Tomorrow apparently is the debut date for MSN Spaces, Microsoft’s new blogging service. [News Link]

Ain’t competition a wonderment? I’ve been on Blogger since March 03, around the time the war started. Before that, I was on Blog City for a short time. I don’t have a problem with Blogger, though there are times when their servers bog down and I want to scream. I’m interested to see what Gates’ Geeks have concocted. But I’m not in a mood to make a change. I’m well rooted here, and setting up new digs is such a pain.

Believe it or not, I had an idea for the general format of blogging before I found out that blogging existed, or saw my first blog. I wanted to have a page on my Web site, maybe an easily- updated html file, for musings on Life, the Universe, and Everything. It should, I thought, be like a journal but upside down, with the latest entry on top. It was a major hassle to set up something that was easy to upload, and could be done in Word not WYSIWYG. Then I saw Pete’s blog and boom: I got my blog, and with it another way to kill an evening without getting drunk or … hmm, this is a family blog … getting horizontal.

Spaces will probably suck, and give you no storage, like Hotmail. Wanna bet?

Well, I managed to make my mortgage payment today, having found the bill last night. I was sitting at the table, about to write the check, when I noticed that the loan company had a Web site. There was a notation that I could pay online. How thoughtful!

So down the hall I went to the computer. Got myself all registered with a clever password, had my banking information in the little blanks and the cursor poised over the Submit button.

Hey just a galldarn minute here, says I. That final payment amount looks wrong. Checking the hardcopy bill, I see it’s $10 more. You know where this is headed, don’t you? Right. Squinting in disbelief at the monitor, I see there’s a $10 service charge for doing it online.

Does this make sense to anyone? I’m doing all the data entry, saving them having to sort and open my mail, route and endorse and deposit the check and everything. All they have to do is download and update a batch file or something. It’s all computerized on their end. They should be paying me!

Needless to say, I mailed it. They can kiss my big fuzzy pink wahzoo. And from now on, I’ll use Yahoo Billpay. That way, they still get paper, but I don’t have to mail it. … Nyahhaha.

What good is conservatism that doesn’t conserve? The environmental vanguard are gearing up for Bush’s 2nd term assault on our environment. They shouldn’t have to. The government should be on our side, not in the hip pocket of the polluters. It’s a shame, and our grandchildren will look at old photos of the world we knew as children and think of us with shame.

This is still very timely. From Lincoln’s State of the Union, in the midst of the Civil War.

“The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor,to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union…In giving freedom to the slave, we ensure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope of earth.”

— Abraham Lincoln, 1862

So it was fast approaching eleven pm when I got this funny idea to take a hot shower. I take my daily shower in the morning, being that kind of guy. My Dad is the kind of guy, by contrast, who takes his in the evening. That’s because he worked for a living; actually worked up a sweat. Gotta respect that, but sometimes at night I get the urge to go to bed extra clean. It helps me relax and sleep. Can you relate?

So I took my shower, and since I live alone and pay the bills I decided to stand for an extra minute or so with my forehead on the white tiles, letting the hot water run on my stressed shoulders, even though I was already clean.

I was nice and relaxed. I got out and dressed in sweats, because I still have to take the doggie out to pee before bed. The thought came to me that tomorrow is the first of the month and I need to pay the mortgage now. It’s just been refinanced, so this is the first month with a new lender. The bill has been waiting on my desk for a couple of weeks. I’d just go ahead and handle it, drop it off at the post office in the morning.

Went to the desk. Guess what was really in the envelope I thought was the bill. Junk mail. An offer to sell me insurance to pay off the mortgage if I croak. Ah Bullshit. It took me 10 minutes to find the real bill, in a stack of crap I was going to feed to the shredder. The real bill didn’t look as real as the fake one. All this killed my happyclean feelgood buzz. I’m about as relaxed as a jackrabbit snagged in a barbwire fence.

I have a stack of mortgage death insurance offers … Why should I give a wet slap about the mortgage if I’m singing with the choir invisible? My folks can sell the casa del cielo, pay off the note, and buy a farm in Arkansas with the equity. I’ll be marching through the afterlife, finding every asshat who sent me one of these these. Then while they’re having a nice hot shower, I’ll sneak in and flush the toilet.

Aaaiieeee!

I think it’s great that Tom Ridge is resigning as chief of the keystone cops. Hope he takes his absurd color chart with him. He has been one of Bush’s flying monkeys of fear, a key cog in the gears grinding up civil liberties. If I never again see him on my TV, calling for general disarray and national panic, it’ll be too soon.

They’re coming to get us! We don’t know where or when or how, and we can’t face up to why, but everybody calmly go about your consumerism in a state of heightened vigilance to this nonspecific, probably imminent threat. Orange! Orange! … What an asshat. So I’m glad he’s decided it’s time to go write his book.

The only problem with all these miscreant minions scuttering out the back doors of power is that All Hat and No Cattle gets to appoint people who are even worse for us. One of the guys up for Ridge’s job was responsible for setting up the Iraqi police. … The first police force in the history of the planet to see 3200 terrified sworn officers desert their posts in a single day. Is it possible Bush could find someone as bad to replace Ridge as he did to replace Ashcroft? There can’t be torture in Gitmo, because the Geneva Convention doesn’t apply. These guys are irregulars, no uniforms. Therefore we aren’t bound to honor the Geneva Convention. This all just keeps getting worse and worse. Anyway, in honor of Ridge’s Orange Terror Alerts, here’s a poem:

Why I am Not a Painter

by Frank O’Hara

I am not a painter, I am a poet.

Why? I think I would rather be

a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg

is starting a painting. I drop in

“Sit down and have a drink” he

says. I drink; we drink. I look

up. “You have SARDINES in it.”

“Yes, it needed something there.”

“Oh.” I go and the days go by

and I drop in again. The painting

is going on, and I go, and the days

go by. I drop in. The painting is

finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”

All that’s left is just

letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of

a color; orange. I write a line

about orange. Pretty soon it is a

whole page of words, not lines.

Then another page. There should be

so much more, not of orange, of

words, of how terrible orange is

and life. Days go by. It is even in

prose, I am a real poet. My poem

is finished and I haven’t mentioned

orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call

it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery

I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

I’ve always had an interest in the San Joaquin Valley of California. My folks are from there, and my grandparents lived there until the last of them passed this summer. It’s an amazing place. Not particularly beautiful, but impressive because of what grows there, the agriculture people have built in just a few generations. This article describes the depth of poverty that’s settling on the valley, to a degree I didn’t realize.

Mother Jones Link

The near future of the mediascape … the next progeny of the blogosphere. Got broadband? You gotta see this video. About 8 minutes.

ols-master

Thanks to Joseph

but I’ve posted the first chapter of my novel again. Just click My Novel in the right column.

Now that it’s posted, you people need to quit hanging around my house, saying things like “I’m with the band,” and “I’m his biggest fan in the world.” Those guys out there in the uniforms are gardeners, not bodyguards. And I’m not about to dangle my dog from the balcony.

Chapter two will be along soon enough.

I just want to make sure this quote from John Updike, whom I’ve been reading lately too, gets a little more exposure in cyberspace. I found this on Eschaton.

“We have explored, on behalf of all mankind, this paradox: the more matter is outwardly mastered, the more it overwhelms us in our hearts.”

What do you think?

And by the way, what do you think of the new color scheme for metaphor?

Hey, check this out. This is from my Blogger account profile. Look at the number of words written.

How about that, huh? All sevens. That’s gotta be lucky! Of course, I’m writing more now, so that changes it. And I think Blogger has been having trouble with stats lately, so it’s more anyway. But at some point in my recent blogging “career,” I was one lucky son of a gun. Thank you very much.