Rogue's gallery...

04:54 am - The recent posterboy...

...for ending the "Don't ask, don't tell" thing in the military.  I came here because I didn't have to confine myself to text-sized posts.  For me it is a complex issue.  I think I can claim to be 'on record' as having no problems with people in same-sex relationships and partnerships... for years Charmaine and I wished for an alternative to 'marriage' because that's not really how we saw ourselves, either.  Whatever you want to call the bond between you and your partner is fine with me.  You, whoever you are, should have the same rights and opportunities as my wife and I do in those circumstances.

The realm of the armed forces is a little different, to me.  I have always thought the "Don't ask, don't tell" policy was a good thing.  At it's most blunt, I could point out that not everyone is comfortable with sharing a shower with someone who just might be checking out their ass while they are there.  And you have no choice.  And you have to do it every day.  I have always expected women, in particular, to get this... but they often don't.  Picture that creepy guy who's always undressing you with his eyes, then think about having to share a bathroom/shower area with him every day...

Now, include the idea that nearly as many men as women have been sexually assaulted in their youth, and that's just the ones on record, and then tell me that these young men, these boys, should have to cope with that as well as the fact that they might die today if they aren't carefull enough and you start to get an understanding of why I think the current policy might just be the right way to go for a while yet.  These kids have enough on their plate and the ones who 'out' themselves generally seem to be looking for their their five minutes in the spotlight and a chance to be on Nightline...

Side notes: First of all, I have a cousin who isn't much older than me who served his term in the navy, was honorably discharged at the rank of Lt. Commander, came home, came out, and openly partnered (read as 'married') another guy he'd served with.  He had been, at the peak of his naval career, Number 4 on a nuclear powered aircraft carrier.  He left with his laurels and has lived his life a happy man, and a proud one.

Second: and this is the tough one, when I was 14 years old I was sexually assaulted in a men's room at a shopping mall.  It wasn't as bad as many, but I will say it left it's marks.  Marks I felt much more strongly when I was 18-20 years old.  They were fresher.  Now, ask yourself, are these the kind of preocupations we wish to inflict on 15-25% of the young men who've volunteered, signed they're lives away, to serve our cause as a nation?  Or, perhaps as the Bard is paraphrased, the lady doth protest too much?

01:13 am

So, inspired by the idiot box and an article in a car magazine I have some questions for y'all; 

Do you sit down for most of the day at work, or do you spend most of your time on your feet?

Do you spend more of your day thinking about how something should be done, or actually doing it?

Just how much of the product your company sells can you actually produce (without help or further training)?

Are you sure?

What is the actual product or service you take part in providing to others?

Who do you know who needs that product or service?

What are they going to do with it?

Do you care?

11:58 pm - On record...

I'd just like to say that I'm on record as having said that Al Franken was a bad choice because he was so vulnerable, like over a year ago.  There were better candidates available.  Three at least.
Hillary had the same problem to a lesser extent.

So, and I'm quoting...

Just a note to let you know
That I was right, I told you so.
I told you so, I told you so.
I told you so, I told you so.
...etc.

02:30 pm - An idea.

I was thinking the other day about books and how most of my friends all seem to have too many of them, yet never have enough to read.

This idea occurred to me: what about an exchange?  One last outdoor party before the weather seals us in until spring, everybody brings some books.  Everybody leaves with about the same number of books, but ones they haven't already read.  I know I have two or three hundred I wouldn't mind rotating.  There are, of course, others you'll have to pry out of my cold, dead hands.

Does this sound like a good idea?  Maybe throw in movies as well, and make all our video and book stores wonder where we went for a month or two...

03:58 am - Thoughts on reaching forty...

My mother made it to 67, my father to 81.  I figure this is a midpoint in my life.  Somewhere in here I'm going to start having more memories than moments...  that's ok, the memories I hold on to are as good as you'll get.  The ones that won't go away, well, they can take care of themselves.  It's only right that it should be raining tonight, it suits my mood.

I've had a wonderfull birthday, all 24 hours.  Like my life, gifts unexpected, given and received.  Tomorrow is just another day.

Yeah, maybe I don't know all that much, but I know more than I ever wanted to.  The real world is an ugly place, dirty and cold and uncaring, but there are these things, commonly called people, and despite their reputation they really aren't all that bad.  Well, some of them, anyway.  To the rest of you, the secret's to bang the rocks together guys...

No, nothing profound, nothing subtle.  More stories I'll never tell, more stuff I could never explain.  I still feel alone in the middle of a crowd, much the way I think we all do, and I still think it's sad that we have to live out our lives inside our seperate skins, alone, but that's just how it is.  Good luck to you, too.

12:20 am - Change?

Wait, are the conservatives claiming they are the most liberal?

Am I high, or in political terms doesn't liberal mean promoting change, and conservative mean resisting change?  My head hurts, and I blame Carl Rove.

01:26 am - Do you know...

...what a bastard is?  Theorheticaly, or in reality? Well, I am one.  I am  a child so akwardly timed that, when I was born, no one's life was enriched by my existance... and most of them had had time to give it some thought.  I was the worst thing that could happen, in many peoples eyes, many of whom came to love me, in spite of themselves.

As far as I know, I was born to my natural parents... and they were there for me, together, at least until I was twenty.  How many Americans can say that?  Since then, and both within 12 months, they have died.  Cancer, in both cases, 67 and 81, respectively.  Myself, and my nine siblings are left to cope (on the one side they had lost their mother only just over a year before)... and I'm the youngest... the only one that ties the set together.  Before you decide my math is off, the only other son my mother delivered died in the cradle, well before I was an issue.  While I was standing at my mother's death-bed I was reminded of that fact... that they'd had to pry her fingers from the rail of his crib in the hospital (he was just a little over a year old when he died) by her two older sister who only missed being there for her by less than an hour.

So, why am I laying this on the line?  Because that and all the baggage I carry, that only some of which even my wife can understand, has destroyed me this last year or so, and that so many of you who don't have a clue can get a grip on why I've been so fucked up.  For the record I was there when my mother died... I will swear that I felt the last beats of her heart.  As for my father, well, we were all just hoping it was over.  I still have to go back, and see her headstone and take possesion of his painting kit.  There's a part of me that wants to take the one to bring some color to the other.  She was a Rose and he was a Dick and I'm just their bastard child.  I'm sorry.

Oh, and on 9/10 I turn 40...

And, just for the record, that's not me looking all stern in my ID pic, that's my grandmother's grandfather.  It just runs strong in some families.

I could go on but it starts to sound lame, even to me.  If it weren't my life I wouldn't believe it.

10:26 pm - Lyrics, for no good reason.

Shine On You Crazy Diamond

First Part

Remember when you were young,
You shone like the sun.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Now there's a look in your eyes,
Like black holes in the sky.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
You were caught on the crossfire
Of childhood and stardom,
Blown on the steel breeze.
Come on you target for faraway laughter,
Come on you stranger, you legend, you martyr, and shine!

You reached for the secret too soon,
You cried for the moon.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Threatened by shadows at night,
And exposed in the light.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Well you wore out your welcome
With random precision,
Rode on the steel breeze.
Come on you raver, you seer of visions,
Come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner, and shine!

Second Part

Nobody knows where you are,
How near or how far.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Pile on many more layers
And I'll be joining you there.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
And we'll bask in the shadow
Of yesterday's triumph,
And sail on the steel breeze.
Come on you boy child,
You winner and loser,
Come on you miner for truth and delusion, and shine!

12:38 am - C'ya Chef...

So long Mr. Hayes. 

11:34 pm - Clone Wars

 Not to sound paranoid, but I was just polishing off a hearty rant about how George Lucas can kiss my ass, what with this insulting half-Disney-half-anime piece of crap he expects us to swallow as a feature film, just because he's too lazy to finish the series, but too greedy to walk away, when lj neatly crashed, sending me to desktop like nothing had ever happened.  I'm not going to bother with trying to recreate the whole thing, but a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I was eight and there was this movie...

Before you go into the whole "you expect too much" line of shit, remember that I was one of the staunch supporters of the last set of Star Wars flicks.  "But," I so often heard myself say, "it's just a Star Wars movie, what do you expect?"

This video game adapted for the big screen is, I have to say, a whole different kettle of fish.  All the space ships and robots are perfect, and all the people look like Disney's after-school cartoons (available only on the Disney channel) and, frankly, I hope the regurgitated, rebranded, retold and otherwise fucked up Batman movie kicks this things ass.  I have to go see the Hulk movie to be sure, but I'm pretty certian I'd be better off just going to see Iron Man two or three more times if I wanted a decent, mid-summer release action/adventure movie.  

C'mon, the last Indianna Jones was fun, but was it really so distracting he let this piece of... well, he let this thing slide through with that little supervision?  Fuck George Lucas, I'm not paying a cent to see this afterschool special.  I have video games with cooler graphics, and let's be honest, it was never the story or the writing we went to a Star Wars film to see.

Can you say "Direct to Video?"  I knew you could.

Current Mood: cranky

04:35 am - Footnote.

Ted Stevens is about three years older than my father would be had he not died this spring, and has been a member of the Senate for about three months less than I have been breathing.

Take that and relate it to your own lives as you will, I just hope the @$$#()|_[- goes down, and hard.

01:02 am - Just my luck.

So, my new kinda-crappy-kinda-fun job has me talking to people on the phone all over the country.  Guess where I was calling earlier tonight.  You get three guesses and if the first two aren't Southern California, they don't count.

So, yeah, we were getting a lot of voice mail responses.  Was kinda fun to talk to a few people near the quake site, not long after it happened.  They were unusually prone to ramble.  A mite distracted, perhaps?   Once I found out the size of the quake and that no major damage had been reported I quit being concerned for friends and in-laws who might be in the area and enjoyed talking to people who were marking a Moment in their lives.

For the record, the only quake that occurred while I was in CA was about the same size, and I was really pissed when I heard about it and realized I'd slept right through it.  So it goes. 

11:57 pm - It's so strange...

how your mind works, sometimes.

So I'm sitting reading this book by Terry Pratchet that I haven't read before and suddenly it hits me right between the eyes...  the last time I saw my mother actually happy and enjoying herself.  Charmaine and I were all packed up and getting ready to go to Minicon, Mr. Pratchet was one of the guests of honor, and because we'd been talking about him, being fans, she'd picked up one of his books and started reading it.  We're running around, trying to remember that one thing you always forget, and she's sitting there reading.  Occasionally, she'd burst out laughing and then read off some line from the book.  It was "Equal Rites" and had been laying out because it was a favorite and what with him coming to the Con and all, we'd been re-reading them.  She'd read off the line, and we'd all laugh.  Charmaine and I would remember it and the situation, but it was fresh to her, and we shared her joy along with the humor. Just before we left, I ducked into the office and pulled out "The Colour of Magic".  I interrupted her reading, and said "That one's really good, but they're even funnier if you take them in order.  Here's the first one."  She took it, and started reading, while we threw the last few things in the car and was laughing again in just a few pages.  We left all the discworld books we had (except the two we were taking to be signed) out for her, a sadly small percentage, and as we left she was waving us off, with the book in her hand, truely "tickled" and eager to get back to it and her few days alone and unbothered.

If what I've learned later is accurate, even then the cancer was rooted deep and spreading.

By the end of that weekend, and as I remember I cut it short at the con because I was feeling namelessly uneasy, she'd read them all.  Of course, she wasn't feeling too good then, and not looking foreward to the long drive home and we were wiped out as well.  There were pleasant times after that, comfortable and easy, but that was the last time I saw her truly happy.  I should have recognized the change.  Some small part of me noted the little signals, but I just didn't see her often enough and wrote it off as getting older and being under the weather, as she put it.

You can call me a Momma's boy if you want.  If you'd ever gotten to know her, as some of you had, you'd understand.  I've never known anyone as good at finding the fun and adventure in any situation, yet so dedicated to her responsibilities.  Those thing we shared, like when I found a Peter Seller's movie she hadn't seen, her joy was contagious... 

I'm sorry, it's been over a year now, but I've got this dent in my forehead from this fresh blow and needed to vent.  Now I remember part of why I'd been trying to dull my memory.  Things don't just come back because you want them to, sometimes they just come back.

Current Mood: melancholy

11:57 am

Rules:
1) Copy this quote into your journal.
2) Bold any one you've done.
3) Italicize any one you've not done, but have been trained to do.

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." -Robert A. Heinlien 

Stolen blatently from N.

02:58 am - Enthusiasm vs. Pragmatism.

I haven't been posting much for a while, much to the relief of many but also, I must confess, to the distress of some who have reminded me of this fact. This update is directed towards them.

I have been focusing on getting myself and thereby my life into some kind of order. I had a number of plans and hopes lined up for this last spring derailed by unfortunate events but despite a bout with depression and self imposed illness I have been trying to get things back on track. The schedule is off but things are again moving along.

Much of my societal spouting has been replaced with involvement at a local level with a political activism organization (non-profit on both counts) and on a purely selfish level I am again going ahead with plans to return to school.

Yes, I hope to be a 40 year old freshman.

The extra time has had one unforeseen benefit in that I now know what I want to go to school for and where it will take me afterward. Not just learning for learning's sake, which is laudable but unprofitable, but learning to do something I will enjoy doing and getting paid for it someday. But wait, there's more! It's also something that will include my twenty-plus years of professional skill and talent as a benefit and not a waste. A chance to change and progress, not just start over... ah, what a revelation that was.

No, I haven't been talking about these things much because in the first case I wasn't sure at first about the organization, it's goals or the impact I could make and in the second because money and more importantly time is short right now and there is still a real chance I might not get it going as soon as I hope to. Getting all the school paperwork in order, hell, just remembering how the process works is a bit daunting right now, but if I can't pull it off for spring (I really should but I might do something stupid) I WILL be starting this summer.

So... if you don't hear much out of me here just wish me luck as hopefully I'll still be finally doing many of the things I've been wanting to do most of my life.

06:51 am - Thanksgiving thoughts

Life is the struggle of order versus chaos.

To be alive is the organized, coherent attempt to carry on the order, the law, that was brought into existence in the face of disorder, chaos and entropy. To paraphrase, to fly in the face of the night. To be alive is to stand up and tell the whole universe to go fuck itself, because , hey, I'm right here, and you haven't stopped me yet.

The very doom we live under, the denial we live with is the heart of the struggle. When the understanding of the fight is lost we cease to be alive. At that point we are just part of the machine, no longer striving but simply abiding, living on what was left to us by those who went before and hoped to leave us more than they had to begin with. If we lose that appreciation, that understanding of what we have been given, well... we are not alive.

12:32 am - How it all comes together.

Part of me thinks I should tuck this entire entry behind a cut tag but a louder part of me screams that that's part of the problem.

My urge to post a political rant has been tempered by a recent discussion about the US educational system, and I swear I'm going to demonstrate that some combination of the two is worthy of your consideration.

This recent discussion showed that a friend of mine and I, who come from very different family and educational backgrounds, agree that there is a fundamental flaw in the American approach to education and that it exists not at it's ability to convey knowledge but in it's inability to give it's students the keys to learning.

Philosophy, scientific method, logical argument and critical thinking are the keys I refer to. The US public school system does not and has not been able to imbue even a substantial percentage of it's graduates (much less, it's drop outs) with even a rudimentary understanding of these keys perhaps since it's inception and certainly for several generations.

I know that my very limited audience are primarily exceptions to that rule (or you wouldn't be my friends) but how many of you can say you understand each and all of those key elements and not just a rote understanding of the definitions of the terms? How many of you rediscovered some of them later in life, and how many of those only came to understand other ones because of their dedication to (aptitude for) one or two?

'The three "R"s' is as flawed as it's spelling. It's usefullness does not extend beyond the sixth grade. That's about the time the european and asian school systems that so routinely beat ours in standardized tests start teaching those basics of learning to their students while we focus on teaching our students to beat standardized tests through rote learning.

Abrupt summation:
Would US citizens be so susceptible to marketing and it's evil twin, political mechanization were the ability to assess facts and draw conclusions, analise those conclusions based on the quantity and quality of data collected, compare and contrast those conclusions rationally with those of others and finally reach a tentative judgment until further data can be found while reserving the option to reconsider our conclusions should new facts, opinions or theories arise?

Or do you think we would still just do or think what had been repeated the most often in our ears while accepting or rejecting what we heard based most on what fit best with what we'd liked to hear all along?

Reality is.

MB

04:29 am - Conservation of energy.

No, I don't mean that in a green sort of way I mean it in a basic science sort of way... or maybe both.

Here we are using energy stored for millions of years by biological systems through inefficient conversion and we still can't accept global warming as a realistic concept. Do just a little of the math (it's not that hard) and you get the idea. Energy, primarily from our sun, has bombarded this planet since it first formed and biological systems have been storing that energy almost since their inception on this planet. That's how life works.

Ever since man discovered fire we have been releasing and consuming more of this energy than the system we live in developed to accommodate. We don't 'produce' energy, we release it from storage. Burning wood, coal, or oil we are simply unlocking energy absorbed through solar radiation and stored by biological processes.

Our efficiency at releasing and using that energy isn't very good technologically with the best output being the generation of heat. That we can do pretty well and nearly all other attempts at using stored energy result in the waste energy being converted to heat. Meanwhile the system we live in (let's call it... ummm, 'Earth') has developed the way it has because of it's ability to resist heat loss and maintain relatively stable temperatures ie. that narrow zone where water is a liquid rather than a solid or a collection of gasses to be shed into space.

Those who can't conceive how small temperature changes globally can make a huge difference to our lives are as ignorant as those who can't conceive of evolution over millions of generations having drastic effects on life forms.

11:07 am - The Great Cat Experiment

As of today, everyone is loose in the house.

No one has had to bleed yet.

I haven't been the center of this much jealousy since I was twenty-two. Or everyone is just sucking up to the Big Dog.

They're still easier to deal with than people.

01:13 am - Whose day?

What do you do for father's day when your dad was (is) an asshole? How do you ignore all the reminders of all the uglieness, violence and pain during every commercial break and every set of billboards and all the rest of the marketing bombardment?

It can't be healthy to give in to the rage and call him up one more time (the first time in nearly twenty years) just to make sure he hears one more time before he dies (it can't be too much longer) that no matter who he may fool I know how selfish, vicious and evil he has been and hope when he does finally go that it's painfull and lonely.

Sounds awful, hunh? He deserves every bit of it and more.

If I have to listen to another commercial exhorting me to "Give Dad what he deserves for Fathers' Day" I just might.

No, probably not.

Current Mood: annoyed