let me just say one thing

famous S&M picture of nietzsche and friends. Need i say more?



a handy reference to some dictators. which is to say: what do you get when you combine a penis and a potato?




Evo Morales: what a hilarious person. he reminds me of my friend, who i lovingly call the "gay pimp clown." although in this case i would describe Evo more as a "pimp clown king." Same basic idea.




A giant fish, caught in the canal zone at some point. Can you believe such a fish exist/s/ed?


also, a thought - friendship: oh, it's good. amistad! what would i do without it. o friends of mine, i love you. you should know that. and enemies, i don't really have you. please know that too.

now back to the procrastination-ization (that being the circadian act of preparing to procrastinate, following through, and finishing triumphantly, then gearing up for another cycle of the same).

and here are some pictures, to whet your nonexistent appetites - because you're nonexistent readers, more like ghosts than anything, which gives me relative freedom and leads me to ask: didn't you think that John McCain sort of looked like casper the friendly ghost up there at the podium? Although his striped tie also made me hum that inane song about "the Candyman." moreover, it's amazing how the internet lends itself to found art objects. okay, i gotta go. more later, when the brain's not so fried. muak!

unheard-of thing

shuttling information from one blog to the other, that is. i'm not yet ready to make my private, off-limits "dark" blog into a freedom-for-all, seeing-the-light-of-day entity, but there are good things in it. so i'm reproducing one of the early-july posts below for people to see, like a sort of bush administration redaction sort of thing. don't FOIA my ass, people! please! i just need to finish grad school, that's all.

July post: context - just arrived in panama.

well, hello again - up until this very minute, i didn't think i'd be able to get my fingers to the keys and into blogging mode, but here they are. after some chicago nights that truly defied the meaning of crepuscular, i am here in a sweltering, grey land, funded by a grant to interview disparate individuals about their activities. having slept for about 24 hours straight (i was completely exhausted from the final days of gin and glory), i feel grounded, like this might be the right idea after all. i've found an apartment with a charming group, an older couple and their daughter, whose name is, eerily, salome, and her daughter, 'la paula.' i keep expecting salome to do the dance of the seven veils around my decapitated torso, and she definitely has a somewhat surly, salome-ish air. the father is even weirder - he's italian but speaks english with a british accent and announces his vocation as 'sailor' - and he was wearing wraparound sunglasses as he embraced me and ushered me into the place. but they seem very nice and kissed me a lot. humans are drawn to making narratives, and i'd say that this one has ended happily enough. i've been reading about the brain, having been experimenting with some neurochemical 'dope' which i'm now happy to say is no longer part of my retinue, doctors be damned. reading about consciousness makes me feel slimy and uncomfortable, like i'm sitting on my brain, squashing it flat and feeling the jellyish matter push up against my inner thighs. you know? or maybe you don't. anyhow, so what have i learned about the brain? i've learned that the two cortices (or hemispheres, rather) are only connected by the corpus callosum and are actually very different. the right one's the one behind which we should rally. the left one is the petty micromanager, or the neurotic capitalist. the right one's all sentimentality, clotted with that oceanic feeling that freud liked so much. i also learned that music is often beneficial for the brain and can be good therapy for patients with a variety of maladies, including alzheimer's and autism. i learned that people often remember music over and above anything else, even when they have amnesia. hm, what else? there was more, but i think i left it in slot 22B of a boeing airbus. it was enough to consider the grandiosity, and the specificity, of the brain. ironically, between bouts of brain-adoration, i was dropping off to sleep like one drugged. and the druggedness lasted quite a while, leading me to consider myself as a crashed computer. but now i'm back up and running, feeling the life-force trickle back into my pores and getting ready (really ready this time) for the research.

and i'm getting ready for living in panama, which is looking basically the same but perhaps a bit cleaner and more closely surveilled than before. every place i've been has a guard with a giant machine gun (or perhaps an uzi - one of those large rectangular sling-y things) and a beret, scowling at la gente. i have to figure out why, as i don't recall this sort of armed presence last year. maybe because it's the fourth of july, and the country is preparing for a counterinvasion? that was a joke. also, the gentrification has been progressing apace, with monstrous condos going up, gay consumerism sprouting, and raw sewage spilling out into the streets because the infrastructure's overtaxed. there's a specialty cheese store here now, along with air-conditioned enclaves for the wealthy and flaxen-haired. i've been reading up on the news of late, and apparently it's election time, with balbina something-or-other, this frosted valkyrie, in the lead by a few points, her looks carrying her past the other contenders, who comprise a variety of buffoonish-looking men, one who's clearly wearing pink lipstick in his campaign ads. carnivalesque. i'm reminded of the debonair e. and his thoughts about land and water rights in mexico - here, the leftists are boycotting the elections and demanding similar reforms, but they're being shut out, for all practical purposes. panama is a mercenary, extremely neoliberal place. anyhow, today while walking i saw a bird hopping in a circle of barbed wire, unable to extricate itself; this same coil of wire was hidden in a cloud of luscious purple flowers and leafy green protuberances. maybe that's why the bird hopped in. allegory?

using my blog as a platform for the accomplishments of others

it's a good thing, no? here's something amazing and entirely obfuscating that my close friend Stevie is doing. Gobama, Go Stevie! So awesome. Close to obfuscated greatness.

can i just say

that i am in an extremely good mood right now and have been these past few months, after what was probably the worst spring of my young and tender girlhood. some kind of euphoria has been coursing through my body and making me hear major flights of trumpets, trombones, and other brass-section standards; it's like some sort of heavenly choir is always starting up just as i board my bike and wend my way to school. also, the smell of some kind of barely perceptible yet sweet and potent ester keeps wafting through the air, some kind of mango-human spit combination that's really excellent.

there's no explanation at all for this intense good mood - in fact, all current events and demographics would tend far to the opposite - but i'm glad that it's here, and i hope that it doesn't distract me too much from the work that i have to do. somehow, i feel very healthy and alive at this moment in time. everything's been light green and good-tasting, and i've been waking up full of a sense of my own and others' potential. i suspect a cocktail of hormones, libido, delayed-response functions, or vitamin A. now to harness this life-force for good...

midwestern feelings

this is nice.

a question about monies

hello elephantine masses, a question for you. so, the other day seemingly all the pillars of pecuniary stability crashed to the ground and wept and pissed their pants, asking for a government buy-out, but the government slapped their collective hands and said something to the effect of, "clean up your own mess." i should note that the government's earlier bailout of fannie may/freddie mac was a spectacular piece of quasi-populist, New Deal-era legislation - nationalizing these huge lending agencies! ha! and we thought that cuba and venezuela were communist! it's awesome. i wish we would nationalize more things, but then we'd also need competent people (i.e., not bush's drinking buddies from Tejas) to run them. hm.

anyhow, a debacle. that's what it appears to be. but at the same time, i look out my window, and all seems pretty comfortable and bright- there's a sort of celestial light pouring in, that early-morning light that's sort of hard and cold in a way, because it's so cleanly bright - and i don't feel like i've been shaken to my foundations. all of this is a leadup to say: will this financial crisis seriously disrupt the class hierarchy in the US? will it plunge the middle classes into poverty and those with low income into dire poverty? i'm guessing that it will due to sheer layoffs. but what of the rich? will their positions be disrupted? how are we going to materially gauge the effects of the crisis? breadlines, ketchup soup, spike in alcoholism and spousal abuse, packed movie-houses? i guess i want to crystallize the material effects of capitalism's creative destruction in order to have some vignettes at hand to show how the bankruptcy of banks, on the one hand, can lead to or interact with more expensive rice and beans in the supermarkets, with rising unemployment, unaffordable rents, and all of the other components that are accompanying this crisis. in some ways, i feel like it's a crisis collage, bringing in seemingly unrelated elements that somehow jive together when juxtaposed. can someone with an economics background explain to me how differently-positioned sectors of the economy will feel and are feeling this? i know that the poor will be hardest hit, and in the wake of the lovingly dismantled social service structure, they have basically no safety net. my only touchpoint is the GD (Great Depression), which was encapsulated in photographs and a broadbased cultural movement funded by the government, whose central purpose was to document the effects of uneven development and offer succour. amazing time that was - i wish that we could do the same thing again. art really proved its material worth. this time, there will likely be no original plays or oral-history gathering missions...we're at war, people.

i have more to say about the uproar over financial failure, but i have to work now. all i'd like to say in conclusion is that maybe the large hadron collider unleashed a financial black hole that is sucking in lehman brothers and merrill lynch and bear stearns and all those bignames/bignoses into subterranean french countryside. i also want to point out that the LHC's provenance underground in france would fit very well with Umberto Eco's writings on the Templars, jeje. furthermore, i want to relate a story told to me by some orthodox jewish girls, aged 9 and 11, respectively: the father of one of the girls was visiting the US mint as a child, and at the end of the tour, he asked,"do we get free samples?" gevalt. gestalt!

encounters in transit: three vignettes

1) I was sitting in a Burger King in Rio Abajo, a historically West Indian neighborhood in Panama City. I had been asked to wait there to meet some of the people from SAMAAP for the final activity of the "Conozca su canal" week, which was a visit to a sick elderly woman in a nursing home. I arrived late, but everyone else was later, so I wandered around a bit in the pouring rain, bought some vegetables and coconut from the fruit-market outside, and sat down in the joint to wait and outline an article that i was writing.

i ended up waiting for about three hours in the burger king, sitting at the sticky ketchup-covered table and scribbling notes on the only piece of paper i'd brought with me. throughout, i was observing the people at the "restaurant" - for example, spread out over two tables next to me were three middle-aged west indian panamanian men, clearly former or current employees of the Panama Canal. they were dressed nicely and had copious gold jewelry, and they spoke Bajan english. clearly identified. two were sitting together, and one of the two - this very attractive, slim man with longish hair - got in an argument with what seemed to be a complete stranger, the third west indian panamanian man, seated next to but not with him and his companion. the fight was about Iriving Saladino, the long-jump champion (and "Colon boy," as people liked to say, trumpeting his humble roots). one of the men swore that Saladino was afro-antillean, whereas the other insisted that he was afro-colonial, as he spoke no english and came from the Atlantic side. this argument grew larger and more elaborate, and the two men ended up at the same table, bickering for about as long as i sat in my chilly plastic booth, while the third man jumped ship, seemingly bored. the attractive man was all for the afro-antillean side, and he traced several polemics of differing persuasiveness - including some sort of culturally chauvinist argument about the afro-coloniales and their violent, crime-driven ways. the other man was quieter but intransigent, not giving way. anyhow, it was kind of fascinating to see that debate playing out before my eyes, and at burger king, no less.

i should mention that i hadn't been in a burger king in quite some time, if ever. i think that my paternal grandfather, who is now dead, used to take me there to eat this incredibly disgusting sandwich consisting of beef smeared with cheese, mayonnaise, grilled onions, and generally well-larded grease-fat substance. espantoso! it was so decadent that it wasn't even good - i remember wanting to throw up in the car on the way home. ick.

and i couldn't believe how packed the place was, considering that this westernized fast food is damn expensive. i don't understand how panamanians survive: food is extremely pricey, and salaries are miserably low. it may be the multigenerational living situation thing, but i simply don't understand how the middle-class of panama can afford to buy 6.00 burger-fries-drink combinations, which incorporate potatoes imported from idaho and beef from canada...so strange, globalization. and other clichés.

anyhow, while i was in the burger king, this old white man approached me. he looked like a wizened skull-face, kind of like larry david - his hair was shorn very short around his crown, and he was thin and wrinkly and pasty, with a hawkish nose and a sort of sickly stoop. he wore semi-sporty "leisure clothes," a sure sign of extranjero-idad. he had sort of come up to me before at the fruit market - as he recognized that i was a foreigner, his eyes flashed and he said something to the effect of, "do you know if this guy sells bebidas? mango? mango?" and i said, "no, it's only shredded coconut here, i think you're talking about the batidos, they're over there, i believe." his sports-clothes and sort of panicked inquiry annoyed me, but i tried not to get all liberal-fascist on him. but i knew that he wanted to linger and talk, and later he came into the burger king, walking in a meaningful way toward me. he sat down and said, "want some company for five minutes?" and before i could respond, we launched into a conversation that was weird and at the same time infinitely typical. he had moved to panama after being shown an ad for real estate, and he felt like it was fort lauderdale ("have you ever been to fort lauderdale?" i nodded yes, noticing his hairy chest and gold necklace. he had an old jewish man's raspy brooklynite-accented voice). he hated the architecture - "panama" he said, adopting a regal, halting tone, "is an ugly, ugly place" - but loved the people. it's amazing to me that foreigners with no understanding of spanish or anything else done or said in panama always "love the people." i guess they see that this is a very service-sector place, with no industry to speak of, but what i think is particularly interesting and even funny and cool is the gentle, almost viscous surliness and obstinacy - or just quiet peruke, rebellion through excessively slow movements - evinced by service-sector drones in this (or, i should say, that, since i'm back in chicago) place.

this reminds me, i want to talk about chicago at some point very very soon. i'm aching to write about chicago and the painfulness of being here, among spiking homelessness and poverty and despair and weary black and brown and smug white fat faces. not to generalize, but i've been taking the train and noticing these things. back to the land of the 'one-drop rule.' maybe it's the rain, but i'm filled with tristeza for this place, and i need to do something about it during my brief time here, before the research stint (where i also hope to act upon my sadness about the same issues - poverty, homelessness, despair - as they are magnified in the monumental white, bleached-bones ribcage and empty skull (death's head) of america).

but back to burger king. so i saw a bevy of young, healthy, greased-head panamanians eating expensive imported precooked beef patties, and then this old white man, and the west indians. the guy and i continued talking - he seemed like a thirsty person lapping up my english words, like someone who really needed to converse at that moment- and i felt a weird sort of pity-contempt mixture for him, though i try very hard not to feel contempt for others (because that is one emotion that is far too easy to throw around, like some sort of nuclear weapon. i try not to engage in arms races of contempt or arrogance. sometimes it's an uphill battle). but then he seemed to be satiated, having sucked my conversation dry with his invisible proboscis, and he scuttled off into his yellow all-terrain four-wheel drive, which he had parked, like a protuberant bumblebee, in the middle of the market.

so that's something of vignette 1.

2) the salsero and his pregnant wife. this happened to me one night down in the casco viejo, that beautiful crumbling place that gets transformed by steam and darkness into some sort of fantasy-scape, a james bond backdrop. there are two major hanging-out venues in the casco viejo - the aforementioned la casona, which is a hip-hipster-queer-rasta-etc gallery space in an old bank, and the 'baños públicos,' a rock joint that used to be the public baths for the nuns who lived in the monastery (or nunnery?) that was the old casona. this little club is free and basically outdoors, made up partly of tarps, partly of old stones (the baths), and partly with antiquated, mildewy velour couches and bookshelves for lounging. the sound equipment is minimal - an amp and a microphone stand - but there are always two musicians playing there: a skinny, ratlike guitarist who wears a beret, and a drunken old drummer with a dippy upturned montuno, the típico hat. anyhow, i was hanging out there with the lumpen-headed camel man (old chilean lecher), his 'spirit daughter,' otherwise known as my witchy roommate Salomé, and a weird Colombian friend who would later go apeshit and punch one of my other roommates in the face (long story). The crazy Colombian was recently getting over a breakup, and more recently reeling from a comment that her boyfriend made about her 'chortIZos' (see previous blogpost on jerga), and she wanted to sing melancholy eagles covers. she dragged me up to sing 'hotel california,' which i've heard maybe once in my life, and was very disappointed when i didn't know the words. when it looked like we were basically washed up, this couple appeared - a guy wearing a red t-shirt and pleated khakis hiked up to his waist, with a very angular panamanian haircut, and his wife, who had on her own latina uniform, with rhinestone sneakers and hair gelled to her forehead and a sort of placid half-smile on her somewhat indígena face. they were gorgeous, but in a slim and unassuming way. when they entered, the chilean lech got excited and motioned at the guy; apparently, he was one of the best amateur salseros (salsa singers) in these parts, and he'd often come here to croon to his wife. immediately, the guy runs up onto the stage and grabs the microphone, and he begins to sing - at first well-known standards, like "guantanamera" and "la bamba," but then increasingly esoteric songs, and finally just improvisational riffs. salsa sort of goes like this: there's a singer and a guitarist - perhaps the same person, not sure - and a drummer, at the very least. the singer does a lot of repeating, both of refrains and melodies, and sometimes keeps stringing along the same tune to different rhymed verses, until he decides to break into a refrain. i found the rhymed verses very suspenseful, because there was no telling how long this guy could continue to invent them, and he was extremely physically compelling: he had this huge grin with long white teeth, black eyes, something sharp and clear and hyper-animated about him. he looked almost like a cartoon, with large, bright swatches of color. the red background of the baños públicos, the red shirt of the man, and his clean khakis gave the whole place a surreal aura, such that i could not turn away from his jumpy, smiling figure, as he kept riffing verses until finally relaxing back into the refrain. the guitarist seemed to enjoy following along and taking his cues from this guy, and their faces got very close, but it was a lateral closeness, and neither seemed to notice it - a sort of clustering around the microphone. although the salsero's eyes looked off too the side, it was clear that he was singing only to his heavily pregnant wife, who sat there beaming and squatting a bit under the weight. the whole scene was riveting and intensely charming. i think i sat and watched the guy perform, rapt, for an hour. i just couldn't turn away. the music was measured but suffused with something of hope or optimism, some extremely evocative and full sound, and hearing it gave me this feeling of a sort of contentment without satisfaction. this is not, i should note, a scientific or technical description of what salsa is or does; this is like melville's writings on whales in moby-dick - somewhat pseudo-science-y, somewhat fantastic lore. i wish i had written about this when i saw the performance, when it was still fresh, but memory is seeming to serve. one song in particular was about this guy who couldn't stand his wife (all irony with this smiling salsero), and every verse ended on a somewhat minor key, and these continued for a long while before the upswell into the refrain. while we all clapped and jumped around like ebullient animals, the wife sat still and silent, staring forward and up at her husband. eventually the guitarist ran out of steam and the drummer started rolling around on the floor (it was our fault - we had given him some of our beers), but the man looked like he could've kept at it for a while. i was prompted to ask him if he was a professional musician, and he laughed and said that he worked construction.

3) this encounter is a bit silly, and it happened on a plane - specifically on the plane from panama to dallas/fort worth, where i had a layover and just enough time to bemoan the republican trickery while standing between texas-sized jellybeans and 'guns and ammo' magazines, not to mention obama-dissing tell-alls, at the airport newsstand. blah! anyhow, so in the morning i headed to the one restaurant in the airport, which was crammed with sunburnt dutch tourists and sweaty hairy businessmen. notably, these two cool-looking black guys were sitting in the corner, and i recall thinking, "they look cool, oh, they're probably too cool for me." i was still heavily into the whole talk-to-random-strangers thing, which happens a lot in latin america, and which i like to do in general. i think that this doesn't happen enough in the USA - here, we deny our genitality and other freudian detritus, cloaking ourselves with the aerospatial equivalent of styrofoam packaging. a buffer. this kind of thing definitely does not exist to the same extent in Panama, and i much preferred the proxemics there. anyhow, but so i was later sitting on the plane, and it turned out that i was sitting next to those guys. one of them was tall and skinny, with shoulder-length braids and baggy jeans, and the other was older, wearing a sort of trucker's cap. the tall, skinny one was reading from what looked to be a painstakingly handwritten list of spanish/english translations, all of which seemed to deal with sexual matters (the list read: YOU HAVE NICE HAIR/ I LIKE YOUR BODY/ LET'S GO TO THE BEACH/ HOW MUCH DOES IT COST/ DO YOU WANT TO GO TO A RESTAURANT WITH ME? and phrases of that sort). which wasn't strange, considering that prostitution is legal in panama. anyhow, before i could talk to them, i fell into this coma-like swoon, but after a while i woke up and we started chatting. at some point the younger man and i got into this very intense conversation; he told me that he was a nutritionist and only ate foods prepared on the george foreman grill, and he opened up his carry-on bag and showed me said grill, which he had apparently carried with him at all times during his one-week stay in panama. at one point, my glasses fell off my face, and when i went to put them on again, he said, "no - stop - when your glasses fell off, you looked like this famous, beautiful actress." unfortunately, he couldn't remember the actress's name, and so the pickup line flopped, and i felt suddenly plunged into this hilarity.

anyhow, he gave me his card, which reads:

End Result
Athletic Nutritionist Fitness Trainer
Ron James
ronromeoj@aol.com

The main reason which prevent people from getting fit is lack of being discipline. Are you happy looking in the mirror? Are You?

we began talking about obama, and he told me that he'd recently chewed out his african-american friend for having voted for bush in the past, saying, "what did the republicans ever do for us?" although he was sort of sleazy, he had something charismatic about him, and i told him all about my recent love issues, and he kept asking me seemingly unrelated questions. here's a reconstituted sample of what i remember our conversation being like:

RJ: Let me ask you a question.

Me: Yes?

RJ: What's your favorite movie.

Me: Uhh...don't have one. I uhhh don't really watch movies.

RJ: You don't????

Me: Um, no.

RJ: Okay. Let me ask you a question. What's your zodiac sign?

Me: Capricorn.

RJ: Well, that says it all! You're stubborn, girl! Stubborn! You have to compromise.

Me: Yes, I know that now. I made some mistakes...

RJ: No, no, no. Listen. What time is it.

Me: Um, about 5 after 3?

RJ: Listen: you'll never see 5 after 3 on September the 8th again. You have to enjoy life!

Me: Yeah, I am enjoying life...

RJ: Let me ask you a question. What is the first thing you do when you get out of bed in the morning.

Me: Um, make coffee?

RJ: See, that means you're responsible. You're a busy little lady, and you need someone who'll resPECT that.

Me: Uh-huh, I see.

So it continued on in this vein. We touched upon Bobby Brown's ill-fated marriage to Whitney Houston (RJ was displeased that she was "seduced by that bad-boy image"), the perils of drug-use among the celebrity caste, halle berry and her sex-addicted husband, the democratic primaries (RJ wanted Obama to name Hillary as VP), and a variety of other topics. and this brings me to the previous post, in which i stood inside the voyeuristic x-ray box, latest diagnostic sadism-masturbation tool of airport security, and RJ laughed at me, and i laughed too hard back, and they had to re-take the scan of my calzones. jajaja.

and I'd like you to know

that at the airport in Dallas/Fort Worth, I got full body-scanned in a machine exactly like that pictured above. It was unbelievably stupid, a complete waste of time and money, and I laughed so hard that the airport security official had to do a re-take. In my defense, the nutritionist that I'd met on the plane, Ron James, was making me laugh by pointing at me through the glass. Also, the lady doing the scan giggled a little. Ridiculous technological excess!

Republican Jews: damned depressing. and other stories.

So, i know i've been lax as all get out lately, o blog. but sometimes when the brain gets too full of reportage, it clogs, and then said reportage congeals like hardened fecal matter. i know that the scatophiles among you will like that statement. so i have fecal impaction of the mind. so be it.

anyhow, what's important is that i still have my dignity, and lately i'm in a somewhat buoyant mood, all things considered. not like the euphoria of being in Panamá, but still - knowing that i could still experience euphoria cheered me up a hell of a lot. for if i lost my cheer, then what was i? the cheer, it turned out, was self-propelled, enriched by the very fact and existence of the cheer itself, the Ding an Sich. while this may seem tautological, somehow it worked well for me. having confidence in my ability to be happy has made me happy. so i'm going to continue to run that motor, on fumes, as it were.

okay, so yeah, a lot of things happened in old panama. maybe i'll list them really fast at some point so as to leave a mental record, much in the same way that a worm leaves processed soil in smooth swirls as it feeds and shits and continues on its way. not sure why i'm so shit-fixated right now. i'm going to put on my glasses and get a little clarity. i reckon i'll spend a bit more time listing these events as they come to me, which is to say not necessarily in order. as is my wont.

tonight it's quiet and the streets are bare, slick and clean. everything is sparse here in the old (new) USA; i keep expecting indigenous women to jam their colorfully-clad bodies against me while we inhale dust until our snot turns black. hm. also, my skin and hair are freaking out, dry and oily and stringy all at the same time and generally in some sort of shock. i feel like i've been dipped in tar, and my brain is generally empty. trying to get back some power. hm.

before going into detail, i must say that lately i've had some extremely depressing and enraging encounters with Republican Jews, who i can stand even less than Republican non-Jews, for whatever reason. When in Panama, I went out to dinner and Shabbat with these Jews who had formerly taken me in and shown me around, even helping me acquire a yellow fever vaccination at a moment's notice, and then they turned out to be Republicans - Bush-voting, McCain-voting, Palin-adoring Repubs. (They were largely ex-pats living in Panama, probably for shady rich-person reasons.) Anyhow, I fell right into that trap when I made a gaffe about Sarah Palin and her vapid beaver-looking overbite and anti-feminist ways. In a moment, everything changed, and I was completely alienated. I almost choked on my food at that minute; I wanted to vomit. Needless to say, I probably will not be hanging out with them in the future. Weird that our politics would become so divisive, but this is contentious shit.

Then yesterday I had an equally unpleasant encounter with a terrible Republican Jew. Not only was he mean, old, ugly, and unwell, but he was entranced by Palin's naivete and simplistically angered by Obama's middle names. I just don't understand how anyone could be voting Republican after having lived in this country for the last decade or so. Everything has been gutted, impaled, stripped, embezzled, scrapped, and looted. Everything. And it's just going to get worse. I'd say that in some areas - like the environment, or the Middle East - the damage that the US under Bush has created has far exceeded our ability to reverse it at this point, but we need to apply some salve, some balm. What I really, really want is for there to be some kind of violent outcry from the left - especially if McCain wins. Not an assassination, but something other than docility and inward-turning. We have to be creative and brave, to follow the example of Celia Hart. Who i was lucky enough to see speak in Panama shortly before her death in a car crash. Amazing woman, loud and robust gesticulations. That'll all be in an upcoming blog post.

i know that this is painting in broad brushstrokes, but honestly, this campaign is seriously getting me down. Obama is like "a giant being trampled to death by geese" - Kierkegaard had it right when he discussed the gentle and banal ways in which modernity kills the spirit. i must say that today i was walking around in the rain, thinking about global warming and the energy crisis, the housing market and the economic crisis, the war and the global crisis, and feeling strongly that THIS IS NOT POSTMODERNITY. the postmodern - postmodernism, that is- is just an excuse, people, or a mirage, meant to make us feel the passage of time. people will eventually likely decide that the invention of postmodernity was a surrealist prank. blah. the goal is NOT to get more theoretical, but rather to be more concrete, to understand better the material conditions that give us systems that then collapse in on themselves and maroon people in hurricane-stricken lands, without proper healthcare, without government-provided safety measures, homeless, addicted to drugs, penalized, criminalized, forced out, ignored. i'm so irate about Republicans. Because if i want to get an abortion or access birth control, take a bus or a train, have services like public water and streetlights, be helped by a policeman or a fireman, have a fair trial, not be tortured, and carefully vet all possible preconditions/intelligence/justifications before launching into war with Iran, Russia, or Pakistan, well, i'm going to be sorely disappointed by the Republicans. i think it's basically a known fact that many of the constituencies voting for the Repubs will not be helped by their victory and will likely be hurt by the trickle-down economic measures and tax cuts for the very rich and all that other bullshit. Also, let me say: the weather sucks. It's because of global warming, in part, and under a Republian regime, our relentless destruction of the environment will worsen, bringing further catastrophes to Texas and other areas that are vulnerable even under relatively 'normal' weather conditions. The world created by the Republicans, the future that they would shape for Americans, is noxious. Oil-drilling, gun-shooting, fat, unhealthy, fiscally irresponsible, home-owning, suburb-living, car-driving. Blech. It's as if we're all fish swimming in a tank, and if the Republicans were to run the tank, we'd all slowly asphyxiate on the algae-slime that covers the walls of the tank, because the government would no longer pay to have periodic tank-cleanings; rather, we'd each have to hire a private contractor to do that, and the contractor would take our money and do shoddy work, cleaning maybe 50% of the slime, leaving us drowning in our own shit and waste. Then catfish like Karl Rove would come and slurp up the slime from the bottom, getting fat on the immiseration of thousands, as bloated fish corpses floated to the surface, green slime leaching from their bulging eyes and forced-open maws...ugh. apocalypse! this makes me want to eat some fish, i admit.

I wish that Europeans got to vote in US elections. Nonsensical as it is, this makes a kind of sense, as US election outcomes are an issue of global concern. In the future, once our economic clout dissolves like melting ice, there will be no one following the US into its rogue wars, not even Poland.

History brings perspective. I was perusing Harper's (excellent toilet-reading, that is), and the contributors were holding forth with their typical rhetorically-poor vituperative haranguing against Bush and everyone else. What annoys me about this is that it's stuff that we already know; I doubt that many right-wingers read Harper's. It's a self-selecting group and therefore does not need such redundancy. Anyhow, I've also been reading Harper's from 1906 lately, as I write this paper on the aesthetics and architecture of US empire in the Canal Zone, and I notice that there's the same sort of commentary, the same tone, and really amazing luminaries doing the commenting (WD Howells dominated the editorial board of Harper's during this era, it seems. and he was an excellent guy, if not the most interesting author of fiction). I'm so glad that we have archives to house our old newspapers and journals; it's comforting to dip into these things that are older than I am and see the same sort of haranguing critiques going on. Perhaps a false comfort.

Ideally, some mainstream media outlet like Newsweek would sneak in pro-Democrat content like spinach into cupcakes, so that the picky eaters (i.e., Republican voters easily wowed by the sugary symbolism of proudly waving flags and Muslim middle names) wouldn't notice that they were imperceptibly acquiring their vitamin A.

Which makes me wonder about swing voters: who are they? Are these the same people who often compose juries? What makes them undecided? Are they swing voters because they're wiser than us, or more naive? Fascinating and elusive creatures, these. The rest of the population seems basically neatly divided into their respective grandiose gestures. Nuances are not to be had; differences are stressed rather than similarities. Is this because the candidates are campaigning against each other, or is it that they really are completely different, like carrots/chocolate or black/white (pardon that last binary)?

i know that this is ideological, but these are ideological times. apathy, passivity, and hard-headed individualism have got us nowhere, people. it's time to take extreme positions and utter words that would formerly have struck us as the sayings of a demagogue. when and where exactly will this much-discussed pendulum-swing come to bring people back into the spirit of taking to the streets in favor of the maintenance and preservation of democratic goals and institutions? one thing that i'm not saying here is that the US is inherently bad; in fact, there are things that i love deeply and painfully about this country, and that's why i'm feeling so worried that the Republicans will essentially piss on the constitution and reaffirm our status as the enemy of all nations, the one to be feared. okay. love is painful, i know. unnnnnnnnnnnnggggggggggggghuuuuuuuuuuuuuhmm. primal jelly welling up/exploding out of pores...