rock over London. rock on, Chicago.

hoops revisited
remember my bracket? yeah, you remember that shit. you loved it. well, I got most of it wrong, as did we all, but I got two in the Final Four: West Virginia and Butler. Butler is my saving grace. no one picked Butler. because they thought too hard about it. so if West Virginia wins out, like I have them doing, I’ll win the sports desk pool. which will offset some of the taxes I’ll probably owe. yes. it is springtime in America.

local news
I wrote a headline that was pretty amusing the other day. it pissed off a few of the old crackers that frequent my newspaper’s website, who thought it was in bad taste, but it has apparently gotten plenty of hits. which means to me: I was correct in writing it. anyway, I am a copy editor. I work a shitty, thankless job that’s leading me nowhere. so when I write a good headline, I’d like it pointed out.

Police: Man exposed himself at Dick’s

sometimes, these things just write themselves.

real news

edit: see? LOOK.

somebody done committed a pair of suicide bombings in Moscow two days ago now, and Vladimir Putin is pissed. the last time he got pissed, the second Chechen war happened. and then he put this guy in charge. and that guy is fucking crazy.
the Russian government is saying this is the work of Islamic militants in the volatile north Caucasus. President Medvedyev is saying while there must be a swift and strong military response against those laboring to create a regional caliphate, the federal authorities should probably try to improve living conditions in an area swamped with rampant government corruption and an ongoing litany of human rights abuses. but then, Medvedev’s metaphorical old man, Putin, doesn’t seem to buy any of that hippified “improving living conditions” bullshit.
it’s Russia, after all. big, cold and tragic. I’m sure it won’t end well.

Health care reform has descended upon America, like a blanket tucked in underneath the nation’s chin by a gauzy-white angel to some; and a oozing, heavy cloud of pestilence and disease to others. whether or not there are more of the latter is debatable, but they are certainly louder.

consider my district. I live in Virginia’s fifth, which, if you look at it on a map, has a  ridiculous shape thanks to the time-honored tradition of gerrymandering. drawn to allow large chunks of rural conservative voters dillute the college town up north and its surrounding liberal ilk.
it was the most closely-contested house seat in the nation last election cycle, and it went oh-so barely for Tom Perriello, who I have lionized around here in an offhand way for a few months now.
I like him. he seems pretty pragmatic, and weighs his votes pretty carefully. he’s aware of how conservative his district usually is (he represents Lynchburg, after all), so he bucks his party from time to time and is apparently pretty easy to talk to. he was an active proponent of health care town hall meetings, and held a cople of dozen of them around here last summer, where the invective and spittle flew unbridled. socialism. respectin’ the Constitution. etcetera. 
but if you listen to a certain narrative, all that accessibility dries up when you’re a tea-party patriot, or whatever it is those loons call themselves nowadays …

this is a great column. I’ll just post it below, because you jackasses don’t click on the links – oh I know – and I want you to read it.

.

“I lost my seat. And I’m not sorry”
by Marjorie Margolies

Dear wavering House Democrats,

I feel your pain. Eighteen years ago, I was elected on the coattails of a popular young Democratic president who promised a post-partisan Washington. A year later, with partisan gridlock capturing the Capitol, there was a razor-thin vote on the House floor over legislation that Democrats said would remake the country and Republicans promised would bankrupt it.

– Votes like this are never a zero-sum game.

While it is easy to say my balanced-budget vote cost me reelection, that assumes the line of history that followed the bill’s passage. Had I voted against it, the bill wouldn’t have passed, the Republican opposition would have been emboldened, the Clinton presidency would have moved into a tailspin . . . and all of this could have just as easily led to my undoing.

Simply put, you could be Margolies-Mezvinskied whether you vote with or against President Obama. You will be assailed no matter how you vote this week. And this job isn’t supposed to be easy. So cast the vote that you won’t regret in 18 years.

– America is a strong country — despite what the cynics say.

In the run-up to the vote on the Clinton budget, rhetoric reached a fever pitch. The legislation would, alternately, destroy the free market; thrust our economy into the next Great Depression; spell the end of the United States as the leader of the free world. Based on the clips, one might think passage of the Clinton budget made Armageddon look like a walk in the park.

The moral of my brief political story is not that casting a tough and decisive vote necessarily predicts a bad electoral outcome for you, nor that the majority of your constituents is always wrong or always right.

It’s that there are times in all our careers when we must ask ourselves why we’re here. I decided that my desire for public service at that moment was greater than my desire to guarantee continued service. Yes, there are few jobs as rewarding (mostly) as being a member of Congress, and I was let down after I lost. But I believed then and now that being able to point to something tangible that changed our country for the better was a more powerful motivator than the possible electoral repercussions.

I urge you simply to cast the vote you can be proud of next week, next year and for years to come. Given the opportunity, I wouldn’t change my vote.

Then again, what do I know? I was a lousy politician.

who is sick and fucking tired of hearing about health care reform?

I am. I know you are, Smith. I’ve been reading every story the AP puts out on this — because that’s what I do at work, I read the AP wire — and all fucking week it’s been “Dems push toward final health vote” this, “Obama rallies support for health reform in Ohio” that. this fucking thing has been going on for nigh 12 months. Obama was talking about health reform last goddamn April. which goes to show you how long it takes for the sausage of government to turn out anything these days.
there was a full-page ad in the paper today taken out by some PAC that threatened the local congressman, Tom Perriello, with loss of livelihood should he vote for the bill that is now in front of the House. those motherfuckers on the right hate this bill, they hate it in a way that is as vital as the blood that flows through their veins, and I doubt that most of them could tell you what it is they really dislike about it. besides Obama is a socialist, and all your health care is going to go away and become more ‘spensive — like it isn’t already.
the most amazing goddamn thing about the last eleven months of “debate” is the predictability of its course: Obama, and the brain trust of pompous jackasses that surround every president, decided to let congress write its own legislation, fearing a repeat of the failed health care attempt tried by the Clinton administration in its first term. while the Clintons were assailed for using a dictatorial approach that didn’t allow input from the People’s Representatives on Capitol Hill, their approach didn’t suffer from the glaring malady that Obama’s has: allowing congress to take the lead on anything will result in gridlock and an endless amount of mean-spirited political maneuvering.
such has been the past eleven months.
I don’t think anyone who isn’t lying to themselves could really think health care legislation is unneeded. we, as a nation, decided long ago to let medicine function as a commodity to be bought and sold, something that greedy fucks could hold over our heads and charge us out the nose for, and that market has grown exponentially. the Republicans, who in denouncing reform and regulation of insurance markets, regularly say that a market that amounts for a sixth of the nation’s spending shouldn’t be tackled all at once, or at all. no, of course not: those dumb assholes would rather wait for another couple of election cycles until it’s an entire third of spending done in this country, until one out of every three dollars spent from DC to California goes to paying a fucking doctor bill. hell, maybe they could wait until they unseat Obama; paint their political opponents as freedom-hating foreigners; lose again after they demonstrate again that they stand for nothing but not lettin’ fags get married, preemptive warfare, incredibly bad education policy, border fences and no tax hikes; and then let another Democratic administration attempt this mess all over again. and then bludgeon them anew with the same charges.
this is the circle of political life in this country. it takes twelve years.
but I really do need to give the Republicans credit and spread the love around a little bit. this could have all been done in January if the Democrats — who hold massive majorities in both chambers as I type this — didn’t basically surrender for an entire week after they lost the special election for Ted Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts. they was ascared! it’s like they gave up until they were reminded that they still had ten months in power in which to actually pass some legislation. so the Senate finally passed a bill through reconciliation (a simple majority vote usually used to solve contentious budget impasses) and, despite what that fucking jellyfish Mitch McConnell and the rest of the good ol’ boys in the GOP Senate caucus would have you believe, democracy didn’t end. and now it’s back in the House, where the majority leadership is having trouble getting the liberals (who still want a public health care option) and the pro-life democrats (who would rather derail national health care reform than allow the possibility that federal funds might pay for an abortion someday, a possibility which is entirely debatable) in line.
what the fuck is wrong with you people? just how fucking stupid do you have to be to be a democratic congressman? is it really so hard to see that the longer this dumbfuck high-school musical plays out, the less likely your chances are that you’ll win re-election in November? I mean, come on. that’s what this giant, choreographed clusterfuck is all about anyway; it’s all political posturing. everyone wants to be able to go back to their district and say that they did the right thing, they didn’t vote for wasteful government spending or an expansion of entitlements or for killing life in the womb or for the Cornhusker Kickback or the Louisiana Purchase. but the longer health care reform is in front of congress, the longer the dumb, neanderthal assholes on the right will continue to throw mud at it. they will write editorials about it, they will bitch about it on cable TV, they will have Dick Armey and a bunch of other cynical old cancers whip gullible tea-party types into frothing anger about it, and they will blame it all on you, Democrats. I mean, I would bet my life that the average American doesn’t even know what’s included in the goddamn health reform bill. and that includes most everyone protesting outside of their local congressman’s office. but that doesn’t mean they don’t hate it any less.
you are fucked if you pass it. and you are fucked even worse if you don’t, because then you’re not only evil to the screeching, ill-informed minority, then you’re inept. and that don’t play well at the polls. so just pass the fucking thing already. America won’t burn to the ground. and if you think it will, you’re fucking retarded. JESUS CHRIST. PASS THE FUCKING THING ALREADY.

twelve hours later:

I got “Die Hard” on the tube. this movie is stupid with a capital Dumb, but it sure is fun to watch. a good 80′s action movie. the glory days of xenophobic, sappy, gratuitous-violence machines. when Bruce Willis had hair. but anyway, fuck all that. let’s talk about hoops.

first, my final four has changed since noon. ever so slightly. they will be in the bolds below.

tha west

okay, to begin, let’s just go ahead and pencil in the number ones into the second round, and then into the sweet sixteen without much thought. this line of thinking works very well with Syracuse, which lost its last two games but nevertheless will not fuck up and bow out early. it doesn’t matter if their center is gimpy; they’re still loaded for at least two wins without so much as blinking. I got them getting over Butler and into the Elite Eight, though Butler is basically the same team that lost in the first round last year, only older (read: less dumb), so they could pull off that upset.
but Xavier will get over Pittsburgh in the second round to meet Kansas State who will be fresh off of topping BYU, and then will advance again. because Jordan Crawford is my man. because he actually played at Indiana for one glorious year and he jammed on Lebron. 
this is the team that will win the bracket. because that video is awesome.

tha midwest

this one’s the no-brainer, though there’s a lot of talent in it.
I think Maryland will beat Michigan State in the second round. and then get rolled by Kansas, but Greivis Vasquez will still do something like shit-talk in Spanish despite being in a twenty-point hole. Georgetown, a really good team, will meet Ohio State, a really average team entirely supported by star Evan Turner. but he could go off and play wonderfully through the tournament and bring the rest of that goddamn abomination of a university with him. that’s entirely possible, he was just rollin’ in the Big Ten tourney. but I don’t think that’ll happen. because, I don’t know. I think Georgetown is better, and pissed at losing to a bunch of slack-jawed yokels like WVU on Saturday night in Madison Square Garden, and will ride that deep into the bracket.
but not deep enough to beat giant white guy Cole Aldridge, Sherron Collins and Xavier Henry. their big three beats out Georgetown’s big three. so Kansas over Georgetown and into the Final Four.  

tha east

I think the Wake Forest and Texas matchup would be one most uninteresting game to watch from the stands in the first round, and it’s a shame that I have to pick a winner out of it. I wish I could give better describe my boredom with this game, but I’m at a loss. Texas was ranked No. 1 this season, and won it’s first gajillion games before going 7-9 down the stretch in the Big 12. weak. they aren’t gonna figure it out in the tourney. which is fine with me. fuck Rick Barnes, and fuck Texas. this isn’t his fault, I’ll give, but if you’re school is a national contender every year in college football, I usually despise your hoops program as a rule. leave basketball to the rest of us, you greedy fucks. this applies perfectly to my feelings on Ohio State … but strangely, not to Florida. everything’s got wrinkles, I guess.
anyways, here’s where the levee breaks on the number ones: Kentucky won’t get past the Sweet Sixten. I don’t know about your dumb ass, but I saw a team on Sunday that needed overtime to beat Mississippi State. I don’t care that John Wall is faster than everyone on the court and can draw fouls at will. that cheeseball used-car salesman Calipari starts three freshmen. and that means they go for stretches in which they play stupid and rely on talent.
well, I don’t think god rewards dumb. and I believe in god. so I got them losing to Temple, which is probably completely wrong. and truthfully, I hate Kentucky, because I went to Indiana, and what’s filling out a bracket for if not indulging your own prejudices and misinformed opinion?
so I’m picking Temple, because I think Kentucky is due to look bad. fuck that team.
in the other leg of this bracket, West Virginia will beat the New Mexico Lobos (best mascot in the field) and then get past Fran Dunphy (whom my dad knows, I think) and the Owls, and into the Final Four. because, you gotta indulge sentimentality too sometimes. to hell with it. I’m for Huggins, and I’m with West By God.

tha south

the south is lame. Duke is a number one? they beat Virginia, Miami, and Georgia Tech to win the ACC tourney. I live in an ACC town, and I work at the local paper. trust me, Virginia sucks, and they sucked even before their leading scorer had to leave the goddamn team because he skipped all of his art classes. Miami was at the bottom of the league. and Georgia Tech is … anyway, beating those three teams won Duke the ACC this year, and that shit is weak.
so after getting inexplicable dap from the selection committe, the Blue Devils, who always manage to have a bunch of waspy, disciplinarian types on the team, will get past Louisville in a close one, and lose to Texas A&M. I’ve got nothing to support this; I know fuckall about Texas A&M. but I read somewhere today that Duke hasen’t been past the sweet sixteen in, like, six years. and that’s a pretty surprising little trivia nugget. so why break with that now?
elsewheres in the south, Old Dominion will beat Notre Dame before losing to Baylor, which is coached by a pudgy guy from Valparaiso named Scott Drew. Purdue will beat Siena, because regardless of how they’ve looked they’re still worth at least one win in the tournament. Purdue losing as a number four is the trendy high-seed upset, but it won’t happen. don’t do it, America.
and then, Baylor will beat Richmond before meeting A&M in the Battle of Texas sometime next week in Houston. and that will make four.

so I got: Baylor, West Virginia, Kansas and Xavier.
come on, that’s feasible. that’s totally feasible. you could see that, not even stretching.
I know it’s not. but eh, at least I know how I got there. I tried to get into a bracket at work, but the only one going around is being administered through Facebook. so I’d have to sign up for Facebook to participate, and the burning dumb flame of desire to get into a pool and recklessly gamble with ten dollars that I don’t have is a strong flame indeed, but I don’t know if it’s worth giving up this lovely self-imposed exile from social networking sites. I am in the wilderness. so I think I’ll just print one out and fill it in by pen instead. 

and, just to make note: did you see that Gorillaz has put out a new album? I have the first two albums.
think about that. I own two British electropop albums fronted by a bunch of cartoon characters with an elaborate backstory. and I’m excited to listen to the next one. either that is telling, or the fact that I find this embarassing is. I will leave that up for you to consider.

 ——–  ——–  ——–  ——–  ——–
 ——–  ——–  ——–  ——–  ——–

at noon the day before:

Final Four picks.

Kansas, West by God Virginia, the fightin’ Scott Drews of Baylor, and Butler. I will expand upon this at great length and at interest to no one in the near future.

dude, ‘Tron’ is coming back. in IMAX with the 3-D! so GO MAKE YOUR COSTUME.

Corey Haim is dead. I didn’t even bother to read the story. did you know that most wire services in major news publications prewrite obituaries? it’s true. let’s run down the list on this guy: child actor, drug abuse, big in the 80s, hung out with Corey Feldman? I wonder how long his has been on the shelf.

anyway. pour a sip on the concrete.

I really like the last scene in “Pulp Fiction,” when Sam Jackson explains to Tim Roth why he’s not going to kill him. that clip that you just skipped clicking on, it doesn’t include the scene where Jules explains his “moment of clarity” to Vincent about his profession and how he wants to live his life, but it leads into these ten minutes of Mexican standoff and pontificating and ends with a great line, and one to which I can’t exactly relate but I sometimes feel I’m trying real hard to.
is that a pun? or a just a grammatically incorrect sentence?
anyway, I had a job interview yesterday morning, and it actually went pretty well. I think. gotta keep it in perspective; I’ve been involved with some pretty shitty job interviews, and this one broke with precedent and they asked me to take a couple of editing tests after they spoke with me, so as long as I don’t fuck those up, who knows? maybe I’ll get another interview.
the job? nonprofit in Washington. it wouldn’t be awful. in fact, I think I’d find it interesting.
but is this what I really want to do?
… no?
note the elipses and question mark. maybe I should bold that for emphasis. the truth is, I don’t really know what I want to do with my career.
yeah, you’re right. that seems kind of important because the sun is past its high point on my twenties, but when people put that question to me, either in conversation or even a few times now from potential employers: Where do you see yourself in ten years? I never have a concrete answer. my answer is always some version of ‘ten years is a long time, and I have no idea what I’ll be feeling then.’ because that shit is true! I have no idea what I’ll be like when I’m 36. I can’t even fucking fathom 36 right now.
so that leaves me with: what do I know? what do I want for my life going forward? well, I’d like to get a job I could retire from some day, and I’d like to have a family; a wife, kids and a yard, a dog and yes, maybe even a cat, but I don’t know how I’m going to get it. I haven’t figured out what is going to be the engine to generate all of this that I imagine having some day, and if these are things that I’m at all serious about pursuing then I need to start making some moves, quick.
but that still leaves me with the same question. if those are the ends, what will be my means? I suppose I have thought those would reveal themselves to me in time, that I would see the face of God in a piece of toast, or come around a corner some day and find My Calling sitting on the hood of my truck and staring back at me, or the phone would ring and I would pick it up and someone would say “your time has come,” and I would spring to action. in that moment-of-clarity kind of way that Jules had after that dude jumped out from behind a door and unloaded a gun at him and he was miraculously unscathed, but I haven’t had any near-death experiences. I’m just getting laid off from my job, it’s spring time again, and I would like to get this new one landed, so I’ll have something to do and can continue ponder the direction of my existence with a roof over my head.
but. you know, for someone with such little idea of what he’s doing with himself, I’m pretty excited about what will happen next. it’s just … while I will complain and worry self-doubt and sweat this out, it’s all overridden by the physical feeling that spring is here, Aarti is next to me, and maybe this job, this something to do, maybe I’ll get it and it’ll be kickass. maybe it’ll be a springboard into grad school. maybe this is it, a career in nonprofits. or maybe it isn’t and maybe I’ll move to Guadalajara and raise plants. and maybe the phone will ring tomorrow and I’ll begin figuring everything out.

when I was younger, I had a very clear image of what my dream home was: a large turn-of-the-century farm-house with high windows on the first floor. it had an old coat of white paint on its outsides, radiator heating on its insides, and it sat in the middle of a vast grassland plain under cold blue skies with tall clouds in them. from the windows you could see for miles in any direction and could see comers well before they arrived. in this image it was quiet and cold outside, but in the house it was loud and warm, and I had a couple of large, friendly dogs and a big television that was be tuned to news with the volume turned up, and I’d get three or four major newspapers delivered to my house daily, and I’d read all of them.

I fucked my back up lifting weights. how lame is that? lift with your knees, dipshit, you’ve been through this before!
anyway, it makes sitting for more than five minutes really uncomfortable, which is a problem when you have a desk jockey job like mine. so I just took a painkiller five minutes ago, and I got about five minutes before it kicks in full force and knocks my ass out cold. I took one today before work, which was necessary but turned me into a numbed zombie. I took a couple of naps on the couch in the photography room. and like earlier, I will sleep one of those heavy, dreamless sleeps tonight. the kind where your mouth lies open and you drool.

so. once, during college, while I was home in Valparaiso for a week or so during summer break, Andrew and I went to Mount Baldy … to fuck around. because that’s what you do at Mount Baldy, you fuck around. you bring a frisbee and wear flip-flops that you’re bound to lose, and you climb to the top of that giant-ass sand dune in Laporte County, and at the top you can see the Chicago skyline to your left, that looks like a hazy miniature set, and to the right is the impending water cooling tower at the power plant in Michigan City, and in front of you is Lake Michigan. and a couple hundred miles over this water due north is the upper peninsula of Michigan. it’s a really big lake, Lake Michigan is. some might even call it Great.
so Andrew and I climbed to the top of this thing, and then purposefully leapt back down its steep side in giant, gravity-powered bounds. if you trip, it is fine; there is nothing but sand to break your fall.
and then we threw a frisbee around; intentionally throwing it over the precipice every once in a while to send the other scrambling.
and then we went swimming, in the questionable Lake Michigan water, with our clothes on. because it was summer, and clothes will always dry.
it was a Sunday evening, probably late July or early August, and it was growing late. Andrew wanted to stay, but I wanted to leave, because I wanted to drive back down to school that night because I was chasing some dumb ass that summer – which, by association and logic, makes me dumb as well — and I wanted to get back to that game. 
“you can always go back tomorrow. just go back tomorrow,” was Andrew’s argument, I believe, and I kind of listened to it, but eventually I kept acting like an asshole and he acquiesced, and we left. and I went back down to Bloomington that evening, and got in around 11 pm.
I don’t even remember what happend that evening after I returned, which means it wasn’t memorable. but I do remember the day on Mount Baldy, and I have always remembered it. because I know now that I should have stayed. because you’re only young and free of responsibility on top of Mount Baldy in the cool summer dusk once or twice, and you got to hold on to those moments. 
you were right, Andrew. it’s the little things, man.