He died for our sins so we honor him by being inconvenienced

Happy belated Jesus-Day everyone.

Micki: "Yeah, Taco Bell is always open. But thats about it."
Me: "This is your Lord's fault."

Since it was a religious holiday I spent the majority of my time wandering into the center of a forest and becoming inebriated solely for the challenge of finding my way out. I needed to do something to take my mind off the sad truth that I had just come to realize; the fact that with my current wages, I don't make enough money to live. Shortly I will need to go out in search of a new job and my cross-hairs are centered directly on the myriad of local magazines and newspapers. This is all in light of my recent epiphany that I, much like communism, make a lot more sense on paper.

If I could draw a generalized version of the Washington landscape peppered liberally with fat people eating hundred-dollar-bills I could easily make a few dollars as a political cartoonist. Especially in our current political climate. But sadly I am not blessed with the ability to graphically depict the morbidly obese, at least not in the symbolic context of pork-barrel legislation. So instead I will just rip into these bastards verbally.

Where shall I begin?

It would be wise to start by pointing out the obvious hypocrisy of the fact that our country is currently teetering on the edge of using nuclear force to prevent Iran from having nuclear force. Somehow I can't help but think that this whole thing is, at least in part, some very large and dangerously ill-concieved broom to sweep under the rug the ever widenning array of scandals that seem to pop up almost daily like methane bubbles from a stagnant swamp.

The most recent bubble is the fact that six retired generals who were quite deeply involved in the Iraq War are now calling for the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld. This is an incredible attack that, in the twisted minds of those at the helm, would warrant this large Iranian broom. Sadly though I have to agree with Rolling Stone magazine when they assert "Rummy is not going anywhere. Despite what you may have heard, we still have three co-equal branches of government: Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. Neither Dick nor Rummy serve at the pleasure of the president. Along with Bush, they are president.

"Think of it this way: If Cheney is Bush's adult supervision, Rumsfeld is Cheney's. Rummy was Cheney's boss and mentor in the Seventies and that power dynamic remains in full effect. In the Cheney/Rumsfeld cabal, power flows downhill from Rumsfeld." (Rolling Stone, April 14, 2006)

Maybe this is a desperate grab in the dark. They are, after all, running out of distractions.
Maybe what we are seeing is a horrid administration that is finally seeing the cracks in its own foundation. One that knows that sometime in the near future the weight of its lies, guilt and hypocrisy is going to reach critical mass. I hope when Bush reads the paper in the morning, or at least has someone give him the gyst of it, he feels that familiar, panicked, sinking feeling. Like when you are stopped at a redlight and you look into your rear-view mirror to realize that the inattentive driver behind you is not going to stop.

What ever happened to good ol' Scooter? Well, all I can find on the whole Libby situation is an article on Rolling Stone and a couple of new links on The Smoking Gun that indicate that he is calling Karl Rove and Ari Fleischer to testify. "You're doin' a helluva job" Scooter.

To top this feculent pile is yet another shining emblem of our great nations trend of overcoming adversity, triumphing beyond all odds and making it to the top of the hill to look out onto a beautiful sunrise then, for no aparent reason, turning around and running the other way: The Omaha, Nebraska school district is going to re-segregate. Thats right, in early July 2008 there will be three separate yet deliberately unequal school systems in Omaha. One mostly for whites, one mostly for blacks and one mostly for hispanics.

This, along with the fact that theology is being taught as a science at several institutions after being smuggled in under the guise of "Intelligent Design" as well as Bush's early cabinet-meetings with God and all 'round erosion of the separation of church and state are just footprints that our society is leaving in the sand as we back-pedal into some previous century that will keep the Right in both power and wealth.

Murderous deer, Scooter Libby, racism and the morbidly obese.

I felt the urge to write the other day while reading an article on The Smoking Gun about how one of Cheney's ex-minions, now punching bag and general scapegoat, "Scooter" Libby has aparently had enough after being the defendant of, if memory serves me correctly, five felony accusations. Two of which were purgery, which I believe he was convicted of (don't quote me on either of those facts).

The termination of Libby's employment came about rather abruptly after he leaked the identity of a CIA agent named Plame to a New York Times reporter. Although he has taken the brunt of the punishment for the crime, which borders on treason, up until this point it appears that whatever compensation he was recieving for the prostitution of his credibility is no longer enough and the bad blood that has been brewing within the administration is finally bubbling up to the surface. His story now, which seems extremely plausible and, in fact, quite probable within this hellish government is that he had direct authorization from George W. Bush to leak the information to the public.

Keep in mind that on national television just days after the leak the President promised to immediately bring the hammer down and fire whoever was responsible for the leak.
But I didn't write about it immediately. "Let it brew", I thought. I took one last glance at the headlines on Yahoo News before my ride arrived to take me to my car which had been resurrected the day before. There were several headlines about various explosions killing nameless people in the Middle East and adding them to the maddening pile of statistics that casts a grim shadow on this hideous war. There was also a headline about a goose sexually harrassing a woman in New York's Central Park as well as the headline containing the Libby story.

The ride to my car was a mind-numbing, soul-dissolving journey which I know only took an hour and a half but felt like three as my mom droned on about how I should come home more, cut my hair that way girls will like me (thanks for the vote of confidence mom), stop hanging around at the Gypsy because its weird and find a church to go to. She also informed me that kids these days are playing something called "The Choking Game" which we used to refer to as simply "Bullying" and that people in the towns that I grew up in are dying left and right from various diseases and addictions. It has always amazed me that the people in those towns have yet to catch on to the correlation between their diets and their high death rate. If these people could figure out a way to free-base fried chicken and inject it directly into their aorta they probably would. There is a decent chance that several autopsies in the area have revealed whole christmas hams lodged in the subject's left ventricle. She also told me how, as a christian, she takes these events as well as the abundance of "damn inter-racial couples" as signs of the approaching apocolypse. Hypocrisy both amuses and enrages me.

Anyway, after driving an hour and a half away from the ocean we decided to eat seafood and stopped at Dale's. Our waitress was around my age, some sort of modern, slightly diluted version of a southern belle. She has probably never touched dirt in her entire life and seemed like the type who would spend the night in her car if she ever saw a spider in her house. I got the sudden urge to set the building on fire just to see her reaction.

The conversation teetered back and forth between my mother's rants about how the weather lately makes her think that the world is about to end and my random input about various happenings around Wilmington until I finally found a moment to confront her with something that had been bothering me for quite some time. Two decades to be exact. She was talking about some "mexican" person from Miami (they were most likely Cuban) who called her desk at work yesterday and wanted to settle a speeding ticket that they got on I-95 recently.

"I couldn't understand a damn word she was saying and there was a baby screaming constantly in the background. I wish I could work for the Border Patrol. If they couldn't speak the language I would tell them to turn their ass around and go back."

I looked at her and tried out of respect to mask my dissappointment but judging by her reaction it is safe to assume I failed:

"I mean, I am not racist or anyth-"

"Yes you are."

The conversation quickly turned back to some mundane, neutral topic as we finished the meal.

Once home, I said hello to my dogs, one of which is nearly old enough to get his driver's license, and then I threw all of the shit which had been pulled out of my car back into it, hugged my mom, told her that I love her and began the return trip.

My car seemed foreign to me. Mostly because it was clean. I hit the 70mph zone between Chadbourn and Whiteville and my foot got heavy. 65. 75. 83. 90. Deer. A whole heard of them flashing past me for a brief second on either side of my car. I eased off the gas and enjoyed the free adrenaline. A few miles down the road my foot got close to the floor again as a result of the idea that lightning doesnt strike twice. Zap. Deer. Another herd. This time I saw them coming and had time to react but not enough to stop, so I hit the gas and began straddling the center line. God has hired quadrupeds as hitmen against me. He probably pays them with corn and various other grains. They lack the opposable thumbs neccessary to handle paper currency.

Back within the city limits I relaxed and drove the speed limit all the way back to my apartment where the first thing I did was check the headlines. More, or maybe even the same... I can't really tell anymore, headlines about civilian deaths in Iraq. The video of the sexually deviant water foul and some story dealing with gas prices. But where was the Libby story? Why is there a follow-up about some pervert bird but not even a whisper about a crime far more drastic than what chased Nixon out of the White House?

The media scares me. Every once in a while very important things tend to dissappear all together. Someone is masking something. Thats fine I guess. You can only suppress so much shit before you begin to build up pressure and things begin floating to he surface. What we are seeing now, ladies and gentlemen, are the first gurgles of a pot about to boil over. I wouldn't mind being in Washington with a pen and paper when it scalds all of those evil bastards.

The line between whore and pimp is hopelessly blurred.

The brown-gold metal-flake streak that I just watched go by on the highway was a 1972 Chevrolet El Camino. Beautiful car. A piece of american muscle that was crafted before Chevy and America in general said "fuck it" and decided to coast on their own shaky merits.

This car rolled off the assembly line in Detroit just before the first crippling blow to modern american politics was delivered and the red carpet was rolled out for Richard Milhous Nixon between the White House and that fateful helicopter.

The car survived unscathed but the country has had a subtle limp ever since. Now, thirty years later George W. Bush stands with crow-bar poised to take out its last good knee and permanently cripple the damn thing.

History will forever curse the day that this theatrically religious drunk was chosen over a dead-pan kook by a margin of 537 possibly fictional votes.

Why is he still in office? For the same reason people my age are dying everyday in Iraq long after the "mission" was aparently "accomplished". When Bush stood on the deck of that aircraft carrier under that enormous banner he looked exactly like a moral-less info-mercial personality trying frantically to sell some type of new-fangled blender that he had either never laid eyes on before or knew was a total piece of shit. The greasy little salesman has been peddling shit to his constituents since September 11, 2002.

While I would like to see the evil bastard suffer the same fate as Nixon (even though Nixon didn't really suffer all that much thanks to Gerald Ford) I know that it will never happen. Bush is not the bumbling idiot that everyone would like to make him out to be. Or, at least, those at the helm of this hell-ship aren't anyway. Bush has taken many precautions to prevent such a dismal end to his career. He has legalized the vast majority of the offenses that chased Nixon onto that helicopter.

The son of a bitch lies so blatantly that no one even takes notice. I have always said that if you have a grey jumpsuit, a handtruck and a white van you can rob any place that you want. As long as you look like you know what you are doing and are supposed to be doing it, no one will question you. Just walk into a convenience store, grab a bag of chips and wave them at the cashier as you walk out the door.

This is Bush's approach to presidency.

Why are we not stopping him?

We should have had the bastard grilled in front of a jury years ago. But instead, nation of befuddled cashiers that we are, we just watch him come in, day after day, and walk out. Everyday anothe bag of chips. We treat him like some homeless drifter who has made such a habit out f this that we have simply come to expect it and just let it happen.

I would call the members of the Bush administration whores but that would imply that the work that they do is unpleasant. But they seem to get a kick out of it (as evidenced by that stupid hyena smirk that always seems to peek out from behind Bush's facade at the most inappropriate times like dirt that you didn't sweep far enough under the rug) so a more appropriate title is simply "greedy bastards".

The scope of the people employed by this administration is staggering. The roster of course includes the standard array of scumbag politicians, however, it also includes quite a few religious authorities who came in handy during both elections by helping to lock down the critical "christian" vote. This was the first crack in the now crumbling separation of church and state. How could such a partition stand when it was the church who gave the current state its power?

Also on the payroll is a wide variety of "scientists" (as a biologist I cringe when I use that word to describe these reptiles) who whore away their credibility everyday to "research" (cringe) that says anything Bush wants the people to hear. The most blatant example of this is the research that claimed that drilling in ANWR would not effect the wildlife in the region at all.

If there is a benevolent God then there can be no afterlife because if there is, Washington, Adams, Franklin and Jefferson are all shitting their collective pants in the great hereafter at this very moment.

Eleanor Rigby died in the church... funny...

She came in. A symbol of everything that I despise about the middle class. Unreasonably loud for no apparent reason, she spoke with the same inflection of monotone belligerence that you normally only hear in the voice of a heavily medicated idiot locked away in an institution somewhere. If I had my way I would have been conversing with the idiot while this banshee was howling away in a padded room.

Listening to her was like having to sit through a concert with an array of terrible bands whose collective motto is "If you can't play well, play loud."Her diction was about as solid as Jello as she strung together loose strings of words that only vaguely fit the criteria for "sentences".

Her thought process was only slightly more coherent than the early morning ramblings of someone with a fresh gram of coke up their nose as she droned on and on about every detail of every option on her beige 2007 GMC Yukon Denali All-Wheel-Drive.She finally turned and walked out the door to await her car outside.

Watching her leave was like watching a waterspout head back out to sea.

In the ten minutes that she spent waiting outside she sent her two adolescent daughters back in a total of four times to get change and buy snacks and drinks. The fruit, this time, fell quite far from the tree as her children did not show even the smallest sign of an amphetamine addiction. In fact, they said very little which I assume is due to the fact that they are not used to things such as openings in conversations.

Although they are different right now, those children have at least another 5 years under that womans thumb and that makes me very nervous about their futures.I nearly just wrote "God help them if they mature into any semblance of their mother." But upon more extensive thought, that sentence should read "God help us if they mature into any semblance of their mother."

God help them if they don't run away. I spent five minutes with this woman and it made me feel like less of a human. Living with her for five YEARS would be a serious mind-fuck. They will most likely develope into sadistic, she-devil hookers; stealing kidneys in Las Vegas and
smiling whenever they hear The Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby".

That is a very sane man sprinting across the highway.

I am content. This is a recent developement. For the first time in two decades I feel mentally healthy. By my own standards anyway. Just yesterday I took the deer's approach to crossing College Road and simply bolted across with absolutely no regard for the basic ideas of
physics such as inertia and impact. Less than a week ago failed miserably at trying to stifle laughter as a total stranger threatened to "fucking kill" me. Not actions typically viewed as evidence of sanity. Hell, while I was writing that last sentence a customer arrived and I served him with a completely bogus New York accent and while I was writing this sentence he came back to buy a keychain which I handled with my true, southern accent.

The point is, life is fun right now. Perhaps "content" is not the correct word. Content implies a certain apprehension towards the idea of change, therefore, content cannot be a suitable word because it is change itself that has made me feel this way. If that made any sense at
all.

My shit-hole car finally died. It was resurrected friday morning and by friday afternoon it was back in the one place where it seems to feel right at home, the back of a tow-truck. So now it looks like I will be back on the bus with all of the drug-dealers, prostitutes, fast food
employees, that guy who pisses on the courthouse, and every other lunatic in Wilmington.

I think I might go apply for a job at a childrens daycare under the name "Icepick".