As Slow as the Summer Seems On a Hot Day Drinking Beer Outside Riverside or Standing in the Middle of a White-Hot Road between Bakersfield and Hell Waiting for Santa Claus.

This, the second slowest week of the year in Blegsylvania, perhaps a breath-catching reevaluation of my coordinates might not help you, but it might me.

1. Maybe Obama and the Democratic congress, especially senators, are as progressive as American politics will allow at this moment, regardless of the complex and cynical reasons why.
2. My team sucks. That makes it more my team. I'm the kind of dope whose money for season-ticket renewal is coming due (and you know who you are) that my team has already spent on a left-footed El Salvadoran midfielder hopefully taller than Franco Niell. This entitles me to strong and kneejerk opinions whose ferocious anger at my own I've earned the right to profanely and hyperbolically shout.
3. Less-shitty does apply if #1 is true.
4. Shoot me: What if Obama has more moxie, ruthlessness, blind ambition and the skills to get it done than any politician currently striding the globe (and he hasn't, isn't, does but doesn't), how much could he get done in 2010 America?

The hoary truth: My team is less-shitty in the fraction it's less-shitty only because that fraction is our influence.

Well, this, the second slowest week of the year in Blegsylvania, I'm bored and when bored dream of tinkering - you can see I've moved a few things around already so that a project you may or not have noticed you can continue to notice or not, and I daydream about subtle color changes and reorganizing the blegrell so it makes honest sense, but I'm fairly certain I can talk myself out of those two.

Meanwhile, it's been a couple of months since I posted this, without doubt another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever, probably in my top ten actually:

You, um, do know to click the songs before starting reading the post, yes?

• This is exactly what I've been saying.
• I love Old Paleo Dirty 101 Bama (who got the hell out of Alabama), but the sooner Alabama and the other ex-Confederacy states break away to form the third world country of Crackerstan, the sooner more of my tax dollars can go to those who need it in the real America.
• Your Fucking Washington Post.
• Your Fucking Washington Post.
• UPDATE! World's Shittiest Human takes the opportunity on Giftmas to prove he is the World's Shittiest Human.
• UPDATE! The sublede of this article - Political turmoil has made it nearly impossible for anyone in Iran to support nuclear cooperation without being accused of capitulating to the West - proves Iran has its own World's Shittiest Human competitors.
• UPDATE! Pastor Sanctimonious, typing from his mansion, tells you the TRUE message of Giftmas is SHUT UP AND EMBRACE YOUR POVERTY, YOU FUCKING PEASANT!
• Your Fucking Washington Post.
• Pigpunditry! Palace sources say Patrick Stewart is about to be knighted by Queen Elizabeth. It turns out he is an avid supporter of Britain’s Labour party; his support must be especially welcome in this, one of Labour’s darker hours. Coincidentally, I have over the past couple of months been watching DVDs of Star Trek: The Next Generation, a show I missed completely in its run of 1987 to 1994; and I confess myself amazed that so many conservatives are fond of it. Its messages are unabashedly liberal ones of the early post-Cold War era – peace, tolerance, due process, progress (as opposed to skepticism about human perfectibility).

• Star Trek and Moral Judgment.

UPDATE!

I finally remembered the episode of the Picard photo I luckily stumbled upon, and it's.... Ardra!

• UPDATE! Woman jumps Vatican barrier, knocks Pope to the ground, and an American Catholic from Texas grasps the event's significance: "I'm really mad because I had a perfect shot lined up," she said. "I'm still shaking."
• Why yes, there is a reason I don't read Reason.
• UPDATE! Irrational Exuberance.
• The Year in Crazy, part one.

• UPDATE! One can't be a lifelong Mocomofer and not note the death of George Michael. I understand his influence in the industry, his standing in Greater Districtville, but I never watched. Once Glenn Brenner - a comedic genius -died I stopped watching local news (or rather, I only watched local news to watch Brenner poke Gordon Peterson into losing it on set).
• My Future Hell.
• ICC!
• Bus route paralleling ICC to be cut!
• Georgia Avenue Greenway!
• Crisis in Cabin John!
• Crisis in Silver Spring!
• Taking back Alexandria!
• SoccerPlex!
• How will soccer tactics evolve in the next ten years?

• Poetry Best Sellers of 2009? is mostly suck.
• UPDATE! How poetry has changed in the past ten years. It's ahead of fiction in depicting now. It's not torturing epistemology for golf claps - THERE IS NOTHING MORE BORING THAN EPISTEMOLOGY FOR GOLF CLAPS! - it's rawer, it's better than it was ten years ago.
• UPDATE! Though Spicer's Collected generating such heat says more about current reading more than writing, I suppose....
• What writers at the New Yorker read - includes Maqroll!
• A review of what I think the Most Overrated Novel Ever.
• Vinyl v Digital.
• The 100 Jazz Albums that Shook the World.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.

PSYCHOANALYSIS: AN ELEGY

Jack Spicer

What are you thinking about?

I am thinking of an early summer.

I am thinking of wet hills in the rain

Pouring water. Shedding it

Down empty acres of oak and manzanita

Down to the old green brush tangled in the sun,

Greasewood, sage, and spring mustard.

Or the hot wind coming down from Santa Ana

Driving the hills crazy,

A fast wind with a bit of dust in it

Bruising everything and making the seed sweet.

Or down in the city where the peach trees

Are awkward as young horses,

And there are kites caught on the wires

Up above the street lamps,

And the storm drains are all choked with dead branches.

What are you thinking?

I think that I would like to write a poem that is slow as a summer

As slow getting started

As 4th of July somewhere around the middle of the second stanza

After a lot of unusual rain

California seems long in the summer.

I would like to write a poem as long as California

And as slow as a summer.

Do you get me, Doctor? It would have to be as slow

As the very tip of summer.

As slow as the summer seems

On a hot day drinking beer outside Riverside

Or standing in the middle of a white-hot road

Between Bakersfield and Hell

Waiting for Santa Claus.

What are you thinking now?

I’m thinking that she is very much like California.

When she is still her dress is like a roadmap. Highways

Traveling up and down her skin

Long empty highways

With the moon chasing jackrabbits across them

On hot summer nights.

I am thinking that her body could be California

And I a rich Eastern tourist

Lost somewhere between Hell and Texas

Looking at a map of a long, wet, dancing California

That I have never seen.

Send me some penny picture-postcards, lady,

Send them.

One of each breast photographed looking

Like curious national monuments,

One of your body sweeping like a three-lane highway

Twenty-seven miles from a night’s lodging

In the world’s oldest hotel.

What are you thinking?

I am thinking of how many times this poem

Will be repeated. How many summers

Will torture California

Until the damned maps burn

Until the mad cartographer

Falls to the ground and possesses

The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding.

What are you thinking now?

I am thinking that a poem could go on forever.

Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever: