Sean Bell

I don't know the facts, but there has to be something wrong when you empty a whole clip at someone who isn't shooting back. Or really, even when you fire 17 bullets at a number of targets you can count up to on one hand. I'm pretty sure thats not what they teach you about how to use a gun. It could just be incompetence, but that doesn't really make me feel that much better.

Lefties

Historically, a lack of unity has been a problem for the political left. Generally it's something that comes up in countries where you have a proportional representation system and lots of political parties; on the left, you tend to see a dizzying array of small parties in addition to one or two big ones in the mainstream. The other end of the spectrum tends to be a bit less balkanized.

Occasionally this situation is really debilitating for liberal politics. The best example I can think of was when Le Pen made it to the presidential run-off in France a few years ago. For those of you who don't remember this one, Le Pen is this vaguely fascist creep on the far right of French politics (he would be far right anywhere). Le Pen was not very popular, and in this particular election he only drew something like 15% of the votes; many more votes were cast in favor of candidates far to his left. However, because there were so many leftist parties each running their own candidate, the liberal vote was split up and Le Pen actually came out ahead. He ended up getting obliterated in the run-off, but had electoral rules been different he would have been the president.

I am becoming more and more convinced that the Democratic Party is about to pay the price for its own unity problems. I know there are arguments both ways; the long running battle for the nomination does generate a lot of noise in the media and whoever wins it will not suffer for name recognition. However, its also a maxim in politics that you have to get your base out to vote if you want to win, and one half of hard core Democrats are going to come out of this primary contest with their feelings hurt. It wouldn't surprise me at all if some of the loser's supporters don't feel like getting out to the polls, particularly if Hilary manages to snatch the nomination from Obama.

McCain has none of these liabilities, and is confronting opponents that at the moment can only devote a small portion of their time to engaging him. There is also a strategic component; McCain has some small ability to choose his opponent. I have noticed that he has more heavily attacked Obama recently; this could be because Obama is the likely nominee, but it could also be because he would rather face Hilary in the general election and exploit the 15 years of experience the religious right has in ripping on her.

As I said before, there are arguments both ways about this, but if the Democrats manage to piss away victory in this election I have some ideas about who they can blame.

Civil War (cont.)

I think TI approves of eating pussy, so if you are southern rap fan who also enjoys seafood you can rest a bit easier.

Forgive Yourself

Last night I was out boozing in the loop...

I'm walking home with some people, and I start talking to this homeless dude. I zone out, and the next thing I knew all my friends are gone. At this point, I am pretty wasted. I buy this homeless dude a hot dog, and I am chilling out by the hot dog stand with him and some other loop denizens. As is my custom I start crying and talking crazy shit...

...and now I am going to try to reconstruct what I said, because I think its important...

If you're driving East on MO 40 coming out of downtown, on your right there is a warehouse with some really impressive graffiti on the roof. Somebody went to a lot of trouble to climb up onto this roof and write "Forgive Yourself" in giant letters. Every time I drive back to St. Louis from Michigan I see that shit and it hits me like a freight train.

In anybody's life, there is a cycle of hurting other people. Nobody indigenously wants to be selfish, or to fuck other people over, or hurt other people's feelings, but sometimes it happens by accident. Sometimes you have good intentions but you fuck someone over, and that shit hurts you too. You feel that you have betrayed something important and good inside of you and you fall into a kind of despair that is deep below the level of conscious thought. You become angry with yourself, and that subconscious leaks out. You turn it against other people, and the cycle starts again.

Sometimes, I find myself doing things I know are wrong, and I honestly can't say why I am doing them. And... I just wish I could live my life better. Whenever I see that graffiti, its this epiphany like ..."Thats what the fucking problem is. Why couldn't I think of that by myself?" I realize that I have got that cycle going on deep in my mind, and that I am not going to be able to break out of it until I forgive myself for the shit that I fucked up in the past.

...so last night I was saying this shit, and me and some random dude at the hot dog stand promised each other we would spread the word about the sign and about forgiving yourself.

So...this is that. Forgive yourself.

In a World Lit Only By Christmas Lights

What follows is a series of nostalgic anecdotes about a summer I spent living in semi-alcoholic squalor (in no particular order)...

Earlier today I was browsing through the Facebook photo albums of total strangers, and I saw something great: Christmas lights used as interior lighting. It reminded me of the ridiculous summer I sublet from Tower on Trinity with James and (sort of) Vito. We had a huge living room with no light fixtures, and obviously we were too cheap and lazy to buy a lamp. What we did have was a huge bucket of Tyler's Christmas lights, which we nailed to the walls all over the room. They ended up being the only lighting in that room for the whole summer.

Right at the beginning of the summer James turned 21. James was the first person in my crew of friends to turn 21, and as his birthday expanded our access to alcohol it was kind of an event for everyone. We bought (or had James buy) a really excessive amount of liquor and threw a big party. The people at the party didn't get close to drinking it all up, so we opened the summer with just bottles and bottles of liquor lying around. I guess at some point we all developed this subconscious desire to get rid of it all, and we started playing beirut with all kinds of mixed drinks to try and drink it up. We did rum and coke, vodka and sprite, and on one occasion I think I did gin and orange juice.

There are some humorous bedwetting stories behind the vodka and sprite, of which I will omit the details. For those of you that were there, wasn't that some funny shit?

At another point in the summer Andrew basically moved in with us for a week (I think Alice was out of town). He was sleeping on our couch, which was right by the door to James's room. James vanished for two days, off doing whatever the shit is that James likes to disappear for a couple days and do. He left this 45 second clip of the Battlestar Galactica theme playing on his computer (on a loop), and because he had his door locked nobody could go in and turn that shit off. It was clearly audible in the living room, and Andrew had to spend a whole night listening to it loop over and over. I would have gone fucking crazy.

There was also a night when Vito randomly decided to sleep on the pool table (instead of his bed). He wasn't even drunk or anything. I guess if you know Vito that's not too weird, but if you don't, it sure is.

Oh...I shouldn't forget when Tower's sister visited, got plastered, and totally wigged out. I can't remember what she was in town for, but as it was Tower's apartment anyway we were letting her crash on our couch. We were playing the board game Diplomacy upstairs, and at one point she went downstairs for a bit. Later on I went down to get a snack, and I see her just chilling out by herself with a bottle of Jack Daniels. She said something to the effect of "Oh, I am just cleaning up a bit down here..." and skittered off. Later, she came back upstairs and seemed totally fine. Then there was a moment when it seemed like she snapped and Pop! all of a sudden she was wasted. It was like night and day. Diplomacy involves a lot of passing notes, and she handed someone this note like she had written down the most diabolical plan imaginable on it...but she had actually just written the number "3" over and over again in different sizes. It was pretty funny.

Back then Battlestar Galactica was still good, and we were pretty into it. We made plaques with the characters names on them (with the corners cut off, naturally) and hung them above our doors. We also had a masturbation alarm; when someone rang it, everyone had to run back to room and masturbate as if it were an emergency. We only used it once, but thats probably pretty messed up as it is.