Squublog

I am completely can't believe anything like possible is the claims expressed by the postings I've just read surrounining the most horriblendous piece of BEST FUCKIGN SONG EVER I've just been hearing for a while. Here, so to boot:

Ramadan,
Ramadan,
lots of praying
With no breakfast!

Ramadan,
so much fun,
do all your shopping
at Wal-Mart!

This is not only not possibly what it tried to be, but better than anything it didn't tried to be. It's smearing me with it.

Oh, what is this? The Most Unwanted Song, by once-Russian (still Russian? (not Rush)) dudes Komar & Melamid, some artists who did (do?) Art. art. Art?

Needn't shall I go through the specificis. I'm not sure what the deal with where that link is is, the song link, I mean, that you're maybe (I hope) hearinging, but hopefully it'll be there when you're here reading this. This piece of musicsong, all 22-almost minutes of it, is fucking goddamn fucking f-fucking brilliant. I don't think there are cussing in it, though. Unlike this is. The methodology that I'm not going into about how this song was created by the musician (who wasn't the artists who conceived of it,) involved polling and figuring out what people most hated to hear. But seriously, that couldn't have actually made somebody think everybody'd hate this thing. How could everybody hate this thing?

My mainly complaint: not long enough. Seriously. However they figured out that 22 minutes was exactly the long of the worst horrible for most people (the survey says!?) they should've fudged that up a little so this would fill a whole album instead of just apparently half of one, or maybe since it was... I can't.

I at least in partially hope that some of my readers might not have already seen tell hear of this elseway. DaveX and your late-into-the-early: it's to be this for hearing, at very least yours. Right.

It's hard to tell how far from I think it's "novelty," but there's enough great amidst the makes-me-laughing for me to consider it to be more than that.

Here are various places where this was/is being linked/talked about. I found it first on Boing Boing, then...
this here at arts journal?
and this here at musicology and
this here at design observer.

This will be unfocused or not, rambling, just. If you're a blogger or someone who reads blogs regularly, you may have noticed this. First, if you're a blog reader, without a blog of your own, do you read comments on blogs? I don't get many here, so I don't really have this problem I'm talking about. But as a reader of blogs and their comments, I often notice an irritating tendency of people to post comments that completely ignore all preceding comments.

Of course there are valid reasons for this happening. Some blogs have delays in posting comments. So a lot of people might comment before the comments show up for anybody to read.

Still, many of them aren't like that. A recent example: on this post on Atheist Revolution, the blogger (VJack) is talking about a letter from an atheist-hater to a different blog. In the post, VJack asks whether this could be some kind of spoof site. By the third response in the comments, someone is indicating that the site is a parody site. But at least a few subsequent comments indicate that the commenters weren't paying any attention to the previous comments.

That post is far from being the best example of this. I regularly see much worse, posts with upwards of 50 comments, half of them saying something identical to what was clearly said in the first comment in the thread.

I think this rant is a weird way of my getting around to wondering about what people are doing when they blog, and what people are doing when they comment on other blogs.

For me sometimes it's obvious: when I'm commenting on someone else's post, I'm blogging without having the time or wherewithal to do it properly. Reading and commenting on someone else's post is easier than hatching whole posts of my own, especially more recently when I'm low on time and very often feel as if I've burned through my reserve of personal topics-of-interest. (Present post, of course, excluded. I've been saving up the "blog about blog comments" post for years now, waiting for just the right moment to spring it on a stunned public.)

But still, very often when I read a post that for whatever reason strongly pushes me to comment, the first thing I do is to read previous comments on the post. If I find that someone else has already made my point, most of the burning urge to talk about it evaporates. Reminds me of an XKCD comic - Duty Calls that made the rounds not long ago (and since in today's market you're not a fresh, trendy blog if you don't link to that particular comic strip, it's about time I start.)

Speaking of which: lately I've been in a few "arguments." (At 2Blowhards here and here, and maybe some others, plus this particularly confounding argument at the Universal Church of Cosmic Uncertainty, which actually isn't that at all anymore but has just recently been re-launched with the name Mike Wilson.) It's certainly never a surprise to me when I get into an argument in a comment thread, as by nature I'm at least one third troll, although it is still disappointing when it's not so much an argument of substance as name calling and "nuh-uh, YOU are!"ing. Not that I probably haven't been guilty of the same kind of bullshit myself. In one of those 2Blowhards threads in fact Michael Blowhard sort of nailed something about me fairly well - "Treating that gumbo of highly-charged stuff as an attempt at argument-making is what strikes me as a little off." Of course without context that's pretty vague. Basically I'll argue with anything, and that IS a little off. Even if someone's obviously not interested in a rational debate, I'll act as if he is. In this case, though, I'm still not certain about Michael's take on the commenter I was "debating" (and I'll be the first to admit that my role in this particular debate has never been world-class-logician material.) But either way, it was a good observation about my own personality and just why that XKCD comic hit me right in the nuts when I first saw it.

So back to it -- why is it that some people do that drive-by thing, reading a post and then spewing out a comment without bothering to pay attention to the rest of the comments? It's a little like standing in a mall with a group of friends talking for half an hour about something and having some loudmouth walk by and shout out, "No, you idiot, you're all wrong," and then just continue on his merry way, when you were merely quoting someone else and that guy walking by clearly couldn't have heard the frame for the story you were telling and so had no point of reference from which to argue at all. Discourse in blog comment threads can be extremely interesting and thought-provoking. In fact recently I haven't been commenting on the 2Blowhards posts themselves so much as commenting on other comments (which actually is probably sometimes more annoying to bloggers than the drive-by stuff.) But the discourse falls down a rung or two when the threads get overly long and at least half of the commenters are just popping in to say something that's already been said, better, by someone else.

Is it wrong to be in love with a robot?

Found that on Cardhouse. It plays music. I encourage even the link-clicking-shy persons to check it out. I really, really, really wish I built that thing.

*Updated*

There have been times when I've stumbled into the basement and found explosions of molded plastics, circuit boards, solder and wire. Kingo does Circuit Bending the way we both do most everything: partway. For the uninitiated who don't want to follow that link, circuit bending is breaking electronic sound-making gizmos so that they do something they weren't really intended to do. Sometimes it's just a matter of short-circuiting circuit boards with wire; but it can be more complex. Kingo does it so that Halaka can sound more broken than they already do.

My cell phone's ring tone is a short sample of a circuit bent keyboard doing one of the things it does. (By request for DaveX, the ringtone is now here.) When we were discussing selling our house with our Realtor in Germantown, that phone rang and the Realtor cocked his head to the side and looked around like a confused dog. "Is that your... phone?" he asked me. When I told him that it was, he said, "It sounds like it's broken."

There's an article from the New York Times (found through Kottke,org) that talks about Frontotemporal Dementia, a brain disease that has been found, at times, to cause its sufferers to become extra-ly creative. (I'm finding that I don't like any way of wording this that I can come up with. It strikes me that this is more about being differently creative than becoming creative; and I've got issues (as always) with comparing one person's creativity to another in any meaningful way, so saying "more creative" doesn't really work for me.)

The disease is something wherein one part of the brain becomes screwed up, and another part therefore takes over some of the roles previously played by the atrophying part. New connections are made. Weirdness comes out.

Sometimes circuit bending of a toy can happen by accident (accidental short circuit -- even low batteries can cause circuit-bent-like output,) and other times it's done on purpose. I'm wondering if anybody's ever tried circuit bending their own brain to try to change creativity. Maybe someday?

So it was January 21, 2008, and one Taleswapper asked me a question in response to my post wherein I'd followed his meme and invited my readers to ask me stuff.

That's not my earliest memory, and it's not the point in my life where everything started to go wrong. It may possibly be the point in my life when everything continued to go the way it had started to go some time ago, or it may not have. It's hard to say. What I can definitely say is that I wasn't sure then how to answer that question, I wasn't sure if I wanted to, I wasn't sure if I could give it the time it deserved in the case that I did want to, and I wasn't sure what I had thought I'd get out of saying I'd do this thing.

What I also know is that it's Friday night, it's 11:30, I'm down here in my basement (the new basement, not the old basement, though the new basement is fairly old, and I've had access to it for probably half a year now, so it's really not new in any respect,) and I'm very much not doing what I keep telling myself I'm going to do down here late at night, which is to wake Kingo the fuck up and tell him there's a lot of shit that needs to be done before August 8, 2008.

Basements are stifling. I have loved basements in my life. But basements are fucking stifling. Spending more than a decade having as your primary lyrical outlet some digital machine or other where black letters appear as if by magic on a white background, at the prompting of your fidgeting fingers somewhere barely within your line of vision as you stare at those letters: there comes a time when the shit (even when sometimes it would be perfectly alright if it were in fact shit, and self-consciously so,) will not flow. (FUCK NO THIS ISN'T ANOTHER ONE OF THESE POSTS. SERIOUSLY. FUCK.)

There's the computer that belongs to the family of one of my wife's sisters, and it's got the smitfraud.c virus/spyware/shithole on it, and I've had it for at least a month, and I'm letting CounterSpy try to clean it up right now, even though I know it won't because there are steps that need to be taken that are complicated and annoying and it took a week of solid fuckery when my work laptop had that same infection.

When I was a boy, as I've mentioned before, the first home I lived in that I can remember was a house that is now below me but very near by. Astoundingly nearby. There are memories of that house and this neighborhood, but they do not connect very well to real geography. Still, some of the memories are solid and I trust that they are, to some extent, grounded in some kind of fact.

I do not have a good memory. I think I say this a lot. I'm not old enough for this to be a sign of age; I'm fairly certain I've always had this problem, though honestly (not joking) I can't remember. To me I barely know what form a memory like that might take: knowing whether one has always been a certain way. You'd need to have specific examples, maybe, or counter-examples. For example, maybe I'd remember that when I was in my 20s I remembered everything about my teens. But that doesn't even make sense to me.

I've never been able to sort the memories from my life in that neighborhood into order. I've never been able to figure out which things I remember because they happened to me, and which I remember because someone told me they happened to me and so I imagined how they might have seemed to me were I to remember them. So the memory I'm going to talk about is possibly not the first, and possibly not very accurate, and possibly more than one incident merged together, but it's something that must've happened.

There's a bridge that crosses the interstate at the end of the neighborhood down there. There's a sidewalk on the bridge, and there's a chain-link fence along the sides of the bridge. It's summer. There's something of the 4th of July in it, but it's hard for me to decipher whether this was on the 4th of July. For a long time I've thought that no, it couldn't have been, because this memory involves only my father and I, and how could it just be us doing something on that holiday? Where was my mother, and my younger brother?

But maybe all the time stretching between now and then have added some recognition. My father is enamored of his grandchildren. He's got three of them now, two by my brother and one by me. My brother lives over two hours away, and so my father doesn't see those kids as much as he'd surely like to. He's lately been seeing my daughter practically every weekend. And what he does with her, what he always does with her, is to take her outside. They go for walks. She's just 16 months old now, and she walks, but sometimes he surely carries her, as do I when I walk with her. My mother doesn't usually go with them. In fact when I'm there she'll make snarky comments about it: he's always got to be taking her outside! Why does he always have to take her outside!

So then the story makes more sense to me now. Mom stayed home with the baby, dad went for a walk. Maybe the baby would be scared by fireworks, even though from this neighborhood they'd be kind of small and distant, not so loud. We walked to that bridge and he held me up, with my legs around his waist, the way we carry my daughter now. If there were fireworks I barely remember them, or I think I barely remember them.

But what there was: he had a white, plastic ball. Probably a whiffle ball. By holding that ball in the air and letting the streetlights play along the side of it, he explained to me what the moon was, how it was that we could see it, how the sun's light reflected from it and down to us, and how it orbited the Earth, upon which we were standing. He might've talked about the moon always keeping the same side toward us.

I could've been less than two years old! It's hard to know. If so my brother wasn't born yet, and maybe my mother was pregnant. Maybe though I was older, 2 or 3, and he was still holding me up like that to see the fireworks in the distance, or to see the moon. He probably enjoyed taking me out for walks like that.

What does it say about me that I remember that? It might say more about the subject matter, the gravity of it, maybe my dad's seriousness when he explained it, than it says anything about me. Then again, things like planets and the moon have always held a fascination for me, and maybe they did so even then, and maybe even then I was excited to get to learn such a thing.

Of course I don't think I could've possibly been under 2. It's not that I put it past my dad to explain something complex like that to someone as young as my daughter is now; he tells her a lot of things that I doubt she really understands (as do I.) But I can't imagine I'd have known enough at that age to form a memory like this.

Sarah also asked me some questions, and here's one of them:

Was there some specific epiphany that made you realize you're an atheist?

When I have epiphanies, I spend a few minutes marveling at them, then a few minutes thinking how great it'd be if I had something to write with, then maybe 30 seconds looking under something for a pen or a pad, then I think again about what I've just discovered and think, "eh, really?" It's sort of like I get high for 5 minutes at a time at random times during the day, and, being high, I discover the most profound things about the universe, and then I tell them to my friend, except that friend is just the more-sober version of myself, five minutes ago (hey there, buddy,) and he says, "No, that's fucking dumb. Eat another cheeto."

I've called myself agnostic for a long time. I think at some point in my early or mid teens I probably found out about that word and what it meant and started trying to figure out how anybody wasn't that. My flawed memory tells me that I've had a lifelong struggle with "faith" - and I never could make it make any sense. I'm an argumentative person by nature; and I instinctively play devil's advocate anytime I'm near a discussion with multiple viewpoints. In questions of religion, this trait is always right there for me. A person can't say, "I know there's a god," without me asking, "how?", and a person can't say, "God says we can't eat meat on Fridays during Lent," without me saying, "But other people say that God says we can't eat any meat at all, ever. How do you know you're right and they're wrong, if neither of you have any evidence?"

I thought that way so much growing up that it sounds trite and ridiculous to me now. There are answers like god is talking to everyone but their own minds filter what he's saying so that they hear him differently. But of course that devil's advocate still has to ask, "How do you know that the "filter" isn't just the imagination, making up the voice in the first place?" There's no answer to these questions based on evidence, and that's fine with some people, but no different from other late-night universal epiphanies that turn out not to really mean anything when considered by the light of day.

It was much more recently that I started self-identifying as an atheist. It was probably just as semantic as my original identification as agnostic. I kept spinning through these words: I don't know if there's a god, if there's a god he can come and introduce himself, that'd be fine, but I certainly don't have any reason to think that'll happen. I don't believe that'll happen. I don't believe there's a god. That's not me making the assertion that there is no god. It's me saying I don't believe there's a god, and I will not believe there's a god until there's a solid case for it."

Well, no, I didn't spin through those exact words. But I thought about them, and words like them, and I thought about the way "atheist" didn't really mean what maybe I'd once thought it meant, and that "agnostic" doesn't mean to most people what it means when I use it to describe myself, and I figured I might as well be clear about at least one thing.

If I've had any one pivotal moment in my conviction that I'm not simply a theist trying to play word games, it came when I was in the hospital with my wife, holding my daughter, when I feared that my wife might die in her hospital bed. What went through me is a little hard to describe, but I was up against the big questions and I was scrabbling through my toolkit trying to find a way to deal with them. One of the obvious tools that came out of my Catholic upbringing was prayer. "Say a prayer for her, for this," I thought.

"Huh?" I immediately responded. "Why?"

It came clear then that I didn't want to try fooling myself. And in that recognition is the implicit recognition that what I really think prayer is is self-deception.

The irony there is that I don't think that's a categorically bad thing. If I had been able to say a prayer, chant something, meditate, cast a spell, and have that calm me down and comfort me in a situation where there was really nothing good coming from my thinking about vast chasms of empty nothing, then I'd be glad for that.

I think there's a struggle for faith that is not at all what those words mean to me. The struggle may be nothing more than to shut up that arguing guy, that math guy, that guy that keeps saying, "yes, if a = b and b = c then a = c, but b has not been shown to equal c, no matter how much you want it to." Shutting that guy up happens in a lot of ways: some people pray, some meditate, some chant... some try to wake the arguing guy up in the middle of his usual sleep pattern and force him to start writing whatever comes out as fast as he can. Maybe a lot of people really need to have an analogous solution to this "problem," even if "a lot of people" doesn't mean everybody.

At any rate there's a paradox in there, and I think about it a lot. Oddly my head sees it as almost the same paradox I kept thinking about around the time of the last election: What if Bush had to lie to get us to go to war, and going to war was the right thing?

I'm really not turning this political, that's not my point. My point is that I see this paradox a lot and I've never tried to figure out if it has a name. What if for prayer to be an effective way to shut off the analytical mind, the analytical mind has to be shut off enough that it does not over-analyze the foundation of prayer? (There's another one of these related to voting but I can't right now get it to even sound like anything.)

A data paradox: The system contains enough data that, if all of it were fully considered, the system would no long work correctly.

Gah. It's late. Shut up.

Haven't done this in a long time. My webstats used to be a source of much amusement for me. Somewhere though most of the hits starting being referrer spam, and I stopped paying attention.

Still, from time to time it's nice to see how people are finding squub (or one of the other sites hosted under it) through search engines.

I'm gonna utilize this after-the-jump thing that I don't really use usually due to a high volume of things you probably don't want your kids to read over your shoulder...

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Followed a link from Kottke.org to Top Ten Artists Suffering The Lindsey Buckingham Paradox on a blog called Not too Crazy. Had to do it, since it's got Buckingham right there in the title. I'm a big fan of his, both as a guiding-force/producer/songwriter/guitarist/singer for Fleetwood Mac and as a solo artist. And I'm basically in agreement about the fact that his work as a solo artist rarely (if ever) lives up to the potential exhibited by his work with Fleetwood Mac. Basically.

Trouble is, I'm suspicious of anything that discusses the relative artistic merits of a person's works. As an example of why: the list in that post includes Sting. Now I'm not big fan of his, and I'm not a huge Police fan either. But there's no doubt in my mind that the music created by Sting as a solo artist is not possibly quantifiably not-as-good as the music created by the band. A lot of it's very different, to be sure, but comparing the two is an apples-and-oranges thing.

With Lindsey it's a little more difficult to argue that the music he produces on his own isn't just less-good, overall, than the Fleetwood Mac stuff. The trouble here is that Lindsey's released just 4 solo albums since he started doing solo stuff in the 80s. When I got his Go Insane album on cassette in the mid-80s it blew me away. For a long time. It sounds nothing like Fleetwood Mac, so there's that apples-and-oranges thing, but it also sounds much more dated-to-the-80s than any Mac stuff has ever sounded dated to me. Since I fell in love with the record when I was fairly young, I've got no way to be objective about it now (in addition to the fact that I've got no idea how to dig up the cassette copy of it, and I've never downloaded it/bought a CD/etc,) but at any rate it was great to me then, and I probably listened to it as much as or more than any of the Mac cassettes I loved at the time.

Sometime there I also bought Law and Order on cassette. That one I didn't think much of, though it had its moments. It basically sounded like Buckingham was going for a style that I wasn't interested in. In hindsight I've enjoyed that one over the years a bit more than I did at first, and while part of that's surely nostalgia, some of it's because my tastes have changed and I've to some extent caught up with what he was trying to do.

The Fleetwood Mac album that came out shortly after that first solo record, Mirage, is a very good indicator of what I think is probably going on with this "Paradox," at least in this case. Lindsey is a better producer than he is a songwriter. That's not to say that he isn't a fantastic songwriter - because I certainly think he is. But he strikes me as being the kind of fantastic songwriter who really has to work for it, and who isn't entirely consistent even while releasing things at such a slow pace. I suspect (though I could be miles off,) that he spends more time crafting his songs after they're written than he does writing them in the first place. The memorable songs on Mirage (for me, anyway,) are none of them songs Buckingham wrote. The songs on that album that he did write are in a similar vein to the material on Law and Order, and by the time they created Mirage he'd probably already spread his own material pretty thin. Songs like "Gypsy" and "Hold Me" more or less hold that record together; they're brilliantly produced and put together, and written by the other writers in the band. As a producer on other peoples' songs, he has a chance to work with songs that are great as written, and to spend all that fiddle-around-in-the-studio energy making them shine.

It's interesting to compare Buckingham to his counterpart, Stevie Nicks. As a solo artist she's certainly had more success, and she's also had more output. But does any of it hold up to the things she's done with Fleetwood Mac? I'd say not quite, though I'll admit that that's going to be a taste thing. Part of the difference here is that when she does "solo" records, she's really not solo. She works with good collaborators, for the most part. The problem with that, though, is that I don't think any of those collaborators are as brilliant as Buckingham, as musicians or as producers.

His third solo release, in the early 90s, Out of the Cradle, which I bought on CD right when it came out (or close to it) was a bit of a disappointment for me. It had some great stuff, great production and sounded great, but at least half of the songs never caught me in a very good way. Still, I listened to it (and still do, on occasion,) and enjoyed it. The stand-out tracks (like "Don't Look Down", "Wrong", and "This is the Time") are fantastic, but for me the bulk of the material suffers from the same whatever-kind-of-music-this-is-ain't-what-I-wanna-hear problem that I had with Law and Order.

My big argument on this score is a result of his most recent solo record, Under the Skin. I love this record. Stylistically he's in territory that I enjoy a lot - acoustic rock, not so much that sort of Adult Contemporary-ish thing he kept bumping up against on Law and Order and Out of the Cradle. It's a good album. Still, the standout tracks are so good that it's obvious that there's still a consistency problem. "Shut us Down" is probably one of the best songs he's written, be it for solo release or with Fleetwood Mac.

Maybe he's best when he really focuses on a song. He wrote/produced/performed the standout soundtrack song from National Lampoon's Vacation, "Holiday Road." This "Shut us Down" track was in the movie Elizabethtown. Maybe his best songs stand out more than his albums.

Basically I think there's a very broad "paradox" going on here. Rock bands are awesome. The best bands (in my opinion, obviously) are very often those wherein the individual members have so much talent that in the process of tearing each other apart to create an album there's very little left but great songs. Think Genesis, The Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, The Eagles... even when their members have great success as solo artists, there's something lost in them having free reign with their material.

Of course I'm never able to say anything unequivocally: If there's something lost in these people going solo, there's something else gained. Some of the best songs by solo performers might, for whatever reason, have never made it past the thrashing editing that happens in being part of a band. For me as a music fan, I like to hear everything my favorite artists create. I don't trust their bands or their producers to decide what's "good" and what isn't. I don't even trust the artists themselves to decide that. I think it's absolutely idiotic that Axl is still trying to "finish" Chinese Democracy. Some of the songs being pruned away could turn out to be the ones I'd really like to hear. And of course it's all about me.

(An exclusive debate you won't want to read anywhere else. Or here, even.)


Hilary: I am very impressed with myself.

Obama: I hope.

John McCain: I am really old.

Hilary: I'm not going to be able to agree with that. I have years of experience.

John McCain: I was a POW, I was tortured, and I'm really old.

Obama: America hopes!

John McCain: Hogwash.

Hilary: This country needs more than empty platitudes.

Obama: I can't bowl at all, really.

John McCain: Not only am I really very old, I'm also a white man. I fought in the war.

Hilary: I dodged exploding children in Rwanda.

John McCain: Hogwash.

Obama: I can feed a calf out of a bottle, but I really can't bowl.

Hilary: They were blowing up all around me. Barrack Obama has no idea how to pick up a telephone after midnight. I'd be willing to bet that even if it's just after 10pm he wouldn't know how to answer a telephone.

John McCain: We didn't have telephones back in my day. You bunch of communists.

Obama: Yes we can!

Hilary: Isn't that a David Crosby album?

Obama: No, it's not. Not even close.

John McCain: Bill Cosby? You think Bill Cosby's been in a Turkish prison?

Obama: America hopes!

Hilary: Remember that time when I was being attacked by snipers?

John McCain: They named the McChicken Sandwich after me! I have experience! They could roll you two kids up together in a ball and you'd still have less experience than me! Hundreds of years!

Hilary: Is that your age or how long you want us to stay in Iraq?

Howard Dean: YeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeArrrrrrrrrrrghhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!

Obama: What the hell? Oh, I mean, my grandmother is very, very white.

Hilary: How'd he get in... is this in the script?

John McCain: We will stay in Iraq as long as it takes.

Obama: I'm the only person in America who didn't support this war right from the start.

Hilary: You didn't even HAVE a phone when we started this war. What would you know then about answering it at 3 in the morning.

Obama: I gave a speech. In Chicago. Nobody recorded it. That's the last time in America that anybody was able to say anything and not have it recorded on somebody's cell phone.

John McCain: Cell? Cell? You think you know about a cell? Try a five by five concrete bunker on for size. For five years.

Obama: America hopes you know what a cell phone is.

Hilary: My teeth are extraordinary. You don't even have teeth at three in the morning.

*Pause*

Obama: Oh, you were talking about me? I thought you were talking about Senator McCain.

Bill Clinton: *laughing* I used to drunk-call Hillary all the time at three in the morning. Man she hated that.

John McCain: I have a lot of teeth! I'm old and I still have teeth.

Bill Clinton: Sometimes Monica used her teeth just a little too much, if you know what I mean.

Hilary: Seriously, Bill. Jesus Christ. wtf?

You: "What are you doing this coming weekend?"

I: "You mean the one starting this friday, or the one after that?"

You: "Starting this Friday."

I: "That's next weekend."

You: "No, that'd be the weekend after this coming weekend."

I: "Then what's 'this weekend'?"

You: "That's the one we just had."

I: "I thought it's the one we're about to have."

You: "No, that's this coming weekend."

I: "Then what's 'last weekend'?"

You: "Last weekend is the one before the one we just had."

I: "That's two weekends ago! What do you call the one we just had?"

You: "I told you, that's 'this weekend'."

I: "How can 'this weekend' be over? That's... isn't it 'this past weekend'?"

You: "That too."

It's 31 days into March. Monday, Monday. My vacation rotted on the thing. It was fun, some of it, most, all, away from the work, out in the not this, functioning differently. But it's over and I fell right back into the nightmare that is being-behind-at-work, and so far this morning I've yet to be able to get my neck around what it needs to be around in order for me to be a functional member of working society again. There's too much.

Vacation is supposed to do something for that, isn't it? And it wasn't even a particularly stressful vacation. We didn't have too many things planned and not enough time to do them. We got sleep. We had fun. All the same, Monday has clamped down right on my testicles and won't let go. Ouch. Quit it.

Of course because of all that, even this little bit of time spent blogging is too much, and there's no room for talking about the substance of the vacation.