Sleeping in the office tonight. I still set my own hours; go figure. Anyway, behold the fruits of my labor:

http://beta.musicforamerica.com

The real deal goes out sometime in the next 72 hours, but if you're so inclined go ahead and take a test drive. Check out what I'll be working on for the next year. It's going to be some exciting stuff.

Where have I been the past few days?

Probably at the office.

...details coming soon

Saturday sun here at the cafe next door to my place. Lovely spot with neighborly owners, good coffee and tea and wireless internet access. The hood is good.

Out late last night, the Zeitgeist, and had the whole Jungle household crashing in my barely furnished apartment. I felt guilty having a bed and everyone else sharing our one couch and the cushions and the thermarest. I'm up in the big house on the hill, a plush Serta bought off two friendly lesbiens from Oakland. It's all fine in the morning with coffee and biscuits and gravy at Als. Maybe we'll see Bubba Hotep later today; depends on how work goes.

At the bar trying to have converstaion, trying to look at women, hearing myself talk -- my voice repeating cracky high tones -- and wondering what it was all about. Shots of cheap Irish Whisky (Powers) and pints of Steam. Stopping off at the El Salvadoran joint for way more food than we could eat and a lovely hit of orchata before coming to rest. Frisco is a small town at heart, I think. It's got that feeling; friends and family and familiar faces.

Deep into my 11th hour today in the office and alone now at 6:45 on a friday, a creeping loneliness sweeps in with the dusk. Here I am on the run from things -- we all realized this was a contributing factor to my readyness to move across country -- and it's not quite working. My thoughts cling to lapsed times, deadening my soul, moments coming back into the minds eye; sometimes unbidden, sometimes dredged up on purpose for the sake of feeling. Or at least feeling what feeling was like, passion regrettably now residing in tenses past.

Don't get me wrong. It's not all desolation. There are sprouts, curious things emerging from the rich San Franciscan soil. But they're fits and flashes, a blurry moment of lust last weekend in the loft with the skate-ramp, but only a moment. Literally. Seconds: flash, eye contact, words, phone number, nothing. The rest is ashes and application, no phoenix yet, dig? Work and sleep and a (still) mostly empty apartment. The moments of coordinated unity are good, the click of teamwork, but when all the purpose falls away and it's just me and my life and my memories... well, the walls are pretty rickety.

And I'm reading Henry Miller and that's probably not helping.

So I'll trundle along. There's too much at stake to get kneecapped by something as banal and ubiquitous as catching a cold and missing your ex-girlfriend. Focus is the premium thing now.

So let's wrap our heads around this; Tommy gets 9 months for paraphinalia and Rush goes to rehab in spite of trafficing in 1000s of pills. I'm not saying Rush should go to jail; I wouldn't advocate sending an addict to prision, much as the perverse irony of forcing the mother of all windbags to follow his own advice appeals to the political warrior in me. It would be fun, but it would also be wrong.

Let's talk about the truth and chemicals. It's true that drug use, abuse and addiction can all be destructive for individuals and communities. It's also true that none of these are necessarily so, that in fact the reverse may be true depending on the individual circumstances and the substance involved. It's also true that sending people to prison is perhaps the most expensive and least effective way of dealing with the social problems that drugs create. Finally, it also seems true that if we're going to have a free society, that freedom aught to include chemical liberty, the recognition that our bodies are our own property, and as such we have sovereignty over our own phisiology.

Perhaps Rush's admission will cause the mindlocked debate over drugs in our society to shamble forward a step or two. Perhaps it will cause people to stop demogauging about substances and start thinking about how we might inject a little sanity into our legislative system. I think it will probably take a new generation -- probably mine since generation X seems to do fuck-all -- to get this country off it's 100-year puritan rampage and back into the smooth groove of reason. It's going to take people stepping away from ideology and lore and into the realities of human experience. On a meta level, this is movement that's picking up steam, so maybe there's cause for hope yet.

I'm sick; some kind of cold. I think it might be stress related along with the fact that I've got pimples on my forehead for the first time in four years and my hair seems to be falling out. The good news is I've got a nice comfey bed, a kettle and some tea, and a couple good books to see me through. The bad news is that Ahnuld is now the governor; though I think he'll face a recall too -- probably at the same time as the presidential primary in March.

Working hard for the future... good conversation with Marcus tonight; good times at the office and after with co-workers. It's an adventure, moving to a new place. Lots of stimulation in lots of ways, and almost all of it positive.

Now time to knuckle, to bear down as my Father would say. A savage orgy of production is the only thing I will accept from myself over the next two weeks.

There's a serious problem in this country when paragraphs like this appear from prominant (Maureen Dowd) columnists in major (NY Times) newspapers with regards to the recent re-revelation of gubernatorial candidate Ahhhnold's shabby treatment of women:

Now Republicans who thundered against Bill — not Arnold, who scorned impeachment as a waste of time and money — argue that peccadilloes are not relevant to governing. And feminists who backed Bill are ushering Arnold gropees up to the Democratic microphones.

Let's get something fucking straight. Bill Clinton received consensual oral sex from an intern in his office, and while this wasn't an issue in the attendant media circus, I'll bet he reciprocated too. Arnold Schwarzenegger on the other hand made several specific, aggressive, crude, unwanted, unsuccessful and non-consensual advances towards women, detailed quite sickeningly here. These are completely, utterly, and indisputably different sets of actions with absolutely separate moral content and value. One guy I understand, the other makes me ashamed to have the same gender.

You can argue that Clinton abused his power in an indirect way with regards to his affair w/Ms. Lewinski, but the situation still boils down to two consenting adults having fun with one another. He's a playboy in a long tradition of playboys, and while I wish dearly he'd have had the spine to admit it at the time (might have dragged this country forward a step) I still maintain that he didn't do anything all that wrong. He fucked around with someone, and that is essentially personal -- between he and his mistress and his wife.

Arnold's actions, on the other hand, showcase a completely different set of values. He's either a straight-up abuser, or he doesn't have the human sensibility to know when his advances are unwanted, goes around humping people whenever he feels like it. Looking at his sum total history, one gets the sense that a lot of what he does is about power, and that his crudely aggressive sexuality is an extension of that. His blatant use of power -- both physical and professional -- to sucessfully perpitrate these ugly sex pranks really makes the whole thing take on a dark tone; it's not fun or good or happy. It approaches the realm of evil.

And if he weren't an enormously powerful man, he would have been kicked in the nuts several times by now and probably learned his lesson. But he hasn't, and his attitude towards women is not funny, right, nice or even excusable. He's a fucking dick, the guy at the party everyone just wants to leave, and his behavior enrages me personally as a man.

The fact that his past actions are being paralelled with Clinton's would be laughable if it weren't so sick underneath. Are we still too puritanically straightlaced to be honest about sex and power? Do people seriously not see the difference between consenting sex (even if it is adultry) and aggressive harassment? If so, that's pretty fucking degrading. It's a shameful reflection of this nation's maturity and still-lingering misogyny that these two types of sexual interaction are being equated in the national political press.

So Tom Tomorrow as the text of a poem by our Commander in Chief. What's the worst part? The carrier reference? The fact that he referrs to his wife as "lump in my bed?" I don't know, but it makes me feel uneasy in new and perilous ways.

I havn't been pushing out the same quantity of political observations lately. Partly that's because I've moved and have lots of personal observations that I think are worthwhile. Partly that's because I'm kind of fulltime on politix and I don't always have as much mojo left at the end of the day. Partly it's because I'm reaching for a mannifesto; trying to build something up that's more than a couple paragraphs of the same old same old. We'll see.

Out for a walk, window-shopping bikes and housewares, saw some dress shoes power-screwed to a plywood construction wall over the posters, highly reminiscent of where I got my painting last night. They had little typed messages on them.

"Who are we trying to impress?"

"Who do you watch?"

"Who watches you?"

It's beauty here in my new 'hood. Not a starbucks in sight, but a beautiful homey cafe just downstairs; nice Korean(?) couple, lots of regulars, classical music, wifi. Strolling along in the afternoon; sun; palm trees; it's fucking California, the street with a mexican feeling. Looks like I'll be trading my greasy pizza by the slice for tacos, a change of pace is nice.

And is it just me, or has the RIAA going after Kazaa users made Gnutella a much more lively place to swap files? The music industry is painfully clueless. Technology remains at least one step ahead of the law, and the gap is widening. Adapt or die, sucka.