Why the HELL are we considering a bailout to the insurance industry?

Terrorism is a cost of doing business the way the US does business, folks. The Republicans controlling the government right now got there on a platform of free market liberalism, so what happened to the free market? Isn’t capitalism supposed to make corrections for things that are of negative value, without huge government bailouts?

All this insurance bailout legislation proves is that, at the beginning of the 21st century, government isn’t about regulation, it’s about using the tax base as capital infusion for large, failing industries. We hear that it’s good for ‘the economy,’ but do they ever really qualify what ‘the economy’ means? Or ‘good’ for that matter?

One of the things that’s making me happy of late is the fact that bootleg Richard Thompson songs are easily available on gnutella.

“He reached for her hand and he slipped her the keys
Said, “I’ve got no further use for these
I see angels and ariels in leather and chrome
Swoopin’ down from heaven to carry me home”
And he gave her one last kiss and died
And he gave her his Vincent to ride.
–1952 Vincent Black Lightning

It’s 7pm. There was supposed to be a house meeting at 6, but I had a mini meltdown from stress earlier in the day.

I watched it happen, too. I was upstairs trying to do relaxing things. X came upstairs and asked me if I wanted in on ordering a pizza. Making that decision was the one thing that was too much, and boom.

“Hey, want to order some pizza?”

(Long pause during which I watch the stress spill over into emotional upset-ness.) “Damn.”

“I guess that’s a no…”

The irony is that I was going to try and come up with some workable solutions for this stuff at the house meeting. I don’t want people to have to feel like they live in a monastery or anything, but I also want to let the two new housemates know about my needs. Of course this happens and I can’t have that discussion now.

I feel utterly powerless.

We’ll have to reschedule my power for another day. Hah.

Bill Moyers talks about the 2002 elections.

For the past week or so, I’ve been trying to think of a funny ‘blog.

Since I can’t, read Stjnky‘s ‘blog instead. I’ll be here when you get back.

If you live in the Seattle area, and you want an old Mac, I’m your man.

I have a monster pile of old computers in my basement, and it needs to move. It needs to go away. It needs to vanish into the chaotic stream of life outside this house.

So let me know. Seriously.

And I have a dead VW Vanagon (’86, A/C, auto, white) that needs a new home, too. Put in a new engine and it’s a happy road-trip takin’ wonder bus.

Let me know.

“I survived high school.”

When you look at such a statement, you bring your own experience to it. That is, when *I* say that I survived high school, you read it as ‘Homer survived my high school experience.’

It’s like that when you hear a lot of things: ‘I’m happy in my marriage,’ or ‘I enjoy travelling,’ or ‘I had jury duty today.’ You acknowledge to yourself that you’re filling in a lot of the blanks, but you *are* filling in the blanks until further notice.

For instance, when I say that I survived high school, you might think about graduation. You might imagine me tossing my little square hat in the air and then going to get drunk. Ah, survival! But I didn’t graduate. I dropped out. It was one of the wisest things I ever did.

But that isn’t how I survived.

Earlier tonight, I was thinking about the first time I dropped out of high school. I was stressed and tired, and I went to home room on the second day of classes for my sophmore year. I had missed the first, because of anxiety. Assigned seating put me next to one of my bullies from junior high. He made a joke, trying to be friendly, but even though the joke was harmless, it was at my expense. I couldn’t deal, excused myself from class to go to the bathroom, went instead to the payphone, called my mom and got her to get me the hell out of there. Which she did. I spent the next quite a while feeling guilty and horrible. By quite a while I mean a little more than a decade. Seriously.

I was thinking about this story, and how much mileage I’d gotten out of it. Certainly the story can be put to a self-pity kind of use. But beyond that, it had guided me through psychiatric evaluations, self-help, new age mumbo jumbo. I’d go to yet another shrink and tell them the story. I’d go to a medical specialist and end up telling them the story. My parents would want to understand what had happened, so we’d talk about the story. The story was that I had failed miserably at something everyone else was able to do. I was the only one I knew of who had to leave class because someone was trying to be friendly.

I survived high school by abandoning this story.

I abandoned it slowly. It’s more accurate to say it got replaced by increment. People are capable of change, but they’re only capable of the change they’re capable of, if you get my meaning. You learn something small, and it changes you in a small way. And you learn a zillion small things, and you’re a zillion times different.

The fact is that I forgot the story. I had to work to remember it. I can remember the bully’s name was Scott, but can’t get his last name. I would have been able to spout his full name instantly up into my 20s. I can’t remember if it was the second or third day of class. I can’t definitively say if it was the first or second time I dropped out, though I’m pretty sure it was the first.

I can look back on my understanding of the situation and see how horribly misinformed I was about myself and the world. Not in the sense that every teenager is ignorant, but in the sense that I wasn’t aware that I had a neurological disorder, and that my reaction to the chaos of that school, while abnormal, was understandable given that disorder. I had a cultural model: The misfit teen. I tried to make it all fit into the misfit teen model, because I thought that was how everyone dealt with this stuff. Of course I failed at being a proper misfit; I was too truly strange for that. So culture had misinformed me, too. When I managed to talk to my friends at school (minor miracle that I had friends at all), my problems were understood in *their* context, and they’d offer sympathy, as though they were really capable of understanding. And, not knowing any better, I’d hear them and wonder how the hell they could feel what I felt and deal so well.

That was the story of high school I lugged around for so long.

The reality was that I didn’t understand my options. I was powerless in myself because I didn’t understand that I could be powerful, that I could make decisions about this stuff. And when I learned that, I began to forget.

I only recently survived high school, in my mid-30s, by forgetting it.

Every time I cut my hair, I’m amazed at how new it makes me feel.

“And when state and national governments begin to act in effect as agents of the global economy, selling their people for low wages and their people’s products for low prices, then the rights and liberties of citizenship must necessarily shrink. A total economy is an unrestrained taking of profits from the disintegration of nations, communities, households, landscapes, and ecosystems. It licenses symbolic or artificial wealth to “grow” by means of the destruction of the real wealth of all the world.”

–Wendell Berry, from ‘The Idea Of A Local Economy’ (published in ‘In The Presence Of Fear‘)

This is from a little tiny book I got at a newsstand. Berry rocks my world.

Every now and then there’s something to be happy about.

The Varsity theater is having a Kurosawa retrospective, between the 8th and the 22nd. ‘Throne of Blood,’ ‘Hidden Fortress,’ ‘Yojimbo,’ ‘Sanjuro,’ ‘Drunken Angel,’ ‘Rashomon,’ and of course ‘Seven Samurai.’ Among others. All new prints. Notable absences from the list: ‘Lower Depths,’ and ‘Dreams.’

This is the kind of thing that makes me think I might not go to TX as early as I thought I would. Seriously. Homer loves his Kurosawa! I could go to the movies every night through the 22nd and see a different Kurosawa flick!