Several things:

• Life and death: Frank Edward Robbins the Sixth has his picture taken inside of Laura. Patricia Helsing, RIP.
• Super tuesday! Obama has a narrow lead in delegates. Neither he or Clinton are likely to "win" based on primaries. Basically, if Clinton can keep a virtual tie, she can probably choke him out at the convention w/superdelegates and committee maneuvers. However, if Obama can open up enough of a lead to make that choke-out sufficiently unDemocratic, he could keep the nomination.
• On that note, I'm working on my first real decent think-piece on politics in ages. I'll post it on one of those kinds of websites and throw a link up here soon. UPDATE: here.
• Cornell Club: I'm more or less moved-in to the East Bay bachelor pad. It's pretty cool, actually. We have a nice dining room with an impressive scotch bar, are proximal to both the BART and a couple good night spots, and with a little more set-up should be ready for some kickass housewarming activities soon.
• On the downside, after two separate trips to Ikea, I still don't have all the parts to build a bed. Screw you, Swedes!
• It's been productive to be back in the office, and we've got pieces of paper up all over the place with bullet lists and schedules. Feels good!

All in all it's been busy but in a refreshing way. I've been getting up early and coming home late, which if not exactly how I want to spend my time in a perfect world, is decidedly a change in my habits of action, and is as such refreshing.

Find your polling place and go exercise the franchise.

It was a slaughter. By the time I got around to buying seven shots of Kessler for the table -- "smooth as silk" -- we were all coloring well outside the lines, flirting with the ladies, shouting half-bright witticisms at one another. Yes, for the Girth's 29th birthday, after a very lovely and grown-up dinner of cayenne chicken and freshly-made pesto, we got drunk.

This is an old passtime, one that brought us together as wild young men, and still serves a bonding purpose, even if the path is now more well-worn and recovery a bit more difficult. It doesn't happen that often, this dionysian fugue, this western tradition of peeling back the civilized parts of our brains. We're more self-conscious and protective; more self-judging too. We've got better things to do a lot of the time. We worry about our health. Still, the ritual persists.

Considerable vulnerability is created, both during and after. This is part and parcel with any loss of control, and it's what we hope for I think, part of the draw. Things will be admitted, attempted, words blurted, action taken. Magical events may transpire, and in the hard light of day, with luck, truth will reveal itself.

The morning finds me shaky, giddy, mumbling rationalizations and pining away over a girl I haven't seen in more than year. The hard light reveals an empty landscape; my cupboard is bare. It's a weak kind of feeling, and I don't like it.

I'm headed down south for a week or two. It's all-hands at the office next week as we gear up for a big group project that runs through April.

This will also be the innaugural journey to Man House, the East Bay pied'a'terre I'll be establishing in conjunction with LGD and The Girth. It'll be interesting to see in what ways this will differ from skuzzy early-20s dude-house living, and in what ways it may remain the same.

We've all got high hopes, and there will be warming parties and more.

So far, 2008 is off to a slow start. Post-project crash and a generally listless feeling. Even flossing has become irregular. I'm hoping my full health will return and a taste of ramblin will put a little spring back in my step.

Just a note as I saw this in google news: Al Qaeda No. 3 Man Killed.

It just jogged my memory, because here's the version from 2005, and here's 2003. Indeed, this Times of India story from '05 notes that the subject of its piece was the sixth number three to date. I wonder what we're up to now? Moreover, the Times of India has the temerity to throw quotes around "senior" in the phrase "'senior' al-Qaeda operative," and to note:

bq. Although, no one officially described Al-Yemeni as a No.3, the joke in media circles here is that will be the nomenclature for any al-Qaeda suspect besides Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahiri, the one-two who have evaded capture for more than three years.

I do love the Times of India. So disrespectful of our holy cows.

The point is not that these stories are lies, but to say they are stories, and that their value is as such -- comforting narratives of progress -- not as sources of information. This is generally true of non-investigative press reports based on sources within the military.

It's nothing new, but yet another reminder that you are surrounded by propaganda.

Check the Cali voter guide, y'all.

In a voluntary open-sourcing of the great tradition of secret balloting, here's how I voted:

• Dem Primary: Obama. It's an easy call w/Edwards out. I won't feel terrible if Sen. Clinton pulls it out, but I dislike the dynastic aspects of her campaign, and have more peer-weight pulling me towards Barack. California is a showdown state for the two of them, so I'm happy to lend my weight to the cause of a Black President.
• Prop 91 (Transportation Funding): No. This is apparently a vestigital ballot measure with it's original supporters saysing it's no longer necessary as law.
• Prop 92 (Community College Funding): Yes. The upcoming demographics for California project rising college-age population. Keeping community colleges both well-funded and affordable is especially important over the next 10 to 20 years. They fill a really important part in the educational spectrum, and frankly I'd like to see more ambitious uses of CC facilities and institutions.
• Prop 93 ("Term Limits"): No. As the quotes indicate, I don't believe this is about term limits. It's a technical change to existing term-limit law that on the surface makes them tougher, but in practice would expand the terms of many incumbent state assembly/senate members, who are the ones who put it on the ballot.
• Props 94 - 97 (Indian Gaming Agreements): Yes. I believe there is spiritual irony and justice in the ability for Native peoples to swindle the white man with the benefit of the one-armed bandit. More power to them.

The little election office over in Eureka is a pretty quaint and friendly little place, and the workers there are very nice and accommodating. As a first-time early-voter, I have to say the whole thing was pretty swell.

My friend Sarah is on her way to India. She's among the finest of the people I've gotten to know fairly well since moving up to these parts, and an amazingly talented artist. We have a few of her pieces around the house, really great paintings, and honestly one of the main things that set the mood and made me really want to live here.

Now she has some of her work online too:

Paintings By Sarah Finestone.

I really love Sarah's art. It strikes such a great balance between portrait and pastiche, symbols and subjects. That you can see my friends and roommates in some of them probably makes it more exciting for me personally, but I feel that she's really in a good spot stylistically, and hopefully will go places with her creative endeavors.

If I were a rich man I would be a patron. Maybe someday I will!

Those were what I called our "salad days."

As one commentator for this Mike Lux post put it, "soaring rhetoric, like most anything else Bush touched, is dead for me for a while." And lately it hasn't even been soaring.

George W. Bush is headed to history's footlocker as possibly the most unpopular president since measuring popularity was invented. He doesn't even have a "Nixon goes to China" to pin on his legacy, just a shitty debt-based economy, a brutal and senseless war/occupation, and a wave of fraud, indictments, and political malpractice that's only going to smell worse as time ripens the pile.

So I didn't really have any interest in watching the State of the Union. G-dubs is haggard and on the defensive. His popularity has been so low for so long, he can't even help out his peeps except by steering clear and trying to keep his stink off 'em. There would be no substantive announcements, and with his lack of political zazz, no entertaining shout outs warning us of "Human-Animal Hybrids" or the like.

Indeed, overall the reviews are tepid and our first-drafters of history seem eager to pass on by this guy, get back to covering the race to replace. People just don't care anymore, not even those of us who many thought were "haters." The Bush administration seems ready to fold up shop with a whimper, which is better than a bang given their predilections, I suppose.

Not much going on 'round here. I have become infested with the Humboldt County Crud, which will hopefully pass soon. On the upside its a winter wonderland here (rare snow) and we replaced our broken dishwasher, raising the Westhaven standard of living by 3.35 points in a single afternoon.

Since I've been sleeping and laying in bed more, I've been thinking about what kind of life I want to lead, trying to let my mind wander, entice the possibilities. It's been a year and a half since I relocated to this little slice of earth. Time flies.

I've been reading more lately, which is good. In addition to dumping my Netflix subscription in favor of The New Yorker and Harper's, I've digested a few books, which I'll talk about briefly and (ahah!) interconnectedly.

Air Guitar
A collection of short pieces by Dave Hickey, subtitled "Essays on Art & Democracy," this book is just fantastic reading if you like $5 and even $10 words, distrust academia and other elite discourses, and enjoy thinking about art and culture with a political bent. The text occasionally diverges into minutia of fine art that lost me (I don't know from painting) but in almost all cases the thread returned to terra firma, and I didn't really feel like I missed out on the true meaning of Hickey's prose because I have no idea what Cézanne was really all about.

Harper's recently had a great excerpt from an upcoming book by Slavoj Zizek in which the Slovenian guru (who I encountered because a really pretty girl making a documentary wanted to talk to me about Music For America once) chides various leftist tactics around the world, in particular the "retreat into criticism" and the "politics of infinite demands." It made me wonder if Zizek has ever read Hickey, who's an art critic and not a "Critical Theorist," but whose writings as such contain, to me, some of the most insightful and generalizable observations about politics I've ever read.