uTopianTurtleTop

[POSTED EARLIER THE SAME EVENING, ORIGINALLY WITHOUT A TITLE]

Yesterday’s post about playing a show -- I’m not satisfied. Satisfied with playing the show, but not with my writing about it.

Cliches. There’s a reason they’re around -- they often have truth, or at least perceived truth. To dip into some of that pool some more -- playing the show was very absorbing. It was as if nothing else mattered but the music, and, sometimes, the connection with the tiny audience. I’ve got no quarrel with a tiny audience. After all, they’re there (it’s the others who aren’t). And if you’re connecting, as Jake was big time during his solo set, and as I felt we were on our duo set (though not so much on the comic songs as I would like) -- if you’re connecting, it’s a type of communion. I feel this as a listener and as a player, when I’m connecting from either side of the stage.

Off to Atlanta for 4 days tomorrow for training for my job. Not delighted to be leaving the baby dude and his lovely and wonderful mother my spouse, but so it goes. Don’t know if I’ll have web access.

Still thinking about Ella and Friends (see previous posts starting Friday and rolling back). Much still to pursue in the spaghetti bowl of associations and histories and phenomena in there. I stubbed my mental toe on the realization that I’m much more fired up to write about one of the Friends on the album -- Louis Armstrong, Pops, Satchmo -- than I am about Ella herself. And yet I listen to Ella more than I do to Louis. So I’m inarticulately trying to untangle that paradox, and typing drafts of thoughts that haven’t come together yet. And I’ve been sick the last week too -- blah blah blah -- you probably don’t want to read this, whoever you are, dear reader (my friend).

I’ve also been tangled up in rhetorical flashbacks around the announcement of the Nader candidacy. Like a bad trip, man! 4 years ago, me, typing to whoever would read, “Yes, Clinton is a deeply compromised and mediocre, even wicked centrist, but Bush wants to trash the economy! Bush wants to trash the economy!” Even my friends thought I was nuts. I was. I didn’t read anybody who was more pessimistic about the prospect of a Bush presidency, and I am deeply sickened to say that I far, far underestimated his awfulness too.

Bush didn’t WANT to trash the economy, but the policies he’s deadset on driving down our throats lead to that result. But I was wrong -- the trashing is just a side effect. The looting is the goal. If he wins again, within 10 years American life expectancy will begin to plummet, as it has in Russia since the Commies gave away the assets of the state to the robber barons.

One really bad idea that the Republicans have been fixated on since Reagan: “Bankrupt government now! Bankrupt government now!” To which Bush added the incomparably worse idea: “And let’s piss off everybody in the world while we’re at it!" And, to make it bloodily concrete: "Let's invade and occupy hostile, complex, volatile countries that present zero threat to us as they are now constituted but could threaten us after we destroy their infrastructure!”

What bastards. The Bastard President (meaning, of course, "illegitimate").

BUT! Don't think Mr. Nader will have that much impact this time -- he could even provide positive influences, who the hell knows? And the last debacle wasn't his fault entirely by any means -- a nightmare brew of deeply unethical and even criminal elections officials in Fla. (the gov, the sec't'y of state), a deeply unethical and compromised and even unconstitutional and impeachable Supreme Court (two of Bush's appointers had immediate family members who were already working for him!), and the freak absurdist accident of the Palm Beach County butterfly ballot (a satirist would have blanched at the invention of Holocaust survivors accidentally voting for Pat Buchanan by the thousands). Not to mention the mainstream so-called liberal press's insane war against Al Gore -- check out the Daily Howler, http://dailyhowler.com/dh022304.shtml , and do a search for Gore.

All there is to do is keep on rockin' ("rockin'" as metaphorical coin for whatever fires up your woodstove) and don't let the bastards get you down. E-see you in a few.