We are watching

the airline industry collapse. There are some factors, such as poor business planning, that are entirely within the ability of airlines to correct. There are others, such as fuel prices, the cost of jet fuel, and the expense of fueling their jets, that are beyond anyones ability to change in the foreseeable future.

That's why I'm going home again this winter. I'll fly to Colorado, then drive to California with me Pops, and I will soak in every last detail of my journey because it may well be the last one I ever take.

Call me pessimistic. Ticket prices are already more expensive this year than they have been, and we're still months away from the peak travel season. Perhaps the airlines will make one last major push to drop prices in order to convince people to jet across the country for the holidays, but it seriously may be the last. All the romance of airline terminals and pressurized cabins and baggage claims will be gone within our lifetimes, and in the shorter term they will become unavailable to most Americans (especially as the rich-poor wage gap continues to widen due to high energy costs).

Speaking of high energy costs, I picked up a small space heater for this winter, and it's already proven it's worth. My room is easily the poorest-insulated in the house, yet it is many degrees warmer than any other. I'll be adding plastic insulation, replacing bulbs with CFLs, and buying a "Draft Dodger" or two (cute little draft socks that sit below the door). What bothers me now, that I just realised, is that the attitude most people are taking is that Yes, this winter will be Diffficult, but things will Get Better. There is little sense that our NG crisis is permanent, or that we are on the cusp of the post-carbon-energy era. For myself, I can't shake the feeling that a door is closing, rapidly, and that by the next springtime our reality will have been severely altered.

A Powerful Funk

Settled on my brow this evening. It was one of those infamous Grey Days in Pittsburgh, when no rain fell, no sun shone, and the wind was just cold enough to remind you that summer has ended. My professor for history writing has serious doubts about my ability to pull enough research for my term paper, and I know that he is justified. As a part of my reasearch on cold war era SAM silos I watched the documentary "Fog of War" about Rob MacNamera, and it was useless for my topic but tragically fascinating for my inner Historian. He sat in front of the camera and with almost reptilian calm discussed the war that we never fought, the one in which 58,000 Americans died because of a lack of understanding, and it made me depressed and fearful because we are so obviously repeating the same mistakes all over again.

I told my friend Wonko that the neat thing about history is that you can tell who's learned from it. The unfortunate corollary is that you can tell pretty damned easy who has not learned from it, and this would include just about everyone in politics today. We're living through a massive tragedy that never had to happen.

The walk home always gets me down too. There are too many people, for one, and almost no human beings. Cigarette smoke gets puffed at you, sluts yell insult-greetings across the crowded streets, crazy people mumble at ghosts and ask you for change. You have to detour around half-dried vomit-splatters.

I took a route through a hospital parking lot, following a pair of flighty dancers chatting about who did this and who said that. We all pass a mother and two children sobbing on a sidewalk corner, yelling No! and Oh my God... I felt the same tears in my eyes, and suddenly all the desires I had for relaxing the rest of the night seem selfish in the face of whatever loss they'd suffered. I didn't know them, but I loved them.

Then I walked through a gang of thuggish teenagers on a street corner just outside my house and it made me want to tear and rend the world. Don't they know people are suffering?

As I walked up to my door I saw that my Netflix DVDs had arrived, three red bundles of fantasy. So I could spend the rest of the night escaping.

Proof #397

that Macs are easier to use than Windows PCs:

I got a Razr when I re-upped with my cell service. This is slightly ironic since I'm the kind of guy who guards my phone number with almost the same zeal as I guard my SSN. Point being, I'm not the type to be using it very much, but it was free and every gadget geek is obligated to acquire the most awesome hardware he can.

I was under the impression from the reviews on the Internets that it would be possible to use MP3 ringtones and customise the display with my own pictures and so forth, by downloading them from my computer. The Razr has both a standard USB port and Bluetooth, and since Ruri is an older iBook and didn't come with Bluetooth, I thought it might be possible to use the cable to transfer da goods.

Silly human. iSync will work with calendars and address books, but not simple file transfers. So I went on a search for some software that would let me do it with a Windows laptop, since we have a bunch of those at work and I could possess one temporarily. After ONE HOUR of downloading software that said it would work then didn't, searching Motorola's help site and dozens of other cell phone sites and trying to find the drivers, all I could get was a form for buying, at $29.99, the sync package from Moto that would enable the basic communications features I was seeking.

So I gave up. I Grabbed a 17" PowerBook, turned the Bluetooth on, paired the device, and sent my files over. It took three minutes with built-in software to accomplish on a Mac what it would have taken thirty bucks and two Install Wizards to do on a PC. That is proof #397.

This struck me

as odd, and sad. I think they've missed the point:



Let me zoom in on the top of the container, in case you missed it.



Yes, friends, this coffee is superior because it is Patriotic.

I have no idea why. Why? Why? Why?

There are few

words, phrases, or expressions that suit my mood at approx. 7:15 AM this day. This is when I saw Charlie Gibson sail a courteous greeting at Bill O'Rielly, welcoming him to Good Morning America.

Here's the phrase:
What the FUCK?

Ow. Oowoww. Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow.
This happened just after they introduced Robin Roberts live from some disaster zone, wearing a t-shirt that said "GMA - Getting It Done." When a news organisation has to try out new action-oriented slogans while covering a token rebuilding effort in the middle of the worst natural devistation in a hundred years, you know you're in trouble.

Or you're in the Twilight Zone! Doo dee doo doo, doo dee doo doo! That's how What the FUCK?-ed up it was.

I just told

Lindsay B. to follow the dream that I abandoned. She seems to have something I don't, a belief in the basic goodness of Humans, which should make her far better equipped to write in a way that people will pay attention to.

It follows that I do not have a belief in the basic goodness of Humans. This has been said before, and is the primary source of my tendency to be an asshole, which I have just realised creates a very serious feedback loop of Negative Vibes. It is easy to feel superior or inferior to people when you believe that a person can be either. It is hard, in the course of a day, not to believe it honestly. I watch people throw trash out their car window and I think, "I have a superior understanding of the consequences of littering. They are ignorant." I hear people talk about how awesome their drug and alcohol use makes them feel, and I think, "I have a superior understanding of the effects these have on the human body and spirit. They are self-destructive."

I watch parents shopping with their fat children, buying them candy and junk food and yelling at them to quit running around, and I think, "These people have no idea the damage they wreak upon their heirs. They will cripple the civilisation that sustains them. But I know better."

All of which is despicably self-congratulatory, and yet, feels right. I suppose that's just as scary as listening to some crazy Revelationist describe the lake of fire that we'll all be cast in to, for they are no less certain of themselves. This is my weakness.

Could it be true?

Am I really watching a fat woman outside this cafe hand out pamphlets by Jews for Jesus? What kind of spiritual/racial/personal clusterfuck is going on there?

At least we're heading for the End Times. Not in the silly teleport-the-nice-ones-to-Heaven kind, but the social upheaval that will likely result from the extraordinary cost of natural gas heating this winter. Combined with a real gas / refinery shortage and the orgy of debt spending that will surely come with the Shopping Season, these factors will start causing real problems for an awful lot of folks in the near future. I had a long talk with mum the other day about what I really believe will happen, and why I'm not doing more about it - educating people, writing, working for environmental groups and so forth.

It comes down to the fact that there's damn-all we can do at this point. The disease - growth-dependent capitalism and mass consumerism - has spread too far. The cancer is now in virtually every system. The body feeds its growth. To kill it is to kill the host.

Us.

So yeah, researching old ABM missile systems for history class isn't exactly the foremost thing on my mind right now.

Ah well.

I assured me mum that when the Navy finally arrives at New Orleans in force, some serious relief can get underway. The small boat capacity alone, together with all that helo space parked right next to the worst of the flooded areas, would make a huge difference. That is, if FEMA were interested in utilising them. Or if they felt like allowing people to leave the city. Is any of this real? How fucked up in the head do you have to be?

Something tells me that Bush could have waited a week before nominating a ghost like Roberts for Chief Justice of the Supreme Fucking Court, which raises the question of Why Now. Abysmal poll numbers and clearly videotaped incompetence during the nation's largest modern disaster relief effort, together with the blatant efforts at spinning massive death and utter destruction point to a lame effort to divert some smidgen of attention from his failings. I shouldn't even be able to consider this about anyone, it's wholly inhuman, but with these jokers...

Yes. The Devistation

is indeed nearly complete. It now appears certain that a number of "actionable items" were in the works to repair critical weaknesses in the levies and pumps that kept the water out of the New Orleans bowl. Funded in large part by government monies, these plans were cast aside as the more critical War On Terr'r sucked funds away from all sources. The Treasury, which once boasted of a tremendous budget surplus, has been wiped out, so that all our national savings, the product of past productivity, are gone. There is no room in the current budget - indeed, there could be said to be negative room, as the deficit en masse continues to grow. And all future plans, especially planned programs like Medicaid and Social Security, are endangered by this Terr'r. Is it scary, or merely strange, that we are siphoning funds from the entire American space-time continuum, past, present, and future? It no longer seems real.

I, like a not-insignificant portion of My Fellow Americans, have been to The City That Was. My time was spent wandering the old street fronts during Mardi Gras, the peak time for partying and chicanery of all sorts. I have fond memories, what memories remain intact, and of course the human loss should be enough to sadden even those who have never ventured outside their home counties. In the end, that's all there is in the state of LA. Loss.

Yes, Journal,

it's been a while. If Future Self is reading this, then he might be asking, why? Why did you shut off the treadmill and park yr. keister on the couch for more than two months, eating delicious donuts and drinking expensive forms of coffee?

Part of it was the exasperating prospect of trying to keep up with all the bloggable news - it's a Shit Storm, allright, and only the most dedicated of reporters will venture out into it on camera, shouting futile weather-truisms into their microphones while expensive waterproof parkas slap and flutter around their jaws.

I return because my prof in Writing Seminar for Majors, and to a lesser degree my sister, reminded me that we learn by doing. A gross Tonne of writing will be required of me this semester, and I must get the juices flowing again. Time to plug the treadmill back in and start sweating. Ruri's desktop has been recast, I am living in a new abode (equipped with wireless Internets and 48-inch TeeVee, the techie equivalent of a split morphine/caffine IV drip), and mum supports my plan of moving to Ireland and working for Apple when all this school nonsense is over with.

Blammo! Back into the Life.

Extremely Strange ad

of the day: Microsoft's web based XP Media Version flash ad, which claims, among other things, that "It will make your teeth whiter."

's True.

I'm sure the transcript

will be available somewhere online, but I had to get this down before it left my head.

In a report on ABC News, Bob Woodruf is exploring the parts of North Korea that North Korea wants him to see. In the capital of Pyongyang there is a large school for young children which lavishes them with money and attention, what few fruits of Kim Jong-Il's retarded economy can be directed their way.

The kids put on a remarkable music and dance performance for visiting dignitaries, and Woodruf ends his broadcast with something along the lines of, "It's remarkable what children can learn when the state is willing to teach them."

This has some interesting implications, and they cut both ways. On the one hand, there is clear evidence that a well-funded state standardised educational system benefits children, adults, and society. If every citizen were able to read and write coherently, and were fluent in not only the language of math and science but of art and music as well, is there any doubt that all of America would be richer in ways money cannot count? On the other, only the most careful monitoring by it's populace can keep the government from teaching it's own revised history, as the abuses of the governmental monopoly on telecommunications that North Korea so adeptly demonstrates.

Fascinating bits like this are mainly found on ABC, although their coverage of Jesus is second only to the Cornerstone Network and tends to irritate me. I particularly liked the bit about hand-fishing being made legal again in rednecked bits of the nation if only for Charlie Gibson's deadpan one-word response after the peice ended: "Okay."

I find myself

pining for the end of our world. Particularly after a bad day on the bus, full of smelly noisy freaks who yell into their cell phones then yell at strangers about what they were yelling about before. The GODDAMN ENDLESS MINDLESS THUMPING of the downstair's neighboor's stereo. My German teacher asked us why we enjoy camping. "Nich so viele leben" was my reply- "Not so many people."

My inner Destroyer longs for a semi-lawless wasteland of abandoned cars and looted store fronts. I'm even fine with being lost to the Die Off that some have posited will by necessity come with the end of cheap fuel. Being aware of both the remarkable damage we're doing to our planet and the near-total apathy we feel towards it, my mind is peirced by a constant ache, and perhaps the only cure for such pain is for the cause - what we so pompusly call Western Civilisation - to be removed.

Right now that part of me is ascendant. Every day that passes I long intensely to stand amongst the rubble of America. Tyler Durden leaps to mind;

In the future I see, you're stalking elk through the deep forest canyon that surrounds the ruins of Rockefeller Center.

I feel a little

used now. The Fam and I had gone to see Star Bores Episode 3: Revenge of the Pith (-y Dialogue). It's the least sucky suck of the three sucks, but that still implies an unfortunate degree of suckage. Basicaly, mum fell asleep twice and we all laughed and cringed whenever a character talked. Every time they started talking, in fact, I found myself waiting for them to stop. And I kept hoping, against all evidence and past experience, that it wouldn't turn out to be a complete disaster.

It is. But the worst moment came when I caught a commercial for Burger King that featured new Star Wars merchandise in the kiddie meals. I realised then, as I suspected all along, that the new movies weren't really about the story - you could sum up the plot of all three in a fortune cookie - but about the Merch. The bulk of Lucas's profits won't come from theater tickets, but from cross promotions and plastic figurine sales, from an epic sort of exploitation. And I gave my money to the machine responsible, believing that I had to participate in this cultural phenomenon. It is a culture of Blind Consumption, and now I feel used.

I'm only through the

first installment, but this series in Harpers is fabulous for many reasons. Having grown up in Colorado Springs, and having many direct tussels with the Fundamental folk, I delight in reading that they've forsaken the center of the city - which is highly walkable and bikable - for the "exurbs" of the north and east. If NASCAR is the perfect sport for christianity (making simple and endless philisophical circles until The End of The Race) then their weird desire to make the exurbs the center of their revolution is also perfectly appropriate. Suburban development is by definition soulless, with every house and street mind-numbingly identical, across states and countries. Any calling to faith that demands unquestioning obiedience to one line of ideology seems to me as horribly conformist as those off-white Lego brick family boxes.

I'm disappointed that

Ken Salazar, from my own home state, has turned out to be a far more conservative sort of Dem than we were all hoping for. Although, given the general "redness" of Colorado - excepting spots like Boulder and Manitou Springs - getting anyone with a capital D after their names into national public office is a real challenge.

So I was greatly encouraged when I learned that he's been sparring with our good friends at Focus on the White Christian Family. I suspect that what stings Mr. Dobson is not that Salazar compared their desire for theocracy to a similar Saudi affliction, but that they really, truly desire an all-Christian government. In other words, it's not the comparison itself that stung, but the truth that underlies it.

Fabulous.

One of my favourite

fortune cookie fortunes, to date at least, is now my AIM away message.

"There can be no existance of evil as a force to the healthy-minded individual."

Allow the profoundity of this statement to penetrate your forebrain and percolate for a time. You will recognise it as a Truth, one of those near-magical ideas that allows you to slice through the thicket of deceit we trudge through every day. I share it with you freely.

Now that I'm working

I have too much time to read stuff. Blogs, news wires, almost any form the english language takes upon my tiny screen.

Oh, tiny? Yes, Pallas has been sold and replaced with a delightfully lightweight 12 inch iBook named Ruri. I upgraded the memory and hard drive myself, which was fun and surprisingly exhausting the first time through.

Week Three of Super German Class began with our first test, and today I got it back graded - "B." That might be the best grade I've ever gotten on a German test in four years of trying to pass the first term. I told my current teacher that I'm a poor student in foreign languages because of my love affair with English, and I'd likely find something wrong with every language that isn't English. Still, to mind it seems as though there's a few things utterly perverse about the German language, which were hilariously summed up by Mark Twain in his essay, "The Awful German Language." Google it, then be like me - read it!

For the first time

in a long long time, words have failed me.

Actually, that's not true. They regularly fail me when it comes time to describe some new and exciting form of idiocy in human life. But in this case, all I'm trying to do is describe the weather in Pittsburgh.

It's so nice, so genuinely enjoyable, so picturesque that I just don't know how to describe it. Even when it rains, it rains solidly and with great assurance, so that you feel that your time is not wasted. Don't worry, says The Weather, I'm serious about getting you wet today. No light halting showers. Relax and enjoy. The sun, as it shines, heats you pleasantly, not oppressively, and when a breeze blows to cool you it feels like a fine light spray of moisture, like those little mister/fan combo things.

I want to burn these days into my limited memory, so that when conditions again become awful, when the air is thick enough to chew and hot enough to melt hip kids' hair gel, I can have a few positive thoughts to draw on.

The Barbarism of Certitude

Ooh, that's some catchy English. I happened upon a Tract, or small illustrated booklet by a man named Chick, which told the tale of an Olde West Gun Slinger. This Gun Slinger came to town to stir up trouble, for some mysterious reason attends church on Sunday morning, and gradually comes to accept the line that God loves all sinners and Jeebus can save him from going to Hell. In the meantime, the local sheriff has posted a reward for his capture and is gathering the forces of Decency, or perhaps Greed and Self-Interest, to capture this Nefarious Bad Guy.

The Gun Slinger emerges from church a converted man, but the locals have him surrounded and cart him off to jail to await his hanging. There is presumably a preponderance of evidence that this dude has done some Heinous Crimes, such that no trial was necessary to determine his guilt. The Sheriff watches his neck snap, the Reverend stands by and covers his eyes. The Nefarious Bad Guy, who may have burned down orphanages, shot countless innocent people, and otherwise engaged in the worst possible criminal behaviour in mid-19th century America, goes to Heaven because he clapped his hands together the night before and agreed to believe in a magical book and special Power Words.

After he's buried, the Sheriff is rejoined by the Reverend to accept Jeebus as well. The Sheriff declines, rides off into the sunset, get's bitten by a snake, dies, and is immediately sent to Hell. Apparently, no amount of Doing Good on Earth can get you into heaven, but no amount of Doing Evil can keep you out. It all hinges on whether or not you believe that a 2,000 year old dead dude can erase a lifetime of moral crapulence.

But Wait, There's More! Apparently a lot more, although I won't link directly to this man's website. I realise no one reads this journal, but I don't even want to take the chance that someone might increase his business. Let it be said that there are plenty of other Tracts on other subjects, including the absolute truth of the Bible in regards to the creation date of the Earth, roughly 6,000 years ago.



The light from distant stars that's been traveling for millions of years? The measurable radioactive half-life of the most common life-giving element on Earth? The less than 2% variation between higher ape and human DNA? The amount of evidence and provable fact that you must ignore in order to arrive at the conclusion that only an invisible Super Man could have built the universe is staggering. It's just not even worth conversing with these people. If that sounds horrible it, is, but I cannot believe that anyone who buys this crap whole could make any useful contribution to human society. It's just flabbergasting.