project 365 #116: nightskycoxeave

project 365 #116: nightskycoxeave
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

Last night I filled in as co host for Drinking Liberally since my friend S is out of town and my friend A had an experimental music gig (I was going to go over there, A, honest I was, but then. . it got late. . . I suck. . . ) and, while it was kind of a small turnout, it was fun because we got to watch the "debates." Of the democratic candidates for president, of whom there are a lot, despite the fact that the goddamn election is over a year and a half away and this constant damn campaigning is getting ridiculous. Now, these were not debates as I understand the term; they were more like a game show or a panel discussion or a really short interview with lots of people, but it was interesting all the same. For one thing, it introduced me to the redoubtable Senator Mike Gravel and, forgive the pun, but Gravel Rocks. (I made that up! That is my meme! Laugh!) He does, though. Rock, I mean. We were literally standing up and cheering him wildly - among other things, the man came out against the military/industrial complex and so I, for one, am totally madly deeply in love with him. I want him to be our next president.

The thing is, at the last election the stupid Dems chickened out and refused to nominate anyone who they thought was in the least confrontational or controversial or anything, really, but bland and annoying and wishy washy. They said someone angry and tough, like Dean, or visionary and smart, like Kucinich, couldn't get elected and I went along with them because I thought they had a handle on this thing called realpolitik which I, a humble dreamer who is only even interested in politics in occasional spurts, do not. Well, fuck that. I'm not going along anymore. I want someone angry. I want someone controversial and pissed off who's not afraid to alienate people and ignore his handlers and speak his mind. Not a slick politician like John "Did I Mention That Daddy was a Millworker" Edwards or a tough politician like Hilary "Pearl Collar = Bad, Bad Fashion Choice" Clinton or Barack "I really like him but I don't think he's ready for the presidency just yet" Obama or Whatsisname "Did he really just say that if he'd been in charge at the Bay of Pigs he'd have nuked Cuba? He didn't really just say that, did he? Holy Shit." Richardson or any of the other old party hacks like Dodd, or, for gods' sake, Biden. Joe? Earth to Joe Biden? The original election jokes about you weren't funny when I was in high school, Joe. That was a loooong time ago. This is not the Academy Awards. No one is going to give you a lifetime achievement award for running in every fucking primary since the Taft administration. Give it up. Go back to Delaware and drink yourself to death like a good hack, okay?

There is, of course, a school of thought that says that the last election - and, in fact, most of them - were masterminded by the Demopublicans/Republocrats/Evil Corporatocracy Lizard Overlords of Cthulhu which is why we ended up with a shlump like Kerry as a nominee and while I do not often don a tin foil hat, sometimes I think they're right. However. Let's hope they don't do it again. Maybe this time we will free ourselves from the terrible grip of the evil lizard people with their paranoid reptilian brains and actually end up with a reasonable government. Maybe this time we can not listen to them when they say that a person with an actual functioning independently thinking brain cannot be elected and so we all have to go out and vote hopelessly for the robot. Maybe this time the electoral college will be turned into a purely ceremonial thing (hopefully involving horses and lots of gold braid and funny hats) and the Diebold machines will not skew to the right and the Bush dynasty, having pissed off their demonic master, will vanish in a puff of evil scented smoke and the Christians will come to their senses and realize that Jesus didn't advocate hatred and/or running the country and everyone will finally get a grip on the simple, basic fact that if somebody's sex life doesn't involve you, your kids or your dog, then it is None. Of. Your. Business who the hell people sleep with or marry and also that if every child was a wanted child, this damn world would be one fucking hell of a lot better and everything we can do to get ourselves in that direction is a good thing. One can always hope, right?

project 365 #23: chessmen watching the SOTU

project 365 #23: chessmen watching the SOTU
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

This was kind of an accidental picture and I wish that different people had been behind the chessmen, instead of close friends of mine who are passionately involved liberals and thoroughly like the farthest thing from pawns that you can imagine. That said, damn! Is this a cool shot or what? The state of the union. . . the pawn. . . the entire fucking thing. Taken tonight at the Drinking Liberally Asheville State of the Union Party, whereby we all knocked it back at the mention of certain words, like Evil and Terror and Nucular, like Iraq (we had to retire that one) and Troops and Surge.

I hate watching stuff like this - partly because I have no immunity to TV, since I haven't had one since 2000 - and partly because the whole giant farce of evil and cruelty becomes so fucking horribly apparent whenever the entire power structure is gathered together in one room, as in the State of the Union address. There they all are, in hideous ties, our representative government: apparently our country consists pretty much of old white men with a few old white women scattered around and 8 African-Americans, looking a bit uneasy. It's the 21st century and those are our representatives, including a president who has personally done more to eliminate womens' rights than the last six presidents combined, standing up like he's all pro female, welcoming Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker - something that should have happened a fucking generation ago.

And when I see all of them, in their power pastel ties, women carefully dressed in suits of red or white or blue, I'm so reminded of the beginning of a Robert Anton Wilson book, probably Cosmic Trigger, where he talks about all the various leaders - high on speed and downers and power, paranoid and crazy and so fucking hyped full of wacked out chemicals, natural and otherwise, that they've long since abdicated from the human race. This is what I think when I look at rooms full of politicians and it scares the fuck out of me and makes me a little sick.

And so we drink heavily, because you have to laugh, right, when the "leader" of the "free world" says nucular instead of nuclear and when he seems to earnestly believe that our health care "system" is working just fine, in need only of expansion, instead of the sick fucking joke to the rest of the world that it actually is. It's kind of like our war in Iraq, going so swimmingly well that it needs only some 95,000 soldiers - apparently mercenaries - to come in and fix it. French foreign legion? 95,000 contract laborers, maybe the 2nd class citizens he proposes to create to fix immigration, will fix this war. Drink heavily, children. It's all that's left.

Why You Should Be Careful to Never Get Your Car Stolen

A got her car back. As we recall, her car was stolen in the waning days of 2006, which was deeply weird for a variety of reasons, chief among them the fact that her car did not actually run. It sort of worked, in that every now and then you could get it going, sometimes even into 2nd gear, but not for long. A had just sold it for parts - and for $200 - to this very nice guy, actually, when it vanished, and I'm sorry to say that we kind of even suspected Very Nice Guy. However, he was as outraged as we were and even drove around looking for it. So A reported it stolen and the matter rested until last Thursday, when the police called to say that they had found the car up at Lee Walker Heights. The car was as fine as it ever was, except the radio had been taken out, but then who cares about that, since - wait for it - the radio didn't work either! It's like it was stolen by some kind of deeply compassionate organization, a strange hospice for dying cars, isn't it?

At any rate, the cops towed the car and that's when the problems began, because if you are unlucky dumb enough to get your car stolen, it turns out that you then owe all kinds of money. They charge you $100 for the towing fees (you don't get a choice about it being towed, either, like you can't call Triple A or anything) and then they charge you $20 a day to store it. If, like A, you realize that your car isn't really worth more than $120 and you don't have that much money anyway, you may contemplate leaving it right the hell where it is, which is to say in police lock up waaaaay down in South Asheville. Unfortunately, you can't do that, because you are now legally liable for every penny of that money, which will keep on mounting up every day you don't pay it, and they will in fact come after your ass for it. We know this because we asked. So A got the money together and in a feat of strategic time planning that quite impressed me, went and picked up the damn car in the window between her two jobs and then met the Very Nice Guy (remember him?) who took the car away. So now the saga has finished, although it must be noted that all the charges for being unlucky dumb enough to get your car stolen pretty much ate all the money A got for the car.

It seems somehow wrong and unfair to me that the victim should be penalized when their car is stolen, since getting even a dying car stolen is a drag, even if it was stolen by loving expiring car hospice workers. I actually think that whoever stole it noticed that it hadn't moved in 2 or 3 months and thought that perhaps we might not miss it, which kind of makes me feel guilty. But that aside, it really rubs me the wrong way to have the victim of a crime be charged a bunch of fees. Yet in a curious way this very fact seems to be in a kind of weird accordance with a particular kind of American/Puritan/Calvinist dogma that holds that all bad luck is totally your own fault, poor people deserve to be poor because they're lazy and the rich, clearly blessed, are as gods upon the earth who deserve our respect. It's this kind of thinking that makes me the godless socialist commie bitch I am, and I don't think that Asheville's finest should be subcontracting all this towing/storage stuff to a bunch of godfearing capitalists who are leeching large chunks of money off crime victims.

cross posted to BlogAsheville

I Have A Cold

I am sniffling and miserable and that is why there have been no posts lately. Also, if you didn't hear about it elsewhere, we mostly won the election. Me, I was too involved in the process of getting ill to enjoy the victory party much, but apparently the entire government is going to get better now. And Donald Rumsfeld resigned, which is awesome, and I seriously hope he is off somewhere in outer darkness weeping and gnashing his teeth. So, to sum up: Yay politics - clearly my year of attending Drinking Liberally has had a beneficial effect on the whole country and Boo colds - they're closing schools and churches and stuff all over this area because everyone has the flu, but I'm at work, moaning now and then.

The Hangover Journal Bus Project: Asheville Buses SUCK

I rode the bus again today. As you may or may not know, my daughter's car went belly up, died, was nailed to the perch and is currently providing charming condo space to varmints in my front yard. Therefore, for over a month now we have been a four person family with one car. The strain is beginning to show because the buses SUCK. Yes, they suck. I'm sorry, Brainshrub, but they SUCK donkey balls in hell.

My daughter ends up getting the car most of the time, because she works way the hell out Hendersonville Road and public transportation out to South Asheville and beyond is a sad, sick joke. The bus goes two or three times a DAY (yeah, a DAY, not an HOUR) and it does not stop between the Wal Mart and the Airport, a distance of 12 or so miles. Somewhere in the middle of those miles is where my daughter works. Note that this is still theoretically within Asheville city limits. She has found that the individual drivers are usually pretty nice about letting her out, although the people on the phone at the Asheville transit authority say that they're not allowed to, and if you need to get anywhere within those 12 miles you're just fucked, sorry. And then, once you've persuaded the driver to let you off somewhere, you still face walking down Hendersonville Road, which seems to have been specifically designed to discourage pedestrians. Or possibly it was designed by crows looking for human roadkill - something like that. At any rate it was taking A 3 to 4 hours to get to work via public transport, and then a taxi back home costs $30 (if you're not in Asheville, you may think that buses run all the time! Ha ha! You are so naive! The Asheville buses, my friend, just this year started running past 6:00 pm at all and now they quit at 10:00 pm, although in actual fact that really means 9:00 pm) so A gets the car most of the time. I, in turn, am taking the bus, because after all I work downtown, which is very close to West Asheville, and what the hell, I said. How bad could it be? Pretty damn bad.

M has been taking the buses for months now, because I have always felt that a teenager who can get himself around town is a happy teenager, and, more to the point, has a happy mother who doesn't have to be chauffering him on all his dubious teenage errands 24/7. M has complained bitterly about the buses, but I mostly ignored him, since M is 14 and complains bitterly about many things. Until lately, when I myself have started taking the buses and have discovered that they do, in fact, as I may have mentioned in the first paragraph, SUCK.

Why do the buses suck?

1. They are routinely late; that is, when they show up at all. The 9 bus I rode today was 35 minutes late - I stood out in the cold for 45 minutes tonight, waiting for the bus. Last Friday, after waiting for 40 minutes, I gave up and went to the bar and got a ride home from a friend.
2. They hardly ever run anyway. The buses that run between downtown and West Asheville run once an hour. Once. An. Hour.
3. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, they simply do not post. On Wednesday, I had to go pick M up at the bus station, since the 6:30 bus was just not going to happen. Tough shit, people. Wait another hour.
4. The people on the buses are scary. And I say that as a long time denizen of inner city Baltimore who has ridden buses and trains all over the east coast, through all of New York and Baltimore and DC and so on and so forth, not a naive young thing fresh from the suburbs but a woman who has routinely been lulled to sleep by the comforting roar of urban gunfire. Yet even to me, the people on the Asheville buses are actively frightening. Last week I ended up getting off the bus two stops early and hoofing it halfway up the hill because I really thought there might be a crack whore war and I was standing right between the two of them. Also, I had heard all the details I could take about Crack Whore A's big fight, subsequent months in the hospital, husband in jail and Mexican pimp.
5. A corollary to 5: the people on the buses are so damn depressing I can't stand it, and the advertising on the buses, which is pitched to the depressing scary people (i.e.: Sell Your Plasma Here!) is also deeply, deeply saddening and wrong. The class system in this country is wrong. The educational system is broken. And nowhere, nowhere, my friends, is that more evident than on the buses.
6. The bus that routinely goes to West Asheville, the #9, is tiny. It's the short bus, but it's packed full of people. It's packed full of people because a lot of people actually live in West Asheville, which you would think the transit authority would have noticed by now, but alas, not so.
7. A corollary to 6: Not everyone who is waiting for the bus can fit onto the tiny bus, so some people must wait for the next bus. An hour later.
8. If you are one of the lucky and or rude ones and have managed to squeeze yourself onto the tiny bus, then your trials are not over. The driver goes like a bat out of hell and the bus heels way over to the side on the turns and the rims of the tires scrape on the roadbed making sparks and frightening noises and you think you're going to die. I have never seen Clingman Avenue flash by so fast as when I'm on that bus - and I have driven it just about every single frickin' day for five and a half years. Some time soon that driver is going to kill a whole lot of people.
9. You never know where the driver is going to stop. It's totally fucking random. You push the stop requested thing or pull the little wire and he will stop. . .eventually. When he feels like it. When a sufficient number of bus stop signs have flashed by. Whatever. Walk, you stupid bus riding peon.
10. The bus maps and schedules are indecipherable, which doesn't really matter, which is why I put it last, since none of the drivers obey them anyway.

So fuck the Asheville buses. I am sorry to report that they suck most horrendously and you know, as a good little liberal type person, I went into this really wanting to like them, but I can't, because (did I say this already?) they SUCK.

On Being A Celebrity

So I go into work on Wednesday morning (just for the record, for once it is not my own lameness that causes this blogging lag. No, just this one time, it is the fault of blogspot/blogger. I could at this point insert some undeserved vitriol towards them since they were down much of yesterday or I could say, which I will, thank the gods they exist, and honey, this is FREE, and so anyway. . . back to our regularly scheduled programming.) and I'm a celebrity. My bosses watched CNN, my friends watched CNN, friends I haven't even spoken with for three years watched CNN and a coworker who didn't even know I was going to be on grabbed me to tell me she saw me on CNN. Yes. I am famous now and apparently people on DailyKos were slamming us all for not having team spirit and supporting Heath Shuler unconditionally, for which I say to them, fuck off. Heath Shuler is anti-choice and anti gay marriage and for those two things alone I will be GOD FOREVER DAMNED if I support him unconditionally. I'm supporting him because he is, a) the lesser of two evils and b) because he is not Charles "Darth Vader" Taylor and c) because he is pro universal health care and pro union and d) because he is earnest and honest and trying very hard and e) because his campaign staff is doing this for love and not for money and f) because he named his kids cute names and f) because he is, yes, extremely cute. And also because I am a dead yellow dog Democrat, for better or for worse, or until we finally get a third and fourth and fifth party in this country who will actually represent my own personal political wishes, which are not aligned with the Demopublicans at all but instead favor accountability and the crushing of the corporatocracy and the question, what can governments do for their citizens, to wit, health care and time off and limits on the credit card companies and food for the children and the artists. God damn it.

I watched Iraq for Sale tonight and while I can't really recommend it wholeheartedly in the spirit, say, in which I would wholeheartedly recommend Mars Attacks , still, if you want to see something utterly depressing and sobering, I recommend it. The gist of it all is that there are far too many private contractors in Iraq, making horrifying bazillions of tax dollars doing things that we shouldn't be allowing them to do. This is not really a huge surprise to anyone who is even slightly politidcally aware, but it does bring it all together in a chillingly thorough way, plus a lot of very sad and depressing interviews with families of people who went over to Iraq apparently naively expecting that these companies wouldn't send them into the line of fire which is, of course, exactly what happened and then these people died. I will say that if you take a job with Halliburton and they send you to Iraq you are really kind of staggeringly innocent if you think you're not going to get shot at, but still, in the larger sense, the growth of "private contractors" in this country from the truly horrifying like the interrogators at Abu Ghraib to the small and sad like any given clerical employee at your favorite telecom is a large and terrible evil worthy of record and eradication.

And now I must go and do the dishes because I seem to have been talked into a written private type contract with my son whose dish night it is supposed to be, in which I will do his dishes tonight and then I get to take actual pictures of him for 10 days, except I'm not allowed, of course, to blog them. Hmmmmmm. Perhaps it is unwise to sign contracts when you get home from Drinking Liberally.

Malevolent Deities and TV

You know that last post? The one where I’m all happy and shit and say I’ve been replaced by a joyous pod person of loving grace? That’s just the sort of drooling idiocy that you’d expect from someone who momentarily forgot that this earth is a vale of struggle and thorns and the gods are armed malevolent beings with macabre senses of humor. In other words, my car broke down and the Saturn people have no shame at all about charging a hundred bucks for a radiator cap. Such is life: we’re all doomed and the best you can get is a gallows laugh on the way down. Or not. Actually I’m still pretty cheerful – significantly poorer, with no prospects for being able to heat the house this winter, but cheerful. Relatively, anyway.

REMINDER! I am going to be on NATIONAL TELEVISION TONIGHT, as part of a documentary on CNN this very evening at 8:00 pm. Sources say my part is towards the end, so if you don’t tune in until 8:30 you might still see me. Or you might not. If not, can you live with the guilt? Hee hee. My brother said, “Aren’t you going to tape it?” and I said, “Of course not, I don’t even have a TV, remember?” Which is true – all I have is a DVD player with a screen. I mean, I could turn it into a TV with the application of $15 or so a month but I have these moral qualms about paying actual cash money to invite the media demons into your house to corrupt your children’s brains. Also, TV makes me jittery and I don’t have enough of an attention span to actually watch it. So my brother said, “Oh, I see. There are two kinds of people – those who are ON TV and those who WATCH it and you’re going to be the first kind, huh?” These words, believe it or not, were just slightly tinged with sarcasm and irony but I chose to take them literally and actually they made me feel like a photographer from People Magazine might appear behind the butterfly bush in my backyard at any moment, which is a really good feeling unless, of course, you happen to be wearing your red plaid fleece baggy pants.

Stepping Outside the Comfort Zone

I went and volunteered at MoveOn this evening; they have an office in Asheville since our congressional race is so important - we're trying to replace an old, evil, corrupt Republican with a young, fresh, soon-to-be-corrupted Democrat. I was reluctant to go volunteer - I'm terrified of things like that and I was afraid they would ask me to make phone calls, which I loathe. Naturally, that's exactly what I had to do. I had to call and try to convince people to volunteer to make calls themselves - GOTV calls, which I learned tonight stands for Get Out the Vote - that's a good thing, because everyone at Drinking Liberally (DL) was talking about doing GoTV this weekend and I thought it was yet another TV station that I would never encounter. Anyhow, our upbeat MoveOn staffer told us we would be calling only other Move On members and it would all be fun. Naturally, though, the third person on my list listened to me say, "Hi! I'm Felicity, calling for MoveOn about our Call for Change campaign to get the Republicans out of Congress" and then snarled, "I'm a Republican! Goodbye!" This sort of thing takes the heart out of one, particularly when one doesn't have much heart to begin with and besides one has never been very good at recruiting volunteers even when it is one's actual by god job which it in fact is.

Still, it is a good thing to do and I felt virtuous - and I even told them I would call people to GOTV myself. I snuck out a bit early, because I felt duty bound to stop in at DL (Drinking Liberally) and knock back a pint or two and a couple of slices of pizza. Then I took the 8:30 bus home (another virtuous choice. I am just steeped in goodness at the moment.) so that I could reach a new low in the homework wars. We have this homework plan now, see, where I sit at the computer and type M's papers while he lies on the kitchen floor behind me, moaning occasionally. It's very productive: I ask him questions about important choices he's made in his life (god love the 9th grade teachers. Can you imagine anything worse than 90 papers on important choices written by 14 year olds?) and he grunts in agony.

For more of me on politics, by the way, check out CNN next Tuesday, October 24, from 8 - 9 pm, because sometime after 8:30 is my national TV debut. I was interviewed about the Taylor/Shuler race and that's when my little segment is going to air, I hope, and if the October surprise doesn't preempt me. I'm psyched: I'm going over to my Mom's to watch it with the whole family so we can all be impressed with my television star self. You must watch it too, so that I can soak up the adoration, or, failing that, the laughter.

A Quick Political Post

The other night he who shall not be blogged about discovered some new information about his beloved 1960s age of revolution online. "Hey mom!" he called, "Check this out! Here's this guy who blew up a CIA building with a home made bomb in 1969 and guess what happened to him?"
"No idea," I said, fully planning to ignore this.
"He got 39 months in prison," said my son, "What do you think would happen if somebody did that nowadays?"
Well. What do YOU think would happen, gentle reader? I think probably that bomb building university student would go off to Gitmo where his legs would be "pulpified" and then, likely, if he was poor he would just disappear and die, and if he was rich he might make it back to the States where he would be in jail for the rest of his miserable life. Unless he got the death penalty.
And I ask you, where the fuck did we go so wrong?

Giant Mushroooooms! Oh, and Class Structure in America

I went and picked up my friend D on Saturday and brought her down off the mountain where she had been trapped for 10 days without a car and with a crazy, deeply crazy, neighbor. On the way up to her house I stopped my car on her twisty narrow dirt road to take pictures of these amazing mushrooms. I swear when I saw them out the window I thought they were fake: twee little ceramic or resin thingies from the Kountry Shoppe in Chimney Rock Village or something, but no, they are quite real, and the biggest one was easily a foot across. One of these days there are going to be two cars going opposite directions on that road, and I'm not sure what's going to happen then. It's too narrow to pass, there's nowhere, not even a driveway, to turn around, and it's over a mile long; I was thinking about this the other day and even briefly wondered if I should google it, because I want to know if there is some kind of etiquette to cover such a situation, like, does the uphill car start reversing? Or the downhill one?

Poor D got immediately submerged in the city, as I promptly dragged her along on the Drinking Liberally/BlogAsheville blog slog pub crawl, which was huge fun. I was reluctant initially to take place, feeling like a)I would be a slumming yuppie and b)that was exploitative of me and c)besides, if I was going to be the only girl I was SO not going (there turned out to be more girls than guys, actually, which just goes to show you, uh, something.) It's terrible, when you think about it, how segregated "old" West Asheville and "new" West Asheville are. We "new" people - never mind that some of us have been here for a long damn time now - go to the Westville Pub and Burgermeister, the Lucky Otter and the Gray Eagle, while "old" West Asheville goes to Cowboy's Nite Life and the B&D Bar, Mike's Side Pocket and the Burger Barn. Separate but equal? Not really. The new places are all spruced up; someone spent time designing them; they have light and windows, plants and funky paintings and, perhaps most striking, they're clean, which you can't say about the old places. The old places hew to the design ethos of the original local bar'n'grill which just got that way without anyone thinking about it: panelling (why, oh lord, is panelling?) darkness, a beer mirror or two, some neon and one helluvalot of good old fashioned dirt on the theory that the darkness and the smoke covers it up.

So what makes the difference? Why does one group go to one set of watering holes and the other go to the other? We all know, even though as Americans we're wildly uncomfortable talking about class. We try to cover it up by talking about education, and opportunities, and "old" versus "new" in much the same way that we try to cover up racism (that's not an issue in these bars, btw, I mean, it IS, of course, but this is a pretty damn white neighborhood and these are all white bars.) But it is, of course, a class issue, this segregation of my neighborhood. Because we the crawlers are the "educated" "new" people, I think we were all a little worried about our reception: we thought it was possible that those rednecks were going to kick our yuppie asses. We are chickenshits, and clearly prejudiced to boot. The people in the "old" bars were uniformly pleasant and funny and welcoming and thought our pub crawl idea was great. See what unfamiliarity can do? Scare you silly - for nothing.

The pathetic thing about this - okay, one of the many, many pathetic things about this - is I'm not sure when I made this transition to group A: for years I hung out in redneck bars by choice. Well, on the other hand, for years those were pretty much the only kinds of bars there were where I lived. Being as how I have a liking for bars in general and have always lived in a state of complete and dire poverty which lends me a certain low class dollar store shopping cred with The Working Classes, I became and remained a redneck bar habitue for many years. Redneck bars or art bars: it is also true that I always have gone to the art bars but then sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference and yes, I'm thinking about you, Mount Royal Tavern. Then I got older and discovered a fondness deep within myself for a real beer selection, the occasional fern and the ability to see what it is I'm drinking and I moved away from what are blithely called Holes in the Wall, although usually they stand alone and are made of either cinderblock or panelling and duct tape.

I doubt I'm going to suddenly switch back to the group B bars, although it's cool to feel like at least I know my neighborhood options now. And, people? The jukebox at Mike's Side Pocket? Awesome.

How Conservatives See the NYT

This is hilarious. We know how I feel about the so called "liberal bias" - I'm totally confused by it. MMOs (major media outlets, people, get with the newspeak here) are clearly mouthpieces for the same tired wealthy corporatocracy and I'm utterly unable to understand how anyone could think the New York Times is liberal, when it's a bastion of business-as-usual right wing blather. This instructive little graphic has been very helpful! Now I understand!

Worries

I woke up in the middle of the night the other night (well, obviously it was at night, since it was, you see, the middle) to worry about the coming pandemic. Bird flu, or ebola, or something we don't know about yet - you know, the 21st century variant on the Black Plague. That thing that's going to kill most of us and bring our dissolute, decadent way of life to a terrible, tragic yet somehow justified (in the eyes of 25th century historians, anyway) end. I'm not particularly worried about it killing me - hell, I've lived enough. All sudden death means to me is that I'll have to be reincarnated sooner in order to get my lazy ass around to writing the Great American Novel and probably I'll have to do a lot of the same things over again, since life lessons have this way of sort of not sticking to me. I have to do all that in my next life anyway, regardless of when I die, since it it's a bit late to fix myself; I haven't written that Great Novel or painted that Great Painting and I kind of doubt that the Great American Blog counts in that Great American Creative This Is Your Life Work So Get It Right This Time On the Karmic Wheel Please For Pity's Sake sweepstakes. So the problem isn't me dying of a horrible sudden pandemic disease, although obviously that's devoutly to be avoided (there's more beer to be drunk, and I need to be here to drink it;) the problem is M. If the Plague comes and we all die except him, he'll be stuck in this house with no earthly idea of how to feed himself or drive a standard shift car - and this is a two standard shift Saturn household. Of course it is. We live in Asheville - we're all about the low gas mileage and the cool points inherent in the clutch.

So after tossing and turning and finally turning on the light, I decided that it was vital that M learn to drive a standard shift car. I'm not sure where the hell he's going to go if 90% of the people in the US are dead, or even if only 75% of them are - in fact, he'd probably be better off staying in Asheville, where at least the weather is nice and the survivors are likely to be no loonier post pandemic than they were pre, but you know, you have to give your kids options. Maybe he wants to go to whatever will be the post apocalyptic hot spot - Thunderdome, or something - but he'll need wheels to get there. And black leather and spikes, but that's his lookout.

I told him this tonight and he said he could already drive a stick and anyway didn't care and jesus, Mom, will you just shut up? He's at that age where he would be overjoyed if everyone under the age of 13 and over the age of 19 died tomorrow: they don't understand, man! I also told him I was getting him a life coach to get his ass organized and he had better not plan on having fun like this once school started and I think that was the point at which he cracked, desperately howled for his sister to toss him her keys and started her car up. His sister is a bit miffed at him at the moment, because he hasn't washed the dishes in three days, despite apparently intense inter-sibling bargaining. We have a dish rota theoretically going on, in which each person is assigned a day, and if they don't do their day, then the dishes pass over and they have to do the next day, and so on. M's day was Friday. It is now Monday. Every plate, and bowl, and piece of mismatched silverware in the house is sitting by the sink, to say nothing of the pots and pans. I know the bargaining was intense, because he told me that he was going to pay his sister $10, which is half of his weekly allowance, to wash the dishes, and then I heard him earnestly explaining, “Dude. You need $10. You’ll be so happy when you see that $10.”
“But there are way more dishes there than you said there were!” said A,
and M, who is rarely at a loss, said, “Fine. You pay me $5 and I’ll wash half of them. No, wait. You give me $15 and I’ll do them all.”
That was probably when she started after him and he started her car up. "Don't worry," I said, "He can't drive a standard shift. You can catch him easy when he starts hopping down the street."

Jesus H. Christ on a Pogostick

I am weeping and wailing and gnashing my teeth today because of the Asheville Citizen-Times. Not because of their fearful editing or horrible writing or overall Gannet-ness and not even because of Susan Reimer, whose determined perkiness gives me hives, but because of the two stories on their front page.

First of all, they're selling Chimney Rock. Chimney Rock is a tacky wonderland, it is true, but it's also a glorious anomaly and I love the rickety staircase to the top of the mountain, the crazy elevator and, of course, the views. Kiss those views goodbye, because it's all going to be condos soon. Ridgetop development, the latest wonderful craze to hit our area, which destroys ecosystems from the top down and, in the process, ruins everyone's views. Hundreds of developable acres near Lake Lure, now on the market: you know they're salivating, champing at the bit to further clog the narrow roads, overtax the infrastructure, destroy the quality of life and market all of WNC to people with way more money than taste or sense. Because we need more assholes - the kind of assholes who will move downtown because it's scenic and cute and artsy, the kind of assholes who spend $2 mil on an apartment because they can and then, also because they can. . .

they complain about the noise and get the drum circle kicked out of downtown. The drum circle, which has been there for years, which livens up downtown on Friday nights and makes me happy to live here, has come into inevitable conflict with the wealthy downtown residents who moved here because Asheville was so different and now want it to be much more, you know, restricted. And genteel, and quiet and would all these strange hairy people please go away because they're lowering our property values and really, we'd rather just see people like us, which is to say Floridians and New Yorkers and occasional Californians who are over 55 and worth more than $4 million and who sold their old house and business for lots and lots of money and want to retire to downtown Asheville because it's so quaint and charming and all, but they don't want to interact with any Ashevillians unless said Ashevilliens are handing them their dinner. After their dinner shift, those Ashevilliens should take their $8 an hour and get on a bus back to guarded work camps in Candler. Because why should the new residents of Asheville, who have so much money and prestige, be troubled by the old residents, who have neither, and can't afford to live here anymore anyway, since the buildings that were moderately priced apartments are now multi million dollar "lofts"?

God fucking damn it. Is there any place on earth that humans won't spoil once they get a chance? Is there no way to stop the greed parade, the wretched excess, the vulgar assholes from ruining everything? I can't stand it.

Near Barnardsville, Somewhere

panorama near barnardsville
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

This is about the best panoramic stitched shot I've done yet, which isn't, I recognize, saying much. I'm still getting the hang of this stitching thing. Click on it, and then when you get to Flickr, click all sizes to see it in a reasonable version. My brother and I went and got mildly lost outside Barnardsville today. I was looking for Douglas Falls, which I vaguely remembered as being "easily" accessible: you take the Barnardsville exit, follow the road on past where it turns to dirt, go way the hell up the mountain looping along, and then the road ends at a parking area and you hike on down to the waterfall. Nope, that is not true. Either I remembered it totally wrong, which is probable, since it's been around 3 years since I was out there, or they've changed it, which is sadly also possible, since lo and behold, at the way the hell point up the dirt road are a couple of McMansions in various states of construction. At any rate, the dirt road turns back to pavement, and that pavement eventually takes you to, of all places, Burnsville. We tried going up another dirt road - that ended at a locked gate, and then we walked for a bit, although my brother was slightly worried that someone with the key to the gate was going to drive up behind my car, see the hippie stickers and shove my car over the cliff.

I do not get McMansions, hideous things, anywhere but particularly not up there, which is eleventy hundred miles from anywhere. Even with our new, milder (tm) winters, that road has to be impassable from November to March and it's no picnic in July. But what do I know? I'm poor, and I think spending millions on a house is immoral, and building a slew of houses in the middle of nowhere, up on a ridgeline, destroying the ecosystem and spoiling everyone elses view is double immoral. However, in the silver linings department, it was either the development or some logging that took me to the clearing where I shot this picture and, bonus, the clearing was full of wildflowers.

Note: Damn, it's my own stupid fault. I forgot about the turnoff onto Dillingham Road.


don't mind me, I'm tweaking. These lovely things are from my friend taz' site, and I want them as my backgrounds, oh yes I do. In a further design type note, isn't it interesting how the eye reads the one on the left as a hole in the white page, but the one on the right doesn't read like that at all? YMMV, I guess. But that's how I see it. HEY! What do you think about the new design?