Czech Days

First off. it was still eighty eight degrees and humid at ten p.m. I feel that it's real important to mention this, as a single moment of experiencing hot weather makes every millisecond of life pointless and unbearable and all attempts at social joviality evil and disgusting. But the festival, lets get back to the festival.

Well, the town of Wilber was filled to the brim. I drove in via U.S. 77 and Nebraska 41, a narrow shoulderless road that is usually adequate to serve east-west traffic to and from Wilber but on Czech Days weekend is something of a death trap, especially this long double curve out of Clatonia. Parking was a bit of a problem once I got there but not as bad as downtown Lincoln on a workday. I found a spot at first and Court just two blocks from the west end of the street fair. Mostly it was the pedestrians that made driving through town problematic. The typical big bubbas mixed with girls in old peasant-frauling costume wrapped in the arms of boys in cowboy hats and Jay-Z t-shirts.

It was disappointing, the way that the festival added only a thin layer of gloss to a perfectly generic prairie village. There were two live rock bands playing in the bars. (One thing Wilber has going for it is that it has one bar for every thirty people or so, revealing the town's Bohemian roots much more than any country schlock fest.) One band was playing Puddle of Mudd, the other was playing Bachman-Turner Overdrive. Major events, whether at the personal or community level, are really not at all transformative. They merely amplify the character that is already there. If there isn't anything interesting there than this will become more obvious than ever.

There was a street dance going on in the parking lot of a small grocery store. They were playing some current top-forty rap of the type I do my best to avoid. Girls in tank tops and high heels complimented by the occasional straw hat. Boys standing on the backs of pickup trucks and, dear God, raising the roof. It wasn't more than ten years ago when white people in even the larger Midwestern towns had a knee-jerk hostility towards rap. We should go back to that. Rap was better then. It was beyond horrible, watching these kids scream and "dance" while the stereo spouted TRL cant. Girl I like it when/you move that/sit back for me dolla/slap that/Mercedes Rims/That Bitch got a Dime/Move that Ass/ Who now?

I walked to a food stand featuring fare from the meat market owned by Russ Karpisek. Karpisek is known to the outside world as the state senator from the area, replacing deranged moon-harpy Jeanne Combs of 'I need a concealed gun to protect myself from prostitutes' fame. In the last session Karpisek managed to get a bill of his passed which upped the penalty for possession of marijuana under an ounce, reasoning that it was wrong for minors who are caught drinking to be punished more harshly than if they were smoking a substance that it illegal to all. While Karpisek is a marked improvement over Combs, it is still comforting to know that the area can still produce senators with ass-backwards solutions to state problems. I bought a polish dog with kraut. It was magnificent. All is forgiven senator.

I walked into a bar, also owned by Karpisek unless it's his brother or something. There was a Cech brass band singing a drinking song that was incomprehensible over the crowd. There was a two dollar cover charge, with another three-fifty for a Pillsner Urquell. The women were overweight and/or overly made-up. It was stuffed fill of assholes and the collective body heat negated the air conditioning, and than the band started playing the husker fight song, and the people sang along, and I always knew that this would happen. Even when I was an infant, unable to speak or reason, I knew that this moment would be. That I would be in a bar in Wilber Nebraska listening to a brass band in peasant costume playing the Husker Fight song while I was surrounded by sunburned rubes in a fire-hazard country bar. This is my moment of eternal return, this is what I will experience forever in the split-second before my death, and the thought of that fills me with a sort of bitter peace. Why does the world hurt me? Why does it hate me? Why must I be the one who reveals the smell of spilled Bud Light on the floor combined with sweat and chewing tobacco? There is no escape from this universal destiny. This is are apocalypse. While the rest of the world collapses in a great wave of blood and fire, Nebraska will be in a bar listening to an Ethnic brass band play "Good ol Nebraska U."

After this I wondered up and down the festival streets until I came to the Hotel Wilber. Which is a historic hotel which is currently being used as, a hotel, or rather a bed-and-breakfast. And in truth the place is, rather pretty. Judging by the website it seems that the maids and the waitresses all dress in old-world costume. This loses its novelty quickly. It only takes a few minutes for the sight of a woman in Czech dress smoking a cigarette, drinking a Bud Light, and cursing her child via cellphone to become nothing at all.

The Hotel Wilber is where the various state Czech Queens are being kept. I was surprised at how easily I walked in the front door. There were various hangers-on about, presumably the owners of the hotel, officials connected to the pageant, the festival, the town. The Czech Queens came and went among them, dressed down to five or six layers of underwear. Why I didn't strike up a conversation with one of them I don't know. I could of taken them away from there. We could have gone to Oakland, where the weather is never offensive and the subdivisions among white people are laughably insignificant. But here I am and there they are. Life is pain.

I went to a liquor store in search of an individual 24 of Urquell, but all they had in this vain were Budweiser products. I went back to my car and eventually navigated my way out of the village, taking the shouldered Nebraska 103 north towards Crete. Two thirds of the other cars on the highway were cops just sitting there just waiting to catch somebody swerving. When I got back to Lincoln I bought a pint of Pillsner Urquell from N street liquors and drank it in the alleys of T-Town.

McDonalds Boycotted for Supporting Gay Agenda in Ways Boycotters Seem Unsure Of.

Some knucklehead group out of Naperville called "Americans for Truth About Homosexuality" was whining about the Chicagoland media's blatantly conspiratorial lack of coverage of a press conference the group had on the boycott. This in spite of the fact that "nearly 200000" that's right, "nearly 200000" or nearly one-fifteenth of one percent of the American population, has signed onto the boycott.


"The people involved in this boycott of McDonald’s are good family people — not vegans, America-hating leftists, or some other fringe group."

Right. Boycotting a multi-billion dollar corporation for donating twenty grand to the Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce is clearly more American than boycotting McDonald's over objections to the meat industry's treatment of animals. Veganism is communism because people who don't eat meat hate their father's penis.

http://americansfortruth.com/news/chicago-media-blacks-out-mcdonalds-boycott-press-conference.html

The comments on the actual boycott site itself, http://www.boycottmcdonalds.com/ demonstrates how right-wing sloganeering is a bigger threat to the English language that VH1 can ever hope to be. The act of creating ultra-compound sentences for the sake of jamming all of the catch phrases in creates a very Beckettian sense of anti-narrative.

"America is tired of corporations and organizations twisting the free speech and actions of its citizens into 'hatred' when we simply oppose the corporation's, or organization's, involvement in areas where we don't want our money going. Opposing your involvement says nothing about the individual's point of view on homosexuality and yet you claim to know, anyway. How arrogant and childish. We are tired of the brainwashing politically correct movement. I hoped McD's was smarter than that, but obviously it's not. Don't expect anymore of my money."


"We love your fries, but we will not compromise truth. You have taken money that our family, and millions of others, have contributed to the success of the McDonald's Corp. and chosen to use it for an agenda that defies the foundation of our nation, the family, as created by a man and woman. Perhaps you should spend more time sitting at the tables in the play yards of the thousands of McD's restaurants around the country. We will only be missing the fries, but your corporation has lost something much greater, respect and truth."

"I will take me 10 great grand children to Wendys BurgerKing or some other place. YOU ARE NOT THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN!"
(I will take ME ten great-grandchildren? Are London chimney-sweeps signing the petition?)

"We will not spend our money at MCD's until the Co. becomes neutral on the homosexual agenda which breaks down the natural family unit. Having two gay sisters, I know first hand how destructive this agenda becomes. I do not take it lightly labeling Christians as hateful. We just dislike the carefree lifestyles imposed on others. Lets keep our American values."

Conservative cant bingo anyone?

Politically correct
family values
American Family (capitalization theirs)
American Values (ditto)
gay agenda
Homosexual agenda
gay agenda
Homosexual Agenda
gay agenda
gay agenda

I believe I have a postage stamp.

I Swam At Blue Stem Lake Today

Tried to go to Branched Oak on the weekend but it was actually guarded by Game and Parks employees. I told one that I was lost coming out of Malcolm and he guided me back to town while his hand rested on the towel in the passenger seat.

Blue Stem was nice, the feeling of forty five minutes in pesticide-flavored water on a hot day is incomparable, something that one must do at least once in the summer. Some of the locals were there, don't know if they were from Lincoln or actually local-local. They seemed about nineteen and had no children with them.

Afterwords I went to Crete to have a drink at one of the local bars and catch something of the flavor of the town that way as is my wont. But it seems that Crete is woefully undertaverned, only three bars in a town of fifteen thousand, and only the VFW was open even though it was barely an hour before five o'clock. I take this as a sign of racial tension, or at least some sort of coldness and unwillingness of the townspeople to connect.

So I came back to Lincoln and stopped at the Ideal supermarket looking for some middle-brow tomato sauce to add to some pasta I made yesterday. All they had were the name brands offered at twice the market value, this and middle-brow wine priced at twice the market value. I still have at least a liter and a half on my box of Franzia.

After all of this disappointment the only logical thing to do was to dine at the KFC buffet at ninth and South. I waited in line for ten minutes behind an elderly woman who was having all of the combo meals explained to her point by point. I was the only one there who wasn't at least forty pounds overweight, I thought back to the lake and was horrified. Somehow I knew that, for at least those forty-five minutes, I had a full pair of breasts. I was shirtless of course, and they were there for all to see. Fat, milk gland, enlarged pores, covered in grease. If the police had shown up at that moment I would have been infamous. My breasts roast in the sun for eternity. I had the extra crispy, some buffalo fingers, buttermilk biscuit in brown gravy, and the vanilla wafer pudding.

Actual World-Herald Headline

"The 'Saddle Creek Generation' takes a cue from vintage listeners"

It seems that the (Choke) "Saddle Creek Generation" in addition to obsessing over failed relationships and awkwardly spouting liberal slogans, has the same taste for vinyl L.P's that every youngish music fan of every generation, every subculture, and every subgenre has had since the invention of the compact disc.

It is comforting, isn't it, that members of the (gargle) "Saddle Creek Generation" have shown their Midwestern essence by latching onto a (supposed) fad that could not possibly distinguish anybody from anyone.

I don't know how to say it, and yet I can't stop writing about it. I mean seriously, a vinyl collection is as universal as it gets.

"The 'Saddle Creek Generation' Enjoys Beer and Sex"

"The 'Saddle Creek Generation' will quote 'Simpsons' lines when conversation lulls."

"The 'Saddle Creek Generation' is happy at weddings and sad at funerals"

"Men of 'Saddle Creek Generation' are only pretending to enjoy Carly Simon"

"The 'Saddle Creek Generation' whispers at how mismatched you are with your girlfriend when you're not in the room"


"The tenacious comeback of classic vinyl LPs that started several years ago still is going strong."


Indeed it is John Keenen, indeed it is. Your piercing insight into the most obscure subcultural crevasses is truly exacerbating. I salute you sir. And I salute the entire staff of the World-Herald for extending showing such keen insight into youth culture.

Ya fucking dipshits.

http://www.omaha.com/index.php?u_page=1208&u_sid=10384767

Thoughts on The Memorial Park Show.

The Good Life are rather overrated. The impulse to write songs about nothing but your failed relationships is born of the same navel-gazing that causes relationships to fail. Tim Kasher is an absolute dope who lacks stage presence and makes political shout-outs so ham-fisted as to make Kanye West seem smooth. But hell, it was vaguely groovable music played on a beautiful day, their signiture, "Album of the Year" is undeniably endearing, and overall it could have been worse, even with the doddering teenage twits who make up the band's most loyal base.
4.5/10

Argentine Juana Molina's folktronica sound is damned fascinating, especially with her Italian-flavored, consonants-as-vowels, Buenos Aires dialect of Spanish. Her instruments are an acoustic guitar, some synthesizers, and an echo machine that enables her to use a a single lyrical line as background noise for the next minute or so. Very cool, and perfect for sunset.
8/10

I actually liked her better than Feist, who was perfectly fine, charming and playing a good mix of up-tempo songs and torch burners. I'm afraid that I was somewhat distressed by the climax of the show as I had lost track of anyone from Lincoln and worried that my Smiley novel and cheap cigarettes were lost to the four winds. But in the end I ran into Ms. Rebecca who had dutifully saved them for me. There was a shadow show that complimented the music very well, especially on the false closer before the encore, the night was cool and the crowd became more tolerable as Leslie began to command their attention. Overall though, I felt as if something were being held back, can't really explain why.
7.5/10

No Comment Neccessary

Tales From North Platte

Jade Keith is my six-year-old second cousin, the daughter of my cousin Richard and his wife Wendy. She has asthma and allergies that she inherited from my uncle Tim and needs breathing treatments every couple of hours. She is smarter than her age and knows it, reading books aloud, pointing out logical absurdities in movies just like I enjoyed doing at her age and do still, and showing off her handful of Spanish to whoever will hear. She is the primary watchdog for her infant twin brothers while the parents are out smoking.

Wendy is my age, 27. She looks a solid eight years older thanks to powder-parties in the Arizona desert. She has vague notions of going to college for something. I told her about my plans for grad school and my vague notions of being a professor. When I told her all that was required she said "so you're some kind of genius right?" She asked me to draw up an IQ test so she could see if night classes would be worth the trouble. I quickly explained that there's some precision to it, logical riddles and spatial testing and all that, nothing one could make up on the spot.

Aside from this request, Wendy gives every indication of being perfectly bright herself, able to read shades and vocal tone and understand the mood of the room and even get my jokes. She is ignorant to the world outside of the trailer park simply because it doesn't exist to her. I wonder how much she was like her daughter at her age. When I was six years old my family recognized my wits and even though they weren't college educated and not rich they still knew well enough to "encourage" me to take up an instrument, write a poem,go out for band, geography bee, get used to showing off my mental processes in public. I never have, but I can at least tolerate the public, more or less, tolerate having something like a name in a way that would be unthinkable if I wasn't a publicly smart kid.

And what about Jade? She lords over children four years older than her with her wits and the ability to say "silly" with all the honeyed venom that makes adults fall in love with young girls. Beyond that she has nothing but some public school in North Vegas that isn't even trying to notice the superlative poor kids and a family that knows nothing of the white-collar spelling bee and recital circuit.

She'll finish high school easily enough and be thrilled to death with it. She'll take She may or may not spend a year or two in junior college before shacking up with some galoot and moving to a trailer park three towns away from the folks, using her mental power to rationalize his thuggery and drunkenness, staying up late to drink every night with him in the neighbors in the hope that some dear girlfriend will show up and maybe they might get a few minutes to talk alone, acquiring a taste for upper-middle brow films and books before finally becoming addicted to General Hospital out of boredom, waiting for her children to grow up and call her for bail, knowing that it's simply a part of life.

On The Al Gorium. (Or Why Al Gore is not an Argument you Stupid Asshole.)

Don't act like you don't want what he's got bitch.

O.K. Slim, I'll try to explain this as simply as I can. The message is wholly, completely, totally, and utterly independent of the messenger in every way. If Hitler tells you that water is wet, water is wet. The fact that Al Gore has a big house means nothing. The fact that Al Gore has a private jet means nothing. If Al Gore had a fleet of three hundred diesel tankers idling in his back yard and running continuously simply to satiate his carbon monoxide fetish, it would mean nothing. The problem with killing the messenger is so obvious that it is almost universally known by its common name instead of the official Latin one. (That's Ad Hominem Slim")
There is no excuse whatsoever for anyone of average intelligence to think that either hypocrisy or perceived hypocrisy is relevent to anything whatsoever. The Ad Hominem is the tool of the moron and the liar and no one else.

It's not fair, I know, the fact that Al Gore has infinitely more money, power, and respect than you do, even though he doesn't know how to be a real man like you do. All the same, the way that Al Gore is jammed into global warming arguments like a frat house broom rape does betray a deep level of envy towards someone who's more successful than you, and that's not very conservative of you now is it Slim? A hundred years from now, Al Gore will be remembered in history with admiration and respect. Your great-grandchildren will read about his wisdom and his foresight while throwing your polaroid out with the cat liter. Fuck you.

So Here's a Little Link from Conservapedia.

http://www.conservapedia.com/Lenski_dialog#Second_reply

Follow it and you find a conversation between Conservapedia founder Andrew Schlafly, (who we can be reasonably certain is at this moment smiling approvingly while mother Phyllis belittles his wife's chicken Marcella) and one Dr. Richard Lenski, evolutionary biologist and professor at Michigan State. The conversation consists of Schlafly's bullying attempts to get Dr. Lenski to 'explain himself' and 'show' the data gathered for a study showing that E. Coli bacteria evolve (duh-duh-duh) over time in order to better fit into their environments. Lenski replies that the data for the experiment is thoroughly documented in the paper he wrote for it, and helpfully points out that Schlafly could download the paper from most any university library if he should ever care to read the study he is criticizing.

Schlafly than makes a huffy second request for data, again making it clear that he has still not read the paper and does not seem to know exactly what "scientific data" entails. Lenski's reply to this is, magnificent.

"...It is my impression that you seem to think we have only paper and electronic records of having seen some unusual E. coli. If we made serious errors or misrepresentations, you would surely like to find them in those records. If we did not, then – as some of your acolytes have suggested – you might assert that our records are themselves untrustworthy because, well, because you said so, I guess. But perhaps because you did not bother even to read our paper, or perhaps because you aren’t very bright, you seem not to understand that we have the actual, living bacteria that exhibit the properties reported in our paper, including both the ancestral strain used to start this long-term experiment and its evolved citrate-using descendants. In other words, it’s not that we claim to have glimpsed “a unicorn in the garden” – we have a whole population of them living in my lab!..."

The thing that makes this such a beautiful moment in internet history is that Schlafly printed the dialogue, which everyone but him can immediately recognize as an absolute rhetorical drubbing, on his very own FAS baby, Conservapedia.com, under the headline, "Take a good look at the attitude our tax dollars are paying for."

I do suppose that it costs money to actually learn something instead of believing in that what we must not think about, but more to the point is the fact that it's Lenski's bad attitude that Schlafly thinks he is revealing, this man who was accused of shoddy record-keeping and outright fraud in a project he had been working on for twenty years, simply because it is proof that evolution exists, and so simply had to be untrue. The sense of entitlement Schlafly feels towards "lesser Americans", the ones who read what they criticize or even the ones who go through college without blocking out all of the information that God doesn't want them to know, is nauseatingly clear.

If you don't have the time to read the entire exchange, you'll find out everything you need to know by how the two mens signitures Schlafly his letters as "Andy Schlafly, B.S.E., J.D. www.conservapedia.com" while the man who has spent the past twenty years working on a hugely important biological study and can also claim the incredible accomplishment of knowing what the hell he's talking about signs as "Richard Lenski."

"In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation … the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not … express themselves in ideas but only … in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas" Lionel Trilling-1950

Susan Smith

I was just reading about the one who drowned her kids about fifteen years back and blamed their disappearance on a phantom black man who who officials dutifully chsed around the country for nine days before the local sheriff employed time-tested Catholic tactics to elicit the down-home Llorona's confession.

I was thinking in particular of her sexual affairs. Smith was catting about with the son of a textile mill owner who was the major employer of her hometown of Union South Carolina. The theory goes that the rich dick didn't want kids, so Smith decided to dispose of her own in order to win his heart and position herself to become the economic crown princess of her town. Like I said, Daisy Mae La Llorona. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Llorona

Smith was also still fooling around with her ex-husband, and the mill owner herself, and the step-father that had began raping her when she was fifteen. (A respected member of the community, the church, and the Republican Party by the way, I'd just thought I'd mention.) Her psychiatrists say that the abuse instilled Smith with an insatiable need for love and affection. Two guards have been fired from the prison where Smith is kept for providing vigorous love and affection.

I know I'm an evil man for thinking this, but I have a feeling that you're thinking it too. God damn but she must fuck like a beast.

Confirmation Bias is a Hell of a Drug.

“He did it by his own achievement. Nobody gave it to him.” Ward Connerly, on Barrack Obama's nomination.

That's an odd way to think of it , Mr. Connerly, since being a successful politician in a democracy necessarily requires depending on other people to give you your job.

"The entire argument for race preferences is that society is institutionally racist and institutionally sexist, and you need affirmative action to level the playing field,” The historic success of Senator Obama, as well as Senator Clinton, dismantles that argument.”

Or perhaps the fact that these campaigns were historic after two hundred and thirty years of American history is proof of that argument's validity.

Perhaps you have been trying very hard not to notice people of average intelligence latching on to the self-apparently ludicrous rumors that Obama is a secret Muslim agent, desperate to find anything to justify their ill-defined fear of the other. Perhaps you haven't noticed the common and equally absurd belief that Senator Clinton
is a stone-hearted man hating harpy, an attitude that is based solely on the fact that Clinton is a woman who is openly as proud and ambitious as any major male politician.

Have you ever seen people who have lost a house to flood or tornado or what have you on the news, Mr. Connerly? I'm sure that you and I have both seen a newly homeless housewife stare into the camera and declare,"I refuse to be a victim."

You probably approve of this, don't you Mr. Connerly? I personally find this statement very bizarre. In spite of what the Optimism Nazis in this country would have us believe, victimhood is not a choice, it is simply a physical condition that does or does not exist. I do not choose whether or not to be a victim, the tornado does.

And what is a natural disaster if not the ultimate proof that we are not the absolute masters of our own fates? That not everything that happens to us, good or bad, is what we bring upon ourselves?

Though I'm sure you would find it intolerably radical and un-American for me to say so, sir, I would suggest that a human society that is unjust and irrational at some level, as all human societies inevitably are, can leave an individual just as helpless and victimized as a natural disaster.

When African-Americans make up 13% of the general population and 40% of the prison population, what is one to say to that? Though you have been nauseatingly close to the Ku Klux Klan before, Mr. Connerly, surely you don't believe that your own people, (Yes, yes, I know, there is only one American people, and social divisions are nothing but imaginary creations of the politically correct.) are more inclined towards criminality than other people. I'm sure that you studiously ignore the fact that some groups of people are more likely to get pulled over by the police for minor offenses or no offense at all than other groups. (Or, indeed, shot dead for no offense at all every now and again.) Does it make the remotest amount of sense to you, that endemic poverty or children out of wedlock within a certain ethnic group is purely the fault of the individual and has nothing whatsoever to do with the larger society? I can assure you, sir, that your ethnic group is no more debauched than mine. Believe you me, I can assure you of that.

Mr. Connerly, I find it hard to believe that the phallus-inflating lie of the individual human as absolute master of his fate is more important to you than your own eyesight. Most people I know take pride in being able to discern the truth of what is around them and yet you willfully twist the facts and information around you to conform to your cowardly and childish delusion of a just society.

I am sure, Mr. Connerly, that you take pride in your own individual success, perhaps even see it as an example for members of other marginalized groups to follow. But have you ever reflected on how sad the manner you came to national prominence truly is? Trolling around looking for small states where the white working-class is frightened and angered by demographic changes shattering their illusions of being the center of the world, asserting your will by preying on the bitter and the ill-informed, providing a scapegoat of the weak to spare uneducated citizens who pride themselves on patriotism from the frightening idea of challenging the social order. I must say, Mr. Connerly, that it is more than a little galling to see such an inveterate bloodsucker as yourself rail against free rides and handouts.

And now you seek to suck the vitality out of my own alma-matter, a rare oasis from the mono-cultural desert that is Nebraska. I am aware sir, that you are appealing mainly to those Nebraskans who like mono-culturalism. Well fuck them. And fuck you.

There are sir, many places in the third world where an individual superman can make himself rich. A Liberian militia, after all, costs much less than a diploma from an American university. It is painfully obvious, Mr. Connerly, that you are completely ignorant to the true appeal of living in a country like this, the true pleasures of living in the modern world. I will thank you sir, to take your grinding white-bread soulessness the hell out of my state, because we already have a surplus of that.

So What's the Deal with Baseball?

I've often noticed how baseball is associated with children and "purity" more than other sports. The recent steroid scandal revealed an entire universe of commentators who are horrified by the example that the chiseled ass-juicers are setting for the children.

It's not that baseball is the only sport where ill-behaved players are berated for the lessons they are supposedly teaching the children. There are, after all, many people in this world who are rather stupid, and stupid people tend to believe stupid things, such that there is an objective, universal standard of masculinity that can be taught to boys through athletics; that a man's path to fulfillment lies in the pyramid of obedience, to dominate his wife and children as the quarterback dominates his players, and to be dominated by his employer as the quarterback is dominated by his coach.

The most galling thing about those who think that rectal vaccination against pop-fly outs is damaging to the children is the obtuseness of those who worry. These are grown adults who simply can't imagine themselves not being influenced by professional athletes, who simply can't imagine not watching sports and certainly can't imagine their children not watching sports. While it's clear that kids in general and boys in particular have some sort of natural impulse to run and play and compete, this is a different thing entirely from watching thirty-year old men do the same thing. This is something that can be indoctrinated or not. It is a choice. Watching a documentary instead of football is not a sign that you or your children are gay, watching large men work themselves into a lather by slamming themselves into each other is.

But to get back to my original point, it is strange how baseball is associated with "the children" than other sports. Baseball teams will often try to sell themselves as "family friendly." (The K.C. Royals in particular will use this line. Children can hardly hear any foul words when there isn't anyone in the stadium to speak them now can they?) "Bring the kids to the park" goes the jingle.

Baseball than, in its idealized form, is bucolic,morally pure and child-friendly; in other words Marian. The manner in which baseball is idolized, the way in which the public sensibility is SHOCKED by any suggestion of naughtiness in the game, makes it clear that some point in our history the collective American conscience came to associate the game of baseball with white women.

It is a damned strange phenomenon, and I don't have the slightest clue for when, where, and how this came to be, but it's certainly clear enough now isn't it? Perhaps it's the fact that baseball has historically been played by more clean-cut crackers than other professional sports. (Barry Bonds as devil.) but than their is also the prevalence of Latinos, the hot other of the month, in the game, and the defenders of youthful virtue are at least publicly unbothered by this, so I don't know.

I had a history professor once who offered a class called "Baseball is America." A real jackass that guy.

Watching TBN in a state of hyper-awareness

Veterans being honored in a tunnel of stars and stripes. Pray for our rulers. Pray for presidents and prime ministers, pray for those who have authority and their will be peace in your life. The storm of Yahwah lashes an arrogant land and brings darkness to the home of Back To The Bible.

Kenneth Copeland; God will perform. (Say it with me, he will perform.)
Kenneth Copeland, mocking the hypothetical orphan taken in by a wealthy Christian family. "I want to meet my biological mother" he says in a third-grade mocking tone. Why? Copeland asks. Such is the love of God for his people.

Dr. Creflo Dollar.
God will cure your debt.
God will cure your debt if you believe.
Stop trying to think your way out of debt.
"That smart head of yours got you into debt in the first place, now didn't it?"
(Nods and grumbles of agreement."
"Turn off the part of your brain that THINKS and turn on the part the BELIEVES in the UNLIMITED POWER OF GAWD."

Faith in the White House
Fields of Crucified Strawmen.
Liberal critics quoted in mocking-third grade tones.
Out of context in such a manner as to make it appear as if they were bothered only by the president's religious faith and not the way it is used to justify Iraq, Patriot act, homosexual pyramids.
Actress playing young Barbara Bush portrayed with unmistakably Marian glow.

President's drinking days presented as both story of redemption and proof of manliness. Midland Texas is an Eden where the blatantly feudalistic mingle with their barrel-chested employees.

President heroically rejects temptations of secretary-succubus-witch, despite protestations of congressman ""whose name you would immediately recognize."

Religion makes you a better person.
You must choose.
There is only fundamentalist Christian morality or Gomorrac nihilism.

Only President Bush can lead in the greatest national crisis since the Civil War. (World War II, Cuban Missile "Crisis" oh please.)
Thank God we don't have a European style relativist-socialist-atheist-witch.

I sweat profusely and stare at myself from outside with a clarity that my nation is above.

I Think I've Made My Peace With North Platte.

I've always found those who think that one is not a true patriot unlessone thinks that the U.S. is superior and entitled to exert its will rather strange. We love what is ours because it is ours, without justification.

And yet I have never been able to feel that way about my hometown. The Marilyn Manson Hoodies Nickleback on the jukebox, and pathetic alpha-male tattoos have never reminded me of anything but my wasted years, and I hated it all and them all.

But now I think that, yes, I do feel warm towards these folk. It isn't love, neccessarily. But I can emphesize with their anger, their confusion, their rage/envy towards those places that are not at the edge of the world.

I've told my family that my hair is unkempt because I hate barbers. I can tell that they think I'm just being flip; that they are unable to comprehend that I really would suffer all of the social liabilities that come with wild hair rather than suffer five seconds of barber talk. Fine.

My father stays up watching soft-core Cinemax porn after mom goes to bed, and exaggerates my grandmother's memory problems. Fine. She is in her eighties, and clearly is losing it; but it is also clear that she will go to her grave with a basic understanding of what is happening to all of her descendents and their spouses. She is aware enough, and Grandpa faces death with all of the courage and grace that Catholicism promises it will give us.

Dad liked "No Country for old Men." Mom found it unberably strange. It's kind of funny, because mom is the smart one. But she is also deferential to a fault. Always searching for concensious and normality, a mother if you will. My father, rightous defender that he is, almost certainly didn't approve of the bad guy getting away, but he is also the kind of man who would have had a gutteral understanding of Cormac McCarthy's bleakly defiant masculinist vision, that one must protect one's family from death incarnate not in spite of the fact that it is futile, but specifically because it is futile.

I've learned to love the space that a western town gives itself; the wide streets that are dead by ten o'clock, seemingly every yard big enough for two loud, raggady-ass, dogs, the new butt-rock radio station that will help ol Flatrock get over its inferiority complex towards even its peers; other outstate market towns like Grand Island or Norfolk.

So For Those That Know me, The Story of my Cat Situation

I happened to be walking to the neighborhood liquor store sometime around the turn of April. The cat that was to become Telly was sitting in one of the unmowed yards around 23rd and Q. She meowed at me and I said hello. Then she came up to me and I gave her a pat.

She proceeded to follow me, determinedly so. Whenever I would stride more than twenty feet ahead I would hear an angry meow and turn back to see her bounding towards me. I came in and out of Mums with my Sunday night pint of Beck's and saw her clawing at the wall wondering where I was, and from there she continued to follow me home. I came to notice that I was gaging oncoming traffic to see if there was time for both of us to cross.

When we came to my apartment house I figured that it was the least I could do to give her one of my tins of tuna. She was visibly malnourished, bag of bones and all that.
The next day I gave her a bath to wash off the street grime that was far too thick for her to lick off herself. She took this as well as you could guess.

I spent the next week putting out internet ads that went unanswered. I did have some hope in the Cat House, a no-kill shelter in my neighborhood, but they turned out to suffer the same fate of most no-kill shelters; overcrowding due to lack of death.

So Telly became my cat, and she came to gain a healthy amount of weight, and then she came to gain some more weight around the lower belly and nowhere else, and there were protrusions in this belly that strongly resembled legs.

And so the kittens came on Thursday-Friday. The eldest is twelve hours older than
his? siblings and is one of the two gray ones, Dad must of been a tabby. The other two resemble their calico mother. One has nearly the exact same orange/white band color pattern of mom and the other is almost completely orange. My next-door neighbor must have heard the high-pitched wail of the Prince of Wales, but so far he hasn't ratted me out to our landlord. (Hello, Mr. Anderson.)

It goes without saying that taking care of four newborn kittens in addition to their mother is completely beyond me. So I contacted the local humane society to see if we could work out some sort of loan program until my grandchildren are weened. This worked out as well as can be expected. If I were to turn the family into the pound, they would become city property. Telly would be spared or euthanasized base on her health/aesthetic beauty/temperament(!!!) after four days, and the kittens would be spared or killed based on the same pragmatic criteria. I would be lying if I said that I had a problem with this logic. Stray animals reproducing at random are a serious menace, and this is certainly the proper way to deal with everybody else's cat.

As for mine, I decided to follow the normal ghetto protocol for unwanted children and dump them off on grandma. My parents will take Telly and her brood in until the brats are weened and pass the kittens on to the lonely hearts of North Platte.

I pride myself on not being a superstitious man, but I also pride myself on seeing that which is before me for what it is; and I can't help but think that Telly was smart enough to know that she needed a human being to take care of her for the sake of her babies, and this is why she followed me home with the tenacity of a Catholic woman feeling guilty about still being single.

And yet she gives me the filthiest murder-look whenever I try to intervene in her affairs, and I must say that I like that in a woman.

Reminder

Your brain and the world outside of it are completely and hopelessly independent of each other. Every emotion you feel for the universe outside of yourself and all of the people in it is false. There are no relationships. There is no bonding. There are no friendships. There is no love. There is no family. There is no sex. There is no patriotism. There is no country. There is no tradition. There is no symbolism. There is no ceremony. There is only a desire to connect that cannot possibly be fulfilled, and is itself born of the narcissistic desire to find purpose outside of oneself born of the horror of realizing the utter pointlessness and banality of one's own internal dialogue.

There is no escape. Have a nice "weekend".

FYI

If you don't have an honorary degree, than your free-speech rights are being violated.

http://politicsandpigskins.blogspot.com/2008/05/ayn-rand-phyllis-schlafly-and-ditsy.html

Remember kids, calling a liberal a traitor for criticizing the president is free speech. Protesting Phyllis Schlafly because she assumes that every woman in the world is a leather slave like herself violates free speech.

Any questions?

So I'm Thinking of Going Home This Weekend

But I drove my van for the first time in four months today, and wouldn't you know it I'm low on oil and need to get it fixed up. I could afford it if I skimped on some vice or another, but it does raise the question, if I only made the three hour drive to North Platte say, once every three years or so, would that make me a bad son?

I'm thinking in particular of the Christmas of 06; my dad had ordered the new version of "The Longest Yard" on pay-per-view to watch with my sister and I while my mom was at work at the liquor store. I have a fair amount of respect for the old Burt Reynolds version. It certainly doesn't have the artistic quality of a "Godfather" or "French Connection", but it does have that same sort of August afternoon wariness, the sort of anti-authoritarianism and hangover-urine bitterness that made 1970's American cinema something we can be unabashedly proud of. It goes without saying that the Adam Sandler version does not fit this mold.

I remember when my mother came home Dad said with pride that "we had watched a funny movie together and had a good time." He actually believed that it had been a true bonding experience.

There was a point in the movie where I was flipping through the World-Herald and started laughing at a story about a Sudanese restaurant that was forcing baby monkeys
to fight each other for the amusement of its customers, and Dad must have thought I was laughing at one of Sandler's zany homoerotic shenanigans.

There was a point in the movie where actor/wrestler Goldberg was shirtless and triumphant about something, and my father muttered "What a man" to himself.

I've said before that there is no such thing as a man having a non-sexual appreciation for the masculinity of another man, and I stand by that statement. If you are not indifferent to another man's biceps, then you want to nibble at them, it's as simple as that.

And I suppose that I shouldn't be the least bit surprised at my father's latent gayness. He has all the attributes of a closet case; an obsession with proving his manliness at every opportunity to a point that a twelve-year-old boy would find silly, transparently insincere peons towards tolerance of gays, "I have no problems, with gays, I've just never seen a met a homo that was really happy," (I'll spare you his thoughts on lesbians.) and an obsession with the traditional masculine ideal of the father protecting his family from enemies that goes far beyond absurd. (We were visiting Lincoln when I was a boy, and while driving down a darkish section of O street he mentioned that he was driving faster to avoid the gangsters that were surely hanging out in the shadows, when I grew up I learned that this darkish section was Wyuka Cemetery.) This fantasy of his (There's no other word) with killing the intruder clearly indicates some deep hidden frustration that must be unloaded on another man with violent abandon.

But than it's all well and good to speak of the warped psyche of the rural American male in the abstract isn't it?" This is my father I write of, and I've already said far too much.

Chicago D

The sprawl isn't as bad as in the urban areas of California or Texas. By the time you reach the inner suburbs, Brookfield, Cicero, the neighborhoods very much take on the look of any midtown. Somewhere in Chicago proper is a massive junkyard, slightly to the northwest of where Jurgis Rudkis's Packingtown was. The line comes into Union Station along a large stack of tracks with chunks of industrial brickabrack lying all about the ground. Not an impressive enterence to the Loop by any means. But still, there was the Sears Tower.

It was the afternoon rush hour when I got off the train; 5:30 P.M. but damned if this place isn't well-designed, it's easy to move about quickly even when it's crowded.

The Art-Deco architectural touches are very nice, but beyond that the place has the same generic anywhere look you could find in any major metro train station, airport, or shopping mall for that matter. The corned newsstands with Cigar Aficionado and The New York Times on display, the food courts with the mix of national and somewhat less than culturally defining local chains, a little bar whose "Irishness" was denoted by green neon lighting and servers wearing green vests under their jackets.

But the cultural sterility has a strange sort of appropriateness here. Union Station is the pituitary gland of the Midwest. It is because of the railroad that Chicago was able to beat out St. Louis to become the great interior metropolis. The wars between competing lines are the reason why the California Zephyr meanders so; competing railroads drawing random lines from Chicago to Des Moines, St. Louis, Omaha, Kansas City, Twin Cities, Denver. If one line took the most direct route than simply make one up of your own, create towns out of thin air (Crete, Dorchester, Exeter, Friend) and send out flyers telling immigrants that the land is filled with milk and honey. So you end up with the ultimate all roads lead to Rome scenario; the highways follow the railroads after all. before the interstate was built there were about half a doezen driving routes from Denver to Omaha and no choice was more than half an hour shorter than any other. Drive east on O Street, down hwy 34, across the Plattesmouth bridge, and through Iowa, you'll eventually role into Chicago on Ogdon avenue.

I bought egg rolls and a soda for supper from a group of Salvadorians who spoke Spanish to each other and the customer in front of me before switching to English with me. I could tell they were Salvadorians by the baseball hats.

I stepped out onto Jackson Street knowing only that I could never dream of affording a room in the Loop, beyond that I didn't know where I was going to stay, plus it was St. Patrick's Day, and though I had arrived too late for the parades the fact is that I was a fractionally Irish man in one of America's great immigrant cities, and this would have to be celebrated. But first the library.

You do Realize

that my content warning makes me even more badass than I was before right?