Neo-Beat Meta-Narratives
Dreamt I had a few extra thousand dollars in my bank account, versus a scant few extra hundred. Everything was perfect in my dreams last night, and I woke up this morning and it's another beautiful day outside, and I have the day off, but I'm not sure what's perfect beyond that.
Polaroid film is coming back in about a month, and you can smell the excitement on my breath. Steve left a number of his cameras in America--I don't know why he did it. In the vacuum of time and space left in his wake, I mean to get his permission to become something of a day-to-day photographer. (I use the word "permission" only because I need him to give me a transcontinental tutorial on apertures.)
On the subject of Steve: Kathleen, Zach, and I are going to dismantle his former bedroom this morning, in anticipation of Ashley moving in at the end of the month. That means exchanging red-tinted fluorescent lightbulbs for real ones, packing up all his clothing and computer stuff and storing it in my reorganized second closet, and washing his bed sheets. Hope remains that Ashley can girl it up enough to make the room comfortable--it will certainly be warm through the rest of this winter.
We were called hipsters again this weekend. By a new friend, and there was no malice in his choice of words. I don't take it as an insult, but I know so so many people who do, and I don't get it. When did the collision of eco-conscious, progressive politics and millennial rock'n'roll take on negative value? It's like we're black matter, biking from Whole Foods to the corner liquor store and city park for pick-up soccer. A line of kids in skin tight denim and porkpie hats outside the theatre, and who gives a fuck? Am I really convinced that this is still an issue? Have I outsourced a piece of my own self-identification to an easily referenced caricature? Or: Am I just making myself available to help hoist the banner of a psychologically battered upon generation?
The notion came to me yesterday, while bodyrocked on a GB of Hindu kush, so I'm not positive it's on the level or what, but: Maybe it's time I found myself an editor?
Just: If I don't give myself the push, who will?
The Human Side of Things
Evan Bayh decided to retire from the Senate four days before the filing deadline to run for the party's nomination. That means Democrats will probably lose five or six Senate seats in the 2010 midterms, versus four or five. If one of those seats is Harry Reid's, this shouldn't be too big an issue. However, if Harry Reid survives the dreaded Tea Party machinery (who are surely shooting themselves in their faces by registering as an existing party and running a candidate of their own, rather than by primary-ing the Republicans), Senate Dems really will be stuck in butt-fucking-nowhere's-ville.
There's also the Lieberman factor. If Dems lose six, they'll think they need him more than ever. However, there will likely be a stronger-than-ever challenge by progressives for the party in the halls to take stock of itself, and that could mean he loses his committee chairmanship post. If such is the case, he immediately turncoats to the GOP. But if Harry Reid's gone, it won't matter as much as they'll say it does.
On the other hand, there's the optimistic pivot: The convenient media narrative has been that it's going to be a tough cycle for Democrats, when the truth is: it's going to be a tough cycle for incumbents. Evan Bayh was going to waltz to another term, and his star was probably going to keep rising to Lieberman status, and no one besides he and his corporate interests really wanted that to happen. So now the former-Senator-turned-lobbyist-current-Republican-candidate is the prohibitive favorite, and the convenient media narrative will be that the Democrats are going to lose the seat because Indiana's not really a blue state that went for Obama. If the Indiana state party can find the right candidate--one with enough populist rage burning inside to begin immediately campaigning aggressively against any and all things corporate (like a good little socialist in touch with the true righteousness of the arc of time), the midwest could have its workers' revolution. He or she could come out of nowhere, and be swept into the US Senate on the furious wave of the people.
It could be anywhere, though. It could happen in any midterm state, on any or either side of the country: men and women with the energy to fight the established order of things could convince enough of their family and friends to create a true political force in favor of equality--beginning with the tenets of economic equality, and branching that ethos to true civil equality. To become the very free rights society Americans like to think they were born to bare unto the world.
America really is ripe for its socialist revolution. But we're too afraid to let a few heads role. So we'll lose it to the Christian herds; we'll fall again to serfdom.
The Democrats will likely concede this seat without anything remote of a real political fight.
These days, my concerns have more or less nothing to do with Democrats' Senate composition: I'm mostly concerned about my iron deficiency.
Polaroid film is coming back in about a month, and you can smell the excitement on my breath. Steve left a number of his cameras in America--I don't know why he did it. In the vacuum of time and space left in his wake, I mean to get his permission to become something of a day-to-day photographer. (I use the word "permission" only because I need him to give me a transcontinental tutorial on apertures.)
On the subject of Steve: Kathleen, Zach, and I are going to dismantle his former bedroom this morning, in anticipation of Ashley moving in at the end of the month. That means exchanging red-tinted fluorescent lightbulbs for real ones, packing up all his clothing and computer stuff and storing it in my reorganized second closet, and washing his bed sheets. Hope remains that Ashley can girl it up enough to make the room comfortable--it will certainly be warm through the rest of this winter.
We were called hipsters again this weekend. By a new friend, and there was no malice in his choice of words. I don't take it as an insult, but I know so so many people who do, and I don't get it. When did the collision of eco-conscious, progressive politics and millennial rock'n'roll take on negative value? It's like we're black matter, biking from Whole Foods to the corner liquor store and city park for pick-up soccer. A line of kids in skin tight denim and porkpie hats outside the theatre, and who gives a fuck? Am I really convinced that this is still an issue? Have I outsourced a piece of my own self-identification to an easily referenced caricature? Or: Am I just making myself available to help hoist the banner of a psychologically battered upon generation?
The notion came to me yesterday, while bodyrocked on a GB of Hindu kush, so I'm not positive it's on the level or what, but: Maybe it's time I found myself an editor?
Just: If I don't give myself the push, who will?
The Human Side of Things
Evan Bayh decided to retire from the Senate four days before the filing deadline to run for the party's nomination. That means Democrats will probably lose five or six Senate seats in the 2010 midterms, versus four or five. If one of those seats is Harry Reid's, this shouldn't be too big an issue. However, if Harry Reid survives the dreaded Tea Party machinery (who are surely shooting themselves in their faces by registering as an existing party and running a candidate of their own, rather than by primary-ing the Republicans), Senate Dems really will be stuck in butt-fucking-nowhere's-ville.
There's also the Lieberman factor. If Dems lose six, they'll think they need him more than ever. However, there will likely be a stronger-than-ever challenge by progressives for the party in the halls to take stock of itself, and that could mean he loses his committee chairmanship post. If such is the case, he immediately turncoats to the GOP. But if Harry Reid's gone, it won't matter as much as they'll say it does.
On the other hand, there's the optimistic pivot: The convenient media narrative has been that it's going to be a tough cycle for Democrats, when the truth is: it's going to be a tough cycle for incumbents. Evan Bayh was going to waltz to another term, and his star was probably going to keep rising to Lieberman status, and no one besides he and his corporate interests really wanted that to happen. So now the former-Senator-turned-lobbyist-current-Republican-candidate is the prohibitive favorite, and the convenient media narrative will be that the Democrats are going to lose the seat because Indiana's not really a blue state that went for Obama. If the Indiana state party can find the right candidate--one with enough populist rage burning inside to begin immediately campaigning aggressively against any and all things corporate (like a good little socialist in touch with the true righteousness of the arc of time), the midwest could have its workers' revolution. He or she could come out of nowhere, and be swept into the US Senate on the furious wave of the people.
It could be anywhere, though. It could happen in any midterm state, on any or either side of the country: men and women with the energy to fight the established order of things could convince enough of their family and friends to create a true political force in favor of equality--beginning with the tenets of economic equality, and branching that ethos to true civil equality. To become the very free rights society Americans like to think they were born to bare unto the world.
America really is ripe for its socialist revolution. But we're too afraid to let a few heads role. So we'll lose it to the Christian herds; we'll fall again to serfdom.
The Democrats will likely concede this seat without anything remote of a real political fight.
These days, my concerns have more or less nothing to do with Democrats' Senate composition: I'm mostly concerned about my iron deficiency.