The newly surging war news is running over my mind in spite my best efforts. Iraqi bogger Salam Pax sums it: "Dear US administration, Welcome to the next level."

Holy fuck. This is what we all feared, some predicted, but no one hoped would happen. It would seem that the kettle is on its way to boil.

Bill O'Reilly wants us out because the Iraqi people "are are not going to fight for their freedom," that they "don't value democracy," and that all this is jeopardizing Bush's reelection. In the midst of trying to grapple with the meaning of All This Horror (see below), I find Bill's assessment to be fucking pathetic, even by the standard of The Factor.

So the Iraqi's "don't value democracy." Perhaps the complete lack of a democratic tradition in Iraq, the reality that the country was invented by the British Empire a century ago, is a factor. Perhaps the identification of the US-backed Governing Council with unpopular hucksters like Ahmad Chalibi cause otherwise believing Iraqis to doubt us.

So the Iraqi police don't rush to the aid of embattled US troops. Perhaps, much like the Marine who didn't come to rescue four American mercs as they were beaten to death and hung from a bridge, the Iraqi police don't feel like risking their hides to help out people they don't really feel all that close to. As for "the people," well, we took their guns away. What the fuck do you want them to do, Bill? Act as human shields? I know Bush is having a hard time coming up with the money to give our GIs body armor, but that's going a little far.

And then he starts in with the Vietnam comparisons. He was of age, though he never served, and he talks about how we gave 50,000 of our own troops for Freedom, but those lazy Vietnamese just didn't have the will take the gift. Wake up call, Bill: the South Vietnamise had eight times as many casualties, so you might want to pick your words a little more closely. You might want to check Rob Macnamara on this too: the prevailing opinion in North Vietnam (and the undercurrent in the South) was that the US was just picking up the colonial ball where the French left off. Astounding as it may be, around the world, the United States isn't automagically assumed to be the good guy in any conflict. Incomprehensible as it might seem to Factor devotees, many of the people in Vietnam rightly or wrongly felt the NVA was on the side of freedom, not the US.

Goddamn it; doesn't this remind anyone of anything?

It's a thing to make you loose faith, this war. It's a killer. It's a killer for what it is, a killer how it happened, and a killer how it's unfolding. It kills me that we went along with this shit, that the public supported it, that I walk in a perminant minority now as someone who was opposed. I remember right before we got rolling -- in that spiritual dead zone between the last big protests and the kickoff of hostilities -- watching "Born on the 4th of July" one night on TBS or USA or one of those networks for men we got for free in Brooklyn. I remember watching and drinking a few pints of beer and getting pretty upset at it all, at what was coming.

I'll be honest. I thought it would be much worse, the invasion. I expected that the best trained, best equipped and most loyal of the Iraqi armed forces would fall back into urban cores and force a Berlin-style seige, bloody and awful and very costly of life. As it was, we anniahlated a 10,000 or so Iraqis, buried a couple hundred of our own, the president flew a plane for a minute, and just like that Major Combat Operations Were Over. It was a pretty easy invasion by any historical standard; three cheers and a grunt for the strength and fortitude of the US armed forces.

Yet here we are a year later and the worm is starting to turn. After a year of steady but low-level conflict -- four hundred more body bags, a few thousand crippled, $200 Billion in contracts and expenses -- things are coming to a head. Urban warfare in six cities. It's likely to get fucking uglier from here on out.

It turns out that many of the movers and shakers in Iraq don't trust the United States, and neither do most of the people on the street. Is this a real big surprise? We blew the fuck out of their country more than ten years ago and then dropped in some punishing sanctions which were largely responsible for sending Iraq back to near third-world status. Then we blew the fuck out of their country again, and even though 90% or more of the people are glad to be rid of the tyrant, that require them to love the folks who rained high explosives upon them and killed their husbands, uncles, sons and brothers to make it happen.

And so can we be surprised that people aren't overjoyed that their lives have been turned upside down, that kidnappers and rapises rule the night, that the power still doesn't work, and that some of their family or neighbors are conspicuously absent? I don't think we can.

The question -- the very fucking difficult question that no one is even pretending to answer -- is what in God's name do we do?

It sucks to be in Iraq right about now, but predictably you wouldn't know it from the TV. I don't get TV, but the Agonist sums it:

8:50 PM CST: CNN: Larry King's gab fest. MSNBC: Barry Manilow is on. Fox: Hannity and colmes.

That's pathetic. These networks couldn't wait for 'major combat operations'. Yet today, arguably one of the worst days of the war, period, they're offering nothing. How many soldiers have died today? This isn't four deaths. It's more than a dozen. What do they offer you? Barry Manilow, Karen Hughes and Hannity and colmes.

Folks, this is your media. Whatcha gonna do?

Young liars...

I'm getting more and more to like TV on the Radio. The fact that they do this is helping.

TV : id rather watch a million breasts exposed than a single bomb fall on a village

Ya Damn Right. I'm glad the hipsters are along for the ride.

I've been reading A Million Little Pieces by James Frey. It's fucking good literature, and after having to force myself through reading David Eggars, it's nice to know that there are other voices sprouting. Literature seems to be a game for people who've attained a certain level of experience. You just don't see many people under 25 who are published and good. Though there are plenty of sub-25ers who can certainly write, there aren't many -- it seems -- who can write whole books. Some of this probably has to do with market forces, but I digress.

Anyway, I like James Frey's book and I didn't like Eggars's. I just finished You Shall Know Our Velocity and it bothers me that anyone would like that book. I contains little wisdom in my estimation, and the fact that anyone has ever compared it to On the Road is deeply and personally offensive. I've heard that Eggars had to battle with publishers, cut hundreds of pages, and that the "real" book is much better. Maybe that's true; maybe it's PR. I don't really care. It's not the author who I find disturbing; Eggars seems at worst to be a well-intentioned egomaniac with an undeniable gift for language, at best a struggling young author with some sense of social responsibility. In either case, he's fine. What I find disturbing is that there are people who read the same book that I did, and who really enjoyed it.

It disturbs me because I disliked 90% of the book. I disliked the characters, failed to empathize. Were I to meet these people in real life I wouldn't think so much of them. It distrubs me to think that either A) skilled rhetorical flourishes (which Eggars provides in quantity) are all that people notice about literature, or that B) other people really felt for these characters. It disturbs me and leads me to question my own grasp of the America Cultural Moment.

I find emotional immaturity and postmodern self-awareness to be generally annoying and generally my two least favorite personality facits of my supposed peer group. I have a spiritual kind of hatred for the kind of peevish inhibition which Eggars's characters wallow in. I also have little patience for reflexive emotional skirt-holding; for people who can't buck the fuck up and live. There are great moments and good sentences in that book, but there's nothing I would call substance. There might be a real attempt to grapple with Everything, but if there is -- and it's not just a bunch of intellectual razzle-dazzle -- it's a failure. And so it worries me that people might think the book is wise, or even entertaining.

James Frey, on the other hand, is my kind of person. I would like to shake his hand and talk about philosophy and the human condition over many cups of coffee. His writing is stylistically adventurous (no quotation marks), but that's fucking irrellivant. What's relevant is that he knows how to write in a way that grips your mind and heart. What's relevant is that he has a vision for comedy and tragedy and understands something about the soul and what makes people tick; reminds me of Irvine Welsh at his best. His character -- himself at 23, no doubt in some ways filtered through hindsight -- is a character I can not only empathize with, but strongly admire to boot. The other people in the book, even the incidental ones, are all rendered full and lifelike. The situations, though far outside me realm of experience, are engaging and the story (the story!) carries me along as a reader the way a story aught to. It engaged my imagination and intelect and emotional vocabulary and made me really want to know what happens next. It is a book which I stayed up too late reading more than a couple times. I am sad that it is over. I strongly recommend it.

I want to write private notes. Great letters to old friends which express all the things I'm for one reason or another still shy about writing right here. I've always been skittish talking about girls in the thick of it. After the fact, in the lens of history, I'll go over things. But I don't often dive in to the workings of my heart (or my hips) in public without the comfortable distance and respectibility which introspection brings. I find the kiss and tell to be generally cheap.

So I want to write private notes to girls. Old girls and new girls; curiosities and rememerences and flirtations on the sly. I also want to pitch woo, to use an old outdated phrase, and I that's something which needs cover. Romance implies a certain kind of seclusion, an enticing element of closeness and privacy. You need curtains and candles and music and time; or at the very least you need some good sheets to hide under, though those always get tangled. It's better when you have the whole set of freedoms; no restrictions and ample energy. But I digress.

I want to write private notes. I've been thinking about myself as a writer, how I feel stagnant a lot of the time, and wondering if maybe become an electronic man of letters wouldn't be a way to keep my creative fires high. I could perhaps delve more deeply into fanciful writing, letting a bit more of my pent up internal fuel into the stream. But I want to start out with something a little more covert. Maybe I'll make my own email list that people can opt-in on, something which can carry juicy bits and wild renderings. My own foray down the the Rageboy path. Maybe there will be a secret website -- someplace where the full life of my mind can live. Maybe that someplace could be out here in the same old spot, with some kind of password or permission...

But I want to write private notes, and I think there's a reason for that. And I think that's where I will start.

The image seems broken, but it's kinda monty-python-esque.

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!


If your mission in life is not already to
preserve the English tongue, it should be.
Congratulations and thank you!


How grammatically sound are you?

For anyone who's heard me rant, I've been wanting a Luxury Hybrid on the market for years now. Lexus is doing it. The market is so fucking obvious. This will, I think, do a lot to get the ball rolling. According to my man Frank, it'll have equivalent 270 hp, a sub 8 second 0-60 and the fuel efficiency of a 4-banger. About f'ing time, sez I.

I feel like dancing, and ain't gonna spend any of my hard-earned hours wondering how people I don't know think it looks. This is a calculated decision, because you look cooler when you don't care. The ultimate is if you can spend hours and hours caring and rehearsing and disciplining your body, then let it all go in the moment. Yeah; that's how you make good art, good love, good work, good memories.

I'm still wound pretty tight; like a sping-loaded toy when you've fully cocked the works. More key-twisting just makes that broken clicking sound. Caffeine-loaded and this feedback thing is starting to spiral. Knots grow in my back on their own accord. But in spite of this and Everything I'm feeling good, like I can still hang loose, like I know what I'm about. I feel tall, serpintine, like a lanky asskicking rainmaker. I feel fearless, if still slightly overwhelmed.

She trapeses by, comments, and I tingle. This is how we all feel from time to time if we're lucky; and there's no point in hiding it.

I'm lonesome. The other weekend this really great woman sort of just brushed through my life; a highschool crush, and still quite something. Then just this past weekend I was hoping to see her again -- she lives far from here, was on her way to and from a Spring vacation -- but no such luck. I shouldda called her. And, yet there's been an effect, old musty parts of my mind and body are alive and tingling.

And I remember this feeling. As all my senses come online it feels like senior year of college, like that last frenzied compressed three semesters. Very busy and on my own. I'd broken up with Yael, was solidifying my identity, directing my friends in a play, taking a full courseload -- classical theater, musical singing, hitting the weights, trying my little gambits with the women. Everything was full of movement, and yet I cut through it more or less in my own bubble.

Once again my days are full, the stress is high, the great singing uknown calls out, but this time I think my sense of isolation is more pronounced. My social world, while growing, is much smaller than it was when I was in college. With work taking so much of my time and being so far removed from the rest of my life, conditions have been unfavorable; the network is thin. And so the night just a mite bit colder.

Sunday afternoon was beautiful in San Francisco. I took my bike up some hills to one of the hilltop parks, sat there on the grass looking out at the city in the sun, thinking about how it aught to be. Maybe you wonder what I want out of all this work I'm doing. Here's a round-about answer.

The United States and the rest of the world are in trouble on numerous levels. I'm not being pessimistic. I still think humanity's chances are decent, but I'm not willing to cheapen the gravity of the situation. The way life works now can't go on; cementing the status quo is not an option. I'm a big one for saying, "we can do better than this." Here are some of my specific ideas.

It's a tall order. My idea of what a 20-year agenda might look like, but that's the level I think on. At some point I want to have children. This is the world I want for them... This post continues on my MfA blog.