So it has come to this.  The United States is now a banana republic.  The trappings and institutions are still there, left over from a previous time, but the military runs everything.

It's much more sophisticated than, say, Honduras or Nicaragua.  People in those places know the game, and they play accordingly.  Here, people continue to believe things are what they used to be, ignoring all the evidence to the contrary ... I guess in hopes it will go away by itself.

Obama says he didn't know what the NSA was doing.  That's the one that rang the bell for me.  Of course he didn't know!  Nobody knows, that's just the point!

And then the NSA guy gets up there and says him and his buddies work with their counterparts in other countries, collecting and sharing.  This is no big deal, it's business as usual, folks.

Yeah, that's what's bothering me.

Congress says it's gonna really look into this and get to the bottom of it.  Are you shitting me?  These people are so way, way past Congress!  They don't even have budgets any more, and even when they did the stuff these guys did was all fuzzed out so nobody knew.  You can't shut off their money because if you threaten to they'll claim the "terrorists" will overrun us, and of course nobody wants to go on record being for that.

So they've basically got the perfect scam going.  Not only no oversight, no possibility of oversight, and as much money as you can think up reasons to ask for.

Myself, I'd shut off their money and take my chances with the terrorists.  The terrorists don't seem poised to take over my life, so they seem like less of a threat in the long run.

I just want to go on record telling Vanessa, whoever and wherever you are, that you did some stuff to me that night last summer, and I will never be the same.  

It was probably pretty obvious how terrified I was at what was happening while we danced, and that’s probably why you drifted away into the dark without even telling me your last name or how I could get in touch with you.  You could tell I wasn’t ready for prime time.  You were right, but I didn’t know that then and I know it now, so that was a big turnaround.

All this is another way of saying I think about you all the time, and the idea that I won’t ever see you again kills me.  So I guess I’ll try to make it to Port Angeles about the same time next year, and if they have another one of those whatever-they-called-it things in the woods, I’ll be there looking for your oval face and your long, straight brown hair framing those brown eyes.  If those eyes are still saying, “Come on, let’s see what you’ve got”, I’ll have something.

So here we are in the eleventy-third day of the so-called "government shutdown", which it isn't, of course, since all of the "essential" parts of the government have been running along smoothly.  But the misnomer fits because the whole "government" this is an illusion, isn't it.  There is no actual, tangible thing called "government"; it's an abstraction that exists only because we all agree on it.  So they can call a slowdown a "shutdown" and it's the same thing: we all agree, so it's so.

They're saying they've almost got some agreement worked out, and everything will be back to "normal" soon.  Or maybe not, depending on which channel you watch or which minute you watch it.  I predict that they will work something out soon, but not because of the defaulting on the debt; they'll quit this drama because their ratings are slipping.  It's not the lead story any more, it's slipped to the inside pages, and now people are getting back to their old standby titillation sources: pop music stars, TV stars, nipples and, of course, death.  The politicians are starting to panic; if there's one thing they can't stand, it's to be ignored.  So look for a resolution real soon.

Meantime, I'm getting ready to do a little Google adwords campaign for The Dropouts.  This temporary shutdown should be a great fulcrum for leveraging interest in a novel about a permanent shutdown.  That's my theory, anyway.  We'll see.  If it works I'll be raising the price, so you might want to get in there and have a look while it's still a bargain.  Here's the link again: The Dropouts.

Last night was a little weird.  The "band" at the bar consisted of two people, a man playing guitar and a singing woman.  But the music coming out the speakers also had a bass and drums, so what the hell?

The guitar player had a computer next to him, and he was fiddling with it before each song, so I went up and asked.  Some gobbledygook about synthesizers and stuff.  The upshot was he programmed it all, so it's his music, but is he even really playing the guitar?  He was fingering the frets, and his other hand was hitting the strings, but as the evening progressed I began to doubt whether what I was seeing was making it to the speakers.  The whole thing was apparently a self-made Karaoke.  Is that maybe the way they all do it now?

The singer would have been good if she hadn't been so fakey.  You know how they say the worst insult you can give to an actor is to say "good acting"?  Well, her singing was "good acting".  I wondered what kind of a person she was really.  No way of knowing from last night.  Or was she even singing?  Maybe she was lip syncing too.

The sign outside the bar said next weekend they're gonna have what they're calling a "Slut Strut".  I won't want to miss that one.

Part of what I like about my life is the unexpected way unusual stuff drifts by.
Like the retired guy I met in Washington State who travels around alone in a motor home, spending most of his time on-line recording the names, locations and pictures of graves.  I ran into him again here in California, and we chatted at great length one night about his life before.  Teaching elementary school, coaching softball, open-heart surgery, successfully beating prostate cancer with some kind of new therapy involving radioactive pellets; the guy likes to talk.
He also likes to zip around on a motor scooter he carries on the back of his rig, and his other mobility toy is a recumbent bike, on which he ran around the park several times while he was here.  Always smiling.  A real smiley kind of a guy.  Is he really that happy?  Yeah, I think he might be.
He no sooner left than people started showing up with motorized bicycles.  First one, then three, and now it turns out there will be about forty of them tomorrow, setting out on a tour of the area, driving on the levees that hold back the Sacramento River on its way to the Pacific Ocean.
The bikes are called "Whizzer", a regular Schwinn bike with a one-cylinder engine tucked into the middle of the frame.  They were invented in 1938, and apparently they were pretty big for a while in the 40s and 50s.  Oddly, although I was around during that period, I don't remember seeing one.  Naturally, I googled it and got the whole story.  You can too.  They don't make them any more, and a guy was telling me one I was looking at, which was one of the originals, was worth about 12 grand even though it looked kind of ratty.  I think this is the one, but I could be mistaken.

As it turns out, there are three fan clubs in the USA, and one of them is in Sacramento, California.  They come out here a few times a year to ride around, make noise and have fun.  Here are bunch more:

I'm gonna go up to the bar on the levee later on.  Live music and dancing, they say.  More my speed.

I'm now the proud self-publisher of two spectacularly unsuccessful novels, so you understand how with that much of a tailwind of success I would be moving ahead with a third.

My point being I am completely insane, which is fine.  I've been cultivating insanity for some time now, so I greet any symptoms with a warm welcome.  Or open arms, if you're looking for a more active although stale metaphor.

The first was a novel about a girl that got raped by her step-dad and went on to be a hero something like Miley Cyrus ... except before she started acting like a slut, which I totally love, by the way, but I wasn't that far into sexual deviance in that one.  Except for the part about the rape, I guess.  I should hope we all agree that's deviant.  Some people make the point that rape is about violence, not sex, although that wasn't the case in this story, which involved a very mixed-up religious dude.  I spent a lot of time on it, and it's well-written, but the story line is a bit trite ... to look at it now.  To me it is, but if you like it, hey.  Take a look if you want, it's called ... but the Girl Didn't Believe It

The second is called The Dropouts.  It's about the end of America and why nobody cared.  Unless you wanted to say it was about sex, especially taboo sex, in which case you'd also be correct.  There are several of those holographic ways of viewing it, but I won't get into them because you're perfectly free to do so and make your own judgments, if that's what you want.  In which case, be my guest.

Of more interest to me is the one I'm working on now, which I'm calling

The Universe, and Stuff Like That  

It has a catchy sub-title too, I think:

The light around points of life.It’s not always obvious, so if you become confused, anxious, outraged or giggly, don’t be alarmed.  It’ll pass, it’ll pass.  Like everything.

The underlying theme is about there being zillions of universes that people zip around through except usually they don't know about it, but in this story a few people start noticing and pretty soon more do until it gets really confusing because people can't tell who the bad guys and good guys are because they keep changing places.  

And masturbating boys.  For some reason there are several masturbating boys.  Go figure.

Stuff like that.