Actually, 10 things, because I’m in list mode today:

10. When she dances, she epitomizes fluidity and grace. For all that I’ve preached and practiced adapting a more elementally water-like life, she embodies it physically.

9. Her vocabulary is amazing. I knew that I would fall in love with her on the day that she used the word “atavistic” in a sentence, and didn’t blink.

8. She is guarded and private, but somehow she’s not distant or cold. It’s a dichotomy that I never would have imagined; it’s a trait that I never would have thought I would find attractive. But I do.

7. She is loyal and dedicated to both friends and family.

6. Watching her occasionally have her non-sequitur moments (when her blood sugar drops too low, she has the attnetion span of a hyperactive child on a sugar binge) is one of the most endearing things that I have ever done. I’m not sure why, but I think this is incredibly cute.

5. She has the body of an 18 year old, and of a dancer. Sorry — I’m still male, somewhere underneath all this romanticism.

4. Sleepy feet that keep accurate rhythm and tempo. I think only a musician could appreciate this.

3. She rarely gets offended by the over-the-boundaries things that pop out of my mouth sometimes. And when she does, it’s more cute than angry.

I think. At least, that’s what I choose to believe.

2. Her amazing nerditude. I never would have imagined that I would meet a woman who enjoys reading comics or watching sci-fi and horror. It’s nice to be able to enjoy these things with someone, to talk about Ellis and Gaiman and Bendis and Whedon, as opposed to having someone tolerate those things you probably should have let go with other childish things.

1. Watching her sleep is perhaps the most at peace I’ve ever felt. I can’t explain this, outside perhaps of my empathy kicking, but hearing her deep breaths and watching her eyes flicker behind closed lids in the half-light coming in through the window, feeling her skin against mine and smelling the scent of her hair — nothing else puts me in a place where everything is and always has been and will be right in the universe.

(Please, try to come up with something more original than a vomit reference in your comments)

(Better, save them for someone who isn’t happy with life)

BREAKING NEWS: Be sure to check newsstands shortly for the latest issue of mental_floss magazine — I have a new piece in this issue (the annual 10 issue), “10 Recent Sightings of Einstein” (or something to that effect). It’s a collaboration between myself and Wade Kwon — amazingly, the first collaborative effort between us (that I can think of, at least) in over 25 years.

Also, for those wondering what the hell this post means: Pluto was downgraded from a planet yesterday. Pluto will now be in a new class of dwarf planets (or, to be PC, little planets).

George Bush: He’s not retarded.

Oh, my God. He really just admitted that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11? He’s not retarded; he’s just undoubtedly the worst president — well, of my lifetime. I don’t have much of a history background, so maybe there were worse. But I doubt it.
Lewis Black is brilliant. And Jessica Simpson — still not so hot. Maybe with a little sign of intelligence behind those eyes?

Alan Moore: “I don’t think I’ll ever personally break even on Lost Girls. But it remains one of the works I’m most proud of. It’s not about the money. It’s about the accomplishment. I’m a very smug show-off at heart. I’m altogether too pleased with myself. The big boost for me is to be able to turn out something that I think is pretty marvelous, like Lost Girls. I’m not in it for money, I’m just in it for the glory. Me and Melinda think that Lost Girls is pretty glorious.” More at the Onion AV Club…

Apparently, size does matter.

Dropping soda from my life (five days and counting) has had some strange side effects that I hadn’t foreseen.

I wouldn’t really mind all this — it’s gonna do my teeth a world of good, and eventually I’ll adjust to the new diet (once i figure out what it’s supposed to be) and adapt to the distractability — except for the rubbery wings that I seem to be sprouting from between my shoulderblades, the metallic bristles of hair on my arms and chest, and my new incessant craving of garbage. That part’s got me a little concerned.

I did this, originally and still, to drop the acids from my diet (I’m having recurring dental problems, and I’m finally forcing myself to admit that either soda goes or my front teeth do). CL, being hypoglycemic and thus much more aware of dietary and nutrition issues than I (keep in mind that healthy for me involves eating at least one meal every couple of days. It’s all relative.), pointed out that all the fructose in sodas (etc.) is terrible sugar as well. I would have thought that sugar was sugar was sugar. Go figure.

Keep in mind that I’m not doing this to diet (I’m not in the best shape of my life, but far from overwieght), nor to purge my body of toxins (I’m still a big fan of Milo’s tea and coffee in the morning, both of which are filled to the brim with caffeine and sugar). It’s purely a vanity thing, me and my choppers.

So far, so good, in some ways. Sodas are portable, so I was drinking an average of four a day at work and then another three or so at night (yay, metabolism); now, I’m drinking next to nothing during the day. I’ll have sweet tea at lunch, for a little tiny bit of caffeine, and milk at night (does a body good, damn it!). So, consequently, I’m dehydrating a little bit. But no migraines that I’ve heard about when people cut too far back, too fast, on caffeine. And I’ll probably lose a few pounds, by default.

However, I don’t think I ever knew exactly how much of my energy was coming from the sodas I was drinking. Now that I’ve quit, I’m going to have to start eating regularly. No more skipping meals, much less days of eating (I don’t get hungry, still; I do, however, get mean as my blood sugar gets too low).

My ADD is back, full force. Again, I’m not sure that I knew how bad it was (or at least, I managed to forget since high school). Writing this much on one topic is a major exercise for me; getting through a movie is, so far, impossible. I keep likening it to Charlie getting smart and then very suddenly losing his newfound intelligence (rather than over a prolonged and painful period), but also knowing what it was like to be smart still.

Okay, it’s a terrible metaphor. But literary, so I get points from CL.

The best part of all this? I figure I’ll being really adapting and getting comfortable with all this right around Labor Day, which is the date I’ve chosen to quit smoking. So, on the one hand, I’ll hopefully be turning thirty-five in much better shape. On the other hand, you folks might have to bring me cake and presents in the psyche ward, and I understand they won’t allow colored hats or balloons because they cause too much excitement.

Bummer. At least I still have my crystal meth…

If Hope’s contribution to the world of “run, little ones — escape this mad world while you still can!” wasn’t enough for you, then perhaps Kristi’s will be, as she forwards me a lovely link of 1974 Weight Watchers’ menu cards.

Frankly, the only thing about these recipes that works on a dietary level is that they are apt to induce vomiting.

hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk…

Okay, so you’re selling something — a product, a service, an idea. You want to get the whole world or some interested subset thereof on your side — whatever you’re selling, you want them to buy. You come up with catchy slogans, witty ad campaigns, and perhaps even find yourself a sponsor, someone famous to shill your wares.

Famous and infamous are not the same:

http://www.wearetheweb.org/

Anyone have a Brillo pad on a pencil and some Drano? I need to scrub large parts of my brain away now.

Thanks, Hope. You’ve just proven how ironic your name is.

I would have taken it for free, you asshole. Okay, not anymore, unless maybe you held a gun to CL’s head and told me I had to (or else). But I promise you that I will be staring at you, laughing the whole time, making you wonder if I’m seeing smurfs or just playing Final Jeopardy in my pants.

Blogs tend to fit into one a few categories: news, politics, vanity. I’m sure I’m forgetting one or two (like the niche storyteller: Waiterrant, Clublife, etc.), but that pretty well lumps them all together. I really like the ones by my friends, those that serve a few purposes: keeping a journal, of sorts (the kind of journal kept by people with interesting lives or, at least, interesting perspectives), and maybe trying to work some thoughts into coherency every now and then, sharing their lives in sort of a mass-mail approach (only the kind that you request, instead of sending to everyone like spam). The important thing that separates the friends that I like from those who I like and read daily is an ability to write — maybe not with perfect grammatical precision or punctuation that would give the Pope a throbbing erection or even vocabularies built from the bones of gods and forgotten worlds, though those things never hurt. If you want me to swing by your blog every day, just write about something that interests me, and tell me a good story, or make me laugh, or both.

My blogroll list of links thing over there to the right will never be huge, mostly because I’m not playing a game with people trading links, or even linking to you just because you’re my friend. Rather, I’m more concerned with turning the random readers — those who get here via Google searches for “amputee prostitute” (seriously, creepy anonymous reader, stop that!), or maybe from blogs that link to me — onto really good, regular, funny reading.

Because, believe it or not, you can tell as much about most people by looking at what they read as you can by looking at what they write.

If you want me to link to you, join MySpace and ask me to put you in my Top 8.  That’s what’s important in life anyway, right?

Bopping around my usual haunts, I find this post from Heather over at Dooce, where she kindly takes the time to respond to hateful e-mail from her readers.

See, right here, I’m already amused. It’s as if their browsers are stuck at Dooce.com, and they aren’t allowed to head over to their usual porn or gambling sites or right-wing hate-filled bulletin boards until they’ve read her latest post and answered three multiple choice questions about that day’s content. Are these the same people that continue to watch television shows that offend or bore them, week after week?

It got me thinking that I’m kind of jealous, on one hand, that I don’t have the readership numbers to qualify for entry into the weekly hatemail sweepstakes. Some of us write blogs for ourselves more than others, sure — with an average daily visitor count hovering around 50, it would be summarily stupid of me to claim that I’m doing it for the attention. But on the flip side, no one puts this sort of thing out for public view without at least somewhat craving attention, readers, feedback — whatever. Yeah, I’d love to have thousands of visitors per day; not only would it give me hate mail to respond to (and you can ask Neely — my writing is infinitely less boring when I actually get to make fun of something someone else has written), but I could put ads up, and editors across the country would be knocking my door down to write a book, and maybe, just maybe, my girlfriend would stop calling me a worthless waste of skin.

I’m kidding, of course. No editor in his or her right mind wants another book by a blogger, and my girlfriend never calls me a waste of skin to my face.

But on the flip side, writing for that many people, knowing that my words and my life (or what passes for one) are under the scrutinous eyes of thousands or hundred of thousands of people that I don’t really care one way or the other about… imagine the pressure. I wonder: would it affect my writing, or the topics that I’m comfortable addressing? Would the hatemail cause me to question my behavior, my morals, my beliefs? Would I become impotent and flaccid without the adulation of my legions of fans and stat logs to back it up?

Nah. CL is way too hot for that last one to ever be a concern.

No shit. She’s a bellydancer. Viagra, I hear, sponsored four assassination attempts on her last month alone.

I should be happy, I suppose. I’ve got a small but devoted* number of readers, and even at this level I already get hateful comments. And those are from a guy that I’ve known for a quarter of a century. Imagine how much fun they’d be from people that can hide behind anonymity.

*If you ever hear a creative type use the phrase “small but devoted,” it’s exactly the same as hearing a woman say that “it’s not the size that matters.” It means we’re both terribly displeased with how little we have, but hey — why should anyone’s feelings get hurt along the way?

Generically speaking, I hate telephones. I’ve thought many times about why this is, and the best that I can come up with is that my mother was raped and killed by a pack of wild telephones when I was just a child. Of course, this is obviously not true; while I think that my mother might have dated a telephone in her teens (a lovely rotary, according to the pictures), she’s not the type to hang out with the phones that would kill.

Why do I have a cellphone? Well, it’s cheaper and more portable than a landline, it comes with a camera that fits in my back pocket and allows me to email myself photos instantly, and sometimes my job requires me to be near a phone at random or inconvenient hours. Plus, once in a blue moon, I like to call people, if only to tell them that I just saw their boyfriend at the movies (with another woman), or to warn them of impending if slightly fictional disasters.

Everyone that knows me well at all knows that I often don’t answer my phone. They also suspect that I am ignoring their phone calls only, and I’d like to take this moment to note that, when I ignore calls, I don’t even pull the phone out of my pocket. I have no idea who is calling when I don’t answer. I don’t care, I think, is the point I’m trying to make. Oh, and sometimes, I’m doing something that would prevent me from answering the phone: watching a movie, playing a concert, working.

In fact, that’s what I was doing Tuesday night at midnight. Same as every Tuesday, we’re playing at Bailey’s. We were a little late getting started with out second set, though, and so when my phone rang, I actually felt it (it’s set to vibrate so as not to bother those around me, but playing bass makes everything vibrate; if I’m onstage, the odds of me knowing that anyone’s calling are comparable to those that Mel Gibson’s next film will play temples across America). I pulled it out to check the caller ID.

Hey, just because I’m probably going to ignore you doesn’t mean I’m not curious sometimes.

Turned out to be CL, which struck me for two reasons: she’s almost always in bed and asleep well before midnight, and because she had a rough night with what she thought might have been a pre-migraine headache and some weird conversations. I answered, if only to make sure that she was okay.

And if any of you want to go ahead and get jealous, yes, I always answer CL’s calls unless I’m incapable of taking a call.

It was a short conversation, mostly due to the fact that Eric began pointing out to the crowd via the live microphone that i was on the phone and holding up the magical country set. Nothing was wrong, it turns out; as she said, “I just wanted to tell you that I love you.” And while it’s even better to see her eyes and feel her hand in mine when she says it, it’s those little moments, the in-between moments, those times when you’re waiting for the next big thing…

See, this is why I answer the phone any time I see her name on the screen.

So, here’s the deal: Patricia Todd is a white woman, Gaynell Hendricks is a black woman.  Both are competing for the Alabama State Senate seat in area 54 (which makes me think of a video game or a sci-fi movie.  And not a good one in either case).

And there was all this talk of racism in the weeks leading up to the election — surprisingly, here in Alabama, it was not Patricia accused of it, but Hendrick’s campaign and supporters, claiming that the blacks in the zone needed to protect their interests by voting black.

And so it’s down to a runoff vote, then a contested election, and so on.  All this for a state Senate seat.  In Alabama.

But here’s the rub: the same guy who wrote that letter to Area 54 residents (““Moreover, if we start electing whites in majority black districts, the chances are great that these districts will be redrawn as majority white districts after the 2010 census, and will remain so thereafter”), on Dr. Joe Reed, is now scrambling to get himself and two others on a committee of five that will decide the contested election.  This same Dr. Reed that, according to a statement made by Todd on August 16th, paid the fee required to contest the election, after the original filer’s check bounced.

It’s not the conflict of interest that bothers me.  It’s the fact that politicians are trying more and more to pull this shit right in front of our eyes and then complaining when we notice, or denying their actions, or saying that we’re wrong about their intentions, or saying that we have no clue what we’re talking about.  It’s the same thing across the country, from local boards to the President’s administration in Washington. And, outside of the blogosphere (mostly those bloggers who spend too much time shutting out unlike-minded people with their extremist rants), it seems to me that no one is really all that concerned. “It’s just politics as usual.”

Really?  Am I just a little late in pulling the idealistic blinders off my face at this point?  Or are you all just becoming complacent and giving up?  Are you not the least bit insulted that these pretentious and arrogant fucks with their overblown sense of entitlement and underdeveloped moral systems think they can pull this off, right in front of your blind eyes that couldn’t possibly understand even if you did see?

They’re calling you a moron, to your face, and you don’t seem to care.

For the record, I know Patricia; I’ve done volunteer work for AIDS Alabama, and I am the webmaster for her election website. She’s a nice woman, and smart, and if I lived in her district, I would’ve voted for her, too.  But this isn’t really about that (though I wish her luck in this bullshit process).  It’s about people like Joe Reed, and people refusing to gracefully admit defeat in what amounts to a popularity contest, and the entire process upon which the governing of our country — okay, fine, the governing that I have to live with — is based.

Anyone that really thinks that our electoral system is truly representative of the people needs to take a closer look at this mess, and then get back to me.

(Thanks to 3cho, Dre, and Kathy for bringing this to my attention, albeit indirectly)