I was at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, on Sunday.

Telluride is the most beautiful place I’ve seen, so far, in Colorado. The town is nestled in a tiny valley carpeted with aspen trees. The mountains that rise up on three sides are so raw that, were it not for traces of snow, you could almost believe they’d been forced up from the earth only days before.

Some of the people at the festival look like that, too.

I’m convinced that the Telluride Bluegrass Festival is, in fact, the National Finals For Hairy Women Who Dance By Themselves At Outdoor Concerts. They all deserved prizes, in my opinion.

There is something fundamentally odd about seven acres of hippies smoking out to redneck gospel music. To be honest, I can’t believe that it has anything to do with the music, itself. If you held your kid’s elementary school orchestra recital at a park in the mountains and sold tickets, I’m fairly certain there’d be three-hundred-or-so people with questionable hygiene dancing badly and smoking doobies. If you asked, they’d tell you it was a Phish concert.

Katie Holmes has converted to Scientology. It was on the front page of cnn.com today, until the Jackson verdict was announced.

I’m afraid I have to ask.

In the name of all that’s Holy, why would anyone with even half a brain buy into a religion that was invented by a guy who wrote science fiction? Hellooooo? Can we get that second word again? That’s right, FICTION

How do you end up picking a religion like that? How do you skip over Buddha and Jesus, and settle on L. Ron Hubbard? “Well, you know, that heal-the-sick-raise-the-dead-your-sins-are-forgiven stuff, that’s okaaaaaay, but that scientology guy… he was onto something.”

(Originally written September, 2004–GK)

I haven’t mentioned it yet, a “friend” of mine is currently getting some “R & R” at the Broomfield County Jail. The dipstick doesn’t quite touch the oil, if you know what I mean, and he’s made a series of poor decisions that resulted in this temporary change of address. It’s unclear how long he has been invited to stay with them, but this isn’t really what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about are Waiting Rooms.

Waiting Rooms should be put into the same category as Death and Taxes: they are unavoidable. Yet we don’t talk about them, and they don’t get reviewed in the local paper.

As everyone knows, Waiting Rooms boil down to two things: Magazines and Wait Time. If there is a waiting room in Hell–okay, of course there’s a waiting room in Hell–it will be something like this:

You walk into a lime-colored room the size of Costco, or maybe Rhode Island, full of folding chairs from the basement of a Methodist church. You take a number and sit down.

A cheery, female voice echos from the front desk just over the horizon, “Number eleven? Number eleven?” You look down at your number. It’s number 11,279,302. You are, of course, the only person in the room.

“Number twelve? Number twelve?” the voice says, pleasantly.

You look at the fake-wood-laminated lamp stand, and there are two dog-eared magazines: Highlights, and AARP Magazine. From 1981.

“Number 13? Number 13?”

And that is when it hits you: Hell really sucks.

If Satan is out of the office for the week, you might find a copy of Sunset, too.

(Originally written sometime in 2000–GK)

I’m grateful for my car, but I’d never admit it. I hate the thing.

To be fair, it does have a few positive traits that I should be honest about:

1. It is completely paid for.
2. It’s the same color as dirt. (Actually, that’s because it’s never been washed–I don’t know what color the paint is.)
3. It is easy to break into when I lock my keys inside with the engine running.
4. From experience, I know that it will run on only 1.5 quarts of oil for at least three weeks.
5. It is too slow to get speeding tickets.
6. Did I mention that it was the color of dirt?

It is said that you shouldn’t go grocery shopping when you are hungry. I always go to the grocery store hungry. I go to the liquor store thirsty. And I went car shopping the day after I had driven my previous car into a semi.

Normally I am a saavy, discriminating customer. However-based on my choices that day, I’m convinced that, the night before, I must have walked downtown, purchased an immense ball of crack, and smoked the entire thing without ever waking up. I can only imagine where I got the money; I could have spent it on a better car.

Everything started with the classifieds. I think the ad read something like this:

Little old lady died and now her car needs a loving home. Can you help?
88 Honda Civic, cream, auto, very clean, no rust, runs great, 80k miles.
Only $3500. Higher Image Auto Sales.

Had the dealer been honest, it would have read like this:

This car was dredged from the bottom of a flooded river in Illinois, but the police removed the body of the little old lady they found in the driver’s seat, so it doesn’t smell much, anymore. You can’t see the rust because we dipped the car in latex paint from Home Depot. You’ll find that out in a month or two. This piece of crap has been passed from dealership to dealership like a stinky potato at eleven different auctions, which you’d notice if we hadn’t lost the original title. And now we’d like to unload it on you for twice the amount that we were overcharged for it in the first place.

At least the police removed the little old lady.

In some ways it’s an advantage that my car is such a piece of junk. I’m never worried that someone is going to dent my door or scratch my paint. I’m sure I wouldn’t notice. Every time I park my car I pray that someone will steal it. It would serve them right.

I am confused about something, however. When I bring my laptop home from work, do I need to call my insurance company to let them know that their liability just doubled?

A friend of mine brought up a good point about the Amnesty International report I mentioned in a previous entry:

To put the U.S. treatment of terrorists in prison on an equal moral plane with the terrible human rights abuses of Sadaam Hussein, Rwanda, Liberia, Zimbabwe, Milosevich, Turkmenistan, etc. is just plain foolish and strips Amnesty Intl. of all credibility.

I would agree, except I’m not certain that Amnesty does, in fact, equate them. They come close, calling Guantanamo the “Gulag of our time,” which is at best hyperbole, and at worst, simply wrong. The real, Soviet-era gulags were certainly worse both in the quality of abuse and the quantity of victims.

But that’s not really the point. At issue is not the precise measurement of Guantanamo or Abu Graib on the “Universal Abuse-O-Meter.”

The point–the point at the heart of the Amnesty report–is that the US has become a hypocrite on the World stage, and that because of our immense clout, our hypocrisy hamstrings the cause of human rights in places where they are most abused.

Is Guantanamo as bad as the Gulags? The genocide in Rwanda? The ethnic cleansing in Sudan? Dear God, no. But it is still wrong. Even if it is legal–another question entirely–it is still wrong.

Our current government wants to have it both ways. The 500-odd men kept in cages at Guantanamo are not entitled to the basic rights guaranteed under the US Constitution, such as legal representation or due process, because they are not on US soil, because they are not US citizens, and because they were captured as combatants in the “War Against Terror.” And even though these men are our enemies in this “War Against Terror,” they are not entitled to their rights as prisoners under the Geneva Convention, either, because they are “enemy combatants,” not “soldiers.”

I’m sorry, but that is a semantic quick-step easily on par with Clinton’s infamous retort, “That depends on your definition of the word Is.” It is a glib, cynical, and blatant rationalization. It is complete and utter Bullshit.

Documents such as our Bill of Rights, or the Geneva Convention, are not legal strictures to be danced around, but rather imperfect renderings of our mutual recognition that we hold certain truths to be self-evident and transcendent–such that they must be held sacred even when our own survival is at stake. We cannot, we must not, do whatever we please to people from other countries simply because we feel threatened by them–we would not tolerate such treatment of our own citizens by other governments.

Citizens and citizen-soldiers throughout our history have given their lives not merely to protect our soil or our interests, but to protect the values and freedoms we cherish. If we abuse those values in the name of protecting them, we diminish their sacrifice to nothing more than base self-interest. If those principles are so important that we will send our soldiers to die for them, surely we are willing to die for them ouselves, on our own soil?

The US is not some small, totalitarian, pariah-state, surprising no-one when it abuses basic human rights. We are a massive super-state that bases its domestic and foreign policy on claims to the moral high ground. Whether other countries acknowledge it, whether we accept it–we, more than any other nation by far, exert a tremendous influence on the behavior of other countries. When we hold to the principles we preach, that influence moves other countries to do good. When we do not, we are recognized as a hypocrite. Sure, even when we are a hypocrite, our sheer power dictates that other countries must appease us. But they do not respect us, and they do not respect the values we proclaim.

We are not virtuous, as Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld have suggested this week, by virtue of being the United States.

We are human. We are lucky to have inherited a tremendous tradition of morality. But we are made of the same stuff as other humans.

That we have allowed, by carelessness, the injustices at Abu Graib; or by policy, the injustice of Guantanamo, is a profound national tragedy. We have sacrificed, for our physical safety, the principles we supposedly hold more dear than Life.

Amnesty International isn’t perfect. They use hype and hyperbole to advance the causes in which they believe. They overstate.

But, fundamentally, they’re right. We can discount them, discredit them. We should remember, though, that when they have pointed their bony finger at other countries, we’ve applauded. It’s only when they point that finger at us that we discredit them, suggesting that they are, as Bush said, “people who hate America.”

Amnesty Internation has declared that human rights are being rolled back around the World, and the United States is the chief culprit. “When the most powerful country in the world thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights, it grants a licence to others to commit abuse with impunity.”

CNN
Washington Post

We should congratulate ourselves. As citizens of a state that democratically elects its leaders, and which just reelected the leaders responsible for these policies, we share in this guilt.

Peter Lynds: read the article about him and his theory of time that was published in the latest print issue of (Wired). Honestly, it surprised me. I thought that his theory (and I’m hardly doing it justice)–that there is no time, only changes which, relative to each other, give the illusion of time–was a generally accepted theory. Guess not. Makes me wonder where I first heard the idea. Perhaps I thought of it myself? Doubtful, since I don’t much like the theory.

Xbox: can’t remember what I was going to say here, originally. I will say that I believe “they” are right when they say that video games cause your brain to release endorphins or some other neurological chemical to which you can become addicted. I’ve been playing Kingdom Under Fire every chance I get since I got it, and I’m not even sure why. It’s fun, but it’s very repetitive. I finally decided to quit playing for a few weeks so that I can focus on other parts of life. Nothing else seems half as interesting when I have been playing video games.

Of course, that may just be it. Maybe nothing else IS as interesting. Video games provide compressed, distilled excitement, with none of the risk and tedium that are part of any real life, no matter how exciting. A police officer once told me that his job was “five percent terror and nintey-five percent paperwork.” The moments of exhileration also bring fear and real risk, and they are widely spaced by long stretches of dull routine. Video games give you all the good stuff and none of the bad stuff (other than arthritis and lack of sleep). Perhaps I shouldn’t wonder why I like them so much, or why they make everything else seem dull. The involved brain chemistry may simply be the physics of the obvious, like the theory of gravity.

Life: I don’t know whether women struggle with this, but most of the men I know do. I know it is true for me.

I need to be building something, creating something. Something that I believe in, something unique. I realized that some of my dissatisfaction with being a corporate wage slave is that I don’t particularly believe that there’s any “meaning” in a large corporation. We exist in order to exist. Everything else, such as the products we produce, the lives we fund with our salaries, the charities we support, these are just means by which we continue to exist, and by-products of that existance. And at a personal level, I see nothing I want to achieve within the corporate structure. I don’t aspire to any significant, unique role within the corporation. Not that I don’t want promotions, don’t want to make things better, etc. But there aren’t any jobs within the company that seem meaningfully different than mine.

What does this mean? I’m not sure, yet. So many career paths would lead to the same place, in a short amount of time.