Sides.

Sometimes I don’t even know why I keep up with this shit.

I spent all weekend feeling somewhat sorry for Billary, because let’s face it, there was some serious sexist shit going on in the last couple weeks, and I don’t approve of that crap.  But now the Clinton Political Gank Machine has seemingly won both Texas and Ohio. I didn’t feel THAT sorry for her, jerks!

Of course, McCain – one of the few GOP members I’ve ever admired, along with Arlen Specter – has finally made it to the nomination.  I guess things could be worse there, although I don’t like how he acts when he runs for president.  He tries to get all cozy with the GOP base, always an ugly and sycophantic display. At least I’m no longer having to deal with the possibility of having Romney in his place.

Now, I know Obama is not going to be, was NEVER going to be the hero everyone expects him to be.   Bill Clinton wasn’t.   Hell, JFK wasn’t either, and people remember him as if he was perfect.  However, I do feel that if anyone out there would at least make the attempt to restore our reputation internationally, it would be him, although maybe that’s not fair to Ms. Clinton. In a perfect world, I think she could do a decent job of that as well, but I also think that if Clinton makes it to the nomination, her diplomatic playbook is never even going to see the light of day, as she will be dealing with the GOP shitstorm that is coming her way.

I want Obama not because I believe all the hype (I don’t believe anyone is in politics who really holds onto their ideals for very long because of the nature of the game), but because he’s a relatively unknown figure, he’s extremely cool under pressure, and he seems to have good intentions.  I want to see a democrat in a position for once who isn’t playing to the lowest common denominator, who isn’t constantly triangulating to find the focus-group sweet-spot before making a policy choice. I also want someone who won’t be afraid to encourage another round of independent investigations after Bush leaves office – there’s still a great deal of harm to clean up even after W’s gone back to that f-ing ranch we saw so much of in Crawford, Texas.  Personally, I think Hillary Clinton is too calculating to take such a bold step.

Current standing amidst my tribe.

Well we’ll get to the serious stuff tomorrow.  Right now let’s do some introductions.

I’d like  you to meet some of my family first. Myself and my three brothers:

Yes, of course I’m the guy with the tie, also sporting the muscle shirt.

 

Next is my wife, without whom I could never get out of bed in the morning. She’s extra hot here. No, you cannot have her.

Finally, one of my sons.  His was a premature birth, hence the yellowish nature of his complexion, although truth to tell, this is just an artist’s rendering. 

Parameters.

Hello world. Big brazen and cramped ball of humanity that you are, terrible bringer of bad news, frequent blind adjudicator that you’ve been to me and all of mine.   Hello.   Said like a prayer or curse, hello.

31 years playing the game and not coming out a winner.  31 years of spilled milk, crying over it and yet still looking optimistically for the paper towels.  And wordpress is where it leads me.

I kept a diary, I mean a real one (one with dirty, worn pages, one that felt like a friend to me and then later on as I would go back and look over events past, like a liar) on and off for my entire late childhood, from the age of 15 until somewhere around the time of my first mental breakdown, at the age of 21.  The years of stereotypical angst.  After that, life became swiss cheese for awhile, messy and full of holes, some of which never got filled in, but still, six years of learning how to better engage myself with the necessities of logic, learning how to write effectively (though sometimes with little enough flair), and mostly, learning how to create a version of myself from nothing that I could be proud of….that time was valuable in making me who I am today.  But time as usual has passed me by, and I lost the great love I used to have for the craft of telling one’s own story, or indeed even in caring about it enough to string phrases together. Shortly thereafter I got my life back together somewhat, had the happy accident of having my first child and first real job, and life just kind of…….rolled on.

But then time passed again. I’m still here, life is not any less complex as it was the day before, and yet some part of me is still self-important enough to think that there might be phrases enough left for me to string together for a little while, so here I am, diary.

Some parameters:  This will always be a public diary, no matter what the cost.  It’s going to be brutally honest. It will have a limited scope, which is to say, the blog is called Educated Poor because that’s what I am and what I’m talking about: very well educated, but not a degree holder.  Financially poor, but cultured enough to know that things could be a hell of a lot worse.

I’m no Tom Joad, and this is not a soapbox I’m standing on, but I have this feeling, this craziness inside me again, it feels like a scream, and if the scream had any words (and they don’t) the words would be

I WANT MORE FROM THIS LIFE.

If I now have any worth to anyone else in the world, it is because of the time I have spent making music – we’ll get to that later – and the time I spent trying to learn how to be a better writer when I wrote my diary all those years ago.  I’d like to say that the past has caught up with me and that I’m doing this now because I just fondly recall the years I spent being creatively productive and want to do it again, but to be more honest, and therefore more cruel, I’m doing this because I feel like time is leeching the past away from me, and I’m just trying to do what I can to reclaim myself in my mind’s eye before I forget what that happy image of myself ever was in the first place.

If it sounds like a serious subject, you’re not wrong, although moods do change, don’t they?, and tables do eventually turn. Hopefully this blog will be more than just a weathervane for how I should be regarded when you pass me in the hallway: I want very badly to also try and impart something that others can relate to, like a reaching out to see if anybody’s out there outside of my own little safe and guarded corral.   If the internet is a series of tubes, then life has become a series of bubbles: the bubbles of the apartment, of the car, of the cubicle at work, until you get to your last bubble, which is the grave. Well, I’m not happy playing this game anymore and I want out of this bubble, at least temporarily.

So I guess this blog comes down to being many things, but most importantly it’s going to be a window to an experiment I am performing on myself. I’m not really sure what the experiment is yet, I just know that I’m up for something a little different and trying my hardest not to screw it up, and I’m living in a time that is a turning point for a lot of us in America. Documenting that, both the turning point and my reactions to it, will be my first priority and hopefully there will be something worth reading every once in a while. 

I’m out for now but hopefully not too long.