Author: fifteenkey (Page 49 of 95)

“Walking down Main Street,
Getting to know the concrete.”

“Tear Stained Eye” – Jay Farrar of Son Volt

Early Friday morning I left my car at European Auto Werks and walked most of the 4.16 miles home. I was going to iPod out the din of life on that route, but instead decided to leave all senses available for the trip. Traversing a common path by foot provides such a different perspective than through a windshield. Our streets are crumbling like dry chocolate cake and chunks of asphalt are strewn around craters where they once lay. The blacker repairs are clearly temporary and quality of their installation lacking. I passed many dormant storefronts and old churches broken by time.

What accompanied nearly every step was litter. Superfund sites aside, I’m concerned that we are literally littering (wow, that was bad alliteration…) our country into a dump. I saw Bud Light and Coors Light cans, various auto parts of rusted metal and black rubber, fast-food packaging, and of course cigarette butts; my favorite. Oh, and there’s a flattened plastic jug of windshield fluid. I guess the owner was finished with it… Much of this garbage is invisible at 20 miles per hour or more (driving, not running), but it’s right there in 3D when you’re stepping over it.

Why do people litter? Did no one ever tell them not to? When I was a kid, this Public Service Announcement ran for quite some time. Maybe it’s time for a sequel.

As I climbed a long hill close to home, an aging ambulance accelerated past me leaving a cloud of acrid blue carbon poison in my path. Is that Spring in the air?

Music marketing of a relatively unknown artist isnt easy, but we certainly had musicians whoring around, and now with the internet, anythings possible. Apparently, the young woman under the fall of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer has made $1.4M in the past couple days off two singles she had on her MySpace page In the math can be fun category is the fact she earned 69 cents per download. Yeah.

Yesterday the news swirled like an indestructible plastic grocery bag pirouetting down a street in Anytown, USA. It seems only a couple weeks ago, Barack Obama was being portrayed as a Muslim, and being criticized for having only “a speech from 2002” as his sole presidential credential. Now he is being attacked for going to a Christian church. Yeah, his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright has exercised “the audacity of speech” and Sen. Obama is paying a price. In an interview last night on the Nazi network, the tone of the “interview” was that of a legal deposition… FauxNews was performing their due diligence for the fall swift-boating of Sen. Obama.

Rev. Wright is a pastor of a Black church in the city of Chicago. His sermons are directed at an audience of primarily African-Americans who have experienced a different American experience than your typical Faux viewer. However, as Bill Maher learned after 9/11, criticism of the US of A is not tolerated. You see, we are infallible and only stand for things like “democracy,” “human rights,” and “truth.” The spin of September 11th was that “they” attached us because of “our freedom.” Maybe “they” are upset because we’ve been interfering with their freedom and the sovereignty of their nations for years. Mr. Maher lost his job for implying it took more courage to fly a plane into a building than it does to lob a cruise missile from six miles offshore. He was right, but the action taken against him was that of a corporation carrying the water of the Bush administration to make it clear that no dissent by the citizenry would be tolerated. Just flags and chants of “USA.” Democracy and Human Rights? Oh, is that what they have in Saudi Arabia? No, they have oil. Truth? Like the fairy tale about WMD’s in Iraq or Saddam’s connection to Al Qaeda?

The controversial statements of Rev. Wright that are now the substance of attacks on Sen. Obama include his perspective on the use of nuclear weapons, foreign interventions, and the treatment of blacks for over 300 years:

1. “We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”
2. “The government gives them (blacks) the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.”
3. “Barack knows what it means to be a black man to be living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people. Hillary can never know that. Hillary ain’t never been called a nigger.”

I certainly can see how many white people in this country, particularly the undereducated, mostly rural red-state voters, would be scared by the statements above, but doesn’t the first amendment grant the Reverend the right to make them? Scared is key word here… The Fox-led spin this fall is going to be that Barack “Hussein” Obama is a black wolf in Muslim clothing who’s an anti-American and a black-separatist. If he’s elected, he’ll let Willie Horton and thousands of other scary black men out of prison to rape your white women and steal your children in the night…

Here’s a preview:

I’m going to try a new fifteenkey feature to help me write when I’m uninspired… like lately. I’ll grab a book from my shelf and open it to a random page. Wherever my left thumb lands, I’ll copy the passage here and rant about it. Okay? Ready? Here we go… Tonight’s random passage is from Nick Hornby’s “High Fidelity:”

“He must be terrible to work with the morning after a wine-tasting session: not because of the reek of stale booze, or the bloodshot eyes, or the crabby behavior, but because of all the facts he has swallowed. He’d spend half the day telling people things they didn’t want to know.”

I regurgitate a lot of facts and I wonder if people just turn me off when I think I’m so fascinating. Leaving the office tonight I chatted for a few minutes with my boss Joyce. In hindsight I wonder what she was thinking when I laid my latest “sky is falling” story on her. This one was a marketwatch.com article called, “Derivatives the new ‘ticking bomb‘.”

It’s the uplifting story of “derivatives,” described by legendary investor Warren Buffett in 2003 as “financial weapons of mass destruction” that could harm the whole economic system. At that time, the derivatives market was $75 Trillion Dollars. Today it’s $516 with a capital “T,” or 34 ½ times the US annual gross domestic product of $15T.

Today’s other news is that the Federal Reserve and other Central Banks are pumping $200B of “liquidity” into big banks like Bear Stearns and accepting teetering mortgages from the sub-prime mess as collateral… I’m feeling like the US/world economy is a giant leveraged house of cards and if one falls, we’ll all fall so the rich money traders who obscenely profit get bailed out when they fuck up, but for the rest of us:

“As life closes in on someone who has borrowed far too much money on the strength of far too little income, there are no fire escapes.”
–John Kenneth Galbraith

I haven’t been blogging because I’m counting all the cells in my body to confirm whether I have 10 trillion, 50 trillion or 100 trillion… Think about that though… You are just a Naturalamb water balloon of trillions of interconnected cells, some of which you occasionally scratch and others that participate in more advanced aspects of the neuron doctrine.

Bill Maher questions the intelligence of our fellow Americans and I concur. Mr. Maher is catching a little flack for stating, “politicians must stop saying the American people are smarter than that. No they aren’t!” He’s right. All the candidates kiss our asses to get our vote, but they’re not doing us any favors pandering to us about our collective intelligence then underfunding education while individuals and countries in Europe and Asia are working smarter and harder than we as they pass us by.

Her Ohio victory assured, Hillary Clinton thanked her erupting supporters tonight as “Land of Hopes and Dreams” began cranking through the PA. As I now listen dispassionately to essentially a concession speech by Barack Obama, I think he should also close with a song made famous by Bruce Springsteen oratory, but penned in the background by Elvis Costello: “Brilliant Disguise.”

In the past few days in different discussions about today’s tilt, I expressed my dismay over the Obama controversy involving a meeting between Canadian officials and Austan D. Goolsbee, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and Mr. Obama’s senior economic policy adviser. At first the campaign denied the meeting took place, then had to uh, baraktrack after a memo documenting the meeting surfaced.

According to the memo by a Canadian attendee, Professor Goolsbee assured the Canadians that Mr. Obama’s anti-NAFTA stance, primarily in job-strapped Ohio, was “more reflective of political maneuvering than policy,” and “should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans.”

That meeting in Canada has been largely dismissed in the Obama worshiping press, but I think it cost him Ohio tonight. “Just words” about NAFTA may have been only political posturing to Mr. Obama, but it is perceived by those seeing their unemployment benefits end as the reason their lives are unraveling.

I and many others have supported Mr. Obama because he was different. He was not just another pol. Now I wonder, “Is that you, baby, or just a brilliant disguise?”

Not really. Not fifteen. Just the only key to my car, house, Megan’s car and my office. Oh, and the remote to my garage. What’s that? Five? The distress of losing keys is acute. I guess a lost wallet is worse with credit, debit, health and ID cards…

I spent yesterday miserable and miserable to be around. Some people I used to work with called it “the monster.” Well, he was back, sulking around the house inside and out, in a joyless search for shards of carved metal. What about that spare to the Volvo? I know I had one of those. Yeah, Megan used it once to um, borrow my car. Once I got it back, I hid it… Uhhhh…. That’s where the early-onset Alzheimer’s kicks in…

This morning I tore the house apart. Post-Megan joyride, I had hidden the key under my luggage in a cubbyhole in my room. As I frisked every pocket in 3 black roller bags, I was teased by two of them with what turned out to be the cheesy combination bag lock. I moved to old pants pockets, old shoes, my Volvo file and in a variety of “junk drawers.” I crawled under beds (note to self: discuss contents with Kyle) and through the car itself… Nothing. I dug through the antique dresser in Kyle’s room through the Harry Potter stuff, old racquetball racquets, and my plaque of the 1978 Intercity League Champs, the Wakefield Merchants. Hey kid, nice ‘fro. Zip… Then a hopeful sense washed over me and I opened Kyle’s closet. Most of it is now filled with the bright colors of baby girl clothes yet to be modeled by Miss Madison, but in the back were my coats… Immediately I knew which one and pulled the “Valet” key from the pocket of an old “LL Bean” type canvas windbreaker Dad had given me. I stuffed the monster into the closet and walked into Megan’s room silently hold the key aloft like I had won “the Ring” after a dirty, medieval death match with Gollum.

So I’m off to get a couple copies of my house key made and I’ll order a new primary key from Volvo. As for my office key, I’m sure there are spares and I gained some new perspective from my daughter about it. “You should be happy you have an office key. Most people have cubes.”

It’s that “glass half full” perspective that’s um… a key to happiness.

Maybe it’s the endorphins, but at the 3:25 mark of this song by the amazing Antony and the Johnsons, I was dancing in my kitchen and Kyle was looking at me with a facial expression somewhere between complete hilarity and the haunting notion that I may be having an epileptic seizure. I turned off my iPod and asked, “hey kid, can you dance?” “No! And I don’t want to like that!”

No, really. I’m quite good and employed several Motown techniques in this afternoon’s performance. I have serious soul for a white guy. Seriously. I’ll just have to videotape myself and post it to youtube. Yeah, that’s just what I’ll do.

Senator Obama caught some flack recently for um, “evoking” some words used previously by Deval Patrick in a speech while successfully running for Governor of Massachusetts. In writing, that would be called “plagiarism,” but my candidate keeps working on his tan while most of the media spray him with Teflon sunblock. Mrs. Obama also had a few things to say this week and they were not well received.

Senator Clinton’s new campaign theme is that the difference between Barack Obama and her is “a choice between speeches and solutions.” I see. Anyway, wanting to learn more about my candidate, I’ve begun to read about him while on my stairway to the stars. I just finished reading a 2006 speech on the relevance of faith in our country. I urge you to read it. Here’s a highlight:

“Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

Now this is going to be difficult for some who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice. Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. It involves the compromise, the art of what’s possible.”

I’ll be printing and reading more speeches and position papers in the days and weeks ahead. I don’t want to become a viral video the next time I’m interviewed by a big boy on TV: