Chasing Amy

I know I won't solve the biology vs. environment debate right here right now, but I do want to make the argument that there is something to be said for the Jungian model of the collective unconscious, a species memory that informs action independent of individual experience.

This is at odds with my overall tendency toward metaphysical subjectivism, somewhat attenuated by the construction of contexts that may or may not suggest a homunculus of an exterior "reality" comprehensible outside of the alchemical filter of conscious/subconscious. Like Wittgenstein said, "If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits."

Ha, I know, right?

Anyway, what got me thinking about this is that there's a new Britney Spears album out. This is either her second or third comeback album... I've lost track. But this time, apparently, she has flat abs, so this is the one that counts!

I heard somebody talking about it on the radio this morning, during which they played several clips. They were all perfectly forgettable club-thumping electronico-digitized sound collages, loaded with whizzes and purrs and completely manufactured vocal tracks; predictable fare for a singer whose primary talents are dancing and sweating.

One of the tracks they sampled was called "If You Seek Amy," which, yes, sounds totally stupid, but see, if you say it fast, it kind of sort of almost sounds like letters, which spell out... F.U.C.K. me! Get it!? She totally wants you to do it with her!

My initial reaction to this was horror. The crassness involved is twofold, first in the blatant faux-shock pandering of it, and secondly... well, it just says "fuck me."

I was surprised at just how school-marmish my first-blush response was. It quite literally started out with "In my day..." As in: in my day, people weren't quite so forward. In my day, yes, songs could be risqué, but they were more subtle about it, more clever, they made you think about sex without saying it outright and now we've totally devolved to the "If You Seek Amy," which, as communications methods go, is like sending Morse code with a sledgehammer.

Then I got kind of disturbed, trying to figure out where this prudishness came from and the hypocrisy of condemning Britney's overt come-ons, then justifying the reaction by making fun of her inability to sing. Neither of those stopped me from totally digging Liz Phair all these years.

If I really thought about it, one of the main differences between Britney Spears and Liz Phair is that I was 19 when Exile in Guyville came out. Well, that and "Flower" is a million times dirtier than any Britney song, ever.

Now I'm an old dad with buried collective unconscious thoughts that make me shake my fist and wheeze at the kids today with their crazy rock music. Every dad who thought he'd be the cool dad fails because the instincts of Grandpa and his plaid pants are written right into our DNA. They have to be. Who would choose plaid pants otherwise, in any context?

Lather lather lather AAAAAAGH lather lather lather AAAAAGH...

In case any of you were wondering how my Thanksgiving week has gone thus far, I will tell you that we did NOT have to evacuate due to any fire/flood/mudslide event.

We did have to deal with the minor inconvenience of having our water heater fail on us. Since I have a job that unofficially requires me to bathe daily (no more happy housewife every-odd-day showering for ole P), for a short few minutes each day, my experience has not been dissimilar to this:



Just as air conditioners only break in July, water healers invariably fail after Labor Day. I'm sure it has something to do with the dearth of white shoes.

And I tell you, with the weather turning autumnal on us of a sudden, the lack of hot water has been quite unwelcome. It nearly dropped below 70 outside today, if you can believe it. Will there be no end to our suffering?

Happy post-turkey bloat, everyone.

Perdition's Flames

I'm OK! Don't everyone rush to the comment section to check on my well-being what with all of Southern California burning down in the last week or so. I mean, I know I punted on that last post so it's really been two weeks since I posted anything that reflected effort... and yeah, OK, so maybe you're not all from here so you don't quite have the grasp of SoCal geography to know if the fires were really anywhere near me at all... which, yes, granted, they weren't, but STILL... Nothing? I'm not going to pretend it doesn't sting a little.

But you're in luck! Because I live in SoCal, another GIGANTOR EARTH-SWALLOWING DISASTER is always one weather system away. High pressure? Zero humidity, high winds, uncontrollable conflagration! Low pressure? Flash-floods and whole mountains sliding down on top of grandmothers as they sleep!

It's supposed to rain over the next couple of days, so keep an eye on CNN. You know that pale, unmoving leg you'll see sticking out from under a hillock's-worth of sodden, mud-slid earth? That could be me! You won't be able to see my hands, but I'll try to wave.

Just to map out the week in the place with, inexplicably, some of the world's most expensive property, it goes something like this:

Sunday: Fire!
Tuesday: Flood + Mudslide (= Floodslide? Credit me when you toss that around in casual conversation, please)!
Wednesday: Earthquake!
Thursday: Gluttony!
Friday: "The Ghost Whisperer" on CBS!

See how we compound our suffering with the Deadly Sins and unforgivable television. Disaster begets disaster, and I'm not so sure we don't have it coming.

This naturally brings me to the only conclusion consistent with this stark presentation of the facts: Barack Obama is the Antichrist.

Well, OK, maybe not. All this stuff DID start happening AFTER he won that election, and I shudder to think how it will surely get worse after he is puts his hand on his family Koran, with pages made of fine, stretched fetus skin and written in the blood of 9/11 victims, and then swears to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me ALLAHUAKBAR! LLLAALALALALALALALALAAALALALALLAA!" and then tears John Roberts' throat out with his teeth.

But I've lived here long enough to know that the natural disasters are going to be visited upon us by a wrathful God no matter who's president. We had a big ole Jesusy president for the last 8 years and look how that worked out for New Orleans.

It's freaky how the Barack = Lucifer business has seeped up from the peaty dungpile of white trash resentment into semi-legitimate journalistic news sources. What scares me though is that Snopes refutes it which means you KNOW it's true. I actually know a girl who got pregnant from sperm carried on a bullet that passed through some dude's junk and then lodged in her hoo-ha, in direct contravention of the Snopes people. Well, I don't know her, but my friend's cousin went to camp with this guy who's sister was friends with her, so it's practically like I was there.

Have a lovely Thanksgiving everyone, but remember: be careful out there. People are going to driving under the influence of turkey.

No Smiling, Damn You Both!

Um...



What the hell?

Guess it's back to generating my own content.

I...

..uh...

...let me get back to you.

Right, You Did Some Orange Sunshine, Peter

I wanted to spend a couple of days really thinking about the events of last Tuesday night, their ramifications and what they really meant before spouting off some half-thought-out collection of unformed ideas reflecting my immediate mood. I figured nobody wanted to read a bunch of posts that were just a long-winded way of saying "Woo!"

That said, just to get it out of the way: Woo!

The transition between the potential energy of candidacy and the kinetic energy of election is dissipated into friction and heat fairly quickly, in most cases. The historic nature of what's occurred, of course, should make this something of a special case, but the (more?) special and immediate challenges of the moment in every arena--economic, international, military--almost negate the basking time we all, as a people, should enjoy between now and Jan. 20.

Maybe it's the contrarian in me, but instead of being filled with nonstop Hope and Change and all those other things many of us voted for Tuesday last, I keep thinking about this old SNL sketch. (Sorry, there's a commercial before it... no YouTube of it appparently).

Jimmy Carter's become a person who's more than earned his status as American Elder Statesman in a way we haven't really seen in any late 20th century former presidents. Nixon was rightly disgraced, Ford never had the weight of winning an election, Reagan had health issues, the first Bush was shunted off to obscurity by ignominious defeat and Clinton, well, he's never really left the arena. Jimmy Carter's been the one out there doing and moving and daring to speak, which has put a shine on what had been considered a fairly disastrous presidency. But the reason the video clip is relevant is because, as an historian, it constitutes a primary document. What people were thinking at the time, the central joke of the piece, is that Carter was Everything to Everyone. He had all the answers because he was not only wicked smart, but he was decent and good and patient and kind and oh, what an antidote for America reeling from a period of executive abuse of our Constitution and the damage to our international prestige by waging an interminible unilateral war.

I'm just trying to say that before we get ahead of ourselves, let's just remember that 1976 to 1980 wasn't much good to anyone not named Walter Mondale. And even he'd get his in '84.

So that's the Word of Caution.

The other side of last Tuesday is that the only thing I can really think of that might equate to what happened when we elected a black man president might be Neil Armstrong landing on the moon. Except, even though we shared in the awe of the moment because the decals on the side of the spaceships said "USA," in a participatory sense, that feat was achieved by a statistically insignificant number of engineers and near-suicidally brave military test pilots. We all just got to watch.

Well, YOU got to watch. I was still five years short of being born. You are old.

Electing an African-American president was like going to the moon, except somehow 66 million of us were able to fit into the capsule for the trip. And then when we got there, we found out the President of the Moon was a black guy. That's how surprising it was.

I guess what I'm saying is that I anticipate that the Obama Administration, be it one term or two, has reached the highest of its highs. He may be a good-to-great president. I certainly hope he will be. But he can't be EVERYTHING we imagine him to be simply because we've been starved for competence by eight years of willful division, stubborn ideology and imperial pretense. He can't be the answer to every prayer deferred by everyone in the 70%+ who think George Bush is doing a bad job.

Can he?

Election Liveblog! Oh the Humanity!

See, I came up with this idea to track what I think and feel as I watch election coverage LIVE LIVE LIVE with this fancy internet thing. I hope it someday catches on.

4:04 pm- So I had some laptop issues and now I'm here to... fucking hell, I already missed the first slate of poll closures. Here, let me catch you up... uh... OK, nobody is really calling anything but KY (McCain) and VT (Obama). So Jack Daniels went GOP and America's Socialist Heartland went for Obama. This was a stupid idea.

4:17 pm- Just a note of housekeeping: I promised the Google/Blogger people that I'd do what I could to limit the tsunami of traffic and not crash their servers. Just do me a favor and spread your attentions around to other liveblogs so as not to inundate my hosts.

Also, another note: a night when your spouse is out of town and you have three kids who have homework to do? Maybe not the most conducive to paying attention to a liveblog. The self-imposed stress level is... curious. I am considering starting drinking soon.

4:29 pm- As I look at MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, I can't help but wonder: if I didn't KNOW that she wouldn't have anything to do with me at all, would I still be all ready to tear that up, given the chance? Is she just a regular looking girl with a lopsided right-talking face that is only made intriguing because she would feel nothing for me? And doees this also explain my attraction to Heidi Klum?

4:45 pm- While I applaud the people at HDNET for putting together a team to compete and cable news, if you're HDNET, you have a paricularl responsibility to not put fuck-ugly troglodytes on the air. That's a lot of pixels worth of detail. I swear to God I can see every pus bubble Dan Rather's conjunctivitis.

4:59 pm- BREAKING BREAKING BREAKING According to the robocall I just got, Obama hates the gays. If the Riverside County registrar of voters is reading this (and I assume s/he is), please change my vote from AGAINST Prop. 8 to FOR Prop. 8. Thank you.

Also: Obama wins PA, NH, ME, MD, NJ, DE, IL, DC, MA, CT. McCain wins OK, TN. Some others probably that I missed.

But I'll keep you posted on that Obama vs. the Gays thing. That could be big.

5:20 pm- Turns out only NBC/MSNBC have called PA for Obama, which means of course that we will find out at about 4 am that Pennsylvania has in fact been won by George W. Bush.

5:23 pm- I checked back with the HDNET coverage. Coincidentally, I just bought a gun online. And just one bullet.

5:34 pm - I apologize what I said about HDNET. It's not so boring that I want to kill myself. It turns out that I simply misunderstood. Instead of a television broadcast, they've decided to broadcast a still digital painting with a droning monotone buzz for background noise. Very avant garde.

5:45 pm- Rudy Giuliani on ABC just now: turns out, John McCain? Used to be a POW or something! I guess we should be glad it wasn't a 9/11 reference. Apparently there's only room in Rudy's head for one talking point at a time.

5:56 pm- Before I forget, someone should point out how much election night sucks with no Tim Russert. Brian Williams has to make do with analysis from dour schoolmarm Tom Brokaw. No white marker boards tonight, I guarantee it.

6:01 pm- McCain wins KS, ND, WY. Obama wins MI, NY, MN, WI, RI. AZ(!), CO, TX, LA, NM, NE, SD no answer yet. Come on with this BS. It's been like TWO HOURS already and we don't know who won? This is going to be like a thousand pages long if I keep up this pace. Energy bar and a Red Bull and I should be OK.

6:24 pm- MSNBC just called Ohio for Obama. I know, it's MSNBC, but still, I'm going to go ahead and call it over and start drinking in earnest.

I appreciate you heeding my call not to overwhelm the site with visits. I didn't want to be the one who broke the internet on a night like this.

In closing, let me just say this is the biggest triumph for American Socialism since Ronald Reagan collectivised the aerospace and defense industries. Viva la revolucion!

...Notify the Affiliates, We're Going Long

I was just about to sit down and write this when I was interrupted by my oldest son who just now said to me (and I am not making this up): "Dad, there's something wrong with my private. [ed. note: that's his little euphemism for... you know, his junk. No idea why it ranks so low; we can only hope it one day merits a promotion to corporal, or even sergeant. A dad can dream.] Usually [he said] I can move it upwards without using my hands and now for some reason I can't."

I am a father of three boys. This qualifies as a crisis in my house.

What does one say to that, you might ask? I don't know. I said "Does it hurt?" He assures me no, it does not. OK, let's wait it out. At least we know it's not gonorrhea.

* * * *

This is the day and the time to be a blogger, right before an election. Totally unprompted and unsolicited, I have been considering possible outcomes and the Great Cultural Meaning of tomorrow's events and I offer the following observation by way of analysis:

If tomorrow things go the way they are now projected, if you are a young, unattached Democrat, passably good looking (or, really, just not deformed) with baseline personal hygiene habits, and you are in Chicago tomorrow night, and you cannot get laid? Get thee to a nunnery. Get thee to a monestary.

Sew it shut. Tie it in a not. Whatever is genitally relevant for you. If after the catastrophic blue-balls result of the Kerry campaign, followed by the four-year Sting-like tantric denial of endorphin release finally erupts and you are within 25 miles of the pheremonic ground zero of Grant Park and you still cannot close the deal, then it's time to turn the sign over from "Yes, we're open" to "Sorry, we're closed" and consider a life of silent meditation.

It's isn't health care or the graduated income tax, but it's what struck me.

Anyway, there's so much more where that came from!

I would like to announce that tomorrow evening, starting roughly at 4 Pacific/7 Eastern, I will be, for the first time ever in the history of Me, liveblogging Election Night.

Yes, that's right! Be here and refresh refresh refresh while I infotain you all with pithy rejoinders and incisive insight! If it goes at all like I think it will, you all should be able to practically taste the flop sweat by about 4:30.

It's going to be fast and furious. I'm thinking maybe 4 to 6 updates in 8 hours, something like that.

OK, yeah, not that intense, but the wife is out of town and, let's be honest, this is a blog with single-digit readership trying out a concept that was passé in 2003.

Mark you calendars!

See you here tomorrow night!

Unless I'm late!

Or I forget!