Picking up on my last post:

You do what you do because you like doing it. Because you like doing it you do it well. Because you do it well, it's valuable to other people.

In a clinical analysis, there's no real need for thankless labor anymore, though with our industreal-era habit of massive over-consumption quite a bit of it still exists. As a society we're trapped in a dead-end way of thinking, but the current People In Charge are deadly afraid of allowing different ideas to be taken seriously. Such an undertaking, while perhaps getting closer to the truth, might jeopardize their position.

An example: in my previous post on health care, my friend A-Stock (also named Alex, but another friend named Alex already commented) wonders how a better system might come into being. My other friend Nick responds in girthly fashion and is, I think, essentially correct. But I want to kind of elaborate on what's going on here.

First of all, the question of paradigm. In response to the observation that Americans spent more than twice per-citizen on health care as any other nation in the world, yet still manage to have middling life expectancy and close to 50 million citizens with no coverage, Alex asks "How do you pay for [health care for more people]?"

The answer is we're already paying for it. In fact, we're paying double. The question is not how does one pay to get quality health care for all citizens. The question is who do you pay.

Now, what do I suggest? I suggest we not be shy about picking up a good idea and implement a standard single-payer system for all general coverage: preventative care, dental, and anything you need to stay alive at a minimum. We can haggle over "quality of life" costs (hip replacement, viagra, etc) all day long, but covering the basics is a no-brainer and there's no reason not to do it.

I suggest we call health insurence what it is: a trickle-up system of extracting wealth from working/middle-class families and seniors. Insurance companies are out to make money, and the market doesn't have any problem using human suffering and weakness to drive profits. Remember the market doesn't give a shit about people or society. Is it right for health insurance profits to skyrocket as medical coverage declines?

I suggest we remove inefficient and corrupt profit-taking beureaucracies from health care administration as well. Medicare runs about 3% in administrative overhead. HMOs are somewhere between 4 to 15 times as wasteful. Why are we tolerating this drain on our economy?

I also suggest we allow collective bargaining with pharmaceutical companies on drug prices. To make up for any lost profits, we can prohibit marketing and doctor-lobbying for prescription medications. Free speech is not a right to advertise, and prescription medications should be recommended by doctors, not hyped directly to consumers. The US and New Zeland are the only countries that allow this practice; maybe we should rethink it. Cutting the ad budget will remove about $2.5B in costs for the pharmaceutical industry, which should provide a healthy boost to their bottom line.

To sum up, I suggest we give businesses an effective tax break and provide workers with a bigger paycheck and more peace of mind by making health care efficient and decoupling it from employment. Our immigrant population won't wreck the single-payer equation. This problem can be solved. Even if we're not as efficient as the Germans or Japanese, we can still give workers and businesses a boost to their bottom line while simultaniously providing coverage to the millions of uninsured.

In today's political environment, this is a somewhat radical ideas, but it shouldn't be. It's just the truth.

Update: J-Chow (Gotta Drop A Blog), the voice of reason:

yes, something needs to be done, but the solution is not simple because it involves a large number of people giving up power, perks, control, and money. it also involves people (the general population) becoming less apathetic and focused on others (instead of our own selves). this will be the hardest part of the process.

I too don't think the solution is simple. I think there are ways to innovate. For instance, why not have single-payer coverage for general health care with private coverage (maybe even "Health Savings Accounts") for elective and quality-of-life costs. Couple that with a redoubled investment in R&D, total transparency in accounting, and a system of oversight and governence that doesn't put CEOs, bureaucrats (corporate or government), politicians or union bosses in the drivers seat, and that's getting to sound pretty sweet. I'd settle in the short term for not having health care tied to a job, bringing down costs so give small businesses a break, and covering people who are really in pretty desperate need.

Welcome back,

Here's how I spent my last few days. 1900 words or so. Just autobio.

Thursday I worked a bit, corresponded, read the blogs, tinkered. In the late afternon I played some Civilization III -- an integral refresher for western history -- and then went out to the grocery store to pick up supplies to make Grandma Madeline's Iowa Beef Stew. It's simple stuff, but really righteous, and a good pot of it can feed quite a few folks, or one person for quite a few days, quite sumptuously and economically.

Luke came on over to have dinner, and along with Dan we had a little meal of it, toasting with a quart of Miller High Life each. Dan and I showed Lucas Halo 2 and Xbox Live, which represent another frontier in gaming and kind of freaked ol' "Straight Arrow" Dauter out a little bit. After eating and visiting with Dan, Luke and I headed back to the East Bay to hang out and talk and meet up with Luke's friend Sid.

We got pretty high for the BART ride -- oh yeah, get a little paranoid on the BART -- which helped to drive a lively chat on the walk through North Berkeley about the nature of existence and whether or not Domination was a fact of life. Luke maintains it isn't necessary, but I disagree. However, I qualify this with my belief that properly contextualized and balanced, there's nothing necessarily malignant about Domination. I just think you have to pass the conch shell around enough to keep everyone honest, and it'll all work out from there, at least as far as the rules of the State are concerned.

But then that gets into this whole other business of when power is being exercised, and all the forms domination and power-poverty can take; from outright physical deprivation to the kind of mental slavery that exists today. So yeah, that's true, but I'm with Bob Marley when it comes to emancipating ones self from mental slavery: "none but our selves can free our minds." It's not up to the State to Prohibit any and all forms of Domination. It just wouldn't work.

Anyway, it was a good vigorous philosophical debate -- heated at times, but essentially friendly. I'm into philosophy, you know. Like most things academic, I think it's gotten to be a bit out of touch, but I believe in the discipline, whether or not it's being very aptly applied at the moment. I believe I can make it my own. See, we're getting to a new stage in human development. The development of scale-free community is going to shake up the whole nature of society, sure as the cottin gin did.

A brief flashback; I remember the room I had at Rubin hall my Freshman Year at NYU. How innocent. How full of life. How shabby and gorgeous. Back when my life was light, entirely my own and at the same time entirely supported by a vast institution. "Everything's gonna be allright; Everything's gonna be allright..." It was a much more brilliant if significantly less focused time. I think my fond recollection has something to do with the current bout I'm having with the ever-present crisis of meaning.

Anyway, we drank beer and whiskey and got high from the Sobe Bong -- a neat little hack of engineering made by Kim's little brother -- and shot the shit for a while. Sid showed up, and he and Luke tore a brilliant sociological streak that I was happy to mostly observe and pick up bits and pieces from. Sid's a little older, doing grad school as well. He studies interracial violence between Latin and Black gangs in Los Angeles, a serious sociologist.

I started fading after a massive attack of munchies hit as I spectated on Luke and Sid's discussion of these wild academic times. They're onto some rebel shit, all obsessed with Foucault and fired up about alternate theories. For my part, I hadn't gotten much sleep the night before because I was having a wild tumble with this really fantastic woman who I met dancing last weekend. More about that in a while. The point is, Luke put on The Big Lebowski and I fell asleep at some point.

The next day we lazed. Luke had to go proctor an exam for about an hour, but other than that there was nothing on the schedule. Luke showed me where he was at in San Andreas and I played a mission or two on the saved game I made when I was hiding out at his place right before the election. It's a fun game; verging on role-playing in its depth. Having only played a fraction of the game, I don't really know how strong the plot is -- starts out pretty good -- but if those people at RockStar keep working on it eventually they'll hit some kind of jackpot.

There was a little shenanigans with the test because the professor who was nominally "in charge" had gotten drunk at the Sociology Department Party the night before and forgotten to photocopy the questions. So while Luke was out dealing with that and making sure kids didn't cheat, I picked up a sequel to Hitman, which I'd enjoyed playing once. It was interesting. Very adult in terms of the lack of twitchy action (though that's always a possibility) and also in terms of the disturbing darkness of the plot. It was a twinge of what my friend Chris calls Survival Horror.

I play for a bit, and eventually Luke gets back from his exam. We talk about the game and some other things a bit, and soon Kim comes over. Luke and Kim have been together for a couple of years now, but last week they broke up, at least as lovers. They're still really close friends in terms of being mutually supportive and hanging out pretty often, and they'd had tentative plans to go see a movie, so I tagged along. We decided on Blade 3, because why not. It was a matenee, and we figured we could get high over at Kim's North Berkeley House of Bachelor-Degree Holding Graduate Women and make a go of it.

It was allright. The walk over was quite nice. It's good to be high in Berkeley on a relatively warm late afternoon in December. School is getting out and it's a Friday and the energy was bright. The movie had its ups and downs. I think it might just be the first consciously ironic but still serious action movie, another sign of how comic books are coming to inform the media of film. The casting of Parker Posey is the icing on the cake. I recommend it on video if you enjoyed the other installments; wonder how this kind of film pans out as an investment.

After the movie we talked about food and Luke and Kim exchanged some DVDs at Blockbuster. They watch a lot of stuff, have that pass where you can just keep a certain number of movies out. It turned out Luke had had a bit more than me to drink last night and was suffering from a hangover, so we decided just to chill. Kim and I went back to her house where I took a shower listening to Sammy Hagar on 107.7 The Bone via her antique bathroom radio, which has great sound. It was fun, especially since I'd been wearing the same clothes for quite a few days.

When my shower was done and Kim had had a small sandwitch, we went back over to Luke's (they live like three blocks from one another; it's cute) to get Brazillian pizza and watch Shaolin Soccer, an entertaining and worthy -- if somehow distastefully Disney-esque -- attempt at creating a Chineese film with some western crossover value. After that I hoofed it back to the BART home.

Finding myself still with energy to burn and it being Friday night, I took a bike ride to the top of Twin Peaks. I've been doing light yoga, pushups, leg bends and situps this past week, slowly waking up my body. Adding in some good cardiovascular bike riding is the next logical step.

I did it up right with the longjohns under the torn up black cut-offs and the Neal Young-flavored mp3 mix; sweated my ass off, getting in some good uphill attacks and some solid projing on the shallow rises. Downhill I took the twisty backroads route rather than bombing down Portrola; there's this great smooth two-block downhill that leads into a shallow one-block uphill. You can really pump and lean into the downhill, because you know the return curve at the bottom will catch you and let you bleed off the speed. On other downhills it's generally 15-degree slopes broken by flatland crossrodes and you have to take it easy, pump those breaks, don't want to go flying off the edge or slamming uncontrollably into oncoming traffic 200 yards down the line. But this one little lazy half-parabola, you can soar, and I know how to hit it really good. Cheap thrills.

After getting home and stretching/pushups, I took a bath and relaxed. Slept late.

Saturday I had a date. The night before I'd traded voice messages and quick conversations with Carrie, the girl I met dancing last weekend, setting up the plan. She was going to come to my neighborhood and we'd get a drink and see what happened next. I was excited. I spent the day cleaning up the house and my room, then late in the afternoon I fixed myself a little leftover stew, and then headed to Ryan's house, a friend of Nicks, where we were watching Vitali Klitchko defend his heavyweight belt on pay per view.

Nick's a pugilist -- a longtime fan of boxing and now taking lessons himself -- and he does a great job of representing and trying to spread interest in the sport. It reminds me of the people who consciously tried to promote soccer when I was growing up, except somewhat less wholesome. It's sometimes a little weird, but I generally enjoy having a few beers, watching some fighting, eating some chineese food or whatever. It's a good masculine ritual to have.

And then the date, which I thought I would be late for because there were three undercards, and most of the fights went into the late rounds. I cut loose back from the Marina-area to the Mission along Fillmore, slicing through the taxi and SUV-heavy traffic in grand Manhattain fashion. There's something about making a mockery of automobiles with my superior agility that's especially satisfying when you do it to yuppies. I arrived at The Attic, where we'd set to meet, pretty sweaty but generally charged up. Turned out Carrie was stuck up on Twin Peaks because of a public transportation mix up and was waiting for a cab, so I waited, had a beer and listened to some great old reggae music.

She came in good time, and we sat for a bit and caught up. My plan had been to go look at art for free at some of the nearby galleries, but they were all closed because it had gotten late; so we just walked around the mission and eventually came back to my place, which was all right and then some.

That pretty much brings us up to speed. I had breakfast with Carrie at Big Al's. I definitely dig her. She's really funny and really good looking and she really seems to enjoy being with me, and that makes me feel fucking great to be honest. After that I just whiled away the afternoon and evening.

I'm thinking more and more about this big road trip and just how exciting it all is. Maybe it's all the biking and sex and reefer, but I'm starting to feel loose, like I might actually hit a good groove again sometime soon. I think I'm over the election, and I think I'm going to be fine with my separation from Music for America. There's going to be a lot of stuff still to sort out, but I'm starting to feel confident about myself in terms of my ability to set and follow some direction. We'll see how this plays out in this week, if we can actually get some Praxis going.

Welcome back,

Here's how I spent my last few days. 1900 words or so. Just autobio.

Thursday I worked a bit, corresponded, read the blogs, tinkered. In the late afternon I played some Civilization III -- an integral refresher for western history -- and then went out to the grocery store to pick up supplies to make Grandma Madeline's Iowa Beef Stew. It's simple stuff, but really righteous, and a good pot of it can feed quite a few folks, or one person for quite a few days, quite sumptuously and economically.

Luke came on over to have dinner, and along with Dan we had a little meal of it, toasting with a quart of Miller High Life each. Dan and I showed Lucas Halo 2 and Xbox Live, which represent another frontier in gaming and kind of freaked ol' "Straight Arrow" Dauter out a little bit. After eating and visiting with Dan, Luke and I headed back to the East Bay to hang out and talk and meet up with Luke's friend Sid.

We got pretty high for the BART ride -- oh yeah, get a little paranoid on the BART -- which helped to drive a lively chat on the walk through North Berkeley about the nature of existence and whether or not Domination was a fact of life. Luke maintains it isn't necessary, but I disagree. However, I qualify this with my belief that properly contextualized and balanced, there's nothing necessarily malignant about Domination. I just think you have to pass the conch shell around enough to keep everyone honest, and it'll all work out from there, at least as far as the rules of the State are concerned.

But then that gets into this whole other business of when power is being exercised, and all the forms domination and power-poverty can take; from outright physical deprivation to the kind of mental slavery that exists today. So yeah, that's true, but I'm with Bob Marley when it comes to emancipating ones self from mental slavery: "none but our selves can free our minds." It's not up to the State to Prohibit any and all forms of Domination. It just wouldn't work.

Anyway, it was a good vigorous philosophical debate -- heated at times, but essentially friendly. I'm into philosophy, you know. Like most things academic, I think it's gotten to be a bit out of touch, but I believe in the discipline, whether or not it's being very aptly applied at the moment. I believe I can make it my own. See, we're getting to a new stage in human development. The development of scale-free community is going to shake up the whole nature of society, sure as the cottin gin did.

A brief flashback; I remember the room I had at Rubin hall my Freshman Year at NYU. How innocent. How full of life. How shabby and gorgeous. Back when my life was light, entirely my own and at the same time entirely supported by a vast institution. "Everything's gonna be allright; Everything's gonna be allright..." It was a much more brilliant if significantly less focused time. I think my fond recollection has something to do with the current bout I'm having with the ever-present crisis of meaning.

Anyway, we drank beer and whiskey and got high from the Sobe Bong -- a neat little hack of engineering made by Kim's little brother -- and shot the shit for a while. Sid showed up, and he and Luke tore a brilliant sociological streak that I was happy to mostly observe and pick up bits and pieces from. Sid's a little older, doing grad school as well. He studies interracial violence between Latin and Black gangs in Los Angeles, a serious sociologist.

I started fading after a massive attack of munchies hit as I spectated on Luke and Sid's discussion of these wild academic times. They're onto some rebel shit, all obsessed with Foucault and fired up about alternate theories. For my part, I hadn't gotten much sleep the night before because I was having a wild tumble with this really fantastic woman who I met dancing last weekend. More about that in a while. The point is, Luke put on The Big Lebowski and I fell asleep at some point.

The next day we lazed. Luke had to go proctor an exam for about an hour, but other than that there was nothing on the schedule. Luke showed me where he was at in San Andreas and I played a mission or two on the saved game I made when I was hiding out at his place right before the election. It's a fun game; verging on role-playing in its depth. Having only played a fraction of the game, I don't really know how strong the plot is -- starts out pretty good -- but if those people at RockStar keep working on it eventually they'll hit some kind of jackpot.

There was a little shenanigans with the test because the professor who was nominally "in charge" had gotten drunk at the Sociology Department Party the night before and forgotten to photocopy the questions. So while Luke was out dealing with that and making sure kids didn't cheat, I picked up a sequel to Hitman, which I'd enjoyed playing once. It was interesting. Very adult in terms of the lack of twitchy action (though that's always a possibility) and also in terms of the disturbing darkness of the plot. It was a twinge of what my friend Chris calls Survival Horror.

I play for a bit, and eventually Luke gets back from his exam. We talk about the game and some other things a bit, and soon Kim comes over. Luke and Kim have been together for a couple of years now, but last week they broke up, at least as lovers. They're still really close friends in terms of being mutually supportive and hanging out pretty often, and they'd had tentative plans to go see a movie, so I tagged along. We decided on Blade 3, because why not. It was a matenee, and we figured we could get high over at Kim's North Berkeley House of Bachelor-Degree Holding Graduate Women and make a go of it.

It was allright. The walk over was quite nice. It's good to be high in Berkeley on a relatively warm late afternoon in December. School is getting out and it's a Friday and the energy was bright. The movie had its ups and downs. I think it might just be the first consciously ironic but still serious action movie, another sign of how comic books are coming to inform the media of film. The casting of Parker Posey is the icing on the cake. I recommend it on video if you enjoyed the other installments; wonder how this kind of film pans out as an investment.

After the movie we talked about food and Luke and Kim exchanged some DVDs at Blockbuster. They watch a lot of stuff, have that pass where you can just keep a certain number of movies out. It turned out Luke had had a bit more than me to drink last night and was suffering from a hangover, so we decided just to chill. Kim and I went back to her house where I took a shower listening to Sammy Hagar on 107.7 The Bone via her antique bathroom radio, which has great sound. It was fun, especially since I'd been wearing the same clothes for quite a few days.

When my shower was done and Kim had had a small sandwitch, we went back over to Luke's (they live like three blocks from one another; it's cute) to get Brazillian pizza and watch Shaolin Soccer, an entertaining and worthy -- if somehow distastefully Disney-esque -- attempt at creating a Chineese film with some western crossover value. After that I hoofed it back to the BART home.

Finding myself still with energy to burn and it being Friday night, I took a bike ride to the top of Twin Peaks. I've been doing light yoga, pushups, leg bends and situps this past week, slowly waking up my body. Adding in some good cardiovascular bike riding is the next logical step.

I did it up right with the longjohns under the torn up black cut-offs and the Neal Young-flavored mp3 mix; sweated my ass off, getting in some good uphill attacks and some solid projing on the shallow rises. Downhill I took the twisty backroads route rather than bombing down Portrola; there's this great smooth two-block downhill that leads into a shallow one-block uphill. You can really pump and lean into the downhill, because you know the return curve at the bottom will catch you and let you bleed off the speed. On other downhills it's generally 15-degree slopes broken by flatland crossrodes and you have to take it easy, pump those breaks, don't want to go flying off the edge or slamming uncontrollably into oncoming traffic 200 yards down the line. But this one little lazy half-parabola, you can soar, and I know how to hit it really good. Cheap thrills.

After getting home and stretching/pushups, I took a bath and relaxed. Slept late.

Saturday I had a date. The night before I'd traded voice messages and quick conversations with Carrie, the girl I met dancing last weekend, setting up the plan. She was going to come to my neighborhood and we'd get a drink and see what happened next. I was excited. I spent the day cleaning up the house and my room, then late in the afternoon I fixed myself a little leftover stew, and then headed to Ryan's house, a friend of Nicks, where we were watching Vitali Klitchko defend his heavyweight belt on pay per view.

Nick's a pugilist -- a longtime fan of boxing and now taking lessons himself -- and he does a great job of representing and trying to spread interest in the sport. It reminds me of the people who consciously tried to promote soccer when I was growing up, except somewhat less wholesome. It's sometimes a little weird, but I generally enjoy having a few beers, watching some fighting, eating some chineese food or whatever. It's a good masculine ritual to have.

And then the date, which I thought I would be late for because there were three undercards, and most of the fights went into the late rounds. I cut loose back from the Marina-area to the Mission along Fillmore, slicing through the taxi and SUV-heavy traffic in grand Manhattain fashion. There's something about making a mockery of automobiles with my superior agility that's especially satisfying when you do it to yuppies. I arrived at The Attic, where we'd set to meet, pretty sweaty but generally charged up. Turned out Carrie was stuck up on Twin Peaks because of a public transportation mix up and was waiting for a cab, so I waited, had a beer and listened to some great old reggae music.

She came in good time, and we sat for a bit and caught up. My plan had been to go look at art for free at some of the nearby galleries, but they were all closed because it had gotten late; so we just walked around the mission and eventually came back to my place, which was all right and then some.

That pretty much brings us up to speed. I had breakfast with Carrie at Big Al's. I definitely dig her. She's really funny and really good looking and she really seems to enjoy being with me, and that makes me feel fucking great to be honest. After that I just whiled away the afternoon and evening.

I'm thinking more and more about this big road trip and just how exciting it all is. Maybe it's all the biking and sex and reefer, but I'm starting to feel loose, like I might actually hit a good groove again sometime soon. I think I'm over the election, and I think I'm going to be fine with my separation from Music for America. There's going to be a lot of stuff still to sort out, but I'm starting to feel confident about myself in terms of my ability to set and follow some direction. We'll see how this plays out in this week, if we can actually get some Praxis going.

We need more life about each other. Light creates understanding. Understanding creates love. Love creates patience, and Patience creates unity.

-- Malcom X

Or did I just blow your fucking mind? It's not what most people expect to hear from brother Malcom, but there it is. That man was deep. What a blogger he would have been.

I've got my work cut out for me. This one's optimistic, but the situation right now isn't good. It's not the end of the world, but there's certainly a bit more of a shadow over my vision. Tough living, these days.

In a quest for inspiration, I look back at some of the performance work I did hack right after 9/11, the spirit that was expressed then. In something I wrote between 9/11 and 9/13, I informed my audience that reality was in their hands to create as artists:

Change your reality, shave your head, move, eat a new food; or find a new fantasy, believe in love, in opportunity, in your fellow human. Either way you change your experience. Change your experience, change a lot of experiences, reclaim the dignity of a lot of experiences, and you can change a lot of reality. Then you too can move the heavens and the earth.

--And I'm Not Fucking Around

That's right, man! Justify your existence! A month later trying to put my theory into practice I presented a character based on the homeless man who fix bycicles, including mine, in the East Villiage, as well as my own naiscent philosophy of change and politics.

Yeah well, you know, it's like... if you could figure out how things are changing though, like the code to change, like the rhythm, yeah the, the wavelength - there's a, there's a wave of change, and you could hop up on that shit. You could surf that change, you know, bust some serious Big Kahuna Che Guevara moves.

Man you could get it together, the change, like all the spare change lying around, get it together and it's a real thing. Change, man. Real change. Real-World change. Real-world "change the world" Change.

-- The Best I Can

Viva Che! That one was scored to Radiohead's Optimistic, quite a stirring tune if I don't say so myself. I had it played live on acoustic guitar and told jokes with my musician as part of the performance.

Anyway, the point is that at the end of the day, these are things I still really believe in. I believe in the social revolution, and I believe that the political process is a part of it. They can be complimentary elements rather than antagonists. I believe that by changing enough hearts, we can simply prevail by our energy, without having to destroy other lives.

The question is, how do we do it?

Notes from the KoneZone:

Lately it occurs to me that this has been a long strange trip and there are about 10 million girls around my age in this here country and a lot of 'em are cute and I haven't had any real good fun for a while. Real Good Fun, maybe. It aughtta be capitalized.

It's funny, you know. Because last night I found myself at this party at Kim's house in the East Bay, and it was pleasently and un-pleasently like high school. I didn't really know anyone there other than a few good friends, but everyone was vaguely attractive and I was feeling out of it and slightly emotional, and I had to keep going back outside to sit down and collect myself and repeatedly come to the realization that I was not "living in the moment."

And that's the thing. When you're not really "in the moment," it's hard to have Real Good Fun. It speaks to a couple of my basic axioms: Life is holy and every moment precious -- which is both the reason for and primary entry point to the closest thing I know to enlightenment. And Presence is perfection, which is similar, but serves a practical method as well as being a useful diagnostic tool.

Lemme break that verbage down:

You can always ask yourself, "am I present?" And yourself is going to know if you're where you need to be. That's basic. You gotta trust it.

So anyway, this gets kinda mad personal and shit, because there are certain things that would take a lot of telling to unpack cleanly, and a lot of the stories aren't mine alone. I can't rightly write about some of the more saucy (and [in]formative) escapades I've had this year because the stories aren't entirely mine to tell. Some might take offense. I'll need to get clearance from people to mention things, or find a way to literarily obscure them. Or both. Probably both.

But confession is good, so here's a little bit of the truth. The last time I had sex with a girl was before I went back east for the RNC. It was wild, but not in the end something that made me feel better than I felt before. It was kind of draining, and at the same time even though it was pretty hard, it wasn't quite enough. In any event, since then I've kind of been flippantly casting my gaze about wherever I am; hungry eyes, but also wavering, unsure, heasitant.

You know, on some level I serioosuly beleive that this will get better if Kerry wins. Somehow that will give me some of my mojo back. I've been pretty deflated since Dean flamed out; maybe a change in political fortunes will have an echo elsewhere. No matter what happens, the presence of more personal freedom -- the election being over -- will bring welcome room for self-examination and change.

And I also really do think Kerry is going to win at this point. Honestly. I'm going to send a big message about it tomrrow. I'm willing to stake something on it, some hope. I've come to accept that it's not something I really have much conscious control over at this point; all I can do is the same as any of you: do all you can to get your people out there to do it... still, I'm feeling good.

At the same time, I do feel nervous about trusting that guy... but I really like what my mom said. She said, "remember when Clinton was elected, and everthing was about how he was 'my generation's' president? That wasn't true. He set himself up like that, but I never felt that he represented my generation. Kerry does. He's still got that in him somewhere."

Yeah... maybe. That would be nice, and I even kind of believe it -- check the clips from "going upriver" here; let me know if I should annotate them. But actually, I'm more excited about the fact that we might get to completely discredit the Bush administration by launching a series of investigations into their misdeeds so that we don't repeat history again. And maybe we'll get some shit-hot sunshine laws enacted to make sure the people can watchdog the whole process; take it back to the old-school. Transparency, bitches! That and cooler voting laws so we can do same day registration. And a popular revolt against the media establishment.

You know I once blogged to Sumner Redstone -- CEO of Viacom -- "Fuck you, Sumner. I will burn you down?" I meant that. Some days I really do want to be a HST-like figure on the internet. Justin Hall is my blogfather, don't forget, and he had more fun than me on halloween. I've got plenty more room to grow. But to really chase that dream, I'll have to wait until I'm in a position to really cut loose. That was late 20s for Hunter.

Interlude: here's what The Doctor actually said about his process...

I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant starbursts of writing from the book of Revelation than anything else in the English language." He elaborates that "you cannot call the desk at the Mark Hopkins or the Las Vegas Hilton or the Arizona Biltmore and have the bell captain bring up the collected works of Sam Coleridge or Stephen Crane at three o'clock in the morning[… ]It simply takes too much time, and if they've been sending bottles of Chivas up to your room for the past three days, they get nervous when you start demanding things they've never heard of[…]If there is a God, I want to thank Him for the Gideons, whoever they are. I have dealt with some of His other messengers and found them utterly useless. But not the Gideons. They have saved me many times, when nobody else could do anything but mutter about calling Security on me unless I turned out my lights and went to sleep like all the others…"

He would have loved google, so say nothing of technorati...

As I like to recall it, he got married and that only made him more weird, more free I suppose. If that kind of thing really worked out, man, there's no telling where I could go. Totally free of the need to chase women, all that nervous entropy gone; no more soul-drag to hold me down. Oh, man I could soar if it really worked out for me. I know I could. Of course, Hunter also got divorced, and recently married his assistant who's less than half his age, and I think that's rather something not to emulate. So it's not all a bowl of cherries.

The sentiment lives in me though; I could soar. Outide of being the most romantic damn thing I've written in the past eight months, this raises a really interesting question: why don't I let myself be fooled? Why don't I let myself be won over by someone else? It's not a really arbitrary question. I'm a good actor. I know how to nuzzle up into a fantasy world. I do it as art from time to time. I could do it in the name of fun at least once, right?

Well, for now no. It's just not happening. It hasn't felt like fun the last few times I'd tried getting lured into someone else's field, and Saturday night I actually ran away from that kind of situation. I met someone who was about as hungry as I was, but it just didn't feel right so I actually literally ran and hid.

I've got some work to do before I'm there. Hopefully part of that work is taking baby steps back to being ready for bliss by learning how to have fun again. I really would like that. We'll see how it feels in a week

Click Here and see if you don't get just a little bit excited. Just a little weensy bit.

Love you all!
-OJ