Sunday March 20, 2005

TIME SEE WHAT’S BECOME OF ME

So I saw on someone’s blog that Daylight Saving Time (Saving, not Savings, as I’ve been misusing it all these years) went into effect last night. So when I got up this morning, I felt fatuously self congratulatory as I set my watch and the two clocks in the house ahead an hour.

Of course, DST doesn’t go into effect until April 3 for us colonials, don’tcha know. But I didn’t know, so at 10:30, Delusional Situation Time, I went traipsing off to the Dollar General to purchase me some shampoo.

So that was the first thing in the chain.

Second thing in the chain: Dollar General opens at 10 a.m. Not 9 a.m., not 11 a.m. If Dollar General opened at either of those other times, then either it would have been open when I got there, or I would have shrugged upon seeing the stated Sunday opening time posted on the door and walked over to the Sav A Lot without further ado.

But, nooooooo. Dollar General, according to the time posted on the door, opens at 10. It was 10:30 (I erroneously thought). So I smugly thought to myself “whoever was supposed to open today didn’t set their clock ahead, the dim fuck. Heh.”

And then, third thing in the chain, whoever was supposed to open walked up to the glass door from the inside at that point. And, fourth thing in series, it was a guy I know… my brother Paul’s one time neighbor, Jeff, who now manages the Dollar General.

So I said, self righteously, “Heh, you didn’t set your clock ahead. Daylight Savings Time.”

Mind you, as I like Jeff, for the most part, I didn’t add in the ‘you dim fuck’ part.

Out loud.

Jeff advised me sagely that I was thick as a plank, but then, uncertain of himself in the face of my (deluded) self assurance, he wandered over to his cash register to check. “Nope,” he said, coming back to the door, “the cash registers automatically reset for Daylight Savings (he used the wrong word! Ha! Oaf!) Time, and they haven’t.”

He didn’t actually say I was thick as a plank. He’s not that witty. Or perhaps he is, but he just isn’t in the middle of reading Peter O’Donnell’s The Impossible Virgin at the moment.

So, I wandered over to Sav A Lot, but now the seeds of doubt had been planted. Could my pal the blogger have been wrong?

So I asked the rather cute but no doubt jailbait cashier what time it was as she rang up my shampoo and frozen chicken (the secret to making Banquet frozen chicken edible is… well, it’s cooking it, certainly, but also, it’s wrapping each piece in tin foil to keep it from drying out WHEN you cook it, is what I meant to say) and she peered over her shoulder at absolute nothingness (from my point of view, that is; I imagine, though, she was actually looking at a clock in the office I couldn’t see from my angle) and said “It’s about ten minutes of ten.”

Rashen frashen fricken fracken.

So I strode manfully home again, re-started my X-Box (it promptly started playing What A Good Boy by the Barenaked Ladies in what I took to be a fairly patronizing effort at assuaging me, but I was not assuaged, although I did sing along with the tune for the next several minutes), hurtled out onto the Internet, and confirmed fairly quickly that Daylight Saving Time does not start, as I’ve noted, for us benighted colonials until April 3 this year.

CHRIST in a bucket.

See, as my brother Paul now works at my former place of work, and as my former place of work is right next to the Dollar General, it will inevitably, at near light speed, get back to Paul that his older brother is dotty as a 1950s Sunday go to meetin dress, specifically on the subject of Daylight Saving Time.

It’s all part of the show, folks. It’s ALL part of the show.

A LAST CRUSADE – A FINAL OUTRAGE

Despite the melodramatic header, I’m actually equivocal about the subject of this entry. But I have opinions. They’re just kind of all over the place. Chalk up the header to the fact that Blue Oyster Cult’s Golden Age of Leather played on the X-Box not too long ago, and let it go.

Down here in Florida, we have an odd little game we play.

See, there’s this woman in a persistent vegetative state. She’s been in this persistent vegetative state for seven years now, since a tragic accident that cut off oxygen to her brain for five minutes. Her husband, as the law allows, stated that she had told him repeatedly during their marriage that she did not want extreme measures taken to prolong her life in such a case. However, she did not have a living will, and her parents promptly flew into a sobbing huddle of outrage and demanded that… well, that the law be immediately changed to that they could be considered this woman’s next of kin and prolong her life indefinitely, as was their preference.

You’d think this would be a fairly private matter. And, I don’t know, you’d think, since the State of Florida specifically has a right to die act, that specifically sets out the conditions under which it will be enacted (one of them being, in the absence of a living will, the next of kin, i.e., in this case, the spouse, gets to decide), that it would be a fairly easily handled one if it goes to the courts. The Law, after all, is The Law.

But, well, unless you’ve been hiding under a rock the last couple of days, you know that it isn’t a private matter, and, well, the Law Isn’t The Law, when there are votes to be picked up by pandering to conservatives over something, and there aren’t any wealthy special interest groups getting in the way.

So we have this little game we play in Florida. Every once in a while, someone takes Terry Schiavo’s feeding tube out of her arm, because while we believe in a right to die, we don’t believe in actually administering it in any merciful or civilized fashion (assuming, as may not be appropriate, that a ‘right to die’ law is ever civilized).

And then, a few days later, someone gets a court order due to some extraordinary piece of emergency legislation rammed through at hypersonic speed by our normally stodgy legislative branch, and we put the tube back in Ms. Schiavo’s arm.

It’s been a local game up until recently, but now the U.S. Congress has gotten on board.

I have some conflicting views on this.

First, this has been all over our local news down here. Our local reporters are constantly going up to where the Right To Life protesters are stalking around outside Ms. Schiavo’s hospice, and I presume they interview every single one of them (each of whom, despite the melodramatic red tape with ‘LIFE’ written on it plastered over their mouths, seems to have no difficulty ranting for great lengths of time into a TV camera) and then they pick the one that sounds the most thoroughly obnoxious and show him or her on TV.

This makes me hate the fact that, emotionally, I am more or less on their side.

Some great thinker whose name I can’t recall at the moment once stated that a civilization is largely measured by how it treats its most powerless citizens. I happen to think there’s some wisdom in that statement, and in all honesty, it’s hard to figure a more powerless citizen than Terry Schiavo. Emotionally, I am appalled that we have a legal apparatus in place that allows someone else to decide that their spouse, or their close relative, should be allowed to die, in the absence of clear evidence that this is what that person wants.

If there is any doubt whatsoever, it seems to me you have to opt for life. I mean, once she’s dead, you can’t make her be not-dead, right?

So that’s me, emotionally, and it puts me down on the side of the morons who carry signs saying “Thou Shall Not Kill” (it’s actually ‘shalt’, in all the Bibles I’ve read), and that bugs the shit out of me.

I’m not going to bother with the other side of this specific argument, because this is one of the few cases where I simply don’t care about logic or reason or Law And Order. Laws get changed all the time. Maybe this one should be. Maybe if there is any one person anywhere in the world who cares about someone on life support enough to go to court about it, they should be given legal standing to do so. I don’t know. But there is nothing sacred about the law; we have a lot of bad laws on the books right now.

There should, however, be something sacred, or at least, of primary social and cultural importance, about life.

I’m not sure I want to live in a culture that says it’s okay to let someone helpless die.

Leave that aside for the moment… It simply appalls and disgusts me how fast our government can get off its ass and spring into action when it feels the necessity. Give our elected representatives a cause to rally round that will pick them up some easy votes, and won’t cost them anything from any lobbyist, and my GOD watch them strut.

I would simply like to ask all the posturing, preening Congress folk this:

Why don’t our troops have body armor?

Why do we have so many kids living in wretched poverty in America?

Why is our prison system a horror? Why is our public education system a joke?

Why do we have homeless war veterans living on our streets? Why is the V.A. hospital system such a goddam fucked up mess?

Where’s my affordable health care? Where’s my mom’s affordable health care? Where’s her damn Social Security? Where’s mine going to be in twenty years?

The entire monolithic power of our legislative branch of government can mobilize itself in 48 hours to interfere with what’s going on regarding one vegetative woman in a small town in Central Florida.

God forbid they actually, you know, govern.

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, "Wow, I didn't recognize you in men's clothing". According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I'm reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I'd take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here's The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people's blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin's Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron's blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don't really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren't related to me by marriage, I'd most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I've learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don't care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I'd get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don't Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.