Tag: Uncategorized

I voted, so I want it to be over.

Everyone must be so sick of this campaign by now.
I know I am and it love to talk about politics, but the majority of us have had enough and we just want this to be over so we can go back to the normal American life– which has been severely altered over the last two years while our time has been taken by the Washington DC crowd who started jockeying for the White House way too soon and spent millions upon millions of dollars that could have done other things than pay the maajor television networks ad revenue.
We are so morally lost in this country that the people that are trying to sell morals sound like the craziest zealots of them all!
Time after time, the republicans want nothing more than to make this election about the least important things to America, guns: war, abortion and prayer.
NONE of the this things have anything to do with government– but they want to make it that way, but then they don’t want government to regulate free markets or any number of things, but they DO want them to oversee a woman’s vagina, a persons right to buy a gun at walmart and teach children a philosophy on what their limited understanding of the Universe teaches them to be self-evident.
Its a joke for 7/10ths of this country and we know it, but we get all worked up over these issues while our savings and natural reserves are being depleted.
But the worst thing of all is in the desperation, Senator McCain has turned into Senator Joe McCarthy in calling the dems a “socialist party”. Read more about socialism, folks. Re-distribution of wealth? Try Alaska, Gov. Palin— you have brokered the highest settlement ever for a “rich” oil company to share their profits with the State of Alaska– is that not a socialist move?
Ok, enough is enough, but seriously think for a moment, disregarding our potential leadership– how did all of this happen? We were all taught that this was unacceptable–and the last eight years should have shown us the lesson that we were taught as a case study– so why is anyone, ANYONE allowing this to happen?
Please respond in kind if you have a theory.

travelitis

Americans are particularly funny about their travels. I have noticed it throughout my life. We tend to stay in our own country, which is understandable–it’s fucking huge!! Regardless, part of the point of traveling is to go to other places to see how people live–to speak to them and see what their lives are about, how they are getting by on their side of the rock.
The more that I speak to my brethren, the more I see how little we travel. Sure, we all know those people that are serial travelers to Vegas and Hawaii for the west coast and Florida for the east coast. We don’t generally go to experience culture, but rather to escape our own reality of things.

Vacation for the American is just that–to vacate, to leave, to part ways. American’s don’t travel, they don’t wander, they don’t go on walkabout. This is a generality of course–we do travel, some of do wander and a few of us might actually go on walkabout.

Someone said the other day, We don’t travel like John Muir did, with nothing more than a sketchbook and an imagination and perhaps a new pair of boots.
The fact is that we must prepare for that harsh world that lies outside of that comfort zone known as home. Think about all of those things you own and assess how much of it is for that harsh world you have to travel in everyday.

All of this came about because I had recently overheard that a friend of mine was going out East for a few weeks to check it out. I offered to have a drink with him and go over some details about things I experienced while I was there–the more information you have, the more time you can have to focus on the pleasantness of the trip. Anything to speed up past the minutia of traveling helps, right?
Not quite.
This fellow actually said that he would prefer just to go about it on his own. “We have totally done our research.” was the quip.
I retreated. The east is a messy place and time can easily get away from you. It’s not like the rest of the world where you can get by on “roughing it”. Countless hours and days can be wasted if you don’t know when or where to go during certain times. But the issue was a little deeper than that– I think this guys problem was also a common one– people don’t care to hear about your adventures as much as they want to make their own–they want to make the same mistakes that you make, they want to wait in the same lines that you wait in.
It also is hard to believe that things could be so different somewhere else until you have actually been there and seen what there is to see and do. When I got off the plane in China, I had not the slightest clue what the hell I would do if I got off that plane and there wasn’t someone there to rescue me, but I would have managed and that is the adventure.
Eventually, we did get to talking a little bit about the trip he was going on. He eventually told me that I was just telling him all the things to watch out for, but I wasn’t giving him any advice.
My response: it’s up to you to find the diamonds–another traveller’s job is to help you not fall in the mole holes on the journey.
You will never spoil your trip by talking to other travellers– you will own what it yours, no journey is like another. It’s for you to take and for you to see.
That’s how it is out there.

…on Michael Jackson

It is sad that M.J. has done has last moonwalk, but make no mistake: the real sadness is about to plague the media for the next couple of weeks. There will certainly be a special cast of characters brought out of the woodwork to showcase just how pathetic the “King of Pop” existence was. For the next several months, we will be constantly hearing about the wrongful death, how the doctor is to blame and how people like the Reverend Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are there to aid and assist the family in their time of need.

We will allow grow pathetically tired of it.

Brining out people like Jesse Jackson and Sharpton do nothing but kill any sense of reality that this story had.

However, they do seem to serve as the most ideal representatives of a family that has mooched off of Michaels extreme wealth and good fortune–and they seem to be the ones to blame for Jackson’s condition.

Michael Jackson was in a very special group of Hollywood’s most elite, Liz Taylor, Liza Minelli and all the rest of the plastic population spending their good fortune obsessed with never growing old, yet looking so far away from the human condition that they don’t appear young, but moreso Alien.

Jackson, like most Pop artists, had a moment in time where he was a talent, a prodigy, a hero–but something seems to happen when you get as big as he did, some of the minds internal wiring came undone — so many friends, yet no one seems to care that you are killing yourself slowly inside–and they just stand by, waiting for him to unravel in front of their eyes–that must be the most sad thing about all of it–was that it very could have been that everyone in the world was his friend, yet no one could save him.

…and now, all we get to do is simply stand by and watch the vultures circle around his carcass, seeping each droplet of blood and gold that they can.

This is what makes the world such a sad place.

the dust is beginning to settle

….fragments of everything have come together.
yet some grow further apart.

Lili has been here for close to a month and we are finally beginning to feel somewhat settled into the place and things are beginning to come together. I feel like I will once again be able to take up this blog and writing again as soon as I can get my head out of the work I am engaged in and begin to think about the next steps of what were going to do for the next couple of years.

We watched a little No Reservations this evening, with Anthony Bourdain and it made us both linger for the open road– specifically Brazil. Although finances do not allow for such a trip just now, it is on our minds and we will eventually hit the road again, this time as a married couple, our lives connected in every possible legal way… It will be a nice way to travel and I look forward to spending many days wandering around this earth with my wife.

I have a week of work left before getting laid off, but I can’t seem to start freaking out about it. The last 9 months of work have been good, easy and fun, but all things must come to an end and this job was beginning to get overly boring and mentally taxing, so I am not all that sad that things are coming to an end. We all like money, we all need money and there is a certain level of comfort one has from having the same old job, but there wasn’t much of a future in the team I was in– I need something that continues to have some level of excitement in it, along with a sense of accomplishment, mixed with the greater good.

I do wish that we did have a small nest egg left over, mostly because we need to travel during this free time we have, for there soon will not be that shared time that we can both enjoy at the same time. This is the way of the world.

Alligator Pie

Finally, a moment to write.
So much to talk about, so many things to discuss and its almost midnight, so allow me to just puke it all out and put it into it’s right place later.
Special thanks to Jason and Apple for opening up their house to me and making it possible to pay off some bills and save a few dimes before Lili arrived.
Since I have just used arrived in the past tense, this means that she is in fact, here. Lili arrived Wednesday afternoon, which I must say is one of the most exciting and strange moments of my life. It was the moment where it all became a reality, all of the waiting, all of the phone calls, all of the stress, worry and everything else you can image came to a closer as she called me on her cellphone and said, “I’m down at baggage claim.”
The details of that are for another time…
The last several weeks leading up to this moment were gradually getting busier and busier, both in my professional life as well as my private life. Work at Microsoft has been fast paced and higher stress as Windows 7 comes closer to release.
Apartment hunting was also total choas. Jason and Apple wanted to get the place ready for when her brother moves here from Thailand and I decided it would be better for us to move into our own place and not have anytime in the basement while we looked– so I started to look…
and look…
and look…
Seattle has had some definitive times where it has really had a building boom– you can see it in the design of places (Hello brown 70’s cabinets!!)
..and along with that comes the new modern, green, green look-alike over-priced postage stamps .. Searching and searching to find the right place in the right neighboorhood– Fremont (nothing good for the price), Ballard (Old and New, see above), Magnolia (Too Goddamn Far, train tracks) Green Lake (nicer places) and Ravenna (where we settled).
The place is perfect– right near good places to see and hang, third flood with a deck, tiki torches, 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms… perfect– especially after looking at other boxes of crap throughout the city– Lili instantly feel in love with it and each day it is becoming more and more our place.
All of that, mixed with a glorious couple weeks of some well needed sun and a new Dave Matthews Band album to boot!!!
Anyway, I will get into more details later– just wanted to put an entry in because the office I have been waiting years for and the wife I have waited decades for are all here now, so you will be hearing a lot more from me than before.

Hope all is well, wherever you happen to be on the rock.