To educate yourself for the feeling of gratitude means to take nothing for granted, but to always seek out and value the kind that will stand behind the action. Nothing that is done for you is a matter of course. Everything originates in a will for the good, which is directed at you. Train yourself never to put off the word or action for the expression of gratitude.
–ALBERT SCHWEITZER

When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
–Audre Lorde

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
–Erich Fromm

You flee to the tree stump, you stand there and sing, stretch an arm into the yard to beckon the sad tomato plants to listen. Until the neighbor Don appears leaning on the fence, smiling—embarassed then you run to the porch swing, play Ambulance with the ants on the concrete. Marvel at their ability to carry the injured away.

Never dwell long in the cool dark corner, the one pine tree shade, the place where your cousins will gravitate with their miniatures and stories. You hover at the edge, kick rotting apples and pretend like your game is right there on the boundary in the sun. Sink into the tick-tick-tick of cicadas and summer. The lightning bugs launch from hands, the fence is closed.

All of the houses are one level, and brick. The occupants are anonymous and older—you squint when their doors open looking for a kid. Someone your age to scheme with, but nothing. Find solace in the storm drain, the septic gurgle at the end of the property line. Write on your skin with squeezed mulberries. Believe that one day you will grow up, live close to this road, maybe build something huge like a family or a cilo of movie stubs and pop tabs(all the rage to keep on key rings and rusty necklaces). Watch the rows of folding chairs multiply next door for an outdoor wedding and write like mad in a journal—what of this waiting, you scrawl, what of this time. Let me be there now.

When you go home, hang onto the scent of where you were previous. The mix of laundry and objects. Cuff to nose, cuff to nose. When the arguing is bad you go downstairs, dance on one foot in the back room making up songs to drown out the shouting. Long for pine green carpet, the trampled fabric of illusioned safety. Not really here, not really there. Develop stomach responses to outside statements. When the car stops at red lights, imagine throwing the door open, not looking back as you break into a run.

Report: Top Bush aides ducked queries on prosecutor firingsBy Michael Isikoff | NEWSWEEK
Published Sep 29, 2008

Karl Rove shows up most nights these days as a commentator on Fox News and offers up political insights in columns for the Wall Street Journal and NEWSWEEK. But when Justice Department investigators tried to ask him about his role in the mass firings of U.S. attorneys, the former White House political chief would say nothing, refusing to be questioned at all.

According to a blistering new report by the Justice Department inspector general released Monday, Rove was one of a number of former White House officials (including ex-White House counsel and Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers) who declined to cooperate with its investigation into the U.S. attorney firings-even though the current White House counsel’s office encouraged them to do so.

The result of that stance led Attorney General Michael Mukasey today to take the extraordinary step of appointing a new special prosecutor (with full grand jury subpoena power) to investigate the U.S. attorney firings. He did so, he said in a statement, because “important questions” about the mass purge of prosecutors remain “unanswered” and “further investigation” is needed to determine whether federal crimes were committed in the decision to fire some of the U.S. attorneys or in providing false testimony to Congress about why the dismissals had taken place.
The massive (and long-awaited) 392-page report excoriates former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and other onetime senior Justice Department officials for presiding over a “fundamentally flawed” and “unprecedented” process to summarily remove nine U.S. attorneys-and then mislead the Congress about why they had done so. And it lays the basis for Mukasey’s action by concluding there was “significant evidence that political partisan considerations” played a major role in some of the firings-most notably in the dismissal of David Iglesias, the U.S. attorney in New Mexico.

The inspector general uncovered new evidence showing how New Mexico Republican Party officials repeatedly tried to pressure Iglesias to launch vote fraud investigations that could boost the party’s prospects in federal and state elections. “This is the single best wedge issue ever in NM,” one state GOP lawyer wrote in an email to Iglesias that was copied to the New Mexico GOP chairman and a host of party officials in the state.

But when Iglesias concluded there was not enough evidence to bring such cases, the state GOP chairman and others were infuriated and brought their complaints to Washington-including to Rove and his political deputies in the White House. The state GOP’s complaints prompted Rove (and President Bush himself) to raise the issue with then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Those complaints-coupled with the annoyance of GOP Sen. Pete Domenici about Iglesias’ failure to bring an election eve indictment against a leading state Democrat in Oct. 2006-prompted Gonzales’ chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, to suddenly put Iglesias on the list of prosecutors to be fired in November, 2006, the report concludes.

“Because of complaints by political officials who had a political interest in the outcome of these voter fraud and public corruption cases, the Department removed Iglesias, an individual who had previously been viewed as a strong U.S. attorney,” the report states. (The report concludes that if Iglesias was fired as part of an attempt to influence the decisions on particular cases, it could constitute “obstruction of justice” or a conspiracy to defraud the public of his “honest services.”)

The report dismisses later testimony to Congress by Gonzales and other top Justice Department officials that Iglesias was fired because he was an “under-performer” and an “absentee landlord” as “disingenuous after-the-fact rationalizations that had nothing to do with the real reason for Iglesias’ removal.”

“I’ve always believed that Rove was front and center in this mess,” Iglesias told Newsweek in a telephone interview today. But he said he was not surprised that the former White House chief political aide (along with Miers and two other former White House officials) rebuffed the attempts by Justice inspector general investigators to question them about their actions in the U.S. attorney firings. “They have the right against self-incrimination like anybody else,” said Iglesias.

Rove and his attorney, Robert Luskin, did not respond to repeated request for comment. Rove and Miers had previously refused to answer questions from Congress about the firings, citing White House claims of executive privilege. But as inspector general Glenn Fine noted in the report, the claim of executive privilege did not apply in this instance, since the Justice Department is part of the executive branch itself-one key reason, the report says, that the White House counsel’s office “encouraged” current and former employees to cooperate with the probe. (The White House refused, however, to turn over its own internal emails about the U.S. attorney firings as well as a full copy of a special internal memo, prepared for White House counsel Fred Fielding last year about the firings, citing what it called “confidentiality interests of a very high order.”)

Iglesias, a Bush appointee who served as the model for the Tom Cruise character in the movie “A Few Good Men,” said Monday that the new evidence in the report shows how New Mexico Republican officials and White House aides like Rove fundamentally misunderstood his duties as U.S. attorney. The report documents how the state GOP chairman wrote one email to Iglesias proposing that he become part of “the [Republican] party’s voter fraud working group.” (The email was copied to other state GOP officials as well as the chiefs of staff of GOP Rep. Heather Wilson and Sen. Domenici in Washington.) But Iglesias ignored the request. “I was a law enforcement official,” he said. “It wasn’t appropriate for me to join any partisan team.”

The report does criticize Iglesias, saying he engaged in “misconduct” by failing to report his election-eve phone call from Domenici to senior Justice officials in Washington as he was required to do under Justice guidelines. And it dismisses some of the charges of congressional Democrats about the U.S. attorney firings last year-concluding, for example, that the dismissal of Carol Lamm, the U.S. attorney in San Diego, had nothing to do with her aggressive corruption prosecution of a GOP congressman. Instead, it was related to her failure to more vigorously bring immigration and gun cases, as department officials wanted.

The report did find there may have been political factors in some of the other U.S. attorney firings in Missouri, Washington, and Arkansas. But the investigators could not get to the bottom of the matter-and in particular determine the role White House officials played-without the cooperation of key witnesses like Rove, the report found. The newly appointed special prosecutor, a career official named Nora Dannehy, who is now serving as acting U.S. attorney in Connecticut, will have more leverage. Unlike the inspector general, she will be empowered to subpoena the reluctant witnesses-and have a federal judge hold them in contempt if they fail to comply. But Iglesias, for one, isn’t holding his breath. “I don’t think we’re going to get the answers while this administration is in office,” he said.

I predict so much shit hitting the fan once the Bush administration is out of office.

Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.

Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.

both quotes by henry david thoreau.

SpaceX has made history. Its privately developed rocket has made it into space.

“I don’t know what to say… because my mind is just blown,” said Musk, during a brief address to his staff after the successful launch. “This is just the first step of many.”

so this is what it looks like to leave earth…

source

i have a good feeling that my sex anthology is going to mutate into a zine.

which is fine because inspiration struck on another anthology idea this evening.

sorry but i just gotta say it: man. creative block be gone! i feel absolutely on fire tonight.

From brow to foot, this weekend has been…something. I want to say “the most relaxing” and “one of the most peculiar”(in relation to observing human nature/actions around me) but I cannot construct the sentence to correctly convey this thought. Through and through, I am perplexed. I guess it goes to show(goes to show who? goes to show me I suppose) that any day is everything to anyone. You might have to think about it for a moment.

The neighborhood I live in is known as Little Italy, and this weekend marked Little Italy Days–three days of festival-like activities with many booths lining the street selling edibles and wearables(like Italia track jackets and baklava). The main street through Bloomfield is a zoo during this time, particularly if you are on foot. I decided to take a trip to the grocery store, and the best route there is through the madness. I grabbed my ipod and made a go of it. I’m wading and wading through people–so many people that I’m actually standing still on the sidewalk in some places, no forward progress. I just want some bagels, and something for dinner. I make it there, and I head back with my arms swinging bags. Music still blasting, yet I’m picking up little fibers of conversation along the way. I notice backtalking children, and couples fighting aggressively in front of Armand’s(man in beret, a classic figure in the neighborhood, stands by and watches the drama). The ugly kind of argument, where the woman keeps getting closer and closer to the man’s face, and then walking away, only to come marching back to stand toe to toe with him. I’m only there to see it for a minute, and then I’m gone. But the ugliness stays. I pass gaggles of young girls who seem to flip their hair ends in unison–they seem to float inches above the ground on their own disillusions..I can see their youth like some beautiful danger. The exquisite storm that unfolds and gathers, destroys and passes. I think of my own, thankful that I never owned platform flipflops(random yes but I really thought this). If they were stopped and told to guess my age, I wonder what they would say. I’m still carrying groceries, bending to sidestep the crowds and booths.

And you know, I’m hovering above the ground a bit too. All of it touches me in some way of course(if it has to do with humanity when it comes to witnessing, them I’m going to feel it) but I’m in my own little brilliant bubble. I carry my beautiful morning with me in protection, a talisman–the clock pushing 6pm and I still had bedhead. My corkscrew frenzy halo in the wind.

Meanwhile, people are pressing hips for the first time(and countless times) and living light years from their norm(due to unusual circumstance). It is, truly, all connected. The arguing couple, the gaggle of pre-teen, the strolling street musicians who turn and pluck their strings for me and my groceries, the groceries themselves; Milly curling up in a chair next to a beaten copy of “Moby Dick;” the span of ground from K’s house to mine. The question coming up today “how am I not myself?” Even the 3 dollar lemonade–it’s all. Right. Here. This nonsense is my sense-making. My brain feels upside down–it’s wonderful.

Like planting something. At the beginning for every glance in that direction, there’s just dirt. You start to wonder/doubt if you planted anything at all. Then you forget about the void because you have other things to do and glance at, and rain comes so you can afford to be less attentive in terms of nourishment. Then a shitload of things happen in a row, eyes back to where you planted and boom–a sprig.

Yeah. In short, this weekend felt like that.

October 11th..I’m going to see the ballet Radio and Juliet(which is choreographed to the music of Radiohead, o’ course). I cannot wait. I love the ballet.

at 1:22 in this video..that’s when my brian explodes pretty much.

Published.

By the way, the piece is written about the track below. I suggest listening to it while you read. I think it makes the most sense that way.