Friday night I did a short DJ set at Dry River's "anti-prom." Don't ask me to define what an anti-prom is. And I'm not sure why I volunteered to DJ. But it was somewhat fun and somewhat successful.
Here's my playlist:
Thatll Be the Day Buddy Holly
Bossa Nova Baby Elvis Presley
Honey Don't The Beatles
Who Do You Love Bo Diddley
Track 09 B.B. King
Rock 'n' Roll High School The Ramones
Chick Habit April March
Holiday Innn Stereo Total
Harley Davidson Brigitte Bardot
Hicky burr Quincy Jones/Bill Cosby
Can You Get To That Funkadelic
Love Revolution Big Star
Best Friends Forever Treasure MammaL
You Make Me High (When You Go Down Low) Lolita Storm
Strange Powers The Magnetic Fields
Hey Mama Black Eyed Peas
Dancing Queen ABBA
Let The Music Play Barry White
Reanimator Amon Tobin
The Pink Room Twin Peaks

The other 2 evenings of the weekend were spent at Dry River too, Saturday to see Andrew Jackson Jihad, from Phoenix, and Sunday to see D-numbers, from Santa Fe.

I've been away from home for the last 9 days and today I'm finanlly returning. It seems like much longer. I'm so glad it's over. It's been fun, and also very productive, and I was able to see several friends and acquaintances I haven't seen for quite awhile, but none of that has counteracted the ache of missing my partner, and her dog.

Not to mention that I've had quite enough of the New York City transportation experience. The subway system is amazing considering its challenge: providing a way for a few million people to move around without all needing to drive cars. But I can't really wrap my mind around the need to budget an hour to get anywhere. I'm accustomed to hopping on my bike and being anywhere I routinely need to be within 10 minutes, maybe 15 tops. So waiting for these big metal worms to laboriously drag me through this concrete anthill is not cool.

Oh and speaking of cool its still damn cold in NYC. Sonoran Desert here I come!

I have mucho things to blog about but i haven't been prioritizing it. I guess I'll start with a brief mention of our trip to Bahia de Kino for my birthday and xmas. It was awesome. Great fun, great getaway. Warm, sunny, quiet.
There are photos.

Other fascinating subjects, coming soon.

Today through Tuesday we're going down south to the beach at Bahia Kino, Sonora, Mexico. It's about a 5 hour drive. We'll be offline and away from cell reception and it will be most probably quite wonderful.

I just woke up, a bit hungover from a late party, and I need to pack. Just wanted to sign in and say, happy holidaze and don't expect another post here till wednesday at least.

I've been keeping a journal for 21 years. This blog for 3 and a half years (and almost 1000 entries).

I can't tell you how I found this (wink) but there's an interesting piece in the New Yorker about diaries. In this text the writer, Louis Menand, makes it clear that there's a difference between a journal, a blog, and a diary, and I of course agree, though the lines blur at times. I have always called my journal a journal. Diary smacks of something more pedestrian and tacky, a slavish record of exactly what happens each day, something to be disciplined about - like being on a diet, or trying to be, Menand says - something teen girls write in and fight to keep their little brothers from reading. Journals are more literary, more discriminating. And yet Menand drifts in his examples between diaries and what seem more like journals even in his estimation.

Lately it's been a cloudy, dreary, watery gloomworld here in Tucson. It reminds me of Portland. It reminds me of the weather I came here 2 years ago to get away from. It sucks. It makes me glum and melancholy and I know it's good for the plants and if you're from here or have been here for longer than me you can cheer but it just makes me feel down, and makes it easier for anything else that goes wrong to have a much heavier, soul-crushing import than normally. I really need the sun to come back.

Rain rain go away.

(To match the weather, by coincidence I'm currently listening to a song by the Flaming Lips called "Jesus Shooting Heroin.")

What a crazy time, this week and the coming 2. This evening was a Critical Mass ride, the first in Tucson for about 12 years, I'm told. So long ago that the organizers weren't aware that there had ever been one. So long ago, and Critical Mass so crazy an idea for this town, I guess, that the organizers were about 6 years old when it was last tried.

I'll have more of a report later, with photos, but in brief, it was without incident. The police herded everyone along in a double-file line for about an hour, blocked traffic for us, and there were no arrests or even tickets. Compared to the debacle on Tuesday night, they were amazingly respectful of the bicyclists.

After the ride me and O had a little dinner and then went to see Gogol Bordello. They're such an amazing live band. But, since I have to wake up at 4am to drive to Calexico, I couldn't really get that into it. normally i might have had a couple beers and gone down to the front and pogo'ed with everybody else.

So, yeah, weekend in Calexico doing No Border Camp prep stuff and then back here for a day and then to portland for a wedding and then back to tucson again for the Dry River anniversary party and then back to Calexico for the camp iteself.

Can someone slow down this merry-go-round?

Ugh. A few hours ago in my backyard a little insect flew into my ear, and didn't come out till just now. Going about my day, whenever I was sitting still for longer than a minute or so, it would start moving around in my ear canal! I could hear it and feel it! I couldn't get it out. And if i started moving or trying to remove it, it would stop. I tried q-tips, water, blowing with my nose and mouth and other ear closed. no dice. I started worrying it would crawl further and further into my sinuses and lay eggs in my brain or something.

But luckily a few minutes ago I felt it moving and it felt somewhat different. It was not moving deeper; It had found its way closer to the exit! It was seeking the light! I waited with hand to ear and suddenly it dropped out and i batted it away. yuck. Whew. Luckily that didn't happen during the meeting I was just at. Might have freaked some people out.

Well, as you might have guessed (if you didn't know already) by the 2-week silence on this blog (which ended 3 entries ago, i hate when bloggers post just to say how sorry they are for not posting for awhile), I was on vacation again. O and I drove north to Oregon in a rental car, outfitted with a borrowed bike rack so we could bring our bikes. It was a bit trying spending so much time in a car, but we had a lot of fun too. We camped a lot on the way, and we saw 4000 year old trees and volcanic mud pools and coastal dunes and coyotes and a seal and lots of old friends.
I have a set of my best photos from the trip on Flickr. Sadly my still camera seems to be dying, placing random crunchy bars of color on some photos. Which sucks because i can't really afford to buy a new one at this point. But to be fair, I've taken about 10,000 shots since I bought the thing in December 2004, so i've gotten a lot out of it.

Went to Phoenix this past weekend, mainly for a meeting and benefit for the No Borders Camp. It was pretty productive but pretty frustrating too, because I'm not sure if I agree with the direction that plans for the camp are going. It may be too late to change, as well.

I also was at a meeting in Phoenix with a few people from AZ indymedia. The site is almost totally dormant and the collective has been in a lull for the last 6 months at least. We talked about what to do and I volunteered to spearhead solving the technical hurdles, but I can't help wondering how important indymedia really is, to me or Arizonans or to the world, anymore - especially the websites. I believe that as a loose network of resource-sharing media activists it still is quite useful (e.g. an aquaintance here in Tucson scored an interview with Noam Chomsky last month, and wanted me to go along and film it. I said, I can't, but here, email this person from Boston IMC that I know, and sure enough he hooked up with 2 awesome videographers there who filmed the thing with him), but as an online source of news and information for those that are "outside the fold" I'm getting more and more doubtful.

Various video projects of mine are churning away, including a couple for pay, which is great. It's definitely more fun to me than coding or other IT stuff, and it makes me more interested in volunteer IT work for activist projects.

Meanwhile O is quitting her job, or rather being forced to quit, and it's a job she has really loved, or at least the work. The management and a lot of the other staff are corrupt and unethical and petty jerks, but the organization does some great work still and has a lofty reputation in the field. It's so disillusioning to see non-profits devolve like this, but as one of her only cool co-workers said the other day, it's just like in the for-profit world, and people from that world aren't surprised at all. Why should people not lie and cheat and backstab, just because they work for a nonprofit that's supposedly about saving the environment? To think they wouldn't is to probably expect too much from humans.

Sigh...