i got a nasty sunburn in colorado when i was riding around on my kayak. my legs were really red. the next day i went out again, because chris (who never posts because he’s a douche) was visiting from denver. i so paranoidally sprayed sunscreen on my charred legs that it eventually lacquered them in a clear coating. i didn’t get burned, though it was completely disgusting.

the best, best best part of getting a sunburn is, of course, getting to peel the skin off later. it’s like a joyous romp to me. i giggle with glee at the thought of getting a long, sheer section of skin peeling off. it’s not a sexual fetish, not yet anyway…

being fairskinned, i feel cautious about getting burned, so when i get a real good peel working it’s like a special treat from the melanoma bunny.

I know it’s just one staffer for one insane idiot neo-con, but it’s still telling. Bear in mind that this is in reaction to ONE op-ed in ONE newspaper.

“Connecticut should have its statehood taken away from it. The foolishness of its pampered residents should be demonstrated to others by a government program to bulldoze the entire state, salt the land and construct a windfarm to supply NYC with electricity. And its residents should be relocated to Guantanamo Bay where they can take a number behind the 3 who hung themselves this weekend, since they seem so intent on suicide.”
— Daniel Kish, a senior adviser to Pombo, in an email

we live in a time where a significant chunk of the country supports a party that believes it’s okay to kill and imprison other Americans if they disagree with a political standpoint you have. That is alarming as fuck. some people call it a “rise in eliminationist rhetoric”. i call it “buy a fucking gun and keep your name and address secret”. Because, although they’re right now just a bunch of windbag assholes, they’re setting the groundwork for the even bigger psychos who will come after them. And since their predecessors set the bar for acceptable rhetoric so low, they will infer that the bar for acceptable actions is equally low. And then horrible tihngs happen.

I have a counter-proposal to Mr. Kish. I posit he should defend his call to imprison Americans and destroy their belongings because of a disagreement over a miniscule amount of oil (less than a week’s supply) that his boss’s wealthiest contributors are likely to squeeze a couple extra dimes out of. I say to Mr. Kish: You, by this email, have qualified as a grade-A fucking psycho dickbag, and should be locked up in a nice, clean mental facility and routinely cavity-searched. That’s a little nicer than your desires for the people of Connecticut isn’t it? Pudding twice a day, i bet.

hey! you’re doing the same thing! you may holler at the screen, slapping your knee in outrage, perhaps gripping the drapes. Sure. But look closely at the context. Mr. Douchebag is advocating imprisonment and impoverishment for millions because he doesn’t like something they said. I’m advcocating a nice “vacation” (perhaps some ECT) for his call to destroy a US state. I know he’s engaged in rhetoric, assholes. So am i. but he’s help pushing norms to gross places, as i explained above. so fuck him. Fuck him in the ass with a big rubber dick. than break it off inside and beat him with what’s left, and ditch his still quivering shitpile of a body in a filthy men’s room in some run-down ghetto his fucking party makes bigger and smellier and more hopeless.

just kidding.

you ever wondered about the pro-life movement, and the motivations of its intellectual masters, read this post by Jill guest-bloggin at Rude Pundit. Whatever their motivations may be, however honorable or hopeful, they do nothing but provide cover for a Nazi-esque program to control women, wombs, and reproduction in service of a vile agenda. PERIOD. There is no “life” in “pro-life”, only control. the goal is to gain control of women’s ability to dictate their reproductive lives, and it’s revealed in deed after deed. don’t listen to their profoundly dishonest rhetoric. look at their deeds. the truth will be evident, and it is as fucking awful as you could imagine.

if i was John Conyers, I’d stay away from airplanes for a while. nosy Democrats have a way of dying in plane crashes.

i found this page on snowsurfer, which i hadn’t been to in years, and it was the first of what appeared to be many “Link-fest Friday” pages. Of all 13 links on there, mine is the only one still active. I don’t know what that says about me, but I’ve been doing this for a long time.

i give israel the right to defend itself…but is this the way to do it?

“They wrote the names of the dead children on their plastic shrouds. ‘Mehdi Hashem, aged seven Qana’ was written in felt pen on the bag in which the little boy’s body lay. ‘Hussein al-Mohamed, aged 12 Qana’, ‘Abbas al-Shalhoub, aged one Qana.’ And when the Lebanese soldier went to pick up Abbas’s little body, it bounced on his shoulder as the boy might have done on his father’s shoulder on Saturday. In all, there were 56 corpses brought to the Tyre government hospital and other surgeries, and 34 of them were children. When they ran out of plastic bags, they wrapped the small corpses in carpets. Their hair was matted with dust, most had blood running from their noses.

Qana…

We’ve been killing little children in Iraq for 15 years. First our war, then our sanctions, designed and run by the US, and then another war and utterly disgraceful planning for the postwar period. Isreal had been killing Palestinians for as long or longer….but have returned to another pasttime, killing Lebanese children.

israel authorities claim that Hizbollah or however you spell it fighters are hiding amongst civilians. Okay. Who cares? how does that justify killing the civilians? it DOES NOT justify it. I’ll tell you one stone cold fact: if they were hiding amongst ISRAELI civilians, they would be safer than babes in the cradle. Since they’re allegedly hiding amongst Lebanese civilians, they’re meat, and everyone around them. It is disgusting. It’s also, without doubt, a war crime, though you will not hear about the proceedings, nor will you hear about the US vetoing any sanctions against Israel, which it doubtless will.

How is it okay to have 56 dead, 34 children? Why do we accept this. and it would stop too, if the United States turned off the money spigot. The people in power won’t do it, and it’s unlikely the people waiting in the wings will. we need to flush through the cycle rapidly to help create a just world, not just control petroleum. That’s what being a liberal is about: the creation of a moral, just nation. We have not done that. We’ve been carping and chirping about issues, and all the while these animals in charge get worse, with no one to stop them. What do you say to them? Stop, you’re being insane?

Aim yourself at a just world and other things fall into place.

I was reading this post. This song makes me cry.

Maria
RATM

she regenerates
And like tha sun disappears only to reappear
Maria she’s eternally here
Her time is near
Never conquered but here

Look at the last 100 years. Look at the death, war and blood spilled on foreign soil. Try and figure out what its for.

Its for the dollar. The Germans were vociferously supported by all American elites until they infringed on our trade practices. The Indonesians tried to keep US corps out. The Chinese wouldn’t let Brits sell opium in China. The American Indians wouldn’t let invaders take their homes. The response of the white man? Death. Endless death.

That’s capitalism.

Now it’s being reflected in the endless stream of the poor from south of us. They come some for work, some for free government services. All dreaming of living a better life. It’s a measure of the extremist right-wing efforts’ success at realigning people’s views that the poor white people (and trust me, you’re poor if you’re reading this, I don’t care what kind of car you drive) and some Latinos have voluntarily formed a buffer against this human tide. Some going so far as to plant their soft white asses on lawn chairs surrounded by media and Border Patrol agents on the border. Its a sorry sight.

One thing I don’t believe many people realize is that American policy in South and Central America, specifically state-sponsored terrorism campaigns and monetary/military/political support for extremist dictators, is what caused these countries to become so desperately poor. The campaigns in Nicauragua, if you extrapolate the casualty figures to a country the size of the US, would have been 2.25 million, more than the casualties the US suffered in all of its wars combined. And on a tiny country like Nicauragua… the impact was extreme. All because rich fuckers didn’t like poor, shit-upon people standing up and demanding a better life. The market rules over everyone but them you see.

So when you see the poor bastards dying in the desert, or swept away in ravines, or kicked by racist pricks, imagine Ron Reagan standing over them laughing, as his legacy and wishes are fulfilled. Imagine 50 years of US meddling and the death, torture and horror it’s lead to.

Look at yourself and ask, “Do I support this? Is this me?”.

Because unless you stand up and scream NO MORE, it is you.

i’m a happy little girl
i’m the happiest little girl in a white dress in the world, i’m skipping around throwing flowers out of a basket

i’ve written two songs in two days, after not having written anything in years. like 5 years…coincidence? who knows.
i’m feeling energized even though it’s over 100 here and we have no AC. apparently while i was gone the temps in Esco topped 115, setting a record. that’s Baker heat.
I came to a realization while travelling through Utah and Nevada…parts of this country are fucking UGLY. There are some bits that are ruggedly beautiful, but also freaking ugly. St. George Utah is one such place. it looks like someone just had a handful of model railroad shrubs and let an arthritic baby pile up sand and scatter junked cars and walmarts around.
there’s a stretch of road that is so abandoned it’s stupid, and as you’re going along this craptacular dirt fest, you crest a slight rise and see the biggest stinking warehouse ever. it’s got to be a mile long, and it’s got a big fat “Wal Mart” on the side of it, and hundreds of semis and trailers clustering like sperm on an egg around its many cargo doors.
there’s a spot right outside the virgin river gorge that is just awful. it’s a long, dirty sprawled out spray of litter and trailers and fireworks shops randomly interspersed with microwave and cell phone towers. we still got shit for service too. when you first emerge from the gorge and look to your left you’ll see a single, ramshackle joint leaning on the slop from the mountains, looking for all the world that it’s preparing to jump to its long-awaited death. i tried my damnedest to imagine people living in baker, or beaver, or salinas, or any of those shit hole towns along the I-15 or 70, and i couldn’t do it. even here, in san marcos, which is kind of an asshole of a town, or escondido, which is fucking unbelievably hot, i couldn’t figure it out. i’d rather deal with the traffic. i guess there’s a special kind of person that can live in that sort of desolation. The gorge itself is beautiful….everything around it looks like shit to me.

i just went and got a portable AC unit for the art room. our landlord, who is a gigantic douchebag of quivering proportions, has failed to fix our AC for at least 3 weeks. i suggested not paying any fuckin rent. people who don’t fix AC units during heatwaves deserve to have their eyeballs removed with salad tongs and fried up into tasty eye-fritters.
the thing is buzzing along happily behind me, and i can even now feel some cooling going on. i didn’t actually mind the heat so much, but my office mate gets kind of whiny. i think i’ll get some delicious lunch.

i’m in the wilderness literally and abstractly. i have trouble getting to sleep. there’s rodents in my 100-year-old cabin, and they can make weird noises. there was a bizarre moment last night where a coyote was yelping in a repetitive fashion, and an owl started hooting over it, and they combined to make a noise which i had no mental place for.
the air mattress i have is a cruel joke. it has about a 3 hour leak…long enough for me to fall asleep, after dozens of games of solitaire (oh, the symbolism is rich) but not long enough to get any kind of sleep. i wake up after a couple hours with my ass on the ground and my head jackknifed up on my pillow. its beautiful
i saw a female turkey with three babies. what’s a baby turkey called? i bet you’d all imagine that i’d know that already. stupid dial-up connection makes me dumber.
i’ve seen deer and hawks. the pond up the draw from the cabin has many little green and brown frogs in it. we hiked up there and brought some frog-catching gear, to show the kiddos. our planning was not perfect. the fishing net i brought had mesh too large for the small frogs. my brother and i tried to double team the frogs by using a badminton racquet to fling one gently up into the sky and catch it. tip: if someone tells you this plan, be the recquet man. the catcher gets faces full of mud, algae, and anything else in the pond immediately around the frog that gets flung. add to that the difficulty in judging the force necessary to gently fling a frog that weighs an ounce or two at most, and you have a recipe for everyone around you laughing their asses off. amazingly, we did manage to catch a number of frogs, though none on the fly. my brother nailed me right on the palm with a larger model, but here’s the final piece of the puzzle we hadn’t considered (among many): frogs are slippery as hell. chris fired this frog over (one about three times bigger than any of the others) and it slapped right into my palm. as i tried to close on it, it SHPLOOP fires out of my hand, pulls a couple open field juke moves on me and bang, is home free in the pond.
it’s really hard to not type “frongs” instead of frogs. i don’t know what a frong is. charles is a frong.