the hardest part is things already said 
  getting better, worse, i can not tell  
why do good things never wanna stay?
   some things you lose, some things you give away 
--Sleater Kinney




It’s late... Hotel has rolled up its streets for the evening though the occasional somnambulist rolls back home with engines growling and prowling-- then leaving nothing but a fading doppelgänger of itself behind ‘til the evening’s empty ambiance dissipates it further and night returns, silent and mysterious.

So, I stay awake a bit, with some blues coming from a blues dedicated satellite station that’s part of my cable T.V. package. Love the station, but the Special Winter Watchers Package is not worth the monthly bill... too many sequels to mediocre films that weren’t all that good the first time around and station after station of old movies that no longer feel like a 3 a.m. find worthy of taping... two channels of Mexican novellas, two Armenian stations where everyone still seems keen on the whole moving pictures concept, a Japanese station that changes to a Chinese station mid-way through the day, all day/all night 24-hour news and punditry circuses, cooking shows that have lost their flavor, regular T.V... the whole wide assortment of crap just the way Springsteen described it... save for the Satellite radio channels, which are almost worth the price of the ridiculous Special Winter Watchers Package... and The Soprano’s ain’t on again ‘til Spring.

No war news anymore... got over saturated with information on everything Afghani or Anthrax-y. No news really is good news nowadays.

So, if not my Raoul Duke take on WWII-1/2, I remain in a conundrum as far as this blog (journal, napkin, bathroom wall) goes. ‘Cause if I write the truth, it’ll be inadvertently destructive... to others and then to me. Of course, I can always heed the advice of Harlan Ellison, that yes, indeed! writers are paid liars (though in this case, I’m not writing for... hell... am I writing at all?)

All I have in my head anyway is the sensations of a truly wonderful day I’d experienced, oh... days ago; though as days go, it seems as if months have passed. That’s how my memories have always worked-- they become transparent and stretched and lose the outlines of the reality they once were to become blurred and iconographic more than detailed and specific. They end up as graphic art for the mind... a slide show of greatest hits and complete misses.

So, as Leonard Cohen once said, I can’t forget, but I don’t remember what.

Just a lazy morning visit from a dear and lifelong friend-- we venture out into Hotel and its surroundings where I become an urban vintner, then we drive onward to a wine lubricated lunch, then Further (as that ol' bus says) and further away from reality we go, meandering about Los Angeles in bliss and total exhilaration, coming, finally, to a blue room and a blue mood, whereupon things get a little blue and then the evening unravels giddily into nothing but memory and memory and fading memory that turns into vibrant graphics in the brain, iconic moments to dwell upon and get lost in whenever possible.

So, the weather finally cools in Hotel, CA. Autumn, or what passes for it in a desert, is upon its sleepy citizens. Soon, maybe the leaves might fall in a brown clump, like low desert snow, a brown muck heralding a new season or reasonable facsimile thereof. It’s time to start missing and losing things, and time to get lost and go missing.

Xian

Hotel, California is awfully warm tonight... the whole city seems thick and stagnant, and it’s October. Shouldn’t they change the calendar around for So.Cal’s sake? We’re having summer now, after having a long mild spring that wandered into August. September got warmer and October is feeling downright hot, or maybe it’s just that I’m inside Sanctuary with those “Casablanca” fans making the heat flutter around my body.

More anthrax today. Rock on!

Today they discovered it in a post office in Trenton, N.J. where the white powder boogie made its way to NYC, Florida and points West.

I should be afraid, but I’d rather be sitting in a cool theater watching David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. But I’m not doing that at all. Rather, I spent two hours in front of the home theater watching pundits ponder platitudes on everything from the anthrax scare (Tipper Gore’s heart be stilled... it ain’t just a heavy metal band anymore) to India (nuclear power) starting up artillery shelling against Pakistan (nuclear power, home of the “Islamic Bomb”) over the “disputed Kashmir region.” Kashmir used to be a really good Zeppelin song once. And on and on the news goes... from a toddler with anthrax to the current state of mind of Osama bin Laden (or, as FOXNews spins it, “Usama bin Ladin” or somesuch... I’ve the feeling Roger Ailes wishes Mu'ammar Qadhafi (or Kadhaffi, or Moammar or whatever) was still a powerful cult of personality, but it just ain’t so... The rest of us are on a different page of the Various Spellings Dictionary, and we pick, overwhelmingly, Osama bin fucking Laden), suffice to say, Osama is still crazy and we’re still bombing the same nothing in Khandahar or Kabul or Jalalalalalalalabad, when we should be dropping a fuel-air bomb (as strong as a nuke, but with no radiation and half the calories) right down into the caves of the Khyber Pass and Hindu Kush (granted, the mere mention of Hindu Kush used to make me crave a bongload, now it’s a place where we might either screw things up royally, or blow the Taliban to Kingdom Come and all the virgins they could possibly want at one sitting). Fuel-air bomb... dowses the air with a fuel mixture which mixes with oxygen and saturates a wide-area radius in the fuel oxygen mixture, sucks the life out of everything in range as the blast occurs, ignites the fuel/oxygen mixture which combusts instantaneously and, with high pressure heat and a rather large fireball, proceeds to blow organic matter to soot over a wide--area radius. If dropped within the valleys of the mountainous Northern Afghanistan region it would have the force of impact of those kinds of Hollywood explosions that occur in confined areas. Think the airshaft explosion in Aliens only on a much wider scale.

Now I’m no “from my cold, dead hands” Jane’s nut with a hard-on for military hardware, but ever since I saw the rather lame movie Outbreak (which screwed-up a perfectly good book, “The Hot Zone”), I’ve been interested in this equivalent of a small, tactical nuke. It appears, in real life, to fuck things up rather well minus the repercussions of radiation and bad P.R. But why can we seemingly not utilize it before sending in ground troops/Special Forces? Only your hairdresser knows for sure. With nil-levels of radiation it makes the perfect gift to send any religious fanatic with a grudge against freedom and liberty (and our presence in Saudi Arabia... heh heh). Just drop, “smoke ‘em out” as George W. sez, and then run in troops to savage and decimate a highly demoralized and tattered Taliban force. Heck... we might even get bin Laden.

Anywho, that’s the war. Got Anthrax?

It’s warm at Sanctuary Central tonight... too warm for this time of year, too warm for my tastes... At least too warm without frontal nudity involved. Feels like someone done dropped a fuel-air bomb on me. I crave a New England autumn, I crave a chilly breeze, I crave winter... but not a nuclear one.

Xian

Today is the first day of the rest of my blog. This is my blog. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

Another Sunday morning, sitting in front of the news shows (vacillating between CNN and FOXNews), it’s getting monotonous, but I keep them on in the background... the war report. So that’s it then... this is my war journal, as I sit in Hotel, CA., home of the Hotel Eagles (GO EAGLES!) and a laid back community of dark, desert highways and Tiffany-twisted women. Our stop signs say STOP, but our id impulses say GO...


Maybe I won’t bother with the war at all, I myself support beating back a medieval, totalitarian people who wish to impose their will upon me. But which side to choose!! I joke of course, but we’re frequently as backward looking (take the War on Drugs for example... just where does the mindset come from that says soft drugs like marijuana should be illegal? That people shouldn't privately enjoy and perhaps use pot responsibly, as they do alcohol, and perhaps by repealing this particular prohibition, freedom and liberty will taste just a little sweeter because the whiff of hypocrisy will have disappeared). But of course, I support our country and our ideals, dreams and values. I’d have it no other way, and often told myself throughout most of my last 32 years that if an enemy ever touched our shores (stormin’ the beaches of Zuma and Malibu, we will fight them and never never never give in!) I’d fight for our land and the aforementioned principals, the very foundation for who we our and how we view ourselves in relation to the rest of the world... although sometimes that view gets sullied by the actions of our government or our own people, I still believe in what our Founders intended for us... self-government, liberation from the tyranny of religion and the occasional illogical despot or demagogue.

The Taliban represents everything I can’t stand about the Southern Baptist Convention and some of the more medieval notions the Catholic Church clings to (having been a lapsed Catholic and having lapsed from being a Christmas/Easter Catholic, I annulled myself from the Papal faith, considered what the Protestant Church had to offer, considered it all lacking in one regard or another in respect to reason and my personal empirical experiences.

The Taliban is such a far reach away from the concepts of liberty and freedom, that it made the WTC, Pentagon and Pittsburgh-area tragedies all the more painful and frightening for me. Trust me, I’m not a flag-waving, jingoistic rah-rah normally. Normally, I’m ideologically opposed to many of the things our Government does to appease various groups who elect them... our Constitution suffers dramatically as it’s chipped away from all sides, be they Conservative or Liberal or somewhere in between.

Since 911, I’ve taken up to flying a flag from the antenna of my car as I wind my way around the streets of Hotel and nearby Los Angeles.

I’m tired though, of a few things, but not of flag-waving just yet (mostly tired of getting emails forwarded from people that haven’t quite figured out how to be ‘Netiquettely Skeptical about things they see, hear or read online; to wit, I offer the constant emails I was getting about candlelight vigils that the Space Shuttle would happily take a picture of... just the right kinda stuff those Space Shuttle folks are... only it was a hoax, of course. Now those funky hoax emails have changed over from pics of the WTC guy on the observatory deck prior to the impact of the first plane and the surfing survivors of WTC #2 (riding metal beams right to the ground, yeah... sure... physics) to emails about anthrax scares and mall closings come Halloween. Funcity.

The other distressing thing is “America Strikes Back,” which I assure you sounds to an entire generation or two of “Star Wars” fanatics like we’re the bad guy... the Empire that will over power the rebels and make them pay for stealing the plans to yet another physically and cosmologically impossible Death Star. We will make them pay-- this time! They will not escape! You are with us, or you are against us (which actually sounds like something Clint Eastwood would say in a Dirty Harry film, but just add the breathmask and, voilá! You’ve got Darth!).

Of course, we are fighting the Phantom Menace in many ways, so the networks might have a valid point, graphically speaking.

So, this war, like the last war, looks like it will be vicariously lived through television’s power to entertain... though this time it might seem like reality television with the threat hitting our shores. I have no doubt we will destroy the terror networks, and I know where doin’ the right thing, something we make a lot of pretense and sound and thunder and lightening about, but don’t often succeed in reaching, especially when it’s a front for something else.


Hotel, CA has sunshine, and it beckons, so I must go... off to hit the road, smoke some colitas... take in the view.

Xian