Waking up. Drinking coffee. Coffee’s another drug in my life, but I’ve already written about that on numerous occasions.

My waking thought was… Well, there were two waking thoughts. One was based on the idea that when someone slams the back door, the whole house shudders. So the first waking thought was, “What the fuck was that?” followed quickly by, “Oh. Slammed door. I’m awake now.”

The next waking thought was an odd juxtaposition after the first one. I thought, The Democrats really don’t care. Hillary Clinton was up there trying to sound presidential, talking about containing Iraq and other assorted bullshit, when in fact, she was signing away her own future presidential campaign. It’s all a huge gamble for them, but it’s not about balancing one good of the nation against another good of the nation, it’s about balancing future election results against November.

I bet anyone a beer that we don’t invade Iraq before November elections. Bush has been making all kinds of noises about needing to invade this month, but now that he’s got his resolution (and, more importantly to him, he’s got the Democrats’ votes on the thing), we can relax a little on it.

Democrats fear Republicans. Republicans have contempt for Democrats. It’s classic co-dependency.

Time for an intervention.

Music Du Jour

Bongo Bong by Manu Chao, from the album ‘Clandestino’

I think I’m going to feature music du jour sporadically for the next little while.

The only benefit of wine over pot is that wine is legal. Good wine costs more than good pot. Wine and pot are neck-and-neck in the potential-to-ruin-your-life department, but you can’t make wine brownies.

Wine, the drug, is so much more easily available than it’s illegal cousin. It stains if you spill it. You have to buy special wine glasses to drink it from, but this disadvantage isn’t as bad as having to go to an ‘exotic pipe shop’ to get an ‘exotic pipe.’

Wine is more likely to put you to sleep. At least it is for me. Some people are out like a light on their first puff of pot. Driving under the influence of either drug is not recommended, but if the choice is to ride shotgun with Billy Pothead versus Johnny Boozehound, I’ll be riding with Billy.

I write better with wine. Pot is a mind-wipe. Sure, you have good ideas, but they’re not really good ideas, you just think they are. Wine enhances the belligerent complainer, and I find it easy to complain anyway.

Pot grows and you harvest it and then you smoke it. That’s it. Grapes are grown and fermented in accordance with longstanding traditions of winemaking. Many people toil endlessly the way generations of their forefathers did, so that you can get fucked up.

The best wine is honey mead. Fermented honey. From time to time I’ll take a knife and dip it in the honey jar and suck the honey off of it. I love honey. An attraction to honey mead is a natural psychoactive extension of the honey lovey-ness I feel.

I’d get sips of mead on rare occasions from some of my celtic reconstructionist friends in Houston. I miss that set of folks, but mostly because of the mead.

I’ve also lost touch with the hippie greenie pothead people up here in Seattle. So I’m drinking wine I got at the Ballard Market.

I got carded buying it, to. I look young. The checkout clerk apologized profusely for checking up on me. She thought I was a teenager. People are funny. Why apologize for something like that? Yah, I’m so offended that you thought I was younger than I am. But the funniest part is the comment that inevitably follows in some form or another: “When you’re 80, you’ll look 40!” Yeah, and when you’re DEAD, you’ll look like rotting flesh! Funny, eh? Har!

Actually, when I bought the wine I’m drinking right now, after the ‘when you’re 80′ line, the guy behind me said the following to the cashier: “Me, I’m waiting for Dr. Kervorkian to get out of jail for when I’m 40.”

I said, “Hey, good luck with that.” He laughed. I laughed. I walked out with my wine and soy milk and Peanut Butter Bumpers.

Creepy. Especially this article which equates terrorism to postmodernism.

One of the things I was planning to do today was go to Ikea. I need a bed. A real bed. Not the futon on the floor I’ve got now. I like the futon on the floor; it’s firm and cheap and all-around good. The problem is that I can hear everything going on downstairs through the floorboards.

So I think I need a bed. And it can’t be just any bed. And I thought, maybe Ikea has something decent that won’t cost a zillion dollars.

But. I just saw this Ikea ad. Now, I like Spike Jonze, who directed this spot. It’s a very well made ad. It’s sad and funny and has a huge quirk factor, much like other works by Jonze (‘Being John Malkovitch,’ for instance).

My problem is that this ad encourages you to throw out a perfectly good lamp, leaving it in the rain to rust and decay, because you can buy a better one at Ikea.

This is in direct opposition to Ikea’s statement about recycling on their unboring.com website. They say to give your old furniture to Goodwill.

They also have an ‘unboring manifesto’ on the same site that says theirs is not a flashy revolution (presented as a Flash animation).

One of the things I think about a lot is design. I’m looking at the unboring manifesto flash it’s product catalog in another window, and thinking about a book I’ve been reading called ‘Cradle to Cradle.’ The idea of the book is that merely recycling stuff doesn’t really help the environment; in fact, it leeches value out of the materials as they’re recycled.

Wood pulp, for instance, gets made into paper for a single use. After that single use, it may get recycled, but the value of the pulp is reduced dramatically. Further, all sorts of noxious chemicals must be added to the paper before it’s useful for the second time, adding to the pollution involved. If paper were designed from the outset to be recyclable, however, we’d end up with a few interesting end results. Not the least of which is that we probably wouldn’t use wood pulp for making paper. And this is just one example of many different product (re)cycles that are horribly inefficient, though we’re able to label them as ‘eco-friendly.’

So I’m thinking about all this, and I want to buy a bed, and I don’t want to throw out my futon, and I’m thinking about going to Ikea because they’re fairly progressive in their designs…

But then I see the ad. And then I think of all the crappy particle board construction of their furniture, and how it’s totally not sustainable, and how, after Ikea furniture breaks, it can’t be repaired in any good way. But I’m almost willing to make that sacrifice because every morning people downstairs wake me up. And then I see the ad with the little desk lamp, so sad, ending it’s product life cycle. And there’s Mr. Ikea saying ‘Don’t worry about landfills, don’t worry about toxic waste, don’t worry about all the effort that went into this little lamp. The new one is happy and shiny!’

Sigh.

XangaGods II:

It takes ten thousand reloads to get the look & feel settings to work.

Click on ‘look & feel,’ change the settings, hit save changes, see old settings on page, reload to see new settings, decide to change something, click ‘look & feel,’ change one setting, click save changes, see cached page, hit reload, see that everything is back the way it was before you started editing except the one thing you changed (because when you changed look & feel the second time, you were looking at the cached edit form), click look & feel again, know to press command-R (since Xanga doesn’t show the window toolbar), press command-R, make all the changes over again… You get the point.

And you know what really sucks? Monsur subbed to my ‘blog, and now I’m making ‘blogs essentially to him. I suck, I suck. Please forgive me.

Just a hint: If you live in Seattle, there’s a big ol’ box of books in a free pile at NW 70th St. and 14th Ave. NW.

Lots of old Macintosh technical manuals at the bottom of the box.

Hey, XangaGods!

The banner ads for ‘most watched’ and ‘most listened-to’ Amazon products are making me not read the SIR list. I’m using email subscriptions now.

And geez. I’ve seen Amelie, OK?

Today’s soundtrack:

Mykologics by Mouse On Mars

From The Only Blip Hop Record You Will Ever Need, Vol. 1

I write a lot on usenet. If you don’t know what usenet is, it’s a very lively messaging system where people post messages and hold conversations. I participate in political discussions, if you could call them that. Mostly they just degenerate to stupid bickering.

But the point is that someone responded to something I said by jokingly asking me why I hate America. This is my response:

I choose to live in a country founded on the principles of independence and liberty. Since the time of its inception, the country I live in has degraded itself, by valuing legal entities over the individual, and by valuing wealth over the independence and liberty that are its foundational ideals.

In this country that I hate, the weak and incompetent rise to easy power, while the strong and smart toil and struggle. The ugly and disdainful rise to celebrity while those of beautiful integrity waste away, unrewarded for their faith in justice. The spiteful liars grab the headlines while the quiet truth is actively ignored out of petty self-interest.

The America I hate is composed of people who ruin it for everybody. The willfully ignorant, the loud-mouthed, the obnoxious. Those of small spirit whose selfishness and desperation remove civility from public life. The easily led. The loyal. The fair-weather patriots. The gullible.

There is only one cure for the ill of this hateful America. There’s only one balm that can soothe the rash, that can inject civility into the bloodstream of public life. The only cure is compassion. The only cure is to listen to all those rants, all that divisiveness, and realize that every last drop of it comes from inner pain. It comes from a need to belong, a need to be held in high regard. The need to belong is so strong because America is set up that way. Without it, politics would take its proper place in the back seat of American life. Divisiveness is the wrong answer to this question. You have to love your opponent in order to love America.

From this love flows everything that cures all the other ills. The ignorance, the uncivility, the gullibility and credulousness; all are healed by compassion.

Make no mistake: If you hate liberals, you hate America. If you hate conservatives, you hate America. If you hate Clinton or Bush, you hate America.

And that’s why I hate America: No one but me seems to realize this.