Sock Puppets
Friday. An early morning in September, the sound of Ms. Emmy yorking her cookies in the hall, the sun shining, the birds singing except there aren't any birds, what with the pesticides, breakfast at the usual place, it's Friday. These and many other things are true today, here in Oakland, across the Bay from the city that sits at the end of the rainbow.
Sounds like you need a good all-American pickup, one of the many available mood enhancers from our awesome pharmaceutical industry.
Yes, yes. I'm much too old to be wandering off the reservation in any meaningful way, particularly since I've found how well pharmaceuticals go with sake. But we've degenerated into gibberish here, best to start over.
Later. I've been making headway with Clockers, but I've also gotten about a hundred pages into Barton Gellman's Angler, a recently published (in the last week) story of the Cheney Vice-Presidency. Why I would buy, let alone read about Cheney I can't fathom: too much time reading and listening to the news, maybe, catching a piece here, a tidbit there - My, my! He did that? He said that? - and with Amazon just a click away, well.... Still, it does keep me reading.
Cheney, a fellow with fixed ideas about the world - how it works, where it should be going - couples intelligence, drive and previous Oval office experience to, well, implement his particular authoritarian vision. The intelligence (underpinned by, shall we say, a contempt for democratic values) is a bummer. Most observers, of whatever political persuasion, say Nixon and Clinton of recent presidents possessed first class intelligence. Gellman says the same of Cheney. Pain in the butt when an authoritarian with contempt for the law gains a position of power where he can change the world to fit his prejudices and has the drive and intellectual tools to achieve them. But I've drifted into politics again, something I promised a rest.
Other than that, a slow day at the apartment. I finished watching Save The Green Planet, something I thought was going to be an off the wall aliens from outer space cute little Korean thing with English subtitles and it turned out to be exactly that except for the many rather grisly, well, scenes of torture. Off the wall, sort of cute, an alien or two, but with, you know, torture: blood, broken bones and people screaming. Should you be browsing the movie section thinking you might like to try a whacko space alien ditty and notice Save The Green Planet I'd suggest you pass right by it. Makes Clockers read like a morality play performed by button eyed sock puppets. Oh, it does make you think, it is a movie of consequence, but I've grown tired of reading about torture, let alone watching it.
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