Day Three in Key West

The weather has been hot, muggy and threatening to storm each afternoon, but no relief.

This town is pretty awesome. Imagine Greenwich Village without the smug sophistication of enduring winters. Now add back in the inherent danger of running into the local rednecks while you're strolling around with your Noo Yawk walk and talk and political views.

I've felt more comfortable, at times, in the middle of Kingston, Jamaica, is what I'm saying. There are few places in the world where I've felt less local and more of an outsider. There's a hungry desperation in people's eyes, too. Concerns about the economy, no doubt, and to be sure there aren't as many people wandering Duval as I would have expected. The oil slick, the general economic malaise, and just people tired of being scared.

You wonder why Americans get so paranoid, and yet we do. This is still America, still a great nation. We can still come back and fashion a future.

I've managed to stay out of bar fights, and even tho soccer gets laughed at regularly when it's on the TeeVee, moments like the last American game prove a point: we simply don't know as much about the world as we would lie to. Underneath it all, underneath the braggadocio and bluster, America is still the baby brother who's trying to fit in with big brother's buddies.

One more full day to walk around. I promised ThumbPer I'd go to Hemingway House and visit his cousins, so that's on today's agenda. Plus, I need a dose of inspiration to get my books back on track.

Margaritaville

I'm heading to Key West to attend to some business over the next few days. I'll be back on Saturday.

And yes, the Duvall Crawl is part of my plan!

See...I got bad news this morning...

Godspeed Jon Swift

I'll miss you.

 

Story here.

 

UPDATE
The problem with posting on the fly as I have to is that I can't really say what I want to say.

Jon Swift, or as we now know, Al Weisel, was a writer to envy, and I often did. His talent and dedication to both entertain while informing was unparalleled in Blogtopia (© Skippy, The Bush Kangaroo). He was always willing to lend a hand to a C-List blogger like me, and would sometimes comment here or email me if he thought a piece I had up was particularly interesting.

I envy him his ability to remain in character while writing words that thoroughly skewer that character's outlook. I wondered sometimes if he cringed at some of the things he was forced to say in order to get to his point.

He was Stephen Colbert, only funny without being a cardboard cutout. Clearly, he thought his way through positions he abhorred and found the comedy inherent in the ignorance it took to hold ludicrous thoughts.

He was a humourist's humourist. His ability to mine irony and poignance did not end with him. He died on the way to his father's funeral of a broken heart, literally. Not only that, but the last post he left us, almost a year ago, was acknowledging a friend's terrible tragic loss.

Its title? "Sometimes There Are No Words". It was on that thread that his mother notified us of his loss. I like to think that he looked down, cringed at first, then got the joke.

Here's to you, Mr. Swift, Mr. Weisel! A scotch in your honor, with a glass turned upside down.

Unless, you know, you'd like to return and share it with me...

A New Look

Well, after ages of looking at the same retarded* template, and watching it gather kipple like the corners of a flat in Bexhill, I decided to upgrade my blog's look.

Hope you like it as much as I do. I'll be tweaking the settings as I go. The final straw was the fact that, for some strange reason, my sidebar ended up under my posts.






* Sorry, Sarah, I calls 'em like I sees 'em

Te Aworo

I thought I'd have more time today to post something, and maybe even have the chance to write some things for next week.

I'll be on vacation. I'll see about posting stuff, but I ain't promising. I leave you in the capable hands of Kat, and if ThumbPer can work out the password on the computer, he might post some stuff too.

See you on the 18th!

The Image Dilemma

Lately, I've been giving much thought to old friends and new ones.

Sometimes friendships work out, and sometimes they do not. Now, I'm the first to admit that, as a friend, I'm a handful. I can be irascible, pretty obnoxious, definitely outspoken while remaining reseved and introspective, but not one to keep the peace merely for the sake of keeping the peace.

But I can also be warm, giving to the point of generosity, compassionate and heartfelt once you've gained my trust.

In other words, human. You'll never know which parts of me you'll get, anymore than I'll know which bits of you you'll give me.

Which leads me to this bizarre column: I've been thinking about psychology and jigsaw puzzles.

Each of us has a self-image that is at once clear and muddled. Some of us are clearer than others, but we all have blindspots. Into those blindspots, we seek friends to help us interpret and understand them.

Some friends, a few, fit smoothly like the right jigaw piece. Pretty quickly, you come to the realization that this friend is one who can help nurture you, and help you comprehend yourself.

Some do not. Those friends you keep at arm's length, if you keep them at all. Like the jigsaw piece that is interlocking and you need a tessellating piece, you quickly come to the realization that this relationship is not as vaulable as you had hoped.

Most friends fall in between, on a spectrum of good friends who develop over time to friends you might run into from time to time.

Some of these friends, like some jigsaw pieces, look like they should fit easily, but you discover the puzzle is more complex than you thought. You rotate them around and still, they just don't fit easily where you thought they might.

You have two alternatives: you can put it aside, and hope it fits someplace else when the puzzle of your self-image is further along, or you can take a hammer and try to bang it into place.

Most people have tried the hammer at least once or twice in their lives. It never works.

See, the piece, the friend, looks like it should be a good fit. Maybe it has the right shape, but not exactly. Maybe it has some really bright colours that help offset a dark and dreary, lonely corner of the puzzle and you really really want that piece to fit.

Rather than perhaps admit the piece is wrong, you try to reshape the piece. Worse, maybe the admission you have to make is that the puzzle, your self-image, itself is wrong.

We hang dearly onto our images. We have illusions of who people are, and how they fit in with us. We believe things we have no business believing about someone, or worse, we don't believe in someone when maybe all it takes is a little adjustment of attitude on our part, and then suddenly, the piece fits.

After all, there was some reason we were attracted enough to that piece to even try to fit it in.

The old saw, about experience being the course in which the tests come before the lessons, holds particularly true when it comes to our self-image.

We all want to believe we are something more than we already are, and some of us actually are. For most of us, though, we are already enough to do the things we need to do to survive and thrive. Our self-image is neither complete or unfinished. It really just needs a little filling in.

Like any good puzzle strategy, most of us have laid the framework for filling in the spaces. We just need to hunt down the right pieces.

Quick Admin Note

I know, it's been awfully quiet here on the ranch.

Mea culpa. I left for vacation in such a rush that I forgot to ask Katrina to come in and feed the cat (THUMBPER adds, "Dass riet! Ah had ta et howseplans awl wik!").

And I forgot to set up a bunch of posts to tide you guys over.

I'll figure some way to make it all up to you folks, even you, Stoopid!. Sorry about that.

Sub-burpin' Sprawl

I am a black hole.

I'll get back to that in a minute. Let me do the set up first.

I would argue that, while perhaps not an overwhelming number, a pretty big segment of society is pretty shallow, perhaps even a majority.

Psychic space being a finite element if you look in two dimensions, part of the reason we end up in conflict with each other is that your sprawl ends up butting against my sprawl, because each of us is trying to get more sprawl.

I'd wager this large segment of society are always busy doing, well, something: Running out to meet friends, working too hard at a job, jetting off to the next vacation. They need the trappings of a "good life", the condo on the beach, the car, fine wines.

They expand sideways because they can't know there's a depth to life, too.

I call these people "Flatlanders". In the guise of "expanding themselves," adding sides (to extend the metaphor), they gain no third dimension. They buy this trinket or that souvenir and proudly display them on their shelves to boast of their travels.

They claim understanding of the world around them, but in truth, this is a false logic.

For how can you truly relate to the world if you do not relate to yourself? How can you understand someone else and have compassion for their plight if you don't understand yourself and extend that compassion to yourself?

How can you love if you have no love to give?

Love is a commitment, and commitments always demand faith. You can only have faith by delving deep into those parts of you that lie covered in darkness, shrouded by the sprawl of your flatlandedness.

Faith is not based on logic or hunches. Indeed, faith is that thing that keeps us tied to what we love when "evidence" suggests it might be time to let go.

I put "evidence" in quotes because none of us can ever really know a truth outside of ourselves. our eyes deceive us. Our ears hear distant noises that emanate from within us.

Our minds lie to us for...what? Fear? Our protection? Freud was not far off, I fear, when he spoke of the id, the ego, and the superego. Many people you'll meet have a champion superego, but no id.

Well, that's not completely true. That id shows up in the weirdest ways and those are the behaviors we look at and wonder what the hell were they (or we) thinking?

Faith comes from belief. Faith is a never-ending well to draw from.

I am a black hole.

Spending my adult life extending my self-knowledge, I have been able to give love completely.

Love does not necessarily mean another person at all times. One can love yourself, for example, or find love in the smallest acts of kindness and in the roughest, bleakest landscape.

I express this love through my art: my photography, my acting and performing, and especially my writing. By opening my heart to what goes on around me, by drinking in from the fountain of the world, I can absorb that which I see and express how it affects me.

This is something that Flatlanders never get: it's not about seeing the temples at Angkor Wat or the pyramids or Mount Everest, taking a snapshot, buying a trinket, and bragging about it later, maybe saying how you "soaked up" the local culture with a beer and some local food at a boîte.

It's about how these affect you. I probably have fewer pictures of more places in the world that I've been than anyone else. And I'd wager I have a deeper understanding of anyplace I've been than a million other tourists.

Let's say five people, including me, see a house on a high cliff and take pictures of it.

Most people will center on the house, and the good ones will get enough of the cliff to allow for the precarious position of the building.

I will take that same picture and focus on the cliff: the striations of layers of history building, year after year, one on top of the other, the roots breaking out into the air, the grass overhanging the lip.

Oh, I'll include the house, to show it as the burden the cliff must bear until it can no longer bear it, to highlight the foolish transient nature of people who build on land that is ultimately destined to fall.

To highlight the Flatlanders.

I take that picture that way because I understand the precarious nature of life, how tomorrow, we might all be gone. Or more to the point, how tomorrow I might be gone.

So I want to leave a piece of me in these places. Many people talk about leaving their heart, but for me, I've shredded little bits of my soul and left them behind. Places don't steal my heart. I steal places' hearts.

I am a black hole. I leave a small footprint on the surface, but once you've peeked into the abyss, you realize there's a lot more down there than up here.

The trouble with Flatlanders is, they insist on painting on the surface what they want me to be, to define me somehow. But you cannot define that which you cannot understand.

And then they get frustrated that I no longer fit the definition they gave me in the first place.

I am a being, not a doing. I don't worry that I've held the same job for eleven years, because while I don't enjoy it much, I know that it's comfortable for me, and as many places as I've worked, this is pretty sweet and stable.

Some may jump jobs every other year and believe they are improving their lot, but they collect nothing but a paycheck and a too-long resume. Like children with french fries, they are grabbing for the next one before they're finished chewing the first one.

Further, I understand that my discomfort there has to do with boredom, the terrible mind draining tedium of having conquered all I can on this employment.

My faith tells me this. I am enough, and my needs beyond the space to explore my space are few. I don't need to be "seen" in a hot exotic restaurant with friends who I can only truly stand when I'm drunk, but my influence is felt none the less.

I am a black hole. By knowing myself, I know everything I encounter. No, I might not know every single fact about everything...altho most people will swear I do...but I have a deep comprehension of the truth of it.

It is that truth that gets expressed, like the radiation bursts out of the black hole.

Escape To Which Mountain?

When life throws a curve, or when the world weighs heavily, we all seek an escape clause.

There's nothing wrong with that. Our primitive ancestors had to deal with problems that were right in front of them: Hungry. Need food. Cold. Need fur. Horny. Need sex.

Modern man, and in this case, anybody born after 1950, does not have it so easy. You and I are aware of the larger world around us.

OK, so maybe that includes mostly just the progressive liberal side of American society unless cheap political points can be scored by conservatives whining about children, but I digress.

We have retirement accounts. We have paychecks that we live off. We have homes to pay for and cars to maintain and children to raise.

In short, the North Korean government has a nuclear sneeze, and you and I pick up a Kleenex.

Humans aren't made for that kind of stress. We fight or flight, which implies we have to have an immediate stressor, a confrontation. We don't have strong tools that allow us to be under major stresses constantly for a long term.

Enter the concept of stress-relief.

Much like the concept of Daylight Savings Time, stress relief is an attempt to alleviate a situation that shouldn't occur in the first place: the feeling of being trapped by circumstance, of seeing no way out, of not being able to fight or flee.

Some people drink. Some take drugs. Some turn to religion. Some find a hobby. But we all of us have some way to cut the tension down a bit to at least almost-manageable proportions.

I'm about to admit a vice...ok, two vices...vice, in that they are escapes from reality.

This all sort of hit home yesterday afternoon. It was about 2:30 and I was sitting at home, restless and bored, and took a walk. As I strolled through a local park, I found myself suddenly very depressed and sad. I couldn't shake the feeling, nor could I very easily understand what was going on in me.

In fact, just after I took that picture, I had this feeling of doom as I glanced at the sunbathers gathered on the small lawn under that bridge tower. And it hit me: I had to go back to work today.

And it pissed me off.

Why did it bug me so much? As I walked, the stiffness in my legs and the soreness of my back whispered loudly to me.

You see, I had ridden my bike for about 50 miles over this weekend. The weather was nice, and I had the energy, so for roughly four hours, I was free.

Free, as in free to deal with my situation as it occured. No thoughts about tomorrow. No insurance worries. No bank accounts. No work. Just me, my bike, and some small amounts of traffic and the occasional hill.

Life, the way it's supposed to be lived.

To give you an idea of what I was dealing with, here are some photos I shot this weekend. I made myself carry a point-and-shoot camera:

Kinda sweet, huh? It would be fun to get on my bike and keep riding, carrying my camera and just shooting pictures.

But...

Yeah. It's the "but." A big "but."

We all need escapes. We all need the kind of vice that for a few moments, or hours, allows us to deal with life on our terms. Something that stops us from thinking, and starts us dealing with who we are and what we want to do.

Something that reminds us of our humanity. We are human beings, not human doings...

Someone Needs To Check Their Facts

Talk about Epic Fails:

In America today, there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers. Already more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers or firefighters.

I'm guessing the American standard of living, according to the Wall Street Journal, now hovers somewhere around the wages Nike pays in Indonesia.

Now, I'm sure there is a small number of people who can actually be prolific enough and charismatic enough to make a go of blogging full-time. You can sell ad space, after all, and its possible the statistics the WSJ includes in their article are skewed by revenues people make who sell their own shit on their websites like their own books and stuff.

But nearly every blog I visit, and I visit many of the largest ones, right and left, is practically begging for donations. Even The Corner, which is sponsored and funded in part by the odious "National Review" magazine, has had to hold two online fundraisers to defray costs.

And Pajamas Media, which was supposed to be the Life Magazine of blogging right-wingers, only without the pictures...or intellect...or snappy prose...or, hell, not even the Life Magazine of the dung pile!...folded unceremoniously.

So I think, WSJ, you messed up here.

Liveblogging The Tax Day Tea Party

7:00 PM This is Actor212, speaking to you live from City Hall Park near the site of the World Trade Center, where literally ones of people turned out today in support of the nationwide "Tea Bag Parties," protesting President Obama's plan to raise taxes on the fat and lazy rich.

 

7:05 PM I see over there on the corner a handful of former Lehman brokers, looking spiffy in their Brooks Brothers suits...even if it's been a few days since they've bathed, and haven't bothered to change clothes since Veteran's Day, shuffling around like they were about to board the trains to a Michelle malkin Internment camp, asking for spare stock tips, panhandling at Harry's Of Hanover Street, leaping off tall curbs trying to commit suicide, and then showing up in droves mobs small groups of one or less to protest the patent unfairness of Obama's tax policy.

 

7:06 PM One protestor I interviewed, a Richie McRich, talked about how Obama had his nerve asking the ultrawealthy to pitch in and help, when they have houses on small tropical islands to support and landscape.

7:07 PM OK, we've got a little action here. Apparently, one of the protestors, a lawyer from the looks of it, has spilled his Perrier all over one of the brokers, and accidentally washed a small patch of his suit clean.

 

7:15 PM So far, just a lot of speaking, squawking really, about "taxes", "flat", and "screwed". Sounds more like a union meeting at an unpopular Vegas strip club, but maybe they're just getting warmed up.

 

7:20 PM Is that Michelle Malkin? The cameras converge. Much anticipation of some violent and self-ignorant outburst....

 

7:21 PM Nope. Just a homeless Filipino collecting deposit bottles after losing his job at Citibank.

 

7:25 PM I'm surrounded by literally dozens of pigeons, scrambling for the crumbs left by a couple of protestors who bought a sack of Big Macs to feed the ensemble.

 

7:30 PM A couple of signs being held up...uh oh, the crowd suspects something about these protestors...they're conferring in a phone booth...I can't quite make out what...oh. OHHHHHHHHHHHH! Apparently some liberal infiltrators from ACORN have intruded! The tip-off was the fact that their signs were spelled correctly!

 

7:31 PM Someone is trying to show a video...it's hard to see the screen of the cellphone from this far away...I'm about one-deep in the throng of five....

 

7:35 PM OK, I manage to elbow my way past the dude who thought we were having a free sex show, and the homeless guy who thought this was City Harvest...the video is from Chicago where apparently, a conservative comedy team is putting on a show for a handful of people and some Cubs fans staggering by..."Crocs & Stretch Pants" is the name of the group.

 

7:40 PM People are looking around at each other in embarassed silence.

 

7:45 PM The Lehman brokers are looking at people like they were giant hot dogs, drooling.

 

7:50 PM Uh oh, there's a few cops on the outskirts of the group, about a foot away from the podium, moving in closer, checking their watches. It must either be time to wrap this up, or a new batch of Krispy Kremes is baking and they want to see if they can beat the rush...

 

7:51 PM OK, I see something...it looks like a nightstick raised up! Could we be seeing The Man oppressing our lowly taxpaying brethr-- Oh. No. Sorry. Jonah Goldberg showed up, carrying a salami and baguette.

 

8:00 PM It's starting to rain again; it's—the rain had slacked up a little bit. The back motors of the ship are just holding it just enough to keep it from— It's burst into flames! It burst into flames, and it's falling, it's crashing! Watch it! Watch it! Get out of the way! Get out of the way! Get this, Charlie; get this, Charlie! It's fire—and it's crashing! It's crashing terrible! Oh, my! Get out of the way, please! It's burning and bursting into flames; and the—and it's falling on the mooring-mast.This is terrible! This is the worst of the worst catastrophes in the world. Oh my President! It's flames... Crashing, oh! Four- or five-hundred feet into the sky and it—it's a terrific crash, ladies and gentlemen. It's smoke, and it's flames now; and the frame is crashing to the ground, not quite to the mooring-mast. Oh! The humanity! And all the passengers screaming around here. I told you; it—I can't even talk to people. Their friends are on there! Ah! It's—it—it's a—ah! I—I can't talk, ladies and gentlemen. Honest: it's just laying there, mass of smoking wreckage!

 

8:05 PM OK, I made that up, but it's FUCKING BORING HERE!!!!!!! Oh god, I could be home poking my eyes out with knitting needles!!!!! What have I done to deserve this fate?????

 

8:11 PM Now people are milling around, which is really funny to watch since there's maybe a dozen people here, four if you subtract the Fox News reporters. Try to organize four people to mill, it looks like a game of musical chairs.

 

8:15 PM It's agreed. No one wants to pay taxes and everyone would rather be home watching the Law and Order repeat. Even the Fox News reporters think we should go to a titty bar. Meeting adjourned!

15 Books That Will Always Stick With Me

As tagged by Lance Mannion:

1) The Bible - Various authors, even tho One Guy claims sole authorship. Sort of like Mark Rothko's body of work.

2) The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams

3) Hamlet - William Shakespeare (I'm claiming book by dint of the edition I read, which was annotated)

4) A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking

5) Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions - A. Square (Edwin Abbott)

6) An Actor Prepares - Constantin Stanislavski

7) Lateral Thinking - Edward de Bono

8) The Drama of the Gifted Child/Alice Miller; Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child/John Bradshaw I just felt these two needed to be together.

9) Moby Dick - Herman Melville

10) Death Be Not Proud - John Gunther

11) The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

12) Bullfinch's Mythology - errrr....Bullfinch, I think. (Thomas. I knew that)

13) Le Morte d'Arthur - Sir Thomas Malory

14) Beowulf

15) The Foundation Trilogy - Isaac Asimov

March Snowstorm

snow day 003
Originally uploaded by actor212

Yes. We had a significant snowfall for the first time this season.

No, I did not get a snow day.

Rat fucking bastards...

Way To Go!

A big shout out and "Attaboy!" to my good blogging buddy, Gort42 for being interviewed by a Dutch newspaper because he was all over the "locking up kids for cash" scandal in northeast Pennsylvania.

If you aren't aware of this story, go read up on it at Gort's place.

I Be B.A.D.

It's that time again! Blogroll Amnesty Day or B.A.D. The day when Blogtopia (and yes, Skippy coined that word!) recognizes those who need a leg up and some exposure.

So I'm going to link to five smaller blogs than this insignificant shitty little place and mention them for kudos. I don't get around to them as often as I'd like, but I try.

1) Mad In The Middle Bob claims he's boring. He's not.

2) Debsweb Quirky. Who else would have NASA's picture of the day next to gourmet recipes?

3) Politicat Travis is a great writer.

4) Southern Atlantis The best thing to come out of Norleans since bagnettes and Cafe Du Monde.

5) Agita Diaries There are few as poetic and MandT.

Forecast

Blogging will be light to moderate over the next week as a low pressure system moves in over Simply Left Behind, meaning basically that I'll be on vacation starting, well, in an hour or so.

Enjoy! I'll catch as catch can.

The Sins Of Wages

Four weeks ago, I developed a really nasty sinus infection. The mother of all sinus infections, if you will.

For the past month or so, I've suffered from insomnia of the worst kind, the kind where you are fast and deeply asleep, only to be roused by a coughing jag. Kind of like electing a Bush after eight years of peace and prosperity.

I finally went to a doctor last week ahead of a trip I am taking at the end of this week (which is why I haven't been lobbying hard for the Weblog Awards for Simply Left Behind, but please do vote!), was given antibiotics and sent home to heal.

Heal I have, to a degree. And yet, here I am this morning, awake at 2:30 after three hours of sleep. My thoughts are racing, flitting like fireflies about me. This thought lights up, dims, and another flashes off in the corner of my other eye.

I hate nature.

I woke to a vague recollection of a dream about this contest. At first, I thought I was disturbed by my casual attitude towards it. I cannot deny there is a hypercompetitive part of me that simply will not allow me to fail. This being the slack time in between the election and the inauguration, I thought I'd explore this a little.

As I lay there in the dark, the cat watching me through one eyelid, I let my mind wander. This was not about the contest, to be sure, although I did manage to stroke that part of my id into relaxation.

There's something more. I'm disturbed by what I have allowed myself, and by extension this blog, to become.

Each morning, I sit at a PC, either in my office or at home, and I search for a story to write about. Recklessly disregarding the fact that I really don't care about half the stuff I read online, I choose a topic.

Usually, I search Memeorandum and see what other bloggers are talking about. I admit to a frisson of excitement and satisfaction when I see my name, with SLB attached to it, listed as commenting on a story. If an orgasm is la petite morte in French, then this is the cigarette afterwards.

Bollocks. That's what's pissing me off about life. I'm tying myself to what other people think and see. I'm letting the world set my agenda for me. I'm taking myself way too fucking seriously.

Now, the practice of writing a blog every day has its charm and its advantages. For one, by forcing myself to write daily, I'm forcing myself to be a better writer, to learn what mistakes I'm capable of and to prevent them. For another, it usually kills about 30 minutes at work, and probably stops me from playing FreeCell.

In 2008, it was too easy to write a blog, and I suspect that by the end of this year, an awful lot of blogs that popped up during the Bush administration will close down. And why not? People aren't as angry. Obama seems to be a decent sort who is committed to turning America around again. It's going to be hard to find something to take umbrage at and write a 3,000 word screed, mixing humour and anger, rage and fear.

Fear. Yes, that's what I want to talk about today. It's odd, but each year around this time, sins and emotions seem to be the backdrop to our lives.

Most sins can be understood in context of satisfying a need: envy, for example, keeps us up to date with what people around us have, and so we increase our odds of breeding by "keeping up with the Joneses," lust provides us with a motivation to collect genetic material from as many mates as possible, and so on.

Underlying all these, I think, is fear. Fear is the mind-killer, as Frank Herbert put it, by way of Huxley.

Fear is, I believe the yan to the yin of love, which I think is the underlying emotion behind all happiness. Blend fear and love, and you pretty cover the emotional gamut of humanity.

Anger, jealousy, hatred, all involve some element of love, even if that element is self-love and not the love for another person. We can delude and rationalize our anger at our spouse or child as "being good for them," but in reality, it's more about us taking care of ourselves than caring for someone else.

But notice also there's an element of fear to that love: by lashing out at those around you, you are warning them that they are scaring you, threatening you in some way. And it doesn't even have to manifest in rage: anger expressed in the most gentle way is still anger and still about fear.

On the flipside, you see joy, openess, and giving, which while all perfectly self-loving, involve far greater blends of love for someone else, and much less fear.

Even in these emotions, there's some fear involved. When you first tell someone you love them, there's always the chance they'll reject you.

Which brings me back to my original message, my original thought, my insomniatic stream of consciousness: what do I fear, by manipulating my energies and thoughts so they conform with what the rest of Blogtopia (© Skippy) is talking about?

Does it really matter to me that my hit counter is ringing every day? Does it make a difference in my life, apart from making me feel a little better about myself?

No, not really. So the question becomes, is that feeling worth it? Is the self-esteem tied up in that stupid little ticker worth the effort of being topical?

I'm not earning a single dime off this thing, yet I write more here in a week than I have in a month in the book I'm supposedly working on to sell.

I'm communicating and yes, that's important to me. I have thoughts and ideas and they need to be expressed, but not on the world's terms.

On my terms.

Vote for Simply Left Behind in the Weblog Awards

Weblog Awards Voting Begins Today

I'll have a separate post that will allow you to vote from here at SLB, rather than shlepping over to the Awards page up on Monday, when voting is scheduled to begin.

I'm asking for your vote. Vote daily (cookies are recorded and IPs logged, so you can't vote twice in a 24 hour period), and vote from as many computers as you can. No reason you can't vote from home, work and a laptop or two. If you can access a computer, you can vote once more. And of course, please lobby your friends to vote, as well.

Also, I'd ask you to take a moment and vote in the other categories listed below. These are my recommendations:

Best Blog - Huffington Post, altho they really don't need the support, I suspect.

Best New Blog - Uppity Woman

Best Humour Blog - Jon Swift, who fashions the single funniest posts in the entire of Blogtopia (© Skippy), who's writing, infrequent tho it may be, is of the highest quality and caliber always.

Best Individual Blogger - Lindsay Beyerstein/Majikthise

Best Liberal Blog - Blue Gal. I had a hard time in this category. I love Sadly, No! and Wonkette as well, but I feel they are more humour than political, even if their humour IS political.

Best Political Coverage - FiveThirtyEight. They turned out to be the place to go for polling info during the election cycle.

Best Technology Blog - Geeks Are Sexy. MissCellania blogs here, along with many other places, and this is sort of a sop to her in case I decide....well, you'll see.

Best Diarist - Blue Girl In A Red Blue State. It's the closest I'm going to get to voting for my friend, Lance Mannion. This is a vote I strongly urge.

Best Major Blog - The Moderate Voice

Best Very Large Blog - Jesus' General

Best Large Blog -OK...this category has me hurting. One the one hand, MissCellania is one of my close blogging friends. On the other hand, Skippy, The Bush Kangaroo is also one of my close blogging friends. You're on your own on this one. As for me, well, that's the beauty of the secret ballot, isn't it? Fortunately, I can vote more than once, so....

Best Hidden Gem - Pajama Pundit. The name might remind you of Pajamas Media and Instapundit, two obnoxious and odious foully stenched blogs, but the politics will not.

My opponents in this contest are as follows:

If Mom Says OK
The Stupid Shall Be Punished (this is a rematch, I think)
Daled Amos
McClatchy Watch
Savage Politics
The Sundries Shack
The Colossus of Rhodey
Connecting the Dots (sorry, Bob!)
Phoenix Arizona East Valley Living

Visit them all. Play nice! You'll disagree with at least two of these folks and Connecting The Dots' Bob Stein is a friend, so throw him a visit or a dozen and check out his place. His writing makes mine look like, well, a right-winger's!

*AHEM*

Best Up And Coming Blog

Look who is a finalist, again!

In The Rearview Mirror

The year is ending today. Please accept my best and fondest wishes for a healthy, and happy New Year. May your best day of 2008 be your worst day of 2009.

 

I think I suffer from Bush Fatigue. Eight years of a good President is wearing. Eight years of a bad President is exhausting. Knowing full well that he's leaving at the end January, one is tempted to ask if there's anyway he can hurry along.

 

I have hopes for Obama's presidency. They used to be high hopes, until the markets melted away and the economy went in the pan. Now, I just hope he can stop the bleeding and sew up a few of the bigger wounds. He should win a second term (it's hard to unelect a President. Just look at 2004.), by which we will have been firmly on the road to recovery.

 

I think. I hope. It would be hard to imagine a crisis so severe that it would outlast a President's term but there you have it.

 

Barring a major outbreak of amazing news-- it could happen!-- I should end 2009 about as well as 2008 ends. 2008 saw the collapse of several things in my life, from my health to some family issues that really need to be taken care of. The shocks are over, the regrouping has begun. I figure it will take about a year to recover. This is my time to praise my Jesus for keeping an eye on me, and giving me good friends who have not been afraid to stand up to me and question what I'm all about.

 

I've made it hard on a lot of you this year, and for that, I am sorry. I've purposely distanced myself in order to give myself some breathing room to examine all that's gone on in the world and in my world. I hope you'll understand. If our friendships cannot survive that, then perhaps we were not meant to be friends in the first place.

 

I started the year with some goals, and I think I've achieved a few of them. One was to make this blog a voice in Blogtopia (© Skippy, the Bush Kangaroo). I've added fifty new names to the mailing list (you can click the little button in the upper right hand corner if you want to join).

 

More important, I won the Weblog Award. I'm nominated again (I'll link the pages and such later this week). I hope to work my magic one more time.

 

I guest-blogged at Crooks and Liars for a week.

 

More important to me is not to watch my hit counter rack up points every day, but to see my ideas echo along the corridors of Blogtopia and the blogosphere from time to time. Every so often, I'll see someone quote a piece of mine (I can see the incoming links) and read a discussion about the idea. This is good. This is why I blog. I got this massive brain, the size of a planet, and it would be a damned shame to keep all of the thoughts inside. And for convincing me to do this, I have to thank Katrina. Again.  

 

I promise to work harder on this, to hone my writing and critical thinking (and to perfect my grammar and spelling) and make it easier to coalesce the way I see this world into things that can be talked about. I don't have the time, like a lot of the furry mammalian bloggers, to sit and think and read and edit. I write these posts sitting at my desk at work, and even MIS is getting antsy about that much time spent. It means I will have to work harder at making myself clear.

 

I want to do this without losing sight of something valuable to be: the transparent thought process. A careful reader of my work will notice every once in a while I'll post something disjointed. This simply means I haven't considered everything yet, but that I feel strongly one way already. I don't want to lose that, because in sharing my thoughts, I share a bit of myself with you.

 

Too, it gives my reader the opportunity to take his or her own journey with me. It's been fun sometimes to correspond, in comments or email, about a nugget of information and see where things go.

 

2009 projects to be a quiet year, from a blog standpoint. I don't see where Obama has many choices about what he can and cannot do, so I can't imagine he'll make any significantly controversial decisions. We've pretty much hashed out his policies for the first half ot the year, and I don't see him as having the courage to take a real risk with the economy as tattered as it is.

 

I hope I'm wrong, of course. I like watching my hit counter soar!