I'd ask for an extension,

except I'm the one who's giving it. So okay I can have one. One day? Two? Something along those lines...

And you thought you knew.

Stumbled across this--

O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything and yet nothing at all--what is it?

And where did it come from?

And why?

--and now here I am. Sitting in an RV by a lake in the northwest corner of South Carolina. Speaking to myself through words I want to soon write down. The words bubbling, surfacing, wicked away by my mind, caught by my fingertips. There is the me that is typing, and there is the me that is dictating what to type. Which is the one doing the writing? Is there a difference? Or is there not?

The excerpt above comes from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. The person who wrote it was Julian Jaynes, and his idea was that humans were not always conscious, that we only acquired C around 3000 years ago, and the reason we acquired it is because we stopped listening to ourselves. Let me clarify. We stopped perceiving the voices in our heads as somehow Other, and began to acknowledge them as part of ourselves. That is, what was once a call-and-response became then a monologue, a soliloquy.

That is, I am doing the dictating, and I am doing the writing, and I am doing the bubbling, and I am doing the typing. It is all one, and there is no separation.

This came up in the Times Magazine article on voices in the head, specifically in/re: that theory which posits that the condition of hearing voices in one's head is merely a matter of displaced sensory perception, or "source monitoring": the brain interprets the inner monologue as not its own--a precognitive, preemptive disavowal, if you will. That is, there's nothing wrong with them beyond the fact that they've lost the biological capacity to conceive of two as one (to put it a bit crudely)...oh fuck it; just read what the Times piece had to say about it:

In his 2003 book, “Madness Explained,” [University of Manchester professor of psychology Richard] Bentall draws on the theory that auditory hallucinations may have their roots in what psychologists call “inner speech.” All of us, every day, produce a steady stream of silent, inward-directed speech: plans, thoughts, quotations, memories. People hear voices, Bentall argues, when they make faulty judgments about whether this inner speech is the product of their own consciousness or of something alien to their consciousness. Lapses in what researchers call “source monitoring” may occur for a number of reasons...

[Editor's note: Forgive the author his argumentative clunkiness; he is just now beginning to work through the problem in his mind, and anyway this is not a Thursday, don't expect too much.]

My point is this: Just the other day I was thinking about what it meant to be conscious, whether animals were, what separated us, and now this. My contention I believe--made to myself--was that animals couldn't step outside themselves, they acted and willed, sure, but they could in no way analyze those acts, that will. And it isn't merely because they don't have the power of analysis. Rather, it is because they cannot separate, animals cannot see their selves as selves. If that makes any sense.

[Editor's note: ibid.]

I'll get to the bottom of this in a few weeks. And trust me: it matters.

The dogwoods are in bloom, and that spells trouble for me.

Here in Atlanta spring arrives, apparently, roughly a week after it does in New Orleans. Like a deliberate mother waking up every one of her thousands of kids, bed by bed tapping them each awake, sitting maybe for a moment, stroking hair. She will make her way slowly up the coast, slowly up the Mississippi, all the way past our borders into Canada (circa July sometime, I believe), all the way even farther north. Bed by bed, state by state, tree by pollen-spewing fucking tree.

Or, like a slow hurricane of pollinated asphyxiation for people like your correspondent. Jesus what a nightmare this renaissance business is, this rejuvenation. I can't see it, can't hear it, I suppose I can smell it, though, and I really ought to be able to taste it because those are the two places it goes, delivering its gagging life: my nose and my mouth. This hemisphere of ours leans back towards the sun and the air warms up and dogwoods and all the other trees take notice, stir, send leaves and seed out of their branches. The air becomes drunk with the stuff, saturated. We live for a time in one of those shakeable snow globes except instead of snow it is pollen, and instead of seeing it you only know it's there because of miserable wretches like myself, awake and wheezing at 3 am, awake and wheezing with eyes glued shut at 4, awake and mucous pouring out of my nose when I sit up at 5, eyes again stuck shut, the wheezing not for one moment abating. Awake and wheezing, awake and gasping for air.

It appears as though I'm allergic to spring. So. Actually this is something I've known for some time, it all started when I was 20, but since moving out to the Bay I've forgotten this, there being nothing out there for me to choke on. It all starts with a few straight days of warm weather. Snow, if it's still around, melts. The ground thaws, giving up its goddam beautiful smell, its smell that for the life of me is the second most beautiful thing I've ever known. Crocuses bloom. Young people and old people and middle-aged people everywhere start spending a little more time outside, start smiling a little more easily, start looking around themselves, start lightening up. And then the trees and the bushes bloom, the leaves come out, and all that pollen springs into the air, if our vision were strong enough we would see it glistening green with seed, if our hearing were good enough we would hear it crackle. Zing! Whick! Tsussse! Things! Coming! To Life! Everywhere!

Hurrah, the return of spring!

Hurrah, the return of life!

Hurrah Rejuvenation! Hurrah Hope!

And it's always right around this moment that I start to choke. I gasp I wheeze, it all becomes too much for me, my body seizes itself, I swell and leak. Either I can't take spring or spring can't take me, either way there isn't enough room in the air for the both of us, it seems, the pollen has pushed me out. I go inside, sit in movie theatres or libraries or malls for hours at a time, I close all my windows, I shut all my doors. I will keep all that pollen away, I will keep all that life very far from me, I don't care what it proves, winter's verdant jettisoning is too much for me. At moments, during certain early morning hours when I'm sitting up dripping snot wheezing for 1/3 the oxygen I normally get, at moments like these I think that it is life itself that's too much for me. I think that it is entirely too fitting and discomfitingly allegorical that it is this season, the season of life and rejuvenation, that almost kills me.

As personal allegories are never lost on me. I believe that it's because I'm a writer--or I'm a writer because of it--that I always see the metaphorical in the actual, always read the lesson in the tea leaves of the day's events. Things happen, friends of mine say things, loved ones do or do not, and I think: It is all so obvious. Because I am thinking: If I were writing this in a character, I would write exactly what she said, precisely what he did, I would create the scene--almost to the gesture--of what just happened to me. Everything has a Meaning. We all do things and want things and ruin things because we have Reasons. We are all perfect caricatures of ourselves. If only we'd sit down with a pen and paper for fifteen years inside of 700 different coffee shops, if only we'd look and look.

Of course my body rejects spring, spring is rejuvenation, the earth's and because the earth is the known universe the universe's annual vernal argument against death, against hopelessness. Spring is resilience, spring is bouncing back. Spring is the crocus pushing once again out of the unfrozen land, yellow and white, tiny, the first alive thing in months, spring is this happening not just once, but indeed every year. Spring is, in this sense, its own recurrence. Spring is repetition.

All of which--nice, quaint--I do not believe, none of these I have the innate capacity to yield. I am neither crocus nor the fodder for them. I am a depressive, I have been a depressive all my adult life and even before then, as a child when I would bike to a creek not far away from my house but removed, even then, when I would sit as an eight-year-old and be sullen, and mope. I am a depressive and depressives have no resilience, all is already lost, and if we are lucky/unlucky enough to have ever been given a valuable thing, all is soon to be lost, making, of course, it all that much, the losing having not yet happened. My nickname in 6th grade was Mister Negative, I dropped the block on Joey Eliazarov's foot because there was no hope that day of me being good, no hope at all so I might as well keep being bad, that day was in Kindergarten. I was reduced, by a spilt glass of juice, to tears one night after study hall my freshman year at Choate; everyone was outside having fun but I had to be inside cleaning up the mess, the mess which would take two minutes to clean up if I would just do it, clean it up, which I could not. A fracture begets the fall. Possession begets loss. Love, eventually, begets fear.

Spring with its life begets a choking sound and gasps as my body swells shut, as my body seeks to reject it. It is too much for me. I am autumn clinging always and only to the last leaf. The wind is blowing. The leaf is about to blow. November, with its ten-times decimation, is the most humane month, coming as it does with its certainty. The cold sets in. You can no longer break open the earth. You would be a fool to believe anything will come back. April housing the cruelty. April with its giving what November will take away.

Spring

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

the Big Easy

45 murdered so far this year, just now within spitting distance of March's ides. The population these days swelling (like a bruise) back up about 250,000, maybe a few thousand fewer. Which is to say--20% of the way through the year, 45x5--the Crescent City is on pace to cudgel its former high of 85 murdered per 100,000 residents, by my math on pace to make it all the way up to a clean 100.

Horrifying, we're told, national highs we can verify for ourselves...--but they seem like such small numbers, no? I mean, 1% of every 100,000 residents would be 1000, which gives you less than .1% chance of getting killed. And that's if we fool ourselves and try to say that every race, every level of education, every economic disposition, every man, woman and child regardless of these material assignations is equally likely to find his or her way to a bullet or a knife in the coming months....

And yet. And yet perfectly rational people when contemplating visiting this ruined and unforgiven city balk, pause, avert full of fear. And yet there it is in the national psyche: New Orleans as the Lower 9th Ward of the country that never made it out from under all the water and all the Martial Law, the town people are leaving, the people who are leaving being written about in national papers, the national papers read by you, me, and plenty of other educated and otherwise rational people in the living rooms of the world. And yet famous couples who adopt babies from war-torn African countries are adopting houses in the French Quarter, too. And yet there I am, every day after dark, walking that last stretch of unpopulated pavement before I get to my RV park, wondering if I'll get to keep the computer I carry in my hands, the blood I carry inside my veins.

On pace to hit 225, maybe 250 if the summer's heat does its violence-inducing thing; on pace to make it a clean 100 per 100,000 residents. Leaving the rest of the country behind in its dust.

And yet.
____________________________

This is of course nothing new to me. I have over the past few years--the past several months in particular--had occasion to consider the violence in inner city America, the disquieting lack of empathy in the communities that have been left, for all intents and purposes, behind. And without meaning to excuse their actions--agency and responsibility being two ropes in human society one ought not fray with too much abandon--I have never been able to wholly begrudge these ghetto thugs their behavior. Their schools are far, far--far--cries from what is generally accepted as acceptable in the rest of America, staffed by teachers who may or may not care, but there is only so much one can do when there is a textbook for every 2 or 7 children, when the heat won't last through the winter, when there may or may not be cess gurgling from the playground, when the number of viable rooms in the school building forces two, three grades per classroom. When so many of these children go home to parents who are either not there, or else, if there, do more harm by their presence than their absence. When they walk through neighborhoods with 10%, 20% unemployment, and when those who are employed are paid $5 and 15 or 20 cents an hour, unable to live on that in America even if they're careful because who could, people could barely live off that when Congress passed that in 1994. When they see the government's response to a devastated poor and black city, a response that--well, we won't even begin to compare it to other recent instances of mass and immediate ruination. When the only stores in the neighborhood sell lottery tickets and liquor, and the nearest grocery store offers moldy and dying produce, and a cornucopia of Frito-Lay products. When the table of media culture is replete with offerings that laud the gangbanger, vilify the snitch. When speaking correct English is 'talking white,' getting uppity.

Now again--mind you--I do not seek here to eradicate responsibility, to say that the effective underwriting of the Frito-Lay Corp. is not the community's fault, that the bad parenting is not the community's fault, that the racist prohibition on speaking correct grammar--indeed, on valuing education at all--is not the community's fault. But--and I ask you to consider this with sincerity--how much can an 8-year-old be blamed for taking part in these actions? How much can a 9-year-old be blamed? And what about a 10-year-old? And an 11-year-old? And if perhaps you are inclined to aver that at, say, 12 people should begin to think for themselves--or maybe you draw that line at 13, 14, or 15--then how is this young man or young woman supposed to suddenly, apropos of so very little in their immediate environment and contrary to all they've taught and learned and whom so many of their elders have sought for them to become...become something different? If you don't blame the 8- or 9- or 10-year-old, why is all of a sudden the 11-year-old worthy of blame for not being a certain way? When for the other 10 years of his or her life you found it perfectly normal to expect something different....
____________________________

In the Times Magazine this Sunday in case you missed it was the story of Herbert Weinstein. Aged 65 and an ad executive living in Manhattan at the time, nary an instance, legal or otherwise, of violence in all of his life, he strangled his wife and then, in order to make it look like a suicide, threw her out the window of their 12th-floor apartment on the Upper East Side (making it look thoroughly
worse). Odd, and like a John Cheever story gone way, way awry. Maybe he had been under so much stress for so long, yadda yadda yadda, went postal. Maybe she was nagging him about upkeep on the house in Connecticut and finally--at long last--he showed her. Maybe it was actually that they were into kink, and still, to this, day, he can't admit it. Or maybe the cyst that was growing in his brain near his amygdalae had been pushing in the right place, finally had bored close enough onto the very neurons in his brain responsible for sending and receiving those pulses of electricity that cause us to conceive of other people as human, needing of our care. Murder lost its meaning, or no--he lost, physically, his ability to understand what it meant.

In any event, she died, he went to prison, and since this early-90's trial there has been a slow but inexorable movement in American jurisprudence to incorporate the latest lessons from neuroscience into our courts of law. Lie detector tests that focus on which areas of the brain light up with electrical activity when we say something we know is true, as opposed to when we say something we know is false. Interrogations undertaken with the aid of electrodes, at the interrogator's side a map of the brain showing which areas light up when we remember something seen as opposed to those areas that jump alive when we recall an act we ourselves performed. Courtrooms and attorneys' offices and police precincts all suffused with the latest research on which areas of our brain are related to anger, which to regret, which to retribution, which to fear. Ways we could then start picking jurors because of all this. Methods to mitigate--perhaps with surgical or very specific rehabilitative caveats--the punishment meted out by the state.

All very complicated and murky issues--and this being the tip of the proverbial sharp and craggy floating ice--but ones which nonetheless all hinge on just how [philosophically] materialist we want to be in our collective social and legal metaphysics. That is, do we cause our actions, or do our brains? And is there a difference? And if there is, then I can go ahead and pinpoint where the brain is, but can you please tell me where the "we" is? Because I can't seem to find it at the moment. It's kind of eluding me. And law, as we all know--some of us here more intimately than others--is a real stickler for details.

Here--let's try a thought experiment. See how you react to each of the following two quotes (the first by Joshua Greene, assistant professor of psychology at Harvard; the second by Stephen Morse, professor of law and psychiatry at UPenn):

"To a neuroscientist, you are your brain; nothing causes your behavior other than the operations of your brain."

"brains do not commit crimes; people commit crimes..."

So? Which side are you on? If you agree with one, you're more of a Materialist than what I'm going to go ahead and call a Noumenonist--one who believes there are things we can't see/touch/smell/hear, but that exist anyway. [For my etymological reasoning for the derivation of this term, Kant's wiki entry is a good place to start, though if you want to skip right to the chase then just go here.] If you're the former, you're more likely to be an agnostic/atheist, and if you find yourself in the latter group you probably have some answering to do if you don't explicitly believe in god (or a kind of god). In any event, the point still remains: either you believe that we as individuals--as persons, as selves, as unique and singular individuals--are responsible for our actions, or you believe that we are all just products of our brains, our brains which can be altered, altered sometimes by our own actions, sometimes by our environments, sometimes by cysts growing inside them, pushing up against the wrong regions....

I, for one, am in the former group, and I certainly agree with the former quotation, though this could be almost exclusively because the latter is inherently flawed (i.e., there is no way to define "people" without at some point, and probably ultimately, getting to "brain" [or at least the less materialist nomenclature "mind"]). Not that I want to exculpate all criminals and all crimes; to the contrary, I'm opting instead not to stop looking for answers, I'm opting to dig deeper, to find the point which is as close to the first cause as possible. I am not, like some Noumenonists out there and like so many Religionists in this country, interested only in dividing matters and societies into two halves, the good and the bad, the rightfully acting (insofar as we know, at any rate), and those whose actions are not rightful. The world is more complicated than that, and it seems that every time we find something new we are forced to say, It is only now that we have begun looking.

Foreign Policy Negotiations

(I know I said I wouldn't post until Thursday, and no this is not what I have been preparing, but with this I couldn't resist, and also allow me, oh silent, invisible, non-existent masses, to make one more scheduling emendation: every Thursday will be a big(ger) post, with smaller things like this in between.)

Note to All Those Who Are Probably Not Reading Anyway, but Just in Case You Are

I've decided, for everyone's sake, and because it seems something like fitting given the title, to post only on Thursdays. This way you all will no longer be forced to come back here with heavy fingertips wondering Did he post last night? and Did he post last night?, losing faith and interest by the day, neglecting to come by for days and then weeks at a time, taking it out of your sacred schedule of online rituals. And I will no longer feel guilty about missing so many straight days for no good reason other than the drunken entreaties of the Vieux Carre. And--like I said--this title will finally have meaning.

So look for me on Thursday morning. I've already got a post several days in the works.

In the meantime, try out this thought experiment: irrefutable proof of karma or at least a worthwhile god would be a naked human pile/triangle of

BUSH
CONDY GINGRICH
CHENEY GONZALEZ RUMSFELD


with James Dobson, honestly one of the worst people to currently walk this earth, performing on all of them acts which will remain nameless because of the mixed crowd sitting at my digital knee here.


Anyway, yeah--Thursday. Thanks for tuning in.

or, as Ms. Didion wrote in about a thousand fewer words,

("We must be aware of the dangers which lie in our most generous wishes," Lionel Trilling once wrote. "Some paradox of our nature leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.") That the ethic of conscience is intrinsically insidious seems scarcely a revelatory point, but it is one raised with increasing infrequency; even those who do raise it tend to segue with troubling readiness into the quite contradictory position that the ethic of conscience is dangerous when it is "wrong," and admirable when it is "right."

You see, I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing--beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code--what is "right" and what is "wrong," what is "good" and what is "evil." ... Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.

--"On Morality"; Slouching Towards Bethlehem

little did we know, "other people" is French for "Texas"

I don't remember if it came before or after, but this titular thought is tied in my mind to the following moment of two nights ago: crossing a street with the signal (as I am still amazed there even was one), my progress forced a pickup truck to pause mid-turn, which semi-prolonged pause clearly incensed whomever was steering said large vehicle because the moment I was no longer in his way--and several moments before I stepped onto the curb--the tires screeched/peeled/burnt their rubber as he pulled away, 0-60. Eat his dust, I did. And his smoke and exhaust and rubber as well.

So. Welcome to Texas, it felt a lot like, or Don't Forget (Ferget) You're (Yer) in It (init). Pedestrians are not welcome, perfect and abundant evidence of which is in inverse relation to the square footage of sidewalks in the state. Indeed, not only was I informed by an urban planning student at Texas State-San Marcos that SM has a) almost none of this kind of [foreign] surface throughout its city limits, and b) no plans, according to the city council, to remedy this problem (i.e., not a "problem," no "remedy" needed), but the area directly around this RV park [South Side, I guess, of Austin] is exemplary of this, as well: in order to get from A (RV park) to B (nearest place to purchase a cup of coffee (Exxon)), I have to walk roughly 200 yards, 30 of which are on a sidewalk.

Notable Interlude: And where, exactly, is this sidewalk located? Along an auto dealership lot, of course, so that one can walk and look at the fronts of the cars, of course. As in: the only time a Texan would want to walk is in order to survey vehicles, the point of which survey is, we presume, to indeed fix the problem that has put you on the sidewalk in the first place.

The coffee is of course adequate (though it should be noted that your correspondent is notoriously permissive in his caffeine-related gustation), providing flavors like "Buttered French Toast" are avoided, and it is also worth noting that, at this particular gas station coffee station at any rate, each stirrer is individually wrapped. As in, in paper. As in, like a straw.

A (quick) note about another street crossing, specifically, the boulevard I must cross in order to reach this coffee. Crossing of course not at the intersection as it is too busy and maddening, I stroll/lollygag as ungayly--not mis-spelled: this is Texas after all, and I have had hecklers in the past--as possible through the interstices in the traffic. During one such strololly I noticed a police cruiser cruising on the other side of the street and panged a wonder: would he cite me for jaywalking? A moment later I had my answer: no. A few moments after that I had the thought: of course not! Because there are no crosswalks in Texas, because there are no sidewalks leading up to them! Small, hidden benefit I in truth would rather not have.

____________________

So. So I have been doing some thinking and wondering aloud as to why, indeed, Texas is my and JPS's hell. For it is more than just the peeling pickups and wide boulevards and individually wrapped stirrers, it is more than the seemingly ever-present danger of being called a faggot, it is more than nearly unblemished landscape of fast food options and strip malls and parking lots, it is more than the existence of "America's Ketchup," the only explanation for the existence of which, Mike has surmised, is to be a gob of sophomoric spit in the face of the Heinz ketchup and its unofficial sponsoring of the Democrats' latest offering to keep W from this nation's console. Yes it is more than that, or rather it is the way in which all of these woefully deleterious predilections (culturally deleterious, environmentally deleterious) are implemented: with glee.

Or should I say, as a teenager would. Because this is what I mean, and this is what it feels like: as though I am surrounded by the kind of arrogance that so often comes from underdeveloped awareness of the effects of one's actions in the world. I'll drive my truck and you cain't stop me. I'll eat my fast food, and make it Texas-sized, too. Walkin's for sissies. There's a battle of Good versus Evil in the world, and we're the only ones strong enough to fight it. The world is their domain, god gave them the animals to husband, et cetera et cetera and all that other Baconian jazz. They eat their meat, and they'll have it with a meat and cheese topping, and they'll drive their 'rigs' to get to it, and they'll drive their 'rigs' back. Rigs and guns and 20 oz. steaks, and no one can tell them any different, cause that's the way it is, that's the way the world works.

It is worth noting that I have on this trip missed dearly the Bay area. I see ads on the internet for the movie Zodiac--which takes place, of course, in San Francisco--and in case you don't know these ads all have the same picture: a night shot looking down from a tower of the Golden Gate Bridge, foreground fog that swallows the descending slope of the suspension cables, the city's lights aglitter in the distance. It is a shot that beckons, or at least one that beckons me, and whenever I see it I think fondly even of the two things that when I'm home I dislike--the summer chill and the rarity of heat--and of course become at once wrapped in the thrall of all that I love--the hills, the urban beauty that at moments approaches the sublime, the diversity, the food, the people who are sometimes too relaxed, the sense that this is, to my thinking at any rate, how life should be.

Which is of course the beginnings of the rub: If Texas is my hell, the Bay area is my heaven. The middle of the rub being: If Texas is the heaven of Texan's, the San Francisco Bay area must surely be their hell. (Think of it: not enough parking for their big rigs, often narrow streets impeding same, homeless everywhere reminding them of their (Texas-sized) plenitude, an even greater preponderance of non-white and more than occasionally illegal immigrants, a godless heathen on every third corner calling for George Bush's ouster, nary an anti-choice protester in sight [yes I choose that compound word after much thought; those of us who want to keep abortion legal are rarely actually pro its use], a metro area noted for its rabid, yes rabid pacifism. There are no shotgun racks, nor are there many pickup trucks in which to put them (pickup trucks that surely would not peel away for want of unbesmirched forward progress through an intersection). Vegetarianism and shoelessness and unceasing growth and study are in many corners of the city the norm. The "price of freedom" is not known or, if known, is presumed to be vastly inflated.

And yet. And yet there are similarities, quite eerie similarities, between the two. Or maybe there is just one: the teenaged gleefulness.

As I would of course be remiss in not noting that the average Bay area denizen can be quite obtuse and obnoxious in her or his held values. Case in point is a banner I saw unfurled in Union Square sometime last fall. It read: Abortion Doctors Are Heroes. Now, regardless of the feasibility of any sound argumentation that could get them there--the echo of Slepian's demise casting a vaguely lethal pall over the practices of the profession--it is indisputable that this is an incendiary banner, one that was not meant to proffer an argument, but rather poke in the eye. What's more, this is by no means an aberration for this town; I was on another occasion called a Nazi for not wanting to impeach George Bush. All I wanted to do was cross the street. The slinger of the aspersion was nonplussed by my telling him that, being of semi-Jewish descent, I hardly thought a comparison of myself to a Nazi accurate. So.

So what I mean to say is this: I guess I can't rightly call this Texas-sized state hell, while still calling home heaven. There are problems with both, problems that could be most readily ameliorated through the consideration of other points of view, the acknowledgement that others of us have just as much right to vote and act like assholes as do we. Without doubt, it is more enlightened to avoid using egregious amounts of a limited energy source, and to understand one of the most basic concepts of physics: for every action (bomb, bullet), there is an equal and opposite reaction (bomb, bullet). To name just a few things.

____________________

At any rate, I'm leaving soon enough. Come Monday night, it is onward and eastward and slightly southward to a city this state's former governor allowed to languish for a very unchristian three or four days before deigning to do anything about. There, particularly now, I will be able to see some very unTexas-sized things. Including a population that knows, now better than all of us--even we San Franciscans--that there are limits to how much we can exert our will on the world.