I am feeling both abandoned and guilty of abandoning others... I feel like I am scrambling for purchase to avoid a huge fall, and I am grabbing at all the wrong things... thanks for choosing the airport Hilton... we will start with the daywalker... yes, these are South Park references thrown into my otherwise somewhat serious and contemplative thoughts... I miss having a close circle of friends, and while I understand some of the reason for our current state, I still struggle with the loss of my closeness with each of them... my fear is killing me... my obsession is killing me... Zildjian is a funny word... happy birthday sister... I'm going down to South Park going to have a real good time...

 Nothing I can say here explains why, after eleven years, I have rediscovered this blog. 

11 long days...

... without a cigarette. Anyone who knows me very well at all would have considered me least likely of all the smokers they know to quit, and yet here I sit at my computer, smoke free for the longest span of time since the mid 1990's. It's causing me to feel happy, anxious, nervous, sneaky, shitty, shaky, proud, antsy, and several other less-describable feeling in random succession. But so far in spite of some pretty serious cravings I have yet to give in. Will try to post more about this in the fututre, but just too tired to continue the thought right now.

Bitter? Vengeful? Just?

So I recently got a ticket in Dakota County. I made a right turn on red at an intersection where a "no right turn on red" sign is pretty clearly posted. I don't deny in any way that I broke a traffic law here. Honestly, I don't blame the officer for pulling me over... he was doing his job.

Something the officer said bothered me, however. I can't remember it exactly, but he said something to the effect that he had no choice but to write me that ticket, that it was required as a result of his act of pulling me over for the violation. Really? So the choice has been taken away from the officer to decide whether the driver posed an imminent threat in the situation for which he/she was pulled over? Given the facts that there was no traffic coming from my left and the officer made a right turn on the same red light immediately behind me, I would think that more often than not an officer, given the discretion to decide whether or not this offense was worthy of a ticket, would choose to issue a verbal warning. Especially when the driver in question has no prior offenses in the last 8 years. But then, I may be a bit biased.

So now I have this ticket. I'm looking through the fines thinking I'll be out $40-50 bucks and find that the smallest moving violation on the fine portion of the sheet is $130!!! All for being in the intersection 10 seconds before I should have. To me this fine is far more onerous than the infraction for which it was levied.

So I'm seriously thinking about making it a personal goal to change my spending habits in such a way that I am able to deprive Dakota county of that $130. I may still have to pay the fine, but they will be no richer as a result of it if I can help it. I won't go into the argument of whether this county sees its traffic policing as a source of revenue more than a ensurance of public safety - I don't know enough about the system there to know which way that card falls. But I find the fine to be seriously out of proportion to the severity of the infraction, and as such I feel like I need to even the score.

Okay...

So, that being said, am I taking this too seriously? Yes, I understand that people get tickets every day, and for many it's a pretty run-of-the-mill occurrence. But as I mentioned, I have had no infractions in the last 8 years, and I drive 30-40k miles per year for work. Is this not a well enough established track record of good driving to justify my being angry at the indifference with which I was given this citation?

Wonder what it is...

... that got me writing again? I don't remember anything different having happened over the last week or so. But suddenly I've got that urge to write again. It's not that I have anything particularly compelling to write about. On the contrary, I find myself in a constant struggle to believe that I have anything interesting to say at all, via live dialogue or the written word. But I just spent over an hour sitting at my computer working on a short story for a Writer's Journal competition. I didn't have to force myself to do it, either. I just sat down and wrote. I can't say exactly what it is that compelled me to do this, but I hope it keeps up.

90%? Seriously?

So I've been hearing all day about the plan by congress to tax some AIG bonus recipients as much as 90% of the total bonus. Oh, and the same news sources have said something to the effect that such a tax would serve as a warning to other businesses.

Honestly I think if anyone should take a warning from this it should be individual taxpayers. This action by congress should make it clear to each and every individual that there is no limit to the level of greed in our current government. If they can get away with taxing this small group of people 90% on these bonuses, what is to stop them from picking another small group, and another, and another... until they find a reason to tax each and every one of us this much for one of a million reasons.

And has it occurred to anyone to consider that AIG might have thought this through before cutting the checks? According to a couple of news sources AIG looked into the legal consequences of not giving these bonuses out and found that they would take on an unacceptable risk if they chose to break the contracts they had with these employees. No matter how much we as individuals may dislike what was done within this company and the effect it has had on our economy, no amount of government bail out money does or should nullify pre-existing contracts the company had with its employees. Perhaps when our congress was jamming this bailout through they should have considered that handing AIG a crisp new dollar gains them no right to dictate how they spend that dollar.

......................

Sometimes I feel like I need to scream, laugh, cry, run, sleep, talk, and just generally live out loud where everyone can see me, where one who is in the general vicinity has no choice but to see me! Unfortunately it's 2am on a Saturday night and, while not as bad as a work day, I'd rather not piss off my neighbors by running naked and screaming down Nicollet Ave. So in answer to all of life's questions, small and large, and in answer to the indecipherable results my mind spews out after pondering these questions for the nth time, I give a simultaneous middle finger and hug... Sometimes it hurts so bad and feels so good at the same time.