Wars are fought
in the back of my throat, there just above the curl of my tongue.

In 1960, on this day, a woman was born with a heart stronger than the stars and a beauty deeper than the sky. She would become the light of everyone she met, and when she laughs, she laughs with such unwaivering honesty that you can't help but smile. Her generous selflessness, more consistent than the sun...

...I'm lucky enough to call her my mom.

Happy birthday, Mum!

Truthfully, I don't care what kind of governor the people of California decide they need. I'd just be happy if someone taught the people what the hell a stop sign means.

But the fact remains: If Davis can be recalled for supposedly throwing his state into massive debt, injuring its economy, and not looking out for the best interests of his constituents...

Why, in the name of all that is holy, haven't we recalled Mr. Bush?

I own three pairs of shoes that are allowed to see daylight. So when I caved in and decided to do something as stereotypically "girly" as buy a $40 pair of strappy sandals, it was a momentous occasion to say the least.

They have this platform heel and the chocolate straps slide out from behind the center and loop around each other at the toes. They're... and I say this with all necessary disgust... irresistibly cute. They even put it in my mind that I should splurge on (gasp) a dress to match.

After all, a quick glance in my closet is enough to know I have nothing to wear with them.

But I believe in signs.
And last week, when said supercute shoes were shredded by my sister's dog, I realized something.

I was never meant for such silliness. In so many many ways...

Loving the little things #25, 26, and 27:

The coolness of the other side of the pillow.
The song Venus by The Shocking Blue.
My cat's attention-hungry sandpaper kisses on my legs.

"'what will be will be'
Over my dead body"
Tori Amos - Don't Make Me Come To Vegas

From the sun to the tree to the hands to box, and there are peaches in the bin rotting in the dark, just under the ones you're pinching and plumping.

The Bible was enough of a societal menace without the help of the Christian Reich's equivalent of Cosmo. Mark Morford takes us on a tour of new horrors facing teen girls.

Jesus Doesn't Wear Prada

There now. All better. Screw the female cause. Screw individuality and divine feminine power. Sure Jesus loves you, Jenny, but he loves you more if you wear long shapeless wool skirts and minimal mascara and not think too darn much, K?

And yet, weird little makeup tips abound in the book, outright groaners for all but the most painfully gullible Bible-belted girls. "You need a good, balanced foundation for the rest of your makeup," says one "tip." "Kinda like how Jesus is the strong foundation in our lives."

Yes that's right. Jesus is the Chapstick for the dry lips of your sinning self. Jesus is the holy Clearasil for your Satanic shin zits. Jesus is that amazing clenched feeling you get when you lie back and aim the shower massager just right and... oh, never mind.

God help the children of the 90's and may they discover the truth before all hope is lost.

Fall's nearly here, and like the weather, I appear to be trapped in a netherworld of in-betweens, of empty thoughts and near-excitement. To actively set your mind to creation is to tell the wind to blow. You can throw your lungs into it all you want, but Mother Nature makes all the decisions. And so I find myself without muse and without life, just hoping a brainstorm will build on the horizon.

Avast!

Hope everyone had a remarrrrrrrkable day.
I, for one, am more drunk than anyone should be who has to work the next morning at 7:30. Guess it was also Drink Like A Pirate Day for me.

Damn.

You make me nervous
without even looking
but I know where your hands are
I know how you’ll tilt your head
just on that word and again
right there
and you smile just so when you put your mouth
around the idea of this or that
and it makes me nervous
that I know this
Without even looking

This is brilliant.
If I were planning on going to Europe in the next year, I'd have no reason to not buy it.

"I'm sorry my president's an idiot. I didn't vote for him."

Maybe wearing that, Americans won't have anger hurled at them so fiercely while visiting other countries.

It's in the back of my throat.
But I won't say it.
I won't.

How does the moon just hang there like that?

"Wish I'd have written it first" #652:

"'It's been raining so long,' she said, 'even the stars are wet.'"
-epitaphica-

Nice.

Who says nothing exciting ever happens in Boulder City? A 2.7 magnitude earthquake just breezed on through this morning at about 11:00. Nearly shook my poor Buddha buddy right off the desk.

I'm still trying to get Jack to calm down. How exactly does one convince a cat that the world isn't coming to an end?

I'm about to kill myself.

(And I mean that in the oh-so-over-dramatic way I've meant it in the past.)

I've been sleeping for two hours at a time. Barely enough REM sneaks in there to show me a five second glimpse of a man with a knife or a gun or some absurdly esoteric plan to end me. And I wake up in a panic, clutching the comforter like a neck.

"Ah! What? Oh. Fuck."

And then sleep eldues me for another 15 minutes.

Work has been pushing me to the brink of insanity. In total, I will have worked 68.5 hours over the past two weeks. That's not full time, no, but it's more than anyone should work.

I'm exhausted. I wake up wanting to cry. I hate my job. And I hate the prospect of facing another night in a fitful battle with sleep, even though by the end of the day my body and mind are so tired that neither can move.

Wow. Isn't life fun?

If something doesn't change soon, I'm moving to San Diego and living with the penguins at Sea World. They'll have to drag me from the enclosure kicking and screaming.

You'll have to excuse me this week as my brain goes on hiatus due to unhealthy amounts of work. We will then return to our regularly scheduled monotony.

In the meantime, feel free to write me email. About anything. I like it.

It's nearly that time again, children. Time to break out the skull garland and orange lights. Time for mini pumpkins to dot the indoor landscape and for candy to look unreasonably appealing.

Oh, Halloween... is there another holiday greater?

...I mean, besides my birthday...

Um...

What?

Uhhh.... Halloween kicks ass!

Yeah.

Most of the time I feel like the photographer at a stranger's wedding.

Not holding conversations, not attempting any toasts, just watching for the moments that transfer well to film.

I relearned this on Thursday night at a quick get-together with some of Tony's work buddies. Introductions. Chit chat. Booze orders. Chit chat. Repeat. And within ten minutes, the false facade of pleasantries had melted from my face leaving only the impolite truth that I had nothing in common with any of these people.

I must have missed school the day they taught everyone to how to feign interest in people they barely know.

...Maybe my standards are too high, my interests too narrow, my expectations too precise... And maybe most people just aren't worth the effort of getting to know.

Either way, I always find myself just outside the circle, clutching a lens and clicking away without a word.

3000 dead.
And the little black box on the paper on the wall, the note inside read "Patriot Day" in the same little letters as "Columbus Day."

[Scrap. Found among the ruins.]

Day 596,

I'm dreading work today, dragging my heels and sneering at the clock. The days have been passing like a non-stop parade of the monotonous and bland and jejune, like flag twirlers on valium.

My only escape comes in the form of sound. When I close my eyes, I can leave my body. I can leave this routine. I can leave.
But only for 3 minutes at a time.

10 minutes have passed since I realized for the second time that today would be like the others. How many more tens of minutes will drip through my hands before I realize I can't take it anymore?

Save me.

Save me.

It's been just over seven years since my enlightenment. And I'm listening. To the turning point of my life.

"So bright..."

Maybe everyone of us has a song that defines, or creates, the moment in our lives when we see the world in brand new lights. Or at least everyone of us should have that song. Mine...

"We'll crucify the insincere tonight...."

Brilliance. But it's more than that. It's like a freaking calling from God.

Without this song, I'd probably be listening to Kelly Clarkson and watching the OC before heading off to the mall to buy some new kicks. Wow, that's almost too terrifying to think about...

Thank God for the Smashing Pumpkins.
That's all there is to it.

When will the people revolt and burn down the houses of record execs? When, oh, when?

There's no time like the present, people.

Driving home tonight, after a day where everything that could have gone wrong nearly did, smelling of a 12 hour day, and hard-pressed to find anything on the radio that even resembled music, a thought crossed my mind like a pedestrian in the fog.

It's raining.

And not in that physical, oh-there's-water-falling-from-the-sky sense of the word. No, in the everything-sucks-and-isn't-that-nice-for-the-soul kind of way.

If you still don't understand, you may have been a cheerleader in high school or someone who wore a $60 Tommy Hilfiger shirt yesterday. In either case, go back to your happy little life and ignore me.

Because I just need to enjoy the rain...

"Really?" he asked, in that "huh? what?" kind of way after looking up from the comics section.

"Yeah, really. It was the jello that did it. Ask anybody who was there that night."

And with that I folded my arms proudly and yawned with all the conviction I could muster.

In honor of the reiteration of lies due from Bush this evening, I thought it best to share with you a rarely heard speech from the man himself that may shed some light on his true feelings.

"The threat comes from my administration... and its drive toward an arsenal of terror."

Warms your heart to hear the truth, don't it?

At some point, I either forgot or stopped caring, because I really couldn't tell you whether to say "me either" or "me neither."

At some point, I threw up a mental pair of hands in a metaphysically exasperated manner and said, "You know what? Don't know - don't care."

At some point, everyone around me will start to realize that.

And that's when the trouble's gonna start.

Honestly, if you've moved to Las Vegas in the past five years and do nothing but complain about it like the snotty carpetbagger you are, I'd like to see your head cut off.

Okay... so maybe nothing that drastic. I do have some anger issues I need to work on...

But really. Shut the fuck up or go back to where you came from.

After watching the Democratic Debate, I feel more motivated than ever to run down to City Hall and change my voter registration from Unaffiliated to Democrat. There's nothing more satisfying than the sound of an audience cheering to criticism of Dubya and his cronies.

And while Dean still kicked Joe Lieberman's pseudo-liberal ass all over the place, I think I have a new favorite to oust America's worst president ever. Surprisingly, it was the one candidate whose name I had never heard: Dennis Kucinich. From universal health care to dropping NAFTA to repealing the damaging Bush tax cuts to actively pursuing environmental reform and renewable energy, this man seemed truly passionate about setting America right.

In a perfect world, however, my vote would go to the sole woman in the run for President: Carol Mosely-Braun. Not solely because she's a woman (though it wouldn't hurt to peel some of the testosterone aggression from our foreign policy), but because she needs to be president. Her ideas are well-formed, plausible, and important to making this country healthy again... But we all know, all-too-painfully, that America's still a caveman nation at heart. There's no way she's making it past the primaries...

My solution:
Kucinich for President, with Mosely-Braun as his running mate.

A girl can dream, can't she?

Cable news channels never fail to make my brain hurt.

As I jumped between CNN and C-SPAN just now, I caught an interview with the gum-smacking, ever-vacuous Britney Spears. Firstly: How is this girl even still alive? She has only enough brain cells to move her limbs and eyelids; I'm sure of it. After getting the highly important discussion of her onstage lesbian stunt with Madonna out of the way, the certainly self-loathing interviewer decided to hit her with the hard questions.

Spears avoided the political pot hole that other entertainers have fallen into when she was asked about whether she supported the war in Iraq.

"Honestly, I think we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that," she said.

This time the Republicans have really put together a genius plot. They must have seen how well she pushes soft-drink-like Pepsi swill to the masses, to which Spears also showed a robotic adherence during the interview, and in some dark, smoke-filled room, Trent Lott slammed a whiskey tumbler on his desk and shouted, "I've got it!" Well... way to go boys. You'll have thirteen-year-olds everywhere wishing they were 18 in 2004 just so they could Vote Like Britney!

...I think I'm going to be sick...

There is a Schwan's food delivery van parked in the cemetery parking lot.
There are more things wrong with that than I have energy to go into.