Friday, April 30, 2010

Welcome to the FUTURE!


I'm crazy about QR's at the moment and can't wait to do more with them. My head is exploding with ideas.


My asthma seems under control. I have been gluten-free for almost 30 days, and I have not taken any medication for about that long, too. It's been great. My skin feels tighter and healthier, and I just feel more alert and happier. But the asthma thing is the biggest deal, and I've been working on a miracle.

I have been fighting asthma for 30 years. I've tried everything. And now I think that I'm almost finished with it. One... more... step.

Here it is (it's a two-parter):

  1. I'm going to quit alcohol completely.
  2. I'm going to work on building upper body strength.

For the first one, it seems crazy. I don't know how I'm supposed to give up cider and white wine and gin. I love those things very much. After 30 days, perhaps I'll try to drink them once a month or something. This will be a major test of will power. Alcohol has been linked to asthma. It must be addressed before I can say that I've conquered my dark companion.

For the second item, I'm working on getting up to a hundred push-ups in one go. I'm going to try to get to 100 by June 1. I think I'll also get a membership to the Y and start swimming and bench-pressing. Upper body strength has been said to take the stress off much of your respiratory system. It must be developed to muscle out my dark companion.

When I've slayed the dragon, I will write a book to help other people rid themselves of asthma.


Today I found out MBH and I would not buy the house we wanted. But we are moving the cafe and have signed on it and are renovating the space, and one big real estate deal a year might be enough for me. Yes, it sucks that I will not be getting the big tax credit. But that's all right. People have been buying houses without tax credits for a long time.

Thursday, April 29, 2010

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Bad Ass Vegetarian

I always love it when PETA features bad ass vegetarians in their communications. If I ever have enough money, I would like to open a manufactory of bad ass vegan gear. I don't think that market is covered enough by the likes Stella McCartney, &c.

I mean, I don't subscribe to the 1960's male identity GQ and Men's Health are peddling, but there is definitely a part of me that appreciates the rougher parts of masculinity. I do not believe for one nanosecond that the "Eat Like a Man" B.S. touted by male-targeted magazines is accurate, necessary, or even tolerable.

Consider what my most likely causes of death will be as a white, heterosexual, American male: a heart-related illness, colon cancer, or prostate cancer. All of those C.O.D.'s are directly related to the disgusting amount of animal products American men eat.

Why do men eat so many damned animals? Because they have been trained since birth to believe that masculinity and eating animal flesh are somehow related. They've been duped by campaigns with billions of dollars behind them. It's the same thing that caused them to smoke, the same thing that causes them to drink crap beer, and the same thing that gets them to buy big trucks they never really use (unless they're contractors or something).

When women redefined their role in our society (and continue to fight to do), men did not. Why should they have? They were the kings of castles, and their word was command, after all and for the most part. So they missed the boat. And now, men are still living like it's 1965. Women are communicating differently, having the right kinds of arguments about their gender identity, questioning what their role is in this millennium, and I think there's an underlying frustration with their counterparts who are behaving as if nothing has changed.

Well, I hope that there are more ads like this for all of our sake. Jake Shields is an MMA fighter who kicks a lot of ass and is undeniably masculine, even fitting into a stereotype of masculinity, a stereotype men are comfortable with, and he's vegetarian. That's extremely bad ass.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

The Staunton Police and the Dead


The police in this town, for the most part, are brutish. I've never liked calling police officers pigs or saying nasty things about "the boys in blue," but in Staunton they are a problem. I haven't said much about them because Staunton is a pretty nice place to live, and I'd like more young people to live here. I don't think that young people would want to come here and work and start businesses and spend money if they knew how piggish our police force is. If Staunton can't have a good police force, it might not deserve to be much more than a retirement community. Some people might be happy with that outcome.

I've seen them push people, intimidate people, and otherwise behave unprofessionally. I've heard them say racist things and speak poorly of Jews. I've even had them leak information to politicians about me, which I think might be illegal. They've done other illegal things that have made the news. But I want to talk about the thing that happened recently in connection with the tragic unintentional suicide of a teenager.

A young man died. He was 14. He took pills on a camping trip and drowned on his vomit. He was a semi-regular customer at the Darjeeling Café. He seemed like a good kid.

His friends and a couple family members gathered at the park for a vigil. There were around 20 of them. They might have blocked some traffic. Someone saw a bunch of kids dressed in black and called the cops. The cops aggressively broke up the vigil. While in one of the police cruisers, the dead boy's brother kicked out its window.

The police are defending what happened, but they defend everything they do. They have proven in this town that they are not to be trusted or believed when it comes to these things. They've had to publicly apologize for lying about events. They're a disgrace.

McCloskey, the cartoonist at the Staunton News Leader, doesn't have a conscience. He drew the cartoon about the event above. I don't expect cartoonists to have tact or to think that anything is sacred or off-limits, but I expect them to have consciences.

The problem is that we have young people living in a town full of old people. The police have not been trained to deal with this. Are they to blame? Maybe a little for their duplicity, but they can't help that they are ill-equipped. They signed up to help people, but they're poorly managed and operate with impunity. They are by far the worst police that I have encountered in all of my travels – worse than Mexican police, worse than German police, and even worse than the Polish police. The worst. It seems a lot of people in this town want to talk about how this is the kids' fault for not conforming or being more compliant. They had a permit to gather at the park. No report of drug use that day at the park has come to light. The only thing everyone can agree on is that they blocked the road that circles the park. . . a road that shouldn't be there anyway (I hate that there's car traffic in our beautiful park). Arguments about how teenagers won't conform are old and too simple and stupid.

Tragedy is complicated and heavy. . . especially when you're young. I remember feeling so much when I was that age. I remember how important everything seemed. I remember how emotional it was when friends died while still teenagers. McCloskey and the Police obviously don't. And that's tragic, too.

Friday, April 16, 2010

This is a batman sign at Darjeeling Cafe

I made it.

Have You Seen High Plains Drifter?

Have you seen, High Plains Drifter?
Clint Eastwood plays "Nameless Stranger," returning from the dead to kill everyone? What's not to love?

There's nothing not to love. Basically, Clint Eastwood is a zombie or a ghost who rapes, kills, paints a whole town red, renames it Hell, and takes his sweet, sweet revenge. There are some funny parts, some parts that hold up over time and still make me cringe, and parts that reach across centuries to criticize our current societal situation.

When people talk about Clint Eastwood, they bring up a lot of his films, and this one doesn't always come up. I'm not sure why; it's one of my all time favorite westerns. It seriously pushes some envelopes while adhering to a sort of western opera/fantasy that people have always seemed to love. It doesn't stoop for easy symbols of good and evil, and there isn't much room for a tale of real redemption (though there is a "little"), and no one's off the hook—maybe not even the viewer.

Here are my five favorite westerns in no particular order. If you like any of them, and you haven't see High Plains Drifter, check it out:
  1. Tombstone
  2. Unforgiven
  3. McCabe and Mrs. Miller
  4. High Plains Drifter
  5. The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean

There are of course others, but 5's good.

They'll always try, but...

...don't ever let them.

Thursday, April 15, 2010

The Gangsters


Have you seen The Killing of a Chinese Bookie?

I've been thinking about this movie a lot lately.
It's about a guy who lives in a small world. He's a part of a bigger world, but the space he occupies is very important to him. He takes his art seriously even if no one else does. He tries to make it good so that people will enjoy it. . . he loves what he does.
But there's space he doesn't occupy, and that space is filled with gangsters and bad people. Those people are always there, the gangsters, to destroy anything you build and to attack anything you love. To use you.

Arnold is in this movie for about ten seconds. I think it's his first American movie appearance, but I might be wrong.

It's hard to keep living in a world full of gangsters and people who want to ruin you. I tend to be one of those who forgets about the gangsters. The criminals who will take from us anything we hold dear and kick us when we're down, the people who will use your weaknesses against you in order to make some gain. I'm always forgetting about them.

John Cassavetes is one of the best directors of all time, I think. His films stick to you, and you carry them with you wherever you go.

Friday, April 9, 2010

Day 3 of gluten free

I feel pretty good about being gluten free. Don't know if it's a
miracle yet.

Thursday, April 8, 2010

Is Gluten-Free Sexy?


What if we're eating too much of something? Shouldn't we stop even if it seems innocuous?

Kings and queens stored wheat and other grains as a commodity, as a way to control their subjects. It was like gold and oil and anything else worth fighting over. Wars were fought over wheat, riots sprang up for wheat. It's always been considered an important part of the western diet—maybe the most important.

It's currently one of the most subsidized crops in the United States, and when I was a kid it was one of the main things, next to meat and dairy, people were supposed to be eating. So we did, we ate a lot. Along with dairy and meat and corn, Americans eat hundreds of times more wheat than people did just fifty years ago.

Coincidentally, we're getting sicker. We're living longer, but we're suffering more. We take more medicine to mask our symptoms and live less healthy lives. Asthma, obesity, mental illness, muscular and neural disorders, and cancer are all up and are rising.

"Post hoc, ergo, propter hoc" I don't want to use chopped logic here, but there does seem to be a correlation to what we consume and what afflicts us. Some people, folks often scoffed at by medical professionals, think that there are direct correlations regarding certain foodstuffs in developed nations and the diseases that plague the people living there.

Some people think that gluten affects, exacerbates, and maybe even causes asthma. What if they're right? Is it worth giving up wheat, rye, and barley for 30 days to find out if gluten is an enemy?

Could it really be the case that the staple of western cuisine is its own enemy? I love bread, but could gluten be poisoning us? I mean, there's a ton of evidence of the nasty things meat does to us. . . and the government told me to eat a lot of meat and still does. It's one of the reasons I'm vegan. I'm thinner and healthier without it.

So is going gluten-free sexy? I don't know. I know that asthma is not sexy. What if I stop eating it for 30 days and my asthma symptoms go away? I've tried everything else, and I'm still medicated. What if I can get off the meds? How incredible would that be? It would be a miracle. . . a miracle that I performed on myself.

I'm in.

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

What if "Not Enough" Is Not the Problem?



In the developed countries, where we have everything we really need, and pretty much everything we'd ever want, there is a strange paradigm that I am beginning to think is founded on false logic. Whenever something is wrong here, if you are sick, or you're tired, or you've got restless leg syndrome, the assumption by our medical professionals is that you have too little of something. In fact, it's the assumption almost all of us make. My skin is itchy, I must not be getting enough water. My asthma is acting up, I must not be getting enough vitamin B. My eyes are tired, I must have a deficiency of some kind. Even mental illness is treated thus, and everyone medicates or get medicated accordingly.

The idea of deficiency is counter everything we know about being American, and it's something we only agree about when we're at death's door. For example, when someone has colon or prostate cancer, they make them stop eating casein protein and usually make them stop eating animals. When someone's heart is clogged up, he is supposed to stop eating cholesterol. When someone has lung cancer, they think about quitting cigarettes. Why wait until it's too late and live and die miserably?

It goes further. When people are getting shot in the streets, people start thinking we might have too many guns. When drunk drivers kill kids, we think maybe they shouldn't drink so much. Planet's getting hotter, y'all, and we're fighting wars all over the world or oil; maybe we're burning too much crude. Dust bowls are caused by over-farming. Obesity is caused by overeating. So why do we always think we're not getting enough of something?

We've been hoodwinked, that's why. The food pyramid is a lie. It's a politically-motivated exercise to sell you more of what the government subsidizes. You don't need more vitamins, more bottled water, more protein, or more of anything else. Chances are, if you're American, you're eating or drinking too much of something. We suffer from overabundance. We eat too many calories during the day. The only thing you might not be getting enough of is exercise. Too much TV?

Change something.
I am going to make a big change. I'm struggling with it right now, but I'm working on it. . . and I'll write more about that soon.

Saturday, April 3, 2010

Judy fkn chops, son!

Every show the Judy Chops play is like a carnival. They don't get old.
They're like Peter Pan. They're playing at the Darjeeling Cafe right
now. Word!

Friday, April 2, 2010

Strip mall ballads

Darjeeling Cafe is blowing up with peeps and talent tonight with
stripmall ballads. Very good!!!