Something Serious Needs to Be Said

Last night was Ben-Jammin's birthday party, and we got crazy, as usual. Lotsa beer and BBQ and then Jameson's and tequila and lords knows what else. Some mushrooms very early in the morning - someone had a bag and I thought it was pot and I was getting it for some girl but it was mushrooms. I ate a few. I'm still a little wobbly and unsteady - we were up 'til around 8am and at 10:30 Ben decided he wanted to do Gospel Brunch at the Cowgirl, Bloody Marys and brunch. Christ. I begged off and he went with Fate and Jill.

Last night I got into a screaming match with a friend about the Karl Rove-Valerie Plame thing. I can't believe that more people don't find this whole situation completely appalling - but my friend said something to the effect of, "I didn't see you get this upset when Clinton got a blowjob from Monica Lewinsky." I hardly see how these things are even remotely related - a man gets a blowjob from an intern, another outs an undercover CIA agent who obstensibly works for HIM, thereby compromising national security and someone's life in order to "punish" her husband Joseph Wilson for speaking out against the war.

The thing that disturbed me the most was that the speaker was gay - if he can't see how oppression & intimidation is no longer hidden and subtle, then who can? This is what frightens me the most about America today - of course our leaders are assholes - but when the great bulk of the populace pretends it isn't even happening, that's what really frightens me. They'll come next for you, cocksucker - don't you even think they won't -

But like a good liberal, I'm supposed to be tolerant of other people's total fucking ignorance of history and the nature of power while the other guy gets to out people's wives in order to punish them for revealing their EVIDENCE that THERE WAS NO WMD IN IRAQ AND THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION KNEW IT ALL ALONG. Fucking great. Like the bumper sticker goes, "Common Ground? I'll hug you elephant if you KISS MY ASS."

Homeboy's coup de grace? "She isn't dead, is she?" As if her being alive shows the Bush Administration has some kind of conscience, some sense of restraint in their Machiavellian power grabs. Yeah, just thinking about the dumb-ass people that I share this country makes me real certain that I wanna get the fuck out of it as soon as I can.

Coming up next (I promise) as much data as I can find to back up my CERTAIN premonition that the CIA bombed the London Tube to eliminate discussion of the Kyoto Protocol at the G-8 summit and to shore up Tony Blair's sagging popularity in the UK. Tony Bliar...another stupid cocksucker who can't see the writing on the wall. And the band plays on...

GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!

I just discovered that I locked my keys in my car when I came home last night. I called AAA and they're coming, but I just WANT TO SCREAM!!!

I'm in Santa Fe and I don't especially want to be here. After my vacation in San Diego I was really getting into being back at my little house in Albuquerque, and I've made some progress on my latest writing project. I had type-ins to do last night, but then my step-dad calledto tell me an old Army friend of his was coming in to Albuquerque and could I pick him up at the airport? I could hardly say no - dads are dads, you know?

In any case - last night I posted about "Testing Weblogs." Weblogs.com is a site that simply lists every blog updated on the Internet via RSS feed. You can turn it on or off in blogger - I had it turned off and I turned it on just to see what would happen. You turn on your feed to Weblog, update your blog and then go watch it appear on the update list. Kinda fun thing to do ar 2:30 in the morning when you can't sleep.

The list is GI-FUCKING-NORMOUS, and I clicked around at other people's stuff, but I found only one that I subbed to. It's called Teen Relationship Love, Sex and Violence, and it seems to be a high school girl talking about her experience with date-rape. I'm looking forward to more entries.

Testing Weblogs

Acts of Pronoia Are Essential to Hope

On July the 21st in Julia Goldberg's Blog, Julia started a thread about Pronoia that has been wandering through my life in the course of the last few days. Quoting from Infidels of Every Denomination, Pronoia is

The state of believing that the universe is disposed towards benevolence and that others are conspiring to shower you with blessings. The opposite of paranoia.

My last post here was a rollicking journey through what has been without a doubt the strangest period of singleness that I have ever known. Yesterday, it all came to a mammoth head when I realized (as I have considered before) that maybe it really was *entirely* possible that I was going to spend the rest of my life being single, without a partner or a family beyond my parents, simply because everyone out there (myself included) is just Too Fucked Up to engage in a meaningful relationship with another person.

Today I got dumped at a PICNIC

Now I know I promised when I started this blog that I wouldn't waste my time talking about personal things - but no one actually reads this little journal o' mine, and besides - there is a way to make this funny, right? Let's hope so.

We left San Diego at 4pm on Sunday with the hopes that we'd somehow manage to shave a few hours off our twelve-hour journey west by taking the 8 to the 10 to the 17 to the 40 - for reasons that are still unclear to me, my earstwhile companion Ben-Jammin' thought we should take the northernly route through Los Angeles - Sunday afternoon traffic swamped us, and we were On the Road until about nine o'clock this morning, give or take, all because last week's flirtatious encounter in Santa Fe & Albuquerque had turned into a virtual text-messaging war of two hearts beating as one - and I was to meet her at noon in Santa Fe for lunch.

I couldn't miss it - our texxxting had three x's in it, and our phone conversations were coded but equally vivacious. I arrived in Santa Fe totally bleary-eyed from ginseng-based uppers we bought at a truck stop in Arizona, and proceeded over to Trader Joe's...we were to meet for lunch, but I thought a picnic would be a fine romantic counterpart to a week of text-centered lust.

I bought a baguette and some fresh roast beef, some Tuscan herbed spreadable cheese and a pint of blueberries, some baby carrots and sparkling grapefruit soda. Knowing she had to be back at work in an hour, I prepared everything before picking her up at work and heading over to Rose Park for my spread of love.

Loving does strange and wonderful things to me - I feel lighter and as if my imagination for fun and interesting things to do is being put to the test because I won't be enjoying all those activities alone. I'm not just talking about more creative sex - I'm talking about more creative camping, more creative craft projects, more creative meals, more creative ways to be the goofy romantic that is My One True Identity.

I arrive and she looks non-committal...I offer that if this seems a bit much we can eat lunch at the Baking Co. like normal courting couples in Santa Fe, but she says she appreciates the gesture and we go to the park. We talk about really boring subjects - her job, her belief that it's a stress-filled culture that creates mental illness (sure, I say, but I ain't livin' in a cave anytime soon) and then finally she stops and rests her granitre-colored eyes on me and I melt, remembering why I wanted her so very badly in the first place. We kiss.

"Listen," she says, "I really have a lot going on in my life right now, and I'm trying to do what I can not to complicate things with any emotional entanglements."

Really? You're kidding. Oh, so that's why you gave me your number when we met, text-messaged me frantically for a week, then met with me for lunch and told me you adored me, came back to my place with me and showed me a hidden tattoo, begged off when I begged for more, then called me later once you'd left to ask me to meet you somewhere else, where we kissed in full view of your friends you just introduced me to....

I'm not going to go on. Suffice to say that the idea that I thought that the "emotional entanglement" was a mutually-agreed-upon enterprise was not a mistaken one on my part. Nevermind that I was gone for a full week between first date and picnic date and you had plenty of time to bring it up on the phone or via text the way you were feeling. I fully understand that my sense of disappointment takes a second fiddle (and should) to your need to maintain your delicate and fragile psyche...

But since *when* does a romantic interlude qualify as an "emotional entanglement" that must be avoided at all costs? When your therapist tells you this is a bad idea, could it have anything to do with the fact that you're sleeping with him? (I'm being sarcastic - as far as I know, this person is not sleeping with her therapist - but whose idea is it exactly that sex and romanticism are incongruous with emotional well-being?)

We're living in strange times. Gas prices are through the roof and the oil is running out. The CIA just bombed London to help Georgie Boy avoid another difficult conversation about global warming. Brazilians are rioting in the streets of England. Karl Rove *did* out Valerie Plame, everyone's known about it for months and nothing will be done about it. Future Shock is fully upon us, with most relationships (mine anyway) lasting about one and a half date - and usually with the date telling me "It has nothing to do with you."

But I ask you - if someone told you you had one year to live - if you were living amidst the ashes of a dying civilization - if you knew that at any fucking moment some BIG-ASS DISASTER might destroy everything you knew - wouldn't YOU be out there trying to get in all the deep deep loving you could? Or would you be staring into your navel, alone, congratulating yourself on how mature you'd become in being able to avoid the ONE THING - togetherness - that makes this world even slightly tolerable?

Of course you would. Because your therapist thinks it's a good idea. And because the new sign of maturity is about the kind of boundaries that makes certain that we're all barricaded off from one another, wondering why we're all so miserable with this "singularity" that no primitive human ever would've been able to survive in. (And hence, of course, that pesky mental illness thing, all over again.)

Hmmm...well, it's not really funny - but it's sure is amusing on so many levels.

Home is Where the Wireless is FREE

People who still want to make a few nickels off a wireless connection in their business are utterly missing the point - everywhere WE go where we get it for free, we buy shit. And we hang out for a long time and buy more stuff. And if I was here for any length of time, I'd be having meetings in those locations where my wireless needs are accomodated for FREE, thus bringing more people into the business.

I think we've found our true home-away-from-home in San Diego - LeStat's coffee house in the North Point neighborhood, somewhere off the 805. It's not an easy trek from Ocean Beach - but seeing as how no one down there is hip enough to offer free wireless, we had to make the journey.

Lestat's, as you may be able to tell by the name and the picture, is a gothic coffee shop - Rob Zombie is playing on the soud system, but it's cool and the coffee beats drinking beer at Sinbad's just to catch the wireless wave. Not that we didn't love those folks - we just weren't getting much work done in a free wireless bar as we might in a free wireless coffee shop.

Tell all your friends and business owners - MAKE THE DAMN WIRELESS FREE. And ADVERTISE IT. The Modern On-The-Road Writer NEEDS IT!!!

Mapping San Diego Free Wireless

So we're back in Sinbad's - and it's because it's the source of the only damn Freenet in all of the beach districts we've been to. Someone needs to tell San Diego that they're grossly behind the times when it comes to free wireless - as it stands, we've had to get drunk in Sinbad's two days in a row just to get any work done. Not that this is a bad thing - we just happen to be getting more drunk than work done. But hey - we're on vacation, right?

We had the wireless laptop when we left town - crazed on mushrooms and mescaline, we were certain we would need it. And we were certain that in the BEEEG CEETY of San Diego, we would find wireless connections galore to tap into. Boy, were we ever wrong.

On day one - Monday? - we started asking around. The first place we went was to Newbreak on Sunset Cliffs, and we asked. Ben asked, actually, because after all, I saw no open laptops and just assumed. They told us we could find wireless access at their "other location", located Right on the Beach. Not a bad place to cop a muffin and some coffee and check our e-mail all at the same time. So we went there - sans laptop - to check out the scene. Sure, they had a wireless system - but it wasn't free. It would run us five bucks a day for a pass, but that seemed cheap enough, considering we were in a strange city. We decided that this place would be our morning coffee spot.

Tuesday morning came around - and guess what? There was no one to pay. That is - it wasn't a secure network with five bucks to access a password, payable to the barista over the counter. We'd need a *CREDIT CARD* to buy a day pass. Not that we didn't have them, but it just seemed so impersonal, so I took a couple bucks and slid them into the public Internet terminals and began googling "San Diego free wireless" just to see what I'd find.

And what I found was - not a lot. But I did find a listing for a place in Old Town called The Living Room that had free wireless. And it turned out that our hostesses (with the mostesses) spent a lot of time studying there so they nknew just where it was. And we went there - and found that they *HAD* free wireless "just last week" but they were switching services now and had nothing.

So...it seemed like only a matter of time before we were going to have to hit up the Evil Empire (aka Starbucks) in order to get our GODDAMN E-MAIL. No one really wanted to do that. But we really had to check some shit out - but the first thing we needed to do was go check out Ben's new school - the International Professional Bodywork School - over in Pacific Beach.

Across the street was a Starbuck's - I really needed to check my mail - and so I went. But THOSE MOTHERFUCKERS(!!!) were wireless on a T-Mobile network, and for $29.99 a month, I could get access. Fuck that shit. Fuck it in the neck. So I started walking down the street (Ben had an appointment with admissions) to see what I could find. And eventually, I saw a sign that read "M2M Wireless Systems." And I thought to myself, "Well, those guys must know where we can find free wireless access."

Inside was a guy sitting alone in front of a laptop, (scrolling porn, I might add) and he said, "Shit man, you gotta be kidding - there's wireless everywhere. We don't even have a connection in here - we just pick up on the connections in the rest of the building," so I sat down and checked my laptop and sure enough - there were THREE wireless connections in that building (an office complex) alone - but just then the fucking battery died and there weren't any plugs handy, so I knew I'd have to find a cafe and surf for connections where I couold also plug the laptop in.

A few blocks across the street - Sinbad's. It sorta looked like it might be a coffee shop, but I walked in and realized it was a BAR with a Happy Hour that ran from 11am (11am!!!!) - 7pm - $2 pints on EVERYTHING - along with cigars and hookahs for rent and shit. This was *not* going to be a conducive working environment. I walked in looking dazed, and there was a cat behind the counter who wanted to help, and I said, holding up the laptop and feeling exasperated, "Shit, man, I'm just trying to cop a wireless connect so I can check my fucking mail." And he said (much to my surprise) "Dude - we have free wireless here - let me get you the code and you're set, bro."

Set. We've searched all over this town and the only actually FREE WIRELESS we've been able to find is in a weird-ass shithole bar with cheap beer and fine lookin' broads. Fuck Starbucks. Fuck hipster "indy" coffee shops that wanna charge $5 a day to use wireless. In this place it's free - and I *could've* ordered the coffee instead of the beer, but when in Rome...you drink and 'net and hope for the best.

Mescaline Miracles

<-----Ben Corbett in his new home, Ocean Beach.

I'm sitting in a place called "Sinbad's Hookah Lounge & Cigar Bar" on Garnet Street in the PB neighborhood of San Diego. How this came to be involved a lot of different decisions and variables over the course of the last few days, with the major crux point of this location being the need to get online as freely as possible.

My trusty companion (Benjamin Corbett) and I began the weekend in a typical fashion, hooking up at the Bloc-Busta party at the Open Source space in the DMV (De-Merchandized Zone) of Santa Fe with a six-pack of beer (for both of - we were feeling timid after some hard weekends) and hanging there to catch Walker, DJ Harry, and the inimitable Feathericci and his wack collection of records. Sangria was on-hand as were many of our friends, and there was a competing party down the street at Meridian Six with a much better bar so there was a lotta drift between the two spaces.

Anyway - some cat (who SHALL be nameless) showed up bitching about how he'd just been on his over to show us all his latest score - 350 hits of high-grade LSD - but he'd been busted. It'd been awhile since any psychedelics had entered my life, and knowing that they *almost* had but didn't *quite* make it there wet my whistle in a big way, and so I asked him if he had *anything*. Turns out he did - mushrooms at a fairly decent price and I said okay and he said okay and we did the deal.

Ben and I each took ONE CAP. Enough, I thought, to wake us up and get a little lift, a micro-dose really, nothing more. In NO TIME AT ALL, we were tripping like high school kids, wacked on beer and sangria besides, and Ben had been dipping into the whiskey, so you know how these things go...

Suddenly, it's about 4:30 in the morning (Open Source has a way of warping time like that) and we're sitting in Ben's living room and he hands me half of a very stale cookie. It tastes...like a very stale cookie, but then all of a sudden it occurs to me that I wouldn't be eating a cookie at 4:30 in the morning with my friend Ben unless it had some advanced properties, so I said, "Ben, what did we just take?" And he just starts cackling madly and says, "Nothing. It's gotta be bunk by now," and start to feel very, um...HIGH, and I'm thinking that maybe the mushrooms are kicking in again and suddenly he shrieks at the top of his voice, "Oh shit - it's not bunk at all - jesus Greg, I'm sorry, but...we just took MESCALINE."

At 5am on a Sunday morning, no less - and then he says, "Quick, before we're too high to do anything - we MUST go to the mountains." So we get in the car and we drive to somewhere just above Hyde Park to the Borrego Pass and head for the woods - and a good thing too, because just about then, we really came on - I was certain I could *see* the curvature of the Earth (which is never a good sign, but happens fairly regularly on mescaline, I've come to find) and we hiked all the way to the end of the trail to a little spot where the last of the winter snow melt comes barrelling down the mountain into a little stream-creek, and we stripped off our clothes and plunged our naked bodies into the ice-cold agua, thus initiating the first meeting of the High Desert Polar Bear Club - all before the first sight of the sun.

And somewhere along the way, we decided that as long as we were awake, we might as well head for the Ocean - it had been a long time since either of us had seen it, and so we headed back to his house, packed the car, then drove to my house in Albuquerque and had a good long nap - and then we hit the fucking road - which is Part One of why I happen to be in Sinbad's Hookah Lounge and Cigar Bar on Garnet Street in San Diego, California at this very minute.

TWOMB on my mind

I sorta feel like I'm cracking up, there are too many things up in the air, nothing feels solid and last night it kinda felt like my mind was moving like a freight train across the sky, spinning around and around and I was helpless inside it, unable to get off, unable to stop moving with weight and volume of freight, thrown to and fro with the twist of the spin, knowing seeing nothing really but pulling giant chunks of unprocessed data no clear way out no clear goal in mind, just oblivion really, picking up speed and losing clarity at an even faster rate, and when I finally opened my eyes to greet the day I realized that one of the reasons *I'm in love with Mike's book* (I'm not totally done yet, but still) is that it articulates the words that are always in my head at such times and he's just man enough to write them all, I never do, I strive for simplicity and clarity in every piece I present to someone other than myself, here, inside these notebooks, but his words make me aware that someone else has slam-danced along that slipstream, someone else is surfing that datastream, only he has the will and the desire to actually commit it all to page and make sense of it, in some way, while for the most part I try (albeit not well) to make sense of it and give it order, make it clean and tidy and clear and he's just got it all there exposed and naked for everyone to see.

DropCaster Artist Showcase Begins with MORAY

So last night, I made my way over to a someone's house in the northeast Heights of Albuquerque to interview an alternative rock band called Moray. As I told the band when I met them, "I don't really know what people mean anymore when they tell me they play 'alternative rock', so what do you guys mean?" They preceded to show me, leading me into their rug-lined little studio capsule in the back of the house, where they flipped on the amps and the instruments and got down with their bad selves and let me record a couple of live tracks on my trusty Mini-Disc recorder. With Ryan on vocals and guitar, Ian on bass, and "Animal" (yes, he really goes by that) on drums, Moray utterly *ripped* the place up with their version of alternative rock, complete with those guhn-guhn-guhn-guhn feedback-distortion sounds from the middle '90s that might remind you of Nirvana, the Smashing Pumpkins, and that song by The Cranberries that might be called, "What's in Your Head?" but lord knows I don't remember anymore.

This is a rock vernacular that is at once familiar and fresh, accentuating what I've always felt about the music of that time, that the death of Kurt Cobain and Bily Corgan's fascination with house music ended a conversation that still had a lot more to say. And Moray, it would seem, are here to say it. Described by another reviewer (and now themselves) as Jimi Hendrix meets the Smashing Pumpkins, I'm here to tell that these guys live up to the hype and here's hoping they've got a long future together.

Moray is the subject of the first DropCaster Artist Showcase podcast, which we will begin casting as soon as we go into our Alpha Two. In addition to a live track and a short interview, the cast will include some interstitial twelve-bar blues that the band jammed out for me - providing I can figure out how to make Audacity work the way I want it to. Until then...check out Moray on MySpace for a look at their upcoming Albuquerque gigs.

DropCaster Artist Showcase Begins

So tonight I went to a house somewhere in the nether regions of the Northeast Heights in to meet with and interview a band called Moray'>http://www.myspace.com/moray"> Moray. Made up of Ryan the singer, Ian, (the Rock Star) bass player, and ANIMAL the drummer, Moray describes its sound as "Jimi Hendrix meets the Smashing Pumpkins," and they're not far off from that. This is "alternative rock" as it was meant to be played, as I discovered with my handy MiniDisc Recorder inside their Aztec studio, complete with those guhn-guhn-ghun-ghun sounds that always remind me of Nirvana, the Smashing Pumpkins, and that one weird track from the Cranberries ("What's in Your Head?" perhaps maybe it was called?) Anyway, soon I will get to post their track and interview as part of the DropCaster Artist Showcase - the DASH, as we call it.

TWOMB, a novel by Michael Brown

Those very few of you who actually read this blog may recall a bit about Cormac McCarthy Spotted in Santa Fe. It was my pal Mike Brown who spotted him, and it gives me Very Great Pleasure to announce that yesterday I went over to Mike's house and was presented with a GIANT three-ring binder containing 478-pages of Mr. Brown's first draft of his first novel.

It was like a dream come true. The only thing cooler than putting your own book together or working on and then finishing your own novel (nope, not yet - but I'm really getting there this time) lies in being a "publisher" and getting a book for your newly christened little press by another writer. My experience with Mike is that he's got a really inventive imagination and he's a damn fine prose writer, so I imagine that TWOMB will be interesting - and if all goes well, Plaza Rat Press might actually release its second book by the end of 2005. Kiiiiiiick ass.

Social Network and Audio BloggingThere's Just So Much to DO!

I haven't mentioned it before on this blog, but we're getting so close to being public that I figure, Now It Can Be Told. I could be wrong, but no one reads this blog anyway, so I just want to talk about it a little.

For the past four or five months, since around early March or April, my friend Josh Bates and I have been working on an online podcasting management program called DropCaster. Go ahead - click the link - it'll just take you to our login page where you can sign up for the Beta (and I hope you do, as it's getting more fun every day.)

Currently, we're in an Alpha One stage, which basically means, "We think it's cool enough to show our closest friends and family, but we're certain no one else will get it - yet."

Josh Bates is one killer geek, let me tell ya. He came up with the idea because he wanted to learn a new programming language and platform called Ruby on Rails. I was into thinking about and strategizing about it, so he gets to be Chief Technology Officer and I got to be Marketing & Business Development, but mostly, doing a web-based tech company is just like playing a giant role-playing game, as I articulated in "Diary of a 'Net Whore," (which isn't linked on the web, but you can find it in my book.

The whole point of DropCaster is to allow people who want to feed podcasts to have a place to do it, while helping people who want to listen to a bunch of cool stuff to be able to find and organize it all in one place.

The whole exercise has actually been a joy - yes, we have a revenue model, no, we haven't made any money, yes everyone is working for free - and thanks to Base Camp, I actually have a fairly accurate record of everything we've done and everyone we've met with since the project started, which is handy since I tend to lose track without something in the computer keeping me honest and on-track.

We're going into an Alpha Two on July the 10th, (if we actually finish the massive checklist) and I'll be posting things here and there about it as we go.