I lead a charmed life, and sometimes great things just drop onto me without explanation. Last night met a scintillating lady at the Publik House. Seems like every time I go there it's a hot ticket. AP chemisty teacher by day, singer-songwriter-bandleader by night, crooked teeth and bright eyes and all done fucking around with life -- I'm still crackling with the energy. Anyway, it was a great evening; I have only one word for y'all: conversation. Since she lives 'round the corner, I found out that brunch at Enids is really fucking delicious. She also showed me a couple great things on the web. First a gut-bustingly funny webtoon: Strindburg and Helium. Second, a hot photo of her I can show off to all my friends -- though I prefer the human reality to the makeup. She peeked at this page and I turned her on to Odd Todd. It was good. We're both nerds. We riffed about a million little things, connections and accumulation abounding. A choice idea, "Learning and putting knowledge to use: the conjoined twins of intellectual fun." Whooo... I'm in a tizzy. I have to go back and pick up my bike now. I'll enjoy walking in the sunshine.

Speaking of the funny, Julia sends this incomprehensable yet amazing link.

I'm on the mend!

On the mend here, though a little psychically disturbed from a morning of watching c-span, but there's not a lot more to say about the situation that hasn't already been said, words spilling forth in accent or crisp translaton and overfilling our minds with senseless and meaningless datum. I'll be personal for a bit.

I feel a shift coming on, though into what I do not know. February was a month of high velocity, something I relish and desire, yet that led to a crash, as life's highs tend to do. The bike thing was a pretty good metaphor for it all; moments of hubris, lapses in judgement, dangers unseen, these things can align in deadly calculus, their formation escaping our notice until we are beyond the point of no return. But the damage is imperminant. I will have no scars, though I might have a slightly crooked tooth for some time. I think it gives my mouth a little more character, to be honest.

Yet I'm plagued with doubts about what is to be next. I'm in hot pursuit of more work for the months of March and April, clawing my way back to fiscal solvancy and aiming for a summer of freewheeling times in the west (Berkeley, Eugene, Black Rock City). It's good for me to have these goals, and yet on some level they fail to obliviate my sense of responsibility toward the world. They fail to address the desire to build "a career" to gain recognition, standing, esteem, to slake my thirst for power in an orgy of revolutionary change. I lust for significance, partly for egotistical ends and partly because of my utter contempt for the people running the show at the moment, but mostly because I want the world to be a better place than it is. It's a mood I've been in for quite some time.

I've been working on a lenthy document that I call "Praxis." It encapsulates some of my ideas about where this wild torpedo is headed and what I might do to ride it the best I can. I've latched on to the word praxis because my life is full of theory but not so full of practice: a little less conversation and a lot more action please. Actually, I'll take conversation -- real conversation, meaning communication about life and souls and meaning and other real things -- over inaction and small talk. Communication is where things start. The document is my strategy, my business plan, my mission statement and my manifesto. I need to put it through another round of addition/revision/reduction and then I need to start sharing it with people. This will be the likely locale for a first premire.

Spent last night in a pleasent post-workout, whisky-slicked nirvana at Pete's Candy Store, joining the Be Somebody crew mid-way through for trivia, staying on for music and then a meeting with Julia about an upcoming art project. Motivated by the sparking half-mad Captain Capodice, Be Somebody has been dominating the quizz-off in 2003. They even have a cheer for when they win. It's all in good fun, but sometimes I wonder if they're not headed down the road of becoming the ugly americans of this Wednesday evening contest.

After that Matty Charles and the Valientines took to the stage. I met the Bass player (another Josh, though not quite as outlandish as I) via a QuickFix gig back in the fall. Turns out he's a good friend of the mind-numbingly attractive Cynthia Hopkins, who wrote all our music for that show. It's a small world. The Valentines are good, but a few songs in to the set -- just as I started to nurse my sweet sweet Knob Creek -- Josh's double bass broke. There was sadness and confusion, but then Matty did two positively transcendent solos. It was like watching the American West and Nick Drake combine. Quite great.

And perplexing. The first time I encountered Matty was at the end of another trivia night. I was retelling a story to some friends, the climax of which is "Oregon! Not much is known about Oregon!" Immediately, I was shoved from behind and this guy setting up on stage advises me, "don't talk shit about what you don't know." Matty's from Portland, it turns out, and thought I was some dumbshit hipster bagging on his home state. Once we cleared up my origins, everything was cool, but it was interesting watching this delecate and beautiful music come out of someone who I still associate with a violent and aggressive event; got me going on all sorts of half-drunk thoughts about the tenuous nature of manhood and the playground politics we seem unable to escape.

Finally, Kate (from who's relatives the afformentioned Oregon story comes) and Frank have turned me on to the latest run in Doonsbury. Start here and just keep clicking 'next comic.' Got a few guffaws from me.

I'm back in the saddle for the most part, rolling on a new art project and having a ball reading Middlesex, which Christine, my beautiful and trusted Lit connection, dropped on me a couple weeks ago. I'll probably go to see the dentist tomorrow, but that's ok. I've got checks in the mail!

Perhaps this joviality in the face of all things tragic (see posts below) is related to the 50+ degree weather. Whatever. I'm going outside.

Also, I seems to be one of the fiew, the proud, the ones who has friends who like to troll his site. The first two comments I've gotten were from "Ann Coulter" (read all about her here and "Andrew W.K." who we all know and love. Though the former is almost certainly Slarz, I suspect the latter might be Frank based on the tone.

Well, I've made the leap. After tooling around the web in search of the right bundle of code for me, I've found that b2, classy blogware by a mad Corsican, is to my liking. It's in PHP, so I can hack it, and it includes all the trackback, rdf and rss godness my inner geek desires. You can now comment on my posts, issue trackbacks, and if you have a website of your own, link directly to them via the permalink. I know that Movable Type is what the real technorai use, but I'm not as good at hacking Perl as I am at PHP, and there were some issues with my otherwise benevolent hosting provider. This gives me just the right amount of automation, but still lets me noodle with things too. Huzzah!

If you encounter any problems or weirdness with the new frontpage or anything, please give me a shout out and let me know.

I feel an intense and stupifying frustration. Focus, Koenig! Focus! My face hurts and itches... the uncomfortable part of the healing process. It seems like there will be war in spite of it being a very bad idea. I have an unbelievable tension between my shoulders. I can't relax. I can't rest my eyes on anything. My neck is sore. I jangle. This is one of the bad mornings. In a few hours I'll be headed up to see Peter. Maybe getting out of the city for 18 hours will help. I don't know. I don't know what to do with myself. I've reached the end of a period of fairly active work and like a junky kicking I'm deep in the throes of sick.

Still on the mend. Still not pretty. The tooth thing has me a little paranoid... but from what I read there's not much to be done now unless I have nerve damage, which seems unlikely since my gums are not swollen. Last night I made a strange but somehow true connection. Jeremy and Wes and I were looking at andrewwk.com, and after they got done making fun of me for my similar (if somewhat less extreme) facial condition. I said, "this reminds me of reading a doctor bronners soap bottle." Compare the sites and see.

Here are two quick politix links: The Observer breaks a story about the NSA bugging UNSC member's phones in an attempt to help win the next war-resolution vote. That don't help Team Bush's credibility problem. Let's see if this makes any US media. Also, if you're tired of hearing people hawk about Kenneth Pollack and The Threatening Storm, here's a little dissection of his position.

I still have pain. Not as much as yesterday, but still more than I would like. The swelling has gone down some, but my tooth remains somewhat more tender than I'd like it to. Really not relishing the prospect of trying to find a dentist... it's not that I fear or loath the medical establishment, just that a certain part of me always wonders how monkey-man hunter-gatherers dealt with this kind of thing. There's an impulse to let nature take its course, but I suppose that's why not many primitive humans lived past 35.

Worst of all, I have to go out in public today, and I'm really especially not relishing the prospect of having to explain what happened to everyone I see. Maybe I'll stick with the marine fight story; when he first saw my face, I duped Kevin into thinking I got into a rumble with some Jarheads after mouthing off in a bar. I just feel like an idiot telling people that a simple pothole busted me up.

Rambling among the moderately exhibitionist and fair-to-poorly written blogosphere of the more or less beautiful people, I come across this true gem: The New York City Anti-Hipster Forum. True comic life-recording at its best.

Talking about the rent, Frank and I have decided to take a page from the Team Bush playbook and simply repeat the phrase, "we're rich!" until it becomes true. Wealth is a massively concurrent consensual hallucination anyway, so why couldn't the power of suggestion have some effect. It's a faith-based initiative, after all.

Hmmm... a little less swelling, and a lot more visible brusing than last night. I have a morbid desire to photograph the whole affair. Catch biology in the bits. It's been a slow day in front of the television. I'm finding Irish Whisky to be about as effective as an icepack at reducing the swelling in my lip, which is to say not very. I need to jot down some non-injury notes from last night, but my will is failing.

My soul is consumed with discovering the thing -- the purpose, the cause, the means of bringing the essense of me into contact with the world that surrounds -- that will make me proud to be myslef, and with wondering in languishing uncertainty when Love will come by and lift my spirit into fields of unconscious glee as I know it one day will. I just hope I don't have to wait until I'm in my late '20s or even my '30s to get there. Partly impatience, but also a desire to direct my energies to more substantial things than this sophomoric search for mates. I know part of the key to this equation is my attitude, but part of it is also uncovering the right someone. More on that another time.

Right now on blessed and free IFC is way of the gun, a neat little existential experiment in violence with lots of surprising characters but a dissappointingly ambivalent ending. Choice line: in the dicy beginnings of the climactic gun battle, Benicio del Toro asks Ryan Phillipe "what do you think?" His response, "I think a plan is a list of things that don't happen." Calls to mind the good moments of Hal Hartley. Also worth seeing are the two Young Consultant Killers; kind of like dot-com kids of the murder-for-hire biz. Really a brilliant formal exercise, just lacking total follow through on substence. Nice scoring also.

He ain't pretty no more
That's right, I'm a fucking mess. This is what you get when your city can't afford to fix potholes. Riding home on Astor Place last night after going to the Free Eddie show, a mighty crevase in the street escaped my attention, swallowed my front wheel and agganged quite defttly to acquaint my face with the loving caress of pavement. It took a minute for what happened to hit home. I was on the sidewalk in front of k-mart collecting myself when I realized I was bleeding. Some kind soul offered me some napkins and they came away red. My first bloody nose! I didn't quite get the full impact until I got to a mirror. It's ugly, but after three accident-free years of NYC biking, I could have done a lot worse.

It's ironic that this happens now, what with the little trip I've got on the left and the poll that's running on the right.

So don't worry, I think I'm fine. One of my front teeth is very sore and a little loose, but not as loose as it was, which I take to be a good sign. Assuming my lip un-swells in due course and the tooth returns to normal, everything else is just urban rug burn. Happens to be on my face, but hey: I needed to take some time off from all this reckless makeout anyway.

So I'm taking it easy tonight. A little reading. A little porrage. Maybe some ice cream later on. I'll peruse the web some more. I've been getting in on some of the technorati stuff -- kind of an ofshoot of my praxis idea -- and I'm strangely attracted to this blog by some chick in my 'hood... full of hikou-esque words, good photos and neat uses of technology. Planned architectural site updates have been shelved for today.

Colin Powell made his case to the UN today. I've read the coverage and basically my response is to yawn. There's nothing new here. No one expects Saddam to openly cooperate just like no one expects a person to be helpful to police who show up with a search warrant. What he seems to be saying is that "hey, we have this resolution, and Iraq isn't going along with it, so now we have to go to war."

So now it's war over a point of order? War for the sake of rules and regulations? Where's the threat, Mr Powell?

This is what I heard from Tony Blair the other day, only he was even more plain. He said, "If we don't show strength now, no one will believe us when we try to show strength in the future." This, I also believe, is closely related to the derisive "peace at any price" remarks which come from the pro-war camp.

Now, there's an argument to be made here, but not a very logically sound one. I must say that that argument will not convince me, now will it convince the American public.

Comparisons to 1938 are highly fatuous. In that case, Western European leaders were turning a blind eye as Hitler annexed Austria and much of Eastern Europe. In this case, Saddam knows he can't be aggressive without paying a very high cost (ala 1991). That is why Powell and Bush constantly harp on the scare tactics, playing up what a bad guy Saddam is and how he's really secretly best buds with Osama.

Furthermore, the world will react far better to just uses of force that are honestly supported by the international community than they will to being bullied about by a superpower. There's a good chance that this whole debacle will de-legitimize any United States role in global peacekeeping for many years to come. People intuitively feel this, which is why you see the polls showing support for unliateral action consitantly below 40%. Even most conservatives I know are disgusted by what this is doing to our reputation as a nation.

Which brings us back to the terrorist cell connection. We're told that Iraq must be prevented from having WMD because of a terrorist link. Problem is, the argument that Saddam will give away his best toys to terrorists is roundly believed to be highly unlikely. In fact, it's much more likely that terrorist or sympathizers would get their hands on bio or chemical WMD under the fog of war than with the blessing of Iraq's regime. Think about it, if someone dumps VX in the NYC subway system, what nation is being bombed to hell in about 8 hours? What does Saddam have to gain in that scneario? This is simply a rather transparent (and to my eyes fucking disgraceful) attempt to use the memory of 9-11 to justify war.

Finally, there is the $64,000 question: nukes. I would support all manner of covert operations and interdiction to slow nuclear proliferation, but waging pre-emtive war is a different kettle of fish. I for one am pretty sure that Saddam is as deterrable as Stalin on this question. We've proven willing to militarily resist aggression (1991) and militarily support containment (e.g. no-fly zones). Seems like that sort of thing is working just fine. I live in NYC, so it means something when I say I'm sure enough to stake my life on it.

An invasion of Iraq would be an atrocity. Unless we are attacked first, there's absolutly no excuse to unleash the hell of war. Are we not supposed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave? With immagrant roundups, nonstop fearmongering from politicians and the media and a frankly cowardly foreign policy, I'm with my conservative friends when they worry what is happening to this country.