Don't belong to her, I don't belong to every choir.

Spring Break Stat #1: Number of times I've watched I'm Not There: 2

Spring Break Stat #2: Number of times I'll have watched I'm Not There by the end of spring break: 3


Spring Break Musical Highlight #1: Charging around on country roads in an old Porsche while listening to early Otis Redding.

Spring Break Musical Highlight #2: Trawling the River and Buenaventura Trails while listening to "Sandinista!" (But not in its entirety; I wouldn't wish that on anyone, much less myself.)

Blowing stacks.

I had this grand spring break plan to catch up on all the reading from my Transition Economics class that I'd been deferring through midterm season. But that wretched Irish teacher's reading list is comprised almost exclusively of readings that can be found only in hard copy. And what's best, there's generally only one copy of each book. Just great.

College teachers suck.

Leave the gun; take the cannoli.

Spring break's just begun, and the cliche home adjustment is getting progressively more pronounced. I'm bored, cooped up by the weather. I just want to run, but my mom's cooking is making my running hard to accommodate. Spring breaks seem especially scattered this year, and lots of my friends have already had their breaks. Just about everything in Redding is the same, except that everyone seems way more concerned with the economy, which is understandable since Shasta County unemployment just surpassed 16%. People are panicky (some are downright kooky; people at my parents' church have planted a communal vegetable garden), and all the shut businesses and foreclosed houses have dispelled any airs of affluence the region might have had during the housing boom. It's just like we've been re-rendered the Okie enclave we should always have known we were. But times are just hard, and I still enjoy being home. No künstlerroman-izing from me.

I know that returning to Berkeley next week will be like entering a great time suck, with OCS preparation taking on a coequal role to school work. For the first time in my life I feel like I need more hours in the day, and, since I've never really been all that into sleeping in, I'm intent on waking up before 7 AM daily for the rest of the semester to get a jump on proceedings. And I mean a real jump- I need to be all wire when I hit Quantico. So with the days lining up to be both physically taxing and full, it looks like things will only slow down when I (God-willingly) resurface from OCS in August. I'm trying to figure out how to spend those few pre-school, post-OCS weeks, and, if there's no logging for me, I'm thinking about a little desert trek on the Pac Crest Trail. Anyone down? (No?)




A propos nothing, whenever I'm at home spending an afternoon on the couch, it seems like The Godfather is always on. And the thing is, there're certain movies that I have to stop everything and watch in their entirety if they come on. They are: The Godfather, The Godfather II, Pulp Fiction, Trainspotting, and Giant. So I watched it, and I saw one of my favorite scenes ever:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxPoqw5cD-Q

I love Sonny. He doesn't posture. He bites, he throws sticks and shoes. He has no sense of the justice people might think he's serving. There's just something going on in him he can't manage, which I find strangely respectable.

Leave me out of this one, man.

It never fails that anyone who posts a picture of him/her kissing his/her significant other on an online networking page is met with "oh my God, CUTE ;)" comments, even from people who are known to dislike one side of the menage. I just find them distasteful and refrain from encouraging that kind of behavior, even if I actively like whomever the friend in question happens to be dating/marrying. No one wants to see that. Granted, it's debatable whether my reason is that I want no one else to be happy; this is plausible. At any rate, it's a matter of principle.

...to say nothing of the contrivance required to overcome the technical difficulties associated with taking pictures of one's self while kissing.

Love,
The Colonel

Variations in form, style.

A letter, addressed to me, from my nipples:

Gus,
From heretofore, please refrain from running in the rain without an undershirt. I know we're really just cosmetic entities, but nonetheless....

Yours,
Nipples

Edification.

Sometime soon, I need to:

-Get my motorcycle license.
-Stop wearing skinny jeans.
-Develop my taste in jazz.
-Stop hunching my shoulders forward.
-Grow more chest hair.
-Actually understand the mechanism linking open market operations and interest rates.
-Do twenty pull-ups (hello perfect PFT).
-Stop wearing stripes.
-Get a tan that isn't only on my forearms.
-Start flossing more.
-Actually learn meter.
-Finish In Search of Lost Time (only five books to go).
-Get my hunting license.
-Get used to wearing hats, so I can hide my penis-head haircut next fall.
-Retire my black minstrel impression.

That's all I can think of. If you see any glaring deficiencies in character, be sure to let me know.

Oh, lordy lord, a confessional.

My moods oscillate between two extremes. The first is 'low and mean.' The second is 'deflated and overripe.' (Cheeriness is the extraneous interloper between the poles.)

I'm in the clutches of the second, and Chet Baker isn't helping.

Jump up from my starbed, make another day.

My cousin once complimented my brother for "not just throwing words down" on his blogspot. But that's what I'm doing right now, in direct controvertion (not a word, but it should be) to my previous post's argument against the minutia of the daily entry. But give the kids what they want, I say. Besides: Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am vast- I contain multitudes. (A good self-congratulatory panacea of a $2 quote, though previously a $100 quote, whose effect has been diluted by years of misuse and overuse by people who've seen Finding Forrester- the same people who might unapologetically drop a, "Those willing to give up liberty for security deserve neither." My response to these people is, with varying degrees of vinegar, unalterably, "Yes, I, too, went to high school, young man. I can even regurgitate more strangely salient nuggets of learning from high school: diffusion is mitosis over a semi-permeable membrane. The Civil War wasn't fought over slavery. The subjunctive mood is used in situations of imagination and potential. The Louisiana purchase cost $.03 an acre. 'PPF' stands for 'production possibilities frontier.'")

But now for my thoughts and updates.

Mini-OCS is over the course of Easter weekend this year. Real, live Sergeant Instructors will be flown from Quantico, VA to harangue/prepare Marine Officer candidates from the Berkeley, Santa Clara, and Sacramento OSO's two months before departure for the real thing. Taube said this is good, pointing out that Jesus arose from the dead on Sunday. I'm more wary. The bulk of the course will take place on Black Saturday. What are the metaphorical ramifications of that?

It's my birthday Wednesday.

My roommate is very tolerant, considering the amount of sweaty workout clothes that fester in here between laundry days.

I'm about to file my tax return and am debating what to treat myself to once it comes. (But this raises a question. The Internal Revenue Service is relatively convinced that my name is actually 'August William Slagk,' and I've never told them otherwise; in fact, I've even gone so far to ponder what kind of name 'Slagk' would be were it real. I've decided Slovak. Anyway, the North Valley Bank tellers didn't mind, but I wonder if the Berkeley ones will be a bit more hard nosed.) I'm thinking a pair of trousers and some loafers. Class the place up a bit.

I'm done.

I saw the news today, oh boy.

The height of arrogance is the daily blog. This is mostly the mental mechanism I adhere to to rationalize my infrequent entries, make no mistake. But I do have an inchoate, feeble-voiced, yet genuine desire to minimize "today I got the best latte at my favorite little coffee shop and read Kerouac there lol" journalistic behavior. So let me treat you to the kind of dredge you'd be stuck at the bottom with if I didn't treat my writing as a great big rant orifice:

February 6, 2009

05:40 I end February 5, 2009 under the assumption of a non-binding commitment to work out with Lt. Chin et al at 09:00. I won't be binded, I tell myself- it's only a couple of hours away. Tomorrow, today I sleep in.
07:50 Eyes open. I'm tired, I tell myself. Let me sleep in.
08:00 I text Lt. Chin. I'll make it in, I say. He says, bring swim trunks and towel.
08:12 It hits me, albeit belatedly, that this kind of language is less cryptic than my not-as-yet completely functional faculties originally construe. Actually, it pretty openly implies...swimming. Shit.
08:20 I need to get moving to make it to the OSO. I decide against wearing my new running shorts with their nifty built in, ahem, 'compression brief' and opt for my too-loose boardshorts. (Take note of this, dear reader, and its effect on underwear related choices.)

So let's take a step back. Checklists are good, and a good checklist would have featured these key pieces of preparation:
1. Backpack.
2. Socks.
3. Undershirt.
4. Underwear.
5. Ability to swim underwater.
6. PT gear that isn't for swimming.
7. Phone.
8. Keys.
9. Wallet.
10. Ipod.

And had I used the checklist test, I'd have scored a pretty respectable 5/10. But note that the ones I missed (2-6) are more consequential than we give them credit for.

08:50-12:00 (compressed) I walk to the USMC OSO, utilizing my new umbrella. I reflect on the threat a dad of one of my high school friends wielded at his son: if you use an umbrella, I'm going to make you wear a dress. I reflect that said father probably never ruined a $130 Microeconomics book by walking around in the rain (but I'm the wiser for it, eh?). I get to the OSO. Captain Wheatcroft remains the most affable man in existence. Lt. Chin says something mean to me. A new aspirant looks at me and gives me bad vibes- I didn't call him about running together as promised because I don't run in the mornings anymore. He's upset? C'est la vie. Life is pain, young man. Get up and get on with is; nothing a good spit can't cure! We get into Lt. Montes' car and take off for the Coast Guard installation in Oakland. Lt. Chin calls me a fag. I deflect his fiery darts with consummate fluency and alternately open and latent wit. He pretends not to notice. We start the swimming workout, and it's pretty obvious I'm a poor swimmer. I pretend not to notice. We finish and change. Lt. Chin notes that I've gone commando, as I dawn my only layers: jeans and a sweater. I contemplate a gimme gay joke. Opt against it. I regret this. We drive back to Berkeley, city of light and learning. I lend Lt. Chin $6 to pick up his uniforms from dry cleaning. I contemplate a gimme joke about the Semitic background of UC Berkeley's only other two PLC Combined candidates...I can't decide whether to go with, "Too bad Rosenfield's not here, huh?" or, "Yeah, out of the PLC candidates, I probably have the best rate." I opt against both. I'm known for my tact, I remember. We get back to the OSO. I chew the fat. I go to Asian Ghetto and pick up some Mongolian beef, eventually placing it next to my Econ 100B study materials.
12:30 I eat my Chinese food and listen to "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," almost pining for an unremembered (and manifestly unlived) downhome past.
13:00-16:00 I study for Tuesday's exam in 100B and rue the fact that I got the professor I did. Originally I thought he was pleasantly crass. Now I know he's just an asshole. An ineffectual asshole. And he has a belly that's so decadent, it could only be of Third World extraction where it might redeem its offensiveness by performing as an obtrusive indicator of material well-being. Kyle and I ponder whether his metal water bottle is really full of chocolate milk. Cesar studies with me and Kyle. Rosenfield says something mean to me on Facebook. I pretend not to notice.
16:00-18:00 Facebook. A long shower. I appreciate an unhurried toilette in the middle of the day, as it puts things in perspective. Some people posit that metaphysics is so well-developed in the West because we were the first to reach the level of wealth accumulation affording the devotion of time to philosophical pursuits. I don't deny this, but I think a long portion of the day devoted to self-grooming, even shoddy self-grooming, is the apparatus through which the framework actually functions. It's a reflective and calming experience.
18:00-20:00 I try to do the reading for my non-100B classes, but only get half of my target amount done. The lack of sleep is catching up, and my nose literally hits my reader several times.
21:00 I come home, Facebook, and write a blog instead of trying to read.

FINIS

Extracurriculars

Lots of people have been asking me why, given my background in logging, I don't join the Cal timbersports team.

I just say it would be like joining the archery team because you fought in Iraq before college.

Non sequitur

A non sequitur in the context of my exploits in Filipino endontology and dilettante apologetics on behalf of Israel.

Some day I will own an old plantation house in the Mississippi. (Note that I avoided the contraction "I'll." This means I mean business, since I generally consider a lack of contractions pompous. By the by, I also consider songs sung in the third person pompous.) I'll wear linen, sniff magnolias, sip lemonade, and maintain both clipped hair and moustache.

I loled.

This is an entry that should probably go into my equivalent of Lisa's "Looks Like Rain," if I had one. So avert your eyes if you don't want to be exposed to my hidden (some would offer that they're really not all that hidden) character flaws.

This passage made me lol: "Rachael Corrie, an American, was killed when an Israeli soldier bulldozed her." LOL!

How stupid would you have to be to get bulldozed? Probably about as stupid as you'd have to be to pay money for an Evergreen State College (another lol) degree. (The real question is how narcissistic and sanctimonious you'd have to be to think the world at large would hold you as some kind of legitimate martyr for getting crushed in an effort to save a bit of real estate, 'marginalized' occupants or not.)

But Corrie's ineffectual and, admittedly, more substantive than average activism isn't what I find most worth thinking about. Her demise harkens back to some situations my family has experienced, namely, environmental activists who sought to block our family logging company's efforts to log redwoods in the mid-nineties. They employed similarly narcissistic tactics, that is, they chained themselves to trees that were to be felled and lay beneath fallen logs that were to be bucked, so that any action on the loggers' part would lead to the activists' deaths. I term them narcissistic because their actions imply that we, the loggers, value their lives more than we do our profession and more importantly, our obligation to the mill to fulfill our contract. It's a wrong assumption.

At risk of sounding ponderous, the tactics of Corrie/Greenpeace et al are poisonous to society. I reject wholeheartedly Ayn Rand's philosophy (would even go so far as to affirm Whittaker Chambers' assessment of Atlas Shrugged's undertone as "to the gas chambers go"), but I think she got it right when she pointed out the greatest and most repugnant piece of moral bankruptcy is the exploitation of someone else's moral code against the adherent by one who does not keep it. Corrie's like-minded ilk live outside of societal norms, trampling over property and self-determination rights alike, yet they employ a societal norm, that of not killing crunchy Northwestern bitches, against the adherents.

Obtuse and imperfect hypothetical arguments are trotted out against any deviation from living under the hegemony of the decided deviants ("oink oink oink is stopping a logging site's work punishable by the death penalty oink oink oink"), but I should like to live in a world where more Telegraph Avenue blackguards have to be scraped out from under felled Douglas firs. Hats off to the Israeli bulldozer engineer for keeping Corrie, erm, intellectually honest.

Let's suspend morality.

Just for a moment. Here's my maiden delve into current events. (I'm sure all three of you are absolutely titillating!)

Regardless of the moral questions concerning the conflict in Gaza, let's agree on these pretty standard facts:
-Israel has an infinitely more effective fighting force than that of the Palestinians.
-Israel has both the capability and probably the political wherewithal (were they cavalier enough to use it) to obliterate the Gaza strip, and I mean every living soul it contains. It would resultantly become a pariah state and probably have a pretty high level of attrition in the ensuing Arab/Persian-Israeli war, but it's common knowledge that the formal militaries of the non-Israeli Mideast are complete clowns and would be rendered ineffective within months. Israel would draw severe censure from the US, but not a complete withdrawal of support (what with the State Department now able to gleefully watch as Israel does what was probably more geopolitically urgent than the Iraq invasion, ie, the forceful neutralization of Iran). And Western Europe? Toothless, per usual; but probably more critical than they were of the last few genocides committed by the Arab world (Kurdistan, Darfur anyone?). But- and I diverge from the objective theme- this is all moot, as Israel is a representative democracy with a sizeable domestic minority critical of IDF's pugilism and would never even consider the 'ultimate solution,' though its converse is in the mandate of their current Gazan adversary. Here's a fun one: try to name a modern war fought between two true democracies and then mull on the ramifications of your list.
-Hamas is no match for the IDF, whether IDF is justified in its actions or not (see above).

With Israel pretty much untouchable by its critics, who's doing a greater disservice to the Palestinians: the Israeli hawks who kill a thousand or so Palestinians every six years and will do so ad infinitum if the current climate is maintained, or the Euro-lefty-slobs who perpetuate the climate by inuring the Palestinians to reality with their toothless indignation? And here's the reality: the maintenance of a 100:1 kill ratio in the Jews' favor, white phosphorus, and slum conditions for the Palestinians, combatants (sic) and civilians alike. It's irrelevant to discuss whether it's right or wrong, because it is what it is and will continue to be, mass street protests in Oslo or not.

It's always very sad when each successive generation of kids learn the world as it is versus the world as they want it to be/what's "fair". I know the thought of the noble terrorist throwing rocks at a tank is so romantic for some, but that doesn't change the reality, which is getting shot by depleted uranium bullets.

You'll find that in the 'Misadventure' section.

I've always had an odd penchant for bad decisions. It's an ingrained habit I try to pass off by unequivocably embracing the decisions, hoping that observers might attribute these miscarriages of logic to my overwhelming zaniness and inexorable idiosyncrasy. Exhibits: (A.)My taste for logging was more stillborn than my present day enthusiasm might let on; my first summer in the woods was a moody self-exile imposed after falling out with a girl and assuming the role of spurned lover. (She didn't really love me, by the by!) In fact, I was physically ill with dread the night before returning to the mountain for my second week of choker setting. (B.) I once ran ten miles the very morning I felt my constitution surrendering to the flu, employing the scintillating logic that once down with the flu, I wouldn't be able to get any good runs in, so I had better get this one done. I went on to coolly play the 'incorrigible and thus lovable' card on my mother by describing my exploits, even as I was, eh, pretty much dying. (C.) Once, on the indoor soccer court and already on a yellow card, an opponent, whom I had just fouled pretty cynically, informed me that I had better not try that again. So, knowing that I was then obligated to try to hurt him, I shoved him into the wall the first time the flow of play permitted, got in a fight, and was pretty predictibly escorted out of the park.

What I'm trying to say is that I'm given to rash decisions made on trivial premises. For example, I didn't want to wipe my savings out on the dental treatments I need, so, logically, I went to the Philippines to have it done. This morning, I had one pretty ruthlessly deep filling done and another tooth extracted by a Filipina-Chinese dentist. To be honest, the experience was, in the most important ways, pretty congruent to its Stateside counterpart, down to that irritating tendency toward tut-tutting of most dentists. But there were some interesting deviations. For example, all of her instruments were kept in old Folgers-esque novocaine cans. Also, prices were discussed pretty openly (with the dentist herself eventually performing as cashier!), an American taboo I'll never understand and choose to attribute to the silly deification we assign to people in the medical industry. (As an aside, why are we permitted to question our mechanics, hair stylists, and plumbers but not our doctors? Sure, the services they render are more important to our well-being, but doesn't that make lying prostrate to a single person's dictates on the subject all the more dangerous? It's silly that we hold them in such high esteem that it's considered a slight to imply that their rendered services aren't too priceless to engage in the crassness of rate discussion over. That's blind faith most people are willing to place in someone they've never met because of an MD at the end of his/her name. This sheepishness is all the result of a sexist assault on midwifery back in the early twentieth century...but I digress. And, for the record, I think modern midwifery is dangerous bourgeois posturing toward an unremembered and romanticized past. Another entry.)

I've literally forgotten what I was saying and refuse to edit for coherence later. The point is, my first dabbling in medical tourism wasn't at all bad, and, considering an American dentist would have sent me to an oral surgeon just to have a bum tooth pulled, my trip has already paid for itself. Tomorrow: a root canal and crown.

Gizbagel!

Two notes on a passage to the Philippines.

Does that constitute a pun? Is it plagiarizing Forster? Whatever.



1. I can never help but be impressed by the general malaise that settles over an airplane's passengers when a baby begins to cry because of bad turbulence. Really, crying is the most natural response in Christendom when your little aluminum cylinder, at sea in hostile air pockets and suspended over the North Pacific, begins to rock and dip and- this is the worst part- creak. I like to think the uncomfortable silence is a collective moment of realization that we are a stuuuupid and unfit species for willingly putting ourselves into this flying Orient-bound deathtrap.

2. Foreigners on airplanes smell really, really bad and love sitting next to me.