Today’s Question-Mark-Over-My-Head news story:

Michael Jackson dangles baby out of window.

WTF?

I’m in the kitchen, poking around. P comes in and watches me.

Me: “I want a schnack food.”

P: “You want a magic cookie?”

Me: “Uh… YAH…”

P: “Follow me.”

We walk into P’s room. He hands me a fairly un-magical looking chocolate chip cookie. About 3 inches diameter. Pretty enough to be in the counter at Starbucks or something, but still pretty generic.

P: “A and B gave these to me. I haven’t had one. They say they’re strong.”

I begin to chew. A chocolate cookie with happy extra crystalline structure type things in it. A bit of an extra oily taste. Magic cookies.

I thank P. I tell him I’m going to go downstairs and watch TV while intoxicated.

One hour later:

I am in a sleeping bag on the couch, unable to move. I don’t feel stoned, I’m just unable to make the command go to my body. I discover this by wanting to get up and turn the sound down, since it must be getting late. I manage to unzip the sleeping bag a little bit, but not much else is going to happen. I fall instantly asleep.

I wake up and realize I’m in the basement watching TV and I’m still stoned. It’s about four hours later. I have to pee, really bad.

All my defenses are down. The sense of needing to pee, the pressure in my abdomen, is so great that I almost have something akin to an anxiety attack, except that the induced executive dysfunction stops the anxiety.

I’m having gas, too. It feels like someone’s squeezing giant ball bearings through my intestines. And I can feel every bit of it, to an extreme degree, because I’m more stoned than I’ve ever known anyone to be, ever.

After the exploding gas pains (I think of the natural gas pipeline that exploded near Bellingham a few years back, that destroyed a housing subdivision and killed a few people), I manage to turn off the TV, the stereo, the space heater. I stagger up the stairs to the bathroom, sleeping bag over my shoulder. I piss. I sit there on the toilet half-asleep.

I want to get up and go up to bed, but I can’t. I make it to my feet. I reach over to pick up the sleeping bag off the floor and I end up asleep in it.

A few hours later I wake up and think, “Oh, geez… I’m asleep on the floor of the freaking bathroom!”

I crawl up to the upstairs. I slide into bed and fall asleep before I can pull the covers over myself.

Noon today: I wake up. I feel utterly refreshed. I’m in bed, in my clothes, half-covered by the blanket. I turn over onto my back and think, ‘Damn! I feel great! How can I possibly feel this good after last night?”

I move to get up. I slump back down into bed and fall asleep again.

A curling spiral of blanket
A tight pressure, a beautiful
Pleasure of heavy flannel and
Like a tickle, only
Not a threat, not a surprise

A tickle to the brainstem
Curling spiral of blanket
Happy and released mind.

You give me back to myself
After this spiral of blanket

You told me I was healthy.
You said the day is long and full
and now is the time for release
Like the moment of spastic joy
At getting in bed and curling up
In the blanket

You take the sponge and the dish
of warm water and gently wash
The day away, smiling that knowing
Smile.

This kindness, this giving.
The soft slush sound of the day being
lightly scrubbed off.

I’m naked, and I turn under you,
offering the patches of skin
And finally the eyelids.

What can I give back to you?
Is there some currency of value
to you? Send the answer
in a dream.

BABY-EATING ALIENS!

I’m finally getting around to ripping my CD of XTC’s ‘Black Sea.’ Why did it take me so long to get around to doing this? (..he asked himself rhetorically.)

Back in the early 80s, XTC was known as the punk Beatles. And ‘Black Sea’ is really the last album of theirs that would qualify for that description, because soon after ‘Black Sea’ they went on to become the not-so-punk-anymore punk Beatles.

There’s also a fair measure of Captain Beefheart thrown in on this album for good measure, mostly in the Colin Moulding songs, and this makes me happy. I suppose being the punk Beefheart band wouldn’t garner as much positive public image.

Anyway. Music Du Jour for today, straight atcha from 1980, and in ‘honor’ of my generally foul mood of late: ‘Burning With Optimism’s Flames‘

I don’t know what to say today other than to bitch and moan about how overloaded I feel with all the stuff I need to do before heading for TX.

I have to donate the dead van to the charity, but to do that, I have to dig the middle seat bench out from under the pile of junk in the garage, and if I’m doing that I might as well load a bunch of it into the car to take to the other charity, but not all of it’s mine, so some of it I have to set aside, only there’s no room for any of it in the overcrowded garage.

That kind of thing.

Plus the car needs a tune up and oil change before I go, which means going to the auto parts place and getting the stuff and doing that work, and the van has a flat tire which is still under warranty which I can take advantage of, but that involves taking the wheel off the van and driving it there in the car, and if I sort through the garage first I’ll end up with no place for the tire in the car because it’ll be full of goodwill droppings, so I should do that first but I don’t want to because it’s gray outside and I’m hungry and Dale’s coming over to borrow the VCR so I need to set it aside for him and so forth.

Such problems I have. Heh.

Something I really dislike:

The fact that SIR presents everybody’s ‘blog in the font and font size they chose. Some I have to squint for. Some are just huge on my screen.

I want my ‘look & feel’ to apply to blogs I read in SIR.

Thank you for listening to me rant.

I just wrote something on usenet. I though I’d ‘blog it.

(On the difference between self-esteem and self-awareness…)

Self-esteem seems to be the result of something, rather than a cause. You do something and you end up with self-esteem, either good or bad or neither. Maybe self-esteem is a value judgement you make on your own behavior.

I think self-awareness is different because it’s an unvarnished, un-judgemental set of knowledge you have about yourself. For instance, I *know* that certain things are very difficult for me to do. If I didn’t know this, I might develop low self-esteem because I had an unrealistic expectation of being able to do those things. But since I do know about my difficulties, I might not feel so bad about them. Conversely, there are things that I *know* I absolutely kick ass at doing, and these things result in a higher self-esteem. Then again, I could be assigning artificial competence to myself, which means my high self-esteem would be a false one. I’d still feel good about myself, though.

I think a lot of relatively non-self-aware people feel threatened by anyone who is critical of themselves. That is, if I’m with certain people, and I voice my frustration about communication or executive dysfunction, they say, “Don’t be so hard on yourself…” I think this is because any self-criticism that ends up being true is threatening to their own self-esteem. If *my* self-criticism could be true, then it could also be true that *their* doubts about themselves are true, as well. After all, they could offer some constructive advice, rather than telling me how wrong I am about my own feelings. Instead they try to prove me wrong.

I also think that people who face these kinds of issues head-on, as a matter of course, and who develop an accurate understanding of themselves, are more likely to remain unthreatened by another person’s self-criticism.

Just some thoughts.

Did you know that less than a quarter of those eligible to vote turned the tide of power for the Republicans in this last election? 21%

18% of eligible voters elected George W. Bush to the White House.

Why doesn’t this country give a shit about who represents it?

Read this.

Yes, it’s William Safire.

A taste:

If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before passage, here is what will happen to you:

Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend — all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as “a virtual, centralized grand database.”"