these earthlings play serious hardball

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Urgh.

This is probably happening where you live as well, but we are slogging through the mother of all heatwaves. The hottest it’s ever been here was 107 degrees, but we broke that shit yesterday. Meanwhile, it’s 69 in Seattle. Lewis said that the Pacific Northwest is getting colder ever year, and holy fuck i want to live there forever.

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One thing about the year 2012 is that it’s probably the best year ever to be a fan of BT, aka Brian Transeau, aka my favorite music maker of all time. First, he released Laptop Symphony, his first-ever DJ album, two discs of high-quality tunes…

…and then he stealthily released two absolutely fantastic records through that CreateSpace branch of Amazon instead of a major label. The first one, Morceau Subrosa, is an excellent ambient album consisting of one 46-minute track of delicate piano and ethereal synthesizer. The second one, If the Stars are Eternal So Are You and I, is a fucking masterpiece. It’s pretty much a direct musical sequel to the This Binary Universe, the lightyears-ahead-of-its-time record that he released in 2006. But that album now sounds a little dissonant and show-offy compared to this one. He dialed back the glitches and stutters and focused on pure epic beauty, huge arcs of majestic sound rising from quieter interludes. It’s one of the best things i’ve ever heard.

And he ain’t even done! His “official” new record is coming at the end of the summer, along with a record called All Hail the Silence which is basically BT arranging music while some singer i’ve never heard of sings new-wavey pop lyrics over them. If the first single is any indication, i’m gonna love it.

Brian Transeau. He is the Man. Every time this dude releases music, it sounds like it’s coming from 15 years in the future. No joke. When i really think about it, though, it’s kind of strange how unknown If the Stars are Eternal So Are You and I is and will most likely remain. Everything is so decentralized these days. There’s no nexus of MTV/Rolling Stone/NME where groundbreaking music gets examined and discussed. Remember the days when you’d hear about an album like Kid A or Play or Psyence Fiction and be curious about it because other people wouldn’t shut up about it? I didn’t buy OK Computer because i was familiar with Radiohead’s previous work, i bought it because all the smart kids were cumming themselves over it while MTV played “Paranoid Android” every hour or so. That doesn’t seem to happen anymore. There’s no… dialectic. Yeah, dialectic.

Or maybe i’m just out of the loop.

Anyway, it’s a stupendous album, even if the title is silly. Stars aren’t eternal, they blow up and burn out all the time.

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Yesterday, i saw a car careen out of control and veer madly over a curb and through a stop sign before stopping. The front tire had blown out. The woman driving was unhurt, but she was very shaken and started crying, mostly fretting about the cost of fixing her car because she didn’t have full coverage. I stopped to help, but i didn’t get the chance to really do much because some take-charge woman and some guy on a bike swooped over to help as well. The police arrived before i was even through talking to them, so we just gave her hugs and tried to tell her not to worry about the money because, damn, she could have just as easily veered into the other lane and freaking died or been smashed into a retarded vegetable.

This is a ridiculously friendly town.

My real good deed of the week was giving Tameeka a ride to Central when her miserable, drug-addicted, piece-of-shit boyfriend didn’t pick her up. I thought, oh hell, i’ve avoided Central for four years now, now they’re going to SEE me. Instead, we ended up somewhere on highway 440 where the scumbag had been pulled over by the police. As i drove away, i realized that i had no idea how to get back… but then i saw a ramp leading to I-24 East, the highway that goes straight to the ‘Boro. Phew.

I need a GPS more than anybody else in the entire world but i still don’t own one. When you buy a GPS thingy, do you pay a monthly fee? I hate fees. Fees, shorty, fees.

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Gadzooks, Obamacare survives for now. I was one of the people watching CNN when the news came down and i thought the poor Dems had suffered yet another skullcrushing blow… but hey, it’s good now if you think that Obamacare is a good thing…

…do i? I don’t even know anymore. I’m wary of unintended consequences because America is capable of fucking anything up at this point. Things are going to suck either way. If we instituted the Clinton plan in 1994, we’d hear nothing but horror stories about people being lost in a vast bureaucracy; if we deregulated everything, we’d hear horror stories about sick people being wheeled out into parking lots when their credit cards are declined.

My only thought is… uh, i hope it works. At least it’s something? The only ideas that Republicans have on the issue are: let’s make it harder to sue for malpractice, and let’s let people buy insurance across state lines. That’s their cure-all, buying things across state lines. Then Georgia tried that, and for various reasons, not a single out-of-state insurance company took them up on the offer.

My dream is to live to see a single-payer system, because i personally think that healthcare, like roads and police and fire departments and militaries and coast guards and volcano monitoring, are more sensibly handled on a collective not-for-profit basis. At the same time, i’d like this liberal system to be paired with a strong sense of individual responsibility as duty to society; i want doctors to hector, berate, and slap the shit out of people who make horrible choices, and for laziness and self-destructive lunacy to be shamed in the public square…

…that’s what Germany does, right? Let’s do what Germany is.

Sigh.

I don’t know where you stand, but please keep in mind that it’s absolutely possible that the Republicans can repeal the whole works if Romney wins the Presidency and they pick up a few Senate seats.

VOTE

AGAINST

REPUBLICANS.

As for my beloved online psychopaths, this is a money quote right here.

Chief Justice Roberts?

Nay.

He has discarded all cause for respect of his person and office. He has thoughtlessly, and capriciously torn down the work of 231 years and handed us over to would be monarchs and nobles.

He is “Fucking Roberts” now and forever. Or perhaps Effin’ Roberts when you want to take the edge off a little for the sake of gentler ears. The Supreme Court is a mere apparatchik committee now, a tarnished pen in the tyrant’s breast pocket. Roberts’ name is now sunk deep in the lowest ditch, the grimiest mire of infamy to lie in ruin besides such names as Arnold and Quisling.

May God in his mercy one day deliver us from the noxious fruits of such malicious foolish negligence, or else grant us the strength and clarity of purpose to deliver ourselves.

….my god, that’s beautiful.

Almost as beautiful as this.

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