We wanna be free!
We wanna be free to do what we wanna do!
We wanna be free to ride!
And we wanna be free to ride on machines without being hassled by the man!

And we wanna get loaded!

I am listening to Superfuzz Bigmuff, cracking back Coronas and failing to code anything productive. The magikal TiVo is recording both the premier of Heroes and this week's episode of The Sarah Connor Chronicles at the same time. In HD! Technological madness, this is.

Back in, oh, 1995 or so, there were only, like, four movie channels. So you gots what they gave, which was usually the same five movies. God help you if you wanted to watch the tube during the daytime.

Over time, the number of channels increased pretty heavily. At the beginning of the year, I think I was getting something like thirty or thirty-five movie channels plus all the other crap. So there was always something on - which is important when you work from home.

However, now that I have all this high-def goodness, I'm finding myself in the same position I was a decade ago. High-def teevee looks so much freakin' better that I can't go back to standard definition. And while I still get the four-quadrillion standard definition channels, I don't want to watch any of them - I only want to watch the shit that's on the ten or twelve high-def channels.

Which sucks during the day, because there are only three or four movie channels, and they all play kids movies before four p.m. And my other options are Dr. Phil, Oprah, and the Guiding Light.

Life is hard.

Jesus take me to a higher place
Sliding in 'n' out of grace
Christ - body and blood I crave
Sliding in 'n' out of grace, yeah

Mom is home from the hospital now following her double bypass heart surgery. This is apparently a very, very good thing that she's recovering so quickly. My father and I were actually able to talk about things other than her today (such as the US victory in the Ryder Cup and my boys trouncing the fuck out of the Lions [31 to 13; eat it bitches]).

Speaking of football, my alma mater is playing WVU on Saturday as some sort of "state rivalry" thing. I'm fairly certain I'm not going to be able to see this game through the miracle of Comcast but maybe it will show up on DISH or summat and I'll be able to see it.

(Hey. Two prime numbers. Awesome.)

Speaking of home, I am (very) likely to be heading there for Christmas. EA "shuts down" during this time, so there's no work, and I haven't been home in a dog's age. Also: mom being sick. Also: need to see the mountains. Also: hopefully run into old school people from home.

Speaking of people from home, here is Jenny in a commercial for the Sarah Palin Action Figure. (Yes, KBK, I know you're sick of hearing about Palin, but it's Jenny!)

Cry for mercy, relieve my hate
Sliding in 'n' out of grace
Spill my seed, suck my waste
Sliding in 'n' out of grace

I took a nap (well, I tried to take a nap but failed) and upon getting up found myself suddenly depressed. No real reason, just . . . down. I reckon it is the result of the previous week's crappiness catching up to me.

(Also, I got kind of shot down by this chick for a dinner date. I include that only for completion, even though it's probably not impacted my mental state. She and I have been orbiting each other for several months at various distances. She'd asked me out a week or so ago but had to bail, and when I tried to reschedule she said she was taking some "self time". C'est la vie; this is pretty par for the course for the two of us. One of us is always unavailable. Hence my thought that it has nothing of impact.)

Facebook is weird. I posted in my "status" that I was "suddenly depressed" and then got responses from three kids I went to high school with about it. It has been weird, but I've been connecting with people from my Deep Past more and more often and with greater and greater depth.

Now I'm listening to Mudhoney and it's all better. This was the shit I was listening to as I grew "into my own," so it's always a good nostalgia trip.

Oh God, how I love to hate
Sliding in 'n' out of grace
Save me Lord, and fuck the race
Sliding in 'n' out of grace

We're all douchebags on this bus.

I was able to talk with my mother. She is awake now, and can only have visitors for fifteen minutes at a time. They aren't supposed to have cell phones there but the nurse said "but if I turn my back, I can't see one being used, can I?"

So my sister held the phone to her ear and I got to hear her voice. And she's alive, and that is good. Groggy, but that's to be expected.

I gave my sister instructions to bring her some "young adult" style literature for her to read. The drugs she's going to be on will prevent her from being able to concentrate on anything overmuch. Jaclyn suggested the Harry Potter series, and I think that's an excellent choice.

They (my family) had some other drug-related questions for me about what to expect with her. Since I am the family expert on, you know, being stoned, I was happy to oblige.

I feel much better.

Mom's surgery went well. She is now resting in intensive care and will be there for the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, after which people will be able to talk to her, which will be a pointless exercise, because I've been on those drugs, and wow do they screw with your ability to hold conversations.

Or read.

Or watch television.

Or pretty much anything except eat hospital food, which, incidentally, is the bizzity-omb when you're cracked out on these kind of pain meds.


I had dinner with Jenny last night and it was good. Then Ivana got me drunk.

( Take a Picture of Yourself Right Now )

I am finding myself extra-specially depressed and stress-ified the past couple of days. There are many reasons for this, two of which are primary.

1) My mother's impending open-heart surgery;
2) The awesome economic forecasts we're seeing.

I am unsure if my apprehension about #2 is the result of being unseated by #1.

Both of these events are monoliths. There simply is nothing that I can do to affect the outcome of either one.

For two nights running I have found myself awake at three a.m., staring at the ceiling, wondering, "My god, what I am I going to do?" I am having flashbacks to eight years ago, when everything started to crumble, and I am utterly terrified about reliving the summer of 2001, when getting a job was one of the most difficult things imaginable.

So there is fear.

Normally, I combat fear through a mantra: "It is useless to be afraid of something when there are no options for combat."

"Fear", to me, is an emotional state wherein one expects a negative outcome to an as-yet incomplete event. "Hope" is the flip side of that coin: it is the expectation of a positive outcome.

In many, many instances these two emotive states are extremely useful. I am afraid of getting burned, so I know not to stick my hand in a fire. If I hear a gunshot, I become afraid, and know not to go towards it. I hope that the girl I ask out will say yes, because she just might, and we might have fun.

But these (poor) examples are events where we have options. We can choose to put our hands in the fire. It's stupid, but we can. We can choose to run into a gunfight. Fear says, in these cases, "this is the wrong thing to do."

But I can't do dick about the stock market. If it drops enough, all the companies start cutting back. And jobs like mine are deemed "unnecessary". I have fall-back talents but they don't pay anywhere near what I currently make. So my fear, in this case, is that I will be forced to radically alter my lifestyle in a manner which I find negative.

I have zero desire to relive the dotcom burst. (In fact, I wonder if the only reason that I made it through then was because gnat23 and I had each other to fall back on.)

Then I start to think about why I (and millions of others) are in this place, and I get angry.

The reason we are fuct in this manner is, quite simply, willful ignorance by a large percentage of the population.

Conservatives. Religious nutjobs. Homophobes.

There. I said it. I said it out loud.

In theory, we have two political parties. The Republican party was/is supposed to stand for two things: 1) Fiduciary responsibility by the government and 2) staying the fuck out of your private life. The Democratic party was/is supposed to stand for pretty much one thing: the improvement of the life of individual citizens through the exercise of governmental power (e.g., taxing you to make public programs, social security, medicare, roads, etc.)

(I am aware that this is a somewhat incorrect view of the history of the two parties but this is what I was taught about them in the modern age.)

However, in the modern day, the Republican party is pretty much about the opposite of these two things. And they're not spending the money in a good way.

Here is where the willful ignorance comes in:

I believe that the GOP is controlled by a bunch of rich, greedy fucks. And they have a bunch of policies and an agenda which, if taken on its own merits, would never fly with the American people because it really boils down to making the rich, greedy fucks even richer.

Since they cannot win elections based on the merits of their agenda, they were forced to alter the message. These rich fucks figured out that they could capture the votes of two kinds of people:

1) Willfully ignorant nutjobs (racists, religious fanatics, etc) by taking what are ultimately fringe issues (gay marriage) and using demagogue tactics to imply that they are more important than they really are, and
2)Middle class Americans who *want* to be rich, greedy fucks, and are under the mistaken belief that the neocons will hold open the door to Richville for them.

With regards to group number 1, this is monolithic. You can't get angry at someone for being crazy, really - it is just additive emotional stress. No amount of discussion will convince a nutjob that it should be okay for gays to get married so why bother having the conversation?

It's the people in group 2 that piss me off because they should know better. These are reasonably intelligent people. But they have this mistaken belief that they are sharks following the Great Rich Whales around and if they just hang around long enough that they'll grow into Great Rich Whales, too.

The thing is, though, they are not sharks. They are members of the middle-middle and upper-middle class. And that, my friends, makes them krill. They are the food that the Great Rich Whales eat. They pay the most taxes and buy the most goods. Consume the most fuel. Are the largest advertising demographic.

It is not in the best interests of the Great Rich Whales to have additional Great Rich Whales because it decreases the number of krill they can eat and creates additional competition for the food source.

And yet, despite all historical evidence to the contrary, many middle-class people believe that they will grow fat and sleek because the Great Rich Whales want them to.

I am angry because, due to this willful ignorance, the same Great Rich Whales are continually placed into positions of power where they make unbelievably bad and dare-I-say criminal decisions and get away with it.

[I can go off on this whole tangent about how NeoCons are all about 'free market enterprise' and yet when the big companies fall down (as big companies are wont to do in a free market enterprise when poorly managed) they use government money to bail them out and take them over.

When large institutions are government run and paid for by taxes, this is called "socialism."

But we can't use that word because it isn't in the conservative lexicon. Had Bill Clinton bailed out the airlines, or Fanny Mae, or AIG, he would have been ripped to shreds. This is not to say that I think the bailouts were the wrong thing to do - quite the opposite. However, I think that we should not have had to do this because the road by which we got here was paved with bad intentions.

Apparently I did go off on a tangent.]

Just so frustrated and helpless.

ITEM!

I am avoiding discussion with people about my mother and her impending heart surgery. It's kind of weird, but it seems that if I talk about it becomes more real.

However, everyone seems (at this point) to be optimistic. So there's that.

ITEM!

I, however, am less optimistic about the country's current case of economic botulism. So much so that I found myself awake at four a.m. worried about it, and couldn't get back to sleep until about seven.

I have no desire to repeat the Great Job Scare of 2001. I rather like my current lifestyle.

ITEM!

I am now 300 pages into Anathem and, lo and behold, there has been plot movement. Like, there have been actual things happening in the story rather than pages upon pages of mood-setting.

The book has started to catch hold of me, however, despite it's long-windedness. One thing that I think he did well is that he put all his little stories where the main character teaches geometry proofs to someone in an appendix. The main text says, "So I taught him about foo.*" and at the bottom it says "See XXXX". And if you go to XXXX, it's text that could be inserted right there (and probably was, in Draft 1). This is good: Stephenson has a habit of going into super spatter nerd mode and go into excruciating depth about esoterica such as the banking laws of Holland in the 1600s. For twenty pages.

A large part of the monk-life as described involves them engaging in philosophic dialog (though they call it "Theoric Dialog" and at one point there is a big deal about describing the difference between Theorics and Philosophers. This I find humorous, because many of the "dialogs" are pretty much lifted directly out of second and third year Plato (only attributed to fictional people from his universe).

ITEM!

This is really cool, and makes me want to build crap out of Lego again.

ITEM!

On Friday my venerable rear-projection teevee finally croaked over. It had been dying for a while - projectors going out of sync, whatever, audio glitches, etc. So on Saturday afternoon I went out and blew a chunk of change on a new LCD television.

This of course included an HD TiVo (see below), a mounting bracket, and a couple HDMI cables.

Maynard and I mounted it on Saturday night and got the most important thing hooked up to it: the 360. This was done via HDMI-1; the other things were set up component. Worked perfectly.

Until I hooked the HD TiVo into HDMI-2. At this point, neither the TiVo nor the XBox were producing audio. Since the TiVo had support for optical audio in addition to HDMI, and HDMI-1 allows for optical audio, I switched TiVo to HDMI-1 and pulled the XBox onto the HD Component cable system (not an HDMI cable).

So, wtf? Why would the HDMI inputs (all four of them - I checked) suddenly stop taking audio?

ITEM!

Man, TiVo HD and CableCARDs can eat a can of Spaghetti-os and then be sent to work in Hell's Scab Factory.

In theory, this is a cool idea: ditch the cable box; just slot a special kind of PCMCIA card into the TiVo. BAM! The TiVo becomes your cable box. Which is a neat idea, assuming it fucking works. Which, apparently, it only does about half the time. The other half of the time the cards don't sync up, or they're fried, or the TiVo software has bugs and needs an upgrade, or whatever. The intertron is filled with horror stories about this.

It seems to be a good idea but poorly tested and executed.

ITEM!

I started a new game of Grand Theft Auto IV in a hope that the game is "better" when it doesn't look like shit on a decade-old, dying television. I played it for about an hour and a half and so far it is more fun - though I'm not sure if that's because I'm at the early points, because I know the control scheme already, or because it looks so damned fine.

(Geometry Wars 2 looks utterly phenomenal in 1080p.)

ITEM!

With the removal of the Monolith TV, the furniture layout in my apartment has also changed. The new TV is above the fireplace, which pushed the couch into one of the bay windows. This has provided the downstairs with about 30 square feet of empty space.

I'm unsure what to put there. The place feels empty now.

Maybe a big table for building Lego crap.

Mom's heart catheter did not go well.

We thought it would - she's had several of these. But they found things in her heart that they cannot fix via catheter.

So she's going to have to undergo "real" heart surgery this week.

I don't know anything more than that.

My father sounded worried. He never sounds worried.

Edit: Thursday morning. Double Bypass.

Mom is in the hospital with heart problems.