So, dear reader, why have I stopped compiling statewide polls from realclearpolitics? Because this website does a much better job.

Bush excerpts are in already, at the NYT. One that stands out is this one:

"This changed world can be a time of great opportunity for all Americans to earn a better living, support your family, and have a rewarding career. And government must take your side. Many of our most fundamental systems - the tax code, health coverage, pension plans, worker training - were created for the world of yesterday, not tomorrow. We will transform these systems so that all citizens are equipped, prepared - and thus truly free - to make your own choices and pursue your own dreams."

My translation: We are bankrupting the treasury so that the next generation will be forced to abandon social security, medicare and medicaid altogether. Then you will be on your own. So long as you're born into a family that has already made it, you will be okay. But if you are born into a family without the resources to pay for health care, a 401K, or a simple savings account, you're shit out of luck. This is the closest Bush has gotten to admitting the truth, that the GOP is going after the New Deal, and have been all along. What a fuckin' douche!

My good friend Jason asked me earlier in the week to tape some of the speeches of the GOP convention this week for his arrival back to the Bay Area just in time to take care of our cats. But I am boycotting the convention. I refuse to throw things at the TV which is something I usually only reserve for Packer games. Instead, I will leave him a printed packet of the speeches and the extra Eric Chavez Babooshka I acquired at the A's/Rangers game back on July 25th. Oh, and the detailed instructions on how to take care of the cats.

I began the week by sending a copy of this article to my list of friends and I also included the GOP leaning members of my family, a practice I usually eschew. Lakoff says many of the things I've been thinking. And I would add to it that it's always the people who benefit the most from government who complain about it the loudest.

My mother forwarded the link, along with my comments, to an old friend of hers from her neck of the woods. I was floored by the following letter in response:

Dear [My mom],

This e-mail came today from the old oil company and might have information that could be of help to you since you are a cell-phoner now.

I REALLY liked the article you sent. I can see right now your Bill is my kind of guy. It seems to me the political world is such a wilderness now, filled with grotesque creatures who use words to soothe and lure us but who have little regard for America or its people.

We have been taught a new vocabulary that seems too closely tied to that black beast of mind control, “1984”. Here it is twenty years after that cautioned date and we have Clear Skies programs that remove restrictions for pollution and Healthy Forest programs that open public lands to loggers. And that is just the beginning. We tolerate ads that twist words and contort intentions. We buy politicians like cornflakes off the shelf and then seem stunned when in the silence of our own homes we find the box more than half empty with stale, outdated goods. We allow lies to stand and truth to be trampled. We take bullheadedness for strength and make fun of “nuances” as if it were some kind of fault to be found thinking. We let people of heathen fruit define Christianity for us always leaving out Christ’s admonishment to care for the weak and provide for the poor. Like Herod in Auden’s “For the Time Being” we pray for a Messiah with the caveat “but let him be weak and ineffectual like us”.

I really do feel a kinship with your Bill because among so many things about him that I admire there is the welcome strain of sophisticated political thought. That is rare and to be highly treasured.

I will not send on the article because it would go straight over the heads of most of the good people I know. Thank you so much for passing it along to me. I have read it and will re-read it again before long.

With affection, E.

And then she sent me a link to the latest Garrison Keillor article on the GOP which was even more eloquent: http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/979/

I am not much of a "Prairie Home Companion" listener, but I love reading his words! All of this made my day both yesterday and today. And I am glad I am filling my thoughts with these words and not words of Mr. "Girlie Man." For those who are worried on the Dem side, this too shall pass, and pass it shall soon. "Carpe 9/11" does not have sea legs.

In the days when I had time on my hands, I posted a lot more in here and perhaps my thoughts were a little more, um, cogent? If that's the right word. But transition periods don't usually afford a lot of time. Learning a new job takes up that time, but I am starting to get to a point where I am settling in now, so you'll be hearing a lot more from me. I've filled time that I used to spend watching the news and getting upset over what I feel is actually a pro-Bush media, in that he's not getting hammered nearly enough over how dishonest his administration has been on so many fronts, with either being at work or being at home watching the Oakland A's try to hang onto first place in the AL west. My wife's not nearly as interested in baseball on TV as she is with football: that's one of the extra bonuses in our partnership...she loves football as much as I do and, in fact, nowadays gets a lot more pissed off when the Raiders lose than I do when the Packers do. But she does like to go to baseball games, like the one we're going to tonight. The A's play the Devil Rays, not exactly a game that generates as much excitement as the time we went to see them win their 20th in a row back in '02, but in recent weeks the A's have had tougher times playing the crap teams like KC than they have playing Texas and the like. So we're gonna go to show our support.

We are also inviting a good friend of ours, a guy friend in a couple that just broke up. Not another one of those! My wife and I have navigated through the tough waters of trying to remain friends with both people that were once in a couple that we would mutually spend a lot of time with, and our success rate in that has thus far been poor at best, but I'm thinking the lessons learned from past situations will help us this time around: Stay out of it, and don't pick sides. Try to be there as best you can.

I am finding new and interesting ways to get lost here in Silicon Valley. I've lived in the Bay Area for almost twelve years and have gotten to know SF and the East Bay pretty well. Now the South Bay is the next stop in that rotation. I've printed out maps in anticipation of moving to Santa Clara, hoping I can find a good bike route to my job here in San Jose. It would be a 6.6 mile ride and I could use the exercise. Right now I am commuting from Oakland to San Jose. Worst. Commute. Ever. But it's okay, because I am working, and I am grateful for that.

I'm settling into the job nicely this week. Without my predecessor looking over my shoulder, I feel like I can begin to put my own stamp on things here and stretch out in my own communication style. I'm just taking the issues one at a time, as they come. Tomorrow I have lunch with our head of sales and later that evening the CEO is hosting a barbecue. I am approaching week two of my new life. So far, so good.

I am with the Rude Pundit in hoping that the protesters in Ny don't play into the hands of the GOP. No puke-in's for peace, please?

It's been quite a week. I am now on my own at my new job next week, and I know it's going to be stumble and bumble for a while. But that's life. I'm glad this job thing happened, because without it I would probably be sitting and moping at home feeling sorry for myself trying to adjust to being retired from the road.

I haven't been reading as much online in the political department the past week or so, just enough to know that the "swift boat veterans for untruth" should all be sodomized by the biggest cat and its barbed prick that one can imagine. These douchebags must realize they are about to be voted out. It seems Kerry is taking Clinton's advice: Politics is most definitely a contact sport, and he hit back, hard.

Fuck Fox, and Fuck B*SH (censored, once again, for the kids).

Onward and forward

Forward and onward...I've been away from here for a short while because of two things. First, the band I helped start back in late '95, early '96, played its final show at Castle Clinton National Monument a week ago Thursday, August 5th. My wife was in attendance and took lots of fantastic pictures. We spent the remainder of the weekend exploring New York, although the Friday after the show we were recovering from a super deadly hangover (getting free drinks all night at the hi-fi club, which hosted the band's afterparty, will do that).

It's hard to describe the feelings I have now that the band has officially broken up. And I'm not just giving up THAT band. My days in the band dynamic are likely over for good. I've showed up for practice either two or three times a week for the past 17 years (with a brief respite during my move to SF from Wisconsin back in January to July of 1993). I have said to myself for a while that I needed a break from that. My last day job put that notion at a premium, as I was working 5-2 at first and then 6-3 by the end. Juggling this with band practices that went from 7-11pm was a little taxing. But the job ended when we hit the road in early April of this year. We returned in mid June, played the Fillmore in SF on 6/26 and then the Castle Clinton show on 8/5. And now, , it's all done.

I was fully prepared to spend the next month struggling to find a new job and identity, battling the post-partum depression along the way. And then on Monday morning, 8/9, I got a cold call from someone who saw my resume posted on craigslist, and by yesterday I was starting a new job as Technical Support Engineer for a mobile productivity application company based down in San Jose. I am the only one who will be doing this job, and it builds upon my day job experience I've juggled between tours and records. It affords us the opportunity to pay down our debts accrued over time as a result of all of this juggling since about 1999. The "rock student loans" (read: credit cards) have been getting out of hand. And this job pays better than all of the other jobs I've had. The CEO is super cool and we were cracking jokes during the my second interview, where he offered me the job as a permanent hire rather than the three month contractor I was first supposed to be.

The interesting thing about that is how I had said "fuck it" when I posted a resume on craigslist that included a curriculum vitae of sorts, of my music career. I had always kept that part of my life off of my resumes, thinking it would scare potential employers away. But I realized that eschewing that long held notion was a good one for two reasons: 1. It explained the gaps in my resume. 2. It showed I had a life outside of work, and that I could learn things quickly. The "multi-intstrumentalist" aspect of the cv (trumpet, drums, engineer, webmaster, guitar player, backing and sometimes lead vocalist) suggested to any potential employer that I could certainly multi-task. And I was right. I began getting calls. And the job I found perfectly fused my previous on the job experience for the past seven years into a position I have leeway in creating for myself. And everyone at the company (16-17 people, a startup), knows about my history in rock and roll, and also know that I have retired from the road life (at least for the foreseeable future).

I was offered the job on Thursday, exactly one week after my final gig in NY, and I started the very next day. I have a lot to learn. And I also have to shake off that feeling I have, a feeling that reminds me of my first day of high school orientation in 1985, a few days before my sophomore year. I was born and raised in tiny Berlin, Wisconsin until the spring of '85, when my father decided to take a new job down in Elmhurst, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. He started the job in April of that year and spent evenings and weekends searching for a house while my mom and I stayed in Berlin to finish out my freshman year. We hadn't moved into the house yet when school was to start, so the first week or so my dad and I lived in a hotel right down the street from the school. And I remember the overwhelming feeling I had during that abrupt change in my life. This change rivals it, because my wife and I will soon be moving into an in-law unit in Santa Clara to save on rent, so my entire existence will be commuting about five to ten minutes from Santa Clara to San Jose. This thought hit me at home during my lunch break yesterday, where I drove to a little strip mall down the street from the office to have a Vermicelli bowl (at least the restaurants there are good, thought the strip mall atmosphere is not an aesthetic favorite of mine). I looked around and thought to myself, this whole experience is foreign to me. I don't know anybody here. And then I thought to myself: less than four months ago I was driving a van through the Bavarian countryside on the way to a gig in Switzerland during a one month European tour, and now I am living the suburban 9-5 existence like practically everybody else.

This is what I wanted, some peace for a while from the hectic touring schedule away so long from my wife, and some financial stability to take care of some outstanding debts. Still, it's a transition that I am going to have to get used to. So I think I will chronicle it here, peppering it with a few political notes along the way.