So, here in Cali some of the news is full of Stanley Tookie Williams and how he’s fixing to die.

Straight out I am anti-death penalty. I think that eye for an eye logic that it’s got going for it is antedeluvian, you know, before the flood, seriously old school. Evolving (yeah, fucking evolution again), evolving as a society means you got to beat weapons to plowshares and find new civilized behaviors.

Chief, then, is not killing in the fucking sacred name of no one. No killing.

Still and all, there’s some tiny reptile part of my brain that’s kind of comfy with Ahnold basically telling his old Venice Beach lifting buddy, “Tough shit, man, you going to die.”

All of the Nobel-prize-nominated reform shit was starting to get on my nerves. You can’t gangland style mow down a few guys and a whole fucking Asian family and be totally a saint. Maybe if you were doing a Joan of Arc soldier for the lord thang, and you, like, had to kill. Maybe, then you are a philosopher, king, statesman, saint and bound for glory.

Co-founder of a huge syndicate of thugs and criminals, though, not a demi-god, not a saviour. Maybe it’s sad and all, the human story, the beginning of a youth looking for a cause and a family, a neighborhood organization to improve his world. Maybe people do change. Maybe his redemption was to have lived to write about his mistakes.

I want everyone on death row granted clemency with life imprisonment but no death penalty. I want prison reform and flawless justice and healthcare and counseling and outreach and addiction assistance and all kinds of just societal shite that would lessen crime and give everyone a chance. I want peace in our time.

Nonetheless, I don’t feel good about deifying stone killers.

Every fucking week I drag my world-weary suspicious self into the old office gig, I am rewarded with another episode of “is this place fucking real or what?”

It is the opposite of all other toil in which I have heretofore participated. Not entirely, ’cause it’s still work and I spend my days in slogging minutia as is typical of an office job. No ones paying me to think great thoughts in my pajamas, which to me would be the definitive “good job.”

Still and all, it mostly doesn’t suck. The other day there was a fire drill. It was a real drill, because they truly needed to test the alarms. And, it turned out the volume didn’t quite make it. But, as the drill happened (and mind you they handed out shit about why it was necessary all community-like and treated folks like grown ups and, as they might say, “stakeholders”) any way as the ring a ding ling a ding warning was subsiding, someone wheeled out a cart of hot coffee and hot cocoa. And, piece de resistance, two fucking different sized marshmallows, man. Mini bitty ones and the classic marshmallow cylinder.

Ain’t that the fucking height of drill luxury. Hot fucking cocoa.

Today, though, my reward was high amusement. For someone who has gotten into shit her whole life for a somewhat bawdy sense of humor, imagine my shock and giddiness over watching a chick hang a poster of the widest variety of condoms I’ve seen. Unfurled in their glory with instructions for use. Quite risque.

Naturally, I walked up to her to announce my disgusted offense at her pro-recreational sex propaganda. She gave me ten condoms each a differen color, flavor or configuration for my troubles.

Fucked up, man. This is my office job.

Last weekend we checked out downtown San Jose’s “Community Giving Tree” and the Christmas in the Park display. It’s actually rather festive. A park full of Christmas trees adopted and decorated by local stores and civic shit and all. Somehow some cash goes to charity.

You know, like the giving, in the giving tree. Shel Silverstein, or anyone tunneling through the time space continuum and arriving here from the 70s, would be so goddamn proud.

Also downtown were not one but two Ferris wheels and displays and treats for the kiddies. My favorites were the thermometer showing a balmy 59 degrees and the multi-culti representation of the Old Lady in a Shoe, apparently, she was a whore who liked men of multiple hues and cultural traditions. The thing that shot “snow” in the form of blown out soap bubbles was fun. M. looked like a five-year-old seeing his first flake.

Anywho, it was so beauteous we had to get our own. M. says it’s his first.

I’m pretty sure the tight throat, sniffly feeling is an allergic reaction to having a tree in the house. But, goddamn it’s perty.

While for years I’ve gradually become less and less Christmas-y, this whole living together thang has seemed to fuck with that system. Together, we are a fun-loving, joyous holiday couple. We have even been to two fairs.

Merry, merry, merry.

And, a Happy Holidays to Bill O’Reilly.

Is the Internet broken?

I can’t seem to get on a bunch of different sites, my Sidekick ain’t kicking any email and everything feels slow. This page works, and I’m using different networks, so, yeah, no more Internet. My sky has fallen.

Other than that, we are pondering a big tree purchase. M. was leaning hard on the artificial limbs, as it were. However, I may have won that battle with a simple fact. A fake Christmas tree (or as I like now that I’ve seen San Jose’s and to fuck with Bill O’Reilly’s broken brain, a fake “Community Giving Tree”) needs to be taken down, put away, stored and ultimately moved when we vacate the house of Nick’s.

Actually, the City of San Jose’s Community Giving Tree seems to pre-date by a couple of decades the current “war on Christmas” by us secular fuckheads who worry about the actual war. (You know the one with bullets and rocket launchers and suicide-bombers and shit.)

So far, my favorite display in the defense of Christmas Fox videos was from some poor family who had the misfortune of moving into a development with home association rules and an inadequate grasp of the fine print. They threw up a lovely, almost lifesize tableau of a light-up holy family, an equally glowing snowman and a jolly-lighted Santa.

It sucks and all to not be able to decorate your house the way you want. But, that’s why a shitload of us don’t move into those kinds of gated communities and whatnot. I couldn’t even cope with a bunch of the shit condos were telling me if I lived in certain buildings. I think the town of Hingham won’t let you decorate with non-white lights. (Actually, I think that’s peer pressure. Nonetheless, it keeps me the fuck out of Hingham.)

However, I gotta question the sacred, faith shit when the display includes a snowman and a santa and everything lights the fuck up. Seriously, my bullshit detector rings. Boohoohoo, they ain’t letting you live freely and religiously in the old, U.S. of A. Glad you found Fox News to listen.

I think “Christmas” in almost all quarters is an allowable adjective, no matter what Fox claims. But, everything doesn’t require it.

And, for the record, that thing with Santa and reindeer and gifts and eggnog is not sacred. The minute they dig up some verifiable scrolls, which the wackjob fundies can follow alongside their misunderstanding of the New Testament as a literal blueprint for good living, that features a chimney and red stockings, it’ll be sacred. Until then, um, ah, it’s capitalism not Christianity, and if stores zig with the zag of a changing demographic, that’s fucking life not war or faith under siege.

I forgot to write about last weekend. We cruised by The Great Dickens Christmas Fair, Christmas hype’s answer to a Ren Fair.

Personally, I was disappointed by the lack of disease, crippled, starving beggar children and chamber pots emptied to the street. But, history’s a funny thing.

I’m too lazy to write right now, and I’m too lazy to post the sound file of tonight, as I had planned.

But, among the power elite that is Stanford, I did the laugh making thang fairly adequately. I had fun. I chatted with some nice people. All and all I can’t complain.

The surreal of the evening was in its entirety and scope. Dig the concept from a small taste of higlighting — Undergrads aged from somewhere youthful in the birth to 20 zone, me talking trash about my 41-year-old cooch and a 72 year old doing a striptease. Fun for all ages.