While picking up stuff for some picnic action on Saturday at Whole foods, I grabbed an extra bread bag so we could split the baguette in half and have it with dinner. It kind of freaked the checker out…
Hippy Checker Girl: Dude something happened to your loaf!
Me: Uh, what ? Oh…no, I jut got an extra bag.
HCG: Oh man that’s a relief. I was like ‘oh no there’s a lost loaf somewhere in the store. Help!’
I love this town.
The old, oil based, suburban sprawl economy based on forever rising house prices, on easy credit, on subdivision after subdivision–on running up credit cards and on leverage piled on leverage piled on arbitrage, is in the middle of cracking up, spectacularly. While there will be a short term reduction in the price of oil, in the long term oil is still going up and the America of the sprawl economy; the economic geography of America, looks entirely different at $4/gallon gasoline than it does at $2/gallon gasoline. Huge swathes of exurbia and suburbia become simply economically unviable. Zombie Burbs.
An interesting take on the current economic outlook. The pertinent question in my mind is where do we put all the refugees from the suburbs? Are we looking at reverse white-flight, where the affluent flock back to the urban cores, while the suburbs take a dive? Judging by the number of high-end condos going up in downtown Austin, this may already be happening.
Enough of the political-horse-race horse-shit. Standing in the crowd at a What Made Milwaukee Famous show, as the speakers shatter the ice in my drink and setup harmonic oscillations in my nostrils (yeah my schnoz is pretty big), while the kids on the front row use smoke signals to let us know that, yes it sounds good up there too–that’s good times.
Over the Instant Messenger….
Germ:
elections are less about how good a candidate is
and more about how bad the other candidate is
1:22
i’m normal germ, nothing special…
1:23
but wade, he [does unfortunate things to] unicorns in the ass while slaughtering seals with aborted fetuses.
vote for me.
1:24
my name is germ, and i approved this message…
This morning I woke up to see that my state had inexplicably selected Hillary Clinton as their choice for the democratic nominee. As the sun went down i was pushing my bike up a 700ft tall hill due to another round of flat tires. Some nice symmetry there.
The bike i can deal with, the politics, I dunno.
I’m not sure whether to be pissed, sad or just completely disheartened by the whole debacle. The only solace I can take from the whole thing is that, barring a national emergency like the inevitable impending zombie war, there’s at least a 75% chance that George Bush will not be president next year. I guess that’s something.
Here’s the thing – I’m a mildly progressive Democrat in a largely republican state. And make no mistake, I love this state. On the whole, I respect the opinions of the Republicans I know even if i do disagree with them. Maybe some times I call them fascist bastards, and maybe sometimes they call me a liberal hippy, but its all in the spirit of spirited debate. That’s what I thought this contest started as, a debate. An intellectual discourse on the very trying issues that face this country. That is until one candidate lost 11 primaries in a row. Then it was the attack ads, the planted media stories about diplomatic incompetence and rumors of being sworn into congress on the Koran (by the way anyone who gives a flying crap about that please see the Bill of Rights, bullet one). This from the woman who still won’t release her tax returns (come on internets, why have we dug that up yet..?). The salient point is, it’s stopped being a debate and started being an American-style election again. How sad.
The sad part, the really horrifyingly depressing part, is to see 50% of the voting populace of my state buy it. I feel like as a whole, as a state, we’re smarter than this, that we should know to see through the bullshit (We’re Texans we invented the stuff). We’ve had a Bush or a Clinton in charge for the last twenty years, or rather, two-thirds of my short life–have things really got better? Has your corporate-sponsored-federal government done anything for you lately besides murder and maim a lot of promising young men in far-off land for no good reason? Has the media (who despite her claims to the contrary is giving one candidate a pretty easy time of it) done anything for other than spoon-feed you hype to feed a 24-hours news cycle ? No. Corporate media (now with touch-screen-on-demand-graph goodness!) keeps us happy by reporting on Britney and keeping any eye who’s going to pull the best ratings six months down the line (imagine the hype when they catch slick-willy pulling another Moncia…moreover imagine the advertising revenues). And the meta-corporate-hegemony that runs the country will always back the known quantity, especially if its good for the bottom line. While we fret over Brit, they’ll be working to swing the election on asinine issues like abortion and gay-marriage, while the middle and lower classes are hemorrhaging from $3 gas, 80% increases in food costs and an uncertain future of failing banks and oil wars.
We buy it, again and again. Even the great people in this state I’m normally so proud of.
Related Depressing Stuff
Getting Screwed by Canada
Why McCain was Actually the Big Winner
Clinton wins bragging rights, Obama wins in delegates
This morning I was confronted with a myriad of transit problems. First, they (the city or the terrorists, I can’t figure out which) are doing some nebulous type of construction at Westlynn where I use the light to left-turn onto the main drag, to get to the highway, to get to the work. Thus, I have to use the intersection by my house (sans light), which is challenging. Today, executing the bonsai-left-turn was like trying to merge into an in-progress nascar race, so I threw it in reverse and hit the back streets.
Opps. Turns out that one of the churches on the small-roads is a polling station and traffic was, in a word, fuckered. Normally this would enrage the pre-coffee-morning-wade, but the fact that a polling station for a primary is causing traffic jams at 7:30 is actually kind of cool.
Later, in line for coffee (which keeping with theme of the morning was packed), It occurred to me that Starbucks could be using their corporate-mega structure for good if they could go out and buy a company like diebold and incorporate voting into the order process – walk in to touch screen: Venti drip with some ice and Obama for president. The republicans could have theirs at McDonald’s so they don’t have to get out of their cars. Increase voter turn-out while in increasing profits. That’s so American, it’s like John Wayne just served you a slice of red-white-and-blue apple pie. And Starbucks always offers me a paper receipt, which is more than you can say for most electronic polling stations.
Of the banking variety. Yikes.