mushinnoshin

Marsha Blackburn, William Jenkins, John Duncan, & Zach Wamp vote against states’ rights.

Jim Cooper, Harold Ford, Bart Gordon, Lincoln Davis, & John Tanner vote against individual rights.

Marsha Blackburn, William Jenkins, John Duncan, & Zach Wamp vote against smaller government.

Jim Cooper, Harold Ford, Bart Gordon, Lincoln Davis, & John Tanner vote against medical privacy.

In related news, not one Tennessee congressman has a soul, or anything resembling integrity.

It started out as a normal week. Fuck.

Wednesday: dentist. Numb ’til 8:30 or so. Put off regular karate class to Thursday makeup.

Thursday, 3:30 AM: wake-up in order to get to work by 5:00 AM

Thursday, 5:00 AM: arrive at work, time to take the new Google Checkout service live on our site. Fix a stupid bug first very thing.

Spend the day monitoring the orders coming in & working on related issues.

Thursday, 6:30 PM: head to Smyrna for karate make up class. Screw up a lot.

Thursday, 8:30 PM: notice a weird rat-tat-tat sound coming from my engine. Moments later begin to hear what sounds like metal pieces falling out of the engine and onto the road. Notice tremendous clouds of smoke pouring out the back.

Thursday, 8:33 PM-ish: notice that the “Check Engine Soon” light just came on. Gee, ya think???????

Friday, 12:00 AM: finally home, eat soup.

Friday, 12:30-ish: blog deleriously.

Fuck.

Addendum: Friday, 7:30 AM: realize that it’s a holiday weekend as it takes 4 tries before I find a rental car place that actually has any cars.

Trying to decide what to do is hurting my head. Fixing the thing is going to cost me around two grand. And that’s getting a used motor and including the brother-is-a-mechanic discount. And that’s hoping it doesn’t take longer than a week so I don’t get eaten alive on the rental car. Not fixing it & getting a new ride is easily doable, but would royally screw my house budget planning. Why couldn’t the damn thing just hold out one more year??? Argh.

(meme courtesy of amy)

one word
no explanations
no exceptions

so sayeth the bulletin lord

1. Yourself:
   healing
2. Your crush:
   developing
3. Your Father:
   forgiven
4. Your Favorite Item:
   memory
5. Your dream last night:
   forgotten
6. Your Favourite Drink:
   vodka
7. Your Dream Home:
   soon
8. The Room You Are In:
   dark
9. Your fear:
   conversation
10. Where you Want to be in Ten Years?
    happy
11. Who you were with 2 nights ago?
    fictional
12. What You’re Not:
    simple
13. Your Best Friend:
    distant
14. One of Your Wish List Items:
    immaterial
15. Your Gender:
    male
16. The Last Thing You did:
    pondered
17. What You Are Wearing
    black
18. Your favorite weather:
    crisp
19. Your Favorite Book:
    Siddhartha
20. The Last Thing you ate:
    soyburger
21. Your Life:
    improving
22. Your Mood:
    —
23. Who are you thinking about right now?
    Evil

Shuffle play just picked out this weekend’s perfect theme song:

How I wish, how I wish you were here.
We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl,
year after year,
Running over the same old ground.
What have we found? The same old fears.
Wish you were here.

(Although just getting a “hello” would put a huge smile on my face…)

Ah well, it’s playing something else now anyway. And Cradle of Filth, while fun, isn’t nearly so poignant : )

Dude, I was totally going to post the Killing Joke song Eighties to augment this entry, but I just realized that I must have lost or sold my “Laugh? I Nearly Bought One!” disc some point. I suppose I’ll have to pick up another copy now.

Anyway that song wasn’t the point. No, this is about some other great 80s tunes in which I’m currently basking. See, Amazon is having an indie rock sale, and included are some tasty choices from labels like 4AD, Beggars Banquet, etc. (PS: Mike, it’s not all 80s, there’s some good Epitaph stuff in there as well.) Well at $8 a pop I couldn’t say to no to grabbing a few that had been on my back list for a while.

First, a rediscovery, “16 Lovers Lane” by the Go-Betweens. I f-ing loved “Was There Anything I Could Do”, and somehow that song got pushed back into the front of my consciousness a few months ago, so I had to grab it. The whole album is good — if you like lush, orchestral indie pop (closest comparison I can think of is maybe The Church) — but that song to me is among the greats of the decade. What can I say, I’m a sucker for violin-out-of-context.

Then there was the belated exploration: I’ve long heard about how great The Fall are supposed to be, but for some reason I’d never gotten around to listening to ‘em much. So when I saw them in the list, I figured I’d give ‘em a shot. The one song I did know & love was “Big New Prinz”, so I picked up that album, “I am Kurious Oranj”. I understand their earlier stuff is supposed to be more “punk”, and I’ll still have to look into that sometime, but this is good for now. It is apparently the score to a rock ballet of sorts, which definately appeals to my penchant for art-rock crossover work. (As in see also “Young Gods play Kurt Weil”…)

Finally, less exciting, but a necessary addition to round out my collection, the Best of Love and Rockets. I hadn’t heard “No New Tale to Tell” in a long ass time. good stuff.

Just got back from the “Bindlestiff Family Cirkus and Magic Hat Summer Variety Show Tour” — allright, where do I begin…

OK — start with a circus, slice the budget to nil, lose the animals, fit it into a tiny art-theater space, and let the whole thing be performed by six people. Then make it all work with a healthy dose of retro-vaudeville schtick, and glue it together with plenty of humor, most of it just barely this side of bawdy. What do you get? I have no fucking idea, but I just saw it.

I suppose you might call it the circus equivalent of a garage band.

There was the sexy, tatooed, precision-bullwhipping ring-mistress. There was the flaming gay man in a blue bunny suit, whose function seemed to be “to be the flaming gay man in the blue bunny suit”. Throw in a spritely acrobat-slash-hula-hoop girl, and a guy who does the tightrope bit. And arguably the “star” is a fellow who handled duties as clown, twister-of-phallic-ballons, weilder-of-yoyo-like-gadgets, spinner of a variety of tops, and finally, sword swallower (who supplies his own jokes about sword swallowing). Oh, and *everybody* juggles, without apologies for varying degrees of success.

Then there was my favorite, “Skip”, the maestro who provided the musical accompaniment — handling keyboards, guitar, vocalized sound effects, and harmonica-through-a-bullhorn. And this was all before getting to his solo feature, in which he introduced us to the heretofore untapped tonality of the Tampax tampon. I’ll just have to leave that to your imagination.

All in all a damn good time for anyone far enough askew to appreciate it.

Senate one vote away from officially outlawing freedom.

It’s the waiting that’s so hard,
or so they say, but it makes sense –
when we Know but want to question anyhow;
the sane approach I’m sure, but sanity?
Not our suit.

Can we explain
what we don’t understand?
When all we know is wind,
but we’ve no doubt that wind uplifts?

No, we can but feel,
and though feeling brings the fear we also find
it brings us warmth
and Hope

And there we hang our hat, on hope –
that peace at last may live among us.

We only have to let it in.

So it seems my new name is:

(disclaimer: I have no idea if I’ve even got this right-side up)

At least, that’s what the Khenpos have named me. The ISO-8859-1 transliteration is “Pema Chojor”, and it means “Lotus who keeps the blessings of the spiritual”. Noooo, that’s not going to encourage my god complex at all… : )

So, yeah. It’s been a weird couple of days. The Khenpos are the two Tibetan lamas that lead our sangha, and they are in town this week. They gave us teachings the last two nights and are holding a retreat this weekend. And so yesterday I was one of several who took part in what’s called the “refuge ceremony”, which is sort of the formal introduction into the sangha. Buddhist Baptisim, if you will, except of course that we know it’s *just a ceremony*. This is where, among other things, the lamas give us our dharma names. We had an interview with the Khenpos in the afternoon, then the ceremony last night. Good times.

Anarchist Cheerleader Elected