Epic Banality

I’ve recently been bit by the writing bug, although I have a feeling those that have been reading around here would think otherwise given that I’ve said nothing for over a week. I’ve been writing elsewhere though. Last night and this morning I began work on a section of a greater essay, a political treatise of sorts, concerning voting which is what has spawned today’s rant.

It started like my normal writing sessions on political topics generally do. I go through some of my notes, read quotes, write a little bit and then generally decide to do some additional research to put my mind in gear and find a few other historical points and authorities for whatever it is I happen to be compiling. While I have a small library of quotes and references on some subjects—liberty, the right to bear arms, the evils of the consolidation of wealth and corporate power—voting is a subject I have very little on. I tried some Google searches which turned up nothing. So, I decided to plug in a portion of a quote I did have to see if I could find a collection of similar statements. That’s where things became very messy. Here’s the quote:

Depend upon it, Sir, it is dangerous to open so fruitful a source of controversy and altercation as would be opened by attempting to alter the qualifications of voters; there will be no end to it. New claims will arise; women will demand the vote; lads from 12 to 21 will think their rights not enough attended to; and every man who has not a farthing, will demand an equal voice with any other, in all acts of state. It tends to confound and destroy all distinctions, and prostrate all ranks to one common level. — John Adams

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Today marked the last symbolic step in finalizing what I am calling my “trial separation” from religion. It’s been a long and complicated road the last few years, where I’ve struggled much more with the concept than I had as a child or teenager. However, this year finally did it for me. There wasn’t any particular event, but most people out there have a threshold for the amount of guilt and disappointment that they’re willing to tolerate. Furthermore, people who value things like reason and logic tend to have a similar threshold for the amount of arbitrary ceremony that they can stand. My thresholds have all be crossed I guess.

So what was my symbolic step? I went underwear shopping today and for the first time in about six years I’m wearing something other than white underwear; it’s red right now, for those of you who are curious. I purchased an array of colors: greens, blues, the red pair and some gray and black. No white though, not a one.

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For the past few years, the bread and butter of my web development career—presuming that you could call it a career anyway—has been PHP coding. I know a lot of so-called “real programmers” will boo and hiss and whatever, but it’s served me well enough. When I made my initial exodus from ASP in 2000, PHP was a breath of fresh air. I preferred the syntax to that of ASP (and I was one of those “mavericks” coding it in JScript and not VBScript because I hace class) plus it was free and ran on my home grown Linux server. Those were good days.

In the past eight years, I’ve done more programming and gotten better at it. Some of my projects have been larger in scale and PHP becomes much less fun to work with. I’ve been working with Python in my free time and really like the Django. In fact, if any of you out there are fledgling programmers and are looking for a place to start, I can’t help but recommend Learning Python by Mark Lutz. Python has a lot of good free tools, runs on many platforms and this book is very, very good in my opinion—not just as a primer on Python itself, but on beginning programming in general. I even picked up a few things from it. (And, if you’re a Monty Python buff, you get a bunch of extra bonuses.) I much preferred to Programming Ruby by Dave Thomas.

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There were a number of occasions where I started rolling out my own blog software and wrote one or two entries to fill space and left them at that. Some of them I actually liked so, as I putter along with this thing I’ll publish a few so I don’t ultimately lose the text. Any post designated “B-side” is an old post from another time and another place. This one, A Peak at the Past was originally written on October 3rd of 2007. I was experimenting with Drupal at the time. Anyway, here’s the entry:

Aside from working on the server and playing around with this site, I did quite a bit of reading over the weekend and even some today and the day before. There are a few things I’d like to write about concerning American history and some political concepts but before I got to that I felt like I had to do some more research. Voting and juries were the two main issues. While I won’t be getting deep into those right now, there are some things of interest I wanted to jot down.

Voting in Early America is a nice article with a few very choice quotes covering the basic history of voting in, you guessed it, early America. It’s not terribly long and I suggest that everyone take the time to read it. Benjamin Franklin’s remarks alone are worth the price of admission. If you haven’t studied very much in the way of American History, you’ll probably find this article even more interesting than I did.

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I suffer from some strange compulsions. There are the simple ones, like the fact that all the cash in my wallet must be sorted by denomination and series date and if I see some change sitting on a table or a counter I feel the need to arrange it in an orderly fashion. When I eat at In’n Out Burger I have two hamburgers—no cheese—and some fries and consume them thusly: burger, fries, burger. It must be this way. I generally like symmetry and order and my family has categorized me as “anal” since middle school. There are also the more annoying ones, like the resulting problem with the table IDs in Wordpress and the mess and hell that is the newest version (2.6).

Wordpress 2.6 introduced something that, at first, seemed like a damn cool feature: it keeps track of revisions. Every time I change a post it keeps a history of the changes. Cool, very cool. That is, until you combine it with their auto save feature and the fact that it’s just not a very well thought out system. It could be—and I hope they do something about it—but for now it grates on my compulsion for tidiness in data.

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Every Wednesday the gang—which generally includes Guinness, Voltron, Hotelie, Soldier and K.L.—and I head to our favorite pub, Fadó for some drinks, dinner and a furious round of pub quiz. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, people form teams at their respective tables and compete for a number of rounds of trivial. At the end of the night the team with the most points wins some kind of award. At Fadó first place gets a $50.00 gift certificate and there are prizes for second and third as well. We’ve been at this “traditionally” for about six or seven weeks. We’ve never managed to win and even when we’re in the race, the last round always proves fatal. In the last round the points are doubled and we always seem to fare poorly.

Tonight was different. Tonight, even though it required some morally flexible means, we emerged victorious. The night began with naming our team which is given a theme each time. The theme for tonight was a made up 80s dance move. We thought that “The Blumpkin” had a nice ring to it. Over the course of the match we answered the questions pretty well, but for that extra added push in the last round we effectively bribed one of the waitresses for the answers. (She was a hot waitress according to K.L., and I have to agree. Incidentally, so does Guinness.) Also, I stole one answer (the number of stars on the Australian flag) from K.L.’s Blackberry. So, we’ve got unclean hands now. We also have a $50.00 gift certificate.

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I know there are is some kind of prevailing idea that maligning someone who has recently died is tacky, but I have to say, when someone dies in a way that’s all too fitting for their lifestyle or position, I just can’t help it. If this person has worked for the current White House administration then it’s worth bonus points.

Tony Snow died today. It was colon cancer that got him. All I could do was laugh when I read the headline this morning and exclaim out loud to my monitor, “Well Tony, that’s what happens to a man when he’s completely full of shit!” I realize that’s not a universal truth since the entire administration and everyone working for Fox News would be being radiated in a cancer ward somewhere, but still it’s nice when the grim reaper claims someone in a way that’s all too fitting. If only Dick Cheney could drown in a drum of crude oil. (For the record, I’m aware of the fact he’d been dealing with cancer for a long time, in fact I exclaimed the same thing when I first heard about it.)

Anyway, good riddance. One less Washington DC politician, one less media jack off, one less Republican and one less conservative.

Today marks two months since K.L. and I managed to solidify the particular parameters of our association. The story is short and amusing.

I had been invited to a party that a buddy of mine was putting on and I basically asked K.L. to be my date. We were together for most of the party and I can’t count the number of times someone asked me, “So, is that your girlfriend?” This question posed a problem for me and revealed the most sensitive spot in a budding relationship. If I answered yes that would be presumptive but I didn’t want to say no in a manner that was like, “Definitely not!” So I did a lot of fudging and humming and ha-ing. K.L. recounted as recently as last night how amused she was that I was being “grilled” and she was being left alone concerning the matter.

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With the 2008 election rearing its ugly head, I find myself viewing it with the same hopeless dispassion that I viewed 2004 and 2000 with. If there’s one thing the Bill Clinton to George W. Bush transition taught me—no, reinforced since this is something I already knew—it can always get worse and generally will get worse. To many people though, our current president has set a new standard for rock bottom and a lot of people think anything will be better. Do not, whatever you do, get caught up in this snare. There is no such thing as rock bottom.

The current “leader of the free world” is a bumbling fascist who is practically drowning in his own cronyism. He’s a war monger, a religious fanatic and a man who has the spoken eloquence of Beavis and Butthead. (”Heh, heh… heh, heh… we’re gonna bomb Iraq. Bombs rule! So do nachos.”) He’s also managed to have the kind of personality that could get him elected as the Governor of Texas and that, in and of itself, has a volume of implications and not one of them qualify as good. If you want to understand the true intellect and quality of George W. Bush you need look no further than the people who still support him. I realize 2 digit IQs make you special, but that’s not something anyone should really aspire to.

So now we’re left with John McCain and Barack Obama. Oh, joy. Oh, rapture.

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If I was to say that K.L. was weird, she’d be the first to insist that was not the case. She’d say, “I’m original, not weird. I can’t be weird because I’m normal.” Her mother agrees with her assessment, though I have some feeling if a vote were taken among those who know her, the consensus would favor my evaluation. She’s weird, plain and simple. Allow me to submit an example that took place last night.

K.L. came over to my place, as has become customary, and we simply laid down in bed together. It wasn’t long before she curled up and rested her head on my stomach so the back of her head was facing me. So far, so good. This is a typical position for two people who interact in a romantic capacity. Things became decidedly abnormal when she said, without looking back, “I like stomachs. They make so many interesting noises.” I don’t remember the exact order of events that followed but I can say that I said that she was a weirdo, she asked me if I could “feel it” in reference to the noises that were being made, commented on liking what stomachs “said” and when I got up a little later I suggested we change positions so I could listen. (Yes, I get that I’m weird too, but I make no arguments to the contrary.)

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