I just came back from a bike ride with Danielle and all of the songs on the party shuffle look okay to me. I didn't delete anything exccept one of two Van Halen songs. Translates to: I need to get out more like that, at night, like old times. This summer could be all about that. I need a new bike, for sure.

someone is seriously whistling the andy griffith theme outside right now.

Danny Stiles, 7/8/03

This is all so ridiculous. Sitting here at 4 almost, have to get up at 7:30. I'm hungry even. The funny thing is, now that I'm writing, I realize how ridiculous it is that I don't stay up anymore and write at 4am. Seeing Steve and Alex today drove that home even more. Memories of freer times, I guess. I'm losing myself, in a way. Afraid to go out, afraid to be awake. Afraid of dirt. Afraid of disorder. All the messiness and flailing limbs. Afraid of fat. I'm gonna eat something and stay up a long time and listen to music. Stiles on your dials. He's talking about DiMico's. 718-875-5403. Frank DiMico. President of the Kiwanis Club of Western Brooklyn. That trusty old dusty 78. Al Bowles' "The Very Thought of You." More about me, except I'm not interested in me. "Spin the old nostalgia wheel back to September 2, 1940. I was matriculating at [such and such] high school in Newark, NJ." "Jelly Roll killed my pappy--it runned my mommy stone blind." "...Klepping Nachus over that one." "Snuffy's Pantageous Renaissance on eastbound Route 22 in Scotch Plains, NJ. 908-751-2241. Steve and Nick Pantageous.""Three Guys From Italy with real dancing. 170 Washington Avenue. 973-751-2241. Be sure to ask for a copy of Frank Sinatra's birth certificate." "Marco Polo. Joe Shirico wants you to come celebrate. Court Street in Brooklyn. 718-852-5015. Call Michael Scotto fro reservations and details about our celebration.

From Summer, 2000

Gas is expensive. Not only is it hot out and use is up/production down, but a pipeline that carries 1/3 of Michigan's supply broke the other day. I still drove to work. I woke up too late. It's only a couple miles. I came home for lunch, promising myself I'd ride my bike back after. 27 cents in my pocket, not even enough for Jimmy John's day-old bread. I looked in the fridge and found some baba ghanouj and Diet Pepsi that both came with the sublet. No bread, so I dipped uncooked ramen noodles in the baba. It's too hot for hot ramen, anyway.

I came home from work for lunch Friday and fell asleep, missing the entire afternoon. Ah well. My supervisor laughed it off. "I didn't wake up until 6pm when my friend came to get me for El Azteco," I explained. "I feel really dumb." Always try and sound ashamed, embarrassed, something. Just make yourself the weak, stupid one when things like this happen. It could only happen to you because you're a bumbling, clumsy dork with no luck. Explaining that you were tired because you'd been working so hard all week doesn't hurt either. So after being woken at 6, Dave and I went to El Az and I ate so much that I fell over on the front lawn of the church on the way home, as usual.

Enough enough enough. Knots in my back and dry eyes. I don't mind the sweat and smell, but I'm so bored. Detroit again. No matter where you go, there ain't shit to do, I always say. I'm not much for social interaction, I guess. Give me a movie or a book or a record to listen to and I'm content. Put me in conversation and I usually tire quickly. Maybe it's the people to whom I talk. I like being one-on-one with people because you don't always have to be talking. You can pick something up and read it and they do the same and you're not accused of being anti-social.

Paul decided he is moving to Willemstad, capital of the Netherlands Antilles.

My dick may not function, but I have not lost my smile!

Song for a Future Generation

The Air Force consumed 3.2 billion gallons of aviation fuel in fiscal year 2005, which was 52.5 percent of all fossil fuel used by the government, Pentagon statistics show. The total Air Force bill for jet fuel last year topped $4.7 billion.

Military Plans Tests in Search for an Alternative to Oil-Based Fuel"
New York Times, 5/14/06

When we hear statistics about military spending in Iraq, this never takes into account the high cost of training and preparedness.

Wanna be the captain of the Enterprise

Wanna be the king of the Zulus

Let's meet and have a baby now!

Jenny Lewis called this morning and here is what she said:

What are you changing?
Who do you think you're changing?
You can't change things, we're all stuck in our ways
It's like trying to clean the ocean
What do you think you can drain it?
Well it was poison and dry long before you came

My mom says I'm a Survivor so it must be true

List of my health issues as of late:
-Sprained ankle at Critical Mass
-Bruised other foot after being hit by car
-Food poisoning or some other bug caused puking and dizziness and pain for the past 6 hours. Now I feel fine.
-Newfound allergy to car and truck exhaust
-Mysterious groin pain, possibly pulled inguinal ligament, possible hernia or kidney stones

I PUKED ON MY KEYBOARD

What's the goal here? Some times it feels really good to write something great when I can squeeze it out. But am I all about the ultimate goal or just living for the now. Like anything, I guess it's probably a balance. An excess of energy in any one direction destroys a part of the system, which brings down the whole system in one way or another. I got hit by a car today. That was great. I haven't been writing enough lately. I need to get myself to get everything down that I can think of. Even just day to day events. you know?

So I'm sitting here 8pm on a Wednesday night, listening to the Weakerthans. So good. I need to get all their stuff. study it. the lyrics are nice. I'M TOO TECHNICAL. I just keep thinking of logistics and the stupid technical details of things rather than concentrating on the creative part. The part that I reall like the results of. but I'm getting better. Like I'll go to great depths to gather all the albums by an artist, but never learn the lyrics to their songs. Or I'll be busy formatting blogger rather than writing in it.

The orange lamp glow dripping all over the shit on my desk. I wish it would stop getting all over it, reminding me how slow I read and how many days I could've been home enjoying myself and hanging out in my room, but instead I'm working all the time and live in a mess. That's not true though. I really haven't been working as much as I used to. And my room isn't that bad. It's just small. That means there isn't space for everything. this weakerthans guy is always talking about things around the house, like living the boho lifestlye these days (not in a negative way, do I mean that). wee wee wee. "Had one of those days when you want to try heroine." nice. The boho lifestyle, except in Winnipeg.

"I hate Winnipeg"

All wealth and power and even history aside. All we are after the day is done is ourselves, by ourselves. Alone and without money or possessions, just left with experience. Which may or may not even matter. I'll probably never know. Because it doesn't matter. What matters? Does anything matter. Is it just one thing? Like by definition. The postulate of "mattering." Because one thing matters because of another thing and that matters because of something else. And on and on. So what is the one thing that matters. The thing they all radiate from? Most likely that thing mattters for some other reason, though. So there is no one thing. It's circular. So which one has the most connections to things with lots of connections. You need to put it all into a computer to figure it out. Characterize reasons. Rate them, classify them.

Living in the city and not having space, you have to get rid of all the things you don't want. You can't live this suburban, basement lifestyle where you just put something into storage downstairs if it has fallen out of use or is in the way. You'd have to pay for storage, which is ridiculous. But people do it. Rational reasons for storage spaces, in my opinion, are for short-term moving away, storage of work-related equipment, not just for a place to store all the crap you are too chicken-shit to throw away. That's pathetic.

From sometime around 2000:

Alex told me he was impressed when I, without thinking, blew out of a stop light just turned green, from the parking lane and cut in front of the long row of cars pulling out next to me. I respect Alex a great deal and this positive feedback meant a lot to me. Especially on a Saturday morning after being up all night save for a short nap on the beach with a St. Ides Special Brew.

What he said snuck its way into my subconscious. I started doing it at every light. Just like Charlie had taught me. "Secrets of city driving," he'd said. We'd come back for the weekend from Michigan, me from my parents' in Lansing, Alex and Crystal from Detroit. We were supposed to be looking for places to live, so we ended up driving around the city North-East-West-South whatever. Wherever we went though, I'd still subconsciously refer back to the secrets of city driving, fueled by Alex's compliment.

All of the sudden, "Why do you do that?"

"I dunno," I replied, not consciously remembering what he'd said earlier that was driving my behavior. Lack of sleep and ten cups of coffee. My head was swimming, I was feeling great. Too good to worry about pissin' people off at stop lights and too good to worry about Alex's loving critique of my technique. Which was rough, I might add. But I wasn't trying to impress anyone. Although it seems like a real dick-in-hand, machismo thing to do, to peel out like that, it wasn't like that. It couldn't possibly be with the car I was driving. Let's just say the flower vase is a standard feature. It's pretty tough to look tough in a car like that. Perhaps it was my subconscious intention, trying to make up in speed and agility what I lacked in coolness. Like deep inside I was painfully aware of how silly driving this automobile looked and just had to prove to all the other drivers and the pedestrians I almost hit in the crosswalks that there was more than meets the eye. More power. More speed. How dumb is that?

I need to step back and look at this whole thing from a different perspective. Like a writer would. all the angles. but how? how to just get a different perspective. You have to like become a different person. But then you're a different person so you can't gauge because what you're supposed to be observing has changed. Is writing supposed to help this? Should I be reading old writings? Probably. Maybe this is the answer. I've looked outward. Now It's time to look inward... OLD WRITINGS. READ THEM. EDIT. FROM NOTEBOOKS.

"For the first time, a new generation would experience the revelation of unlimited possibilities."

-Little Steven on the release of On the Road

That's Day to Day

It's not about trying to figure people out. It's just. It's just figuring out where people are coming from to try and see what they like and why they like it and how that all developed into them as a person and member of society and how it all works for them in relationships with other people, even just like day to day meeting strangers in public or at parties or associating with people at work. These Sunday mornings are somethin'. So full of possibilities. Boy, Mondays sure do disappoint.

we both know hearts can change

Chinese Democracy took so long to come out that there's actually democracy in China now! Sort of! The reclusive Guns N Roses frontman Axl Rose was recently interviewed on the Eddie Trunk show (podcast). When asked about the videos for Use Your Illusion, he said he finds the videos really "corny" now and that for the "Sweet Child O' Mine" video, what he "really wanted to do...this woman from the Orient bringing this baby through customs and stuff and caring for this baby and at the end some guy splits it in half because it's dead and full of heroine." Wow. He also compared himself to Kurt Cobain when, in a photo in Hit Parader magazine, he wrote in white-out that "glam sucks" on his jeans. His hair was teased. This apparently blew Sebastian Bach's mind, right there in the supermarket. Who's doing the teasing now, dude!

"The jury convicted him to life in prison, where he will spend the rest of his life."

-George Bush on the Moussoaui ruling

Game Over! for all you skeptics! Woah look at me! I'm a policy wonk! My name is Rafe!

"This puts the nail in the coffin of [the skeptics'] argument as much as anything I've seen. It may not be the first time it's been said, but it's the clearest I've seen it stated coming out of a government agency. Game over."

-Rafe Pomerance, chairman of the Climate Policy Center speaking about the government report released yesterday admitting climate change exists

A novel written in the 1950s describes a world where people are not allowed to read books. A small group of people who want to save books memorize them so that the books won't be forgotten. For example, an old man who has memorized the novel "The Call of the Wild" helps a young boy memorize it by reciting the story to him. In this way, the book is saved for the future. If you were told that you could save just one book for future generations, which book would you choose?

-from the US Department of Education's
Nation's Report Card for high school seniors

We're always talking about not violating local custom when you visit a place, but aren't we just presuming that the locals are too dumb to realize we're not from there and/or they're too evil to forgive us for it with a smile and enjoy the break from routine? That's how I try to treat foreigners, anyway. It's fun.

May 1 holiday rejected in Indonesia

www.chinaview.cn 2006-05-01 19:33:45

JAKARTA, May 1 (Xinhua) -- Indonesian Vice President Jusuf Kalla on Monday rejected calls to grant a holiday during the International Labor Day commemoration on May 1, saying the country already has too many days off.

"If we accepted the calls, there would be too many holidays. Therefore we oppose them," he told reporters here.

Kalla said Indonesia has at least 12 holidays a year for religious events and national celebrations.

On the occasion, Kalla expressed relief that the worker's day commemoration went peacefully despite the presence of an estimated 100,000 workers in the capital alone and praised security officers for their "professional works" in safeguarding the nation.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who was on an official visit to Middle East countries, has made a phone call to thank workers, labor unions and security officers for the absence of violence during the nationwide rally earlier in the day, said Kalla. Enditem

Editor: Lu Hui

May Day.

An international workers' holiday? I slept in this morning, thus ensuring myself no more than an eight-hour work day. It's hard to get up with a warm body next to you that also doesn't want to (and doesn't have to) get up.

May day is a commemoration of the the 1886 Haymarket Riot in Chicago, which led to the eight hour work day. Fine. Sounds good. All I remember from childhood is making flower baskets out of construction paper. I didn't really like construction paper and didn't really understand why this was considered a holiday. In fact, I would say that May Day played a major part in confusing me as a child about what holidays are supposed to mean. A time to gather. To break from routine. To reflect, etc. All it was was making some bullshit crafts project at school and then go home and watch cartoons, just like any other day. That's the best we could do as a society in coping with and learning from history. And it only gets worse as we get older.

I feel like being in the city, in a progressive neighborhood, we lose sight of what it's like out there. Out in the suburbs where all the little kids have is TV and their parents are afraid to pass on information about the world. And you better believe the teachers are afraid. The teachers afraid of offending the parents, the parents afraid of offending the other parents. Afraid their kids will turn out like the bad kids on TV. So the kids end up being afraid of everything.

The TV that unifies us. In 1886, there were a lot of folks in this country who weren't getting along very well and they probably felt pretty alienated from the people with money. Class division and all that. This unified them. Their common goal was a better life, whatever that meant. 130 years later, we've still got the division of wealth, but we're all closer socially. We see the same media at the same time, in real time. Consume the same goods. We're unified by wars and iPods. In effect, this gives the people at the bottom less power. They're made to feel like it's wrong to complain. They've gotta fit in, right? They feel ashamed at their mistakes, ashamed at their status.

I love what the immigrants are doing. They're making their voice heard in the tradition of American Labor. They understand better than anyone that this isn't about American anymore. It's too late for that. So much of what we do affects the whole world, national governments aren't enough. How can US government policy, protecting our own narrow self-interests, result in a just outcome for people elsewhere? (let alone at home) When it comes down to it, politicians in Washington will always place profits before people.