America has become a phobocracy.

Michael Chabon, who writes books for a living and who I associate with Pittsburgh, on
Obama's candidacy

The point of Obama's candidacy is that the damaged state of American democracy is not the fault of George W. Bush and his minions, the corporate-controlled media, the insurance industry, the oil industry, lobbyists, terrorists, illegal immigrants or Satan. The point is that this mess is our fault. We let in the serpents and liars, we exchanged shining ideals for a handful of nails and some two-by-fours, and we did it by resorting to the simplest, deepest-seated and readiest method we possess as human beings for trying to make sense of the world: through our fear. America has become a phobocracy.

Since I started talking and writing about Obama I have come to see that this ruling fear, and nothing else, lies at the back of every objection or reservation people raise or harbor regarding the man and his candidacy.

SW but not x SW

Sometimes I’m sitting in bed reading when it becomes obvious how thin the walls of my apartment are. The exuberant sounds of my neighbor and whoever her friend is on that particular nght quite quickly make it necessary to head to the couch (if sleep is close) or sit here at the computer, awash in idle speculation as to how today may fit into the larger scheme of larger schemes.

1) I would like to travel somewhere with exotic fruits. I met some people from Hawaii while in Phoenix last week and they were quite adamant about access to fruits. Later that night I watched a group of young Goths stand next to a street minister with a megaphone and attempt to shout him down. One had a fairly Nordic looking helmet, made of tin foil and adorned with Magic Marker statements of his love for Beezlebub, affixed to his head. The minister was more New Testament than Old, albeit with a strange fixation on the sinfulness of pet owners who neglected their pets. I ate pineapple and passed on margaritas – one highlight was spent at a dive bar with the previous night’s cabdriver, a 50 odd something ex-Navy man who said he was a part-time cabbie and a part-time drunk and who had rigged up a CPU monitor on his passenger seat with what looked to be a GPS system circa 1984. I kept thinking of Mathew Broderick and the movie War Games, but the navy guy told good stories and I had had more than my fair share of the Pac-10 hormonal debauchery that is Tempe’s college age district, so the stale peanuts and two $2 diesels were the perfect segue to returning to the hotel and staring out the window at the palm trees.

2) I would like to read Maximum City. I recently purchased all non-Catcher in the Rye related salinger books, or at least three of them (are there more?). I am not sure what kind of course of action this foretells. I suspect the neighbors are now basking in post-coital sleep (I’ve been switching from this to “Seymour: An Introduction” for the last hour) and so now sign off.

i'll show you my inbox, if you show me yours

I very much dislike bringing the white box of technology on which I type this out into the wider world, in part because I may drop it or be walking across a parking lot and have some car speed past shooting slush into the cheap black soft briefcase in which I package it, and in part because I abhor the notion of being in front of a screen for the majority of the day. Pen or pencil are inadequate tools in comparison to ten fingers' clicking, but also not at all inadequate depending on what type of function you envision a tool to fulfill.

As a consequence, amongst the three email addresses I currently occupy, a majority of the messages are from myself, to myself, b/c at various stages, from various campus computers, I wish to save my work and for reasons I would rather not think about there seems to be no central hard drive that is ambulatory across the campus computers. So if I work at computer X, and save at computer X, I must go to computer X to re-up the work. To avoid the inconvenience I end up saving the work and giving it a very time/place specific file designation, e.g. "writing comp Tuesday 9 pm no cover page" and sending it from one of my email hubs to another. All this makes for the dreaded intrusion of solipsism, which is, essentially, Hell. And I don't know what to about my own private hell but explain to you, dear Reader, how it came to be and to note that I don't know what else can be done. This is not a complaint or even an insight, but just one of those things (like fixing a paper jam) that seems to be both essentially absurd and so minuscule as to amount to less than the reaction it engenders really amounts to. Whew.

A mailman died today (more or less my fault) and I had to apologize to the drapes

Computer pitfalls, the flu, irrepressible urge to take on larger things that require more than what can be offered, and simple winter doldrums all have contributed to the paucity of recent activity among the lame and scabbed over equine friends of whose imaginings this is comprised. Fact, the players have reported. Fact, jesus is Dwight Howard ever an amalgamation of athletic gifts. Allegation to be confirmed or denied, Phoenix is a consummate Pac10 city full of Fembot-esque conformity and dudes who drink beers on verandas with sunglasses on.


1. Link via King Timahoe via NY Times, all the way to

Obama {social realism} - - - > This


2. Cocktail parties involving Nintendo Wii (I'm far enough detached from reality to not know how the system is signified, but I think that's it) are pretty much irreproachable ideas, in my experience.


3. Most of last week I spent delaminating from the inside out. It is better to not do that too often.


4. Beatty claims to be growing a beard. If you know what this means, things in need of being shook are now shaken. I myself have the beard taker offer plugged into the socket, charging up for duty it may or may not be called on to fulfill. It is still winter after all.

5. Back at you.