Alrighty... it's been a while since I've done any blogging - I've certainly written a lot in my travel journal, I've made a couple video blogs which hopefully my buddy Ronen is going to put together in an interesting way to start showcasing how awesome I am :P
That said, this medium has taken a hit. I didn't even realize some people had commented on it. It's hard to keep track of things like this when you travel so much... I don't really know what I'm doing with myself anymore.
Right now, I'm in Anchorage, AK in a hotel room. I slept in late, it's 11:30 and I haven't left the room yet today. I think I'll probably leave long enough to go to the gym here and then speak with the front desk about what to do for food today. Anyway... it is what it is.
Getting back to this "blogging" thing though... It seems as if I have my thoughts spread out over a lot of different mediums, and I do, but they all seem to have a different aesthetic and a different purpose. This one, for example, tends to be loftier thoughts that I want disseminated in a large and very public forum - like my notes about Castro, religion, technology, people, etc. My travel journal (which is kept in the exceedingly expensive leather book I got from the shop on 2nd Avenue in New York when the NYFC filmed the one scene of "Opening" there), is reserved for much more private thoughts - things that I generally don't want others to read. Although, last night... I actually did let someone read a piece of it. Not much though - and certainly not the really embarrassing parts, of which there were many possible options. My videos have been these little snippets of my life taken via Kodak Easyshare camera.
I have found another great use for that too actually - weekly reports for my job have always been a bit of a pain since I have to go back each day and remember everything I did and write it down in a specific format... if I forget to do that or don't have time, I wind up doing it at the end of the cruise and have to think back and remember everything - with the vlog thing, I just record 2 or 3 minutes of what I did and then I can go back and watch those and write them down later. No problem!
But again, this forum is much more public, and therefore public things go here... Rather than one definite topic, I have a potpourri for you all today. This suits my frame of mind quite well at the moment anyway - I'll try to be relatively brief with each however since otherwise this will turn into a hundred pages in an instant.
1. "www.dividedwefail.org" - I was, and please don't judge me, watching Celebrity Golf (complete with Alice Cooper leading one of the teams - who said something amusing... "You'd think it's weird, cause he's jazz and I'm rock, but Kenny G and I are really great friends"... yeah, I don't think it's weird, because you're both hacks). Anyway, ads kept coming on for www.dividedwefail.org, announcing that we should put aside our political differences and join together to save the economy and health care. So I thought, ya know, why not? I went to their website and discovered three things of note. First: They have no point of view at all.
Their "platform" is essentially "we believe people should have good health care and it should be affordable" and "we need to save social security".
Wow.
Good stuff guys... SECOND: It's sponsored/funded/produced by the AARP. Shock? No. But what else does that likely mean? Well - for starters, I'm sure it means that their solutions (although none are proposed at all on their website) to these problems are New Deal-style socialism. Good times? Not so much.
Hey - here's a thought, why not use a solution that isn't the *cause* of our current problems when fixing those problems!? I think that would be cool.
2. McBama - First off, let me just say - good GOD I'm glad Clinton has finally thrown in the towel. A little more of that and I'm sure I'd have started breaking TVs and started to learn computer hacking skills so I could fuck with CNN's printing and online publishing abilities.
That said, we are now left with two shitty options for president, hooray! Aren't elections great???
Yeah. Ok, so Obama is a socialist who would like to "solve" our problems by contributing an extra 200+ billion dollars to the federal budget, expand the powers of the presidency some more (after 8 years of Bush doing just that, I'm a little surprised not one party-nominated candidate save Bob Barr is talking about *reducing* the scope of presidential authority!), keep us in an un-winnable war at least for a few more years, and push for more autocratic, monolithic government micromanagement of healthcare, energy and transportation industries.
Check.
McCain, by "contrast" might only raise the federal budget, according to some analysts, by about 15, Carl Sagan Billion with a "B", Billion dollars in clearly marked spending, but keep us in an unwinnable war for "100 years", advocates a lot of the same New Deal socialism that Obama does and would expand the powers of the presidency even farther in terms of military related issues.
Check.
Wow... another year of marginal major-party candidate differences backed by the following philosophies. 1. People's problems cannot be solved without the help of government, 2. Initiation of force is always perfectly ok if the things you're using it for seem "good", 3. American citizens have no natural rights but are perpetually subject to the allowances of government.
"A Government Big Enough to Give You Everything You Want is Powerful Enough to Take Everything You Have"
-Thomas Jefferson
The lesson we could have been learning for the past 80 years but not only have we not learned it yet, we are now seeing the active promotion of people who both live by the opposite. Though there was this fine quote:
"A democracy can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasury."
...and of course, Dostoevsky was smart enough to say: "In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, 'Make us your slaves, but feed us'"
Well anyway, fine points all, but look at what America is doing instead. Well... exactly what Tyler said - voting ourselves money that we don't have, generally to fix problems caused by an expansive government which is meddling far too much and using forcibly taken tax-dollars to do so.
Ok, that was a bit longer than "brief" but still - McBama can suck it.
3. Beautiful cellists who make me smile, laugh and think. Uh oh. Was not expecting that...What was it Bill said, Carpe Filae? Fingers crossed with this one everybody...
4. Things that need to happen: I need a huge raise. I need Holland America to quit being retarded. I need to be able to afford to travel to Rob's wedding. I need to figure out the other part of my life... I need to keep writing music. I need to start pushing for those goals I wrote out in the other book...I need to get back to the Zaandam in July when I plan to...
Ok... My mind is racing still and I'm going to commit it now to a Marimba quartet, then to a song I need to have started, completed and produced in less than a month and be the greatest thing I've ever written.
OUT.
