"Undermining my electoral viability since 2001."

Swelter

Well, I'm back in the Big City, trading off two days and a night in the air-conditioning of Bablylon -- corporate HQs, Chilli's bar'n'grill, hotel room, places where people are comfortable with a certain amount of bureaucracy -- for the kind of specific swelter that you only get when your rubbing up hot and raw against eight million or so of your fellow monkeys.

Indian Lake is burnin'
New York's skyline is hazy
The River Thames is turnin'dry
The whole world is a-blazin'

It actually made me sick. Maybe it was my cafeteria salad lunch, but when I got back to trendy trendy Williamsburg and Atlas Cafe, I started feeling ill. When I finally got up to walk to the park and lie down, I made it about a block and a half before bending over and puking down a storm drain. It all happened so fast, and I felt immediately better. So I called up Frank -- who this made me think of thanks to a little bit of shared history -- and drank 1.5L of new water in the park while relaxing sans-shoes and watching the McCarren pick-up softball practice (a random mix of Poles, Hipsters, Dominicans and Orthodox Jews, which made me happy).

New York seems good. The heat brings out some of the best, as does the cold. I suppose we thrive on adversity here. Inexplicably, I don't feel so outraged by hipsters here as opposed to San Francisco. They're less pretentious and somehow more butch; more beards and sweaty white t-shirts, less designer printed long-sleeves.

I'm looking forward to a few more days here and then another weekend in Weshaven. The way things are going, I'm gonna need it!

...adding, I seem to be running a persistent fever even now that it's cooled down and I'm all hydrated. That's not good, even if it does make me feel a little tripped-out. Now would not be a good time to succumb to some damn airplane flu. Bleah.

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More Sicko

Sort of a ranty post here, hence the angry gun-toting photo.

My man -- and soon to be home-owner (!!!) -- Franko had an interesting comment on his blog in response to Sicko:

I've had no illusions about how fucked up HMO's are and always just assume that I'll never get any coverage for anything. I have never, ever been totally honest with any doctor I have ever had for fear of having my honesty come back to haunt me. No doctor of mine has or will ever know that I used to smoke cigarettes, how much I drink, past drug use etc. I feel that I am always trying to game a system that would like nothing more than to game me.

This is something I'd never actually considered. Frank's the son of a Doctor so he's been on the inside his whole life. I suppose I've been more of a naive trusting optimist, and having never had any other regular doctor than Dr. Halpern, who was my pediatrician and saw me once or twice as an adult, I've always been totally honest with health care people. It's never occurred to me to do otherwise, because they're supposed to be evaluating my health, and I assume they need all the data. I also assume at some level that what I share with them is private.

This, of course, is not really how it works. The fact that we have a system which employs the profit-motive to drive denial-of-care of course does mean that people lie to their docs. This is just another example of how deeply-grooved the wrong in our system of Health Care is. It's paradigmatically perverted. Spiritually fucked.

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Happy Birthday 'Merika!

I just made it back from a few days out camping at a boat-in site with Mark, Zya, her sister and brother in law, all hosted by Can-Do Tiger Dave (Zya's progenitor) and his goon squad of drunken loggers. Good times. I feel that all Americans should drive a speed boat at least once every four years.

It was hot and nasty on the way back across the Sacto valley (110 and humid at the low point) but Moamar held up fine in the heat, and here in Westhaven it's fogged-in and maybe 60 degrees tops. I'll be here until Sunday when I fly to New York for a bit.

I read some news today as a way of reorienting myself. The local paper out in the Sierras was all about parade coverage and exotic police-blotter stuff (woman with sword detained, etc), and I knew that The Fear would be progressing even over a holiday weekend.

It strikes me as odd how disconnected things are. Like, the giant -imperial palace- embassy being built in Baghdad, which is news because of construction problems. What the fuck, you know? The undercurrent of doom is returning.

Never underestimate the power of inertia to keep things going, but the total lack of sanity in this country's brain-trust is kind of alarming at times. Feels like we've all just accepted that Shit's Bad, and we're just going to make the best of it for ourselves and those around us. I lump myself into that group. It's hard to know what else really to do but bide time and work on yr own life.

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Source Text For "The Best I Can"

The following are texts which I wrote leading up to the final product, [[The Best I Can]]. Frank Boudreaux had told me already about the concept for the overall show -- 10 pieces by different artists based on the 10 tracks from Kid A -- and I'd picked "Optimistic", which is my favorite Radiohead song, as the one to do.