that got your attention, didn’t it?

if i lived in portugal, i might actually be too stoned to write.

or not -- since decriminalizing ALL drug use eight years ago, fewer people in that country use drugs today than did back when using was illegal. and the dreaded influx of slavering junkies searching for a safe place to shoot up never materialized. check out this short docuclip from the BBC:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lmx5-a_ny00

amazing? no, predictable. but this is america, and we don’t need evidence if we can have a war instead, even one so unwinnable, expensive and disastrous as the infamous “war on drugs” has turned out to be.

in fact, we are so determined to keep drugs away from people at all costs that our egregious policies have created a set of international laws around painkiller prescriptions so monstrous that few underdeveloped countries can comply with them. the result? people with cancer and HIV die screaming, with nary a tab of oxycontin nor shot of morphine to give them so much as an hour of relief. can’t be too careful with those opiates, you know. what if these people became addicted?

can’t you just picture it: armies of deathbed junkies slavering through the hospital corridors, tumors in hand, searching for that next one.

as terry j. allen so eloquently put it:

Few actions so perfectly combine stupidity and cruelty as denying pain relief to the dying because narcotics can be addictive.

meanwhile, alcohol is not only legal, not only tolerated, but absolutely celebrated by the american political elite, who can hardly hold a fundraiser without a few magnums of Cristal. despite the whimpering lush beneath the park bench two blocks away from the white house, the one who couldn’t find anything to drink that night and so is hiding from his DDT horrors like somebody out of an updated scene from the days of wine and roses.

oh stop it, jackie, you left-wing hippie liberal drugloving so-and-so. if our fearless leaders are, even today, even in the year of our lord 2009, introducing legislation that would send pot dealers to jail for the next quarter century (at our expense, of course), then you’ve got it all wrong.

uh, unless they live on rhode island, where legal pot distribution centers are set to open shortly.

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i’ll let the video speak for itself.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuHOvEfHxbc

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i’m damn mad and i want you to GET ANGRY AT FACEBOOK WITH ME.

it’s a somewhat convoluted story and i’ll do my best to get it straight, but what it boils down to is this: when some millionaire doesn’t care for a facebook group that has more than TWELVE THOUSAND MEMBERS, his money and a couple of slick attorneys can shut it down overnight – without inquiry, explanation or warning. 12,000 facebookers logged in, saw a black hole where their BOYCOTT ROCKSTARS group had formerly been, and said wtf? facebook said nothing.

then, to complete the bootlicking, facebook also disabled the account of charles tsai, the young man who initially created the group. again, without explanation, warning or recourse.

now *i* am saying

FUCK?

the millionaire in question is michael (weiner) savage, an ultraconservative hater of many, a “right-wing crusader against gays, immigrants, Muslims, Barack Obama, Britain, [and] women” who uses the bully pulpit of his radio show to promote prejudice and hatred. just like bill o’reilly. his son is the CEO of  rockstar energy drinks, which savage vehemently denies co-founding.

frankly, i don’t give a flying fuck whether savage co-founded rockstar or not (though i’m happy enough to boycott that disgusting concoction — something i wouldn’t drink even before learning that its proceeds are poured into fascist organizations like the paul revere society).

but i DO give a flying fuck about facebook caving in so easily, with so little pressure.

facebook is as much a center of social action as it is of casual networking; free and unrestricted speech is the cornerstone of all social action. facebook’s actions (rather, its complete over-reactions) in this case suggest that they could care less about free speech, social action OR its members.

consider this: the weiner clan also sicced their dogs on Alternet, but that site didn’t just bend over and take it — they did more research, and published a “correction” that’s more of an indictment than an apology.

another legal warning letter went to gaywired, which had also carried a story about the boycott. the gaywired editors really did their homework, including this paragraph in their public “retraction”:

GayWired regrets naming Michael Savage as a co-founder of Rockstar and apologizes for the error. Russell Weiner, who happens to be Savage’s son, is the sole founder of the company. As the attorneys iterate, “Mr. Savage is not affiliated with Rockstar in any manner.”

GayWired presumes that a similar clarification is on its way to the Nevada Secretary of State. For according to that office, Savage’s company, Savage Productions, uses the same mailbox and is registered at the same street address as Rockstar. Also, Rockstar’s sole officer other than Russell Weiner is Savage’s wife and Weiner’s mother, Janet Weiner, who fills the positions of director, treasurer, and secretary. Ms. Weiner must be exceedingly adept at these diverse responsibilities since she is also the director, treasurer, and secretary of Savage Productions.

facebook could have done something similar. or they could simply have done nothing. but they just caved.

must every facebook user who creates a group now fear loss of their profile, their friends, connections, groups, photos, and calendar, without warning — without any good reason other than that somebody with deep pockets didn’t like it?

will i lose my facebook account over this blog post?

will you lose your facebook account over YOURS?

facebook users are not taking this lying down. other members immediately recreated the BOYCOTT ROCKSTARS group. i joined it around 3:30 this afternoon, when it had about 600 members. a few hours later it was up aroun 900. go check out that group right now and see how large it’s grown — and JOIN it. create a new FB account if you don’t already have one, just to become a member of this group.

yes, it’s that important.

why? facebook is without doubt the most significant social networking site around and, unlike myspace (which is practically on life support at this point) it’s still growing like a weed. where facebook leads, others will follow, and they lead by their examples.

this is not a precedent that any of us should be willing to tolerate, and it’s OUR responsibility to speak up about it — to speak up LOUDLY and to speak up RIGHT NOW — and say NO. we are NOT going to allow any corporate hate-mongerers to dictate conversations on a public platform.

if there was some inaccuracy in the BOYCOTT ROCKSTARS group, it seems to be only that michael savage was referred to as a “co-founder” of the company that his son owns and at which his wife is a senior executive. he says that’s not true. fine, then ask the group to do some fact-checking.

but to simply shut it down? wipe out the admin’s entire profile? flip the bird to more than 12,000 facebook users?

that’s nothing less than fascism in action. and we know what happens when you don’t nip that kind of cocksucker in the bud.

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specifically, THIS dog:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgjyhKN_35g

i can’t understand the spanish commentator, but it’s not hard to imagine what he must be saying.

there are some human beings as brave, even braver, than this hero dog. irena sendler, who died last year, was one of them. i just learned about this amazing woman, and i am not likely to forget her story, even with my astoundingly crappy memory.

i challenge you to watch this account of her life without tears:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVw1PANUcdg

i’ve often wondered, as perhaps some of you have wondered, what would i really do in a life-or-death situation: save myself, or try to save another? it’s an impossible question to answer, of course, until you are in that situation, and once you ARE in that situation the question becomes irrelevant. nothing matters but the action taken … or not taken.

i know from experience that, in a crisis, i will pretty much go for helping the other guy, no matter what the risk. i sort of enjoy immediate risk. but that is completely different from the kind of risk that irena sendler took. you could almost call it “cold-blooded” risk. day after day, hiding infants and young kids in her truck to smuggle them out of the warsaw ghetto. joking with the guards who would’ve killed her in a minute if they realized what was going on. smiling at the wheel of her ambulance.

that kind of sustained action in the face of potentially grave consequences (which ultimately came to pass for irena, when the nazis discovered what she was doing, broke her arms and legs and threw her in prison). it’s one thing to take a bold action in a bold moment of decision; many of us can do that. but this? sustained resistance to evil at immense risk to one’s own self?

i don’t know if i could have done what irena sendler did during the holocaust. but i do know that i want to be, or to become, the kind of a woman who can. i’m working on it.

i wanna be your dog.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nb31X1pmrag

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i had to run a couple errands on my lunch hour yesterday, which was also my first day of not smoking, after having taken up the filthy habit again a couple of months ago. i was not at my most serene.

so on the way back from guitar center (which didn’t have two of the three things i needed) i stopped in baskin-robbins for the tiniest possible rum-raisin ice-cream cone. i have no business eating ice cream with this fat ass of mine, but the nicotine detox simply cried out for some kind of reward.

lo and behold, sugar cones now come wrapped in their own little cone-shaped paper condoms. more than 200 years after the invention of the ice cream cone, which millions upon millions of human beings have safely and enjoyably eaten naked, baskin-robbins now finds it necessary to clothe their cones in paper that makes the cone harder to eat. even if you use the cone to build an edible stereo speaker, you have to take the wrapper off and throw it out.

irritated by the delicious but wastefully and unnecessarily condomized cone, i swung through the doors of ever-irritating bed, bath & beyond to buy a mop. i needed a new mop because the previous mop, supposedly a most excellent mop that never needed replacing because you could just put a new mop-head on it, refused to keep its head on. yes, after paying extra for this supposedly more environmentally-correct mop i now had to buy a plain old incorrect mop to replace the nonworking newfangled piece of shit that the original mop had turned out to be. i wonder how long one of their $250 floor-washing robots would last.

there’s nothing to increase one’s irritation level like having to nod and smile (or at least nod) fifteen different times when fifteen different bb&b workers brightly say “Hi! How are you!” as they are now required to do anytime a customer passes within five feet of them. what marketing genius from hell thought that one up? imagine how much the workers hate greeting every fucking body all the day long, when most customers find more than three minutes of it intolerable.

Hi! How are you! … no wonder employees call the place “blood bath & beyond“.

then i saw it. the oxo soap-squirting dish wand (NOT to be confused with the soap-squirting dish BRUSH, which requires a different kind of refill).

that’s right. squirting a little palmolive straight out of the container is now as unthinkable as eating a naked ice-cream cone. in fact, the entire act of squirting soap out of a container has become so distasteful to so many americans that for only $50 you can get an auto-sensing self-squirter that can be used when soap-squirting dish wands simply will not do the trick. just wave your dainty hand before the sensor.

do people really want this shit? i mean, was this shit created in response to some kind of demand, or did the shit come first (conceived, no doubt, by the same evil marketing genius who told all the clerks to greet people to death the minute they walk in the goddam store), followed by some kind of desire-manufacturing campaign?

all this shit has piled up so gradually that we hardly even see it any more. i’ve been in bb&b many times — last year i found myself ranting about their uber-annoying umbrella condoms — but yesterday it hit me like an avalanche. all this beautiful, gleaming, expensive and entirely unnecessary SHIT that is packaged within an inch of its life and most likely, like my frigging supermop, soon fails to work. soon needs to be replaced. one more, another, and another, and more shit, More Shit, MORE SHIT.

there are people on this planet who would consider it a lucky day to find one intact tupperware bowl washed up on the beach. people for whom merely having a bowl might make the difference between being hungry or not being hungry on a particular day. between having and not having a way to wash their face. and so on. i am not exaggerating.

imagine what it would be like to walk through bb&b with such a person, explaining what all this shit is for. why we can’t squirt our own soap onto our own dishrag to wash our plenitude of bowls. why all these items are packaged tighter than the roof of their family shanty, and why we throw all that sturdy packaging straight into a landfill the minute we get to our gleamingly overstocked homes.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wUayAI1YAQ

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get ready. we’re going to see and hear of more scenes like these:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y14a1paBiDo

it reminds me of mantadhar al-zaidi throwing his shoes at dubya. (al-zaidi just received a three-year prison sentence for that brave and creative protest, though he continues to be viewed as a hero by the people of iraq. and by me.)

and it reminds me very much of a scene from network, a thirty-some-year-old movie. i saw it when it first came out, at a theater in the village with a big crew of friends that included david peel, who was quite a wild guy at the time, fronting a punk band in the heyday of CGBG’s and patti smith.

when we got to that famous scene in the movie — which none of us knew was coming, it was a brand-new release and there was no internet then handing out spoilers like lollipops at the dentist — david stood on top of his seat and started screaming along with the window shouters. by the end of the scene, half the people in the theater were doing the same thing.

it’s like patti smith says: the people have the power. sometimes it takes just one voice to get things rolling. it’s happening all over france. it’s happening in barcelona. it’s happened in chicago. and we’ve only just begun.

we’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take this any more:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dib2-HBsF08

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alexandra pietropinto is 33 years old and lives in a wheelchair.

after waking from a two-month-long coma caused by a motorcyle accident, this girl — a former dancer — had become a quadriplegic, without the ability to speak or move any part of her body other than her head.

doctors told the family that this was as good as it was going to get for alex: she’d never walk or talk. she was lucky that she’d come out of the coma.

well there are doctors and then there are doctors. Mark Pacchiano, seeing alex’s determined spirit as he worked with her in physical therapy sessions, told her a different story: that she COULD talk and she COULD walk if she worked hard enough.

today, alex talks. with assistance, she is able to stand and take a few steps. she uses her head to work a laptop, and she wants to go back to school.

please watch this video of alex working with her therapist. listen to her say a few words. (i can’t embed it here, it’s proprietary to the news site.) here’s a screenshot of her with Dr. Mark:

after five years in various rehab centers, alex made enough progress to return home, and now lives with her parents on Staten Island.

the house is 100 years old, and not handicapped accessible in any way — the doors too narrow for an electric wheelchair, the bathrooms unreachable without assistance. her dad is a carpenter and has made what changes he can, but more is needed. like, an elevator to get to the second floor, which alex presently has no way of reaching and so is limited to the three small downstairs rooms.

Dr. Mark Pacchiano, in conjunction with the Head On Foundation (Helping Empower Autism and Disorders of Neurological-Systems), has organized a benefit for alex being held on march 12th. the money will be used to make the necessary renovations to the house so that alex can live a bit more independently. you know, like be able to get in and out of the bathroom on her own — something most of us take so for granted that it’s never given a second of thought.

i will be attending the benefit 3/12 and would love to meet some of my readers there if you can make it over to staten island. i know most of you aren’t in the NYC area, but you can make a donation if you like, in any amount. i would be so grateful if you chose to help out in this way. the house needs a LOT of work.

i want alex to see the second floor again, the bedroom she grew up in as a little girl. i want her to be able to take a bathroom break whenever she feels like it, without the need for an escort.

even ten bucks would help. and maybe you could tell your friends about alex, too?

thank you so much.

checks, payable to the Head On Foundation, may be sent to
Dr. Mark Pacchiano
44 Jeanette Avenue
 Staten Island, New York 10312

here’s a brief bio of my cousin:

Alexandra (Alex) grew up with a love for dance.  She attended the prestigious Mark Twain Junior High School for the Gifted and Talented and studied dance at the Brooklyn Academy of Performing Arts. Alex attended New York University preparing for a career in business management.  She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in organizational behavior, which is business management and the psychology of the workplace.  Alex was offered an incredible opportunity to work as a Household Manager and Estate Manager for Denise Rich, a well known songwriter.  Working in this career afforded her the opportunity to travel, enjoy the arts and maintain her love for dance. 

On October 12^th, 2003, Alex was involved in a motorcycle accident which sent her flying over 40 feet in the air.  She incurred severe damage to her brain and body which placed her in a coma for two months.  Alex awoke from the coma as a quadriplegic with inability to move her arms and legs.  After multiple surgeries, she became a resident of two rehabilitation facilities.  In February of 2008, Alex was able to return home to live with her parents. 

 

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Last night I saw an extended commercial for a “program” for Nintendo’s  Wii console called “WiiFit”. WiiFit hold itself out as an “exercise game” that offers approximately 40 activities, such as yoga, push ups, and aerobics. One programs one’s height and weight into the game, and then uses the Wii “balance board” along with a graphical interpretation of the body to perform the activities. For PlayStation, you can try Dance, Dance Revolution. This game is a kind of electronic twister sheet; you try to get your feet to do what the feet on the screen are doing, at various levels of difficulty. While these games may be played with another person, there is the spectre of playing alone, with your avatar body or disembodied feet.

At first this just seemed ridiculous; the commercials depict entire families sitting on couches as cheering spectators while an individual enthusiastically works out. But then I started to think.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iYBmAVuBns

I admit taking part in exercise at a gym, something I used to ridicule. I didn’t understand why people couldn’t get enough exercise via normal everyday activities such as bicycling or roller skating, or just good brisk walking. Now that I’m a little older and not living the urban life, though, I use the gym primarily to take classes  and, well, just to get out of the house.

During and after the commercial, my mind kept returning to a science fiction story I read years ago, a story about people who have lost the ability to live on the Earth’s surface, and so live under the earth in isolated rooms, all their needs, including feeling and waste management, provided for by a machine that, like the Wii or PlayStation, has been built by humans. This was  E.M. Forster’s 1909 story, The Machine Stops.

In that story, people have reached such a state of isolation and discomfort with others that they have begun to cherish their privacy, becoming unwilling to travel between cells even to see their children and equally uncomfortable having others visit in their own cells. They communicate through a network remarkably similar to the internet.

1909!

I understand that this is a matter of personal preference, yet I cannot imagine exercising an avatar with only a secondary concern for one’s actual self. Yes, there are plenty of gaming addicts who spend all of their free time on Grand Theft Auto and World of Warcraft. I can almost comprehend the increasing proliferation of electronic pets; they don’t shed, and only need to be walked insofar as one can call pushing a button walking.  So why does WiiFit seem to me to be so much more…chilling, more so than the iPod, or reading books, or any other solitary pursuits?

It may be the fact WiiFit is marketed as a game. And while I see nothing inherently wrong with electronic fitness, I am disturbed by the fact that it begins to appear that some segment of our society will not participate in anything, including eating and dancing, unless it is alone, in their own virtual cells, and presented as a “game”.

I won’t spoil the ending of Forster’s story. Just  call me apocalyptic; what happens when the machine stops?Recent Posts:

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the times had this to say about obama’s plan for hapless homeowners:

It could ultimately cost taxpayers as much as $275 billion — $75 billion in direct spending to keep people in their homes and the rest in additional financial backing for the government-controlled mortgage giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

But analysts and administration officials alike cautioned that it would not come close to halting the tidal wave of foreclosures. Nor would it provide much help to millions of homeowners who are “under water,” or holding mortgages that are bigger that the market value of their houses.

as a taxpayer, i’d rather hand hundreds of millions to homeowners than trillions to the goddam banks that are at the root of today’s economic disaster. you know, those banks who suddenly decide they may not need bailout money after all if it means accepting some very generous limitations on how much their execs can be paid. (limitations! sorry, but i can’t quite see a half-million dollar salary cap as a “limitation” of any kind.)

but i have to question the…plight?…situation mentioned in that second paragraph, homeowners who are underwater because the present value of their house is less than their mortgage total.

if you buy a house that you plan to live in, and you know that it will cost you X dollars per month for the next X years in order to own it completely, then what difference do either of those numbers actually make? it’s only if you bought the house as an investment rather than as a home that this really matters. right? you know, physical things tend to lose, rather than gain, value over time. think about buying a new car. five minutes after you drive it out of the showroom it drops like 20% in value. the day after you get it you can’t sell it for anywhere near what you paid. we all know this, and it doesn’t stop anybody from buying cars (though it might be a helluva good thing for our rapidly deteriorating environment if it did).

how did we get to a place where houses are expected to automatically, through no effort nor improvements on behalf of the owner, supposed to appreciate — and appreciate substantially — due to nothing more than the inevitable passage of time?

there’s your bubble. seems pretty clear that if people bought houses in order to live in them, rather than profit off of them, and then did just that — lived in the house and willed it to their kids — the market value of the house becomes entirely meaningless.

so don’t treat your house like a piece of preferred stock and you don’t have a bubble problem. right? or am i missing something here?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOaDrM3rMXs

our president gets it:

“It will not help speculators who took risky bets on a rising market and bought homes not to live in but to sell,” he said, adding, “And it will not reward folks who bought homes they knew from the beginning they would never be able to afford.”

when i was growing up in brooklyn, people who were fortunate enough to own homes (less than 50% in my neighborhood) took it for granted that they would stay there, and mostly took it for granted that they’d leave the house to their kids when they died. nobody obsessed over market values, nobody was stupid enough to take out a home-equity line of credit (not sure they even existed in the seventies) (i remember them being called the “lose-your-house” loans) and they threw little parties when the house was finally paid off. got drunk with their friends and barbecued the mortgage paperwork, a nice little ritual.

now, the house is supposed to make you a millionaire (or close to it), and finance your entire world-traveling retirement. or your home equity loan on house #1 gives you the deposit for house #2, which will “pay for itself” as you rent it before selling that one at double whatever you paid.

there is nothing normal about any of this. the shame is that so many otherwise-intelligent people fed into the myth of eternal growth and so destroyed their prospects. but if many of those same people change their expectations and just LIVE in the fucking house, and just PAY the fucking mortgage (as millions did without complaint for decades until now) then there is not a problem.

i’m not making light of the economic crisis here. there’s no doubt we’re in disaster mode. but i don’t include the class of “underwater” mortgage holders as a group that has been treated overly harshly by the bubble. unless you’ve lost your job, you should be able to make your payments. if you took out a mortgage with payments higher than you are able to make, then you’re an idiot (or a speculator), not a victim. and i’m glad we’re not handing you a get-out-of-jail-free card.

there is one exception to the idiot rule, and that’s for people who got these goddam complicated balloon payment mortgages and did not know enough to read (or understand) the fine print. there’s no doubt that fast-talking salespeople from corrupt lenders like countrywide got very good at talking people into financial commitments that were way over their heads and which they did not have the ability to comprehend. sorting those true victims out from the semi-speculator class might take a bit of homework. but it can be done and it should be actioned.

as for the rest of them? just stay where you are and pay your bills on time. there are far worse things happening in this world than a drop in the paper valuation of your house.Recent Posts:

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i read a post on zen habits this morning about finding your natural work rhythms. while the focus was more on freelancers and work-at-homers giving themselves permission to break out of the 9-5 mindset and find a flow that suits them, it got me thinking about the way that i have organized my own life in order to have enough time to do the things i want to do, without slacking off on the things that i must do.

i love blogging. i love writing — songwriting, poems, memoir. i love performing live and recording what i’ve written, i love playing the guitar. these are not the things that i do at my dayjob, which is a pretty standard 9-5 corporate gig. it’s taken me years to find a balance that works for me and, while it requires a certain amount of discipline on my part, the rewards are tremendous.

every day, i get out of bed at 4am, usually before the clock goes off. i’m naturally a morning person — maybe not quite THAT early, but if i want to take advantage of the creative flow that is always more available to me in the morning, that’s the right time to start my day, as it gives me plenty of personal time to work on my projects. granted, that’s not the best time for recording (and surely not for live gigs!), which i tend to do more on weekends, but for blogging and writing it’s perfect, and i’ve got several solid hours all to myself before leaving for the office.

after work, i use whatever energy is left to just hang out. dinner with a friend, sprawling on the couch with a great book (i recently discovered the french writer annie ernaux and “splinter factory” by poet jeffrey mcdaniel and i am simply drinking in their brilliance, between copies of The New Yorker), swapping ideas with my best friend and musical collaborator who is a total night owl.

now, if i hadn’t done my early-morning writing practice (that’s what natalie goldberg calls it), i wouldn’t feel free to just slob out at night. not saying i wouldn’t DO it — i’m not all that disciplined! — but i would feel guilty doing it, would have that annoying virgo headvoice chanting out a nonstop list of shoulds. (if you’ve got one of those voices, you know what an unforgiving taskmaster it can be, and i don’t think it’s exclusive to virgos.) but i’m really not all that sharp at night, and not just because i get up early. it’s the way i’ve always been, ready for anything at the start of the day and not up for much at all near the end of it.

understanding my natural creative/life rhythm, and organizing my days around those rhythms, is the difference between living the life that i want to live and living the life that i am obligated to live. some sacrifice? sure. but when people who know me well ask, as they often do, “how do you find the time to get all of this stuff done?” there’s only one answer to give them.

i don’t find the time. i MAKE it.

i’d love to hear from readers who are honoring their rhythms and their creative life by giving it a home among their hours. this early morning thing isn’t for everybody — many people are nightbirds, whose juices start flowing only when the sun goes down.

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