A Bike Ride In The Neighborhood On A Sunday

Suppose you own a pet and supposed that pet gets out. You are no longer in control of that pet. What's it going to do? What're you going to have to do?
If your cat gets out you might have to corner it in the bushes and work your way in after it.
If your dog gets out it might run out into the street or scare some kids in the neighborhood.
What about if your killbeast gets out?
So I'm riding my bike, minding my own business when a big pit bull comes barreling at me like a torpedo. He gets to me, rounds my front tire, comes back around. Does it again. He's circling me. I hear his keeper yelling "Jesse" (not making that up) and by his second or third very close circle of me as I'm pedalling like mad to avoid being mauled, he gives up.
Good thing too because I was coming up on a main road and I doubt the killbeast would have given me the time to negotiate any traffic.
When I got home my heart was pounding and I wanted nothing more than for dear Jesse to be put down.
I've lost a couple of hours sleep over it but this one will go unresolved.
I'm told that I'm overreacting, that pit bulls aren't evil, bloodthirsty killbeasts but innocent dogs that sometimes have less than innocent owners.
I didn't like these dogs before and I didn't like what I thought they represented: the projection of brute force and mayhem.
I understand that this is a bias and that it's only amplified after yesterday afternoon.

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Ruminations On

New Atheism Socialism

Atheism isn't a worldview. It's a component to other worldviews.
Over the last decade the "New Atheists" (Dawkins, Hitchens, Haris...) have gone a long way to start questioning the moral authority of religions.
As you can imagine, religions didn't take kindly to their moral authority being questioned.
I think it's decades past time that we get smart articulate people on CNBC and other venues to challenge the moral authority of Capitalism.
People who speak for Capitalism should have to defend their position that it should be the organizing principal for our society. Why should it be? Why shouldn't some other economic system or combination of them be the organizing principal for our society and our economy?
We need Socialists out there throwing some elbows in a way that engages the public.
I don't care if they're atheists or Christians practicing the Social Gospel or on some other faith path that is also the path of human equality as long as people are challenging a few people owning mulitiple houses while tens of thousands on a good day have no place to call home.
I think out & proud Atheism is a fine thing but in these times we need something that has a bit more impact.
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Second Coming

At some point some of the baggy bands in the UK learned to play their guitars (Soup Dragons, Stone Roses) or stopped hiding their sound behind so much distortion and effects (Blur).

People made such a big deal about the Stone Roses return because it was a follow-up five years after their hit I Wanna Be Adored.
A lot can change between 1989 and 1994. I Wanna Be Adored competed well with 808 State, the Charlatans and a Morrissey very early in his solo career and years away from getting his musical feet under him.
Love Spreads still has Ian Brown's trippy dancing but this song stands apart from what this band had been doing. And it's a damn good song.
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Flood

Okay, why does my son have two children's books about Noah's Ark? (I blame my step mother)
To humor the situation I read one at story time.
Eons ago at the end of an Ice Age the isthmus of Gibraltar was overtopped by rising sea water, which inundated the Mediterranean to the point that the Bosporus flowed in reverse channeling sea water into the Black Sea. That happened.
How that translates into parents regaling toddlers about God deeming people to be wicked and planning to drown them all except for his appointed games keeper.
Granted you can ad lib lots of fun animal noises and go "look, camels!, penguins(?)!" but it's creepy as hell.
I mean, why not make a children's board book of The Godfather? I'd love to see the page where the Tataglias rub out Sonny Corleone.
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When Reason Fails...

There is prayer.

Faith No More and Living Colour in one day. My subconscious must be wearing spandex.
Anyway, when reason fails I find myself meditating on Love and Happiness.
If a dream is a wish your heart makes, what is a meditation?
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So Now What?

Okay, so everthing's ruined...

So now what?
The good news is that some nice person has imparted to me the cure to insecurity.
It involves more living.
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Sunday Sunny Mill Valley Groove Day

Been ruminating on Frank Black's return to his solo career, his 2004 Honeycomb album.

In the early 2000s he had been adding Pixies songs into his sets with Frank Black and the Catholics and in a very short time a divorce, remarriage, (one that has seen the birth of three children so far) and the reformation of the Pixies for a series of lucrative-back-catalog-lours.

Recording next to nothing with the newly reformed Pixies, Frank doubled down on his rootsy sound.

It even included a fantastic cover of Sunday Sunny Mill Valley Groove Day that I can't get a version of on Youtube that I'm okay with. See, he tried that one once with the Catholics (it was set to be the title track even) and it was a dud.

So, if I may take another moment to promote albums as full pieces of music, this one is an excellent candidate.

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Security

I've lost the gotdam cure for Insecurity.
Ain't this a bitch.

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Hypnotist Of Ladies

Or, he could just ask I guess...

It's morning at Chez Patel and I have nothing to say that I can condense into a blog post.
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New Routines

Mrs. Patel and I each have new working hours. She works 9-5, I work 10-6.
Now I drop VJ off at daycare and she picks him up. The reverse of how we had been doing it for more than a year.
I am currently hanging out with him as he picks at what's left of his breakfast and I have my coffee.
He seemed to like this. There was clapping.

Amy Ray and The Butchies.
He was indifferent to all the solo-acoustic J Mascis songs I had been playing before that.
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Carrion

Turks on the Bosporus Bridge, part of mass protests that have rocket Turkey over the last several days.
Turkey's got some problems. Refugee problems from Syria, Culture War problems with an increasingly Islamist government after decades of secular (mostly military) governance. And decades old Kurdish problem which they have recently been trying to stop provoking. It's probably got a Greek problem with loads of Greek expats (who only skipped town just after World War I) come along to live in a functioning economy.

Unrest is photogenic. Look at this. This is a Time Magazine cover waiting to happen. It's also an actual man in the middle of an actual conflict.

This just sickens me. Maybe it's from settling down with a family, maybe it's just that I'm not a real radical but there is a real city really burning behind this masked man who may or may not really be at this scene.
I don't know a lot of things but I know that the appropriate response to The_Shit_Is_On_Fire is not "yay!!!"
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Imitation

This was being handed out at a comicon in San Diego. It looks like something Jack Chick would produce tbut it turned out to be a hoax. A parody.
It's funny because it's so on-the-nose.
Skull & Bones, Trilateralism. Can't go wrong parodying fundies by trying to sound Bircher.
Old-spelling marijuana and slapping on current things like the Twilight movies is right on the mark.
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Proper

This is a fine piece of propaganda.
It's over the top, it hits you right on the head with it's point.
Just the right amount of heavy handedness.
The fact that it's also correct helps a lot.
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The Angle

The gun lobby has been trying to attach itself to the gay rights movement in Washington State.
It's fascinating. But they've got the angle all wrong.
The purpose of a firearm is not to be pointed into neutral space.
The purpose of a firearm is to threaten (or take) the life of the person in front of it.
The two men training their guns on the viewer would have been a much more interesting image and a much harder message to sell.
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Dancing

Daycare has been telling me that VJ can dance and the other night Lisa saw him dance but I was half asleep in the other room.
So, yesterday we put on some music but there wasn't a lot of beat for him to hear and dance to.
What's more beat-heavy than old school rap?

Sucker MCs and Roxanne Roxanne later

and I witness the gobsmacking frickin cuteness of my child getting down.
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Tender

I've always been a sentimental person but until I had a child I had never been tender.
Perhaps I have always had too much armor. We all have our armor.
Around my own small child I could be gentle and not defensive.
Tenderness turns out to be fairly dynamic.
Sure, he needs protection but he also needs to be able to learn to do things himself.
Of course I love him but I've loved other people and still do.
As a child he requires a presence on my part that I've never applied before.
He's bringing me into this world.

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Meme

Been playing with what is now a fairly dated (and stupid) statement from (nor former) NRA chief Wayne LaPierre. In the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Massacre, wherein twenty first graders were gunned down by a young man with an assault rifle, LaPierre said "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."
In the aftermath of a tornado that flattened a town on Oklahoma (including at least two elementary schools with students in side) this image came to me.

The only thing that stops a bad guy with a tornado is a good guy with a tornado.
It works for almost anything.

Hippos, halitosis, salsa, graham crackers, cornrows...
I might be onto something.
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Why They Don't Do It In The Road

Even those people on the far right understand that there is something wrong with our severe concentrations of wealth and poverty. If they didn't understand that they wouldn't go through any efforts at hiding their benefactors mountain ranges of money.

Case in point, Apple. Not that Apple is any bastion of the right, it's just a massive bastion of wealth.
Billions of which have been sheltered from taxation in the United States in shell companies in Ireland.
Here's the thing, if Apple thought that this would go over well with the American public this never would have been a revelation. It would have been open information for the last thirty years.
You don't keep something secret unless there is some reason you don't want people to know what it is you're doing.
The other thing is our recent scandal having to do with the Internal Revenue Service (the agency that collects taxes in this country) targeting Tea Party and right wing groups (like there's a difference) for greater scrutiny in their filings under chapter 501C4 of the tax code. This filing would allow them to have tax-free status but more importantly it would allow them to not disclose their donors.
See, this category in the tax code was designed for social welfare organizations like the Audubon Society, the Sierra Club or the United Way. Groups that are not overtly political.
Groups that are overtly political can file for tax exempt status under chapter 527 like the "free market" Club for Growth or the NAACP but the difference is that these groups have to disclose their donors.
In the run-up to the 2010 midterm elections building supplies company Home Depot donated money to some profoundly right wing candidate in Minnesota because he was an opponent of labor rights. This being our age of social media, there was a swift consumer backlash.
Corporate America has avoided that mistake ever since by giving of their huge supplies of money on the down low.
There are some really right wing loudmouths running big U.S. companies like Home Depot, Whole Foods and Papa John's pizza and they don't like the public punishing them for being right wing loudmouths.
But more than unpopular politics, I think it's about the stink of billions of dollars that nobody would say they deserve.
We are not children. We know that our big corporations have that financial largess through manipulations of the laws that they purchase through armies of lobbyists and by outsourcing jobs and pulling out the floor from the rights of working people.
If they thought wealth inequality wasn't a big deal they would let the media companies that they own talk openly about how much they have and how much the rest of us don't.
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Three And One

A couple for the other Divine MS M.

Love that song.

This one's unrelated to Willie's reggae album...

Which brings me back to...

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Fathers

I think a lot of the reason I had fallen into depression for the back half of 2011 and about all of 2012 was that I was grieving the sadness of my childhood.
Not until I had become a father myself did I really start to deal with how the departure of my own father effected me.
One of my biggest hazards is getting stuck in my own head. It's a defensive posture but it can also allow me to miss what's right there all around me.
My son has nothing to do with my sad childhood.
I can grieve but then I must release my grief.
Then I can be in this moment today without being so anchored to some day long passed.

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