rock over London. rock on, Chicago.

this photo has been taken, literally, thousands of times in the past few months.
what sets this one apart is the back of mom’s head is in it. neat!

also, mom’s at 43 seconds. holy crap!

I picked up a copy of the C-Ville while at the bagel shop today with my coworker (who apparently reads this. who knew?). the C-Ville is Charlottesville’s arts and entertainment magazine. it’s about 70 percent advertisements, free, and without a doubt, more widely read among people in my age group than the publication I work for.
shit, I’ll leaf through the thing regularly. if you’re on your lunch break or drinking a coffee, it’s something to look at. it’s well designed. and they have a movie section. but that’s not to say that there’s anything really worth reading in it. the feature stories are usually pretty awful, and – and I mean this – as far as hard local news, the reporters at the Progress are much more competent.
but it’s free. and it’s the competition. and it has a sudoku puzzle in it.
this week, it had a UVa student on the cover. the C-Ville always has a nice-looking cover, and this week it’s got this UVa student on it who was the center of a minor controversy involving the university’s student newspaper last year. this incident got a muzzle award.
so you’ve got this local free speech advocacy group. it’s called the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression. they do this annual publicity thing called the muzzle awards, where they name a bunch of organizations and individuals that they say have acted to stifle free speech. the center puts it out in a press release. it’s the kind of thing that makes an interesting read, and this is what this week’s C-Ville cover is about. shit, we ran a story on it early this week. I wrote the headline for it.

backstory: back to your boy at UVa. this guy worked as a cartoonist at the Cavalier Daily. and back in September, he drew a cartoon called “Ethiopian food fight” that depicted a bunch of black guys in loin cloths beating each other with furniture and branches.
get it?
if you wanna see it, the C-Ville reposted it on their Web site. scroll down.
the black community at the university - all fifteen of them – was fucking pissed, and called for an apology and the cartoonist’s firing. a sit-in was held at the Cavalier Daily. people bugged.
well, by the end of the week, the cartoonist got sacked. the newspaper’s managing board printed apologies. and this cartoonist got the shaft. so.
so, the Thomas Jefferson Center named the managing board of the student newspaper to its annual list of muzzle awards.
I don’t disagree with the dubious award, though I think it’s a little harsh to call out a bunch of editors at a student newspaper for something that ultimately wasn’t that big of a deal. but as this is Charlottesville, and that’s a marginally interesting story, the C-Ville lead with the cartoonist on its cover. they photoshopped a zipper in over his mouth, and said something cute about free speech.

and that there’s where the bullshit comes in. I started talking about this with my coworker, and I brought up Ernesto Miranda as an analogy. everybody loves Miranda rights, and they’re definitely a good thing. but Ernesto Miranda was basically some asshole drifter who admitted to rape, and he got off once it was proven that he was denied his right against self-incrimination. so hooray for Miranda rights. but fuck Miranda.
the point is, the muzzle award I can understand. as I see it, some dipshit undergraduate cartoonist drew a single-frame comic that had absolutely no point, other than to be offensive. but that dipshit cartoonist shouldn’t have been fired. the managing board - all students - were wrong to leave him hanging like that. they fucked up and tried to pass the buck by appeasing the masses with his release, and he became the sacrificial lamb when they should have had the stones to stick by publishing such a shitty cartoon in the first place.
but now, this jackass – his name is Grant Woolard – he gets to act the martyr in the name of that holiest of American ideals, free speech. he gets his face on the cover! with a zipper over the mouth! our democracy is in ruins!
I’m really into free speech. I think it’s pretty fucking cool, matter of fact. but having Grant Woolard on the cover of the C-Ville because the local entertainment shitrag wants to teach me about how we should defend free speech no matter how ugly I may find it, well, fuck you. that’s insulting.
I know free speech can be ugly. I just don’t like it when that lesson is dumbed-down and obnoxious. which is what this article is. matter of fact, that’s the C-Ville in a nutshell.

you know what the worst thing is, though?
according to the article, the douchebag has an internship lined up in the Onion’s graphics department this summer. ehhhh, said Mar. what a dick.

yes.

I hate writing cover letters. they make me feel cheap.
I’ve been working on one, off and on, all evening. but I will finish it tonight. and it will be awesome.

let’s us start off with a color. I feel blue. dark blue. quet, reserved.

this weekend, Spencer came down to town and stayed at Catherine’s house. along with Marisa, whom he is dating. she and I – and Spencer, actually – we went to elementary school together. I hadn’t seen her since that time, but she seems legit. she’s very nice.
I really like seeing Spencer. Spencer is my oldest friend, and I hope he and I grow older. I’d go to the mat for him; he has for me. please make note.

last year, for a few weeks, the biggest story coming out of the Senate was Larry Craig’s alleged improprieties in a Minneapolis airport bathroom. I say alleged, even though he admitted guilt. he tried to reverse his story later, resolved to clear his name, but the point had been made: a socially conservative lawmaker got caught trolling for dick in a public can.
politicians caught up in sex scandals are really nothing new. Americans tend to hold their elected officials to very high standards when it comes to sexuality – chastity is the ultimate virtue to the electorate, which is ridiculous. most everyone likes sex, and that includes the “people” in elected office, so expecting that they aren’t perverts like the rest of us is wishful thinking.
for whatever reason, though – maybe cause everyone was paying attention to Senator Craig - but David Vitter’s sex scandal was kind of swept under the rug. Vitter is the junior senator from Louisiana. according to his votes, he’s a supporter of abstinence-only education, and he’s anti-gay marriage. the gun lobby loves him. so does the military. he’s a solid conservative.
which is fine. hey; if that’s how you want to roll, that’s what you want to represent, that’s OK. Louisiana deserves him. it elected him.
anyway. last year, his phone number came up in an investigation into a prostitution ring in Washington, not unlike the one that just shelved Eliot Spitzer. apparently, back when Vitter was just a congressman, he was a client of this prostitution ring. as soon as his phone number was identified, he owned up to it and apologized.
I’ll give him dap for that; he’s been a senator for all of 18 months now, and that means that in 2012 he might even be able to run again and forget all about his now-public infidelity. and apparenlty, the national Republican party is laying off of him in order to preserve a Republican seat in Louisiana.

but it’s getting much better: the Madam in this prostitution ring, she’s going to trial, and guess who is getting called to the witness stand?
god willing, he gets subpoenaed. maybe they’ll get to treat him as a hostile witness.
there’s something beautiful in hypocrisy exposed. at least when it’s in the Senate.

there’s nothing to this, except that it’s very blue. I like that.

I heard on the radio today about a Human Rights Watch report, about Darfur, how rape is still widespread after five years of conflict. lot and lots of reports of rape, both by Sudanese-government and rebel soldiers, as well as randomly affiliated militiamen. the numbers, they think they’re actually a lot higher. lots of stuff goes unreported. soldiers can act with impunity, as there’s no fear of retribution. to do this to another human being in Darfur right now, there’s nothing to it. it’s the wild west. there is no law.
when asked, the Sudanese government’s ambassador to the United Nations shrugged off the allegations, and said it wasn’t the policy of the Sudanese government to use rape as a weapon.
obviously, that’s not an admission of guilt. but it wasn’t an actual denial, either. the ambassador, he actually sounded like he was bored and trying to get off the phone.
and there’s really no way of writing this without sounding ridiculous, but I’d like to hear that motherfucker sound inconvenienced if he’d been raped. sexual violence as a tool? OK. I’ll get the ball rolling. would anyone like to rape a middle-aged Sudanese diplomat?

I am sleepy tonight. that hasn’t happened a lot recently. but it has been a long night at work. didn’t go very well.
the front page has a bunch of bowling pins on it.
the story was about a comic/juggler, who is to perform in town next week. he’s raising money to put a monument to the Bill of Rights in every state capitol in the United States, because, apparently, he posted a video of himself online, juggling to the “Golden Slumbers” medley from the White Album, and he claims that it has inspired people all over the world to … well, I gotta be honest, I don’t know what actions it inspired people to. the story wasn’t particularly well-written. but this outpouring of support that Mister Juggler says he’s received has made him want to give back to the country he loves, and he wants to honor American democracy and the rights of man by putting monuments to the Bill of Rights in the nation’s state capitols.
I’m not making this up. here is the video of him jugglin’.
there wasn’t any photos of the guy, you know, juggling, so I put together a bunch of bowling pins, tennis balls, crossing the top of the page. just to do something different. either way, when the paper actually printed at 12:45 in the morning, I was the only person there, and the only person to realize that that shit looks ridiculous.
I expect to catch hell tomorrow.

So this morning… as i woke up ( Gerald had chosen not to sleep last night) the guy says, ” Guess what Mr. Andrew I don’t need to eat!. I said: “Oh yes you do!”
At which point he responded with: “My guinea pig eats for me!”   And I think he was only half joking.
Yep thats the type of crazy shit that makes it worth it.
.

.     A boney, middle-aged hoodlum wearing a Harley-Davidson t-shirt boomed up to the bar and yelled: “God damn! What day is this - Saturday?”
     “More like Sunday,” somebody replied.
     “Hah! That’s a bitch, ain’t it?” the H-D boomer shouted to nobody in particular. “Last night I was out home in Long Beach and somebody said they were runnin’ the Mint 400 today, so I says to my old lady, ‘Man, I’m goin’.'” He laughed. “So she gives me a lot of crap about it, you know … so I started slappin’ her around and the next thing you know two guys I never even seen before got me out on the sidewalk workin’ me over. Jesus! They beat me stupid.”
     He laughed again, talking into the crowd and not seeming to care who listened. “Hell yes!” he continued. “Then one of ‘em says, ‘Where you going?’ And I says, ‘Las Vegas, to the Mint 400.’ So they gave me ten bucks and drove me down to the bus station …” He paused. “At least I think it was them …
     “Well, anyway, here I am. And I tell you that was one hell of a long night, man! Seven hours on that goddamn bus! But when I woke up it was dawn and here I was in downtown Vegas and for a minute I didn’t know what the hell I was doin’ here. All I could think was, ‘O Jesus, here we go again: Who’s divorced me this time?’”
     He accepted a cigarette from somebody in the crowd, still  grinning as he lit up. “But then I remembered, by God! I was here for the Mint 400 … and, man, that’s all I needed to know. I tell you it’s wonderful to be here, man. I don’t give a damn who wins or loses. It’s just wonderful to be here with you people …”
.

I’ve got this twitch above my left eye. it sucks. just started today. this happened before, lasted a couple of days, back in college. I remember this.
eh. Christ. I’m a mess.

I saw a man today walking toward the shopping center. kind of hefty; center of gravity was near his waist. he was shaped like a pear. his shirt tails were pulled out. his tie was loose. he was staggering a bit. wasn’t following a straight line. drifting into the road from the sidewalk, into traffic. but I don’t think he was drunk.

I think it’s only fair that I take a second to acknowledge how much I like Queen. but please don’t read too much into this; I just really like this song.

I told Mar I’d run a marathon with her in October. I almost don’t want to mention this where it’ll be archived; if I bail, for whatever reason, I’d rather keep that embarassment of reneging on a commitment to my sister to myself.
but with that in mind, if I put it up here, maybe, in some small way, it’ll keep me to it. hold my feet to the fire.
anyway. I’m running a lot these days. so I might as well run more.

I just dug out the old folder of MP3s I have on this here contraption. playing all of them while I watch Baseball Tonight. right now, it’s “we’re in this together” by Nine Inch Nails. I have a very specific memory of this – 9th and Lincoln in Bloomington, walking to a house party with Ben on an October weekend. dark out. a car went flying by, white Oldmobile, windows down. driven by a thin guy, one hand on the wheel, the other on the door. this was blasting out. I asked Ben, “what song was that?” and Ben told me. Halo 15. a Nine Inch Nails aficionado.

Alisha has taken the job in France.
I’d like to paint a prettier picture, but that bothered me, and that’s no lie. in small ways, that are obvious to no one but me, I keep going back, keep talking to someone, keep taking the same path with this person. and I keep getting the same rude awakening – because what I feel, read, isn’t reality – and that’s disheartening.
but you know, being alone sucks. and maybe I’m emotionally stunted. and maybe this is all my fault. or, maybe I’m just fucking lazy, and I don’t have the drive or the confidence to do anything else. but when the only other person who calls you with regularity is your mother (who, undeniably, is the bomb), you’ve got to change your lifestyle. this can’t last, it’s getting to me. because I’m holding out for things I don’t want anymore. and that’s no fun. you know?