A new congress was sworn in today.
Bibles or Korans?
Who the fuck cares?
They could put their hands on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for what’s it’s worth (actually I think I’d prefer that) as long as they do the right thing once they get inside those halls. We know what that is. They do too. Get us out of Iraq. But we know they won’t.
The Democrats don’t have the balls and the Republicans are a bunch of dicks.
The genitals and the genitaless. That’s who runs our government.
When politicians get into a war, their instinct is to dig deeper and wait for someone else to fix it. Or bail out like LBJ. It’s like someone that steps in a pile of shit and instead of lifting their foot, they rub it into the grass and just stand there.
The wind blowing their hair.
Their arms crossed.
Their foot in a pile of dogshit.
Meanwhile, a Newport Beach man is stranded on a sailboat with broken masts and no power, drifting off the coast of Chile, near Antartica, near the graveyard known as the Straight of Magellan. He’s been calling his girlfriend from the other side of the globe on a satellite phone begging her to tell someone to come get him.
The gash in his leg was worse than he thought.
This is his girlfriend’s hand pointing to his location on a map.
He was attempting to be the first dude from the West Coast to sail around the world by himself. Ambititious guy. In a way I admire the crazy bastard. As I write this he’s still floating out in the ocean in 25-foot waves, a Chilean fishing boat chugging his way; and all I can think about is that they cancelled The OC today and how bummed he’s going to be when he finds out.
It should have been Seth out there instead.
The man should have just crashed his boat on Easter Island and called it a day.
Poor Easter Islanders!
Of course they didn’t know they were Easter Islanders; they didn’t even know what Christianity was even though according to our history books it was the only thing that mattered in the 17th Century, while their society was collapsing and all their Gods were being knocked over and their people were starving to death and chaos and mayhem ensued.
From Jared Diamond’s Collapse. A terrifically depressing book
“Oral traditions record that the last ahu and moai were erected around 1620, and that Paro (the tallest statue) was among the last. The upland plantations whose elite-commandeered production fed the statue teams were progressively abandoned between 1600 and 1680. That the sizes of statues had been increasing may reflect not only chiefs vying to outdo each other, but also more urgent appeals to ancestors necessitated by the growing environmental crisis. Around 1680, at the time of the military coup, rival clans switched from erecting increasingly large statues to throwing down one another’s statues by toppling a statue forwards onto a slab so that the statue would fall on the slab and break.”
I love beautifully tragic tales like these. Who knows. Maybe when the world goes to shit the only survivors will be the scientists and tourists out on Easter Island. The isolation which killed all those statue builders might save the modern day inhabitants of the island.
Sweet irony.
I can’t sleep because of all these scattered, random thoughts running through my head. There’s too much going on in the world. All the hullabaloo and noise. I can’t shut off this brain. At least if I had one thing to worry about I could worry myself to sleep.
My bank account.
Finding a job.
My dentist appointment tomorrow.
All things I could be focusing on and troubled by instead of the demise of those Easter Islanders more than three centuries ago. Before America was America and Iraq was Iraq. I mean, there were Ottomans in Iraq and Native Americans in America but neither were even countries then, neither were even in existence, neither were even… ah forget it.
In the last couple of hours a fronts come through and the weather’s change. It’s gotten cold and a fierce wind has started to kick up after being in the high 70’s today. It’s nothing sensational, just a little blustery; but in LA it constitutes rough weather and I love it. Leaves are blowing around under the streetlamp. There’s some Christmas trees waiting to be picked up by the curb.
Ice cubes drop in the freezer. The Arcade Fire has a new song out. My wife is sleeping peacefully downstairs and the Lakers beat Sacramento in overtime.
Life isn’t all that bad.
At least I don’t have to build any statues.
