Last Dispatch from Riverside

T minus two days.

It's getting weird. Last night was weirdest of all. It's one thing buying tickets and running around town preparing for my grand exit... but throwing away most of the accumulated "stuff" I've gathered over the years was tough. Weirdest of all was tossing clothes. Anybody who knows me knows that I am not a fashionable man. I'm as anti-trend as they come and I buy for durability and minimalism. But, man... throwing clothes away was hard. I have a giant yardwork garbage bag of the old band t-shirts and whatnot that I couldn't give away. It's going in the attic. Diane is letting me stay downstairs now that someone else has moved upstairs. I was up till 6:30 last night finishing up clearing the flat out then woke up again at 11:30 to help her move in.

A lot of people want to know how I feel... well, here are some thoughts:

First I feel like I'm about to slam into a brick wall. Not in a bad way... it's just I'm moving very fast towards something large and beyond my knowledge. I have no idea what China is or what the Chinese are like. It's just a big one-dimensional block that is directly in front of me that encompasses all of my peripheral vision.

Second, I feel like I'm committing some ritualistic suicide. This is harder to explain and there's no reason to freak out, it's not as macabre as it sounds. It has a lot to do with Nick and Richard's deaths and my justification thereof... but I'm more or less killing the life I've spent a decade building in Jacksonville. I'm fully aware of the realities that I'll never hear from most of the people I hung with in my years here ever again. That's fine, that's life anyway... it just exacerbates when you move overseas. It's suicide in that I'm killing off that part of my life where I have to at least try to fit in, where I have to get the 9-5, where I'm supposed to be looking for a breeding partner, buy house, talk mutual funds, watch American Idol... all that stuff. It's not me.

I don't fit into the mainstream of American culture and the corruption and commodification of the counter-culture ideal is more repulsive every day. Out here in Riverside, even bikes become trendy. People sing songs about them, where shirts with them, name bands after them.... and hey, I love bicycles and deplore what cars have done to the sub/urban landscape... but at some point it looses any real meaning and becomes a fashionable trend like rolling the legs on your jeans up.

It sounds more dark than it really is, but this life I know is dead. Once I step foot on that plane, it's gone... and I'm doing it to myself.

Get Well Cards

Anybody who's in debt to the Karma Police, here's your bail:

My little niece is in at Wolfson's Children Hospital. We just confirmed she has leukemia. She's nine years old. Needless to say, the prognosis is fairly grim. She'll be in the hospital for at least another fifteen(!) weeks for chemo, then a transplant, and then she goes home. She'll be out of school for at least nine months to a year recovering at home. After that, there's a 15% chance of relapse.

Her mother, my step-sister, reads her e-cards everyday. If you've got a minute, just start one out "I'm a friend of your Uncle Trey..." and do the standard get-well routine.

Here's the e-card link at CaringBridge.

Hama Rules in Gaza

Things are about to get silly in the Levant again. This time some infatistas raided an IDF Merkava tank and managed to kidnap an Israeli soldier. They're treating him well enough, the only issue is that they're demanded all women and children under 18 be released from Israeli jails. Sounds almost reasonable... almost. "Hostages" for hostages. I have no doubt Israeli jails are filled with innocents with the wrong friends or people in the wrong place at the wrong time... but I'm not convinced Palestinian women and teens could never have taken part in violence against Israeli citizens.

Sounds like a situation adults could talk there way through, though, right? Hamas's new leadership has asked that the prisoner be treated well but that the kidnapping itself is a natural reaction against Israeli aggressions. Maybe.

Well. The situation spirals out of control now as Olmert, the new Israeli prime-minister replacing the all-but-dead Sharon, is promising a broad offensive to search for the first Israeli soldier kidnapped in a decade. Great. They also want to target Hamas leaders. So much for the idea of democracic Arab institutions living long enough to see a peaceful transfer of power.

This is Hama Rules, pure and simple. Hamas Rules are guidelines Thomas Friedman observed while he was stationed in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War. It basically states that every enemy action will be responded to with the most amount of violence possible. You blow up a car bomb on my street, I shell your neighborhood for twelve hours. You kill my brother, I dedicate my life to killing everybody in your nation. It's basic foreign and domestic policy in the Middle East. Friedman coined the term after Bashir al-Assad in Syria leveled the town of Hama when the Islamic Brotherhood was acting up and hatching assassination plots. Just leveled the entire damn city. (It's interesting to note that Assad and Saddam Hussein were both Ba'athists, secular Arab nationalists, and that the Islamic Brotherhood was the intellectual foundation for al Qaida.)

Things have been calm in the Levant since Sharon started seeing the light and realizing the endless cycle of Hama Rules. I doubt this will rekindle the Intifada but this reeks of "business as usual" before the cease-fire. It wouldn't hurt Israel to respond by saying it would look into releasing the falsely assumed, and it certainly wouldn't Hamas to say it wants an eventual peace with Israel and work to facilitate the release of the soldier as a sign of good faith. We're not going to see that anytime soon. Kaboooooom for tat.

Tattoo sketch

A dirty Photoshop sketch of what looks to my next tattoo. Nick, Richard, and Hunter S. Thompson all took their own lives last year. All exhibited much the same free spirit raging against "normal" society that I think the gonzo fist signifies. It has a healthy dose of social justice loaded into it's meaning for me too. I took out the peyote button normally held inside the fist and replaced it with a celtic triangle similar to the one on my back... again, loaded with symbolism and perhaps a bit of self-mythology. I'll expand in later posts.