I went downtown with Kite in the morning to get her daily dose of methadone. She normally goes there alone, primarily because nobody else wants to get up as early as she does. The clinic actually opens at 4:30 a.m., for working addicts, and others who do not wish to be seen standing around outside a methadone clinic during regular daylight hours. I don’t have any first-hand knowledge of this, but there is supposed to be quite a collection of prominent citizenry, including members of the judicial and law enforcement divisions, who appear there anonymously during the early morning hours. I hung out on the sidewalk outside the clinic, sipping coffee and shivering and looking more or less like a junkie while Kite went inside to get her daily ration. She looked to be heavily sedated when she finally came outside again.

“They actually let you walk out of there in that kind of shape?” I asked her.

“Got a good dose this morning,” she said. Her eyes were partly closed, kind of sleepy-dreamy looking, and she spoke like somebody who was heavily medicated. “Got to finish the bottle,” she went on, “licked that sucker clean. Then she gave me another whole cup full.” She licked her lips and smacked them, rubbed her belly. “Mmm, swaz gooood.”

They give the methadone in small plastic measuring cups, and from what I gathered, her first cup was only a partial from the bottom of a bottle, while the second was the normal full dose. So she ended up getting almost twice as much as she normally does. It was too cold to go to the park and wait this out, so we got on the Broadway bus and rode it out to the end of the line. We took the Speedway bus back again, and by the time we’d made it back downtown, she was nearly normal again, albeit a tad bit goofy.

We had some food and coffee, smoked a joint, then went to the library to get some books. They have this thing there once each week called a “Farmer’s Market,” part of this ongoing downtown rejuvenation effort that has be taking place for more than a decade now. I expect that when it first started it was really a genuine Farmer’s Market, with bushel baskets of fresh corn and pyramids of red ripe tomatoes. Nowadays, however, it is nothing of the sort, having degraded to a handful of about six regular vendors who cater to fruitcakes and the like for lack of a market for real produce.

There is one gal who appears to have raided her grandparent’s attic and pulled down a collection of hippie clothes and a Tie-Dye for Dummies handbook. She sells these monstrous pink and magenta and purple dyed tee-shirts and wrap-around skirts. She incidentally wears her hair nappy and died similarly to her clothing creations, as if somebody told her that those colors were popular back in the days when real hippies roamed the earth. I think that if I were to wear anything so loud, I would have to complete the ensemble with sleigh bells strapped to my wrists and whoopee-cushions on the soles of my feet.

Another fellow there specializes in sterling silver tableware. Since I’d been smoking, I was in one of my human studies modes and accidentally prompted him to explaining his art to me, which he did at length, since Kite and I seemed to be the only people in town even remotely interested in what he was selling. In short, he had taken to bending and twisting these things so that they would stand up and look like, well, bent and twisted silverware. They served no useful purpose whatsoever. I’d pulled similar creations out of my garbage disposal in the past, but I refrained from telling him that.

Now there was a gal there who had something that I thought was unique. She had a collection of glass medallions, paper weights, and nick-knacks that she made by sandwiching brightly colored paints in between layers of different pieces of broken glass, then heating them inside a kiln until they melted and fused together. I had no particular use for a 10-ounce glass medallion, and have no desk for a paper weight, but I gave her an “E” for effort anyway.

There was one canopy up high on the lawn that didn’t appear to be selling anything, except the tenants were dressed like Buddhists or something similar, with clothes fashioned from bed sheets and hair-cuts by Hari, so if they were selling, it would have been keys to enlightenment. They had a couple of percussion instruments, which I gather is part of the basic kit to attract attention by making strange noises. I made a wide berth around their little pagoda. Kite, attracted by the strange metallic pinging of their bongo drums, tried to lead me over to them to see what they were up to.

“You don’t want to go over there,” I told her softly, gently guiding her by the arm in the other direction.

“But they have music,” she protested. If you can call it that, I thought.

“Trust me,” I insisted. She pooted out her bottom lip and reluctantly allowed me to lead her, looking over her shoulder like a child passing a candy store. We went to the library finally and checked out some reading material.

“I thought you were a liberal, Panch. What’s with the indifferent attitude since the election?” Enon was spreading a cloth in preparation for our lunch.

“Yeah, Pancho,” Kite joined in, “I thought you’d be all happy about it.” She was helping with lunch by pulling out the contents of the bags and sorting them on the cloth according to some semblance of type. I had just returned to camp from a food run, had managed to score quite a bit. We would all enjoy a well-balanced diet today, except possibly for Skute, who had earlier consumed some kind of narcotic in pill form, was at the time passed out cold, and I didn’t expect him to awaken any time before all the best food had already been eaten. Snooze you lose, I thought.

“You know, guys,” I told them, “just about everything I voted for was a winner this time. That’s never happened with me before.”

“And you’re not happy about it because,..” Kite had opened a jar of pickled jalapenos, proceeded to dig her fingers down in search of the best looking one. I winced in phantom anguish. The chick actually likes jalapenos. And I remembered how I selfishly thought that I would not have to share them with anybody when I picked the jar from the store shelf.

“I’m happy about the minimum wage increase,” I said. “That’s a keeper.” The truth of the matter is that most of the people I know who actually do work tend to earn more than the minimum wage anyhow, so I really don’t see it affecting anybody in my particular circle. There are, however, quite a few employers out there who insist on paying minimum wage in order to keep their bottom lines. These are the same people who don’t pay for sick time or holidays, and forget about medical or retirement benefits. These are also the same people who threaten to move their operations overseas when the costs are too high here at home. They can get the fuck out, as far as I’m concerned. There’s billions of starving Asians who would just jump at the chance to earn $0.30 per hour working for their little shit operations. They don’t deserve to have Americans on their payrolls.

“So that’s it, Panch?” Enon asked. “Minimum wage, but nothing else really made you happy? What about all the Democrats who got elected?”

“I’m not really sure I trust those polls,” I told him. “Even six months ago everybody was blissfully unaware of how dangerous things were becoming. George Bush and his cronies were busy stripping us of our civil liberties one by one, and nobody had a clue about what was going on. Our Congress and Senate sat on their hands because they thought that that was what the voters wanted. And you know what? I don’t think they were too far off the mark.”

“The one consensus we all share,” I went on, “is that we all seem to agree that things are going badly with the war in Iraq. But is that enough for everybody to all of the sudden decide to switch sides? I don’t think so. These are the same people who elected our Republican Congress and Senate in the first place. These are the same people who put George Bush and Dick Cheney in office. And all of the sudden they decide to change their minds about it all. These are the same people who are going to be goose-stepping across the parade grounds on the first indication that the tide is turning that way again. These people are more dangerous than the politicians they elect.”

“Wow,” said Kite. “That’s pretty extreme, you know?” She’d finished eating her pickled jalapeno and had begun fixing a ham and cheese sandwich. I had my eye on the jar of peppers and was making plans to confiscate it before she got too comfortable with it.

“Says here that the Pentagon is going to start counter-acting against news reports that fail to shed the proper light on the subjects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Enon was reading one of the papers. It was still fresh in the morning, so he spoke with a reasonably clear head. He can come off sounding pretty elegant when he’s not drunk. “They are going to be presenting their own news stories through various creative media outlets. The suggestion is that the stories we hear normally are not the truth, rather lies designed to steer our opinions of the war in the wrong direction.”

“And that direction would be…” I started.

“Left,” he said.

“Of course,” I complied. “But isn’t it a little late in the game to try and turn the upcoming elections?” It seemed to me that that would be the only reason the Pentagon would be even remotely interested in influencing the content of media propaganda, that is to say, aside from what they normally do to generate news stories.

“I don’t think they can do much to spoil the momentum of the election at this point in the game,” he offered, pausing to take a sip from his pint bottle of whiskey, “but what really bothers me about it is that they feel it is necessary to manipulate the news at all. They are implying that we don’t get the correct news, and therefore they have to somehow tweak it in order to give us a different perspective.”

“So…”

“So it becomes a question of who’s truth is the right truth. And at that point the issue becomes less dependent on fact, and more on ideology.” Enon took another sip. He waited for me to respond for while. I was trying to roll a cigarette, but the tobacco was dry and the wind was blowing, so I was having a hard time of it. He finally finished: “So the Pentagon itself becomes its own media outlet because the commercial networks aren’t quite all on the same bus as them.”

“You can see that anywhere,” I finally told him, “about any kind of news. Each individual network has their own ideological versions of what to present to the public. It’s never clear whether they are trying to cater to an existing segment of the population, or if they are in fact trying to sway the population into thinking along their particular lines.”

“I think if you ever listen to A.M. talk radio you’d tend to opt for the recruitment side,” he said. “No sense in preaching to the chorus.”

“Probably,” I said. “But if you really listen, then it means that you are essentially pre-disposed to thinking along the same lines as them anyhow. They are, in fact, catering to a particular segment of society.”

“Then you’re saying that the Pentagon can manipulate the media all they want to, but the only people who will really listen will be the ones who want to believe it. And everybody else will just go ahead and believe whatever they want, because no matter what it is, they can find an outlet that presents it to them the way they like it.”

“In a perfect world…” I said. “But in the real world everybody’s probably going to head lock-step over to the Pentagon Channel just because it’s the Pentagon and not some damned foreigner.”

“And get on board,” Enon added, “because if you don’t we’re going to start tossing terms like patriotism and Christianity around.”

“We’ll be afraid to show our faces in public,” I agreed. “You’re going to have to send a runner for your whiskey from now on, because they’ll recognize you if you go downtown.” He pondered that for a moment as if he was really taking me seriously. The truth of the matter is that he usually has somebody else bring him his whiskey anyhow.

“It’s almost like North Korea, the way they control the media,” he said.

“Next thing that’s gunna’ happen is they’ll seal the borders,” I speculated. We looked at each other and shrugged our shoulders simultaneously. He took another sip from his pint, then passed the bottle over to me.

“Uncovered meat,” quoted Enon, as we were discussing the Australian Muslim cleric who apparently thinks it’s okay to rape women who are not covered in the traditional Moslem attire.

“I guess this isn’t traditional attire,” Kite said, pulling her shirt up and exposing her slender torso. Skute sat up and started to comment but I slapped him across the back of his head and scolded him with my eyes. He scowled at me, shrugged, then laid back down again.

“Oo, lookie this,” said Enon, after another article in the paper caught his attention.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Seems VeePee Cheney let the cat out of the bag about water-boarding as a means of extracting information from terrorists. Seems he thinks it’s okay. Bush had to do quick damage control.”

“You mean we’re still talking about the ducking stool?” asked Kite.

“It would appear that way,” Enon told her. This got Skute’s attention, and while I wanted to hit him again, I opted to let him speak.

“What’s a ducking stool?” he asked. Enon and I rolled our eyes at one another. We are both old enough to remember studying the Puritans back during our early years. I even made a working model of a ducking stool for a class project one time. Enon probably did too. I think all of us did back in those days. It's probably politically incorrect to do those kinds of things in grade-school any more.

“They used to tie a chair onto the end of a long pole,” Kite recited, remembering our discussion about it previously. “They would strap people in the chair and duck them in a lake until they confessed. If they didn’t confess, they got tired of holding their breath and ended up drowning.”

“Confess to what?” asked Skute.

“Being a witch,..” Enon started to tell him, but Kite cut him off.

“Being an idiot,” Kite answered frankly, her arms crossed, looking at Skute smugly.

“You mean they made people confess to being an idiot, and if they didn’t admit it, then they drowned?”

“Yup,” Kite told him, still looking smug, as if she expected him to admit being an idiot without the persuasion of such an elaborate contraption as a ducking stool.

“So they let you go if you say you’re an idiot? That’s easy enough. They wouldn’t even have to put me in the chair for that.”

“No, not exactly,” Kite said, giggling. “They didn’t just let you go, you know, cuz you’re an idiot, and they didn’t like idiots very much. They tied you to a wooden pole and made a bon fire out of you.”

“So if I was an idiot, they’d burn me, and if I wasn’t, they’d drown me? That doesn’t really seem fair.”

“I think they were pretty certain about you being an idiot before they even started,” Enon reasoned.

“Oh,” said Skute. He looked worried. “So when did they do this? Is this like when you guys were kids or something?” He was looking at Enon and myself, since Kite was actually younger than him.

“They still do it,” Kite said, teasing him. “That’s what the article in the paper’s about. In fact, we were thinking of making a ducking stool for you.”

“Can’t,” he said confidently. “We don’t have any lakes here in the desert.”

“We don’t have any decent chairs here either,” Kite pointed out. “So maybe we’ll just tie a rope around your ankles and throw you in the wash the next time it rains.”

“There, see?” Enon said. “For every problem there is a solution.”

I met Tjewe a couple of weeks ago, after seeing her around on South Sixth for the past several months. She was at the bus stop early one morning, crying and sick, after being up all night, presumably working but maybe not. She told me she was a heroin addict, and was at the time going through serious withdrawals. She needed help badly, but was hesitant to commit to any rehab program because she had this little dog that needed to be cared for. I wished I could have done something for her; given her a place to stay, clean her up, get her away from the drugs, that sort of thing. I bought her and her dog some food and drink, tried to encourage her to get some help, then left her there at the bus stop.

I hadn’t seen her since that morning, and wondered if she did in fact get into a program somewhere. To me, she was just too young and pretty to be messing up on the street like that. I was conflicted when I saw her and her dog again finally last night, there on South Sixth, at the same bus stop. I was glad to see her, after kind of missing her for so long, but at the same time I was disappointed that she did not clean up and get away from the street. She’s just too young and pretty for that kind of life. I wish there was something I could do for her.

“Says here that the U.K. is now the number one target for Al-Qaeda attacks,” Enon quoted the paper between puffs of his cigarette and sips of whiskey.

“We must be slipping,” I replied.

“I’m not really sure how that can be,” he said. “We’ve made a mess of everything we’ve touched over in the Middle-East.”

“Kind of an insult, if you ask me,” I said. “I mean we really, really try, don’t we? The Brits don’t want it, and I see them trying their damnedest to avoid any kind of distinction like that. But us, we really try. We want to be number one.”

Enon passed me the bottle, gesturing loudly that he thought I needed a swig. I took the bottle and sipped it twice. Kite had just finished rolling a joint, and showed off the crooked and pregnant looking hand-made cigarette. She was just learning how to do this. Enon gave her a nod of approval, but just enough to suggest that she still needed a little bit of practice. Kite presented the joint to me, indicating I should light it, which I did, then passed it back to her.

“So what are we going to do?” asked Kite. She likes to pretend that she’s actually interested in our discussions about politics and world events. “I mean,” she went on, “how are we going to get them pissed off at us again?”

Enon took another sip of the whiskey then closed his eyes. He appeared to be deep in thought, but he was really only holding his breath after taking a hit off of Kite’s joint.

“I think the British problem is that they tend to do things a little bit more correctly than we do,” Enon finally said after exhaling loudly. “While we only ever fuck everything up, we look like a bunch of clowns over there.”

“So they don’t feel like messing with us because we’re such screw-ups?” Kite asked.

“Sounds about right,” I injected. “They are probably just laughing at us, while they consider the Brits to be a viable threat.”

“Yup,” Enon said, holding in another hit while he passed the joint back to me.

“Seems like we used to be able to get everybody pissed all the time,” Kite reminisced. “We must be slipping.”

“Yeah, I miss the good ol’ days,” I said, laying back and looking up at the stars.

“Yeah, the good ol’ days,” said Kite. She laid back beside me, hissing loudly as he puffed on the joint.

“The good ol’ days,” agreed Enon. He stood, gulped one large swig of whiskey, then rested the bottle on my belly as he rolled over to lay next to Kite. I propped my head high enough to sip the whiskey one last time, then laid back again, closed my eyes and thought of how peaceful thing were.

Chubby Chavez of Venezuela vows to protect the Bolivian government in the event that anything bad happens there in the near future. Chavez reminds me of that crazy Korean Kim. Seems he likes to pump his ego by taking spots in the world news. Though not nearly as bad as North Korea, Venezuela is really just another under-developed shit-hole of a country, and frankly I think Hugo should keep to himself. He is not worthy of any kind of world spotlight.

On the North Korean front, the diplomats have moved from deliberate posturing back down to the typical disagreement over what to do in the manner of punishment for Kim’s alleged testing of a nuclear bomb. The end result is likely to be no result, and the world will continue on as if nothing really happened. But come to think of it, there isn’t really much that anybody can or is prepared to do, even in spite of the fact that we’ve had years of warning about this particular scenario.

“Let’s just wait and see what happens, then we’ll deal with it when it becomes an issue.”

Well, it’s become an issue all of the sudden, and still nobody is willing to deal with it.

“Well, you can have your nuclear bombs, but just don’t light them off in anybody else’s back yard.”

That, sirs, is the only next logical step. Let’s just see what happens next. Just wait.

It still remains to be seen just exactly what this madman wants. I mean you can’t hold somebody hostage without also having some kind of demand. What the hell does Kim want so badly that he has to threaten world peace? He wants direct negotiations with the U.S. But negotiate what? Makes no sense to me.

I run into a fellow from time to time who vocalizes all his internal dialog, which in itself is pretty crazy, but if you heard the disjointed thoughts going through his head, you would not expect to be able to carry on any kind of rational conversation with him. The guy is a stark raving lunatic. So given that analogy, I would not be inclined to want to open any kind of dialog with Kim the crazy Korean either.

On to Iraq, they want to pass a law that effectively segments the country into different semi-autonomous regions. The Sunni opposition fear that it will fragment Iraq, meaning the Sunni chunk of land will not have as much oil as the Kurdish and Shiite chunks. The Shiite opposition fears it will adversely impact national reconciliation, which means they aren’t though killing all the Sunnis yet. The Kurds, bless them, have been pleasantly quiet.

The British want to pull out of Iraq, claiming their presence in the country is contributing to the insecurity there. It’s a double-edged sword that, if they pull out, it’s exactly what the people presenting the security problems want, so that they will be freer to make more of a mess than things are now.

The conservatives in the U.S. call it cut-and-run. When thing get tough, we all go home. The truth of the matter is that the violence will not stop there until the Iraqis are ready to stop it themselves. It doesn’t matter how many British or American troops there are over there. We clearly aren’t doing anything to help the situation. The Iraqis can blame our presence all they want for the violence, but it really is just Iraqis killing Iraqis, and they will continue to do it whether we are there or not. We certainly aren’t doing anything to stop it. So maybe the British have a point.

And then in Afghanistan, the house speaker there is threatening to resign because of alleged corruption in the government. It is widely know that Afghanistan supplies 90% of the world’s heroin. Now, that’s a lot of dope. It couldn’t happen if the government wasn’t corrupt, at least not on that scale. And President Karzai has the nerve to complain about Pakistan harboring the Taliban on their side of the border, when it is Karzai’s government and the opium crop that funds the Taliban in the first place.

Now who’s stupid here? I guess we are. We don’t know what’s going on. Obviously President Bush doesn’t know what’s going on or he wouldn’t have invited Karzai to visit him in Washington last month. And certainly NATO doesn’t know what’s going on, since their soldiers are too busy fighting the Taliban to notice all the thousands of acres of opium fields across the country. Yup, them Afghans got us all spoofed. I guess I’ll just have to accept the fact that I am dumber than a bucket of rocks.

Lots of good stuff today, somewhat backed up, but we’ll try to get to as much as we can.

Shouldn’t fail to mention that some bonehead crashed an airplane into a building in New York today. Details are still sketchy. Hope everybody in the building is okay. As for the bonehead in the plane, well,…

Kim the crazy Korean continues to dominate the news with his claim to have tested an atomic bomb earlier in the week. It remains to be seen whether it was really an atom bomb, or if it just wasn’t a train load of TNT. Either way, he’s managed to get just about everybody in the civilized part of the world up in some kind of tizzy about it. A lot of diplomatic posturing going on all over the place. We’ll see how this turns out in the coming weeks.

Frankly, I don’t think much will ever come of it. The moron has been claiming to have nuclear bombs for a few years now, and nobody has done anything about that. In my opinion, I think the pudgy little fuck is some kind of egomaniac, and gets his rocks off by seeing his name in the news. He never seems to go more than a week or two without pulling some kind of stupid stunt. He clearly dislikes it when things go on in other parts of the world that distract attention from his little shit-hole of a country. So the question remains, after this, what could *possibly* be next? Now, maybe that’s a little bit scary.

In Iraq, they are claiming that 655,000 civilians have been killed since we invaded. They had it broken down into various categories like bullet wounds, roadside and suicide bombs, assorted other violent and sadistic atrocities. It’s kind of hard to imagine that many dead people. Also hard to imagine that they missed counting that many bodies, I mean they have to be buried somewhere, don’t they? What’s so hard about counting grave sites? Or are there fewer graves than there are supposed dead bodies?

Anyhow, 10,000 dead people per month is quite an astonishing figure. Why isn’t somebody crying genocide? Seems like a culling going on there, if you ask me. Shias and Sunnis culling one-another. To be honest, I don’t really believe the figures. Granted, there are probably an astounding number of dead civilians there, but you are talking about numbers along the lines of Darfur and Rwanda. It doesn’t make sense that this can go on for five years and somebody just now takes notice.

And who can forget the beloved and retired Congressman Foley. This will be known in generations to come as Foley’s Folly. He dominates the news here as much, if not more than the madman Kim of Korea. I personally can’t wait to see the results of this November’s mid-term elections. I won’t go as far as to predict the outcome, because as we all know, most of us Americans are a bunch of under-educated grass-chewing crackers, and it will take a hell of a lot more than one faggot pedophile in the Republican party to deter them from voting the party line. For all we know, half the members of Congress are faggots and child molesters, but we just don’t know about it yet. But like I say, it will be interesting if something like this is what it takes to tip the balance of power back into the Liberal side of the house and senate.

We’ll see how things go.

Skute came trundling into camp last night with a bucket of fried chicken that somebody had given him. We all ate pretty well. That is not to say that any of us ever really go hungry – it’s just that we don’t get buckets of chicken very often, and we appreciated it very much.

Enon pointed out that they don’t call it “Kentucky Fried Chicken” any more, that the name had been shortened to “KFC” at some point in the past. None of us were sure of how long ago that happened. I told them that the reason for the name change was because the State of Kentucky went to court and essentially “trade-marked” their name, then went about filing lawsuits against anybody who was using “Kentucky” in their own business names, demanding royalties from various entities such as everybody’s favorite old Colonel Sanders and his chicken empire.

There was some discussion about this, since nobody really believed me when I had told them what had happened. We all tried to brainstorm other examples of name changes in the aftermath of the Kentucky lawsuits. The only other one we could come up with out of hand was the Kentucky Derby. Its name has been changed to “The Run For The Roses”.

“Ohh,” Kite said, as this all suddenly came to light. “That’s what happened to the horse race.”

Enon was still skeptical about the Kentucky thing, but he decided he would check it out for himself rather than try and argue against it.

“You know,” Kite said, munching on a chicken wing that had been dipped in mashed potatoes and brown gravy, “I used to be an equestrian.”

“No kidding,” replied Skute. “I used to be a Pentecostal. I think I still am, but I haven’t been to chur,…” I thwacked his ear with a flick of my middle finger. It turned bright red very quickly. He held his palm against it and cowered away from me so I was out of easy reach.

“Owww,” he whined.

“Huk”, said Kite. “What kind of animals do Pentecostals ride?”

“You don’t want to know,” Enon told her. She looked at him questioningly with round lips and eyes, then shrugged her shoulders and went back to eating her chicken and potatoes and gravy.

Full of news this week. We’ve had a spate of school killings, which makes me wonder just what in the hell it is that triggers these kinds of events.

There is the Florida Congressman Foley who resigned his post after a scandal about his electronic communication with a 15-year-old boy. Funny how this same guy is the author of legislation meant to protect youths from predatory adults over the internet. Also funny how there are law enforcement agencies who pose as kids on line in efforts to “sting” potential predators. The people who get caught talking nasty to kids wind up in jail, even though they didn’t actually do what they were accused of. It’s kind of like committing a crime by proxy. But somehow this Congressman Foley managed to slide by the law, even going as far as checking himself into a clinic for treatment of alcohol abuse. Seems that nobody but Congressmen and Senators get away with breaking the law.

I was listening to news this morning about an Oklahoma Senator who claims that our global warming problem is a figment of everybody’s imagination. He cited all kinds of scientific studies about it, all of which seemed to conveniently ignore the fact that the polar ice caps are melting at a tremendous rate. Well, he’s a Senator, so we’d better listen to him. He obviously knows more about this stuff than we do. If he said that white was black, I would have to believe him just because of his credentials, forget everything else I know about anything.

And the Palestinians, apparently distraught over the lack of violence coming at them over the border from Israel, have begun fighting amongst themselves. So it seems that many people are just intent to fight and kill, and for a shortage of one enemy, they will find another to fill the void.

Finally, Iraqi leaders are meeting to discuss quelling the sectarian violence between the Shia and Sunni Moslems there. These leaders are all in fact leaders of militia factions and responsible for the vast majority of killing in Baghdad. These guys are also elected officials. What the fuck? Nobody really wants peace over there. The people who are supposed to be responsible for law and order are in fact responsible for sectarian murder on a massive scale. You think these guys will ever face trial for any crimes? Fat fucking chance.

All over the news today are unconfirmed reports that Bin Laden might actually be dead. Apparently somebody in the French government leaked a document to the press there, and it has stirred quite a ruckus. Nobody knows for certain, but the report suggests that Bin Laden may have died in August from typhoid fever. This makes a little bit of sense, considering he has been presumably living in a cave for the last five years, and in all likelihood drinking tainted water the whole time. There is no natural clean water left in the world.

It is amusing to me that such might be the case, since it implies that he has been drinking water tainted with human fecal matter. Certainly an un-martyr like way to meet one’s end. I would have expected a fellow like him to glorify himself by going down in a hail of gunfire. This might also explain why, if he is really dead, there has been no official news of it in the Islamic web community. There is no hero-like way to explain how somebody died from drinking shit water.

Well, if he’s dead, then that’s that. Good riddance. If he’s still alive, then that still doesn’t explain his reluctance to show himself. The last batch of videos were old re-hashed material. There was an audio recording, which may or may not be recent. But all of this came about the same time that this new report says that he may have died. It’s not sad because I don’t feel sorry for him. Stuff his filthy body under a rock somewhere in the wasted mountains of Eastern Pakistan. Anybody else would be worthy of a decent funeral.

The Iranian and Venezuelan presidents each had their day at the U.N., and while Iran was a little more diplomatic, (or was it obscure?), old Mr. Chavez held no punches. And while as an American I feel it is within my rights, indeed my duty to slam my President when I feel he might deserve it, I felt somewhat miffed at Mr. Chavez’s verbal assault, that the little fat fuck has no business coming to my country and speaking like that about anybody.

I mean, who *is* this guy anyhow? All the news suggests he thinks he is a world player because he sells oil. But if you look at the impoverished state of 80% of Venezuela, you wonder if this jerk shouldn’t spend a little more time addressing his issues at home before he starts speaking about things abroad. The little creep needs to get his own affairs in order.

To be fair, I think that Mr. Bush ought to spend a little more time addressing issues here at home as well, that while our armed forces are out trouncing around playing cowboy in places that don’t even know what cowboys are, we forget about the state of our economy, jobs and wages and homelessness and healthcare and drug addiction and illegal immigration and violent crime, you name it, the list goes on and on.

Now the Iranian president was a bit more subtle, as I said, but while I think he ought not to be ignored like we have rightly ignored the Iranians since 1979, I also think he is one of those people who ought not be entirely trusted. He seemed open and honest when he spoke in a television interview a few weeks ago, but when I heard him with CNN the other day, he was evasive, always answering questions with questions or rhetoric or as typical of most Middle Easterners, used the past actions of others to justify his own. I don’t think that Anderson Cooper got one single strait answer from him.

But yeah Mr. Bush, like it or not, it is about time to start talking to the Iranians again, and the Syrians for that matter. We still don’t have to buy oil from them if we don’t want to. But as far as fat Hugo goes, that little turd can take a flying fuck at a rolling donut. If there is any way at all to get away from Venezuelan oil, then the sooner the better for all of us.

“The city of Plzen,” Enon read aloud from the newspaper, “lies about 100 Kilometers, (62 miles), southwest of the Czech capitol, Prague.”

“Why would they lie about that?” asked Skute, who had somehow quietly woken up and wanted to join the conversation. You could tell he was still foggy from whatever drugs had induced him to pass out in the first place. Enon rolled his eyes and made a face that said he thought Skute was a complete moron. Skute saw Enon’s expression and opened his mouth to defend himself. I rapped him soundly on the top of his skull with my knuckles; the noise was similar to that of the type of wood block that is popular among rock-and-roll drummers. Kite laughed out loud. Skute soured his face and rubbed the top of his head. I made a gesture like I was going to hit him again, and he scurried away just far enough out of reach that it would be inconvenient for me to do it.

We talked about how the Pope had to apologize for something he said in a speech last week. He’d apparently been quoting some 14th-Century king, something about spreading the word of God with a sword.

“A butter knife would be better,” Kite commented. Enon looked surprised at the accidental wisdom of what she had said. So did I.

Enon and I were talking about how the White House wants to amend the articles of the Geneva Convention so that it better suits their desires. The funny thing about it is that the usual crowd of Bush-ites that follow him around Washington like lap dogs are having trouble agreeing with him for the first time in their miserable, self-serving lives. This left the President in a somewhat combative mood this morning when he held a press conference hoping to sell the idea to the general public so that we all might get on the phone to our respective Senators and Congressmen and tell them that they need to get back on the bus.

“If you listen to what he says,” Enon told me, “he makes a lot of good sense. But the trouble is,” he went on, “is that the words that come out of his mouth are only part truthful, and if anyone ever bothered to read the text – as if any of those grass-chewing crackers actually got past Dick and Jane in the first grade – of Bush’s proposed legislation, then they would see why his contingent of over-fed Pomeranians were having second thoughts about it.”

That was a mouthful for Enon, but we hadn’t started drinking whiskey yet, so it wasn’t completely unbelievable. He’s right, of course. Simply put, the bill makes it legal to torture enemy prisoners, as long as it is done outside the Code of Military Conduct, which is a separate set of laws entirely, and does not apply to civilians such as employees of the C.I.A. and private contractors acting under the direction of the U.S. Government. It means that Army personnel still can’t torture and humiliate prisoners, contrary to what we know about what happened in the recent past in Iraq, but as long as the C.I.A. is handling the prisoners, then they can pretty much do whatever they want. And get this: the bill also forgives the past so that anyone who had previously broken the law before this new bill is signed cannot be held criminally liable for their actions.

Kite, who had listened to some of the arguments in favor of the bill, was concerned about the scenario where a terrorist might know something that would save lives if he was forced to indulge the information.

“Take him out back and beat the living shit out of him,” was Enon’s response. “But don’t make it all-right by passing a law that says it’s legal.”

“The next thing you know, they will be jerking people off the streets and tying them to ducking stools just because they suspect something might be up,” I added. Enon agreed. Kite looked at me funny.

“Ducking stools are what they used back in early Massachusetts,” I clarified for her, “when the Puritans wanted someone to confess to being a witch. It was a chair hung from a long pole. The accused was strapped to the chair, and then repeatedly dunked into a lake until they either drowned or confessed.”

“What happened when they confessed,” Kite asked.

“They tied them to a pole and made a bon fire out them,” I said. She crinkled her nose in disgust.

“They actually *did* that?” she asked.

“It was a long, long time ago,” I told her. “We are much more rational and civilized about those sorts of things nowadays.”

“It’s not entirely clear to me that we are,” said Enon. He pulled a bottle of whiskey from his bag and cracked the seal. He studied it thoughtfully for a moment, swigged it, then offered the bottle to Kite. She turned it down, as he knew she would, then he passed it over to me. Just then Skute came bumbling down the path, returning after heading out earlier in search of one or another form of narcotic. Apparently he found something.

Kite gestured with her thumb over her shoulder in Skute’s direction. “Maybe we can tie *him* to a ducking stool,” she suggested.

“No lakes around here,” said Enon.

“And remember,” I told her, shaking my index finger at her, “we are much more rational and civilized than we used to be.”

“Yeah, right,” she said sarcastically.

“Here-here,” said Enon, then he took the bottle and swigged it again.

Things tend to become somewhat philosophical when Enon and I stay up drinking whiskey. Kite was snoozing peacefully near the fire, and Skute had passed out sprawled like he’d fallen from an airplane. Enon and I were talking about theocracies, a topic that had been reached through association to the President’s assertion that radical Islamists were the same sort of fascists that embodied the likes of Hitler and others similar. Enon didn’t buy the fascist argument, and thinking about it, I really didn’t either.

“A theocratic society is not the same as Nazi Germany,” Enon said. “If we are going to label the Islamists that way,” he went on, “then perhaps we ought to take a look at ourselves.”

“How so?” I asked him, already half-knowing where he was going. I sipped from my shot glass while he composed the thought in his mind.

“That’s where we are headed right now,” he told me. “If you consider the influence that the religious right has on our political system, how anyone lately who does not buy into the current mindset is immediately labeled as unpatriotic and by the way godless.”

I could see it. The U.S. Government is run by a bunch of over-zealous red-neck Christians. No rationality about it any more. The politicians foster their votes from a community of under-educated grass-chewing crackers, not necessarily because they really believe in the party line, but because they have to in order to get reelected.

“Listen to the party line, Pancho,” he told me. “It’s all about terrorism. George Bush can do whatever the fuck he wants as long as he includes terrorism in his speeches and addresses. And if he decides that there isn’t enough terrorism to keep everybody in goose-stepping formation, all he has to do is make some.”

“Like invading Iraq,” I suggested.

“Exactly,” he said.

“Like the bumper poppy crop in Afghanistan,” I said. “The Taliban can afford to pay fighters nearly twice the salary that the Afghan army earns, and all the money comes from the opium trade.”

“Ninety-five percent of the opium in the world comes from Afghanistan,” Enon agreed, “and we had it in our power at one point to put a stop to it.”

Yeah, we did. I remember how wishy-washy the generals were about that right after we invaded the place. They were worried about “winning the hearts and minds”, (a term that really bothers me lately because I hear it way too much), of the Afghan people, and the farmers would complain if the army made them all stop growing poppies. They actually allowed it to continue because they were worried about the repercussions. And now the same poppies that we ignored are being used to pay the salaries of bombers and fighters. The Taliban doesn’t need donations from rich Saudi Arabs. They control the world’s supply of opium.

Seems to me an effective use of military force might be to torch all the poppy fields, but somehow that doesn’t get done. “What will the farmers do for a living if they can’t grow opium?” is the standard argument. Give them something else to do, or tell them all to fuck off. The real question is what the army will do if the Taliban fades away because they can’t support themselves. A big chunk of our Global War on Terror would vanish into the distance, and with it a big chunk of the Bush party line.

“Ahh, but we’ll always have Iraq,” I reassured Enon.

“Probably,” he agreed. “If not, I’m sure we’ll find something else to do.”

“Here’s to making terrorists,” I raised my glass.

“Here-here,” he toasted.

The American Jihad moron made the news. I was looking at his face on the television, listening to his voice, his tone, his manner, and all I could think of was all the times I’d been assaulted by Jesus freaks over the years, these assholes who are so self-assured that their way is the right way. Fucking boneheads. The last thing I’m worried about is the life after. I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.

Imagine that. They actually got on the air, “inviting” all us non-believers to join in their cause, even called for the troops in Afghanistan to change sides. Like that’s going to ever happen. The only thing I can imagine about this, just like I’ve ever imagined every Jesus freak who preached at me, is these people are insane. Completely bonkers.

I suppose the invitation to join in their insanity was really a warning about some impending disaster, like they have something planned that is going to take a bunch of innocent lives, probably in New York, which happens to be a place where the morons like to attack the most. Maybe even a September 11 anniversary, as if we all decided to become insane like them, then we might be somehow spared from the violence that is yet to come.

Fucking morons. Bring it on.

Skute had apparently caught some news somewhere, perhaps on somebody’s television since I found it difficult to picture him actually reading a paper or using a computer. Enon and I were discussing the situation in the Middle East, in particular the smufudgen they call a war in Iraq. Skute interrupted.

“What are these clusters that everybody is talking about, and why did the Israelis drop all those bombs on them?” he asked.

I had to think about it for a minute. Ahh, cluster bombs! I sidled over to him, rested my left arm across his shoulder, then sucker-punched him with a right to the belly. He sat down to catch his breath, and hopefully think for a minute about what he said. Enon was obliged to explain to him that cluster bombs were clusters of little bombs that spread out over a large area, designed primarily to kill indiscriminately large numbers of people. In older days, I imagine before the cluster bomb was ever introduced, (correct me if I’m wrong, please), these devices could have been very effective against a standing army. But the days of standing armies are long gone, and so too are the strategically viable reasons to use cluster bombs. The bombs just kill people, and in the Middle East, these people are 90% civilian, and about half of them are children.

Something about the cluster bombs is that they are notoriously unreliable, that a significant number of the little “bomb-lets” do not detonate when they are supposed to, so they lay around in the dirt like land mines waiting for kids and farmers to stumble across them months or even years after the fact.

International law, the Israelis claim, allows them to use these things. It is my understanding that my own U.S. military used these devices in both Afghanistan and Iraq. To fuck with international law, where the hell is your conscience? Might as well break out the gas canisters because they serve to the same exact end. Where, morally is the difference?

Once Skute caught his breath again, he asked another question: “How come the Israelis ended up looking so bad to everybody? I thought they were supposed to be the good guys,” he added.

“What about us?” Enon replied. “We use cluster bombs all the time. And we are supposed to be the good guys, too.”

“No wonder everybody over there hates us,” commented Skute.

“That’s one of the reasons,” Enon told him. “But only one of many.”

Skute looked quizzically at Enon, hoping to dig out a deeper explanation. When that didn’t happen, he shrugged his shoulders, then dug into his shirt pocket and pulled out a joint. After he had examined it for tears in the paper, he passed the number to Enon who lit it and inhaled deeply. It went around the circle several times, and the discussion turned to Kite, who was absent, and who all three of us have some kind of crush on.

"She's back on the methadone," Enon said.

"That's good," I replied honestly, but knowing in my heart that it would probably only last a few days.

The anniversary of the hurricane Katrina that destroyed New Orleans happened this week. There has been much hullabaloo about the recovery efforts, the heart-warming human interest stories surrounding the victims, all that crap. Truth be told, I know what it is like to be a hurricane survivor, and I also know what it is like to live through the aftermath of being forcibly removed from your demolished home, leaving everything you own behind. I know what the authorities do for you, that unless there is a shotgun to their heads, they will do as little as they can get by with.

FEMA was ill-prepared when hurricane Jean wrecked my home in Cape Canaveral the previous year. Sadly, in spite of knowing that every year without fail they will have to respond to at least one big storm related disaster, they were just as inept and incompetent when Katrina struck New Orleans. The only thing that FEMA responded to was public pressure, and when that finally happened, everybody started to realize that FEMA really didn’t know how to respond. Nobody ever told them that they would have to do more than write checks for $700 per homeless person. They still have trailer homes that were probably bought through some brother-in-law deal that have not been distributed to the people who need them.

The lesson I learned from hurricane Jean was to move the fuck away from anyplace that might ever stand even a remote chance of becoming a disaster site. And while my living situation has not improved since I lost my home in Cape Canaveral, at least I am reasonably assured that my camp site in Tucson will not be swallowed up by a 7.6 magnitude earthquake or washed away by violent tides and hundred-mile-per-hour winds.

Latest statistics in this great country of mine is that 13.3% of the population lives at or below the poverty level, a line drawn somewhat arbitrarily and artificially optimistically at somewhere around $7000 per year. This means that one-in-eight people here don’t even have enough money to rent a roach motel room, let alone afford a car payment and the mandatory insurance. And you know what? Nobody cares. That is until the spotlight focuses on a large number of these poor people stranded in places like New Orleans after Katrina wrecked what little they had of lives. And you know what else? Nobody would even care about that except for the other seven-of-eight people who had money yet still lost homes and businesses there, as it seems in all fairness that Katrina didn’t give a shit about whose homes she demolished.

So the Israelis never seem to disappoint. Not only have they violated their cease fire agreement in Lebanon, but they are back to arresting more of the Palestinian MP’s. They really don’t know when to leave well enough alone. I’m getting to where I really don’t like them much more than I like the Arabs. They can have each other.

I was anxious the other morning to see if the cease fire had been broken yet, but all I found on the cable news was 24-7 coverage of this moron in Bangkok who claims to have murdered that little Colorado girl some 10 years ago. Of course it didn’t take long for most of the news channels to get the idea that this guy was full of shit, but we get no apology from the cable channels for being so stupid. There was literally no news that day about anything but this pedophile nimrod and the Colorado girl.

What was unsaid in all this was that he had been arrested because of an investigation there in Bangkok, unknown what about but probably something related to the child sex tourism industry. (Look at all the places he’s visited over the past few years, and it is almost clear exactly what he’s been up to). The news channels played it up like he had been arrested at the request of the Boulder D.A., but in fact the law in Boulder had to grope for a legitimate reason to issue an arrest warrant. Apparently the Bangkok police were more than happy to hand him off, probably because of holes in their own investigation, that it was some kind of blessing in disguise when he started spouting off about this ten-year-old murder case. Who cares if he did it or not, just get rid of the psycho. Send him back to the country he was born in, and let the Americans deal with it.

I have to wonder where people get their money sometimes. It is not cheap to travel from country to country the way this fellow did, yet he was only ever marginally employed for very short periods of time. Is he independently wealthy or something? I’m unemployed, and I can’t afford to pay attention, let alone buy plane tickets and hotel rooms. Must be something I missed somewhere along the line. Maybe there is some place I can go to take lessons in becoming a well-off tramp. Nobody I know has a clue though, as is evidenced by all the panhandling and snipe hunting they do.

So the tentative truce between Hezbollah and the Israelis marches on, much to my own surprise. Rightly so, Hezbollah has begun cash compensation for Lebanese who had their homes destroyed. They ought to foot the bill for all the damaged infrastructure like bridges, roads, power plants, etc,..

The Israelis should help out too, but a cold day in hell before anything like that will ever happen. The Israelis ought to learn how to respond to terror with a little less force and a little more tact. Us Americans ought to learn the same. The old days of standing armies are gone, and the sooner people begin to realize that, the better for everybody in the world.

So let’s go somewhere else. We haven’t visited Iraq, primarily because it happens to be a sore spot for me. We are losing about 500 soldiers per year there, which seems like a lot until you compare it to 500 or so per week that the Iraqi civilians are suffering. The place is completely insane. The violence seems to be primarily focused between the Sunni and Shiite sects, with the Bin Laden group practicing the only thing they know, death and chaos and instability and yes, the T-word, terror to the extreme.

It’s hard to imagine such widespread lawlessness in a place that is supposed to be civilized. Kidnappings that serve no political purpose whatsoever. Anybody suspected of having any money is subject to being snatched and ransomed for cash. The bombings tend to be more political, striving to send the country into a full-fledged lines-drawn civil war. And all the murders, some for revenge, others for political reasons. Essentially nobody is safe there. For whatever reason, everybody is a potential target, and everybody is a potential victim.

I think the Bin Laden clan ought to re-think their plans there. They seem to be somewhat short-sighted, their goals appearing to be simply to create mass chaos in order to make the foreign invaders look impotent and incompetent. They should realize that starting a civil war with the Shiites is in essence starting a war with Iran. They will not win if they wind up in a war with the Iranians. The Iranians know how to fight fire with fire, and they are a lot better funded, better trained, and better equipped. If the Iranians chose to go after Bin Laden for whatever reason, I have little doubt that they would make quick business of it.

I listened to the 60 Minutes interview with the Iranian president last week. If you listen to the Bushites in Washington, you get a picture of a raving lunatic with nuclear aspirations, much like Kim in Korea. But I didn’t get that impression of the man at all. Extreme, perhaps, but certainly not crazy, and as far as I was able to discern, he was not necessarily interested in destabilizing any of his neighbors, in fact seemed more concerned about all the existing instability around, and the root causes of such, which happen to point mostly all the way back to Washington.

So we don’t ask ourselves why so many millions of people in the Middle East hate us so, instead blaming it all on bad publicity and religious extremism. But the Israelis made an excellent example of why when they trashed Lebanon over the kidnapping of two soldiers, which I might add, haven’t been returned home yet unless I missed the news about it somewhere. This heavy-handed approach is effective when it comes to toppling regimes, but serves no long or short term benefit in a limited exchange as was the case in Lebanon. The only thing that it served was to foster more hatred toward the Israelis and indirectly, us Americans.

Ask the Bushites and you get the answer that we are fighting against an ideology. But if it is our intention to force our ideas on the people over there, be it with bombs or diplomats, then the Arabs are fighting against the same thing. It is really nothing more than a clash of cultures. Our behavior over the past several decades has created what we are dealing with now. You can grant that terror is not right in any case, but when bombs fall indiscriminately from Israeli planes over Lebanon, you can hardly say that the Lebanese civilian population was not terrorized. So what’s the difference?

And the truce be told. Enon did not win our informal lottery. There was no prize anyhow, so it was just for fun. I myself actually thought the cease fire would not hold this long.

“But it’s only been a day,” said Kite. “You gotta give ‘em more credit than that.”

“Yeah, right,” spouted Enon. “These people want to fight. This cease fire is akin to a child’s ‘time out’.”

I imagined two dirty little nasty boys, one watchful eye on the sitter, and one disdainful eye on each other, waiting behind their respective wooden scissor gates for the opportunity to resume hostilities. I looked around and saw how nicely the other kids were playing together as long as these two offenders were kept locked up. I imagined how pleasant it would be to take those two little nasty boys and paddle their little asses, but everybody knows you can’t hit kids these days.

George Bush proclaimed that the Israelis won this war, while at the same time, the Arabs insist that Hezbollah were the winners. I don’t really see it either way. I know who lost though, and it was the Lebanese people. If anybody got spanked here, it was them. I don’t feel for the Lebanese government because they are ultimately responsible for what happens within their borders, and whether they were impotent, unable, or unwilling to deal with a militia like Hezbollah, the simple fact is that they did nothing for years, essentially allowing Hezbollah to grow and strengthen to the point they are at now, where even the Israelis can find them to be a formidable opponent.

That’s kind of the point I think in Hezbollah declaring victory. The simple truth is that a conventional army is ineffectual against the style of fighting that presented itself in Lebanon over the past month. In a public relations war, which is essentially what this became, the numbers of dead Lebanese civilians became more important than anything.

And the Israelis never seem to get it. They haven’t got it in Gaza either, and they’ve been killing Palestinian civilians for decades there. It doesn’t weaken their opposition, but only strengthens their opposition’s resolve. Using a helicopter gunship to fire a missile at a car, whether or not they succeed in the objective of killing a militant fighter is lost in the noise of all the nearby civilians who were also killed by the explosion. Likewise, in Lebanon, it doesn’t seem rational to drop a 500-pound bomb on an apartment building just because one of the tenants might be the enemy. All you succeed in doing is making more enemies.

Like it or not, the Israelis are in for a long haul if they don't start spending to effort on getting people to like them.

The quasi-truce between the Israelis and militants in Lebanon takes effect this morning, and so far things seem to going reasonably well. We had a kind of unofficial lottery going at camp over how long the semi-peaceful situation will last. Enon, by far the most well read of all, is also the most skeptical, giving the end to quiet at no later than tomorrow morning.

“Somebody’s going to get antsy”, he said, but declining to speculate on which side will break the cease fire first.

The rest of us were about evenly divided between the Arabs and Jews. Kite suggested it would be ambiguous whenever it happened, with nobody being the clear violator. That to me was a safe opinion, but also a very good one as far as I was concerned. I myself imagined a scenario where the Arabs shoot first, but the Israelis “defend” themselves by killing a bunch more civilians, thereby prompting a resumption of rocket attacks into northern Israel, to which the Israelis will respond ten-fold. And on and on.

As usual, Skute had no valid opinion whatsoever. “We should just send a bunch of troops over there and kick *everybody’s* ass,” he said, as he dug around in his belongings, no doubt in search of something to get high on. I slapped him. He rubbed his cheek, looked at me briefly, and then resumed his search. Enon scolded me with his eyes. Kite giggled. Skute never had anything to get high on, and his display of desperate longing was merely a ploy to prompt somebody else to offer him some of their drugs. He would do this long enough for everybody to notice, and then wander off for another day of pan-handling quarters downtown where, conveniently, all the drugs happen to be. Skute took one last look around hoping somebody had something to offer, then headed off.

“What’s on the menu today?” I asked him as he was leaving. He scratched his head, further mussing his already unkempt hairdo. I could tell he was thinking that I expected him to bring us all lunch or something, and he was going over excuses in his mind about why he couldn’t do that. Actually he *could*, if he wanted, but was planning on engaging himself in the pursuit of illegal narcotics for most of the day, and would not have time to deliver lunch.

"Never mind," I told him, rolling my eyes.

I was only really curious about what kind of drugs he was looking for. Unlike most, Skute seemed to have no particular preference. Others tend to be a bit more specific, crack, crank, meth, synthetics, everybody seemed to have their favorites. But not skute. Anything will do, the stronger the better, the more the merrier.

“Pathetic,” I commented as he disappeared down the trail. Of course, I am no angel in that respect, having indulged in just about everything in the past. But the difference is that in my case, it is all in the past. Except pot. I like to smoke pot.

Kite is one of a handful of methadone junkies that I know. I try my best to keep her honest, but the truth of the matter is that methadone is really no better than heroin. You still stay just as addicted, the difference being that you are plugged into the system where I suppose the admins in the government think they have some kind of handle on your behavior. “Liquid handcuffs,” Kite calls it. Sad but true. She literally can’t go anywhere that takes her too far from her twice daily dose at the methadone clinic downtown. Otherwise she is back on the real stuff again, just that quick. And while there is some effort on the part of the clinic to treat the addiction by slowly reducing the dosages over time, I have personally never met a “former” junkie. I’m sure they exist somewhere. But not where I hang out. Nobody I know has any intention of quitting anything. Kite does the methadone because it’s free. Otherwise she would be panhandling and hooking for her drugs.

Enon is an anomaly in his own right. He prefers to drink, and on occasion will smoke a joint with me. Cheap whiskey is his poison. However he is somewhat settled about drinking, preferring to keep it in camp, rather than making a fool of himself in public places. Both Enon and I despise the public drunks. Especially the ones who make asses of themselves on the bus lines. They seem to be all over, expecting everybody to pardon them for being stupid and clumsy and appreciate them for the festive spirit they are in. Fat chance. They too are panhandlers, always bumming quarters for malt liquor.

They also spend an inordinate amount of time in jail, since it is not such an easy thing to play strait in public after you’ve downed two or three forties. Also, since the vast majority of them are homeless, they have no place to go where it is legal to drink. So they loiter in parks and at bus stops, stealing swigs from bottles cleverly disguised as brown paper bags. They have no clue what they look like, and probably wouldn’t care if they did.

The typical line the panhandlers use is for food. You are supposed to feel sorry for these guys because they haven’t eaten. Or bus fare. They have to be somewhere important. Both of those excuses seem real enough, except for the fact that both free food and bus passes are available, and everybody knows where to go to get that stuff. Of course, you have to be sober or you’ll just get the boot.

I myself would prefer it if all the panhandlers were just honest. “I’m trying to raise enough money to buy a forty of Old English 800.” I could almost appreciate that, though I still probably wouldn’t give them any money. Enon will ask me for money to buy whiskey, and I often give it to him because I know he will share it with me once he gets back to camp.

Our informal lottery went on to the condition we all expected Skute to be in when he returned later.

“Downers,” said Enon. “Really mellow, and then he’ll pass out.”

“Crystal,” said Kite. She stood up and imitated a series of spastic convulsions, wild-eyed and slapping herself in the head.

“Crack,” I speculated. "He’ll hang out for about five minutes the go back out looking for more."

I wondered about Skute, what kind of person he was before he got so screwed up on all those drugs, whether his apparent idiocy was a result of his years of drug abuse, or if he was always just a plain idiot. He certainly looked like an idiot, no matter what he did. Try as I might, I just couldn’t imagine him any other way. Did he *ever* have a regular job? A career? A family? No telling. And while I am somewhat curious, I am not curious enough to ask him. Likely I wouldn’t get a strait answer if I did ask.

I rolled a joint and handed it to Kite. She lit it, then we passed it around as we resumed our discussion on the Israelis and Arabs.

Anonymous Comments

Even blogs are not immune to spammers. Somebody keeps putting comments on these pages that point, by way of a rather lengthy line of indirection, to somebody who wants to sell something. If you read these blogs, do not follow any links provided by the comments. I don't even know if these links are safe, that is to say that somewhere in all the indirection it is entirely likely to pick up a virus, worm, trojan horse, whatever else these ass-holes do when they are not spanking their monkeys in their mother's bathrooms.

So the Eretrians are moving mass volumes of weaponry into Mogadishu, all the while the Islamic Courts there deny everything. At the same time, the Ethiopians are keying up along Somalia’s west, and it looks like the staging of what will be one big nasty war between the two nations. The Islamists don’t care as long as Somalia is thoroughly trashed once all the smoke clears so that they can move in and make everybody’s lives miserable there. What an insane, sick philosophy.

Meanwhile, back in Lebanon, same old story. The Arabs are using nickel-sized steel balls in the rockets they are launching into Israel. Conventionally, a weapon like that can serve no strategic purpose other than to terrorize the civilians. But that’s the whole point of terrorism, isn’t it?

Israelis tend to be liars sometimes, so one tends to doubt a lot of what they say. This tid-bit comes in saying that the Arabs were holding civilians at gun-point inside a town, forcing these people to stay and act as shields, eventually adding to higher civilian casualty figures. It wouldn’t also surprise me to learn that many of the attacks on civilian convoys were carried out by Arabs and blamed on the Israelis, an explanation that nobody ever seems to question because it is Israel’s word against everybody else’s. I mean unless the Israelis actually *want* a protracted and bloody war, I can’t see them doing these things deliberately. On the other hand, it is only par for the Arabs, who have shown so dramatically over the decades that they have no regard for anyone’s innocent life when it comes to justifying their aspirations to a higher religious purpose.

It takes only a few things to control the world. Determination, perseverance, time, and money. All of these things are possible today, so why would it be so hard to imagine? All these petty little nations crying about democracy and freedom and fairness don’t mean jack shit to somebody with the mindset and means to want to see things another way. Somebody runs that show over there. I don’t see why that is so hard to believe.

Enon was talking about newspaper articles. It seems that Condoleza is planning on entertaining some diplomats with a piano recital.

"Is that party really so gene impaired that they actually think something of this?” Enon asks. "Maybe it's that everybody else is a complete moron, and these people are the only ones who know what they are doing," he suggests a moment later.

It seems so 1800's to me, these ridiculous little things that diplomats do. What a bunch of clowns.

And in the mean while, we have this kind of big thing going on in the middle east, a few of them in fact, and Condoleza just flits through there, makes a few profound observations about the situation over there, then traipses away again. "Call me when you guys get it figured out what you want to do." More of that low-gene arrogance that seems to emanate so prominently from the southern states these days.

So Condoleza goes to visit the Asians. They have that Korean nut to deal with. It’s funny that somebody could be so completely insane and still run his own country, especially in this day and age where everything is so transparent. The only people who aren’t aware are the North Koreans themselves, probably because they don’t have satellite television or internet access.

I guess you can’t fault the Arabs in that respect – they are about the most heavily-wired people on the planet. Imagine running an entire insurgency with cell phones.

I can see Newt being afraid. As long as the Arabs continue to want things to be the way they are, there will not be anything different. And it seems things are trying to gravitate in the direction that no sane individual wants, and there is nothing anybody can do to change this process they have going on over there of weathering the foundations of civilization itself. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

And these people don’t appear to be happy with only trashing their own piss-ant pieces of desert, as it seems that they are all bred into this mindset that they can never truly be happy unless they have also trashed every other place in the world as well. Imagine two-billion soccer hooligans armed with AK-47’s and Semtex marching across the countryside laying waste to anything that even remotely resembles structure, order, rationality, sanity.

But the thing about it all that nobody seems to get the big picture is money. It’s not like a bunch of guys got together and formed a club united to defend some obscure notion of justice they might have, then went to their local charity and signed out for guns and bullets and bombs. All those things eventually come from somewhere. Somebody somewhere is in charge of all this insanity. These goof-balls like Bin Laden are dangerous in their own rights, but they all have bosses who call the shots and pay the bills. And somewhere at the top of this hierarchy is somebody in charge of the whole insane schmeel.

Kite was sitting cross-legged on the cooler like she was meditating or something like that. I know her from this place where everybody goes to get coffee and sack lunches in the morning. From time to time she flits in, sits for a while, then flits away again. I found it strangely intriguing until I learned that she just didn't like all the flies and bad smells there. I slowly began to realize that that was pretty much the way I felt about it too.

The place smells like a dumpster behind a busy restaurant on a really hot day. And when it rains, boy it gets really ripe. And so many flies. Thousands and thousands of flies.

I saw a little frightened old man there one morning. He looked like one of these guys who wound up suddenly street-bound because of a clerical error on the part of a worker down at the Social Security office. So there he was, terrified to death, his little rolling suitcase and shaving kit, standing in line with all manner of felons and drug addicts, everybody holding their little white foam cups in anticipation of the fresh kettle of coffee that was due to come out of the kitchen any minute now.

He straitened his back and puffed out his chest all of the sudden.

"This place is evil to the core!" he said rather loudly.

He stood there for a while looking around at people to see if anybody was going to challenge is position. Everyone ignored him, so he marched away. He made a point of gesture, which everybody also ignored, as he dropped his unfilled foam cup into the trash can on his way out the gate. I never saw him again after that.

You see them from time to time. The system usually sweeps them up before they get too lost.

Kite can't wait until computers become sophistocated enough to have our brains uploaded into them. This is actually a popular theme in science fiction novels these days. I've read several books where you explore the implications of uploaded consciences being allowed varying degrees of civil liberties. For instance if you were to upload your mind into a robot of some sort because your biological body was going to die, would you be able to maintain your identity and rights and property?

"Imagine being able to create multiple instances of youself", Kite speculated, "then they could all fight over your stuff like a bunch of spoiled neices and nephews."