Take thirty seconds out of your day, and know what it feels like to have your consciousness fragmented.  Is your brain alive or dead?  Both, as long as the box stays closed…

http://www.globalaigs.org/

(via Warren Ellis)

I’m not into fighting.  I’m not afraid of it; a beating will either kill me, in which case I have other things besides the pain to worry about, or it won’t, in which case I’ll heal.  Pain’s not a big deal.  But I don’t go looking for it, either; the only time that I will get physical these days is if I need to break up a fight at Bailey’s or back up one of my friends (again, at Bailey’s – who says that bars aren’t good influence?).

Lately, though, I’ve started thinking that a good beatdown would make me feel better.  Not just on anyone; the common lowlife shitheels that wind their ways through the bar on a nightly basis aren’t really worth it (outside of the occasional spineless chump that thinks hitting women is impressive). In fact, most of these guys are out looking for a fight — win or lose, it makes their night, to blow off some steamed testosterone, to have some bruises and cuts to show off the next day while they tell some pumped up and largely fabricated story about how manly they had to get the night before.

If you’re looking for it, I say, go find it elsewhere.  Not my bag, though I do know a few guys who will be more than happy to supply you with the props for redneck storyhour if you’d like some recommendations.

The people I’m thinking of are easy targets, sure. Not one of them could stand up to a good punch, much less a serious thrashing.  But then, that sort of adds to the attraction for me.  I never said I got rid of all the effects of being bullied in elementary school, after all…

• ANN COULTER In some ways, I really think that this would be better served by saying “anti-liberal conservatives,” but damn it, there are a lot of those fuckers out there.  You know the ones I’m talking about — if you’re liberal (which is to say, if you don’t believe exactly like they do — that Bush is infallible, that the Christian God is the only god, that foreigners are stupid and silly, and that Creationism is the highest truth), then you’re shit.  They never come out in so many words, but it’s there.  And the worst part is the bullying tone in their voice.  The best part is that they hide behind anonymity, and you know that most of them would never have the balls to voice such opinions (and certainly not in such blunt terms) in public.

  But since it would be far too time consuming to find each and every one of them, not to mention tiring, let’s just drag old Horseface out into some public square and give her a few heel-thrusts into the throat, eh?  Think of the pay-per-view revenues — we could probably make a huge dent in the deficit that Bush has helped reinvigorate.

• Celebrities drunk on power I’m not entirely sure who would be a good spokesperson for this category, but since it’s much smaller, we could probably make a weekend out of it.  For reference, though, let’s use Tom Cruise.  Don’t get me wrong: this little soiree should include musicians, athletes, etc.  But Tom’s got the limelight; if you’re too hung up on Tiny Tom, substitute Lindsay “If You’d Put Stuff In the Other Hole In Your Head, You Might Be Attractive Again” Lohan or Paris Hilton.  And it’s not superstars in the spotlight that bother me — Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Aniston, Shaq — hell, even Madonna or Britney Spears.  Sure, we’re all sick of hearing about them (but if we were all sick of them, US WEEKLY wouldn’t sell so many copies, would they?), but they’re innocuous enough, if a little weird.  But do you really need to act like the rest of the world is beneath you because you’ve got money and are recognized?

  So many of these people would like us to believe that the perils of fame and fortune were thrust upon them without warning, that paparazzi and tabloids and general interest in the lives of the rich and famous started with their rise to the top.  And maybe they really had no clue what it would be like — fucking morons, then.  Otherwise, you have money enough to buy all that happiness you dreamed of; this is the price you pay.  Get over it. And by the way, you can lose it all, and be right back with us in the blink of an eye; don’t think that if you piss on us while you’re up at the top that we’re going to forgive and forget just because you once made popcorn movies or hit homeruns.

  The more I think about it, it might be fun to punch Lohan or Hilton in the throat, but how disappointing would it be for one punch to be all you get before the wind blew those shredded boxkites to the hills?

• You know, it’s not just the extreme right bloggers that get me, the more I think about it.  It’s everyone that gets out there and voices anger and hatred behind some veil of anonymity.  I will say this for Coulter: at least she’s willing to stand behind her words, no matter how moronic and misguidedly hateful they may be.  Underneath the river of blogs is the biggest sign of the damage that the Internet has done to communication between humans: the masks that we can hide behind allow us to spew all sorts of venom that I’d bet 95% of us would never vomit forth if we had to have our names and faces associated with the thoughts.

  I think we should all have to be accountable for our words.  But in the meantime, I think all the anonymously bitter and vicious bloggers out there — and the forum trolls, too, because they are the forefathers of the masked blog assholes — should be taken to the kitchen and pounded in the face with iron skillets for a while.

Why am I so angry today?  Really, no different than any other day.  I make the mistake of reading things that I shouldn’t — Coulter interviews, puff pieces on the latest celebristar feuds and babble, blogs by people whose writing style indicates much more intelligence than their writing substance. And I know I should stop, but I just can’t.  Truth be told, I think I like getting a little fired up.  If nothing else, it makes my weekends in the bar a little easier.

It’s not quite as catchy as Faces of Death, sure, but you could get so much more mileage out of a series called Faces of Sick. You can get an entire volume just following people around Bailey’s for a couple of weeks, for instance.

And then, you could put a camera on me, because sometimes, I’m an absolute moron who thinks he’s bulletproof. I took a week off at the end of February to deal with what turned out to be part one of a sweeps-month cliffhanger of the flu. That seemed smart enough, right? Of course, I didn’t completely take the week off — there was a show to be played, and I don’t miss Exhibit(s) gigs, paid or not. And there was work around the house to be done. And so forth.

As of this past Sunday, I felt the relapse coming on, and forced myself through the show at Dave’s. Not so bad — I drank water all night, avoided alcohol, and took it as easy as I could. Monday, I felt worse, but came into work nonetheless — partially to avoid falling behind again, partially to avoid burning any more sick days. Went home, and promptly fell asleep for fourteen hours. I suspect part of that was my body forcing me to chill out (my original plans involved rearranging my house into the summer format, so I don’t melt in my sleep), and part of it was an under-the-surface depression that has been lingering for a few weeks. Yesterday: again, a little worse, still, but can’t miss the gigs, even if they don’t pay me anything. And can’t miss the cable-access television show appearances, even if I don’t say word one (I like to think it was my contribution to Eric’s fascist leader appearance).

And so today: the flu is passing (all over but a slight ache and a lot of coughing and sniffling), only to be partially replaced by conjunctivitis. Yup, pinkeye. Whee. And I think I might have laryngitis coming on.

Throughout all of this — and over the past two years, whenever I get more than a mild cold — what concerns me is not the illness itself. That’s just a pain-in-the-ass that I do my best not to allow to slow me down too much. Constantly lingering in the back of my head, though, is the curiousity as to whether or not this will be the time that I get another visit from the CIPD fairy, as I did back in December of 2003.

Amazingly, it looks like I never bothered to document all the fun that I had back then, so let me try to do a brief recap here real quick: over the course of a few weeks, following a month-long run of flu followed by laryngitis followed by some stomach bug, I began to lose feeling in my extremities — fingertips and toes, spreading fairly rapidly inward. At the peak, after about three weeks, it felt like I had thick socks on my feet up to my knees, thick gloves on my hands up to my elbows, and there was a constant pins-and-needles tingling at the tip of my tongue and nose. I had trouble walking, because I couldn’t tell when my feet were fully on the ground; so I walked with a cane, and was moving toward a walker. I had little manual dexterity (I have a few things that I tried hand-writing during this time, and it’s comical, to see me writing like a three-year-old with seizures); bass playing was no longer something that I was very good at (and it hurt, too, to get that intense shock with each note), and my ability to grasp was on the decline. Oh, and my balance was terrible, too; showering required constantly holding onto the curtain rod to make sure that I didn’t fall when I closed my eyes.

It took what seemed like a brutal amount of time for them to figure out what I had – blood tests revealed nothing, no vitamin or nutrient deficiencies, no markers for MS or ALS or any number of other exotic-sounding diseases that I might have had. Finally, a few fun neural tests (even if your brain can’t get signal to your fingers, apparently a machine can, and you too can be a frog in a biology lab) revealed that I have a condition called Chronic Inflammatory Polyneuropathic Demylenization, or CIPD (referred to more commonly on the net at CIDP, it seems). The long and short of it: my immune system attacks my nervous system at the trunk of my spine, and no one seems to know just why.

Oh, and before you internet detectives start crying wolf, the immediate response was an AIDS test, and I’m clean. God knows how, but I’m happily disease free after all this time. So to speak, at least…

But CIPD, according to the literature and my doctor, often shows up in people (as does it’s cousin, Guillain Barre) after an illness — specifically, respiratory or gastro-intestinal. Or the flu. They don’t know why, though I’ve heard suspicions that the immune system doesn’t recieve the messages that the body is clean, and so keeps looking for things to eat, and it just so happens that certain virii are remarkably similar to the myelin that surrounds your nerves.

Whee. Lucky me.

And so I spend my sick days looking around the corner, ahead, wondering if it’s coming back this time. They assure me that it will be back — that’s the chronic part of all this, after all. And the treatments involve either steroids — prednisone, which knocks your immune system offline long enough for the nerves to repair themselves, leaving you open to illness, weight gain, and the shakes, not to mention eventual severe liver damage — or plasmapheresis, where your blood gets cleaned. Outside of your body. Not a lot of fun, as I gather, and also leaves you reliving the symptoms towards the end of each cycle.

Not to mention the brief panic that sets in when I sleep on an arm wrong, and wake up with no feeling in one of my hands.

And then you could make volumes of the Faces of Sick series about mental illness. Bipolar disorder can be fun, but enough about me: let’s talk about real sickness. Like people who would want to view “molestation on demand,” for instance.

Y’know, I can wrap my head around a lot of things. A lot. Things that have bothered some people that I’ve known. Things like murder, and brutality, and death. I’ve done enough studying (and maybe there’s a part of me that’s wired just so) that I can empathize with the criminal and the disturbed, and often enough understand where they’re coming from, why they do what they do. But this… It’s beyond me. Not the preferences, or the turn-ons; I think, just like gay men and foot fetishists and even boring vanilla old you and me, what we are attracted to is beyond our control. And the people in this world that are drawn to seeing young children as erotic objects shouldn’t be vilified as much, perhaps, as pitied; as bad as it is for me to be attracted to women that I will never have, how bad must it be for those who find excitement in a ten-year-old?

But those that feel these tendencies should be separated from those who feel and act upon them. With sturdy walls, strong enough to block out the gas that you might fill that room with. Oh, and the walls should have spikes, and barbed wire. And maybe the floor can be made of razor blades, and covered with a thin sheen of lye.

An animal is no different from a man in that it cannot help what it instinctively feels. Man and beast alike, we all get hungry beyond our control, and we all crave things to sate our desires — be they flavors of food or objects of lust. The difference between man and beast is the self-control to act or not act on these desires, depending not on whether we can get away with it but on whether said action is right or wrong.

I say, if you’re gonna run with the beasts, you get put down with ’em.

But hey, I have a condition, and parts of me eat other, perfectly good parts of me. So what do I know?

From the BBC online:

On the programme, the 75-year-old preacher responded to a news item about the reaction of Muslims in Europe to the publishing of cartoons satirising the Prophet Muhammad.

The footage showed Muslims screaming “May Allah bomb you! May Osama Bin Laden bomb you!”

Mr Robertson said the pictures “just shows the kind of people we’re dealing with. These people are crazed fanatics, and I want to say it now: I believe it’s motivated by demonic power. It is satanic and it’s time we recognize what we’re dealing with”.

He went on to say that “Islam is not a religion of peace”, and “the goal of Islam, ladies and gentlemen whether you like it or not, is world domination”.

Mr Robertson said in a statement later he was referring specifically to terrorists as being motivated by Satan.

See, I want to imagine that Robertson is a fringe-type, a nutjob that no one will claim at dinner parties, one of those guys that has been around for so long that even people like my grandmother who watched him all the time would be forced to shake their head at statements like this, with a gentle roll of the eyes and perhaps a whispered, “Oh, Pat…”

You can hear the tsking if you try.

And yet, when I shake my own head enough to clear the cobwebs that Claritin-D (irony of the week: Claritin D is inversely proportionate to clarity) has strewn about my brainspace, I realize that, even if people are embarrassed in public that Robertson has his own TV show, too many of them are thinking exactly what he’s saying.

Hey, fundamentalist Christian bloggers that I’m aiming this at: remember the Crusades.  Among other things.

Spirituality is a wonderful thing that is all too often warped and made pointed by religion.

You know you’re doing okay in your art when the process of setting up to create — be it preparing your materials, rehearsing for the billionth time, or dragging a seventy pound amplifier around when your flu-ridden body would rather use it as a final resting place — is not that much of a hassle.  Fun, at absolute best, or, in my case, something that I don’t even notice anymore.

We finish setting up the amps and the pedals and the mic stands, and Kyle calls me over to the bar. “Minimal volume, yeah?”  My god, we haven’t even played a single note yet, and they’re already asking us to turn it down.  What did we do to deserve this – outside of playing to the deaf people three states over most of the time? I assure him this will be no problem tonight — we’re coming off a hard played gig on Saturday, and I worked a nearly 24 hour day on Friday (leading to my relapse), so minimal is no problem.  Minimal volume, tempo, and effort.

Playing a quiet gig is hard for rock and roll — because often, playing quietly means that you’re gonna lose your energy.  Combine that with playing for a Sunday night crowd at a bar that is known more for it’s beer selection than it’s live music, and you’ve got a challenge — one that I think Eric and Carlos and I more than met last night.

Being a musician is much more than learning how to read dots on a page and play them with correct pitch and tempo.  One of the most overlooked abilities — at least, from what I’ve witnessed over fifteen years over working in audio and bars and playing in bands  — is dynamics — being able to bring the music up or down on the fly.  The term dynamics in music refers most commonly to volume or intensity, but I’m talking here also about tempo, about feeling, about any number of things that the song might call for at a given moment.  Musicians don’t seem to learn this — some of the most talented musicians I know seem incapable of using dynamics on an unprocessed instrument, relying on pedals and Eventides to take things up or down a notch.

Eric and Carlos and I showed why the Exhibit(s) are such a good band — we all have a strong sense of dynamics, and a good chemistry that allows us all to flow on the spur of the moment.  Chance has it too — that’s one of the first things I noticed when I started playing with he and Eric three years ago.  The four of us, all pushing and pulling and pounding away at a song until it just falls into place some nights — it’s like the rock and roll version of Brokeback Mountain.  Only without the cowboys (though Chance sometimes wears that hat).

I think it should be said that any weekend that earns you hundreds of dollars for hanging out in bars is not a bad one, return of the great white flu or no.

Eliot: Oh, Dr. Cox, does this lipstick make me look like a clown?
Cox: No, Barbie, no… it makes you look like a prostitute who caters exclusively *to* clowns.

As much as I love Eliot — and Sarah Chalke, for that matter — it’s lines like this and responses like Cox’s that make me wish for a quicker wit. And more opportunities to use it.

J.D.: You know, when you stop being frightened, time really is on your side. And you can just go on being you.

Sometimes, SCRUBS is funny, sometimes poignant, but always worth watching. There are two moments on the show that are quite possibly the funniest things I’ve ever seen or heard. From season two:

Cox: Newbie, if the next two words out of your mouth aren’t ‘See ya’ then the third word will be ‘Oh my god. My crotch. You’ve punched me in my crotch.’.

And then, there’s the game of Gay Chicken from season three. Best moment ever shown on television.

J.D. It’s the kid inside of us that keeps us all from going crazy.

Sadly, that’s what Michael Jackson thought.

Oh, I know. Too easy. But if I joke, tis that I may not get maudlin.

J.D. Because nothing sucks worse than feeling alone, no matter how many people are around.

Shit. Too late, eh?

Cox: Relationships don’t work they way they do on television and in the movies. Will they? Won’t they? And then they finally do, and they’re happy forever. Gimme a break. Nine out of ten of them end because they weren’t right for each other to begin with, and half of the ones who get married get divorced anyway, and I’m telling you right now, through all this stuff I have not become a cynic. I haven’t. Yes, I do happen to believe that love is mainly about pushing chocolate covered candies and, y’know, in some cultures, a chicken. You can call me a sucker, I don’t care, because I do believe in it. Bottom line: it’s couples who are truly right for each other wade through the same crap as everybody else, but the big difference is they don’t let it take them down. One of those two people will stand up and fight for that relationship every time. If it’s right, and they’re real lucky, one of them will say something.

Holy crappucino! What’s happening to me? I started this as a tribute to the show that makes me chuckle uproariously, no matter how down I might be, and I end up bringing out all the touchy-feely quotes (the ones that go so well with the Colin Hay and Del Amitri songs). I’ll have to fix this, and quickly!

Cox: Oh, my God! I just gagged and vomited at the same time. I gavomited.

Much better.

Cox gets all the best lines. And Jordan — Christa Miller is gorgeous. Sigh…

Cox: By the by, this moment is so great that I would cheat on that other moment with it, marry it, and raise a family of tiny little moments.

See what I mean? Best. Lines. Ever.

And the little bits of philosophy tie it all together and bring it home:

Eliot:A person doesn’t have to be perfect to be exactly what you need.

It didn’t start out well — I got home from playing my show at 3 AM last night to find Adolf had jumped ship, too.  And so I started walking the streets around my neighborhood, smoking way too much and finding absolutely nothing.  Every hour or so, I ended upo back at my place, walking the few houses around mine to see if I can hear or spot one of the little bastards. Nothing.

Adolf’s huge, and they’ve both got claws and a mean streak, but I’m not convinced that either one is made for survival outdoors.  Even beyond the cars, there’re a lot of stray cats, dogs, and probably large rats in a few-block radius of my house, and past the playing, I don’t know that Adolf or Ari would know what to do if attacked.

Fortunately, Adolf must have sensed that I was giving up on him, and came mewling out from underneath my house this afternoon (yeah, even fat, he can still squeeze himself into all sorts of strange places).  He was the same talkative shit that he’s been all week, and that apparently drew Ari out of whatever hole in the ground she’s been hiding in for the past seven days — I could hear her through the closed windows upstairs when I took Adolf back inside.  It took a little coaxing — and I’m fairly convinced that if I hadn’t just carried Adolf to the house, Ari wouldn’t have come anywhere near me.

It seems six days is plenty of time for a cat to start to go feral.

So I left the little buggers inside, with all the windows tightly shut.  No more roof privileges for them.  Ever. Or at least until I’m ready for them to run away.

Tonight, they pay for running away. I’m off to the store to get shampoo.

Bath time, bitches, cause I know you cats dig it so….

South Dakota: making Alabama look progressive.

Actually, I suspect that Alabama’s lawmakers are really pissed off that they didn’t think of this first. It’s not that I live in a state that is less conservative than South Dakota — just lazier.

No exception for rape or incest? I hope none of you assholes ever has a daughter or wife or grandchild that would need one of those exceptions that you’re trying to get rid off.

People are such shitbags in the name of religion.

A US state has signed into law a bill banning most abortions, in a move aimed to force the US Supreme Court to reconsider its key ruling on the issue.

The South Dakota law – approved by the governor on Monday – makes it a crime for doctors to perform terminations.

Exceptions will be made if a woman’s life is at risk, but not in cases of rape or incest.

(via Warren)

Although I think that Ces had the funniest reaction of all.

I’m not kidding. I was racing through thoughts like an Olympic sprinter, arguing with the voices in my head about which of the clever things was going to be the title, which would be the closing gag… And of course, like a good dream, all the brilliance is gone with the daylight.

The basis of the brilliance was a list in my head of strengths and weaknesses. It’s been stuck in my head for a while now, although only rising to the surface recently (which is to say last night at 4:30 AM), that I have a real disconnect in my head between reality and desire when it comes to who and what I am. At least, I think I do; it’s either that, or maybe there’s a stronger duality inside of me than I’m willing to admit.

Taking personality tests has always been hard for me, partially because I know how they work, and therefore can do a fair job of skewing them whichever way happens to suit me at the moment. And partially becuase of the above disconnect: I have a really hard time, I think, sometimes, answering truthfully about myself — rather than answering a question with what I do, I answer with what I would ideally do. I don’t describe myself as I am, but as I wish I were.

For the most part, this isn’t really a problem, I suppose — I don’t give a fuck if some profile of me is accurate or not. I’d rather people get to know me before they start applying labels. But at least in the sense of self-examination, it makes things difficult. Trying to figure out who you are when you won’t admit the truth, even to yourself, is not the easiest of pursuits.

• So am I extroverted or introverted? Equal parts both, I think — I really do crave large crowds and attention and recognition, but I just as much demand my own time and space, alone whether surrounded by people or not. It just depends on the time of day.
• Do I think more with my head or my heart – am I a thinker or a feeler? To steal a bit from Daniel, “Which answer gets me the cookie?” Not to say that I choose between logic and gut based on reward — except, yeah, maybe I do. I value logic at times when it suits my ends, just as I validate choice by instinct for the same reason. Hmm. I’d guess, for testing purposes, I’d show up as about 60% thinker, 40% feel, but then, I may be overcompensating for what I wish were true (which is less logic, more gut).
• Intuition versus sensing — fuck, I don’t know. Ditto on the Judging/Perceiving.

Maybe I just fall outside of all the conventional wisdom. And that’s fine, too, but it sure would be nice if there were more resources for those of us that want to understand what’s going on in out heads but don’t really fit in with the average Joe.

Even on the list in my head of strengths and weaknessness, I can’t quite figure out where some of the traits go. For example: I can be manipulative (although, according to Melissa, it’s fairly transparent) — is that a strength (very useful) or a weakness? Most people would be able to figure at least that much out — but then, tops on my list straddling the line is “overly analytical.”

If you’re bored, or want way too much of a glance into my head, or just need something that’s an easy target for amusement and humor, you can click on the little thumbnail for a bigger version of my hand-drawn list of me. Or maybe just my misconceptions of me. Or maybe just handwriting for the FBI to analyze one day.

the days go by
and nothing brings me joy
the glow was strong
when i was a boy
but it’s gone
–Blackfield, GLOW

But enough about me. Let’s talk about you. What do you think about me?