TAKING OFF

I’ll be home tomorrow so I can run about and get things that need to be done done before I head off to Florida, I won’t have time this weekend or next week so tomorrow it is. Then a slanging match with my cable provider.

Random Neural Firings:

Why does phrase recreational sex it sound to me like it’s something involving tracksuits? It’s very odd my head – tracksuits and maybe a trampoline and juggling.

Everybody in New York flashed on 9-11 the instant when they heard that Corey Lidel’s plane had smacked into a building but once we knew where it happened, things calmed down. On 9-11 planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, not some Park Avenue Apartment building.

You have to feel for the poor people in the Apartment – one minute they are just sitting there, the next moment there’s a plane crashing through their window and their world is in flames. It’s one of those moments that HST said “confirms my belief that your worst nightmare can come true any minute”

I quote a lot form HST cause he, before things got too much, was very very good in a words as blunt instruments way. To me, Thomson’s best writing came when he was tossed (or jumped) into situations where he was completely out of place (Los Vegas, the Kentucky Derby and the Presidential Campaigns) and utterly out of sync with the vibe of the scene and the people around him. The constant thread in his writing goes: “This is insane, what is front of me is babbling madness. But nobody else seems bothered. They are just going about doing insane things like it’s just normal. Jesus what the hell is wrong with these people? Is it me? Am I crazy? Or are they that crazy? Oh my god they spotted me!”

It is that sense of a man caught in the middle of an artillery barrage trying to get people to stop god damn filing the reports and take cover and being told “what artillery barrage.”

I always got the sense Thomson was a raw nerve ending whose emotions ran very very deep, which explains the drinking and the drugs and the thug like behavior. Numb that bastard down so you can at least function on a day to day basis. Act like a monster to keep the monsters away from you.

In the end he became bigger than the stories he covered and slipped into, occasional flashes notwithstanding, into self parody. It was a peculiar American Tragedy, this place gives you the chance to define yourself however you want, to make of yourself anything you want, the problem is, it never lets up.

Meantime we have W saying the study that says some 655,000 Iraqis have died since we invaded isn’t true because the methodology is flawed. This is rich, the man can’t even speak a complete English sentence hates to read and didn’t know anything about North Korea before he was elected and he’s now an expert on statistics? Right. And I’m Marie of Romania to quote Dorothy Parker. Basically his and his enablers complaints about the study boil down to "it makes us look bad so it can't be true".

The thing that truly sickens me about the mess that is Iraq is not just that W is just going to let people die for the next two years so that someone else will clean up the mess he’s made (something he’s done his whole benighted life) but that the whole DC establishment seems willing to along with that- hell they won’t even talk about it. They’d all rather let kids, fathers, mothers, sons and daughters die, like killed die, than embarrass the president or confront him with the ugly truth that the Iraqi war is the worst disaster in US Foreign policy since the end of World War 2. Can’t do that. We’d only upset the ape, better let things lie, the people dying aren’t our people anyway.

Killer Sheep thing isn’t going well – back to blank paper here – I like a challenge but really I can’t get the damn thing started. Trying to get the big reveal where the window is pulled back and – hell maybe a one act isn’t the right way – maybe two, with the sheep reveal at the end of the 1st? And the Bacon eating Robots at the end of the second? Yeah, that's it now we’re talking art!

Ever since I wrote the Red Shirt Diary of Ensign Ricky I haven’t been able to watch the Original Star Trek the same way – at least when I see a Red Shirt guy beam down with the away team I have to supress a giggle.