heat coming down

It wasn't until Monday morning that I found out about all this current events business after everyone else, kind of like how I didn't hear about the Boston bombing manhunt until after the fact. My friends who are sane folk say to stay off the interwebs but like a car crash I just can't look away completely and very few people are acting sane about the whole thing, because as advanced and progressive as people think they are, there's still that bloodlust. I did jury duty once for a civil suit and it was awful, and if you don't have enough evidence stacked up one way or another that's really concrete, these kinds of things happen. At any rate, there seemed to be a lot of testosterone, and something that could have been prevented if both parties hadn't decided to mutually escalate.Not to mention the whole racism thing that goes without saying.

But some people on my corner of the Internet are spewing race war rhetoric and others the usual tropes about punkass kids and a lot of smug yanqui feelings about southerners although we're not that much different. Kids get shot every day in my part of the world, and in lots of parts, and our government evidently was cool with blowing a teenage boy off the face of the earth because his dad had dubious political affiliations and won't even say I'm sorry.

So I guess I'm more bothered by powers that be who brag about their "kill lists" because that's ongoing and unaccountable? I don't know. It sucks. This is also the state where a white chick got off with killing her kid, so I'm just going to chalk it up to bad courtroomness with a sizable side of racism on top of that? Also, seriously people, it's like you just realized that the odds in a courtroom are stacked against the white guy? Where have you been the last two hundred years? And I'm wary about giving that already failed system more power than it has to do anything circumstantial, as Ken astutely points out here.

Anyways, I got to escape to Pittsburgh to go to a nice record store, eat pizza, and hang out with sundry folk, and we ended up going up some crazy hills to get to Trundle Manor to gawk and geek at absinthe-drinking taxidermied bears, sundry things in jars, a bottle of Bela Lugosi's grave dirt, and whatnot. 

 And then I hung out with nephews, and slacked on the front porch drinking libations left over from book club, (where we really couldn't come up with much to say about 100 Years of Solitude except that the Oprah analysis sucked mightily (Ooh exotic Latino bunga-bunga with MAGIC!)), with an old friend from the library school days. Strange how people cycle in and out, it doesn't bother me too much, as long as the terms are good.

And today is Jeremy Enigk's birthday, he was in one of my favorite bands in high school. Sunny Day Real Estate was something I heard on college radio and got from the library and from there delved further into indie rock and other strands of underground. My entry point was "how it feels to be something on," and I think I put bits and pieces of these albums on every mixtape I made for anyone between the ages of 16 and 18, back before Myspace and asymmetrical hair and whatnot. It's overwrought and emotional, and quite possibly the equivalent of Yes for indie rockers, but it sounded really good this morning for the last hour of my show.