[Most Recent Entries] [Calendar View] [Friends]
Below are the 4 most recent journal entries recorded in
Infinite Possibility's InsaneJournal:
| Thursday, November 12th, 2009 | |
| 6:16 am | Dead Cat  Earlier tonight my daughter and I went out for a bit; we got home around 9 pm, or four hours ago. Kara just went out to go for a walk and found a dead cat on our walk. Our driveway is about 50 yards long and it’s another 15 feet to the porch; the cat was about 3 feet shy of making the porch. It was a small, charcoal gray cat that I am not familiar with. It had no obvious wounds. My guess is it got hit by a car or perhaps ate something poisonous (I cringe at the thought that anyone around here is baiting cats), and crawled up our driveway because we have so many cats of our own, most of which stay outside as they wait for new homes. Poor kitty. Its mouth was open and it had a pained expression on its face, as if it died mid-meow. It was lying no more than six feet from where I’m sitting, and I can typically hear our cats meow at the window plain as day. I heard nothing, so that plus the lack of obvious wounds reassures me that it wasn’t a cat fight that killed the kitty. I’m sorry I didn’t find it in time, but if I had I would have gone searching for a late-night vet and I have no money for that (no offense to injured or very sick kitties). I’m sad, anyway. I hope it was a stray and not someone’s beloved pet. No collar or I.D., though. Those of you so inclined are asked to please do what you do to help such creatures along their way. Thanks. The thumbnail for this post is our cat that disappeared last August, Bandit.
|
| Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 | |
| 5:09 am | Overdue Concert Review – The Cult  I’m sitting here going through my .mp3s one at a time, in an attempt to weed out bad or truncated files and to come up with a couple of good playlists (one more evocative and “emo,” and one of high energy/good driving music) for my friend Mel for Christmas. I believe I mentioned this plan in a previous post. I’m at the C’s now, and it reminded me that I wanted to tell you all about the Cult concert. It’s taken until now (from a September 6 show) because I knew I needed time to digest it properly… you’ll understand what I mean in a minute. Ian Astbury, the frontman for the Cult, has an enormous voice. It’s just huge — strong, powerful, and fabulous. In photos and videos I remember from MTV’s heyday, he looks/looked tall with long black hair and penetrating eyes. In person, he’s nothing like that, at least not anymore. The band came on without making anyone wait a noticeable period. It seemed like they came on almost right after we arrived, which was probably around 8:30. The House of Blues is not a large venue; I think they seat 1100. There are two levels, and each has stadium seating for part of the area with a mill-around-by-the-bar area to walk around in. The place was predictably packed, but due to its size, it feels very intimate. We found a place to stand and after a while had to move because Kara and I are short and we can’t see over tall people. We have to move three or four times. Eventually, Tina and I found a decent spot to one side and Kara spent some time with some very nice band member’s wife who carved her out a spot in the lower prom before she took off and re-found us, figuring we’d be worried about her. Ian Astbury is obviously older than he was in the 1980s, as we all are (except you people who were still aether-bound at the time). His hair is long and basic brown, layered a bit. His stage energy is that of someone shy — he is always lit in muted shades, never a white spotlight or anything that really shows him well. He tends to look down, probably toward the front rows but it often seemed he was staring at the floor or his feet. He didn’t talk to the crowd a whole lot. Similarly, his vocal was mixed too far into the music, whereas I really would’ve enjoyed hearing his strong voice blasting out my eardrums. The volume in general was lower than I expected. We’d brought earplugs for Kara but she didn’t need them once the music started. I was disappointed at the mix and at my inability to see Astbury well. On the other hand, during times when I couldn’t see at all and wasn’t struggling to fight my way to a better spot, I could hear him well enough to get the much beloved sound of his voice. I missed most of “Revolution” because I went to the restroom. I haven’t had the Love album since the 80s when I had it on cassette (it might be here somewhere); “Revolution” had been my favorite song but I’d forgotten all about it. Toward the end of the show, Ian announced to the crowd that the band would be available in some named room, but I didn’t catch the name. When the show was over, we started making our way to the door to beat the crowd. It’s a confusing place with stairs inside and out, and an elevator that seems to only be available under certain conditions. We didn’t get to use the elevator to come in, but we used it to leave, and it stopped at what we thought was the “lobby” floor, and we got out. We found ourselves in what had to be the named room, very decked out with a much higher class of crowd that I am accustomed to mingling with. I knew the band would be along in a bit. There was incense burning all over the place and a bunch of Hindu decor; I passed a large picture of Kali, my patron goddess, at one point and wondered if it was a sign. Normally, I’d take it as such — who expects to run into such a thing at a club? — but for some reason, I was just too easy going to care right then. And for only the second time in memory, I deliberately walked out of an opportunity to meet my favorite band. (The other band was Queensryche.) I marveled aloud at this as we walked to the car. I still don’t know why I left, and I regret it a little bit (just like with Queensryche), but it felt like the right thing to do at the time. Perhaps Kali was there to encourage me to follow my intuition. The affluent crowd in attendance would have most likely fawned on the band in a way I never do, and I probably wouldn’t have been able to get near them without participating in all that. All in all, the show was disappointing in some key ways without being at all bad. I’m not sure how much was due to the venue and how much was due to the band’s preferences. I’d see them again, if I could. And I could swear I’ve already written this review — every bit of it feels familiar. *shrug* Download: Revolution
|
| Sunday, November 8th, 2009 | |
| 9:27 pm | In Which I Rant  The New York Times today reports (among content about the new health care bill and the release of the names of those killed at Fort Hood) that “There are just over 100 people in the world serving sentences of life without parole for crimes they committed as juveniles in which no one was killed; 77 of them are in Florida.” These occurred in the 1990s. The article expresses the (thankfully humane) opinion of various judges that locking juvenile offenders away for life is “barbaric” and leaves them no hope. Read on:
The definition of a social Republican is dominated by the concept that he (and it is a he, most of the time) will insist upon allowing all babies to be born, and then insist that all offenders be punished to the full extent of the law. Many of those unwanted babies live to grow up in the projects, where they learn all too well how to become those offenders. Whose care or execution we then pay for as taxpayers. Add to this generally accepted (if liberal) definition of a Republican the presumption to decide who is allowed to love or marry whom, who is allowed to have access to birth control (yet another way to make those unwanted children overrun society in greater numbers), who is allowed to have medical care, who is allowed to worship what, who is allowed to rape and destroy the environment as they please, and who is allowed to prosper at the cost of whom. Oops, I slipped a bit into fiscal definition there, but oh well, sue me. I am a raving psycho of a liberal. I am not a Libertarian. I am not Green Party. I am not, by any measure whatsoever, remotely Republican. I am a Democrat in an age when Democrats are the least cool thing to be. I would love to see income tax abolished in favor of a everyone-is-equal-including-corporations sales tax. I suppose that is rather a Libertarian idea. I think human rights are human rights and as long as one is a human being, there should be no weights and measures deciding what you’re allowed to do, barring probation or parole restrictions (which are temporary and should fall completely away after a prescribed period). Convicted felons who’ve fulfilled their parole could be checked on every so often rather than singled out for suspicion by having to cite their crime on a job application. Everyone needs health care. Everyone needs education. Everyone needs the right and opportunities to prosper. While there is no way, nor should there be, to give everyone the exact same upbringing or spectrum of opportunity, personal effort to succeed is a fine barometer of character and mettle. But as it is now, the poor and the ever-shrinking middle class are suffering a lack of basic health care while corporations ride taxpayers’ coattails to repeated quarterly revenue records, cackling all the way to the bank. It’s deplorable. I saw a pickup truck with a homemade panel top a couple of days ago. This plywood mess was painted up with warnings about government control and weird paranoid propaganda about Obama. I live in Houston, TX, and these people here really hate Obama. I voted for him in both the primary and the general election; it was my first primary. I think the people here feel about Obama the way I felt about GWB. I am unable to stomach any video of GWBush. He was giving a speech on TV once when I was at the hospital waiting to have tests run. I had to leave the waiting room and go down the hall, because he literally makes my skin crawl. I am wracked with waves of instinctive, purely visceral disgust at the sight and sound of him. He has a cameo of sorts in the movie Live Free or Die Hard, and I have to mute the TV and look away while the montage runs in which he says, “We will not falter, and we will not fail,” because the physical response is immediate and intense. When his father was elected President, I cried. I knew there would be war, and I was right. We then had the first Gulf War. GWB, though, made Daddy Bush look like a puppy who’d lick you to death in comparison. And this country, to the horror of the rest of the Western world, spiraled into some sick, right wing, fundamentalist surreal reality that could’ve been straight out of a Phillip K. Dick novel — and yet the “Christian” majority kept on tooting their horns for him, almost right up to the day he left office. The rest of us, the minority groups who love the Bill of Rights and feel that the Constitution is much more than just a goddamn piece of paper, watched in growing disbelief, dismay, and distress as it became okay to quite vocally suggest gays should be put to death and Constitutional amendments should be added that restricted rights rather than protected them. I don’t, and never will, understand how anyone can fear Obama or accuse him of being the Anti-Christ (I’m serious, it’s all over the place here) when he is so clearly a beacon of hope. How can a Christian fear religious freedom as if it were a threat to him, and how can a perfectly content and married suburbanite fear gay marriage as if it somehow would subvert the value of her own relationship? It boggles the mind. What’s so wrong with equal rights for all that it scares people who are in the obvious majority? Someone please explain this to me. To briefly return to the original topic of this post and piss off even more people — nonviolent crimes should not receive such harsh sentences, especially with juveniles. And victimless crimes shouldn’t either. All drug offenders should be released, and marijuana should be legalized, regulated, and taxed. It would bring in serious, substantial revenue for the government to pay for things like this 1.1 trillion health care plan. I know I’ve meandered all over the place in this post, but with so much going on right now, I had to put it somewhere. Feel free to air your opinions in comments, but please try to be smart and thoughtful — posting one sentence insults won’t do anything to make your case look intelligent.
|
| 6:52 am | Ugh-thud  I am SO tired. I am still trying to get my house decluttered and organized, and arranged in a way that is both functional and aesthetically pleasing. Imagine someone moving all your stuff into half your current space, and putting everything in all the wrong places, all mixed up. Imagine trying to work within the confines of that smaller space and organize it, putting things away where they are used most. It’s a nightmare, but there is progress in spurts and trickles. I had the living room nicely set up but it wasn’t doing it for me. Worse still was my bedroom, where I’d tried to move everything with personal significance in some wayward attempt to make my living room more “adult.” What it did was make my living room aesthetically meaningless to me (BOOOORING) and my bedroom way too crammed. I then started trying to weed out what wasn’t essential from the bedroom, putting it in boxes for storage, and every time I wanted to sit at my computer desk, I had to move boxes and bags out of the computer area to the bed. Then at bedtime I had to move them back. I fell twice within one week from my feet catching on things. Then I brought in the enormous corner cabinet that Jesi and I picked out on “as is” sale at Ikea in 2007 (paid for by my mother). I moved it into the corner of the living room and put my computer in it. Got it all set up, and then realized that the keyboard tray was as high as my kitchen table. Who the fuck types that high up? My arms don’t like it one bit. And in the course of the last week, we were blessed with four boxes of clothes that can fit my daughter, which we desperately needed, along with a bunch of stuff my mother brought over — everything from a six-disc cd changer to a bunch of berries like you’d use on a wreath, which I’ll use for my next Art League project. But this amounted to about 8 boxes in an already crowded apartment, plus we have all the Halloween stuff in boxes, and boom, I was unable to move in my it-was-clean-yesterday living room. I got really discouraged. So today I cleaned out the big shipping container shed we have and rearranged it, creating room to put some stuff in so I can have room to move in the house. I rearranged my living room and we went through the four boxes of clothes. I still have to clean out the closet of clothes we don’t want to make room for them, but this was a lot done today and I feel better. I’m also completely exhausted. Due to Halloween concerns (we went to a costume party and it was a major undertaking), I haven’t worked on the book I’m supposed to be editing. So that’s pressing hard on me. I also have another issue of Rending the Veil to edit and put together by the end of the month. I’ve been prodded by a concerned contributor regarding the not-yet-restored archives — we’ll have been at the new site for a year by Yule, and I’ve only restored two issues. Bad Sheta. And then there’s my long-suffering book, always shoved aside for other things that need to be done. It’s a good thing that I’m making actual progress nowadays, though. At least I’m confident it’ll all get done, and I’m working very hard to make sure of it. I have friends who care and who help me. I am blessed. Oh, and I drank absinthe for the first time (and then every night for about 5 days) over Halloween. Woot!
|