i didn't know that pat robertson's father was a senator.

....just like george hw bush's.

mmmmmhhmmmm.

it's especially curious, given just how similar hw looked to his father, prescott.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absalom_Willis_Robertson

anybody ever noticed that dubya actually looks a lot like pat robertson?

makes you wonder whether barbara was getting around, huh?

this meme exists, so somebody else noticed:

yeah. facebook's updated. i have eaten. and i'm staying in for the night.

i want to be clear that this is why i got off of facebook.

yes, i found the hive mindset to be a little bit scary. and, while i think that the premise that the russians are all over facebook is in truth a lie that the cia paid rachel maddow a lot of money to propagate, i do think there are legitimate concerns about local governments eavesdropping on their own citizens. that feinstein report disappeared about the same time that the russian narrative hit.

but, the real reason i had to get off is just that the site sucks. it's slow, it's buggy, it's impossible to navigate...

i forgot to update facebook last week when i finished september, so that's today's task, and i've been at it all day.

the servers are so slow that it takes all day to make 20 posts.

i've added a forum.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/394519381089546

again: this is just embarrassing.

we're essentially legislating child abuse. and, all of these parents that want to keep their children ignorant and sheltered until they end up pregnant and/or diseased because they didn't know any better should be ashamed of themselves. i may even support a policy that bans adults from welfare if they didn't get sex ed when they were kids: send the bill to the fucking mosque.

what's next? a waiver for science class?

public education is paramount. and, as parents, you should not have the right to control what your child learns at school - that should be a collective decision, and should be shaped by experts, because a big part of what public education is is about undoing the nonsense that is being taught at home.

i'm not even angry. i'm distraught. i'm grieving. rip, ontario.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-new-sex-ed-curriculum-1.5254327

please.

polling is clear that canadians view this as the biggest electoral issue on the table. and, the reason he's going to lose the balance of power, if he doesn't lose outright, is that he has consistently refused to take real, tangible actions to reduce emissions.

the only loser, here, is justin trudeau.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/wherry-book-trudeau-climate-change-election-1.5243737

more sleeping.

*shrug*.

i'm back to work, now.

are you confused by this?

there's a reason that most drag queens identify as gay men, and don't have the slightest interest in transitioning. the routine is a way for them to carry out their male desires for control. so, the whole thing is a misnomer; it's not really about men impersonating women, so much as it's about men being men. it's a male thing through and through.

the transgendered side tends to avoid all of that kind of stuff.

no, it's actually not that i have some kind of problem with nudity. almost nobody in this world has seen me naked, and there's almost nothing anybody could do to convince me to undress for them, but i would feel comfortable enough in a nudist colony, or on a nude beach or something, so long as they were matter of fact about it.

and, burlesque actually involves very little nudity, from what i understand about it. it's not about taking your clothes off, it's about keeping them on...

what actually bugs me about burlesque and stripping and other things of the sort is that it's about controlling people. i don't enjoy being manipulated like that, nor do i have any desire to manipulate others in that way. and, i'm not able to see past the basic monetary exchange and erect something exciting about it; i don't fantasize about being taken advantage of, and i'm not naive enough to suspend disbelief and forget it. even if there's not actual money involved, it's still about control, and it's consequently still gross. and, i don't think there's a way to really sanitize it and make it fun without removing it from the public arena.

some people are going to talk about female empowerment, but i think this is taking the wrong approach to equality. i mean, it's easy to understand why a capitalist society would want to focus more on empowering women than it does on emasculating men, sure. but, when your end point is the abolition of all hierarchy and exploitation, this is actually kind of a massive step backwards. two wrongs don't make a right, sort of thing.

like i say: i'm not going to go out and protest it or anything, but i don't want to be anywhere near it.

yeah, it's time to stop to eat, and october should be super fast. i spent the beginning of the month doing a lot of writing, so it's mostly going to be about archiving writing posts to the blogs. no scripts. no files, even. the rest of it is mostly posted, although we're also going to see the first actual dtk posts, too.

i don't think it'll take more than 24 hours to finish the master document. and, it's just going to be pictures, page updates and emails, mostly with the initial landlord. the only other thing to add will be messenger posts, but october is the point where those break up, too.

for what it's worth, as the alter-reality has been rewound from 20 to 30 years as a consequence of getting bogged down with various things, the first half of 2013 will not be posted until 2043, if i even make it that long. i'll be 62 at that point. so, these characters are fading out now, and it's going to be along time before they're worked back in.

if i make it, most of them will probably be dead.

but, i'm over the hump with this, i think, and it should be a lot faster from here on in.

so, i slept a fair amount today, and that's ok. i seem to have developed a habit of not really sleeping when i get back from detroit, and needing to wait a few days to catch up. so, if i'm up and ready for the week then that's a quick turnover.

the rotting smell has at least passed, from what i can tell, although it's lifting has brought back a bit of a musty smell. i'm going to tone it down and wait a few days before i take the next step on this. my old fender bass amp has a carpet around it, and it seems to pick up smells fairly quickly. it's also directly in front of me. so, i might need to air the place out more than anything else. it's way, way, way better.

it's almost time to finish laundry, and make something to eat. but, i'm going to be filing october for the night, and could potentially be posting in a day or two.

indeed, the end is neigh.

tomorrow appears to be the last night of summer

and, i may have to sneak out for a few hours, as a result of it.

the sun will be back soon.

they should raise property taxes and loudly blame it on doug ford.

call it the "doug tax"

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/ontario-cuts-health-care-child-care_ca_5d5a7ac5e4b056fafd0e9295

i think the smell has mostly lifted, at this point. the final test will be to shower, and i'm just about to hop in. i just wanted to wait for the heat to come down a little, and to get my sheets & blanket out of the laundry, first.

how was the show?

i was, as usual, a little late, and missed both the jazz show and the tomato fest. and, i mixed myself a stronger than normal pre-drink, so i was a little bit tipsy from the getgo.

the route i take to hamtramck took me past the russell, which was having a marijuana festival, which was headlined by the wutang clan. they were also having a marijuana festival on the 7/20 weekend, which was headlined by sunsquabi. there's even a section of the complex nicknamed "dab alley". so, i may prefer my russells with a side of bertrand, but this place dispenses with the ert and caters more to the brand side of russellphilism. i think i speak for a lot of the area when i say i'm just glad the complex is actually being used. it's about time they fixed the probably hundreds of windows that were broken in a tornado back in 1999, though. hey, this is why i came here.

i was hoping to just bump into a session as i biked by on the way to the show, but i managed to find some friendly michiganders that gifted me a couple of pre-rolls. so, i knew i was going to be there overnight from the start.

i missed most of the first act, partly because i was just walking in at 20:00 and partly because sitting down was kind of key, and there was only standing room in the place. they seemed to be mixing up some horns with some math-y patterns, but the fact is that i didn't catch a lot of it.

i was most interested in the second act, which came in from boston with an array of vintage 70s synthesizers. there were people in the crowd talking about "elp spliced with santana", but i think a better reference point is something like chick corea; they dabbled in prog and funk, but they were fundamentally a jazz fusion act, complete with a guitarist making generous allan holdsworth references. so, if you've ever enjoyed a record by the band uk, you might have loved this. they're called "space junk forever".

earth engine were a little less adventurous. they had moments, but i actually found them to be a bit generic. that happens sometimes when you take a lot of different ideas from different places without really crafting them into your own ideas. so, you get this shifting array of cliches in an unexpected order. i'd like to hear them build on their sound a bit more.

and, just plurals were, likewise, fairly predictable math, if enjoyable enough at that time, with that beer.

i got to the diner around 4:00, got some eggs and caught the early bus home...

...and then spent the day cleaning. now that the smell appears to be contained, i had the task of cleaning the smell out of the general area. in fact, it seems to have lifted pretty quickly, but i wanted to lysol all around there, anyways.

so, i'll be doing laundry all night, and if i don't get back to work before i sleep next, i should be on it right after i wake up.

there was this one time...

it was my friend's 18th birthday. i'm born at the beginning of the year, so i was always a little older. and, there was a third party driving that was a little older than both of us. he was a weird character; he stayed with several of my friends for long periods, on couches, at the time, and was known for handing out large amounts of free mushrooms.

the older one picked us up somewhere near my place (near pius) after school and initially didn't tell either of us where we were going. but, it was obvious once we got over the bridge and on to the 50.

even then, i didn't feel comfortable about it. so, i pretended i forgot my id and smoked a joint by myself out in the car, instead.

apparently, it's all about what the meaning of if is.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2019/08/18/spare-me-the-hpony-apologies.html

and, this thing in canada about the ethics commissioner is boring.

sorry.

and, frankly, when they hear these white folks come down from new york, and they be all talkin' about bringing drugs into the community, they have reason to interpret that as a red flag.

because they do know that it's always been white folks from new york that are behind this. some with last names like delano, in fact.

what your average church-going black woman in southern georgia wants to hear is what it is that you're going to do to keep drugs out of her community. she wants to know how you're going to protect her and her family from the pushers and predators.

she might not want her kids or grandkids in jail, granted. but what she really wants is to keep the drugs away from them.

and, while the science is obviously paramount, any policy designed to win southern black voters has to be designed with this in mind.

i'm clearly going to miss the jazz show, which i kind of expected would happen, but i'm still planning on making it out to the prog show...

but, i will tell you this flat out, regardless of what these coastal libertarians are trying to say: you're not going to win in the southeast by appearing "soft on drugs".

i know there's an issue that comes up when it comes to the idea that trafficking crack is punished more harshly than trafficking cocaine.

i just want to point out that i think the proper answer is to make sure that cocaine traffickers are being sufficiently sentenced.

what is the war on drugs?

because if you're going to oppose it, defining it first is important.

where i come from, it's been generally understood that the war on drugs - much like the war on terrorism after it and the war against communism before it - was mostly just an excuse to advance american geostrategic interests, mostly in latin america. to the extent that much of anything associated with the war on drugs had anything to actually do with drugs, the focus appears to have mostly been to control the supply, in order to inflate the price. and, there seems to be good evidence that the drugs were introduced into specific communities by the government itself, in an attempt to control and in some cases enslave certain segments of the population. from that perspective, talking about ending the war on drugs in 2019 is somewhat of an anachronistic position - the war on drugs largely turned into the war on terrorism, in the sense that the propaganda shifted.

i would oppose the war on drugs in this sense, which basically means no longer propping up dictatorships in latin america. i bet bernie could have a long discussion about this, giving that he lived through it and i don't really remember it, first hand. but, if that's what he meant, he may have confused people.

if you're referring to abolishing actual domestic drug laws when you talk about the "war on drugs", which i think is what the term is likely to mean to a contemporary audience, then you're moving into the libertarian right in a way that is going to lose a lot of people. and, it's a strange thing to hear from a guy that's threatened to put pharmaceutical executives in jail as a corollary of the opiate crisis. there are certain drugs - opiates, methamphetamines, crack/cocaine -  that are just an absolute scourge on society and that a war truly needs to be fought against. while i may agree that we should take more intelligent tactics in our war against these drugs, which may require changing certain laws, the idea of ending that war is not something i'm in favour of at all.

i just think this is a language thing: that term, war on drugs, may not mean the same thing to you as it does to bernie sanders, or it does to me. and, some clarification is required on everybody's behalf.

it's the dealers and manufacturers of dangerous drugs that i want to put in jail, not the users of them, whom i would consider victims of an industry that should be shut down with extreme force.

in a single-payer healthcare system, supervised injection sites are useful because they reduce the deadweight costs associated with drug users. and, i consequently support them as a cost-cutting measure. that is the actual reason that liberal governments have allowed them in canada - as the actual reason that we have a single-payer system (as designed by and brought in by the liberals) is that it makes us more economically competitive.

further, the idea of capital punishment is anathema to most canadians. it's not even thought about. it's insane that america still does this.

but, he doesn't think this is going to win him black votes in the bible belt does he? they don't want less incarceration, there. they want a stronger police presence to keep their communities safe, more action to keep drugs off the street and more retribution in the system, to ensure that the evil doers get what's coming to them.

it's a policy that might be popular in chicago or detroit or new york, but it's political suicide in the southeast.

https://www.apnews.com/6d4cf74fef0b4b36a086682780ac8937

i think bernie is probably better off "quarterbacking" in the senate.

he'd be a better majority leader than president...

it my be true that whites are projected to be a minority in the total voting population some time in the middle of the century, but that observation, however relevant it actually is, doesn't help you win the election in 2020. the united states does not elect a president with the popular vote, and i'm not aware of any projections suggesting that whites are going to cede control of the electoral college, the thing that matters, any time soon. so, this democratic strategy of trying to win minority voters in red states is a tentative strategy in the distant future, not a realistic one in front of us today.

this is, in truth, not a controversial point, and the fact that it's being seen as one is just reflective of the delusions underlying the campaign. the entire discourse is stuck in 2008. but, why did clinton lose to trump? it's not because she didn't do well enough with minorities.

and, if you're making a serious run at the democratic nomination in 2020 - not 2070. 2020. - the calculation is crystal clear and obvious: winning minority votes is easy, while winning white votes is hard. and, it's the hard task you have to accomplish to actually win.

but, there's a more cynical problem underlying this strategy i'm talking about of relying on minority voters to overpower white voters. even if it were to work, is that what a responsible politician would want? that's a dangerous path, one that's going to lead to a lot of problems. again: one would expect a politician of the left to try and move past race, not try and exploit it as a wedge issue. this isn't a society i want to live in, and there's good reason that white voters aren't reacting very well to it: it's an algorithm for another civil war.

bernie remains a lesser evil in a field full of pretty evil candidates. his policies are far and away the best on the table and if, like me, you're mostly concerned about policy, then he has no serious competitor in the primary. but, i think i've been clear that i wish he did have one because his temperament and personality is a problem. he has this me v. the world attitude that liberals usually associate with the right, but that i know from experience is a pretty endemic problem on the pseudo-left. these people just don't accept criticism of any sort - you are with them or against them, like politics is some kind of sport rather than a process of consensus building. they've fundamentally lost the plot.

so, i can keep trolling bernie if you want, and i no doubt will, but i think the more important lesson is to realize how easy it is to set him off, and to ask yourself whether you want this guy with his finger on the button or not. a successful president is going to need to be less defensive, less authoritarian and more willing to listen to the views of people that disagree with him. these kneejerk reactions and strong arm tactics don't seem to be that different than the guy they've got now.

guess i'm awake.

it doesn't appear to have rained here tonight after all, in fact it's very nice out, but i'm doubling down on there not having been anything really worthwhile to actually do. i would have had a few beers at villain's, talked about nothing of substance, and then gone out to try and figure out if this place down the street is an after hours club or a strip club (i don't actually know, and it might even be both).

i've never entered a strip club in my life, and don't really want to enter one now.

it's too early to tell if the smell is really lifted or not. there's a faint background, but i don't know if it just means i need to clean or if it's indicative of a lingering problem. at the least, i think i've finally actually identified what the problem actually is.

so, i've got tonight left, but do i actually want to go anywhere or not? i don't want to force myself out if i don't want to actually go.

i've been out a lot this summer, but when the introversion hits, it hits hard and lasts a long time. i will go weeks or months without talking to anybody. i'm careening in that direction, but am i actually there yet?

how's bernie polling in vermont right now, anyways?

....and, while i will often cite dawkins and hitchens, i have actually never read anything by sam harris, who i've actually accused of being a fraud (he's not an atheist.) and a cia agent.

i seek a post-culturalist, post-racial, post-religious, post-capitalist society.

and, my offensive statements here are either about religion or about class, they are never about race.

the fact is that bernie is losing, and he's losing because he's doing everything wrong, and he's doing everything wrong because he's getting terrible advice.

and, at the end of the day, he'll be lucky to finish third in the south, anyways. he's going to need biden to drop, to start with.

no.

it's disingenuous.

if you want to beat trump, south carolina offers you nothing of any value. the reason is twofold. first, the democrats have no chance of swinging the state. second, the party can take at least 90% of the black vote for granted.

if you want to beat trump, you need to focus on states you can actually win, like nevada, iowa, new hampshire, wisconsin, michigan, pennsylvania...

...and winning those states means the party needs to perform better with white voters.

so, you need to make that choice: do you want to win or not? campaigning against white supremacism in south carolina is just tilting at windmills.

bernie's made his coffin, he can lie in it.

and, it does not matter who wins the south carolina primary.

at all.

this is just a periodic reminder that race is not actually a scientific concept, and anybody rooting their politics in race is consequently performing pseudo-science.

it's really long past time that america left the idea of race in the past. it has no place in the modern world.

i'm a typical nerd: if you give me a complicated differential equation, i have an array of tools to utilize, but it took me three months to find the p-trap in the cleanout.

we're all like this. really.

well, it seems 100% better, so far.

it seems too easy, though.

this has actually been going on for months. it took me the longest time to even realize where it was coming from. but, everything is clicking at this point.

so, maybe my landlord isn't cooking meth after all.

actually, i think i just needed to understand how the system worked a little bit better. i went to university for a long time, but i'm not a plumber, and i don't actually know anything about plumbing. but that's how you learn, right.

so, there's a p-trap beside the cleanout (i think i said dugout previously) and apparently it can evaporate, thereby releasing sewer gas. and, the guy upstairs likes it cold and dry, so he was no doubt running a dehumidifier down here. and, i like it hot, at least, even if i'm struggling with the dry air. so, the conditions for evaporation were present.

what you're supposed to do is fill it up with water, so i untaped it and then i did that.

but, then i taped it back up again to try and lock the moisture in. maybe i can put a ziplock bag over it or something; crazy glue the tupperware.

i still need to lysol the fuck out of it. and we'll see if it even works or not. but this at least makes sense.

then, why did running the water stop the smell? i guess it must have been blocking the gas from coming back up the trap.

if it works, i'm probably at least mostly right.

ok, so, i left the fan on for groceries, but turned the water off, and i came home to the most disgusting stench i've ever smelled, distributed over the entire space. i had to open up the closet and see what the fuck is going on in there.

is it the gas after all? well, i started by turning it off and draining the tank. what i was experiencing was that the smell came back after i turned the water off, so what happens if i turn the gas off?

there does not appear to be any odor coming from the heater, but there's a dugout beside the main that is just rank. i suppose that the right answer is probably that there is in fact something rotting in there, like i thought in the first place. but, i can't just run the hot water 24/7.

what i'm going to try and do as a stop-gap is just tape the dugout up and lysol the space. if that doesn't work, i'm going to need to get the landlord to call a roto-rooter....

is marijuana legalization actually....

....population control?

listen, i just want the ability to choose when i'm stoned and when i'm not. that's what it comes down to. and, that should be a fundamental right.

and, i shouldn't have to send a thug with a gun after you to get you to respect that, either.

i tried to turn the water off a few hours ago and i just got swamped. *shrug*. so, i've got something up at reddit asking what it means when the water from your your water main reeks and running the hot water flushes out the smell. i mean, it's almost like a crude boil water. is it just a function of the bad water supply? is the water here really that gross?

but, now that i'm starting to get a better grasp of what's happening, i can hardly turn the water off and deal with it.

fwiw, it did rain here early this morning, which is when i'd have been trying to enjoy the overnight. and, they're officially calling for rain this evening @ 90% certainty. i'm actually kind of relieved about it as i don't think i'd have that much fun at villain's. and, that means i'm officially staying in, and hoping it clears up for tomorrow.

i've started on october, as well, and i think it's likely a pretty quick job, relative to the last few. that's not to say that it's less data, overall (it might be more), but that most of it is already done. and, that should be the norm moving forwards, too. if i'm in for the month, i could get through 2013 before september 1st.

so, i'm going to step away, take a quick grocery run before the rain hits, make some eggs and then hop in the shower. if it doesn't clear up tomorrow, that might be my last step outside the house this month. at the least, i'm planning for a long slog through the rebuild.

i guess i have two modes. and, i'm potentially swinging back to hermit mode, now, as i push back into getting some work done.

"marijuana cures cancer".

riiiiiight.

https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/throwback-thursday-when-doctors-prescribed-healthy-cigarette-brands-165404/

you know they told you cigarettes were good for you too, right?

they even had studies that backed it up.

small sample sizes. small scale studies. industry money. it's exactly the same thing.

it's funny that he doesn't realize that marijuana is just the next entry in the list, though.

when we get the data in on cancer rates for "medicinal" users, a lot of people are going to have a lot of egg on their face.

"fool me once..."

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/4/20/15328384/opioid-epidemic-drug-legalization

but, like i say, i'm kind of fucked. even if i was sure about it, it would not be in my self-interest to call in.

i mean, i've pointed this out before.

the police are there to moderate the drug trade, rather than shut it down. and, at the end of the day, they're also there to protect the drug dealers from the wrath of the anger in the community about the effects of addiction.

so, there's this weird thinking on the libertarian right that removing the state would lead to a society that is more lax on drug use. but, i'd rather argue that, in an actual anarchist society, when the police are no longer there to protect the pushers, what would actually happen to people pushing hard drugs like meth, crack or heroin is that they'd be strung up in a tree by an angry mob.

and, if you were the fucker that sold my daughter her last hit before she overdosed, and the cops weren't there to protect you, i can tell you that i'd be looking for your head on a pole.

it was genesis p'orridge that pointed out that heroin is only less dangerous than capitalism. and, you really can't make sense of hard drug use outside of a capitalist paradigm - only a society rooted in the naivete of free markets would allow for such a thing.

see, i'm in a shitty situation.

i would not hesitate to call a meth lab in. the stuff is literally poison, and if he's cooking meth then he definitely belongs in jail. i categorize meth with opiates, and i have zero tolerance for it. how many kids has he killed or otherwise damaged for life? i'm actually really not very "liberal" when it comes to drug laws - i'm a socialist before i'm a liberal, and the fact is that the far left has really never had much patience for this kind of thing. and, i actually think we need to be writing very strict bylaws around residential marijuana use. if this confuses you, check your strawman.

but, if i call in the narcotics squad, they're going to seize the place, and i'm going to end up homeless. nor do i want to approach him about running a meth lab.

what i need is for the fucking oversight body to get the report in already so i can launch my legal action, get my settlement and get out of here.

i'm stuck, until then.

but, he's not going to like the cost of his water bill.

the guy has gone to work like five times in the last 10 months.

i'm giving him $750/month, granted. but, he surely has a mortgage. how is he paying his bills?

yeah, i guess the unavoidable conclusion is that there is something in there. bacteria. a blockage. even a broken pipe. i don't know.

running the water gets rid of the smell, so what does that mean? if it was a partial block, you'd think running the water wouldn't be very effective. so, do i just try to use more bleach?

the other thing is that it was fine, yesterday. so, why did it come back today?

i'm going to let the hot water run for a long time and periodically run the rest of that bottle of bleach through.

but, i'm starting to more seriously suspect a meth lab upstairs, and am beginning to wonder if that's what his no smoking lease clause was really about, given that he does seem to smoke. i mean, i've been wondering why the fuck somebody signs a no-smoking lease, then starts smoking. that might be the answer....

maybe it's coming from under me because he's dumping something into the water table via the pipes.

yeah. so, the bleach didn't help in the long run.

if i run the hot water for a while, the smell goes away, but then it comes back. if i run the bathtub, the hot water runs out. so, i'm going to try to run the sink instead.

it might be sewer gas backing up, then, rather than bacteria in the pipes. i don't know if that means something is broke or what....

so, if there's a late party in detroit tonight, i can't find any evidence of it - which isn't to say it isn't happening, or even that i don't know the spot, but just to say that i can't confirm it. there's the usual options at the goth club and the gay club, but i'm not feeling it, really. or, at least, not yet. the gay club is the more likely option but i think it's pretty remote...

there's another possibility i could try, which is an after hours club not far from here, but i'm not even sure they still exist and, if they do, i suspect it's fucking dubstep. that seems like such an obvious option, i know, but i really just don't like the genre. there's also something at villain's, but it's almost certainly going to be people sitting and chatting rather than dancing and grooving, and i tend to find that kind of thing painfully boring. i don't want to sit and chat. sorry. i might drop in for a beer once in a while, but villain's is kind of a bourgeois place. i'd actually bet that most of the regulars are going to go to the comic book convention.

(i've never "read" a comic book in my life.)

i'll check the weather in a few hours, and if it looks like tomorrow is a wash and tonight is nice, i might flip the thing over and do the villain's/x bit after all. but, for right, now, i'm looking at this:

13:30-14:30 - oopapada @ ripe records. grosse pointe. free.
14:30-18:00 - bike to hamramck, and get a beer somewhere.
18:00-20:00 - tomato fest @ outer limits. hamtramck. free + cost of food.
20:00-???? - prog & math show @ ghost light. hamtramck. $10 + cost of beer.

the last sunday bus is 00:30. if i miss it, i guess i'm hanging out until the morning.

so, i mean, i would prefer a system where you let the immigrants buy the new houses, and let the white people stay in the poor areas. and, i'm actually even happy to let the housing decay, if it reduces the cost of rent.

but, that means you need to cut the number of refugees coming in in favour of more wealthy immigrants, so they're not creating all of this pressure at the margins.

and, no, the answer isn't to build more new houses and then try and push people up "the ladder".

i am a white person with a decent education, and i don't want to own a new house in the suburbs with a picket fence, where i need to spend hours of my time in a car to get back and forth from downtown. i reject that vision of western civilization. what i want is a small, affordable apartment in the heart of the city, where i am within bicycling distance of everything i need, and can rely on public transit in a pinch. that means i want a space in an old building in a centralized location, not a new house in the middle of nowhere.

in that sense, i'm happy to let wealthy immigrants come in and buy up the new housing, although i might criticize them on their carbon footprint. what pisses me off is when i'm forced to compete with a bunch of refugees for basic shelter, which should be my right as a citizen of the country.

so, the point that the liberals aren't grasping is that these policies that are designed to clear white people out of the low income areas by moving them into middle class areas in order to make way for refugees in the low income areas are running into the basic problem that we're living in the low income areas because the kind of class mobility being hinted at requires lifestyle choices that we don't want to make. i'm an artist. i don't want an office job. i don't want a trade union job. i don't want to buy a house or to be in the middle class. what i want is cheap rent in the slum and the freedom to create. and, if i have to compete with people for that as a consequence of some liberal politicians' vision about class mobility, i'm going to get pissy about it.

they're focusing on the refugees, but i care more about low-income canadians. and, it's a circular problem: the more you increase demand without addressing the supply issue, the worse the problem gets.

i'll state what i've been saying for years: if the government wants to admit all of these refugees, it is going to need to build the infrastructure for them. and, if it won't build the infrastructure, if it's just going to let the market deal with it, then it's going to face a backlash.

so, do you blame it on the government? do you blame it on the refugees? at the end of the day, it's the mismatch between the immigration policy and the housing policy that's at the root of the problem. but, when some poor white person - be they a struggling artist or a heroin addict - points out that the cost of living is rising because of market forces being driven by immigration policy, they're not wrong, and the political spectrum needs to get their head around it.

so, we're not 'full'. but we lack the infrastructure and need to cut immigration levels until it catches up. it is true that it is in the benefit of low-income canadians to focus more on a housing strategy, and that's what the thrust of the policy ought to be about, but we need a two-thronged policy if we want to really get rents under control.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/homeless-newcomers-refugees-canada-studies-1.5242426

and, also, about that stench.

there's a set of french doors across from my bed, behind which is a water closet with the the hot water heater, gas lines and piping going directly into the floor. that area definitely smelled bad, but it came and went, so i decided it probably wasn't a gas leak. last week, i decided to try and seal the doors a bit better to see if i could block the smell a bit to better understand what it actually was.

i ended up with two conclusions from this. the first is that there's actually two smells, and they were getting mixed up into one. the first is a garlic-y or onion-y smell that appears to be coming directly from upstairs, and is either food or meth. i learned enough about meth in the last house (and was never convinced she wasn't smoking it) to understand that, and he does appear to have a drug addiction, but i can't rule out food, and in context think it's rather more likely. the other smell seems to be of something rotting and is likely bacteria in the piping coming directly underneath me. and, i am convinced that there are in fact pipes from the shower to the water closet that go underneath the floor.

it always seemed like the smell was coming from below me rather than above me, and, so, i think i've got my primary problem: there's very stinky bacteria in the pipes. and, this is sort of consistent with the stinky sinks, which i think i've mostly fixed via bleach.

so, i ran some liquid bleach through the bathtub and we'll see if it works or not.

as for the onion-y smell, now that i can separate it better, i'm going to try and figure out when it's coming. if i notice that it frequently smells like onions around five or six at night, i guess that's just a diet choice and something i'll need to get used to. but, if it starts coming down at odd hours, i might have solved more than one problem....

i'm going to say this again: it always seemed like the smell was below me, even when it was clearly smoke. so, was i smelling the gaseous byproduct from the bacteria and deciding it was smoke? i'll have to keep at this with the bleach for a while and see how effective it is in the long run, but, for now, it seems to have cleared it up.

and, i actually think i'm going to take a nap.

there are things happening in detroit this weekend. i bet there's a 60 year old tatted grandfather in the 'burbs that's just totally psyched about neurosis on friday, followed by wu-tang on saturday, and may stay up all night drinking coke to do it. *satan symbol*. but, i'm not into either of those acts...

just for context, it actually wasn't that warm out last weekend. last weekend, i actually went for the shows, because it happened to fluke out into such a long fest. it warmed up nicely on saturday afternoon, but both the mornings dipped down to around 15 degrees, which is sub-60 farenheit. so, my comment about the 3rd/4th of august being the last hot saturday night this year lasted through last weekend, anyways.

as mentioned many times now, the one way out of the solar magnets this summer is if the ocean patterns overcome, and that's only going to happen due to cyclones. it is nice this weekend - excluding some potential issues with rain - and it's because there's a gigantic system in the pacific.

but, you can see in the long range that this weekend is an unusually nice blip.we're looking at a cold saturday morning, next week.

again: i know we're getting record global average temperatures right now, which means it's very hot in some places, but that's an average. i'm kind of making the flip argument that a lot of climate deniers make: i'm acknowledging the existence of record global average temperatures (which is what we call climate change actually is), while pointing out that the local weather in this particular region has been below seasonal for most of the year, and then blaming that on the sun. again: i don't argue in terms of false dichotomies. i'm not a conservative. i'm a socialist; i want dialectics. so, the fact is that you don't have to choose between the cooling effects of the current solar cycle (which is ending) and the greenhouse effect (which is continuing to run out of control). the dialectic, for this summer, is that both things are true: it is globally very hot (on average) while being cooler than normal, here, in this specific place, although the effects of all of these hurricanes might manage to balance it out better than i'm suggesting. that is, the averages here may end up being pretty "normal", as a consequence of these long cold stretches being overrun by these brief blasts of tropical air.

so, i do want to get out one more time. maybe. it's just, for tonight, the only real choice is crystal method--->goth club, and that's going to require something like two hours on the bus in the middle of the night. further, both shows are in air conditioned clubs. so, if the point is to go outside, it kind of fails.

i don't have a late show tomorrow, yet. i'm still looking. but, i think i have yet another path through hamtramck on sunday. they should just dig that city up out of detroit and airlift it to south of the 401....perfect...

in the medium term, while i can't predict when it's going to happen, we can expect that the winter jet stream is going to take over suddenly again, like it did last year. it's just a question of when. october? november? let's hope it isn't september, but highs in the low 20s for the last week of august is pretty ominous. if we don't get another hurricane, it won't swing back to the high 20s. i know it said it two weeks ago, and the hurricane fluked us out, but there's an even higher chance that this weekend is the end of serious summer.

that brutal jet stream pattern will lift when the magnetic field from the sun shifts, and while we don't have predictive solar science (we just don't understand it. nobody does. the science doesn't exist.), it's a coin flip whether we can get back to global warming here or not next year. and, when that happens, it could be pretty dramatic pretty fast. if that jet stream pulls back early in the spring, we could have a glorious summer....

or not.

we'll find out next year, right?

so, here's the travel blog:

https://books.noisetrade.com//j/092013-travel-blog

....and i'm now done with september and can move on to october.

unfortunately, noise trade did not work out as a hosting solution, and i never got a clear answer as to why. but, i decided in the end that the site was full of ads and unworkable, anyways.

the readable version of the september archive for this blog is now available as a standalone in the music journal package at bandcamp:
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/09-2013-music-journal

...or as a component in the full first reconstruction phase archive, available in the following places:
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1026660
https://www.lulu.com/en/ca/shop/jessica-murray/full-first-reconstruction-phase-travel-blog/ebook/product-nm4jeq.html
https://drive.google.com/file/d/13M7Vvz2hLiuGdywPL2oNRgUY3nmn26E6/view

stop.

one of these things is not like the other. one of these things doesn't belong. so, can you guess which thing is not like the other by the time i finish this song?

1. new hampshire
2. iowa
3. nevada
4. south carolina

scroll.....
























those are the first four states. and, the answer is that three of them are swing states and one of them isn't.

and, maybe it's time to ask ilhan omar to go away so as to no longer be such a distraction.

maybe it's time to put some pressure on her to resign, or at least to resign from the party. i mean, this is the party that pushed out al franken for far less.

they should have distanced themselves from her from when they could. now, they have to ask her to step down. as it is, she's a gift that just keeps on giving, and the longer she's around, the more seats she's going to cost them.

do you know what you call it when a president alters his foreign policy based on how a foreign leader treats his friends?

that's called nepotism.

that's called corruption.

i would hope that, in the future, he's a little more cognizant of the fact that people are currently rating and judging him on his reasoning skills and on his temperament, as he's running for an important executive position.

that was a stupid comment that was no doubt suggested to him by the stupid people he has around him right now, and he should walk it back.

but, if bernie thinks he has a path via jew-baiting to try and win the arab vote, he's got the whole thing completely ass backwards.

it's statements like this that are why he's going to lose new hampshire, and why he's becoming an also-ran in iowa.

this is exactly what he needs to stop doing....

i've actually made this argument before.

if netanyahu wants to act like he's just another gop governor of just another red state, the president should go ahead and annex the country.

...west bank and all.

israel is a sovereign country with absolute authority over who is and is not allowed to cross it's borders. they're fully in their rights. that said, i would hope that the openly racist representatives in question are afforded the opportunity to appeal the decision via the israeli judiciary, and are otherwise given proper due process in law. i would also hope that this kind of rash and poorly thought through kneejerk punitive reactionary policy is not reflective of how sanders would behave as commander in chief.

that said, i would take the opposite position: if israel insists on interfering in american politics, perhaps there should be a serious discussion about statehood. i don't want to be the 51st state. israel is a better choice.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/08/16/sanders-says-if-israel-wants-ban-members-congress-it-should-not-receive-billions-us

so, this is what i've got done so far on the two main blogs.

the politics blog is being built up from scratch, whereas the music blog is being edited in place. so, the politics blog is just jul 16th-sept 30th, 2013 and the music blog is from 1996-2018. both are typeset on 5"x8 paper, meaning they're intended for roughly novel sized publication. it also means there's a maximum page limit of around 1000 pages, so i'm looking at these four-month 'semester' subsets as the most realistic maximum publishing option.

i'm currently charging $1/100 pages on the pdf downloads at noise trade (or $3/journal, flat, at bandcamp, which is a more comprehensive package, including scripts and documents). and, i'm rounding. so, the first one would be $7 and the second would be $45. yeah.

in the long run, it might be comical to print the final product as a hardcover textbook, which would not be typeset to 5"x8" but may still be on the order of 5000 pages, anyways. if we can get a next-level optical disc that can take multiple terrabytes of data, maybe you put it in the sleeve, like they used to do in the 90s.

as posted previously, i want to get to the end of 2017 on the rebuild before i put this aside, and i hope this picks up soon. as for right now, i crashed hard after i ate last night, haven't really fully woken up yet and am not entirely sure why. i didn't smell any drugs. i think it might have more to do with not really sleeping off last weekend. i mean, i slept for a few hours on sunday afternoon, but i didn't get the kind of sleep i usually get after a two-day party. i might just be behind on my sleep, but if that's the case, i should be caught up soon, too, after having slept the better part of the last 15 hours.

as of right now, i legitimately want to stay in this weekend. what i was talking about has finally cycled around: i'm partied out, and keen to stay in and get a move on things. so, sunday's a distinct maybe....and i might start late on saturday, if it is.

for now, i still need to finish the stuff i was doing here locally, then switch into the travel account to update that.

see, here's the sneaky thing about that.

what's going to happen over the next several months is that all of the media and all of the campaigns are going to try to create divisions between the candidates around their identity, and if the media pushes it down hard enough then it might become real after all. and, so we're going to see this boys v girls grade school spat, with bernie on the boys' side and one of the female candidates (probably warren.) on the the girls' side.

so, what if you made this gender fight inside the candidates' campaign?

it's not ideal, but it's maybe a way to co-opt the media's tactics. 

for real.

bitches v bros basketball. round robin. march madness.

make it happen.

what?

they should do a bitches vs bros basketball tournament as a fundraiser.

so, is cardi b a bernie bitch? is that the idea?

bernie broad?

it's pandery and kind of cringey and sort of exactly the kind of thing that clinton was doing four years ago that gave people the chills. stay away from the hot sauce, bernie. 

at least he tried to focus it on the issues. he's not trying to pretend he's a young black female (which is an empirical question.), he's just (consensually) grabbing hold of one for a few minutes to draw attention to himself.

i dunno. we'll see how people react, i guess.

but, don't be surprised if it's not so well.

the dtk blog for 09/13 is up...

i have some loose ends locally, and i'll need to log into the other account to update the travel blog, but i'm pretty much done, so i'm going to stop to use the stove, first, to warm the place up a bit. i'll probably take a shower after, too.

it's only about 25 degrees out right now, which is really not warm enough for air conditioning.

https://books.noisetrade.com//j/092013-deathtokoalas

unfortunately, noise trade did not work out as a hosting solution, and i never got a clear answer as to why. but, i decided in the end that the site was full of ads and unworkable, anyways.

the readable version of the september, 2013 archive for this blog is now available as a standalone in the music journal package at bandcamp:
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/09-2013-music-journal

...or as a component in the half year archive at smashwords:
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1026620

...or as a component in the first reconstruction phase archive, available in the following places:
https://www.lulu.com/en/ca/shop/jessica-murray/full-first-reconstruction-phase-deathtokoalas-blog/ebook/product-zrgr94.html
https://drive.google.com/file/d/10DbwOVdqWt73rHNzWJWgEfduzREogExX/view

the third entry in the music journal series, which is the month of september, 2013 and is 134 pages long. i am not going to summarize the story, but it is available on the web over here: musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/09/.

this is a compilation of written correspondences that occurred around me over september, 2013. it includes facebook posts, messenger chats and emails with friends and family members, in an attempt to tell the story of how i set my studio back up in windsor after relocating from ottawa. the contents of this download are the dummy track, a word doc file and a pdf file, both written in a more readable, chronological ordering. i've also added the respective files for my other three blogs, for general interest, as well as 82 separate txt documents (essays, notes, scripts and web pages) that are referenced in the journal.

the events documented in this journal occurred in september, 2013 and were compiled into a narrative in several stages over the years 2014-2019. journal completed on july 30, 2019. released and finalized in doc and pdf format on aug 15, 2019. doc0913.

credits

released October 1, 2013

j - editing, participant

esa - participant
nana - participant
the surviving uncle - participant
the initial landlord - participant
teksavvy technical support - participant
dr. robert clarke, dentist - participant

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/09-2013-music-journal

so, here's the noise trade smashwords link to the music blog in readable format.

https://books.noisetrade.com//j/092013-music-journal
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1026600

it's looking like i'm going to have to leave late to avoid the rain, and then the point is lost.

i'm also not really feeling like i want to be around cigarettes tonight. it's just not that appealing, right now.

i'd rather finish what i'm doing (and the music file should be posted soon), take a hot shower and get a start on october.

i'll take another quick run through weekend shows some time tomorrow, but i'm pretty sure that we're down to a maybe on sunday afternoon.

so, here's the noise trade smashwords link to the sept, 2013 archive for this blog.

https://books.noisetrade.com//j/092013-dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1026603

i'm fairly certain that that's done.

next, i'll need to construct the one for the music blog.

the romanticization of labour - call it the protestant work ethic if you'd rather - is a bourgeois position designed to maximize surplus value by warping the minds of workers. it's propaganda, and it's necessary for the system to function; in turn, leftists need to stop buying into it if they have any kind of meaningful revolutionary ambitions.

i've always wondered why politicians make that pilgrimage to auschwitz. is it to push this idea of never forgetting? or is it far more nefarious than that? because the protestant work ethic, the romanticization of labour, has another formulation, namely work will set you free. and, those work camps are merely the idea taken to it's most violent, brutal conclusion.

the orientation of the left should not be to romanticize work. it should be to help construct the conditions that allow us, one day, to walk away from it.

so, i don't want to have wasted this week. my sleeping patterns are screwy right now, and it's partly because it's unpleasantly cold in here. all i want to do is wrap myself up in a nice, warm blanket, which is making me sleepy.

so, i'll tell you what, then.

if i finish publishing for sept, i'll hit the punk show. if not, i'll stay in and finish it.

and, yes: in the long run, anarchists don't believe in borders. but, tearing down borders is something you do between countries with comparable economies.

so, in theory, i would support a schengen-type zone over nafta, and i was hoping the last round of renegotiation would address the point. but, we'd be talking about taking steps to implement it eventually, not doing it right away. mexico's gdp per capita is 15% of that in the united states, which is far too low for this kind of discussion. and, it has absolutely no security at it's border at all...

but, yes, that should be the end point, eventually, once mexico has raised it's living standards. and, that should be the focus of american workers, as difficult as it is: they have to stop seeing mexico as a competitor, while continuing to see individual mexican workers for what they are. a tricky task for the best of us...

a schengen-type agreement, if passed today, would result in an incredible race to the bottom for everybody.

here's something to chew on:

are undocumented workers basically scabs?

i just want to point something else out about deportations, though.

something you very frequently hear from the bourgeois left is that people should only be deported when they commit "serious" crimes. they never finish their thought, though - the idea is that their campaign donors (big agriculture, and other industries that rely on migrant labour) don't want criminals in their work force, so it's ok to get rid of them.

but, what are you really doing when you deport a criminal? you're essentially sending that person back to their country of origin to continue committing crimes, which is just a push factor on continuing the flow of people. is it really a good idea to send a rapist back to guatemala where they can rape people with impunity?

rather, it seems to me that the people who ought to have the best arguments against deportation should be the criminals, but that they should also be tried and sentenced for the crimes, as is appropriate, and then rehabilitated as is best possible inside of the country. and, if anybody should be working sub-minimum wage jobs, it's the criminals, not the law-abiding migrants. so, you put the ones that break laws other than immigration law in jail, and you process their immigration papers as is appropriate while they're in there. then, they get their decision when they get out: either they're approved and allowed to work for proper wages and benefits, or they're denied and sent home.

regarding the people that are being rounded up for no reason other than entering the country illegally, i'd present more or less the same argument. there are laws in place, and perhaps they ought to be changed, but they are in place, and they were democratically enacted and the ice is carrying out a legitimate function with them (so long as we have habeas corpus). if you've overstayed your visa, for example, then you've broken the law, and enforcing the rule of law means you need to pay the price for it. but, what that should mean is that your citizenship status should be determined while you're being processed, not that you should be deported offhand. so, maybe somebody that's overstayed their visa has to carry out a thirty-day jail sentence (which is probably appropriate for a crime of that nature), but they should be being processed while they're in there, and should have a clear answer when they get out.

but, protesting something like this doesn't make sense, and would be leaning more towards a concept of ochlocracy - that is, mob rule - than anarchy, which is supposed to maintain a concept of democratic decision making, whatever it is.

it's interesting to see just how debased certain ideas have become on the left.

i would expect an action of this type to be mostly focused on political prisoners, i.e. people that are being imprisoned unjustly, perhaps by being framed, or perhaps by being held without charge. while i don't want to make the same error that i'm about to throw out there, i strongly doubt that much of anybody in attendance has done any meaningful research on anybody they're holding at all. while i am aware that there have been cases of american-born citizens being deported because they have latin-sounding names (which is horrifically egregious, obviously.), i think a better assumption is that at least almost all of them have entered the country illegally, meaning they are not actually political prisoners, or being framed, or being held without charge. further, a good number of them could be being held on much greater charges. so, this is just a situation where these particular protestors happen to dislike the legitimate law that the migrants are being legitimately charged under, and it's consequently difficult to argue with a straight-face that this is a democratic way to approach the situation as there's no breach of constitutionality, no breakdown in the rule of law, no abuse of power...

i mean, that's the point of direct action: when citizens are convinced that the state is breaking the law in a way that harms people, and there is no oversight body to stop it, it becomes our responsibility to step in, even if the best we can do is a symbolic gesture. but, there is no credible argument, here, that the state is breaking any laws, except maybe some hokey concept of "natural law", which is in truth not law at all.

it's really just these peoples' opinion that the law should be changed, and they do have that right to their opinion. but, if they were to act independently of a collective like this, they'd be thrown out of it. it's an undemocratic demand.

and, what is the demand, exactly? to drop the charges? to release them on bail? i suppose that's another question: they certainly have the right to habeas corpus. but, that doesn't seem to be the argument being presented; rather, they just want them to drop the charges and release the prisoners because they say so, despite potentially clear evidence of breaking the law.

....because arresting them and deporting them is a "genocide" against the migrant community. there's another debased term.

i don't like jails, and i don't like deporting people, but these people were arrested legitimately under legitimate laws and need to prepare their legal cases, so this kind of thing is at best disruptive and pointless and at worst has potential to stimulate a backlash. and, if you don't like these laws, there's only one way to change them - and it's not by using the tactic we use when the state is overstepping it's bounds.

further, leftists usually use these tactics with comrades that they expect to welcome back into their communities. it's strange to make the case that they should be used for people that are working sub-minimum wage under the table and thereby undercutting the region's labour force, to the extent that this is actually true (which is quite a bit).

the point i want to a make is just about the debasement of these ideas. i think if you were to run something like this by historical anarchist revolutionaries from proudhon forwards, you'd get a lot of pushback on it. they'd be criticizing the migrants for accepting sub-minimum wage jobs and undermining workers, as well as questioning the appropriateness of working outside of democratic channels

but, i guess you know that capital has won when it's co-opted the voices against it.

https://www.facebook.com/events/374487699875224/

ok, so i have cut it down to a small number of shows tonight (wednesday) and thursday that i'm still sorting through and will post thoughts on to the dtk page. the crystal method is here friday, but there's almost no chance i'll actually go. there's nothing scheduled saturday. but, i could see myself out on sunday afternoon to see a jazz band and a prog band and hopefully something in between....

for right now, i'm going to get to finalizing as i listen to what i pulled out as a shortlist for this week.

if gun control is a waste of time in the united states, it's even more pointless in canada.

contrary to popular opinion, we don't actually have strict gun control laws in canada. what we have is a different culture around guns. for example, i'm 38 years old and i've never even seen (let alone held or shot) a gun before in my life, nor do i expect to see one in the future. i would think that this is rare in the united states, where guns occupy a central part of the culture and national identity.

we have no equivalent to the second amendment, and "gun rights" are a vague and mostly undefined concept.

but, the reality is that around 90% of the guns used in crimes in canada are imported illegally from the united states. that's what the facts are: insofar as we have a problem, it's entirely on the black market. so, any meaningful crackdown has to occur at the border, or in the black market, and not in the market for new weapons.

but, people are stupid and this is an easy way to send him out all foggy-eyed and whatnot. it's a great scam, and if the conservatives play it badly enough, it might work.

so, the liberals are running on gun control and the ndp is running on "corporate accountability" and all of the tiresome & boring old tory talking points around it. it's just empty distraction, all around.

i'm going to need to look at my specific candidate, but i've already decided that i'm either voting green or not voting at all.

i wouldn't expect much from me on the canadian side. the three major parties have identical positions on just about anything that actually matters, leaving the debate up to these fringe issues that nobody actually really cares much about, and that really aren't in the proper scope of government in a liberal democracy.

and, in a sense, if the liberals won't get rid of trudeau on their own, maybe putting the conservatives back in office by voting third party is the only way to do it, and the right tactic to try and wake them the fuck up. they're almost identical in terms of substantive policy, anyways. and, the liberals probably need to clean house pretty seriously if they want to find their way back to where they used to be.

so, i'm not going to get into these petty debates about these petty things that these petty parties want to distract away from substantive concerns like carbon reduction, and don't expect me to. when we wake up in november, nothing much is going to change, either way - unless we can get the greens the balance of power, somehow.

this is something i've pointed out before, though, in a number of circumstances.

first, why do i think the cops are on me? well, have you read much of this? it's less the general thrust of the site - there's lots of people like me out there - and more that there's certain, specific things posted here and there that aren't supposed to be posted. afghanistan, for example - i'm just not supposed to put up a web page that states that there's no intended end date. that's contradicting something that a lot of effort was put into.

the cops have a mandate to keep people safe, and they do carry it out, they just often forget to mention which people that they keep safe. i'm threatening to the power elite on an information level. i get it. and, you only laugh because you don't, and that's ok - it keeps me safer.

so, to an extent, the surveillance doesn't bother me. what bothers me is how poorly it's being done, because if i was somebody else, an actual member of an actual group, then i'd have figured it out a long time ago and left already.

i can often hear the echo on my sound card, indicating that there's something working at a hardware level. and, i can hear them drop out when i cut the service off. it's not subtle, either. if they're going to hack a terrorist's machine or phone with audio firmware to capture the signal, don't you think it's important that they hire capable enough programmers to fix the echo cancellation? is that not budgeted?

likewise, if you're carrying out a stakeout upstairs for a suspect in a small non-smoking duplex, don't you think it's important not to smoke? 'cause it's pretty easy to find you if you're smoking undercover. kind of a dead giveaway.

if the spies were capable, i wouldn't know they're there. and, in a real way, it's realizing how unprofessional the cops are that is what is bothering me more than the surveillance, itself.

...because if i was a pakistani or saudi on the brink of something incomprehensible, i'd have ditched them years ago on my way to blowing up the world. and, if i was a russian operating inside the country, i'd be long gone by now. as it is, i'm just a simple canadian expressing myself in the written medium that is essentially being harassed by officers that should be out there bothering actual criminals, such as drug pushers and addicts and illegal immigrants, and that is still able to rather effortlessly outsmart them.

we need better forms of collective security than this, where they turn a blind eye to the criminals and target the victims.

and, as soon as i mention that the smoke clears out, it starts back up again.

do you know what i honestly think? i think that there's a cop up there with a fucking pathetic attitude towards life (not to mention a really fucking shitty job) that is so worthless to the world that they enjoy harassing me.

and, i also think that that worthless, piece of shit cop up there should put a fucking bullet through her own worthless, piece of shit head. the world would be better off.

the air's cleared up a bit since this morning.

for the sake of pointing it out somewhere, is $1000/month a gimmick? yes. that's not going to accomplish anything, whatsoever. you'd might as well just pass a tax cut for landlords, which is where the idea, as he's promoting it, really came from.

i've talked a lot about a gai in the past, but i wouldn't want to implement it as a dividend like that. so, no, i'm not in favour of sending everybody the money, that's just going to create inflation. the post-work anarchist position has little patience for these arguments about labour being an escape from poverty (that's hilarious. really.) or this idea that you just need to send people to school to eliminate poverty (i don't want a bourgeois office job, dammit!), but it doesn't see the idea as a dividend. it's more just a way to rebrand welfare as a livable subsidy by having it swallow things like disability payments and artist's grants.

i don't reach much friedman, so i might be getting the idea wrong, but the gai as a negative income tax is more along the lines of the way that post-work anarchists see this implemented. so, you'd do your taxes at the end of the year, and if your income is below a certain level then you get a top up to the minimum.

so, let's set the minimum to $30,000. if your taxable income is $30,001, you'd get nothing. if your taxable income is $15,000 you'd get a $15,000 subsidy, either in a lump sum or via monthly payments. and, if your income is $0 you'd get the full $30,000 in subsidies.

so, the idea is that (1) you make sure that the minimum is livable and (2) you give it to everybody, whether they have a job or not. it's a literal guaranteed minimum amount of income, whoever you are. further, you'd have to tie it to inflation to stop the landlords from cashing in on it.

just sending everybody $1000 is pointless, and the unavoidable conclusion is that the candidate is either using it as a gimmick to win votes the way that many candidates float around tax cuts or legitimately doesn't understand the point of the policy.

he didn't go to work last week, and it doesn't look like he's going to work this week, either.

he's mentioned that he's "depressed". well, maybe he should stop sitting around smoking pot by himself during weekdays, then? i don't get it...this reinforcing pot habit, it's just flat out stupidity. you're depressed, so you take a drug that science is very clear increases depression. then, you keep complaining. because you're stupid, ok? that's the fact of it - you're just a fucking retard.

what i "get" is that i need to get away from here, because you can never trust an addict, and because i don't have the patience or mental stability to handle being around them.

i took a good initial run through, and i don't actually see anything obvious happening for the rest of the month.

so, if i end up staying in for the month, that means i'm not smoking for the month. and, i expect that the lease obligations - obligations - be properly upheld, or i'm going to flip.

my habits outside of the property have absolutely no legal, moral or logical consequence on the lease that was signed, or my legal rights around having those lease obligations properly upheld. i didn't sign a non-smoking lease by accident. it wasn't a coincidental request. it was the only important part of the agreement.

tell yourself i have a split personality if you can't get your head around it, but social smoking is a real thing, and i completely reject arguments of hypocrisy around it. it's not a moral issue. i'm not compromising myself. i've organized the situation this way because it's how i want it, and i'm not going to be shy about enforcing it, when the time is appropriate to do so.

and, i'd better get that fucking oiprd report this week, too, so i can start planning around getting out of this fucking place and getting away from this guy upstairs and whatever he's addicted to.

i have never smoked inside of any place that i've ever lived.

ever.

in my whole life.

i have always been an outside smoker.

it's disgusting to smoke inside. period.

so, even if i was smoking, i'd still demand you go the fuck outside.

that's not something that's changed. that's been a constant my whole life: i can't deal with inside smoke, and i've never been able to, and so i've always sent people outside.

i wouldn't even let my girlfriend smoke inside, when we lived together, and we both smoked. i sent her outside in the fucking blizzard. she tried to smoke in the basement, but i wouldn't stand for that, either.

i have no tolerance for this at all, and i never have.

it's exceedingly frustrating.

i wanted one thing: a non-smoking living space.

there is one important part of the lease: a non-smoking living space.

i am not compromising on the point, and i am not relenting on it. he will be forced to compensate me for the suffering he's causing me, in due time.

in the mean time, he can enjoy the fan running, because i'm not turning it off until the air clears in here.

why don't these fucking idiots get the point?

i smoke when i'm out, drinking, at the bar, where it's dirty.

i do not smoke when i'm at home, in my space, where it's clean.

do you understand?

so, no. the fact that i smoked four packs of cigarettes on the weekend - when i was at the bar, drinking - does not give the fucking idiot upstairs a listen to smoke inside when i'm at home, sober, and clean. nor will i be smoking again until i go back out to the bar, where it's dirty.

and, yes, i can smell it.

and, yes, i'm going to sue him for it as soon as i get done with the previous case.

whether you're talking about burlesque dancers or lap dancing or strippers or even just twerking or anything else like that, it's just an "ew. gross." type reaction.

burlesque.

listen - i don't care what you do. really. like, at all. i don't care about you one bit. but, i can't stand being in the same room as it.

i don't find it emancipating at all in any remote way. and, i just don't see where the question of morality even arises, in context; it's just not a relevant analysis. rather, i just find it sleazy and gross, and i'm going to get up and walk out every time.

i can understand it as a reaction, though. if i had grown up in a conservative christian or muslim household, maybe i'd be more attracted to the rebellion of it. but, i wasn't raised in a conservative household, and my reaction on that level is consequently to point to it as an example of why we shouldn't have conservative households. this is how religion warps the minds of your kids, and what they turn into if you raise them in guilt.

so, yes: i don't get it. or, i don't get it on a guttural level, at least. and, the way i'm going to get it on an intellectual level is just to deconstruct it.

which isn't to say i don't think you should do it, just to say that i'd rather not watch.

ok, that was a hard crash and i needed it.

i'm actually going to spend the morning looking ahead to next week, first.

i don't expect a lengthy journey, and frankly don't even want one. but, i need to do a survey, first.

is there an identity politics of intelligence?

or is that a contradiction in terms?

i'm starting to think that the problem may be that cory booker's vocabulary is too large for his plotted path.

again: i broadly don't like his policies (i'm ten degrees to his left), but he has an ability and habit to very effectively project himself as the smartest person in the room, and if you're going to reduce the process of this to just picking the best brain because you don't agree with any of them on anything anyways, then he kind of rises to the top of the list, for me. he does stand out in the field. but, i don't think that's what his target audience really wants.

he may want to start carrying a thesaurus, so he can start using smaller words.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/08/cory-booker-white-supremacy/595684/

male life expectancy in the united states is that you die before you turn 79 77.

and, that number is a hard fact, not a suggestion or a social construction.

the criticisms of biden's record on women's rights are more substantive and more real, and i'm not sure what the right analysis is on it.

i'm not old enough to remember, and i won't pretend i was, but somebody that this argument comes up around quite a bit is john lennon. it's easy to point to certain pieces of evidence and argue that he was a misogynistic piece of shit, and it's not even like i want to argue with you. but, the fact is that almost all of the men of his generation were misogynistic pieces of shit, because the culture was inherently misogynistic and inherently shitty. and, despite being an asshole himself, lennon was also responsible for helping to reverse the situation. so, do you nail him for what he did in his youth, or do you praise him for what he did in middle age (and wonder what he'd do in old age)?

in a sense, it's kind of like criticizing an abolitionist for inheriting slaves. you wake up in a culture, and things are the way they are; it's not like you decided that they'd be that way, and if you inherit something then it becomes yours, whether you like it or not. but, if you're supporting abolition eventually, even if it takes you until the age of 50 to see it, then you're fighting for the end of the oppression. cusps are complicated, like that.

the truth is that biden lived through a change that most of us take for granted at this point (and really shouldn't) and that he had to adjust to it as it was happening. so, you have to analyze how he adjusted rather than where he started from. and, sure: maybe he's even still adjusting. maybe he'll never really let it go, in the end.

debates don't like subtlety...

i think it's biden's responsibility to do two things to help younger people that have never known the world he grew up in through anything but black and white movies and assigned novels in schools understand what living through the cusp of women's rights was actually like. the first thing he has to do is acknowledge the past, and maybe he does that by actually explaining it. and, then he has to carefully point to things he eventually did right, while acknowledging the things he did wrong.

but, i think that the actual problem for biden in these exchanges may be less when it comes to female voters explicitly (in a primary, you also have rural and southern democrats to appeal to, and the women are not so pro-choice or so pro-labour, something senators from new york and california might not be as cognizant of as they should be but senators from delaware might have a better understanding of) and more about how blockfooted he seemed on the response. he looked like a deer caught in headlights, but it was an expression of a broader mannerism. sanders is old, but he hasn't really aged in 20 years. he's "grumpy", but he's not slow on the response, and he's not adopting the body language of a toddler the way that so many older people do when they get past a certain point. biden has slowed down a lot, and you can really tell, it's visibly obvious in the footage. the exchange made him seem past his prime in more ways than one.

and, i need to really state this pretty assertively: it's not "ageism" to argue that somebody in their late 70s and that is showing crystal clear signs of decline should be at home and preparing for end of life with his loved ones, rather than parading around running for president.

i got my cleaning and groceries done and i'm about halfway through the second debate, which i'm going to run through to get it over with. i should be back to work either tonight or tomorrow.

i don't expect my analysis to this point to be popular, but here it is.

i was expecting the second debate to be a complete disaster, and that's more or less what it is so far. what i'm watching is a lot of people throwing what amounts to a bunch of bullshit at biden, who is carefully trying to assert the actual facts of the matter. now, that's not to say i agree with biden - i don't. i think his policies are awful. - but he's at least trying to get an honest debate in amongst a bunch of people that appear to have no interest in such a thing.

and, i have to hand the entire thing very comfortably to biden at this point, but that means i have to curve everybody up. there's a catch on the curve, though. we'll see if somebody steps up in the second half, but, right now, i'm going to have to give biden a D- and everybody else a well deserved F.

also: it's easy to understand that tulsi gabbard got a lot of hits on this night, but i'm not sure it had much to do with what she said. you know who actually watches these debates, right? yeah. ok, moving on...

i just want to close the thought with an example, though, and it's about what obama did or not do regarding immigration reform.

i watched months - it may have been years - of whitehouse press briefings over 2014 and 2015, and i have a very clear understanding of what actually happened. obama was absolutely deadset on comprehensive immigration reform, but he had absolutely no support from the republican held congress, and this is an almost entirely congressional issue. after trying for years to get a bipartisan bill, what happened is that he finally gave up and passed an executive order regarding the dreamers that is, in truth, of exceedingly grey legality. the actual reality is that the dream act is probably unconstitutional, in the form it became law under (executive order).

so, of what value is there in sitting there and blaming the president for not passing something he had no legal authority to pass? the failure to get anything passed is fully the fault of the republican congress, and that's really simply all there is to it. and, the step that obama made was so drastic and desperate that it would probably be struck down by a proper court. what i watched unfold in front of me was consequently in a parallel reality where facts don't exist. and, biden was the only defender of reality on stage.

i don't think i'd vote for joe biden. but, i'm not going to support a bunch of dishonest politicians that are looking to pull the wool over everybody's eyes, either.

i'll say this again: what's happening at the border is not a failure of oversight, although there is a failure of oversight in motion. nor is it the result of specific cruelty by an insane president, or even just a cynical ploy to win votes. what's happening at the border is systemic, it's by design, and it's not going to be altered by anybody standing on that debate stage. the raids are part of a complicated and very purposeful system of state-managed labour for the transnational corporate sector.

if you don't understand the problem, you can't take steps to fix it, and nobody on stage understands the problem. maybe, for some of them, they're just ignorant. it's possible, it really is. but, for all of the talk about prison-industrial complexes, let me throw this question out there: how much money have each of these candidates taken from big agribusiness?

we'll see what else comes up.

so, i got through the two day bender and while i'll say i didn't have any problems, exactly, it was also maybe not the best way to get through certain parts of it. i was a little fadey for saajtak, after 30 or so hours of drinking and smoking leading up to it. i smoked through more than four packs of cigarettes. it's an issue to balance - i seem to be able to do around 25 hours or so, and i'll get a second wind after, but i don't want to put myself in a situation where i'm seeing a headliner in that state.

the highlight of the weekend had to be a completely ridiculous cover of taylor swift's shake it off, by a local band that you've never heard of called the sunburns. i hope somebody caught a good part of that.

briefly, here's the update on what i did and didn't do:

17:00-19:15 - trey priest @ detroit shipping company.

i'm usually late for most things.

20:00-21:15 - my brightest diamond @ dso courtyard.

it's interesting that she's putting such an emphasis on detroit, because she sounds more like late 80s chicago. the new record might have been a strong wax trax! release in the late 80s, and in that sense it's kind of more of a retro thing. but, it's only retro if you know it, right? if jamie stewart & annie lennox did a collaboration...

21:30-02:00 -  another dimension @ tangent gallery.

i was hoping for a lot of guitar theatrics, but it didn't really happen. i'm not sure if it was the same guy or not, but there were two guitar + dj type performances, both more in the realm of "guitarist jams over techno song he likes" rather than any kind of meaningful integration of the guitar into the set. it actually came off as a gimmick, mostly for show; it was less about integrating the instrument into the sound and more about the idea that a guitarist standing beside a dj just looks kickass and cool.

so, i spent the night composing, and if anybody saw me lost in my head outside tangent friday night, that's what i was doing. i tend to avoid composing when i'm dancing for a number of reasons, and it's actually been a while, but the guitars just completely triggered me. and, trust me: the imaginary guitar solos, as imagined in the mind of the imaginer, were far more intense than what i saw in front of me. there was also some dubstep (they call it 'bass music' now), and it was tedious and boring like it always is, but the fact that i was spending the night composing in my head kind of took the grind out. it's funny that all they really needed to do was put a picture of a guitar on the wall to save the vibe, and that trick won't work if it gets overdone, but i did enjoy the night well enough.

chirp came on exceedingly late and was more interested in playing it safe on this night. i caught parts of their set, but not all of it. i will say that whatever kind of guitar synth he's using is exceptionally good sounding, which is to say that it seems as though the technology has really come up in the last few years, and i should take a closer look into that. the last i checked, they had tracking systems through computer sound cards, but the latency wasn't there yet. i guess that all they'd need to do is put that technology in a phone and ramp it up, which is easy enough to convert into a pedal. so, i'm less surprised on a technological level than i am...i'd just never heard anything that realistic from something on the floor, before. 

02:30-6:30 - late party @ unknown location. i was at a secret party with mostly gay men, and it was very secret, so secret that i'm not really going to talk much about it. even if you could find the place, they won't let you in without a password. or if you look too straight. but i'll say that it was more like a house party, so the cops would really have minimal powers in actually doing much. and i did have some fun there.

i got a little lost after that, but after going around in circles for a bit (which included smoking a large joint and figuring out a way to take cash out of the machine in detroit, something i'd never done before), i ended up back in hamtramck for a little before 8:00. i locked up at ant hall and took a walk down the street to find a coffee, which took me half way up campeau to a diner not far from the cvs. it was almost 8:30 before i got back. sometimes, it's things like this that eat away at your time; sometimes, it's a good way to eat away at it.

9:00-12:00 - dsa meeting @ ant hall.

the head organizers ("leadership") were there an hour early, and you could tell right away that these people were running a political party. indeed, it became clear enough fairly quickly that the actual purpose of the meeting was to present some bourgeois politicians to a crowd that is going to act as campaign volunteers. further, while it's not entirely clear where the platform was written, nobody made any effort in trying to conceal that it was being pushed down from somewhere else. so, this meeting would not be accurately described as an organizing meeting of the political grassroots in the community, but rather as an opportunity for an outside organization to find recruits to carry through with it's cause. it felt less like an organizing meeting (and, it's been a while, but i've been to quite a few.) and more like a ponzi scheme sign-up (which i've been to quite a few of, as well. hey, i was looking for a job. that's the hook.). they passed a collection plate at one point.

i didn't really want to address anybody at the meeting, and i wasn't intending to sign up. i was merely an observer from the temporary autonomous zone; a friendly anarchist that was between parties and really just hanging out for general interest.

but, this group is clearly much more focused and almost career-oriented than anything i'd want to involve myself with. we're talking about strictly vertical organizing with a completely pre-written platform, almost more like it's a franchised extension of a fast food restaurant. so, this is a political party, whether it's calling itself one or not. worse, there is clearly a centralized bureaucracy behind this, and you clearly need to get promoted to a higher position in the hierarchy before you're allowed to meaningfully participate in the process. everything i saw was just textbook bourgeois politics that is directly antithetical to any concept of socialism that is worth discussing. there was even one point where one of the "leaders" stated to the crowd that the candidates didn't have any ideas of their own, to the point that it wasn't even worthwhile to ask them questions because everything they know about the party is in the platform; she really wanted to make it clear that all of their positions are defined perfectly in the platform, and if they win then they owe everything to the party, who would be in complete control.

it was at least well attended for what it was, i'll give them that. the crowd was a mix of people that is hard to define in any specific way, as you usually get at these events. that said, it was noticeably white for an area with a majority muslim population (in fact, many of the people were from ferndale), and they seemed cognizant of how unusually white they were for their region, too. i guess all the brown people were too busy working to show up.

so, i don't know exactly who's "steering" this, but it was clear pretty quickly that it's just some "progressive" democrats that are co-opting socialism as a marketing term rather than any kind of meaningful grassroots movement. a better name for the organization as it exists today should probably be "socialist democrats of america" rather than "democratic socialists of america". and, i'd consequently advise avoiding them.

i was torn between waiting for the bbq and eating early, but by around 12:30 the choice had been made by my stomach. i didn't want to show up at the bbq and eat all the food. so, i grabbed a very thick six-inch at subway (bmt + mozz + bacon) before going to the bbq....

13:00-21:30 - punk rock bbq @ kelly's.

i came in super early to grab a beer and basically just hung out all day. i had one hamburger and one chicken burger, which for me was part of the reason i went there.

the bands were just kind of there and that's sort of what you expect from something like this, which is really just a bunch of people, most of whom knew each other, and most of which were over 40, having a beer on a patio. people were kind of only vaguely paying attention.

there was an opener that i can't find the name of - i think his name was steve - that did an atonal singer/songwriter thing. i don't grasp this style of music or understand what it's appeal actually is, but people keep doing it because people like it. i didn't understand a word he said, but his vocal tone was like bob dylan with a bad cold in the middle of allergy season. if he knew a fourth chord, he didn't show it off.

womb worm were on next and they did a mildly interesting no-wavy or weeny math-y sort of thing. this appears to be trendy right now. but, what i'd actually like to hear is somebody make it more complicated and that much weirder (the problem is that it's a 40 year old schtick, and it's actually a highly predictable style), rather than a little bit catchier, which is what they actually did.

there was then an all-girl ramones cover band called the whoremones. i'd doubt any of them were born before 1990, and they were kind of more josie and the pussycats, to be entirely frank about it. they did some newer songs by acts they actually like (colleen green was one of them, and that made more sense) as well. i'll admit i digged watching somebody play the classics like i wanna be sedated at that particular point, but it was actually kind of contrived and, while i recognize that this gig may be profitable for them, i do hope they're able to start a band of their own some time soon.

pet psychic kind of just floated by. i may have been a little too stoned at the time. but, i think it was pretty stripped down - like, early beatles stripped down.

and, i only vaguely recall bourbon squirrel, which i think was also pretty stripped back and kind of slow moving. 

the person that organized this show plays out a lot in detroit under the pseudonym of "lady darkness" and seems to perform in a bunch of different styles. she remembered me from the last two day party, as she did an acoustic set at the dequindre cut midway through it (and i interjected into a conversation she was having about joseph conrad). as i've checked out sound samples previously, i was actually expecting something in the realm of glam rock or even hair metal, as that was what the samples had implied, but this was a different animal - more of an art-rock band (with a violin player), which opened up space for the vocals, which were actually a little reminiscent of a mid-90s jarboe, or maybe a pj harvey. i don't think they got across what they wanted to, and they seemed visibly irritated that people weren't really paying attention, but it was a good proof of concept, at least. what i'll say is this: burgers were maybe not the best way to bribe interested parties to see a band of that sort; she might have got a more interested crowd by bribing them with ramen noodles.

the last band appear to have been a punk band at one point, then grown out of it, then rejoined for the hell of it. that's a guess based on the musicianship, the age of the band and the length of time since their last bandcamp release (7 years). it was skate-y, but full of jazzy fills that were designed simply to show off, kind of thing. so, i enjoyed this. and, near the end of the set they did that cover of shake it off that was just absolutely brilliantly absurd.

so, it's around 20:00 and i'm trying to figure out if i give the next band - jimmy ohio and the ultimate overs - a fair chance or not, knowing i won't be staying for the later acts, which i know well and am not really into. the saajtak show just seems more interesting to me. first, i decided i'd finish my beer and go because the band will be on before i finish my beer. nope. so, i decide i'l have one more smoke, and then they'll be on. nope. they started playing right after i bought another beer, and while i didn't end up missing anything at the other show (in fact, i could have stayed at the barbeque a little longer....), i did spend much of the set outside. it had that angular television vibe to it, but as seems to be normal nowadays, was kind of bombarded with glossy pop. so, i didn't get much out of this. and, i left when they were done....

21:45-02:00 - saajtak record release @ ghost light.

there was a burlesque show and a comedy club event in the same venue, so the place was busier than it ought to have been and the first act didn't come on until like 22:30. i think i impressed some of the improv people in the smoking section with a good run on human sacrifice being theoretically permissible. see, if there was any actual empirical evidence of it's efficacy, it would be hard to argue against it under certain scenarios like drought or climate change. however, because i am aware of no evidence that causally links human sacrifice to any sort of measurable outcome, i can't, in good conscience, stand in favour of it. i actually don't really know why i've never done any stand-up, other than it just never really coming up. i know i'd be good at it because i seem to be able to make people laugh more or less effortlessly. the problem i'd come up with is the crowd being too stupid to get half of the jokes. i guess it's an inversion of how people see it, which is a function of market theory: capitalism insists that it's the clown that needs to adjust to the market in terms of being properly entertaining, but i'd insist that it's rather that the educated clown, at least, shouldn't have it's jokes corrupted by the interference of the audience, that the educated clown must persevere until a sufficiently educated audience that can understand the jokes can be found. so, a really talented comedian should spend at least five years playing to empty clubs, because people are invariably going to be too stupid to get the joke the first time through. and, then i'm just running into the same problems i have with my other art projects. one day, though, somebody will get me drunk enough at ghost light to drag me to the comedy club in the back, and i will slay the one person in the room that took courses on the intersectionality of byzantine history and quantum physics. that is how they got the greek fire.

i think i do enough stand-up sitting down here at home, thanks. these posts are 95% stream of consciousness; the difference is solely in the latency problems that exist between my brain and my (one) typing hand. it's less like a bobbing parrot, and more like an anthropomorphized arthropod at the end of my arm that is connected to my brain via a 14.4 baud modem, even though i'm well aware that the wiring in my body is operating at speeds and on levels that we don't truly understand. for example, did you know that your brain can register an impulse for suicide before you are exposed to fall out boy for the first time?

i think we got the point across.

the first band had a guitarist that i've seen pop up in a number of other projects around town that are a little more....sophisticated than the one i saw on saturday night. if somebody were to notate the parts and print them on to a piece of music, the result may be challenging to perform, i'd have to grant the point. but, the presentation, which sounded like a very young kim gordon fronting some kind of john zorn project, was just simply not very compelling. the impression that i got was that they seemed to sort of be playing down to the audience. now, i'm a fan of certain kinds of noise rock that have more structured components to them, but this just wasn't that. if you've seen something like vampire belt, you get the general point, but the truth is that they were really just literally fucking around for a little while and it just came off like they were wasting their talent. let's hope that it doesn't take them too long to grow out of this particular phase because these musicians should be doing something better than this.

i didn't have a lot of interest in the second or third acts.

when saajtak finally came on - and i don't remember what time it was - i was literally having a hard time standing up. i was less drunk and just more tired; i wasn't in danger of blacking out so much as i was just in danger of falling asleep. and, i may have nodded off for a few seconds, while standing in the audience. but, what i remember of the show is that (1) the sound problems they had at mocad were gone. they sounded good, here. (2) they're actually moving in a more abstract direction that is perhaps making lesser use of the singer's ridiculously high level of technical talent. saajtak has always reminded me a lot of a band from the 70s called yes (that i don't actually like that much), but taken to a modern level of technological wizardry. so, the keys/drums duo often has a very wakeman/bruford feel in it's dichotomy between diddly arpeggiation and weird atonality, but the technology in the synthesizer work is updated to feel a lot more contemporary. legitimate advances in prog rock are rare, nowadays, and they're getting close to their maximum shelf date. so, i think you want to get this while you still can.

2:30-07:00 - late party II @ other unknown location. the second show was not as secret, and it may be unnecessary to hide it's location. there were also less people than there were at the secret show, which is curious, but it was more of a mixed crowd. so, there was some dancing and some smoking (and some drinking) and then i left and went home...

even if i could have stayed awake past that point, i was out of cash and didn't want to spend more. and, the eight hour wait for the book club was simply too daunting.

15:00-17:00 - socialist book club meeting @ 2283 holbrook. $0 + coffee.
19:00-00:00 - cherubs + child bite @ small's. $13 + beer costs.

i'm not a substantive cherubs fan, but would have liked to see them. tell them to come back. and, i still haven't seen child bite because it just hasn't yet made sense.

i was back at the tunnel a little before 8:00, hit the renaissance for a large bowel movement, caught the 8:25 bus, picked up some fruit when i got back over and made it home to some spaghetti at about 9:30, and a shower and some good sleep after that.

i need to finish the cleaning that i put on hold last week, do some groceries and get back to finishing up the last journal compilation.