Tell me please, once again, what exactly it is that makes these children evil.  Objectively speaking, I think it is grossly unreasonable of us to expect that these children will do nothing during their short lives in response to these injustices. 

If we want to continue to do nothing about the crimes committed against them, we should by the same token do nothing about the crimes that they commit.  This is absurd, to be sure, but it is certainly less absurd than what we do currently: cultivate for only one group of people the humane compassion that is rightly deserved by all people.

Look familiar? 

I hate to complain (no, that's a big lie, I love to complain, so here goes...)  I've been watching the above little graphic for an hour.  And during that time I waxed reflective about the magic of push-button publishing.  You see, Blogger has several (at least) major pieces behind the magic.  For example, there is one piece which keeps a database with all my precious irreplaceable pearls of wisdom.  This is where they go when I push the 'Post' button.  There is another piece that takes those posts from the database and transfers them to my web-server, which was originally the most fascinating aspect of Blogger for me.  It was cool to do something on a blogger web page, and have the results emerge on my website. 

That's the gimick that got me hooked, and before long, I was assimilated into the blogger community.  However, as I am wont to do from time to time, my affections eventually wandered; I began seeing Greymatter in furtive little trysts, and adolescent explorations.  We met in the safe and hidden confines fo my webserver, ftp-ing the nights away.  I revealed nothing to my faithful friend, blogger.  But it didn't work out.  Greymatter is one hot piece, (of software), but things got complicated, and I guess I wasn't in it for the long haul.  The mysterious ones are the most attractive, but they require the greatest committment.  I just wasn't at that place with gm.  Except for just one more fling I had with gm, it has been blogger and me for the past two years.

It wasn't really one thing only that led to this.  It never is.  There's a malaise, a general lack of novelty, a challenge, passion, and payoff that is just not there anymore like there was when me and blogger began.  It's not actually over yet.  Though I no longer love blogger we are, you might say, still co-habitating.  But I am seeing another program.

MovableType, apart from having a cool name, isn't 'out there' as much as blogger; he stays home, on my server.  He's more accessible than Greymatter.  He does it for me.  With blogger, depending on what interface I am using—editBlog page, the blogThis popup, or the API products, to name a few—there is at least two servers involved in that process apart from mine, more likely there is a chain of blogger servers, any of which can (and do) go down from time to time.  And when a server goes down on me, it is nothing like when that happens in a human relationship.  It does NOT make me happy.  It really comes down to simple logic (don't we always say that when we are about to break someone's heart?).  The fewer opportunities for failure between me and a published page, then the more likely I can publish when I want to. 

If, or when, I finally do leave blogger, those will be my reasons.  I will miss the tempermental servers; I have grown kinda fond of their antics.  And I will miss the connection to the blogger community, though that will turn out to be, I think, less of a loss than I now anticipate.  I won't be gone and neither will they, but still, moving-on is hard.  And if there is any consistency to my fate, once it is over for good I will realize like a hundred times before that I was nuts to leave, and that it was the best thing I ever had.

It is truly cuckie here.  Cold like winter, and wet, well, ...like winter.  Isn't this after easter already?  I mean, didn't I see pastel bonnets weeks ago?  I know I saw bonnets...  It. Is. Not. Supposed. To. Be. Cuckie. At. The. End. Of. April.  (!)   Jeesh.

And this bronchitis...  I try to take a nap, and with every exhalation, I hear at the very end, tiny old men, in my chest—hundreds of them—making little tiny screams and moans.  They sound so sad.

I can't even focus on a blog entry.  I sat down hours ago to record the tremendously insignificant events of my day.  A simple task.  Instead, I ended-up with that flag rant!  It was like, my scanner just d-r-e-w my face to its glassine surface—and to the impossibly bright light thereunder—as inevitably as gravity draws a meteor to its brilliant demise.

So, I went to my bankruptcy hearing today.  It is called a 'meeting of creditors.'  It seems to me that there are never any creditors at these things.  There were at least five bankruptcies being processed in the hour that I was there, and not one creditor.  Not that I am complaining.  But I wish I knew that earlier.  I was a wreck worrying.

It's a slick process.  One guy from the US Bankruptcy Court, the Trustee, is there sitting in the front of a big room at a huge table.  He has a tape recorder, and a cell phone.  He asks if you have read this or that form, and asks if you understand it.  He does this for about a dozen forms.  One scary thing: He asks if you have read the notice on the door of the hearing room, and do you understand it.  That notice, in giant red letters, says something about firearms and weapons not being allowed in the hearing room.  I don't know what I would have done with my sawed-off had I inadvertantly brought it.  There's no court officers, and just this little guy at a big table with a cell phone.  I wonder if getting you on tape saying that you have read and understood the firearms prohibition somehow makes you more culpable than if you just walked in and blew someones head off without making any such statement. 

He then rattles through a pro-forma interrogation of the petitioner, and schedules the case for discharge of debts two months later.  There's no robes, and not even many suits.  It was scheduled at 10:30 AM.  I woke up sick as hell, crawled there, sat waiting for my lawyer, and trying to keep quiet the old-man chorus in my chest.  My lawyer was representing three of the five petitioners at the 10:30 session.  Bankruptcy law is apparently a brisk business. 

I walked home, changed clothes, and shivering, I put on my little cap and sat down to write a simple blog entry.

This is my answer to all the blind American nationalism.  I have nothing against generic nationalism, the gentle kind, sans bloodlust.  But blind nationalism ala USA says I'm better than you because I'm an American.  I find that nauseatingly juvenile.  Maybe I'm just being contrary, I mean, some of those cheap, shredded, filthy plastic flags that hang pathetically off nearly every car antenna were put there by moderately well-intentioned people.  Placed with the same ubiquity and 'mindfulness' as the antenna standard are the flag bumper stickers and flag window decals, which number at least twice the population of this country.  Where is the nationalism in flying a disgracefully neglected, dirty, torn US flag—as do most of the businesses where I live?  It seems everybody wants to appear patriotic; perhaps this obsession with patriotic appearances is ebbing.  One can only hope.

Maybe it is just a matter of taste, but I am gagging on the overstatement.  This flag saturation is pernicious; it seems to implement the particurlarly emetic slogan of George Bush, "You're either with us or you're against us," implying that my choices are to be either an American, or a terrorist.  It implies that I, flagless, possess suspicious intent, questionable patriotism, and perhaps I even have treasonable designs.  As a mere mark to signify one's concurrence with the prevailing tribal mood, I suppose it works.  But this mindless flag-plastering fails miserably to promote anything, least of all the flag.  The US flag symbolizes a living nation that has historically defended the individual's freedom to act contrary to the majority's sentiment; it represents a brave nation that more often than not, and at grave cost, has sought justice; and despite everything, the United States flag flies over a young nation that once made a revolutionary assertion to the world: human rights preempt state's rights.  The flag represents things about my country which I describe now more with hope they might resume, rather than assurance that they persist.

These US flags, in their proliferation, seem to represent something warlike, inhumane and divisive.  I won't sport one.  I'm not with you, Mr. Bush.  But I am not against America. 

Hi. 

Hello.  So, you're going back to work today?

Yup.  It's hard to go back, after so many days off, but it's only for today.  Then I work Tuesday and I'm off again Wednesday.

They'll want you to work OT on those days off.  Everybody is sick, the place is falling apart...

No.  I'll Just say no.  I may be going back, but I am still sick.  Hell, I was wheezing and gurgling and coughing constantly; I couldn't even breath enough to keep my lips from turning blue two days ago.

You thought you were going to die, didn't you. 

Yah.

You're still scared of it, dying I mean.

Hell, I could die any minute.  I just don't want to die not being able to breathe.

You just don't want to die.  And it's not because you want to live, it's because you're scared to die.

Well, ...yah.

Work on that.  It's no way to live life.

Yah, I know.  Hey thanks, I gotta go.  See ya,
joe.