"no president wants war"

Oh yeah?

Why is it today I miss Los Angeles? Who misses Los Angeles besides people from Los Angeles? The 405? Cold Water Canyon? The 110 on both ends, the ocean and the hills just beyond Pasadena that lead out through the hills into the long flat bowl of central California that bakes and hides as you approach it from the north in a fog.

I used to love driving down the Five, the fault just off the highway running along and watching the horizon for signs of police aircraft. It's its own world there, a language of 1950s truckers and washed out women who've long ago lost hope of making it out unless it's as inspiration for a sleazy character in a cheap detective novel and I'm between San Francisco and Los Angeles for just a minute and always thinking I should stop and see what downtown Bakersfield looks like.

Then Los Angeles, coming in over the pass where the temperature drops and it first it seems like it's still aways away but then the 110 and soon enough the 101 and at night the 101 can feel like the most perfect place on earth.

Going home I'd always take the 101 and look forward to the ocean just around Santa Barbara and, if I was lucky, the last bit of sunlight in the hills just off San Luis Obispo. Here, Brooklyn's stuck in this perpetual pre-spring/post-winter rut where the wind (there is no breeze) is always cold and the sun still feels weak. Baseball in less than a month?

I can't talk about the idiot in the White House today, but I did learn that a soldier in Iraq is about 30 times more likely to die than if he were at home. I don't know about catastrophic injuries, but I do know some conservative pundits have been trying to say Iraq's not much more dangerous than anywhere else. Really (one place to look is littlegreenfootballs.com on 3/21). They don't want to denigrate the soldiers, they say, but really, hell, construction's just as dangerous. College is just as dangerous. Accounting. Yep. So they imply. As much as I hated French, I will never confuse it with Falujah.

So anyway, some guy at tpmcafe.com ran some statistics, which didn't take into account things like soldiers probably don't have aggravating conditions that would more directly threaten their lives than would be found in the rest of the population, which might make it even more dangerous, from a statistical point of view. I stayed home sick today.

Mostly I read, slept and listened to those old songs I've been downloading. I also made a final desperate look for my shaver, but it's gone. Gone, gone, gone. So I'll have to buy a new one tomorrow or the next day and get respectable again. Seriously, it looks more likely than not, on looking at me, that I'll ask you for change.

I spent a bunch of time at my friend Melissa's website. She runs a magazine which is beautifully put together, called Hyphen ( www.hyphenmagazine.com ), it makes me wonder why I'm wasting my life: supreme efforts like that.

I also listened to "Rosa Parks" by Outkast a bunch of times and thought about this article I read a few days ago where some guy who robbed Rosa Parks's apartment and beat her in the 1990s was really sorry because he'd never get to apologize to her. He said he was upset that he would go down in history as the guy who robbed Rosa Parks and he wants redemption. He supposes he will have to draw strength from God. He got 53 dollars. Apparently he had a history of targeting older women for robbery and when he got jumped the next day and turned over to the police he had 11 cents. ( http://detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060319/METRO/603190401/-1/ARCHIVE ) So he gets to jail and everybody takes delight in beating the hell out of him and throwing shit on him and basically passing judgment because finally here's somebody who sucks more than them and there's so much of this everywhere, this, "I would never do THAT" and yesterday O'Reilly's talking to Newt Gingrich about how great Bush was for realizing he "had to take his cause directly to the American people" because of course the media is confusing them, and then O'Reilly turned to the camera, and I was already sick and getting sicker in a haze of pseudafed and he tells me I won't want to miss his next segment, an interview with a kid who had been sexually abused by a guy who only got probation. There it is: groundbreaking journalism. A lot of reporting and deciding there and what else are you supposed to decide about some sexual predator and yet, I thought about it after I turned the channel, because I didn't really want to have to deal with the syruppy sympathy and sloppy sentamental outrage against such an easy target, so I watched this movie for a few minutes with Rosalind Russel on Turner Classics that looked wonderful but I needed to sleep but I kept thinking about it as I said above, while I was dropping off into this really odd dream: why is it that if you try to understand something awful like those above things in a larger context in which we all take on some responsibility (you know, "am I not my brother's keeper" and stuff like that), you're immediately jumped on and instead of being able to explore these issues and their connectivities in discussion you constantly are reduced to saying things like "I understand how horrible and heinous this was", well duh, but can we at least explore the idea that we have a violently repressed society sexually in which we inject tons of artificial sexual stimulants that create images that don't challenge the viewer's fantasies but instead coddle them and further them (and further more, this is a necessary complication of free speech) and while pedophilia is nothing new, how do we spend so much time thinking about that in the media with such obvious outrage and titillation while ignoring our societal confusion as to sex that exists; or that we have a huge underclass that is largely ignored except for when we condemn it and its people of sin and that in such a society it's just a matter of time before someone of Rosa Parks stature is robbed by somebody of Joseph Skipper's stature and it's just their respective bad luck that it's those two, with those names, who become linked so that the one simply becomes a sentence in the other's book of life.

I hate all this God stuff, how we ascribe to God these human attributes like strength and will so that we can give shape to things like fate and life. Let God be God, thank God for existance and then don't profance God with all our sillinesses, stupidities and good lucks. We create borders in which we can define God: constellations against the vacuum of space. I won't hold God to any word, the words were for us to use, for us to guess with, who knows why? But the vastness of this Creation forces us to create all these words which in the end form our only relationship to Creation that is entirely socially based. And so often calling on the "word" of God is used as a way to silence dissent (hardly a groundbreaking thought, I know), but why is the authority of knowing SO EASILY assumed by so many people? How do you presume to KNOW the will of God. The will of God? The will of God is the story of the birth of something out of nothing, can you presume to know that? If your knowledge of God is only selective then how do you discern where your belief becomes a certainty.

To call on faith at this point is to simply revert to the argument "I know because I know". That's ok if you're talking about who's the best baseball player ever, or which cheese is better than which, but not ok if you're talking about how people should be required to live.

I should sleep, tomorrow is long.