Up the Tree

It seems that if you write a blog, you are more apt for something bad to happen to you. Every time I turn on the blog somebody is closing down shop, because of something they said that hurt somebody’s feelings, because something “happened” in their personal life, or because they are just plain exhausted from writing. Even I, Funtime Ben, have had a previous life on a previous blog, that because of a past relationship I chose to leave. It seems that this blog idea is a double edged sword, with your ability to affect people, you also receive the responsibility of affecting them and yourself.

As I travel around the blog universe each morning, I follow links and once every so often a writer has gone missing. Their blog the shell of what it once was. What happened? I wish there was a way to take a blog to a forensic laboratory to explain to us blog causes of death. “Oops, she talked about her husband’s skid marks. He couldn’t handle it and she had to put the blog down.”

Where is the the weblog graveyard?

I remember, back in the olden days, reading letters from people and remembering lines months after. Reading letters was a far more powerful medium than spoken language. With the advent of e-mail, letters diapered and “snail mail” became a novelty reserved for birthday cards and bills. “Snail Mail” was permanent, you had the letter, blogs feel like they are going to be there forever and then (poof!) they’re gone.

Is it any wonder why the book is always better than the movie?

In blogland Dooce lost her job and then, if that wasn’t enough, recently got stuck with a $1,926.10 bill, for her 25GB throughput. I can’t really comprehend how she could have used 25GB, but I don’t doubt that she did. Yet she hasn’t stopped. She continues to write and provide people with her writing. She has succeeded as a blog author. When she gets herself into a jam, her readers help her out. Now that is a community if I ever heard one.

As I continue to read Rebecca Blood’s book The Weblog Handbook, I am struck at the power these weblogs have. With seemingly very little effort, you can publish your thoughts, feelings, rants, diary entries, questions, ideals, political views, findings, and history all with the press of a button. It is the most powerful medium when considering the cost to influence ratio.

So, I would like to take this time to say that this website is an expression. It is a place where I can voice my ideas, concerns, opinions, fears, poems, photographs, essays, ramblings, political views, humor, stupidity, questions, love letters, grocery lists, and fortune cookie messages. I don’t mean to offend you and if I do, I apologize, but I will continue to write this blog, because I want to. I urge you all to talk trough my comment box and my e-mail address. Disagree with me, tell me I’m wrong, show me the light, but by all means don’t read me and get upset without telling me publicly or privately that I offended you. I am a crass bastard, who often bumbles over the line of decency… Please pardon my behavior.

“Democracy and violence can ill go together.
Evolution of democracy is not possible if we are not prepared to hear the other side.”
-Mohandas K. Gandhi

I don’t believe in war. I don’t think it ever makes anything better. Hate will only breed more hate. I know there are people in this country who are angry, I know there are people in this country who have lost loved ones, but that does not make killing people in other countries alright.

FACT We [the CIA] trained Osama Bin Laden to kill.

FACT We [the United States Government] gave weapons to Iraq.

We have tried over and over to fix the problems in the middle east with violence, and all it does is bring us more violence. What if we, instead of waging war, listened to the people of the middle east and heard there complaints with our foreign policy. What if for once we put down our arms and fought a battle with love and compassion?

“Hatred ever kills, love never dies; such is the vast difference between the two.
What is obtained by love is retained for all time. What is obtained by hatred proves a burden in reality for it increases hatred.”
-Mohandas K. Gandhi

I ask you, please do not support this administration and it’s continued policy of intolerance of people throughout the world, if you don’t agree with it. Let’s show the world that we are better than the terrorists. We don’t need to kill others to show our strength. We are a county of progressive minded citizens, now let’s start acting like it.

Please take out a moment of your day to read over Not In Our Name.
True Majority

Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t because of something you said, or did, I just want the option to get the hell out of here (if the shit goes down). The idea came to me one night as I was talking to one of my old roommates about the election, as they were recounting ballots in Florida, in 2000.

HER “I swear, if Bush wins, I’m going to leave the county… Move to Canada, or something. If he wins, it’s going to be bad, really bad.”

I don’t think she knew how bad it was going to get.

Soon after September 11th I thought to myself; I want to leave New York, get the hell out of here. Run Ben, Run… I didn’t. I stayed in Brooklyn and rebuilt my life with an overwhelming groundwork of fear, brought on, largely, by military helicopters passing overhead.

The helicopters have stopped flying overhead.

I am still nervous. More so in the past few weeks, by a president who has backed himself up a tree and must now go to war to save his approval rating and his foreign authority. Our country is in a bad way. Other countries are now revoking their support for a war with Iraq and Bush seems as if he doesn’t give a damn.

Cowboys shouldn’t have nuclear weapons.

I have this recurring daymare as I walk up 16th street toward Union Square. There is this brilliant flash of light and the buildings all around me crumble. People scream in horror as the first nuclear bomb is detonated in the Empire State building. Waves of fire, like breaking waves on the beach, incinerate everything and I get washed away in yellow flame. Everything goes black.

You might say that this is a foolish thought to have. You might say that there are far more things to be afraid of. You might say everything is going to turn out fine… you may be right, but I think things are going to get worse before they get better. I don’t think we have heard the end of Osama, or his followers. Until we start having foreign relations that benefit other countries as it benefits ours, we are going to be hated throughout the world. We get richer as other counties get poorer and it shows.

So, I’ve decided to get Dual Nationality with England.

I want to give myself options. I am getting nervous about this administration and what it might do, to me and others I care about. I am just starting to lose faith in my county (is all) and I would rather leave then put up with leadership I don’t believe in. Not to say I won’t fight for what I belive in, but it seems at the moment my county isn’t listening. They are, fingers in ears, refusing to listem to the concerns of the electorate.

I am tired of being tired.

Yesterday and I went to a chinese restaurant, after she got her hair cut and styled like a Charlie’s Angel. We ordered two hot and sour soups and a chicken chow fun, enjoying them both thoroughly. After the meal we got Chinese fortune cookies as is custom in most Chinese restaurants. Mine was delightfully odd for a fortune cookie Don’t expect romantic attachments to be strictly logical or rational!. Wow weird right? Not after I read ’s…

I think somebody is trying to tell us something.

and other meaningless observations.

Oh Kdunk, how our words resonate in the foothills of my mountain of plumpitude. I feel fat. well, not fat exactly, but I feel if my holiday eating had continued in the direction I had been directing it, I would have resembled a manatee (and a fat manatee at that).

This holiday season I went nuts, thanks in part to a fantastically cold winter and a snugly coutch, I squandered butter on mashed potatoes, extravagantly partook in alcoholic beverages, I ate chocolate cherry cordials shrugging them off with words like…

“It’s the holidays. As soon as they are over, I will stop eating this shit.”

The holidays are over and I am just beginning to stop eating this shit. I ate myself into such a stopper, that last Monday night was the first time I had had fruit in over a month. A FRUIT! I thought you were supposed to die if you didn’t eat your fruits. I knew it was bad, when I bit into the apple and had forgotten how good they were. I had so many candy cherries and gummy peaches, that I had forgotten what the taste of a real apple was.

I was appalled at my own behavior.

A grown man eating Snickers bars and parading about with a second helping of Tin Roof Sundae. I should have been ashamed, but I wasn’t [at the time]. Everybody was doing it. A scoop here, a nibble there, and before you knew it everyone was partaking in sinful delights like it was their last days on earth. A group mentality of more.

You have to look objectively at the whole mess and think, “it’s not so bad”, but then again, didn’t you eat that entire pumpkin pie by yourself?

For shame!