i am not this body

i'm considering becoming a marijuana user, and i'm not happy about the prospect.

having read a piece in The Onion that Snoop Dogg is giving up his bong and going straight, i feel it's my duty to create balance. problem is, i don't really like smoking wEEd. it just makes me stupid(er) and dries me out, two things of which we have plenty here in 'burque.

yet as i face my 39th (no shit) birthday next month the care of toddler and infant is fast sapping my delicate ganglia as well as aggravating my arthritis. medical ganja may not be indicated for achy joints (pun half-intended), but the variety i'm facing carries chronic (yeah, again) low-grade pain and weakness in the connective tissues, and there's a limit to how much ibuprofen i can eat before i nupe my liver. i started t'ai ch'i and qigong partly for that reason (as well as getting me outta the house for a coupla hours each week). but it's the stupid(er) part that interests me most.

aside from the 1am, 3am, 5am wake-up calls from popeye's crib (he gives new meaning to "light sleeper"), my weekday consists of long stretches absent of meaningful conversation, thought, or adult language. that, and being barfed upon. it should be an opportunity for mindfulness and meditation, but in practice it's sending me into a bad place, ranging from lethargia to rage and points betwixt. i find myself unable to read more than a paragraph at a time as one son or the other or the other demands my undivided attention - and even then it's all bad news. furthermore, i find myself too-frequently humming tunes from Blues Clues or Dora the Explorer (albeit with altered and highly inappropriate lyrics) or staring into the vastness of one or another electronic medium. if i were simply losing my mind it'd be easier, but most of my faculties are still there, they just can't do a damned thing when they want or need to.

so, yes, the dumbing down has its appeal.

help me, spock....

"astronaut diapers"

between churning out daily sleep-depped rants to my congresscritters and being thrown up on i managed to fire off a one-word entry to Ben Brown's call at Über to conjugate "cunnilingus" into a verb form.

The results can be viewed at http://uber.nu/docs/do.cgi/20021001. personally, i think cunnilingusize, to which Brown gave a four-tongue rating, paled in comparison to my two-tongued cunnuflect. but i'm biased.

the barista-grunts at the local corporate coffee drive-thru have changed their greeting recently, and it bothers me. instead of the usual "welcome to badplace...," they're now greeting me over the tinny speaker with "thank you for choosing badplace, how may i blah blah blah".

i object. i don't choose the badplace. i want to tell the cafeclone strapped into hir wireless headset, "i didn't choose this badplace any more than you chose to make six bucks an hour without benefits working for a standardized lifestyle product vendor that profits of the sweat of third world peasants," or something.

technically, no, i did not have to drive up, order, and pay for that double grande mocha no-whip thingamaccino this afternoon, but in reality it was either that or 1) go cold turkey, 2) park, get two sleeping babies out of the van - one of whom is nursing a sinus infection - and either load them into the double stroller or get popeye into the snugli and try to carry or walk a sleepy/screaming tank into the store, in which case i would've gone somewhere locally owned and with better coffee, atmosphere, and staff, or 3) make some tea instead. i'm all out of black tea, and i didn't feel like green or oolong and that's what.

so just stop with the illusory "choice" marketing already. it's not helping.

been overwhelmed with parenting and a family-wide cold for the past week. just had to post this before the nyQuil kicks in:

the "great game", the wars over central asia, have been played for the last century or so without an overt winner, although the power elites that profit from exploiting the region have alays been the actual winners all along. but anyway - it's like a big chess game, with a seemingly endless supply of pawns.

so dubya's speech at the UN last week was like the opening move (or maybe the first offensive move, the previous few weeks' or months' yapping and posturing being akin to the opening defensive setup ... or something) in the latest match. and iraq's ploy of allowing weapons inspections was a brilliant counter.

but seriously, can anyone picture george wanker bush playing a real game of chess with anyone more intelligent than a toaster ? he'd get his moron ass wiped across the board in under ten moves every time. so there's got to be a hidden roomful of old bulgarians watching the game from upstairs, fleshing out his possible moves on two dozen boards up in the eaves somewhere, feeding him his next move over a hidden earphone. but the transmission gets garbled sometimes and, well, just listen to one of his stump speeches and you'll see the results.

kinda scary that the queen might be carrying a suitcase nuke, tho'....

• i won't watch tv. i normally don't watch tv at all except for baseball games and the occasional cave-in to Nick Jr. for the kids, but today i'm making a point of it (besides, the Mets have tanked for the season and the kids watch too much tv already). i'm not listening to the radio or reading the local crapass corporate newspaper (except for maybe the comics).
  last sept. 11 i spent too much of the day in front of CNN. so today, no news, and certainly no commentary or punditry trying to spin my emotions or tell me what i should think.
• instead, i'm going to write, even if it is in this little blog-vacuum. i'm going to dissent, even f no one listens or cares. i'm starting a letter to the editor of the local crapass corporate paper which i'll copy to my senator-and-a-half (one actually listens, the other doesn't give a shit about little people like me), my congress-robot and her Democrat opponent, as well as the independent media. at least NM Indymedia will let me post it, although if any human other than myself will read it is unlikely. but i'm writing it and sending/posting it anyway. today i will dissent, and if anyone tells me i can't i'm going to dissent some more, and louder.
• i'm also going to work on a new site, a parody of the department of homeland security. the DHS has gone from being a compelling, timely, and neccessary idea to a classic example of government ineptness, bureaucratic muddle, and propagandism. so i'm going to fuck with it today in the only way i can, making my own.
  some might say i'm being flippant and disrespectful in light of today's anniversary. flippant, perhaps. disrespectful? it disses the memory of those who died in the attacks one year ago today that our alleged commandeer-in-chief still won't call for and investigation into what happened and what went wrong that day. it pisses me off that he's more concerned with starting a New! Improved! Pointless! war while the job in Afghanistan - and Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia in particular - remains unfinished. Osama is still out there. Mullah Omar is still out there. The ISI training apparatus is still out there. The School of the Americas is still out there. and Saddam (remember kids, he's "madass" spelled backwards)is undoubtedly a complete shithead but he's not in any position to nuke us, gas us, or even throw spitballs at us.
• once i finish this post, i'm gonna get off my soapbox for a while. but just a little while.
• today i'm going to stretch, play qigong and as much tai chi as i know how. i'm going to change dipes and wash clothes (my version of Chop Wood, Carry Water). i'm going to play with the babies and make silly noises and pretend to chew on their feet when they get cranky. i'm going to try to remember just how fucking awful it felt one year ago when i heard The News. i'm going to call my family back east and read poetry to their answering machines. i'm going to breathe and pay attention to it if i can remember.
• but today, the tv stays off.

he's been quiet for a few weeks, but there's new stuff up from Herb. and this stuff is raw from the man's mouth.

i've been debating for a while whether or not to post the details of Tank's potty training. We weren't planning on trying to train him until he seemed ready - he'll turn terrible Two this month - but a cliche crisis (i.e., danger plus opportunity) has started us on that path.

if yr squeamish, or have just eaten, or lack masochism, or are just sane, this is the part where you stop reading. really. i'm planning on getting excruciatingly descriptive.

(as Shrek said, "this is the part where you run away")

are they gone yet? good. now it's just me, the experienced parents, and the rest of the nutjobs.

parenting three "high needs" boys has been more of a challenge than i'd ever expected. i missed out on Bink's early years while wandering in the wilderness of stupidity and tequila (okay, it was texas), and taking over as Tank's and now Popeye's primary caregiver started as part new adventure, part atonement. two years in and i think the atonement is paid with interest; as for the adventure, let's just say i've realized the alleged chinese curse of "may you live in interesting times".

(seriously, if you've wandered this far there's still time to get out before i give the horrid, fetid, unseemly, and all-too pungent details)

about three months after Tank's first birthday, the whole familia came down with some sort of intestinal bug. In my nearly 39 years i've suffered from food poisoning or "stomach flu" a handful of times, but since moving to sunny smoky and driving blind drunk New Mexico i've had such joyful distress four or five times in a little over two years. sanitation and other luxuries of public health are still difficult concepts for this state to grasp, so i'm not surprised.

Bink, with his intestines of iron, barely noticed he was ill. Mama and i had our two day bouts of incapacitation, thankfully in non-overlapping intervals. Tank had one bad day of bursting at both ends (hey, i warned you this was gonna get ugly) followed by a few days of low grade digestive ickness.

since then the by has only been ill once or twice, and briefly at that. but he's had chronic constipation that hasn't been alleviated by laxatives, dietary changes, or other drastic measures that even i am not low enough to descibe here. over the past few months it seems to have gotten worse, and we've tried homeopathic treatment, massage, and have had to resort to all-too-frequent enemas (last warning, this is getting into Herb territory from here on in) just to get his insides cleared.

we finally found a description of his condition online (don't have the URL handy but i'll post it later for anyone still reading) - it turns out his colon's gotten distended and needs to stay relatively cleaned out before it will regain muscle tone and return to its normal size. hence the frequent fun park ride of turning a squirmy toddler on his side, sticking a babylax into his butt, holding him in The Position for a minute and then placing him on the potty, and finally watching in awe as he passes a stool the size of my forearm.

(your remaining speck of sanity is screaming at you to GET OUT! GET OUT NOW! it's like the amityville horror, but with an anus...)

tonight Tank was doing his patented PoopFoot routine, in which he sits and crunches up while grabbing one foot in an attempt to squeeze one out. this results in one of two outcomes: he either succeeds, or we assist as above. tonight we were going to break open a new box of babylax and get his unloaded yet again, when i decided to let him try the potty without the harsh intervention. it took a few minutes of nearly blowing out an O ring, but this little tyke lost a good unhappy pound at the end of it. if i'd had to pass this brick i'd have hurt, and i'm six-five and a good 215 lb. imagine a baby pushing out a chunk like that and cringe.

he's happy again - in fact, he ran around the kitchen and plucked a plum from me after we washed up - but i think we're onto something. all this time we've tried to find ways to force his bowels to work again, and all he really needed (or what he's reached now) was the encouragement to do it himself. we'd thought Tank would be as hard to potty train as his big brother (who didn't get it until he was four), but now i think we might start trying it. not forcing him to use the portable plumbing, but letting him play it as a game. as i watch him having his pre-bed nightcap of magnesia-spiked milk, i'm thinking of showing him how to play Sink this week. you know, throw a few cheerios into the toilet, unzip, and teach him how to aim ....

i dreamed the president of the united states had to wear a diaper at all times because he could not stop from pissing hisself. i discovered this inadvertently when i tried to place a small box on his head as a new year's eve hat and found that his back was soaked through his suit. the secret service was not happy with this and chased me away.

i felt sorry for the man and wanted to find him a towel. from a distance he seemed unhappy with his moistened state yet accepting of it. i resolved to put rubber underwear on my christmas list for next year.

oooh, i been busy. only a week left before bink starts 4th grade and it's been me and the boys all week, all day, all the time. i am seriously losing my shit. (note: should you locate my shit please do not return it, as i will just lose it again.)

but i have found time for a hobby. i've decided that my congressperson has pissed me off enough that i'm going to dedicate the next 2-1/2 months to introducing her to the pleasures of the unemployment line.

to that end i've gone and become the New Mexico moderator for democrats.com. i'd originally intended to help out the local chapter, like the Albuquerque or Bernalillo County or even the 1st Congressional District chapter, but it turned out there wasn't one. Nuthin'. sheesh, even Kentucky has a chapter for each county, but NM? nada. so i asked, and now i'm the mod for the Nuevo Mexico Group. Now all i have to do is find some members and get to work on ousting Leather Heather.

it's too bad, really - i'd like to see more women running the government, but she's proven herself time and again to be little more than a GOP toady who lets Big Oil, defense contractors, the NRA, and the trained monkey in the White House (whoops, he's taking a euro-style vacation this month, make that the trained monkey on the ranch) do the thinking for her. even scarier is the fact that she's no common Republican meat puppet - she's a Rhodes scholar and holds a Ph.D. in international relations from Oxford. She's actually a brillliant individual who's stated in the past that she would not support sending US military personnel overseas unless there were clear threats to US interests. then again, she didn't exactly state what the nature of those interests might be. crafty....

so i'll be posting updates and various screeds here shortly. gotta go tell the neighbors that the end is near or something....

it's been eight days since i posted, and this page is starting to feel stale. so what've i been up to over the past week+ ?

first and foremost, i've been watching the boys at home. a few weeks back i had to take bink out of his regular day camp. he'd been alternating between two, one at the childrens' museum and the other at a health club, complementing his major needs of exercising his enormous brain and running around like a puppy on amp'd entheogens. the programs at the museum have been consistently excellent, but enrollment is occasionally so low that they have to cancel a week here and there, and their summer program ends, um, tomorrow.
i'd had a few reservations about the utter chaos at the health club's "kids kamp" (and yes, about the name too), but i just took a deep breath, praised Eris and made sure bink had sunsccreen and water. then one monday last month he came home with a knot on his head. after some interviewing ("so bink, what happened today?" "mmrummumrmmrumrmrmur...") i learned that he'd slipped and hit his head on the concrete by the pool, was screaming incoherently for at least ten minutes, and may have had a concussion (turned out he didn't, but we didn't come to that copnclusion until much later). yet no one at the "kamp" bothered to tell their supervisor, much less call me or any of his other emergency contacts.

so he spent the rest of the week with me and the babies. a good time for male bonding right? riiiight.

by the end of the week i was going stir crazy, as the four of us couldn't seem to get out of the house before noon and then had to get to shelter before the afternoon monsoons hit. i managed to enroll him in the museum's afternoon program last week, but this week was another experiment in swamp-cooled cabin fever. we had a tryout day at another daycare center; he liked it enough to go for the next two weeks, and soon afterwards school starts and i will praise the coming of that day like the Dineh greet Dawn Boy, except with more out-loud whooping.

other than that i've been going to tai chi regularly (after years of telling myself to do so only to manufacture a few bazillion excuses) and making a few Bad Art Things.

1. A New Commissioner
   Yeah, it's an easy stance to take, as just about everyone who's ever heard of the sport wants current Commissioner of Major League Baseball Bud "It's a tie! Everyone wins!" Selig to hit the showers once and for all. But let's not forget that whoever replaces Bud the Dud is going to have an uphill struggle restoring the public's confidence in the market - um, i mean game. Unlike the Harvey Pitt of baseball, it'll have to be someone who loves the game, won't tolerate pitchers who throw beanballs as if they were sunflower seed hulls, and (perhaps most importantly) does not have a financial interest in any of the teams.
   Former US President and Jimmy Carter, a man who could make Jim and Tammy Faye kiss and make up (shudder), has offered to mediate, and some have even suggested drafting Jimmy as the next Commish. All good except for the fact that he's a Braves fan, and that would just be Wrong. there's another former Southern governor whose earlier stated ambition was to be Baseball Commissioner, but i care about the game too much to let Uncurious George screw it up any worse than it is now.
   likewise, none of the current or recent MLB execs are ready to step up to the plate. Frank Robinson left to try and convince the Expos to win a game once in a while, and Bob Watson has the taint of Selig on him - e.g., fining Shawn Estes for throwing at Clemens' giant ass (and how did he miss?) but ignoring the Sprocket's throw at Barry Bonds' wrist, which he'd openly stated he would do beforehand.
   then who? i nominate Jesse "The Governor" Ventura. he may not be a baseball fan (i honestly don't know), but he stood up for his hometown Twins when Selig threatened to contract them (say "inside deal" three time fast). i see Jesse as someone who wouldn't fine Fat Bastard for throwing a broken bat at Mike Piazza, he'd fly into LaGuardia, hop on the Number 7 train, walk into the stadium and flatten him. then he'd fine and suspend him.
2. Bye-Bye Brewers
   hey, contraction wouldn't be such a bad idea after all. especially when it's Bud Selig's team, the useless Milwaukee Brewers. i have nothing against Milwaukee: this is the city that welcomed Hank Aaron into the majors. to truly honor the Hammer's career both as player and symbol of what's right with the game, this team shadow-owned by Selig, playing in a park named for a tobacco company's lameass beer, and only playing slightly better than the pathetic Devil Rays must go.
3. Ditch the DH
   there are things about commercial baseball that irk me that i am willing to forgive. the pampered closers for example, especially in the AL, where even an 18-run lead gets you one in the 'S' column. the endorsements (see below). the bobbleheads. but the designated hitter is an abomination before the Lord. besides, there's nothing like watching a pitcher take a cut at a 95-mph fastball and actually make contact.
4. No more Viagra ads
   please, Rafael. we really did not want to know.
5. WOMEN
   there are no female players in the Major Leagues. why the hell not? most female players are pushed into softball by the time they reach middle school, leaving them with the shining career prospect of ... nothing. i have seen little league girls who can play second like Roberto Alomar used to, throw no-hit streaks that last for weeks, and plug a curveball through the gap in left-center for a stand-up triple. c'mon, guys, say it with me: Title Nine. baseball needs to be dragged kicking and screaming into at least the late Twentieth Century. we need a Jacqui Robinson.