Well, they certainly seem headed toward the ontoligical showdown. That's satisfying. Gets my brain all het up. Interesting that the girls who died were the same ones with DUIs.

Causality? I tend to think it's the reverse: actors get written out of a show, they have to stick around for a month or so more, they get careless, etc. Boom. Boozed up in Maui, why not do a little joyriding. Lord knows I've done the same just feeling reckless in Oregon.

Anywayn, out here it's thunderbolts and lightning. First big Spring rain. Smells pretty good.

Iraq is gonna be procesed by our culture very differently than any previous wars. Exhibit A -- The War Tapes:

You can get a sense of the whole project a little better from the trailer. This will be worth checking out I think.

USA Today of all places has broken the news that the NSA has a massive database of domestic US phone calls. The legal authorization? None. As Glenn Greenwald put it:

We now learn that when Americans call their Aunt Millie, or their girlfriend, or their psychiatrist, or their drug counselor, or their priest or rabbi, or their lawyer, or anyone and everyone else, the Government is very interested. In fact, they are so interested that they make note of it and keep it forever, so that at any time, anyone in the Government can look at a record of every single person whom every single American ever called or from whom they received a call. It doesn't take a professional privacy advocate to find that creepy, invasive, dangerous and un-American.

I also find it worth noting how the government got this information: they asked for it, and every big telco (with the exception of Qwest) just turned over the records.

We are living in a society where the power of the State is increasingly being concentrated into a single entity (the Decider in Chief). At the same time, enormous undemocratic organizations called "Corporations" administer most of the ins and outs of our daily life, and function as both a perverse/corrupting influence and aider and abetter of wrongful State action.

It's like the worst of both worlds! This is what happens when you concentrate wealth and power, and remove checks, balances and real competition: mega-suckage. Big government and Big Business are in bed alright, tag-teaming the little guy.

UPDATE: In another perverse twise, the NSA effectively stomped out a Department of Justice investigation into their wiretapping programs by denying their lawyers security clearance. You can't make shit like this up.

On this day 27 years ago I was born. Huzzah for life.

It's a new era. I no longer reflexively think of myself as 24, but I don't yet have a new age-identity to roll with. I'm in a middle ground between the Eriksonian crises of Intimacy vs. Isolation and Generativity vs. Self-Absorbtion. I think I'm doing well on both counts -- a bit snobby on the Intimacy tip and only truly Generative in fits and starts -- but I'm very much starting to feel the lack of a well-defined career path. Where, exactly, am I going with all this?

For the past half-year, I've been working, living, and loving pretty steadily: Trellon, Park Slope, the Belle du Mois. These things have been good, but I'm about to let them go. In three weeks or so, I'll get on an airplane and fly West, there to live for the summer with my friend Mark -- and compadres Kelly, Zya, and associated nerdowells -- at the Country Soul Carnival in Westhaven, California, State of Jefferson. I'm stepping down as Lead Developer to focus on creative works and speculative projects, freeing up my schedule and scrambling a life that's been comfortable, but also somewhat confining. I'm trying for another run at the unknown and impossible.

I sense a fork in the road. Do I buckle down and try to become a "sucessful professional" in some sense or another? I could, you know. I have a lucrative trade, a pretty keen analytical mind, and I can talk with the best of them. I'm teaching a workshop this weekend and speaking at a conference on Monday. I got skills, yo. Play the game. Play to win.

Or do I want to follow the other fork, the one marked "get a life, not a job?" The hard truth is that I don't have much of a stomach for ladder-climbing. I'm not excited by money. I long for a community-oriented lifestyle, rich in human connections and creativity and the like. I also crave adventure, the buzz of new things and new people and challenges.

Bob Frost is right that the road less traveled is the one worth taking, but I wonder whether I'm not falling into another well-worn rut by setting up this kind of dichotomy in the first place? Isn't it a cliche either way? The one-time artist who packs away his bohemian leanings to join the workaday world is just as much a architype as the dropout hippy who skates by on talent and luck in his own Pirate Utopia.

It seems to me that the real road less traveled is the fusion route, the uncompromising stand. That kind of scares me, which my internal Allen Ginsuburg quote-machine reminds me is how you know when you're getting into something good.