Later on Sunday April 20 2003

The hit counter keeps steadily ratcheting up, but Squawkbox won't let me have any chat threads, and nobody in the world except me bothers to comment on blog postings via e-mail . So I'm not feelin' the love, and I just hate that... because once the stuff you've posted falls off the front page, who's ever going to read it in an archive? Oh well...

STREAM OF UNCONSCIOUSNESS

This one is going to jump around a bit.

I hate doing the dishes. I just did them. I cooked lunch on an electric frying pan I took out on my patio and slapped my outdoor grille down on… it’s just so much easier than fucking around with charcoal briquettes and lighter fluid and all that shit. I ate lunch. I cursed the flies and nits and other shit that bugged me (heh) while I was cooking and eating lunch. Then I carried all that crap back inside (it took three trips, just as it had taken three trips to carry it outside, and I rarely do this, but sometimes you just want to eat outside, damn it). And then I did the, as the Brits might put it, washing up. And I hated it. I hated every second of the washing up.

I also hate doing laundry. And it’s interesting. (Well, only slightly, but you can just go read some other blog, or, you know, an actual book, if you’re really all that bored, friend.) Because like doing the dishes, while you’re doing it, and even after you finish doing it, you’re thinking ‘well, this isn’t that bad… I don’t know why I hate this so much, or why I put it off and let it pile up”. And I don’t. But I think about things like this, so… why is it that I… and everybody else I know… absolutely hates doing laundry and doing the dishes, even though, when we finally get off our asses and do the shit, it ain’t that bad?

The Late, Great Jeff Webb would opine that we are all children of entropy and it is profoundly against our nature to restore order to something once chaos has set in. Jeff lived by that code; I shared a dorm room with him for a year and then a house with him for another year and a half or thereabouts, and was often in and out of his domiciles for the remainder of his life, and that man simply had no slovenliness threshold. He was brilliant, a superior human being in many ways and a fine friend, but he simply never reached a point where, left to himself, he would ever just have enough and start cleaning up. However, while I’ve known other people like this from time to time, and my own slovenliness threshold is higher than many, still… there comes a point where I just have to tidy things up. So I suspect that Jeff’s theorem would be incorrect… most people I know will, eventually, start cleaning when things get too bad.

I tend to think the reason these tasks, and other basic household maintenance tasks, are so difficult for us to rouse ourselves to activity over, is that it simply feels futile. If we could do these things once and have them done with, even if that one time it was going to take us all goddam weekend to get them done properly, and then there would never be dirty dishes again, and our laundry would never need cleaning again, I suspect we’d all throw ourselves into it with a will. We would, for that one weekend, be a nation of assholes and elbows as we vigorously scrubbed and polished and cleaned and loaded and unloaded and poured in detergent and all that stuff. We would do it, and we would be more or less content and pleased to do it, because we would know that it would never ever have to be done, ever again.

But entropy always increases, and you kick yourself in the ass and make yourself go out to that overflowing cruddy sink stacked high with every dish you own and a few you don’t exactly know where the hell they came from (if you’re a bachelor, like me) and you know, you’re going to have to do this all over again in another week or so. And it just flails you. It makes you feel like, well, some sort of rube. What the hell are you doing this for? When do we get to live in those science fiction futures where people just BURN the goddam dishes when they’re done with them? Stuff them down an incinerator chute, like in Farmer In The Sky? And shouldn’t we really have clothes that don’t wear out and don’t need cleaning by now? I mean, seriously.

So, okay, I seem to be giving folks a break from all the astonishingly pretentious and pedantic and I’m fairly sure, really boring, observations I’ve been making lately. And honestly, it’s very odd. When I was keeping a private weblog, for just a few friends and family members, I didn’t feel obligated to run around the blogosphere looking for especially provocative posts to pull and respond to. I didn’t write about deep social issues. I occasionally did long rambling lectures on the dichotomy between what women say they want in a man and what they are actually willing (nay, True Believer, eager) to climb into the sack with, but hey, that was just The Fat Geek Who Never Gets Laid being bitter.

But, I lose my job and decide to do a public blog (why not, they can’t fire me again) and suddenly I’m all… I don’t know… Hey, I’m A Big Time Blogger And Brilliant Social Critic Just Like Everyone Else, Love Me. And it wasn’t a conscious decision or anything. It was just, in the knowledge that suddenly there were eyes upon me, well… I changed. Or my blog did.

Of course, basic quantum physics teaches us that the act of observation alters the events we are observing. I’m going to write very very differently for a wide open audience of potential strangers than I am for a very small handful of people I have sent my URL off to very specifically. I just find it a bit aggravating that suddenly, I’m writing all this pompous nonsense when I used to have a pretty good time just writing about the really stupid, trivial stuff that went into my day to day life.

Now I have to run out and get a Sunday paper. I’m kidding myself I’ll look through the classifieds for job openings. But I won’t. Or if I do, I won’t do anything about it. I’ll call my temp agencies every day and in another week or so if I don’t have anything, then I’ll start looking through the want ads and calling people to set up interviews and emailing or faxing out my resumes and all that really tedious shit. But today, I’ll probably just check out the news, curse because there won’t be anything about the Buccaneers in the sports pages (football season should last all goddam year long, goddam it), curse even more because there will be shit about the Tampa Bay Lightning and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and oh my GOD who CARES, they aren’t the Super Bowl Champions, they don’t even play a real sport , this is just a waste of column inches somebody could use to write about Jon Gruden or Brad Johnson or Joe Jurevicius… then read the funnies… and then come back to the computer and do something else.

And I’ll gently kid myself for a while on that subject, too. I have an article on Robert A. Heinlein’s influence on modern day superhero comics I’d like to finish. I made a monstrous effort to get most of my email caught up yesterday, but I still have three notes from Elayne Riggs to answer. (Email has been quiet today; normally that annoys me, but today I can use the break.) I’m in the middle of several stories I should probably finish and upload to the Website Which Must Not Be Named (yeah, those kind of stories… but I get paid for them… a very, very minor amount that comes in very, very infrequently… and at that, it’s an infinitude more than I seem to be able to get paid for anything else I write).

And instead of writing any of that, I’ll probably noodle around more on tomorrow’s blog entry, and websurf from blog to blog and hang some comments on the chat threads, and check to see if anyone has responded to the last comments I hung, and go confirm that yet another day has gone by with no response to my personal ad from anyone I would ever remotely want to date… and by then it should be time for The Simpsons.

And this is how the days of my life go swirling away.

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AND IN THE NEWS…

It seems a lot of no-fun Biblical scholars are arguing vehemently that Mary Magdalene wasn’t a prostitute.

I mean, jeez, guys. The Bible isn’t boring enough already?

Oh, and there was Bux news. My bad. I forgot it’s draft day.

In the Tampa & State section, which I usually read pretty much every word of, we have:

Columnist Mary Jo Melone, writing something called Fun new toy, or 4-wheeled window into the psyche?. If it’s about something automotive, I couldn’t care less. Then the eye goes over to Playwright finds the heritage is the thing. Leaving aside how horrible and forced that headline is, the photo of an earnest looking Hispanic fellow in a billed cap, the name in the caption (Nilo Cruz), combined with the words ‘playwright’ and ‘heritage’, send my eyes skittering onwards. Hastily. (The photo of Mary Jo Melone at the top of her column, looking as if she’s just about to reach out and choke the photographer until his or her beady little eyes pop out, also never helps me want to read her stuff. The fact that she writes like Irma Bombeck’s biggest and most humorless fan doesn’t help.) Moving my eyes further down, we come to Blue crabs melt away and we just keep on moving… crustaceans, ew. Over to the right again, we find Serving beyond their number, which, you know, has a few interesting words in it, so I read the subhead: The recruiters’ pitch – education, travel, benefits – is a powerful lure for black women, who flock to the military. Gah, I silently shriek, and hastily move on, and find, at the bottom of the page, Voter registration drive features a TV star. All right! Finally something my media crazed, pop culture obsessed, microscopic attention span can fasten on! So I read the sub-head, to discover Judge Greg Mathis attracts a crowd to the Neighborhood Empowerment Festival in East Ybor, and I realize I’ve been had again… Judge Greg Mathis isn’t a TV star, I expect at least Speed Racer. Or Bob Denver. Or something. And a Neighborhood Empowerment Festival? How is this titillating? How is this exciting? How is this emotionally provocative? How is this in any way about me? Jesus Christ. Who publishes this crap?

Turning the page, I discover… my, my, there’s a whole buncha crap on tonight. Something about Bob Hope. Some chick with breast cancer at the South Pole. Something about Helen of Troy. And I read Elayne Riggs’ blog, so I know that somebody somewhere is showing The Ten Commandments, which I’m not going to watch either. Fortunately, there is a Simpsons rerun on, so that’s okay. And Boomtown’s Season Finale is at 10. And I don’t have to get up and go to work tomorrow like the rest of you non-slackers do! Yay!

And there’s a lot of blather about turtles. We get a lot of that down here in Florida.

Ah, but in the Perspective section, there’s an excellent article entitled The Death of Dissent by Bill Duryea. I’ll try to remember to see if it’s online, and if it is, I’ll try to post a link to it.

::sigh:: Doonesbury is whackin’ on Resident Bush for not believing in evolution.

I’m generally all in favor of whackin’ on Resident Bush. There’s just so much about him that’s worth whackin’ on. Pulling strings to jump the line and get into the Air National Guard so he could ditch Vietnam, and then ditching the last year of his Guard drills, too. Stock market manipulation. Sending thugs down to Miami-Dade to shut down the manual recounts. Having his lawyers prepare arguments based on high moral principles for overturning an electoral vote victory by Al Gore if Bush won the popular vote, as everyone thought would happen, and then abandoning those same highly principled arguments when it came out differently. Accepting a victory he knew was deeply tainted by his brother and his brother’s Secretary of State deliberately disenfranchising thousands that would have voted for Gore. Manufacturing evidence to justify invading a sovereign nation. Making up reasons for invading a sovereign nation that changed every news cycle. And then actually invading a sovereign nation, putting America on a par with… well… the Unspoken Laws of Blogging prevent me from typing the N.G. phrase, but still. And all this, while enacting a domestic policy consisting of reducing civil rights and environmental protections, while nailing into place a great big tax cut for his Vice President (and people as rich as his Vice President).

Yeah, there’s lots of stuff out there to whack on Resident Bush over, but not believing in evolution?

Dude -- evolution is a theory. It hasn’t been proven yet. Ask any actual scientist you happen to see, and they’ll tell you that. Moreover, anyone who has studied evolutionary theory at all knows that it’s a field of theories, some of them wildly disparate. Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection is simply the most widely known one, and it’s a model that has problems… it doesn’t seem to credibly explain the existence of certain highly cooperative group-organisms, for example. (Other theories of evolution, which posit a more cooperative model among various species than natural selection, seem to work more consistently. But they aren't as widely publicized.)

Now, mind you, I suspect what Trudeau is doing in this strip is being oddly mealy-mouthed. He’s going after Bush for ‘not believing in evolution’, which is much safer than what he wants to do (and what I’d fully support him for): ridiculing Bush for believing absolutely in Creationism, to the point where Bush simply refuses to acknowledge, in any way, shape or form, that any other theory as to the origin of man, or the creation of the universe, has the remotest possibility of being true. That’s close minded religious zealotry on a truly stunning, and very frightening, level, and yeah, I find it to be of great concern that the most powerful man in the world is that incredibly pig headed.

But then, it annoys me that you can’t get elected to any representative post anywhere in the nation I live in unless you go to church on Sunday, and tell all the reporters where, too.

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HOME IS WHERE YOU WEAR YOUR HAT

I'm getting into something of a tiff over on Emily Jones' fine blog with some truly astonishing folks. Honestly, it simply leaves me slack jawed and stupified when obviously intelligent people insist, without qualifiers and in no uncertain terms, that George W. Bush won the election. Uncontrovertibly, without question, without the slightest shade of doubt, completely legitimately... he won, that's it, get over it, you pathetic liberal loser.

And... you know what? I had like another 800 to 1000 words on this, listing all the 'facts' that righties always leave out of their litany on this subject, but, really, I just don't care at the moment. Anyone who honestly thinks that Dubya is our legitimately elected Commander in Chief is simply self deluding to a truly absurd degree, and I'm not going to trouble myself arguing with madmen any more... right now, anyway. It's their reality tunnel, I guess they're happy in it. Dubya won the election? Without question, uncontrovertibly, completely legitimately? Sure. Whatever.

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THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally acceptable social standards, I’m not a likable guy. I’m not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It’s simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly… even when I’m talking in ‘public’, to an unknown audience, nearly any of whom may be almost as crazy as that whackjob female blogger I mentioned running afoul of previously.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude that most bloggers who know their opinions are going to offend people tend to take… namely, if you don’t like my opinions or my blog, don’t read them or it.

Having given that some more thought, though, I’m not going to say that this time around, because I’ve realized that what this is basically saying is, ‘if you don’t like what I have to say, tough, I don’t want to hear it, don’t even bother to tell me, just go away’.

And that’s actually a pretty worthless attitude. Oh, I firmly believe that if you really don’t like something, well, you must have hit a link or typed in my URL voluntarily to get here, and you have a back button on your browser… you certainly don’t need to flame me just because something I’ve written here has gotten your shorts all in a bunch.

Nonetheless, this is still a free country… for a little while longer, anyway… and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out. Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I’m not sure that’s a right when you’re doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don’t feel like reading… and I’m really quick with the delete key… as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don’t like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance… these things are only worth my time and attention if they’re entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough style and panache to amuse me… try to be smart, informed, and broad minded if you write me, okay?