Now there is the siege.

I’m at a wonderful, scenic spot with good food and campfires hard by the Pacific Coast Highway and then, right by that road, the actual fucking Pacific. The scenic coast. The place so beautiful that someone like Magellan got fucked up and thought it was peaceful.

And, then there’s the wine. A lovely glass of a lovely Syrah, right hear seated by my left hand.

But, I, where am I? I am in a conference room looking at folks looking an LCD projector and group editing a document. Another word for my geographical location might be Hell.

I like the folks. The work ain’t always bad, and it’s honorable and shit. But holy fucking Jesus on a popsicle stick. I am not a 12-hour a day worker. I’m good for about two, two and a half. Tops.

I woke up today with an edgy, jumpy feeling of dread. Of course, I am sure it stems from a lizard corner of my brain dealing with overactive stress (and imagination) with a little bit more andrenaline and nerve juice in the blood stream.

Sometimes, you just get a bit overwhelmed and start thinking, “hey, I should remember to fucking breathe.”

Given that I ain’t never really stopped breathing or hyperventilated from pure worry, this too shall pass no doubt, like most of my irrational emotions (and the rational ones). But, for the moment the darkening, clouded sky is one of them there metaphors.

Truth is somewhere or another August just started getting a bit crazed. From possibly kind of sort of maybe I’m not sure vaguaries about the Fringe Fest in Scotland, I now have a ticket. And, at work the nebulous, theoretical “strategy plan” now has an in-sight due date and the retreat I planned starts tomorrow night.

As an aside, I fucking hate planning major expeditions at work. In this case, it’s an offsite retreat for almost the whole workweek with lodging and food and memos and shit for 12 to 15 co-workers. Now, I’m good at this shit, don’t get me wrong. (Although, realistically, I’m not cooking the food or making the beds, just hiring the caterers and whatnot. Rocket science or storming Omaha Beach it is not.)

But, being responsible for people just kicks my natural tendencies into senseless worry into high gear. It’s why I don’t typically love throwing parties. Like, suddenly, it’s on me if people have eaten, but what if, I dunno, all the stores suddenly close and there’s pestilence and rioting? That’d be my fault, right?

Jumping from spending the work money on a gathering and finding appropriate rooms to meet and sleep and gather and all to working on finding lodging at the Fringe Fest is kind of a busman’s holiday, though, you know. Not to mention, there’s a about 8 or 9 zeroes of decimal point’s difference to the work budget versus my own.

How much exactly can I afford for a week’s stay in Edinburgh? Surely, it won’t be the same business plan rates I handle at work.

Am I willing to sleep in a house with a dog and fuck my allergic self up in an overdrive of histamine production to save a few quid? (Probably “yes” when I was last in Scotland, circa 1984. Probably “no,” now that I’m a bit softer round the middle physically and emotionally.)

To battle the vague angsty feelings of the vague angsty, unformed worries, I’m regressing musically. I spent part of last night and this morning grabbing the tunes from the appropriate late-70s, early-80s period of optimal young adult confusion. I’m tearing it up in my head with the Buzzcocks, Mission of Burma, Dead Kennedys, but this time its on my pricey iPhone not my cheapo, knock off Walkman cassette player.

We even went into a music store last night, and I flipped through the clearance bins for old time’s sake. Even now, I fear the record-store (or I guess CD/DVD-store) employees and their judging eyes as they rang up my buys. I never was cool, and I ain’t likely to renaissance.

For both the retreat and the fest, I can probably grab my toothbrush and just show up. Shit will work itself out. But, I know the innermost dirty truth. I am just not that hip and spontaneous.

And, of course, it ain’t getting undone.

Dot and I both now have plane tickets. We are heading to Edinburgh at the end of the month. It will be MTV’s Real World. But, older and with show people. A veritable wall of comedy shows.

I am both excited and nauseously anxious.

Looks like I’ll be headed to some ancient isles and checking out the grave of Grey Friar’s Bobby once again. Back in 1984, I checked out Scotland. Looks like a couple of decades later, a few pounds heavier, a few pounds, or I guess Euros, richer and way, fucking older, I’ll be heading back.

In evidence that evolution passed me by, I’ll probably be backpacking and sleeping on floors just like then. You’d think I’d be all growed up by now.

Better yet, it looks like the intrepid Dot may be roped into joining me, as we cheer on and, I hope, participate in shows by some way funny folks. M., sadly, can’t get away.

Now, here’s an interesting realization about my life as it is. It has changed. I am en-partnered (almost wrote ensnared). It’s different. But, life rolling like it does and ideas always getting filtered through your own personal neurons, you have to pause every now and again and think a bit harder before you get it.

Sunday, I was musing about this possible jaunt, this junket, this comedy adventure to what some might consider the uber-festival of festivals for the things I like to do. Bear in mind, will you, you reader, that one of the shows at the fest that I have, let’s say, an intimate knowledge is called “The Naked Comedy Showcase.” I think that’s pretty clear as to what it’s all about. And also, mind, please do, that the majority of comedy folks are testosterone cursed and Y-chromosome possessing. Boys.

M. turns to me with a smile and says something like, “Let’s think about this. What if I told you I was going to Europe to meet up with my friends, and they’re all women. Oh, yeah, there will be nudity…”

Yes. I understand. Except it being my life and my non-messy intentions, I obviously consider myself loftily above reproach. I mean I’m practically a goddess, pedastled and righteous. It is not a pedastle from which a tumble would be worthwhile.

Enter Dot, itching to revisit the town she festivaled in last summer. My traveling companion. The woman to balance the crowd. The chaperone. She’s not old enough to be the the Emma Thompson to my Helen Bonham Carter. But, I do think we shall don petticoats.

I’m such a shit writer, I didn’t even write the post title. M. came up with it when I was telling how much of a fraudulent failure-type person I am.

I set aside time to write. I planned to write. I had my notebook, my computer and time. Twice today.

I did fuck all. Why? Because obviously I don’t have enough heart, soul and gray matter. Yup, just drool and lack of discipline.

No one to blame but my pathetic self. And, the programmers who built all sorts of stupid boring solitaire games. I can click and type and produce nothing.

In order to embrace, revist and swallow my former glories, I acted today as I did 20 years ago.

I paid a few bucks for a trim at SuperCuts and bought some hair dye at the drugstore, donned plastic gloves and went to town.

Nothing says rockstar rawness like cheap hair.

I recently had a couple of conversations that mock troubled me. The gist is my life is rather blandly calm. Suburban, contented, if you will.

Shit that I am, and warped to boot, I can’t really wrap the old brain pan around simple and quiet and comfortable. Like some lizard point inside my skull would prefer that M. took a swing every now and again, because that would be so fucking punk rock.

The problem with being in your 40s is you start to make choices. Cost benefit analyses like the reality that mopping vomit chunks out of the metal teeth of your leather jacket clearly loses out to the clarity of never letting the Jager burn your throat in the first fucking place.

Boozing, drugs and unbridled sex are fun and all, in their respective times and places, and whilst hewing to the Aristotleian Golden Mean, of course. But, eventually, you learn a Sunday morning discovered and awoken to without pain is a fine fucking day. Seriously, the recovery now sucks the fun out of the night before.

I mean plain old vanilla intercourse is just easier without stumbling, insensitive numbness and the hydration issues of imbibing. I’m going die eventually, I don’t have the hours to waste trying to resucitate a whiskey dick.

All of this info is prologue to the real point of my writing. Some of the coolest folks I know from Boston comedy, the ones I truly call friends, who were denizens and main players of my two favorite comedy haunts, the Lizard Lounge and the Great and Secret Show, are taking it onto the ultimate comedy road. They’re heading to the Edinburgh Fringe Fest

This is them (or themself):

I seriously love these people. I mean a nice friend love, not the kind where I let them touch the flowering labia of my womanhood.

So, in my stable life, my happy life, my peaceful life, I’m conflicted. I have the means, and with a little cajoling action and hard work with some co-workers to smooth the demands of the day job, I have the time to make a week’s vacation visit to their month-long entertaining. But, with comfort comes complacency, so I’m having trouble embracing the 14-hour flight with a backpack and the floor-sleeping adventure.

If I can swing it, I’ll go. Alone, because M. has a far higher commitment to his career.

Feeling old and feeling distinctly not punk rock is worrying about creature comforts in place of adventure.

When did I become so fucking lazy and so fucking wimpy.

But, when I show up, it will be totally kick ass. Even if I end up baring all to the Scots and making them laugh.

Thanks, Dot, for spreading the rumor that I was rolling the idea of a trip around in my head.

Maybe we should all feel bad for Harriet Miers. I mean, she’s a hard working chick, working in the weasely field of juris prudence, as the mouthpiece for that fucking idiot chimp, the president.

And, think about the pride. One day, you are shooting for the Supreme Court. Sure, not fully qualified and living the ultimate Peter Principle bullshit kind of possible promotion, but Harriet could’ve tasted the glory.

Now, she very well may be getting some paperwork from the House Judiciary Committee about being in contempt. Hee hee hee. Sorry Harriet, but some friends of GW really deserve the thrill by the rest of us for the possibility that just maybe some parts of our three branches of government are still working.

In the same spirit of malfeasance, how evil is Dick Cheney? Looks like in addition to hating on our own species, he doesn’t mind interfering with the lives of other living things.

Oh, and in an unrelated Public Service Announcement — You might want to write a note to a local Senator or Congress folk. Looks like there’s a chance that the Farm Bill is about to get legislatively fucked. Good news if you are a heartless conglomerate living off the fat of the public trust in the heartland. Sucks if you like good food and not beating down the rural poor, here and in the world.

Leastways, it won’t be on CNN.

We watched the “historic” YouTube debate tonight. My first take, wow, this is only a bit less irritating than a “town hall.” There’s something about the regular joe public voice, or the pre-selected version anyway, getting tossed up there and then reworded, clarified, whatever the fuck by the TV personality host that always kind of kills me.

Are we really getting closer to democracy and people and populism and all sorts of shit? I doubt it. Although, before Cooper Anderson stepped in a couple tims or so, some of the questions were interesting. Here’s Salon’s take.

Toss up on my favorite moments — But right now Mike Gravel is leading in the poll inside my head. CNN’s transcript misses the tag line, but the Democrat from Alaska apparently didn’t just take a train to get there, he also grabbed the bus. Overall, he won on the I’m-an-old-man-I-can-be-cantankerous fun ticket.

Gotta love his cajones for standing firm on the troops dying in vain in Vietnam and doing it all over again in Iraq.

I’m tired of the whole troop supporting thang that makes quagmires honorable. I get it, don’t get me wrong you can’t blame some punk kid from Mo-Town or wherever the fuck getting his nuts blown off in the desert. But the bullshit of the Whitehouse and the Pentagon and all does smear the soldiers.

Best falling all over themselves to appeal to the common man moment was watching everyone talk about their public-schooled children. Or fucking Biden, playing the “hey my wife was killed” non sequitur card, mixed with the I loves me some one holy and apostolic church Catholic cred, so yeah, parochial school for his kids.

Dude, my dad died, and I did alright at the public high school.

Or, maybe it was the would you work for the minimum wage pandering? Can’t decide what inspired me more in my love/hate of American democracy.

Good old Barack Obama, though, got in a couple of good reality checks on both questions. He might as well have said, “Who the hell we fooling, we’re goddamn rich and priveleged?”

He’ll never be president, but every debates needs a bit more of the little Kucinich. Text P*E*A*C*E everybody. It won’t send a message to anyone, but Dennis will keep you posted on the war still going on.

Before I write any other blather, I have a bulletin. I just ate the best peach I have ever put in my mouth, fresh from the farmer’s market and sweet in that sticky wonderfulness that makes you overlook a peach’s, well, peach fuzz.

Also, a prayer for Tammy Faye to rest in peace. I don’t know about all the heaven and hell, Jesus stuff, but she had a sense of humor and earthiness that more uber-Christian TV evangelists should adopt.

Dancing with Ron Jeremy. Priceless.

I may have become thoroughly sated for a bit on street fairs. Although, my appetite is vast. Two days a scant half mile from our home is pretty fucking sweet, though. We can hear the music from the concert space in the park on our balcony.

Here’s some of my photos of the big day yesterday, which ended with a concert in the park by a cover band.

M. seemed quite enamored of this performers musical prowess.

You know what you get when you mix affluence, high end street fairing, maybe some wine and beer (served in actual souvenir glasses, made of glass) and cover songs from the 60s, 70s and 80s?

Y M C A!

Here M. sings along with “Sweet Home Alabama.” I’m not lying. Beating inside his outwardly melanin rich person is a whiter than white redneck.

I was actually, and unusually for me, digging watching happy people having fun. Even when M. claimed concern that I was photographing strange children.

These are the kind of folks I think you only see in California. Seriously. The hair, the accessorizing, it’s how the west was won.

Then, there’s this guy. I decided to hate him. I mean how can you not? You just know he’d want hassle Ponyboy and Johnny.

Finally, here’s a reality check. I am neither this obese or lesbian-leaning.