Yeah, I'm telling you where to go

Massive linkage below to keep Technorati on its toes - and me See Peeing.

My list will be here tomorrow and then, as many of you know, I will post the new theme on Wednesday. The next theme is very special, an emotional powerhouse, and I don't know if it will encourage very many players (although it could also lead to the biggest mixmania! ever). You'll jst have to check in on Wednesday to see if the theme is your cup of tea.

Here's where the playas reside and hopefully will have posted their mix lists:

Sam
Lena
AKA Monty
Kim P.
Punchbuggyblues
alala
Waltzing Mathilda
Sterfish
Mamacita
Natsthename
Chuck
Evil Mommy
~ d
avrowife
Debi
Randi
Kelly

Even you non-playas should click the above links to see what kind of excellent mixes get made for this little how-do-you-do. For those of you here who mixed and mailed: happy hunting!

We called him Tortoise because he taught us

In a minute or two the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth and yawned once or twice, and shook itself. Then it got down off the mushroom, and crawled away in the grass, merely remarking as it went, 'One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter.' 'One side of what? The other side of what?' thought Alice to herself. 'Of the mushroom,' said the Caterpillar, just as if she had asked it aloud; and in another moment it was out of sight.

Before you venture any further into this post (you intrepid few deluded enough to think there's anything worth reading), I give fair warning that the subject will be lost on the unititiated, i.e. those of you unfortunate enough to have never ingested psychedelics. No matter how much Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, or Alan Ginsburgh you've read, if you've never tripped you won't really know what I'm writing about. It's not that I'll be writing in some lost ancient language (as I usually do) but when it comes to describing the hallucinogenic experience, I might as well type this out with Wingdings. If I described my best orgasm EVAH (hopefully we've all had one of those), it would make more sense although you couldn't get even 1% of what that experience meant or felt like much less a sense of its 4-dimensional extant.

As teh old Zen saying goes, "Those who say don't know and those who know don't say." Not to be purposely obtuse but there are no words for the concept (nor concrete conceptsto illustrate) that which describes "trippin'". The truly initiated will bear me out on this and so, without further ado...

This story caught my eye a few weeks ago:

A recent Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine study suggests "sacred mushrooms" can provide a religious experience that makes one see the world from a different, more positive perspective.

The study tested psilocybin, the active agent in so-called "sacred mushrooms," to determine whether it could induce "mystical experiences" in a group of 36 adults who come from religious backgrounds.

The answer, the study says, is an emphatic yes.

Except for scientific research, however, possession of the substance is illegal in every state.

More than 60 percent of the study subjects said psilocybin produced a "full mystical experience," and one-third said they enjoyed "the single most spiritually significant experience of their lifetimes."

I won't ridicule those of you who believe in a Universal Ruling Principle (URP, yeah), just those of you who plan to stop into the display of a cavemen riding dinosaurs. However, dontcha' think all these vague references to God and God-thought somewhat support Terrence McKenna's theory that our sense of God (and by implication, ourselves) was induced by our greatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreat ancestor's lack of prejudice regarding saprophytic produce, especially what grows out of an ungulates turd piles? My God, dear God, holy fucking Christ, eating mushrooms out of cow shit had to have been a pure inspired chaos because I remember my first time and thinking, "What - you expect me to EAT that?!?"

Actually, we didn't eat them whole but boiled them and then mixed them with 10 pounds of ice and a few packets of grape Kool-aid. Yet, I'm willing to bet our ancestors had no fear of a fat pitcher braking though a brick wall and screaming "Oh Yeah!" and thus it all makes sense to me because my entire view of life shifted a few moments after I took my first sip of that lavender brew. Sure, reality shifted, shuffled and restacked in a grand way but I didn't see God and in fact it was just a Loony-Tunes-like version of reality, garish colors, tweeting perfect birds chirping hello and other absurd grabass comedy.

Most of my friends who've indulged in the Happy Caps have tied their own spirituality to trips and whatever was revealed when the fabric of reality was twisted and wrung out to be hung on the line to dance in the breeze. I won't gainsay them or the validity of their interpretation of thier experiences. It's obvious that they honestly believe the Godhead was speaking to them. Their common thread is that the voice was resonant and clear in its articulation of those things residing deep within the mystic. Those friends are good friends - GREAT friends - so I won't equivocate but neither will I capitulate; my belief that this is all random and not requiring a Big Daddy is not shaken.

One of these days I'll write about the time I was dosed beyond belief (a huge, legendary amount) and yet managed to keep my mind intact but that's a nuther story and it will be a nuther time when I tell it and until then you have this and the promise of yet a nuther tale backing up this whole post that tells you that if you have never tripped you'll stil have anuther chance to not undestand

a nuther comment about them Tigers.

Sipping my Dirty Martini, with a smile

Ahhhh. As I stood under warm jets of water this morning I felt my brainpan kick into gear, a sensation I've missed for too long. The past couple of months have been shrouded with an intellectual torpor and it's felt as though every ounce of mental and physical energy has been sapped by the task of swimming upstream. Although I've had plenty of time to write (what with being unemployed and all), the effect of being jobless crushed any creative urge I had, drowning my self-esteem in a miasmic sludge of doubt and self-pity. Whenever I approached the keyboard my muse sputtered and siezed since it seemed that all I had to say was, "I suck, life sucks, looking for work sucks, everything sucks, sucks, sucks, sucks worse than a pound of Reagan dimes." Not a pretty scenario and in retrospect I'm glad I spared my 2 or 3 readers from a sip of that blige water, spared myself from the opprobrium of posting that poop. As I entered here tonight, I saw more than a dozen entries "saved" because they were either utter crap or I didn't have the motivation (or creative wherewithal) to finish them.

In short, being unemployed hammered me in a big way. Conversely, the sizzling synapses this morning was an indication that knowing I was on my way to my first day on the job had instantly revitalized my faith that I indeed possess some small brain. It was as if someone had charged my long-dead battery over night. Suddenly, as I soaked in the shower, I was analyzing lines of poetry, parsing syllogisms, composing lines of thought that only I heard but would get filed until the time was right to pull them out, stocking the cache of ammo that had been obscured for so many weeks. My mind, MIA and unrecognizable to those who know it, had returned.

The blog neglect of the past couple of months was due to my inability to produce anything more than a desultory post because dragging myself to the computer was almost painful. When I post almost every day it's because the words blitz my brain like the swarm of Box Elder Beetles on my window screens - I yearn to get online and align electrons in such a way to say what's going on inside. That was missing as I spent my days filling out applications, composing cover letters, emailing out resumes and dealing with despair of rejection, poverty, and the stress of the desuetude that resembled my day by day existence.

Having a steady income, sure, it's wonderful, a life-saver but the side benefit of feeling like I'm back on my game makes this turn of events so much sweeter. So sweet in fact that I don't care a bit if there's zero comments. Being back on the horse and shooting from the hip (slinging western cliches like they're trail muffins) is enough for now. Yee haw.

This is just to say

Well the weatherdude got that one so wrong, more wrong than the one time I wore drag (for Halloween - I make a scary, scary woman), more wrong than the poor schmuck I savaged in my last post. When checking the forcast with the local gets-it-wrong-all-the-time news team last night, weatherdude estimated the high today at a very civilized eighty-six degrees. He could have been half-assing it what with the beastly heat and mid-summer doldrums, I assume he just reached into his magic statistic machine and let it run some random numbers instead of doing some real weather prognostication. All I know is that the last time I looked the thermometer registered ninety-nine and I dared not look again for fear that the mercury would keep going until it did one of those cartoon pop the top off the glass moves then turns to steam and makes a little mushroom cloud.

Too hot to cook (much less move with any intention) and yet the wee ones were howling for food, little necks craned back and mouths agape like baby birds - I was tempted to regurgitate my lunch for them but I suppose that would have warranted a visit from DHS. Instead, I slapped together some turkey sandwiches, slices of watermelon, and a big communal bowl of cherries.

Perfection. There's nothing like cold, succulent cherries on a hot day. Pits covered the kitchen floor along with watermelon seeds and crusts of bread (it's always the crusts), fronts of t-shirts pink from the juice that dripped from eager chins. As dad cleaned the table - and the floor - the brood made their way out front to make the most of the rest of the summer sun, dirt patched on the remnants of the evening's cherries. The evenings are still long but shorten with each passing day and eventually I will not be able to complain about the heat, the kids will not be chasing the last light out or carrying their cherry mud into the tub.

Sans cherries, the sentiments are the same, a moment frozen in time; I have mine, William Carlos Williams had his:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold.

Usually, 'anonymous' means 'dumbass'

About a year ago I decided to go with moderated comments, mostly to eliminate spam ("Great blog you have here! You might want to check out this link on refinancing your home!") but also to put the kibosh on a stalker who, apparently lacking a satisfying life and in dire need of a hobby, felt inclined to post incredibly incoherent messages meant to entertain none but the voices in her head. Suffice it to say, the moderated comments worked. The spam stopped immediately and the stalker found something else to do (probably learned how to fold that aluminum foil cap into a stately swan). Since then, most of my moderating has involved deleting redundant comments from the same poster; I've deleted only one comment and that was so astonishingly stupid I imagined the poster sitting on a porch somewhere in the far reaches of Appalachia, typing drool when not strummin' on the ol' banjo.

Thus, when I checked my email tonight to find this comment for my last post, my first thought was to send it off into oblivion and give it the fate it deserved. However, the more I read (and considered), the more I realized that a vicious beating was in order. The comment in question:

If its not your country ...than move. Sad story, tis true but dont blame the whole fucking country. I didnt do it.

By Anonymous, at 5:26 PM

First of all A, let's deal with matters of simple grammar, sweep that issue aside before we graduate to more serious skull thumping. A, it's "If... then" not "than". If you'd said, "You should leave rather than stay," then your statement might have made sense (doubtful, as you will see). However A, your inability to master simple punctuation tells me the then/than distinction is beyond your comprehension.

My guess is that the reading comprehension portion of your SATs came up with a big zero, A, since the concept of "This is not my country," amounted to nothing more than a loud whooshing sound as it whizzed several feet over your head. "This is not my country," was not a declaration qualified with "Because my country is Buzov" or "France" but this is not my country because what happened in Delaware betrays the promise that our country holds. The pointy headed religious bigots who drove a Jewish family to exile through threats and intimidation (going as far as publishing the family's address and phone number on the Stop the ACLU web site so every pointy headed religious bigot in the country could harass them) are the dark, ugly underbelly of our country, shameful examples of the worst of America. Having said that, it should be obvious that I didn't "blame the whole fucking country" but only a few knuckle-dragging buffoons. The rest of my readers got that so it's not as though I was being obtuse or vague. No, the misunderstanding is all you, A, not just being an idiot but being the kind of idiot that other idiots can only aspire to by huffing gallons of gasoline, headbutting the grill of a Ford F-350, and drinking Clorox.

As to your argument A, the whole "If its (sic) not your country ...than (sic) move," is so 1968, not only stale and uninteresting (though I consider the source) but also utter nonsense. It's the same as me saying, "Sweet mother of God, this house stinks," with you responding, "Well, why don't you move?" Except you wouldn't use punctuation or bother with grammar. The point is, a useful response would be, "Then (not "than") take out the trash, do your dishes, open the windows, spray some Febreze around, and get rid of that damn dog!" Unfortunately, I suspect you're not big on complexity A and that you'll be moving soon enough once the kitty that crawled into the dryer starts to get ripe.

A final word for you A, advice from someone who has been blogging for about 4 years and has been on the internet for almost 20 years: 'anonymous' commenting not only identifies you as a troll - a cowardly troll - but gives you exactly zero credibility. No one takes you seriously, no one respects what you have to say, and you've only accomplished making yourself look like an incompetent boob.

Sure, I've just wasted an entire post kicking a mangy cur but anonymous comments, especially anonymous comments from a barely literate meathead, wastes my precious time. Sometimes it's appropriate to slap the ninny silly, knock him conscious, and hope that serves as fair warning for the other anonymous numbnuts aching to post half wit comments. Scant hope, I know, but sometimes hope is all we have.

This is not my country, goddammit

Usually, I go to Jesus' General for a good laugh and a decent dollop of snark. It's a milk-through-the-nose kind of place. Unfortunately, it was not milk coming through my nose that was coming up the last time I went to Patriot Boy, but me being honestly sick when I read this quoted at his site:

A large Delaware school district promoted Christianity so aggressively that a Jewish family felt it necessary to move to Wilmington, two hours away, because they feared retaliation for filing a lawsuit.
[...]
On the evening in August 2004 when the board was to announce its new policy, hundreds of people turned out for the meeting. The Dobrich family and Jane Doe felt intimidated and asked a state trooper to escort them.

The complaint recounts a raucous crowd that applauded the board's opening prayer and then, when sixth-grader Alexander Dobrich stood up to read a statement, yelled at him "take your yarmulke off!" His statement, read by Samantha, confided "I feel bad when kids in my class call me Jew boy."

...A former board member suggested that Mona Dobrich might "disappear" like Madalyn Murray O'Hair, the atheist whose Supreme Court case resulted in ending organized school prayer. She disappeared in 1995 and her dismembered body was found six years later.

The crowd booed an ACLU speaker and told her to "go back up north."

In the days after the meeting the community poured venom on the Dobriches. Callers to the local radio station said the family they should convert or leave the area. Someone called them and said the Ku Klux Klan was nearby.

You can read the General's snark here and here. You can also read pastordan's reasoned outrage here - really, you need to go read these links to get the full story.

Really, I don't care what you think about the ACLU. I haven't been behind all their causes (I wish we were as laid back as the Europeans about religion - "Yeah, it's a big cathedral and we've always let our tax money pay for its upkeep but whatcha' gonna' do? Let's have a drink..."), but overall, I think they do good work. As an atheist, I'm not intimidated by anyone's religious beliefs, they don't make sense to me. However, it's amazing to me that American evangelicals are so insecure with their beliefs that they feel the need to toss tantrums about not getting their views (whatever those are) spray-painted on every curb in America.

Yet, when the scum who run the Stop the ACLU published the address and phone number of this family on their site in an effort to "expose ACLU plaintiffs", lines were crossed. Imagine if you wrote something on your blog that some pinhead extremists didn't like and they published your personal information on a website to incite kooks to prowl around your property (or do worse).

This is not my country, goddammit, not when shit like this goes down. It's a fucking embarasment. And the worst of it is, the fucknuts who did this seem to forget that Jesus was a Jew.

Sometimes it rains on the 4th of July all day and there's no fireworks

230 years today, happy birthday USA. What a long strange trip it's been (nod to the Dead, the band with the best 4th of July song ever) and although not all's well with our Grand Experiment, we still rock harder than any damn country on the planet.

In no mood to grovel or gripe, I lead you to Oliver's post of Declaration (in it's entirety, as relevant today as it was then) and some interesting trivia from AmericaBlog about the National Anthem having four stanzas (Who knew? Apparently Isaac Asimov did).

I doubt Jimi Hendrix knew but he proved the US does indeed rock harder than any other place in the solar system:


My own Fourth involved watching heavy gray clouds roll down the mountainside and dump rain on our parade, buckets of water that we badly needed and I was glad for it. Big drops blessing dusty streets hissing with thirst, a steadied hand holding the shaky wrist that tipped a shot to lips craving relief. Families crowded beneath shelters, huddled together against the chill, wrapped in the smoke of grills, frisbees and softballs stowed hopefully on long, damp tables.

We gathered around my parent's table, passing plates and bowls, sauces, "Can I have" this and "Pass me" that, steak sliced into chewable pieces for little mouths, soy sauce dumped liberally on white rice.

My brother, drunk and self-involved, screaming at his kids and smarmy with conservative talking points (with me biting my tongue with facts), then him driving off in high dudgeon, screeching the wheels of his Escalade to seek the bottom of his Smirnoff bottle. I don't know what it is about our nation's birthday that demands drunken stupidity. The wee ones savvy enough to walk away and seek out better energy, sparklers and running up and down the sidewalk in bare feet, splashing puddles hard hard hard. Anger is the dominion of "adults".

Stole to the back of my parent's house and called The Babe, shared some non-information, said "I love you" - silence.

Little drops on my windshield for the drive home, spat spat spat, drops and lots of emptiness. Plenty of red and blue lights on the way home as our city's finest dealt with whatever American anger drew the 911 call.

All the fireworks I saw. That was my Fourth.

Stormy Sunday

Before I get all deep and shit, I'll give ya' a clue how this hot mix goes...



Read on, on to the previous post and all the pics or else stare mindlessly at the video.

Sorry bout' the last three posts, especially not spelling it "teh Denver"; WTF was I thinking? Afterall, "teh" makes all my inane jibbering one of those "blogs".

The most excellent thing in the world

A criminal waste of time, vanity, oh the humanity, what celebrity do you look like?

David Beckham?



Well, it was only a 62% match, which makes me only a 38% loser, right?













Emma Watson? Yeah, she is very much like Hermione Granger... more than anyone knows.




A Japanese pop star? Not my Lilly... she's too much a "granola".





LMAO, when I didn't adjust the program for gender, Zeke was matched with Lindsay Lohan. Adjusted to boys, he's matched with a young Cat Stevens. I'd have prefered a young Bob Dylan or a young Christ but I think the little guy is full of himself enough.