I swear I had one of those conversations with M. that made me think about something to write. But, somewhere between doing shit and less than shit all day, and not to get too scatological, actually shitting, I plum forgot.

Here’s all I know right now. We live near a regular farmer’s market and warm from sunshine, picked yesterday, stems still on, organiic strawberries are damn fine. Tasty and fine.

Other than that, check out the various pictures below from hanging near the Bay in the city of San Francisco the other day.

Not exactly sure, but I might have done the voyeur thing with a couple of killdeer by the San Francisco Bay. Really, though, I’m not sure if they are killdeer, and I ain’t got any idea about the real birds and the bees and doing it.

Judging by the looks of shame, the couple post-coitally:

I can’t see the commercial for the world’s first chewable birth control, and not think about Flinstone chewables.

When they come out with gummy birth control, I’ll assume kids are doing it before kindergarten, and I’ll start looking for the four horseman of the apocalypse.

Been doing some letter writing to Washington, DC. Letters without the white powder and cryptic syntax made from an alphabet slashed by knifepoint from periodicals.

Nope, these correspondences were the real deal legitimacy of an informed constituency.

We’s the people gotta save our new media radio. Thanks to the bastards at the RIAA pulling strings to help keep the cash in their dying old school industry, the Copyright Royalty Board is looking for some usury-type rates from the new school web.

Congress is soon to vote on a bill that could set things right and keep the little, but wired, guys from getting crushed. (And, if you’re a latte-sipping, effete, elite who Fox News bitches about, NPR is pushing big time against the CRB rates.)

I’m a fan of Pandora.com, which wrote about the issue here on its weblog.

Save Net Radio has some info on the issue and links to send letters to your legislators. Get our American groove on and influence someone.

It is so damn hard not to cynical about the shiny TV-version of the green movement and the nobody gives a shit observation of Earth Day.

I want to believe the carbon offset buying does something. It’s hard to shake the notion that it’s about as effective in changing the world as my handing a buck to a bum that made me feel just guilty enough or slightly less of a dick. It also has a weird ickiness. like a medieval, flagellating penance. You know, you do the careless flight, piss some money away, but you tithe a liberal fund and it’s all clean and purified, slate-wise.

I want to get the joke of Sheryl Crow’s no spare square asswipe. But, the biodiesel juiced bus makes me cringe. After that I start thinking about the agribusiness that greew the corn that got synthesized to fuel the car. How were those tractors fueled?

I wish it were 1970 again. Some time near the original Earth Day, our first grade class polluted an aquarium and, I think, but don’t really remember, killed some fish. A kid name Bobby, who may have been Bobby Burns, except I wasn’t Scottish a couple of centuries ago, and I got chosen to represent at the state-wide science fair at MIT.

There we stood precocious, six-year-old conservationists ‘splaining the need for clean water. Back then, water came from pipes. It didn’t come in plastic bottles that likely dirty up some resources somewhere else on the planet.

I also have some dim recollection of my brothers collecting newspaper for various drives. They would pack every square inch possible apart from perches for the driver and a passenger of Pat’s sedan. Through some magical process the collector would weigh the whole car paper and all, take out the paper and weigh the car again. The boys then got cash at some ratio for the weight of he papers.

Would more people recyle the excess crap with which we are now inundated if a Boy Scout got a check?

Yes. Yet another life experience and conversation.

Today, for the first time ever I walked into a process server office. It’s one of those businesses, like scorpion extermination or something equally fanciful and rare, that you don’t think a single thought about until you’re in need.

I filed the court papers for the dramatic court room drama in our lives. Then, I walked down the street to one of those nondescript office buildings where you find insurers and dentists and lawyers and teeny weeny marketing operations, all just starting out. The kind of building that could have been something else before it was professional offices and maybe has an awning.

A toddle down the hall, and I’m standing amid a couple of big, paper-loaded desks in a compact room. I knocked on the doorjamb, and a good-sized fella with the best, not-of-the-mainstream coiffing. The flowing, shoulder-length gray hair wen great with the classic Custer-styled goatee. You remember Custer, general with the famous Brazilian wax line of hair anchoring his chin.

Not at all a done deal, but I got to ask a nice man a lot of questions about a kind of esoteric day job. Even better we shot the shit about jurisprudence and all sorts of crazy ideas like teaching folks about civics and contract law.

I dug he saw himself as part of a chain helping little people fighting against bad people and the bad guys ended up paying his fee and court costs. Rock on legal helping man.

I’m not saying I’m quitting my job tomorrow, but I have a new fantasy gig to sustain me.

You’ve been served.

In various internet-type fake conversations and some real world conversations and on television shows and cable news infotainment, there’s been hand wringing and bunched undies over the firing of Don Imus. As I have said, I don’t give a flying fuck about some wrinkled nastiness, who’s been talking shit for years for major pay.

Free speech is a sacred belief system for me. But, free or no, consequences there shall always be if you say something that gets folks’ attention. If you live by saying what ever the fuck you want, you make a lot of cake off of it and then the market says, “Um, yeah, you can shut up now,” the free-speech dialogue is working.

From Wired.com I found out about something that does raise my free-speech willies.

Mike Daisey, actor, monologist, performer guy, was doing a piece at the American Repertory Theater in my old Cambridge stomping grounds. Cambridge, liberal bastion known as the People’s Republic. ART, pinko experimental theater, where you are likely to find the avant garde, the modern and the controversial theater in the Boston area.

So, at that ART, in that city of Cambridge, a group of 87 folks, reported to be largely highschoolers and part of a Christian choir, all got up and walked out presumably for taking offense at the language or something. On the way, one of the dipshits poured his bottled water on the auteur’s notes.

Here’s my main, overarching question: Why the fuck did they buy tickets?

I’m from the area. As a kid, I went on a few theatrical field trips, but never to the ART. Pretty much it was understood, that was grown up, legit, thinking man’s theater. Adult themes and maybe some spicy Mamet-type language, or Ibsen’s syphillitic drama. Maturity and appreciation of some higher shit was assumed, not for the faint of heart or closed minded.

Why would a Christian group, I’m assuming bussing themselves in from some suburb, not Cambridge Christians, which may not exist, go? Why spend the money, take the time to see someone who talks in the contemporary vernacular about stuff that may not be Sunday-picnic like?

My fear in the free-speech wars is now people can go out looking to be offended and looking to pick a fight.

I’m hip to voices speaking out for what they want. But, the way I look at this theater thing is, Mike Daisey was hosting a private party. They showed up at his house and raised a ruckus. He wasn’t political, he’s not controversial, he’s not an outspoken target acting a lightening rod for some cause worth evangelizing over. Nope, just an artist trying to share a bit of himself.

I just realized these guys put this thing on the interwebtubes. Calling my lawyer.

I just haven’t felt so much like writing in the last few days. Mostly, it’s still shaking off a cold, I suspect, and a headache. And, maybe it’s the one degree of separation from a big-time act of crazy horror.

Then, there’s the nattering noise behind me in my office, which I suspect is also the source of the current rhinovirus. I tune in and out of the noise in my actually large, real wood, state of the art, ergonomic, comfy-like, but cube-nonetheless cube. With a cold and a headache I tend to get caught in the noise.

One thing I wish I could alter about the current workaday world would be the cube-farm. Some days, usually when the convo turns to banal complaints and misinformation about nutrition given the abundance of snack food in the office, I dream and yearn for a cone of silence.

From the news that used to be new, until bigger news broke, I still have one lingering question. How the hell does this man have a girlfriend, let alone one causing a scandal?
They say power is attractive to your Washington, DC chicks, but um, for me, not with a borrowed twat, as it were.

Strangely, every shot of the gal pal I could find on the web is the same profile.

I’m going to imagine the right half of her face is kind of like Two-Face in Batman. Otherwise, she could do better than this guy.

I’m mildly obsessed with the reverb coming from the national news about the Virgina Tech killer. There’s the news story, then the news story about the press coverage. Then there’s the analysis of the coverage and whether the coverage is covering the right or wrong things. Of course, then, there’s the speculation that media influenced the killer and whether media will now glorify his infamy.

Here’s the deal. I believe one thing to be true. There are crazy, fucking animals amongst us homo sapiens. It’s random, it’s sick, it’s unpredictable and sadly, every present. Life is random. Who’s batshit crazy AND homicidal isn’t known until the batshit crazy fucker kills someone. It just sucks.

And, for fuck’s sake, I wish the web and cable news commentary on the killer’s crappy writing would just stop. Writing crazy shit doesn’t equate with homicidal horror.

Here’s a test over here, if you need some proof.