but first a word from our pal Howard Owens:

I used to say that I couldn’t decide who to vote for. In the last view days, I’ve decided to vote against Michael Moore. Whatever I can do to make MM miserable, that’s how I’ll vote.

Also, Tony writes, “no gary, we’re not mad that he is “liberating” iraq, we’re mad that he took us to iraq under the guise of wmd, not human rights issues.”

No, you’re mad because he’s a Republican liberating Iraq. You’re mad because he doesn’t fit your ideal of a politician liberating Iraq. You’re mad because you don’t like him and he liberated Iraq.

It has nothing to do with WMD, because you never believed it was WMD in the first place, or argued that the WMD wasn’t a good enough reason to go to war, or whatever … you were against the war before the war for whatever reason you could find, and only later latched on to the “Bush Lied” meme, however untruthful that meme actually is.

The left’s agenda has never been about Iraq, pro or con. It’s been about Bush and hating Bush and pushing a liberal/progressive/partisan agenda. If Bush said “I support socialized medicine,” the left would suddenly say socialized medicine is a bad thing.

The right did the same thing to Clinton was president.

Moore is a perfect example of the “hate Bush first” league … invade Afghanistan = bad thing; now, it’s “we didn’t send enough troops to Afghanistan and we didn’t send them quickly enough.”

First, Afghanistan shouldn’t have been invaded, now it’s that it wasn’t invaded properly. It’s called moving the goal posts, and the left does it to Bush on a daily basis, just as the right did it to Clinton for eight years.

a few points howard,

im not a liberal. in the last elections i voted for Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Clinton, and Nader. i don’t follow groups, i follow my heart. groups can follow me if they want.

im a born-again who listens to nwa, gwar, and iron maiden. im a blogger and i can pull chicks. im a black man whose favorite record this year is the new loretta lynn.

i agree with many planks of the republican platform: less government, personal privacy, self-reliance.

i also agree with many planks of the democratic platform: help the poor, tax the fucking rich, more money for schools than for bombs.

i also agree with many planks of the libertarian platform: individual liberty, personal responsibility; and a foreign policy of non-intervention, peace, and free trade.

i also agree with my hippie friends who think we should legalize weed, socialize meds, abolish the fcc, break the monopoly of ticketmaster, and allow women (and men) to be topless whenever they please. not sure which party is rallying around those things.

and i think the dh is bad for baseball. duh.

i wasn’t in favor of invading afghanistan or iraq. im still not in favor of what we did in iraq or afghanistan, although im less upset about the latter than the former.

one reason im not jumping up and down about kerry is i believe he shares these beliefs but is willing to bend because he is a politician and doesn’t want to be seen as a bleeding heart. its impossible to hope for a leader with a spine AND a brain, so i wont dwell. but sorry to break it to you howard, but i would have been upset if clinton had sent us to war with iraq too. or gore. or hillary. or anybody. especially over wmd.

lots of people have wmd and we don’t invade them. similarily there are lots of murderous tyrants who aren’t sitting on barrels of oil and we don’t “liberate” those people either.

im a pacifist but if Bush said right now that he wanted to “liberate” Saudi Arabia, i would be in favor of it. the victims of 9/11 don’t deserve to die in vain, and america needs to get back into the business of fighting wars against people who started fucked up shit against us.

there is a huge difference my friend between don’t tread on me and don’t think about treading on me.

freedom is a double edged sore.

which brings us to your unfounded question, if bush said he was in favor of free health care, i would vote for him. i fuckin dare him.

perfect example: someone asked me today what i would do if i found out i had cancer. among other things i said i would quit my stupid job. and then we realized i wouldn’t be able to because then i would have to fight cancer without any health care! even terminal im chained to my cubicle.

my kingdom for an accountant.

i don’t have problems with bush because he’s a republican. i have problems with him because he’s a moron, a liar, a failure, why we hate fratboys, and because he’s Not a republican. less government doesn’t mean more FCC. less government doesn’t mean coming out against gay marriages from the executive branch. less government doesn’t mean giving less money to soldiers as they’re in the middle of a hopeless “war.”

not everyone who thinks bush is bad is a liberal.

some people just don’t like being lied to in regards to why this country goes to war.

other people don’t like being lied to about when public people are asked about their private sex life.

me, i couldn’t care less about what you do sexually in the privacy of your oval office, but don’t bullshit me about real matters of life and death.

and don’t call me a liberal.

im an american, i can think for myself.

the beetlejuice song video, h/t Short + police and theives + she verb, where do you guys play online poker?

now that i want to spend like five minutes with her shes skeptical and nervous.

we’ll send two sentences via myspace email every other day. i use it because i can tell if shes read it. this is a girl who was my girlfriend pretty much for a year and a half maybe more. who knows. she’d call several times a day. shed email shed chat shed fly out here she moved out here she spent weeks here. and now she doesnt even want to spend five minutes with me, even four, and i understand, ive been freaky with her, not sexy freaky but reclusive freaky like rivers cuomo freaky like i dont have a top hat big enough to hide underneath when she calls me like shes done over the years and i dont know why im wanting to spend four minutes with her. i dont know what id say i dont know what id do i dont know what would happen. nothing would happen if thats what youre worried about. she has a man. lives with the man. gotta respect that. and its gone on for a while now so good for them good for her and good for him because that girl like so many are all about love love love and he will always feel wanted and needed and who doesnt want that. except me.

i finished two days of interviews with prospective companies and i like them all. but because this is a holiday weekend im getting the feeling that im not going to know from any of them what my future holds until at least next week. meanwhile i have this new used car that runs prrrrfectly. so well i cant even believe it. it runs like a car with 40k miles, not more than twice that. i just need a knob for the volume control and a wiper blade. other than that its perfect.

so its 5:37am ive been watching princes sign of the times which was on black starz. prince is playing drums now and wearing a cops hat as sheila e dances around. so what i want to do with this week is drive somewhere desolate. i have enough money to maybe get a hotel room in vegas for a few days and write. the only problem is i dont have a laptop and what id really like to do is finish Stiff and then start something new that id have ready for christmas cuz the feeling i have from people is they dont want any more greatest hits from the old blog posts, what they want is something new that they wouldnta been able to read on the blog.

sadly the only way i can do that is not be in this house cuz when im here all i wanna do is blog fuck and fight. in that order. and eat. ive been eating like crazy. i had two of those new jack in the box chicoplates or whatever that thing is called. basically theyre two quarter cheese patties cheese bacon lettuce and this fancy bun. i had a coupon that gave me two for the price of one, but you know fast food joints, the price of a sandwhich a la carte is ridiculous, so two cipppolates was four bucks plus tax. and it was way too much red meat for this dj.

vegas is the perfect escape route for citizens of los angeles. its a five hour drive for those like me who like to mosey and take little stops and take pictures and meet people. its a three hour drive for maniacs like karisa, and its a one hour flight for people who dont factor in the hour and a half in the airport the half hour on the runway and the hour getting out of the airport and renting a car. thats why i like to drive.

i have an ipod bursting full of new music from missy eliot to the foo fighters to audioslave and the white stripes and the new teenage fanclub. and i have two full howard stern shows i havent heard yet from the last two days. if i went to sleep now and woke up at 1 i could have three howards in my ipod for the trip, the only problem is i would miss out on the blogger meetup on the beach on friday and thats why ive tried my best not to tie myself down to any responsibilities whatsoever for the exception of job interviews and strolls to the curb to move the car due to street cleaning.

but i have no laptop, but i was watching prince who didnt have a laptop either and then it dawned on me, bring the whole friggin rig. youre gonna be in a hotel room, just set up your shit right there at the dining room table your big computer your big monitor your big ideas by lynda barry and knock out your bullshit.

but you have no stories to tell

the little demon in my ear whispers

oh yes he certainly does

the medium sized demon in my pants sneers

the funny thing is, all i want to do is sit in the giant hottub and sip armerettos.

id need a straw hat and a cheesy gold chain necklace.

i wonder if ashleys sister is still a lifeguard at ballys?

flipping through my file-a-dex i stop at a and think ashley, do i have any stories of going to vegas and meeting a blonde teenager named ashley that would be of interest to the good people of the world? stories that i have never told before? tales that have never reached the ears of even my closest friends?

no, sadly ours was a very simple and sweet thing. she said she loved me and i said it back. we’d blab and fall asleep talking on the phone.

until shed scream in my ear and tell me to wake up.

like the sunlight shining through my mexican blanket curtain is trying to do.

six oh one am and if i was smart id get four hours sleep and be at caesars by supper.

riley dog + my taco stand + its time to buy sirius + pink is the new blog

googled the college of creative studies and found my blog.

and had some questions for me about the school and about her curiosity about writing for the daily nexus.

theres no better combination for learning how to write than to be a freshman in the college of creative studies who is already interested in the daily nexus, the greatest college newspaper in america.

but i wont bore you with old war stories of the olden days when we used such crazy things like 5 1/4 disks and paper and glue and rulers and pencils. even though it was the beach we had to walk five miles uphill to the keg parties and the girls would only go as far as second base on the first date.

much simpler times back then. quaint.

anyway she asked me what i hated about the college of creative stuides, i suppose so she could prepare for the worst.

i told her that i didnt hate any part of it, but that she should be on the lookout for a few things when going into a writing program.

first she should actually try the things that the professors suggest. i had a teacher who hated talking animals, talking inanimate objects, science fiction, anything that wasnt happening right now, or better yet, two hundred years ago.

his theory, though he never said it, was that sci fi, talking animals, and lets say escalators that speak chinese are really things having a conversation, so why not make it easy on yourself and just make those two things People because, especially when youre just a fucking idiot getting drunk for the first time regularilly, getting two people to talk realistically on the page is tough enough.

you’ll have the rest of your life to write talking animal stories, in college get the basics down and write at least a few kickass stories involving talking people.

my other bit of advice is to read everything they give you. the college of creative studies has no grades no tests no finals, so they load you up with so much work that theres no way you will be able to finish it all, but what you will end up doing is way more than in a normal class. my motto about reading was if it was light study, if it was dark party. because i found that even if i tried to cram for three hours from 1am-4am i really only read and comprehended 5 pages, so while i was sober and alert and awake i should knock out as many series of 5 pages that i could, and if say it was about to get dark i would slip in as much studying as i could until it got dark, then id eat and then id fucking rage like a demon released from the depths of isla vista’s sordid past. guilt free.

the nexus is exactly the same thing except youre getting your instruction from your peers as opposed to someone who youre paying to teach you. in one day you might get edited by 5 people who, if youre lucky, will sit down with you and show you how theyre cleaning your shit up. one guy might be a big softspoken barefooted genius named wade, ten minutes later you might get an earful from a little blonde wiff of an angel named jenny, then mr os or william torren might copy edit your shit and then later the night editor might need your help to write a headline. people who think that their writing is precious never make it through the first week of a newspaper so think of your masterpieces the way i do about mine, like lovely pieces of shit, some nicely formed some forced and sloppy, all examples of your place in history at that moment and all very difficult to call genius but the ones that are totally stand out in their magnificence.

newspaper writing helps you get shit overwith and moved on to the next thing. and the deadlines are little blessings because lets say you write four stories in a week. if you can do that for a month then a five page history paper for school is a walk in the park. hell you can totally knock that out before bongloads and dinner.

and then you have all night to make a name for yourself.

give em something to write about baby and good luck.

interview with an escalator + fuck fuck fuck + five bloggers in this picture