Dying. Death. Fucked up shit. There's been too much of it for my liking lately. You realize the good times might not be coming back around. It's fucking scary. Was it just youth that hid the carrion call from my eyes in days gone by, or has the reaper really been something more of a force upon the earth this year?

On Crashing

Crashing is a function of loosing control. Unless you're deeply fucked in the head, you don't crash on purpose. Say what you will about the sub-conscious, but I still don't think you run it into the wall unless you've either got a screw loose or a load on.

I crash when I'm drunk, intoxicated in one way or another. That's the only time. Sailing home though the cold February night after a long road and many beers, someday you might hit a pothole and the required reaction time, the foresight, the planning, the ability to deal -- it's all impaired. You hit the ground hard, bounce, hit, slide. At first you feel fine. There's a vague burning sensation and you're a little shaky, but you think you're ok. Rub your nose, maybe a little blood, maybe a few tears. No big deal.

It's only when some other poor late-night soul comes by and reacts in shock, offers you some napkins from his pizza that you realize you're bleeding all over the street. That's when it dawns on you: you face is bleeding and one of your teeth is about to fall out.

That realization is sobering, and you head home slow. Stop in on your friends who are expecting you; wash up, get high, garner a little sympathy. Then, feeling good with comfort and adrenaline, you coast on home to bed. You sleep the whole night through, and only in the morning does it come clear what's happening.

Your face is all fucked up, swollen. Your tooth is loose and sore. You can't eat. You've got a headache. Your eyes hurt. It's the aftermath, and it's a bitch, lasts a long time. Much longer than you want. Much longer than you think is needed to learn your lessons. Aftermath is always the worst part of any blunder. The fall itself is exciting, liberating even. It's the healing process that burns and aches.

So there's this period of languishing that has to occur. A time you have to go through alone. No one can help you with that original pain. No one can scratch the itch that grows inside your face as it comes back together. Friends are a blessing, but this is a thing that must be bourne largely in solitude. It's in you, and no one can take it out of you. It's there until you can digest it.

This is just like getting fucked over in a relationship. I'm making an analogy, see.

Looking back, it's all clear. You'd let go of the handlebars at some point, for we all know this is where insanely good things happen, when we relinquish total control. But then the asphalt reached up and grabed you with its sweet caresses, took some skin for its own. These things happen, to good people and bad. It can't be avoided; potholes are a part of the terrain. Don't drive drunk if you can help it, but if you move fast accidents will happen. Goes with the territory of speed and ambition. It was just your time to take a strawberry kiss. Take it up with the Buddha if you've got a problem.

So you swallow your pride. You bleed, you scab, you swell, you heal. It takes a while, and it's not fun while it's happening.

And on nights when it gets stirred up in lonesome Berkeley you drink a bottle of wine and try to forget about death and dying and all those other bad kinds of loosing; try to forget that injustice exists and that people are the most eminently fallible parts of any plan, of any dream. You try to forget that you've let people down and that people have betrayed you. You try to believe in the basic goodness of humanity. You drink yourself to sleep and hope a new day dawns full of promise and manna from heaven.

As you may or may not be aware, I've been deep into my Howard Dean thing for a while. I fear sometimes I've lost all perspective on his chances. Dean seems to have the momentum nationally (polls consistantly point upwards) and every time I catch him on the news, on the radio, whatever, he's sounding good. I can't help but love all the stuff that shows up online for him. For instance:

This snagged from the People-Powered Graphics page. There's also a brilliant automagic poster generator. It's all quite heartening, the participation. In other news, the campaign has been running a "Beat Cheny" counter fundraising drive today. It's all over the Official Blog. The story is that some time today Dick will chuckle his way to $250,000 for W's re-election run; selling $1,000 plates at a closed-door luncheon in Columbia, South Carolina to 250 lucky adherants. Over the weekend Dean's supporters have given close to $400,000. At this time there are more than 7,500 contributors, 30x as many as are filling W's coffers.

If I were Team Bush, that might cause me to break a sweat. The barbarians may be at the gate.

And here's your bittersweet bonus link of the day: the words of a member of the Iraqi governing council who has resigned.

In a fit of ego I checked my site stats today. Averaging about 400 visits a day: yee-haw! I also found out some guy who works for John Kerry has a picture of me up next to an email from "Wayne Carter" (scroll in the little window until you see this), which is odd. I also found out that I'm #2 in a google search for "Outlandish," outranked only by this Danish rap group who look pretty cool. I wish they had audio samples up.

Well, it's not even August and I'm starting to miss NYC. I miss my bike. I miss riding in Brooklyn; tooling around the burnt out husks of old-time industry, the old waterfront on West street. I miss powering over the 59th street bridge, sweating like a savage beast, listening to loud rock and roll and churning through the tides of midtown, freaking people out on the Upper East Site. Sweat dripping down my nose, wild eyes flashing animal promise.

I don't miss the heat and the stink, but I do miss the action. I miss sex and sweat and moving my muscles like an adult does. I miss the engagement that just fucking permiates the air back there; thin layers of oily ambition all over everything. Every now and then it gets to be too much and I need to leave, but after about a month away I start to miss it. I miss the life, the density, the grind of it all. Hymns for the city.

I like San Franciso. It's got a lot of the same qualities, plus hills and wind and even some palm trees. There's also no bitter old-world archie bunker contingent that I can see. White trash instead, like most of the West. The fantasy of being a bike-messenger and a computer guru and an artist sweeps my mind every time I pop my head up from the BART. Fresh baked utopia, just around the corner.

Sometimes I think of the old NYC : Brooklyn :: San Francisco : East Bay analogy, and I think it could happen out here for me. Don't know if it's real of just imaginary, but maybe just crazy enough to work. I don't know much these days. Tailspin on the long-term vision as Everything I once banked on now seems dubious. The dream is mutating -- maybe a new thing, maybe fatal dream-cancer -- and I'm bored sitting around waiting for something to happen.

Part of my ennui springs from the fact that I'm broke right now and here in 'Merica there's not a lot you can do without spending money. Damn shame. Last night Luke and I were wasted -- cheap red wine and california weed -- and trying play Hearts with friends Mike and Emily. It was pretty fun, but I kept feeling self-conscious about how out of it I was. When dealing with friends of friends, I'm still pretty much a socially awkward person, uncomfortable with myself, afraid I'm going to fuck something up.

But I'm going to proj on. There's no point in knuckling now. It's going to be a hell of a month. Anyone got any tips for Burning Man?

I've spent a lot of the past couple days in San Francisco -- a beggar bum outside the BART with a cardboard sign: "another day in paradise" -- slumming around various nice places to eat downtown with Britt Blaser and talking about how we're going to turn the screws and take the Dean Campaign all the way. It's heady stuff, talking about what might be and what it might mean for us if we're a part of making it happen. Sometimes I think it's a little too heady, my internal speed warning light goes on. Is this all real?

When I first started working on this, talking with Zack about the possiblities, one of the first things we hit upon was that our effort, though bold and ambitious, was profoundly anti-ego. Or at least, it's non-ego in the classic GodKing kind of sense. It's non-ego in the we don't get paranoid sense. It's non-ego in that we're looking for friends and not followers.

So hang on to that notion kid. It's going to be an eventful year. There's a need for me to make sure my own house is in order. Rule number one is take care of yrself, stay grounded and so forth. Gonna be a challange.

It seems I'll be able to pay the rent, which I was worried about for a while. I've never had to ask my folks for support of that kind, and I'm rather proud of this. In spite of looming debt and suchlike, I'm still supporting myself. I could probably do a lot better when it comes to money, but then it turns out I really don't care as long as I have enough to get by and have a little fun.

Coming up in NYU, it was a definite difference between me and most of my peers, where we got our spending money from, how we paid the bills. The whole experience made me a little classist, and I've continued to carry that consciousness with me outside of college. When I go back home, it strikes me only now how class played into the social dynamics of my earlier years. Back in high school, I really didn't know or care who was rich and who wasn't. I didn't really know who was a Republican and who was a Democrat. Now I go back and I see who was and who is, and I wonder if it was really all that idylic, or if I was just oblivious. Not that it takes up a lot of my time, but it is something that I notice.

Well, I did have something here about how people at the Dean campaign liked my site but couldn't link to it due to some of the content I have here; but the comment was potentially trouble-causing and a direct quote is out. It's all good. They're an official thing, and this phenomena ain't exactly new, though it does stir up that old idea of mine to have an "official" blog or website or something... but then I think about what I wrote before, about identity, and I think, fuck it.

Surprising to me that it was the pussy thing on the left, and not something in here. Maybe they didn't know about that part. There goes the neighborhood, but the truth always feels better.

However, I did get another good Kudo. My man "The Girth" is off romping in Canada, and he met someone in Montreal who's seen my site. My ego is just about ready to pop.

Just trying to keep it real. I'm busy and not really operating at 100%. The latest Strong Bad Email is a good one though. I just got a pair of hasslin' glasses similar to SB's Dangeresque shades.

Well, anything resembling vacation has now drawn to a close for me. The last of the monkeys left The Jungle (a.k.a. Luke'n'Kim's house on the Oakland/Berkeley border) this morning, and it's back to life, back to reality here in the Bay. I like the scenery here; the smell of the air, the palm trees. I bought some sunglasses and an old rusty french road bike -- the last of my disposable income for a while. The only missing piece is a coffee grinder. I have a big bag of beans courtesy of my mother, but the only means for preparing them in this kitchen is a mideval mortar and pestle set. Anyone who doubts the debilitating addictive force that caffeine can exude should have seen me this morning, pesling away to get my AM fix.

And so the Summer of the Hassle rolls on; hopefully on smoother tracks now. Last night watched films and ate pizza; kind of a suitable comedown from the past three weeks frenetic pace. The 25th Hour (a.k.a. "Spike Lee Loves America!") was enjoyable, with some really stellar moments. Lee does have an amazing appreciation for, understanding of, and ability to convey the spirit of New York City. The movie caused me to miss it quite a bit; the energy, the jive, the fact that it's the capital of the world, that it is the fucking future writ large: steaming, humping, race-mixing, debauchering, loving, nurturing bitch-goddess and everything. I think she's due for a big comeback in the next few years -- a little less yupification and a lot more community, please.

It made me think a little about 9-11 again, which I haven'd done in a long time, and I hit upon what might be a good meme for describing terrorism and how to combat it; imagine terrorism as a really really egregious hate crime. Think about it: Al-Qaeda blowing up the World Trade Center has a lot more in common with KKK-people burning black churchs than it does with the Nipponese attacking Pearl Harbor. It wasn't a tactical act of war, it was an act of symbolism, though nontheless deadly or tragic in its direct consequence. Pearl Harbor was about the destruction of a fleet and a strategic oil reserve and emperial dominion over the Pacific rim. The attack on the WTC was a massive, homicidal "fuck you!"

The means of addressing and preventing said events are very different, and they also map with the analogy. The threat of invasion by foreign power can be deterred and contained though having a strong defense network; terrorism (be it the international or local church-arson variety) cannot be addressed in this way. In fact, it cannot be defended against in any conventional fashion short of instituting a complete police, and planting the seeds of a guerrilla/civil war. A free society is forever vulnerable, which is what makes freedom so valuable and precious. It don't come easy, and if you want to keep it you have to be strong enough to know that bad people will be able to get to you no matter how many walls you build. If you doubt this I invite you to examine the measures Israel has taken to defend itself from terrorism through conventional means. Ain't working so hot, eh?

The only way to be safer from terrorism is to make sure people don't feel like doing it; to make sure that people don't really want to burn down black churches or symbolic skyscrapers, and that even if they do it is such a universally dispised act that there's nothing to be gained by doing it. We were very close to that with 9-11; but the actions taken by this administration since then have squandered the opportunity to cement world opinion against any such acts. Perhaps all is not yet lost. Perhaps we can change our tune nationally and plead temporary insanity due to extreme grief and stress. Perhaps we can come clean to the international community and really get down to the business of dealing with out issues.

Terrorists (like church-burners) need to be hauled before the light of justice so that all can understand and agree upon their guilt. It is the only way to eradicate them as individuals without prepetuating the crimes they commit. We must create a global legal framework that unites the entire civilized world, every nation and every people, against terrorism, but here's a free clue: unilateral invasion of unrelated nations isn't it. What the US has done in Iraq vis-a-vis the "War on Terror" would be like the NAACP and the FBI teaming up and going down to the South in response to a church burning and busting every hunting club, shitkicker bar and antique shop that might have any confederate-era paraphernalia. Sure you're nominally going after mostly "bad guys," but in doing so with little specific just cause and in an agressive and indiscriminate fashion, you only inflame the issues you seek to address. Such beligerance invites reciprocity.

Maybe I'll develop that a little more later. There are some flaws (e.g. the power dynamic doesn't map), but I think the core notion might be a keeper. Anyway, Spike Lee loves New York City, as do almost all free people in the world. As do I. I'm glad to be here in California, but I'm ready for another go-round when I return.

Arrival in the Bay Area feels princely. I slept last night in a real bed for the first time since leaving NYC. I took a lengthy and hot shower. I shaved. I put on some nice clothes and I'm going to a wedding party where there will be amazing amounts of free food and bevvy; out for a jaunt in Oakland I am. Still frustrated at times, but feeling better and better now that I've Named the Beast. Yessir, it's 2003 and this is the summer of the hassle.