Make No Mistake

He will win. I have no doubt in my mind. People have been analyzing this election to death, and people have been saying they won't vote for Obama because they don't know him well enough, etc. There are almost no undecideds, they allege; everyone's in their own camp. And McCain hasn't even been selected yet. There has not been a single debate. We didn't even know who his running mate was until this morning.

So I think there are a hell of a lot more undecideds than they say. This is what we're up against (direct quote, nonbracketed ellipses from the author):

I was a Hillary supporter who would have voted for Obama IF he had chosen Hillary as his VP! [...] Now along comes John McCain…with whom I agree with on some things…and he picks a female GOVERNER as his VP! I’ll tell you right now: McCain has my vote come November.

That's how "decided" the decided voters are. They're picking a candidate "with whom [they] agree on some things" because they want a woman to be Vice President. That's not decided. One word from Palin that she thinks abortion is God's choice alone, that education is not a high priority, and that the government should control what goes on in your back yard, versus Biden, who is directly credited with reducing violence against women and street violence by as much as 20%, whose wife is a teacher (as is Obama's), and those votes will go snapping over to the Dems' side.

People are trying to discredit Obama's lead before his campaign has even started. His campaign kicked off last night with his acceptance speech, when he laid down the foundation for a concise, aggressive, proactive campaign. Biden has already gone on the attack against the Republicans' policies, and both have in no vague terms rendered personal attacks, questions of character, and the "celebrity" offense unusable. And the Republicans don't have anything else in their bag of tricks to use against the undecideds.

My prediction: they will lose every independent vote in the country. The so-called "Hillary Democrats" are claiming to back McCain. But two months is a loooong time to consider the gravity of such a comment. And with Hillary supporting Obama, there's no one to keep them. The Republicans don't know how.

It's not worth it

I'm trying to wrap my head around these alleged 21% of Hillary supporters who are adamantly saying that they will vote for McCain, many of whom were campaigning of McCain right outside of the convention while Hillary is onstage inside saying "No way, no how, no McCain!" They asked one woman why she's insisting on voting for McCain instead of Obama and she said, "because Hillary deserves our respect." Yeah, that's how you respect someone, by ignoring their please to help their cause and devoting yourself to helping their enemy to succeed (and in this case, run/ruin their country).

Ultimately, it's just easier to destroy something than it is to fix it, and for a few moments afterwards, it feels pretty good to watch something get destroyed. Those 21% of Hillary supporters would get a nice feeling for a couple days watching Obama fail, as punishment for what he did to Hillary. Then, their husbands will lose their jobs. Their bosses will stop offering health insurance. Their kids will get sick and bankrupt them. Their house will foreclose. Their brothers will die in Iraq. Their country will be the laughing stock of the entire world. They will never get a raise again.

All for a few minutes of watching someone who desperately wanted to help them being punished before their very eyes. God damn you for trying to destroy our happiness for your own selfish little purposes. Fuck you.

Watch

The Internet Strikes Again

Every night, without fail, I sing a half hour or more of my songs. To this day, I clear out my living room and put my microphone stand in the middle of the room. The west wall—the one without windows—is my stage. I put together a set list, I announce myself to the wall, and I perform a full set. I thank the wall between songs, I mind the fourth wall with every step, I choreograph my moves in synchronization with the invisible musicians in the room with me. I consider it my aerobic exercise for the day, as I'm always drenched in sweat by the end, after giving my all to the performance. My throat is sore, my arms are tired, my neighbors are irritated by me singing full throttle, full dance moves, thrashing into the ground with the music.

I haven't performed my own material to a real audience in six years. I don't have the hair for it anymore anyway. I don't have real band mates. The only people in this city who have even heard my music are my ex-girlfriends and friends who knew me from back when. My old bandmate lives here, but we don't play together anymore. I don't think his wife has ever heard my music. He sits with me at the bar sometimes and talks about how bored he gets, but he never calls to invite me over.

I manifest myself to the public as an employee for a mid-sized insurance company. I was in a kid's musical this summer—one of my coworkers happened to see me perform- her input was "it's great to have hobbies outside of work," like that shouldn't be a given. Like I don't spend ten hours a day letting my life waste a way, and just half an hour a night reliving the times when it wasn't.

An old groupie found me online the other day. She was my biggest fan ten years ago. She was fourteen, I think. She used to call me and invite me over. She listened to my music every night. Once, online, she gushed to some guy online about what an enormous crush she had on me, only to find out that she was actually talking to me (she got her screen names confused).

She's doing well. She's twenty four, living in Boulder. She's the lead singer of a band. She called me on video chat. I remembered her, referred to her by the name I used to call her, forgetting that it wasn't her real name. She laughed and said she remembered the night I gave her that name, every detail of it. "I was such a girl then," she said. Then she went on about all the things going on in her life, all the music she's playing, the people who come out to see her perform.

When I was her age, I was playing shows, too. In fact, I was just getting ready to move to Portland, ready to show my music to the big city. That year, the band broke up. Over the phone, no less. I was already living in Portland, and was driving back home for a show. I still wanted the band to make it. I'd travel for shows, no sweat. My bandmate, the one who lives here now, called me to see if I was already on the road. The show had been cancelled. I found out later it had never been booked; they just didn't have the nerve to tell me. And anyway, the drummer quit. He said that he didn't feel my heart was in it anymore, or I would have stayed with the band.

I never played with a band again.

Luckily, she didn't ask how I was doing, what I was up to. I mentioned something in passing that I had done a little acting, but I think she just assumed that I had gone on to be a successful Portland musician. Why wouldn't I? I was her hero, after all. I'm the one she looked up to, that made her decide to be a lead singer too. She was living the dream.

What would she say if she knew I'd given up music and got a job at an insurance company? How would she look at me then? Would it scare her? I could tell by her voice, the way she worded her sentences, that although she was grown up now and realized I was just some guy, she still respected me. I don't care about the respect, not from my side of it anyway. I'm just worried about how that would change her life view.

I'm not saying she'll be a successful musician. I'm not even saying her band won't break up soon too. I just want to make sure that she stays onstage long enough to inspire some fourteen year old in the audience, like I inspired her. Eventually, one of us will make it, and one of us will enhance people's lives. It won't be me, but I still want to be a part of that. I don't want to break the chain.

Morbid

So, I'm going through my financial paperwork, and realize something: as of December 17th of this year, my life insurance covers a $50,000 benefit if I commit suicide. I always thought that suicide was an instant disqualifier, but I guess not. Of course, it's well over double that if I just die. Still, it's nice to know that the Cobain option is on the table if things get really bad.

Do-over

God, let me relive the second half of the 1990s. They told me it would be the best years of my life, but I didn't believe them and now it's too late. I will tell my kids, but they won't believe me either.

On second thought, don't. Those five years were so wonderful and magical because of that strange thing that happens in a young man's chemistry, where the colors are brighter, the emotions are stronger, and every day lasts a lifetime. Then it seems that the chemicals drain out, leaving the cast that you've molded from the impressionable years.

Tell me, then, what it takes to refill the cast. There has to be something to trigger that part of my brain again. There has to be more than this.

Everybody Chill

Everyone's got their panties in a twist over this Russia-Georgia thing. We've been so inundated with this rhetoric that Russia is in shambles because we so totally thumped 'em in the Cold War that we're in shock when we see them flex their muscles.
They flexed their muscles in Afghanistan in the mid-nineties, and nobody cared, because it was just a bunch of towel heads. They flexed their muscles in Serbia and nobody cared, because we wanted Serbia to go down as well. They flexed their muscles in Chechnya, and Bill Clinton tried to get people to care, but our life was going so well at the time that it didn't really seem like anything bad affected us.

All these skirmishes have common threads—they were fights with former Soviet republics, autonomous countries which never really earned their independence, we were just hell-bent on splitting up the old Soviet Union and didn't care that we were essentially creating a litany of rogue states. Every time, the Pentagon would watch, and Russia would pull out weapons we'd never heard of, and just mop the floor with whoever they were fighting. When they took on Afghanistan, they knew it would be a tough fight, so they started pulling out weapons you see in science-fiction movies: suitcase bombs, roving missile launchers, heat-seeking blanket missiles. Bill Clinton tried to warn us, and even sent troops to defend our then-allies, but Americans accused Clinton of making it all up to distract us from Lewinsky.

The skirmish in Georgia is practically identical to Desert Storm. Georgia stepped into a territory they didn't own, announced that they were running the place, and killed anyone who disagreed with them. The territory was a protectorate of Russia (like Guam or Panama is to us), so Russia came in to end the conflict. Here's how Russia ends a conflict: they go in full force and just clean the place out. They flatten anyone who isn't waving a white flag. They finished the job in five days.

If we had used the same tactic in Iraq, we would be 5 trillion dollars richer, the world would be more stable, and we wouldn't have the widespread animosity of the world we do today.

We care now, though, because Georgia isn't a foreign sounding name. We've got a state named Georgia. So we could picture Bolsheviks marching on Atlanta. And while the Russians gave up on their quest to spread communism after they lost the Cold War, we are continuing our quest to impose our government on the entire world, and are very proud of that fact. Georgia one of the only countries to actually adopt our form of government (constitutional republic), so we feel that any attack on Georgia is an attack on us. In fact, we even tried to get Georgia to join NATO, an effort which was vetoed by NATO for this exact reason—because Georgia takes this confidence that the US will back them unconditionally and exploits it, intentionally drawing the ire of the Sleeping Bear. They knew they were going to get the shit kicked out of them, and they did, and they had no problem having 300 Georgians killed a day, because they wanted the attention that we obediently gave them.

When a child throws a temper tantrum in the middle of Safeway because you won't buy him a candy bar, what happens when you give in and buy him the Twix? That's why you don't start stirring up shit with Russia because our little protege in Eastern Europe is throwing a tantrum. Like it or not, Russia is still their daddy, and they don't buy them candy bars—they give them a spanking.

Unbelievable

In an ongoing effort to prove that there is not a single facet of Clinton or her campaign which makes her the worst possible candidate for President (and therefore continuing to draw the praise and support of 20% of Americans), the Clinton campaign has now come out and blamed Edwards for Clinton losing, stating that if he had not lied about his affair, then Hillary would have won the nomination. It sounds exactly like something Bush's people would say.

Fucking Genius

In general I'm not particularly fond of TV, and I never really like Jimmy Kimmel overall. However, there's one bit that I can't stop laughing all the way through, and I should point out that I very rarely actually laugh at anything, even my favorite shows. I think they're very funny, I'm just not much of a laugher.

The clip is the last video here, but I need to set it up first. This was the culmination of a very long-going running joke on Kimmel. Anyone who watches Kimmel is aware of it, and most people who just casually browse the net have already seen it, but for my own gratification, I'm putting it up on my blog. We start with the running joke:

The running joke hit its punchline after literally a year continuing on, which was itself brilliantly executed:

Then the joke was over, and a new joke was born:

which, while brilliant in its own way, was simply lead in to the best late night production ever:

you're welcome.

When Disclaimers Go To Far

I am eating peanut butter crackers for breakfast, and on the side of the package they felt obligated to write "Caution: Contains Wheat, Peanuts."

I would think it more apt to write a caution if it in fact did not contain either wheat or peanuts. Given that those are the two main ingredients.