"Undermining my electoral viability since 2001."

Halloween, and Other High Risk Ventures

It's been a breezy couple of days, more social contact than ususal. I got to put up my favorite Hobo Lawyer for a night, a quick seven hour visit, and last night saw my friend Kate -- who reminded me again that I need to put her in my people page -- and some of her friends. It was fun and different, investment bankers and planners for the Gap, salesmen of fiber optic transponders. Even though I have a full time job for the first time ever, I'm still the token boho; riding my bike and pushing my non-profit. I get to take home the leftovers from dinner, not that I'm complaining.

Halloween is upon me. Not my favorite holiday because I'm poor at costuming myself. Nothing fits. One of the joys of being an actor has always been that someone else gives me outfits to wear. But I'll make a go of it for stress relief if nothing else.

Finally, pursuant to my last post about sexual harassment, I got a major boost from this bit of news:

A man described by authorities as a known sexual predator was chased through the streets of South Philadelphia by an angry crowd of Catholic high school girls, who kicked and punched him after he was tackled by neighbors, police said Friday.

Flash your willey, get beaten silly. Damn straight.

Read More

Tags: 

Yahoos, Crapping Up My Life

Ever feel the need to apologize for other people? Maybe it's a neurosis of some sort, but I often feel that the actions of other people reflect upon me as a fellow human being. It pisses me off, not out of some bleeding heart empathy with victims -- though there's a touch of that -- but because I feel like that's just one more roadblock that's been placed in front of me having better interactions in my own life.

I take man's inhumanity to man personally. War, bigotry, harassment; these are all things that tend to happen to other people, but we privileged straight middle-class white male Americans ignore the effects on our own lives to our peril.

I'm so sick of hearing about, witnessing, and being impotently enraged by sexual harassment. One girl at our housewarming party last weekend had a bad story about being the only person on a bus with some pervert dipshit as the driver. I've heard many more like it, and worse too. There's nothing I can do about it but get mad and feel like that just one more fucked up man out there attacking the foundations of trust between the sexes, one more man who's crapping all over women and making my life harder. One more man's shadow for me to escape.

And just today I read about this:

Yesterday, an openly gay Dean for America staffer who attended an event for Congressman Dick Gephardt in Iowa (as is common practice among campaigns) was pushed and grabbed by Gephardt staffers, one of whom derided him as a "faggot."

Here's what the AP wire has, and here's a much more detailed article with multiple quotes from both sides.

I know Hunter, the staffer in question. I met him when I was up in Burlington; he sat around and listened to me prattle on and on to a reporter for the NYT Magazine and then recommended the poem "Kuba Kahn" for me to read. He's a class act, and the fact that he got treated this way brings up similar feelings as the harassment story above. Two yahoos in Iowa attacking the foundations of trust between gay and straight men -- to say nothing of the foundations of trust between Democratic political campaigns. Two asshole men crapping up the world and making my life harder.

Read More

Tags: 

Anarchy... Whenever!

So I'm bouncing around the internet before going to bed -- my version of channel surfing I guess -- and I come across this site, the Anarchist Library and I click on the 9-11 link because I'm from New York and there's a post asking "why is conspiracy a dirty word?" or something to that effect.

So I think I'll leave a comment and lay my "conspiracies are disempowering" jive on these black and red beboppers, but then it tells me I have to register to post a comment. Yeah! Anarchy!

Read More

Tags: 

Little Help?

It occurs to me that my sub-par mood of late is probably in part due to the fact that I'm sitting on my ass eating crappy food getting under considerable stress for a good portion of my waking hours without regular source of physical activity. Know a good gym in San Francisco?

Read More

Tags: 

That Bright Stuff

We had a housewarming party last night; a grand success given that Dan and I have put done no roots in this town as of yet. We half-filled our gorgeous apartment with decent people, liberally saturated with booze and food and loud music, and everything was cool. There was conversation and jest and sociopolicial debating, all the ingredients for a swirling cocktail salon scene sometime when we have a couple more connections. I got to talk art-school with some of Molly's student friends, which was refreshing but also made me feel a little old; a few years further out at least. In spite of the fact that there was no one there for me to romance, it was a damn good time. A sizling proof of concept at the very least.

That stuff makes me feel, makes me feel, feel, feel, feel, happy.

Day by day it gets a little easier, the new life. I miss rain and riding on misty mornings past McCarren park on my way to the bridge. I've hit that little stretch of Driggs maybe a couple hundred times over the past two years, and there's no pleasure like spreading your arms like wings and coasting under trees past green grass on either side in the middle of Brooklyn; that beautiful old orthodox church dome ahead on your left, the Empire State Building rising across the river on your right.

In weak moments, whistful or lovesick or something, I replay scenareos, how this or that might have been different. I remember being a teenager and in New England and the rightness of that, and how I kind of crapped all over it; made proud juvinile moves like I thought an adult would. Takes a while to learn these things. I playback the summer's timeline, wondering where I would be if I hadn't had a ticket to California. Pretty much where I am now, I suppose, but the possibilities tickle.

But hindsight is just a story, and usually a convienent one at that. You don't like being alone now. It's highly unlikely that a real solution to that problem lies anywhere in your past, as comforting as that might be to imagine. Better off roaming the streets looking for some bike-riding apparition to pounce upon than mining your past for nuggets of now-bittersweet memory. Chase too many veins of illusion and you might just get in too deep, suffer from a cave in or loose sight of the canary in the shaft, suffocate for lack of emotional oxygen.

The future is out there, and it probably involves a lot of people and places I've never seen before. That's a kind of comfort too, but rather of a cold variety on an unspoken Sunday night in California.

Read More

Tags: 

Linkage

So in the face of dwindling time resources, my potential avenues of expression are expanding. I like to read and post over on the Daily Kos, and he's made the big leap to scoop, which means I now have my own diary there. While I'm currently using that for stuff that is more or less focused at that community, I may start doing more of my harder-core political noodling in that space.

I mean, it's not like many of you really need my two-bit advice on how to harnass the winds of change. Lots of places to go for that.

In addition to the Kos thing I'm going to also start pouring a lot of my pep-talk energy into my blog on Music for America. I might cross-post on occasion; I'll at least put up a link whenever anything good goes on. The point is that this spot is going to be more personal than anything else, back to the old ways.

Read More

Tags: 

It's alive!

It's been my labor for nearly a month now, and will continue to be for the next year at least. Give it a look:

Music For America

Read More

Tags: 

The Obvious Thing

So yesterday I wrote about political ambition vis-a-bis HST's Better than Sex. The obvious collary is that I'd take sex. There's still a lot of getting over -- by my calculations a year or more before I'm fully settled -- but at the same time eye contact has become a dicy proposition. Sparks a series of impulses I find slightly unnerving but also totally fucking exciting. The juice is starting to flow again, even in absense of an obvious draw; just for the sake of being out there.

Read More

Tags: 

Better Than Sex

Better Than Sex is the title of Hunter S. Thompson's book about the 1992 presidential campaign. As I find myself more steeped in the world of politics -- with fair to good results on my sum personal happiness -- I can't help but reflect where all this is leading.

Might I someday run for office? Michael Moore suggested it to the audience at Berkeley last weekend and that gives me the chutzpah to bring it up in public. I might be able to hack it at a low level, but that's rarely a paying gig and I don't come from money. Money is an obstacle to bigger things, but might be raised. But I tend to think that the seamy underbelly of my website might also be an issue.

It shocks me that people are still shocked that I put all this out there. I mean, why not? I did all these things, didn't I? No point in pretending otherwise. But it's a political liability, maybe. I sometimes do think I'm too radical a revelator to make people feel at ease. Perhaps that's just a lack of self-confidence. Sometimes I flip it and think, "fuck you and your obscurity; truth is a live wire dynamo that doesn't end." And then I think "Hubris, Koenig."

Maybe my role is more cultural. I wrote once in a fit of pique in my personal pen and paper journal, wrote as part of a lenghthy jag against Everything, the question, "where is the Hunter S. Thompson of my generation? Probably off somewhere blogging." I was thinking of Justin Hall, but maybe it's me. Somehow that doesn't seem right either.

I know that Frank and I (and others) have talked often enough about how public speakers at political events tend to really suck. I know that I care about a lot of things. I know that I'm halfway decent at articulating a vision if I take some time to figure out what it is before hand. I know that I can turn a pretty phrase, and have an abiding interest in humanity in all it's various kinky permutations.

The question is where does this leave me? I'm wary of the responsibilities of leadership, tending to hide behind my de-centralization mantra, the idea of being an inspiration to other people to be inspiring, to empower people to empower people. This kind of mantra isn't new; it's common to most hucksters. Not that I'm in it for the snakeoil by any stretch, but I look at the words that come out of my mouth and even I can't take them all that seriously. Too etherial. What about the last minute, the time when everything gets done?

No answers tonight of course, and none really needed. Just the stuff that's on my mind having no book to read. I finished Haruki Murakami's South of the Border, West of the Sun today... man does that guy spin out the romance. That triggers a whole other set of things to go on about, but most of it's predictable; think I'll leave it at this for now.

Read More

Tags: 

I am Weary

There's a lot to be said for sticking the right title on your condition, knowing the name of whatever beast is on your back. I am weary. There's all the work I've been doing, and the fact that what I'm doing now -- while still a highly enviable position -- is something of a come-down from the past two month's crazed running about, listening to the O Brother soundtrack and feeling a little like I did right after getting out of college, like those strange introspective days in Eugene in Arcata. There's also the strange new town aspect to things; not quite the same social support network.

But I'm not whining or complaining, more like admiting a problem; it's the first step to finding a solution. Think what you will of 12-step methodology (not a fan myself), but that's wisdom right there. I also need a neck massage in the worst way.

So I won't forget to breathe, and we're having a house-warming party this weekend, and that should be fun. I find myself tending to more grown-up pleasures lately; good conversation over good food and drink, an alternative to the half-bilnd groping fun of post-adolesence. Keep on truckin', that's what I'll do.

Read More

Tags: 

Pages