I miss reading Barking Up the Wrong Tree. I used to read it a lot more when Google Reader was still alive. Now I'm lucky if a bunch of people share links from it to Facebook.

While wading through all these old blog posts, I keep running into mangled Unicode characters. I've had this problem ever since I started blogging in 2000, but I never knew the source of the error.

I am a sucker for any and all mashups no matter how terrible they are and a lot of them aren't terrible.

When my cousin died all of the sudden without warning about seven years ago just after we started reconnecting, I listened to this song a lot.

I think the worst part about watching death—even just the death of an ill-tempered and anxious dog who lived a long life of almost 15 years, who had deteriorated to the point where he couldn't even stand up to take a drink of water or even to move out of his own filth—is that you know for a fact it's going to happen again and again, unless you happen to go first.

I am so tired but I can't sleep. Wonderful.

Even a nuclear bomb up my ass
might fail to move my sad sack, bloated body off of this chair
stuck stupid and slack-jawed, gaping at this screen
(to filter through reality
like stripped shorn pantyhouse in front of a sewage drain
leaving the cigarette butts and used condoms to wallow
in that sepulcher of corrugated metal and chemical despair
letting the fecophilic micro-organisms,
the rich culture medium of turd
float out in the cold of the unforgiving sea)

writhing with frustration
aching with desire
wrestling with indecision
still as a mountain top looming over the City

OK, sure, this will definitely come out culturally elitist, but the phenomenon known as digg.com is yet another example of the principle of mediocrity in capitalist economies. (Or, for the more politically correct minded, perhaps we can call it the principle of democracy.) Like Walmart, the American public school system, Microsoft Windows, and our pathetic dependence on hydrocarbons for fuel, the “good enough” is the enemy of the “best” and, contrary to what Social Darwinists would have you believe, laissez faire capitalism leads to championing the mediocre.

I have been trying to convince myself that there's nothing wrong with being alone, that I am capable of living a rich, fulfilling life on my own, without having to rely on anyone else.

Sunlight is my bestest friend.