it pollutes the soul of anyone who orders it and any who would administer it.    We must understand that these people, these candidates for and of torture, are human beings.  Right or wrong, these people believe what they believe just as fiercely as we do.  Under the last administration, anyone who believed differently than you or Sean Hannity, could literally be tortured for disagreeing, whether they knew shit or not.

Surveilled.  Wire tapped which means computer tapped.  ……..anything you say, can and will be used against you in a court of law……..

Torture is unethical because the result is at best dubious.  With resolute men, the decision about what they are willing to disclose, even when faced with death, has already been made. Count on such men to spew crap when tortured.  It’s useless.  Even the economy of the concept is bankrupt. They think it’s a game of Stratego.

Drinks for my friends.

She.

Prowess and power to have survived from a time before man walked or even swam.  In the interim millennia,  She evolved in wits and wisdom.  Efficiency of things like propagation of the species, were the domain of a hyper Darwinism with a divine sway.  She.  Always a She, was to be born pregnant in perpetuity.

One at a time.  Never more than two at a time.  The gestation period best estimated in centuries.  She dies and the daughter births.  Over and over, one at a time.  Fire and blood.  Screams  shake your torso and the femurs rattle.  A giant infant three or four times as long as a man is tall.  Violence and blood.  Heat and sulphur.  She lands on all four.

Eyes a fiery pool of refract and gold.  She blinks slow and aware.

Far from malevolent, She is of her own mind.  She does not suffer fools.  She understands almost all human beings to be fools.  Light speed quick and clever beyond, discourse with She will ultimately cost far more than such an experience is worth.  Absent an acute illness within weeks or months, madness will visit sooner rather than later.

When she glances, the weight impresses like twenty feet down in a swimming pool.

There is one thing.  Um, legend.  The way I understand it, I’ve studied it.  I know.  I’ve talked to a lot of people and they all know.  You get one to talk to you right after being pushed out and She is your bitch.  Each She needs to have some sorta relationship with at least one of us.  I can’t find the actual rules.  The idea is to be first on the scene.

I need to locate the beasts, get close enough to evaluate the health of the elder She, make pals with the younger She while making sure She’s ready to kick open the furnace door and produce a flaming prodigy.

What this is, is a stroll in the garden.  Walk in the park.  A BBQ with friends and decent hooch.  Fun will be had and I’ll have giant flying mammal reptile as a courtesan.

My name is Gerald Frankenhammer.  I dabble in finance and intrigue.  Legends and myths.  Ghosts and extraterrestrials.  Conspiracies and the macabre.

What I’m about to tell you,  will astound you.

Drinks for my friends.

I talked about it last night but didn’t realize that Senate Democrats had walked away.  Seems they want a specific plan.  As in, where exactly will the money go?  That seems reasonable to me.  $80 million is a lot of cake.

You know, Gitmo.

What baffles me is this:                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    “I can’t make it any more clear,” Reid said. “We will never allow terrorists to be released in the United States.”  Was he quoted out of context?  As far as I know there’s no debate here about what town or city street they’ll be dropped on, they are to be incarcerated.  Harry is a friend of my Mother’s.  I got an inscribed, autographed copy of his book for my birthday.  I’m wondering if he’s getting a little old.  His handwriting describes the drawing of sea monkeys.

What is the deal?  There’s two hundred and forty of them and we already have more people behind bars per capita than any nation on earth.  There’s two hundred and forty and if America has a specialty these days, it’s locking people up.  Specialty?  Industry.  Bring them here, try them like Americans because we still have a system of justice and courts in which they may prevail if they aren’t guilty and are allowed to prove it.

Regardless of the outcome, the truly guilty ones will burn in a Christian hell.  Right?

What scares politicians so much about our justice system functioning as an equitable litmus for these particular “detainees”?

Anyway, it get’s better.

“Republicans are poised with an amendment by James Inhofe of Oklahoma that would block any of the Guantanamo detainees from coming to U.S. soil to stand trial or serve their sentences” -yahoo

Republicans just keep on sweetening  the elixir that will be the lubricant of their demise.  Ha!  Can I make that stick?  I’m way ahead of you.

“Shuttering this facility now could only serve one end: and that is to make Americans less safe than Guantanamo has,” said GOP Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.”  -yahoo

Guantanamo made us safe?  I’d say with the torture and death and all, the hawks would be lucky to slide into obscurity as opposed to jail.  Zero sum for them but a nasty stain on the rest of us.

Mitch McConnell is a scurrilous,  multi-chinned rodent of a Senator.  A nasty, long of tooth and sharp of teeth, a warm blooded, razor incisored dumbshit.  Even his dog hates him.

He warned that if the United States withdrew from Iraq, “the terrorists would come after us where we live.” -1/10/07 CNN

I can actually smell that sentence.

He loathes the idea of campaign finance reform.  He get’s giddy over the NSA listening to whatever and whomever blows their skirt up.  Sans warrant.  He’s very pro Iraq war as a central front for the war on terror.  I love how they accuse us of dangerous political stripes like socialist, when they stand to applaud fascism and nearly shit themselves with glee.

The cherry atop my shit sundae is the reality of scripture superimposed over  dramatic military landscapes as cover pages for top secret war memos to Dumbya.  While we were beating and abusing, torturing to death, people confined and bound.  Dumbya got a report with an inspirational poster for a cover.  I hear he really likes pears and carrots from a jar.  We did this to extract corroborating evidence for what we were about to do and then continue to do in Iraq and everywhere else.  On the off chance there was to be a super secret memo on Sunday, it was wrapped in Easter themed paper.  A candy bar tied in the bow.

Spuriouser and spuriouser.

Dumbya knew there would be pretzels later.  With supervision of course.  Plenty to wash them down with.

Drinks for my friends.

So the titular head of the GOP says, “The era of apologizing for Republican mistakes of the past is now officially over”.

Huh.  You think?  In light of all the malice, avarice and incompetence your party has fomented and been complicit in for the last eight years, you’re no longer accountable?  Not to be asked or even compelled to apologize?

Michael Steele issued this proclamation.  He has giant balls made of flaky, semi solid, foamy stuff.  Premier asstard of the GOP.

Hey Mike, wanna bet?

Mike is a loose lipped cashier.  He’s also an idiot.

Looks like somebody picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.

This dark stain is your legacy.  I’m thinking you guys need to make peace with that.  It’s a blood stain.  You won’t be taken seriously until you do.

It is this exact brand of arrogance that keeps Republican stock in the shitter.  That, and the looming visage of dickheads like Darth Cheney and  the Human Shitsmear.  These two aren’t the only ones tripping over themselves while waltzing  through the GOP’s intestines.  I adore how jacked up they are.

Somebody doesn’t get the difference between consonants and vowels.

Meanwhile and just in time, swine flu rears it’s ugly head again.  Somebody died!  Quick, call Mr. Little, first name Chicken.

In other news, two groups are seeking disbarment of twelve Bush administration lawyers.  Despite a rather overt political posture, their argument is pretty airtight:

“Just as the bar would suspend an attorney who advised a police officer to torture and brutalize a detained immigrant or criminal defendant, the bar must suspend these attorneys for advocating and causing the torture of war detainees,” said Kevin Zeese, a spokesman for the groups. -UPI

Fuckin A, I’m good with that.  All the assholes were named.  Yoo, Ashcroft, Gonzales and Mukasey et al.  Don’t know about you, but I’m getting a half leaner over here.  It won’t amount to shit.

Hi.  I oppose birth control and abortion in the same breath.  I really believe you should get married to experience live dick insertion.  Who am I?  I’m the Catholic Church and I’m okay, I lust all night and I hypocrite all day.  Premarital sex is a sin but ass raping young boys isn’t even outre’…………

When did prisoners become detainees?

John Boehner actually said “our constituents don’t want these terrorists in their neighborhoods”.  He fucking said it.  The subject was Gitmo detainees.  Boehner’s neighborhoods are in Ohio.  How do you say that with a straight face at a press conference in front of cameras?  John Boehner’s neighborhoods in Ohio, are light years from a military prison in Kansas surrounded by a military base.  This whole debate is regoddamndiculous.  Boehner needs to lay off the bronzer.  His eyes are particulary reptilian in contrast with his earnestness to become a lite skinned black man.

Who is this fuck?

Boehner is creepy weird and an astoundingly magnificent dickhead.  He’s so full of shit his caramel orange pallor may just be benefiting from the tremendous output and efficiency yielded by his super human shit producing capability.  It’s all he can do to keep from vomiting actual warm crap while speaking.  Several times a day he burp-pukes and swallows turds back down into his gullet.

Let me tell you how I feel about John Boehner.

This guy is more queer than a pole vaulter in an ice storm.

What the rest of us need to remember, is that are we to march jackbooted in lock step like the Republicans did until the obvious consequence of rot and implosion transpired, events will be eerily similar.

Or, diversity will emerge as strength.  It already has.

Diversity could be the next exclusivity.  Beware.  Don’t laugh, because I’m not kidding and that could be scary.  Ubiquitous caucasian males would be in for a tough time.  Too many of us.

White power!

Drinks for my friends.

I’d made it out alive but it cost me some time and I had two brand new enemies, Sheri and Bill.  A lovely couple, each swinging a bat far heavier than mine.

I didn’t like Bill for shit, but I wasn’t trying to throw him under the bus.  Wasn’t my fault he ended up under the wheels.

I was moving from under Bill to back under Sheri.

Straight to the night shift.  Six p.m. til whenever.

There was new talent down stairs. College boys. Frat boys. Sharma and Bamford. Fags both of them. One with wholesome looks and the other with sorta terrorist Tom Selleck charisma. They golfed and played lacrosse. They both had college degrees. I hated these pricks until I liked them. They turned out to be among the coolest and sharpest engineers ever hired as runners. They were actually overqualified.

Excellent drinking companions.

I had the good fortune to share misery with them and have them as my bitches for a short time.   I believe Bamford did a Weezer record recently and Sharma did a goddamn Stones record not long ago with Don fucking Was.   If either of you two are reading this, you were each my bitch for a time. Pricks.

You can imagine I was threatened back then.

I could feel it, palpable. I hadn’t engineered a thing and had barely assisted on a handful of sessions.  Mark Harvey, may he rest in peace, saw something that was before scared.  He began to move aggressively on my behalf by putting me as a second on high profile sessions. Pardon the misnomer, just about everything that happened there was high profile.

He threw me in the river.

I loved that man, at the very least because he believed in me. Tough but fair.  He saw me in a way I couldn’t yet see myself.

There was a schedule published everyday.  What act was in each of five rooms, start time, producer, engineer, assistant and second assistant.  On the same page were the runners times and mastering schedules. It was to be distributed before five p.m. to all departments and specific offices.

Night shift for runners started at six p.m. When I was on days, I called shotgun on the schedule delivery because I had to establish dominance and maintain my relations with my friends around the lot.

It seems like the first time I saw it was on the schedule. Where your name appeared on that schedule could mean months of misery. What you read there could make your heart sink or burst. What you saw there was your fate. Your rank, your potential. Updated every twenty four hours.

The Harvinator put me on a Guns N Roses tracking session in studio A.  The big room.  The most confusing console; a custom desk built by Rupert Neve for George Martin.  I was to be the second under Hedley Godot.   Ed Goodreau.

To not talk about Ed right here would be remiss,  yet I can’t think of what to say about him.  Smart guy, can’t speak for his engineering because I don’t remember any of it.  I was to see him in many situations beyond this drama.  I’m not sure if he was hard trying to be soft or soft trying to be hard.  I doubt he knows.

Mike Clink was producing and engineering.  The album was to be “Use Your Illusion” 1 & 2.  It would be a fascinating disaster for me.

The very first morning Clink was on my ass for how I draped the cable down the mic stand.  I asked him if he wanted ten pads on the 451’s.  He looked at me like I was an idiot.  No one uses a 451 without a pad on a hat or a ride. He did.  Years later I watched this guy struggle with a kick drum sound for an hour that I or just about any front office jockey could have nailed in five minutes.  Not like he couldn’t fire a sample.

Find the low middle and suck it out.  Somewhere between three and five hundred hertz.  It’s how you find the bottom of a kick drum, capture it all and subtract what’s ugly or messy.  Works on other instruments too.

What has Clink done since Guns & Roses?  Thompson and Barbiero mixed Appetite For Destruction.  His only noteworthy record after Appetite was “Use Your Illusion” 1 & 2.  I watched him ruin a band called I Mother Earth.  I have to tell you that Mike wasn’t a bad guy but he was simultaneously an arrogant prick with mediocre talent.

Hedley had me drive, which meant running the multitrack.  A very demanding job for someone who barely had any experience and a good move on Hedley’s part because I didn’t know the console or the patch bay.  Operating the remote for the tape machine on a tracking session requires a very long and focused attention span, particularly with an engineer like Clink who does dozens of takes for the sake of numerous variables and often edits on the spot.

Many engineers and all producers are loathe to drive the multitrack as it demands so much real time concentration, it limits the ability of an engineer to devote enough creative acumen to the big picture.  I was wood.  Best place for me was on that remote, even though I was tragically inexperienced.

The simple is thus, the recording engineer is analogous to the cinematographer and the record producer is not unlike the director on a film.  Financing can still happen from hell to breakfast.
Wide eyed and panicked but I handled it.  Barely.  I didn’t impress.
The band was a mess, Slash drinking a fifth of Jack a day and Duff doing similar damage to a bottle of Stoli.  I will tell you this, they could fucking play.  Matt Sorum had replaced Steven Adler on drums and he was not less than a goddamn freight train.  One of the best rhythm sections I would ever have anything to do with.  It was a thrill.

These guys could fucking play.

I remember Mike Clink being embarrassed when Slash pissed in a trash can.

Axle Rose was a self involved douchebag.  The band wanted nothing to do with him.  They left as he arrived each day if not before.

I wasn’t killing it but I didn’t suck.

Maybe two weeks in, the last straw came.  Not exactly inspiring confidence in Clink and it felt more and more like Hedley was determined to deliver my first trial by fire by burning me.  Sink or swim.  He wanted for me to go under.  He was anxious to hand me a humility that would be the last thing I needed.  He was a dick.

He expected a pro when he knew he had an amateur.

Last order of the day was to make sure cassette copies of the day’s work were ready for the band before they left.  One morning Mike Clink pulled me into an iso booth to tell me that the stereo image on the cassettes from the day before was reversed.  Left was right and right was left.  He had already spoken to Mark Harvey and asked for me to be removed from the project.  I finished the day knowing it was to be my last.

Late that night after everyone was gone, Hedley brought me a bottle of whiskey and encouraged me to drink it.  I was to meet with Harvey  the next morning to determine my fate but I was off the session for sure.  His demeanor was an impossible dichotomy of smug and sympathy.  I drank most of that bottle.

The patch bay is a wig of wires like an old school telephone switchboard.  Complex signal flow that determined everything from where any part ended up on any track, to what gear was in the signal chain, to what effects appeared on the console and where.  If you were the only assistant on a gig, you covered both, otherwise one drove the machines and one handled the the patch bay.

The thing is this, I didn’t make that patch.  Hedley did.  It wasn’t my mistake.  I never said a thing.  I was sure it would sound like an empty excuse. I understand Ed’s version is disparate.  Ed, although you were to do a lot for me in the years to come, you are not forgiven,  you should apologize.

I was now in the river, whether I liked it or not.

This chapter is dedicated to Baumgartner, Aguto and Korengo. Old studio rats from back in the day. Ran into them on a sidewalk just yesterday.  Ten years at least. We talked for at least four hours and no one did anything but get up to piss. They were more peaceful than I remember so I hope I was too. They were just as bright and funny as I recall. Good times.

Drinks for my friends.

I think it’s great Sarah Palin got a book deal. I mean, maybe rednecks and backward ass country fucks will learn to read.

Krakow!

Let me tell you something else. Friendships are about honesty.  Not tactics.  Loyalty, not gamesmanship.  As selfless as possible. We live once as far as we know,  so integrity should be integral. I hate not knowing, but finding out really sucks.

I’ve been in a few fights.  At first, I sucked at it.  I got my ass beat.  Later, after my father explained to me that it wasn’t the toughest, strongest, biggest or most skilled that prevailed in man to man, it was the meanest, I did a little better.  Held my own.  My old man was a serious brawler and he didn’t want me to fight.  He begged me not to.  He also told me that one of his worse beatings was at the hands of some guy he thought was a sissy.  The truth from a man one eyed after a bar fight before I was born.

I had no interest in it.  I’m not a violent guy.  It creeps me out.  I’m just not mean enough.  Even if I did all right or got the best of someone, it totally rattled my cage.

I like to watch boxing because it’s poetry, but not really feeling the ultimate fighting thing.  No worries, I like big tits and fast cars.

You know what I can’t wrap my brain around?  The idea that the Dick-in-Bush administration fomented and engaged in torture to lend truth to the lie of Iraq’s complicity in 911.  Some 70% of the voters in 2004 believed there was some connection between Saddam and the horrible death rubble in  New York.

A cowardly, despicable lie.

It was to be the biggest lie ever told by the highest elected American executive in the land.  Prove me wrong.

Since then they’ve all pretty much admitted that the two were unrelated.  Mutually exclusive. And there was no goddamn WMD.  That it was a lie.   Pricks.

That really chaps my ass.  People are pedestrian and government is increasingly evil.

My cooler head will not prevail today.  These motherfuckers lied to us and tortured people to back them up so they could see what riches were to be had in Iraq?  In the meantime, thousands of Americans dead, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead at least, and millions displaced.  America is broke and broken.  Her people are fearful and distrustful.  She is struggling to revive her image and standing in the world.  It’s true, we are not what we once were.

All this trouble.  The world.  The climate.  The people and the wars.  It’s some sort of goddamn gravity vortex like a black hole that’s beginning to dim the lights.  As it sucks more and more matter and light, it gets more and more powerful.  All this mayhem and carnage and abject suffering.  Because these fucks, these PNAC fucking hawk/Vulcans had a plan to rework the world order in their favor. Google “Project for a New American Century”.

A self described neoconservative think tank.

All these bastards with faces like melted bags of caramels, were just pissing themselves waiting for something, anything, like 911.  Back in ’98 they said they needed a “Pearl Harbor” like event to basically pivot on, and change the way the wind was blowing.  Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, Bill Bennet, Cheney…………not your average cavalcade of cock teasers.

I’ve written extensively about the notorious and filthy PNACs.  I heard Randi Rhodes today posit the idea that the torture was on purpose to advance the PNAC agenda and I lost all motor control in my jaw over not having thought of it.  Brilliant, if it’s true it might be time for liberals to arm themselves.

What worries me is we can never go home again.

“out on the road today
i saw a dead head sticker on a cadillac
a voice inside my head said don’t look back
you can never look back”  -Don Henley

From Realtime with Bill Maher:

“By the fall of 2008, the face of the Republican party had become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber, conservative intellectuals had no party.  The inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect, as in the denial of global warming, the use of religious criteria in the selection of public officials, the neglect of management and expertise in government.” -Richard Posner

Here’s my take on the torture photo conundrum.  I’m disappointed in Obama.  I imagine he’s doing his best and I’m not worried at all about him changing his mind.  He’s smart, he’s allowed.  It’s just that I disagree.  I admit the national mood is fragile and precariously bipolar.  I myself have no desire to see these photos.  There’s no reason.

I need to be blunt.  God bless America, but I’m not sure enough humility has soaked in yet.  I think this photographic evidence should be made available to anyone of age enough to join an institutional paramilitary program.  The photographs should by legal mandate, be stapled to the head of every dipshit Hannity fan who thinks we’re making a mountain out of a mole hill.  You assholes need to see what you’re talking about.  You really need to see it in other people’s eyes.

Drinks for my friends.

Republicans are a hot mess.

This poor bastard, Sgt Russel, and the five brothers in arms he felled. All the families too. A big bag of tragedy for no good reason. Not that all involved weren’t brave committed men who’d sacrificed for America more than we can comprehend. All the more sad.

It’s just that it didn’t have to happen. A man on his third tour of hell lost his shit. It seems so random but it’s not. He was in treatment for “stress”. These guys are fucking tough. They are crackerfuckingjack. They tipped Iraq over in weeks. Lots of things are very wrong with this story.

A badass soldier whom I presume was sane before he arrived, killed his own, not just his own, but his fellow soldiers. The antithesis of anything like heroic bravery. Almost as curious as it is tragic. PTSD. A political potato of some heat. Inconsistent to nebulous in terms of definition or perception. Through the roof nonetheless. Our veterans are struggling on a scale we’re not even aware of.

This is a gift from the Bush administration that will keep on giving for years to come.

Just like Vietnam!

The dude does not abide and neither do I. This is insane. See what I’m saying?

I really need for you dear reader, to concentrate here. I’m going to cut and paste a news item from today below, and I want you to compare and contrast the news I’ve written about above with this actual piece that appears below inside quotes. All I will say is that I think the two issues at hand are symbiotically entwined:

“In an interview on Fox News, the daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney sharply criticized the new administration for agreeing to release photographs depicting alleged abuses at U.S. prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan during the Bush administration.

“I think it is really appalling that the administration is taking this step,” she said in the interview. “Clearly what they are doing is releasing images that show American military men and woman in a very negative light.”

“I have heard from families of service members from families of 9/11 victims this question about when did it become so fashionable for us to side, really, with the terrorists,” she continued. “You know, President Obama has a lot of rhetoric about support for American military families, support for our men and women who are fighting for us overseas. But if he really cares about them, then he wouldn’t be making such an effort to release photos that show them in a negative light.” -CNN

Ok, I can’t help it. Liz Cheney you stupid fucking cunt. What about this whole egregious clusterfuck do you not understand? You actually seek with all gallows composure to spin this tragedy into some lame evidence that the Obama administration attempts “….to side, really, with the terrorists”?

In a war started by your father without reason?

Look up her name and insult her personally. Liz, you ignorant slut. You have betrayed your country and if Olberman or Stewart did the same schtick I swear I just turned on the glass teat.

Time for a fireside interlude. Picture me with a blanket over my legs in a wheelchair beside a crackling hearth:

A tale related by an excellent friend.

This story is about a man named Donald.

Donald farts in the car, back on a sweltering day. Turns out to be a withering expulsion, weakening the senses of the propagator. He’s impressed by his own ability to generate an odor that would be a captain of any industry. So inspirational that he wonders about his own health.

He then ventures into a video emporium of the strip mall variety. He feels the build. Pressure in his lower abdomen. And it’s hot. It’s temperature is like heat from a crack in the Earth. As though his bowels are about to volcano.

The gastrointestinal expulsion is nuclear but not cacophonous.

He’s grateful he’s not shat himself.

Get my drift? More or less silent but indisputably toxic.

He understands the affront he’s just committed. He flees to the right, past the first few letters of the alphabet. He works his way quickly to the D’s and F’s. Doctor Detroit to Fargo.

A fresh couple enter the emporium. They immediately ventiure into a cloud of Donald’s anal vapor in the A through C sectiion. They are apalled and disturbed. Their faces are an ugly mask of assault and disgust.

This is Donald’s story.

Drinks for my friends.

The dipshits are pissed at Wanda Sykes for skewering Limbaugh by hoping his kidneys fail and referencing his drug abuse and calling the Human Shitsmear of all things, a terrorist. The 20th hijacker on 911 even.

That shit’s funny. It’s funny because I don’t take her seriously. No more serious than I take a jackass like Rush Limbaugh. It was about her vicious and inspired disgust with a lying, manipulative, hypocirtical, blowhard entertainer who “entertains” by scaring the great unwashed and giving the GOP bots and hardliners talking points as well as someone to worship.

Not funny, as he’s a disingenuous dickhead. His comfort level with lying is astounding. His composure while doing his level fucking best to support the plutocracy is chilling. I’m impressed. And he’s a goddamn racist. Preeminent ludicrous douchebag spokeshole for the entire graying elaphantine party it seems.

It’s funny, the sheer volume of their lather over this White House Press Dinner as opposed to the one Stephen Colbert did a few years back. Dumbya walked out of that one with cracked ribs, a punctured lung and a broken facade. Colbert was astounding, wielding sack and fruit of steel and various other alloys in a hall full of crazy neocons, crooks, brass, sychophants, sociopaths, serial murderers and the press.

He rocked out with his cock out.

Know what’s not funny? Everything I just said about Rush Limbaugh could be said about Dick Cheney. Plug him into the last four paragraphs. It all still applies. It’s like shifting from third to fourth on a wide empty road.

Know what’s funny? Obama said Cheney was absent due to writing his memoir “How to shoot friends and interrogate people.” -Huffingtonpost

What goes up must come down. What’s not funny, is the embarrassing desperation of almost the entire GOP. The trinity. The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Congress, rednecks and the true American elite. The super rich. The one percent that owns fifty percent of everything. I won’t pretend we don’t have archangels in their architecture, but today’s GOP is odious and insipid.

What they’ve become is my latest favorite expletive, ‘assclowns’.

Maybe it’s some sort of supersecret conservative caper? Some retarded idea of martyrdom, where the perceived leaders of the cause make complete asses of themselves instead of suicide or assassination. They annoy and bewilder everyday with rhetoric that implodes on the pad. They seem hellbent for less than leather. An inch from a legacy that will conclude them to be doddering, greedy and malicious fools.

At this point I could be talking about either Limbaugh or Cheney and that’s somehow not funny.

All the assclowns talked about Obama’s choice in mustard for two fucking days.

The Inspector General’s report from ’05 states:
“Medical personnel at the detention facility protested the use of the waterboard in that form, stressing that “there was no a prior reason to believe that applying the waterboard with the frequency and intensity with which it was used by the psychologist/interrogators was either efficacious or medically safe.”

Dick has been lying his ass off to you for over eight years. Darth Cheney is a sociopath and he thinks you’re stupid.

All the Republicans have left is a horse named National Security to beat and abuse. They’re so goddamn dumb they have no clue what that word means to most of America and the new administration in 2009.

National Security under the Obama administration is a much broader precept. These guys are smart and focused on all things threatening. From climate change, to pandemics, natural disasters, man made disasters, adversaries and allies. It seems we now have frontal lobes. That’s kind of exciting.

Read about it in the latest Rolling Stone.

Know what’s cool? The Space Shuttle rocked off the planet today to make the Hubble Space Telescope about a hundred times better at being a telescope. This, is going to be great. Scientists are cool motherfuckers.

Drinks for my friends.

Certain times of year, a full fat butter moon would billow up in the west over over the main gate and guard shack. A dish hanging over the ocean with even more drama than it did over Hollywood.  I saw it on the water. It was huge.  It kept place for the sun next afternoon.

Our star busted hard on those mornings and then withered reluctantly as did the moon at the end of my day. I worked nights. Six p.m. until whenever.

There to the left, day and night, was the A&M sign with the trumpet in the logo. Some nights in the fall, it’s luminous disc did harmony with a crescent moon.

A night for me and Jimhead to climb to the roof of the Chaplin stage and throw mustard bottles and leftover fruit at cars on La Brea.  Jimhead would suggest we “throw shit at cars”.  He had a well developed sense of chaos and a fine nose for the absurd. We were both fond of explosives.

We barely hit any. It was a good fifty feet up. Years later, we would have parties up there. Five or ten of us drinking and doing bong rips at three in the morning, striving merely to avoid the attention of the record company’s crack security. We failed at that over and over.

Remind me to tell you about The Secret Pizza Lounge.

Like a promise, said solar star heated those slate steps in front of the monolith door at A&M Recording to a point where you could feel it around your head when reaching for it’s enormous handle.   Twelve hours later, the giant moon would cool them again with equal parts sugar and mint.

The end of the Raygun Bush years, late eighties early nineties. Iran Contra and the first Gulf War. Homeless population way up. Crazies on my block.

For the eight and a half years I worked there, the studio barely ever, really closed.  There was almost always someone there.  If not, the respite was brief, a few minutes or barely a few hours.

For a decade, I had a key to that sixteen foot high front door. I may have it still.

I was to struggle for years.  Behind in an environment that challenged me in every way.  Worse, being surrounded by people at least as smart as me if not smarter.  Some of them a lot smarter.  I was overwhelmed by the confidence I encountered everywhere.

I was a a goddamn hick.

Nothing in life had prepared me for this.  I was always the brain.  The most capable.  The one everybody else looked to for leadership.

I got my ass handed to me every fucking day.

I laid low.  Did my job.  Sucked up.

I became ‘King of The Fruit’.  Seniority.  Everyone underneath me had either not been there as long or had been fired.  As King of The Fruit I had certain privileges.  Some control over my schedule and the ability to delegate responsibilities to other runners.  I had become an excellent runner.

Good news?

Nope.

I was to be sequestered, to serve time elsewhere, for nearly a year.

Drinks for my friends.

So Darth Cheney declared today that it would be a mistake to for the GOP to “moderate”.

“This is about fundamental beliefs and values and ideas … what the role of government should be in our society, and our commitment to the Constitution and constitutional principles,” Cheney said in an interview with North Dakota radio host Scott Hennen Thursday…… -CNN

North Dakota radio, heh.

Dick Cheney is a consummate douchebag. Commitment to the constitution? Fuck you, you lying hypocritical sleazy piece of shit. The object was for you to serve at the convenience of The Costitution, not for it to serve at yours. This statement by you makes me so angry because it reveals you as a world class liar and you still have the withered stones to beak sociopathic bullshit.

You Mr. Cheney, are the depth and breadth of the entire aggregate from dipshit to insanity. You are it’s evil and myopic, it’s misunderstanding, from front to back, from top to bottom. You pull strings for Limbaugh to Hannity, from Bachman to Lieberman.

You’re a dirty bastard.

You think you know, you imagine you have a handle, all in your hands is calcified turds. The fate of sucking is really bad enough. The idea of sucking and not knowing, is about as bad as it gets.

Poster child.

What’s occuring in the Republican party of late is beyond fascinating. It’s a multi car pileup with people face down on the pavement in their own gore. It’s that and a hokey, amateur production of The Music Man or Dirty Dancing or maybe a circus with only invalids for performers. They are breathtakingly out of touch.

Matt Taibbi wrote a great piece about it recently in Rolling Stone. He rocks.

With GOP spotlight whores like Michele Bachmann, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Sarah Palin and Tricky Dick Cheney, it’s not about to get any better. These people are clowns. Forgive me, it’s fucking awesome. The best and the brightest.

Too many of them don’t get it. It amazes me. They have zero grip on the simplest of things like conventional wisdom, current polls and even the goddamn news. The GOP has lost it’s romance with America. They were lying. Thank Sheezus we smelled the goddamn Joe.

I loathe right wing Christians. They’re stupid and diabolical.

Have you noticed how close together their eyes are?

I reserve the right to tell people their beliefs are stupid if they knock on my door or approach me in public. If their shit ends up all over the news, they should practice pissing up a rope.

Drinks for my friends.

So Jessica Simpson lost weight and now her head looks too big. I thought she was kinda hot when she was thicker. Another disproportionate pop star.

I really hate any kinda bottle with a pump dispenser at the top. You have to tip the bottle upside down to get all the useable product out. Who does that? It would take forever.

See, the architecture of a pump dispensered bottle doesn’t allow for easy upside down storage. Whether it’s a lotion or a soap or hair conditioner, it’s stupid. The smartest design is those bottles that have a fat top with a simply attached stopper, flush with the lid when closed and they rest easily upside down or were actually designed be stable with an ever lowering center of gravity until you’ve gotten every last snotty barf of product out of the fucker.

Nobody walks in LA.

Far be it from me to overlook the most practical packaging ever for any consumer consumable no matter it’s viscosity. The toothpaste tube. Squeeze from the bottom, be methodical and there’s no fisherman would cut her open once she goes dry.

I know something pissed me off today and I’ll remember it soon.

So I’ve got this buddy Matt. Owner operator of The Arb Pizza Cafe, 11946 Ventura Blvd, Studio City 91604 (Btwn Carpenter & Radford Ave). Actually, he’s a client. He sells salads and paninis etc. I mean to try them. I bet they rock.

I go there, for his pepperoni by the slice. It’s flawless. The grease from the meat and the cheese pools ever so naturally into the small craters created by the expansion of the crust and bubbling cheese going from solid to liquid to less than aqueous. Chewey. Not too much. Very flavorful little slicks of lube from the sauce and cheese.

The architecture of pizza is brilliant. Still it’s not hard to fuck up. I’ve made a few pizzas and fucked them up all too often by neglecting texture.

Sprinkle it liberally with garlic powder and parmesan, then use your index finger with force to start a crease, and since you’re a primate with opposable thumbs, fold the triangle in two before you tear off the biggest bite you can manage without offending your own poetic correctness.

Any eaterie’s first arbiter is the pizza. Just go get two slices of pepperoni and a soda. Give them a ten dollar bill. It’s less than that but you’ll leave feeling cheap otherwise.

Two things. Napkins and a soft drink. Free refills. I prefer diet sodas myself, but what’s pivotal is the carbonation. It’s texture relief from the hot saucy garment you’ve just clothed your tongue and mouth with. Beer is good. Champagne is the answer to most things. This pizza would be excellent with a nice Veuve Clicquot.

At the same time it makes me think of New York. It is better than Manhattan street pizza but the ethic is way intact.

Come to think of it, Matt has an awesome white pizza that would be a force to be reckoned with were you to have a few jars of caviar laying around. You think I’m kidding. They deliver. Chill some bubbles. (818) 358-2233

Matt’s dad is named Andy. They call him “Deluxe”. Walk in and ask for a free soda. Tell them a guy named “Deluxe” sent you. Order two slices of pepperoni pizza and pay for them.

Do it. Tell me you liked it.

Let’s do some headlines from CNN.

“Same-sex marriage gets OK in N.H., Maine”:
All I can say about this is FUCKING A!! The right coast is leading by example. Lookit them school us on civil rights.

“Colin Powell comment angers Limbaugh”:
Who fucking cares? Not me. Powell’s reputation may be scarred by severe blemishes to the face but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt when it involves The Human Shitsmear. Limbaugh rushed again to claim Powell’s endorsement of Obama was explicitly racial. I would, if given the chance, I’d drop that fuck with a haymaker.

Cracks me up that people pay attention to this asstard.

Powell reffered to Limbaugh appropriately as an entertainer and said “I think what Rush does as an entertainer diminishes the party and intrudes or inserts into our public life a kind of nastiness that we would be better to do without,” Powell said. -CNN

I believe Powell was as polite as as possible by saying that Limbaugh should fuck right the fuck off. More power to him. Limbaugh is rapidly becoming irrelevant. Limbaugh is the epitome and distillation of the growing canker, the cancer indeed that has the GOP on it’s knees. Archaic and obsolete ideology that I’m fascinted to watch them cling to. It’s not unlike watching a reptile slither towards a dark flat rock.

The new racism is homophobia. Send Rush the memo. He sits way back in the back.

Fans of Limbaugh suck relentlessly. They are the worst America has to offer. He said he would like for our President, a man we elected with a sincere hope for success at changing our country, it’s culture of fear above all else, he said he would like for him to fail. Were I a right wing dickhead, I’d accuse the Shitsmear of treason and scream for his head. We liberals are not as anxious as our counterparts to malign and impugn those who’ve not committed an actual crime. Nonetheless, I wouldn’t hesitate to invite him, to his face, to lick my taint.

Cancer indeed.

If you like, admire, worship or even follow this clown, let’s talk. I’m right here. I will blow up in your face and make you cry in front of your friends. Let’s go.

Drinks for my friends.

“Working in a recording studio because you like music is like working in a slaughter house because you like steak.” -Rick Plank

Characters named Eprom, Gunther, Jimhead, Hortense Chlamydia Hortenspinoza, Otis, Shemp, Foo Paux, Geetis, Roland The Headless Thompson-aka New Guy, Helmet, Chameleon Diploma, Schveihundt and a guy named Steve Kukoff Signature Series.  I was Dr. Douglass or Buck.

Then there was Joycee. A syrupy Jamaican accent so thick, it took me weeks to begin to understand her and months to appreciate her. First day on the job, I misunderstood her so completely that I walked into the women’s bathroom instead of the runner’s closet right next to it. Carol and Mrs. Lazerus were kind enough to not actually be excreting in any way at the time. They were applying makeup in anticipation of Eric Carmen’s arrival, or maybe Don Henley, thank Jesus.

“Wrong door honey”. Fuck me I was embarrassed.

I would clean that bathroom for years.

Joycee could be the difference between the success or failure of any runner or potential engineer. Don’t cross her, respect her and she could deliver you into good favor. If she didn’t like you, you just might be fucked. A sweet woman that could neither read or write. She worked her ass off and could save your ass or sink it. Middle fifties to early sixties is my guess.

Black don’t crack you know.

Sad eyes as we got our asses kicked. Sometimes glad. Once in a while she’d remind you that she could do in thirty seconds what took you five minutes. I miss her.

She ran the grill Friday afternoons out behind the studios. She walked the halls in a bright dress carrying fruit on her head and a smile. She chuckled a lot. We always shared what we found in the ashtrays.

A few years in we would test her by tossing the dishes from five lounges into the dumpster along with the trash before the sun rose instead of washing them. It really pissed her off and she knew we’d been raging all night. “Who work last night?” in a dialect so thick only we understood her. One of us would then drive her to a second hand store with money from petty cash enough for dishes and flatware to replace what we’d shitcanned the night before.

Joycee liked to go to the store. So did we. There was a place over on Western and Hollywood that sold everything.

She and I became friends once she decided I wasn’t a fool. It took a while, I was a fool. I loaned her money and drove her home in my shitbox VW Bug. One of three, blue, red and black in that order.

You couldn’t fool Joycee. Almost.

Her son Vanroy worked with us one summer. A giant sinewy black man that liked to joke with me about “pushing my face in”.

I remember being paged for a clean up in the D lounge one night. I can’t remember who the band was but Jimmy Iovine called the front desk himself to demand it in a squeaky voice.

Vanroy and I answered the call. We responded with the big truck. Cleaning supplies, bags and a cart to haul shit out. It was the only lounge with windows in the doors because it used to be part of the shop or a tape copy suite or something. When I knocked, I peered in the window. It’s Iovine, The Edge and other people of some degree of artsy stature.

The obvious approach is fast, thorough and inconspicuous. Two out of three you know. Vanroy was at least six three, probably taller. All activity ceased, we had assassinated the vibe. At one point, Jimmy Iovine looked right at me for a reason I can only guess at. A fairly urgent question in his eyes.

I did my best and introduced Vanroy, the large black man, as Joycee’s son. That seemed to be what he was looking for.

We made short work of it and on the way out Jimmy stopped me to ask me who Joycee was. It was sobering to me that this man had an office on the lot and in and out of this studio everyday…………

She was good to me. She retired and moved back to Jamaica to open a restaurant and that’s all I know. We had a party for her and she was gone. I wonder if she’s still alive.

I remember being high with her just after eight in the morning in Studio A. We’d found a good sized roach in an ashtray. I put on the Toni Childs record BV and Tokes had done back in the mix room. We bonded over it as we pretended to look busy so we could listen to the whole record.

Then I went to buy fruit.

Drinks for my friends.

Yep, brought it up the other day. The girls won’t go near it. I have this huge box of junk to sort through and I figured once I’m sure it’s junk, I’d throw it on top of the shopping cart and dolly it down to the big bin. Maybe purge a little beyond that. Still got the entire internal volume of the basket at my convenience.

Built to last.

We’ve talked about the trash chute, so you understand that would be disrespectful and time consuming.

So yeah, I’m on it.

When you have no television, the silence is not deafening.

Partnership For a Drug-Free America. Funded by the alcohol, pharmaceutical and tobacco lobbies. Probably a thousand legal pot clinics in California. Obama’s AG says hands off. No further action. No more raids. Now, that’s interesting. Policy reversal, just like that.

Ask yourself why. Follow the money. The new boss knows what the old boss willfully ignored. We can no longer afford to fund the War On Drugs. We are out of money and facilities to incarcerate non-violent drug offenders. There’s that, and the fact that it’s all dog and pony. It doesn’t work. It has no chance. It never did.

It’s all really stupid. An exemplary model of how to undermine societal infrastructure, brick by deliberate brick. I doubt they’re that smart but I know they’re that destructive.

Human desire or need to self medicate is primal. We sought to do so long before the beginning of written history. There is nothing immoral about it. It may be instinctual. No shit there are ethical imperatives, responsibility and accountability are emblems regardless of what you choose to imbibe, ingest, inject, snort or introduce via………

We should be held answerable for violating any other person’s pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. I do the best I can. Sometimes I shout at people. It’s not very often.

I think what we should pursue is live and let live. Tolerance. Love thy neighbor. Acceptance. When some jackass becomes unruly and offensive, smite him lest he become ignorant. Ignorance, as insufferable as it is, must be evaluated. Sometimes, ignorance is the result of indoctrination. Sometimes, ignorance is willfull. Sometimes, ignorance is stupid. You can’t fix stupid.

No ignorance, except for the stupid kind, is innocent. It is otherwise voluntary to one degree or another. I think ignorance should be treated as a handicap. I’m being kind. They can’t park in handicapped spaces because they have the ability to change. It’s the twenty first century and information is at our fingertips. But they are stunted. Wounded in a way. The racket of death metal and the malignancy of meth. Bad parenting and early tragedies.

Prescription discounts.

They should have their own register at Ralph’s. The sign should be green. I never see green signs in supermarkets. The sign will say, “Dumbshits, Dumbasses, Dipshits and Angular Headed mouth breathers only”.

I’m really afraid they’ll need more than one register. I know they will.

OK, that was fun.

Drinks for my friends.

“One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion.” -Arthur C. Clarke

A little over a year and brainspank.org passed the one hundred thousand reader mark today. Not bad for a non advertising, word of mouth, grass roots sort of blog. I am pleased and want to thank you, dear reader, for your support. It’s nice to know that mine is not a tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear it.

I want to get paid for writing and I believe I should. I’m prolific. I write like a demon because I like to. You really should take a minute to let me know what you like. Or what you don’t.

Participate. Comment. Tell why. I need your input. I would also ask as humbly as possible that you share brainspank with others whether you estimate them to be like minded or not. I crave debate. I seek dissenting views. I go to conservative blogs and pick fights. Pimp brainspank. My goal is to have enough readers to attract advertising. The only way you can continue reading me for free is to help help me out here. Promote brainspank.

If I entertain you at all, the onus is on you to give back a little by telling others. Post my banner on your myspace or facebook page (go to blogroll on brainspank for the html code). It’s kinda like NPR or PBS but I’m not asking for your money.

This is self aggrandizing to point out but I’m going to anyway. I work hard on this stuff. If you find flaw with any facts in my political pieces, it’s a mistake, not deliberate. I doubt you’ll find very many, I do all my own research and take pride in it. I work hard at making it entertaining and informative.

Fiction and poetry are ten times as hard and take ten times as long. For every few minutes you spend here, I spend hours. 99.5% of the content is generated by me. I fucking love it. If there were fourteen of you, you’d still get a good show. You’d get a very solid six dollar show for four fifty or less not including drinks of course.

Pricks. Work with me here.

Regardless, my sincerest thanks to each and every one of you who visit everyday. It has been an absolute pleasure and I’m grateful for the experience. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could boast of a half million readers this time next year?

Here’s some info for those who give a shit.

I’ve got a couple of chapters ready to go on the A&M story. If you like them, tell me goddamnit.

I once knew a woman who was hot enough for me that I made her wet by virtue of proximity. So much so, that she was inclined to wipe herself on me on more than one occassion.

I believe I am a thespian from a small midwestern values galaxy.

The number of flu victims doubled today. Now I hear the real tsunami is the second wave of the virus after it mutates. Pun intended of course you idiot. I’m thinking, get infected now, can’t hurt, this one won’t kill ya. Might help ya with next one.

Isn’t John Boehner ridiculous? If that guy isn’t spraying it on he’s gonna have a ball sack full of melanoma by the time you stop writing the ‘0’ when you write the year. I bet George Hamilton looks like low grade ground round these days. Is he still alive?

Checks are not a good thing to have when you’re poor. I ran out of checks months ago. I only bounced one. Today I came across this one I noticed a few weeks back. I’ve no idea how it ended up on my night stand but it was neatly folded and had my address from ten years ago on it. I’d already resigned myself to spending the weekend sober using my cash for food only and anticipating closing a few deals, selling some of my comics or my fucking elliptical, or maybe someone who owes me money pays me this coming week.

You never know.

But I had this check.

I wrote that check for a big bottle of Bombay Saphire at Ralph’s. I stopped at the 7-11 on the way home for ice. Seemed wrong to put ice on the hot check, $2.49 cash.

Call me daddy.

Thanks for the hundred K.

Drinks for my friends.

that you really shouldn’t waste your time getting in a lather. While it’s true that pandemics happen, there hasn’t been a serious one in this country for almost a century. Since that time we’ve learned lots of valuable things about sterilization and transmission. The media, for better or worse, gets the message out there.

Wash your goddamn hands.

I can only imagine the need to distract the great unwashed from the jacked up economy is the impetus here. As of this hour there are 367 confirmed cases of The H1N1 worldwide. Excellent name. Can you say andromeda strain? 146 in the US. No deaths here. Yet. It’s rampant though, 13 cases right here in California.

Good God!

Somebody get Chicken Little on the blower.

What we have here is SARS and The Avian ridiculousness comingling for the average American’s need to be frightened about something. A symbiotic relationship between the Great Unwashed and the media. When I first began to understand media manipulation, I had no idea people would become addicted to it.

I never saw that coming. The unslakable thirst so many people in this country share for the odd but primal need to shit their pants over some completely nebulous circumstance. Sheeple.

The regular garden variety flu kills like 35,000 a year in America.

So yeah, it’s a scam. An agitation. Sand in the Vaseline.

What confuses me is they’re so fearlessly tactical and obvious. You’d think folks would be wise to it by now. It’s so overt. But no, and not the contrary. These sons and daughters of our nations first infrequent bathers, they are as complicit as they are ignorant. They love this shit. Michele Bachman, champion of rounheaded Republicans, tried to pin it on Obama. She was circumspect of course. She’s not so stupid as to drool in public.

Wanna make a billion dollars? Get Bachman and Palin to do a lesbian porn movie. Monster truck events would be empty.

Look at it like this; I’m right, or we’re witnessing the most immediate threat to mankind and civilization. Either way, what are your plans?

Drinks for my friends.

All my windows covered with bees this morning. The alarm. It’s dark. No light. I hate this. It scares the shit out of me. What fucking now.

Straight to the bathroom and I crap like a goose. I blow loose gravy. Awful and foul. I retch. I shit blood and it’s all about new copper pennies and deep fermenting sewage. The ocean in there somehow, maybe because there’s pictures of fish on the paper towels I’m using to wipe my ass. I swear I just bought a case of toilet paper.

Nobody knows the trouble I see.

These bees know sweet, sticky blood. They get excited enough to dance.

One by one I thump the glass from inside and they fly away.  The light streams in. It feels natural.  Normal.  Like it’s supposed to work just like that. It makes no sense to me.

Well yeah. Too often things work that way and I’m not inclined to worry because I’ve solved the the problem at hand. But really, I’m getting tired of this shit. I don’t like waking up to a new conundrum every goddamn morning. I just want to be. I’d move to a city. A smaller city, far from this middle of nowhere shit. Austin or Portland or maybe Albuquerque.

I’m tired of the whistling wind and the chaos it brings.

I decide on a peanut butter and honey sandwich with banana slices. I put it together on wheat and butter the bread. I make it a ‘melt’ in a frying pan and eat it while gulping a grape soda. I feel good after I eat it. I use an elbow straw for the soda. I like the way the bread crunches against my gums. I think of the avacados and how I can rub them all over my mouth with my tongue.

I watch Oprah.

These other guys, the ones I share the house with, I don’t know them. I’m not even sure how many they are. Myrus and Paul I know, but there’s a few more that don’t have a bed. Blind shithouse crazy. The shit they leave lying around is insane.

Carcasses and parts. Makes me feel like I’m dead.

I just can’t do this anymore.

He brought my heart to me in a jar. It was Myrus but Paul stood behind him. Handed it to me suspended in a pink liquid. A big glass jar, size enough for a whole sheet of cookies. What happens when all is lost? You are what you eat. Myrus handed me the jar, he’d palmed it by it’s top. I slid the heavy glass lid aside and there was a scrape and a ring as I inhaled the smell of my own heart.

My name is motherfucking Felix.

It would be nice if we could simply choose our own channels. If I don’t pay my bill, Direct TV shuts me down in a heartbeat. I call them on the phone, arrange payment and within thirty seconds, access to like three hundred channels is restored. I don’t believe for a second that making individual choice available to customers isn’t possible.

I’d do the networks, they should be free and I’m a news junkie, including FOX, CNN,and MSNBC. Part of my addiction is to monitor the mainstream. Comedy Central, HBO and Showtime for movies, excellent series’ and boxing. One local affiliate. They all suck but I need access to at least one local news outlet. Maybe some nature channels, IFC and that other one……..

I need to step off this topic for awhile. You who read me regularly understand I am wont to do.

I am moved by this President. He takes complex questions and answers them with intelligence and nuance. He talks to us and explains himself with an earnestness and sincerity that make plain his need for us to understand. He does want to include and engage the lowest common denominator. I believe I’d be remiss were I not to point out the glaring contrast between Mr. Obama and our previous President, who catered to and exploited the lowest common denominator almost exclusively.

Our man was asked this evening, what about his first one hundred days suprised, enchanted, humbled and troubled him the most, on live television. He answered adroitly, compassionately and honestly. This is the kind of question that would never even be allowed under the Dumbya regime. Were such a question somehow allowed to slip through, trust that Dumbya would have stuttered, paused and visited abuse of malapropisms to hitherto unseen depths of national embarrassment.

He’s a primate at best.

His eyes are too close together.

I couldn’t help but remember Clinton. He would appear on television in the middle of our dark years and answer any question by framing it’s context, explaining the variables and then recommending a course of action so expertly that you knew he’d wrestled with it until he understood the issue thoroughly and had arrived at a solution that he grasped completely and had no reservations about endorsing. The man was flawed but he was whip fucking smart and he gave a shit. He was a lighthouse in the dense fog of Dick-in-Bush.

First 100 days? I’ll give Obama a B+. Not bad for his first semester midterm. About what I expected and I’m pleased. My biggest concern is the financial swamp thing. I can’t really pretend to understand it. It goes without saying I don’t have an opinion worth sharing. I will tell you that the more I learn and understand, the more I wonder about moving somewhere I can have a garden.

Those fuckers left us hanging. Cheney won’t shut the fuck up and neither will Rove but have ya heard from Dumbya? The barn door was banging at the start of the storm when those three bastards ran out. Man they were bad news.

Say our man gets us to 911 of this year without a domestic terror attack of similiar scale. Will you then shut the fuck up about your keeping America safe audacity? Allow me to date myself by saying you people sound like a broken goddamn record.

Some advice. The sky has been falling for some time now. You just looked up. You just noticed it could really crack you hard. By the way, if you did just notice all this, part of this is your fault. So anyway, settle down.

What we really need is for you mouthbreathers to be calm. Don’t stir shit up. Try not to shoot fellow humans. Stop turning out like zombies for corporate lobby funded tax protests when you’ll all do better under what you’re marching against. Have some dignity. Pull your pants up.

More of my advice to you is to wade back in. Forego ideology and sincerely look at what progressives are attempting to do here. Find fault with the policy or find flaw with the process. Stop dropping the ‘socialist’ bomb and find a way to participate. Start rolling up your sleeves and stop crapping your pants.

Hannity and Limbaugh are the clown princes of the conservative stagnation and they will be your demise.

Drinks for my friends.