The Indigestible

The most recent GWB-related news is that Bush 41 is now “pained” at how reviled his son is.

We’re reminded that Daddy is 83 delicate years old; we’re supposed, I guess, to feel some kind of sympathy for the old man, and translate that into Good Feeling for his inbred retard of a moron son.

Well, let’s think about that for a minute.

Poor Daddy. Poor, poor Daddy. Gee, where was he when he should have been showing his son, at the age of ten or so, that tossing a ball around in the backyard meant give and take?

Where was he when he should have been reminding his son, at fourteen years old or so, that manhood did not necessarily mean finding the least popular kid and trying to beat him up?

Why, exactly, was Duh-bya so mysteriously absent from service in Viet Nam — and from the ANG duty he was supposed to have been pulling in its stead?

And how, please tell me how, is this touchy-feely bullshit supposed to erase the last seven years?

Feel sorry for Bush 41?

No.

I damn him.

And I damn his child, as well.

And I damn, especially, the “news” “media” which has shamelessly tried to spin a father’s masturbatory fear for his son’s failures into political capital.

Bush wept; Jesus wept much harder, and for a better reason too.

“Liberal media” my ass.

Recently there was a progressive open house at the Medical Professional Center, a more or less satellite facility to the hospital here where physicians have private practices. The idea was that, in order to publicize a half dozen recently-arrived physicians, there would be a sort of food scavenger hunt from office to office.

Beginning with beverages, progressing to crudité, light mini-foods (BBQ meatballs, scallops, etc.), desserts and finally coffee, visitors were encouraged to go from office to office and meet the physicians. There was live music too and door prizes.

I mention all of this because I was asked to produce the promotional materials for the event, and developed something that was significantly at variance from what is normally found in advertising in a small town in Arizona. Along the way I happened across an unexpected bonus in the form of a kind of visual pun.

The main ad’s after the fold.

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The last time I wrote about John Couey was March of this year, after he’d been found guilty of the rape and ghastly murder of nine-year-old Jessica Lunsford. The question at the time was whether he was mentally capable of understanding the magnitude of his crimes; if he was, in short, mentally retarded and therefore unsuitable for killing.

The ruling today is that he is, indeed, eligible to face the death penalty.

Circuit Judge Ric Howard in Citrus County ruled that the most credible intelligence exam rated Couey’s IQ at 78, slightly above the 70 level generally considered retarded, the St. Petersburg Times reported.

This isn’t a cause for celebration. Killing Couey will not resurrect his victim. But as I commented before, given the absolutely horrendous nature of his crime, I don’t believe there is any purpose in keeping this man alive.

Leaving aside the wisdom of parents choosing either name, I have to ask why the hell New Zealand thinks it can accept or reject any name chosen for a child.

A New Zealand couple is looking to call their newborn son Superman — but only because their chosen name of 4Real has been rejected by the government registry.

Sure, both Superman and 4Real are stupid-assed things to call your kids. But should that be grounds for censorship?

Fifteen years ago Douglas Adams wrote a book called Last Chance to See. Unlike his Hitchhiker’s and Dirk Gently series, this was nonfiction; in it he chronicled the plight of a half dozen or so extremely endangered species — imperiled by human encroachment on their territories — and penned a beautifully-done memoir of desperation.

He wrote the following of the Yangtze River dolphin, a freshwater porpoise that was even then reduced to a population of perhaps 100, when contemplating the lives they must now be leading in the silty, polluted waters of one of the most industrialized rivers in the world:

As I watched the wind ruffling over the bilious surface of the Yangtze, I realised with the vividness of shock that somewhere beneath or around me there were intelligent animals whose perceptive universe we could scarcely begin to imagine, living in a seething, poisoned, deafening world, and that their lives were probably passed in continual bewilderment, hunger, pain, and fear.

Alas, that struggle has ended. The Yangtze River dolphin is extinct.

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I wrote this in 1999, when I was there.

I actually lived in this. In Wausau. Some mornings the air was so cold you felt your breath freeze in your nostrils as you inhaled. The moisture from your out-breath just solidified on the hairs and passages in your nose as you breathed in.

It is a very strange feeling to have ice crust inside your head. Dry, crackly and cold, as though your nose-hairs turned to crystal in a moment, scratching and breaking as your nostrils flare.

But the cold, absolute as it was, wasn’t horrible; after all I was in a parka, and could go back inside to the gentle heat of the glycol baseboard warmers any time I pussed out. It was instead a pause, a lacuna in life; it was just a moment when the world, sere and blanketed in white, gathered itself to think about the freshness of the coming year.

Snow drifts under the eaves of my home didn’t simply peak; they curled, their tips curving over like a wave stopped, frozen, in the moment of breaking.

That was Wausau, set in the middle of Wisconsin’s cold Northwoods heart. Milwaukee, on Lake Michigan and below the 45th parallel, was much more humid and considerably warmer; traveling north I could feel the ambient change from wet to very dry, very different air at about 50 miles south of Wausau. The entire tone of the atmosphere changed.

And it smelled only of pine.

Overnight, in downtown MKE, we rarely dropped below 20 degrees Fahrenheit, and the warmed sidewalks were never crusted with snow or ice; they were just wet, as though washed by a gentle rain. It was like a Hollywood winter set, for about five months solid. Skyscrapers’ shadows stood sentinel over the most stubborn patches, keeping them slushily crusted with white well into March or even April, even as the grass beneath insisted upon itself.

Wausau was more like a cake, covered in glistening powdered-sugar frosting for a craps’ win of the year.

I liked Wausau. I really did. What made it impossible for me was the daytime duration in winter. Eight hours from sun to sun just wasn’t enough; I rose in darkness, went to work in darkness, went home in darkness. I’m an Arizona boy. I need more light than that.

But I sure do miss the icicles; and one night, in the depth of the cold of the year, I even saw the Aurora Borealis flickering gently in the sky. I watched it for a while, knowing my lover was in my home, in my bed, and I let him sleep while I sat on the patio, shivering brutally in the relentless cold, and enjoyed the quiet majesty.

I didn’t leave everything behind when I left Wisconsin, but I found and lost quite a lot while I was there.

The prose follows the fold.

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This set of images of Earth is, according to NASA, the best full-planet view to date.

At work I have two monitors, which means I get both hemispheres.

Mini versions after the fold (mini-we?). H/T to Seed.

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I think Hillary Clinton has lost my vote too. Apparently there has been some discussion of employing nukes — nukes! — against terrorist cells; Clinton refused to say whether or not she’d use them.

The yield of even a small weapon is so tremendous that setting one off to kill the average cluster of terrorists would affect hundreds, if not thousands, of others.

Nukes?

Holy shit. And I thought invading Pakistan was bad.

It’s a ticket that doesn’t even exist. One man is undeclared; the other is far, far behind in polls.

So why don’t we change that?

Why not, for once in living memory, choose the best men for the job?

Gore and Kucinich. Because we’re tired of stupidity.

When you live online, a fact of life you get used to is that sometimes personal notes get unintentionally sent to a wider audience; usually it’s because they’ve been sent by mistake to a listserv. Generally these notes are nonsignificant, sometimes they are weird (just a comment meant for a friend), and sometimes they are deeply personal and everyone just looks aside and says ahem.

But occasionally you get to read some things that just make you wonder.

For instance, on a list I sub to, there was a message blat called Blaine’s October Order, followed with only the cryptic line: Here it is.

Well.

I had to reply.

Here it is.

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Apparently Mr. Obama has forgotten something very important about the majority of voters in the US right now.

US presidential candidate Barack Obama has said he would order military action against al-Qaeda in Pakistan without the consent of Pakistan’s government.

Hey. Barack. Diplomacy first, last and always. War is the last recourse of a failed negotiator. It is not the first option of anyone but socially-maladapted cowboys.

We have had more than a bellyful of war and killing, and we are getting tired of asshat politicians, who know they will never be personally risking their lives, who seem so goddamned willing to put our boys and girls into harm’s way at a whim.

I’ve been keeping well away from the contenders’ races; I find all the current “candidates” contemptible. Not because they’re horrible people, but because many of them are elected officials now and seem to believe they should spend the next two years not doing the jobs they were hired to do so they can instead seek office elsewhere.

With the above declaration, though, I’m afraid Obama has lost any chance of gaining my respect or support.

It’s strange to learn that someone whom you didn’t know very well has affected you in subtle, slight ways. I met Robin Kornman about half a decade ago; the other members of the Milwaukee Shambhala sangha had good things to say about him and seemed pleased to learn he would be returning soon after a hiatus — I think at Naropa University — during which he was working on a translation of a Tibetan text, possibly the saga of Gesar.

I never had much opportunity to interact or talk with him, but what little I’d seen bode well. He was an energetic man with a puckish sense of humor and a genuine intelligence. He was gregarious, outspoken and possessed of a keen sense of sarcasm and general wit. The night of our first meeting several of us went to a little restaurant after meditation; he and I got into a very low-key argument about Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. He was convinced the books preceded the radio series; I was just as convinced he had it backward.

I liked him immediately.

He gave at least one talk at MSC, but the discussion — to my recollection — was of esoterica that I didn’t follow well.

Last night I learned that, in the last week or so, he’d had an adverse reaction to an unspecified medicine which was making breathing difficult for him. Soon thereafter he apparently collapsed. It seems he’d suffered a pulmonary embolism. He sank into a coma, was briefly on artificial life support, and then the plug was pulled. He died on July 31.

One of the hardest things about leaving Milwaukee was having to leave the sangha. It’s not a Buddhist church; it’s more along the lines of what Vonnegut might have called a karass. I still miss it, and I know today that some of the people I hold dear are hurting; and their hurt resonates a little with me too, even though I haven’t seen any of them in years.

And that’s probably the lesson I learned from Robin. Connections can be much deeper than we realize; and even though it might hurt, it’s part of our nature. And sometimes they’re too subtle to be felt until they have been severed.