I propose we all sign a petition to rid the world of ants and send it to god.

I got home yesterday exhausted as all hell fucked out exhausted and was just about to lay my pounding head on the sweet softness of my pillow when I noticed something move. So I squished it. I believe in live and let live except when you're in my goddam bed. This goes for spiders too. So I was like, "oh, that was an ant and now it's dead, so, sleep uggghhh." Then something else moves. And for those of you who have lived in southern california, you know if there's one ant, it might just be a fluke. but if there's two ants there's a million. So I look across towards my open window and see an infantry of ant repelling down my wall, charging pell mell over the hills and valleys of the dirty clothes on my floor, and issuing battle cries in a pitch my ears can not register. So I do what any good tree humpin' environmentalist would do and I slam my window shut, spray the outside with raid and armed with garden scented lysol start spraying the little fuckers to death. I know it won't kill them immediately and it's best to use febreeze because it's actually labeled for asphyxiation of smalls animals but the lysol's handy. Turns out it doesn't kill them as planned, it just stuns them and creates a goopy mess which makes them easier to squish with a paper towel. And those I don't get on the first round end up stuck to the residue so when I wipe them up, their little legs stay stuck to my bookshelf. Then I have to clean my room and vaccuum their little carcasses into my roommate's vaccuum. Easy as pie.

Total time: 5 hours

I think this would make a damn fine jazz song

Sometimes I feel I've got to run away
I've got to get away from the pain
that you drive into the heart of me

The love we share seems to go nowhere
And I've lost my light
For I toss and turn I can't sleep at night
Once I ran to you Now I'll run from you
This tainted love you've given
you've given all a boy could give
you take my tears and that's not nearly all

Now I know I've got to run away
I've got to get away
You don't really want IT any more from me
To make things right

You need someone to hold you tight
And you'LL think love is to pray
But I'm sorry I don't pray that way
Don't touch me please
I cannot stand
the way you tease I

love you though you hurt me so
Now I'm going to pack my things
Tainted love, tainted love
Touch me baby

And someone spoke about the past

I have this theory about timelines, the past, memory, whatever. I'm sure it is just a watered down version of someone else's stellar theory or philosophy. If not, then I would have had an original thought, and I don't know that it's possible with all the thoughts flying about and the thinking going on. Billions of people on the planet and thoughts leaking out of all of them. Thought soup. Digression is imminent with all the headaches going on, so an apology in advance has just been issued.

I've never been much of a immutable facts kind of person and I don't really believe in a fixed timeline. You know, like the timeline you spend your whole life trying to speed up or slow down depending on the mood and the atmospheric pressure. Or, I actually believe that there is one timeline we exist on and it is always moving in a forward motion like a string pulling us forward through space. But that our body and mind are mutable, everchanging, stretchy. It's those parts that exist on separate timelines. Parts of you are always travelling through time. My legs ache, they are stuck in yesteday. An old war wound acts up. A scar flares. Suddenly without any warning, I am as flexible as a 5 year old, then it dissipates, I am brought back to the present.

Your mind is the most succeptible. And given that I define myself by my thoughts, my existence is constantly traversing time. I see myself in vivid memories. A smell transports me to New York, two years ago, a sip of coffee and the humidity drops, the buildings disappear I am standing in the Kitchen in my office, the dullness sets in. The gray of tile without sunshine.

Time travel of this sort is mainly conducted through filters. Nostalgia or pain. A filter the color of emotion covers the lights of the set. A week ago, intense nostalgia set in for a coffee shop I used to visit. Sunshine, yellow, white light infused memories. I stayed half in this memory for the entire morning. I needed to recreate this memory desperately. I drank hot coffee in the sun, contacted those who had been there, recemented connections. It felt perfect. It was good. But the light faded eventually, the filter was torn down. And I was left shivering in the dark. And all that's left was the present.

That's why the past is so threatening. It's never gone. You're never fully out of it. You can fool yourself that it is behind you. That you will never be in it again. That you're in control. That anyone is.

The brilliant things that happen when sex is involved.

Well, now there's an interesting thing happening on down at Savage Love. I typically enjoy Dan Savage and agree with most of what he writes and get some of my voyeuristic/gossippy jolly rocks off by reading his column. But every once in a while he says something that is downright profound. And here it is:

While the religious right's war on gay people gets all the headlines, their war on straight rights gains ground daily. They've destroyed sex education, undermined abortion rights, and successfully prevented emergency contraception from being made available over the counter. Now they're going to block the HPV vaccine. Why? Because the American Taliban would rather see sexually active women dead than vaccinated.

Now where the hell is that right? The fundamentalists want to block vaccination because apparently vaccinating is a call to action. Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council told New Scientist magazine that "giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful, because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex." I don't know about you, but the last time I got vaccinated (tetanus), I didn't go around sticking rusty nails in my hands and licking rusty fences. I thanked my lucky stars I didn't get tetanus and forgot about it. Besides there are numerous factors out there associated with sex that this doesn't account for, so until you find a vaccination for AIDS, pregnancy, date rape, boredom, herpes, heartbreak, love, domestic violence, alimony, palimony, divorce, peer pressure, alcohol, miniskirts, testosterone, estrogen, biological urges, fun, dating, pills, prostitution and regret people are still going to be having sex or not having it with the same regularity as before. There just may be fewer funerals for the sinners to put in their daily planner.

The thing about nightmares

This morning I woke up hyperventilating and completely terrified, insanely angry, and completely depressed. I also wanted to kick something. Suffice to say the events in my dream sucked. It was so intense, the only way I could work through what was going on was to replay the scene incessantly in my head until I broke down in tears. I decided to wake early and take a walk and try to clear my head before work so I didn't have a mssive emotional collapse between my coffee break and lunch time. It worked partially.

This has only happened to me a few times, but when it happens, the effects are far reaching and last much longer than your typical nightmare. Usually, after a nightmare, you freak out, turn on a light, drink some water and play a cartoon on your laptop until you fall back asleep. Problem solved. But sometimes things don't work that way and you end up feeling like an idiot for not being able to just put it away and get over it. So, while walking around like a zombie today, I analyzed the whole thing and came up with the following.

There are different kinds of nightmares. We already covered your standard the dog is chasing me nightmare, there is a solution to that one. But when you have an emotional nightmare, your subconscious is stripped bare. Vulnerable when sleeping, your body is an outward mainfestation of your mind. Your have no defenses against someone's actions in dreams. The walls we create for our waking lives to keep people at bay only work when our conscious can activate them. During sleep we have no defenses against any wrong visited upon us and therefore, react to such actions as a child would. Children have not yet learned the defenses our worldweariness has allowed us to create. Emotional defensiveness is a learned trait.

Children also perceive all sensual (as in senses) experiences as being true. Part of this is never lost. For example adults find enjoyment in viewing films on a two dimensional screen. The films, intended to represent a three demensional world, exhibit power solely when the audience allows the film to represent that reality even though they consciously know this world does not exist. Without the ability to perceive a false action as true, there would be no escapism, no entertainment industry, no imagination.

The same applies to dreams, however, we do not have the conscious to intervene in our dreams (very often). We do not have the conscious filter to separate the dream world and the real world into different compartments. This is especially true when one abruptly moved from the dream state to the waking state with no subtle transition in between. The dream state remains vivid in the memory without this buffer to temper the false reality. Therefore, in the abstract realm of memory, the memory is vivid, perhaps even more vivid than other true memories. Since we base the validity of memory on how complete the specific memory is, we find that the false memory is now, possibly more true in the mind than other events that occurred in real time. This becomes truth for the person, and in the case of nightmares this truth can be devastating.

Somehow this makes me feel better. Just a little bit.

I'd Rather Micheal BOLTON for UN Ambassador

Republican senator George Voinovich has decided:

“After hours of deliberation, telephone calls, personal conversations, reading hundreds of pages of transcripts, and asking for guidance from Above, I have come to the determination that the United States can do better than John Bolton,”

Hmmm...sounds like a 'no' vote to me. However:

“That being said, Mr. Chairman, I am not so arrogant to think that I should impose my judgment and perspective of the U.S. position in the world community on the rest of my colleagues.”

Funny, I thought that's exactly what a senator is supposed to do. I thought that was why we hired them. They make tough decisions. The occasionally vote against their party. Perhaps, they even do what's right.

There's also another really good reason to send an unqualified candidate for the senate for a vote:

“We owe it to the president to give Mr. Bolton an up or down vote on the floor.”

I can promise you, from personal experience, hiring a person as a favor to another person (even the president) is a very, very bad idea. He made our lives a living hell for quite some time, and still does from time to time. Thus, if you hire someone for a public relations job, who is (as his supporters describe)

1. an aggressive policymaker who pressed his missions at every opportunity
and argued vociferously for his point of view. In the process, his blunt style
alienated some colleagues.
2. [whose] actions were not always exemplary
3. sometimes engaged in objectionable or wrongheaded behavior.

you're going to get burned. We, as a nation are going, to be internationally fucked if we throw a loose cannon in to fix our rocky relationship with the UN. (Who, if you think about it, is like a wife whom we cheated on with the war in Iraq. I'm just saying.)

quotes found here.