I was walking down by this ship restoration and repair place earlier this afternoon. The place is full of these enormous fishing trawlers and other types of ships with busy little antmen running all around them welding and spraying and such. Most of the ships are pretty alright, except for one horribly named vessel called "Capable."

Who the shit names their ship "Capable?" Does anyone want to ride something called Capable? Why not shoot for "Magnificent" or "Awesome" or even "Pretty Alright?" Confidence is everything on the open sea, and if that is the case, I don't think the crew aboard the H.M.S. Sufficiently Adequate are going to be the best the ocean has ever seen.

I went to Taco Bell after a morning of car shopping (for someone else, don't worry - I would never let go of my baby) for a delectable meal of my favorite Grilled "Stuft" Burrito. Following the brief lunch, I decided I would take a moment to relieve myself in the establishment's facilities. Everything was going okay until I flushed and the toilet nearly sucked my goddamn leg into the bowl.

This toilet was like a fucking fuel-air explosive (only without the dead Iraqi civilians) sucking in not only my excess fluid, but quite nearly my knee and upper thigh. Why the hell does mankind need a shitter so strong? Then suddenly it hit me... Maybe the plumbers now something about the cheese dip I don't.

Well, I've been getting my ass handed to me at my new job at WaterFire. I walked in to volunteer and all of the sudden I end up employed. Doing production work and political writing, it promises to be a really diverse occupation, if only part-time. Last night I took a walk around the fire for, after working all day as a volunteer and rocking all night on the Shaft, the dance in my pants had very well vacated. But, it was still a serene time. It felt really good to watch the event not only with a sense of awe, but also accomplishment.

Rebuilding is quite an effort and yesterday's show, honestly, showed very little progress. That'll teach me to compete with the city's biggest summer event. I think the only answer is more shows, which I'm more than willing to get hopping on right now.

I had a rather vivid nightmare of a car accident last night as well. A little too vivid.

Another rant about television. So, I’m watching Fox of all stations which has particularly turned god awful with the passing of The X-Files, and after the perennial favorite Simpsons and Yet Another Home Movie Show, I come across Anything For Love and become paralyzed with stupidity.

My problem with reality TV exists on a number of levels, not the least of which is the simple fact that it is not reality at all. Reality isn’t full of hot twentysomethings pulling stunts for each other’s affection. I think if they are going to refer to the genre by such a title, the proper show Fox should be fielding is Anything for Lunch.

Go on the streets of major cities, pick up about twelve homeless people, cut their hair and scrub behind their ears, and set them through challenging obstacle courses for Big Macs. You really want to see the desperate lengths humanity is willing to take? Try setting a crippled Vietnam vet in a hamster wheel with a Kansas City Strip dangling in front of his nose and watch the miracle of adrenaline take its course. Are the people on Survivor really risking it all when just a million dollars is on the line? Throw out a punch bowl of Hanta-infected rat shit, set down a dementia-stricken old lady who thinks she’s Elizabeth Taylor, a hairy-backed hippie who always refers to himself in the third person, and a philosophy major, give them bibs and forks, and tell them a coupon for a lifetime supply of sardines is at the bottom of that eleven-foot crapheap. Then you’ll know how real desperation can be.

A mess of Narragansetts in Southern Rhode Island are getting in quite a spat with the state governor over the installation of a casino on their federally protected land. While I certainly agree with the governor's assessment of the casino's danger to general social happiness, I think he went a touch overboard. Walking into any Indian territory with a mess of heavily armed white guys with the avowed intent of taking away Native American tobacco has, historically, never been such a bright idea. Doomed to repeat, I suppose.

Hey. Hug a nun. They're nice ladies.

O'Daly, in a fit of alcohol induced genius, concocted perhaps the best marketing idea for The Shaft since my backyard wrestling idea: Arturo Got The Beer.

We buy a micro-brewery and tap into O'Daly's culinary training to create and develop the finest lagers and stouts this planet has ever seen, and use copies of Yes, Ray, I Believe In God as the coasters. Just think of the possibilities!

Silent Schlagers! A Link to the Pabst! Why Don't You (Ale Yourself?)! Still a Porter!

These beers practically invent themselves. Bottled and issued with demo CDs, I think that perhaps this is the best idea we've ever had.

As the infamous cult classic Big Trouble in Little China, the Mandarins believe that there isn't one centralized location for eternal post-life punishment, but rather several Hells each with a distinct flavor and ontological classification.

I personally believe Hell is television and, if both I and the Taoists are right, public access backyard wrestling is saddled next to the frozen crotch of Lucifer himself. Replete with yellow twine and scrap 2 x 4's for a ring, a tarp filled with fallen leaves for a mat, and the rattiest, greasiest "athletes" one could ever imagine, the USWE (acronym unknown - maybe Unbelievably Shitty Wrestling Entourage?) is a train wreck of redneck fantasy and the harsh realities of working poverty; a case study in the worst of the twentysomething identity search.

Now all I have to do is talk O'Daly into joining it.

Another wicked WaterFire last night in downtown Prov, and this time the whole crew was able to make it out for the festivities. The ballroom was up and the dance genre was Cape Verdean, so named because it is danced by the inhabitants of Cape Verde. An island nation off the West Coast of Africa, the dance required a certain amount of prerequisite funk that I most definitely lack, but I seemed to hold my own in the unfamiliar surroundings. At very least, the band kicked ass.

Tired and wringing in perspiration, I came home to catch the tail end of Empire Records. A perfect day.

Well, not entirely perfect.

So, I'm helping O'Daly's girl with her laptop. The problem was that the battery inside the laptop was not charging when she plugged it in. I've troubleshooted these kinds of problems a million times, and I was reasonably sure that the problem was a short in the wire that was directly behind the plug that goes into the laptop.

After taking 110 straight to the hand, I found out how right I was. The damn wire broke open and shocked the bejeezus out of me, but fortunately didn't have any adverse effects on the laptop itself. The warranty on the laptop had long since expired, but I had a hunch given the electrifying circumstances of the power cord's failure Dell would probably consider a replacement.

One's on it's way now.

When you look into the sky, what do you see? Some hopeful dream, some last minute sketch tossed out on a napkin or some carefully orchestrated symphony of beeping horns and satellite radios and zoological parks? Do you see a kaleidoscope of colors generated for amusement or a painting slopped to black canvas in God’s own image? A mistake or a censure or a present (or a past) or a notion so inconceivably ridiculous that when the coyotes rear their heads back what we hear as howling is actually the belly laugh of a creature that knows something we don’t?
Is the sky the equalizer of men? That no matter how much wealth, power, and women all men (and women) have to look up at the same sky? That regardless of intellect, ability, ingenuity, talent, and raw stupid dumb-fucking-luck each human being has to see the same Polaris – has to see the same Sirius – has to see the same moon and the same stupid planets rotating seen and unseen around a dark mass completely incomprehensibly vast that the only word any one could possibly use: space.
Or is it, instead, something that changes as we change? Changes as human beings are altered over the long hairy road that we all try to comb over the receding hairline of our own hopes and dreams and aspirations, exposed through the passing of time like a burden over already harrowed eyebrows that weigh down like the passage of time and the shirking of a responsibility to oneself, but to one’s brightest hope – the real North Star we should follow.
If the sky is different for everybody, I personally wonder what the sky is like in Liberia. What the sky must be like for a civil war torn 10 year old who has as little understanding of this fight that his fathers have fought anymore than the fight he is about to see. I wonder what the sky is like in the outback where a bushman sits and drinks the intoxicating benefit of expanded capitalism without a goddamned iota of cogitation as to what that Heineken in his hand represents to the death of the North Stars of his grandfathers.
I know what the sky looks like in Rhode Island. I sometimes think that the sky must look the same as there, only I can’t see it as easily.

I was driving today and saw possible the ugliest car ever created by human hands. I say by "human hands" in the event that some previous and unknown Terran society had made a car that, by design, was intended to be the end all and be all of hideous automobilia.

"Hey Fred."

"Yes, Ryaki-san."

"Do you remember The Family Circus?"

"Vaguely."

"Remember when they would let Billy, his cartoon son, take over every once in a while a draw a comic?"

"Yeah. That was hella lame."

"Next Bring-Your-Daughter-To-Work-Day, how about we let your daughter design our next SUV?"

"But she has Downs Syndrome because of her family reunion conception."

"She's just special, Fred."

I got at least a passing shot at the Atlantic over the Independence Day festivities with a trip down to Newport. I did not realize until I arrived that it was *the* Newport. As in Folk Festival Newport. As in Bob fucking Dylan Newport.

In addition to having procreative folk artists, Newport has sailboats. I can't say, truly, that I've ever seen a real sailboat, well, *ever*. To me, it seems kind of silly. The Ancients didn't paddle and rely on wind because they wanted to. In fact, you stick about 200 slave oarsmen and a big diesel engine in front of a Byzantine captain, and I can say with some certainty which one that man is going to say will give him the least amount of shit. Literally.

In other news, the Shaft is growing its New England base slowly but surely. I dragged O'Daly out to an open mic down in North Kingstown which, by the residents' estimation, is the Rhode Island equivalent of Arkansas. Things got a little western for a bit, quite seriously, with the head dude at the open mic kicking things off with a contemporary country set. Undeterred however, we stepped up to rock that mother and rock it we did. By the end of our small set, *everyone* in that joint was fixated on us and our tunes even though we were easily 20 years younger than everyone there.

This in itself is worth the move.

.plan homework assignments folks.

Go to Google.

Enter "Weapons of Mass Destruction."

Click I'm Feeling Lucky.

Recommended reading: Bush Asks For $30 Billion To Help Fight War on Criticism

Bush has started calling out Liberia's leader and is talking about regime change in rhetoric to familiar to the current Iraq situation. I was sitting and talking with a few people about the war in Iraq who were just baffled by the recent ambush attacks on American soldiers. One even went so far to say, "I thought the war was over." It seems that the Bush rhetoric and subsequent lapdog media coverage has convinced the common man and woman that the conflict is over in Iraq, that the fighting has ended.

Well, someone forgot to send the memo to Iraq. Taking a captial city does not mean the war is over, quite the contrary if one picks up a history book on the fall of the Roman Empire. So long as the working class in Iraq is continually screwed and any real higherups in the Iraqi government are captured, there will be plenty of soldiers with plenty of people to lead them to attack. The only thing Bush proved was the one thing everyone knew already: Iraq cannot defeat the United States in open combat. That is of little consequence, however, if we even take a look at our own history. When the American revolutionaries couldn't go gun for gun against a redcoat company, what did they do?

The same thing the Baaths in Iraq are doing now. The same they will be doing until they are dead or the capital is theirs once more.

So, tampon commercials. Is it me, or have they gone covert just to fuck with us guys? There you are, watching some high school teen bopping to forgettable techno. Some soft-voiced female comes on the horn telling us about stressing over the small stuff in life like class and relationships and car insurance and stuff, then all of the sudden - BLIGGITY-BLAM!.

You are stuck at the far end of a tampon commercial.

This is a place no guy wants to be and it is happening more and more frequently. As guys go, I like to think I'm pretty perceptive in spotting a tampon commericial early. But, it seems that Playtex has some sort of psychic marketing death squad out to completely destroy my brain as I have been completely incapable as of late of discerning it anywhere. They should have warning labels early... Like Girls Gone Wild.