The disturbing material in “Grand Theft Auto” and other games like it is stealing the innocence of our children, and it’s making the difficult job of being a parent even harder. Hillary Clinton

This lady’s disturbing acceptance of the dozens of affairs, public and private, of her husband is making the difficult job of being a wife even harder. Me

Plus, wasn’t there something in the news this chick was involved with… not so long ago. Something which every single media outlet, print and broadcast, was discussing 24x7. Something unavoidable even if you were a good parent who didn’t let your kids play “Mature” rated video games. Something even kindergartners were hearing about. Something about jamming one’s cock into a young employee’s mouth during office hours and blowing your load on her dress.

Where was Hillary’s outrage about lost innocence then?

I’d like to be so innocent as to believe we could elect a president who wasn’t a crook, a racist, a misogynist, or just a garden variety liar. Kids don’t know and can’t be expected to understand complex issues like Clinton tacitly sanctioning the genocide in Rwanda or his signing off on the Waco slaughter of children. They can understand that the president was a sleazy liar.

When Hillary didn’t divorce the guy she put her sanction and name to every deed.

“But, Timmy, the president didn’t really do anything wrong. It’s just a smear campaign—a full blown conspiracy—of the radical right.”

“But daddy, didn’t he lie about it? Relentlessly. Even under oath? Didn’t he destroy the reputations and careers of several other women making the same allegations who didn’t have semen stained dresses in their closets? Wasn’t he married through it all? Wasn’t he at work keeping a senator waiting to see him while a girl his daughter’s age was giving him fellatio?”

“Timmy, you just don’t understand politics.”

“So, Daddy. You’re saying everything he did is okay?”

“Okay, Timmy? Why it’s great. He’s a great president.”

Your kids understand that you’ve lost any ethics, outrage, or good sense because your partisanship is so intoxicated you glom onto any evil son of a bitch just because he wears the same Donkey you do and you’re desperate for the appearance of control and self-determination. A six year old could see he and his harpy were hypocritical, murderous grafters, why can’t you?

And mature video games are not making the difficult job of being parent harder, Hillary. They’re making the embarrassing position of being a shitty parent more embarrassing is all.

Kids, don’t look to government programs to get your narrow little asses to Mars. They kill astronauts for want of a 30¢ piece of rubber. They send delicate multi-million dollar ships to other planets to gently land like bullets because they can’t decide if they prefer metric or English for project collaboration. They put up multi-billion dollar telescopes with warped mirrors and the life-span of a large dog. They take almost three years to make the launch of a Shuttle safe only to find the gas gauge doesn’t even work no matter how much you hit it.

In scant years, private enterprise involving just a few men and a few millions of dollars has done what the world’s greatest economy and government could not do in five decades: put a reusable ship into space safely twice in a single week. A private innovation not unlike the one made by two bicycle makers who decided to branch out 100 years ago.

Mars, the moons of Neptune, Venus, the rings of Saturn, the Moon’s vast still seas… it’s all yours if you’ll take it. Don’t wait for someone to give it to you. They don’t know how. They don’t even know why.

Photo courtesy of Scaled Composites, LLC.

Data—the “fully functional” android who whines, but in a manly way, constantly about needing to feel more for others, cannot forget a special occasion or birthday, never feels jealousy or anger, cannot father a child, and is able to fuck relentlessly or tenderly for hours on end in every style from the Kama Sutra to the Andorian Encyclopedia of Oral Labial Massage, while simultaneously composing love poetry, even if only an amalgam of Christina Rossetti, the Romantics, and Shakespeare—is not the single most popular item with the ladies of a deep space vessel which doesn’t permit visits to shore or family for months at a time.

They don’t blow up busses. They don’t fire on scared refugees at check-points. And they absolutely do not threaten to take away everything I’ve worked for if I refuse to pay for them to keep killing.

Dear Comrades:

Will Smith said something I don’t like to hear aloud tonight. It’s the same reason I love travelling to countries where I don’t speak the language. If I don’t understand what people say, I can’t hear the mean gossip, the trite pass-time banter, the historically ignorant politics, or the oblique manipulations. I can love a place and a people.

I wrote that better in a letter once.

I wrote a long thing about this all tonight but all I’m keeping is the title and the first line. You don’t deserve the rest. Which is to say, you haven’t earned it. Most’a you.

I’ve got nothing else. I’m sad that I still care about you tonight. It’s hard being in love with someone bent on suicide. My decision. Not trying to pawn it off. I’ll live with it till I learn to let it go.

Not posting the piece I wrote. I’m getting there.

Even when they are arachnids.

Junior High. I had to take shop; pardon me, Industrial Arts. It was that or French. Even though shop meant probably getting my ass kicked, the choice wasn’t hard.

The teacher, Mr Gomez, was a nice man who generally kept everyone civil and on point. Some of the boys—there was not one girl in the class—were better at welding and woodwork but no one in there was even close to me at drafting so I did okay helping others out sometimes.

The nice man took a sabbatical and since there were no academics involved we got the Narc for substitute. He was a huge fella, the product of all the local blood lines plus a few. Looked a bit like a Mestizo Andre the Giant. No one ever, ever called him anything but the Narc. I never heard his real name once.

Lawrence, tired of picking on the only honky in the class of the lifetime D average representatives of la Raza Cosmica, started to pick at the Narc. I think Lawrence went after him about the same old, same old. The other blood lines obviously represented in the Narc’s collage was Negro. I write Negro not to provoke but because Moroccans and Egyptians are Africans just like Zulus and Hutus. African isn’t a color, culture, or race. It’s a continent.

When Lawrence started in, in local Spanish, the Narc was spacing out on a shop stool, leaning against the painted cinderblock wall at the back of the room, with a big old boner. The head of his cock peeking out from behind his belt, pointing at his belly button where his 70’s era polyester shirt had ridden up.

One of those moments where my consciousness was nowhere near the classroom my body was stuck in. I truly hated my parents for bringing me back home to New Mexico. That was all.

Some sort of challenge happened. They were on their way to Mr Gomez’s walk-in closet sized office at the end of the room. The steel door shut and locked. The blinds came down. For five minutes, while the cement walls shook, the blinds rattled, and we heard a filing cabinet get tossed around, Lawrence got the most important lesson in his life, though he didn’t ever know it.

Contrite, put-down, Lawrence exited the office first. No one talked about it ever.

I wish there were more volition involved in memory. I never should have had to think about it again for a second after the bell rang that day. The boner. An all boys class. The grinning, eager ass-whipping of the best looking boy in the pack. It’s twenty-plus years later and I only put this together this morning. How that boner has haunted me. Maybe now I can let it go, so to speak.

I heard someone killed Lawrence a few years ago. I guess some lessons just don’t stick.

And barring any lapses in sanity, that’s where I’ll be instead of here for awhile. If you miss me, there are well over 650 entries in the QueryLog now. Make a dent in it or read the dictionary cover to cover before you bitch.

I was distinctly hurt when reading in a Led Zeppelin biography that the then singer of Generation X, one Billy Idol, had said some unpleasant things to the band from the back of his motorcycle and called them dinosaurs. He was 20-something at the time but as he was born in 1955 and has just released an album, this guerrilla feedback isn’t weathering well.

I wanted to kick Billy Idol’s ass at the time. The way kids will. The way kids often did when someone scratched “K.I.S.S.” into their desktop, lightning bolt esses and all, in 7th grade in 1978 and the next kid over, having listened to the vinyl “Houses of the Holy” 6 times end-on-end the night before remarked “KISS sucks shit, queer-bait.”

It makes me a bit nostalgic and sad that the “shit” in the “______ sucks shit” is now a linguistic footnote.

Aside to Cameron Crowe: you really should have added the queer-bait on the end. It would have made the beating you took more satisfying in retrospect.

Robert Plant also has a new album out. Robert is 7 years older than Billy today. One of the best songs on “Mighty Rearranger” is Tin Pan Valley.

My peers may flirt with cabaret–
some fake the “rebel yell…”
Me—I’m moving up to higher ground–
I must escape their hell

So, it didn’t matter that I couldn’t kick his ass. I just want to make sure others are aware of the country ass whooping Billy knows he’s taking right now.

What a difference a dinosaur makes.