Rain

A rude surprise this morning, getting me out of bed at five-thirty. Rain. It looks like it was only another shower, one of those ten-minute wonders, but I am still compelled to get up and get the cats inside. I also a little more glad that I knocked out that mow last night.

Celebrities and Stuff

“I think weed is the best drug on earth. One time I smoked a joint with peyote in it, and I saw a wolf howling at the moon. Hollywood is a coke town, but weed is so much better. And molly, too. Those are happy drugs— social drugs. They make you want to be with friends. You’re out in the open. You’re not in a bathroom. I really don’t like coke. It’s so gross and so dark. It’s like what are you, from the ’90s? Ew.”

-- Miley

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Government Shutdown

The federal government is shutdown. It is a temptation that the Republicans apparently have a hard time resisting. They like to talk about hating government, drowning it in a bath tub, and one supposes there is a little of that thrill with these shutdowns. But they are lost in their fantasies. It is not government they hate; it's not even about big government. They are more anti-poor, anti-colored people, and anti-feminism than they are anti-government. But here we are anyway. Maureen Dowd uses her column to get inside the head of House Speaker John Boehner, trying to get at truth through fiction.

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“Oh, Lord,” he growls. “How did I become that idiot Newt?”

He takes a deep drag as he drags himself out of bed. “My whole career was about not becoming Newt,” he mutters. “You’d think our getting bounced from the leadership in ’98, in the backlash after the last shutdown, and then the Clinton impeachment, would have taught me something.”

[...]

“Washington used to be an adult place where you could slug it out during the day and have a few slugs at night, making deals in rooms that I personally filled with smoke. Now Congress is a crap sandwich. We used to pretend to hate each other. Now we really do.”

-- Maureen Dowd at The New York Times

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Ash's Heaves

Ash is having another bout of hacking dry heaves. She goes for long periods free of them (or so it seems) and one can forget about them, but they always come back sometime. She is the only one. None of our other cats have suffered this, including our first feral cats.

To New Beginnings

Long enough have you dreamed contemptible dreams,

Now I wash the gum from your eyes,

You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life.

-- Walt Whitman, “Songs of Myself”

Those Blurty Days

I look at the latest post from all around DW, and I am reminded of how different it is from those Blurty days. Back then it was typical to keep a real online diary. The Internet and blogging was still rather new for the masses, and people came to it with a wonderful naiveté, as they wrote freely about their lives and their personal musings. Nobody does that now. Why would you expose the tenderest parts of yourself to the global public? Now people just post their fan-fiction, or similarly impersonal matter. Even I, when it comes to my main blog, only post book excerpts and stuff about the news. But I miss the Blurty days. I know this is hardly news, but I haven't said this in a long time. And I do miss those days. I always will. To be part of a community of diarists, to share our lives with each other, under the security of believing that we would never really know each other in real life. It was a parallel e-life that we could indulge in. But, again, there no longer is a line between e-life and real life. And, of course, my real life is nothing.

Pi recalls, "Funny, as I recall, you were the one who went impersonal first, becoming a news reel more than a diary, and you actually caught some flack for that, for being the one cheating on the community of diarists."

Heh, true, I remember that. Well, as I was interacting more with others, it was becoming clear that my loserdom put me too far behind the others, and I needed to cover my shortcomings. I was not a cool college kid. Most of my friends were. What I lacked in terms of sharing stuff from my personal life, I hoped to make up for in terms of being a faithful and fun commenter, and I thought I was succeeding at that. But I guess the veneer on my stinky life was becoming too thin over the years, along with the rise in technology that would erase the line between e-life and real life.