I threw caution to the wind recently and purchased a Fitbit, partly at the urging of a gorgeous friend, and partly because after gaining 7kg since my heartattack almost 6 months ago I needed something to help stem, or rather turn, the tide. I was a little hesitant, because hey , it’s sort of pricey, and secondly, I’m about as far from a technonerd as you can get. I love it. I absofuckinglutely love it. It’s not so much that it’s technologically superb, measuring steps, pulse, and a multitude of other things, as well as linking to an app that provides personal stats that make me feel like I’m a world class athlete. (who hasn’t wanted THAT kind of pampering!) It lets me compete against friends! What better motivation is there then competing against friends? Okay that may make me sound horrible, but if it gets me off my fat ass (fat stomach more correctly, my ass remains pretty damned fine), it’s all good. I have turned into a walking madman! Today, while surging through the crowds in downtown Stockholm, walking to a friends for dinner after work, I seriously hit the zone. I had already taken a long walk at lunch and hit my 10,000 step daily minimum. So these steps were all gravy. I walked right through the heart of Stockholm, from Globen via Slussen, through Gamla Stan, and up to the top of Drottninggatan, where my friends Steve and Som live. I walked at top speed, weaving in and out of packs of tourists, reading the path ahead of me, slowing as little as possible. Whenever I was forced to slow down by zombies, in my head I became Dustin Hoffman’s character in Midnight Cowboy, “I’m walking here! I’m fucking walking here!” My legs and feet, after first struggling, finally replied “Fuck yeah!” and rose grandly and elegantly to the occasion. This is going to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship, me and my Fitbit, and my ass is going to be seriously in shape. Well, not my ass, as we’ve established it’s primo, but the rest of me is going to catch up!
Author Archives: blitzken
Fear and Loathing Subsides……..
Wow.
It’s June 27th, 2015, ten days after the slaughter in Charleston’s AME church, and a day after Barack Obama delivered a eulogy in that same church, at the funeral of the Reverend Clementa Pinckney.
I have just had to time to watch it in full.
This is a good man. A real man. A man of substance.
I find my thoughts drawn to Hunter S. Thompson. HST was the keenest poltical writer America has ever known, in my opinion. He saw the big picture. Always. In a way it was his curse, and I think what created his cynical, biting edge. But he wasn’t cynical for the sake of cynicism. He was that way because he saw the whole machination at once. Many of us only see the figures that appear out of the cuckoo clock on the hour, but Hunter always saw the wheels behind those doors and understood them. One of his last books was Better Than Sex, an almost grudging tribute to Bill Clinton, whom HST saw as a perfect politician, because of his natural charisma, and his ability to play that machine better than he ever could that saxophone of his.
But HST could not have foreseen Obama. He could not have dared to have hoped that large, except perhaps maybe in his heart of hearts, where only few, if any could see. I think if Hunter were around today, and had not taken himself out (yes, I’m still pissed at him for that, I miss his voice in this world) he would be describing Obama as “the perfect blend”.
Does he know and play the political game? Of course he does. He has to. No one becomes President any other way. But no President in living memory could represent what he stands for, and could have stood in that pulpit, and delivered that eulogy in the way that he did. He did so from his heart, with conviction and passion, and in a way that showed what Christian ideals are when they are understood and lived properly, regardless of the theology. The social side of the church. He did not bow, or hide his faith, nor did he trumpet it as better than any other. Indeed, he spoke of the church’s actions in fighting actively for change as representing not just Christians, but all Americans.
In a time with so many divisions, Barack Obama is a courageous, tireless, intelligent, passionate, unifying force. Sisyphus with a mission. Sisyphus with a quiet stubborn streak. This man is something we have not seen in leadership in a longtime. He is an inspiration.
I am willing to bet that Hunter would have admired Mr.Obama a great deal. Would he have found some stuff to be cynical about and written about that? Of course he would. But looking at the span of what could have been his lifetime – from Richard Nixon, whom he viewed as the epitome of evil, all the way up to Obama, and the escalation of changes in between, I am convinced he would have seen Obama as just that – the perfect blend, and the person America, and the world, was ready for and needed.
May the remainder of his term give him the leeway to continue the path he is on, and has been on from the beginning, and may his legacy become clear in his lifetime, and even moreso in the history to be written.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/obama-clementa-pinckney-eulogy-charleston
SHAKESPEARE’S HOTEL
To sleep, perchance to dream-
ay, there’s the rub,
Albeit troubled by the down
Of Satan’s ass this hotel deigns to dub
A pillow,
As if by naming it so
Those properties inherent
We expect to find
Would become apparent,
A cradle for our neck and shoulders,
Our troubled mind,
As if packing hell into a case of white
Would make it alright,
Would lead us astray
So that we then could say
A pillow, or a rose,
by any other name is just as sweet,
Though we know this analogy
To be incomplete,
For it does not encompass that we feel,
Yet cannot directly see,
The essence of quality,
From a hotel we deserve
Should it serve
To meet us in our earthly and ethereal stream,
To help us sleep,
Ay, and perchance to dream.
UNINVITED
Hey all ya’ll! Have you ever had a momentary slip and invited someone to your party because you thought it would be a kind gesture and you sort of wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt but then after you’d invited and before the party you dug a little deeper and had a change of heart and realized you absolutely positively without a shade of doubt do not want this person anywhere near your home, your family, or your friends and you are looking for a way to make them:
UNINVITED!
“I thought that I’d invite you,
Out of kindness and respect,
I really was inclined to,
But then your views I checked,
Now I find that you’ve a mind,
Which to be kind,
Is suspect,
So please don’t bother coming,
Your name has just been “x’d”.
A Great Day for the Irish
The post of a good friend, well written, and sentiment shared completely.
I am rarely proud of my country. I’ve nothing against Ireland, but it always seemed to me a weird thing to be, proud of something over which I had no control. I like Ireland, sure, but I’ve also had to grow up in it, deep in the countryside, where I experienced at first-hand the guilt and harshness and brutality and misogyny and block-headed thickness of the place.
But yesterday the people of Ireland were asked if any two adults could get fully and properly married, regardless of their gender, and they said: sure, why the fuck not? They said it loud and emphatically, bringing back a 62% vote in favour. A resounding YES, allowing any two people in love to tell the world.
I admit many tears as I watched the day unfold on twitter. The 50,000 plus who came home from living abroad just to cast their votes. The…
View original post 274 more words
DANGLING SHOES
Pristine pairs of shoes,
Hanging from wires and trees,
Couplets of separate meaning,
Swinging in the breeze,
One thinks of people struggling,
With life’s necessities,
And ponders over affluence,
First world luxuries.
View through Starbucks window in Stockholm
Happy Ending (Where the fuck’s my?)
Something a little different for the blog. A recent recording of one of my songs. It deals with that feeling we have all encountered at least once in our lives. If you haven’t yet, don’t worry, you will. 😉
https://soundcloud.com/ken-donner/happyendingmastered
PILLOW TALK
My pillow says I hug it too tight,
It’s red,
But I squeeze till it’s white,
It says I project,
But I reject that assumption,
As untrue,
Easy to say,
If you’re a pillow and lay
there with someone to hold you.
THE DRESS
We’ve long known our reality,
Hinges on whether we agree,
That what we see is what we see,
Our world’s created mutually,
Assured acts of joint creation,
Helped us build civilization,
Though often I’ve had the sensation,
We’d lose our sense of calibration,
That one day we’d end our progress,
Things would unravel more or less,
But I did not know, I must confess,
It’d come down to the colour of an ugly dress!
Vinnie Barbarino knows women’s bodies better than Vito Barbieri (but Vinnie ain’t no legislator!)
This week in the journals of GFY, Stupidity On Parade!
Okay, that’s not unusual, there is a lot of stupidity around, and we do like to parade it, but this one still feels like it is in a league all its own.
On February 23, in this year of Cthulhu 2015, Mr.Vito Barbieri, a republican representative in the Idaho legislature (no I can’t bring myself to spell republican with an upper-case R, sue me) raised a serious question during discussion of an abortion bill. He was questioning Dr. Julie Madsen.
The bill in question would ban doctors from prescribing abortion-inducing drugs via video conference, or phone call, thus limiting access to abortion for women in outlying areas. Dr.Madsen was explaining how remote cameras can work in situations such as a colonoscopy, where one would swallow a capsule with a tiny camera that can be operated remotely. This makes sense, because there is actually a connection between the mouth and the colon. It was then that good old VB asked his stunning question, which he later tried to explain away as being rhethorical. He asked Dr.Madsen if the same method could be used for pregnancies. Here is the exact exchange, because you can’t make this stuff up:
Barbieri: “You mentioned the risk of colonoscopy , can that be done by drugs?”
Dr. Julie Madsen: “It cannot be done by drugs. It can, however, be done remotely where you swallow a pill and this pill has a little camera, and it makes its way through your intestines and those images are uploaded to a doctor who’s often thousands of miles away, who then interprets that.”
Barbieri: “Can this same procedure then be done in a pregnancy? Swallowing a camera and helping the doctor determine what the situation is?”
Madsen: “It cannot be done in pregnancy, simply because when you swallow a pill, it would not end up in the vagina.” (Hoots of laughter from the audience)
Barbieri: “Fascinating. That certainly makes sense, doctor.”
His attempt to explain the question away as being rhethorical is hilarious, simply because it is not based in any reality whatsoever. He might as well have asked if it were possible to recruit tiny green spacemen like they have in old Twilight Zone episodes and let them do gynecological exams.
The whole affair raises a slew of questions for me. I have to wonder if Mr.Barbieri believes you can get pregnant by swallowing semen. If that were the case one of the few tried and true birth control methods would be thrown out the window, and all those people who have t-shirts reading “I could have had a brother, but mom swallowed” would have to burn them since they would be meaningless. Although it might open up new possibilities for smuggling, and finally provide a scientific basis for the Linda Lovelace phenomenon, that is to say the plotline in the infamous Deep Throat movie. The storyline goes that her clitoris is located in her throat. In fact, perhaps that’s the sort of resource Mr.Barbieri has used to gather his unique spin on anatomical information.
If there was a direct line from mouth to vagina, I wonder where he thinks the food would go when women eat? No doubt he has an explanation for that as well, and is probably ready to propose legislation for larger feminine protection products in order to help women with the food overflow, since he is so concerned for them and has his finger on the pulse. He’s not sure exactly where the pulse is, but his finger is there.
Of course if there is a direct line from mouth to vagina, there must be a direct line the other way as well, and that conjures up pictures to disturbing to even consider.
But not to worry, there is no act of anatomical terrorism that legislation can’t deal with, though even as I write that I hesitate slightly, should “anatomical terrorism” actually become a concept. One never knows anymore. Hunter S. Thompson used to say when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. He also said, in a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity. If so, Mr. Barbieri you are a special kind of sinner, a sinner in a league all your own. I take special joy in telling you to GFY, because I realize you might actually try.
(Incidentally, when looking Mr.Vito Barbieri up online, I found there is another Mr.Vito Barbieri who is apparently a doctor in Italy. Given the potential affect on his career should anyone attribute Mr.VB’s inane anatomical quote to Dr.VB, I think he should consider a major lawsuit for potential slander and damage. I’ll have my attornies draft a letter to his attornies, with proper references, because no doubt they’ll just think it is a joke at first.)
