RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPiTER

Dovate.com has become riddled with problems. What are the problems? I don’t know. Basically, large, important swaths of the site have stopped working in Firefox. As a loyal Firefox user myself – this was a crisis that hit particularly close to home.

But anyway, the quickest and easiest fix was to add a title page to the site. Without getting too deep into the history of dovate.com, this site was thrown together haphazardly, with content and design management systems not being any real part of the its architecture. I’ve taken it upon myself to learn some real programming, particularly PHP and MySQL, but a new layout with a real content management system is at least 3 months away. In the meantime, please enjoy the new front page. I’ll try to change the image often. Please enjoy today’s image, taken yesterday afternoon in New Jersey.

In other news, I’d like to take a moment to make a point.

Harpers is a great magazine.

I love reading internet conspiracy theories.

Strangely, these two strands of thought have been growing startlingly close together. Example in point. This month’s Harpers cover story, penned by editor Lewis Lapham calls emphatically for the impeachment of President Bush. Now that’s perfectly reasonable, even fashionable in Washington D.C. these days. The conspiratorial part comes a few pages into the article, when Lapham states: : “The country is threatened by free-booting terrorists unaligned with a foreign government or an enemy army; the secrets are those of the Bush Administration, chief among them its determination to replace a democratic republic with something more safely totalitarian…”

This is great news! It even makes up for their disappointingly flaccid cover story on how Bush stole the 2004 election by means of massive voter fraud, (None Dare Call it Stolen, Mark Crispin Miller) In my opinion, if Miller was going to write a cover story on election fraud, he should have gone all the way. Computer based irregularities should have been the focus and not the whispered subtext.

But getting back to Harpers descending into the territory of Rep. Cynthia McKinney and Wayne “at extreme risk to be suicided” Madsen, I can’t wait for next months issue where they’ll discuss how 9-11 was an inside job and next July, when they blow the cover off the government’s secret alliance with a massive interplanetary federation of extraterrestrials. But anyway, I’m only half kidding…. For as long as this site is functioning, that’s all for now.

In last weekend’s great unraveling, I lost my broccoli post. I later received threatening emails (from a friend) demanding that I return it to its rightful place so that she and the farmer/radical types she’s fallen in with could see it whenever they wanted. I lost the original text - which was edited and a better piece of writing, but the images are all the same. So HERE:

*

The same thing happens every morning. I head out to work full of inspiration. I usually ride my bike – so as it is, I’m riding through the city streets watching the golden light of early morning reflect softly off buildings and glass, admiring shadows stretching westward, flocks of pigeons circling and roosting on ornate ledges. In my mind I promise myself that I’ll wake up early some weekend morning and catch the light of early morning while I actually have the time to cultivate it.

I imagine what might keep me going through the day and my mind forms stories I want to write, observations I want to explain, ideas I want to share. I leave for work with my mind full of things and then, disturbingly, I have to work.

Now I understand the importance of offering a service to society so as to contribute to the upkeep and maintenance of that society – but the whole drudgery of it is really starting to grate on my nerves.

But that’s where I stopped… that thought will not be expanded today.

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BEGIN 2-22

Yesterday afternoon on my way home from work I found a full-size dumpster overflowing with broccoli. It was the most amazing thing I’ve seen this year. There’s something incredible about stumbling across several thousand pounds of discarded broccoli. Why is it there? How did it get there? Who made the decision to throw it out?

With these things running through my head I cursed myself for not having brought my camera.. This morning, I made a point to leave a few minutes early, in the hopes that the broccoli would still be there. It was.

This evening while cleaning out email, I ran across something very strange. It took me a minute to remember, but then I realized it was the first in a series of self assigned writing assignments. In these assignments, I’d think up a topic in a second and write a page about it. This masterpiece was created a week before I started my current job. Its title and its concept: Clown Trapped in A Burning Car:

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It happened in a flash. Literally a flash, as the trucks headlights swung across 2 lanes of traffic and into my path. In the blinding brilliance of halogen beams cutting through the windshield like some wild spirit, I saw the certainty of death in the eyes of that truck driver. I also saw in that split second - a suspension of belief - as he realized his truck was hurtling towards a clown car.

I was the clown. Usually hired for jobs at kid’s birthdays and traveling carnivals, I was on my way home from a gig at one hell of a strange bachelorette party. In what turned out to be a cataclysmic error, I decided to take the local route. Traffic was too thick and I had a little too much to drink to drive on the Garden State Parkway. That shitty meth deprived driver whose eyes I met in that instant, took the turn too fast and overcompensated after he cut into the shoulder. Now there I was, with a second, maybe 2 to prepare for the inexorable impact.

People say the seconds stretch out long enough for your entire life to flash before your eyes, and yes they do. But what they never tell you is that even in that space of mysteriously convex time, there aren’t enough real moments in which to feel fear. Following instinct and pulsing with adrenaline, I jarred the steering wheel so hard to the right I thought I’d rip it out of the dashboard. The car cut hard enough into the blind darkness of the New Jersey countryside, to send my big red nose flying right off my face.

The impact, which came at the rear driver’s side of my tiny Corolla sent the car end over end into the cool Jersey air. I remember a moment of peculiar silence between the time I left the ground and the time the roof hit the first of a series of pine trees. A giant shoe, sent flying from its place on the passenger seat smacked me in the face, temporarily blinding me. Then came impact… and the rolling.

Tumbling was more like it, as glass and metal flew without mercy through the cabin of my little Toyota, cutting my face hands and fluffy, oversize clothing. The passenger side roof collapsed, hemming me into a rapidly narrowing cocoon of gnarled steel. A hissing and loud pop accompanied the car’s grinding halt. A few seconds after the sinister pop, the sweet and smell of an electric fire filled the car. I was pinned upside-down, white make-up stinging my eyes and choking on the sharp and putrid smoke.

I found both arms trapped, pinned between the former elements of my vehicle. I felt the fire spreading, not in my senses, but in my minds eye. I saw it catching a dab of engine oil and spreading through the interior components on its unstoppable march to the gas tank. In a slow, burning internal panic, I tore free my left arm and undid my seat belt. By some miracle, it unlatched and let me fall the a few inches to the roof. A wisp of flame caught the polyester of the clown suit…

And that’s as far as I got.

For no particular reason, here’s a woodpecker. It’s a Downy woodpecker and it lives in Northern California.

That’s all.