Sleepin and Whatnot

This is not my home.

So last night I again went to bed **relatively** early, around 12:40. Small victories, people.

And then tonight I had another run-in with some beer and the booze won. Doorknobs, Jayson and I went to Mugs to have bar food and bro time and some wings, a burger and one higher proof stout later, we came home to get ready to go out at see Ladyhawke at Studio B. Except that within 30 minutes of being home I first passed out in an armchair and then on the nearby couch.

Of course, now it's 1:40 and I'm wide awake (after having just finished watching a wonderful albeit a little dated Sutherland-Fonda curio called Klute***), so obviously I'm not "in-need-of-rest, on-the-verge-of-collapse", but nonetheless I'm a little concerned over how quickly and absolutely sleep seemed to overtake me both tonight and on Tuesday. It's probably a testament to the general insanity in my life for this to be a concern, but I seem to be able rely on a certain type of regularity of my physical and mental functioning and any "disturbances in the force" tend to trouble me until I'm able to suss out what's going on. Still, i'm not ridiculous enough to suggest that feeling tired and a need to sleep at night time should be deemed strange enough to cause me alarm... but let's just say i'm "monitoring the situation". Or whatever.

NOTES:
***- I would strongly suggest checking out Klute if you haven't already (it's available through Netflix's Watch Instantly service, hint hint). It is yes, a little "dated", but there's also something fresh and almost anachronistic about the frankness of Jane Fonda's character and some of the feelings and attitudes she displays. Sutherland is also strange and good as he often is, and possibly of most significance is the score, which is both frightening and forward-looking. Check out for yourself.

NJ Rendezvous

The bike action is happening again, in full force; I shall be fit or else.

I went out for my first legit ride of the year on Saturday, a 40 miler from Columbus Circle, which came out to about 60 miles of riding including the trips to and from Columbus Circle and the additional trip from home to the 59 St Apple Store and back. My right thigh gave out from a cramp while going home over the 59 St bridge the first time and for the first time I felt truly exhausted, but within an hour my legs seemed to have rebounded, as I felt more or less totally fine. It was overall a tremendously satisfying feeling of exhaustion.

I tried to go out again for a ride today but noticed that my rear wheel apparently has a flat. I attempted to change the tube but instead spent hours determining that I literally could not. I somehow got the tire off the wheel and patched the leak, but then popped the tube as I struggled to get the tire bead back in place, and then from there was completely unable to get the tire off again. So tough did it become that I broke three tire levels in the process, leading even extreme do-it-yourselfer Mark Jaffe to proclaim the tire unchangeable. And so instead I proceeded to watch SEVEN STRAIGHT HOURS of NBA basketball, of which I enjoyed nearly every minute.

Now I have to try and get the bike to a shop tomorrow, somehow, but it's considerably more difficult to do so during the week when I struggle to get home at reasonable hours. Any non-standard hour jobbed friends want to help a brother out?


My training ride cue card

???

Lost at sea, i've been. Still not Hyperliving. I'd like to just say i've learned everything i need to and now i'm just done with this, but it isn't the case--i've been temporarily defeated, self-defeated, and somehow i need to overcome. It's all in my head, and somehow it must come up.

I am not succeeding yet but I have not given up either.

To be continued...

Hyperliving Returns... No, Really

Ok, 3 months vacation is a long time. Here we go again.

The upcoming schedule for Hyperliving, Pt. II:

Week 0², Aug 24-30: Mini-Hyperliving/ResAdv "Night Out" Week

Week A, Aug 31-Sept 6: Week of Yoga

Week B, Sept 7-13: Raw Foods Week

Week C, Sept 14-20: Travel only by Bus

Expect also: 

- posts on my continued crossword and biking obsessions

- stories about my new bike

- more mixes

- more bullshit

love, 

Jeffrey

BROKEN HOUSE:


SMALL REPLICANT:

ESTABLISHED TELECOMMUNICATIONS LIFELINK DEVICE:

Hyperliving Returns

Today is my birthday. It is July 26, and I am 26 years old. 

Hyperliving will be back, starting tomorrow.

Hyperliving, where art thou?

A bit of time tending to the tomatoes, from last week's "Gardening Week"

Hyperliving is, obviously, on a bit of a hiatus. I am leaving for England tomorrow for work and will be gone until June 29. The recently exhaustive amounts of work i've been doing have been wearing me down and cutting into my ability to focus on anything resembling blogging. This is the first week in 2008 when I haven't even had the pretense of having a "Hyperliving activity"--but, as you might guess, that is mostly because this week's Hyperliving task has been "Do your job because it all comes down to next Monday, buddy!" However, I do hope to regroup when I come back and get Hyperliving back into gear.

But regardless of where Hyperliving heads, now or later, I think that most importantly I can say that I appear to have achieved a relatively stable level of happiness over the past few months that is almost unlike anything I've ever known. For the first time in my life, I feel like I have some perspective on what I'm doing and where I'm going, and what I might be trying to get out of life. It's sort of amazing. I am not suggesting that I feel constantly ecstatic, but simply that things seem all right and in order and that I feel generally confident that I am making decisions that I feel good about, which represent new directions in life that I've taken.

Though this year i've struggled my way through some of these Hyperliving activities (not to mention getting past my own personal demons and misfortunes), but there is just no question that they've done wonders for me, and that many of them have lead me to change small and large parts of the way I live each day of my life.

I'll check back in again in a few days but rest assured, there will be more Hyperliving.

-JB

Umm..

As Todd said to me today, Bike Week was the worst week of Hyperliving so far because it's totally killed what I've done since then. I have to wake up in three and a half hours for a 65 mile bike ride I'm taking tomorrow to Montauk. I think only of bikes.

I have scraps of paper with stuff i've written about friends on my desk and photos of them to post. Tomorrow begins meditation week. I feel like this ride is going to be the ultimate sort of meditative exercise for a man whose brain travels only at speeds of 70-120mph. We'll see. I'll try and photog as much as i can and rejoin you soon.

love,
JB

Black Tears (I Can See Them But I Can't Feel Them), or "I Know that I'm / The most enept / That ever stepped"

This is neither an excuse nor an actual follow-through, but merely a reminder that I'm not dead and I'm still trying to make my way in a world that I admittedly am in constant struggle with to understand and make ok.

So I'm here and trying to sort shit out right now, and it's a bit of murk murk and a lot of glug glug. But Hyperliving is still here, and will be "back on track" in the more registered, formal sense, soon enough. But, as my man says, "These things take time."

Week 18: "Reading Week" Recap Pt. 1 (Bikes and Other Things and Not Books)

I have been alternating between massively gleeful and horrifyingly depressed. Life has been up and down for me lately, despite staying largely the same. Meaning, it's all been in my idea-overflowing head.

First things first: this past week must certainly be redacted in the Hyperliving annals as "Vacation Week #2", subtitled Mental Recuperation and Reconstruction Week.

So what happened for "Reading Week"? I didn't read. Or hardly read.

I needed to finish my book club book before we meet next week and I hadn't even started reading it. I ordered two copies (accidentally) but the first didn't even come until Friday. In between then, I attempted to read Ulysses (beyond hilarious, laughable, the perfect metaphor for the ways in which I almost force failure by overreaching on simple aims)--resulting in, essentially, opening and closing the book and then nothing. I moved on from there to Don Delillo's Underworld, but I also was unprepared to get into that weighty tome, and so I finally hunkered down with JG Ballard's Empire of the Sun, of which I read about 35 pages in a hour of reading on Thursday night before finally relenting and deciding to accept the week as another week off.

I mark Week 18 as a failure week for sure, but at least it generated some good: a big reason that reading was such a struggle right now, beyond my generally non-longterm concentration lifestyle, is that lots of things have been going on in my life and I've been feeling pretty great about some new pursuits I've been engaging in.

Chief among these "new pursuits" is that I've become completely obsessed with bicycling. I am not one to generally talk such talk, but I'd say right now that it's approaching feelings of "This might be my 'salvation'". I've been struggling for years for find some way to get myself back on a track of exercise and healthiness and I think I've finally found it.

Compounding my new interest in biking is the fact that last Sunday I got a "new" bike on long-term loan from a friend who's father had just gotten a new bike and wanted to pass his old one along, an early 90s Japanese racing bike. This bike is just completely amazing and has taken the experience of biking for me from great to "I need to be sitting on this bike every minute of every day." I will write more on this bike and my history of bikes later, as there's something there, but suffice it to say that right now I have a hunger to be on the road.

In the past week I rode (according to the bike odometer) 96 miles. My rides this week included biking to work on Wednesday and Thursday and then three particular bike journeys on Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday.

Wednesday Ride, 17.62 miles
Wednesday was the day of The Great Hot Dog Ride Photo Recapturing with Ben D.


View Larger Map

Ben has been taking a statistics course on his way to beginning a path toward becoming a physician's assistant and for a final project he decided to canvas the city to evaluate the hot dog cart pricing. He did this as a part of a healthy 32 mile bike ride, but forgot to bring the memory card to his camera and was therefore unable to take any photos, so I agreed to meet up with him and recapture some action shots. I rode to work via the 59 St bridge and then met him downtown after work at Houston & Broadway. I snapped some poses and then we went for a ride to his house and continued our discussions on the finer points of Photoshop editing.

Here's a few photos I took (amazingly he didn't eat a single dog on his first journey, despite stopping at over 100 hot dog stands):








Saturday Ride, 13.81 miles
On Saturday, E-bad and I went on a sweet little bike tour of Astoria:


View Larger Map

We left from Williamsburg and headed over the Pulaski, the same way I ride to work, but then headed toward the East River and rode along that, seeing some of Astoria's lovely riverbank greens. We stopped along the way at Socrates Sculpture Park near the Noguchi Museum to relax and see some interesting outdoor artwork.

Photos:









We finished the ride by riding east across 20th Ave, the northernmost street in Queens, and then cruising down Steinway back toward the Burg. We'd hoped to find the Steinway piano factory somewhere along our route, but no such luck.

Sunday Ride, 28.19 miles
I am hoping to participate in a 65 mile bike ride on Long Island next week (more on that later), but I'd still never ridden more than 20 or so miles in a day, so yesterday I went on a long ride of 28 miles:


View Larger Map

I began in Williamsburg into Queens, over the 59 St bridge, north up 1st Ave eventually reaching 145 St, then back down and through Central Park on the bike/ride/walk loop, all the way down and then back up to the E90 St exit. I then rode down 5th Ave to Broadway, and then more or less (there was a street fair on part of Broadway) down Broadway to Canal and then over the Manhattan Bridge into Brooklyn and then home via standard Fort Greene route.

It was a great ride and probably the longest I've ever taken. Unlike the other two more leisurely rides, I attempted to ride fast and hard, and so my legs were basically exhausted by the end (including a few incidents of cramping, which probably could have been avoided had I stretched better and eaten a few more sugars before beginning). I will need to work on pacing myself if I'm going to ride 65 miles next Sunday. Laugh with me on that one, please.

--------

So we're getting back on track--regular updates going once again starting today.

cheers,
JB

Not Dead / Not Done

I'm still here. Distracted. Not accomplishing the week's goal of Hyperliving. But living, and certainly accomplishing some things related to my human life.

Updates to follow this weekend and over the next few days.

Looking Kinda Anxious in My Cross-armed Stance

Back in Upstate NY

Speaking of old weirdness, my mom handed me a pile of forgotten errata today, including photos of the past, random trinkets, and a postcard from an old girlfriend sent to me in the middle of a bout of insanity. Here's some photos of those items as well as some others I've taken:


Mom, in typical form


Dad


The Crayon Family


A little boy hammers nails to help build his new home.


A book of sister


Some things never change.

From a Rotterdam "park" off Rt 5S near Schenectady


This sign pinpoints precisely why this park seemed so strange.


This is the gross restroom Lil Beaumont insisted on using. Inviting, mmm.


And this is the toilet that she actually sat on.


And this is the mantra she stared at while she peed: "I want young dick in my mouth."

-----------------------------

It's been an odd, albeit wholly uneventful, few days up here. Even when nothing happens in Upstate NY I am reminded of everything that has come before and everything that didn't and might. There is a feeling here that always overcomes me, managing to present both sweeping stillness and also terrible uneasiness.

Blue Album Group Redux

I spoke at length a few weeks ago about the greatness of the Blue Album Group's efforts at rechanneling lost glory of the 90s and the end of innocence. My posts offered some words and photos, but I am in upstate NY right now and having visions of a past I'd nearly forgotten... and so I thought I'd post two video clips from the two final Blue Album Group shows, the former from last Friday's show at Trash Bar and the latter from the Glasslands show I saw on April 4:

Blue Album Group - My Name is Jonas (Live at Trash 4/25/08) from Lawrence Scaduto on Vimeo.


Blue Album Group - Buddy Holly from Lawrence Scaduto on Vimeo.

Computer Aliveness: Hard to complain right now...

I have just acted more impulsively than is usual for even me--as the devasting reality that I may have just erased my entire life of the past few years in digital form begins to set in slowly, the thought that I was also without computer began to take hold of me and savage my emotional well-being. And so...



I bought this new fella tonight--a 2.4 Ghz MacBook Pro. I feel spoiled.

It is the fifth computer I've had as an adult but my first new one since I got a Dell Dimension 4100 Pentium III 800 mhz desktop (256mb RAM) in August 2000 to take with me to school--running Windows ME and looking for love. I don't know why I still have this tower, but here it is:



My next machine was a used laptop I received in December 2002 to take with me on my semester abroad in London. It was just weak Celeron processor running Windows 98 SE and had only a cd player, but it did me well for a while. I'm pretty sure this computer is floating around my apartment somewhere but I can't seem to find it anywhere.

After that I got my next computer in September 2005, for $100 from the university where Princess Icy worked. They were upgrading all of their units and throwing out the old ones, so they offered all staff the chance to purchase one for $100. Though this machine was probably from 2002 or 2003, it was a Pentium 4 1.7 ghz with 1 GB ram and two harddrives totaling 120 GB. And most importantly, it ran Windows 2000, meaning that, unlike the other two, it could run iTunes. Up until this point I'd been relying on other people's computers to maintain my ipod, but finally I could control it all on my own. Here it is now below; it ran perfectly until just a few months ago when it began shutting off spontaneously and now, as of last week, seems to have kicked the bucket for good:



There it is at the bottom; note that the monitor is the same 17" monitor I got with my Dell desktop in 2000.

Finally in October 2006 I received "the life-changer"--my very first Mac. For $500, I purchased from a coworker of Shrimp Cracker a nearly 3 year old G4 1 ghz 12" Apple Powerbook with 1.25 GB ram (max) and 120 GB hard drive space (max). Here it is below in darkness next to the bright magic light of my new friend.



This machine literally changed my life. Though already aged when I received it, this machine finally brought me forward in the world, and its previous owner had souped it up enough to extend its lifespan years past the store purchase life. I began carrying this computer everywhere, using it for everything. It brought me immense joy and helped me feel finally like I'd been able to "center" my digital existence in a way that felt natural and right. It also converted me into a full-on Mac man.

I knew that eventually my romance with my G4 would fall apart, but even as recently as Friday it was still going strong and I hoped to have more time with it.

But you can't control the wind--I know that clearly enough. And now I have a new machine, and it's amazing and I am a lucky (though impoverished) boy. The start of a new era.

Computer Deadness: Maximum Sadness

(Note: This is not my computer, though mine is indeed smashed)

Expect a little upcoming interruption in Hyperliving service: my dearly beloved computer died last night--I left the cord in a precarious position in the middle of a walkpath and it was tripped and my computer was yanked to the ground, smashing to its seeming death. It immediately shut off and now when I turn it on, it makes the "Apple sound" but the screen just turns gray and nothing happens. Sadness.

Ironically enough, I just last week bought a 320 GB external harddrive to back everything up, but hadn't yet done so. I said to myself just on Friday when I was riding my bike home that, "I really need to do that on Sunday". The depressing result of my delay is that I may have lost 68 GB of music with hundreds of carefully crafted playlists. Equally important is the loss of all of my precious photos, which carefully document my life from September 2006 to the present. Some of these were taken by others and which I can get back in various ways, but most I can't get back and the rest, about 1500 or so, were photos I took this year for Hyperliving and otherwise. Finally, though there is less of this, lost is all of my non-Internet saved writing... including about 15 fresh pages on Beck I wrote this spring (as well as all of the 150 b-sides/etc making up my mighty Becklog).

I feel pretty devasted right now because I've finally stored my entire life--especially the last year and a half--on that little silver rectangle and it seems like I might have just lost it all.

The short of it all is that I now am temporarily without computer, as my aging P4 Windows 2000 desktop just died last week as well (though not nearly as tragically). I am a finger-trigger away from buying a new one with money I truly do not have (Apple credit cards?) so maybe i'll have something in the next few days... but for the time being I am alone in the world without binary comfort.

I'll check in soon with the rest of what's going on in Hyperliving coming up, though sadly won't be able to post the rest of the photos from the past few days.

Week 15, Veganism: Updates coming

It's a BEAUTIFUL fucking Saturday afternoon right now and I'm not about to spend the day inside blogging, but I do owe a few entries about the past few days. Lots of photos and stories about Wed, Thurs and Fri of this week--i'll try to get 'em up tonight.

I am pleased to report though that it's been a week of great success and I'm very pleased. Outside of a total failure to understand how vegans manage to get by on what feels like a nearly joyless understanding of the experience of food-eating, it's actually been kind of fun being so careful about what I eat--a nice reminder that even food is something we can enjoy thoughtlessly and that it usually pays in psychological coinage to invest a little thought process in the food decisions we make.

Now time for basketball and dogs outside with M Jaffe!





... LATER:

Some photos of basketball with M Jaffe. By this point I was already too exhausted and was sitting along the fence tending to whining dogs. I haven't smoked many cigarettes this week following up the no smoking of last week, but today was definitely a reminder that I should be smoking even less than that.


M Jaffe shoots


And he also defends

Continuing exploits of "The Heart Beats." - I Heart Yoko

We went to the studio last night to record some stuff for The Heart Beats. and laid down a few more tracks for the "EP". Things are coming along well, albeitly slowly (an unfortunate problem of making music when you aren't very good at playing music).

The final tracks I think will be finished next week after Imanant and I can record the rest of the vocals, but here's one for fun now, a track we laid down as the last of the evening, called "No Pussy Blues (Ode to Yoko)". I could explain it but it'll be more fun if I leave that for later.

Enjoy (or don't):

The Heart Beats. - "No Pussy Blues (Ode to Yoko)"

Week 11, Day 3: A Little Bit More, A Little Bit Less

I feel a little tired this morning.

The official Night 3 Sleep Report
--Went to bed: 10:26 pm
--Sleep music: Lali Puna, Scary World Theory
--Fell asleep: approx. 11:05 pm
--First woke up: 2:31 am
--Subsequent wakeups: 3:33 am, 3:58 am, 4:15 am, 4:34 am, 4:59 am, 5:11 am, 5:28 am, 5:47 am, 6:08 am, 6:26 am, 6:44 am, 6:59 am, 7:07 am, 7:15 am (last three with alarm clock)
--Out of bed/wide-awake: 7:16 am
--Total sleep period (counting brief wake-ups): 8 hrs, 11 min

Now I'm beginning to get the feeling that I really just don't know how to sleep well, or that maybe I can't. Last night seemed like the most restless night I've had yet, haunted by ridiculous "wide-awake" REM dreams with real people in very real situations. I fell asleep a bit later than intended because I'd met up for drinks with a friend who, after I recapped to her what's been going on this week, said, "Jeffrey... so basically you're sleeping like a pregnant woman," explaining how her friend who recently birthed a child has spent the past few months prior to and after her pregnancy sleeping for only 10-20 minutes at a time, unable to link the bits of rest together into something more cumulatively beneficial.

And that's the weird thing: it's like I get one first block of 2-3 hrs of sleep, but then upon waking up that first time (at which point each of the three times I've felt wide awake), I am unable to sleep for more than 30 minute chunks before jerking awake, certain it's now 7:45 am. Que terible. Perhaps it's more about being used to having to wake up when i'm still exhausted, and also about constantly sleeping until the point when I really "have to" get up, but it's sort of alarming/depressing. It's been recommended to me by non-medical professionals that I attempt to procure some kind of sleeping aid(s) for the duration of the week, but I'm really not generally into taking medication, especially not of that variety and especially not when some of the options have crazy/dangerous side effects like wakeless activity-engaging sleepwalking. I'll just try to keep sticking it out as I've been doing, hoping that the coming nights will be more restful than the last few.

Unofficial Post-Sleep Day 2 (Tuesday) Daytime Report
Even if the nights haven't seemed quite restful enough, Tuesday was my second straight day of making it through all of work feeling like I had maintained a solid and unwavering sense of alertness (can't say focus exactly, given my general disinterest in my job) all day long. Again, this should NOT be a big a deal and is only testament to how long I've let myself run on empty. It's been pretty nice, because I feel like I've gotten a lot of work done and have still had time to be myself, which is to say pretty unfocused and distracted and unable to work on any one project/task for more than 4 minutes at a time.

Week 10: [crickets] .... "What should I do / When I can't see my way out?"

I am struggling right now--March hasn't been so good to me. First i failed to complete an entire week's task on Beck and now this week's thank yous... one finished letter and two nearly finished letters is not enough. Let alone the three long overdue and very nearly finished (but "not yet perfect") mixes sit on my proverbial dashboard... and I haven't run in five days. If i had to label a "loser week" so far this year, this is surely it.

Unfortunately right now I'm struggling to get through the most significant depression I've felt in a while. I float through work like a zombie, struggling to do enough just to be ok, and then i get home and sit motionless on the couch or at the kitchen table or on my bed, held captive by my runaway brain waves. Self-esteem is low and sense of self lower. The last few days especially have been rough, and it hasn't helped that the apartment has been empty most of the week due to SXSW and other roommate life requirements. All day long and especially at home I am bombarded by destructive thoughts of sadness and loss and emptiness and despair and they take complete and total control of me, shutting everything down.

How do you block this kind of shit out? This is what I am trying to learn, and what, thus far, I have failed mightily at discovering. When I've got things going right (which admittedly in my life hasn't seemed often enough), everything clicks. But when things get out of hand, or go downhill, my spirit bends and sways and then ultimately collapses, knocked over by the powerful and seizing winds of depression.

Something has happened to my brain also, musically speaking, where I am listening to a handful of fucking songs OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER again. It's bizarre--never in my life have I wanted to put songs on repeat, but over the past two and a half months there are five specific songs that I've listened to over and over again. These songs, even though two of them are half-joyful, all speak to what's been going on in my life these past few months and I guess they just clicked with me representing different phases of feeling I've had (umm maybe Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's Five Stages of Grief?). Three of them are on the "Anglophilia" mix that will come someday soon, another on a mix I made a few months back. Beck week has inspired my most recent of these obsessions, as evidenced via my Last.FM recent play count of 15 listens (so far) over today and yesterday.

Anyway, as He says, I think/hope that "the cruelest days are almost over now," so hopefully i'll be back on track soon, maybe starting today. Next week though is "just" going to bed early, so outside of the fact that I'm unconvinced that my body knows how to fall asleep before 1 a.m., I think i'll be able to get through it and feel good about myself again (Doorknobs and Shrimp Cracker have promised to remove all electrical devices, including my phone, laptop, and even lamp from my bedroom, save my alarm clock, which honestly I probably won't need if I fall asleep before midnight since my body seems to wake up on its own after five or six hours of sleep.

if you've got any thoughts for me on getting over this kinda shit, hit me up here or at yearofhyperliving AT gmail.com. I'm always interested in the different ways that people deal with things; sometimes hearing another perspective reminds you to how to look at yourself anew and see new answers to old problems.

A workday-inspired poem

"Ode to PA"

clouds everywhere, black as night, opaque and smoky
so that only flashes of muted light ever get in.

Week 10, Thank Yous: Not a death wish, but a life wish

Today I am using the folly of Eliot Spitzer to distract you from my own failings.

I like this quote from NYT:

Dr. Frank Farley, a psychologist at Temple University, said that many politicians are what he calls 'Type T personalities,' with T standing for thrill-seeking. ...[But] it is sometimes speculated that certain politicians, at least subconsciously, want to be caught and have their careers upended. But do they?

"I’ve never seen it," said Dr. Farley. "I don’t believe it’s a factor with these
people. It’s just in their nature to push things. I don’t think they have a
death wish. I think they have a life wish. They just love all aspects of life —
some of it too much."

Spitzer shall be receiving a thank you letter from me tonight. Up until today, I had exactly two "personal effects" adorning my officespace.

One was this Dilbert cartoon, representing my daily feelings:



And the other was this photo of Eliot Spitzer, with the bubble "Bye, Jeffrey" coming from his mouth--a parting gift from another floor as I graduated from floor cubicle to personal (though shared) office:



The creases and wrinkles in the photo admittedly weren't there until today, when I tore the photo down and crumpled it up to throw out, before deciding to re-affix it and photograph for lasting documentation. I will include the photo in my letter to Spitzer thanking him for his year of service but respectfully requesting that he get the fuck out of town and join a private equity firm somewhere where he can just make millions of creepy dollars and live in his own world of fucktastic indulgence.

I have a life wish too, dudes: for the love of "God", can just one single honest politician stand-up for the people? One single person who isn't a worthless hypocrite raging against gays or prostitution or gambling whilst indulging in such "vices" on their own (though, seriously, gambling really IS a terrible vice); dipping their hand in industrial or pharma or cosa nostra $$$ and effecting crooked-minded policy; failing to acknowledge the reality of their experiences growing up American in America (smoking pot, lying occasionally, making mistakes).

I championed this asshole once, even knowing he was probably a huge jerk, because I thought that just maybe his drive for success would be enough to lead him to accomplish some good for the world. Now I see that any good was strictly incidental in the pursuit of Eliot's ever-widening-head. Thanks, Eliot, for reminding me that all heavy-weight politicos are greedy, self-indulgent, untrustworthy scumbag HYPOCRITES, and that it is foolish for me to put any hope in any of them being any different from the rest.

So Eliot, yeah, you lose today, but unfortunately, I've no doubt that you'll eventually win again. Sadly, the rest of us aren't so lucky: in the relative (meaning inherently fucked-up) scale of America, we lose, always.